HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1940: In which business comes before authorship

There is a particular interest in watching filmmakers with a strong, distinctive visual style making their first movie using this or that technology; and there's a similar appeal to watching such filmmakers stretching outside of their comfort zones of tone and genre. So the first color film and first Western made by German expatriate Fritz Lang, four years after he began the Hollywood phase of his career, ought to be very interesting indeed. And yet 1940's The Return of Frank James is almost perversely disinteresting; not bad, nor does it fail to be entertaining in its way. But it's pretty thin gruel as a Lang film, and any viewer with knowledge of his future Western Rancho Notorious would be forgiven for assuming that he couldn't make a genre film so... generic, as this one.

The problems, maybe, begin with the fact that The Return of Frank James is a sequel, on top of everything else, to a movie with which Lang had nothing to do whatsoever: 1939's smash hit Jesse James, a full-color biopic of the famous American outlaw directed by Henry King and produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox. It was Zanuck who gave the reins of the follow-up to Lang, and we can take it for granted that he didn't leave too much slack in those reins, either: with Jesse James triumphing as one of the highest-grossing films of its year, the last thing a savvy executive wanted was to fuck things up with its sequel (such behavior, of course, has not yet been bred out of film studio executives in all the generations since). Despite a few flickers here there, The Return of Frank James really isn't a "Fritz Lang film", at least not to anything like the degree that those of us who fancy such things might prefer.

Take out the (extremely slender) connection to historical figures, and the plot is very much like any one of a hundred other Westerns: after his brother, Jesse, was shot in the back by his friend Bob Ford (John Carradine), Frank James (Henry Fonda) is content to lie low and pretend to be dead as the nation rages over the death-by-betrayal of one of the most beloved/notorious of all outlaws in the great wilds of the American West. The only thing that can rouse Frank from his retirement is injustice: finding out that the Ford brothers, Bob and Charlie (Charles Tannen) are to receive not even a cursory prison term for their acts, Frank emerges to seek revenge, with the enthusiastic if unwanted help of young Clem (Jackie Cooper), and the unwitting support of overly romantic Denver newswoman Eleanor Stone (Gene Tierney). Basic, meat-and-potatoes "you killed my brother and now I'm gonna kill you" stuff, Western boilerplate right up until it crosses the one-hour mark and it becomes clear that a huge portion of the film's last third is going to be taken up with a lengthy courtroom sequence. Based on a real trial, at that, but still, you don't ever expect to see an action-packed Western, especially one from the morally untroubled pre-revisionist days, decide all of a sudden that it wants to be a legal drama instead.

Still, even with this freakish turn of events, The Return of Frank James is nobody's idea of a spectacularly innovative and clever Western, and I doubt that was any less true in 1940 than in the 21st Century. The film's appeal is centered chiefly in its leading man: starting with his previous collaboration with Lang, 1937's You Only Live Once (theirs was not a happy relationship), Fonda had steadily been rising up the leading man ladder, finally sealing the deal in earlier in 1940 with an instantly-iconic leading role in The Grapes of Wrath. With their new star having played one of the side characters most easily spun off into a sequel to their biggest film of '39, it's no surprise that Fox made this film, or that the film, as it was made, is almost exclusively a star vehicle, with its oddly-presented drama considerably less important to the studio, the filmmakers, or the viewers.

And as a Fonda delivery system, it's quite impossible to say anything bad about the movie: he was still young enough and fresh enough that he wasn't inclined to play up a Henry Fonda persona that didn't exist yet. His Frank is a drawling, sarcastic prick, just heroic enough to root for but still totally unconcerned with morality or decency, and his tendency to stand at a remove from other people and look through them makes it clear just how little he actually thinks about them. All of this is in the performance, not in Sam Hellman's script; indeed, the writing is mostly taken up with increasingly desperate tricks meant to allow Frank to emerge as a Good Guy, requiring some awfully convoluted contrivances to absolve him of any unsavory behavior (honestly, given what he was tasked with doing, I think it's amazing that Hellman got as much out of the material as he did - leaving Frank James as not even an antihero must have been profoundly limiting).

As genre fare, it moves quickly enough and is satisfactorily swashbuckling; nothing in the story really redeems it as more than just any random Western, and Lang's directing is at such odd angles relative to everything else that he hardly helps the film. Generally speaking, the director's heavily architectural directorial style helps to situate the characters in their physical space and explore it through and with them; his are films about the relationship between humans and the environment. In this case, there are many undeniably dramatic compositions in which characters are framed by the sets, or cowed by the span of the natural world, but very few of these shots really seem to mean anything; more frequently, especially in his persistent but seemingly random attempts to "imprison" Tierney within the frame, he seems mostly to be amusing himself. There are exceptions - a phenomenal shot of Fonda in a theater box, staring down at the Ford brothers re-enacting the shooting of Jesse James, leaps to mind. Mostly, though, Lang and his cinematographer George Barnes are just having fun. And this is not unwelcome! It gives The Return of Frank James a visual panache not typically found in Westerns of this generation. And there are other moments where the director is up to something clever: in that same theater scene, the actor playing Frank onstage is busily chawing on tobacco, with a cut to Fonda almost subconsciously flexing his mouth in response, a neat echo of past into present and reality into fiction (that is further echoed when the action leaves the theater: from the fake backdrops of a 19th Century theater piece to the far posher but still visibly fake backdrops behind the backlot set). Mostly, though, the inventive Lang, the sociologist Lang, the sneakily perverse Lang - that Lang was not involved in the making of The Return of Frank James.

