A Bookish Cinephile Christmas

Over at Indiewire's Criticwire, the smart, fine and funny Matt Singer has been running a critics' survey for a while, and this week was the first time the Siren participated. The question was, "'Tis the season for gift giving. If someone's looking to buy a film-related book for the cinephile in their life this holiday season, what would you recommend?"

The Siren confined herself to one book, because naming more felt like cheating and because Matt, bless his heart, hasn't got all damn day. So the Siren picked City of Nets by Otto Friedrich, which she's mentioned here often.

But Glenn Kenny, in the same survey, brings up a salient point (as is his wont): what kinda cinephile are we talkin' about? Is our Hypothetical Cinephile someone who adores stars and their foibles? somebody who digs Hollywood history? an auteurist? a writer? an iconoclast? a consumer of deep-and-meaningful critical theory?

So the Siren decided to suggest a few more books she likes and has read recently, say over the past couple of years. And because the holidays don't need more frustration, this is also limited to books that are either in print, or easily available via ABE Books and the like.

(The last three books were written by people the Siren considers friends, but she admired these critics' writing long before she got to know them in person.)

The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre by Stephen D. Youngkin
An exhaustively researched book that appears to have taken up a substantial portion of its author's life, with impressive results. You can't imagine anyone wanting or needing to know anything about Lorre that isn't here. The cumulative effect is tragic, as are so many Hollywood stories, but The Lost One is also a conclusive argument for Lorre the artist. Every movie, every play or other work is treated with care, if not always respect--Lorre himself didn't have much respect for the likes of Mr. Moto. Youngkin recreates all of Lorre's worlds in such detail that you feel how strange it was to be uprooted to, say, Paris, and the boarding house where Lorre and his companion Celia Lovsky stayed with fellow refugees in 1933: "He and Celia lay in their twin beds, eyes open, without speaking. Sleep was impossible with the thunderous speeches of Hitler coming over the radio from the floor above and the angry, indignant rejoinders of their fellow Germans: 'False! False!...Lies.'"

Ideal for: The character actor connoisseur and anyone who's intrigued by the emigre experience in Hollywood.

Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille by Scott Eyman
You know something? The Siren loves being wrong, when she finds out she's wrong in a good way. Which we will define as: The Siren thought she didn't like someone's movies, but in fact, she hadn't been looking at the right movies, and/or she hadn't been looking at the movies she knew in the right way. Which is a convoluted way of saying that the Siren rolled her eyes over a lot of Cecil B. DeMille for many years, and she shouldn't have. This biography, by the excellent writer and film historian Scott Eyman, helped immensely in knocking some sense into her. DeMille was far more complicated and even admirable as a person than he's usually been depicted, and he was a superb visual craftsman and storyteller. Meticulous detail about DeMille's huge role in Hollywood history, too. Superb opening that describes DeMille rewriting Billy Wilder's lines (yes, you read that right) on the set of Sunset Boulevard. Who else but DeMille would have had the nerve? Who else but DeMille would have gotten away with it?

Ideal for: Smart-alecs like the Siren who haven't been giving the man his full due.

The Sound of Silence: Conversations with 16 Film and Stage Personalities Who Bridged the Gap Between Silents and Talkies by Michael G. Ankerich

The Siren has strong preferences in interview books. She likes to hear from people who were a few rungs down, as well as those at the top. She loves a good story but she definitely wants to hear about the work. Above all, she wants an interviewer who knows his stuff, who has seen the movies. Michael Ankerich fulfills all those requirements. And so you get Billie Dove's tales of Marion Davies drinking to get through a horseback outing with Hearst, or how Blondie of the Follies was recut to make Dove the villain; Barbara Boundess, who had a bit part in the scandal of Paul Bern's suicide ("I learned a great lesson through this. It taught me never to go out alone with a married man"); Marcia Mae Jones ("The minute they say, 'Oh, you're that child actress,' I want to scream, because I know it's going to hurt me"); and the late, elusive Barbara Kent ("I've always thought one had to be an exhibitionist to be in pictures. That wasn't me"). Put it this way: this year, the Siren's asking Santa for Ankerich's other book.

Ideal for: The many people who adore this period.

Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne by James Gavin
Admiring but unflinching account of Horne's great talent and also her flaws. Full of first-hand interviews with people who knew Horne. You get not only Hollywood, but also the simultaneous glamor and sleaze of the nightclub circuit and the people who frequented it. And my god, the stories in here--like Horne, called a "nigger bitch" by a 30-year-old white man at the Luau in Beverly Hills in 1960, throwing first a butt-filled ashtray at his head, then a hurricane lamp, then another hurricane lamp. The man wound up bleeding from a cut over his eye, and when the cops arrived and reproached her, Horne flashed back, "What do you want me to do? Apologize?"

Ideal for: Those with a passionate interest in music to go along with movie madness; anyone who wants/needs to know more about the history of black performers in Hollywood.

The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson
Until a couple of years ago the Siren had read Ferguson only in snippets. Like all late converts, she's now an evangelist. The legendary New Republic critic joined the Merchant Marines at the outbreak of war and was killed in 1943 at age 36. While his collected film criticism is criminally out of print, it's still pretty easily obtained, and if the used bookstores of America experience a colossal run on Otis Ferguson, maybe somebody will reissue him. To his weekly reviewing duties Ferguson brought scalpel-clean perception and a supremely graceful prose style. Just now, at random, trying merely to pick a passage that would show off the man's writing, the Siren rediscovered the best description of James Cagney she has ever read:

He is all crust and speed and snap on the surface, a gutter-fighter with the grace of dancing, a boy who knows all the answers and won't even wait for them, a very fast one. But underneath, the fable: the quick generosity and hidden sweetness, the antifraud straight-as-a-string dealing, the native humor and the reckless drive--everything everybody would like to be, if he had the time sometime. But always this, always: if as a low type he is wrong, you are going to see why. In spite of writers, directors, and decency legions you are going to see the world and what it does to its people through his subtle understanding of it. And in The Roaring Twenties this genuine article has had the chance of his life; he has deliberately done much that a star would refuse to attempt, because hell, he isn't a star, he's an actor; and in this actor's range of life and death he is not only an actor but an intelligence. You do not even have to like that quicksilver personality to see its effect in art here. And if you do appreciate his personality-legend, his face on this screen will haunt your dreams.

Ideal for: The Siren is considering a program to leave this in hotel desk drawers at film festivals, à la the Gideons.

Mabel: Hollywood's First I-Don't-Care Girl by Betty Harper Fussell
In the early 1980s Fussell became entranced with Mabel Normand and set out to talk with just about anybody who was still alive and had known the actress. This twisty, highly idiosyncratic book chronicles not just the high times and ill fate of Mabel Normand, but also Fussell's relationship to the idea of Normand; what she saw on screen, what she learned from investigating. In many ways this is an exploration of what happens, good and bad, when an admirer digs deep into the life and myth of a star. Piece by piece, the actress whom audiences so adored emerges--not as a role model, a notion Mabel would have hooted at after you explained what the hell you meant, but still a warmhearted, talented woman laboring through some very, very bad breaks.

