MRS. PARKER & THE VICIOUS CIRCLE - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2006.

"I'll wear my heart on my sleeve like a wet, red stain."

The life of Dorothy Parker, as portrayed in Alan Rudolph's 1994 biopic Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle, is like one long, drunken night. It starts off fun, with witty bons mots tossed out between refills, but as the morning approaches and the bottle gets harder to find, those laughs are soon replaced by tears.

The real Dorothy Parker was a writer in the '20s and '30s known for writing verse with a caustic wit. In a weird way, she's almost like an early Sarah Silverman, setting up her reader with a sweet intro and then hitting them with a devastating punchline. Only her interests were far more tangled up in the emotional affairs of men and women and not so much with social taboos. She wasn't looking to shock nearly as much as she was looking to break your heart by showing you her own. Yet, both women have a yen for exposing the dirty mess that lies inside pretty packages. Parker wrote for magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, producing original work as well as reviewing plays and other people's books. In the mid-1930s, she moved to Hollywood like most writers of her time and worked on several movies, including the 1937 version of A Star is Born and Hitchcock's Saboteur.

I say she was known for her verse, but she was actually best known for being part of the Algonquin Round Table, a regular meeting of artistic types that took place in the restaurant of the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Sporting the sharpest tongues of their day, these folks drank the night away while trading wry verbal jabs. This is the period that Alan Rudolph and his co-writer Randy Sue Coburn mainly concern themselves with. The film is about Parker's struggles as a writer and as a woman searching for love. It's also about drinking to dull the pain.

Jennifer Jason Leigh was born to play Dorothy Parker, and it's arguably the best performance of her career. She presents a woman who is hard to decipher. The slow delivery of her clever words could just be a drunken slur, but she's also using it to mask her loneliness. Every moment of life hurts, and every word is an effort. She is doomed to pursue the wrong men, be it her dope-fiend husband Eddie (Andrew McCarthy), the cavalier journalist Charles MacArthur (Matthew Broderick), or the man who appears to be her soulmate but who never takes her to bed, the droll Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott). All three of those men are married, and only one of them to her.

Dorothy's relationship with Benchley is the most important one. They have a real connection, never at a loss for words and always able to count on each other. Campbell Scott is a good match for Jason Leigh. He stands tall in Benchley's stoic humor, timing his delivery in the same slow-gin manner as hers. In the first half of the movie, it's his hurt that is out front. He isn't about to leave his wife (Jennifer Beals), and something is keeping him from taking the plunge. So, he stands back and watches Parker with other men, the self-loathing clear in his haunted eyes. Halfway through the movie, Dorothy catches him eyeing another girl in a speakeasy. She asks him why they never "misbehaved," and he gives her a couple of intellectual excuses. Here the worm turns. Unhappy with his answer, she practically pushes Benchley into the arms of the other woman, and now the lovelorn weariness will become her cross to bear.

Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle isn't all doom and gloom, however. We see several of the raucous bull sessions that the Algonquin legend is built on, and there are many parties with the likes of Harpo Marx and F. Scott Fitzgerald popping in for cameos. And actually, speaking of cameos, there are a lot of actors who would later become more famous that I forgot got some of their earliest work in this film, possibly because I didn't know who they were at the time. Gwyneth Paltrow, Lili Taylor, Heather Graham, Rebecca Miller (director of The Ballad of Jack & Rose), and Stanley Tucci all have small parts in Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle, and if you keep your eyes pealed, Cyndi Lauper even makes an appearance. (Jon Favreau is listed among the cast, but I never spotted him.)

Even so, all of this happiness is a front, and eventually there will be a morning after, as seen in flash forwards to scenes in Hollywood and later in New York, when Dorothy has returned there to live in obscurity. These scenes are shot in black-and-white, setting them apart from the "present day" of the movie. Black-and-white is also used for the scenes of Dorothy sitting alone and reciting her poetry. Those are splendid interludes in the film, both adding to the emotional weight of the main action and giving viewers a real taste of Dorothy Parker's writing. Too often biopics about writers or artists pass without giving much of a sense of the subject's work. Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle shows how Dorothy Parker's life and her writing were inextricably linked, and it leaves its audience with an affinity for the woman and her craft.

PRIDE OF THE YANKEES - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2008.

The Pride of the Yankees is the sports biopic by which all others are measured. Made in 1942, it stars Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig, the legendary Yankees first baseman who played in over 2,000 consecutive games across a decade and a half before being forced to retire due to ALS, a deadly illness that is now more commonly known as "Lou Gehrig's disease."

The formula should be pretty familiar to all movie buffs by now: a boy grows up in the Bronx dreaming of playing baseball, his dream comes true, he learns the ropes and becomes a star, finds love, and then the final act. It's a set-up that has stood the test of time because its universality ensures that it will always work. In the case of Gehrig, he was enough of a unique character that the now cliché style (which this movie arguably invented) is barely noticeable. A straight shooter who was ready to chuck dreams of sports stardom to pursue a practical career, he only took the Yankees' offer for a contract so he he could pay for his sick mother's hospital bills. He continued to conduct himself in the same moral manner for his entire run as a Yankee, breaking records and inspiring millions. There are some famous anecdotes portrayed, such as hitting two homeruns for a boy in the hospital, and the romance between Lou and his wife Eleanor (Teresa Wright) is given center stage in the second act. The third act is taken up with Gehrig's illness, a climax with enormous pathos. When the disease starts to wreck havoc on Lou's body, you're going to realize how much you've come to care for the big lug.

