A fearful symphony

She spent 5 months editing footage

Leni Riefenstahl was hired by Hitler himself to produce a film that glorified the Nazi party, and she delivered in spectacular fashion. She needed 30 cameras to capture the pageantry of 1934’s week-long, 700,000-strong Nuremberg Rally. The result is Triumph of the Will, a film as tightly controlled and rhythmically beautiful as the paramilitary troops who march and salute on the grand stage of the arena designed by Albert Speer. Her masterful edit of the rich variety of images creates a film that ebbs and swells like a symphony. When it concludes, you will recall with surprise that, but for the rousing speeches by Hitler and others, it is pure cinema– a sweeping array of images with music, but not one word of narration.

“crooks and murderers”

Why, then, was the film described as “the most marvelous anti-Nazi propaganda” by the great film critic Dwight Macdonald? In his words:

“When I saw all those people shouting Heil Hitler and Sieg Heil, I thought this is menacing and sinister. Those close-ups– the porky, beefy, misshapen faces of the Nazi leaders, they are the faces of a bunch of crooks and murderers– you can see that… There were some shots of Goering and Goebbels that you couldn’t possibly admire. Nobody but a Nazi could admire these people.” (From “Interviews with Dwight Macdonald,” University Press of Mississippi, 2003).

Armed and Aryan

His conclusion was that Riefenstahl was “so good a director that she produces truth even when she wants to produce lies.”

When I watched “Triumph of the Will” again recently, I realized how strong Macdonald’s words were. My heart hardened against what I was seeing, even though it was meant to glorify– the frank close-ups of the stolid faces of those high-and-mighty men, men who are staged as individuals standing tall against rows upon rows of those paramilitary troops, the handsomest of whom get their own sunlit close-ups. If you’re not one of them, if you’re not a German chauvinist, it is a chilling, frightening picture of imperial power and rank submission.

Boy meets gargoyle

Triple delight: von Donnersmarck, Venice, Depp

I saw The Tourist to see the work of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. His only other feature, The Lives of Others, is so subtle, so moving, so pitch-perfect that no number of damning reviews could have steered me off his second movie, and The Tourist had plenty of denigrators. It also had big box office, over $275m worldwide. Seeing a movie because of its director always puts one in a minority, and no more so than when the stars are supernovae like Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. They are why most people bought their Tourist tickets. And Depp doesn’t disappoint. Nor does von Donnersmarck, or John Seale’s camera work. It is Angelina Jolie who ultimately sinks this movie.

She’s not the only problem, of course. The plot is harder to believe than the Old Testament. It’s saved by the setting in Venice, and the moments of wryness in the dialog (almost all Depp’s), and a raft of talent that includes von Donnersmarck, Depp, Paul Bettany, Steven Berkoff, Christian de Sica, and, fleetingly, Rufus Sewell as a bemused plot device. (No, I haven’t forgotten about Timothy Dalton, whose acting chops escape me.)

All lashes and lips

Jolie is omitted from that list. Though she’s a gifted actress, as she proved once and for all inA Mighty Heart, she doesn’t even attempt to act in The Tourist. At thirty-six, she is grotesque. I use that word because, from the moment she stepped into the frame, she reminded me of Dwight MacDonald’s description of Brigitte Bardot at the height of her freakish popularity in 1960: “Bardot has become a grotesque, a product of biological overspecialization like a borzoi, her face has been reduced to the sexual essentials and is, objectively considered, by now rather terrifying. A really innocent eye– of a child or a primitive– would be scared by the close-ups: those huge staring eyes, the great thick-lipped toothy mouth, the cascades and whorls and fountains of hair.” Fifty years later, Jolie has out-Bardoted Bardot. She seems to have glued tiny mink stoles to her eyelashes, and her make-up is so thick that I wondered if the crew didn’t have to check it periodically with a dipstick. More forty-weight foundation here!

With von Donnersmarck and Depp, a woman emerges from behind the mask

The freak factor could be forgiven, but where has her talent gone? Depp seems miscast, but he carries his role with his usual light comic touches and his unselfconscious ease, and delivers a characterization enhanced by plainness. He looked his 46 years, and would seem to have spent less than a minute in a make-up chair, none of it with a comb. He’s real. In contrast, Jolie is a Colleen Atwood-clad mannequin with (as MacDonald wrote of BB) “no lightness, no verve, no womanly softness, no change of pace.” Her performance is a series of posed stills.

It is disheartening to see an actress sell out both her natural beauty and her considerable talent for a career that seems to be based wholly on glamor and celebrity. I find myself wondering if Ms. Jolie, with her ample tattoos and numerous adoptions and heavily publicized liaisons, isn’t the Hollywood equivalent of an opera diva. I think they’re called narcissists.

Marilyn’s first starring role

At age 22

“What are you trying to do, give burlesque a bad name?” That question is posed at one of many tedious points during Ladies of the Chorus (1948), a movie which certainly doesn’t do burlesque any favors. But Marilyn Monroe does. If she’d been a burlesque queen, the form might not have died.

