Month: May 2021

Well, now, this was fun!

Set in 1929, this farce stars Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon as “Joe” and “Jerry” respectively, a pair of struggling Chicago musicians. They’re managing to scrape by with a regular gig at a speakeasy, but just barely – so when the speakeasy is raided, they’re in desperate straits, willing to accept any work – even a gig where they would have to drive an hour outside the city. However, the garage where they’re retrieving the car they’ve borrowed for the occasion is owned by a mob boss,
“Toothpick Charlie” (George E. Stone), and currently in conflict with another mob boss named “Spats Columbo” (George Raft) – and while Joe and Jerry are loading the car, Spats and his men drop by to shoot down Toothpick Charlie. Joe and Jerry just manage to escape, but not without Spats noticing – which means Joe and Jerry are now mob targets, and Spats’ men will be hunting for them. …However, Joe remembered that there’s another gig he heard about, where an all-woman band was looking for a pair of musicians for a three-week gig in Florida, and they’re leaving town that night….

And thus Joe and Jerry turn themselves into “Josephine” and “Daphne” (Jerry doesn’t like “Geraldine”, he says) and report for duty just as “Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators” are boarding the train. Jerry struggles mightily to resist the temptation of the other comely women in the band – particularly “Sugar Kane” (Marilyn Monroe), the band’s ukulele player and singer. Joe issues Jerry many warnings en route to “just keep telling yourself, ‘I’m a girl’!”, but soon his head is also turned by Ms. Kane, especially when she confesses to “Josephine” that tenor sax players (like Joe) are her weak spot.

But what Sugar really wants is to marry a millionaire, she tells “Josephine” and “Daphne”. And luckily the resort where they’re heading should be host to scores of them, so she’ll be doing a little manhunting while they’re on location. Joe takes careful note of the things Sugar tells “Josephine” about what her dream man would be like – so he can later disguise himself as “Junior”, heir to the Shell Oil fortune, and “accidentally” meet her at the resort. Jerry, meanwhile, has caught the eye of another millionaire, Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), who proves to be a very ardent suitor – luring “Daphne” with a ride on his yacht, sending “Daphne” huge sprays of flowers and sending her gifts, goosing her in the elevator. Joe asks Jerry to keep egging Osgood on – the gifts for “Daphne” can get regifted to Sugar as part of Joe’s charade as “Junior”. But then things come to something of a startling head when Osgood proposes to Daphne one night – and Jerry seriously considers it, as even a hour-long sham marriage would give him some financial security. And just as Joe and Jerry are discussing that – they discover that Spats has come to that same resort, on a convention for “The Friends Of Italian Opera”.

So there are parts of this which reminded me of the 1930s screwball comedies and a couple bits that felt straight out of the Marx Brothers. Joe and Jerry’s portrayal of “Josephine” and “Daphne” also reminded me of the 1970s sitcom Bosom Buddies; but not in a good way, I’m afraid. Joe and Jerry (or Curtis and Lemmon) play Josephine and Daphne as kind of snooty old maids with slightly dowdy dresses and overly-genteel manners. It’s definitely for laughs, and I get that – but just like when I was a kid and grumbled that “how could anyone not tell that that’s Tom Hanks in a dress”, I also didn’t buy that no one spotted Joe and Jerry for being the men they were. Some Like It Hot goes a little further, even, with a bell boy who keeps trying to hit on “Josephine”; and again, I have no idea how he didn’t know.

But that is the only nit I could pick, really, and it’s the kind of thing that’s so nit-picky it’s unfair. Most of the comedy comes not from playing with gender stereotypes, but rather from the increasingly-complicated deception Joe and Jerry are keeping up. Many scenes see Joe dressed as “Junior” taking his leave of Sugar – and then sprinting to “Josephine’s” hotel room so he can be dragged up enough for when Sugar comes to dish about her date. There’s also a sequence with “Daphne” out on the town with Osgood – so “Junior” can borrow his yacht and pass it off as his own to Sugar – where Jerry gradually goes from dancing a rather unenthusiastic and stiff tango with Osgood to really, really getting into it as the night goes on.

