The Shortest Criterion Collection Movie Ever!

Do you sometimes feel like the Criterion Collection is too big? Well, Criterion.com has created a two and a half minute video with shots from every one of their films to prove that bigger is shorter. It's a lightening-fast view of some of the great (and not-so-great) classics that Criterion is legendary for.

Gab-wooding

Werth: My fellow Gab-mericans— 

Wise: Um, hi there, Werth.  Sounds like you're getting pretty ramped up for the Presidential campaign.  

Werth: I do love convention season, full of rousing speeches, pageantry, balloons—

Wise: —and running mates disguised as a fitness regime?

Werth: Of course, the biggest star to emerge has already been a star for decades. Only this time he brought along a friend.  

Wise: I'm assuming you're talking about Clint Eastwood and his chair.  

Werth: I sure am. And even if not everyone loves that he is one of Hollywood's most vocal Republicans, no one can deny that he is one of Hollywood's top talents.  Starting off his career snarling in 1960s spaghetti westerns, then snarling as America's favorite dirty cop in the '70s, he eventually went on to become one of the most lauded directors of the past two decades. 

His first time occupying the director's chair came in 1971 with the thriller Play Misty for Me. Doing double-duty as both director and star, Eastwood plays Dave Garver, a late-night, Carmel, CA DJ who likes to play jazz and woo women. One groupie in particular is Evelyn, a neurotic chippie who calls the show frequently purring, "Play 'Misty' for me," into the phone. When she shows up at Dave's favorite bar wearing a leather mini and kiki shag hair-do, it's a little jarring realizing that Evelyn is being played by none other than a young, pre-Arrested Development Jessica Walter.

Wise: Please don't tell me he spins Lucille Bluth's platter.

Werth: He does... a couple times. But when he tries to end it so he can return to his ex-girlfriend, Tobie (Donna Mills), Evelyn isn't having any of it. Soon she is following him on his beach dates, staging hysterical screaming fits in front of potential employers and attempting suicide in his bathroom.

Wise: Is there a rabbit boiling in a pot at some point?

Werth: The parallels with Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction (1987) are unmistakable, but Misty is missing the sexiness, the tense pacing, and the terrifying character development of Fatal Attraction. 

Eastwood's acting feels more empty than conflicted or scared, and his use of long shots and voice over instead of actual conversation puts a distance between us and the characters, even if said characters are rolling around in a forest like a soft-core '70's Coke ad.

Wise: I'm suddenly very thirsty.

Werth: One scene does point towards Eastwood's bright directorial future. Dave visits the actual Monterey Jazz Festival and the footage is electric, perfectly capturing the excitement of the crowd in a documentary style. It shows that even as a novice Eastwood was learning to effectively capture mood and style for a film audience. 
 
Wise: Another of the few misfires in Eastwood's oeuvre is Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997).  Based on John Berendt's non-fiction novel of the same name, the film stars John Cusack as John Kelso (a fictionalized stand-in for Berendt), a writer for Town and Country who travels to Savannah, GA, to write a story on the annual Christmas party thrown by the flamboyant Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey), only to be dragged into the mystery surrounding the murder of Williams' hot-headed boyfriend Billy Hanson (Jude Law).  

Werth:  Kevin Spacey only wishes his boyfriend was Jude Law...

Wise: The book had been on the best seller list for almost four years by the time the film came out, making Eastwood's task of meeting audience expectations nearly impossible.  Still, some of the choices he and screenwriter John Lee Hancock made seem absolutely wrong-headed, particularly the transformation of Berendt's careful examination of the vagaries of Savannah society into simply a parade of eccentrics.  

Cusack's task wasn't any easier: Berendt's authorial voice remains resolutely in the background of the book, giving full reign to his characters, while Cusack attempts to bring this observer into the foreground with little success.  

The introduction of a love interest to the character (Eastwood's own daughter Alison Eastwood playing an invented florist who belts Tin Pan Alley hits in her free time) only muddies the character even more.  

Werth: Eastwood's nepotism knows no bounds when it comes to singing. He also squeezed his warbling daughter Morgan into the otherwise wonderful documentary, Johnny Mercer: The Dream's on Me in 2009.

Wise: Despite these problems, the film still offers many pleasures, particularly Kevin Spacey's performance.  He masterfully deploys a bourbon-inflected drawl that both seduces and chills the audience, making his Jim Williams just as compelling and just as mysterious as the actual case that Berendt wrote about.  Jude Law also does excellent (although limited) work as the tempestuous lover, making Billy a sexy time bomb waiting to explode.  

