The Strawberry Blonde (1941)

“If you don’t like this one,” the Siren told her husband, “I’ll eat the DVD case.”

The Siren admits she said this knowing she was in no danger of having to digest plastic, since she could tell her husband, “Hey, I just bought a four-hour dialogue-free movie about a man matching socks and suffering torments over whether to fold them into squares or invert the top over the foot portion, and by the way the man doing the folding is James Cagney,” and presto, her husband would clear a four-hour hole in his schedule and afterward say things like “Nobody handled fiber content like Cagney, nobody.”

Still, Raoul Walsh’s The Strawberry Blonde is a beloved movie, one with a reputation that quietly extends well beyond hardcore classic-film fans, to horror-film lovers, savorers of superheros and serial killers, to people who really would watch a movie about folding socks. When the Siren mentions The Strawberry Blonde, they get this look James Cagney would call “sappy” and they coo, “That’s a great one.”

Even the credits promise a great movie--Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Jack Carson, Alan Hale, Julius and Philip Epstein, Orry-Kelly, Robert Haas, Perc Westmore, and the sublime James Wong Howe, who is probably perched in the afterlife shooting heaven in glorious black and white.

And then there’s Walsh himself, one hell of a great director, his reputation built in large part on tough-minded movies like What Price Glory?, The Roaring Twenties, They Drive By Night, High Sierra and White Heat. His machismo was entirely authentic, and you could easily believe he’d earned his famous eyepatch in a duel or a revolution somewhere south of the border (although you’d be wrong; it was a freak auto accident).

Here’s something about Walsh, though, as well as other he-man directors of the Golden Age like Michael Curtiz, William Wellman, Howard Hawks and John Ford: Their fearlessness extended effortlessly to matters of the heart. Their strong men have strong needs and strong emotions. (And, as in Walsh’s The Man I Love, so does a strong woman.) That’s the secret to Walsh’s incredible control of tone; it’s seamless because it’s tied to one vision of what makes his protagonists worthwhile. There’s very little cool about a Walsh hero, in the sense of emotion withheld. You find that in the villain from time to time, but not the main guy.



So in 1941 the adventurous Walsh takes on this nostalgic tale of the life, loves and bad breaks of a dentist with a mail-order degree, and he’s a perfect fit. That’s obvious from the opening scene, where Biff (James Cagney) is pitching horseshoes with his old friend Nicolas Pappalas (George Tobias). There’s Cagney, throwing the horseshoes with a dancer’s grace, and there’s Walsh, lingering over a shot of Cagney from behind so you get the full effect of that high-pocketed bantam walk. And then the camera moves over the wall, to a group of well-off college boys and their sweethearts, lying in hammocks and singing to one another. And the movement is ravishing--not flashy at all, Walsh never telegraphs his effects. The shot is so fluid and natural it’s like water flowing out of a spring. From Cagney’s packed-dirt backyard, to the grass and trees and ease of the well-to-do just a few feet away. That one movement of Walsh’s camera gives the Siren a pleasure so intense that she can tell you it’s the precise moment she fell in love with The Strawberry Blonde.

The movie follows Biff as he deals with his ne’er-do-well father (Alan Hale), falls for the strawberry-blonde Virginia Brush (Rita Hayworth, and incidentally how did her character’s name get past the Breen Office?), sees Virginia stolen away by the double-dealing Hugo Barnstead (Jack Carson, in what Dennis Grunes calls the “role that made Carson Carson”), and eventually realizes true love with the kindhearted Amy Lind (Olivia de Havilland, looking more beautiful even than Hayworth).

Everyone involved in this movie gave it the best they had. The screenplay was by the Epstein brothers, and their particular wit is all over the dialogue, in Amy asking Virginia, as they wait for Biff and Hugo, “What did we come here for if not to be trifled with?”; in Biff’s father saying cheerfully, “I wasn’t cut out to be a street-cleaner, and it’s no use reaching for the stars”; in Biff’s repeated line, “That’s the kind of a hairpin I am.” James Wong Howe--well, if Howe had an autopilot switch he never used it, but here you can worship the gas lamps being lit in the park, the nightime light on a set of lace curtains moving in the breeze, and the long shadows across the floor of the useless office where Biff goes to work for Hugo. Orry-Kelly’s finest moment is a dress that Virginia wears for a dinner party after she’s married Hugo--the neckline is dramatically low, in keeping with the character’s loss of youthful sweetness, but in deference to Breen it’s cut so there’s no visible cleavage from Hayworth’s magnificent poitrine. This was the Siren’s fourth viewing (at least) and she still can’t figure out exactly how Orry-Kelly managed that.

Nor can the Siren completely unravel the mystery of Walsh’s elegantly balanced two-shots. The movie is full of them, and they never get old or static. Biff is up high when he’s talking to his father at one point, side by side with Hugo when Hugo is cheating him once again. When Biff meets Amy in the park, he’s up near the top of a hill, she’s down closer to the bottom, as she’s already attracted to him and Biff doesn’t have the sense to see it. Virginia is up in a carriage, Biff is down on the ground mooning after her. The whole beautiful rhythm of The Strawberry Blonde comes in pairs. And it’s punctuated with music, each familiar old song signaling a transition, as good as an intertitle.



The secondary leads are superb. Where Jack Carson excelled, and where he was perfect for Hugo Barnstead, was in playing the louse who doesn’t believe he’s a louse. Hugo’s efforts to pin his misdeeds on Biff are just the way Hugo thinks the world works. Hugo orders the substandard materials that cause old man Grimes’ death late in the movie, but Carson’s head shakes and his eyes widen in hurt at the suggestion that anyone would think he bore responsibility.

Carson would go on to be the best thing in many a mediocre movie, but Rita Hayworth was generally only as good as her directors. In his autobiography, Walsh recalled that Ann Sheridan, who would have been excellent, turned down the part in a fit of self-sabotaging pique at Jack Warner. The director said that he’d seen Hayworth dance and play some small roles at Columbia. Evidently Walsh missed Only Angels Have Wings, but some self-back-patting was in order, because Hayworth does marvelous work, showing good nature occasionally peeking out from Virginia’s cold-eyed ambition. Hayworth gets better and better as the movie goes on--watch the way she picks up spaghetti with two forks, mocking Hugo’s airs. And, in the penultimate scene, watch her put out a cigarette in Cagney’s dental sink, nine years before Margo Channing doused one in a jar of cold cream.



But it’s the slowly developing romance between Cagney and de Havilland that clutches at you. Biff is a brawler--he has a black eye in what must be more than half his scenes--but Cagney also shows the character’s dreamy, yearning side. Amy starts out trying to shock people with suffragette rhetoric, but it’s her kindness that makes you know she’s meant for Biff. There isn’t any question about whether they will get together--they’re shown married in the opening scene. The suspense becomes whether Biff has really learned to appreciate Amy, or still yearns for Virginia. His dawning regard is shown first in the scene when Amy comes to tell him Virginia has married Hugo, when Biff keeps dropping his eyes to avoid Amy’s sympathy. Later, after they’re married and before Biff goes to prison for Hugo’s crime, there’s a shot of Biff and Amy’s hands together that makes the Siren’s heart turn over. When Biff is in prison, Walsh balances the couple even then, as the nurse Amy pushes patients in wheelchairs and Biff pushes a shovel full of dirt in the prison yard.