Ideal for: Silent movie lovers; lovers of a good mystery.

Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman by Dan Callahan
Anyone who's hung around these parts long enough knows the Siren's high opinion of Dan Callahan's writing on film. The Miracle Woman does something that is very unusual: The life is the backdrop to the work, and not the other way around. You want to know about the marriages to Frank Fay and Robert Taylor, the old rumors about Stanwyck's sexual preference, the sad story of her relationship with her son? It's all there. But the focus stays on the movies, with chapters organized around periods and themes in Stanwyck's work: "The Rough-and-Tumble Wellman Five," "Screwball Stanwyck," "Stanwyck Noir." Within those sections, Dan gives detailed looks at the choices Stanwyck the actress is making--the way each character walks, moves, gestures, reacts. He compiles sources to suggest what kind of thinking and goals the actress was bringing to each part, like Stella Dallas: "A fury rises up, crests, then falls as she pulls Laurel away from her father...'Get out,' she says to her husband, making it sound like a choked afterthought. Laurel is crying hard, and Stella takes the child on her lap and tries to comfort her. The little girl keeps on crying, and Stanwyck's face takes on a distant blankness as she says that Mummy is right here."

Ideal for: Stanwyck fans (so, everybody) and any cinephile who takes acting seriously.

In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the Cities by Imogen Sara Smith
Also mentioned briefly here before. The Siren has often backed a fairly tight definition of noir, usually seen as an urban genre. Imogen argues, persuasively, for how noir "flourishes in marginal places...there are recurring noir images out here, too, evoking a transient, brutal, melancholy world." She traces noir in the suburbs (notably in a chapter delightfully titled "Maximum Security: Domestic Noir"), branching out through buses "with their miserable enforced communities of travelers," roaming down interstate highways, even into the plains and saloons of the Western. And brother, can she write.

Whether playing flawed heroes or redeemable villains, Dana Andrews found his niche as film noir's uneasy conscience. He was the most repressed of all tough guys. "It's not difficult for me to hide emotion," Andrews said, "since I've always hidden it in my personal life." His suits seem welded to him like armor. With that boxy mid-century silhouette, further fortified by the fedora, the glass of bourbon, the cigarette that stays jammed in his mouth when he talks, he looks oppressed by the masculine ideal of granite-faced impassivity. Those critics who called him wooden or monochromatic must not have looked into his troubled eyes.

Ideal for: The true noir fiend, the one who's been known to snap, "Why don't you quit cryin' and get me some bourbon?"

When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade by Dave Kehr
Every week in the New York Times, and every month in Film Comment, we have an eloquent voice for film preservation, an advocate wandering the back rooms of studios worldwide to see what's unjustly been left on the shelf. Dave Kehr is, simply, a very great critic and one of auteurism's best advocates. This book of reviews from the Chicago Reader, spanning 1974 to 1986, consists solely of raves, or near-raves. You can pull When Movies Mattered off the shelf again and again, like any great collection of essays. When she read it, the Siren couldn't resist starting with The Leopard, even though that one's in the back: "A social portrait is only successful when it ceases to be strange--when we have the sense of sharing the characters' world, seeing it as they do. If the world of The Leopard seems extraordinarily real, it is because Visconti sees it as ordinary."

Ideal for: Discerning auteurists; aspiring film critics who want to See How It's Done, Kids; the many fans of Dave's splendid writing.

That ends the Siren's list. For the movie-lover who might require something a bit more esoteric, a handful of suggestions: Things I Did...and Things I Think I Did, by Jean Negulesco (not much on the movies but he gives good yarn); anything by Oscar Levant, but the best is The Memoirs of an Amnesiac, one of the most howlingly funny autobiographies of all time; Marlene Dietrich's ABC (contains her astrological, love and wardrobe advice as well as her recipe for schnitzel); An Orderly Man by Dirk Bogarde; any of Anita Loos' three books on Hollywood, but especially The Talmadge Girls.

The Siren has over the years found a large number of great film books via the kind suggestions of patient readers, so if you also know a good one, speak up.

Buffalo Bill (1944) and The Great Man's Lady (1942) at the Film Forum

The Film Forum in New York City is running a massive William Wellman retrospective, projected in glorious 35-millimeter, through March 1. The Siren's life being what it perpetually is, she hasn't made it there until this week, when she saw a double bill of The Great Man's Lady (1942) and Buffalo Bill (1944).

The Great Man's Lady, in which Barbara Stanwyck ages to over 100, had great merit and some beautiful scenes, including a wedding by a covered-wagon train as a Plains thunderstorm brews; and, later, Stanwyck dragging herself out of a flooded river, looking as beautiful as she ever did. Wellman, who like almost all of her collaborators worshipped Stanwyck, said it was "one of the best performances ever given by anybody." But the Siren isn't going to go into this one, because old friend and brilliant film writer Dan Callahan has a book about Stanwyck just out. It's called Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, and it just got a fine review from Scott Eyman in The Wall Street Journal. The Siren hasn't read it yet, but she's getting a copy this Sunday, Feb. 19, at the Museum of the Moving Image, where Dan will be presenting a double feature of The Lady Eve and Forty Guns. The movies start at 3 p.m., so do go, or just order the thing off Amazon or wherever. If you need proof of what Dan can do (and the Siren's been praising him to the skies for yonks) here's a sample.

Buffalo Bill can't be called top-tier Wellman, not while prints of anything from Wild Boys of the Road to The Story of G.I. Joe still circulate; but it's more worthwhile than the Siren expected. This Technicolor Western was made by Wellman as a sop to Darryl Zanuck, who told the director that the prestige of The Ox-Bow Incident was all very well, but it sure wasn't going to pay anybody's grocery bills. Zanuck said he'd make the downbeat project anyway if Wellman gave him two pictures with a little more commercial pizazz, and that agreement resulted in this gorgeous, thematically screwy Western.

On one level, it's straight-up Great Man mythology of Buffalo Bill Cody, from the Homeric boom of the narrator, to turning a skirmish between a cavalry regiment and about a half-dozen Cheyenne into "the battle of War Bonnet Gorge." This "battle" lives in the annals of Twentieth-Century Fox and not the West, but it offers astonishing images. The two sides are filmed from a long distance, dead-on, so that the hooves of the horses churn up the water across the expanse of the eerily still water, and the sound comes at you like a squall on the horizon.



Meanwhile Bill can shoot the feathers off an Indian-head penny at fifty paces and looks great in (or out of) buckskin because he's played by Joel McCrea. He can woo the luscious, ever-feisty Maureen O'Hara without smudging her Jungle Red lipstick. Bill can relate to the Indians, because he is a man of the West and knows their ways--and hey, some of Bill's best friends are Indians, like Yellow Hand, played by Anthony Quinn in a loincloth that offers flirtatious glimpses of his clingy flesh-toned briefs. Alas for Buffalo Bill, nowadays when a Native American in a Western holds up his hand to say "How," you can practically hear the audience's eyes rolling toward the ceiling.