Perhaps the stand-out performance of the film is by the Lady Chablis playing herself as a kind of Girl Friday to Cusack.  She brings humor and pathos to the film, and frankly makes a much more compelling partner to Cusack than Alison Eastwood's drab Mandy. 

Werth: When your name is a wine product, you tend to attract attention.

Wise: Also of note is the really wonderful soundtrack of Johnny Mercer hits performed by such luminaries as Tony Bennett, k.d. lang, Diana Krall and the director himself.  Mercer came from Savannah and his ancestral home was the site of the murder; using his songs to score the film gives it a texture and authenticity it would otherwise have lacked.  

Werth: The same thing Eastwood achieved for the RNC with his chair scolding.

Wise: I'm happy as long as we both vote for more Film Gab next week.  

Happy Gabs Are Here Again

Werth: Hey, Wise, can you spare a dime?  

Wise: Oh, gee, Werth, I don't typically carry change.  It's a plastic society, you know.  

Werth: Save your explanations, Wise.  I was referring to the anthem of the Great Depression with lyrics by the great E. Y. Harburg.  With Lawless opening this Friday, I've been nostalgic for the Hollywood classics made in the decade after the 1929 stock market crash. Americans struggled with wild unemployment, severely reduced incomes and homelessness and longed for an escape from the world of Hoovervilles and soup kitchens. 

One of the easiest places for people to go to forget about their troubles, was their local movie theater. Everyday stories of fearless heroes and glamorous heroines unspooled for an audience hungry for distraction—all for the price of one quarter. 

Wise: The Gay Divorcee (1934) eschews the realities of the Great Depression almost entirely and instead presents a romanticized version of life among the jet set.  After being abandoned by her geologist husband, Mimi Glossop (Ginger Rogers) heads to England where she seeks the advice of her serially married aunt on how best to obtain a divorce.  Aunt Hortense (Alice Brady) calls upon her bumbling lawyer Egbert Fitzgerald (the ever delightful Edward Everett Horton) who schemes to have Mimi caught in a staged affair, only to have the plan go awry when Mimi mistakes besotted dance man Guy Holden (Fred Astaire) for the gigolo.

After a series of mistaken identities, sudden reversals and transcendent dance numbers, the missing geologist is revealed to be a cad and Mimi can guiltlessly dissolve that failed marriage and embark on a happier union with Guy.  

Werth: I think all divorce proceedings should require a tap number. 

Wise: Of course the plot is littered with roadblocks just to allow the audience the pleasure of witnessing Mimi and Guy fall in love.  Mimi's reluctance and Guy's persistence is beautifully realized in their duet to Cole Porter's "Night and Day."
Choreographed by Astaire and longtime collaborator Hermes Pan, the number exemplifies what made Depression-era audiences clamor for the Astaire/Rogers dance team: his elegance and crack precision; her insight that acting while dancing was just as important as during the dramatic bits.  It's a seduction as poetic as it is erotic, leaving both Mimi and the audience shuddering with pleasure.  

Werth: Shuddering with pleasure. Sounds like a shaky Newport cigarette ad.

Wise: Perhaps the most delightful, non-Astaire/Rogers number in the film is Betty Grable's flirtation in song "Let's Knock Knees."  In pursuit of Horton's prissy Egbert, she leads the chorus of beach goers in a spirited novelty dance that showcases both her tap dancing chops and Horton's finely honed comic persona.  In real life, it would be a ridiculous pairing, but in the fantasy world of the silver screen, it somehow makes sense that a dithering, old-maidish man would fall for a teenage, platinum blonde hoofer.  

Werth: Happens in Hollywood real life. Just ask Kelsey Grammer.

Wise: But that's all part of why these Hollywood fantasies work: an ordinary-looking fellow like Fred Astaire could have an extraordinary talent that elevates him to a world just beyond the grasp of the everyday, transporting audiences away from their cares and toward a glittering Art Deco place in the imagination. 

Werth: From the opening number of Gold Diggers of 1933, you'd think director Mervyn LeRoy was also shooting for some cinematic escapism from the troubles of the breadline. Ginger Rogers (boy, that girl got around), all fresh-faced and spunky sings "We're in the Money" while a bevy of finely coiffed chorus girls dance around her holding giant coins in skimpy Orry-Kelly costumes blinged out with enough change to excite all of New York's panhandlers. But the number is rudely interrupted by a group of policemen who close down the rehearsal and the show because the producer can't pay his bills.

Wise: Could that please happen to The Client List?  