Biff is finally released, and he goes to meet Amy in the park where they’ve met so many important times before. “Their reunion was one of the most emotional scenes I ever filmed,” said Walsh. At first Walsh hangs back a bit, and their shots are separate--until Biff and Amy’s love wells up and the director finally moves in, but still not too close, as if to show a bit of respect. Earlier, asked why he’s infatuated with Virginia, Biff replies, “Every fellow has an ideal”--and here he’s found it.

The Strawberry Blonde is another one of mid-century Hollywood’s forays into Gay Nineties nostalgia. The period was closer to them than the 1940s are to us now, but the difference between 1891 and 1941 is a lot bigger than between 1941 and 2011, and so there’s even more period detail to wallow in. But the film slyly, and without nastiness or rancor, insinuates that nostalgia is a mug’s game that can keep a man brooding on what might have been, rather than what is. Like a pretty lover with a bad disposition, nostalgia is something to be trifled with, not obsessed over.

Patrick McGilligan: What was your favorite picture of the sound period?

Raoul Walsh: Offhand, I might say The Strawberry Blonde. I kind of liked the swing of it, the old-time music, the characters and the dress. It brought me back to my childhood. I grew up in that area [of New York City], you know.

McGilligan: Did you deliberately sweeten the memory of your past?

Walsh: Yes. A jolly time, good times, all nice people, singing and dancing.

McGilligan: That’s the way it really was, or the way you wanted to remember it?

Walsh: That was the way I wanted to remember it.

TCM Alert: Kim Morgan and Lou Lumenick on Critics' Choice (with update)

Update: Kim's piece on Something Wild is up at Sunset Gun. The Siren watched it and testifies that the movie is all she says, and then some. More than worth your time, a highly original piece of filmmaking. And Kim's chat with Robert Osborne showed her far-ranging classic-film chops, and the way she responds to a great film not just with her considerable intellect, but with deep emotion as well.

This month Turner Classic Movies is doing a great series called Critics' Choice. A number of film critics were asked to pick a double feature of favorite films. Two of the Siren's favorite critics--and dear friends--are appearing, and they both made splendid, offbeat choices.

Tonight (Oct. 13) goddess Kim Morgan will be discussing Something Wild, directed by Jack Garfein and starring Carroll Baker, at 11:30 pm Eastern time; and at 1:30 am Thursday morning Kim introduces the superb He Ran All the Way, directed by John Berry, with cinematography by genius James Wong Howe. As the Siren's patient readers already know, it's the last film of John Garfield, an actor Kim and the Siren both yell about from rooftops and barstools and passing convertibles and whatever else is handy.




On Wednesday, Oct. 20 at 11 pm Eastern, Lou Lumenick, the Siren's fearless Shadows of Russia comrade, shows his great taste in classic film with the seldom-screened, exceptionally good The Last Flight, directed by William Dieterle, who deserves a much higher profile. And at 12:30 am Thursday morning Lou introduces All Through the Night, directed by Vincent Sherman, one of the Siren's favorite stalwart studio directors, and starring Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre.

Fire up the DVRs, y'all.

Housekeeping; or, Multiple Fragments in Search of a Post

It's been a slow couple of viewing weeks chez Siren. She's had a hard time finding quiet periods to watch things, for one. And for another, what she has seen hasn't exactly brought the Muse sashaying over to her computer keyboard. There were a couple of John Garfield movies, Out of the Fog and Saturday's Children. Out of the Fog had Garfield in delicious bad-guy mode, Ida Lupino looking glorious and James Wong Howe making Sheepshead Bay look the way it should look but undoubtedly never did. Still, no inspiration. Saturday's Children had some lovely, delicate moments in the early scenes but slipped later.

There was The Hucksters, deeply disappointing to the Siren, although Sydney Greenstreet hauling off and spitting on a conference table was an unexpected fillip. But Greenstreet, despite the Siren's deep love for the man, was woefully miscast, Gable failed to charm and Ava Gardner's hairstylist must have had it in for her. Deborah Kerr looked ravishing but her part was wan. The movie looked pretty good but was ultimately toothless; maybe if the Siren watches Mad Men again she will now appreciate it more.

Saw Nightfall at the Film Forum, and a good thing too, since its ravishing beauty (via Jacques Tourneur and Burnett Guffey) needed a big screen. But the plot was preposterous in ways both big and small. Saw Cyrus (oh look! a new movie!) and it had some funny moments, but Marisa Tomei's character was frustratingly underdeveloped and the out-of-nowhere constant zooming made the Siren want to gently take the directors' hands off the camera and hand them some worry beads.



Then there was a Frank Borzage night at the home of some dear friends, where we saw Doctors' Wives, an intermittently interesting early work that the Siren has little to say about, and Young as You Feel, a ghastly relic that the Siren cannot recommend even to ardent Borzage completists. There were three shots where she thought she spotted Borzage; otherwise the only sustaining moments came when the Siren's couchmate (He Knows Who He Is) dissolved into inadequately suppressed giggles every time Will Rogers described himself as "an old meat-packer." That sent the Siren into fits as well and she ended the evening with her Serious Classic Movie Viewer cred in tatters.

Hence the radio silence.

Some weeks back we held a belated house-warming and the Siren shut the door to the hall closet where we had piled all the things we didn't know what to do with, like toolboxes and an old bureau and papers to shred and all the pictures we haven't hung because we don't want to face the inevitable debates: "I hate that one." "I hate THAT one more." "Hey, that was a gift." "Oh, a gift, huh. From who? a sworn enemy?" The door to the closet is right next to the bathroom and during the party the Siren kept one eye peeled to make sure no one opened the wrong door and discovered the secret of our Potemkin housekeeping. Since then, the Siren opens the door from time to time, looks in and says to herself, "I ain't touching this shit," and shuts the door, suddenly gripped with the strong desire for a stiff Scotch.

Well, it's only 9:30 am right now and besides, the housewarming guests drank up all the Scotch and it hasn't been replaced. (That isn't a reproach, guys; we had fun doing it.) So the Siren brewed a cup of nicely smoky lapsang souchong and decided to clean out her computer files instead. The Siren wouldn't show you that hall closet's interior if you came over with an armful of gardenias, a sonnet to her left eyebrow and a large bottle of 30-year-old Talisker. But herewith, because her Scots-Irish ancestral blood deplores waste of any kind, and because otherwise the cupboard is bare, a glance at some of the unfinished fragments that have been lurking on the Siren's hard drive.



Here we have the notes for Siren's abortive stab at a comparison between Criss Cross and Touchez Pas au Grisbi, two movies that she saw back-to-back and that still strike her as complementary.

Oddly, it was the French film that ultimately had a less cynical outlook, holding out the possibility of loyalty and even love. Yvonne DeCarlo speaks for the Americans when she snaps at Burt Lancaster: "Love, love! You've got to watch out for yourself."

Criss Cross is even better than The Killers, one of its predecessors, at least in part because of DeCarlo. Her beauty is just lights-out, on a level with the earlier film's Ava Gardner. Unlike Gardner, however, DeCarlo really acts in this movie. She is very good as Anna, Lancaster's ex-wife, showing us a woman who may have some good qualities deep down, but meanwhile is out for herself. Burt Lancaster's magnificent looks help his portrayal of Steve who is, it must be acknowledged, a bit of a drip. Steve takes up a lot of his narration blaming fate, when we can see he's the author of his own misfortunes.

Both of the movies flip sex roles--Steve the drippy romantic, Anna the practical hustler; Gabin the loyal mate, his partner the feckless damsel-in-distress.