That isn't the whole movie, though. There are some startlingly on-target attempts to add a taste of the real history of the white man and Native Americans, a bloody saga that even Technicolor couldn't pretty up. The Great White Eastern types are a sorry lot, references to broken treaties abound, and the buffalo hunts that gave Cody his nickname are explicitly depicted as yet another knife in the heart of the Plains nations.

Another jolt is that while the Siren hasn't nailed down a definitively sourced answer, it sure looks as though some of those buffalo were killed on film. Let's put it this way; the Siren has yet to hear of a trained buffalo able to keel over on command during a stampede. (If you know different, please speak up; here's one instance where the Siren wants to be wrong.) Nothing justifies slaughtering an animal for a movie, in the Siren's view and surely everyone else's; that's why the Siren has always had a hard time with King Solomon's Mines. But the scenes do hammer home the script's bald statement that the animals are dying to feed a fad for buffalo rugs back East. Watching the Cheyenne ride through a field of buffalo heads discarded like trash at a county fair, then later through a literal boneyard, speaks louder than anything Cody says in the movie.



The Siren hasn't read anything on Cody in eons, and her attempts to untangle some of the controversies for this review ended with the realization that she hasn't got all damn year. She can run a blog and a household, or she can figure out what the deal was with Buffalo Bill, she cannot do both. It's somewhat comforting that story writer Frank Winch, screenwriters Aeneas Mackenzie, Clements Ripley and Cecile Kramer, and even Wellman himself, clearly had the same problem. Cody displays heroism in the film's battle, but soon he's condemned to re-enact his glories as a sideshow attraction, cutting down wooden substitutes for the Native Americans we so successfully wiped out. Cody goes on a hunt with a Russian Grand Duke, although we aren't shown that bit o' shootin'. But the movie's other hunts are so canned and merciless that it's clear Cody might as well have taken His Imperial Highness out to a barn and had him pop old Bessie while she was being milked. At the same time--indeed, while he's in the camp with the off-screen Duke--Cody expresses proto-Sierra Club doubts about whether mowing down the buffalo like blades of grass is such a hot idea.

Like so many Westerns, Buffalo Bill wants to have it both ways: sorrow and remorse for the fate of the Native Americans, and valorization of the events that decimated them. One scene gives you Bill tied up in a Cheyenne camp having dirt clumps thrown at him by giggling women in body makeup. Another scene gives you the same Cheyenne, racked by grief, hunger and fear, dancing in preparation for battle, stamping in a circle and wearing the old feathered costumes we've all seen so often. But as filmed by Wellman, from a distance that fills the frame, it's a march to the graveyard, foreboding and tragic.



Linda Darnell has a small role in Buffalo Bill, as a Cheyenne schoolteacher ("Dawn Starlight") who loves Cody from afar. Early in the movie, Darnell sneaks into Maureen O'Hara's bedroom to try on a ruffled dress and what must be about eight or nine petticoats. O'Hara enters and accuses Darnell of being a thief. Darnell flashes back that she wanted to see if she could be as beautiful as a white girl. O'Hara softens and shows the girl the reflection in the mirror--then asks if Darnell has "an Indian brave" who would like to see her in all that finery. Darnell responds with fury at the patronizing reminder, spitting out the word "Indian" and ripping off the dress. The beautiful mirror shots, the dialogue, the mood shattered by the clueless white girl and the pain, frustration and disabling rage of Darnell--it's Imitation of Life, fifteen years before Douglas Sirk filmed it.

Beautiful and schizoid as it is (the cinematographer was Leon Shamroy) the Siren can't imagine someone like Sherman Alexie watching Buffalo Bill and not having a seizure; and there's plenty here that could make others choke on their popcorn as well. As filmmaking, however, it's Wellman. And Wild Bill Wellman always finds a way to lure the Siren.

The Siren by Request: Ball of Fire (1941)

(Requested by Bill Wren of Piddleville, Happy Miser and Oshimoi.)

Ball of Fire is a two-hander--”on the one hand...on the other...” On the one hand, it’s intensely lovable, and was requested by more individuals than any other single movie. On the other hand, despite the amazing array of talent, it’s got some problems. This was the Siren’s second encounter with Ball of Fire, and she spotted the same flaws she did on the first go-round. But she still had a great time.

Ball of Fire was produced by Samuel Goldwyn in 1941, and was the last movie Billy Wilder made before moving on to directing. One of Wilder’s conditions for writing the screenplay was that he be permitted to observe every day of Howard Hawks’ shooting, and Hawks was happy to let Wilder hang around and learn. Wilder biographer Ed Sikov argues that Hawks’ fluid, understated, harmonious visuals were ultimately a stronger influence on Wilder the director than his acknowledged idol, Ernst Lubitsch. Hawks had nothing but praise for Wilder and Charles Brackett as screenwriters. (But when Hawks later claimed credit for pointing out that “hey, this is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs!”, an annoyed Wilder said that had occurred to him on his own, thankyouverymuch.)

Samuel Goldwyn felt aggrieved that his most valuable contract player, Gary Cooper, was having more success in movies made on loanout than in Goldwyn-produced pictures. So Goldwyn obtained Wilder and Charles Brackett on loan from Paramount and put them to work on a vehicle for Cooper. After Wilder rejected a number of old ideas, he hit on a tale he’d written years earlier, concerning a professor of linguistics who gets involved with a burlesque singer and has a run-in with the lady’s gangster associates. Wilder and Brackett set to work on the script that would become Ball of Fire, with Cooper as a professor whose initial interest in jazz singer Sugarpuss O’Shea is her facility with American slang.



Who besides Billy Wilder would look at Gary Cooper, the most laconic speaker in Hollywood, and think, “Linguistics!” Not only is that genius, it’s unparalleled mischievousness, and with Wilder, the two qualities are joined at the hip. Everybody seems to have accepted casting Cooper as a language maven as a self-evidently great idea, with the exception of Cooper himself, who was fine with playing a professor but got the shrieking blue fantods when he laid eyes on the dialogue. According to Sikov, Cooper described his polysyllabic lines as “gibberish” and declared, “I can’t memorize it if it doesn’t mean anything.” The actor made an appointment to complain to Samuel Goldwyn, the only person in Hollywood with more of a reputation for giving English a wide berth, and Sikov observes, “That must have been a real meeting of minds.” Give Goldwyn credit, however. When Cooper emerged from the producer’s office, he’d agreed to do Brackett and Wilder’s dialogue almost without alteration. “Two-dollar words, okay, but not ten-dollar words,” was Cooper’s final say.

Let’s swing here into the things about Ball of Fire that don’t work, so we can move on to the things that do. Counting down in reverse order...

