There’s No Business Like Snow Business

Werth: Hi there, Wise.

Wise: Hello, Werth.  

Werth: I was just sitting here thinking about all this lovely snow we’ve been getting.  

Wise: I know.  It’s turned New York into a winter wonderland. 

Werth: Or a wonderslush depending on your street corner. I was worried about you.  I knew you had gone to the farm for the weekend, but didn’t know if you could make it back.  

Wise: Luckily, I left just before the snow started, otherwise I would have been stuck out there until the mule team came by on the sledge.  

Werth: I do hope John Proctor and Goody Smith brought their snowblower.

Wise: As it was, I got to watch the start of the storm from the train.  It was really beautiful to see the landscape gradually fill up with snow.  It reminded me of how great it is when movies use snow in interesting ways.  

Werth: Like in Scarface? 

Wise: Actually I was thinking about  Murder on The Orient Express.  Based on the mystery novel by Agatha Christie, it’s a classic turn on the locked room formula.  All the characters are trapped on a snowbound train, a murder is committed in the middle of the night, and Christie favorite Hercule Poirot must solve the mystery. 

Werth: That darned Belgian.

Wise: It’s also a classic of 70’s cinema with the cast packed with Hollywood luminaries from all over the map.  Albert Finney plays Poirot, Richard Widmark is the paranoid American businessman who winds up dead, Sean Connery is delightfully blustery, and Ingrid Bergman plays against type as a stuttering milquetoast.  

Werth: That train is jam-packed with stars! 

Wise: But that’s not even half the cast.  Lauren Bacall is in it and so are John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Perkins, Michael York, and Jacqueline Bisset.  It even has Dame Wendy Hiller who is not only one of my favorite actresses but also originated the role of Eliza Doolittle in the film version of Geroge Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion long before Audrey Hepburn lip synced her way through My Fair Lady.  Every performance is delightfully juicy, filled with scenery chewing moments as well as some real tenderness.  It’s also a satisfying mystery.  

Werth: It must be hard to create story action when everyone’s stuck on a train.  

Wise: Director Sidney Lumet makes some interesting choices in the ways he shot the film.  During the interrogation scenes, the camera lingers on the characters’ faces, allowing the audience to speculate on their guilt or innocence.  There are also a number of flashbacks, and Lumet gives those a nightmarish quality, suggesting the furious anger of the murderer. 

Some of the most memorable shots, however, are exteriors of the train in the snow.  Lumet uses the train’s progress to telegraph the progress of the investigation: we see it stuck in a snowbank when the mystery is at its murkiest, and then, as soon as Poirot reveals the solution, the train emerges from the ice.  

Werth: So did the butler do it?  

Wise: I have to admit, the ending is not such a surprise, especially given the calibre of the actors present, but the conclusion makes a particularly satisfying end. What’s your favorite snowbound classic? 

Werth: Amazingly enough, my favorite snowy movie is a mystery as well—1996’s Fargo.

Wise: Ooh! That IS snowy.

Werth: From its opening shot of a small bird followed by a car emerging from a raging snowstorm, Fargo uses the heavy snow of a Middle-North winter to do more than just tell us they’re in Minnesota. The snow becomes an active participant in the film’s design. Fargo is what you might call a Film Blanc.

Wise: Is that a Belgian candy? 

Werth: It’s like the photo negative of the Film Noir. Film Noir uses the stylized lack of light to create a distinct look. Shadows cut across the faces of femmes fatales and mugs with guns, hiding their motives and highlighting their dark intentions. In Fargo, instead of shadow, we have blinding, white snow. The bodies of the victims don’t lie in half-light, but contrast bloodily with the pure snow. 

The criminals aren’t dark masterminds like Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon or Kirk Douglas in Out of the Past. They are snowy morons blinking in the light reflected by snowdrifts. Jerry Lundergaard’s temper tantrum with an ice-scraper is acted out in a snow-covered, empty parking lot as if on a white canvas for all to see. The darkness (and the idiocy) of these characters has nowhere to hide.

