Recent Screenings

The International (2009) - Clive Owen plays a weary but determined Interpol agent and Naomi Watts an assistant Manhattan D.A. who team up for an investigation of the corrupt International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC). Based in part on the real-life Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the IBBC has dealings with every important global player, legal or illegal: drug lords, African terrorists, the CIA, the Mafia, other major banks, and numerous governments. The closer Clive and Naomi get to the heart of the matter, naturally, the more people die around them. Forgoing the hyper-kinetic sprint from one explosion or car chase to the next that's so popular these days, The International proceeds at a nice, leisurely pace, making it feel closer in spirit to an international thriller from the 1960s or 70s. This slower pace gives a screenwriter and director the opportunity to really explore the complexity of a situation - in this case, global finance and all of its interconnections - as well as to develop their characters. Unfortunately, though I kept waiting for the plot and characters to develop, director Tom Twyker and screenwriter Eric Singer don't take much advantage of their opportunity, and the slow pace too often feels, well, slow.

Luckily, there are other elements that make The International enjoyable, especially Frank Griebe's excellent cinematography. There are some wonderful individual shots throughout the film, most of them composed for the big screen, including a marvelous image of Clive Owen ascending the wide and enormous marble stairs that lead up to the headquarters of the IBBC. And then there's the delicious international scenery: Milan, Berlin, New York, Lyon, Istanbul (with a great a roof-top chase), and one stunning sequence filmed in Lake Garda, Italy that took my breath away. How long has it been since I've been able to really dwell in the extoic locations of a big Hollywood movie and not been jerked away by a car chase?

And though there's only one big action sequence in the film, it's definitely a winner: A terrific shoot-out down Frank Lloyd Wright's spiraling rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. (Though one does wonder why it takes so long for the NYPD to arrive.) They could have actually shortened that scene, however, and used a little more action elsewhere.

Clive Owen looks more like Peter Falk's Columbo than an action hero this time around, the result of his character's obsession with bringing the corrupt bank to justice, which has left him exhausted, world-weary and paranoid. It's an underrated talent for actors to pick roles in good, intelligent films, and Owen is one of the better examples of this right now. I wish, however, that he would start to stretch himself a bit more. Make a comedy, Clive; It won't kill you. His role as Interpol agent Louis Salinger feels too much like previous roles. But I enjoy watching him on the screen, and he definitely carries The International. Naomi Watts does as well as she can with a not very interesting or well-written role. I appreciate the director's willingness to not push a forced romance between Owens and Watts, but they could've used more chemistry. They're both fine actors, but they never find a way to make the screen crackle.

Ultimately, The International feels different from most contemporary thrillers - as if it were, gasp, actually made for adults - and I liked that very much. It's a solid, intelligent film, good but not great. It never quite lives up to its potential, but it's worth watching.

The Dark Knight (2008) - After all the hype and hullabaloo, I finally got a chance to see Christopher Nolan's latest Batman film a few weeks ago at the IMAX Cinema at Lincoln Center on a limited re-release for the Oscars. I felt like I had let go of as many preconceptions as I could and was ready to just go along for the ride, in the mood for a big film on a big screen. And I did go along with the ride for a while, enjoying the first half of the film quite a bit, but after about 100 minutes, I looked at my watch for the first time. After two hours and fifteen minutes, I looked at it again. By the time the film ended, I felt exhausted and relieved to get out of there. Even the IMAX Cinema seemed weary and restless, as twice during the latter part of the movie the lights came on and an automated announcement thanked everyone for coming. (AMC gave us a free ticket for that - good customer service on their part.)

There's a lot to recommend in the film. As everyone and their uncle has mentioned, Heath Ledger does an excellent job as the Joker. His performance turns a normally cartoon villian into a more complex human figure. (Though, if he hadn't died, I wonder if he'd be such a lock to win the Oscar.) On the other hand, few people have mentioned Aaron Eckhart as Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent, and I thought he did very well with a role that could've easily remained one dimensional. Christian Bale excels as billionaire Bruce Wayne, but his Batman remains unnecessarily irritating and dull. (After all is said and done, I'm beginning to wonder if Adam West wasn't the most enjoyable Batman.) Maggie Gyllenhaal is a definite improvement over Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes, but her vast talents seems wasted in the role. Gary Oldman does a fine job as Commissioner Gordon, and Michael Caine gets all the best lines as Alfred the Butler.

