Monthly Archives: March 2020

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 219 – Bacurau

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A political parable, satire, thriller, high-concept actioner, horror, and Western all at once, 2019 Cannes Jury Prize winner Bacurau is a wild experience and well worth your time. Set in a tiny, remote village in a near-future Brazil, we’re given a portrait of life within an open, tolerant community under the thumb of a distant but powerful mayor, and shortly after the funeral of one of the town’s elders, things start going awry.

To say more would be to spoil the surprises, and we encourage you to check the film out knowing as little as possible. As a fable, it’s a potent piece of work – themes of political abuses, the ownership and withholding of water conferring power, and the value of community and the knowledge of history are all made manifest as Bacurau straddles its genres and provides its thrills. It’s a film that’s as open to interpretation as it is clear about what it thinks – its clunkiness in this respect a positive for Mike while occasionally a little overegged for José. But quibbles here and there pale in significance to Bacurau‘s boldness and intelligence, and you should see it.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Brute Force (Jules Dassin, USA, 1947)

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I’ve now seen Brute Force several times, hoping to be persuaded by the claims others make for it but I remain unconvinced. The story of prison inmates suffering through the sadistic actions of a quasi-Nazi prison official (Hume Cronyn) and attempting an escape which ends in failure is excitingly rendered visually by Jules Dassin and cinematographer William H. Daniels.

It’s got very striking compositions (see below):

Some exciting set-pieces —  like the final mow-down in the prison yard, or when inmates force the squealer into the industrial press with blowtorches — that have lost none of their power: (see below):

or tie the second squealer to the cart near the end:

 

Daniels’ low-key lighting is really beautiful and expressive:

Particularly good at lighting actor’s faces:

I always like seeing scenes of people watching movies, such as here when the inmates watch The Egg and I, with Claudette Colbert and Fred McMurray:

Screenshot 2020-03-31 at 10.13.45

It’s also got an incredible cast of noir stalwarts, not only Lancaster and Charles Bickford but also Yvonne De Carlo, Anne Blyth and Ella Raines:

Screenshot 2020-03-31 at 10.05.50

The film also has the kind of gratuitous and extraneous chest baring I am also partial to:

 

And one which the film deployed to the marketing the film. The shot below was used in publicity but appears nowhere in the film:

 

So with all this going for it, why does it fail to convince? In the essay that accompanies the Arrow release, Frank Krutnik notes that the film was based on a botched escape attempt at Alcatraz in May 1946 and that producer Mark Hellinger, ‘enlisted the fiercely liberal novelist Richard Brooks, author of the sensational best-seller The Brick Foxhole (filmed y RKO in 1947 as Crossfire), who had crafted the original screen story for The Killers. Lik Hellinger, Brooks was fascinated by Heminway’s tough, masculine ethos and, as a New York Times reviewer commented, his post-war screen work — Brute Force, Crossfire and Key Largo (1948) — consisted of ‘savage indictments of social wrong. melodramatic and hairy chested, they demonstrated the shock technique of the movie’s current approach to controversy.’ The social wrongs in the film are clearly set up in early scenes in the Warden’s office: overcrowded jails, sadistic wardens who commit more and worse crimes in prison than those that landed the convicts in jail; the conflict over reforming versus punishing inmates; the goal of educating and enlightening  versus control by force.

Brooks was praised for his ‘bristling and biting’ dialogue and I do love some of it — ‘I wonder who Flossy’s fleecing now’? — but the rest of his screenplay leaves a lot to be desired. The character of Calypso (Sir Lancelot), though in many ways a respectful representation of a black inmate (the lone one we see) is a ridiculous contrivance, embarrassingly singing every bit of action that he’s part of to a calypso beat.  The flashback structures to the women are also very poorly dramatised, the sections  in Italy being particularly embarrassing. And this ‘hairy chested’ and ‘tough, masculiine ethos’ also turns out to be very homophobic, not only making of Captain Munsey a Wagner-listening quasi Nazi, but also clearly coding him as homosexual. See the amount of ‘classic’ male nudes, pictures and statues, his prison office is furnished with:

and which help to explain glances like this in the film:

