NEW SLANG

A review requested by McAlister, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The ingredients are pretty standard early '40s Hollywood comedy, so you wouldn't know it just to glance at it, but Ball of Fire is a very special movie. And not just because every film directed by Howard Hawks is special, though that should certainly be enough for anybody. This is a film directed by Hawks from a screenplay by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder, one of those collisions of talent that makes so much obvious sense when you hear about it that you wonder why the studios didn't try it sooner (or at all: made by Samuel Goldwyn Productions, Ball of Fire is actually an independent film), or why, given the exemplary results, they didn't try it a second time. Better yet: not only is the solitary collaboration between Hawks and Brackett & Wilder, it's also the only instance of Hawks directing Barbara Stanwyck, which if anything makes even more obvious sense: the director had a marked tendency to trying to make the women in his films feel like they were just one of the boys, and Stanwyck was very probably the most masculine actress of the '30s and '40s. And under Hawks's guiding hand, she turned out one of the definitive performances of her entire career, though it speaks to the overwhelming quality of that career that her work in this film (for which she received the second of a woefully insufficient four Oscar nominations) wasn't even her best stuff in 1941 (for that, I turn you to The Lady Eve and one of the greatest comic performances that ever was or will be).

We'll get back to Stanwyck. Let's stick with Brackett & Wilder, because the scenario (which was also Oscar nominated) is thoroughly characteristic of those authors' tendency towards fancifully arbitrary urban fables, and their beloved mixture of the over-educated with the bawdy. Once upon a time, eight professors were holed up in New York, writing an encyclopedia; in 1941, that project had arrived in its ninth of a projected twelve years, close to the end of "S". Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) has only lately completed his entry on "slang", when an encounter with the garbage man (Allen Jenkins) reveals to him entirely by accident that nine years of seclusion have left him totally unable to understand any of the current street argot. A long day of research tromping around the city ends at a nightclub, where he's fascinated by the brassy language of featured singer Sugarpuss O'Shea (Stanwyck), whom he invites back to his office to take part in a roundtable discussion. What he doesn't know is that Sugarpuss is dating Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews), a mobster with the police hot on his tail, and they're looking for her now, too. No better place to hide out than a noble institute of study inhabited by seven bachelors and one widower, all of whom literally wouldn't know what to do with a gorgeous woman if they had her. That Potts is the most visibly disinterested in Sugarpuss's obvious physical charms means, of course, that he's going to be the one to fall in love with her, a development that she sensibly, if callously, ends up using to her own advantage.

Riffing lightly on the Grimms' "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" - the early giveaway is when Potts stands in front of a theater marquee advertising the Disney adaptation of that story - Ball of Fire is a fairy tale all right, though one filtered through the sophistication and grit of a big American city right in the breezy period before America entered World War II (the film premiered all of five days before the attack on Pearl Harbor), and the whirligig sense of cynical humor characteristic of its screenwriters. There's not really all that much depth to it: it's a breezy lark in which a whole mess of delightful character actors - S.Z. Sakall, Oskar Homolka, and Henry Travers are the most immediately recognisable, though Richard Haydn (another Disney connection: ten years later, he'd voice the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland) maybe has the most interesting of the seven supporting parts - react with charmingly soft-edged horniness, while Cooper bumbles around looking terrified and confused of everything, and demonstrates that being a big, lanky, strong-chinned all-American guy can be the most amazingly hilarious thing when you turn of the saintliness and determination that tend to accrue to him in his dramas and Frank Capra dramedies.

The script is a beautifully-constructed thing: at 111 minutes, it's bloated for a comedy of this era, but the stacking of one scene atop the last is so organically done that it never feels like anything happens that doesn't absolutely need too. Nor is anything wasted, with apparent throw-away moments looping back around like a whole aresenal of Chekhov's guns. Even the distinct identities of each professor - instead of Grumpy, Dopey, and Bashful, we have the geographer, the botanist, the anatomist - end up providing specific plot-important detail later on, as though Brackett & Wilder had made it their goal to do something meaningful with each of seven stock types.

And the story told through all the flawlessly-disciplined writing is pretty great, on top of it. Step far enough back, and it's just a romcom - but one that works so hard to get to the ending! We know from his future career that Wilder was a cynic and more than slightly misogynistic, and yet it's still an unexpected, bold move when he and Brackett allow Sugarpuss to remain unredeemed deep into the second half, even after she's had the sweet banter with her Pottsie and all the ingredients that would ordinarily fuel the de rigueur "oh no, I have mistreated the man I really love" revelation. She's sorry, but still enough of a survivalist to not actually regret anything. And that makes the fourth act where things finally come together all the more satisfying, while also giving Stanwyck a far more interesting character to play.

See? We're back to Stanwyck. And what an awe-inspiring place to be. This isn't a character in her wheelhouse: lines like "Oh, Greek philosophy! I got a set like this with a radio inside", directed to a stack of books, naturally suggest Jean Arthur in her "I'm not as flighty and dumb as you think I am" mode, or Ginger Rogers in her "I'm bored, why aren't we boning yet?" mode, and it's easy to imagine Ball of Fire with either of those actors; it's easy to imagine it still being a hell of a good movie. But what Stanwyck is up to is in some entirely different stratosphere. To begin with, there's the shocking respect she demands for Sugarpuss: an uneducated floozy the role may be, but this performer has no interest in playing a wide-eyed bimbo or a sexy yokel or even a flirt. There is, throughout the first half of the movie, a powerful sense that she's studying the professors every bit as much as they're studying her, and her fascination with their arcane knowledge is that of the tough survivor who has learned that no piece of knowledge should be discarded, just in case it turns out to be useful someday. She doesn't play up the dumb aspects of Sugarpuss, because in her hands, Sugarpuss isn't dumb. She's cagey - that shows up in her handling of the character's approach to sex, as well. Though the mechanics of the plot require her to lead the boys along, it's all in the facial expressions and elegantly flirty body language that clearly indicate how much Sugarpuss genuinely appreciates the attention being lavished upon her by these befuddled old men. Which, in turn, makes the gradual evolution of her loyalties in the film's second half easier to understand, and more plausible.

