Happy Birthday, Joan Fontaine: Ivy (1947)

"It's a perfect fascination, my attachment to that girl. If she were to poison me, I would forgive her."
--Emile L'Angelier's tribute to his lover Madeleine Smith, from testimony at Madeleine's 1857 trial for poisoning him with arsenic.

The Siren has non-film obsessions that she discusses here not at all (scarves, sonnets, Gram Parsons) or not that often (Victorian novelists, perfume). She's mentioned her love of a good vintage murder only once or twice, when discussing David Lean’s fabulous Madeleine, but there’s nothing like a good domestic poisoning case to get the Siren feeling all’s right with the world.

So she was predisposed to like Ivy, the 1947 film about a poison-wielding Edwardian belle, even had it not starred Joan Fontaine at the peak of her beauty and talent or been directed by Sam Wood and produced by William Cameron Menzies, who probably contributed a great deal to the film's stunning design. Furthermore, it was lensed by Russell Metty, scored by the same man who did Letter from an Unknown Woman, Daniele Amfitheatrof, written by sometime HItchcock collaborator Charles Bennett, and the costumes were by Orry-Kelly, who set off Fontaine's features with wide-brimmed hats and fetching veils. All that, plus Herbert Marshall once more looking at a conniving snake of a woman and deciding, "Hey, she's pretty cute.”

It was, in short, 99 minutes of ecstasy, and the Siren felt the same way as David Cairns, "as if someone had cut me open and inserted a big cake made of happiness.” (The Siren stole some of these screen caps from David, with his kind permission.) Ivy is criminally unavailable on DVD (the Siren’s copy was a gift), so you can take David’s suggestion and start a letter-writing campaign, or you can take a break from reading this and watch Ivy in its entirety, and looking pretty good despite Spanish subtitles, on Youtube (start here)--quick, before somebody takes it down. The Siren recommends the latter course.

Why does the Siren like a good poisoning case, you may well be too afraid to ask? It's psychologically interesting, that's why. Poison is said to be a woman's method, stealthy and nonviolent. Provided you are trying to mimic a debilitating illness, or you don't happen to have a movie-style clutch-heart-and-keel-over toxin in the medicine cabinet, it’s also exceptionally nasty. Poison requires you to eye the pain-wracked victim and muse not only, "Young man, I think you're dying," but also, "Time for another dose." Poison is a vision of Madeleine Smith, everybody's favorite Victorian murderess, listening to her unwanted lover complain about the jagged-toothed animal trying to gnaw through his guts and, with a smile of womanly commiseration, handing him another cup of cocoa. Madeleine, in fact, is the ne plus ultra of female poisoners, remorseless and beautiful, so intoxicating that as Emile L'Angelier lay dying, and maybe knowing why, the closest he came to incriminating her was when he said "I cannot think why I was so unwell after getting that coffee and chocolate from her.” L'Angelier was blackmailing Madeleine, threatening to expose their torrid physical affair just as Madeleine was about to marry a nice merchant. The verdict against her was the classic Scottish "not proven," which someone once translated as "you're not guilty, but don't do it again."

Ivy, based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, has all sorts of echoes of Madeleine Smith, but the differences make the plot and Fontaine's title character all the more irresistible. Ivy is guilty; some think Madeleine was innocent (although the Siren’s view was well put by F. Tennyson Jesse: "Probably she did it, but anyhow he deserved it").

And Ivy's psychology also veers from that of the sensual Madeleine. As played by Fontaine--and the Siren ranks this among Joan's best performances--Ivy gives every indication of not much liking sex at all. She endures the caresses and importunings of her millstone husband and discarded lover as one might absently pat an overeager Pekingese. When she goes after rich, unsuspecting (wasn't he always, poor lamb) Herbert Marshall, Ivy displays herself like a piece of Wedgewood--not something to be seized with vulgar hands, but rather to be wrapped in tissue paper and taken home to a proper setting in the nicest room in the house. It isn't men who bring a flash to Ivy's eyes and a flush to her cheekbones, but mansions, large boats, feathered hats and, most of all, spangled handbags with cunning secret compartments.