Some style, some pretty great, rough Fondaisms; the film offers up little else, though the only real detriment is Tierney, in her very first film performance, failing entirely to tune down her bubbly girlish squeak and gaping a little bit in all of her shots (Lang, we are told, spoke terrible imprecations against her and demanded that she keep her mouth shut in reaction shots), and feeling not just like a teen girl from the '30s had just wandered into the Old West, but that she was a particularly dimwitted teen girl at that. Kinder directors and more appropriate material would shape Tierney into one of the more striking new stars of the '40s, but she's simply terrible here.

Outside of those positives and that negative, the film is serviceable and fun - except for the draggy courtroom scene, but at least that has the merit of being weird. The Technicolor footage of the California desert is extraordinarily pleasant, if a bit spectacle-for-spectacle's sake; and the brief action scenes are staged with verve and energy - there's a horse-riding montage that has some of the best editing in any horse-riding montage I've ever seen, which probably sounds insulting even though I don't want it to.

All in all, it's a fine, durable genre picture. Lang had already made better films in America and would make better films again; that's true for most of the people involved, really. But as a snapshot of what mindless popcorn cinema looked like in 1940, it's a flattering example, still watchable and breezy even if it's not remotely challenging on any level.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1940
-Alfred Hitchcock makes his first Hollywood film, Rebecca, for David O. Selznick
-Disney animation reaches its all-time artistic pinnacle with Pinocchio and Fantasia
-Bing Crosby and Bob Hope travel on the Road to Singapore, the first in a long-lived comedy series

Elsehwhere in world cinema in 1940
-Alexander Korda produces the Technicolor fantasy extravaganza The Thief of Bagdad in Great Britain
-Vittoria De Sica, who would become Italy's first important film director after the war and the end of Fascist control over the film industry, makes his debut with Maddalena, zero in condotta
-The most infamous of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda films, The Eternal Jew, is released

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ALL THE POWERS OF HELL

The worst flaw, by far, of Disney's new adventure in branding, Maleficent, is that it's operating in completely bad faith. This isn't a retelling of the same company's 1959 animated masterpiece Sleeping Beauty, told from the perspective of the villain; it's not a backstory that explains how the villain used to be good before turning evil, in the Wicked mode; it's not a retelling of the story designed to show how the villain actually isn't that villainous, although this is what it thinks it is. It is, in fact, a completely different story altogether that shares a few character names and design elements, as well as one specific scene with Sleeping Beauty, but cannot be squared with the events of that film even at the level of he-said-she-said narrative subjectivity. Ideally, we wouldn't feel compelled to compare the two at all, but Disney is hellbent on making certain we do, and this is absolutely deadly for the new film, which tells a less interesting story centered on a much less interesting figure: the idea of Angelina Jolie playing Maleficent is a lot more exciting when it's the raging, purely evil Maleficent who delights in being cruel for the sake of it and transforms into a dragon and sneers with contemptuous menace at the human maggots she knows to be beneath her.

It's a pity that the film starts off with such an insurmountable handicap, because if it weren't explicitly tied to one of the finest villains in cinema history, transforming her into a sympathetic, tragic figure - though one whose given name unyieldingly connotes to any speaker of English or any Romantic language the idea of wickedness and violence - Maleficent would be a lot easier to like as a pretty decent, though unmistakably flawed fantasy. If we allow that it's part of a loosely defined brand that includes Alice in Wonderland from 2010, Snow White and the Huntsman from 2012, and Oz the Great and Powerful from 2013 - all sharp-edged riffs on classic children's stories produced by Joe Roth, three of them involving former visual effects artist Robert Stromberg in some capacity - Maleficent is cozily the best of them, though if the bar gets much lower than "this was better than Alice in Wonderland", one begins to question whether or not one actually "clears" it, or simply trips over it.

It is, at any rate, Stromberg's first film as a director, and if he designed production like a VFX artist before, he directs like a production designer now, clearly more interested in the locations and objects that parade in front of the camera than the humans who interact with those locations. The actual production design is left to Dylan Cole and Gary Freeman, and I think that, in part, makes all of the difference: their style isn't so garish as Stromberg's was on Alice and Oz, even if the overall feeling of Maleficent's fantasy sequences shares their "let's bring a '70s prog-rock album cover to life!" mentality. Better still, Maleficent boasts a protagonist played by an actor with extremely clear designs on her character, who needs no guidance from a filmmaker obviously more interested in tinkering with video game characters than telling a story or having people doing interesting things (the aggressively poor performances by any and all non-Jolie actors in the cast speaks to this fluently, if depressingly).

Despite largely eschewing Sleeping Beauty, Linda Woolverton's screenplay for the new film copies, more or less, that movie's ellipsis-driven structure, which I find myself regarding as a good choice; it lends Maleficent the feeling of a a classic European fairy tale, with details sketched in and explained as asides, and this gives it quite a bit of added weight when it starts to tweak and up-end the tone of those fairy tales. So it is that we have a quickly blitzed-through prologue explaining how there's a human kingdom next to a fairy realm on the moors, and one day a human boy, Stefan (Michael Higgins as a child, Jackson Bews as a teen, and Sharlto Copley as an adult, which is most of the time), crosses the line into the moors and is caught by the fairies; he's saved through the intercession of the human-sized horned fairy Maleficent (Isobelle Molloy and Ella Purnell precede Jolie in the role), and they fall in love. But then, one day, Stefan drugs and mutilates Maleficent, cutting off her wings to use as token that he should be named heir to the kingdom. Enraged, the fairy took her revenge on the human upon the birth of his daughter, laying out the whole spinning wheel curse of legend.

After this, the story overlaps with Disney's original, though it doesn't coincide with it: Stefan sends the baby to live with three incompetent fairies disguised as human women, Knotgrass (Imelda Staunton), Flittle (Lesley Manville), and Thistletwit (June Temple). Since they're incapable of keeping the child from starving to death, Maleficent herself, aided by a crow-turned-human, Diaval (Sam Riley), intercedes to raise the baby to her teenage years, so that the curse may be carried out; but when teenage Aurora (Elle Fanning), gifted by the other fairies with eternal happiness, finds great joy and delight in spending time with the grim-faced Maleficent, it begins to thaw the "wicked" fairy's heart. At which point the film stops resembling Disney's at all, although Stromberg and cinematographer Dean Semler do their best to stage scenes in ways that echo and mimic individual shots from the '59 film.