Jeanne Moreau really, really, really cannot dance. DeCarlo, on the other hand, tears up the floor.

The opening graf of a planned post on the splendid The Late George Apley. If this one pops up on TCM, by all means watch it.

It has a dry, witty script by Philip Dunne and a wonderfully funny performance from Ronald Colman whom, as her readers know, usually hits the Siren like a big ol' dose of Nyquil. Mr. Siren, who was in the same room trying to beat an external hard drive into submission, at one point looked up and remarked with mild irritation, "You're laughing a LOT at this one." He would have had a much better time just watching it with me.

This is an excellent example of a post the Siren abandoned because she was being entirely too pissy. And no, she won't tell you who it was who aroused her ire, and there are no prizes for a correct guess, either.

Dude ... Stage Door?

There are I-don't-know-how-many actresses and films out there to illustrate your thesis that everything was so much better without feminism, and you choose--Katharine Hepburn in Stage Door?

Okay, don't let me stop you. Maybe next week you'll follow up with how things in Hollywood were a lot better before they invented panchromatic film. I want to be sympathetic here, because I happen to prefer old movies myself. Hence my blogging about old movies. And of course it is a truism that you are entitled to your opinion. But thematic evaluations are supposed to be rooted in something, preferably something connected to the movie. You can't just watch Bringing Up Baby and decide it's all a metaphor for the Boer War.

Yes, we are all better off without that one. It was only going to get worse from there.

Here, to close out this collection of unrelated fragments, are the Siren's notes on My Last Breath, as her British edition titles Luis Buñuel's autobiography.

The book is, surprisingly, in rough chronological order but Buñuel still meanders from topic to topic, detouring for a while and then swerving back onto the road. He was born in the Aragon region of Spain in 1900, at a time when the area was poor and the peasants still lived in much the same way they had for centuries. His father was relatively well-to-do, however, and Buñuel received a good Jesuit education, right up to the day he was expelled, much to the Siren's relief. (Come on, this is Buñuel. You don't want to hear about him being a complete altar boy, do you?) He went to Madrid in the 1920s to be educated at the university, and there Buñuel seems to have met everyone who was anyone in Spain at the time, from the young Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali to King Alfonse.

He started out studying insects and claims he could recognize and give Latin names for many well into his old age. Eventually he switched to philosophy, but then he moved to Paris. There he made the revolutionary Un chien andalou and L'Âge d'Or, the latter film distinguishing itself by being the first Buñuel to be banned (for about fifty years, as a matter of fact).

In the same way that Buñuel's films can focus on seemingly extraneous details (in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, people going on and on about their dreams, as Bunuel does here) and exclude the information you are dying to know (what, exactly, happened to Don Jaime's wife in Viridiana?) the director gives one chapter apiece to his most prolific years as a filmmaker, in Mexico and in France. He is happy to give you a recipe for a Buñueloni (the Siren would love to order one of these at her next blogger outing) but doesn't want to tell you much about, say, Gerard Philippe.

So now we've used up some leftovers. There's about a half-dozen more lurking around, but the Siren promises she won't drag those out until the next time she's just seen a Will Rogers movie and is stumped for material.

If you've seen anything brilliant lately, by all means, tell.

Update: In a nice coincidence prompted by TV5's showing Grisbi last night (Mr. S watched too), James Wolcott posts about the Becker film. The dancing amused him too. Even funnier: Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough, which may well be playing on a double bill with The Oscar in some midnight-camp-palace of the afterlife.

And the in-depth take on Nightfall that the movie deserves, from Kim Morgan, at Noir of the Week. The Siren was still not keen on the woozy plotting, but Kim points out all the brilliance that made the Siren pretty much love the thing anyway. And Simon Abrams at Slant Magazine liked the movie less than either Kim or me, but makes his case very well (Simon has particular problems with the ending).

A Director Out of Wood*

The Siren has been pondering auteurism. Some time back Girish had a long and fruitful discussion of it, and last week Glenn Kenny went over to the Auteurs to proclaim "an auteurist film is an interesting film."

Glenn is right, of course. But the Siren runs into two problems with auteurism. One is the tendency of some auteurists to overpraise their idols' lesser works. The other, more significant problem is what to do with Jean Negulesco, Jack Conway, Roy del Ruth, Vincent Sherman, Archie Mayo, Henry Hathaway or today's guest star, Sam Wood.

Sam Wood is an excellent example of a studio man who helmed some good-to-great movies--namely, Hold Your Man, A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, the 1937 Madame X, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Our Town, Raffles, The Devil and Miss Jones, Kings Row, Pride of the Yankees and oh, all right, some people like this one, For Whom the Bell Tolls. (Ivy, starring goddess Joan Fontaine, is also supposed to be pretty good, and Lord Jeff too.) Yet Wood garners career evaluations that range from tepid to eye-rolling. In the afterlife, Vincent Sherman probably reads Sam Wood mini-bios to make himself feel better.

Let's be frank. Wood's hard-right politics have played a part in how he is remembered, as his post-war anti-Communism went from vocal to obsessive in nothing flat. He founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and in that guise was a driving force behind the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, where he testified grimly that certain Directors' Guild members were trying to "steer us into the Red River." Such was Wood's fear of subversion that after his death in 1949, his heirs discovered a clause in the will stipulating that they had to take a loyalty oath ("I am not now nor have I ever been...") before they could collect a dime.

The result was that during the years when books and interviews and documentaries were brought forth to celebrate the Golden Age, a number of Wood's ex-colleagues had little good to say about him; "a fascist," was Groucho Marx's encomium. And later critics, mindful of Wood's role in the blacklist and with no Wood still alive to discuss anything, haven't been inclined to give him much credit. His bad or mediocre films (and they are many) have been deemed as much or more representative of his abilities than his successes. And Wood's successes were discussed without much enthusiasm for his role. Mind you, the Siren is all for giving ample credit to James Wong Howe, William Cameron Menzies and Gregg Toland, or Rudolph Mate, Cedric Gibbons and Norman Krasna, for that matter. But watch Kings Row on a double bill with Picnic and tell me if you think the difference is all Howe.



It is possible to read a critique of a Sam Wood picture and wonder if the thing directed itself. In fact, some have pretty much suggested that's what happened on the two Marx films. While Thalberg had the final say, and the Marxes drove many (all right, most) collaborators crazy, the idea of Wood as glorified traffic cop doesn't fit so neatly with Simon Louvish's statement that Wood "refused to take any Marx Brothers nonsense and insisted on endless and exhausting retakes" (a signature Wood technique, although his taste for takes doesn't seem to have been quite up to Wyler levels). The Siren would never argue for Wood's sole authorship of those movies, but she doesn't see why we should presume that he contributed nothing.

Anyway, the blacklist ended forty years ago, Wood's been dead for more than sixty and the Siren thinks no one need be ashamed to be caught loving a good Sam Wood movie. The fact is, pace M. Truffaut, I would much rather watch The Devil and Miss Jones than Hatari!; would curl up with The Pride of the Yankees well before I'd sit down with The Long Gray Line; and would take King's Row over Frenzy in a heartbeat. Does this mean that I consider Wood to be the equal of Hawks, Ford or Hitchcock? Nope. But it does mean I think he deserves to be taken seriously, and given credit for the things he did well.

There, that's my Sam Wood defense.

Unfortunately, it's all leading up to a brief discussion of a not-terribly-good Sam Wood movie, Saratoga Trunk.