This was her sixth film but her first truly featured role. Hers is the only name above the title, and when she’s on screen, the tedium is replaced by fascination. The screenplay– by two journeymen Hollywood writers whom only their direct descendants have ever heard of– is a pitifully formulaic rags-to-riches (actually sequins-to-riches) B movie, but Monroe is given two full musical numbers, and the filmmakers found ways to give her an additional song or two as well– that’s in addition to padding the thinnest of plots with at least three other performed songs to fill the scant 61-minute running time.

The Millers, 1956

Columbia Pictures knew what they had in the young Monroe. Every shot of her is flattering– luminous close-ups, lingering takes of her dancing and singing. And she obviously deserves the camera’s attentions; she holds the screen from the moment she emerges in front of it. Indeed, her famous screen persona is already fully realized and recognizable, reminding me of the Dwight Macdonald review of her last complete film, The Misfits (1961): “…the script Mr. Miller wrote for his recently divorced wife, Marilyn Monroe, was an attempt to render her real, off-screen personality. That he sees this pretty much as the rest of us off-screen people do is either a tribute to her wholeness or a sign that Mr. Miller is not very perceptive.”

After seeing this movie, I’m convinced it’s the former.

A great film about a Soviet stooge

Life on the Volga, ca. 1880

Okay, stooge may be too strong. Maxim Gorky is just a boy in this film, too young to be a stooge of any sort. But there’s no shortage of pictures of the adult Gorky consorting with Josef Stalin. When Stalin was Time Magazine‘s Man of the Year in 1939 (not an accolade that year), the tribute cited Gorky as “a good friend of Stalin.” Gorky was enormously controversial, and posterity has not treated him well in part because of his propagandizing. His novels, plays, and essays are little read or performed now, but in the Soviet Union in the 1930s he was a state (if not a popular) hero. At least in part, that explains Mark Donskoy’s 1938 film, The Childhood of Maxim Gorky,a.ka. Detstvo Gorkogo.

You know a movie is obscure when there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry. In this case, the whole trilogy of Donskoy’s Gorky films is absent, Childhood being but the first and, so far, the only one I’ve seen. I’ve now seen it twice, screenings which were separated by more than 30 years. When I first viewed it, as part of a film course taught by Dwight Macdonald in 1971 (his other choices included Rules of the Game, The Italian Straw Hat, Potemkin, Trouble in Paradise, Children of Paradise, Keaton’s Cops, 8 1/2, and Rashomon, to give you an idea of the range and level of films he chose), the film had a profound impact on me. In the back of my mind, I wanted to see it again, but it was already hopelessly obscure.

Serf children as scavengers

Recently, however, I found it on Netflix. It flew to the top of my queue, thence to my mailbox and DVR. Within the first half-hour or so of watching it, I left the sofa and pulled a chair closer to the TV so that I could really drink in the images and the subtitles. Needless to say, I discovered all over again what had so affected me–  the mature and sophisticated style of early Russian filmmakers, and the power they could generate, particularly with material as touching and honest as Gorky’s childhood memoir.

Little is available about the film, though this short article from the Harvard Crimson in 1961 (the silver anniversary of Gorky’s death) is a worthy read, and I admire this blog entry. And the film is a must for every serious film-goer. Even minor characters, like the crippled boy who keeps insects as pets (metaphor alert–this movie is about serfs), dreaming he can some day set them free in the fields around the Volga, are utterly believable. Donskoy was given unusual license by Soviet government censors, no doubt because he presents the misery of serfdom, which by inference praises the liberating Communist Party.

Igor Smirnov as the crippled boy

Incidentally, Mark Donskoy is also so obscure that his Wikipedia entry consists of two sentences. There’s a lot more information, perhaps appropriately, at his grave site. He’s buried at Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery, which is anything but obscure, and very much worth a visit, as I recall.

Hud, suckers, and a proxy.

Hud isn’t the worst movie of Paul Newman’s career (Hudsucker Proxy? Quintet? Silver Chalice? A New Kind of Love? What a Way To Go!? The Outrage?), but with three Oscars, it is easily the most over-rated.

Patricia Neal

Martin Ritt’s movie really has only two things going for it, which account for two of the three Oscars: James Wong Howe‘s wise and understated photography, and Patricia Neal’s wise and understated performance as a mature but sensuous leading lady (rare enough in itself to merit a watching the movie).