Woolverton's script is heavy on abstraction and low on real cohesion - the shift by which Maleficent transforms from irritated child-hater to affectionate secret caregiver is missing entirely, and it's the one thing that Jolie is powerless to do anything about - and the themes are foggier than they'd like to be (it's feminist-ish without actually being feminist; but then again, the fact that a family-friendly Disney movie is metaphorically about not letting men get away with date rape counts as some The Second Sex-level radicalism by corporate standards). But the overall tone is about right, giving us the mythic strokes of a story and letting us imagine our way into the rest. It's a brisk narrative that has the exact feeling of a bedtime story, not an epic adventure, and it's easy to see why plenty of people have been turned off by that, but given the material and the target audience, it leaves the film with a pleasantly distinct personality that stands out nicely against the generally overly-literal popcorn movies that come out these days.

The crisp, folkloric storytelling is better than the film built around that story, perhaps: it's a handsome but blank looking film with some faintly awful CGI in its depiction of the fairy world and the creatures living there, frequently feeling more like a cartoon than something that's meant to be photorealistic. Stromberg is the absolute dictionary definition of a hack filmmaker: he's there to keep things moving in a forward direction, but doesn't put an ounce in insight or personality into any image or narrative beat, leaving people like Semler and composer James Newton Howard to do all the heavy lifting. The only scene that really sparks as cinema, and not as a chance to watch Angelina Jolie do her thing, is the christening scene, the one beat-for-beat remake of a moment from Sleeping Beauty; it's also the one moment that real fairy tale scariness creeps into the film or Jolie's performance, and the whole thing is dramatic and exciting and over much too quickly.

Still, watching Jolie do her thing turns out to be a more than passable diversion: she's great in the role, greater than she's been in ten years (by which I mean her outstanding snarling female monster in Alexander, a judgment that I not expect to be widely shared). She wails with betrayed anguish when she realises her wings are gone, and it is unnerving and soul-shattering; she laughs with private glee when laying the curse down on baby Aurora, and it is a moment of captivating, charismatic villainy; she holds the toddler Aurora with a kind of well-meaning stiffness as a confused mix of annoyance and affection battle on her face, and it is sweet and tender. Just the variety of ways she says the word "beastie" - her name for Aurora - is enough to make this a fantastic performance and a worthwhile experience.

Without Jolie, Maleficent is a fine, boring movie: faintly anonymous fantasy landscapes with just enough color that they're not completely generic, a story that is mostly interesting for subverting expectations than because of the intellectual rigor with which it so subverts, and some pretty fantastic costume design, courtesy of Anna B. Sheppard. But Jolie is good enough in specific way to make it, an honestly successful summer movie: long on iconic, broad-strokes dramatic moments and emotions, boldly presentational in its approach, and suitably mythic and surface-level. Coupled with its decidedly unfussy approach to fantasy, the film works in an unexpectedly old-school way; it's primitive and direct, simple in its grandeur, with just enough contemporary themes on the edges to avoid feeling musty. It's basic but highly effective children's fantasy, never great but consistently engaging, and just magical and mysterious enough to feel more like a real fairy tale than a dodgy postmodern retelling of one.

6/10

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BEST SHOT: ZORBA THE GREEK

It's 1964 Month at the Film Experience, and Nathaniel R has accordingly selected one of that year's big Zeitgeist pictures, Zorba the Greek, for this week's edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot. It's one of the great "...I don't really know what to think about that" movies of all time, in my estimation: it stars Anthony Quinn (an actor whom I greatly admire, though it's my impression that his massive presence and bombast aren't terribly easy for most folks to warm to) in the highly dubious role of a Greek who teaches a stuffy Brit to loosen up and Live Life, and those capital Ls are burned into the scenario, make no mistake about it. It's corny, it has a remarkable inability to remember characters after they've done their bit for the plot (Irene Pappas's nameless widow, in particular), and it's bogged down by an exhausting 142-minute running time; but Quinn is absolutely flawless in the role (setting aside the flaws that the role had associated with it already), Walter Lassally's cinematography beautifully runs the gamut from hyper-modern realism (by '64 standards) to stark Expressionist shadows, and Mikis Theodorakis's score includes some of the best music written for a movie in the whole decade. And it's intensely, achingly sincere; sincerity goes a long way with me. At any rate, while the whole Learn to Love Life genre is one of which I am instantly suspicious, there aren't many films that do it better.

So the question of choosing a favorite shot arises: there is the absurdly obvious pick, and the obvious but not terribly so pick. And I have elected to go with the only moderately obvious pick.

We are, at this point in the film, near the end of the first dance scene. For dance is an important narrative motif here; it is the metaphor for how much vivacity and vitality one possesses, and how much one is willing to pull the utterly English stick out of one's utterly English ass. At this point, Basil (Alan Bates) - Basil! Even the name is stuck up its own ass! - is still pretty stuffy, and has been watching Zorba's energetic gyrations with something approaching horror; Lassally and director Michael Cacoyannis feed this impression by initially staging Quinn in shadowy, exaggerated medium shots and close-ups that make him look like a lunging beast, but as the dance progresses, it looks increasingly passionate and emotional. This is too much for Basil - Basil! - to take, so he runs out to the beach where Zorba is dancing with a group of musicians on their way home for the night, and demands that they stop. But even deprived of his music, Zorba still has rhythm in his soul, and so he keeps dancing in the silence, despite Basil's anguished desire that he should not do so.