Sam Wood hooked the Siren from scene one, as Ivy, in one of the cloud-like white dresses she wears through most of the movie, climbs the stairs to a back apartment, where Una O'Connor pops in to tell the future. No one in a movie ever goes to a fortune teller to be told "I've looked deep into your soul, my child, and everything is just ducky." No, they go to have the fortune teller start with "I see a journey" or "I see a dark stranger" or, in this case, "I see someone rich"--and then break off, rear back and flinch with dread at a ghastly presentiment. This O'Connor does, and Fontaine also does her duty, as the customer who shrugs off the bad news as a supernatural false alarm, crosses the psychic's palms with silver and hastens off to her fate.

Ivy is married to Jervis Lexton, a happy-go-lucky layabout played by an unexpectedly marvelous Richard Ney. He once had some money, but Ivy ran through it in short order, and now they live in dingy rooms and try to live well on nothing a year. Whatever motivated Ivy to marry him--impulse? infatuation? to get him to quit asking?--is long gone. As Jervis yammers away about how he loves her and they'll get by all right and he wouldn't dream of leaving, Ivy gently pulls at her collar as though she can't breathe. The Siren loved Fontaine doing this so much that she reversed the DVD three times to watch it again.

In addition to her husband, Ivy has an ex-lover who can't get over her, a noble slum doctor named Roger Gretorex (Patric Knowles). Perhaps Ivy once saw Gretorex as an escape, but then she found he lives in a shabby neighborhood and is always attending to injured urchins and what-not and my dear, it's just too dreary. What Ivy needs is a nice multimillionaire, like Una O'Connor promised her in scene one, and soon he appears, Miles Rushworth (Marshall).

Marshall and Fontaine together play two arrestingly gorgeous scenes, including one at a ball where Ivy asks Rushworth to dance, and he says he'd love to in that lovely voice of his. That had the Siren in a tizzy, since Herbert Marshall was (probably) the only man with an artificial leg ever to become a major star. Ivy and Rushworth get waylaid before they reach the dance floor, thank goodness, and play a conversation in front of fireworks. More beautiful still is a scene on Rushworth's yacht, where a thunderstorm comes up and their kiss is shot in silhouette.

And then there's the scene where Fontaine, showing more lust than she does at any other point, spies an expensive antique handbag in a window and deftly manipulates Rushworth into buying it for her. It used to belong to Marie Antoinette, the saleslady tells them, but surely this is a script oversight. L'Autrichienne did play milkmaid while peasants starved, but she didn't run around dosing them with arsenic. Perhaps Lowndes and Bennett were thinking of Madame de Montespan, another of Ivy's lethal sorority. Anyway. The purse has a clasp that opens to reveal a small hollow that's simply perfect for...golly, rouge would fit, or perfumed talc, or maybe face powder…

Ah, that's the ticket. So considerate of Dr. Gretorex to have that lying around his office, just as Rushworth leaves for South Africa and Ivy realizes her husband can't take a hint. (The poison is coyly unnamed, but the Siren thinks it's arsenic, once used to treat psoriasis as well as syphilis, as though the latter diagnosis weren't enough of a problem 100 years ago. And later there's another doctor checking Jervis's fingernails for the telltale white lines.) The moment Fontaine steals the poison is played with her face in shadow, her motivations all in the delicate way she opens the latch on her precious purse. Later, when she's fixing Jervis a fatal drink of brandy and and water, Wood keeps her hands just out of frame, as though sharing Ivy's conviction that it isn't really murder, she's just doing what a woman must, if she wants to be kept in style.

Gretorex tries to see Ivy and winds up making an inadvertent house call on the dying young Jervis, who's complaining about one hell of a hangover. Those factors enable Ivy, who's nothing if not opportunistic, to try to pin the murder on her ex-lover.

And here's the best thing about Fontaine in Ivy: As David also notes, it's such a delectable twist on her performance in Suspicion. In that unjustly maligned Hitchcock outing, where Fontaine was terrific, she's the upper-crust, tormented, tremulous wife of a no-good, but non-poisoning, husband. Here, she's the upper-crust, tremulous poisoner, with the same genteel mannerisms turned lethal. Watch Fontaine trying to maneuver her husband into divorcing her, delicately arranging herself on a sofa and moaning that she is no good for him. Catch her exasperation as this impossible sap insists that no, dearest, he wouldn't dream of it. See Fontaine look at Jervis dying, and show a fleeting bit of pity: "Pain should be quick," she reflects. And then, just like Madeleine, Ivy gives her victim another dose, like he's a suffering parakeet.

