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TCM - Classic Movie Channel The images used in the piece above are all selected from films I happened to see over the past few days on TCM - The Classic Movie Channel, which is available through most cable services. I was on a "cargo" kick. A few notes on those films: Strange Cargo (1940) is the first film Clark Gable made after Gone With the Wind, released in 1939 (a huge color extravaganza). This film was notable in other ways. It has a strange story line involving the escape of "criminals" from a French penal colony in Central America. The escapees are joined by Joan Crawford, portraying a local entertainer who loses her gig (working for Peter Lorre, playing the character "Pig") for communing with prisoners, most notably Gable, whom she met while he was on a dock work detail. Among the escapees is a Christ-like figure played by Ian Hunter, whose purpose in the film seems to be to remind these thugs, some much "thuggier" than others, of their humanity. He seems, in particular, to shadow Gable, who is part alpha thug and part romantic hero. He is Rhett Butler without money. The spiritual overtones got this film blacklisted by the Catholic Legion of Decency, unfathomable as that now seems. While the story is notable for its trippy religious qualities, the real attraction is Joan Crawford, who after a decade of MGM films, including 7 with Gable, made this one sans makeup and the histrionics that were her staples. She is so special in this film, in which she was trying to convince people that she was a real actress, that it makes one wonder why the painted cartoon character that most of us remember as Joan Crawford was ever allowed to exist. This is not a great film but it is way worth watching. Gable and Crawford spend much of it being buffeted by wind, rain and sea water and resting in mud, and it is a great example of what black & white cinematography does to "EQ" the telling of a story. You will need to see it to understand. Of Mice and Men (1939) is the first film adaptation of John Steinbeck's 1937 novella, which was structured along the lines of a play. Like Steinbeck's other work, this focuses on marginally employed workers during the 1930s Depression, the setting here being a "ranch" near Salinas where friends (George says they are cousins) George Milton (Burgess Meredith) and Lenny Smalls (Lon Chaney, Jr.) find work as field hands. They encounter a work place in which every character present is "wounded" in one way or another, none worse than the ill-fated Lenny whose intellect is no match for his physical strength. Burgess Meredith gives a weird performance as George, his motivations for protecting Lenny being so confused as to make one wonder if there isn't some subtle homosexual subtext between them. That was not among the criticisms of the work, which included anti-business sentiment, pro-euthanasia philosophy, racial slurs and offensive language. Chaney dropped his given name, Creighton, and became Lon Chaney, Jr. in 1935, following the death of his famous acting father, the "Man of a Thousand Faces". Most of us would come to know Lon Chaney, Jr. for his work in horror films, most notably as "The Wolfman", but he was aspiring to be a real actor in Of Mice and Men and seems to grow, in that regard, as the film plays out. He is a clumsy oaf, but then so is the character he is playing. There are great performances from Betty Field (Mae), Charles Bickford (Slim), Roman Bohnen (Candy), Bob Steele (Curley), Noah Beery Jr. (Whit) and Leigh Whipper (Crooks), and from the others in the cast, as well. In some respects, the two leads are the weakest of the bunch, but it doesn't make any difference. The production is riveting, a little like a train wreck in slow motion if such could tug at heart strings. The story contains some of the most iconic or archetypal characters in modern fiction, though was it fiction? Steinbeck, pre-fame, worked on such ranches and always said Of Mice and Men was based on a real experience with a simple man, like Lenny, who killed a ranch foreman with a pitchfork and ended up in an asylum for the criminally insane. One could see how Steinbeck created the ranch foreman Curly as a guy who could embolden that kind of action. Sealed Cargo (1951) is a World War II yarn perfect for a rainy Sunday afternoon. Dana Andrews plays a Gloucester, Massacusetts fisher boat captain struggling to crew his vessel with all the most capable workers gone off to the war. He takes aboard a Danish fisherman who becomes more mysterious as the story develops. Another Dane aboard the ship questions the new man's authenticity. He speaks a Danish dialogue unfamiliar to the Dane Andrews knows, and he seems not to know things about the ports in Denmark that a Danish fisherman should know. The first night out, Andrews radio equipment is mysteriously destroyed, and suspicions mount. Also on board is a mysterious woman who Andrews had reluctantly agreed to transport to the port at Trabo, but the trip involves braving German U-Boat attacks, which have been steady along the shipping lanes to Great Britain. Things get weirder and more complicated when, during a thick fog, Andrews trawler hears the sounds of a naval assault and comes upon a schooner that has been riddled with holes, but all above the water line, odd if the intent of the attackers was to sink the ship. On board Andrews and his search party find Claude Rains, the ship's captain, who insists that Andrews pull his tattered schooner to port at Trabo. Once there, the increasingly nervous Andrews starts to sniff around the ghostly schooner a little more, and he discovers that besides the regular ship's hold, there is a second sealed compartment. This is a great story and a wonderful example of the particular qualities of black & white photography. During the foggy night when Andrews' crew first hears the distant gun fire, there is a wonderful sequence in which the fog lights up before them from time to time, as explosions go off in the un-seeable distance. It is totally cool and probably a scene that would not have benefited from the additional information that might have been provided by color, the lack thereof emphasizing the crew's fear and uncertainty about what they were sailing into.