Werth: Ginger is out on the street, and her pals—Carol (Joan Blondell who would have celebrated her 106th birthday this week), Trixie (Fanny Brice wannabe Aline MacMahon), and Polly (Ruby Keeler)—are all worried where their next dollar is going to come from as they share one dress and steal milk from across the breezeway for breakfast. But this is a musical, so of course they can't wind up hooking it on the corner or living in a Hooverville. Cigar-chomping producer Barney (Ned Sparks) has an idea for a show and all he needs is the money to put it up. 

Luck would have it that the next door neighbor, Brad (gooey-toned Dick Powell), is a wildly talented composer who also happens to be a secret blue-blood to boot. So the money appears, everyone gets a part in the show—

 Wise: —and they all live happily ever after.

Werth: After the requisite mistaken identities, romantic hijinx, Guy Kibbee mugging and lavish, kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley dance numbers, yes. But along the way, the poor showgirls get the upper hand on the upper crust, and the finale, "Remember My Forgotten Man" gives the audience a touching reminder of the real world that escapist fantasies like Gold Diggers were trying to help them escape from.

Wise: I guess with fantasies about superheroes, plucky archers and foul-mouthed teddy bears, Hollywood is still using escapist fare to help us forget our current financial woes.

Werth: As long as they don't help our readers forget next week's Film Gab. 

Baby Gab

Today's Wall Street Journal features a story about an upcoming documentary on the life and career of nearly forgotten silent film star Baby Peggy. The doc, titled Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room, premieres in New York next week at MOMA and is accompanied by a discussion with the film's director Vera Iwerebor and the 93-year-old eponymous star.  From the WSJ:

"I was probably one of the 20 top stars [of that era]," says Southern California resident Diana Serra Cary, 93, who, as "Baby Peggy" Montgomery, made some 50 two-reeler comedies and six feature-length movies before her 7th birthday. "I started out at $75 a week when I was 20 months old. At the end of six months . . . the studio upped me to $150 a week. . . . At 5 years old, I was making a million dollars a picture."

This being a Hollywood story, tragedy eventually strikes, and Peggy, after losing two fortunes and her career is forgotten once the sound era sets in and must struggle for even bit parts as an extra.  But for every tragic second act, there is a triumphant final reel, and this doc promises to return the luster to Peggy's long-eclipsed star. 

Funny Ladies

Wise: Hello, Werth!

Werth: Hello, Wise.

Wise: I see you've donned a fright wig.

Werth: I thought it was the least I could do to honor the passing of film and television comedienne Phyllis Diller.

Wise: Just don't start calling me "Fang."




Werth: Diller wasn't really that big a movie star, but she definitely gave women a presence in the comedy culutre that helped those who came after her become silver-screen laugh queens.

Goldie Hawn could have been just another pretty face, but in 1968 she proved on TV's Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In that she could take the dumb blonde routine to a new level.

Wise: It takes a special talent to round up belly laughs with just a giggle and a bikini. 

Werth: While still performing on Laugh-In, Hawn jumped into the movie pool and almost immediately won an Oscar for her role in Cactus Flower (1969). That success was followed by second-billing in There's a Girl in My Soup (1969) and $ (1970) until 1972 when she became the top-billed actress in hits like Butterflies Are Free and The Sugarland Express (1974).

After playing second-fiddle to stars like Warren Beatty (Shampoo (1975)) and George Segal (The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976)), Hawn would return to the first position in 1978 with the mega-hit comedy/thriller Foul Play.

Wise: Not to mention Overboard (1987). 

Werth: Foul Play is basically a romatic comedy homage to mystery-thrillers with some obvious tips of the cap to Hitchcock classics Vertigo, Dial M for Murder and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Hawn plays divorced librarian Gloria Mundy who decides to try and be more outgoing by picking up a hitchhiker on her drive back to her home in San Francisco.

Wise: I know picking up total strangers always makes me loosen up.

Werth: Unfortunately this hitchhiker winds up being murdered, tossing Gloria into an intrigue-filled plot to assassinate the Pope involving a man with a scarred face, a scary albino named Whitey, and a hitman known as "The Dwarf."

Wise: I assume he busts kneecaps.

Werth: Gloria's knight in corduroy armor is disgraced detective Tony Carlson (the almost lecherous Chevy Chase), who seems to be spending more time wooing Gloria than figuring out how to stop the assassination.