It’s also nice to note that a lot of the jokes have aged well, probably because the movie avoid the whole “women are like this and men are like that” kind of joking it could have gone for, and focuses instead on the fallout of the unique situation Joe and Jerry have put themselves into. And it doesn’t make fun of Joe and Jerry – there are almost no “haha men dressed as women isn’t that silly” jokes, instead it’s all about various complications like “can I get into the wig on time” or “oh crap I forgot to take the heels off” or such. It also has one of the single best last lines of any movie – a line which director Billy Wilder was just using as a placeholder at first because he thought they could come up with something better. But that line can’t be topped.

So, I admit up front – I didn’t like this. And as is my wont, it’s because of the story it told. However, I thought at first that the reason I didn’t like it was that it had somehow taken all the things I’d liked about The 400 Blows and then done the opposite; upon reflection, though, I think something a little different.

As is probably no surprise, our lead is a pickpocket. Michel (Martin LaSalle) is a young Parisian man, living in a cramped attic garret and finding his own pocket money by helping himself to others’. His buddy Jacques (Pierre Leymarie) keeps urging him to get a normal job – going so far as to set Michel up on interviews – and the local Chief Police Inspector (Jean Pélégri) keeps sniffing around, suspicious of Michel but never able to find enough evidence. Michel’s ailing mother (Dolly Scal) thinks the sun rises and sets on him, but Michel is too reluctant to visit, leaving money for her instead with her pretty neighbor Jeanne (Marika Green). Michel has tried to break the habit several times, but is compelled to keep stealing – and soon catches the eye of two other pickpocketers, who teach him some of their own techniques and suggest the three of them team up.

One of the things I liked about The 400 Blows is the matter-of-fact tone it took; here, we have instead a near-constant narration track, either a confession or an apologia from Michel, and it kept bothering me – because I bought none of it. Michel ultimately is one of those people who believe that they’re too smart or too unique or to “special” for ordinary work – he says as much to the Chief Inspector at one point – and believes that this gives him free rein to help himself to others’ money. Don’t blame Michel for his crimes – blame God for making Michel such a good pickpocket!

Bleah.

I wrestled with how to write this review for a while – I came away from it not liking Michel on a gut level, and that kept me from getting into the film, no matter how well-shot it was. And there are some beautifully-choreographed shots – there’s a whole sequence where Michel and his two pickpocket accomplices wander amidst the crowds at a train station, meticulously and methodically picking other people’s pockets and clandestinely handing the spoils off to each other. With one victim, they even put the now-empty wallet back in the dude’s pocket.

I did find one technical point that bothered me – the sound design seemed to emphasize people’s footsteps to an unusually noticeable level, to the point that I could tell they were all faked. For a while I thought that this was what bothered me about the film, more so than Michel – but I kept coming back to just plain not liking Michel. And I finally realized why – for four years, we were living with a president who was an even bigger narcissist, and I think I may simply have had my fill of people who think that they are Too Special To Follow The Rules or are More Important Than Anyone Else.

I grant that 1959 is not 2021, and director Robert Bresson couldn’t have forseen Trumpism. But there it is.

When this film ended, I made a confused noise. Roommate Russ asked me about it, and when I explained myself, he just chuckled and said “Welcome to the French New Wave.”

He explained a bit. The 400 Blows is an early example of this French film movement – one that sought to shake up the French film industry through innovation in techniques as well as subject matter. Changing editing and narrative conventions were a particular focus, Roommate Russ said – the filmmakers made no bones about the fact that film was make-believe, and would think nothing of using jump cuts, super-long tracking shots, random scenes with the extras that just seemed cool at the time, or actors addressing the camera, or just wordlessly staring into it. The bit that confused me was that the story I’d been following throughout seemed to suddenly and arbitrarily stop, as opposed to giving me a more conventional ending.

Mind you, I mightn’t have noticed – or cared – that this story just sort of ended if everything that preceded that ending hadn’t captivated me as much. It’s the story of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a rough-around-the-edges Parisian boy of about twelve or thirteen. Antoine is something of a lackluster student who frequently locks horns with a particularly mean teacher (Guy Delcombe), and then scolded by his less-than-supportive parents (Albert Rémy and Claire Maurier). His behavior degrades from school pranks to playing hooky to outright theft, and by the end he’s sent off to a reform school, where his mother visits him only once to tell him that she and his stepfather are washing their hands of him.