Ball of Fire would always be a solid comedy thanks to its script, and Hawks's appropriately busy direction - the number of different ways he manages to stage background business for the seven professors never ceases to be impressive. The writers' way of constantly juggling registers, rocking back and forth between smutty comedy and erudite gags about science and history, is gracefully met by the director's excellent grasp of the comic energy, which he's even willing to roll way back when necessary: there's a solid 20-minute stretch right after the halfway mark where the film isn't funny at all, but Hawks guides the actors so cleanly into the more grounded, sober-minded needs of moving the story forward that it simply doesn't register that it's going on. This is clearly the work of the man who directed Bringing Up Baby and Twentieth Century, which are both more maniacal and thus, I'm compelled to say, "better" than Ball of Fire, while sharing its primary strength of following the characters through the comedy rather than forcing it down upon them. Hawks strength in comedy stars by treating it like drama: by making sure that the whole thing works as a movie, with well-ordered physical relationships, with characters who have fully fleshed-out realities rather than just funny lines to say. Cooper's masculine crisis is of a wholly different order here than in his other 1941 film with Hawks, Sergeant York; but it is still a crisis, and Hawks still treats it as such, even if we're laughing at Cooper rather than feeling with him.

(It is not, maybe, quite as much the perfect follow-up to His Girl Friday, the director's comedy masterpiece from the previous year. Having perfected in that film the art of overlapping comic patter, it's a little disappointing that Hawks doesn't bring it back even once in this film).

So: great, deep, humane, well-built comedy. But throw in Stanwyck's unbelievable act of character creation, and that's when Ball of Fire becomes its best self: a daffy farce in which, without warning, we find this challenging and unpredictable figure, a woman who is palpably more self-aware and crafty and thoughtful than we are. There's only one place where the mask slips: in the film's only weak scene, Stanwyck simply cannot deal with the jazz number "Drum Boogie", which makes a fine showcase for legends Gene Krupa and Roy Eldridge, but a deeply unprepossessing introduction to Sugarpuss O'Shea, who comes off looking flat and uncertain and detached, three things she'll never be again; and Stanwyck joins the legions of terrific actors who simply don't grasp the mechanical requirements of lip-syncing. It's a bum note in an otherwise delicious, quicksilver performance, and all the more damaging because it's literally the first thing we see her do; but Stanwyck survives it just fine, and along with her, so does the whole damn movie, triumphing as one of the last great screwball comedies before war came along and started to ruin everything.

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CINDERELLAS WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE: THE PRETTIEST GIRL AT THE BALL

There's no inherent reason to compare a Korean horror film and an Australian feminist parable, but throughout the entirety of 2006's Cinderella, from director Bong Man-dae and screenwriter Son Kwang-soo, I couldn't keep myself from thinking about Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty from 2011 (whether I'd have made the same connections if I'd seen the films in chronological order, I leave as an exercise for some alternate universe incarnation of this blog). Both take key stories from Western European folklore and bend them until you can only see certain vague elements left in place, which are used to explore the way that folklore and contemporary media alike construct an idea of appropriate female behavior. Sleeping Beauty is, ultimately, an academic piece, while Cinderella is, ultimately, a genre film, and this difference speaks to the enormously different way that one watches them; but it's no secret that genre films have a special privilege to act as social commentary.

Regardless, Cinderella's appropriation of dribs and drabs from Charles Perrault's fairy tale is, for a very long time, almost totally invisible. Almost all of the most interesting and distinguishing elements of the film, in fact, start to show up in the last third, and I shall do my very best to indicate them without going full-on into spoilers, but the sensitive might want to have their parachutes ready to go; I'll let you know when to jump out of the review.

First and most visible of the film's tweaks to the basic formula is that our evident Cinderella and her mother are related by blood, and have what appears to be a splendid relationship. Hyeon-su (Shin Se-kyung) is a high school student, the beloved only daughter of Joon-hee (Do Ji-won), a well-known plastic surgeon. She's also cornered a perhaps ethically dubious market: the film doesn't really clarify the point, but Joon-hee's habit of working on her daughter's school friends feels a bit fucked-up on face of it. The girls, obsessed with finding ever more incremental ways of making themselves look prettier and prettier, don't seem to find anything wrong with it, and if anything, it appears to help with Hyeon-su's popularity among her peers. And at this point, I shall allow that the "seems" and"appears" aren't my way of being coy, but the film's way of being a bit foggy in execution. Structurally - especially once we get to the twists - Cinderella is something like a slasher film, and that goes to include the rather wan characterisation of everybody outside of the innermost circle of characters. In the early going, the movie is longer on cryptic mood than on narrative clarity, and when it starts to tilt in the other direction, there's not the foundation for it. And thus, instead of an ensemble, Cinderella has "that mass of girls who are friendly with Hyeon-su in some capacity".

The cryptic mood is awfully lovely, though. Quite without forewarning or explanation, the movie dives into random paranormal activity: Hyeon-su, carving a clay bust of Su-kyoung (Yoo Da-in), her friend who has just gone under Joon-hee's knife, accidentally slices the knife across the sculpture's cheek, and within seconds, Su-kyoung is bleeding from a nasty gash in the same place that simply appeared from nowhere. We're off the races from there, as the girls are visited by an apparent ghost in the form of - you'll never believe this - a pale girl with long black hair. And horrible things start happening to any of Hyeon-su's acquaintances who've had work done.

There are quite a few individually striking moments generously scattered all throughout Cinderella: the clay sculpting scene, a sequence in which a child is not quite murdered through suffocation, a face-painting party gone severely awry. Bong's ability to marry sickening horror imagery with a gauzy, damn near fantasy-like sense of mystery is utterly admirable. Where things fall apart is, well, where things come together: though more of its component parts are effective than otherwise, the film doesn't succeed in bringing all of those components into a cohesive whole. Cinderella ends up feeling like a collection of horrifying anecdotes centered on the idea of plastic surgery, rather than a fluid movie. The story is underdeveloped, and neither the director nor his game leads - both Shin and Do are quite effective, the latter brilliantly combining unfathomably cruelty with a genuinely tragic layer of maternal tenderness - do much to compensate for it.