And then comes the shot: Basil, lit from just one side so that he fades away into black, has his back to us as he's crushed intoone corner of the frame by Zorba, standing out brightly against the night, springing into chaotic motion that contrasts with Basil's stiff, straight pose. This is the whole conflict of the film in one primal moment: the Life Force refusing to give up and give in to the dark, challenging the conservative, wet noodle personality of the little man who wants to have nothing to do with all of that dangerous passion. Eventually, of course, Basil caves: he will have his own moment of dancing before the film's iconic final scene (the absurdly obvious choice I didn't go with), in which the two men have their dance out in the bright light on a beach. But where we are now, this the lowest point of their conflict, where they are furthest apart; it is thus the moment from which the rest of the drama naturally derives, it is from here that life and light begin to steadily triumph over darkness and crabby Britishness.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: DISNEY PLUNDERING ITS ANIMATED CANON

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: with Maleficent, Disney updates a great cartoon from their Silver Age with a dubious live-action update that feels like it exists solely to facilitate a great movie star playing a redo of one of the best villains in animation, a role she was clearly born for. This is not the first time that this exact situation has happened.

When Disney decided to make a live-action version of its 1961 animated classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians - it obviously being the case that simply not remaking it was too ridiculous and perverse a notion to even contemplate - one of the things that happened was that John Hughes was hired to write and produce. This was undoubtedly because of the onetime teen movie impresario's hand in birthing Beethoven, first of the 1990s wacky pet comedies, and it turned out to be a definitive choice. For the ultimate version of 101 Dalmatians, released at Thanksgiving in 1996, is every inch a Hughes film. Not because the dalmatians sit around and talk about life as high schoolers and discover that there's more to them than just being a doggy jock, a doggy geek, a doggy princess, and so on, though that film would have been so much better that I weep to think of it. Rather, 101 Dalmatians feels like the culmination of Hughes in his "I don't care, give me fucking money" phase; it plays like a crude, clumsy welding of Beethoven (nonspeaking animals doing wacky things) and Home Alone (a protracted third act of alarmingly violent slapstick) stuffed into the narrative framework of the 35-year-old film, with considerable stretches of dialogue taken from the same source.

The results of that Frankensteinian tinkering with scattered body parts are not pretty, though we must pay the film this much respect: it gave the world Glenn Close playing iconic crazy woman villain Cruella De Vil, and that is something all fans of talented actresses uncorking it and having a bit of hammy, campy fun must acknowledge to be an ultimate good in the universe. Even if Close is a bit broader and therefore more fun in the much more deranged and therefore more interesting 2000 sequel 102 Dalmatians. We needed to go through this movie to get to that one, and so it still earns our thanks, however fatigued and sad those thanks might be.

In all ways, the film more closely resembles Disney's original film than the Dodie Smith book from which it claims descent. In London, there are two dogs, Pongo and Perdita, and they are respectively owned by an unemployed American video game designer named Roger (Jeff Daniels) and an English hold tight now, a video game designer? This is the way you sexify up the story of 101 Dalmatians for a 1990s audience, John Hughes? And boy, does the video game he's designing ever look unplayable - it's basically what you'd get if you asked, say, a team of Disney animators to whip up some "game footage" based on the character models from the animated Dalmatians, and don't particularly care if it resembles in any degree the kind of games that actually got played in 1996, or at any point before or after.

Perdita, then is owned by Anita (Joely Richardson), a fashion designer who works at House of De Vil, where she is a favorite of namesake, owner, and guru Cruella De Vil, who notices one day that Anita has been noodling around with a line based on irregular spots, inspired by her photo of Perdita. And this puts a bee in Cruella's bonnet that will not fly away. But it takes a while before she's able to do anything with this insight. First, Pongo and Perdita spot each other in a park, and then contrive to get Roger and Anita all mixed up and fallen in love; before you can say "quickie wedding" their houses are combined and Perdita is heavy with child. Children. 15 children, in fact, a robust litter of dalmatian pups that Cruella offers to buy on the very day of their birth. When Roger finds this all distasteful and suspicious, the fashion magnate opts for plan B: have a pair of idiot thieves, Jasper (Hugh Laurie) and Horace (Mark Williams), kidnap the puppies and take them into the country with 84 others, exactly the number Cruella requires to fashion for herself a dalmatian-skin outfit. The humans are distraught, but the dogs, communicating through an impressive network of barks, are able to track their family out of the city, where they and several other species of animal wreak their wide-rainging revenge on Cruella and her henchmen, including the angry mute furrier Mr. Skinner (John Shrapnel).

None of this is any damn good, though the film does itself no favors by ending on its worst material, the lengthy slapstick booby traps sequence in which the dogs, along with farm animals and a pair of teamwork-oriented raccoons, perpetrate all manner of indignities upon the human villains. The adult viewer cannot help their mind from wandering during all this, to ponder what possibly could have been going through the mind of five-time Academy Award nominee and three-time Tony winner Glenn Close as she read the descriptions in the screenplay of "Cruella drops into a barrel of molasses" and "Cruella slides backwards at high speed through a pool of pig shit", or what director Stephen Herek* might have said to her to get her prepared for the scene where a pig is catapulted onto her chest and she must feebly kick and scream for help.

That being said, Close is - by lots - the best thing happening in the entire movie. Recognising what kind of movie she was in and what kind of character she was playing, she turned of whatever filter actors have that makes them look for character truth or internal credibility, and went from 0 to psycho in one scene flat. It's a glorious thing to behold, when someone with Close's talents and authoritative presence just cuts loose and goes for it: there are manical giggles galore, and every line she speaks is in a relentlessly cheery scream, full of bizarre private amusement. There aren't many movie villains who take actual pleasure in being evil, for the sake of it; Close's Cruella belongs to that company, and while it's not nearly enough to elevate the movie itself, at least we get some one-of-a-kind live action cartooning to enjoy. Even without borrowing any affection the audience might have for the animated original, Close creates an iconic, comically menacing character that lingers in the memory long after the bland nonsense of the film has faded.

