A Few Words About Jack Carson

(Oct. 27 is Jack Carson's 104th birthday, and TCM is having an all-day, eight-film celebration that includes both Mildred Pierce, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Roughly Speaking. The Siren wrote this in 2011 for the now-defunct Nomad, but never published it in full. Here's the whole thing, gussied up with edits and additions.)

Gather old-movie buffs around to ask them what they miss, and one answer will be character actors. Jack Carson, who packed nearly 100 movies into a career cut short by stomach cancer at the age of 52, was one of the greatest.

Carson was born in Manitoba in 1910, but the way his nasal voice lingered over a wisecrack always suggested an urban birthplace anywhere from Brooklyn to Chicago. A beefy man who stood six-foot-two, he had the physique and carriage of a football player grown too fond of roadside meals. His face was round and almost apple-cheeked, with a mole on his right cheek and small eyes that squinted into slits whenever the world dealt him a perplexing situation. With this un-starry equipment he built an unusually varied filmography.

He often played heels, as in his first big break playing James Cagney’s nemesis in Raoul Walsh’s The Strawberry Blonde. Much later on, in his most purely villainous role, Carson can be found destroying James Mason’s fragile psyche with a single vindictive bar conversation in George Cukor’s A Star Is Born. But he could play well in other keys; midway through Carson's credits are a string of light but often diverting comedies where he played Bob Hope to Dennis Morgan’s improbable Bing Crosby. And he had that ability of any good actor to show you more than what's in the script, even a brilliant script. In one of his last film roles, as Gooper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Carson is both venal and sympathetic, a son whose greed for his father's money comes from the bitter knowledge that it's all he will ever get from an old man who doesn't love him, and never has.

In his best-known role, as Wally Fay in Mildred Pierce, Carson's a sleaze, yet weirdly lovable. He reels out of the beach house to tell the cops “There’s a stiff in there” with an expression that seems to say dead bodies are always happening to stand-up guys like him. This man’s romantic maneuvers are like watching the Queen Mary try to parallel-park: “Not too much ice in that drink you’re about to make for me.” Mildred Pierce also gives Carson what the Siren thinks of as his career-defining line. “I like to hear you talk,” says Joan Crawford, trying to distract him so she can pin a murder on him. “So do I,” replies Carson, pleased to have found common ground. “Something about the sound of my own voice fascinates me.”

Unlike a lot of character actors, however, Carson did land the occasional secondary lead. In two such movies, both made at Warner Brothers (and available on Warner Archive), he gave great performances. Neither character is a heel.

In The Hard Way (1943), Carson plays Albert Runkel, one half of a vaudeville act with Paul Collins (Dennis Morgan, as good as he ever got). Runkel and Collins are so hopeless they give the director, Vincent Sherman, a chance to echo the Citizen Kane shot of a stagehand holding his nose. But they are good enough to turn the head of Katherine Blaine (an unusually hard-edged Joan Leslie), a poor girl in a steel-mill town whose prettiness and big-eyed fascination with the two hams causes the goodhearted, hapless Albert to fall in love and marry her. But Albert reckons without Helen (Ida Lupino, in one of her best roles), Katie’s sister, who sees him as a way station on the route to bigger and better things. Pushed by Helen, Katie becomes a star, and Albert is left behind, knowing he’ll never get his wife back and never equal her, either.

The small-time sweetheart pursuing the heroine who’s on the rise — that regular Joe who shows up backstage to moan “But what about us, baby?” — is usually one of the least tolerable aspects of any showbiz saga. Carson makes his part truly touching. It’s Albert, not the teenage Katie, who’s the real innocent.

In one musical number, “Latin from Manhattan,” Albert wears a ghastly pom-pom-bedecked sombrero and strums a guitar while Leslie vamps around a nightclub stage. He's is selling it with everything he’s got, and he’s terrible. And Carson’s face says he knows it’s no good, but that naive faith that was there from the beginning is still carrying him as he prances after his wife.

And then there’s a party scene where Albert tries to get a now-successful Katie to return to him. This time Albert is selling his love for Katie and their marriage with everything he’s got, and he knows it probably won’t work. Unlike the nightclub, the hope in his eyes gets dimmer minute by minute, until Katie tells him that if he thinks she’s leaving, he’s crazy — and you watch the hope die right out of Carson's face.

In Roughly Speaking (Michael Curtiz, 1945), Carson’s character shows up for the first time about halfway through the movie. At that point Louise (Rosalind Russell) has endured the death of her father, the births of four children, the infantile paralysis of the youngest child, years of marriage to a stuffed shirt, the stuffed shirt’s infidelity, and a divorce. Harold (Carson) meets Russell at a costume party and falls for her within two hours of meeting her — after encountering all four of her children in her kitchen. Harold is the ne’er-do-well son of a rich man, and he’s looking for a woman who will approach life with an optimistic and adventurous spirit.