Wise:  I think what’s interesting about Fargo is how it seems so comfortable being a dark thriller, and a comedy at the same time.

Werth: I remember seeing the trailer in the theaters and when we heard, “From the makers of Raising Arizona,” and the two hookers with their sing-song accents started head-bobbing, we were certain Fargo was going to be a laugh riot. But it’s not—not really. The Cohen Brothers film what is essentially a murder mystery with all the requisite blood, violence and tension, but they tell the story with characters that are so quirkily ordinary, it becomes comic. William H. Macy’s Oscar®-nominated performance as Jerry Lundergaard is so expertly pathetic you almost feel sorry for him—even if he is having his own wife kidnapped. Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare as the kidnappers are like a filthy, dysfunctional vaudeville act. 

And Frances McDormand, as the pregnant, homespun Columbo who tracks down the kidnappers, goes from the blandest of conversations with her husband about duck paintings for a stamp competition to walking through a body-filled crime scene where she nails every detail of the murder. Her performance is funny, brave and touching and it won her a much-deserved Oscar®.

Wise: Uh yeah?

Werth: Is that your attempt at a Minnesota accent?

Wise: Uh yeah?

Werth: And on that comically thrilling note, I’m going to go outside and try to find a snowbound trains full of old movie stars.

Wise: Would you settle for a subway car full of old hobos?

Werth: As long as one of them is Belgian.

Wise: Tune in next week for a piping hot serving of Film Gab!

 

The Yunioshi Problem

Werth: Hey, Wise.

Wise: Hey, Werth.

Werth: I’ve been thinking lately about something serious—

Wise: Your Jesse Tyler Ferguson scrapbook?

Werth: No—I mean, yes, that too—but I was thinking of something else. Maybe there's some racial zeitgeist in the air with the publishing of the new edition of Huckleberry Finn sans the 'n' word because a friend of mine posted something on Facebook recently that made me want to address a similar controversial topic in film history.

Wise: I’m hot for controversial. Please address.

Werth: Well, this posting started off by asserting that the casting of Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was racist.

Wise: I'd probably agree with that.

Werth: I know. It was 1961. The Civil Rights Act hadn’t even passed yet, so it’s no surprise that Hollywood was still selling racial stereotypes. But what really interested me about the posting was some of the responses to it. One person said Rooney’s performance made it impossible to watch the film at all.

Wise: But Breakfast at Tiffany’s is so wonderful! Wouldn't it be better to just close your eyes and plug your ears whenever Rooney appears on screen?

Werth: Like what I do whenever there’s a snake in a movie.

Wise: I’ve had to be your snake alert system so many times.

Werth: Due to the unfortunate parts of this country‘s history and culture, there are some really good movies out there that have some less than flattering depictions of minorities—or even worse, blatant black- or yellow-face performances.

Wise: I think the question becomes even more complicated when the portrayal isn’t intended to be comic.  Something like Broken Blossoms, a Lillian Gish film from 1919—

Werth: —directed by the always racially sensitive D.W. Griffith—

Wise: —where Gish plays the abused daughter of a prize fighter who finds temporary haven in the home of a Chinese immigrant.  Clearly this film was intended to address racism and yet it feels offensive to modern audiences because of actor Richard Barthelmess playing the hero Chen Huan. 

Werth: To quote a racial stereotype, “Ah so.”

Wise: Or look at  The Good Earth based on Pearl S. Buck’s wildly popular novel from 1931.  Buck grew up in China as the child of missionaries and was deeply interested in portraying that culture accurately.  When MGM made the film, of course a lot of the “Orientalisms” were emphasized, but the core of the picture is about one family’s struggle out of poverty and the treacherous blessings that prosperity can bring.  There are comic characters, yes, but the family’s plight is always treated with dignity and respect. 