Hud and a handful of Neal

The first and only time I saw Hud, I was bored. The story was predictable (I haven’t read  the original novel, Horseman, Pass By, but it was Larry McMurtry’s first so I’m prepared to believe it’s not his best), and all the male characters were stock. Only Neal felt real. Whenever she was on screen, the movie came to life. I knew Hud‘s vaunted reputation, of course, so I felt intimidated by how far out in left field I seemed to be. I wasn’t prepared to believe that I was right and everyone else was a sucker for Newman stretching to play a bad guy, so I planned to watch it again some day…

…until I read Dwight Macdonald’s review in On Movies. A few sentences of his bracing honesty, and I felt the clean, fresh air of vindication. Macdonald is devastatingly on the mark. His review is succinct, incisive, and merciless (rather like Neal’s character, come to think), and I offer his summation here as a proxy for my own remarks, which could not improve on his:

Melvyn Douglas, by James Wong Howe

“Melvyn Douglas plays the Texan patriarch up to the hilt: brooding, bushy-browed, slow-spoken (if at all), a real down-to-earth old-timer, just like Ward Bond or Walter Brennan. He has many big moments—after all, his part has been taste-tested since 1910 and he introduces no new flavors—but perhaps the biggest comes when, leaning on a property fence and gloating over his broad acres, he tells Hud that oil prospectors have been after him, but that long as I’m above ground (son) there ain’t going’ to be no holes punched in this land. The entire herd of cattle has just been slaughtered by gov’nment agents because of hoof-and-mouth disease, and Hud, greedy and corrupt as usual, suggests that those oil checks would come in mighty handy. But his old man takes the position that if God had wanted oil wells in the good earth, He would have put them there. At one point, Hud tries to have his father declared legally senile. Despicable. But understandable.”

Confessions of a non-fan: Carole Lombard

Lombard at 31.

This truly is a confession. I’ve never appreciated Carole Lombard. It’s an instance in which I know myself to be utterly wrong, and I think I finally figured out why.

The clue came when, on Google books, I found a Life feature article about her from 1938, titled “A Loud Cheer for the Screwball Girl.” It’s a typical puff piece but it includes this observation: when Garbo represented glamor, Mae West sex appeal, and Myrna Loy amiability, Lombard represented “utter undependability.” It’s true. All her most famous characters exhibit it. And that, I believe, is my problem with Lombard– her screen persona is someone I’d spill a drink on at a cocktail party, if not throw it in her face. Undependability is a trait I cannot abide, combining as it does a host of deplorable qualities: egocentricity, insensitivity, disrespect, and simple bad manners.

Ironically, my dislike of Lombard is probably because she’s too good a comic actress. Her performances in movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith and My Man Godfrey found me yearning for Jean Arthur or Claudette Colbert, actresses who could manage the eccentricities of the screwball heroine without becoming inane or irritating. But Lombard goes the whole screwball route. She makes Lucille Ball seem like Dame Judith Anderson.

Praise for Lombard is universal. Even the ruthless critic Dwight Macdonald wrote, “Carole Lombard kidded the Dumb Blonde with a style and wit no other screen actress has approached.” On top of that, everything I know about her– a down-to-earth Midwesterner with  superb comic timing and native wit– encourages me to like her. So maybe it’s time for me to try her again. I’m thinking Made for Each Other, if only because Jimmy Stewart is the spoonful of sugar that can make any medicine go down.

Olivier stoops…

Larry does Carrie

…but even he can’t conquer Carrie, the turgid 1952 film of Theodore Dreiser’s  1900 novel, Sister Carrie. Melodramas can be great fun: Mildred Pierce, Imitation of Life (1934), Now Voyager, even trashy delights like Beyond the Forest. But Carrie is neither wonderful nor fun. Two screen geniuses couldn’t save it, not the divine Laurence Olivier, who proved he was a god when he delivered a ham-on-wry Zeus in his 70s, nor Edith Head, doing some of the finest work of her five-decade career (this earned one of her 35! Oscar nominations).

Wyler mnemonic: why?

Sister Carrie didn’t deserve what happened to it. It was adapted by second-rate screenwriters (Ruth and Augustus Goetz) and an over-rated director. Of William Wyler, the critic Dwight Macdonald wrote: “… a Griffith can make a hundred into a crowd while a Wyler can reduce a thousand to a confused cocktail party.” Carrie is a case in point: a confused mess in which the male lead serves cocktails at a turn-of-the-century Chicago bar. If only barkeeper Olivier could have handed me a whiskey through the TV screen.

Jones, between first husband Robert Walker, and second, David O. Selznick

Adulteress/actress Jennifer Jones is typecast as Carrie Meeber, who lives as a kept woman for most of the movie. Her first sugar daddy is a traveling salesman with all that calling implies, but he’s so charmingly played by Eddie Albert that it’s impossible to dislike him. Her second is a distinguished restaurateur, George Hurstwood (superb Olivier), but also a thief and a bigamist whose crimes catch up with him. Both Jones and Olivier are, of course, presented as victims of circumstance; that is, after all, the melodramatic thing to do.

Broadway for her; Bowery for him

They flee Chicago for New York, where after much hardship she ends up a rich and famous actress, having nailed her first-ever Broadway audition, sans any training or any apparent interest in acting (a flaw in the film, not in the novel). He ends up on the Bowery, with a cough. So the moral here is… women get rewarded while men get punished for bad behavior? The ending, of course, is unhappy; that is also the melodramatic thing to do.

“Dreiser’s great first novel, Sister Carrie… came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman.” — Sinclair Lewis, 1930