And they need it, as Harold and Louise’s every attempt to make money falls flat. They open a greenhouse and inadvertently flood the market with roses. They invest in a new type of airplane just as the stock market crashes. But the point of Roughly Speaking is that compatibility of temperament matters most in a marriage. Louise’s life was steadier with the stuffed shirt, but she could never be as happy as she is with Harold.

They don’t seem as though they should have chemistry, and yet Carson and Russell do. Not the red-hot sexual variety, but that of two people who seem to adore one another’s company, no matter what.

Their fortunes reach such a low ebb that Harold takes a job as a vacuum-cleaner salesman. He comes home to practice his pitch with his wife. As he shoves his shoulders in the door, throws lint on the carpet, gets the vacuum in reverse and covers the house in blowing soot, Carson’s easy camaraderie with his wife is more appealing than many a passionate love scene.

Later, Louise discovers that Harold found door-to-door sales so soul-draining he’s taken to earning money by doing a bit of pool-sharking at the local bar. She comes in and they sit at a table, Louise almost in tears, and Harold gently tells her that he would understand if she cleared out. Carson’s face is a marvel of drily unsentimental love and self-reproach.

Even more tender is the last scene in the movie, when they are sending the two oldest sons off to war. They’re Louise’s boys, Harold is their stepfather, but they call him “Pop” and tell him how much he's meant to them. As Carson watches them go, his eyes and expression show that these are now his sons. Perhaps Harold never completely considered them so before, but he does now. The ability to pack that much meaning into one look at a train station — that’s character indeed.

Harriet Craig (1950)

A while back, the New York Times published an article in their home section that was focused on adjusting your fabulous child-free home decor to the presence of kids. One woman’s solution was to forbid her two children from bringing more than a single toy into the living area, or leaving a toy there; she didn’t want Matchbox cars and Legos in her sightlines.



Harriet Craig, thou livest still.



It’s easy to mock the premise of George Kelly’s 1926 play Craig’s Wife, the source for Vincent Sherman’s 1950 Harriet Craig as well as a 1936 Dorothy Arzner version with Rosalind Russell as the title character (and a 1928 silent that the Siren hasn't seen). The wintry selfishness of Walter Craig's wife drives away everyone, until she is left utterly alone. In Kelly’s vision, Harriet is a housewife obsessed with having a perfect house, and that’s wrong, you see. It’s wrong because a housewife should be focused on...on...well, having a perfect house and just being nicer about it, all right? She needs to let her husband have some fun and then come home to a bunch of little feet doing the time-step, and she should be greeting the man with devotion, not spot-cleaning the drawing room and having conniptions if anyone gets too close to the antique vase.



The Siren has read the play on which Harriet Craig is based, and seen the more faithful '36 version, and from time to time has encountered arguments that Harriet’s devotion to her house is a sub rosa feminist statement. The Siren flat doesn't see it, nor does she see much evidence that it was taken that way at the time. Craig’s Wife is a salvo against raw materialism, not an ironic statement on the condition of housewives. But the 1950 version breaks with precedent in several ways, all of which work in its favor; it's a rare case where, although the Arzner is very good (by all means see it) the Siren (gasp) prefers the remake.

The most important reason for that is the presence of Joan Crawford in the title role. Director Vincent Sherman (who was having an affair with Crawford at the time of filming) was known as an expert helmsman for the movie vehicles of female superstars, and he lets Crawford dominate. She probably would have anyway, given that she was playing opposite Wendell Corey, but the effect was to undermine the original material in a way that made it more interesting.

That’s because Crawford makes the story about sublimation--not merely sexual sublimation, as is blatantly implied in the 1936 version, but sublimation of intelligence and ambition. Harriet tells her niece (K.T. Stevens, the daughter of Sam Wood) that marriage is a cold-eyed bargain: household skills in return for material security. And you’d assume Joan’s body would be part of the bargain, too, Wendell Corey’s body not being much of a factor. The script spells out that Harriet has been evading at least part of that department because she doesn’t want to have kids. But the Siren says that in this version, it's clear Harriet's engaging in, let’s say, non-procreative activities to keep her husband Walter in line. Look at the way her face alters at times when she’s talking to him, and the way Corey (who is perfectly cast for once) looks back, like a boy who’s plowing through the broccoli to get to the ice cream. Not to mention something like Walter acknowledging that wives are “mighty handy gadgets to have around the house.”