But eventually, the film runs out the clock on trying to be crafty, and just about halfway through, we finally learn what's going on, kind of, in the form of a huge, inelegant backstory dump. And here's where the morbidly spoilerphobic must take their leave, though I shall do my level best to speak in vagaries.

Unlike the vast majority of contemporary horror and especially contemporary ghost stories, Cinderella becomes vastly more interesting and effective when it starts to explain things. It is, for one thing, only at this point that the grotesque irony of the title announces itself in all its glory, and we understand the film's critiques of the beauty industry and the individual women who would sacrifice anything for physical attractiveness; and also, on a more elemental level, it's here that the film finally indulges in the mythic angle of familial depravity that the phrase "a horror film version of Cinderella" implied from the beginning. The shocks, even the ones that we've more more or less figured out, hit hard, revealing a depth of nastiness in the characters and the society that supports them that's hard to prepare for, and the slow scare scenes, gratifyingly replacing the more generic jumps and jolts of the film to that point, are the best kind of inexorable. Despite the potential for elaborate, frequent gore effects, Bong holds off for maximum effectiveness as a punctuation mark, instead of a gross-out twist. Everything contributes to a bafflement of sympathy and identification; the implication of the final sequence unnervingly suggests that it's possible for someone to be so broken by emotional malnourishment that suicide in order to become a restless ghost could seem like a great bargain, since it allows for the paranormal toolkit to get revenge on everyone who has wronged you. This is not a film in which being wronged makes one victim, but just a different kind of aggressor.

As intriguing as Cinderella turns out to be in the end, I can't claim that even in its absolute best moments, it's an especially terrific example of Asian horror. The flip-side is that there's nothing that it does which makes it worse than the average of its genre; it's solid horror filmmaking that's not particularly inspired and could easily be trimmed into something that gets through its middle a little faster. It's very much the kind of movie that's best appreciated by people who've already liked things very similar to it, and I would not like to think of it as anybody's first experience with K-horror; but it's definitely got more than a little to recommend it to genre habitués.

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YOU NEVER OPEN YOUR MOUTH UNTIL YOU KNOW WHAT THE SHOT IS

A review requested by Andrew Yankes, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Here's something of a paradox: David Mamet doesn't know shit about directing films, if we're to judge from his 1991 book On Directing Films (as pristine an example I can name of the bizarre fixation that many theater professionals apparently have on cinema as good for only the most ascetic kind of realism), and yet he is absolutely the best director of David Mamet films that has ever been. This is possibly because the viciously lean aesthetic he preaches and practices is so uniquely well-suited to showing off the tightly machined, rhythmic dialogue upon which his entire career has been based. At any rate, nobody does Mamet like Mamet, and the other attempts to do so have been all over the map, quality-wise.

But we have the good fortune to now train our attention on maybe the best of all Mamet movies directed by somebody else, the 1992 adaptation of his 1984 Pulitzer-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross, as directed by James Foley.* In latter days, Foley has found his niche as a prolific director of episodes of House of Cards, and this speaks directly to his primary qualification for adapting an enormously popular play: he is a great facilitator who doesn't try to get in the way of material with his own personalising stamp. In the case of Glengarry, this means (on the good side of the ledger) that maximum attention is drawn to the words being spoken and the actors speaking them, and quite a spectacular marriage that proves to be; it also means (on the bad side) that the film is a bit stilted as a film: there some visual ideas that play and some that don't, but mostly there aren't really ideas at all, just a choppy series of close-ups where we might prefer a longer wide shot to allow the actors to throw lines and pacing back and forth, rather than have editor Howard Smith do all the work for them.

As an expression of a great fucking script, though, Glengarry really can't be beat. The piece itself is a modern classic: Mamet's revisiting of the themes of Death of a Salesman with the added disillusionment of the 1980s and enough profanity to choke a motherfucker. In a crappy little dive office in The Big City (played by New York, but not inherently required to be there), four men sweat and hustle and try to bilk middle class marks out of their retirement money with shady real estate deals: Ricky Roma (Al Pacino) is the current star of the office, though it takes very little effort to outsell George Aaronow (Alan Arkin), Dave Moss (Ed Harris), and especially Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon), an old-timer who lost his game and blusters around in a haze of tart-tongued flop sweat. We meet them on a dank, rainy night when a fire has been lit under their collective asses: Mitch and Murray, the owners of the office, have called in a motivational speaker (Alec Baldwin) - "Blake", he's called in the credits, but I don't believe he gets named onscreen - who has come with a sales contest: first place is a Cadillac El Dorado, second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you're fired. And with slimy little office manager John Williamson (Kevin Spacey) holding a precious set of promising sales leads away from everybody, the mood in the office is grim as a funeral while the salesmen try to scrape some money out of people with nothing better to do than listen to oily flim-flam on the phone.

Mamet re-wrote the play himself, adding the scene with Baldwin's character, and shifting around some scenes in the first half, and in the process made Glengarry Glen Ross, the screenplay, an even stronger piece of drama than the awfully good original. Much of that resides in the Baldwin scene, a fire-and-brimstone sermon from the depths of capitalism at its most merciless. "My name is fuck you" he snarls at one point, and it's a good laugh-line, well-delivered (in a cast that's strong across the board, it's no controversial opinion to propose that Baldwin is the clear stand-out). But it's also kind of true. This is indeed Fuck You, the embodied spirit of the American Dream at its most aggressive and savage, a tyrannical belief that winning is the only thing, and if you can only win by ripping your morality and humanity out at the roots in order to more effectively rape your way across the countryside, than all that says is that morality and humanity weren't things you needed in the first place. It's a caustic tirade that flawlessly sets the scene for all to follow: a bile-soaked depiction of white American men so deep in the toxic atmosphere of brutal economic competition that decades of post-War affluence have built up as the shining ideal of white American masculinity that they can't imagine anything outside of it.