There are several beautifully composed shots in the film - I think of Batman up on the roof at night, looking down on Gotham. And some of the action sequences are first rate, especially Batman's rendition of a crooked Hong Kong business man, and a long chase sequence where the Joker and his henchmen are trying to stop a heavy police caravan transporting Harvey Dent.

But The Dark Knight has some issues. It's too long (by 45 minutes), and it takes itself too seriously. You know it's serious, because Batman speaks in that awful, overly-serious voice. Most surprisingly to me, however, is how flawed the film-making can be at times. Heath Ledger's acting and lots of explosions can't hide the fact that this is one poorly constructed movie, with gaping holes (a showdown between Batman and the Joker at a penthouse party inexplicably stops, for example), a number of philosophical and narrative contradictions, and far too many scenes and sub-plots that serve no purpose. Can anyone tell me why we have to suffer through several scenes of a Bruce Wayne employee threatening to reveal his boss's identity, when, at the same time, Wayne keeps threatening to reveal his own identity at a public press conference? And just how many people are kidnapped in this movie? Can anyone keep count? By the time a woman and son are taken towards the end, I was like, "Oh, please. Just let them die and get on with the film." When you don't care about an innocent mother and child being killed by the villain, something's gone terribly wrong.

Worst of all, however, may be the pseudo-intellectual aspects of the film. The Dark Knight is all about "moral complexity," and Nolan practically holds up flash cards at times in case you miss his point. He explores the motivations and moral complexity of Batman, but this kind of psychological and sociological look at a super hero was already tackled in the first two Spider Man movies, and in a much more effective and entertaining way. Nolan hammers home some vague ideas about our own individual moral complexity via a ridiculous set-up involving two bomb-laden ferries, one full of "normal" people and one packed with the worst bad guys. "See, hardened criminals can act decently and normal people can forsake the Golden Rule." Wow. Complex. (Though this sequence does yield one of the better lines in the movie, spoken by a very serious looking criminal with a deep, serious voice.) Unfortunately, while criminals may behave decently at times (who knew?), it seems that every member of the Gotham Police Department can be easily corrupted, from rookie cops to Commissioner Gordon's closest and dearest friends, one of whom is willing to hand over important people to be killed because mom ran up some hospital bills. In another sequence, Nolan dresses up the Joker as a nurse (nurses want to help people, get it? It's ironic!) and gives him a speech about chaos and the big-shots who make plans and what it all comes to in the end, and the speech probably sounds pretty deep to a 13 year-old. And though the Joker condemns those who make plans, he's obviously spent an incredible amount of time on his own elaborate and complicated plans, because they all go perfectly, allowing him to outwit all of the big shots, including the politicians and the police and even the hardcore and ruthless mobsters - everyone, that is, except for Batman. What's truly impressive is that the Joker, who's escaped from an insane asylum, pulls off all of these incredibly elaborate plans with an endless supply of henchmen whom he repeatedly kills (wouldn't that hurt potential recruitment?) or who are stupid and/or crazy fellow escaped inmates. (I guess no one bothered checking reports about dozens of inmates escaping from asylums.) Amazing what can be accomplished if you're able to motivate your employees.

With the Joker as Osama Bin Laden, threatening the good people of New York/Gotham, Nolan also looks at the post-9/11 world and wonders what people might be willing to do in a time of crisis. The war on terror, you see, is also pretty morally complex. Rendition, it turns out, is okay and even pretty fun. Surveillance of the population is also justified, as long as its only done in extreme cases and by someone who's really trustworthy, which, I believe, was also the Bush administration's argument. Torture, though, is going too far. Batman says so. Thus, when the Joker/Bin Laden comes, we may have to do things we're not always comfortable doing. But it's all for the greater good - a chance to give those hardened criminals who have occasional moments of moral clarity an opportunity to travel by ferry in peace.

