Tag Archives: Edward Everett Horton

LADY ON A TRAIN ( Charles David, 1945)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

A light-hearted, slightly spoofy, detective story. The tone is somewhat in the vein of Simon Templar – sophisticated, elegant, tongue-in-cheek — hardly a surprise as the film is written by Lesley Charteris, who also wrote The Saint. The film begins with Deanna Durbin, playing a San Francisco heiress on her way to New York by train, who looks up from her detective novel and her box of chocolate, and witnesses a murder being committed as the train speeds by, a detail Agatha Christie must have taken note of, as that’s how her 4.50 FROM PADDINGTON begins.

As with CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (Robert Siodmak, 1944) this is a concerted effort to expand Deanna’s persona and her audience, also set at Christmas. She’s surround by a great cast (Ralph Bellamy, Dan Duryea, Allan Jenkins, Edward Everett Horton), beautifully lit by  Woody Bredell, and gets to sing three very famous songs songs in a low slow style that sounds lovely (‘Silent Night’, ‘Give Me A Little Kiss’,  ‘Day and Night’). She doesn’t quite swing but she’s no longer singing opera either. She wears a striking array of hats, dresses (by Howard Greer), hairdos and jewels ( and I see there are still entire Pinterest pages devoted to these).

The question is ‘what is this film doing in a noir box set’? The answer, I suppose, is that it’s instructive in that so many of the situations and the lighting are those one expects from noir, but the tone and moral world are so different as to turn the film into something else.

Deanna Durbin is very charismatic; she looks smashing, and sings great. But the character as written is very thoughtless of others and her charm has a bullying quality that slightly brings to mind Shirley Temple. The screen brags at the very top are a selection of her outfits and hairdos but also , immediately above, some archetypally noir imagery from the film. Lastly, it sometimes seems all a man needs to be imaged a villain is to carry a cat.

José Arroyo

Ritrovato Lockdown 2020 – Day 2

Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , ,
From one o f he Bologna shorts screened today and filmed in Ferrantecolor

 

We discuss the main features of Day 2 of Cinema Ritrovato’s digital offerings — Ladies Should Listen (Frank Tuttle, 1934) , Donne e Soldati / Women and Soldiers (d: Luigi Malerba, Antonio Marchi, co-written by Marco Ferreri) , Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939) — as well as some of the Bologna shorts. We wonder about the Henry Fonda selections and what we can learn from the Frank Tuttle/ Stuart Heisler pairings in the program available digitally. We also discuss some of the failures in access and how it affected our viewing.

https://soundcloud.com/user-766042506/ritrovato-lockdown-2020-with-jose-arroyo-and-richard-layne-day-2

 

The amazing footage of Armenia can be found here just after the 4 minute point:

José Arroyo

Here are some images from the Bologna shorts:

From Donne e soldati:

Butching up Fred

 

fred 2

There’s a lovely moment in Swing Time (George Stevens, USA, 1936) when Fred and Ginger finally kiss. She’s been after him for most of the movie by then. Bewildered by what she sees as a lack of response, she begins singing her reproach: ‘A fine romance, with no *kisses*’:

A fine romance, my friend this is
We should be like a couple of hot tomatoes
But you’re as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes
A fine romance, you won’t nestle
A fine romance, you won’t wrestle
I might as well play bridge
With my old maid aunt
I haven’t got a chance
This is a fine romance

When they finally do begin to kiss, a door closes so that we don’t see the kiss itself. We just know they have because when the door opens Fred’s face is smeared with lipstick, which I’m often tempted to colour in, badly, as above.

What compels me is not that I think that elegant symbol of love, romance and Hollywood cinema is gay or even ‘feminine’. Indeed the image above is a cut-out of the image below. I’ve removed and then restored Ginger from where she rightly belongs, figuring that dream of love and romance *with* Fred.

 

Screen Shot 2018-10-17 at 16.04.14.png

The films, however,  in trying so hard to reassure the audience that Fred Astaire is *not* effeminate create so many spaces where other men can be: Fairies delightedly prance through the Astaire and Rogers series inciting dreams of being just as Fred and Ginger themselves incite dreams of love and romance.

Fred is usually surrounded by Eric Blore, or Edward Everett Horton or Franklin Pangborn or Erik Rhodes — all the lovely pansies of Thirties Hollywood — and often a combination of two or more in the same film — to shore up his masculinity. Sometimes as with Erik Rhodes, those characters are doubly othered by being shown as ‘effeminate’ AND foreign. It’ true that they’re there to be funny, to in some sense, be laughed at for their otherness. But they’re there. And they may be the butt of the joke but they’re also loveable and often elegant, witty, well-dressed and just as as at home in the Art Deco splendor of the world of the films as Fred and Ginger.

Thus, so often, butching up Fred results in gaying up the film and leads to moments like the lovely one below with Victor Moore (and let’s draw the veil over the blackface).

 

 

I wonder what those moments meant to a gay male audience, to a black audience, and to a black and gay audience in the 1930s?