And rounding out this randy cast is Dudley Moore in his breakthrough American performance as diminutive perv, Stanley Tibbets. The film isn't as whacky as a Marx Brothers movie nor as action-filled as a Lethal Weapon. Underscored by a sappy Barry Manilow tune, Foul Play takes a really comfortable middle-of-the-road route bewteen comedy and thrills and creates a satisfying, but not altogether transcendant experience.

Its charm emanates from its lead, with Hawn taking her dumb blonde act to more palatable levels by putting her in situations where she's not dumb—she or the person she's talking to just doesn't know what the other person is talking about.
It leads to a comedy of misunderstandings that allows for such fun moments as a Burgess Meredith vs. Rachel Roberts karate fight and a multi-car race across San Francisco. All-in-all Foul Play isn't foul at all, playing coy at a time when having an old lady use the F-word in a Scrabble game was risqué comedy.

Wise: Comediennes don't have to be dumb blondes to be successful at comedy.  In fact, being a fast-talking, savvy brunette can also lead to big laughs.  Rosalind Russell hit it big in screwball hits like His Girl Friday (1940) and The Feminine Touch (1941), but it is her performance in Auntie Mame (1958) that has become perhaps her most iconic comedic performance.

Werth: I know you weren't going to continue without mentioning her side-splitting turn in 1939's The Women. 

Wise: Of course not. Based on the novel by Patrick Dennis (actually a fictionalized memoir of author Edward Everett Tanner III's nom de plume), Auntie Mame presents the life of orphaned, ten-year-old Patrick once he goes to live with his bohemian aunt Mame Dennis (Russell).  

Mame's outsize personality transforms the sober little boy, and eventually comes to the rescue when Patrick's Ivy League education threatens to pair him up with a shallow, social climbing bride (Joanna Barnes deploying a really top drawer Locust Valley lockjaw).  

Werth: One of my favorite scenes is when Mame gives the Upsons the what for.

Wise: Surrounded by a cadre of eccentrics—Broadway doyenne and heroic tippler Vera Charles (Coral Browne); lecherous Irish poet Brian O'Bannion (Robin Hughes); Texas oilman Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside (Forrest Tucker)—Russell holds her own.  Having originated the role on Broadway, Russell's performance has an appropriate theatricality about it, but her background in film informs the quieter moments when the camera lingers in closeup.  

At its heart, this is a film about finding love, and the tenderness that Russell exhibits when she realizes how much Patrick means to her anchors the film's oddball delights.

Werth: Not to mention the eye-popping array of gowns created by Orry-Kelly.

Wise: While Russell is the chief pleasure of Auntie Mame, the film is crowded with hilarious turns by gifted actresses.  Coral Browne's Vera has all the grande dame-ness of Bette Davis in All About Eve, but leavens the part with her penchant for booze.  Lee Patrick's daft society matron reveals how dangerously close the suburban set is to bigotry.  

But perhaps best of all is Peggy Cass as Mame's secretary Agnes Gooch.  The socially awkward frump was already something of a cliché by the time Auntie Mame hit theaters, but Cass not only takes the requisite glasses, dumpy cardigan, and sensible shoes to their stereotypical heights, she also gets her very own bombshell moment when she follows Mame's exhortation to "Live! Live! Live!"

Werth: Sounds like all these funny ladies followed that good advice.

Wise: As long as we all follow the laughs to next week's Film Gab.  

They're Baaaack!

Werth: One, two, three, four, five—

Wise: Are you practicing for your advanced math classes, Werth?

Werth: No, I'm counting the number of out-of-work action stars who are making a comeback in The Expendables 2.

Wise: You'll need an abacus for that.

Werth: While I'm not a huge fan of the mindless action genre, I think it's great that actors like Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger can put their golf clubs down and show up for hair and makeup.

Wise: The ones who still have hair.

Werth: That kind of comeback reminds me of my favorite star resurgence flick, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).

Wise: Speaking of wigs and makeup.

Werth: When Robert Aldrich started pitching his cinematic take on Henry Farrell's novel, the studios were not biting. Not helping matters was the fact that the two stars of the film were stars in memory only. Neither Joan Crawford nor Bette Davis had much caché left at the box office after glorious careers as marquee headliners.

These famous leading ladies had been relegated to playing old baglady mothers (Davis as Apple Annie in Pocketful of Miracles (1961)) and ball-breaking bitch bosses (Crawford as Amanda Farrow in The Best of Everything (1959)). But after slashing the budget, Aldrich was able to convince Jack Warner to distribute the film, even if, as Warner was accused of saying, "I wouldn't give a plugged nickel for those two old broads."

Wise: I guess he was busy plugging other broads.