And there's Ivy, in bed after Jervis finally expires, shrinking back against the pillows as she's questioned by a gruff detective, as Lina in Suspicion cowered in bed with her eyes glued to a glowing glass of milk. Later, when Ivy realizes the law, personified by Sir Cedric Hardwicke and his eyebags, may be catching on to her, her eyelids flutter with repressed impatience at the lack of cooperation; it's like she's turning a key in a lock and the wretched thing simply won't open.

Joan Fontaine, long may she flourish, turns 93 on Oct. 22. Happy birthday, Ms Fontaine. There could be no better way for us all to celebrate than rediscovering Ivy.

DVD Alert: No Greater Glory, Address Unknown, Other Titles From Sony

Boy is the Siren fashionably late on this one--about a month late, in fact--but it is still well worth trumpeting. Following the success of the Warner Archive Collection, Sony has inaugurated a manufacturing-on-demand service that at last turns up some devoutly hoped-for films. Lou Lumenick wrote about it here. They have started with 100 titles, and more are promised each month.

The site itself is fairly easy to navigate, and in a welcome bonus, includes clips from each film. The prices (around $20) are commensurate with Warner Archive.

What follows is a list of films the Siren recommends to her readers, and others she hasn't seen but wants to. She starts with the best.

No Greater Glory. A shimmering masterpiece from Frank Borzage's sound period, this story of the war games played by groups of boys in a warehouse lot comes with the Siren's highest possible endorsement. George Breakston plays Nemecsek, whose yearning for the friendship of a handsome leader in his gang leads him to reckless acts and, finally, martyrdom. A sequence in a lamplit park where Nemecsek tries to spy on the opposing "army" is as haunting as anything in Borzage's silents; Joseph H. August's cinematography is the equal of his work for John Ford. No Greater Glory was taken from a novel by Ferenc Molnar, The Paul Street Boys, published in 1906, and it carries all the intensity of childhood loves and griefs. It is also as wrenching a statement about war as Paths of Glory. Under Borzage's guidance the gifted young cast performs with sensitivity and restraint. In addition to Breakston, the Siren was particularly taken with Frankie Darro, as the leader of the opposition who comes to see the qualities in Nemecsek that his own friends do not. (The fate of Jimmy Butler, who plays the object of Nemecsek's adoration, adds a piercing coda: An artillery private, Butler died in action in France in 1945, aged 24.) The movie deserves a full-fledged restoration and all-out DVD packaging, but if this is the form we've got, we should still pounce. TCM has shown this at least once, to the Siren's knowledge, but it belongs in the collection of anyone with a serious interest in Borzage, black-and-white cinematography, 1930s cinema or indeed the art of film.





Address Unknown. Directed by William Cameron Menzies, a towering figure who needs a MOMA retrospective, a definitive biography and his own damn DVD box set. Until that day, MOD discs will have to do. It's a parable about the friendship between a Jewish art dealer and his German partner, who returns to the Fatherland just before World War II and is drawn, step by ominous step, into Nazism. Whether the German has adopted the full ideology, or is motivated by ambition and greed, is one of the film's central questions, as well as which ties demand loyalty, and which do not. The movie softens up Kathrine Kressman Taylor's memorably dark, bitter epistolary novel, and that's a pity. But the magnificent look of it (that screen grab is the merest taste) will give incredible pleasure. Cinematography by Rudolph Mate. Here's an excellent write-up by primo blogger David Cairns.

10 Rillington Place. Kim Morgan is a fan. That's good enough for the Siren.

Counter-Attack. Screened during the Shadows of Russia series that the Siren co-programmed with Comrade Lumenick, it includes one of Paul Muni's better performances and has wonderfully claustrophobic tension, as Muni, playing a Russian soldier, and a female resistance fighter battle a small group of Germans in a bombed building. But you don't need to know any of that. The only thing you need to know is that the cinematographer was James Wong Howe, as close to a sure thing as Hollywood can offer us in this cockamamie world.

Footsteps in the Fog. The Siren already has an under-the-counter version of this gaslight thriller, which stars her beloved Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger. She hasn't watched it yet, but the pedigree suggests it is well worth a flutter.