Screenshot 2020-03-31 at 10.07.57

 

According to Krutnik, the film was regarded as setting a new standard for screen brutality and Life magazine deemed it a ‘picture of almost unrelieved violence and gloom’ and by the ending scene, ‘the screen is drenched with blood and littered with corpses’. Standards for violence have now been raised, or lowered, depending on your point of view. A liberal denunciation of prison conditions, a great vehicle for Burt Lancaster, a huge hit in its day. But at best a mixed bag now, at least for this viewer, and contradictorily, one that nonetheless holds up to repeated viewings.

 

Burt Lancaster’s Second Film:

Kate Buford write of how the role of Joe Collins in Brute Force was crafted to showcase Burt Lancaster. ‘Variety raved that the producer’s “gamble as a potential star in The Killers is paying off in spades with Brute Force ‘(loc 1412). As you can see below, Lancaster moved beautifully, Billy Daniels, MGM’s great cameraman, famous for lighting Garbo, was tempted back to work and here lights Lancaster to be both beautiful, strong, and his imprisonment branded by the shadows of bars throughout the film.

burt-leaping-in-Brute-Force

According to Kate Buford, the scene that made Lancaster’s reputation is the one below:

As she writes, ‘Collins is the prototype of all his tough guy roles to come: strong, utterly focused, body bent, yearning, pushing through space towards the goal. The big powerful man trying to break free is an image beyond words….yet as a post-war parable, the movie is deeply sad. The Nazi-type Munsey is vanquished only to have the heroes who killed him either dead or still in prison’ (loc 1401).

The Arrow Academy edition is lovely to look at with a really interesting film in which Burt Lancaster biographer Kate Buford talks intriguingly of this noir period of Lancaster’s career. I have posted her explication of the great scene where Collins through Munsey into the prison yard and why and how that set the basis of his persona above.

 

 

José Arroyo

 

In Conversation with Deborah Shaw on The Daughters of Fire (Albertina Carri, Argentina, 2018.

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If you want to see what a female gaze looks like, what queer cinema by women might feel like to see, what a combination of porn and poetry might evoke, have a look at Albertina Carri´s ‘The Daughters of Fire,’ currently playing on
@mubi.

Skyping with Deborah

‘it´s so sensational that I asked Professor Deborah Shaw, a specialist in Latin American cinema from the University of Portsmouth to join me in a discussion of this great film so we could mull it over together. We also discuss ‘Barbie también puede eStar triste/ Barbie can also be sad’, an extraordinary stop-motion queer short using Barbie dolls to dissect and critique gender under patriarchy. The two films together are proof of a major new voice in world cinema, one worth watching and talking about. The Barbie film can be accessed freely on Carri’s Vimeo channel by clicking on this link.

 

 

In the podcast we discuss how female-centric The Daughters of Fire is and how unusual that is in cinema. It´s a film about women, 95% of the cast and crew were female, and the  film seems deliberately designed for a female gaze.  Its success is evident by how we both felt: as if we were seeing something new, something  we´d never seen before.

We discuss the film in relation to pornography. Can it void patriarchal norms? Can porn be rendered poetic and what would that look and feel like? Does the film succeed? The film defies many norms. Scenes that might not seem so unusual in an interior urban metropolitan setting make even more of an impact as they are set in the natural rural setting of Patagonia.

We also discuss The Daughter of Fire as a ‘Road’ movie: our protagonists set out on a journey, meet more people, give expression to themselves. The film laudably makes it difficult to  generalise about female desire or female sexuality because each woman in the film is so different. What matters is each character´s pleasure.The film transcends a lot of the codes that have been used previously in relation to lesbian culture.

Is there a discourse on nation in The Daughters of Fire? What is the relationship in the film between people, community, nation?

We also discuss whether queer culture in its present form erases lesbianism or whether the relative lack of attention the film´s been getting is due to Anglo-centrism. Anyone working on queer theory would have a field day with the film. What is porn? What is female pleasure? How do we escape the patriarchy. Sexuality is seen as fluid, butch/femme is de-centred. We discuss how the film is trying to find a way to say something that requires a new or different form.

