GOODBYE AGAIN (1933)

Pretty lame. Warner Bros.’ 1930s house style for comedy comes down too hard to help pull off this third-rate B’way Boulevard Farce. And it needs all the help it can get. The set up finds novelist Warren William, tops in Ladies’ Fiction, touring his latest with loyal secretary Joan Blondell. But a stop in Cleveland brings something extra, old flame Genevieve Tobin who thinks she’s the model for his new bestseller, now hopes to leave butter-and-egg husband Hugh Herbert and pick up where she & William left off back in their college days. Things dribble along in talky manner before picking up slightly near the end for a mock divorce staged in William’s hotel suite. He gives ‘testimony’ dressed in pajamas. A yawner, but with one striking moment, literally so as Blondell serves up two sincere (possibly real) slaps to William. (I get it! She really cares for her boss after all!) With director Michael Curtiz calling the shots, those resounding slaps sound like the real thing. Too bad nothing else in here does.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: William, an underappreciated Pre-Code star, made two of his best in ‘33: naughty & hilarious as the driven department store manager in EMPLOYEE’S ENTRANCE; and superbly Damon Runyonesque for Frank Capra in his early masterpiece LADY FOR A DAY. And 1934 was even better. But he soon fell into Bs before dying young (only 53) in 1948.

HIGANBANA / EQUINOX FLOWER (1958)

Yasujirô Ozu’s first film in color (AgfaColor, to be exact), is lesser Ozu . . . but still Ozu. So still pretty wonderful. Dealing mostly with fathers & daughters, it’s one of his generational shift stories on loosening traditions in post-war Japanese culture; here a decline in arranged marriages. Father Shin Saburi, a successful businessman is first seen giving an awkward celebratory speech at a wedding, noting how his marriage, a happy one, began without choice or love entering into the equation. His wife smiles at his side, but what is she really thinking? At home, older daughter Ineko Arima is quietly determined to go a new way and make her own choice for a husband. And with Keiji Sada, a Japanese Gregory Peck type as suitor, you’ll know why. Between Japanese social reserve and communication in a dysfunctional family, the situation is more likely to hit a breaking point than resolution. But with gentle humor, deft observation and more emotional heft than you expect, Ozu finds a way. Here, the real beauty comes less in seeing how things play out than in just watching things play, as Ozu adds color to his compositional magic. Some shot choices more satisfying than entire movies*, and not just his distinctive low camera position. You’ll note something RED in nearly every shot. And his famous ‘pillow shots,’ the little still-life compositions between scenes, more beautiful than ever. Or the frames within frames of boxy apartments, an extra editing device so skillfully used you barely notice that the film uses no camera movement, no tracking, no zooms, not even a panning shot. Yet gives the illusion of movement as needed by increasing editing rhythm during moments of crisis or when Ozu wants to spread some good news around. It’s a lovely little film by this stealth cinematic revolutionary, deceptive as ever.

DOUBLE-BILL: In his next film, GOOD MORNING/’59, Ozu ups the ante from cultural generation shift to flat out Generation Gap, adding obstreperous up-to-date kids (and rude laughs) to the mix.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Example: off-center entry shot in a bar; green-upholstered seats on stool chairs.  Impossible to forget; yet neither self-conscious nor ostentatiously frame-worthy.

INTOLERANCE: LOVE'S STRUGGLE THROUGH THE AGES (1916)