4. Cooper had a point, in the sense that the movie, at 111 minutes, is too long and a bit sluggish. Hawks was aware of this and according to Todd McCarthy, he defended the picture by pointing out that “when you’ve got professors speaking lines, they can’t say ‘em like crime reporters.” Still, one hallmark of a wholly successful comedy is pace, and a screwball (which Ball of Fire is, fundamentally) is fast. The flawless timing of Twentieth Century, Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday is missing from Ball of Fire. Even Dana Andrews, playing a gangster who might conceivably be a fast talker, is a beat or two slower than he should be. (He’s so handsome, though, that the Siren doesn’t much care; she was drooling over him more than Cooper.)

3. Richard Haydn. The Siren admits to the personal nature of this quibble, but Haydn’s adenoidal speaking manner as Professor Oddly drives her up a wall. She’s convinced that Mel Blanc must have had this actor, in this role, in mind when he voiced Marvin the Martian. Each time Haydn speaks the Siren hears, “The Illudium Q36 Explosive Space Modulator! That creature has stolen the Space Modulator!”



2. Cooper doesn’t have much chemistry with Barbara Stanwyck. The Siren believes Bertram Potts is attracted to Sugarpuss, as with the fabulous line, “Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind. Unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.” And the Siren believes that Sugarpuss is attracted to “Pottsie”; Stanwyck is so great she could make the Siren believe she’s got the hots for S.Z. Sakall. But when Stanwyck stands on some books and it’s time to get the yum-yum on with Coop, they ignite a Zippo lighter, not a bonfire.

1. The cinematography. And right now, the Siren’s readers are checking the credits, seeing Gregg Toland’s name, and lining up to feel her forehead and ask if she’s feeling herself today. Yes, complaining about Toland’s cinematography may seem the product of delirium or glaucoma. But this isn’t a question of skill or beauty--of course it’s beautiful, it’s Toland and Hawks--it’s a question of what suits the material. Ball of Fire’s pacing problems are exacerbated by a look that’s disconcertingly gloomy. The house where the professors are compiling their encyclopedia is lit like Xanadu, and instead of emphasizing the contrast between the eccentrics and what one of them calls “a mausoleum,” the visuals just muffle the action further. All the deep-focus shots keep pulling the Siren into the sets, when she wants to concentrate on the conga line.

Nits picked. On to the fun stuff. Again, in reverse order:

4. Oscar Homolka as Professor Gurkakoff, the scientist/mathematician. This may be another perception unique to the Siren, but he’s her favorite dwarf. The Siren once worked for mathematicians, and Homolka’s performance, combining a certain innocence with common sense and kindness with oddball humor, is a compendium of all the things she loved so much about those guys. Coop aside, he’s also the only professor with a little bit of sex appeal. (Like the Siren said, this may be a personal thing...)

3. The movie’s sweetness. Even Joe Lilac (Andrews) gets a signature color that's a nudging joke and some pretty funny moments, considering he’s described as the head of Murder Incorporated. Dan Duryea, one of the movies’ most reliable sadists, also goes easy as thug Pastrami. So do his partner Asthma (Ralph Peters) and the professors’ battle-axe housekeeper Kathleen Howard. But the real tell is the gentle, loving treatment of the Seven Dwarfs. Intellectuals get sent up a lot in American comedy; as stuffed-shirt targets, they--oh all right, we--are irresistible. The profs are babes in the Central Park woods, the first ones you’d pull out of a crowd for a cozy little game of three-card monte. But we like them that way. When Sugarpuss arrives, they’ve got all the equipment needed to join the conga line and overcome a bunch of gangsters. The eggheads do it, however, without changing their essential natures. Witness the lovely scene where, after Haydn has described his sexless, John-Ruskin-esque honeymoon with a watercolor-painting virgin named Genevieve, the professors serenade him with the old Victorian song of the same name. They sing without a trace of condescension or pity; they’re just performing an act of lovingkindness for an old friend.

2. The dialogue. Nobody, but nobody ever venerated and immortalized American slang like Austrian-born Billy Wilder, and this was his chance to shoot the works. “Root, zoot, and cute--and solid to boot!” “Brother, we’re going to have some hoy toy toy.” “Scrow! Scram! Scraw!” “Blitz it, mister, blitz it, will ya!” “Patch my pantywaist.” “A slight case of Andy Hardy.” And one the Siren admires for its Code-proof double entendre: “Shove in your clutch.” What a feast this movie is. And the Siren thinks that while Wilder and Brackett recorded authentic phrases, they also just made shit up, and did it so well you think it’s something you’ve been hearing all your life. Of the lines above, which ones would you have heard on the street in 1941? The Siren can’t tell you. Maybe all, maybe none. Example: when Stanwyck says someone is going to “throw me out on my tin.” The Siren’s heard a lot of euphemisms, and seen a lot of movies, but that’s a new one on her. (She’s adopting it forthwith, by the by.)

And now we come to the Siren’s number-one favorite thing about Ball of Fire, the place where the whole movie comes together.

1. Barbara Stanwyck as Sugarpuss O’Shea. She was, incredibly, fifth choice, behind Carole Lombard, who disliked the character and the story, Jean Arthur, whom McCarthy says Hawks didn’t really want, Lucille Ball, and Ginger Rogers, who was offered the part and turned it down because, she told Goldwyn via her agent, she only wanted to play “ladies” from now on. (Goldwyn’s response: “You tell Ginger Rogers ladies stink up the place!”) That’s an impressive list, and any of them could done have a creditable job. But not like Stanwyck, oh no. She was as sexy in this movie as any in her career, especially in the early scenes with her nightclub costume swaying around those gams like spangled vertical blinds. The Brooklyn that never entirely left her low-pitched voice gets free rein in lines like “Say, who decorated this place, the mug that shot Lincoln?” and “This is the first time anyone moved in on my brain.” Her dawning love for Pottsie is so perfectly calibrated it’s like watching a thermostat turned up notch by notch. Her attack of late-movie remorse over having deceived Pottsie is delivered with one line, “a tramp,” spoken in a way that tells more than her tears seconds later. In a movie stacked with some of Hollywood’s greatest character actors, one gorgeous future leading man and one eternal legend, Stanwyck still carries the whole thing. She is, as Professor Bertram Potts might say, the complete conjugation.

Women's Costumes at the Movies: Faux Fashion Blogger Edition

My final defeat, which made me cry real tears, came at the end of [Pandora's Box], when [G.W. Pabst] went through my trunks to select a dress to be 'aged' for Lulu's murder as a streetwalker in the arms of Jack the Ripper. With his instinctive understanding of my tastes, he decided on the blouse and skirt of my very favorite suit. I was anguished. "Why can't you buy some cheap little dress to be ruined? Why does it have to be my dress?" To these questions I got no answer till the next morning, when my once lovely clothes were returned to me in the studio dressing room. They were torn and foul with grease stains. Not some indifferent rags from the wardrobe department but my own suit, which only last Sunday I had worn to lunch at the Adlon Hotel! Josifine hooked up my skirt, I slipped the blouse over my head, and I went on the set feeling as hopelessly defiled as my clothes. Working in that outfit, I didn't care what happened to me...