The story has no heroes: when the pathetic achieve a measure of success, they only become the exact same profane bullies they had previously bemoaned, and when the pathetic continue to fail, they simply retrench into an ever more self-effacing space of servile diminishment. It's a scorched-earth approach to satire, but it works perfectly: if there is a less apologetic and more thorough dismantling of the basic precepts of American capitalism - work hard and you'll be rewarded, making the most money makes you the best person, success is manly and admirable - to have been filmed in the last 25 years, I cannot name it. And it's all enacted by the best cast you could imagine. As the most dynamic character and the one who most fully lives out the whole range of themes explored in the writing, Lemmon gave his best performance in the 32 years since The Apartment, which inevitably echoes here: one generation of the American Dream gone sour informing another in the body of a pleasant-looking old man with an ingratiating voice who lashes out like a wounded animal in humiliated anger that's visceral and unpleasant to watch. And even with all that, he's not clearly "better" than anybody else: the clenched guts and bitter line deliveries and sweaty tension delivered by Harris and Arkin, the calm masking a deep well of rage that marks one of Pacino's last great performances, and the clammy, unimpressed, small meanness of a pre-fame Spacey are all absolutely terrific, breathing life into Mamet's blackhearted fable and flawlessly dancing with his words.

And for enabling all of this, it's absolutely impossible to find fault with this Glengarry, which above all else does nothing wrong. In the first hour, in particular, it even does a lot right, in capturing the bright, gaudy lighting of the Chinese restaurant where the men do most of their hustling - a neon symbol of excessive, kitschy Americana that's omnipresent without being labored - and the claustrophobia of a horrid, wet night, the kind that's chilly outside and humid inside. But the film's sense of place is undone by Foley's highly segmented way of assembling it; this is a film that favors the individual line and close-up shot at the expense of the flow of the whole. It doesn't feel conventionally stagebound in the least: it's almost not stagebound enough, in fact, since the biggest liaibility the film has is failing to include multiple characters in the same frame at the same time. None of this comes even close to making Glengarry Glen Ross a poor experience: the material is brilliant and the actors will never be bettered. And it even passes my private "would this be every bit as good as a radio play?" test - the use of color and lighting are generally strong, and the sense of damp in the first half pervasive. It's not a masterpiece of cinema, though - a masterpiece of drama presented in a cinematic matrix, but not a masterpiece of cinema. And that is, however slightly, a disappointment.

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CINDERELLAS WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE: THIS LOVELY NIGHT WAS ONLY A FANTASY

The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella is, to begin with, an absurd anachronism. For anyone in the English-speaking world to try to put over an overlong spectacle-driven megamusical in 1976 was psychotic - the last hit film on that model was the five-year-old Fiddler on the Roof, and that was itself clearly already an aberration, two years after the very visible implosion of Paint Your Wagon and Hello, Dolly! - and The Slipper and the Rose didn't even have the advantage of being an adaptation of an established show. Though the cinematography is pure mid-'70s, everything else about the film is unreservedly old-fashioned. This is, in honesty, the primary locus of its charm: the clear sense, even some four decades after its creation, that this is all a bit hokey and warmly conservative, and it simply doesn't care what we think about that. It's too busy putting on a show in the most enormous, sloppy, ridiculous way. It is the movie version of a St. Bernard that just lumbers right on over and clambers up on your lap to lick your face.

The updated version of the classic fairy tale, written by brothers Robert M. Sherman and Richard B. Sherman, with some polishing done by Bryan Forbes - the former pair provided the film's soundtrack, the latter its direction - takes place in the 18th Century in a particularly British Ruritanian kingdom by the name of Euphrania. Here, the sturdy but easily rattled king (Michael Hordern) is busily trying to marry off his sole child, Prince Edward (Richard Chamberlain), but Edward has a rather snide disdain for the looks of the (presumably inbred) princesses his father has been sending him off to visit, and roughly declares that he'd rather marry for love than political convenience. This baffles or offends the whole court: his father and mother (Lally Bowers) have been tremendously happy in their arranged marriage, and, they, along with the Lord Chamberlain (Kenneth More) and the batty queen mother (Dame Edith Evans, in the last of her screen roles released during her life) loudly try to sing him down. The only person on his side is his valet and best friend, John (Christopher Gable), who knows the same pain: he's in love with a woman far above his station, whom he can never marry.

You know, the basic meat and potatoes of the Cinderella fairy tale.

After 19 minutes and two songs, we do finally meet Cinderella (Gemma Craven), returning from her father's funeral to learn that her stepmother (Margaret Lockwood, in her own final screen role, though she'd live another 14 years) and gorgeous but cruel stepsisters (Rosalind Ayres and Sherrie Hewson) are exploiting the letter of the dead man's will, though by no means the spirit, to rob Cinderella of her birthright and leave her at the status of unpaid housekeeper. This happens just before the king irritably announces a ball which is to find every woman of the nobility lining up to be thrown at the prince in a last-ditch effort to make him interested in anybody besides John. And the rest you know: Cinderella is aided by a curious woman (Annette Crosbie) who uses magic to help the girl in her chores, and eventually to attend the ball herself. She and the prince fall in love, she runs away, he hunts through the kingdom for her, we all leave happy.

