MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: BLACK WIDOW (1954)

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It's a bit like seeing Rembrandts & Titians in a book reproduction, or from posters with iffy color values, no texture or weight to the surface and the wrong dimensions . . . all while snacking on chips & soda. (Oops! You get that at your local cinema,too.)
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DVDs: the latest opiate of the people meets the internet, where everyone's a critic.
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Thursday, September 10, 2009

BLACK WIDOW (1954)

After two decades as a favored writer/producer @ 20th/Fox, Nunnally Johnson began directing his own stuff. NIGHT PEOPLE/’54 with Greg Peck & a fast-talking Broderick Crawford came first and then this odd conflation of a swanky/bitchy NYC murder mystery like LAURA/’44 with a swanky/bitchy NYC backstager like ALL ABOUT EVE/’50. The attempt at high-style falls flat, even laughable, yet it’s quite watchable in a weird artificial way. Ginger Rogers, in B’way diva mode, is married to the weak, but likeable Reginald Gardiner and they live one floor above her producer, Van Heflin & his heiress wife Gene Tierney. Life gets complicated when scheming vixen Peggy Ann Garner is found dead in Heflin’s apartment. Then, when the investigating detective turns up, it’s a phlegmatic George Raft! That's more acting styles than even CinemaScope can hold, even on those football-sized drawing room sets designed for the depth-of-field problems inherent in those early CinemaScope lenses. The film is catnip for parodists, but why settle for a 'camp' knock-off when you can enjoy the real McCoy?

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A last thought before we go.

Well, enough from me. But before we sign off, here's a great quote from Emile Zola's L'OEUVRE (THE MASTERPIECE), which is about painting rather than the yet to be invented medium of film, but which points a fine critical eye toward the whole idea of art criticism. It's a good, if chilly, thought to keep in mind, especially when you surf the net.

"Has it ever struck you that posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we like to think it is?

"Suppose the artist's paradise turned out to be as nonexistent as the Catholics, and future generations prove just as misguided as the present one and persisted in liking pretty pretty dabbling better than honest to goodness painting. There are some accepted masterpieces for which I myself wouldn't give a twopenny damn.

"Classical training has given us a wrong view of everything and forces us to acclaim as geniuses a lot of fellows who are no more than well-balanced, facile painters, while what we might really prefer is the work of more emancipated but less even artists known only to an initiated few. Immortality at present depends entirely on the average, middle-class mind and is reserved only for the names that have been most forcibly impressed upon us while we were still unable to defend ourselves...

"Perhaps that's the sort of thing that's best left unsaid. It's certainly the sort of thing that gives me the shudders!"- Emile Zola

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Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

Thursday, September 10, 2009

BLACK WIDOW (1954)

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A last thought before we go.

DROP ME A LINE