"You can't go home again," said Thomas Wolfe, in a title the Siren first encountered via Charlie Brown. While there are few movie experiences as great as rediscovering the virtues of an old favorite, it's pretty depressing to go back to a movie you loved in youth and find that it looks kind of cheesy. The Siren was crazy about Saratoga Trunk when she was about 13 years old, but custom has staled this one something awful. There are good visual moments, such as the opening, a late-movie train chase and crash, Ingrid Bergman's untrammeled joy as she tastes her first jambalaya, and Bergman in her Saratoga hotel room getting tiddly on peaches in champagne. Bergman's mouth meeting peach is erotic as it got in 1945. She was quite the sensualist, was Bergman, one who loved her food, and the Siren wonders if that was why she was so hot to play Clio Dulaine. It couldn't have been the script.

Overall, however, it's a slog. Ingrid Bergman is Clio, a Creole adventuress who arrives in New Orleans to seek revenge on her father's snooty family for ruining her mother's life. The first scene is entrancing, Bergman arriving at a French Quarter mansion where the garden has taken over, walking around the broken-down rooms and reliving her mother's heartache. The Siren would definitely point to the sequence as an example of Wood's fluid but inconspicuous camerawork at its best.

But then Clio settles in, and the movie stagnates. There is way too much of Clio's "mammy" figure, Angelique, played in glowering blackface by Flora Robson and topped with eyebrows that would scare the daylights out of Frida Kahlo. (Blackface. Can you believe it? in a serious role, in 1945? and Robson got an Oscar nomination for it!) The character is a snooze, serving only to make you appreciate Hattie McDaniel. And there is too much of Cupidon, played by little person Jerry Austin and used in most early scenes as not much more than a terrier with a French accent (although he gets some better moments later on). For about 70 long, long minutes we watch Ingrid force the Dulaine family to pay her off, merely by showing up at various public places and looking like her mother. That's a long time to wait to get to Saratoga, and the meat of the story, such as it is. Perhaps the fact that Edna Ferber helped adapt her own novel accounts for Saratoga Trunk's length. It definitely smacks of a writer who wrote a long book and was going to get it all in there, by gum, no matter if pacing begins to stagger and finally falls in a ditch.



Gary Cooper has to wear an oversized hat that brings up unfortunate Yosemite Sam associations, but when he takes it off and makes love to Bergman the Siren understands what first drew her adolescent hormones to this movie. Bergman's features look smashing with dark hair, but then we of later years already knew that. The beauty of the leads and the occasional good scene notwithstanding, this one would have been better screened in the Siren's cinema of the memory.

* The story goes that during one of the many tense moments on the set of A Night at the Opera, Sam Wood snapped, "You can't make an actor out of clay," only to have Groucho flash back, "Nor a director out of Wood."

Tis the Season for Re-Viewing

For the longest time the Siren refused to look up anything about the New York Times' Verlyn Klinkenborg because she preferred her imaginings of the man--essentially, Uncle Henry in Understood Betsy. There's Verlyn is in the parlor of a 200-year-old farmhouse in Vermont, having his niece or nephew read Sir Walter Scott by an oil lamp while he mends some tack (whatever tack is).

Well, Verlyn is actually a rather trim fellow and much younger than Uncle Henry, and his farm is apparently in upstate New York. The Siren is happy to report, however, that his taste in reading material isn't too far from Uncle Henry's. Verlyn's a Dickens man, something which always makes the Siren feel comradeship with a writer. And he loves Eliot, and he likes to re-read his favorites:

Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens. Re-reading “Middlemarch,” for instance, or even “The Great Gatsby,” I’m able to pay attention to what’s really happening in the language itself — a pleasure surely as great as discovering who marries whom, and who dies and who does not.

The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is always there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard — always a stranger.

The Siren was struck, when reading these paragraphs months ago, at how you could easily substitute re-watching movies for re-reading books. The Siren wants to see some of the Oscar bait out this month (Up in the Air) and some of it she does not. (The Road--are you bloody well kidding me? I don't care how good it is, I am not doing cannibals for Christmas. And that goes double for Precious.) Well, the Siren would love to be one of those encyclopedic cinephiles who has seen everything, new and old (howdy, Glenn, Peter, Andrew, David and the whole sidebar gang) but she keeps running into the same secret, shameful vice:

She re-watches movies. A lot.

One of life's great pleasures for the Siren comes when, like a dolled-up old broad hitting the jackpot at the slots, she flips over to Turner Classic Movies and hits a well-loved film. Somehow it's better when it's random, and not the process of careful selection at the DVD shelves. There's a particular thrill to turning on a TV and finding a movie that suits your life or week or mood precisely, like Mr. Blandings coming on last week as the Siren unpacked, or White Heat popping up just when the Siren needed a shot of Cagney. And when you tune in to a scene you adore, it's like running into a well-loved friend on the street.

The holiday season is a good time for re-viewing, as you naturally hunger for familiarity and warmth. So, in the spirit both of confession and renewal, the Siren is naming, strictly in the order in which they pop into her head, 10 films she's seen about 10 times, and a favorite scene (or two or three). Some I've mentioned before, some I haven't, but you aren't going to find surprises on here. This isn't a list made to impress. It's made to make the Siren happy.

1. The Maltese Falcon: Chipping away at lead. "Well sir, what do you suggest? We stand here and shed tears and call each other names, or shall we go to Istanbul?"

2. The Thin Man: Myrna: You asleep?
Bill: Yes!
Myrna: Good... I want to talk to you.



(Not only does the Siren cherish this scene, she's played it.)

3. Citizen Kane: "A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."

4. Rules of the Game: The hunt. Octave and Christine in the greenhouse.

5. Letter from an Unknown Woman: Joan, suddenly come back to life in Jourdan's memory, holding the gate for him once more. The Siren has probably seen this movie only about six times because it kills her but she's listing it anyway.

6. The Band Wagon. All of it, but I particularly love trying to figure out what "Louisiana Hayride" is supposed to be doing in the show within the movie. The most utterly incongruous number in the history of American musicals, if you ask the Siren, and that is some accomplishment.



7. Footlight Parade: My favorite 30s musical. Any scene with Cagney makes me happy.

8. Now, Voyager: Claude Rains. Bonita Granville at her bitchiest. "My mother. My mother! MY MOTHER!"

9. Twentieth Century: "I close the iron door..." (A catchphrase with an old boss of the Siren's.)

10. The Pirate: The "Nina" number. Such perfect Gene Kelly, in so many ways.


Oh, what the heck. It's the season of generosity. Here's 10 more.

11. My Favorite Wife: Cary Grant in the elevator. Irene Dunne laughing over the shoe salesman, with one little hand gesture to indicate the guy's height, and another for Cary.

12. A Night at the Opera: When the orchestra strikes up "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" the Siren falls over, every time.

13. Stagecoach: "Looks like I got the plague, don't it?"

14. Captain Blood: Some of the 1930s' most amazing eye candy, but the Siren's favorite is Basil Rathbone, lounging around that prison. Ah, Basil.


15. Shadow of a Doubt: Joe and Herb, discussing the perfect murder. The most obvious counterpoint in the world ("on the nose," in a popular phrase the Siren can't stand for some reason) but Hitchcock makes it perfect, building on their innocent chatter until you find it as unbearable as Charlie does.

16. Stage Door: Any time Eve Arden or Lucille Ball is on screen. "A pleasant little foursome. I predict a hatchet murder before the night is over."