And boy, does it ever fade. 101 Dalmatians is utterly devoid of anything that has a personality at all, let alone anything genuinely appealing. Having made the (probably appropriate) choice not to have the animals speak, the film immediately hits the wall that both Disney's film and Smith's book take Pongo and Perdita as their protagonists, which now becomes virtually impossible. Not that stories with non-speaking animals as protagonists can never work, but when you hire John Hughes and Stephen Herek to make a family movie, you don't expect, don't want, and don't get Au hasard Balthazar. So the story no longer centers on the dogs; but it doesn't really center on anyone else - Cruella would be the obvious choice, but Disney wasn't interested in making movies about bad guys just yet. Roger and Anita are too bland - and Daniels's performance certainly isn't looking to counteract that impression - and that leaves basically nobody else. So the film descends into a free-floating collection of scenes that barely stitch together and have no particular visual flair: the costumes are the most interesting thing to look at in a movie that is content to have the actors stand in front of the camera delivering lines, while a mix of well-trained animals and animatronic critters (and sometimes, vengefully bad CGI ones) enact insipid jokey behaviors designed to appeal only to young and extremely unsophisticated children.

It's lowest-common-denominator kiddie filmmaking, basically, propped up by a weirdly committed and nasty-minded performance by the villain. Not the first time it ever happened, but it's especially irritating in this case: what Close is up to is so damn great that I'm almost bizarrely tempted to try and recommend the film, even though everything - everything - around her is at the most dire, shitty levels that 1990s family entertainment could manage to operate.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1939: In which people who are wittier, prettier, and just better all around than we are fall in love, and it is outrageously delightful

The recent conversation about the state of the romcom in the 2010s - is it dead or dying? is it revivable? why do people hate laughter and love - amuses me to no end, because it misses the most important part of all: the golden age of romantic comedy was over before most of the people involved in the conversation were ever born. The romcom has been dead a looooong time, it's just that the corpse is finally starting to smell.

I mean, there have been some fine and even great romcoms in the years since America entered World War II, but the genre peaked in the 1930s, and if anyone disagrees with me, I will fight you in an alley with a knife. Seriously. Even a desperate, barrel-scraping C-picture in the genre from that period still oozes wit, charismatic actors, a short enough running time that the contrivances don't register until long after the movie is over. And I think most importantly - at any rate, it explains why the genre went off the cliff after 1940, except for Preston Sturges, and he only hung around a short while longer before hitting his desperate years - prior to the war, leading women in American cinema were of an entirely more sturdy, self-reliant stock than the generations that followed. Just a quick tour of names: Hepburn, Davis, Stanwyck, Garbo,Crawford, Lombard, Harlow, Loy, Dunne. They all were best at playing strong people, the kind who would refuse to put up with bumblers or schlubs, unwilling to stand by as the supporting character in somebody else's story. Social considerations aside, it simply makes for better comedy when you put two equally-matched sparring partners against one another, and there simply haven't the leading ladies with the skill or motivation to sell that kind of thing in any kind of mass quantity in later years.

If you'll permit me to stash my soapbox, we can then turn to one of these Golden Age romcoms, and one that is criminally under-recognised in modern days, Paramount's Midnight of 1939, directed by capable journeyman Mitchell Leisen and written by the unbeatable team of Billy Wilder & Charles Brackett, whose work was also on display in another exquisite romantic comedy that same year, Ninotchka. It is not, despite all I just said, the most gender-balanced of '30s comedies, owing mainly to a jaw-dropping final act moment in which Claudette Colbert insistently agrees with a judge that men should spank their wives, in a completely frivolous aside that does nothing else besides suddenly make the film bitterly uncomfortable for moderns. But for the most part, her Eve Peabody is the smartest person in every room, a quick-witted con artist and former golddigger who with a little bit of good luck and a lot fleet improv manages to finagle her way into the lives of several upper-class Parisian socialites. And also into the life of a Hungarian immigrant taxi driver named Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche), and it doesn't take noticing what two names show up on the pre-title credit card to guess who Eve ends up with. Though I am pleased to note that Midnight doesn't have any twinge of "they have to end up together because they shouldn't co-mingle with richer classes" messaging, but the more direct and satisfying "...well, look at them, of course we want them to fall in love".

Apologies for harping on sociology, but it's one of the strengths of comedies that, because they so rarely feel the need to filter and editorialise, they paint a much clearer picture of the cultural norms that produced them. None of this is necessarily the first thing one has in mind while actually watching Midnight; it's much easier to be carried along by its excellent farcical plot, sharp dialogue (though the script, tweaked a bit by Leisen to Wilder's irritation, lacks the punishing wit of the best lines in Ninotchka), and Colbert's splendid performance. Colbert, I might point out, was not an actress who lacked for splendid performances in a career that included plenty of headlining roles but, maybe, fewer long-lived classics than we might prefer (I suspect that to the casual fan of old movies, she's known pretty much exclusively for her Oscar-winning role in 1934's It Happened One Night), and not nearly enough roles with directors or producers who could really exploit her unusual and unique traits as an actress. Above all, her rather direct, deflating way of cutting through bullshit with line readings that are more honest and rueful than just about any other actor in the '30s could reliably produce - in Midnight, that it including the wry, slightly angry delivery of "Well, from here it looks an awful lot like a rainy night in Kokomo, Indiana", as her first words upon entering Paris. Or, at one point, she issues the instruction "Tell him I wouldn't be at all surprised" to a chauffeur with a remarkable mix of confusion, happiness, and nervousness, all communicated through a giggling line delivery she barely completes. And then there's the matter of her one-of-a-kind looks, with wide-set almond eyes exaggerating her face to look squishy and round, and the set of her mouth looks perpetually amused by a joke nobody else heard that even she doesn't genuinely think is funny. Her look is far enough from the standards of beauty active in the '30s (or today, to an even greater degree) that, coupled with her blunt way of speaking, make it feel like someone who wasn't a movie star somehow managed to get all of these leading roles, and that leaves her performances with an eccentric vibe to them, one that's more, I'm almost tempted to call it "modernist" than any of her contemporaries. She's one of the most interesting '30s actresses to watch; I adore her completely, even when her vehicles aren't the greatest.