Hot Blood. Nicholas Ray, and the clip looks gorgeous, although even ardent auteurists often strain to say something nice about this Gypsy melodrama with Jane Russell and Cornel Wilde. The Siren isn't completely sure she wants to buy this movie, actually, even if she knows Glenn Kenny would say "Siren, it has mise en scène!" But the DVD cover is pretty goshdarned fabulous, isn't it?

Mickey One. The death of Arthur Penn has brought this film back into the blogosphere conversation. The Siren found it deeply odd, but in a good way, and Warren Beatty does great work in it.

The Guilt of Janet Ames. A Rosalind Russell vehicle the Siren has long wanted to see.

Song Without End. Once more, say it with the Siren: James. Wong. Howe.

The Spiritualist. Released in the U.S. as The Amazing Mr. X. A legendary film noir/horror movie that is probably a pip for Halloween. The Siren is definitely buying this one. Cinematography by John Alton; check out DVD Beaver's screen caps.

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."

TCM Alerts: What the Siren Wants to Watch This Month

TCM moves away from Shadows of Russia (I know, I get that post-Christmas-letdown feeling about it too) and into 31 Days of Oscar, not usually my favorite month at the channel because I have seen so much already. However, I have been scanning the lineup and found some gems that aren't on home video. I don't often do "TCM Alerts" but some of these are films we've mentioned or yearned for, so here's the list. All times are EST.

Tonight:
2/4: 8 pm The Uninvited. Splendid Old Dark House movie with Ray Milland.



10 pm Kitty Sparkling historical comedy-romance, via Mitchell Leisen, beloved of both the Siren and many commenters here. The Siren has seen this one and it is well worth catching; it also has Ray Milland and one of Paulette Goddard's best performances.

2/5: 6:15 am Address Unknown (dir. William Cameron Menzies) The Siren is very excited about this one. The superbly suspenseful epistolary novella Adressat Unbekannt (1938) kept her awake all night when she read it in high school, and until recently the Siren was unaware it had ever been filmed. William Cameron Menzies is one of Hollywood's unsung geniuses and a primary reason Gone with the Wind looks as beautiful as it does. Pounce.



2/12: 8:45 am Woman of Affairs. Greta Garbo in the bowdlerized, but still scandalous, film version of The Green Hat. Via Clarence Brown, who is cool again, for those keeping score at home.

10:30 am Our Dancing Daughters The summit of Joan Crawford's flapper period.

2/14: 2 pm: The Devil and Miss Jones Wonderful Sam Wood comedy with an unusual labor vs management theme.

2/16: 6:30 pm The Racket (1928) Rarely show mob-themed silent via Lewis Milestone.

2/17 Noon: The War Against Mrs Hadley A rare leading role for the fabulous Fay Bainter. Don't know much about this one but I am intrigued.

2/18 6 am: Pacific Liner Victor McLaghlen starrer about a shipboard epidemic.

8:45 am Five Star Final Pre-Code newspaper drama starring the always-brilliant Edward G. Robinson, directed by Mervyn Le Roy.

2/21 2:30 am The Solid Gold Cadillac. My favorite Judy Holliday movie, and more timely than ever. Not on DVD.

2/22 8 pm Five Graves to Cairo. Billy Wilder's Rommel thriller, also not on DVD.

2/26 3 am Seconds. Incredibly suspenseful sci-fi with Rock Hudson's best performance and an ending that will stick with you forever. I often wonder why this one hasn't been remade, but I am glad it hasn't.



2/28 5:15 am Smilin' Through (1932). Our own Leslie Howard, fresh from being declared Cool Once More by the Siren readership, together with Norma Shearer in a romance that is shown about as often as Albany gets its budget done on time.



Tomorrow I am posting the lineup so far of For the Love of Film, the blogathon that Marilyn Ferdinand and I are hosting to raise money for the National Film Preservation Foundation. If you haven't committed over at Facebook, please drop me a line or post a comment so I will be sure to include you. And if you aren't a Facebook fan, run over and become one; I am happy to say we have more than 600 fans, but we want to keep 'em coming!

UPDATE: The updated Blogathon list may go up Saturday because the Siren has been called into work early, on account of the coming Snowpocalypse. Figures.