Or, you know, not that. The film gave away the game by waiting so long to introduce its nominal protagonist: this version of the story is, weirdly, more interested with family-friendly court intrigue and the annoyances of dynastic politics than it is with fairy tale princesses. And so, after the ball is over, there's almost a solid hour of movie left that decides, inexplicably, to roll a whole theme of class bigotry into the story, and send Cinderella into willing exile so that Edward will marry for the best good of the kingdom. And all this realpolitik is, I want to point out, in the context of a story that also witnesses a magical woman turn ballet dancing mice into horses

It's different, anyway. And mostly, it's different in ways that demonstrate just how little actually happens in Charles Perrault's Cinderella that qualifies as drama. Even with its puffy opening sequence, the main part of The Slipper and the Rose still only gets us to about 80 minutes or so, out of an indefensibly indulgent 143 minute running time (the original U.S. release of this British production cut that down by 16 minutes: two songs - two of the better songs, actually - and some cute but largely irrelevant business for the fairy godmother). It's fascinatingly wrong-headed: this isn't a case of too much story stapled to a slender frame, it's a case of even the added story proving insufficient to hoist the running time up, so the filmmakers kept adding new wrinkles out of nowhere. It doesn't feel like a 143-minute film that got there through a lack of discipline and trimming; it feels like they wanted it to be 143 minutes, and kept adding acts till it got there.

That being said, for that first hour and twenty minutes, The Slipper and the Rose is a genuinely charming and likable variant on the well-told tale. The focus on the sullen prince and the desperate king is a weird shift, absolutely, but it draws attention away from how thoroughly dull Cinderella is in the source material and every traditional adaptation thereof. Some of the individual tweaks are even clever: e.g. the expanded role for the fairy godmother as a general helper sets up the mid-film twist that she's used up too much magic on Cinderella's behalf, and has to borrow more than her share to set up her goddaughter for the ball; hence the otherwise arbitrary midnight cutoff, which represents all the extra magic she was able to scrounge up. And any depiction in any Cinderella story of the stepsisters as attractive and fashionable helps to cushion the material's deeply broken notions of femininity.

Mostly, though, what works is the filmmaking itself, rather than the storytelling. Bryan Forbes was a better director than this project deserved, frankly, and he puts a lot more care into it than it needed. The film has an odd but totally effective addiction to wide shots: Forbes and cinematographer and Tony Imi use the full scale of the anamorphic frame to present crowd shots and big interior spaces, adding a distinct sense of grandeur and scale to the film; mixed with the '70s-style naturalism of the lighting and focus, it's physically present in a way that belies the general '60s superproduction tenor of most of what's going on otherwise. By stressing wide shots and using close-ups only as very conscious punction, the filmmakers emphasise the world of the story, rather like the script's attention to politicking over fairytale lovemaking. And the design team certainly built up a world worth emphasising: Raymond Simm's sets are plausible enough that the fantasy and fluffiness don't float away into the ether, but it's Julie Harris's costumes that really dominate the film. They rush right up to the edge of gaudy: the ball scenes resembling nothing as much as the carefully choreographed dancing of a display case of brightly-iced cupcakes. But that same sugar-sweet fanciness is entirely beguiling at the level of glossy fable; and this is, after all, Cinderella.

Beyond the look of the thing, the film enjoys a pretty terrific cast; with a blank role to play, Craven can't do much, but it's not her film. This movie belongs entirely to the grown-ups: the icy but still human Lockwood, the sputtering, lovable Hordern, the calm and stern Bowers, and chiefly and above all Evans, who plays the most generic role imaginable - the old lady has no idea what's going on, har har - but does so with the most infectious possible brio. It's caricature at it's absolute best, and Evans's performance is the most effortless kind of scene-stealing.

Really, the performances and style are so good that even with the leaden final hour, The Slipper and the Rose could still sparkle; the only thing holding it down to the level of generally charming trifle that's far more boring than it has any cause to be is, I hate to say, the songs by the Sherman brothers. So many delectable scores for Disney came out of those two minds! And yet the 12 songs here are pretty much just one banality after another: perfectly serviceable tunes matched to lyrics that are infinitely clever and proud of their twisty wordplay, without being actually funny; the love ballads are at least a touch more concrete than the prattle-heavy comic numbers, but they're also a bit treacly. Either way, the songs come off as a bit strained and brittle, and they're derivative in obvious ways from the Shermans' earlier, better-known, and just plain stronger songs: it doesn't help that the odd "well, let's go ahead and talk about the class struggle" tune "Position and Positioning" steals its choreography straight from "Step In Time" from Mary Poppins, in case anybody had made it that far into the film without flashing back to the Shermans' most iconic musical.

Snip out the songs, though, and The Slipper and the Rose is a cutely off-kilter riff on a familiar story, with just enough peculiar fascination with the unexplored ramifications of that story to feel like its own thing. Obviously, "snip out the songs" is about as bad a thing as anybody could say about a feature-length musical; but the vivid craftsmanship and thoroughly delightful character acting is enough to make a surprisingly enjoyable experience out of the film, even as it fails what theoretically ought to be its most basic test.

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CINDERELLAS WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE: SUCH FOL-DE-ROL AND FIDDLE-DEE-DEE

Discussions of the 1957 telefilm Cinderella tend to hinge on its role in the developing stardom of 21-year-old Julie Andrews; or build themselves around its screening history, nodding to the fact that it was considered lost for many years before the kinescope recording of its live broadcast on 31 March, 1957 was rediscovered. And they tend to do so in ways that make it mostly clear that the person doing the discussing would rather not have to take too close a look at the film itself. This is not unreasonable. It would be a lie to call Cinderella a poor piece of television, and there's some genuine ambition to its staging, given the circumstances of its production. But it's also the case that it's a bit snoozy and too light for its own good; the core story of Cinderella is already closer to a sustained anecdote than a narrative that can support a feature, and not much about this particular treatment addresses that problem.

