Armed and ready

“I put the bastards of the world on notice that I do not have their best interests at heart.”

Rum Diary was a poorly understood, and therefore poorly received film. Too many people seemed to expect psychedalia, like the chaotic, celebrity-strewn Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Johnny Depp’s first outing as Hunter S. Thompson, from 1998. But that unwatchable mess was directed by a creative incontinent, Terry Gilliam. Rum Diary was written and directed by  Bruce Robinson, the author of Withnail and I, an artist capable of delivering both coherent images and coherent thoughts. It isn’t a blurry valentine to mind- and mood-altering substances; it’s a tribute to Thompson as a fearless, articulate, and principled journalist who was as hell-raising with his body as he was hell-bent in his mission.

To be sure, being based on a Thompson novel and brought to the screen by Robinson, Rum Diary does not lack for authoritative text on substance use. But the real subject is journalism— investigative journalism—and the drunk and druggy scenes serve symbolic as well as realistic purpose: the men working at Puerto Rico’s San Juan Star are as dissipated in life as the newspaper is dissipated as a voice of and for the people.

“How does anyone drink 161 miniatures?”

Richard Jenkins is masterful as Lotterman, the editor-in-chief, whose first concern about hiring Kemp (Depp) is that he’s not “creative,” i.e., gay. Jenkins is so good that he almost steals scenes from Depp, a feat previously achieved only by Al Pacino as a mobster and Bill Nighy as a lobster. Lotterman’s rambling muskrat toupée isn’t even needed to add comedy to his character. His every glance, every sneered remark reveals his contempt for his job, his newspaper, and his subordinates.

Rispoli, Depp, Ribisi

And no wonder. His staff journalists all drink like Anthony Haden-Guest and Peter Fallow combined, and are played by actors in Jenkins’ league:

Giovanni Ribisi as Moberg, a bearded,  Hitler-obsessed has-been so close to the edge that he distills “470 proof” alcohol, which proves useful for self-destruction as well as self-defense. Moberg is a voice for Hunter S., as they all are: “This country was built on genocide and slavery. We killed all the black guys over here and then we shipped in new black guys of our own. And then we brought in Jesus like a bar of soap.”

The exceptionally gifted and versatile Michael Rispoli as Sala, a composite character extracted from the novel, the staff photographer and a cockfight aficionado who knows San Juan inside out, and is assigned to show Kemp the ropes. “Do not confuse love with lust, nor drunkenness with judgment.”

But it is Depp, with his respect for Thompson, who keeps this movie on the rails…

People who like to smoke candy and listen to cigarettes will love it

Frank Morgan, Ernst Lubitsch

It’s hard to even know where to begin to praise The Shop Around the Corner, flawless as it is. Ernst Lubitsch opened up the Miklós László play no more than it needed to be, with sets that are both minimal and appropriately modest. And his sensitive direction of Jimmy Stewart, Joseph Schildkraut, and particularly Frank Morgan draw superbly subtle, heartfelt performances. Even minor roles, like Felix Bressart’s, are engaging and wise. The dialog is so charming that five or six lines have become permanent sayings in my family. But perhaps the highest praise I can offer is this:

A good friend of mine, a septuagenarian, scorned films, preferring opera (and not just opera, but Wagner), literature (Tolstoy at least), and philosophy (Wittgenstein, who else). He gave me one chance to prove movies were an art form.

Schildkraut, Bressart, Stewart

I chose The Shop Around the Corner. It’s neither highbrow nor lowbrow, it’s neither epic nor a silly bit of froth, it’s not a genre or a formula picture, and it’s about nothing bigger than decency and love (which are plenty big enough). It is, however, flawless, both funny and touching, and I thought it was a fair representation of how superb even modest films can be, and therefore a fair test of how open-minded my friend was.

“Powerfully flavored,” was his summation, and he was impressed enough to begin seeing movies again (the last one he’d seen on a big screen was Lawrence of Arabia). My right cross was Burnt by the Sun, which finished a quite effective one-two punch. He became a fan of film, albeit a tepid one. And so, among all its other qualities, The Shop Around the Corner is one of the best ambassadors the art form could ask for. As a Christmas movie (“You’re all alone in Budapest on Christmas eve?!”), it is the gift that keeps on giving. It is irresistible.

Silent Hollywood looks at itself

Vanity Fair cartoon featuring Hughes, 1921

Auteur Rupert Hughes, an uncle of Howard’s, directed only six films, all silent, but he was famous enough to be one of only 19 Hollywood celebrities in a marvelous caricature in Vanity Fair.

As far as I can tell, Souls for Sale is the only of his movies available on DVD, and it’s certainly worth a look. Hughes may have left no other celluloid legacy, but this is plenty—lively, smart, and as great an intro to silent films as Keaton’s Our Hospitality, released the same year. Here is a a superior blog, with a superior entry about Souls for Sale.