10 Books From a Cinephile's Past (Part 1)

The Siren has been tagged several times, but (she believes) first by Tony Dayoub, for a meme about books that have influenced her view of the cinema. At first, the Siren thought, that's been done. Sheila O'Malley's shelf-by-shelf descent through her enormous film-book library is a hard act to follow. Still, the Siren went over to her own haphazardly organized shelves and began to get quite nostalgic over the books she read years ago. So she decided to attempt to reconstruct a small part of her early film-book reading pattern, where she went from just watching movies to wanting to read about who made them, and how, and when, and why. This is not a heavyweight list. It is more akin to stopping into a children's bookstore and saying, "I remember that! I even remember what I was doing when I read it!" But the Siren has always found that the books you read as a youngster stay with you the longest.

So then, roughly in the order that the Siren encountered them, 10 books that shaped my view of the cinema. Herer are the first five books, with the next five to come:

Vanity Fair: Selections from America's Most Memorable Magazine, ed. Cleveland Amory and Frederick Bradlee.This wonderful book, firmly out of print but available on the Web for little more than the price of postage, is full of beautiful images from the magazine's first incarnation, which ran from 1914 to 1936. The Siren spent hours decoding the witty articles like messages from a lost ship--which, in a way, they were. Since this was well before the Internet, it sometimes took years to find out what they were talking about. Who, for example, was Doris Keane?

Long before Graydon Carter or Twitter ever came on the scene, the magazine was in the habit of handing notepads to celebrities and asking them to come up with thoughts, for example, on The Ideal Woman. And, further to our digression on Ruby Keeler, perhaps my readers would like to see what Al Jolson had to say on that matter. Read it and see if you don't appreciate Ruby a little more for sticking it out for 12 years:

1. The gift of stretching a can of sardines into a banquet.
2. A thorough dislike of all actors--save one.
3. An appreciation of the fact that, in all the important affairs of life, and in the trivial ones as well, I am, for some curious reason, invariably RIGHT.
4. A disinclination to be taken out--unless she had bid 'one club.'
5. A hearty laugh for all my jokes, including the very old ones.
6. A loathing for crossword puzzles.
7. An inability to block a straight left. [!!!! -The Siren.]
8. Complete ignorance of the existence of the Lucy Stone League.
9. A million dollars.
10. A cough.

Many were the photographs that filled the Siren with desire to see the subject's movies. Like this one, which along with Queen Christina sparked a lifelong love for Garbo:



Or this one, which prompted the Siren to pick up Sunshine and Shadow, Mary Pickford's autobiography.


Pauline Kael in the New Yorker. I could cheat here and cite 5001 Nights at the Movies, but in truth I didn't get that book until much later and I have been missing my copy for years--probably wound up with an ex-boyfriend. My father subscribed to The New Yorker and my favorite section was the front, where I could get all manner of intriguing capsules about movies I had already seen and movies I wanted to see. I didn't agree with Kael all the time (who does?) but she opened my eyes to so many directors and so many movies. Like this one below, chosen just because the title leaped out at me at this site:

Paths of Glory. Just after he made his racetrack robbery picture THE KILLING, Stanley Kubrick directed this version of Humphrey Cobb's novel, photographed in Germany. It is not so much an anti-war film as an attack on the military mind. Some of the press went all out for it ("searing in its intensity," and that sort of thing), but it wasn't popular. The movie has a fascinating jittery quality, especially when Timothy Carey, who's like a precursor of the hipster druggies of the 60s, is on the screen, and the strong, liberal-intellectual pitch makes it genuinely controversial, though it was certainly easier to be anti-militaristic in a film (made in peacetime) set during the First World War than it would have been in a film set during the Second World War. The story is about the class structure within the French army--the aristocratic generals in their spacious, sunlit châteaux and the proletarian soldiers in the dark trenches; trapped between them is Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), who commiserates with the men but is powerless--he carries out the orders of the high command. When the soldiers refuse to fight in a battle that is almost certain death, three of them are selected to be tried for cowardice; Dax has the task of defending them. The film's rhythm is startling--you can feel the director's temperament. And there's an element of relentlessness in the way he sets out to demonstrate the hopeless cruelty of the "system." (The film was banned in France for some years.) It's an angry film that seems meant to apply to all armies. Watching it is very frustrating: Kubrick, who wrote the script with Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson, doesn't leave you with anything. He must have felt this, because he tacks on a scene at a cabaret, with a German girl (Susanne Christian) singing and the soldiers singing along, as they weep. (It just makes you uncomfortable.)