A FACE IN THE CROWD
Director Elia Kazan's A Face In the Crowd (1957) is one of the most important cultural artifacts in all of United States film history. (In 2008, A Face in the Crowd was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".) Written by Bud Schulberg (it was adapted from his short story "Your Arkansas Traveler"), it is a brilliant call to attention that America, and therefore the world, was being sold a bill of goods by the kind of "K Street" product packagers that would eventually come to own U.S. politics and therefore U.S. public policy. Schulberg tells the story of "Lonesome" Rhodes, an Arkansas grifter who parlays a gift for singing and story telling into a radio program that launches him to national prominence. Portrayed by Andy Griffith, who was born to play the part, Rhodes is a volatile and dangerous blend of right-wing ideology and populist manipulation, as insincere and amoral a man as has ever been splashed across the big screen. Grinning, growling, screaming and revving up the energy, it is an electric and unforgetable performance. Add to that the extraordinary Patricia Neal, who plays the radio producer who launches Rhodes on his radio career and falls for him only to see him become a "monster"; Walter Matthau, who scripts Rhodes' media performances, sees through Rhodes and acts as the film's conscious; Tony Franciosa, an amoral and opportunistic office boy who molds himself into Rhodes' agent and rides his coat tails to prominence; and Lee Remick, who made her film debut as a baton twirling vixen who marries Rhodes only to become intoxicated with the New York City high life and is eventually jettisoned back to Arkansas. Schulberg pre-dated Paddy Chayefsky's explorations into the growing menace of the American media as ours evolved from a radio to a television culture. His wicked characterization of the homespun, and essentially nasty, Lonesome Rhodes was based, to varying degrees on other less malevolent homespun media heroes including Arthur Godfrey, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Will Rogers. - RAR ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Beatle-Head In Praise of Julie Taymor's
by RAR As an avowed "Beatle-Head" - i.e., a guy who is pretty convinced that The Beatles are the only band of the "rock age" that ever really mattered in any ongoing way, as have Mozart, Bach and Beethoven - I tend to be pretty slow to warm to "Beatles projects". Some, like Robert Stigwood's 1978 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band starring the brothers Gibb (and other "natural" Beatle interpreters, like the late George Burns) was just so awful that it hurt. The movie, that is, but never the music. In fact, The Beatles songbook is so extraordinary that it tends to elevate everyone it touches, if not everyone who touches it. We didn't get to hear The Beatles play their music live after 1966; didn't get the thrill of the kind of concert hall productions that were later afforded to other bands, like the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd. When I have heard The Beatles catalog played live and with special care, it has been an extraordinary thing to hear. Paul McCartney has an excellent band that does the songbook with the authenticity one might expect from the most successful songwriter in the history of recorded music. It is the music of his life, and the one guy left standing who can do the sound as it was born. Still, because McCartney wasn't the entirety of The Beatles, and because he has toured the catalog he plays for decades, as if he needs the money, and probably because he is 67 years old, his performances tend to feel the influences. It is near perfect, almost the real deal, but casual in that way that Golden Oldies shows are. It is a credit to McCartney the musician that his current act is as great as it is. Kudos to his band, too, which is dynamite. CBS Orchestra bassist Will Lee plays in a Beatles tribute band called The Fab Faux that faithfully reproduce the sound, including that of the band's later complex arrangements and vocal harmonies. They do an extraordinary job, about as good as a cover band can get. I once saw a performance of the much derided "Beatlemania", the long-running Broadway tribute to The Beatles, that was extraordinarily impressive as a musical presentation, however clumsy its exploitations. And there are some really fine Beatles Tribute bands around the country, all endeavoring to do faithful reproductions of the The Beatles' catalog and sound. Beatles songs have been licensed for reinterpretation, in various forms, to varying degrees of success. The original recordings are so engrained in the DNA of the world population that most modern renditions by current rock singers reveal