‘The problem is never the representation of the body but how those bodies become territory and landscape in front of the camera`, the film´s narrator tells us. How can cinema show female bodies without objectification? If it does´t objectify does it then cease to be pornography?

 

We both agree that The Daughters of Fire and Barbie Can Also be Sad are individually major works and together announce a major voice in the cinema, a major artist: Albertina Carri.

 

We hope you see the film, and if you do, you may want to check that there are no children in the room.

 

José Arroyo

 

 

https://vimeo.com/136821291?fbclid=IwAR1cN-3U6Uim_54wvEAccUpXI4ZuUD9HaXtowQoApTi7ydGocIPEOVg7XWo

 

https://vimeo.com/136821291?fbclid=IwAR1cN-3U6Uim_54wvEAccUpXI4ZuUD9HaXtowQoApTi7ydGocIPEOVg7XWo

Burt serves his sentence in Kiss the Blood Off My Hands

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Was Burt Lancaster ever a gay pinup? I mean he obviously is one to me now but I mean socially, amongst gay subcultures in the 40 and 50s? Kiss The Blood off My Hands has a great scene with Burt, in his prime and shirtless, being flogged senseless. It ostensibly was an approved system of punishment handed out by the courts in post-war Britain, where the film is set. It´s a scene that must have inspired many fantasies and clearly influenced many a subsequent gay sex shop.

PS on a more serious note, it´s also worth thinking about male action stars and scenes like these, where they do bear the burden of the look, where they are objectified, but usually via pain or suffering, a punishment unjustly meted out. Errol Flynn, the major action star of his day, had several scenes like this in the Michael Curtiz pirate pictures he did in the thirties for Warners. What´s interesting about this one, is that the punishment is just. It´s not quite the fault of the character Burt plays. He was a POW, he´s not being too successful at processing trauma, he´s lashing out with terrible consequences. He´s done the deed but the rages or red flags that lead to them are caused by the war and he´s just as much a victim as the people he ends up victimising. He´s mired in circumstances outside of his control that work against him.

 

José Arroyo

Mitchell Leisen in Variety Girl

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This is really just for those of you who might want to know what the famously queer Mitchell Leisen, great director of Easy Living, Midnight, Hold Back the Dawn and so many other classics, looked like. At the time of his appearance here in Variety Girl in 1947  he was Paramount’s top director second only to C.B. DE Mille, who also makes an appearance. Their status is the reason for their presence in the film. Mitchell’s would sadly change, too soon and for the worse:

 

Paulette Goddard flirts in Variety Girl

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Burt and Lizabeth Scott kid their personas

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Variety Girl is one of those all-star productions, usually featuring unknowns, that showcased a particular studio’s stars whilst raising money for a cause. Most of the famous ones — Stage Door Canteen, Thank Your Lucky Stars — were made during the war and in aid of the war effort. Variety Girl was made post-war, in 1947, in aid of the Variety Clubs of America, which itself had a history worthy of a movie. The Variety Club was initially set up as a show-business social club. However, on Christmas Eve 1928, a baby was left at the Sheridan Square Film Theatre with a note:

‘Please take care of my baby. Her name is Catherine. I can no longer take care of her. I have eight others. My husband is out of work. She was born on Thanksgiving Day. I have always heard of the goodness of show-business people and pray to God that you will look after her. Signed, a heartbroken mother’.

This could have been the basis of a great melodrama but is instead turned into the premise of a musical. In the film Catherine grows up, goes to Hollywood, visits the sights and ends up at Paramount, where we get to see all the stars there at the time: Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, Alan Ladd, William Holden etc.

The film is not good but it does have many treasurable bits. I wanted to share the clip above, where you can already see Burt Lancaster and Lizabeth Scott kidding their personas, because it’s surprising to think that this is only a year after Burt Lancaster became a star with his very first film, The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946). He’d also had a success with Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1946). Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947), with Lizabeth Scott had already been released, and the two had teamed up again for I Walk Alone (Byron Haskin, 1947). The bit above fulfills the function of giving audiences what they’d liked but also providing publicity for  one attraction that was still playing in parts of the country (Desert Fury) and the forthcoming I Walk Alone, another hit.