Some elements of Pride of the Yankees haven't aged as well as others. The concoction of two warring reporters (Walter Brennan and Dan Duryea) who spend the years arguing about Lou's potential is kind of corny, and there are times when I found Cooper's "aw shucks" demeanor a little forced. These are minor bumps in the road, however, and easy to get past.

Pride of the Yankees really starts to get going when Teresa Wright enters the scene. The actress was to have her finest hour a year later in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, but she's an alluring presence in this film, bringing oodles of charm to the screen. The courtship of Lou and Eleanor is sweetened with a smartly pitched comic streak, and the relationship only becomes more delightful as the years progress and they become partners in the truest sense.

Director Sam Wood (Kitty Foyle) also knows when to dole out a good baseball scene or two. The best is the aforementioned World Series game where both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig had to come through for the sick child. Also quite good are the games where Lou is starting to realize something is wrong. In fact, it's a little backwards that the director is more adept at the struggle than he is the victory. Authenticity is added by the fact that Babe Ruth and many of Gehrig's other teammates played themselves in the picture.

Of course, Pride of the Yankees would be nothing without the last scene, the recreation of Gehrig's farewell speech to a stadium full of fans. Here is where Cooper's common-man restraint really pays off. He doesn't oversell it, doesn't try to stray outside of the humble parameters Gehrig set for him at the real event. It's a stirring moment, and one of the most memorable in movie history. The final shots of the player walking off the field are poignant and beautiful. There was nowhere to go from there, best to just fade to black.

COLUMBIA NOIR: MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS/SO DARK THE NIGHT/EXPERIMENT IN TERROR - CRITERION CHANNEL

Film noir has long been a passion of mine, and regular readers of my reviews will know I can be rather pedantic over what qualifies a particular movie as part of the genre. As the years have passed, I’ve watched lots of critics and festivals and marketing men bend the term to fit anything that has some kind of crime element in its narrative, disregarding style, tone, and theme in the process.

So it is with the newly opened Criterion Channel’s special collection of “Columbia Noir,” bringing together an unlucky thirteen from the Columbia studio vaults. Upon first entering the new site, I was particularly excited, because out of that baker’s dozen, I had only seen one: Fritz Lang’s bonafide classic The Big Heat.

Sadly, from my initial sampling, the curation here is lacking in rigor. Picking movies from both sides of the set in terms of chronology, at least to start, I have found the selection to be a mixed bag of solid flicks of varied stripes, but not really film noir.

Take, for instance, My Name is Julia Ross, the earliest release offered, dated 1945. Directed by Joseph H. Lewis, who went on to make the noir perennial Gun Crazy, My Name is Julia Ross is more an amalgamation of early Hitchcock than traditional noir. It’s like a mash-up of The Lady Vanishes [review] and Rebecca [review], a little bit of mystery and a little bit of gothic atmosphere.

Nina Foch (An American in Paris [review]) stars as the titular Julia, a London career girl excited to gain regular employment as secretary to a rich widower and his mother. Only, as Julia quickly discovers, this gig is not on the up-and-up. The day after she moves into her new quarters, she wakes up at the seaside in an unfamiliar house where everyone refers to her as Mrs. Hughes and treats her like a hothouse flower. What she quickly realizes is that her employers, played by George Macready (Paths of Glory [review]) and May Whitty (coincidentally, Mrs. Foy in The Lady Vanishes), are trying to use her to replace the man’s dead wife, gaslighting Julia in an attempt to cover up the murder.

It’s a good concept, and could be quite captivating in more adept hands, but Lewis and screenwriter Muriel Roy Bolton (The Amazing Mr. X) give the game away too quickly. They never let the audience spend any time in Julia’s shoes, and so there is no suspense. We are privy to the plot she’s been drawn into and never once led to believe she’ll have any trouble getting out of it.

In terms of storytelling, My Name is Julia Ross is equally flat. There is no apparent aesthetic here, no dark shadows or misty moors, nothing to tie the film to any particular cinematic movement. My Name is Julia Ross is a perfunctory B-picture, little more. The screenplay skirts the edges of intriguing issues--the compulsion to kill that drives Julia’s would-be husband, the perception of single women in the city, etc.--but stops short of really giving any of these topics genuine heft.

Lewis followed this film a year later with 1946’s So Dark the Night, a noir tile in search of a matching script. What that moniker finds instead is an Agatha Christie-type whodunit, complete with a genial, yet world-weary detective. In this case, it’s Henri Cassin (Steven Geray, In a Lonely Place [review]), a Parisian police inspector going on holiday. Geray is so likeable and so assured, I thought there must be more adventures of Cassin, that this was part of a series, or at the very least lifted from a pre-existing literary franchise

No such series exists. Cassin was created by a writer named Aubrey Wisberg (Hercules in New York) for the story adapted here. So Dark the Night follows the middle-aged Inspector Cassin on a much needed vacation to the countryside. In the small town, his reputation precedes him, and his presence shakes up the norm. He attracts the attention of Nanette (Micheline Cheirel), the innkeeper’s daughter, and when Nanette turns up dead, her jealous fiancé (Paul Marion) is the obvious first suspect. Only, someone has killed him, too, leaving the normally unflappable Cassin with nothing to go on.