Alas, a dark palette and a super hero speaking in somber tones doesn't equate cinematic depth. (Though it's enough, evidently, to make critics giddy.) The problems with The Dark Knight - being too long, taking itself too seriously, unnecessary plot lines, and pseudo-intellectual themes - all point to an even greater issue: self-indulgence. I really enjoyed Memento, Christopher Nolan's film from 2000, but his last three films (Batman Begins, The Prestige, and the Dark Knight) have felt increasingly self-indulgent. And with the financial success of The Dark Knight, I don't know who's going to tell him to do a better job of trimming his screenplay and editing his film.

Despite all of the attention, acclaim and money The Dark Knight has received, I'd have to say it wasn't even the best super hero film of 2008. That would've been Iron Man. Though it wasn't as ambitious as Nolan's effort (or maybe because it wasn't as ambitious), Iron Man was a leaner, tighter, and better-crafted movie. It had just as much to say about society, and it did it with humor and fun. And Robert Downey Jr. didn't have to affect a seriously silly "serious" voice when he put on his super hero outfit. Best of all, I enjoyed watching Iron Man and never once looked at my watch.

Five Graves to Cairo (1943) - Billy Wilder's second effort as director opens with an unforgettable sequence in which a tank full of apparently dead British soldiers rambles up and down the dunes of a desert in North Africa. Eventually, one of the men regains consciousness, only to fall out of the tank and be left behind, absolutely alone in that vast ocean of sand. The solider is played by Franchot Tone, a leading man in 1930s Hollywood who started his career as one of the original members of New York's Group Theatre that first brought Stanislavski's acting methods to this country. After wandering through the desert, Tone winds up at a hotel in a bombed-out and desolate Egyptian village, out of his mind from sun-stroke. Before he can recover, the hotel is taken over by advancing German troops, led by the Desert Fox himself, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, played marvelously by Erich von Stroheim. Tone takes on the identity of a waiter who was a spy for the Germans in order to find out where Rommel has buried several depots of oil, food and ammunition that will allow him to move rapidly across the desert and take Egypt from the British. It's a taut wartime espionage film, with an efficient and intelligent script by Wilder and longtime collaborator Charles Brackett. The black and white cinematography by John Seitz earned an Oscar nomination that year and helps create an atmosphere of tension and intrigue in the old hotel out in the desert. You can almost see Wilder becoming a great director before your eyes, developing his chops on a fairly typical Hollywood film before tackling his next project, Double Indemnity.

Five Graves to Cairo may not be one of Wilder's best efforts, but it proves that even B-Level Wilder was superior to much of what Hollywood could produce.

Oscars Quiz - The Great Directors

This coming Sunday, February 24, marks the 80th Annual Academy Awards. Time, then, to celebrate some of Oscar's glorious history.

1. Between them, Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, and Robert Altman were nominated 24 times for Best Direction. Which one of them won the most statues in this category?

2. Between them, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Stanley Kubrick were nominated 17 times for Best Screenplay (Original or Adapted). Which one of them won the most statues in this category?

3. Not including honorary awards, Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick were nominated 49 times for various Oscars. How many statues did they take home?

4. How many Academy Award nominations has Jean-Luc Godard received?
(A) 0 (B) 1 (C) 2 (D) 5

Jean-Luc Godard


5. How many has Godard won?
(A) 0 (B) 1 (C) 2 (D) 5

6. How many Academy Award nominations has Jim Jarmusch received?
(A) 0 (B) 1 (C) 2 (D) 5

7. How many has Jarmusch won?
(A) 0 (B) 1 (C) 2 (D) 5

8. Between Michelangelo Antonioni, John Cassavetes, Charles Chaplin, Mel Gibson, Howard Hawks, Akira Kurosawa, and Orson Welles, who has won the most Academy Awards for Best Direction?

9. Who has been nominated the most times for an Academy Award for Best Direction?
(A) Billy Wilder (B) John Ford (C) William Wyler (D) Robert Altman (E) Martin Scorsese

10. Who has won the most Academy Awards for Best Direction?
(A) Billy Wilder (B) John Ford (C) William Wyler (D) Robert Altman (E) Martin Scorsese

Federico Fellini



Ingmar Bergman on the cover of Time.







Ernst Lubitsch




William Wyler









ANSWERS:

1. None of them ever won an Oscar for Best Direction. Hitchcock and Altman were nominated five times each for the award; Fellini four times; Bergman, Lubitsch and Kubrick three times; and Kurosawa once.

2. None of them ever won an Oscar for Best Screenplay. Fellini was nominated seven times; Bergman and Kubrick five times each.