Hard to fathom, but the most ambitious/ audacious film yet conceived came out (to under-performing confusion) more than 100 years ago. In scope, if not in execution, it has yet to be topped. Stung by criticism on the blatant racism of his epic-grossing BIRTH OF A NATION/’15, D. W. Griffith struck back at ‘intolerant’ cavils with this awesome Four-in-One epic.* And while the film remains both thrilling & absurd, it’s so packed with gobsmacking creativity & daring effect, to say nothing of advanced hopscotch construction, cast of thousands upon thousands & sets upon sets, it’s an irresistible force. Love, war & destruction as seen in a Babylonian tale of sabotage; in highlights from the Life of Christ; in the St. Bartholomew Massacre of French Protestants by French Catholics; and in a modern story of strikes, urban crime and over-zealous loveless welfare ladies. The first half of the film (about two hours long, though editions vary) carefully lays out the separate narrative threads (in physically spectacular fashion, Griffith’s technical chops far ahead of its production date, with Billy Bitzer’s lensing & camera tricks still packing a wallop). The second half (not much over an hour) is looser and more action-oriented, extraordinarily free in cutting between storylines, held together by some sort of mad logic. Even when naive elements raise an inappropriate smile, you’re never confused. Uncharacteristically, Griffith comes up with some fine comic relief, thanks to Constance Talmadge, hoydenesque Mountain Girl of the Babylonian story. (Graced with one of filmdom’s most magical ends, stilled by death into a heroic tableau). And while much of the cast still throw their arms about to denote emotion, most of the acting is very advanced. Especially so in the modern story, with its stunning factory strike scenes (INTOLERANCE was a one-film revolution for the Russian cinema), with Mae Marsh’s childish, but heartbreaking young mother and Robert Harron’s alternately harrowed & unaffected manner as he goes to the gallows for a crime he didn’t commit. (And look for a pre-tubby Eugene Pallette as heroic Huguenot Prosper.) At times, the production is so stupendous, so spendthrift with resources, you’ll hold your head in wonder; at other times, so bizarre & silly, you’ll hold it in disbelief. But you’ll never look away; you can't. Go for the recent Cohen Media edition with improved visual elements and Carl Davis’s thrilling full-orchestra score.

DOUBLE-BILL: Buster Keaton sends this up hilariously in his first feature-length film, THREE AGES/’23 (Caveman; Ancient Rome; Today). But he saved the name Brown Eyes, the doomed Huguenot girl, for the female lead in GO WEST/‘25. She’s a cow; a cow with big brown eyes.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Oddly, the concept of intolerance only drives the Huguenots/St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre storyline. Intolerance is tangential in the other three sections.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: At one particularly daring moment, a shootout is interrupted with an explanatory flashback.  (Audiences at the time must have thought D.W. mad.)  Something not seen again till Sergio Leone did it in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST/’68.

LES PERLES DE LA COURONNE / THE PEARLS OF THE CROWN (1937)

Inventive & freewheeling, a typically enchanting historical vaudeville from French hyphenate supreme, actor-writer-director-producer Sacha Guitry. This one all about the peregrinations of seven matched mega-pearls as they fall in & out of various royal hands after being found in the 1500s. Four will eventually sit atop the British Crown, but three others will go missing. Guitry, figuratively working without a net, jumps from one century & country to another, between different courts & royal households, looking high life & low, over three languages (not including Abyssinian gibberish), bypassing formal technique for offhand leaps in logic, language & linear continuity. Yet never causing a moment of confusion in the fast-paced action (and talk!), assisted by an easy to identify, all-star cast which helps to keep things straight. Look for a couple of especially wild turns from Arletty & Dalio in absurd Abyssinian BlackFace, too silly to be off-putting. (You may not think so, hence BLACKFACE Warning!!) Structurally, the first half collects all the precious jewels; the second, largely contemporary has a Brit, a Frenchmen (Guitry in one of his many roles) and an Italian tracking down the three missing pearls. Sophisticated, silly sui generis fun.

DOUBLE-BILL: When required, Guitry could hold to regular dramatic rules & tactics (in essence a man of the theatre) as in his masterful LA POISON/’51 with shaggy Michel Simon as a henpecked husband out to murder his wife . . . before she murders him.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Entertaining, plus a bonus in some none too shabby history as part of the mix.

