THESE THREE (1936)

Everyone’s a revelation in William Wyler’s first adaptation of Lillian Helman’s powerhouse play THE CHILDREN’S HOUR.* The story, which moves very smartly, follows two freshly graduated college pals (Merle Oberon; Miriam Hopkins) who start a small private girl’s school with help from Joel McCrea, a doctor at the local hospital. And while both are smitten (McCrea’s incredibly attractive here, in looks & personality), he only has eyes for Oberon. But between Hopkins’ jabbering Aunt & a ‘bad seed’ student (a truly terrifying Bonita Granville), we’re shown how a lie, gossip, circumstantial behavior & peer blackmail easily destroys ‘these three.’ Hard to imagine anything bettered on this one, even Merle Oberon drops her glacial manner with a role perfectly suited, while Hopkins shows wariness, warmth & steel beyond her normal range. And that’s to say nothing of the children. How Wyler got these holocausts of fits & tantrums from ten year olds is a mystery . . . and a triumph. The unspoken romantic triangle of Helman’s original play lost its lesbian angle to movie censorship, as well as its far bleaker curtain, elements Wyler was able to retain in the less well-received 1961 remake with Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine & James Garner. (In '36, a smiley tag end is the film’s only pat moment, the one alteration Helman was likely to regret.) Time has made the remake almost as much a period piece as this, greatly improving its effect though still not equaling this bowdlerized beauty.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned above, THE CHILDREN’S HOUR looks better now than when it was first released. With this film’s third-wheel, Miriam Hopkins, exceptional as the dithering Aunt.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-childrens-hour-1961.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Meryl Streep made her film debut in JULIA/'77, punched by Jane Fonda’s Lillian Helman after suggesting that the play’s lesbian theme hit close to home.

THE WANDERERS (1979)

Philip Kaufman’s coming-of-age pic (early ‘60s Bronx nostalgia from the Richard Price novel) may not live up to its cult rep, but is so entertaining you might not notice. One of those pics where latter-day critical standing is helped, rather than hurt, by a botched release and bad initial reviews, once it's been rediscovered as a hard-to-find collector’s item. (Clearance rights to its top-of-the-charts early ‘60s soundtrack must have been tough.) With a smash cast of near unknowns working on real locations, and heightened, not guyed, period detail calling just the right amount of attention to itself, the fairly free adaptation by Kaufman & wife Rose neatly juggles multiple ethnic gangs & crisscrossing storylines. Less successful are high school classes that are little more than set-ups for conflict and, surprisingly, much of the action stuff. The chases come off, but when fights break out, or a big football game turns riot, Kaufman swings big and misses. (Inexperienced actors? Budget limitations?) Still, he finds something special in charting the holdover cultural attitudes of a neighborhood left behind, slowing down for a few big moments-in-time episodes (JFK’s end; Bob Dylan’s beginning) which come across with unusual emotion & clarity. And how many films catch this much breakout talent in leading roles who all burned out before reaching their potential.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL: Released a few months earlier, Walter Hill’s even more stylized high school gang film, THE WARRIORS, set in the near future with more of a musical feel to it, probably stole this film’s commercial thunder. But then, Kaufman’s pic really has less in common with that film (or BLACKBOARD JUNGLE/’55 or WEST SIDE STORY/’61), than it does with Federico Fellini’s indelible coming-of-age pic, I VITELLONI/’53, whose small-town characters are out of school, unwilling to grow up & pushing 30.