3. One. Stanley Kubrick won for "Best Effects, Special Visual Effects" for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). His other 12 nominations didn't lead to any awards.

Fellini received 12 personal nominations without winning anything. Bergman received nine, Altman seven, Hitchcock five, Lubitsch three, and Kurosawa one.

Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) won Best Picture, but the Oscar is given to the producer. Four Fellini films won Best Foreign Language Film (La Strada 1956; The Nights of Cabiria 1957; 8½ 1963; Amarcord 1974), as did three by Bergman (The Virgin Spring 1960; Through a Glass Darkly 1961; Fanny & Alexander 1983) and two by Kurosawa (Rashomon 1951; Dersu Uzala 1975), but, again, the statues are given to the producers.

4. Zero

5. Bigger zero.

6. Yeah, right.

7. He'll probably win an Oscar about the same time the Jets win the Super Bowl.

8. Mel Gibson. He won for Braveheart. The other directors in the list were each nominated once but did not win.

9. William Wyler. He was nominated 12 times for: Dodsworth (1936); Wuthering Heights (1939); The Letter (1940); The Little Foxes (1941); Mrs. Miniver (1942); The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); The Heiress (1949); Detective Story (1951); Roman Holiday (1953); Friendly Persuasion (1956); Ben-Hur (1959); and The Collector (1965).

He won for Mrs. Miniver (1942); The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); and Ben-Hur (1959).

Billy Wilder was nominated eight times, winning twice for and The Lost Weekend (1945) and The Apartment (1960).

David Lean and Fred Zinneman were each nominated seven times, both winning twice.

10. John Ford. He won four times for: The Informer (1935); The Grapes of Wrath (1940); How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Quiet Man (1952). He was also nominated but did not win for Stagecoach (1939).

Recent Screenings

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does,

straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.
Ingmar Bergman

I've fallen behind on my Recent Screenings. Seems like I've been too busy lately to do much more on the blog than toss out a YouTube video or an obituary notice. In case you missed it, though, I did add a rotating list of the last 10 films I've seen, under the heading Recent Screenings in the right-hand column. There have been a couple of great films in the last month, several good ones, and a few I could've skipped. I was going to offer a brief rundown of some of the more interesting ones, but I made the mistake of starting with Sunset Blvd. I enjoyed the film so much upon re-watching it, and had so much fun trying to write about it, that I never managed to get to the others. I'll try again when I have more time and I'm not unpacking.

Sunset Blvd. (1950) - Directed by Billy Wilder, written by Wilder and Charles Brackett. Starring William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim and Nancy Olson.

One could write an entire book about Sunset Blvd., and, in fact, someone has: Close-up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream (St. Martin's 2003), by Sam Staggs. I feel like I can't even came close to doing it justice. There are so many elements about the film and the filmmaking that one could discuss.

The plot of Sunset Blvd. is fairly straightforward. Joe Gillis is a struggling screenwriter who had one early hit but now can't sell anything. Circumstances haven't gotten so bad that his car is about to repossessed, which would effectively finish him off in Hollywood. By accident, or fate, his car has a blowout in the driveway of an abandoned mansion on Sunset Boulevard. Except the mansion isn't abandoned after all, but inhabited by a former silent movie star named Norma Desmond and her devoted and somewhat mysterious butler. Desmond, planning a supposed comeback, has written a long screenplay based on Salome, and she offers Gillis the job of refining it. Thinking he can make some quick money, he accepts the task and winds up staying in the eerie mansion, where he gets sucked deeper and deeper into the dusty, psychotic but alluring world of Desmond, her wealth, and her increasingly unhinged mind. When Gillis begins sneaking out at night to work on a screenplay with a young woman from Paramount, Desmond's jealousy erupts and the whirlpool turns faster and faster until it pulls everyone towards the bottom.

The famous opening sequence features William Holden, as Joe Gillis, delivering a voice-over narration while floating dead in a swimming pool. Right away, you know this isn't going to be your typical film. Ironically, this wasn't the original beginning of the movie. The first version, which featured several corpses conversing in a morgue, provoked unintentional laughter from the audience at a sneak preview in Evanston, Illinois. Director Billy Wilder was stunned. Years later, he admitted that it had been one of the worst moments of his life. The release of the film had to be delayed for six months while he worked on a new beginning. It was worth it, though, as the swimming pool sequence became one of the most iconic in the history of cinema. Interestingly, Franz Waxman, who composed the excellent score for the film, didn't change his music at all for Wilder's new opening. The power, I suppose, of creative serendipity.