17. All About Eve: Not mentioned much, because it isn't one of those famous barbs, but Sanders, purring to Barbara Bates: "Tell me, Phoebe, do you want someday to have an award like that of your own?...Then you must ask Miss Harrington how to get one. Miss Harrington knows all about it."

18. Mildred Pierce: "Not too much ice in that drink you're about to make for me."

19. To Be Or Not to Be: The Siren's favorite part of the running gag: "So they call me Concentration Camp Erhardt." "I thought you'd react like that."

20. Singin' in the Rain: Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont is a desert-island performance if ever there was one. "What do they think I am, dumb or something? Why, I make more money than Calvin Coolidge--PUT TOGETHER!"



That's all the Siren will allow herself, but if anyone wants to chime in with a few of their own, that would make her happy too. Consider it a gift.

Shadows of Russia: TCM, Lou Lumenick and the Siren

Today the Siren fulfilled the dearest dream of many a classic-film buff: Thanks to Jack Warner, New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick, and the wonders of email, she helped program a film series at Turner Classic Movies. Here's the TCM press release.

This January (the Siren's birthday month, and what a present it will be), TCM is screening a month-long film series, Shadows of Russia. The selections focusing on the many views of Russia and communism to be found in American movies. Some films are masterpieces that the Siren and her readers know almost by heart (Ninotchka, The Manchurian Candidate, The Scarlet Empress), others the Siren loved on viewing but needs to get re-acquainted with (Reds, The Way We Were), still others are oddities deserving of a more focused look (Rasputin and the Empress, Red Danube, Conspirator, Comrade X). And there are some rare films being shown, including Leo McCarey's film maudit My Son John, with poor doomed Robert Walker in the lead; The North Star, of which I am told TCM has located a good print that should show off James Wong Howe's cinematography; and I Was a Communist for the FBI.

And all this goes back to Mission to Moscow, and therefore, in a roundabout way, to good old Jack Warner.

Here's how it went down. Lou Lumenick, who in addition to his movie-reviewing duties at the Post is a formidable student of film history, posted an alert in February that Mission to Moscow, the bizarre 1943 Warner Brothers paean to Stalin's Russia, was showing on TCM on a Sunday morning. (His original post is gone, but you can read his thoughts on the DVD here.) The Siren watched, posted her thoughts and discussed the movie with Lou via email.

We agreed it was a shame that Mission to Moscow, which TCM seldom shows, hadn't had a prime-time airing where it could get a thorough intro, because if ever a movie needed a detailed intro with background and context, it's Mission to Moscow. That led to a discussion of American movie depictions of Russia and communists over the years. These movies ran a surprisingly large gamut and their bent tended to coincide with U.S. politics and viewpoints more than with Russian history and realities.

Many of these films have languished, unshown and nearly undiscussed. Wouldn't it be great, we e-dreamed, if we could get TCM to show some of them. Better yet, suggested Lou--a whole month of them. Lou decided to contact the TCM programmers. The rest of the story can be found at his place.

And yes, that's my real name there on the release and at Lou's place, Farran Nehme. Pleased to meet you. I figured it was as good a time as any to come out. If my name is going to be mentioned at the TCM sites I want it to be my real moniker and not some mistress of Alexander the Great's.

So here is the list of films and times for January. The Siren hasn't seen all of these herself, as some have been scarce indeed. The schedule is the result of months of lists and suggestions going back and forth between Lou and me, and the skill of the expert programmers at TCM. The Siren has a widely varying group of readers and she thinks there is something for almost everyone here, whether you are left or right, auteurist or anti-auteurist, Warner Brothers or MGM. She hopes you will all be around in January to discuss the films with her.



Wednesday, Jan. 6

Part One: Twilight of the Tsars
8 p.m. The Scarlet Empress (1934) – starring Marlene Dietrich and John Lodge.
10 p.m. Rasputin and the Empress (1932) – starring John, Ethel and Lionel Barrymore.

Part Two: Red Romance
12:15 a.m. Red Danube (1949) – starring Walter Pidgeon and Ethel Barrymore.
2:30 a.m. Reds (1981) – starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson and Maureen Stapleton.



Wednesday, Jan. 13

Part Three: The Lighter Side of the Revolution
8 p.m. Comrade X (1940) – starring Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr.
10 p.m. Ninotchka (1939) – starring Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas.

Part Four: The Left on Campus
Midnight The Way We Were (1973) – starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford.
2:15 a.m. Spring Madness (1938) – starring Maureen O’Sullivan, Lew Ayres, Ruth Hussey and Burgess Meredith.

Overnight Feature
3:30 a.m. The Strawberry Statement (1970) – starring Bruce Davison, Kim Darby and Bob Balaban.



Wednesday, Jan. 20

Part Five: Our Red Army Pals
8 p.m. The North Star (1943) – starring Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews and Walter Huston.
10 p.m. Mission to Moscow (1943) –starring Walter Huston, Ann Harding and Oscar Homolka.

Part Six: Diplomatic Immunity
12:15 a.m. The Kremlin Letter (1970) – starring Bibi Andersson, Richard Boone, Max von Sydow and Orson Welles.
2:15 a.m. Conspirator (1949) – starring Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor.

Overnight Feature
4 a.m. Counter-Attack (1945) – starring Paul Muni and Marguerite Chapman.



Wednesday, Jan. 27
Part Seven: Spies Among Us
8 p.m. My Son John (1952) – starring Helen Hayes, Robert Walker and Dean Jagger. John McElwee's excellent rundown on this seldom-shown film can be found here.
10:15 p.m. I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) – starring Frank Lovejoy and Dorothy Hart.

Part Eight: The Height of the Cold War
Midnight The Manchurian Candidate (1962) – starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury.
2:15 a.m. The Bedford Incident (1965) – starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier.

Overnight Features
4:15 a.m. Scarlet Dawn (1932) – starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Nancy Carroll.
5:15 a.m. The Doughgirls (1944) – starring Jane Wyman, Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith and Eve Arden.

Anecdote of the Week: Myrna Was the Lady in Red

From Being and Becoming, the autobiography of the peerless Myrna Loy:

[Metro] put me right to work in Manhattan Melodrama, which precipated the demise of John Dillinger, Public Enemy No. 1. FBI agents shot him down outside the Biograph Theatre, in Chicago, after he'd seen the film. Supposedly a Myrna Loy fan, he broke cover to see me. Personally, I suspect the theme of the picture rather than my fatal charms attracted him, but I've always felt a little guilty about it, anyway. They filled him full of holes, poor soul.

For anyone who has read her book, the above paragraph is Myrna Loy in miniature: intelligent, down-to-earth, self-deprecating, and compassionate.

As you can probably guess, the Siren selected this one because the film blogs are full of Public Enemies this week. Glenn Kenny liked it, Lou Lumenick did not. Manohla Dargis had a well-written rave but the Siren was a wee bit flummoxed by her closing sideswipe at Manhattan Melodrama. I haven't seen Public Enemies yet, but as much as I like Johnny Depp (and I do, I do), of course Michael Mann's gangsters will be no less "false" than W.S. Van Dyke's. (And while the new film may not look like "the usual gangster picture," for some of us old fogeys that's no bonus. Come on, even if she likes Public Enemies we all know the Siren is going to miss James Wong Howe.)



Manhattan Melodrama is worth cherishing for a reason that has nothing to do with gangsters: It was the first film Loy made with William Powell.