Burt Lancaster waited a long time to get into the movies. He was already 32 in The Killers. But his success was extraordinary and immediate. As Cosmpolitan said, “a star with a meteroic rise “faster than Gable’s, Garbo’s or Lana Turner.’ Thomas Pryor in The New York Times wrote that “even in a place where spectacular ascents are now more or less commonplace, the rise of Burt Lancaster is regarded as something extraordinary”. His name ona theatre marquee was now said to be good for at least 1 million in ticket sales (Kate Burford, loc 1625, Kindle).

In Variety Girl, he’s ‘Buffalo Burt Lancaster’ who puts a cigarette on the side of Lizabeth Scott’s mouth and will light it with just one bullet. Of course, he misses: it’s a spoof. One year into his movie career and Lancaster already has a persona to kid, a powerful one, aspects of which would cling to his stardom throughout the rest of his life.

 

José Arroyo

Bibliography: Kate Buford, Burt Lancaster: An American Life, London: Aurum, 2013)

Pearl Bailey in Variety Girl: ‘I’m tired’

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I grew up watching Pearl Bailey. She was a staple of 1970s variety television, popping up as a much welcomed guest to liven up  shows with her warmth, sass and savvy. And later, I did have the opportunity of seeing her marvellous turn as Frankie in Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954) singing ‘Beat Out Dat Rhythm on Da Drum’ (“Gypsy Song”).  But I’ve never seen her as young and beautiful, as charismatic, as she is in this wonderful simple number, from Variety Girl (George Marshall, USA, 1947): ‘I’m Tired’

 

 

José Arroyo

Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, USA, 1947)

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Crossfire (1947)

 

A landmark noir with a superb opening sequence (see below): we see some men through their shadows reflected on a wall. They’re fighting. The only light source seems to be from a lamp and  the light gets extinguished as it falls on the floor. For a moment we only hear sounds. Then the lamp gets turned on again but we only see a person below the waist. We follow that person’s feet and they reveal a body on the floor. The man searches its pockets. The first man grabs the other man, clearly drunk, and we see only their legs as they leave through the door. The camera then pans back to allow us to gaze on the body on the floor. There’s a dissolve and the body gets turned over to show us it’s now clearly a corpse with a man we will come to know as Captain Finley asking a woman, ‘Was Samuels drunk when you left him at the bar’?

 

It’s a great opening, all shadows, mystery, half-seen moments of violence. Who are these two men? What were they doing there? Which one is the killer? Why did he kill? These are questions the film sets up. They’ll be answered progressively and only fully at the end. In the meantime the world of the film is dramatically conveyed: darkness, violence, murder, mystery, murkyness. And it´s got a particular and particularly resonant context. These are all returning soldiers who have been demobbed but have yet to find their way home, in a liminal, transitory space, with many of them not yet adapted to a civilian context and some still processing trauma. The world created is a vivid one.

Screenshot 2020-03-25 at 16.33.10

 

 

Crossfire is based on novel by Richard Brooks, The Brick Foxhole. In the novel the cause of the murder was homophobia. The film changes it to anti-Semitism, newly unacceptable after Auschwitz, and denunciations of which were then in vogue: Elia Kazan’s Gentlemen’s Agreement, made the same year, won the Oscar for Best Picture.

According to Thomas Schatz in Boom or Bust:’ In 1947, Hollywood’s film noir output accelerated and took on a new complexity as the period style began to cross-fertilize with other emerging postwar strains. Sometimes noir only slightly shaded an established formula or recombined a bit with another genre. Crossfire, for example, is very much a hard-boiled crime thriller except for two elements which interject element of both the message picture and the police procedural:the killer (Robert Ryan) is an ex-GI motivated by rabid anti-semitism, and he is eventually brought to justice by a police detective (Robert Young) operating very much by the book (p.379)’.