So Dark the Night is an enjoyable little mystery, taking advantage of its rural setting and maintaining an upbeat manner that is antithetical to the usual urban existentialism we associate with noir. Inspector Cassin is a genuine good guy who wants nothing but happiness for his fellow man, and so also far from our expected noir protagonist. In fact, his demeanor should make the mystery’s resolution even more implausible. The climax of So Dark the Night would normally be a textbook example of something you just can’t do in a murder mystery, withholding clues and offering a resolution the audience couldn’t possibly puzzle out on their own, but Lewis--and more significantly, the ever likable Steven Geray--makes it work. Even so, this is more PBS territory than it is noir, more conservative flirting between decent folk than overheated passion amidst desperate degenerates.

On the opposite end of the timeline here is Blake Edwards’ 1962 thriller Experiment in Terror. A stylish psychological potboiler, Experiment in Terror is closer to noir territory, but it’s more indicative of a post-Psycho box office landscape than post-War anxiety.

Lee Remick stars as Kelly, a single woman raising her younger sister all on her own in Twin Peaks, Washington. (Yes, that Twin Peaks.) At the start of the movie, she thinks she is coming home just like every other night, only she is jumped by a man in her garage who knows a little too much about the minutia of her life. He threatens her and her sister if she doesn’t rob the bank where she works and deliver the cash to him. It’s a tense, unsettling scene, made all the more scary by the violent attack Kelly suffers when she tries to call the FBI, believing her assailant to have already gone.

Luckily for her, the call got through anyway, and Agent Ripley (Glenn Ford, Gilda [review]) is ready to help out. Believing this is not the first time this crook has pulled such a trick, Ripley attempts to make it his last by stringing the bad guy along, hoping to figure out who he is before he forces Kelly to carry through on his demand or otherwise has to make good on his own threats.

Edwards is, of course, better known for comedies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s [review] and The Party [review], but he proves no slouch in the suspense department. Experiment in Terror is tense and mostly intriguing, only falling short by maybe being a little long. Edwards draws a sharp divide between his good guys and his bad guys, presenting Ford’s Ripley as the last good man standing guard against a demented criminal future--a trope dating back to Chandler’s The Big Sleep [review] and essential to many a noir antihero. There is a certain inevitability to how the world is changing, suggesting that somehow a destructive fate is unavoidable. And yet, Experiment in Terror lacks the cynicism of a good noir. Ripley is a true believer, and Kelly a shining beacon leading the way, suggesting that civilization should win because it’s good, rather than survive in spite of itself.

And, of course, since it’s Blake Edwards, we get a striking Henry Mancini score, showing as much facility for dramatic tension as he normally does with light melody and irresistible rhythm. It’s the sort of thing Orson Welles rejected from the composer in Touch of Evil [review], a decision I’ve never entirely agreed with--so I’ll give that point to Edwards.

Even as I take some away from the Criterion Channel. Of the three films reviewed, I’d only give Experiment in Terror a full recommendation, noir or no. Let’s hope some of the movies in the center of this virtual collection fit the mold a little better.

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS - #952

Orson Welles is the true prototype of a Wes Anderson character. A child prodigy, precocious and intelligent, obsessed with magic, a born entertainer, emerging from a semi-privileged background with a blind self-determination that would hinder as much, if not more, than it helped, he could have been Max Fischer or Steve Zissou or, god help him, in terms of his relationship to Hollywood, Eli Cash.



And I think even Wes Anderson would tell you, he wouldn’t have created his real second feature (Bottle Rocket fans, come at me [review]) without Orson Welles’ 1942 second feature, no The Royal Tenenbaums [review] without The Magnificent Ambersons.



The comparisons are obvious from the jump: the intro for each is a family history played out in a montage using artificially antiquated imagery, explained by a narrator with a soothing voice, somewhat detached, somewhat reverent, but also sardonic and prone to ironic commentary. In the case of The Magnificent Ambersons, it’s Welles himself, his only mask the recording booth, grappling with the stars of his narrative like a proud parent resigned to letting his children make their own mistakes.



Like the Tenenbaums, but with a more pronounced urgency, the Ambersons are a family in decline, even if they can’t see it yet. A family soon to be out of step. As the 19th century nears its close, the Ambersons are top of the heap, but soon they will be as superfluous as the horse-drawn carriage. Indeed, their happiness and prosperity will become inextricably linked to the advancement of the automobile. A onetime suitor of Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello, Little Lord Fauntleroy), Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotton, The Third Man [review]) returns to town after years in exile looking to establish his own auto factory, building a model he designed. A widower with a young daughter, Lucy (Anne Baxter, All About Eve), Eugene is everything the most recent two generations of Ambersons are not. Namely, he is self-made and self-sufficient. Essentially, he is the Danny Glover character in The Royal Tenenbaums, an example of frugalness and responsibility--and thus an interloper in a clan resigned to doing things their own way.



It only takes one brief encounter for it to become apparent that a torch still burns between Eugene and Isabel. And one also quickly ignites between Lucy and Isabel’s bratty son, George (Tim Holt, Stagecoach [review]). They all come together at a glorious party thrown by the Ambersons and beautifully choreographed by Welles. There is dancing at the soirée, but the affair itself is its own dance, a physical exchange set to social rhythms. Welles favors long, complicated shots with the partygoers circling each other, George trying to disengage from the flow and isolate Lucy, but the crowd consistently coming together, dialogue providing the occasional percussive flourish. It’s a smooth and elegant set piece, establishing the full dynamic of The Magnificent Ambersons, assigning each player their part in the ballet. It’s also effortless, the director’s technique becoming invisible since his first feature; where Citizen Kane dazzled with its constant invention, Ambersonssoothes with its easygoing, imperceptible style.



