Burt gets distracted in Elmer Gantry
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Burt runs to meet Jesus in Elmer Gantry
Burt and Lillian Gish in John Huston’s The Unforgiven
A quick note on Circus of Books
A straight couple take over a gay book shop/sex shop as a business. They become the biggest distributors of gay porn in the country — Blueboy, Honcho, Mandate.They start distributing Matt Sterling films and hosting Jeff Stryker sign-ins. The shop becomes a community hub. They´re at the center of the 80s obscenity wars and get charged by the FBI. They´re also there offering support during the pandemic. And with all of that, the mother still has trouble accepting her gay son. Circus of Books is social history, very moving …. but …it certainly gives one a lot to think about. It´s on Netflix.
José Arroyo
Burt gif update
Merely trying to keep all the Burt gifs in one place:
Day 10 — A Chairy Tale (Claude Jutra, Norman McLaren, Canada, 1957)
Last day: I was nominated by Andrew Grimes Griffin – One movie poster a day for 10 days. The no explanation bit is annoying people so:
I grew up in Canada, which was then a colonised country, at least culturally. Most of the media we had access to was American with bits of British and French, all avidly consumed, thrown in. So animation, experimental cinema, documentary, often but not exclusively through the NFB, had a different level of importance to us. They offered spaces where different identities could be imagined, reflected, explored and artists could try out different means of expressing what seemed an overall national project, reflected in many guises: ‘Who and what are we? What is Here?’. So I wanted to reflect that in my list, and A Chairy Tale was my choice. I, and probably a whole generation of us, saw this at school. No poster. It wasn’t commercial. But a great collaboration of two great loves of mine, Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra, with Evelyn Lambert doing the stop-motion animation. The music features Ravi Shankar on sitar & Sri Chatur Lal on tabla. It can be seen below:
José Arroyo
Day Five — Ten Films in Ten Days
I began playing the Ten Films in Ten Days game on Facebook. The instructions were: ‘I was nominated by Andrew Grimes Griffin – One movie a day for 10 days. No explanation, no reviews, just the poster of the movie that greatly influenced my film-loving life.’ However, the no-explanation bit annoyed people so much that I decided to offer it, and since I am writing them, I thought I´d also share them here:
Day 5:
I was nominated by Andrew Grimes Griffin – One movie a day for 10 days. The no explanation bit is annoying people so: I saw this at the Montreal Film Festival when it came out and was completely delighted and shocked it came from Spain. I then went to the Toronto Film Festival and they had a mini retrospective of his work and I was so excited about that that I went to Madrid and interviewed Almodóvar at his flat. He was watching on replay the bit in Written on the Wind where MeryLee goes up the stairs and does that frenzied dancing no one who´s seen the film has forgotten. I annoyed him by mentioning I liked Gutierrez-Aragon´s films. The result was published in Descant, a literary magazine I think no longer exists. This then led to me doing an MA on Almodóvar and The Law of Desire with Thomas Elsaesser at UEA, in the midst of which I also remember going to Spain and with great difficulty getting all his early films from his production company to aid with my research. So this film is what led to an academic career, and the irony is that the schedules and finances of academic life, or at least mine, never permitted me to do that kind of research again, the being able to travel, interview, and then having a year of doing nothing but reading, seeing and writing. Voila.
José Arroyo
Burt in Birdman of Alcatraz gif
Burt smiles in Vera Cruz
Oh Cherie! Vera Cruz
Burt Lancaster in Bellissima
In Visconti’s Bellissima, all of Ana Magnani’s dreams of cinema get crushed. But then she hears Burt Lancaster’s voice…..Her husband’s a naysayer. But then, some people just don’t get it. It’s perhaps significant in Visconti that we see John Wayne in Red River but that it is Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster that are referred to by name as objects of admiration. And of course Lancaster would go on to work with Visconti in The Leopard and in Conversation Piece, and even before that, with Magnani in The Rose Tattoo.
Burt Climbing, The Flame and the Arrow
Acrobatics in Flame and the Arrow
South Sea Woman (Arthur Lubin, 1953)
In his great The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson writes of Burt Lancaster: he was ‘a strapping athlete, his smile piercing, his hand outstretched, but with the hint that his grip could crush or galvanize. His vitality was more than cheerfulness or strength; he seems charged with power’ (586). He’s the only reason to see South Sea Woman. It’s a South Seas ‘romp’ which is largely tone deaf, b&w when everything about it screams for colour, dripping with the kind of racism that only flows when all involved are completely unaware of even the concept.
Watching him glare he seems the embodiment of G.I Joe
He’s totally aware of the camera, conscious of gesture and look.
His smile and the energy of his movements somehow life affirming, there’s a precision, a grace, a joy in the performance, which is also a performance for others. Look at his stance after he punches Chuck Connors below
and look here at the power evoked by his gesture, and that smile. He’s not just the film’s duracell battery, he’s a a whole generator providing energy to this otherwise lethargic, half-baked and half-dead enterprise.
…and he’s not just a set of muscles for show. He’s strong and agile and can do things like this below, which in spite of being his most graceful, makes one marvel at what the human body can do, The evident joy he takes in his acrobatics and the filmmakers letting the audience see that it is indeed he who is doing this is easily transferred to the audience.
South Seas Woman is an easy watch but a poor film. It’s a South Seas ‘romp,’ largely tone deaf, b&w when everything about it screams for colour, dripping with the kind of racism that only flows when all involved are completely unaware of it, and with some poor performances (Chuck Connors’ is not even the worst). The story begins with Burt — why pretend here he’s even play a character? — being court-marshalled for a whole series of offences and then through the device of the trial, we get all the flashbacks showing that in fact it was all derring-do and that he deserves medals instead. Virginia Mayo is ‘the girl’ who was initially meant for Chuck Connors but — duh! — ends up with Burt.
Kate Burford in Burt Lancaster: An American Life calls South Sea Woman, ‘a forgettable World War II buddy tale with the loose integrity of a veteran’s reverie (girls, guns, jokes and heroics)’, (loc 2424, Kindle). Lancaster’s presence in the film was due to his wanting to quickly wrap up his Warner Brothers contract.
As a sideline, but of interest, Burford writes, ‘Lancaster’s marine pal in the movie, Chuck Connors was a tall, lanky, first baseman for the minor-league Los Angeles Angels and would later say he owed his career to Lancaster, who pushed him for the part and coached him for his screen test. The two men ribbed each other…..with a naturalness that both reinforced a new set of underground rumours that they were romantically involved and might have prompted goofy buddy sequels if the star were anybody but no-sequel Lancaster (Loc 2435).
José Arroyo
Caged Burt
Burt Monkey
Sterling Hayden walks by in Variety Girl
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.
José Arroyo
Acrobatics in The Flame and The Arrow with Burt and Nick
Mademoiselle ange (Geza Radvanyi, France/Germany, 1960)
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.
José Arroyo