No such reservations apply to Midnight, one of Colbert's best films and one of the few to understand that her skills are flawlessly suited to the somewhat artificial and brittle world of screwball farce. Eve Peabody has just arrived in Paris from an ill-fated trip to Monaco, with nothing but the evening dress on her back; her first friend in town is Tibor, who takes her from place to place looking for work that's not to be found. At her last stop, she gets accidentally swept in with a group of other people dressed for a night out, and manages to sneak into a society party held by a blowsy sort of woman named Stephanie (gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, the one clunky note in the cast); she is immediately found out by the perceptive eye of one Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore), but he keeps mum for reasons of her own. Those reasons, she finds out after Georges secretly bails her when she loses a small fortune at bridge, are named Helene (Mary Astor) and Jacques (Francis Lederer) - Helene being Georges's wife, and Jacques being Helene's lover. Georges has noticed that Jacques had his eye on Eve all evening, and wishes to put the broke American up in a fine hotel with plenty of clothes and a car, under the name Baronness Czerny - the name she came up with on the spot - in order to keep pushing her towards Jacques, thereby breaking up his wife's affair. Seeing nothing but the dollar signs, Eve accepts his offer. But Tibor, meanwhile, has assembled all the taxi drivers of Paris to hunt for Eve, and when he finds her, he shows his own quick wits by posing as the Baron Czerny. And thus it is that everyone ends up at the Flammarion estate for a weekend, with Eve trying to seduce Jacques as Helene tries to expose Eve as a fraud and Tibor concocts a series of elaborate lies for why his fake marriage is sacrosanct and happy.

At the simplest level, Midnight is a wonderfully pure farce: it starts because people tell lies, and in order to keep those lies from being found out have to tell increasingly madder lies, that run afoul of other lies told by other people for their own benefit. The only sour note in all of it is its drowsy final sequence; by no means the most elegant or high-energy way to end, it moves the action to a courtroom where a fake divorce is held, as the protagonist uncharacteristically defends spousal abuse. But everything till that point is gloriously nutty, as Wilder and Brackett ladle one wrinkle on top of the last, never reaching such a fever pitch as to push the film firmly into screwball territory instead of the more arch sophisticated comedy subgenere, though it is certainl manic enough to never be boring. The cast is top-to-bottom divine: Barrymore, in the final chance he had to do something really special before sputtering out in nothing films made in the last stages of his alcohol-related death, is absolutely brilliant, with innuendo-laden facial expressions and a hilarious willingness to go totally silly during a late-film scene on the phone; Astor's snappish iciness is in excellent form; Ameche oscillates between charming mooniness and comic petulance nicely.

But it is Colbert's film, and she makes the most of it. She's the center of every shot that includes her, kept in focus and weighted by the compositions; the film lingers on her line deliveries, which are absolutely perfect in every instance, with a certain calming, "now, now, let's all be sane" cadence and a clear sense of authority, as though even when her fate hinges entirely on the whim of other people, she knows that she's smarter than they are and needs to keep them on track. She's a superb, grounding center to a frequently giddy film, but without ever playing the straight man to the material; there's too much sardonic wit to her performance for that to be the case.

At any rate, Midnight is a flat-out comedy masterpiece, the best work of Leisen's solid but hardly inspirational career, and enough to make a lifelong Colbert devotee of anybody who somehow remained unaffected in the face of It Happened One Night. There's an old-fashioned elegance and formality to the storytelling that dates it, sure; and it's narrative is based in a social situation that makes no sense on many levels (besides the gender politics, the class-based plot could only take place in pre-war Paris). But the crowd-pleasing instincts and high-speed literacy of the dialogue are fresh as they were 75 years ago; it's among the best, sharpest, fleetest comedies of its era, and worthy of far more of an audience and bigger classic status than it has ever enjoyed.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1939, the Greatest Year in Hollywood History
-Producer David O. Selznick marshals an army of actors and craftsman to make the epic of all epics, Gone with the Wind
-Garbo Laughs in Ninotchka
-MGM vomits out the most glorious expression of Technicolor ever filmed, The Wizard of Oz
-Disney's idiot dog Goofy makes his solo debut in the shockingly tender short Goofy and Wilbur
-George Cukor oversees the cavalcade of actressexual delights, The Women
-John Ford zooms in on John Wayne and a megastar is born in Stagecoach

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1939
-The first edition of the Cannes International Film Festival is called on account of war
-Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, a timeless and essential masterpiece, is booed and rejected for its mockery of society on the cusp of war; similarly, Marcel Carné's Le jour se lève, though a hit this year, will be banned in 1940 for harming social morale
-Mizoguchi Kenji's Story of the Last Chrysanthemums has nothing to do with war, but it's awfully good anyway

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JUNE 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

At the one month mark, the summer report card is looking pretty decent, I daresay. It's already better than 2013, for damn certain, and we haven't even gotten to some of the most promising releases of the season. And June in particular has a high concentration of such movies. In my estimation, at least.