One of the greatest achievements of Sunset Blvd. is the seemingly impossible balance it strikes between film noir, drama, mystery, love story and some of the most exquisite black humor ever produced. Oh, and it's also the best film ever made about Hollywood. But the slightest wrong turn here or there and one feels like the entire work could unravel. I think some of the appeal of Sunset Blvd. comes from the tension that builds up as we wait for Wilder to slip and fall from his cinematic highwire. But he never does. It's one of the most spectacular daredevil acts by a director in film history.

Billy Wilder

This daredevil aspect is also exemplified in Wilder's choice of subject matter and in his casting decisions. An Austrian-born Jew, Wilder came to Hollywood as a screenwriter in 1933. His career immediately took off and by the time he began Sunset Blvd., he had notched six Oscar nominations for writing and two for directing, winning one each for Lost Weekend in 1946. But he was still something of an outsider, and to make a film about Hollywood's dark side after so much success there might have seemed like he was biting the hand that fed him extremely well. In fact, Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, was so incensed by Sunset Blvd. that he screamed at Wilder after the premiere that he should be tarred and feathered for showing Hollywood in such a bad light. [The highly cultured and intelligent Wilder could only manage a two-word reply involving sexual intercourse.] If the film had turned out badly, or if the tone had been any sharper, or the writing had been the least bit self-serving, Wilder's career could've been seriously damaged, Hollywood not being the most forgiving place on earth. But it's a testament to the brilliance of Sunset Blvd. that it remains the film about Hollywood against which all other attempts are judged.

Wilder also took a tremendous gamble with his casting decisions. By 1950, the silent movie star Gloria Swanson had virtually disappeared from Hollywood, moving to the stage not long after the advent of talking pictures. Erich von Stroheim, one of the great directors of the silent period, had been reduced to acting in mostly bit roles after the colossal failure of his 1929 film, Queen Kelly. One of the great stories within the story of Sunset Blvd. is that Gloria Swanson was the main actress and co-producer of Queen Kelly. She and von Stroheim fought bitterly over the film until she eventually fired him and brought in someone to else to finish the production. He, in turn, owned rights to parts of the film, which he wouldn't allow to be released in the United States. The two had not spoken for 21 years before filming Sunset Blvd. When Norma Desmond (Swanson) watches herself on screen in one of her famous silent movies, with her butler (von Stroheim) running the projector, it is, in fact, a scene from Queen Kelly that we are shown. And though it's hard to imagine anyone else playing Norma Desmond, Swanson was actually Wilder's fourth choice after being turned down by Mae West, Mary Pickford and Pola Negri.

William Holden & Gloria Swanson

Finally, there is the case of William Holden. Though he made something of a splash in his 1939 debut, Golden Boy, Holden's career in the 1940s had basically gone nowhere as he got stuck in one mediocre film after another. He wasn't exactly a hot property when production began on Sunset Blvd. In retrospect, it seems like the role of Joe Gillis, a one-hit wonder whose career fizzles out, was written especially for William Holden at that point in his life. But Holden, like Swanson, wasn't Wilder's first choice either. Montgomery Clift was originally signed to play Gillis, but he backed out of the contract two weeks before filming began. Wilder then offered the role to Fred MacMurray, who turned it down. Marlon Brando was briefly considered, and the producers approached MGM about using Gene Kelly, but the studio refused to loan him out to Paramount. Someone mentioned the idea of Holden, but Wilder had seen some of his films and wasn't impressed. He agreed, though, to have lunch with the actor. As it turned out, Wilder realized that Holden was much more intelligent, sensitive, and charismatic than he had seemed in his movies up until then, and that he had never really been given a chance to shine. In the end, the two became lifelong friends and wound up making three other films together, including Stalag 17 (1953), for which Holden won Best Actor; Sabrina (1954); and Fedora (1978), a disappointing quasi-sequel to Sunset Blvd. So, Wilder not only took a chance on the controversial subject matter of his film, but he did so with a group of actors who in Hollywood terms in 1950 were pretty much has-beens, disappointments, and unknowns (Nancy Olson). And his two main stars, who had to carry the movie, were his fourth and fifth choices. His gamble on the cast paid off in spades, however, as the four principal actors in Sunset Blvd. were all nominated for Academy Awards: Holden for Best Actor, Swanson for Best Actress, von Stroheim for Best Supporting Actor, and Nancy Olson for Best Supporting Actress.