Werth: Even though half of that family is played by white actors in slanty-eye make-up. 

Wise: That’s very true.  As you mentioned in a previous post, Anna Mae Wong lost the female lead to Luise Rainer because Hollywood wouldn’t allow a romantic scene between a white actor and an Asian one. But I have to say Rainer is fantastic as the self-sacrificing wife O-lan.  She doesn’t look anything like a Chinese peasant, but her performance is so heart-felt that by the end of the movie, at least for me, the preposterous make-up fades away and I find myself deeply moved.

Werth: I’m moved that Luise Rainer is still with us and will be turning 101 years old next week.

Wise: Happy Birthday, Luise!

Werth: But back on topic, with dramas like The Good Earth you have the time to develop characters so that these faux racial performances can grow on you. I think reactions to performances like Rooney’s in Tiffany’s are so intense because it comes out of nowhere. Here’s this modern-feeling, comic take on female sexual independence and then, Hello! Rooney in buckteeth and Coke bottle glasses.

Wise: Everything about those Rooney scenes feels out of place, the pacing, the humor, even the logic of the world they exist in.  It’s like they were imported from an entirely different film. 

Werth: One of my all-time favorite comedies has the same issue. Preston Sturges’ 1942 screw-ball classic The Palm Beach Story is a riotous adventure with a loose take on marriage and divorce. Vivid comic bombshell characters abound like The Weenie King and Toto, the unknown foreign language spouting ex-paramour of Princess Centemila (played with sheer joyous abandon by normally staid Mary Astor). Then all of a sudden there’s a scene in a train where the black bartender is all, “Yessuh” and “Nawssuh,” to a group of drunken hunters who force him to throw crackers into the air for their target practice, the buckshot narrowly missing him in the gun revelry.

Wise: To quote another racial stereotype, “Lawdy, lawdy!”

Werth: The pop-eyed antics and shimmying are right out of the “Colored Actors Playbook.” Even the actor’s screen-credited name smacks of a minstrel show—Snowflake.

Wise: Snowflake?  That’s like a ten-year-old’s name for her pony.

Werth: And this wasn’t the only time Sturges used African Americans in a similarly degrading way. The otherwise brilliant Sullivan’s Travels has a black cook thrown around the inside of a careening trailer until he winds up with his head in a bowl of batter, wearing white face. For a director whose themes always seemed to be so much ahead of their time, Sturges was still susceptible to the overriding culture’s “funny” stereotypical depictions.

Wise: But does it make you not want to watch these movies?

Werth: No. And to dispute one of the other post responses, it doesn’t make me want to edit the offensive scenes out either.

Wise: I think editing out a stereotype gives it more power than it deserves.  If past mistakes are hidden away, how can we confront them and avoid them in the future?  A sanitized version of history is a faulty one.

Werth: And to edit a work that was created outside of the current social setting is a slippery slope. What will be edited next? Is Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind  an editable stereotype? Is Carmen Ghia in The Producers too stereotypically gay a character to be seen? Will future obesity rights activists have us remove Martha Dumptruck from Heathers because she is the object of weight-obsessed ridicule?

Wise: And who will be deciding these edits?

Werth: Exactly. We’ve been there and done that. From 1934 to 1964, rabid Catholic Joseph I. Breen as head of the Production Code Administration had a say in almost every Hollywood picture made. It amounted to movies where characters didn’t use language that real people used and nobody could lie on a bed together without one foot touching the floor.

Wise: That’s how I’ve always done it.

Werth: Not to mention that films with black characters in them were made in such a way that when they played in the South, the characters could be cut out by the theater owners who didn't want black characters in their all-white cinemas. Do we really want to go back to a time where someone decides what we should and shouldn't see?

Wise: Not in my America.

Werth: I guess what I’m trying to say is, there are some awful stereotypes in these old movies. We must learn from them, not reject the entire movie or pretend the problem scenes aren’t there.

Wise: I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Werth: Thank you.