The most beautiful part of the set is the central staircase, Harriet swooping up and down as she makes Walter cringe and the maids cry. It’s the focus of several memorable shots, including a wised-up Walter splayed on the sofa--with his shoes on, no less--as he prepares to tell off his wife. The staircase also reminds us of what Harriet wants, which is to climb to high society in the only way that’s open to her. The screenplay works on explaining why Harriet is so fiercely materialistic and shallow; there’s a mid-movie scene where Harriet visits her mentally ill mother in an asylum, a scene put there no doubt to give a human dimension to the title character. Crawford’s playing, more subtle than in any other part of the film, shows Harriet’s mother is the one person she feels real love for, and the one person from whom she will never get it.



But there’s a better explanation later on. Walter is about to be offered a promotion that will take him to Japan, without Harriet, and she can’t bear to have him out of her clutches--he goes so well with her Ming vase, after all. Harriet goes to Walter’s boss and persuades him, with diabolical efficiency, that her husband has a gambling problem and can’t be trusted. Crawford underlines the cold manipulation, but she also demonstrates her character’s misused intelligence, wielded now to push the paternalistic boss along the road to the conclusion she wants. And it’s obvious that this sort of negotiating skill had no outlet at home; here, Harriet is at last in her element. She was never meant to be organizing dull dinner parties and ruining her niece’s life in her spare time. Harriet should have been across a conference table, barking, “Don’t fuck with me, fellas. This ain't my first time at the rodeo.”



That last Mommie Dearest line is irresistible to most modern viewers of Harriet Craig, as are a number of others (“I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at the dirt”). We know Christina and Christopher Crawford saw their mother as a real-life Harriet Craig, only with children to abuse and manipulate and not just servants, a niece and a husband. We also know that a number of loyal friends, and Crawford’s two youngest children, always claimed they saw no Harriet Craig-type side to her. The Siren would like to add an endnote. If Joan was bringing herself to Harriet, she was also bringing her sense of what a life without a career might have been like; stardom offers, if nothing else, plenty of opportunity to negotiate and manipulate. Seen that way, Crawford as Harriet is a cautionary tale of what happens when a smart, calculating, highly ambitious woman has nothing but her home’s decor to occupy her mind.



Because, as far as the Siren is concerned, if you’re flipping out over one extra toy next to the Philippe Starck sofa, you need to get out of the house.



(To the Siren's New York City readers who wish to get out of the house: Harriet Craig, which is not on DVD, is playing tonight only, 7:00 pm and 9:30 pm, at the Clearview Chelsea, 260 West 23rd Street.)

Advice from the Siren

A gentleman has emailed the Siren:

I think you should start an advice column. Here's my first question:

Dear Siren,
I don't understand why Charles Boyer would prefer Olivia de Havilland over Paulette Goddard in "Hold Back The Dawn."
Please advise.
Signed, Cinematically Conflicted


Dear Conflicted,
The Siren is always happy to oblige her patient readers, although she warns some questions are beyond even her mythological powers. Happily, this one she can illuminate, if not solve.

In the studio era, it was occasionally assumed that what a man wants in a life's companion is wholesome sweetness and naïveté, not red-hot rafter-rattling sex. That hasn't been the Siren's personal experience, but then again, she never tried to conduct a love affair under the watchful eye of the Hays Office.

De Havilland was gorgeous, but given her prim character in the movie, Olivia over the much livelier Paulette joins some other puzzling choices. These include Dick Powell even realizing Ruby Keeler is alive when he is right there in the same movie with Ginger Rogers or Joan Blondell; Judy Garland over sultry Angela Lansbury in The Harvey Girls; Janet Leigh over Eleanor Parker in Scaramouche (and in case you're wondering, no, the Siren is never going to get over that one); Donna Reed over Lana Turner in Green Dolphin Street; the Catholic Church over Ingrid Bergman in Bells of St. Mary's; the Welsh church over Maureen O'Hara in How Green Was My Valley; and Margaret Lindsay over Bette Davis in Jezebel.

You may notice a number of these are literary or theatrical adaptations; indeed, this quandary has classic antecedents, e.g. Ivanhoe. Given free rein many, if not most, scriptwriters got it right. Clark Gable, for example, almost always managed to pick Jean Harlow by the last reel.




In an unusual example of Hollywood reverse sexism, this problem is rarely encountered when women are doing the choosing. Rosalind Russell prefers Cary Grant to Ralph Bellamy, Irene Dunne prefers Cary Grant to Ralph Bellamy, and in one that must have really stung, Carole Lombard preferred Fred MacMurray to Ralph Bellamy in Hands Across the Table. The Siren can think of two examples where she questions a heroine's taste, although in both cases there are extenuating circumstances. Joan Crawford goes for Henry Fonda over the decidedly more sensual Dana Andrews in Daisy Kenyon, but as Andrews' character is something of a heel, and it was Fonda's job up to 1968 to be a mensch, you see it coming. And in How to Marry a Millionaire, the large age difference between William Powell and Lauren Bacall can be taken as explanation of why Bacall picks Cameron Mitchell, although the Siren always mutters, "I don't care how old he is--woman, are you nuts?"