THE BLACK SWAN (1942)

The Warner Bros swashbucklers with Flynn/ Curtiz/Korngold handling swash, meg & score, especially the seafaring ones, must have been the despair of other studios. Impossible to best for romance/sweep/derring-do, with an unexpected emotional charge tapping into the war effort & FDR’s Four Freedoms. (Even before he made the speech in 1941.) That said, this is a good example of the competition and still comes across pretty well. Ben Hecht’s script makes quick work of a twisty plot that has three factions of pirates (good/bad/wavering) in constant conflict, while international alliances shift & legit government turns corrupt. All the while, shirtless buccaneer Tyrone Power competes with inconveniently engaged ruling class Maureen O’Hara to see who’s prettier. (She wins, but it’s a close call!) The big cast deliver, especially George Sanders hiding behind a big red beard, peeking under O’Hara’s bed-sheet!; and under a splendid period wig, Laird Cregar as real-life pirate Henry Morgan. Director Henry King hasn’t Michael Curtiz’s dynamism (he’s better at contemplative/slow-burn) and scorer Alfred Newman was no Erich Wolfgang Korngold (who was?), but they’re both in good form. Be aware that a new Blu-Ray edition has significantly sharpened the richly TechniColored DVD of 2006 to fine effect.

DOUBLE-BILL: Power’s best swashbuckler is landlocked, THE MARK OF ZORRO/’40, guided by Rouben Mamoulian’s feel for Southern Border atmosphere & his signature rhythmic direction.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Memory can play tricks, but doesn’t the archival cut contain a couple extra minutes near the opening for pirate pals Sanders & Power to carry on about what they plan to do with the captive beauties at their feet?  Bowdlerized for modern sensibilities?

MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

Though little noted, Robert Altman’s iconoclastic high-tide as gonzo director/cultural guru lasted only six years, from M*A*S*H* in 1970 to NASHVILLE/‘75.* Even within it, only five of eight hold up, but none more so than this NorthWest pipedream of a Western. A literal pipedream for Julie Christie’s opium smoking Mrs. Miller, the entrepreneurial prostitute with a business proposition for Warren Beatty’s slow-on-the-uptake gamblin’ man. Together, as a scrappy mining town goes up, they build & run a dream whore house that draws in free-spending customers and death-dealing competitors. With a refracted physical & narrative design that always serves the story, Altman loads on gorgeous ensemble work in every corner. Something of a necessity with Altman & cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond pulling focus on secondary characters at any given moment in his tenderly ‘distressed’ film stock. More of that pipedream effect, extended from image to sound & narrative, as if thru mist & memory. All capped by a heaven-sent snowstorm finale as McCabe attempts to outwit three professional gunmen who’ve shown their colors in an unforgettable encounter with young buck Keith Carradine in his winning debut. A stunning piece of violence, one of the best things Altman ever did. As is the entire pic.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Modern viewers have few problem with Altman’s cluttered sound design & multi-layered dialogue. But what a brouhaha it made back in the day! One reason was that while Altman & his team worked with state-of-the-art equipment, the final ‘mono’ mix (later films used multi-track formats) was eventually played in ancient sound systems at local bijoux whose speakers and acoustic design were decades out of date, designed to ‘warm up’ dryly recorded optical soundtracks. They turned sophisticated sound design to mush. (So don’t wimp out and turn on the subtitles.)

DOUBLE-BILL: *Two of Altman’s best from this golden period never caught on, then or now: THIEVES LIKE US and CALIFORNIA SPLIT/ both 1974.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Apparently, Warners hadn’t a clue on how to sell this.  See poster.

WILSON (1944)