The Magnificent Ambersons is based on a sprawling book by Booth Tarkington (Alice Adams), a family melodrama informed by historical sea changes. Part of adapting the book to film is paring it down to a manageable narrative, with a focus on George as the central figure. There is an irony to George. As the youngest Amberson, he is the most resistant to change, probably because he is the one who has benefited most from his grandfather’s fortune while contributing absolutely nothing to it. George expects everything to be handed to him and expects nothing to disrupt that. So, why adopt a horseless carriage when he is getting on fine with the dependable horse-drawn version? And when his father passes, if he were to let his mother marry Eugene, who knows what that would mean for the family fortune.



While George succeeds at heading off the romance, the business of making cars is something the remaining Ambersons see as a good investment prospect. Thus George’s two biggest concerns become linked, and if one were to believe in karma, his selfish block against happiness results in professional failure for Eugene and the bankruptcy of the Ambersons. George is a tough part to play. If an actor is too petulant, as was Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the 2002 Alfonso Arau adaptation, the movie becomes unwatchable. No one ends up really liking George, not his family, not even his director, but Tim Holt manages to maintain some glimmer of humanity for the character. There is a sense that his shell could break with the right impact. He can cross over from the side of the family that never worked for anything to the side that pitches in where it counts, leaving his bitter, scornful Aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead, Magnificent Obsession [review]) to join the jovial Uncle Jack (Ray Collins, Touch of Evil [review]), as it were. If George has cursed the family, then it will require a sacrifice to undo it.

Sadly, even as Welles had pared down the Tarkington novel, the studio would pare down The Magnificent Ambersons in his absence, gutting the plot by nearly an hour to shorten the running time. The full Welles cut of the film is one of the great holy grails of cinema, though one likely to never come to fruition, as there has been no indication that the missing footage exists anywhere, and up until Criterion recently rescued the film, Warner Bros. had treated it like an unwanted stepchild, only ever releasing it on DVD coupled with its more accomplished sibling, Citizen Kane. It’s a testament to Welles’ skill that the movie is still so damn good, but if you are watching it and get a weird feeling that something is missing or has been glossed over, your instinct could very well be correct. The one spot where it’s most obvious is the hurried conclusion, which was shot without the great director. Georgie’s off-screen redemption and rescue feels rushed. You have to wonder what the true character arc here was, what great moments fell to the editor’s scissors, or how it would have left the audience without the tacked-on finish. The final fade out in The Magnificent Ambersons comes without much warning.

A couple of other quick notes I jotted down on this viewing of The Magnificent Ambersons:

* Joseph Cotton has always had a quiet presence, making him the perfect foil for a blustery actor like Orson Welles, but in movies like Citizen Kane or Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, he also has an angry edge. Not so here. Eugene Morgan is his most gentle performance, and with his kind eyes and somewhat growly voice, it suits him.

* The audio in The Magnificent Ambersons is particularly impressive. Welles mixes the sound to match the location, with voices echoing and fading out in relation to where the actor is to the central focal point within the cavernous halls of the Ambersons mansion. Likewise, the lighting is designed to be natural, befitting the time period, meaning lots of shadows are cast across the rooms, changing to fit the time of day. In some scenes, the aesthetic becomes almost gothic, befitting the stifled passions and secrets that lay behind each door in the Amberson household. (See also: Hitchcock’s Rebecca [review]; Lang’s The Secret Beyond the Door [review].)

* I watched The Magnificent Ambersons on Christmas Eve, and there is enough wintery melancholy here to qualify it as a Christmas movie, but I’m posting the write-up closer to New Year’s, a more fitting holiday for The Magnificent Ambersons, as it’s all about the passage of time, and the need for growth and change. Shall we start a new tradition? Maybe pair it with Visconti’s The Leopard?

PANIQUE - #955

A small Parisian neighborhood. A carnival. A dead body. A local outcast. A young hustler. A conflicted femme fatale. Nosy neighbors.

These are the essential ingredients of Julien Duvivier’s 1946 French noir Panique. Season with romantic intentions, double-crosses, and even a little mystical mumbo jumbo, and you have the sort of emotional potboiler Fritz Lang liked to make with Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett. Here instead we have the great Michel Simon (L’Atalante [review], The Two of Us [review]) and Viviane Romance (Any Number Can Win) as, respectively, the older man who lives a life of intellectual isolation and the woman too loyal to her criminal boyfriend (Paul Bernard, Les Dames du Bois du Boulogne) for her own good. It’s a great set up, taken from a novel by Georges Simenon, and one Duvivier plans to milk for all the drama and intrigue he can.

Simon leads the picture as Monsieur Hire, a strange character, dismissive of his neighbors, but nice to children and awkward in courtship. His early contact with Alice (Romance) is borderline stalkerish. Hire is a man of many lives: he works under a different name, peddling astrology as if it were a science, and he has a past he abandoned when his wife ditched him for his best friend. Yet, the more we learn, the less shady he becomes, our suspicions replaced by sadness and even sympathy.

Alice is similarly charmed by Hire--though, initially, she only indulges him because he claims to have evidence implicating Alfred (Bernard) in the killing. Alice just spent three years in jail taking the rap for a robbery Alfred committed, and she’s not prepared to lose her lover just yet. Caught between these two unsavories, the unspoken question becomes: whose affection is more genuine? What does each man stand to gain from maintaining her love?