I know that sounds like a Teen Melodrama, but on the contrary – what captivated me is how realistic and nuanced the story was. Antoine isn’t the only kid catching flak from their teacher, and he’s not even the only kid acting up – there’s an amusing scene where an entire classroom of bored students all clown around and act up when their teacher turns to write on the board, all of them stopping instantly when he turns back to them. Or another whole sequence where the gym teacher is leading the whole class out on a job through the surrounding Paris streets; and in a long overhead tracking shot, we watch as at every streetcorner or street crossing, two or three kids each slip away from the pack to go cavort on their own. By the end of the sequence our gym teacher’s pack of about 30 kids has dwindled down to a little group of six.

Antoine’s parents are also presented as less-than-ideal – but aren’t abusive or cruel. Just…frustrated with him, and with their lives. They live in a cramped apartment – but it’s clean. Stepfather Julien is trying to do good, he’s trying to bond with Antoine, and mother Gilberte is also trying to help things out with a part-time job – but Julien’s job is an entry-level grind, and Gilberte is a former teen mother who’s getting bitter. Even so, there’s a sweet scene where the whole family goes to a movie together and has a fantastic time, the ongoing family squabbles temporarily forgotten. No one in this family is an outright monster; they’re just ordinary people who’ve been dealt bad hands and who are finding they aren’t able to work with them as well as they’d hoped.

The performances are also nuanced and realistic – especially Léaud as Antoine. There’s a sequence where he’s in the reform school and his counselor has asked him to tell his story – and we get a whole lot of Antoine’s backstory in a sequence of clipped-together monologues, where we finally learn that Gilberte has been borderline neglectful and that Antoine’s also been misbehaving for a good while prior to our tale. And Léaud delivers it all in a matter-of-fact, almost bored fashion; he’d rather lie to his parents because that’s what they expect, school’s boring so he skips, it is what it is, meh. The only time we see Antoine look really upset is when his best friend René (Patrick Auffay) tries to visit him in the reform school – the security guard won’t let René in, so they’re stuck forlornly looking at each other through the glass doors before the guard shoos René off.

So I was invested in Antoine and his story, and that’s why the abrupt ending felt all the more jarring.

(Incidentally, a fun fact – the title The 400 Blows is an overly-literal translation of the actual French title Les Quatre Cents Coups, which refers to a French expression (“faire les quatre cents coups“) which roughly translates into “Raising Hell”. The original “English” name chosen for the film was Wild Oats, but the distributor insisted on that more literal, if baffling, translation instead.)

In a weird way, this film was almost like Hitchcock’s clap back against the initial response to Vertigo. His 1958 film struggled at the box office; audiences found it to be slow-paced and a little confusing, with a depressing ending and a mystery that got solved with nearly a third of the movie left to go. With this film, you can almost hear Hitchcock grumbling: “Fine, then, we’ll give y’all lots of action, lots of plot twists, a last-minute save and a honeymoon at the end. So there.” He even terminated his working relationship with Jimmy Stewart over fears that audiences hadn’t bought Stewart as a leading man any more. I can’t say for certain whether Hitchcock was right about why Vertigo didn’t seem to work at the time….but, I have to say, I did like North by Northwest better.

It’s still kind of silly, but in a fun way. Cary Grant is “Roger Thornhill”, an advertising executive caught up in an espionage caper through a sheer case of mistaken identity. One minute he’s meeting some clients for after-work cocktails at the Plaza, and the next minute, two thugs are hauling him off to Westchester at gunpoint and dragging him to a mansion where an oily British man is calling him “George Kaplan” and asking for his cooperation. When Thornhill – understandably – protests that he’s the wrong guy, the two thugs attempt to kill him. He survives, and escapes – but “Philip Vandamm” (James Mason) and his crew have him in their sights, framing him for murder and then staging their own manhunt alongside the police as Thornhill flees across the country, dodging policemen, assassins with switchblades, tanker trucks, and crop duster airplanes. Along the way, he is sometimes helped – and sometimes hindered – by the pretty Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who may be in league with Vandamm – but also may not be. And the action stays at a fever pitch until the very end, as Kendall, Thornhill and Vandamm are chasing each other across the tops of the Mount Rushmore heads.