Wise: Now can next week’s posting be less serious?

Werth: Tune in next week for a return to our light-hearted and un-serious Film Gab!

Film Forum Sunk My Battleship!

NYC's The Film Forum is showing Sergei Eisenstein's silent masterpiece Battleship Potemkin for one week only starting January 14th. The Odessa massacre scene alone is a work of cinematic brilliance. So grab some borscht and trot-sky over to The Film Forum.

Joan-Bug!

In this week's issue of "The New Yorker", David Denby reviews Donald Spoto's new biography, Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford, and in the process, makes some interesting points about Crawford, her film persona (was there a difference between the two?), and her movie output. Denby doesn't have the same blind admiration that a certain Film-gabber has, but he definitely gives La Crawford an even-handed retrospection. Check out an excerpt here, or pick-up a copy of the magazine. Then watch two of Joan's best performances in Mildred Pierce and Humoresque next Friday and Saturday (1/7 & 1/8) on TCM.

Auld Lang Gab!

Werth: Happy New Year, Wise!

Wise: Happy New Year, Werth!

Werth: Any fun plans for New Year’s Eve?

Wise: I’m coming to your house to watch your favorite New Year’s movie.

Werth: I know! I just love hearing you say it.

Wise: Between the curry-rubbed baked brie and the copious amounts of mid-level champagne, what will we be watching?

Werth: Well, Wise, you are really in for a treat, because my favorite New Year’s Eve movie is 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure.

Wise: You mean the re-make?

Werth: Bite your tongue! I pretend that disaster of a disaster movie never happened. In this case (as with most) the original really is the best. Irwin Allen produced this all-star adventure flick about the S.S. Poseidon and her passengers and crew as they ring in the New Year at sea. No sooner do they finish Auld Lang Syne than a tidal wave hits the ship and capsizes it, literally turning everyone’s world upside down.

Wise: Sounds like a dud way to start 1973.

Werth: Indeed. But as the Academy Award®-winning theme song says, “There’s got to be a morning after.” The rest of the film follows a small group of survivors as they struggle to climb to the bottom (now the top) of the ship to escape certain death by drowning and or/fiery explosions. Based on the exciting Paul Gallico book of the same name, Allen really makes some fun design and special-effects choices. When young Robin Shelby (played with borderline annoying juvenile pluck by Eric Shea) goes to the men’s room and stares hopelessly at the ceiling where the toilets hang with their lids open, we get a real sense of the pickle these people are in.

Wise: Please don’t ever use the words “pickle” and “men’s room” in the same sentence again.

Werth: I promise. Topping the effects is the stellar cast assembled to play this intrepid group: Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Stella Stevens, Roddy McDowell, Red Buttons, Jack Albertson, Arthur O’Connell, Leslie Nielsen and the one and only Shelley Winters.

Wise: Please tell me Shelley lives.

 Werth: No spoilers! But her performance as Belle Rosen, legendary in camp circles, earned her a well-deserved Best-Suporting Actress nomination. All in all it’s a fun flick that actually makes you care about the characters so that you are invested in whether they survive the ordeal... or not. It became the first hit of Irwin Allen’s disaster dynasty that would go on to include The Towering Inferno, The Swarm and the inevitable Poseidon Adventure sequel.

Wise: Sounds like the perfect way to start 2011.

Werth: I mean, as long as you’re not trapped in a capsized luxury liner, you’re doing better than these folks, right? So if after the stroke of midnight we’re still sober enough, what would be your pick for a follow-up New Year’s flick?  

Wise: Well, I thought it might be a good idea to follow the deadly histrionics of The Poseidon Adventures with something a little quieter that focuses on domestic conflicts.  I’m thinking of Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven.  

Werth: I love that movie. Tell the New Year’s connection!  