6.6.2014

Let's not start out with one of those, though. The Fault in Our Stars is based on a hugely popular YA novel that has gotten those "even as an adult reader, I loved this book" reviews that pass for literary culture in the West nowadays. I confess: I made it three chapters in, concluded that it was not a book for me, and that rather than push myself to complete something that I'd be seeing onscreen anyway (really, is there any chance of it not winning the box office race this weekend?), I'd just put it away and be glad that lots of people with different needs from my own have received pleasure from it. That being said, I couldn't possibly be looking forward to it any less, particularly given my dim view of Shailene Woodley's acting ability.

But ignore my thoughts anyway, because what I am looking forward to is Edge of Tomorrow, a Tom Cruise sci-fi picture. Like, honestly and truly, I have high hopes. High-ish. Anyway, sometimes you want to see well-designed mechas exploding, and sometimes you really want them to do so while pretty people have photogenic dirt on their faces. And with Cruise and Emily Blunt headlining, this will surely do that.

Amidst the usual numbers of arthouse releases, we find the first U.S. screenings of Borgman, a movie that I would enthusiastically and urgently push everyone to see - I caught it at the Chicago International Film Festival last year, and barring something extraordinarily surprising, you'll be seeing it on my 2014 Top 10. So please, check it out.


13.6.2014

Two sequels to two genuinely delightful originals, both of them representing very different question marks. In the case of 22 Jump Street, is it possible that it can possibly re-capture the energy of the first movie, when it cannot have the same sense of surprise to it? If it comes even close, though, that means that directors Phil Miller and Christopher Lord will be 4-for-4 making great comedies from dodgy concepts, and will officially be on my list of filmmakers that I will follow to the ends of the earth. Then we have How to Train Your Dragon 2, the sequel to DreamWorks Animation's best film to date, with one-half of its authorial team returning, and while I feel like I should be excited, I can't help but feel like the ad campaign is selling me a movie I don't want: one that's longer on vistas and epic storytelling than character and sweetly bent humor, the things that made the first one so great. Time will tell, but for right now there's nothing all summer - all year! - that I'm anticipating with such a mix of enthusiasm and ambivalence.


20.6.2014

Think Like a Man was surprisingly charming and all, but Think Like a Man Too - fuck that title, incidentally - seems like a willfully bad idea. Getting all that chemistry to work a second time, when the plot clearly involves broader, wackier comedy (pro-tip: going to Vegas is never a creatively fresh idea), seems entirely impossible, and while it will undoubtedly make a huge pile of money, I can't imagine it being half as good. But stranger things have happened.

Like Clint Eastwood making a musical. Even as "blue collar guys" a musical as the film adaptation of the quintessential jukebox musical hit Jersey Boys. I'll see it - I'll see it opening night, probably - but if it's even tolerably good, I'll be shocked.

Limited release: I wasn't able to see Norte, the End of History at all during its festival run last year, but I'm eager to catch up with it; 250 minutes is the kind of running time that zips past "dear God, that's too long" right back into "okay, I have to see what that's all about". And while I feel like Roman Polanksi's career is in its irreversible wind-down phase, his latest, Venus in Furs, is out for anyone who cares.


27.6.2014

Now the robots transform into dinosaurs. Give Michael Bay your money.

In terms of sci-fi for humans with souls, brains, or just a desire not to be pummeled into fatigue by sound design, the untampered-with version of Snowpiercer by the endlessly reliable Korean director Bong Joon-ho starts its "buried by Harvey Weinstein" micro-tour of North America this weekend. And it is unquestionably the film I am most excited for all summer, assuming it actually makes it to theaters outside of New York and Los Angeles.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: PROTO-SLASHERS

The Town that Dreaded Sundown is not the most important film in the career of director Charles B. Pierce - almost beyond question, that honor goes to 1972's The Legend of Boggy Creek - and maybe it's not even his most interesting. It is, however, his best, and the one that best combines the director's fascinating amateur cinematic sensibility and some feeling that it's actually, y'know, a movie. Pierce ranks alongside Herschell Gordon Lewis as one of America's most successful regional filmmakers (assuming we're not counting Southern California as a "region"), and his most characteristic films have a tendency to feel like elaborate home movies dedicated to the people and land of Arkansas, made with a kind of intuitive and frequently 100% ineffective aesthetic that almost deserves to be called outsider art. The Town that Dreaded Sundown fits neatly into this tradition; it is a swoony love letter to the city of Texarkana, circa 1946, and to the forests and swamps surrounding it, and it frequently allows that love to eradicate anything like narrative momentum or tone. And yet it stars Ben Johnson - Oscar winner Ben Johnson, by that point - as big as life, giving it a weird legitimacy.

Also, unlike Pierce's other films, which exist in some kind of mythic fever dream place that seems indebted to nothing other than the director's private whims, The Town that Dreaded Sundown slides neatly into the tradition of mysterious psycho killers that was percolating in the States all throughout the '70s. It's a police procedural at heart, but with a murderer who wouldn't look remotely out of place in an Italian giallo (whose visual appearance, moreover, is a clear influence on Jason Voorhees mk. 1 from Friday the 13th, Part 2, five years later), and whose preferred methods of killing grow more baroque as the film progresses; there's a peculiar trombone-based death some two-thirds of the way presented with an absurd flair and sense of black comedy that feel like something from the slasher film in its first desperate phase, around 1983 or '84, far more than like anything happening in America in '76.

The film is based on a true story, and unlike virtually every subsequent horror or thriller film to make that claim, you can still actually see most of the real history through Pierce and screenwriter Earl E. Smith's thin fog of zesty exploitation (the film was, after all, distributed by American International Pictures; we should be deeply grateful that there's only the small amount of prurient editorialising that we get). In '46, from March until May, Texarkana was haunted by four attacks by a never-caught assailant, arbitrarily choosing isolated people (always in couples, though not always in a sexual context) and savagely attacking them. The first couple, necking on the local Lover's Lane, survived, and sent up the alarm; for the next couple of months, Texarkana deputy sheriff Norman Ramsey (Andrew Prine) is the chief local law enforcement agent working the series of dead ends making up the case, while legendary Texas Ranger J.D Morales (Johnson) comes to town to add his expertise and gravitas. A second attack happens 21 days after the first; then a third 21 days after that; then the killer, by now nicknamed the Phantom, changes up his pattern, all without ever giving the cops a chance to predict his movements or get out in front of him or do more than watch him recede in the the distance.