There's one that will stump the Siren to her dying day, however. In Walk Don't Run, the remake of The More the Merrier, Samantha Eggar picks Jim Hutton over a never-in-the-running Cary Grant. That flaming chunk of crazy was part of what made Grant decide being a cosmetics executive was a much better deal.

In real life it is a toss-up as to who would have won a Goddard/de Havilland Hold Back Your Man smackdown. They both had It. And How.

Best regards,
T.S.

"Two Grown Men Acting Like...Grown Men!"

Strictly to cheer our Friday, the Siren's favorite Joan Crawford cameo, with Doris Day looking lovely and Dennis Morgan as affable as always. And the great Jack Carson, who's 100% right about that gingham dress.

Handsome Directors: A Brief Visual List

Last night the Siren attended a swell dinner marked by good conversation, good wine, and the best damn roast chicken ever. Since the guests included a number of film writers, naturally the discussion long lingered over the most esoteric, enlightening and intellectual corners of film love...

But after a while we ditched all that and got down to brass tacks: Who was the best-looking director of all time?

We didn't come up with many names. One host ventured that the last time he broached this topic, the one most often mentioned was Francois Truffaut. Well, the Siren loves Truffaut's movies--a lot--but, nah. Then the Siren got up this morning and remembered all sorts of names, most them not mentioned last night.

Thus this mischievous exercise in the most superficial kind of auteurism imaginable.



Frank Borzage


John Cassavetes. How on earth did we forget him?


Vittorio de Sica


Joseph Mankiewicz (on right). Numerous affairs included Linda Darnell, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford and Loretta Young.


Leo McCarey. Frequently cited as a huge influence on Cary Grant's screen persona.


Vincent Sherman. Had affairs with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Lived.


Luchino Visconti


Raoul Walsh. Pre-eye-patch Walsh, in full Mexican bandit regalia, was our host's pick.


Orson Welles. The most beautiful depraved baby face of all time, and as a bonus, you get that voice. Precisely the kind of voice you want to hear saying, "Good morning."


William "Wild Bill" Wellman. The Siren's pick until she was reminded of Welles' youth.

Anecdote of the Week: Joan and the One Man

Every woman tells me there was only the One Man she ever really loved. Joan Crawford told me once that the only man she really loved was the rather dull, middle-aged vice-president of a soda-pop company and when I reminded her she'd said this to me about Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Clark Gable and Greg Bautzer she looked incredulous. Then she said quite simply, "There is always only one though, isn't there?" And told me. It wasn't the vice-president.

--Adela Rogers St. Johns, The Honeycomb

Blogger Larry Aydlette, aka That Little Round-Headed Boy, whom the Siren loves despite his refusal to archive his wonderful blogs, posts a good guess as to Joan's One Man.

Ten Melos the Siren Would Watch Instead of "Mad Men"

If sticking it out for two-and-a-half episodes of Season 1 and one episode this season can be called trying, the Siren has tried with "Mad Men". She sees the attraction, even if the hype blows her mind--everything from Banana Republic to Barron's, for heaven's sake. The Siren admires the cinematic qualities of the series, the fluid camerawork, the carefully angled shots, the flawless integration of sets and costumes. It's pretty. The actors are pretty. The period detail is enough to warm an old-movie hound's heart. But on the whole, the Siren just doesn't dig it.

Despite the stratospheric sex appeal of Jon Hamm, January Jones and Christina Hendricks, the show is just so goddamned dour. The Siren suspects series creator Matthew Weiner wanted to avoid the nostalgia trap, but this is too far in the other direction. A little soupçon of affection for the past will not turn Mr. Weiner's dead-serious critique into "The Wonder Years Meets Ad Age." The Siren has seen movies from the era, and in those movies, people have a good time--every now and then, you understand, between bouts of weltschmerz. As James Wolcott wrote in Vanity Fair, "Mad Men" "has a seductive look, a compelling mood, a cast that could have been carved from a giant bar of Ivory soap, but zero grasp of the elastic optimism and vigor of the Kennedy years, the let-go spring of release after the constriction of the Eisenhower 50s."

Everyone on "Mad Men" goes around smoking and drinking and eating whatever they hell they want and having office affairs without once looking over their lovers' shoulders for process servers bearing class-action subpoenas, but does anyone enjoy it? Not from what the Siren has seen. It's like Saint Augustine wrote the scripts. Such laughs as "Mad Men" affords are tethered to hindsight--"We never indulge in such sexism/racism/anti-Semitism/homophobia now, and even if we do, we sure don't smoke."