That nothing comes totally clear, that Duvivier allows for such gray motivations, is what keeps Panique so intriguing from start to finish. Viviane Romance plays Alice as sincerely conflicted all the way to the end, despite Alfred showing himself as having no nuance whatsoever. And how are we not to be drawn in by Michel Simon’s natural charisma, even as he does his best to tamp it down? There is no distinct moment in Panique when M. Hire is shown as being entirely good or sympathetic. When he confesses his greatest pain, he follows it by showing his guiltiest pleasure, the photos he takes of the downtrodden and indigent, a spectator in other people’s misery. In classic Beauty and the Beast fashion, he only presents his nobler intentions after making the basest of threats. Simon’s performance is like one long dare being leveled at the audience. Will you have the guts to side with a man who we know can be a real creep?

Panique is like a melding of American suspense pictures and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s morality plays, particularly the small-town poison-pen drama Le Corbeau. At times, you might also think of Hitchcock’s Rebecca (Hire taking Alice to his old house) or The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Panique’s desperate climax). Duvivier’s only true genre is melodrama, even if he sharpens it on crime-fiction tropes or winks at gothic traditions. His construction is artful, relying on shadowy actions and voyeuristic impulses--both ours and that of the extended cast--to keep the plot energized. There are even some visceral action scenes. You’ve never seen as savage a bumper car ride as you’ll see in Panique. And it’s no throwaway scene, either; the memory of these dangerous amusements will come flooding back in the final act when the mob leaps from the carnival rides and takes to the streets.

So Panique has a little bit of everything while always feeling like just one thing. There are no unnecessary digressions, no excess fat. Rather, the film is fine-tuned for maximum effect, ceaselessly entertaining and always surprising. That it comes immediately after the end of World War II, and was the first film that Duvivier made upon returning from Hollywood, it must have also had many personal overtones for the director, a parable of groupthink, collaboration, and individuality vs. the mob. In that, it is also like Le Corbeau in how it despises petty small-town gossip, but even more challenging for pushing us to root for a man who, under many other circumstances, might not deserve it. As with any good story, it’s as relevant as ever, though now the controversy and drama would never spill into the public square, it would just remain online--which, even after seeing how wrong things go in Panique, seems all the more barbaric.

This disc provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

MORNING GLORY/WITHOUT LOVE/UNDERCURRENT/SYLVIA SCARLETT - FILMSTRUCK

Katharine Hepburn is the lead Star of the Week for Filmstruck's final month. In honor of that, I am adapting my review for a 2007 boxed set celebrating her 100th birthday to focus on film's currently featured on the streaming service.

Katharine Hepburn is one of those rare individuals who can truly be said to have come from a different time. Yes, many historical figures are reflections of the particular social mores of their era, but it's something else altogether to be one of those figures that is so unique, there is no way to repeat the confluence of factors that made them. Surely, Hollywood couldn't come up with a movie star like her today. The way we view our celebrities has changed too much. The Golden Age of American cinema produced icons whose images were a mixture of their own personal quirks and studio spin. One gets the sense that one knows stars like Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart from watching their films, but at the same time, the flickering lights of motion pictures allow them to maintain a sense of mystery. For as personal as our connection to them, they have a sense of "otherness" that can never be fully erased. They are one of us, and yet they are something more.

Of the classic female stars, no one may embody this as much as Katharine Hepburn. The accent, the laugh, the strident intelligence, the incredible strength and the equally incredible fragility it keeps in check. She had parts in over fifty movies from 1932 to 1994, establishing one of the greatest legacies in American movies. Though she had her fair share of trouble spots, she always managed to pull out of them, and her pairings with the aforementioned Mr. Grant and the love of her life, Spencer Tracy, resulted in some of the best films ever made. Out of twelve Oscar nominations as Best Actress, she won four. Not bad, eh?

Morning Glory (1933) was directed by Lowell Sherman (She Done Him Wrong) and adapted by Howard J. Green (I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang) from a play by Zoe Akins (The Greeks Had a Word For It, a.k.a. How to Marry a Millionaire). It features the young actress, appropriately enough, in the role of a young actress, the hopelessly naive but fiercely determined Eva Lovelace (a stage name, as she's quick to point out--do you like it?). Eva has come to New York City from her home in Vermont to try to make her way treading the boards. Walking into the office of Louis Easton (Adolphe Menjou), one of the most successful producers on Broadway, she talks a blue streak that makes her seem alternately crazy, endearing, or inspiring, depending on who you ask. The other actresses think she's pathetic, but the men around are caught in her spell, particularly the writer Joseph Sheridan (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.).

What transpires is a slightly skewed take on the rags to riches rise of a Broadway star. While the title, Morning Glory, refers to the glow of overnight success, it might also refer to the post-coital glow, the dirty curve Easton throws Eva that could only be talked about in a roundabout fashion in the 1930s. Given Eva's precarious mental state, the situation takes on a decidedly dark pallor, and so it's strange when Easton's cruelty is fairly easily bypassed in the climax. In fact, the whole movie has a kind of strangeness about it. It suffers from a staginess that deadened a lot of pictures from the period, making it all the more discomfiting that Fairbanks performs in a loose, naturalistic style that feels out of place next to his colleagues' more demonstrative approach. There is also a jumbled sense of time in the narrative. Part of it is intentional, since at least one character makes a point of how Eva speaks of weeks as if they were years, but it's an incongruity that eventually affects the timeline of the entire script, making it difficult to gauge just how much time has passed by the end.