Werth: Baby Jane opens in 1917 in a vaudeville hall where the "Diminutive Dancing Duse from Duluth," Baby Jane Hudson (a sickeningly perky Julie Allred), taps and sings her way through her juvenile number, "I've Written a Letter to Daddy." An offstage tantrum reveals a rift between her and her older, un-famous sister Blanche (Gina Gillespie).

Fast forward to a screening room in 1935 where studio execs are screening the grown-up Jane in her latest flop (the footage is actually of Davis from 1933's Parachute Jumper) and wondering why they have to work with this hopeless has-been. The reason? Her hugely successful, movie star sister Blanche's contract requires that Jane get work too.

Wise: The drab older sister also rises.

Werth: But those tables turn again as a cinematically edited accident leaves us with the idea that the spoiled Jane has run over her sister with a car. The film then jumps again in time to the early 1960's where we find Blanche (Crawford) regally sitting in her wheelchair watching one of her old movies on TV (real footage from her hit Sadie McKee (1934)). Jane (Davis) tromps into the room looking like Mrs. Haversham after a mime class and the bitch-fest begins.

The great fun of this movie has always, and will always be the amazing chemistry between these two actresses. The sparks don't fly, they explode as Jane abuses Blanche and Blanche struggles to survive. Much was made in the press of how much Crawford and Davis hated each other, and perhaps that PR agent creation has colored our modern viewing of the film.

No one would be silly enough to say that these two titans of the silver screen liked each other, but by most reputable accounts they were nothing but professional on set. So that leaves us with two amazing actresses who were able to not only create unique opposing characters, but a complicated and emotionally engaging screen relationship with each other.


Wise: Which can't be said for those limp dishrags from Twilight.

Werth: Baby Jane is fascinating in that not only do we see a conflict between Davis/Jane and Crawford/Blanche, but Aldrich also seems torn between worshipping these old movie stars and degrading them. On the one hand we know their mythic reputations and get glimpses of their old work, but on the other, Davis transforms into a painful-to-look-at pyschotic harridan and Crawford is physically brutalized.

While neither actress came out of this movie "looking" good, Davis was nominated for an Oscar and both stars had a resurgence in their careers—even if it was made up of more horror schlock like Davis' Dead Ringer (1964) and The Nanny (1965) and Crawford's dalliances with William Castle in Strait-Jacket (1964) and I Saw What You Did (1965). Still, Baby Jane was a wonderful opportunity to remind the world that these two stars still had plenty of shine in them.

Wise: Even stars who haven't been eclipsed by the next generation sometimes need a career re-invention.  After two decades of being America's TV sweetheart, Mary Tyler Moore left behind the quirky world of sitcoms for Robert Redford's directorial debut Ordinary People (1980).  In it, she plays Beth Jarrett, a perfect suburban mother gone brittle and cold after the death of one son and the suicide attempt of the other.

Werth: That is definitely not a plotline for The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Wise: Based on the novel by Judith Guest, the film focuses on Beth's depressed son Conrad (Oscar-winning Timothy Hutton) and his attempts to return to normalcy despite the guilt he feels for not being able to save his brother in a boating accident.  Helping him along the way is psychiatrist Dr. Berger (Judd Hirsch gently stepping away from his smarmier Taxi persona) and his father Calvin (Donald Sutherland) who nobly, although fruitlessly, attempts to reconcile mother and son.

Werth: He should have just called in Lou Grant to take care of it.

Wise: Moore is terrifying in the role.  After years of playing appealing gals with spunk, she makes Beth utterly unapproachable—all jutting elbows, strained throat, pursed lips.  But unlike a lot of other actors' attempts at image reboots, Moore's past success actually enhances her work here. 

The warmth of her sitcom performaces throws her portrayal of Beth into greater relief, allowing her to make Beth colder and more vicious than just about any other actor could.  The audience longs for—along with her damaged, hurting son—the warmth of the person beneath this icy façade.

Werth: Icy façade or plastic surgery?

Wise: Redford's direction, aside from displaying great sensitivity to the subject, is very clever about the way he uses his actors.  After all, he was in the midst of transforming himself  from matinee idol to auteur, and cannily plays with audience expectations. 

Among other things, Ordinary People is about a golden boy who doesn't survive, and the scrappier, more emotionally messy sibling who does.  Redford uses that model for himself and his actors—especially Moore—escaping the gilded perfections of the past for a more complicated vision of the present.

Werth: Well faithful readers, make sure your complicated vision is focused on next week's Film Gab!