We'll get to Andrews and the realities of live television production in '57 soon enough, I promise, but I'm not done complaining. Cinderella was the ninth musical by lyricist and book author Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Richard Rodgers; it was, moreover, only the second (and final) of their collaborations not to begin its life as a stage musical, after the 1945 theatrical film Stage Fair. It was not their plan to move to TV; they were approached by CBS, who had stared with great envy at NBC's great success in staging the 1954 musical Peter Pan live as part of their monthly series Producer's Showcase, once in 1955, once in '56 (neither of these is the "canonical" telefilm starring Mary Martin, though she played Peter Pan in both airings - that would be the live broadcast from 1960, which was recorded to videotape, and is thus now available in full color). Hoping to trump their rival network, CBS didn't merely want to show a live version of a popular show; they wanted a brand new musical created by the biggest names in musical theater. Rodgers & Hammerstein agreed, though it is generally said that they did so mostly to have a chance to work with Andrews, who was busy at that time with the original Broadway run of My Fair Lady. Regardless of their motivations, it worked out well for CBS: Cinderella is estimated to have had an audience of 107 million viewers, making it the most-watched program in the history of American television up to that point. Depending on whose number you trust, it still holds that record for a non-Super Bowl broadcast.

And because it was so popular on a level which cannot be conceived of in the current pop culture landscape - more individuals watched Cinderella than there were tickets sold to Avatar, and they all watched at the exact same time - it can surely survive my pointing out that it's really not a very good musical. I maintain - as do many others - that the career of Rodgers & Hammerstein is an exercise in diminishing returns: they peaked with their first two collaborations, Oklahoma! and Carousel, and following Cinderella, they only wrote Flower Drum Song, a show that has virtually no modern-day defenders, and The Sound of Music, whose positive reputation rests almost exclusively on the 1965 movie that did a hell of a lot of work to fix the show. By 1957, I mean to say, the gas had largely run out of the tank; the music in Cinderella is harmless and totally inoffensive, but it's light on memorable or particularly high-impact songs. "In My Own Little Corner", a largely typical "I Want" song, is the closest the show has to an iconic number, and it's not at all a triumph on par with "People Will Say We're in Love", or "I'm in Love with a Wonderful Guy", or "Hello, Young Lovers". Or even the songs they wrote that don't have "love" in the title. Otherwise, the bulk of the music is brightly paced and pleasant, and the lyrics offer up some quips about which the nicest I can think to say is that they are more amusing than labored. Given that it is, at heart, a program for parents to watch with their children, innocuous songs aren't any kind of mortal sin. But given that this was the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical to premiere in the same calendar year that The Music Man and West Side Story opened, it's hard not to feel like it's lacking in ambition and depth.

The same is true, if not indeed truer, of the teleplay by Hammerstein, which largely replicates the standard beats of the story, while replacing any of its bitterness and sorrow with blowsy comedy. Then as now, the definitive Cinderella was the 1950 Disney film, which had the same slapstick ugly stepsisters that Kaye Ballard and Alice Ghostley play to such frivolous extremes (fair's fair: the conception of those characters is a little whiffy, but Ballard and Ghostley are absolutely terrific at executing what they've been tasked with doing), but paired with with a wicked stepmother of glacially still cruelty, a genuine threat to the long-term happiness of Cinderella and her dreams. Hammerstein makes her every bit as broad a caricature as her daughters, and things aren't helped by the one outright misstep of a generally posh assortment of costumes designed by Jean Eckhart, when the character is introduced with actor Ilka Chase gamely wearing what appears to be a flattened lampshade on her head.

This is all to say, this Cinderella has absolutely no bite: it's charming and achingly shallow. The story already trends in that direction (of all the major European fairy tales, it has the most limited stakes: "So this girl wants to marry a prince." "...And?" "And, well, she does. He finds her because she dropped a shoe."), and late-period Hammerstein readily gives into that.

Still and all, it's a charming enough thing to watch, in part because it is breathlessly short - 76 minutes once you take out the original commercial breaks. That leaves just enough time to marvel at the grace with which director Ralph Nelson uses visual flourishes that must have been damned complicated to execute in a fairly small studio filled with large sets and huge ensembles of extras. And all of it done totally live! It would have been forgivable if the whole thing had been at the blunt level of the dress transformation, carried off by the banal expedient of focusing the camera on Edie Adams's sly fairy godmother while Andrews quickly changed just off to the left. Instead, the film is full of gliding tracking shots, unexpected high and low angles, and some nuanced, shapely lighting that doesn't at all read as "1950s television", with its characteristic tendency towards bright flatness. It's a real pity that the only version of the show to survive is in black and white; as lavish as the camera is in floating through the big sets, I have to imagine that seeing them in full color must have been a real treat.

The other reason to watch, of course, is Julie Andrews. Her movie debut was (inexplicably) seven years in the future, but she'd already enjoyed two major stage successes, with The Boy Friend and My Fair Lady, and in this role which was written expressly to show off her talents, she scored an absolute triumph. Everything that anyone ever loved about her is fully-formed: the upbeat optimism, but also the twisted internal wistfulness. Without her, "In My Own Little Corner" could easily fly off into insipid cheeriness; and she is solely responsible for anchoring the love duet "Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?" not merely from the songwriters' sentimentality, but from her watery Prince, played by Jon Cypher (an eerily prophetic surname). Her voice is strong and penetrating enough to break through the hissy limitations of '50s TV sound recording, but she never sacrifices the delicacy of any individual moment. The solitary problem with her performance isn't even her fault: she was hit with too much pancake makeup and has a tendency to look a bit waxy in the earlier scenes. Ignore that (and it's only polite that you should), and what remains is a tremendously confident performance of quiet, shy yearning, as perfect a star-is-born moment as you could ever hope to find, except that she was kind of a star already. Cinderella is, throughout, a little empty-headed and gossamer-thin, but the presence of Andrews makes it... not essential, no, I can't go that far. But it is certainly worth anybody's time.

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SOMETHING WILD

A review requested by Scott D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

I say this as someone born 12 years later, but it's probably not possible for anyone who wasn't around in 1969 to genuinely grasp the enormity of The Wild Bunch upon its initial release. We can bone up on the state of the Western and Hollywood filmmaking generally prior to that, and appreciate what a massive gap there is between that tradition and this film, but we can't truly appreciate what an unprecedented step forward it was. Thanks in great part to this very film, the "Death of the Wild West" genre sprouted up all over the 1970s up to the point where most Westerns made in the last 45 years explicitly or implicitly make that their subject, so we can't be quite as amazed by this film's angry and full-blooded commitment to what was, at the time, a fairly unexplored time period; screen violence has gone beyond even the maddest excesses of director Sam Peckinpah's blood-soaked career.