Really, without Katharine Hepburn, we'd probably not even still be viewing Morning Glory today. Her take on Eva suggests more than a passing knowledge of obsessive-compulsive psychoses. When Eva starts on one of her talking jags, Hepburn freight-trains through it, barely breathing but still hitting the right marks, shifting into the various tangents as if they were the most logical choices for where to go next. The speeches are revelatory, not just as pieces of great acting, but for the character, revealing her vulnerability, her intelligence, and the power of her singular belief. It's the most complicated kind of denial, as Eva believes her own rationalizations even as she betrays them by calling them false. Hepburn never rings a bum note. She's just splendid.

Jumpoing twelve years forward to 1945 and Harold S. Bucquet's Without Love, by this point the Katharine Hepburn persona was pretty well-established, and her romantic comedies were becoming a staple of cinemas. It was her third movie with Spencer Tracy, a most winning combination and perennial exception to the rule that off-screen chemistry is supposed to yield on-screen fizzles. In fact, a kind of repertory had gathered around Hepburn in the intervening years. The screenplay for Without Love was adapted by Donald Ogden Stewart, who had also written the scripts for Holiday [review] and The Philadelphia Story, and all three movies were taken from stage plays by Philip Barry.

The deliciously improbable plot casts Tracy as scientist Patrick Jamieson, a citizen contributing to the wartime effort by secretly working on a high-altitude oxygen mask for pilots in the U.S. army. A chance meeting leads him to the basement in the house of Jamie Rowan (Hepburn), a wealthy widow whose personal loss has made her never want to love again. Pat is of the same mind, but for the opposite reason. Rather than having experienced the greatest love of his life, he's experienced the greatest frustration--a French socialite who keeps him dangling by a heartstring. Another thing the pair has in common is that their late fathers were both scientists, and so they share a hunger for knowledge and discovery. Seeing the perfect opportunity for a coupling, they decide to get married. It will be a union of convenience, built on true friendship without any of that troublesome love stuff mucking up the works.

It wouldn't be a Tracy/Hepburn picture, of course, if this plan didn't go horribly awry. Two people so perfect for each other will perfectly fall in love. Not without their obstacles, of course. Jamie will have to get over hang-ups, and Pat will have to finally let go of his French pastry. Comedy ensues along the way, including gleefully silly montages of the two at work in Pat's lab. There is also some funny business involving Pat's sleepwalking and the little dog he's trained to stop him from wandering too far. Running parallel to the action is another comic couple, played by a young Lucille Ball and Keenan Wynn (Royal Wedding). It's nearly a case of the supporting cast running away with the show. Though Ball is more restrained than we'd come to know from her, I've never seen Wynn be funnier. He's marvelous as the perpetually drunken Quentin, equal parts clown and cad.

As a Tracy/Hepburn fan new to Without Love (in fact, I hadn't seen any of the movies in the box before this viewing), the film fits right in with what I like about the acting duo's comedies. Hepburn's character is never any less than her partner's equal, which is not always the case in 1940s romantic comedies. She is always smart and active in her own power, and her specialness is never neutralized. Rather, both lovers usually have to move either up or down to find a common ground that will allow them to be together. For me, what sets Without Love apart from the rest of their team-ups is the final scene, where Jamie and Pat admit their love without ever admitting it out and out. They do a little verbal dance, saying what they feel in a roundabout way. It's both clever and smart, and the two actors come off as remarkably sincere while still keeping it light. (In reality, they weren't stepping too far outside themselves, as they had years of a very public private affair.) Their last embrace is surprisingly sensual. Hepburn looks particularly hungry, like she's just about to bite a chunk of flesh from Tracy's head. It's enough to inspire the vapors.

1946's Undercurrent is a tense thriller that stands out as a kind of oddity in Katharine Hepburn's career. Undercurrent was actually kind of a departure for several of the people involved. Director Vincente Minnelli was known for his frothy musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis, and co-star Robert Mitchum was usually the tough guy, not the more sensitive soul he is here.

Hepburn is cast as Anne, the daughter of a widower scientist (Edmund Gwenn). Her father is about to sell his greatest discovery to Alan Garroway (Robert Taylor), a famous industrialist who invented a revolutionary navigation system for airplanes. Though Anne is convinced she will live the life of a spinster, when she and Alan meet, it's love at first sight. They are quickly married, and Anne is removed from her safe, academic world and placed amongst Washington politicos. She takes well to high society, but always feels out of step. Part of the problem is that her husband seems to be hiding something. The circumstances of his mother's death and the disappearance of his brother Michael (Mitchum) are closely guarded, and Alan loses his temper at the mere thought of them. Too many coincidences and almost psychic feelings keep bringing Michael to the fore, however, and Anne is convinced she must find out the truth if she's ever to know her spouse.

Undercurrent has started to pick up a bit of a reputation as a film noir. I first heard of the film in 2006 when it played as part of a noir festival at the Northwest Film Center. I'm not really sure it qualifies, however, unless we can establish a subgenre of women's noir. The plot has more in common with Victorian melodramas like Wuthering Heights and the work of Daphne Du Maurier (and her frequent adapter Alfred Hitchcock) than it does the moody expressionism of Fritz Lang or Jules Dassin. Genre hair-splitting aside, however, I found Undercurrent to be absolutely riveting. Minnelli creates a palpable sense of foreboding that lingers over the picture, ratcheting up the suspense each time Anne finds something new to cause her to doubt her husband's story only to be placated by his wily explanations. You just know that eventually one of these things is going to be too large for him to erase, and then Anne is going to be in real trouble.