Still, the Siren will probably watch more this season--between Wolcott's liveblogging and Lance's occasional commentaries, she doesn't want to be the clueless playground oddball. But in her heart, she'd rather watch a melodrama from the actual late Eisenhower-early Kennedy era. Good or bad, there's plenty to choose from.

So that's my justification for posting these brief takes on ten films actually made during the "Mad Men" period--dramas, because "Mad Men" is not, god knows, a comedy or a musical. These movies vary widely in terms of quality and critical repute, from bona fide masterpieces to simple soapers. But the Siren likes them all, as she likes a lot of the melodramas from this period. Many directors were exploring widescreen technique to admirable effect, and it was a great era for clothes and interiors. And when you watch the movies, you realize that people were far more aware of what was under society's facade than many suppose. (Two of the movies date to 1959--if Don Draper can fade out to Bob Dylan in 1960 then the Siren can cheat back a single year, she figures.)



Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)
Social Issue: Racism.
Sets and Costumes: Perfection.
Sex appeal (Low/Medium/High): Beside the point. But John Gavin was in the full flower of his lockjaw handsomeness and Susan Kohner and Sandra Dee were lovely.
Why the Siren Likes It: It's a masterpiece, that's why, one that belongs on any list of the great films of the 1950s. A master class in how to make a movie about misguided, surface-focused people trapped by a hypocritical society, without condescending to or withholding compassion from them. The proof is that 50 years after its release, the thwarted mother-daughter love still reduces many to tears. The Siren bristles when she hears this described as camp. There isn't a single unintentional effect in it. The falseness and glitter are there to throw race, this country's original sin, into high relief. But Sirk doesn't invite the audience to feel superior. He wants recognition, AND he wants identification. In the superb opening scene on the beach, when Lana Turner reacts with gooey middle-class "understanding" to Juanita Moore's having a white-skinned daughter, Sirk didn't want the white liberals in the audience to say, "What a hypocrite." He wanted them to say, "Shit, that's me." (The beautiful screen cap is from Ways of Seeing, the Siren's new blog discovery; several others, equally enthralling, right here.)

The Best of Everything (Jean Negulesco, 1959)
Social Issues: Working women and adultery (go together like a horse and carriage in Hollywood movies of all eras), unwed pregnancy, abortion, casting couch, alcoholism.
Sets and Costumes: Great New York exteriors and the ultimate in smart little suits. Best of all, the Mondrian-esque office interiors, which Negulesco, a painter, probably influenced.
Sex appeal: High; Suzy Parker, Stephen Boyd, Louis Jourdan, even Robert Evans looks great.
Why the Siren Likes It: Underrated, influential film whose critical reputation is slowly improving. One of a number of "three [or four] girls" movies from the era, direct ancestors of "Sex and the City." Enjoyable on a number of different levels--as highly informative social artifact, as a proto-feminist tract, as an aesthetic treat, as a showcase for newcomers and old pros. The Siren particularly likes good old Brian Aherne as an ass-pinching executive and Joan Crawford, refusing to play her role as straight office harridan, giving her character both dignity and sensitivity. The beauteous Parker (up top) gets the best line: "Here's to men. Bless their clean-cut faces and their dirty little minds." The best appreciation of this film that the Siren has read is over at Noel Vera's place; he pays great attention to Negulesco's use of Cinemascope.

From the Terrace (Mark Robson, 1960)
Social Issues: Alcoholism, adultery, class snobbery, cutthroat business practices.
Sets and Costumes: High-end all the way. Joanne Woodward doesn't look completely at ease in Travilla, though.
Sex appeal: High. Paul Newman rates an automatic "high" in this category, as does Myrna Loy at any age.
Why the Siren Likes It: A parable about life versus work that everybody calls dated, except "Mad Men" apes the same themes. The Siren wrote a bit about this movie when Newman died; his performance is very good but the direction is noteworthy too, as is the Elmer Bernstein score.



All the Fine Young Cannibals (Michael Anderson, 1960)
Social Issues: Racism, alcoholism, class snobbery, adultery.
Sets and Costumes: Ersatz Southern, then faux bohemian, but extremely well-shot by William H. Daniels.
Sex appeal: Medium, largely because the Siren doesn't get Robert Wagner.
Why the Siren Likes It: Supposedly based on the life of Chet Baker. Jaggedly uneven and no one seems to have a clue about real white Southerners. But deserves to be remembered, if only for Pearl Bailey's haunting performance. For the Siren and those like her, there's also the nifty bit of role reversal for Susan Kohner, the "tragic mulatto" of Sirk's Imitation of Life, in the same movie as the penultimate role for Louise Beavers, of John Stahl's excellent 1934 Imitation of Life. (Poster is from the great Cinema Retro site.)