The Siren most emphatically does not agree with everything in that capsule--for one thing, I couldn't disagree more about the film's ending. Other parts engender the same "Yes, BUT..." reaction that I often have to Kael's criticism. But Kael made me want to see the movie, and she made me want to think about the movie, and she made me yearn for an intelligent conversation about the movie. And that's just one of thousands. Years later I can still remember phrases from both her capsules and her long reviews. Not many critics can expect their writing to be that fresh, that provocative, that memorable long after they have died.


Scarlett Fever by William Pratt, including the collection of Herb Bridges. This picture-packed (but alas, entirely black-and-white) book about Gone with the Wind helped spark the Siren's interest in movie-making, as opposed to just movie-watching. It could be a model for other fan books. There is a long section about Margaret Mitchell, the writing of the book and its stupendous success, but the Siren liked the movie sections the best. Pratt goes back through the filming records and shows almost day by day how GWTW was shot. He details the alterations made during filming, and the rationales for them. There are many on-set photographs, a whole series of test stills of Walter Plunkett's costumes, sketches from William Cameron Menzies, pictures of Ernest Haller at work, and many other details on the movie, from rights purchase to Atlanta premiere, all the way up through re-releases. You get all the directors, including a rundown on which bits George Cukor did, which scenes were shot by Victor Fleming and which were shot by Sam Wood. Pratt even introduced the Siren to such cinephile controversies as aspect ratio, describing misbegotten re-releases in widescreen that cut out part of the image. There's also a huge (maybe too huge) section on Herb Bridges' collection of GWTW memorabilia. Pratt eschews gossip; you will find none of the rumors about Cukor's departure, just a rundown on his "script differences" with David O. Selznick (which appear to have been real enough). But since reading this book, the Siren has read a lot more about Selznick, Vivien Leigh and all the others involved in Gone with the Wind, and has found very little to criticize in terms of Pratt's accuracy. In fact the book politely sets the record straight on a number of matters, Pratt shaking his head gently over such howlers as Bosley Crowther asserting in The Great Films that Victor Fleming died during production. Interpretation is another matter, and the book's most serious flaw is that it barely touches upon the controversies that surrounded GWTW from the moment of the book's publication. Still, this was one of the best Christmas presents my parents ever got me.



Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks. Another Christmas present, and my introduction to Louise Brooks, whom I met as a writer long before I met her as Lulu. Brooks could really write, and this is another book that still has phrases rattling around in the Siren's head. The Siren recommends reading this slim volume of essays alongside Barry Paris's biography of Brooks, because some of her writing bent the facts to her particular viewpoint--the most notable example, according to Paris, being the "Gish and Garbo" essay. Which lends a whole different layer to beautifully executed passages like this one, from her essay on W.C. Fields:

The tragedy of film history is that it is fabricated, falsified, by the very people who make film history. It is understandable that in the early years of film production, when nobody believed there was going to be any film history, most film magazines and books printed trash, aimed only at fulfilling the public's wish to share a fairy-tale existence with its movie idols. But since about 1950 film has been established as an art, and its history recognized as a serious matter. Yet film celebrities continue to cast themselves as stock types--nice or naughty girls, good or bad boys--whom their chroniclers spray with a shower of anecdotes.

The Great Romantic Films by Lawrence J. Quirk. This one I bought for myself with babysitting money on the strength of a cover shot from Wuthering Heights, with which I was slightly obsessed at the time. Lawrence J. Quirk, nephew of the legendary Photoplay editor James Quirk, has written some 30 Hollywood books but the Siren loves this one for two reasons. One, the romantic melodramas it covers are often given short shrift by "Great Film" tomes. And the films that do get a fair bit of serious critical attention (Letter from an Unknown Woman, All That Heaven Allows) are often analyzed from an angle that assumes the romantic and emotional trappings are fripperies to be stripped away to reveal the "real" themes underneath. Quirk passionately believes that the sentiment in these films is part of what recommends them, and needs no apology. The Siren agrees with him. Second, the Siren loved this book for the huge variety of films the writer chose, everything from the obscure (speak up--who here has seen The Life of Vergie Winters?) to the eternally popular (Now, Voyager) to the head-scratcher (the Siren is still trying to figure out what Teorema was doing in this book, although Quirk gives it a thorough write-up). The Siren has spent years trying to see all of the films discussed here; she has about eight left, including Vergie Winters, Only Yesterday, Lydia, the 1932 Smilin' Through and The Music Lovers.