 

Jose Arroyo

Franklin Pangborn in A Star is Born (William Wellman, 1937)

Screen Shot 2017-10-21 at 15.58.38.pngFranklin Pangborn’s been called an aesthete, prissy, flighty, a nance, a pansy, an effeminate fussbudget. Along with Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, and other beloved character actors of the classic era, he made queerness affectionately visible at a time when it couldn’t even be mentioned. This bit part in A Star is Born illustrates why: listen to the intonation on the first line ‘Flash!’, the stress he puts on the word ‘peak’, the phrasing  – does he change divine to devone? — the way he holds his hands, the passion for the inconsequential, the evocation of a slight superiority to what he’s doing, the uppity accent and the careful phrasing; the kind of guy who’d visit your home only to offer proof that your antiques are really repros: watching him speak, a whole other way of being, one then unmentionable, materialises and edges its way into representation.

 

José Arroyo

30s Pansies or was Preston Sturges homophobic?

Gay, , , , , , , , , ,

One of the joys of watching Pre-Code films is the array of gay pansies on offer: Tyler Brooke, Franklin Pangborn, Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton and many others. I’ve been watching a lot of Preston Sturges films recently and have been struck by how often characters coded as effeminate or homosexual figure in his work. In the first clip, which was adapted from one of Sturges’ Broadways plays, Child of Manhattan (1933), we see Tyler Brooke insisting that he is Dulcey Inc. and not *Madame* Dulcey! The character is funny and endearing but like so many homosexual characters then as now is linked to surfaces, appearances, fashion, the ‘feminine sphere’. In the second clip, Easy Living (1937), this time from a from a screenplay by Sturges, we see Franklin Pangborn, an actor to appear in so many subsequent Sturges films, also selling women’s couture, this time to the Bull of Broadway. Lastly we see Brian Donlevy in The Great McGinty, Sturges’ first film as director, making fun of William Demarest for not ordering a manly enough drink. It’s interesting to note how there doesn’t seem to be much  difference in the representation of the Brooke and Pangborn pansies even though one is pre-Code and one post. It is also interesting to note how in all of these films the poof is used to shore up the masculinity of the hero. Moreover, in the films adapted from or merely written by Sturges, the gay character is endearing (in the case of of Easy Living, perhaps aided by the personal understanding of director Mitchell Liesen). In the McGinty clip, Donlevy’s camping it up feels nasty and one is left uneasy: it feels mean, brutish and exactly like the type of bullying that is still so fresh a memory for many of us. This observation leaves me with some questions: what was Sturges preoccupation with homosexual men and can his work be considered homophobic? I don’t yet know.

José Arroyo

The Merry Widow (Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1934)

Uncategorized, , , , , , , ,

The original Punch illustration for the film.
The original Punch illustration for the film.

The Merry Widow is a shallow masterpiece. Sonia (Jeanette MacDonald), the richest woman in Warshovia has been widowed, might be hooked by a foreigner and send the country’s economy into a tailspin. Danilo (Maurice Chevalier) gets caught by the King (George Barbier) making love to his wife and the Queen (Una Merkel) is so complimentary that he is chosen to be the one to woo and win The Merry Widow back to Marshovia. It’s a film full of delights; the magnifying glass over the map that introduces us to Marshovia (figure 1), the first meeting between Danilo and the Widow which begins by her reading the letter saying he’s terrific and ends with him following her to the palace and saying ‘I tried to bring a little moonlight into your life…..Forget me – if you can!…and Don’t include me, even in your dreams!’; The montage of black veils, shoes, corsets and dogs that signify her life and whose change in colour symbolises a decision to change that life; How the King discovers his wife is cheating on him — a scene that Billy Wilder used as an exercise with students at UCLA asking them how would they stage it and then showing how Lubitsch did it; the fabulous waltz sequence, with hundreds of dancers waltzing through a palatial hall of mirrors, a still from which illustrated countless early film books (see fig. 1); the charming prison sequence at the end; Sam Raphaelson’s witty dialogue. The film is  a delight, a joy, a mini-masterpiece of cinematic inventiveness. Barbier and Edward Everett Horton, as the Marshovian Ambassador to France, are particularly enchanting. It’s only of Lubitsch that one dares ask for more.

The film was based on Franz Léhar’s operetta and was remade by Curtis Bernhardt in 1952. I quite like the Bernhardt version with Lana Turner and Fernando Lamas but to see the two films side by side is to be convinced of Lubitsch’s genius. Both films were for MGM, the Lubitsch version, the most expensive film made to that point and, though a considerable hit, it still lost money.

Figure 1: The magnifying glass over Warshovia.
Figure 1: The magnifying glass over Warshovia.

N. T. Binh and Christian Viviani have called The Merry Widow the quintessential Lubitsch film (Lubitsch, T. &B Editores: Madrid 1991, 2005, p. 160). It contains the elements of spectacle evident in his early silent (from Carmen onwards), the operetta form of his early thirties musicals (e.g. The Smiling Lieutenant) — hugely popular then and unjustly marginalised in historical accounts of the musical genre now — the rhythmic elements evident in all of his great works (note the dance number in the silent The Oyster Princess from as early as 1919), the use of doors, the indirect way of showing, the ingeniousness and comedy that infuses the whole film, the sophisticated comedy of manners of his greatest films (Trouble in Paradise), the great dialogue of most of his great talkies (Ninotchka), the controlled, precise, and poetic imagery of is late masterpieces (the letterbox sequence from The Shop Around The Corner say). One can’t help but agree. The Merry Widow might not be the best Lubitsch – it doesn’t quite touch our hearts – but it is the quintessential Lubitsch in that it delights the eye, the ear and the mind.

Figure 2: Classic imagery from celebrated waltz sequence.
Figure 2: Classic imagery from celebrated waltz sequence.

José Arroyo