My first scene with Bill, a night shot on the back lot, happened before we'd even met. Woody was apparently too busy for introductions. My instructions were to run out of a building, through a crowd, and into a strange car. When Woody called "Action," I opened the door, jumped in, and landed smack on William Powell's lap. He looked up nonchalantly. "Miss Loy, I presume?" I said, "Mr. Powell?" And that's how I met the man who would be my partner in fourteen films.

*****

Flickhead's Claude Chabrol Blogathon is now over, but the Siren hopes you have followed it as avidly as she has. It's wonderful, with some of the best, most appreciative writing on Chabrol to be found anywhere. Start here and follow the links.

New York City of the Mind: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread at Newcritics

Tonight marks Round 2 of Wednesday Night at the Movies at Newcritics. This week's selection: Sweet Smell of Success. Read the thoughts here, then mosey over to Newcritics at 9 pm Eastern time and let's talk about this cookie full of arsenic, which for many is the movie about New York City.


At the time the Siren was living in Harlem, she was working to support herself behind a jewelry counter at a downtown store, now long gone. To say the pay was low is like saying the same about the Mariana Trench. For a time it was a wildly popular store, and a lot of celebrities came in. They had one thing in common. Major and minor, of-the-moment and washed up, they all got big discounts, just as soon as the suck-up manager spotted them.

That killed me. People who were up to their facelift scars in cash never, but never paid retail or anything like it. My pals and I spent the day before payday pooling resources in an attempt to make sure everybody had cigarettes and lunch, like some crazy display-case version of Our Daily Bread. What I didn't realize was that this store wasn't that bad. The store owners, guys who came up the hard way and could squeeze a nickel till it screamed for the cornerman, still didn't give anything away. Some retail workers watch celebrities walk out without paying a dime.

In the Sweet Smell of Success, you never see J.J. Hunsecker pay for anything. Sidney Falco, on the other hand, doesn't wear a coat, so he won't have to tip the hatcheck girl.

Thinking about Sid makes the Siren recall a couple of hours she once spent waiting on a condescending twit, biting back retorts as he ceaselessly needled her and insulted the merchandise. And when it was over, the Siren had to watch him leave with everything at half price. Not because HE had ever done (or ever did in future) anything worthwhile, but because he was the brother of a single-monikered pop star. Sid says he wants to be "way up high, Sam, where it's always balmy, where no one snaps his fingers and says, 'Hey, Shrimp, rack the balls!'" When the Siren remembers that SOB customer, she starts to think like Sid: Maybe the rules are for suckers, and the only way is to claw your piece out of the pie.

A lot of critics categorize Sweet Smell of Success as film noir, which I suppose fits as well as anything. Noir is usually a fatalist morality play disguised as a crime thriller or mystery, and Sweet Smell wears no disguise. It's an ugly story about amoral people, with an elegantly simple plot. The omnipotent king of the New York columnists, J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) is furious that his sister Susie (Susan Harrison) is taking baby steps toward independence by dating a rising jazz musician (Marty Milner, whom the Siren cannot look at without hearing a dispatcher calling for Adam-12). Hunsecker enlists press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) to plant a false story about the musician. Sid, who has earned J.J.'s ire with a prior misstep, is willing to plant the story, and to do a whole lot more, to ensure no one will ever snap their fingers at him again.



This movie about ambition and treachery made its way onscreen via one betrayal after another. We've all read that Hunsecker was a take on columnist Walter Winchell. Former press agent Ernest Lehman, who wrote the original novella and co-wrote the script with Clifford Odets, acknowledged the connection, but claimed he'd tried to differentiate between Hunsecker and Winchell with things like Hunsecker's wall of golf trophies. (Winchell didn't play golf, so everyone was supposed to say "Hey, maybe it isn't Winchell!" Right.) Anyway, in The Bad and the Beautiful, the authors write that Falco was an obvious take on press agent Irving Hoffman, who had known Lehman for years and was displeased that while a lot of his recognizable perks and foibles were in the novella, there were none of the many instances in which Hoffman had stood up to Winchell. Unlike Falco, Hoffman never toadied. "Irving had a right to feel betrayed," said Lehman, and though they eventually made up, Hoffman quit speaking to Lehman for a year.

The backstabbing didn't end there. When Burt Lancaster's production company, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, became interested in making the film, Lehman was lured with the promise that he'd direct. He didn't, of course, and people like Tony Curtis and producer Jim Hill confirmed years later that nobody ever had any intention of letting Lehman direct. Instead they signed up Alexander Mackendrick, known for comedies like The Ladykillers. "He was from Scotland for god's sakes!" said Lehman, who came down with a stomach ailment that landed him first in the hospital and then on a tour of the South Pacific, trying to recover from the whole experience. Mackendrick, whom even Lehman came to see as an extravagantly gifted director, found the making of the movie a physical and emotional ordeal that was compounded by its failure at the box office. Two weeks into making The Devil's Disciple, also for Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, Mackendrick was removed because, they said, he was running up the budget. Although the Siren likes A High Wind in Jamaica, which Mackendrick made in 1965, his later career ended abruptly and he moved into teaching film. His too-short career as a director is as painful to contemplate as Charles Laughton's.

The machinations amongst Hecht-Hill-Lancaster would also do Hunsecker proud. The original partnership was between Lancaster and Harold Hecht. How smoothly it went may be surmised from the incident where Lancaster lifted Hecht off the ground and threatened to throw him out the window. Lancaster, loathed by both Lehman and his director, brought in Jim Hill, after which Hecht lost interest in Sweet Smell of Success. When a reporter named Ezra Goodman told Hecht the film had bombed in previews, Hecht's face "broke out into a wide Cinemascope smile."

Between these stories in The Bad and the Beautiful, and the many appraisals around the Web, Siren has spent all week with the low-down, lying snake that is Sid Falco. And he really is a heel. But in his single-minded desire to get ahead, he is also a piece of almost any New Yorker, except maybe the saintliest ones. (And if they're saints, what're they doing here?) Falco is pure ambition, and by that sin fell the angels. But the fall of Sid and J.J. doesn't mean there aren't plenty behind them, knife in hand. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. What the song doesn't mention is that afterward you may not like yourself.

Sex flows underneath the movie like a sewer, the subtext to everything from the come-hither shot of his sister that Hunsecker keeps on his desk, to the cop purring "Come here Sidney. I want to chastise you" for all the world like a brass-buttoned dominatrix. But sex is a currency, not an objective. Ambition is the animating force, and power is what these people do for excitement. Is Hunsecker's interest in his sister incestuous? Oh sure, that idea is there. So is a whiff of the homoerotic in the way Lancaster mouths, "Match me, Sidney." But more than anything, Hunsecker is viscerally offended when anyone dares to slip away.




There's no point in debating who's better here, Lancaster or Curtis. Their performances are as symbiotic as Hunsecker and Falco--host and parasite, David Bordwell calls them. Lancaster was one of Hollywood's most magnificent physical specimens, a true athlete who once made his living as an acrobat. Curtis, born Bernie Schwartz in the Bronx, wasn't as physically powerful as Lancaster (who was?) but nature had given him looks that were no less striking. Both of them spent a long time in movies that made great use of their sex appeal. In its way, Sweet Smell does too. Lancaster plays a guy who rules the world from a table at 21, a night owl whose eyes never seem to blink behind his glasses. But Lancaster still moves with natural elegance, his posture is still majestic. Curtis constantly uses his looks to ingratiate himself, especially with women.