There’s also some business about an Aztec statue with microfilm hidden inside it, and some FBI espionage undercover stuff, but that barely registered with me – because it didn’t really need to. It’s the very definition of a Hitchcock MacGuffin – the thing that is the excuse for the whole rest of the story to happen. We don’t even learn about the microfilm until well into the plot, but by that time we’ve been following Thornhill on his race to Figure Stuff Out for long enough that we’re hooked. The charismatic Cary Grant is part of why; he’s not in screwball comedy mode, but he’s got enough of a whiff of it that I was drawn in and wanted to follow along to find out what the heck was happening. I also got a kick out of how forward Eve Kendall was during her first meeting with Thornhill – for the 1950s she is pretty darn racy. She also turns out to be a good deal more than just the pretty damsel who gets swept up into things – she’s got skin and a brain in the game, and ultimately I ended up liking her a lot more than other Hitchcock heroines.

So – yeah, I guess I’m one of the unwashed philistines Hitchcock was trying to placate after Vertigo. I’m comfortable with that.

Oh, bleah. Okay, yes, this film has come cultural/historical/whatever significance – with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin on hand, it’s considered an early “Rat Pack” film – and the cast gives good performances, but I found the plot irretrievably soapy and wasn’t interested at all.

Sinatra is “Dave Hirsh”, a World War II Vet and middling-successful writer – he’s written two books and wrote for Stars and Stripes, but blew a lot of the money on wine, women and song. At the top of the film, he’s waking up from a bender on a bus en route to his Indiana hometown; his drinking buddies thought it’d be hysterical to send him there, and the cocktail waitress Ginny who’d taken a shine to him (Shirley MacLaine) has joined him. Dave swore he’d never return, but decides to spend at least a few days catching up with folks – including his brother Frank (Arthur Kennedy), a respectable businessman with a social-climber wife (Leora Dana) and teenage daughter (Betty Lou Keim). After gently trying to talk Ginny into returning home and checking into the local hotel, Dave starts his hometown tour.

Dave and his sister-in-law Agnes do not get along; she sees Dave as crude and lower-class, and Dave resents how she’d treated him as a child (Dave is a good deal younger than Frank, and when their parents died she had Dave placed in an orphanage instead of she and Frank taking him in). But Dave’s niece Dawn likes him and Frank wants to mend fences. Also – the prestigious Professor Robert French (Larry Gates) admires his work, as does Professor French’s daughter Gwen (Martha Hyer); Gwen’s single to boot, Agnes realizes, and could maybe reform her wayward brother-in-law. So when Frank asks to have Dave for dinner, Agnes says sure – if she can also invite a couple guests?….Her scheme works, to a point – Dave does fall for Gwen, but she does not reciprocate. Her interest, she tells him, is strictly in his work. It’s still enough to cause Dave to give up drinking and dig out a manuscript he’s been working on, using it as an excuse to win Gwen around.

However, Dave can’t leave the low life behind entirely. He stumbles across an underground card game run by “Bama Dillert” (Dean Martin), another drifter who’s put down roots in town. Dillert introduces him to some of the other less-fussy women in town – including Ginny, who’s stuck around after all, in hopes of catching Dave’s eye again. And thus is Dave torn between two women, and two worlds – the polished, intellectual Gwen, who fascinates him (and may be warming to him) but comes from an upper-class world, or the crude, naive Ginny, who’s a little bit of a ditz but who adores him. …Oh, what ever shall he do?

Yeah, that “who will Dave end up with” is the big engine of the plot, which always just bores me to tears. Especially since Gwen’s portrayed as a repressed spinster who actually did like Dave all along but was just Afraid Of Her Feelings At First or whatever. I actually respected their initial scenes, where she gives him a righteous smackdown about how she likes his work but that is different from liking him – so then when we got to the obligatory moment where she is finally Overcome With Passion and kisses him, I actually shouted “oh, come on” at the screen. It is such a trite, demeaning character trope; one I admit I used to fall for, but now really hate.