Wise: A small but pivotal scene takes place on New Year’s Eve, but the majority of the film feels autumnal.  Julianne Moore plays the apotheosis of the 50s housewife struggling with the dawning knowledge that her seemingly ideal, ad executive husband, played by Dennis Quaid, is actually gay.

Werth: That makes him more ideal in my book. 

Wise: Not for her unfortunately.  The revelation destroys her marriage, plus the friendship she strikes up with her gardener, played by Dennis Haysbert, causes all kinds of gossip and backbiting among her proper Connecticut neighbors who rigidly, but politely, adhere to divisions made along racial lines.  It’s really the story of one woman’s discovery of the hollowness of her achievements and her subsequent determination to make a more honest life for herself.  

Werth: It’s so dramatic!

Wise: Melodramatic, actually.  Todd Haynes made the film as a tribute to the Douglass Sirk “women’s pictures” of the 1950s, and he uses the lurid color palette, the heightened emotionalism, and the undercurrent of social critique characteristic to those movies.  The cinematography is lush, gently floating though sets filled with crimsons, ochres, lavenders, jades and chartreuse.  Sandy Powell’s costumes are glamorous and chic, but somehow real.  And the score by Elmer Bernstein is perfectly calibrated, romantic when it needs to be, anguished and occasionally brittle.  

Werth: Elmer is my favorite of the Bernsteins.

Wise: Of course, the performances are fantastic too.  I don’t think I can say enough about Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid.  They both forgo their usual more contemporary, method-inflected acting style and delve into the more mannered performances of the 50s.  You might think that all this artifice would make a stilted picture, but like opera, the rigid form actually allows for a more moving experience.  

 Werth: It provides a gorgeous contrast between artifice and reality- which is something we all can relate to in our non-cinematic lives.

Wise: I should also mention how great Patricia Clarkson is as the neighbor and best friend and the fantastic Celia Weston as a pernicious gossip.  Even the child actors seem perfectly cast, screeching and stilted and interchangeable with the onscreen children of Lana Turner and Jane Wyman. 

Werth: Is there anything not to like about this movie? 

Wise: Not really.  It’s kind of a perfect film.  

Werth: Amen. So, dear readers, from both of us here at Film Gab, may your 2011 be as perfect as The Poseidon Adventure and Far From Heaven—

Wise: Minus the drowning and the heartbreak.

Werth & Wise: Happy New Year!

A Holly Gabby Christmas!

Werth: Merry Christmas, Wise!

Wise: Merry Christmas, Werth!

Werth: I just love Christmas Eve. Curling up with some white chocolate pretzels and a mug of hot chocolate and vodka in front of a sparkling Christmas tree and a roaring fire waiting for Santa to come down the chimney.

Wise: You still believe in Santa?

Werth: Ssh! Children may be reading this. And nothing makes the wait for that jolly old elf more enjoyable than—

Wise: More vodka.  

Werth: Than watching a classic Christmas movie.

Wise: There are so many to choose from—Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story.

Werth: Nope. Those flicks are holiday amateur hour. When I want to watch a movie about the true spirit of Christmas, I watch The Lion in Winter.

Wise: This I gotta hear.  

Werth: It’s 1183 A.D. and King Henry II of England and bits of France is hosting Christmas at his castle in Chinon. He gathers together his three power-hungry sons; his wife, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine whom he keeps locked up in a castle; his doe-eyed mistress; and the young French king for some good old-fashioned holiday family dysfunction!

Wise: They don’t sing carols or have snowball fights?

Werth: To quote Good King Hank, “What shall we hang? The holly or each other?” Before the un-silent night is through, everyone’s stabbed someone in the back to get a piece of Henry’s kingdom.  Eleanor tells Henry she screwed his dad, and King Phillip lets it slip that he and Prince Richard have been doing more than hunting wild boar together.

Wise: Oh, I’ve used the old boar hunting excuse myself.