We all know how certain directors--Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Mann--could take a beloved actor and show how his charm could turn sinister. Sweet Smell shows us how something sinister can charm. The Siren is always surprised when she reads essays about this film that go on and on about the morally repellent characters, but fail to acknowledge their sleazy allure. The press agents and columnists and hangers-on have their own kind of talk, full of slang, as jagged and rhythmic as Elmer Bernstein's great score. Even the less-famous lines insert the stiletto.

"President? My big toe would make a better president."

"It's a dirty job, but I pay clean money for it."

"Maybe I left my sense of humor in my other suit."

"What am I, a bowl of fruit? A tangerine that peels in a minute?"

"Watch me run a 50-yard dash with my legs cut off!"

"Harvey, I often wish you were dead and wore a hearing aid. With a simple flick of the switch, I could shut out the greedy murmur of little men."

The Siren could quote this movie all day. Another line the Siren loves, because it punctures a rare moment of moral clarity, after an honest columnist has refused to run Sidney's fake item: "What do I do now? Whistle 'Stars and Stripes Forever'?"

The old complaint that "nobody is likable!" is particularly irritating when applied to Sweet Smell of Success. Why do you need to like these guys? All the Siren wants to do is listen to them. You can show characters like Falco and Hunsecker pulling every dirty, manipulative trick in the book, but when you endow them with some of the best dialogue in American cinema, you are giving them power.




And when the cinematographer is James Wong Howe, it doesn't matter how many vipers come crawling out of the nest, your city is going to glitter and beckon like no other. Howe was a genius and Sweet Smell is his masterwork. There has been a lot written about the light in Greece and even in the Hamptons, but it took Howe to give us all the nuances of light in Manhattan. There's the light as the sun is going down and people are deciding where to go, there's the light in the first part of the evening, when every part of the city is blazing. Then the grainier quality you get as the night wears on and the less-hep start to switch off, and finally the sunlight staggering through the streets in the early morning. Through Howe's camera, the air and the light seem to have texture, so that you feel the difference between Sidney dashing out coatless in the evening and Sidney grabbing a paper before dawn. And Howe often shoots from down low and wide-angle, so you've got the same view on the New York lowlifes that a tourist gets on the New York buildings.

People who lived through this era of New York City loved it and speak about the 1950s like a long-dead first love. This may well be the best movie ever made about New York, capturing the city's Golden Age, while it shows you a lining of pure lead.

John and Hedy

Let's try an experiment. Find the most precious object in your life, the light of your eyes. Place him/her/it in the middle of the room. Get the most fake-nice person you know to circle your precious, take notes, simper a lot, and make little enigmatic remarks like "Of course, they all do things at different times." While this is going on, bring your upper right arm across your face and try to French kiss your elbow. Do this every morning for several hours, for about two weeks.

You have now replicated the experience of trying to get your kid into a good kindergarten in New York City.

Anyway, between this and a youngest who thinks 3 am to 5 am is, by god, the best time of the day, the Siren is not up to anything cohesive. She has, however, spent what free time she has sacked out in front of the television set, glued to her Netflix choices and TCM, so here are some loose-knit thoughts on John Garfield and Hedy Lamarr.

About a month ago Blonde Venus Kim Morgan wrote a wonderful birthday tribute to John Garfield. The more the Siren watches, re-watches and reflects upon Garfield, the more she thinks that he--not the inarguably magnificent Brando--was the definitive American screen actor, the one who divides it all into Before and After. The Siren just saw him in two movies, the excellent He Ran All the Way and the dreary Tortilla Flat, and damn but the man was wondrous in anything. He Ran All the Way, Garfield's swan song, makes you weep for what could have been had he lived past 39. The actor was years too old for the part but that didn't occur to the Siren until J. Hoberman pointed it out. His character is a mess of sweaty jitters, doom stamped on him as clear as the marks on a UPS parcel. He's an armed robber on the run, but he's no John Dillinger. Garfield's character can't keep it together for more than a quarter-hour at a time, flipping out first on Shelley Winters in a public pool, then again at her house when he reveals to her family that he's on the lam. The suspense comes from wondering what his next ghastly burst of paranoia will bring. Garfield's line deliveries are a joy--never just a straightforward tough-guy reading, always something coming from a different angle. When he tells the family, "all I wanted was a place to hole up for a couple of days. Something you'd give an alley cat," it has the force of both accusation and elegy. Garfield gives so many different aspects to a man who could have been played far more simply. You see his yearning for a real family life in his scenes with the mother (Selena Royle) and his instinctive resentment of authority, even as he craves direction, in his frightening confrontations with Winters' father (Wallace Ford). Winters, for her part, gives Garfield someone worth playing against, with her own achingly sad performance. Genius James Wong Howe's cinematography makes the broiling hot summer days look even more menacing than the nights, until the inevitably tragic fadeout--but with a twist that the Siren hadn't seen coming. No wonder Morgan cites this as her favorite Garfield film. Give it a few more viewings and it may yet be the Siren's.

Then the Siren watched Tortilla Flat, and ay yi yi, as the characters are made to say whenever you are in danger of forgetting how Very Ethnic They Are. Garfield made this movie on loan to MGM. It's based on a John Steinbeck novel, and neither Garfield nor Steinbeck were at all suited to the MGM attitude which was, generally, "realism be damned." Spencer Tracy, one of Garfield's acting heros, has the main part. Tracy is a Mexican with a bit of his godawful Portuguese accent from Captains Courageous but, gracias a Dios, not too much. Garfield plays his best friend, and they're both in love with Hedy Lamarr. Garfield wisely doesn't try the accent, he just gives his speech some vaguely Spanish cadences. (The Siren finds that actors using accents frequently get the sounds right, but step all over the rhythm of a dialect.) Anyway, the movie is dishwater dull, providing interest only in a rather sweet sequence concerning a baby, and when Garfield is fighting with Lamarr. Despite being miscast the actor gives real believability to his love for Lamarr and strikes sparks off the frosty beauty.

TCM's article on Tortilla Flat has a funny story from filming:

Garfield recalls shooting his first scene with Fleming at the helm: "The director called a halt and shouted: 'For Christ's sake, Garfield, you have to do better than that. I fought like hell to get you in this picture, so don't make me look like a fool.'" As Tracy snickered in the background, Fleming railed at Garfield some more and they shot the scene again. "Take it easy, Garfield, don't get too good. A lot of your scenes are with Hedy Lamarr. She's not what you'd call unoutclassable, and we can't let that happen. Let's take it again. Be better than you were the first time, but worse than the second."