Conversely, and happily, “trite” and “demeaning” are words that Shirley MacLaine seems to avoid with her performance as Ginny. She could have really gone ditzy and crude, but her Ginny seems more like Giuletta Masina’s Cabiria from that film; a little idealistic, a little tough, not quite the brightest but strong enough to command respect from others. Ginny melts and fawns over Dave when he shows her even the tiniest bit of kindness, but when he tries to push her away, instead of dissolving into a puddle she draws herself up and scolds him. “I’m a human being, you know! You gotta be nicer!” She even summons the courage to give Gwen a surprise visit at the school where she teaches, to size her up and have a bit of girl talk straight out of the lyrics to Jolene. ….That talk has some unintended consequences which also made me grumble, but it fleshed Ginny out a lot.

Still, the “which woman will Dave choose” plot bored me. It seems to have even bored the screenwriter, since they threw in a bunch of other subplots that made the whole thing feel like a soap opera – Frank Hirsch flirting with his secretary, Dawn starting to Go Bad, a jealous ex-boyfriend of Ginny’s turned stalker. The film even throws in a Serious Illness subplot for Dillert during the last 20 minutes or so that gets completely dropped 5 minutes later. And that’s the hell of it – a lot of these scenes are well shot and well acted, with a few of the plot threads all weaving together into a tense final sequence with Ginny’s ex, gun in hand, tailing Ginny and Dave through a crowd; but those expert shots and those good performances are supporting a story I just plain didn’t like. One saving grace, at least, is that apparently the book which inspired the film had even more soapy subplots, and reviews of the time praised the film for cutting a lot of them out.

Some people use their own good fortune to turn themselves into cultural ambassadors. They become patrons to artists or playwrights, throw chamber concerts in their homes, provide big endowments to dance troupes, or the like. They may be in part motivated by a sincere artistic appreciation, or a sense that their privilege carries a responsibility; William Randolph Hearst claimed that he bought up a lot of European artifacts for Hearst Castle because “not everyone in the USA would have the chance to go there and see it in its homeland”. But they may also be motivated by wanting to show off (let’s be honest, how many of his fellow citizens did Hearst really intend to invite into his house to show off his treasures?).

It’s difficult to say which mix of factors motivates Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas), an aging member of India’s gentry. As a zamindar, or “landlord”, Roy was a semi-autonomous ruler of his family’s lands in Bengal; in his heyday, he lived in a fine mansion, enjoyed riding a beautiful white horse and a gaily-dressed elephant, and doted on his son Khoka (Pinaki Sen Gupta). He had strict rules in place to protect his subjects from moneylenders like the weaselly Mahim Ganguly (Gangapada Bose). But most of all, he loved hosting recitals in his mansion’s music room, sparing no expense to hire the finest talent or serve the finest wine or offer any number of other trimmings – even if he had to sell off some of the family jewels to do it. His wife Mahamaya (Padma Devi) didn’t love that bit, but she tolerated his whims.

But at the start of the movie, all that is in the past (and retold via flashbacks). Mahamaya and Khoka are long gone, as are most of the servants and most of the money. Roy has been a recluse in his mansion, save for occasional annoying visits from Ganguly, and the music room has been locked up for years after a tragic incident. But one afternoon Roy learns that Ganguly wants to host a recital in his own house, featuring the latest rising star – and, well, that simply won’t do if that boor Ganguly shows him up. Even if it takes everything Roy has left, he has to prove himself with one last recital.

I did find this film a little slow going in places; unsurprisingly, it showcases Indian music a lot, but the music sequences at each of the three recitals featured in the film felt a little long for someone like me who’s unfamiliar with Indian music as a rule. Or perhaps I’m just too accustomed to quicker cuts, and the long static shots of a tabla player or a dancer just didn’t grab me. But the performances were still affecting – particularly that of Roy’s faithful manservant Ananta (Kali Sarkar), who is almost canine in his devotion to Roy and who greets the news of the re-opening of the music room with unbridled glee. There is a whole “cleaning” montage to prepare for the recital, with Ananta scrubbing and polishing and shining and dusting for all he’s worth, a big grin on his face the whole time, and during the concert he is grinning just as broadly, dancing in the back of the room and having the time of his life. He seeks Roy out after the concert, once everyone’s gone home, to celebrate with him – but finds that Roy has maybe made a bit too merry and Roy’s various bills, fiscal and emotional, are now all due.

Ultimately, this is an affecting story about how Roy realizes he is now a relic of the past – and decides to make one last stab at dignity,