I did not realize until I saw Pandora's Box in 1956 how marvelously Mr. Pabst's perfect costume sense symbolized Lulu's character and her destruction. There is not a single spot of blood on the pure-white bridal stain in which she kills her husband. Making love to her wearing the clean white peignoir, Alva asks, "Do you love me, Lulu?" "I? Never a soul!" It is in the worn and filthy garments of the streetwalker that she feels passion for the first time--come to life so that she may die.
--Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood

The Siren was recently designated a fashion blogger by a European site called Wikio, an honor that left her equal parts amused, flattered and puzzled. Aside from her annual rant about the costume awards at the Oscars, a tribute to Mary Astor's makeup and a brief series of posts about perfume, the Siren can't recall saying much about fashion here at her Web outpost, although certainly clothing and makeup rank high on her list of semi-private obsessions. Yet there she is, right next to the black-belt shoppers of Fashionista and seven notches below the cool gaze of the Sartorialist, who would probably stop the Siren in the street right around the same time Dorothy Lamour showed up in hell with a platter of Mai Tais.

Still, the unexpected accolade made the Siren start thinking about costumes in film. The period stuff does get most of the attention, but sometimes deservedly so, as with Walter Plunkett's incredible designs for Gone with the Wind. Those dresses are so brilliantly in tune with Scarlett's character and the events of the movie that you would swear they all must be in the book. The drapery dress is, but just about none of the others are. William Pratt points out that if Plunkett had followed Margaret Mitchell's descriptions to the letter, Scarlett would have spent 9/10ths of the movie wearing green, the author's favorite color. The "scarlet woman" dress that Rhett throws at Scarlett before Ashley's birthday party, for example, was entirely Plunkett's doing. And the Siren has always wanted a better look at the cloudlike indigo gown Scarlett wears in a brief scene of her New Orleans honeymoon. Look closely and you'll see it's adorned with nine stuffed birds--a witty commentary on the once-starving Scarlett stuffing herself with the finest in Louisiana cuisine.

Other great moments in period costume would have to include Marie Antoinette; Jezebel (that red dress was actually bronze, the better to photograph in black-and-white); The Adventures of Robin Hood (Olivia de Havilland spends most of the movie with her hair completely covered, so when she shows up in her bedroom with her hair down in braids, it's a potent sign of sexual yearning); and Queen Christina (the moment when Garbo turns so the firelight outlines her form under a man's shirt is one of the most sensual in all of 1930s cinema).

But the Siren is always drawn to contemporary costumes, particularly those for women. Louise Brooks's essay on Pabst contains what is still the best explanation of costume and performance that the Siren has ever read. Robert Avrech recently posted about designer Helen Rose, and in comments we discussed how an actor's clothing influences a performance. Confronted with that, plus her new job description, the Siren's palms began to itch and she got that yen, the one that says, "It's time to make a highly idiosyncratic list of things I like so that everyone can argue with me, politely."

As Yojimboen has pointed out, the ins and outs of costume credits in old movies can be worse than Kremlinology. Some of these were undoubtedly purchased off the rack, but as Annie or Daria could tell you, there's an art to selecting the right clothes, too. The Siren is mostly sticking with the screen credit, but if someone knows the real scoop on who did what, by all means tell us in comments and I'll update.

So, ten great moments in women's costume design. Let's hope this makes whoever clicks over from Wikio more happy and less confused.

1. Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (Orry-Kelly)

I’ll be wearing my white lace gown tonight. I’d like you to wear your black and white foulard.
--Gladys Cooper as Mrs. Henry Windle Vale

Cooper has a lot of bitchy moments in Now, Voyager, such as, just to pick one out of a hat, throwing herself down a staircase to ensure her daughter stays chained up as a nursemaid.

But the Siren thinks even trying to order the newly fashionable Charlotte back into this offense to the human eyesight is as evil as it gets. Have you ever seen anything to equal this horror? The hem that hits just the right spot to get that redwood-forest effect every woman wants for her legs. The neckline that rests at her throat only because the climb to the earlobes got too exhausting. The lace at the collar, probably thrown there by Gladys in one of her temper fits. The way the dress droops away from the body, yet clings enough to say, "There is a whole world of lumpy oatmeal under here and brother, you want no part of it." It's a goddamn triumph of costuming. Kim Morgan recently said every woman should have Claude Rains as her psychiatrist, and ain't that the truth--but Dr. Jaquith's one mistake is waiting to talk to Charlotte before they leave together for his cozy sanitorium. The second she entered wearing that monstrosity, he should have said, "Right, we're outta here."

2. Jean Seberg in Breathless (N/A)

Michel: How old are you?
Patricia: A hundred.
Michel: You don't look it.

Throw a rock down any street in America and you will hit a woman wearing tight pants and a t-shirt. And not one of them, no matter how beautiful, will look one infinitesimal fraction as dangerous as Jean Seberg does in Breathless. Seberg wears this getup because it's her job to wear it, but when Godard's camera catches her calling "New York Herald Tribune," you see a warning sign that Belmondo does not. It's more than her beauty. It's the way she walks, not just casual in her clothes, but careless. Another down-market outfit, another wasteful American in Paris, ready to toss things aside for who knows what reason.

3. Audrey Hepburn's suit in Sabrina (screen credit, Edith Head; actual design, Hubert de Givenchy.)

You needn't pick me up at the airport. I'll just take the Long Island Rail Road and you can meet me at the train...If you should have any difficulty recognizing your daughter, I shall be the most sophisticated woman at the Glen Cove station.

Over at Glenn's place there is a discussion under way about the old saw that Jaws and/or Star Wars "killed the movies." The Siren remarked that the movies were neither dead, nor dying, nor even feeling a bit faint. Here she adds that this kind of chic, however, is deader than vaudeville. Just imagine showing up at the fetid underground bunker that is modern-day Penn Station wearing that suit. You'd get fewer stares wearing a sandwich board. The suit isn't the movie's most famous costume; that's the Sabrina dress, a version of which the Siren has in her own vintage-clothing collection. But this moment, as Wilder's camera gloats over Hepburn from the top of her hat to the little dog at her feet, is one of the most thrilling in the history of film fashion. Sabrina, the lovelorn chaffeur's daughter, has learned poise and confidence, the essential elements of style. Even the least observant visitor to Paris sees that a fashionable Frenchwoman wears chic clothing because she IS self-assured, not because she WANTS to be. This, this is what Paris and a genius designer can do for you!