Ah, Hedy. It's hard to feel sorry for one of the most beautiful women in film history, but sometimes the Siren does. Shirley Temple got more respect as an actress. In one of life's glaring inequities Lamarr was a beauty and an intellect, so she probably knew her colleagues thought she couldn't act her way out of a lipstick tube. Her "autobiography," Ecstasy and Me, indicates an ego the size of Guam but it also reeks of tall-tale ghostwriting more than any star memoir the Siren has ever read (and as we all know, I've read too many). Lamarr later sued the ghostwriter for embellishing the book and was mocked for her pains. People snickered that she hadn't realized it would make her look like a mix of Baby Jane and Messalina and so, they said, Hedy decided to pretend it was all made up. Well, the Siren thinks that if Hedy could invent frequency-hopping (do you understand how that works? because I sure don't) she could read a manuscript and know how it would sound. There probably was some fabricated stuff, maybe even a lot. It was the lurid sex passages that caused a sensation in 1967--"Hollywood is prudish," shrugged David Shipman. And it's the sex scenes that sound a lot more like a male writer's fantasies than a woman's reminiscences. Of far more concern to the Siren was how Lamarr lovingly details her adoption of a son and her fight to keep him after her divorce--then barely mentions him after she has biological children with a second husband.*

Hedy is TCM's star of the month for April and the Siren has made a discovery: one reason for Lamarr's reputation as a dreadful actress is that her most famous films contain her worst performances. Ziegfeld Girl? Judy Garland blows her off the screen; hell, Lana Turner does too. Samson and Delilah? Her midriff does most of the acting. Algiers? She doesn't have that much screen time and what she does have is excruciatingly self-conscious. And then there's White Cargo, probably her second-most-famous role after the Philistine woman. Man, this is a dreadful movie. Just re-viewing the first hour last night put the Siren in such a grumpy frame of mind she didn't have energy to figure out how to record Experiment Perilous. Lamarr sports hideous brown body makeup, although the Production Code's repulsive miscegenation clause meant she's half-breed but not really half-breed and even though they're in Africa she's certainly not THAT kind of African, my goodness no, here's this letter about her parents. Hedy's pidgin syntax, her sarongs, the way she conveys evil intent by narrowing her eyes, seductiveness by parting her lips and tilting her head back--is this where Claudia Cardinale picked up her technique? The only fun parts are the violent tantrums from Walter Pidgeon when one character complains again about how it's "beastly hot." "STOP SAYING THAT!" shrieks Pidgeon. It's like an early colonial version of Office Space.



But Hedy wasn't always terrible. The Siren has seen two movies in which Lamarr's quite fun, although she does benefit from low expectations. In Edgar Ulmer's Strange Woman, a movie she produced herself, she Vivien-Leighs all over the place, adopting every one of that actress's gestures and movements as Scarlett. But Lamarr is still most enjoyable as a Maine belle with an unexplained accent who uses her sexual allure in an unexpectedly explicit manner, including an implied S&M scene that you truly don't want to miss. Plus, you get Ulmer's direction. Who knew Down East was this erotic?

The second movie is Come Live With Me, a romantic comedy that seemed to owe quite a bit to the previous year's Remember the Night, from Paramount, not to mention It Happened One Night. While not nearly as good as either of those two Come Live With Me has its own points, including excellent performances from James Stewart as a frustrated, then lovelorn writer and Ian Hunter and Verree Teasdale as a posh publishing couple with an open marriage. Lamarr's part as a European refugee is potentially unsympathetic. She starts out as a kept woman breaking up a marriage, then proceeds to a green-card marriage with Stewart. But for once her essentially cool persona serves her well, as you don't know precisely how her feelings tend, and the script keeps offering good reasons for her behavior. Stewart also helps, as he was a premiere romantic actor, able to inject tenderness into scenes with even the least promising leading ladies. Here, a year past The Philadelphia Story, he's another average Joe teasing an ice princess down off her mountain top. Lamarr fares less well when he takes her home to the farm--she's walking around all delighted at the decor when you just know she wouldn't have been caught dead in the place. But she regains her footing with the farcical denouement.

The Siren recorded King Vidor's H.M. Pulham, Esq., which Lamarr frequently cited in Ecstasy and Me as the sort of role she wished she'd had more often. After viewing it, if inspired, the Siren will let you know whether Hedy knew what she was talking about, or was exhibiting the critical facilities that made her say sarongs and hip-swinging would make her a "memorable nymphomaniac" in White Cargo.



*Biographer Patrick Agan claims here that her treatment of that son wasn't as bad as it sounds.

Canada Lee: A Brief Tribute

Does this sound familiar? You have stuff to do. Important Stuff. Then you turn on TCM. And a movie is playing that you have seen many times and you think, okay, I don't need to watch this one again. And then comes a scene you love. And then another. One hundred some-odd minutes later, you are sitting there realizing you haven't done a thing you were supposed to, but you don't care.


Body and Soul. The Siren didn't need to see it again, but then again, she did. The first time she saw it, she loved John Garfield. The second through third or fourth time, James Wong Howe's cinematography killed her. Has there ever been a fight sequence better than the finale? Raging Bull quotes its every aspect, ramps up the realism, sends the blood and sweat flying, but still can't touch it.

But this time the Siren watched, and Canada Lee tore her heart out of her chest. Lee's character, Ben, serves as the ethical anchor for Garfield's ambitious fighter. That wasn't a new role for African Americans in the movies; Mammy serves the same purpose in Gone with the Wind. The role of the black angel on the white character's shoulder persists to this day, as a matter of fact. But Lee reaches beyond the character, to meet Garfield as another man, equally yearning for success, equally bitter about his treatment. Ben's description of what it was like to win a fight, to walk down Lenox Avenue and bask in the admiration, becomes a window into the yearnings of all people for respect. What a shot of adrenaline it must have been in 1947, to see a black man form a genuine friendship with a white man on screen.

What the Siren wouldn't give to see Lee's stage performances as Bigger Thomas or Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi.

As a belated Martin Luther King Day post, or early for Black History Month, a bit about the great, tragic Canada Lee. Here is Otto Friedrich:

He became an actor, a passionate actor at a time when blacks were supposed to be amusing...nobody ever forgot seeing him as the punch-drunk fighter in Garfield's Body and Soul. Shortly after that, his name appeared in the mass of hearsay flushed out of the FBI files in the course of the spy trial of Judith Conlon. 'The drivel that has come from the so-called secret files of the FBI,' Lee called it at a press conference in 1949. 'I am not a Communist...I shall continue to help my people gain their rightful place in America.'

That's what they all said. The next time Canada Lee came up for a TV role, he was barred by the sponsor, the American Tobacco Company. Over the next three years, he was barred from about forty shows. 'How long, how long can a man take this kind of unfair treatment?' he asked the editors of Variety.

Friedrich says a dead-broke Lee finally took part in a "public denunciation" of Paul Robeson, but apparently there is some dispute about that. Historian Glenda E. Gill, for example, quotes Lee's wife Frances as saying the actor flatly refused when urged to denounce Robeson (scroll to page 128; the whole excerpt is worth the time). In any event Lee got a part in a British production, Cry, the Beloved Country. He and Sidney Poitier were admitted to South Africa only after director Zoltan Korda applied for permits to bring them along as his indentured servants. Friedrich again:

It was only a temporary reprieve, and the curtain came down again. 'I can't take it any more,' Lee told Walter White of the NAACP after a few more months of unemployment. 'I'm going to get a shoeshine box and sit outside the Astor Theater. My picture is playing to capacity audiences and, my God, I can't get one day's work.' White counseled caution and patience, and Lee, all full of rage and desperation, accepted that counsel. A few months later he was dead, of high blood pressure, at forty-five.

He had such presence--Canada Lee held your gaze, even in a picture like Lifeboat. In that one he is ostentatiously granted a vote on a life-and-death matter, but he refuses to use it, leaving the big choices to the white folks. Playing scenes like that must have stung Lee, a lifelong civil rights activist, but when the camera is on him, he takes back the screen. The scene where he recites the 23rd Psalm could be another of the era's patronizing touches: "Look at the simple spirituality of the Negro--how childlike, how heart-warming." But Lee keeps his head up, his voice calm and sonorous as he becomes, for that moment, the strongest man on the boat. His detractors had one thing right--Lee was a master of subversion.

P.S. A documentary about Canada Lee, featuring interviews with his 86-year-old widow Frances Lee Pearson, is scheduled for release March 8. The Siren hopes it will come to a venue where she can see it.