Passion-project for 20th/Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck and one of his biggest busts. (Allegedly, the priciest pic since GONE WITH THE WIND.) The idea was to use the presidential life of Woodrow Wilson, with emphasis on his doomed post-WWI League of Nations start-up, to push the ONE WORLD theories of Zanuck pal (and failed Republican Presidential candidate) Wendell Wilkie. Zanuck even optioned Wilkie’s book, but couldn’t find a way to dramatize it. Exactly the problem here! There’s incident aplenty: Princeton academic rises from Jersey governorship to Prez taking down the ‘Party Machine’ along the way; progressive initiatives won; lovely wife lost/lovely wife gained - gossip be damned!; World War to international statesman but with hopes dashed by a stroke. If only Lamar Trotti’s script dramatized & dialogued as much as it speechifies; a waxworks parade that might have been played by Disney Auto-Animatronic figures. Maybe if Wilson's faults & feet of clay were brought into the light? The man, a Southern ‘Gentleman’ by birth, all but singlehandedly returned Jim Crow race laws to D.C.*; then ruined his life’s work (and his health) thru stubborn self-regarding arrogance. Cedric Hardwicke finds something to play as nemesis Senator Cabot Lodge, but the rest of a huge cast is largely wasted on flights of exposition, while underrated director Henry King can do little but monumentalize small action on huge sets. There’s a nice WWI montage using newsreel footage (hey!, there’s Marie Dressler selling War Bonds with Doug Fairbanks & Mary Pickford) and lenser Leon Shamroy gets some spectacular TechniColor depth effects in the big convention sequence. Otherwise, a dud.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Ironically, the studios with the most memorable musical fanfares, Warners & 20th/Fox, often dropped them to telegraph that a film was out of the ordinary.  Here, we get a special DFZ logo like a Medallion-of-Merit signifying worthiness.  (It might have come from the same bag the Wizard of Oz finds achievement tokens for Scarecrow, Tin Man & Lion.)  Small recompense for Alfred Newman’s bold brass signature flourish.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *It’s apt that Wilson is shown enjoying real-life vaudeville star Lew Dockstader doing an impersonation of Teddy Roosevelt in BlackFace! And that Geraldine Fitzgerald, as his second wife, wins him over with a race-inflected punchline. Alas, both are meant to humanize him.

CONTEST: Eddie Foy Jr, seen here as his vaudevillian pop Eddie Foy Sr, played the part in how many feature films at how many studios? Hint: He doesn’t play Dad in THE SEVEN LITTLE FOYS/’55, Bob Hope starred in that bio-pic though Foy did play the role in a ‘60s tv remake produced by Hope. But we’re only counting feature films here.

POST TENEBRAS LUX (2012)

Indigestible Film-Fest Candy from Mexican writer/director Carlos Reygadas; award-bait as lyrical-wannabe headache-inducing Marxist-tinged muddle.*  That’s a literal headache BTW, as the film uses fish-eye lenses that distort for an astigmatism/blurred double-vision effect. (Presumably why the film’s format is square-ish Academy Ratio.) Very loosely, the film takes up divisions between monied & working class families, largely focused on one wealthy extended family (slim, elegant, Caucasian in appearance) living the country life surrounded (occasionally interrupted) by darker, plumper, bean-eating laboring types. Smoldering class violence may be in the air, and sure to erupt like Chekhov’s proverbial loaded gun (he even gets a mention), but not before a prurient visit (don't get your hopes up) to a pricey sauna/sex-club where the rich & bored pay for designated rooms servicing designated perversions.  Reygadas has a remarkable eye for just missing the necessary element to make a shot. Perhaps a clever strategy of æsthetic denial. Nah.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *If you think the film doesn’t end with a couple of British ‘Public’ School teams fighting it out on the rugby field, you’ve got another think coming.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Is Reygadas trying to meld the slow artful staging of Aleksandr Sokurov (try an early semi-success like THE SECOND CIRCLE/’90) with the savage class comedy & perversions of late Luis Buñuel (say, THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE/’72)?

ALL THIS, AND HEAVEN TOO (1940)

Exceptionally well-produced ‘Women’s Weepie’ for Bette Davis in her prime lets her play saintly, wronged-against governess to a gaggle of troubled children as she fights a natural attraction to unhappy papa Charles Boyer and unearned antipathy from pathological maman Barbara O’Neill (Scarlet O’Hara’s mom in GWTW). Long, but consistently involving, with spectacular chemistry (or repulsion) from the leads, and unusual attention given in support from Helen Westley, Walter Hampden, Henry Daniell, Harry Davenport, George Coulouris & Montagu Love. (Warners, positively spendthrift with character actors.) And if eight decades have left the film with a fair share of sticky moments*, the fact-inspired story helps ground the melodrama in something like heightened reality as Boyer’s domestic crisis mirrors (and perhaps precipitates) the fading fortunes of the restored Bourbon monarchy he’s a part of, and the rise of The French Commune of 1848. (Read between the lines and there’s enough repressed sex & politics for a less romanticized/uncensored remake as a cable mini-series.) Anatole Litvak, who made his international rep directing Boyer in the doomed royal romance of MAYERLING/’36, returns to that film’s Max Ophüls-worthy opulence & fluid staging, now with extra Hollywood gloss.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *That’s some peachy Georgia accent on the cuddly tyke Davis nurses back to health. Of course, he’s really speaking French, so maybe he’s from Southern France.