It's rare to see Katharine Hepburn portray a character that is as lost and confused as Anne. Normally, her characters are merely misguided, blinded by their own hubris or stubbornness. She's quite good in this sudsier role, enough to make me wish she had made more genre pictures. Minnelli also shows a great facility for the style, using what he learned about using his environment from shooting more pastoral pictures to give the couple's ranch a sinister bend.

I'd say my only complaint about Undercurrent is that Robert Mitchum is barely in it. Like Harry Lime in The Third Man [review], Michael Garroway is more of a pervading presence than he is an active participant. When he does show up, it has a much weightier impact. So, this isn't really a fault in the story. I just really like Robert Mitchum.

Katharine Hepburn made ten movies under the direction of George Cukor. He cast her in her first film, Bill of Divorcement, in 1932. They paired for the last time forty-seven years later, in 1979, for The Corn is Green [see original review], a television production of a play by Emlyn Williams. Hepburn was 72, Cukor was 80. The Corn is Green was not a bad showing for two mega talents late in their careers, but a little too safe to have a lasting impact when faced with the grandeur that had come before.

Such as 1935's Sylvia Scarlett. This film has a bit of a checkered reputation, having been a much derided flop on its initial release, leading to Hepburn being labeled "box office poison." Though Cary Grant would emerge from it having proven his skills as a romantic funnyman, it would take years for the movie itself to get a proper reassessment. (In the Cukor documentary on Warner Brothers' 2005 double-disc Philadelphia Story, the director comments that it had become a cult hit and a favorite whenever a retrospective of his career was put together.)

Having finally seen Sylvia Scarlett, I can kind of see why the original audience didn't know what to make of it. It's definitely off-kilter, and it may run a little long, particularly in its screwball turn in the final fifteen minutes. Other than that, though, I found it enchanting.

Hepburn is Sylvia, a dour French-English girl who has just lost her mother. Adding insult to injury, her father (Gwenn again) has gotten into trouble from gambling, and the only cash they have to fund an escape is intended for Sylvia's dowry. Believing she'll never be married anyway, Sylvia cooks up a plan for them to escape to England. Fearing the police will be looking for a father/daughter duo, Sylvia decides to dress as a boy to throw the cops off their scent. The newly dubbed Sylvester takes exceedingly well to his new gender, so much so that his moxy impresses a slick Cockney conman by the name of Jimmy Monkley (Grant). He forms a criminal trio with the Scarletts, igniting Sylvester's sense of adventure. His sense of right and wrong won't let him keep stealing, though, so the three then team up with a chambermaid (Dennie Moore) and become traveling clowns.

And that's just the first half. Cukor packs a lot of story into Sylvia Scarlett. It's more than just a simple cross-dressing-for-comedy picture, however. Sylvia becoming a boy is actually a clever device employed by the writers to show how naïve the character really is. Hepburn is credible as a boy, and so she manages a convincing, athletic performance of a girl pretending to be one. It's almost like some weird version of method acting.

The second half of the film is concerned with the romantic entanglements that come out of this arrangement. Papa Scarlett chases the maid, Monkley's affection toward Sylvia after she reveals the truth is never clear, and Sylvia falls for a rakish artist (Brian Aherne, The Best of Everything) who exposes just how unprepared for womanhood Sylvia really is. A female once more, she's has few defenses to protect herself from his cad-like behavior and the emotional games his girlfriend (Natalie Paley) likes to play. Being a boy was easier for her, because the disguise allowed Sylvester to keep the world at arm's length. The revelation of Sylvia's true sex uncorks everything. Tragedy strikes, and the film's cynical heart is exposed, as well. This is perhaps what makes the final scenes of Sylvia Scarlett a little unconvincing: Sylvia and Monkley have already told us not to believe it.

Even so, it's not enough to fell Sylvia Scarlett. The charms of the rest of the film hold strong. Cary Grant is smart and funny, and when you stop and think about it, Sylvia's predicament is really the Katharine Hepburn image taken to the extreme. A woman fights so hard for her liberation, she neglects the things about herself that are honest and warm, and the lesson she must learn is to somehow have both. It didn't matter how many times we watched Katharine Hepburn go through it, she held us in her thrall. It didn't matter if the material let her down, because she'd always pick the script right back up.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD - #909

What’s there to say about Night of the Living Dead that hasn’t been said a million times? The seminal horror indie has been one of the most influential genre pictures of movie history, dissected by critics for the last 50 years, explored from every angle, praised for its technique, innovation, and deeper political subtext. There have even been full-length documentaries made about the production, including 2015’s Birth of the Living Dead [review], which featured Romero himself. And, of course, scores of sequels, remakes, and imitators.

Give Night of the Living Dead a spin and it’s easy to see why the hullabaloo persists. Made on a shoestring budget in the late 1960s, it’s a clever pressure cooker of a zombie film. Most of its running time takes place in a single house, as would-be survivors of an undead apocalypse hole up in hopes of some kind of rescue. It starts with two, Ben (Duane Jones), an African American man, and Barbra (Judith O’Dea), a white woman gone nearly catatonic after seeing her brother attacked before barely escaping herself. They are soon joined by a young couple and a family of three who were hiding in the basement. While the night draws on, arguments ensue about how best to get out alive, as radio and television reports present an increasingly bleak picture of the spreading doom.