One more aspect of the film that seems risky now is Wilder's extensive use of voice-over. Seeing this classic for the second time, I was struck by how much of the story is told to us by Joe Gillis. It's a happy accident for Wilder that he wound up with William Holden in the role. Roger Ebert once said that Holden had one of the best screen voices of all time, and I concur. It's one of his underrated qualities as an actor. If you think the voice-over in Sunset Blvd. wasn't risky, imagine, if you can do so without cringing or laughing, Marlon Brando going on and on about Norma Desmond in that nasal accent of his. Or consider the different feel the film would've had if Gene Kelly had done the narration. Could he have maintained that incredibly fine balance between drama, noir and black comedy? Fred MacMurray does an excellent job with his voice-over in Wilder's Double Indemnity, but that film had a much different tone than Sunset Blvd. I think his higher-pitched, quasi-tough guy voice would've become grating after a while. And finally, though I like Montgomery Clift as an actor, I'm not sure he had the necessary weight or gravitas for Joe Gillis' extensive narration, or for the role in general for that matter. Holden, who always had a hint of sadness in his eyes and in his voice, no matter how cheerful or funny he was in his films, talks to us for almost two hours, and yet we never grow tired of listening to him tell us this strange, sad and darkly humorous tale.

Wilder was riding high when he made Sunset Blvd, and it's to his great credit that he was willing to take so many chances on his next film. A lesser director might have easily gone for the safe project. But you can't make great art without taking great risks. And in the end, Sunset Blvd. will probably go down Wilder's legacy film.

So what holds the movie together so well? I think Wilder's intelligence and great skill as a director are crucial. To weave together disparate genres so well, to have seen something in Holden, to have chosen Swanson and von Stroheim, despite their bitter past, all testify to his greatness as an artist and filmmaker. But the writing may be the key. Billy Wilder is rightly remembered as one of our greatest directors, but he was also one of the finest screenwriters to ever work in Hollywood. He received a total of eight Academy Award nominations for Best Director, winning twice. But he received an astounding 11 nominations for Best Screenplay, and he took an Oscar home for his work on Sunset Blvd. and two other films.

Billy Wilder's grave at Pierce Brothers Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles

If you read through some of the movie's Memorable Quotes on IMDB, you'll see how many are famous and, more importantly, how many are so damn good. It's one of those rare films that feels like it must have come from a great novel, even though it was written for the screen. When Gillis first spies Norma Desmond in the window of her sprawling, seemingly deserted mansion, he says it reminds him of Mrs. Haversham in Dickens' Great Expectations. And the movie itself has a bit of Dickensian feel in a modernized form. The kind of details that Gillis notices when he enters the house - the monkey's paw slipping out from under the cover, the wind blowing through the old pipe organ, the pictures everywhere of the young Norma Desmond - are the details one normally encounters in a book. Using such extensive voice-over allows Wilder and his co-writer, Charles Brackett, to give the film a more literary feel, a story-telling quality. It only works, however, because of the great cinematography and editing, the set design, and the wonderful pace that Wilder sets. Few films could feature so much narration and get away with it.

If you've never seen Sunset Blvd., I highly, highly recommend it. If you've already seen it, watch it again! It's so good, it gets better with each viewing. It's truly one of the greatest works of cinema ever produced in this country.

Crazy About You, Baby

"When I think of the glory days of American film, at its speediest and most velvety, I think of Barbara Stanwyck." Anthony Lane

Barbara Stanwyck was born in Brooklyn, New York, 100 years ago this July, and Anthony Lane has penned a substantial homage to her in the April 30,2007 issue of The New Yorker: "Lady Be Good: A centenary season of Barbara Stanwyck." I highly recommend the article.