Werth: It’s historic melodrama at its Grinchiest. James Goldman’s dialogue crackles more than a yule log with the verbal barbs flying very faithfully to the 1966 play on which the film is based. Although they did cut Prince Richard’s insult about his dufus brother’s birth. “No, it’s the midwives’ fault. They threw the baby out and kept the afterbirth.”

Wise: What happened to, “Children may be reading this?”

Werth: But the best thing about this film is the acting performances. Peter O’Toole is  grumpily regal as King Henry; young Anthony Hopkins plays an early version of his infamous, icy, detached madman; and a very young Timothy Dalton is yummy as the scheming King Phillip. But it is Kate Hepburn who gives what I think is the best performance of her career. Her Eleanor of Aquitaine is a fully-imagined force of nature. 

She enacts a monologue in front of a mirror defiantly recalling the queenly legend she used to be as her haggard face looks back at her. Her fierceness, her vulnerability and her uniqueness shine in this role as a woman who is older, but no less impressive than she was that day long ago when she captured the heart of a king. It’s a role Hepburn could relate to as an aging queen of Hollywood who, despite the fact she was 61, was bound and determined not to go quietly into the Hollywood antique closet.

Wise: She won the Oscar® that year, right?

Werth: She actually shared the Oscar® that year with Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl . It was the second and last time a tie has occurred for the coveted kudo.

Wise: Who deserved it more?

Werth: I actually think Funny Girl is Streisand's best film performance, so I say neither of them should have to give back their statuette.

Wise: No one should have to give back an Oscar® on Christmas.

Werth: Except Halle Berry. What Christmas movie lights up your tree, Wise? 

Wise: Well, it combines three of my favorite things: elaborate musical numbers, heart-tugging sentiment, and puppets.  

Werth: Is it Team America: World Police? 

Wise: Actually, it’s The Life & Adventures of Santa Claus based on the book by L. Frank Baum. It’s one of the last Animagic Christmas specials made by Rankin-Bass, producers of some of the greatest holiday entertainments, like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman.

Werth: So, it’s not a movie? 

Wise: It’s a TV movie. 

Werth: It’s a holiday special and therefore not a movie.  

Wise: Need I remind you of your post about the Judy Garland television show last week?

Werth: You need not. Continue.

Wise: Life & Adventures tells the story of an abandoned infant adopted by the wood nymph Necile who has always longed to know more about the world outside the boundaries of the enchanted Forest of Burzee.  She names the baby Claus and raises him in perfect happiness among the other immortals.  When Claus comes of age, he is taken by The Master Woodsman to see the human world where he witnesses sorrow and suffering for the first time.   

  

The journey has a profound effect upon him and he decides to leave the fairy world and dedicate himself to making children happy.  After a lifetime of spreading joy, Claus approaches death, but the council of Immortals makes Claus one of them so that he will live forever to bring toys to the children of the world.  

Werth: Um.... what?  

Wise: I’m not normally a fan of stories that exploit a familiar character’s backstory, but I find Baum’s departure from the standard version of Santa Claus intriguing because he transforms the commercialism holiday gift-giving into a profound act of good.  Baum was interested in Theosophy which was a 19th Century spiritual movement and its influence gave depth to his literary world, connecting his fairy tales to larger themes.  

Werth: I’m not sure if I can handle being taught spiritual lessons by stop-motion animated puppets. 

Wise: Actually, I think it’s some of the most subtle film making ever produced by Rankin Bass.  The puppets express complex emotions and the writing addresses Baum’s most compelling ideas.  The lovely and fantastical design is clearly influenced by Alphonse Mucha, and there are plenty of funny elves and catchy tunes that stick in your head long after the hour is over.  Plus, the Master Woodsman is voiced by long-time Broadway star Alfred Drake who played opposite Katherine Hepburn in Much Ado About Nothing.  

Werth: Was that your attempt to connect Adventures to a movie?

Wise: Yup. 

Werth: Nicely done.  

Wise: Thank you. And to our readers, Merry Christmas to all—and to all a good gab!