It’s not hard to see the political metaphors when you’re looking for them. The optics of a black man and a blonde woman facing an onslaught of mostly white men hell-bent on destroying them are sadly as relevant in 2018 as they were in 1968. It’s also hard to ignore how when the older white man (Karl Hardman, looking like an early demo of Rob Corddry) arrives on the scene, he immediately tries to take charge, barking orders without considering any alternative point of view. When his wife (Marilyn Eastman) points out how important it is for him “to be right, everyone else to be wrong,” you can feel the pent-up frustration, born of years of listening to him blather on. Tellingly, when it’s time to decide whether to stick with her husband or listen to Ben, the wife is paralyzed with doubt. It’s hard to break a pattern.

Romero is employing a classic technique here. Plenty of low-budget character studies used a confined space to (a) save on location costs and (b) trap their subjects together so they can’t escape one another. See, for instance, Hitchcock’s Lifeboat [review] or countless Twilight Zone episodes. The one I most think of is “The Shelter,” where one family with a bomb shelter has to fend off their neighbors, who scoffed at the notion of such a thing but are now desperate to get in when there is threat of a nuclear attack. When examining Night of the Living Dead, we can talk race or gender, or we can also just study the personalities as the drive for self-preservation overtakes any desire to help one’s fellow man. Is it that different when the living people inside the house start tearing each other apart verbally than when the zombies outside literally feast on the flesh of the fallen?

One has to give Romero credit for pushing the boundaries in that particular scene. The stone-faced actors chewing on a turkey leg or playing with fake entrails paint a pretty grisly picture of a society that has broken down. Though it comes only midway through Night of the Living Dead, it’s really the beginning of the end. It’s when the hordes taste victory and get the strength to carry on, and the last vestiges of civilization fall.

But Romero really saves the best for last. The most unsettling moments in Night of the Living Dead come at the very end, when we learn the fate of Ben. If there is any remaining resistance to the political reading of the movie, that should all vanish here. Romero chooses to show these last shots as a montage of grainy stills, resembling news footage, focusing as much on the uncaring, self-satisfied faces of Ben’s unwitting attackers--who think they are doing the right thing--as much as the sad outcome of their actions. Anyone seeing Night of the Living Dead on initial release would have, unfortunately, found images like these far too familiar, far too similar to what they had been seeing in newspapers throughout the Civil Rights Movement. And the power to provoke has not dulled. (Spike Lee made a similar move, pulling in current events to upend his own entertainment in this summer’s BlacKkKlansman.)

This is what good horror can do: create a commentary on the times, delivering uncomfortable truths in the guise of seemingly unthinkable, frightening events. There’s a reason that the genre thrives when the real world is going through tumultuous times. A good scary movie can make us reflect on the current situation in ways that are obvious (the analogues for the Reagans in Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs) or subtle (the triumphant #metoo parable of David Gordon Green’s recent Halloween sequel, the stifled voices of good people in John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place). For most of Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero goes for the subtle, saving up that sucker punch for when it really counts.

SABOTAGE - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review was originally written as part of an overview of the Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection in 2008.

Based on a novel by Joseph Conrad, Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 spy thriller Sabotage seizes on the paranoia that was infiltrating British life in the preamble to WWII. Oskar Homolka (Mr. Sardonicus) plays Verloc, an immigrant who runs a movie house in London with his young American wife, Winnie (Sylvia Sydney, You Only Live Once). Verloc is rightfully suspected to be a saboteur, and a gregarious agent of Scotland Yard, Ted (John Loder, Lorna Doone), is staking out the theatre from the grocer's next door. He makes friends with Winnie and her little brother Stevie (Desmond Tester), getting closer to them as he gets closer to the truth about Verloc.

Sabotage has one failing, and that's that we maybe see too much behind the scenes as to what Ted and Verloc are up to, which in some cases takes some of the suspense out of the situation. At other times, it helps to amp up our tension, however, since we know, for instance, what is in the dangerous package that Verloc sends out with Little Stevie. Hitchcock's depiction of terrorism has a haunting, on-the-ground quality, with the threat placed amongst an unsuspecting public. It could be any of us riding the wrong bus on the wrong day. The director's visual representations of grief and guilt are also quite effective, with Winnie's nervous visions working quite well to create an aura of sadness and anxiety.

Sylvia Sydney is quite fetching as Winnie, giving her some of that American moxie we expect from movie heroines of the period, but also sublimated by her dependence on Verloc and the sacrifices she will make to take care of her brother. Oskar Homolka is also very menacing as the nervous, morally conflicted saboteur. His motivation is primarily money rather than any national pride (there is little indication of what country he is actually from), and his lack of belief actually makes him more despicable. John Loder is the weak link, trying too hard to be the amiable joker. Even if that's his agent's cover, it doesn't quite work.

Even at this early stage, Hitchcock is already honing his skill at building suspense, cutting back and forth from the various participants to keep us guessing as to what is actually happening. Verloc's main plot is staged with a time deadline, and as Hitchcock unravels the scheme, he ups the personal stakes for the audience to make us even more fearful of the outcome. He also has some fun taking jabs at the movie industry and the demands of its audience, noting our voyeuristic bloodlust and our belief in a new breed of hero through the choice of movies booked at Verloc's theatre.