And yet, even as a spectacular victim of its own success, The Wild Bunch retains a primitive, raw, vulgarly masculine power that leaves it powerful in all the right ways, and surprisingly un-dated. But then, that's not necessarily a coincidence. One of the most important developments in the history of American film was the abandonment, in 1968, of the old Production Code in favor of the MPAA rating system. It was the end point of an evolution that stretched from Otto Preminger provocatively stuffing that filthy word "virgin" into" 1953's The Moon Is Blue, through Alfred Hitchcock's structurally audacious murder of Janet Leigh in a show in 1960's Psycho, up to the storm of bullets that closed Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. In the wake of that film, the MPAA basically gave up and conceded that adults would make films for other adults no matter what the censors had to say about it. Exactly where we set the line that divides "modern cinema" from "classic cinema", assuming we want to be that arbitrary, is debatable, but the first wave of films to fully take advantage of this previously unimaginable freedom in 1969 are fully and truly Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. And The Wild Bunch was not merely part of this wave, it was arguably at the vanguard of it; it was the sacred avatar of Movie Violence, even as Midnight Cowboy, released in the same summer, was the avatar of Movie Sex.

That is to say, we have in The Wild Bunch the film that taught the American film industry how to depict violence. And oh! oh! the skill and intensity and creativity of that violence cannot possibly be overstated. It is as bold and radical an expansion of the climax of Bonnie and Clyde as that film was from a Three Stooges skit. Gunshots beller on the soundtrack with confusing, hectic rage; editor Lou Lombardo dashes from shot to shot in some of the most feverish editing that had been seen anywhere in the world up to that point, cutting between images with no clear intention, passing by exploding squibs so quickly that all we can register is the bluntness of the red, barely allowing us to get a sense of which characters are where. The film practically opens with one such scene, and it effectively closes with another; the second is still a jaw-dropping sequence even generations later, going on for what seems like an eternity of noise and visual chaos and death. In later years, as the film became a lightning rod for controversy, Peckinpah clarified that he'd intended for the sheer volume and intensity of the violence to be a disorienting turn-off, his way of re-acquainting an audience that watched Vietnam on the nightly news with the fleshy, bloody hell of gunshots and killing; he also conceded that he plainly had failed in that goal, given the widespread adoration of the action in The Wild Bunch as exhilarating by those who loved it, and condemnation as exploitative by those who didn't. But this is, I think, an example of the audience failing the film and not the other way around - the way that the gun battles are slashed together, with the fury of a whirlwind and an angry focus on explosive moments of death and suffering, is nothing so much as the film itself twisting and writing, trying to rip itself into pieces before our eyes. Obviously it is possible to find all of this exciting: people have been since 1969. But for myself, I can only find it hellish and brutal.

Those are the two best adjectives to describe the bulk of The Wild Bunch, which notwithstanding its reputation as the movie with the violence, is mostly a character study of an old gunslinger, Pike Bishop (William Holden), the gang he's working with on the One Last Job they pick up while hiding out in Mexico, and his former partner, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), hired by the railroads to track Pike's wild bunch down and bring them back. Preferably dead. Antiheroes being the hot new thing in 1969, it's not surprising that Pike is a rather bleak and nasty fellow, without even the charisma that Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway brought to Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker; Holden was more than capable of playing a vicious bastard when he had to; it was maybe even what he was best at, going as far back as his coming-out year in 1950, with the sardonic asshole he played in Sunset Blvd. registering far more deeply than his charming newspaperman in Born Yesterday. Here in The Wild Bunch, he barks and snaps, fixing his leathery face in a perpetual grimace - when he laughs giddily in one scene, it's stunning and almost grotesque, even in its warmth - and asks for none of our sympathy. He even rejects it, perhaps, when he takes glee in musing about how money is more important than family, or when he treats the usual Western topics of being true to your word and having dignity as a man by shouting the words out in a bullying rage.

There are other great performances in the film that persuasively argue that it's an indictment of the era whose death it depicts, and nervous condemnation of the kind of men who drove it; Ernest Borgnine, as Pike's second-in-command Dutch Engstrom, seems congenitally incapable of wearing a non-threatening expression for virtually all of the film. But Holden is the film's heart; its flinty, curdled, black heart. He is our Great Western Hero, with a fixed moral code and a thousand-yard stare of haunted nobility, and no matter how clearly Peckinpah prefers his killers to have a strong sense of duty, instead of the randomly violent gangs that implicitly take over (the film begins with children in an act of capricious, needless cruelty - animals were harmed in the making of this movie - and that sense that the Old West is giving way to a generation given to more barbarism, not less, echoes over the whole thing); no matter how much depth and nuance is granted to Pike and Deke in the flashback scenes that were cut after the film's premiere and not restored until 2002; through it all, Peckinpah remains clear-eyed about the basic brutality of his protagonists and the lives they lead. He sympathises with them as men without forgiving them their sins.

The overriding sense of The Wild Bunch is not, however, nihilism; nor moral outrage. It is a sense of profound weariness. The longueurs between action, the drooping faces of the cast, the sand-blasted color palette in Lucien Ballard's cinematography, all of these contribute to that sense. This is a film about something old and exhausted collapsing and passing away, presented objectively and without sentiment in either direction. Some Westerns eulogise this passing as a sorry loss of a braver and more manly sensibility; some sweep away the old order as the savagery that had to be abandoned if civilisation was to take over. The Wild Bunch does neither: it bluntly supposes that the violent nature of men continues to perpetuate itself, even as one generation's particular form of violence gives way to the next. It's not a comforting film in the least, nor is it hopeful. But it reflects a society that hadn't all that much reason to hope, and it does so with a potency that still hits hard almost a half-century later.