4. Jean Harlow in China Seas (Adrian)

During my earliest days at Metro, I was put into movies with Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow, and I was always taking their men away from them. Temporarily. It was ludicrous. There would be Jean, all alabaster skin and cleft chin, savory as a ripe peach, and I'd be saying disdainfully (and usually with an English accent, I played a lot of Lady Mary roles) to Gable or Bob Montgomery, "How can you spend time with her? She's rahther vulgar, isn't she?"
--Rosalind Russell, Life Is a Banquet

The Siren would love to tell you this little number is a turning point in China Seas, Tay Garnett's lovable strumpet-on-the-high-seas melodrama from 1935. It isn't, although Harlow wears it in a drinking scene with thoroughgoing louse Wallace Beery, and the jeweled straps do suggest a trap. The neckline is almost modest--right up near the collarbone--as long as you ignore Harlow's obvious lack of underwear and those strips of fabric making an oh-so-scalable ladder down the pure-white arms. Russell was right; it is unlikely Gable would even realize there were other women on the ship.


5. Mary Astor & Ruth Chatterton in Dodsworth (Omar Kiam)

Edith: My dear...don't.

The British gave us the cruel expression "mutton dressed as lamb," but it's Americans who gave us its best illustration, in Dodsworth. Poor Ruth Chatterton. Her character may turn out to be a harpy, but here the Siren aches for her. That hairpiece, ridiculous on anyone who's out of the schoolroom, hellishly combined with the ill-judged white fabric and the simpering black-velvet bow at the too-low neckline. And, to complete the picture of humiliation, there's Mary Astor, a piece of carved ivory in a perfectly draped evening gown, necklace nestled in a neckline that's even lower than Chatterton's--yet somehow not the slightest bit vulgar. The scene is one of the most poignant in the movie, as Dan Callahan writes so well here, but the costumes take the contrast even further.

6. Barbara Stanwyck in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Robert Kalloch & Edward Stevenson)

General Yen: I'm going to convert a missionary.

From the second she dons a spectacular Chinese robe, every aspect of Stanwyck's movement changes. Her arms float away from her body, she takes longer strides around the room, she suddenly seems conscious of having breasts and hips under the fabric. And you sense, too, that the lack of underpinnings makes her feel just that much more vulnerable to the General, even though she is technically as covered up as she was in her missionary garb.

7. Kay Francis in Mandalay (Orry-Kelly)

They call her Spot White. It should be Spot Cash.

Like Harlow's China Seas dress, this one wins for sheer wow factor. Kay Francis, betrayed by the man she loves, winds up as the top earner in a Burmese whorehouse, and shows she won't let the bastard get her down by strutting down a staircase wearing this. She makes that piece of liquid silver seem worth a crash course in male perfidy.

8. Myrna Loy in The Thin Man (Dolly Tree, wardrobe)

Nick: Have you a nice evening gown?
Nora: What's that got to do with it?
Nick: Have you got a nice evening gown?
Nora: Yes, I've got a lulu. Why?
Nick: I'm going to give a party and invite all the suspects.
Nora: The suspects? They won't come.
Nick: Yes, they will.

The Siren can't remember whether the above-referenced "lulu" is the famous one in the above picture, or the halter-necked black gown Loy wears in the last scenes of the movie. No matter; every good husband who asks a question like that should be rewarded by the sight of his wife wearing something like this, even if nobody ever does show. Maybe especially if no one shows.


9. Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Helen Rose, costume and wardrobe department)

Maggie: You've got a nice smell about you. Is your bath water cool?
Brick: No.
Maggie: I know somethin' that would make you feel cool and fresh. Alcohol rub. Cologne.
Brick: No thanks. We'd smell alike. Like a couple of cats in the heat.

In New York City this past week it has been, as Auntie Mame would say, "hot as a crotch." So of course the Siren had to give a nod to Elizabeth Taylor, who set the standard for riding out a heat wave without air conditioning by donning a slip and trying to seduce Paul Newman. The Siren once had the pleasure of relating Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's censorship history to a confused Argentine male who had just watched it and could not get over, indeed seemed personally offended by, Newman's failure to respond to Taylor's come-on: "It was the strangest thing I have ever seen. There's Elizabeth Taylor! and she's wearing that slip! Thank god you explained this..."

10. Kasey Rogers in Strangers on a Train (Leah Rhodes, wardrobe)

Senator Morton: Poor unfortunate girl.
Barbara Morton: She was a tramp.
Senator Morton: She was a human being. Let me remind you that even the most unworthy of us has a right to life and the pursuit of happiness.
Barbara Morton: From what I hear she pursued it in all directions.

Alfred Hitchcock's attention to what his actresses wore gets a lot of press, usually for Rear Window and Vertigo. Here's one that deserves more discussion. Every time the Siren sees this magnificent movie, she's struck again by the brilliance of Miriam's look, how it represents a summit of Hitchcock's oft-stated preference for buttoned-up women. We've already been told about this mantrap who's cuckolding handsome Farley Granger, and we're expecting maybe Linda Darnell. Instead we get a four-eyed tootsie wearing a simple print dress with cap sleeves and a daintily pointed collar, not nearly as tight, body-conscious or as low-cut as you could go in 1951. Miriam probably wore it because it was vaguely pretty and would be easy to clean if she got popcorn butter on it. And the glasses--the Siren can't be the only one mesmerized by Miriam's eyeglasses. Mind you, the glasses are vital to the plot, but Kasey Rogers wields them the way Dietrich wielded a cigarette. This is an everyday black widow we're dealing with, says that costume, the sort of woman who would show up to a backyard pool party in a full-coverage one-piece and a sarong and, given five minutes' opportunity, would still wind up behind the rhododendrons pulling the swimming trunks off the hostess' husband.

There's an awful of lot of sex in this post, isn't there? There are advantages to this whole fashion-blogger gig...

Bonjour Tristesse (1958)

What an up-and-down experience was Bonjour Tristesse, the film based on Francoise Sagan's brief novel about a young girl with an unhealthy jealousy about her alleycat father. The Siren loved the book as a teen, but it had not aged well when she revisited it. Still, artistically the 18-year-old's debut book was more cohesive than Otto Preminger's movie.

Preminger is no great favorite of the Siren. Of what she has seen, the Siren wholeheartedly loves Laura, Angel Face and Advise and Consent; likes somewhat but does not understand the fuss about Daisy Kenyon and Anatomy of a Murder; withstood Carmen Jones only for the sake of Dandridge and Belafonte and River of No Return for Monroe and Mitchum; was bored or repelled in varying measure by The Man With the Golden Arm, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Whirlpool, The Moon Is Blue and Bunny Lake Is Missing; and loathed Saint Joan, Exodus, Hurry Sundown and The Cardinal.

Excepting the first three movies (and to a degree the second two), there is a funhouse-mirror aspect to the Siren's discussions of Preminger with just about anybody outside of James Wolcott. Where Preminger's fans see sophistication, the Siren sees coarseness and an unpardonably leaden way with jokes large or small. Where they find moral complexity, the Siren finds herself repeatedly poked in the eye with The Message. When admirers talk about the beauty of his compositions, the Siren does see the point in many instances; still, the Siren frets over lack of flow, occasional bizarre framing, particularly in the late movies, and how a scene or even a shot can wear out its welcome until pacing and its sister, suspense, clutch their hearts and keel over. Others talk of Preminger's women; the Siren thinks his movies push almost all of them into one side of a nympho/frigid label and when the film doesn't, as with the title character in Daisy Kenyon, Preminger keeps the audience so far from the character that she never seems quite real.