Return to Peyton Place (Jose Ferrer, 1961)
Social Issues: Working women (don't kid yourself, that's still an issue), rape, incest, adultery, (disguised) abortion, xenophobia.
Sets and Costumes: Meh. The exteriors look great, though.
Sex appeal: High; Eleanor Parker, Tuesday Weld, Carol Lynley, Jeff Chandler if you happen to like Jeff Chandler.
Why the Siren Likes It: Um...hard to say, since by no stretch of the imagination is it a good movie. This one the Siren won't kill you for calling camp. There really isn't anything else you could call it. The first Peyton Place is camp too, but had real value in Franz Waxman's score (heaven), Diane Varsi and the New England ambiance. Return, well, Ferrer was no director, they added lyrics and Rosemary Clooney when Waxman needed neither, and most of the cast looks about as comfortable as a soaking wet cat. But I appreciate Carol Lynley's pursuit of a career over and above a love affair (similar to the reason I liked Valley of the Dolls' fadeout). Mary Astor is great, playing a full-out embodiment of small-minded paranoia and ugliness. And Tuesday Weld manages to have emotional sincerity in some scenes despite playing opposite the stiffest excuse for a Swedish ski instructor you ever saw in your life.


Susan Slade (Delmer Daves, 1961)
Social Issues: Premarital sex, unwed motherhood, the hazards of cigarette smoking.
Sets and Costumes: Beautiful exteriors by master cinematographer Lucien Ballard, and the vaguely Japanese-style house on the Northern California coast, given to Connie Stevens's father by Brian Aherne (there he is again!) is quite an eyeful.
Sex appeal: Medium, though Connie Stevens (above) does her best.
Why the Siren Likes It: Interesting, Sirk-esque late-career movie by the talented Delmer Daves, with several scenes that have lost none of their ability to shock. Dave Kehr: "To an America that needed to believe that 'nice girls don’t,' Daves’s melodramas responded, 'Nice girls do' — or did at least sometimes, when the appropriate distinctions had been made between lust and love, predatory older males and sincere young men, casual encounters and lifetime commitments." Kehr prefers Parrish and Rome Adventure to Susan Slade and the Siren pretty much agrees with him, but Slade is worthwhile and closest to the "Mad Men" school of social history. Peter Nelhaus has a fine review of the movie, in which he compares it to Daves' westerns.


Advise and Consent (Otto Preminger, 1962)
Social Issues: Homophobia, subversion, government corruption.
Sets and Costumes: Stiff, cold and forbidding, perfectly in keeping with the machinations of the plot.
Sex appeal: Low. Gene Tierney is in this but she wasn't looking her best. Perhaps because he was making a movie about politicians, Preminger shot everyone with a GargoyleCam.
Why the Siren Likes It: Another masterpiece, a fisheyed look at the Washington influence game, usually taken as a riff on Alger Hiss but full of other echos as well. The scenes of back-door-dealing and blackmail ring as true as they ever did. Those tempted to tag the young, upright conservative senator's operatic torment over his gay attractions as quaint should think back to Jim McGreevey, Larry Craig and their many brethren--not to mention their wives. Despite the Red Scare trappings (and those are somewhat back in fashion, if you've noticed), Advise and Consent is one hell of a prescient movie. (To see just how prescient, the Siren recommends you check out this article by Meredith Hindley, senior writer at Humanities, on "The Transformation of Advise and Consent.") The above is from Ways of Seeing, whose proprietor clearly has excellent taste; for more screen grabs to show just how good this movie is, please click over and check out the rest.


The Light in the Piazza (Guy Green, 1962)
Social Issues: Mental retardation, class snobbery.
Sets and Costumes: Stunningly beautiful Italian setting (Guy Green was a highly accomplished cinematographer), Christian Dior dresses for Olivia de Havilland.
Sex appeal: High; Yvette Mimieux, George Hamilton and Rossano Brazzi, and de Havilland is much lovelier than the frightening lip color above suggests.
Why the Siren Likes It: Tender romance with a great performance by de Havilland, who carries the movie. Recently turned into an acclaimed musical that the Siren, alas, did not see. She does think the movie's insistence on the primacy of love, both parental and romantic, makes it a good choice for a musical treatment. At a time when the common practice was to shut the mentally retarded away in institutions, the notion that a developmentally delayed girl (albeit a beautiful one) deserved to marry a prince of an Italian and have babies was nothing short of revolutionary.