It's a captivating film, but a bizarrely messy one ("but", do I say? Nay, the two facts are deeply related), owing in large part to Pierce's unerring eye for local color and detail. And to the film's inconsistent generic framework; building on Boggy Creek, The Town that Dreaded Sundown presents itself, in moments, as a kind of docudrama, or at least a series of re-enactments, contextualised by a smooth-voiced narrator (Vern Stierman) with fussy, authoritative collection of details about whos and whats and whens and wheres. It is a film anxious about Getting It All Right, and this leads it to a place of unexpected hyper-realism of a sort, where the little undramatic bits and pieces in between policework are presented with strict attention. Morales, upon arriving in Texarkana, walks to a newstand to buys a handful of cigars, an act depicted in real time despite it having not a damn thing to do with anything else; we are privy to roundabout conversations, and scenes of calling for backup and confirming that backup is coming and confirming that it's all right to move all along, and having to click the radio transmitter button a couple of times to get the police station to pick up; all very square and by the books, I have no doubt, and all deeply unusual in a movie, given that the form does tend to expect at least some level of forward motion, consistently. But it's stuff like this that gives The Town that Dreaded Sundown its oh-so-distinctive character, even more than the way it plays like a Southern fried Bava thriller down up as a docudrama.

If the dominant mode of the film is a period police procedural - and it unquestionably is - it nevertheless functions more than satisfactorily as a movie about a mysterious serial killer; it is not a horror film according to any strict definition, but it captures a feeling of inexplicable dread better than most straight-up genre pictures ever manage to. There's the obvious matter of its "slasher" scenes (though that word wouldn't have been first on anyone's tongues back in '76), which are honestly tense and scary and shocking like the vast majority of such sequences are not: particularly in the opening, when that human form with two bright eyes staring from a white sack simply pops into view, it's actually unsettling as all the Jasons in all the camps in all the world never managed to be. Part of it is simply that Bud Davis, playing the killer, is absolutely superb, making his energetic, gibbering monster of a role something that is clearly human in a degraded, awful form, while so many later slashers would feel very much other than human; he is a realistic and thus real threat compared to pick any damn psycho killer of the '80s.

The other, greater part is that, like I said, The Town that Dreaded Sundown isn't a horror film: it's a dramatic film about horror. Pierce's films are all very much of a piece, capturing the texture and physical space of life in his chosen location (often though not always the American South) with an unforced easiness. One gets the impression from watching his work that he was a good observer of people, and knew how they acted, and even when the writing and the acting borders on, or crosses into amateurishness, there's a kind of relaxed naturalism about his material. And of course, the writing and acting nearly always cross into amateurishness, but that's not the point I'm aiming at. The Town that Dreaded Sundown, with its heavily articulated post-WWII setting and its wide array of incidents in small-town post-war Arkansas, has a beautifully lived-in quality, not asking us to believe bromides about rural innocence but acknowledging the frustration and lust and anger and boredom that was as true in '46 as in '76 and now. For the quietness and low-key intimacy that brings with it to cut into screaming and dead bodies and the occasional baroque nighttime visual is jarring and eery in a way that doesn't require the filmmakers to actively strive for horror style. It is, after all, about the TOWN that dreaded sundown, not the sundown killer, and the film's greatest success is to marry in its own shifting tones the way that what happened in '46 felt like a perversion and violation of that town's sense of calm and safety.

That being said, there are three clear problems with the film: four if we count its generally slapdash, low-budget, one-and-done feeling, but I'm inclined to cut regional filmmakers working from the hip a bit of slack, even when they manage to suppose that Sunday could fall on 3 March and Saturday on 24 March, and that in same calendar year (the former is correct). No, let's stick with three problems. One of these is the narration: building on Boggy Creek, the film wants to make sure we understand how real and rooted in history it is, and so there's chatter about everything, even when the scene construction explains exactly what we know in a strictly narrative, not docudrama fashion. It's distracting at best and outrageously campy at worst. Second is Jaime Mendoza-Nava's score, a crazy collage of styles and moods with no rhyme or reason, though generally the points where it is most noticeable are exactly those points where dead silence would be best for the development of tension, the emphasis on naturalism, or both.

Third and worst, Pierce cast himself in the medium-size role of patrolman A.C. "Sparkplug" Benson, and like most characters with a made-up nickname in quotes, Sparkplug is comic relief. Fucking horrible comic relief. The kind of comic relief who, to pull of a sting, decides to dress up as the ugliest woman in the world, like it's an afternoon cartoon show where the only logic is absurdity. Or the kind of comic relief who, standing in front of a big board marked CAR KEYS with only one key hanging on it could turn and ask his boss where the keys to the car are kept. Re-watching the film, there's less Sparkplug than I thought there was, but it doesn't change the fact that every single moment he's onscreen is absolute death, with even the other characters seemingly confused why their serious murder investigation has to keep ceding space to this ludicrous yokel. Worse films have had worse comic relief; so have better films. But it's fascinating and aggravating to me that Pierce made such an irredeemable waste of a character and then chose to embody that waste himself. I take it to always mean something when a director plays a role in his or her movie, and in The Town that Dreaded Sundown, the only thing I can suppose it means is "Hi, I'm Charles B. Pierce, and I'm a giant asshole".

Body Count: 5, with three survivors of what feel like they ought to be body count deaths; but that's historical fealty for you.

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