DOUBLE-BILL: If MAYERLING and HEAVEN carried the torch for Ophüls, Litvak & Boyer show a Lubitsch like touch in TOVARICH/’37. And good luck finding a decent DVD.

YOU GOTTA STAY HAPPY (1948)

1948 was pretty late in the day for a Screwball Comedy featuring a flighty runaway bride heiress. But here’s Joan Fontaine as a marriage-phobic rich girl who meets Mr. Right on her wedding night . . . to someone else. Mr. Right? That’d be James Stewart, an entrepreneurial war vet struggling to get his air-freight operation off the ground. Naturally, he misreads the situation in the hotel suite next door, but still comes to the rescue with a secret lift out of town on his freight plane. Anyway you slice it, this is all comic leftovers, made worse by one of those music scores that does the chuckling for you. Happily, the film quickly drops the forced gagging to find a lightly romantic comic rhythm for its mutually attracted (and attractive) leads under journeyman director H. C. Potter. (At his best later this year with even better call-and-response playing from Cary Grant & Myrna Loy in MR. BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE.) The film builds a lot of goodwill as it flies NYC to L.A. with plenty of warm, funny support from Eddie Albert, Percy Kilbride & a clean-shaven Porter Hall among others. The forced comedy returns right at the end, but at least the music cues calm down . . . most of the way.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Mirroring the film plot, Stewart in real life was working for Fontaine (and then husband William Dozier) since it was her company, Rampart Productions, producing.

DOUBLE-BILL: Rampart made its one & only other film this year, LETTER TO AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, a Max Ophüls masterpiece.

PATERSON (2016)

Jim Jarmusch has been stealthily releasing a film every three or four years for decades; a dozen since 1980. But it’s been a while since one has seemed to matter this much. (Along with a welcome reduction in hipster quotient.) Simply shot, and beautiful in Jarmusch's minimalist style, it tackles an unusual topic (poetry & the mystery of creation) from an unusual proletariat angle. Traversing a week in the life of Paterson, N.J. bus driver Adam Driver (a bus driver named ‘Driver,’ and his film character named Paterson), the film closely observes his life habits with its small variations of regular hours, daily chores & duties of domesticity; a very routine routine. Yet, rather than dull artistic spirit, quotidian repetition feeds creative process, opening mind & thoughts experientially. A pretty tough concept to verbalize, let alone organize & pull off as film where time moves at the same pace for every viewer. Driver, a nearly perfect vessel here, fascinating in repose, is cinematically blessed with a forehead that ‘reads’ as thought. (Something of a Native American cast to his profile, though apparently not in his bloodline.) As his wife, Golshifteh Farahani (a name to stymie SpellCheck) is spacey & sweet, an eccentric homemaker, but a fine receptacle for his literary longings (the poems are charming & believably his). While the rest of a smallish cast, largely bar & work acquaintances, work gracefully as backstop to his still forming ideas. Jarmusch can’t quite maintain his design, giving in to questionable dramatic incidents to pump up the third act. And though you can see why he does it, the film has to land somewhere, you may wish he hadn’t. Still, a lovely piece.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Frederick Elmes’ cinematography really brings out a found bleak beauty in the streets & buildings of Paterson’s on-its-heels working-class town, even without the forested train trestle that pictorially bridges a ravine, a waterfall & the film.