The V.I.P.s (Anthony Asquith, 1963)
Social Issues: Cutthroat business practices, tax evasion, adultery, domestic violence, depression.
Sets and Costumes: Enough to make you fly to Heathrow and wait to get fogged in--if flying were still like this.
Sex appeal: High. (Elizabeth Taylor at this point in her career does the same for a movie as Paul Newman. Elsa Martinelli was nothing to sneeze at, and neither was Richard Burton or Louis Jourdan.)
Why the Siren Likes It: See Return to Peyton Place. Plenty of lush period visuals, and there are pleasures to be had from Orson Welles even in unworthy roles (this one tinged with painful self-parody). But it's a pretty bad movie, though hardly the offense to all civilization that Walter Chaw paints it, and Elizabeth Taylor is an unconvincing version of Vivien Leigh. (Note to Mr. Chaw: Rod Taylor was a native Australian.) The Siren likes this primarily for Maggie Smith as the devoted secretary. I do love Dame Maggie. Christina Hendricks is good, but she still could learn something from what Smith accomplishes with a cliched role. Smith's scene with Richard Burton is the highlight, the so-so writing propped up with perfectly timed and calibrated reactions and beats.


Love With the Proper Stranger (Robert Mulligan, 1963)
Social Issues: Premarital sex, abortion, unwed motherhood.
Sets and Costumes: Supposedly low-end, but a mite too clean for all that. Steve McQueen made everything he wore look like a well-broken-in motorcycle jacket.
Sex appeal: High. Look at that publicity shot and tell me different.
Why the Siren Likes It: Has comic moments, but at heart a rather melancholy movie about a still-relevant topic, with legendary leads giving warm, authentic performances despite a wan third act. McQueen seldom let his vaunted cool slip to as much effect as here. When "Mad Men" gives a nudge about how far we've come, we should remember Wood planning an abortion, without hysteria. How many recent Hollywood movies or TV shows have let a beautiful, sympathetic lead do the same?

All right, so it's been a while, have at it. Tell me why I'm wrong about "Mad Men." Point out the movies I missed. (The Apartment isn't there and doesn't belong there; it's a comedy, and a satire, and very funny, and "Mad Men" isn't any of those those things.)

But, as always, play nice. The new banner, which MrsHenryWindleVale recognized without a telescope, is courtesy of the great Glenn Kenny. It is of course Dorothy Malone, from another Sirk masterpiece, The Tarnished Angels. Dorothy is meant to illustrate the Siren's general mood for the past month and probably the next.

Postscript: I've added a link to Peter Nelhaus's fine writeup (with lovely screen caps) of Susan Slade. Despite the deliberately provocative title, my main idea in writing this piece was "Hey, these early-1960s films that I love deserve a second look." So if anyone else has a post on some of these, or a similar movie from 1959-1963, post a link in comments by all means and I'll add it here. I'll start by also linking to Peter's post about Strangers When We Meet (b/w Town Without Pity, which also roughly fits our parameters despite the German setting). The Siren forgot about Richard Quine because--well, see banner above. Because of that.

Awesome screen caps from The Best of Everything right here. Apparently my mistake was not Googling "Suzy Parker."

Nathaniel of The Film Experience has been doing a series on movie references in Mad Men; one post involves a Draper household pillow-talk discussion of The Best of Everything that the Siren is sorry she missed. Great for "Mad Men" fans but rewarding for non-watchers too.

MORE UPDATES:

Vertigo's Psyche gives some love to Siren darling Sandra Dee and her exquisite performance in A Summer Place.

Arthur S., one of the most astute commenters in the film blogosphere, links us all up to a Douglas Sirk interview that is not to be missed.

Comments I Made at Sites You Don't Read, With Added Borzage Link Bonus

The Siren is giving up on commenting at Big Hollywood. She likes to pounce occasionally on threads about movies she likes, but as noted by one critic who also quit commenting (because he kept getting deleted, bless him), "aw, nobody wants to play with Campaspe." Not a creature was stirring--nothing, no action. Dullsville.

So anyway, Mildred Pierce. Great movie that prompted a commenter to recall an alleged feminist interpretation wherein Mildred is "punished" for daring to step outside her assigned gender role and pursuing a career. The idea that Mildred is punished doesn't jibe with the Siren's viewing; instead, the "happy" ending where Mildred goes off with the drip she was married to at the beginning of the movie just indicates that in Hollywood at the time, if you wanted a happy ending you had to have the heroine go off with someone. Anyway, the marriage roles are a sidelight in the movie, as the Siren pointed out in the following comment. Maybe one of her patient readers would like to respond.