Back in 2001, La Reina and I started an ongoing movie marathon; we've watched over 1,000 films since then, many of them classics from the 1930s to 1950s . The two biggest discoveries for us among the great Hollywood actors have been William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck. They were names we knew, but at the beginning of the 21st century, they just didn't have the same reputation as Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn, etc. I hope Lane's major article, and the retrospective of Stanwyck's career currently taking place at the Brooklyn Academy of Music cinema, will help return her to the Hollywood Pantheon, because I believe she was something special.

Here's Lane: "To addicts of old Hollywood, as to pining critics, no actress delivered a more accomplished body of work; to the general public, however, her name is fading into the past. All we have of Stanwyck is a collection of films—but what a collection. . . . Was there any other actress who had appeared both in a silent movie—Broadway Nights — and in “Dynasty”? To raise the stakes a little, was there any other actress who encompassed so many chapters of what we take to be the history of Hollywood?"

Lane's central theme of the article deals with Stanwyck's toughness, both on screen and in real life. Here's a bit of biography from the article:

[Stanwyck's] real name was Ruby Katherine Stevens. The last of five children, she was two years old when her mother, Catherine, died after stepping off a streetcar, falling, and cracking her head on the curb. Her father, a bricklayer named Byron, waited a couple of weeks, long enough to see his wife interred, then took off to work on the Panama Canal. With that, he vanished from history.

Ruby and her brother Byron were taken up by an older sister, Mildred, who shunted them from one foster family to the next. So tough was that upbringing, and such was Stanwyck’s determination not to milk it for sympathy, that, of all the major actresses, she is the hardest to imagine as a child. By the time she arrived in movies, she seemed to know more of the world than anyone around her, enough to make audiences take her on trust.

Mildred was a showgirl, and Ruby liked to follow in her slipstream, picking up the moves. She left school at thirteen, and two years later she was earning her keep in the chorus at the Strand Roof, high above Times Square, shifting soon to a production of “Ziegfeld Follies” at the New Amsterdam.

Stanwyck as a Ziegfeld Girl, early 1920s.

My only criticism of Lane's thoughtful homage is that he goes on too much about her toughness and misses something essential about her screen presence. It's not vulnerability, but something else. Her Brooklyn street smarts mixed with a kind of animal warmth. It flares up in her eyes. Unlike a typical Hollywood "goddess," with ethereal good looks and an unreachable star quality, Stanwyck managed to stay real and human on the screen. She was more three-dimensional: A tough - and in her comedies, fun - Irish girl from Brooklyn. No small feat in the Hollywood star machine.

I also can't think of any other actress who had Stanwyck's range. Katherine Hepburn comes to mind, because they both moved easily between comedy and drama, but it's hard to imagine Connecticut girl Hepburn in film noir classics like Double Indemnity and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. And she certainly couldn't compare with Stanwyck in westerns. In fact, the Brooklyn showgirl was so good at them, that she was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in 1973 for "Outstanding Contribution to the West Through Motion Pictures."

Lane talks at length about her variety of roles, and suggests that it may be, ironically, one reason her star has faded: "Stanwyck’s greatest strength, in other words—her range—was also the reason that she is impossible to tie down and tame. No genre was beyond her, and no one movie sums her up."

No, there isn't one movie to sum her up. But I'll offer a few that showcase the special screen presence of one of Hollywood's greatest actresses.

The Essential Stanwyck

The Lady Eve (1941) - Written and Directed by Preston Sturges. With Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn, William Demarest and Eric Blore.

Roger Ebert chose this as one of his 100 Great Movies. I suggest reading his entire review, but here's a taste:

If I were asked to name the single scene in all of romantic comedy that was sexiest and funniest at the same time, I would advise beginning at six seconds past the 20-minute mark in Preston Sturges' "The Lady Eve," and watching as Barbara Stanwyck toys with Henry Fonda's hair in an unbroken shot that lasts three minutes and 51 seconds.

Stanwyck plays an adventuress who has lured a rich but unworldly young bachelor to her cabin on an ocean liner, and is skillfully tantalizing him. She reclines on a chaise. He has landed on the floor next to her. "Hold me tight!'' she says, holding him tight -- allegedly because she has been frightened by a snake. Now begins the unbroken shot. Her right arm cradles his head, and as she talks she toys with his earlobe and runs her fingers through his hair. She teases, kids and flirts with him, and he remains almost paralyzed with shyness and self-consciousness. And at some point during this process, she falls for him. . . .