SOL MADRID (1968)

A dud. With THE MAN FROM UNCLE tv series winding down, M-G-M figured they could boost Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum) into features. It didn’t take. He plays Sol Madrid (who came up with this name?) some sort of undercover drug agent assigned to bring down rival dealers: mob-based Rip Torn and island-based drug lord Telly Savalas. A pretty good cast joins in (Stella Stevens, Ricardo Montalban, Pat Hingle, Paul Lukas in a last big screen role), all wasted on a snoozy storyline, with tacky sets & phony locations as feeble as director Brian G. Hutton’s action chops*, and with most of the interiors lit bright as a showroom. (Hard to believe cinematographer Fred J. Koenekamp would soon lens PATTON/’70 and PAPILLON/’73.) The whole project feels less like a film than a Deal Memo the studio couldn’t get out of.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: *Hutton was inexplicably better on his next two films, finding and holding a slightly comic/absurd tone on both WHERE EAGLES DARE/’68 and KELLY’S HEROES/’70.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/where-eagles-dare-1970.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/kellys-heroes-1970.html

THE PARADINE CASE (1947)

Distinguished barrister Gregory Peck risks his reputation & his marriage when he falls for new client Alida Valli, a mysterious beauty who may be guilty of murdering her husband. Smoothly made, in fact, too smoothly made, the last film Alfred Hitchcock made under contract for David O. Selznick is very much the producer’s pic. Selznick personally wrote the 'veddy' British script (‘She’s trying to cover up for that filthy swine!’) based on a ‘30s novel M-G-M once optioned for Garbo, yet the basic set up strikingly mirrors Selznick’s own struggle between estranged wife Irene Mayer Selznick and new love Jennifer Jones. If only the film were as interesting as Selznick’s home life. Miscast male leads don’t help: Peck in a role that begs for a Ronald Colman; Louis Jourdan far too glamorous as Valli’s guilt-ridden lover. (Hitch wanted an earthy Robert Newton type for a note of perversity in the illicit affair.) And female leads not so much miscast as under-cast: Valli a substitute Ingrid Bergman; poor Ann Todd, as Peck’s loyal wife, like Joan Fontaine with a blobby nose. Hitch does pulls off some striking docu-flavored touches going thru jail procedures with the just arrested Valli*, and Selznick adds a few deviant touches to Charles Laughton’s ‘hanging judge’ and fragile wife Ethel Barrymore. But the film must have seem hopelessly dated even when it came out. Selznick’s first major flop as indie producer, painfully out of touch with the post-WWII audience. Hitch would quickly catch up with the changing Zeitgeist; Selznick never did.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Hitch found a proper use for this documentary prison flavor in THE WRONG MAN/’56.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-wrong-man-1956.html

TULIP FEVER (2017)

For the three folks who requested second helpings after GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING*, this time with romantic potboiler tropes tossed in the painterly 17th Century mix. Our story, and honest to Pete, this really is our story: Alicia Vikander, infertile second wife of wealthy, older burgher Christoph Waltz (a guy who chats with and names his engorged penis) falls for portrait painter Dane DeHaan just as he hits the jackpot in the tulip bulb spec market. Meanwhile, her housemaid is preggers by the fishmonger, another tulip bulb winner. But then he’s robbed & shanghaied off to sea, leaving the maid to shame & disgrace. Perhaps they could ‘plant’ the baby on the wife? And then let a fake death-during-childbirth sort out all these complicated affairs. Sure! That’s a good idea! What could possibly go amiss? If this sounds like a parody of historical fiction, co-scripter Tom Stoppard may have thought so too, as the film more than occasionally drops it’s swoon to lean in a comic direction. Half-heartedly so, as novelist/co-scripter Deborah Moggach presumably had first whack at the screenplay and takes her own storyline seriously. It leaves director Justin Chadwick with solid production values and an itch to hide as much as possible with an overabundance of pointlessly choppy editing and swooping camera moves. For camouflage? No wonder this sat on the shelf for a couple of years before opening to general indifference.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Actually, GIRL/’03 is a perfectly watchable pic.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Note this obscurant b&w poster, hiding everything in the pic (Old Amsterdam, faux Vermeer, tulip trading, period detail, storyline), but playing up the sex. An old advertising trick that couldn’t have fooled many paying customers.