the degree to which the new falls short of measuring up to the original. There was a period of schmaltzy exploitations by old crooners, like Frank Sinatra, trying to interpret Beatles tunes to "modernize" their catalogs in hopes of appealing to a generation younger than their own, and those were as awful as the instrumental versions produced as white sound for elevators and shopping malls. RECOGNIZING MAGIC: Julie Taymor's Across the Universe achieved something truly special in the way the film uses 33 Beatles tunes to create something like operatic narrative, in the process revealing fresh and exciting insights into these songs that have been the soundtrack of our cross-generational lives from 1963 to the present. Listening to "All My Loving" performed by Londoner Jim Sturgess, a University of Salford's School of Media, Music and Performance alumni who does a spot-on Liverpool accent, has one hearing anew some mystical thread that runs through The Beatles songbook in ways that are immediately apparent and yet difficult to fully grasp or comprehend. In fact, this magical aspect of The Beatles is clearly the muse that set Taymor off on her romantically visionary exploration of the revolutionary '60s and "all their meaning". There was an extraordinary convergence of social-political, psychic, spiritual, intellectual, creative and moral-ethical energy in the 1960s, that some talked about in terms of a new age, the dawning of the "Age of Aquarius", though the exact timing of that planetary alignment, that astrologers expect to deliver a long period of elevated human sensitivity and response, is open to interpretation and debate. Whatever it was, the 1960s were a period of explosive change, and amid it all were The Beatles, whose songs and personalities both reflected and transcended their times. The Fab Four seemed to know that, for reasons that made no sense whatsoever, they were positioned to guide us all through turbulent times, and it was done through their music. Perhaps their was a shaman influence there, as Jim Morrison of the Doors claimed was at work in the inspiration for his creations. There was a consistent message in The Beatles music that was present from "Please Please Me" through "Let It Be", some indefinable, indescribable vein of something like truth that came through as a feeling that was exclusively theirs. One could attempt to sound like The Beatles, to write songs that suggested things done by The Beatles, but The Beatles were somehow in touch with some vibration that came to the world exclusively through them, and could not be duplicated. This, I believe, is the thing that fans of the music responded to as spirituality, and its power was that it could be shared however impossible it was to describe. It made young girls explode into uncomprehending screams and made older listeners break into broad smiles. It is this that Julie Taymor, working with screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, channeled into this extraordinary film. All of the visual tricks that Taymor developed through her Off-Broadway and Broadway successes (she directed and later filmed Shakespeare's 'Titus Andronicus', brought "The Lion King" to Broadway, and won Oscars for her film Frida), and earlier as a puppet master in Japan, are on display in this wildly inventive film. The music, however, is the big treat. There is an instrumental version of "A Day In the Life" that is one of the most beautiful pieces you will ever hear played. It sent me scrambling to find out who the guitarist was. It was Jeff Beck, playing with remarkable beauty and sensitivity, providing with his singular performance a symbol of the quality that undergirds this entire film effort. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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3Thomas
Newman - Yale educated film-scorer broke through in 1984 with the film
Reckless. Earned two Academy Award nominations for his scores to Little
Women and The Shawshank Redemption; the only double-nominee of
1994. Subsequent successes have included his scores for American Beauty
(winner of the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion
Picture, Television or Other Visual Media), Road to Perdition, Finding
Nemo, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Good
German. He composed the music for the television version of Angels
in America, as well as for HBO's series "Six Feet Under,"
which won Grammy Awards in 2003 for Best Instrumental Composition and Best
Instrumental Arrangement. At the 79th Academy Awards, Thomas Newman
appeared in the opening segment by Errol Morris correcting a claim that he
had been nominated for and not won an Academy Award eight times:
"I've lost seven times; tonight it will be eight."