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THE DEVIL'S MUSIC

A review requested by Travis Neeley, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

By 1974, Brian De Palma had seven features under his belt, with the seventh, 1973's Sisters, having kicked off his legendary run of Hitchcock riffs. So we cannot possibly call Phantom of the Paradise, the director's eighth feature, made when he was 33, the work of a fresh and untried voice. But that's kind of exactly the way it feels: like an explosive volley from the id of some mad, unfocused genius who wanted to puke up some kind of incredibly personal and idiosyncratic new cinema onto the screen without formal training or any sense what he could and couldn't get away with. When that kind of untrammeled creativity meets with the relative classicism and polish of someone with De Palma's professional background, the results are formidable indeed: it's one of those miraculous "only in the '70s" movies that required the full faith and backing of a major studio despite how transparently the massively strange product was going to be a flop. Which it was, everywhere, except for the city of Winnipeg.

The title clues us in that this is to be, at some level, a dressed-up adaptation of Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera; it's also clear within minutes of the film's start that it's going to combine that story with the evergreen Faust legend (and this is does fairly well, though there's a stretch in the second act where the Phantom elements feel rather indifferently tacked-on). We are told in an opening narration by none other than Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone fame that the music world, circa 1974, is totally dominated by the machinations of Swan (Paul Williams), a genius label owner and manager with the power to create or destroy any music artist he wants. His current favorites are the immensely popular '50s throwback boy band the Juicy Fruits, whom he plans to use as the main act at the opening of his extraordinary new club, the Paradise. And one day after a Juicy Fruits rehearsal, he hears exactly the piece of music he wants them to play at that most august event: an ambitious cantata adapting the Faust legend into the modern day, written by earnest nerd Winslow Leach (William Finley). Swan has his hatchet man, Philbin (George Memmoli) promise a recording contract to Winslow, in order to acquire the music, but this is a fake-out; when Winslow shows up demanding an audience with Swan, he's framed as a drug dealer and sent to Sing Sing.

Eventually he escapes, and in an attempt to disrupt Swan's plans, he falls afoul of a record press, mangling his face and vocal cords. This doesn't slow down his attempts to stop the Paradise from opening; he steals a costume and skulks around, sabotaging whatever he can from the shadows. Swan quickly assumes it's easier to join forces than fight this phantom, and offers Winslow a contract, larded up with curiously Satanic passages about the ownership of souls. Given the chance to regain control of his Faust, Winslow leaps for it, and also uses it as an opportunity to give the pretty back-up singer Phoenix (Jessica Harper) a chance to have her wonderful voice give life to his music. But Swan, being the Devil, has plenty of double-crosses left to play, and the opening of the Paradise will still be on his terms, no matter what control Winslow thinks he has.

Recasting Phantom - or at least the 1943 Universal pictures adaptation of the book - as a satire of the 1970s music industry is already a bit batty, and it's the most levelheaded thing that De Palma's film ever does. Phantom of the Paradise is equal parts compendium of the director's interests as a cinephile - Touch of Evil and (naturally) Psycho are among the classics to be explicitly referenced - and showcase for the young Turk's visual flair. That same Touch of Evil homage doubles-down on Orson Welles by including two long tracking shots, presented side-by-side in split-screen, and occasionally showing the same action from different angles; it's the moment that most expressly looks forward to the De Palma of the future in a film that otherwise feels more like some unimaginable combination of Ken Russell and Peter Bogdanovich. Throughout, the director and cinematographer Larry Pizer favor extravagantly wide lenses, giving even the most innocuous moments a bulbous exaggeration that leaves the whole thing feeling utterly demented.

It doesn't take camera trickery to make Phantom of the Paradise look demented, though; the film's design is, as a whole, thoroughly crazed, creating a world of weird interior spaces that have one foot in reality and one foot in an acid trip, populated by some dazzlingly colorful make-up and costume designs slapped onto the game actors. And some of the actors don't even need that: in the central roles, Finley and Williams look like caricatures come to life, with the former's wild-eyed expressions and the latter's compact build and scrunched-up facial features (not to mention his snake-baby voice) making instant, profound impressions even before the plot kicks in.

The oddball imagery fits perfectly with the loopy sense of humor that De Palma uses to bring his unclassifiable hybrid of horror, parody, satire, and head comedy to life. It's probably not fair to say that Phantom of the Paradise is as-such funny; the closest it comes to outright jokes are the songs generously scattered throughout it, all of them written by Williams in a series of pastiches on '50s dead boyfriend anthems, surf rock tributes to cars, theatrical glam rock, and moony singer-songwriter ballads (and then there's the matter of the end-credits tune, "The Hell of It", a menacing combination of acerbic character assassination and jaunty piano riffs from out of the Old West) - a delightful soundtrack all told, one that's proudly campy and sly.

But I was about to talk about the comedy in the film, or anyway the lack of it. Phantom of the Paradise isn't really comic; but it's unstintingly absurd, far too random and lighthearted to function as any sort of horror, no matter how hard the images and plot nudge us in that direction. It's impossible to pin it down to genre, so even as the plot clicks out in exactly the way you assume it will (until it goes Surrealist in the last third), there's never a chance to get out ahead of the film. It always darts in its own direction, and watching it is a constant effort to keep up with its inventive insanity.

It's bravura cinematic spectacle with just enough literary antecedent and social commentary that it doesn't come across as shallow as the word "spectacle" implies. But the spectacle is still pretty wonderful: it's as wild and yet consistent in its aesthetics as anything I've seen of De Palma's (which is, to be fair, not very much), and certainly more exhilarating than some of his more iconic but also more containable efforts. It is silly and stylish in exactly the right measures, a hugely fun exercise in demented excess that launches acidic critiques at everything it can, without ever feeling the slightest bit sour. If it sometimes allows its twitchy weirdness to serve as its own justification, well, it works hard to earn that weirdness, and it's enormously satisfying to watch it sprawl out over the film's unrelenting 92 minutes.

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