THE PALM BEACH STORY (1942)

Of seven unmatched comedies (and one ‘Screwball’ medical drama) made by Preston Sturges @ Paramount over five charmed years (1940 - 1944), THE LADY EVE is the most perfectly formed; HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO the most Freudian; SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS the filmmakers’ delight; and MIRACLE AT MORGAN’S CREEK the champ, a staggeringly unified achievement in comic energy & invention. But the most extreme is undoubtedly THE PALM BEACH STORY, now looking more hilarious than ever. Claudette Colbert & Joel McCrea have flopped after five years of marriage. He can’t get his ‘hanging airfield’ off the ground, she thinks splitting up will give them both a fresh start before it’s too late. So, it’s off to Palm Beach for a quick divorce after settling their affairs (make that arrears) thanks to the unexpected appearance of a Fairy Godfather, aka The Weenie King! (Only Sturges . . . ) Without a cent or a suitcase, Claudette trains her way down to Florida banking on the kindness of strangers faced with a knock-out damsel-in-distress, and picking up a billionaire bachelor on the way (Rudy Vallee in comic clover). McCrea gives chase by air, deplaning into the arms of the billionaire’s much-married sister, dizzy Mary Astor. (With her immortal/dispensable consort Toto.) The comic invention never flags, with full lived-in personas on just about every eccentric met along the way. Listen up or you‘ll miss Colbert offering one of the driest putdowns in film history (‘and weave’) while Sturges lets us know that, au contraire Jean Renoir, the tragedy of life isn’t that everyone has his reasons, but that 'those in most need of a beating are always enormous.’ An equally profound sentiment.

DOUBLE-BILL: Sturges, after writing plays & film scripts since the ‘20s, went completely cold upon leaving Paramount for a production deal with abominable Howard Hughes who proved to be an even more immovable object than the mountain on Paramount’s logo. Sturges had one great act left in him over @ 20th/Fox where he made UNFAITHFULLY YOURS/’48.

CABIN IN THE COTTON (1932)

Issue-oriented drama from Warner Brothers. Not quite up to their later Ripped-From-The-Headlines standard, but getting there. Richard Barthelmess, whose soft, gentlemanly style was falling out of favor, the son of a Southern tenant-farmer on a large cotton estate, has worked his way up to running the accounts & company store of overbearing owner Berton Churchill. Torn between what he owes his boss for his advancement and the loyalty he owes his own people, a pull mirrored in his longing for pretty farm gal Dorothy Jordan and sexy rich girl Bette Davis, it takes a crisis (or two or three) to knock him off the fence. Director Michael Curtiz can’t establish a solid, playable tone all the way thru, some details remain very studio-bound/Early Talkie, but much is already powerful filmmaking, visually striking, especially in a swamp hunt/lynching sequence. And listen up for some striking use of diegetic (screen sourced) music. Uncommonly interesting and unexpectedly fair-handed on the labor/management/owner front, with any 1932 technical gaucheries easy to overlook. Especially when Davis is on screen, making a sexy breakthrough with Southern accent and an all-time favorite line: ‘Ah’d love to kiss ya, but ah jes’ washed my hair.’

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Scripter Paul Green, with B’way plays on poor black So. Carolina tenant farmers (IN ABRAHAM’S BOSOM) and on poor white No. Carolina farmers (THE FIELD GOD) gets an unusual puff credit line noting his professorship at the University of North Carolina. Talk about bona fides!

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: According to Davis, Barthelmess developed a scene stealing trick of doing no acting at all in ‘full’ or ‘medium’ shots; saving it all for his close ups. That way, the editor would have little choice but to use those shots whenever possible.