Although the movie would be inconceivable without Fonda, "The Lady Eve'' is all Stanwyck's; the love, the hurt and the anger of her character provide the motivation for nearly every scene, and what is surprising is how much genuine feeling she finds in the comedy. Watch her eyes as she regards Fonda, in all of their quiet scenes together, and you will see a woman who is amused by a man's boyish shyness and yet aroused by his physical presence. At first she loves the game of seduction, and you can sense her enjoyment of her own powers. Then she is somehow caught up in her own seduction. There has rarely been a woman in a movie who more convincingly desired a man.

Brilliantly written and directed by Sturges, this is one of the greatest comedies of all time. Coburn and Stanwyck as father & daughter card sharks. Henry Fonda as the easy mark - a wealthy but nerdy young man sailing back home after studying snakes in the Amazon. Wickedly funny. And the scene that Ebert describes between Stanwyck and Fonda may be one of my all-time favorites.

Double Indemnity (1944) - Directed by Billy Wilder. Written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler. Starring Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray and E.G. Robinson.

"I'm crazy about you, baby." Fred MacMurray to Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity.

One of the first and best examples of film noir. Also chosen by Ebert for his 100 Great Movies. Read his review. Even in a horrid blonde wig, Stanwyck is the ultimate femme fatale. Her ankle alone is enough to drive insurance salesman Fred MacMurray to murder for her, and, hell, I probably would've done the same. The two come up with a great plan, but E.G. Robinson, as MacMurray's boss at the insurance firm, smells a rat. Superb filmmaking and a great ride.

Ball of Fire (1941) - Directed by Howard Hawks. Written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. Starring Stanwyck, Gary Cooper and S.Z. Sakall.

Sugarpuss O'Shea and the studious professors

Okay, this one's not on Ebert's list of 100 Great Movies, but it is on mine. It's also one of American Film Institutes 100 Greatest Comedies, and Anthony Lane talks about it a lot in his article. Several professors have been living a mostly secluded life in a New York townhouse for the past nine years, working on a major encyclopedia. Professor Bertram Potts, played by Gary Cooper, is in charge of language and grammar, and he's discovered that his section on slang has already gone out of date since the project began. He decides to venture out into the city to copy down the new slang he hears, eventually winding up in a nightclub, where he encounters Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck). She happens to be engaged to a mobster who's just been arrested. The police are looking for her, so the mob guys need to hide her away. What better place than among a bunch of nerdy old bookworms?! Except, of course, that one of them happens to be Gary Cooper. Especially fun and funny film for people who take their encyclopedias and word usage seriously. This was Billy Wilder's last screenplay before he began directing his own films, and he and Charles Brackett crafted a gem. Howard Hawks also directed Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), an amazing hat trick of screwball comedy that has never been equaled.

Here's a great clip from the movie, the scene that Anthony Lane talks about at the opening of his article.

Some Other Great Stanwycks

Meet John Doe (1941) - The second movie Stanywck and Cooper made in 1941, this one a classic directed by Frank Capra. An excellent film about politics and the media.
Christmas in Connecticut (1945) - You don't have to wait until Christmas to watch this delightful comedy. Stanwyck at her most charming. I wrote about it in my Christmas Meme a few months ago.
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) - A brooding and underrated film noir. Kirk Douglas makes his film debut, playing an alcoholic D.A. married to the scheming Stanwyck. Van Helfin and Lizabeth Scott round out the cast.
To Please a Lady (1950) - Clark Gable was the King, the He-Man of He-Men. He's plays a struggling race car driver in this one. Stanwyck plays a journalist. Whatever the King dishes out, Stanwyck gives right back. Not a great film, but it's a lot of fun watching these two work together.
Executive Suite (1954) - William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck are reunited in this excellent big business thriller. The all-star cast also includes Fredric March, June Allyson, Walter Pidgeon, Shelly Winter and Paul Douglas. Directed by Robert Wise, written by Ernest Lehman and produced by John Houseman. An unheralded gem.

Stanwyck in 1937.
In her films, she faced down the schemings of weak men, got a laugh, and vented no pity.
The New Yorker