Now that the Siren has gotten that off her chest, and has royally pissed off all the Preminger fans (I'm so sorry Glenn, I swear I love you anyway), some good, if qualified, words for Bonjour Tristesse. Plot: Seventeen-year-old Cecile sashays through Paris in the black-and-white present, moving from flirtation to flirtation while accompanied by her aging roue of a father, Raymond (David Niven). Flashback to the Technicolor Riviera in the previous summer, where Cecile finds her idyll interrupted by Raymond's marriage proposal to the refined Anne (Deborah Kerr). Unwilling to have her frolics cut off by Anne's prim insistence on things like studying, and prompted also by sexual jealousy over her father, Cecile plots to break up the engagement, with sad results.

One pleasure that maybe should be minor for the Siren, but wasn't: It was shot in France. The locations are a little bit of heaven and Preminger does not stint in using them. The Siren found herself cheering for the characters to get into another car or take another walk, because it meant another fabulous shot of a street, or a beach, or Cecile and Raymond's villa, the most swoonworthy beach house this side of Contempt.

And then there's Jean Seberg, a limited actress whom the Siren will nonetheless watch in anything. (I mean anything. I sat through Paint Your Wagon for that woman.) She had a vividly original beauty and give Otto credit where he deserves it, he shot her like a man bewitched. She walks away from a scene and Preminger leaves the camera on her backside like he can't bear to see her go. Seberg is breathtaking, and Bonjour Tristesse gives you every angle on her that you could possibly have in 1958.

What is interesting about Seberg in this film is the way she handles her obvious insecurities as an actress. Most inexperienced and/or nervous actresses (think early Ava Gardner or Linda Darnell in most things) will concentrate on getting the line readings just right and neglect the whole-body approach you get with someone truly in possession of her craft. Seberg does the opposite. Her movements in Bonjour Tristesse are perfection, or close--whether she is planting a kiss on the boy she's chosen to take her virginity, reaching her arms out to her father on a dance floor, chucking a picture into a drawer in a fit of temper or just getting ice cream out of the icebox, Seberg's every bit of body language plays as truth. But--her voice. Seberg started with a handicap, a thin voice further marred by a field-flat Midwestern accent, but she makes it worse with intonations that suggest she's reciting in class rather than expressing any kind of emotion. The lines all sound the same--a world-weary remark to a suitor gets the same type of expression she gives to joking with her father or plotting Anne's downfall. In Breathless, Godard took Seberg's affectless delivery and married it to a character for whom it made perfect sense. No such luck in Bonjour Tristesse.

The vocal problem is particularly acute because Seberg narrates large chunks of the movie. When we are flashing back to the Riviera summer, she tells us how very happy they were, and how they didn't see anything coming, and now she wonders if it all could have been prevented. And when we move from the Riviera back to Paris, Seberg tells us how very very triste everything is, and where did it all go wrong, and now she and her father are just pretending to be happy. And she also has occasional thinking-out-loud-on-the-soundtrack narration, like where she's chasing after someone and thinking "should I tell her? no, why should I tell her! then again..." All right, I am caricaturing, but only slightly. The narration is dull, at times risible, at least 95% unnecessary, and it's an open question as to whether Danielle Darrieux or Barbara Stanwyck at the height of their powers could have made these interjections work. Seberg, in only her second movie, didn't have a prayer.




Bonjour Tristesse gets a big boost from David Niven in a role that hit uncomfortably close to his real-life reputation. The Siren loved how Niven shows the slight seediness of Raymond's charm, the character's calculation and essential callousness. And Niven gives Raymond just the right amount of flirtatiousness with Cecile--enough to suggest the man is sublimating something by going with his younger girlfriends, but not enough to be repulsive. Deborah Kerr starts off low-key but ends up heartbreaking as Anne, who is rendered a lot less comprehensible and substantive than in the book.




Many of the factors that put the Siren off Preminger are present, though. Attempts at banter among these idle, intelligent people are remarkably slow and unfunny and an extended joke about three maids with similar names is DOA. There was an improbable dance on the docks that reminded the Siren of much that she hated about Carmen Jones. The way Preminger splits up focus in widescreen can strike the Siren as crude, attention jerked hither and yon rather than smoothly drawn from one spot to another. During several conversations there was an odd motif of chopping off the tallest actor at the crown of the head, but that was nothing compared to Kerr and Niven's first big love scene, played in a convertible. This was shot through the windshield in a way that planted the rearview mirror bang in the middle of Kerr's forehead. The Siren simply cannot fathom the reason for this, unless Kerr had somehow incensed her director, a possibility that should probably never be discounted with Preminger.

But the shots that the Siren is complaining about are layered between others of great beauty; in particular the black-and-white scenes are put together with impeccable visual grace. The Siren was delighted with the long swoops of the cars around the Paris streets and Seberg's eyes over her dance-partner's shoulder.




Preminger has a wintry approach to love; romance is usually a distant bat-squeak, if it's there at all. Some directors who don't believe in love do believe in sex, and plenty of it, but despite his vaunted frankness Preminger usually isn't that sexy, either, his camera hanging back as if to say, "Now, if you will, please observe this procedure." But Preminger's attitude is not that far from Sagan's, and Bonjour Tristesse has some heat. The sensuality is almost entirely reserved for Seberg and her young men, with an occasional fatherly embrace from Niven that seems to linger just a hair too long.

Kerr, on the other hand, has her hair scraped tightly off her face, wears clothes that usually don't flatter her and is placed in two-shots with Seberg that emphasize her age (all of 37) in a way that borders on the cruel. Anne's intelligence and intrinsic worth as a person, very much a factor in the novel, are scaled back in the movie. When she reminds Cecile that a seaside tryst "can end up in the hospital" (a pretty goddamn reasonable reminder for a teenager even now) she just sounds prissy. The Siren forgave all this, though, when she saw the final sequences.




Lured by Cecile, Anne stumbles upon Raymond as he tries to lure back his much-younger former flame. As she listens to the man she had planned to marry mocking her age, her looks and even her love, Preminger keeps the camera on Kerr's face, and it's a brilliant choice. You watch this woman's agony grow and grow until you can't bear it any more than she can, and she runs off. It's so beautifully played by Kerr that in no way do you question Anne's suicide later, despite her eminent common sense to that point--what else do you do with that kind of betrayal?

And even more than that, the Siren loved Cecile and Raymond's car ride after he gets the inevitable phone call. They jump into his convertible and wind down the road, and for once Preminger's buildup isn't too long--the car stops in front of the roadblock at exactly the right moment, and its lurch throws you back even though you already know what you're going to see.