Cody and Boardman

The subject is Hollywood itself, and the plot involves a young woman (Eleanor Boardman) fleeing a California train to escape a brutish husband (Lew Cody). She is rescued by a film company on location. (A strikingly similar plot—an homage?—enlivens the under-rated 1975 Jeff Bridges movie, Hearts of the West.) A great deal is exposed about movie-making during the course of Souls, in part because it stars just about everybody who was anybody in filmdom at the time, many of them at pictured at work. Highlights include: A riveting and revelatory look at the pressure of screen tests. A brief scene on the actual set of Greed with von Stroheim and Hersholt. An outdoor scene with Chaplin directing. A long scene (probably filmed at the Guadalupe Sand Dunes in Santa Barbara County, location of many silent films, including The Ten Commandments and The Sheik), which parodies Valentino’s signature role, complete with camel close-ups. The dramatic ending of Souls for Sale is a conflagration on the set of a circus film (a popular genre in the 20s; see also Sally of the Sawdust) that effectively uses color tinting for flames. But best of all, Souls for Sale has performances or cameos by about 80(!) celebrities of the era, from Aileen Pringle to ZaSu Pitts, and including the fabulous Snitz Edwards. The full list is here.

Souls for Sale is also an exceptionally fine intro to silent films because the whole sprawling plot is held together with a typical silent-era story, a melodrama with runaway bride, evil husband, handsome suitor, strict parents—and happy, sentimental, redemptive ending.

A double feature of one movie.

Brit Noir

What a tight, smart movie. The only criticism I can really level at They Made Me A Fugitive is that it’s not as good as The Third Man, and that’s only because it doesn’t have the gravitas of the unconscionable criminality of Harry Lime.

It does have Trevor Howard, as one of the bad guys this time. His riveting performance as a minor-league crook is matched by two British actors little known to Americans: Griffith Jones, whose major-league mobster is as different from and as credible as, e.g., his upper class fop in Wicked Lady; and Sally Gray as the femme fatale who, at one point, takes a beating that she withstands stoically until a girlfriend cleans her up and, finally, gives her a cup of tea. It may be that kindness, or perhaps the hot tea on her split lip, you don’t know, but Gray breaks down at last and you realize what the beating has done to her.

Sally Gray

The pace is swift, but not rushed. Extraneous scenes are included—fascinating scenes which lead nowhere– particularly the homicidal lisping woman and her drunken husband who shelter fugitive Trevor Howard in their house for brief but seriously creepy period.

Every frame is composed with extraordinary care, especially in the climactic scene in the funeral parlor, a scene that reminded me of nothing so much as Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. There’s hardly a right angle in it. The director, Brazilian-born Alberto Cavalcanti, had a career spanning fifty years in France and England. The chiaroscuro photography by Otto Heller (Alfie, Victim, Peeping Tom, etc., etc.) is only enhanced by editing that’s almost as whip-crack as the dialog.

Advanced Composition

And as for that superb dialog… film noir movies typically have wisecrack lines, but this Noel Langley screenplay is brilliantly terse—in league with Raymond Chandler’s work. If any character had two sentences in a row, I didn’t notice. It’s all lickety-split exchanges, and every line adds definition or motivation to the character speaking.

A personal note about the headline of this post: This is the only film I’ve ever watched which, after it finished, I immediately started it over and watched it again from the beginning. It was that rich, that engaging, and that satisfying.

The importance of Ernest

Dapper, deviant, and delightful

The British film They Drive By Night is not to be confused with the Raoul Walsh film starring Bogart. This one, a 1938 thriller, had a rare showing in a New York theater in 2009, as part of a series on British film noir. Aside from the usual advantages of seeing a movie on the big screen, there’s also the crowd reaction.  And the reaction to this film, especially the final sequences, was absolutely joyous.

London by night

The movie is at least two-thirds over before one of the main characters appears, the former schoolmaster Walter Hoover, played by the unbelievably urbane, stick-figure-thin Ernest Thesiger. Our first view of him is of his hands, so you only see what he’s doing– pasting newspaper clippings about lurid murders into a scrapbook: “Dance Hostess Strangled with Silk Stocking,” “Bedroom Mystery.” But when his face is finally revealed, the entire audience seemed to sit a bit straighter, and we stayed that way through the end, reacting with open delight to this character’s every movement, his every phrase. Ernest Thesiger has that effect on people, even those familiar with his work. He seems scarcely human.

The link to his name above is to a wordpress blogger who has come as close to cataloging this movie as you can without actually seeing it. I defer to him on plot. This post, while not meaning to take anything away from the headline star of the film, Emlyn Williams (who wrote almost as many films as he starred in), is a testament to Thesiger’s allure. He was capable of turning a lousy movie into a watchable one, and a good movie into an unforgettable one. This is definitely the latter.