What anti-semitism brings as motive and cause to a crime film and police procedural like Crossfire is that it´s particularly difficult to prove.  Robert Young, nice, steady Robert Young — to my generation forever Marcus Welby MD– is top-billed but burdened with the thankless task of delivering the film´s message, offered in the most cringey and condescending way possible. According to Pauline Kael, ‘There are condescending little messages on the evils of race prejudice that make you squirm; this is the patina of 40s melodrama’. It´s difficult to disagree with the former but I´m not sure about the latter.

In many ways, the film is an archetypal noir: flashbacks that offer different perspectives on the action; unreliable narration, subjective camera on scenes evoking drunkenness that are all canted angles out of focus, and marvellous to see,;low-key lighting often deploying one source (see above). It´s got a great look from cinematographer J. Roy Hunt; and Dmytrik is wonderful at creating interesting compositions (see below):

Screenshot 2020-03-25 at 16.55.08

…and at choosing just the right angles for maximum expressiveness, such as the way the film suggests the very real threat and power that Montgomery (Robert Ryan) represents (see below):

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According to J.R. Jones in The Lives of Robert Ryan:´Dmytryk also chose his lenses to make Monty look increasingly crazed: at first his close-ups were shot with a fifty-millimeter lens, but this was reduced to forty, thirty-five, and ultimately twnty-five millimeter. ¨When the 25mm lens was used, Ryan´s face was also greased with cocoa butter,¨Dmytryk recalled, ¨the shiny skin, with every pore delineated, gave him  a truly menacing appearance¨(p.59).

 

Crossfire is exciting to watch. But it´s also blunt and capable of great crudity — not just thematically, as in the homilies offered by Robert Young´s Finlay but also through it´s mise-en-scène. Note below how Ginny, the hooker marvellously played by Gloria Grahame is introduced via a dissolve of a trash can (see gif below)

gloria-in-crossfire

Robert Ryan nominated for Best Supporting Actor; Gloria Grahame won for Best Supporting Actress. Sam Levene is the victim. George Cooper is Mitchell, the fall-guy. Robert Mitchum was clearly used just for box-office and is completely wasted.

The film was a B produced by Adrian Scott, later one of the Hollywood Ten. It´s box office success would launch Dore Schary from producing B´s at RKO into his running of MGM, still for  while, the ‘Tiffany´s’ of the studio.  It´s the product of progressive filmmakers then at RKO who wanted to make a difference (Schary, Scott, Dmytryk) and was praised for it´s worthyness. But it was also , one of a series of films that led to the famous saying, ‘if you want to send a message, use Western Union.’

To say that it´s a landmark is not to say that it´s great.

 

José Arroyo

 

 

j

 

I Married a Communist aka The Woman on Pier 13 (Robert Stevenson, USA, 1949)

 

It’s got Robert Ryan and some great noir lighting, and it’s of undoubted historical interest. Yet, I Married a Communist aka as The Woman on the Pier 13 is hard to watch and even harder to say anything good about. Ostensibly Howard Hughes used it as a loyalty test for directors. Many (Huston, Ray etc) turned him down. Robert Stevenson took the job. Ryan’s wife told their son that the choice the actor faced was take the job or lose the career.

Screenshot 2020-03-26 at 16.43.09

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 218 – Contagion

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Listen on the players above, on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify.

We may be living under lockdown conditions, but no virus can stop us, and to prove it we’re taking on Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 thriller Contagion, about a virus that rips through every country on Earth, the scientific work to stop it, and the social decay that it leaves in its wake. Suggested as a podcast by an irony-seeking Mike, it backfires as it actually just frightens him.

At least, for a while. We think about the film in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic currently upon us, of course, praising what we recognise in the film’s imagined crisis, remarking upon the differences. Much of what it depicts feels very true to life, and it strongly evokes panic and a sense of uncertainty; on the other hand, the difference less than a decade makes is thrown into sharp relief with the film’s essentially competent and well-intentioned government response to the disease, a far cry from the lies and bluster being spouted by certain American presidents today – something that would have been not only unimaginable but laughable at the time of the film’s release. José notes that a high proportion of the public worry in our current outbreak comes down to its economic effects, which again, Contagion does not imagine as even a minor point.