Then...back to Paris, and more narration. Lots and lots of narration. But it does build to a superb shot of Seberg, taking off her makeup and staring into the mirror, facing a future already bleak and loveless at the ripe old age of seventeen. That shot, and Kerr's last sequence a few moments earlier, make up for a great deal, even if they don't change the Siren's overall view on Preminger.

Watching Movies With My Mother

(The scene: The Siren's living room, kids and Mr. C in bed. We just finished watching There's Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1956)--we both loved it, of course.)

Me: I've seen Vinnie before. (William Reynolds, who plays Fred MacMurray's square-jawed, glowering son.) He reminds me of a lot of those '50s teen actors, like Troy Donahue and...

Mom: Tab Hunter.

Me: Him too. They all played similar types, good-looking...

Mom: Upright...

Me: It makes me appreciate Rock Hudson, he was different.

Mom: Oh yes, he broke the mold. (Pause) Of course, at the time we didn't know which mold he was breaking.

(Grateful hat-tip to Girish Shambu, who also watches Barbara Stanwyck movies with his mother, and who sent me the DVD. Other thoughts on There's Always Tomorrow may be found at Glenn Kenny's place.)

Ten Books From a Cinephile's Past: The Final Chapter

And here, the final three of the Siren's Books from a Cinephile's Past. The Siren has written before of her stint babysitting a toddler by the name of P.D. His parents were movie buffs and in addition to Mary Astor's novel A Place Called Saturday, on their shelves was a treasure trove called The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years, by English critic David Shipman. In later years the Siren came to disagree with Shipman on certain stars (one notable example: Joan Crawford), but she returns to this book again and again. Shipman's research is amazing--pithy lines about each major film for each star, this in the days when he was writing without benefit of VHS or IMDB. How often the Siren has sought out a little-known movie that Shipman loves, such as The Young in Heart, and discovered it is indeed a gem. Observe the love he gives the undeservedly forgotten, such as Aline McMahon. But most of all, relish his wit, as dry as a perfect glass of sherry. No film book in the Siren's extensive collection has more delicious picture captions:

[on a still of Barbara Stanwyck from The Locked Door] They think she's just murdered her husband; she hasn't, but in typical Stanwyck fashion, she sure looks guilty.




[on a still of Lew Ayres and James Stewart--not this one, even worse if you can imagine] Joan Crawford is known to look back on Ice Follies of 1939 with much despondency: it would be strange if James and Stewart and Lew Ayres didn't feel the same way.

Hearts Divided (36) was a lavish historical romance directed by Frank Borzage...Marion Davies was effective in that part, but whoever cast [Dick] Powell as one of the Bonaparte boys deserved a prize for imagination.

Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard in Henry Hathaway's Now and Forever (34). Shirley Temple is not in this still but she was much in evidence in the film.

Speaking of Gary Cooper, here is a bit of Shipman's essay:

The strange thing is that Cooper (as his TV interviews showed) had in life a number of rather effeminate mannerism. However, on screen he was virility personified, all that was required of a hero: honest, courageous and determined--determined to do what must be done at whatever the cost.

Sometimes Shipman is eye-poppingly wrong

Future historians of the art of film will probably pause at the name of John Wayne only because he appeared in some of John Ford's best Westerns, but it is a name which gives pause to everyone interested in the industry.

...but then again, when he's right, he takes your breath away.

[on Irene Dunne] Few actresses could play comedy as she did: there is a brief sequence in The Awful Truth where, her back to the camera, she is contemplating the antics of Cary Grant--her gurgling, smothered laugh is more eloquent than many another's close-up.

Highly recommended. Beloved Siren commenter Yojimboen is a Shipman fan as well. You can find this book easily on Abebooks and if you're in the city the Strand bookstore usually has a few copies lying around. (Probably three-quarters of the Siren's film books come from the Strand. There, now you are privy to one of the Siren's closest secrets.) If you're lucky the Strand will also have the almost-as-wonderful companion book, The Great Stars: The International Years.

Now for a book the Siren doesn't like very much, but it had an undeniable influence on her. Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon was a hand grenade hurled at nostalgia, and it remains a salutary reminder that while Joseph Breen may have been busy keeping the screen safe for the tender minds of his fellow Americans, no amount of Ivory soap could scrub some Hollywood business clean. This compendium of years of scuttlebutt is lavishly illustrated with extremely well-chosen, frequently horrifying stills and news photos. Hollywood Babylon mixes historical truth, leering slant and outright errors. It's witty in parts, but after you devour it (and the Siren did, her book is split in two at the spine) you feel as you do after knocking back one too many drinks with the nastiest gossip in the office. You're in the know, but you hate yourself.

The real problem with Anger is one of tone. Where does all this hatred and seething resentment come from? Take this description of Fatty Arbuckle, whom Anger paints as guilty of rape and manslaughter despite considerable evidence to the contrary:

As headlines screamed, the rumors flew of a hideously unnatural rape. Arbuckle, enraged at his drunken impotence, had ravaged Virginia [Rappe] with a Coca-Cola bottle, or a champagne bottle, then had repeated the act with a jagged of piece of ice...or, wasn't it common knowledge that Arbuckle was exceptionally well endowed?...or, was it just a question of 266-pounds-too-much of Fatty flattening Virginia in a flying leap?

Or, in a discussion of the William Desmond Taylor murder, this acid description of poor tragic Mabel Normand:

It was soon revealed that Taylor's good friend Mabel Normand, whose antic clowning for Sennett gained her fans by the millions, owed her effervescence at at least in part to Cocaine & Co. Mabel's monthly expenditure for "cokey" was in the neighborhood of $2000, blackmail included.

From Anger, the Siren learned that you can certainly look at Hollywood celebrities as spoiled, hateful children and smirk at their comeuppance. God knows that's fun sometimes. Hollywood Babylon is one of the most imitated books about Hollywood ever written--it plays to our sense that the stars have too much and deserve it too little.

But you also can take the angle of Adela Rogers St. Johns, the Hearst columnist whose memoir The Honeycomb is the Siren's final selection for this series. St. John knew the people she wrote about, knew their secrets and their nastiest flaws. But she understood the magic. And she understood that being a star takes, as a friend of the Siren wrote to her, "superhuman effort, talent and grit."

They'd never been to New York. They had never been anywhere including school, except Joan Crawford, who washed dishes at Stephens College for Girls to get a half a freshman year and Jean Harlow, who eloped from a fashionable Chicago finishing school at sixteen to get married. Unless they came over steerage--Chaplin and Valentino--they'd never been to Europe. Garbo was applying lather in a Stockholm barbershop until a Swedish director refused to come to America without her. Finances got frightfully tangled because half of them didn't know what to do with checks. Judy Garland was singing at Elks' Club smokers and Lon Chaney was a kid hoofer in the cheapest musical tourist companies, half-medicine shows and half-circus...

Do not believe for one second that they were ordinary citizens from Emporia and Little Rock.

No, the Siren doesn't believe it. That's why they still matter to her.