“My dear: the noise! And the people!” –Ernest Thesiger, of his experiences in World War I.

I’m not homophobic…

Giles Cole’s play about Rattigan

…or heterophobic, for that matter. But when I encounter an artist whose sexuality seems to actually be a handicap in his work, I see no reason to remain silent. This is as true of Anaïs Nin, Armistead Maupin, and the Marquis de Sade as it is of Sir Terrence Rattigan.

The prolific British playwright kept his homosexuality a secret—as he had to in England, until it was decriminalized in 1967. But his sexuality exhibits itself openly in his work, or so it seems to me. His plays are markedly skewed toward a male point of view (The Browning Version, The Winslow Boy, Adventure Story, etc.), so much so that, ultimately, I don’t believe he understood women any better than he did cats or cows. I don’t think he even realized that women are every bit as complex as men.

I’ll get to the most recent film adaptation of his work (which prompted me to write this) after addressing the most famous one, which is undoubtedly Separate Tables (1958). It won two of the seven Oscars for which it was nominated, but today it feels like a museum piece in an exhibit about British repression. It has six or seven female roles, not one of them a credible woman. The cast— David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Wendy Hiller (all Oscar nominees; Niven a winner), Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, Cathleen Nesbitt, Gladys Cooper— is as faultless as the boredom is relentless.

Meek Kerr, decadent Niven

That is largely the fault of the director, Delbert Mann (whose mediocre career is summarized in his NYTimes obit), so allow me a paragraph to dismantle him. Mann won an Oscar for directing Marty in 1956, a movie I will see again only if Hell exists. That Paddy Chayevsky melodrama premiered on television, and Mann was a made-for-television director. My favorite review of the film version includes this: “No movie can be entirely worthless, it can always serve as a bad example, and this is the worst example of a Best Picture winner I know of.”  Delbert Mann must have been drawn to sentimental, stagey movies about characters who are lonely for good and obvious reasons. Separate Tables is like Marty, but relocated from a Bronx butcher shop to a Bournemouth holiday hotel, and featuring thinner, older, wealthier characters.

But enough about the lousy director. Back to the veiled playwright:

Vixen Hayworth, manly Lancaster

Typical of Rattigan, the male characters in Separate Tables are reasonably well-developed, which is not to say that they ring true. Oscar-winner David Niven, for instance, plays Pee Wee Herman — no, that’s not right. But it’s not far off. He plays Major Angus Pollack, who fabricates stories about his military prowess when he isn’t jerking off in movie theaters.  Burt Lancaster, virile and vigorous as ever, plays an alcoholic, divorced writer, and he is given all the witty lines, which are few in number and they dry up early. He is betrothed to hotelier Wendy Hiller, an engagement that hits the skids when Rita Hayworth, as his ex-wife, shows up with strings she plans to re-attach to his limbs…

“Atonement” for what?

And they died happily ever after.

One question for those of you who have seen Atonement or had the stamina to read the McEwan book: What if Robbie hadn’t been sent to prison by Briony’s lie?

Answer: Able-bodied Robbie would have found himself in the army anyway. And that is what makes this contrived story so dishonest. Far from causing his death, the false testimony of young Briony could actually have saved his life if he’d stayed in prison and fought his conviction, perhaps even  persuading her to recant after she had apparently matured into an empathic adult (she’s a war nurse). Instead, he agrees to exchange prison stripes for khaki– only to croak at Dunkirk exactly one(!) day before the evacuation, because god forbid any tears are left unjerked.

Oh, and by the way, since Briony’s sister Cecilia dies in the Blitz, it isn’t as if sis and Robbie were going to be reunited anyway. One of many factors ignored by the writers and director Joe Wright.

The color of envy

Briony is indeed guilty of causing Robbie’s imprisonment. But as bad as her lie was, it was the act of an adolescent, and the tragedies that ensued had more to do with poor adult responses and a little thing called World War II than with a conceited upper-class schoolgirl.

Briony’s real sins– the chronic faults she takes into adulthood (well played by Romola Garai)– are self-importance, deceit, and opportunism: She capitalizes on her juvenile lie by exploiting the story of Robbie and her sister, publishing a novel in which she yet again falsifies facts, this time to give the lovers a happy ending. After all, it’s much easier to apologize in fiction than in reality. It’s not like she made any effort to clear Robbie’s name of the rape charge. To her way of thinking: Why should I bother when he’s so conveniently dead and I’d be the only one whose reputation suffers– it might hurt book sales! She manages to keep the spotlight on herself, of course, and eventually turns into Vanessa Redgrave on a book tour. The end.

Cool dress, though.