I don’t think Mildred Pierce has much to do with marriage and wifehood at all. James Agee was one of the critics who pointed out that the movie is much more focused on class, social climbing and attitudes toward money. Mildred’s moral unraveling becomes worse even as she gets richer. The really subversive part isn’t Mildred going to work, which she does out of necessity and abandons when she’s able, after finding a rich partner and a higher station. It’s the movie’s fisheyed look at maternal sacrifice. Instead of being beatific and ennobling, as in Stella Dallas, mother love is perceived as unhealthy, obsessive and narcissistic in the fullest sense of that word. Veda is a sociopath, but it’s Veda whom Mildred really loves, more so than any man in the movie and more even than the angelic Kay. “Don’t tell anyone what Mildred Pierce did!” could mean covering up a murder, but in the end it’s the unanswerable question of whether Mildred’s love “did” something to Veda and created this monster, or whether Veda (with the very name and spelling connoting “venal”) was what she was from birth. Mildred’s independence at the end, such as it is, results from her having taken Eve Arden’s joking advice and “eaten her young”–finally (and reluctantly) leaving Veda to her fate. Although, so tied to her dreadful offspring is Mildred that I’ve always wondered if Veda was able to work more machinations on her mother even from behind prison bars. Veda would fit in well in Caged.

And...Jack Carson is pure joy in this movie, as is Arden, who is the movie’s example of a woman happy and secure in herself–and single.

(The above photo is from Legendary Joan Crawford, a beautifully maintained site which has the most awesome collection of Joan Crawford photographs on the Web, bar none. You could spend hours there--I have.)

P.S. Please run over to The Auteurs, where Glenn Kenny has a weekly column about Foreign-Region DVDs. This week's item was requested by the Siren, and he delivers: a write-up of the Frank Borzage-directed, Ernst Lubitsch-produced Desire, which has been released in the U.K. Go, read and see if the screen-caps alone don't explain why the Siren mentions this every time the subject of "not out on Region 1" comes up.

The Hardest Meme Ever

The Siren has been double-dog tagged, by Peter Nelhaus of Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee and Tony Dayoub of Cinema Viewfinder. This traveling list originated with Nathaniel R at The Film Experience, so if you've been tagged, go blame him for the fact that it's ridiculously hard, the hardest meme ever. Twenty actresses. Only twenty! Next time, gentlemen, just go ahead and ask the Siren to pick 20 favorite children, all right?

To whittle things down, the Siren gave herself but one requirement: The actress must be someone whose presence alone, irrespective of director, scriptwriter, subject matter, cinematographer, location or studio, will prompt the Siren to watch the movie. Even if the Siren suspects, or knows, that a movie is a wing-flapping wattle-waving turkey, she will watch it for one of these actresses.

The Siren has added a small embellishment by picking a still from a favorite movie for each actress. The pictures are very easy to guess, for the most part; it was just something the Siren did for her own amusement.


Myrna Loy.


Bette Davis.



Joan Crawford.



Greta Garbo.



Carole Lombard.



Joan Fontaine.



Lillian Gish.



Barbara Stanwyck. Should be on everyone's list.



Miriam Hopkins.



Alida Valli. The Siren saw this movie again recently and it was better than she remembered it.



Danielle Darrieux.



Kay Francis. I already proved I will watch anything with her. I sat through Doctor Monica, for heaven's sake.


Margaret Sullavan. This publicity still is for X. Trapnel; it was lifted from Classic Montgomery, a terrific classic-film blog from a fan of the actor Robert Montgomery. So far it wins the prize for most bizarre stars-link-arms-and-walk-toward-camera-still ever.



Katharine Hepburn.



Thelma Ritter.


Gloria Grahame. See Stanwyck.



Hideko Takamine.



Janet Gaynor.



Catherine Deneuve. All the boys will grab an opportunity to post something from Belle de Jour but this movie was the Siren's first Catherine love.



Meryl Streep. The Siren has problems with this movie, but chose this still because people forget what a unique beauty Streep was when starting out. Still is, in fact, and thank god she can still move her forehead.

You will notice that neither Bennett sister appears here; Constance and Joan just missed this tier. If I see more early work that I love, they may yet make it. Also cruelly forced out by the numerical limitations were Judy Holliday, Jean Harlow, Julie Christie, Ruth Chatterton, Clara Bow, Eve Arden, Dorothy Dandridge, Gong Li, Mary Astor, Gene Tierney, Anna May Wong, Setsuko Hara, Olivia de Havilland, and Ruby Dee.

All right, here are the Siren's tags:

J.C. Loophole of The Shelf (he volunteered--this'll learn him)
Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Film (she probably hates these things, but she will make great choices)
Operator_99 of Allure (this is his second tag from me in as many months, but come on, look at how great his A-Z list was)
Kimberly at Cinebeats (dying to see her swingin' list)
David Cairns at Shadowplay (I expect totally fabulous classic choices from him, too)

P.S. Damnit. I forgot Isabelle Huppert. I think this blog is in Portuguese--which I do not speak, alas--but she has picked up the actress meme and her taste needs no translation. Amazing pictures.

And since I am adding a link anyway, here is an unrelated tip--rush over and read David Cairns' post on the underrated William Dieterle and The Last Flight.