Quirk's definition of romance is a broad one, encompassing mother love and friendship as well. Here is Quirk describing No Greater Glory, the intensely moving Frank Borzage film that the Siren finally saw this year. Quirk sees no need to justify, or indeed even take note of, those things a modern audience might find hokey. He takes the movie on its own lyrical terms:

Young [George] Breakstone's Nemecsek tags after a gang of boys who wear uniforms and run their lumberyard playground like a military post. Heading the gang is Boka (Jimmy Butler), a handsome, stalwart little fellow who is idolized by Nemecsek and whose approval he constantly seeks. But Nemecsek is an outcast; he is frail and delicate, inept at the assorted skills the others regard as mandatory. The impatient, barely tolerant Boka is forever consigning him to his black book for shortcomings and minor ineptitudes. The only "private" in an army of "officers," Nemecsek is held in contempt and condescension for his failure to cope in physical and coordinational terms, although in the actualities of his soul he is a martyr and visionary in the making, the one pure soul of the lot.

(Part 2 to follow...)

Tear Down the Draperies: Gone with the Wind

Over at The News Blog there was a thread recently on a circulating meme of "10 Movies I Hate." Steve Gilliard's number one was Gone with the Wind. Here's his pungent take:

1) Gone with the Wind
Everything to hate in one movie. Best scene...Atlanta burning to the fucking ground. Getting upset about that would be like getting upset about the destruction of Berlin in 1945. Even Birth of a Nation is less offensive because it's up front in its racism.

The Siren has a movie-trivia quibble here, described in a sidebar below. But Mr. Gilliard's post prompts her to write up some deeper, long-simmering thoughts about this movie. She doesn't share his hatred for the movie. That doesn't mean she dismisses his point.

Gone with the Wind's virtues include an indelible love story, two leads at the absolute peak of their good looks and acting ability, a fabulous supporting cast and, perhaps above all, matchless beauty. (The names of production designer William Cameron Menzies and cinematographer Ernest Haller should be as familiar to GWTW lovers as that of David O. Selznick.) The sweep of the movie is so epic that the Siren has talked to several perfectly alert people who swore there were battle scenes in it (there aren't).

But...the politics. The view of history.

Oy, as we used to say back home in Birmingham.

The Siren is from Alabama. She hasn't lived there for many years, but her roots in the South go back about 200 years on either side of her family tree, and that's serious Southern. It stays with you, which is why Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams could leave to live here, there, everywhere and anywhere but the South and still be identifiably Southern to anyone with two eyes and a pulse. Gone with the Wind embodies the mythology of my native region like no other book or movie. Love it or hate it, the one thing you ain't gonna do is ignore it.

The Siren read the book at about age 11 and saw the movie that same year. For years, I loved book and movie without reservation. My Christmas present one year was a copy of Scarlett Fever by William Pratt and Herb Bridges, a big compendium of all things GWTW. Rhett was my romantic ideal, Melanie my pattern of ladyhood, but Scarlett was my heroine. Ashley did lead her on terribly, I was convinced of that. (Still am.) And look at how she got men to do things for her. Look at how hard she worked, how brave she was. Look at all her gorgeous dresses.

And look at how she suffered! Look at how the South suffered! That rat Sherman. Those carpetbaggers. Everybody insisting on making the war all about slavery, when we knew it was about states' rights. Slavery was terrible, but slaves were an investment, and they were treated a lot better than Northern factory workers.

Incredible, isn't it? The Siren was raised in a dedicated pro-civil-rights household, daughter of two of the proudest liberal Democrats you ever saw. They loved Kennedy and loathed Wallace. They sneered at the Southern strategy. My mother still likes to boast that she hated Nixon before Nixon-hating was cool: "Watergate. Ha! I hated the man while he was vice president." They voted for McGovern. (One old friend, told this piece of information, responded, "Well, I guess those two votes in Alabama had to come from somewhere.")