It’s a well-made film, tightly plotted and paced, juggling several plots and sets of characters, understanding keenly how and when to jump between them, and its staging, editing and cinematography bring to life the paranoia of living in a society in which any surface innocently touched by any stranger’s hand could spread a deadly disease, and the fear and confusion engendered by a lack of trust in the government and loud countervailing voices. Contagion uses its characters and scenes as representative of ideas as much as, or more than, things in and of themselves, which Mike argues leaves it emotionally distant and overly simplistic – though there’s plenty of room for debate, particularly over Matt Damon’s performance.

All in all, Contagion is an impressive piece of thriller fiction whose successes and failures are both given oxygen in the light of very recent developments. If you watch it, be prepared to be made even more paranoid than you currently are… because the world we’re living in now is even more insane.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

The Woman on the Beach (Jean Renoir, USA, 1947)

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Scott (Robert Ryan) is a coastguard who’s boat was torpedoed during the war and is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. He’s got a beautiful girlfriend, Eve (Nan Leslie), and they’re planning to marry. But he´s not quite well and they decide to wait. Big mistake. One day he meets a woman on the beach, Peggy (Joan Bennett). She’s no good. She’s married to a blind painter, Tod (Charles Bickford) and has already cheated on him once before.  For Scott, meeting Peggy is like coming out of a fog and into a compulsion, and is beautifully visualised for us by Renoir (see below).

out-of-the-fog

For Peggy meeting Scott is… well who knows for sure. The film leaves it deliciously ambiguous. Sometimes the film indicates that he’s just some bit of juicy meat to her. Other times, a means out of an increasingly self destructive and interdependent relationship with her husband. As you can see below, she admits to cheating on her husband before: ‘I’m a tramp, say it. ‘And whilst she admits to being a tramp she certainly makes no apologies for it. Watching Bennett, perhaps the surliest female presence in all of American cinema, is a pleasure all film noir lovers will recognise.

In Jean Renoir: A Biography, Pascal Mérigeau writes that, ´Renoir knew  that he wouldn´t be able, as he´d confirm after the project, to attempt something that I´d wanted to do for a long time: a film about what you´d  call sex today..but envisioned from the point of view of the purely physical,¨and that it would be impossible ¨to tell a story about love in which the reasons for attraction between the different parties were purely physical, a story in which sentiment would play no part at all¨ (location 11636, Kindle edition).

The film has a discourse on art by someone who should know: Renoir fils learned  a thing or two about it from his father and his friends: the painter who can no longer see, who’s vision is entirely encapsulated in paintings increasingly gaining in value because he can no longer make them, who’s tied to the past in those works and thus also imprisons she whom he loves most, a woman who might only be staying with him for what those paintings are worth…it’s almost too much as a plot though Bickford is wonderful as the blind but still controlling husband, his gaze almost always in the right place so it rouses suspicions as to whether he really is blind.

The nightmare sequences at the beginning and end are wonderfully modernist. The first one, which  starts the film is below:

…and useful to compare to the one near the end:

 

Renoir is extraordinary in creating a mood, a sense of physical compulsion in which questions of morality are over-ridden by desires that can’t be fully comprehended. Mérigeau writes, ‘there´s  nothing to please a viewer who may have been attracted to the idea of seeing a film noir. Although it truly is a film noir, it contains no crime other than those that might exist in the minds of the characters, who need to get rid of their traumas, obsessions, and fantasies if they are ever  to escape their deep, adherent isolation’ (location 11738)

The ending makes no sense to me. It is perhaps arrived at too quickly and I plan on looking into the production history of the film at a later point (and due to the wonders of social media Adrian Martin has kindly pointed out to me that Janet Bergstrom has written a dossier on the troubled production, Janet Bergstrom, ‘Oneiric Cinema: The Woman on the Beach,¨Film History 11 (1) (1999) 114-125) ..But I loved it in spite of that and plan to see it again.

The Woman on the Beach was Renoir’s last American film, one in which he says, ‘I wanted to proceed more by suggestion than by demonstration: a film of acts never carried out..This gives the film an ambiguity that well-complements its intensity: strong feelings not quite understood but carried on into actions, many of them later regretted.

 

It´s a film Renoir tried to forget, without ever quite disowning. It´s certainly imperfect. But it´s also a very beautiful film, a hypnotic presentation of a lulling into sexual desire and physical compulsion that deserves to be seen again and again in spite of its faults

 

José Arroyo

Bibliography:

R. B.Jones, The Lives of Robert Ryan

Pascal Mérigeau: Jean Renoir: A Biography, RatPac Press, 2016, translated by Bruce Benderson with a Foreword by Martin Scorsese.

Burt Lancaster running in Jim Thorpe: All American

burt-nunning

An idle thought on Burt Lancaster

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Burt

 

Burt Lancaster. I was idly glancing at the TV when Apache (Robert Aldrich, 1954) came on, and there´s a love scene there with Jean Peters that´s as sensual and perhaps more deeply felt than the famous beach scene in From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953). Then, I saw the beginning of Jim Thorpe: All American (Michael Curtiz, 1951) where again he plays a native person, a natural athlete, where his very grace in movement is a reproach to the system: ´when they win it´s a great battle, when we win it´s written up as a massacre’. Then the acrobatics in The Flame and The Arrow (Jacques Tourneur, 1950) are as joyous and exhilarating as any musical number. these bits made me think that whilst we tend to emblematise US culture through cinema as Brando or Marilyn or James Dean, Burt Lancaster is the star who best evoked how America was seen at home and abroad in the middle of the last century: the strength, dynamism, beauty, the plenitude expressed by his figure, the freedom in his movement, the chiclets teeth that gleamed like a new Cadillac and the shock of wavy hair that evoked the wildness of ranges and forests and beaches. And that he evoked all of that — and one only has to see what Anna Magnani says about him in Bellisima (Luchino Visconti, 1951) to know that he did, whilst still condensing a critique, truly makes him stand out for me, though perhaps others will say the same of Monroe, Taylor, Holden, Brando et al. A morning thought.

 

José Arroyo

Burt gif

Me today

 

burt

Mademoiselle ange (Geza Radvanyi, France/Germany, 1960)

mademoiselle ange

A supernatural love story. Romy Schneider plays Line, an airline stewardess hopelessly in love with Pierre Chaillot (Henri Vidal), a rich race-car driver who’s about to marry a heartless princess, Augusta de Munchenberg (Michèle Mercier). The princess leaves the race-car driver to helicopter off with an Italian popstar and Line’s guardian angel takes on her form to make Pierre fall in love with her instead.

It’s a trifle that begins as a madcap Runaway Bride and ends with a runway groom, and not a very good one at that. Why see films from 60 years ago that were not very good then and worse now? Well firstly it’s interesting to see what were considered cinematic attractions then: colour of course, the Riviera setting, the café society life of popstars and princesses, cars and car races, helicopter and airline travel, the glamourising of advertising — all signifiers of modernity, image culture, speed, the high life — and of course the wondrous Romy Schneider, rather bland here but extraordinarily beautiful and given a marvellous moment of transformation when she appears as Pierre’s guardian angel in Line’s body as he’s about to commit suicide over Augusta (see below):

 

Romy is the star of the film but the perspective is still that of a relay of male looks, and crude ones at that, as we can see below:

 

If Romy is figuratively crudely undressed via her advertising dummy, the film also puts on display — in a more coy and more dignified way — the body of a very young and very sexy Jean-Paul Belmondo, full of energy and a bit over the top as Pierre Chaillot’s sidekick:

So a film for fans of Romy and Belmondo, a reminder that Europe once had a transnational commercial cinema that offered plenty of attractions, an example of the ideologies at work in the construction of aspirations in modern mid-century Europe where the aristocracy and organised religion were on the wane but still carried weight, a nicely distracting trifle.

Screenshot 2020-03-22 at 11.32.34

José Arroyo