All that good solid upbringing, and I still believed all the myths. And the depressing thing about GWTW, and what makes it--I choose the adjective carefully--pernicious to this day, is that there are an astonishing number of people out there who still believe its dishonest view of history. Check out the IMDB boards. Start a conversation at your local bar. You'll still find someone, and possibly a lot of someones, bringing up the hoary lies.

The Siren says enough with the apologetics. The movie is racist. Not misguided, not dated, RACIST.

It is racist in big ways, as it shows the "good Negros" sticking around to serve their former owners. The bad ones run off. They ride around Atlanta in fancy clothes or congregate in Shantytown until Ashley and Rhett ride in with the (delicately unnamed) Klan and clear it out. Yes, the great stuntman Yakima Canutt played the white man who attacks Scarlett. His accomplice, played by Blue Washington, is black, and the raid is a lynching party. Defend that if you like.

It is racist in small ways, as the late Butterfly McQueen could have told you. Check out the scene where Melanie is feeding the returning Confederate soldiers. McQueen was talked into cutting a watermelon in the background. She stayed pissed off about it to her dying day.

Even people too sophisticated to take much stock in GWTW's mythology will defend certain of the assumptions behind it, such as the idea that most or even many slaves were well-treated, or better off in any sense than Northern workers. They weren't. Life expectancy for a black slave in the antebellum South was about 21, almost exactly half that of a white person. Life expectancy for a Northern white was higher than for a Southern one.

Sure, the war was about state's rights. And economic factors. And which state's right was uppermost in the minds of those who ran the South? And, whether those who fought owned a slave or not, what was the economy of the South based upon?

It is true that Hattie McDaniel's Mammy is the soul of the movie. The monologue she delivers to Melanie after the death of Rhett and Scarlett's daughter is a moment of utter heartbreak. But Mammy is defined only through her devotion to the white folks. She has personality aplenty, but no existence outside of those she serves. Some people argue that Mammy has a great deal more life and individuality than most black characters in mainstream movies up to that time. Even if you grant that point, and the Siren cites the 1934 Imitation of Life as one counterexample, Mammy was perceived by many blacks even at that time as an insult. McDaniel spent the rest of her life fending off accusations of betrayal. "I'd rather play a maid than be one," she supposedly said. McDaniel did a beautiful job with what she had, but what the GWTW script gave her was a stereotype recognizable even in 1939.

Then there's William Tecumseh Sherman. The Siren has spent many nights downing measures with friends and debating the wisdom of that long-ago march to the sea. Militarily, it worked. It also gave white Southerners a sense of victimhood that for some persists to this day. If there is an afterlife, the Siren wonders if General Sherman has found the time to reflect that maybe giving the South a grievance for the ages wasn't such a hot idea.

Remembering the movie's opening epigraph, the Siren is somewhat amazed Mr. Gilliard made it through to the siege of Atlanta:

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South...Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow...Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave...Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind...

It's depressing that in 2005 one must still point out to some people that all the gallantry in the world can't pretty up what the South was doing. But the Siren saw GWTW again in a movie theater about five years ago, and she will see it again. Her "dream remembered" is the grand-style moviemaking that reached its apogee in 1939. Scarlett is still a first-class scheming hussy, and the Siren still loves her for it.

If you ever came with her to Alabama, the Siren could take you to the cemetery where many of her forebears are buried. Some of them were Civil War veterans. They sure as hell weren't fighting for Lincoln. For many reasons, some sentimental, some historical, the Siren does not choose to believe that they were anything other than brave in the battles they fought. But sentiment doesn't blind her, and neither does Gone with the Wind, not anymore. As one Union veteran wrote twenty-five years after the battle of Gettysburg, "The men who won the victory there were eternally right, and the men who were defeated were eternally wrong."

Baghdad and Boobs

No, this isn't a political post. It is a digression on a Hollywood genre. One IMDB reviewer calls these movies "Grecianized Near-Easterns," others call them sand-and-sandals. The Siren calls them Baghdad-and-boobs.

I have a big soft spot for these cinematic baubles, and Maureen O'Hara is one reason. A fair-skinned redhead myself, flicks like Sinbad the Sailor (1947) assured me that if I pursued an acting career I need not fear typecasting. I envisioned myself at casting calls for a "Scheherazade type." I could even bring my own chiffon, to audition with that cute little see-through square that passed for the veil in these movies.

O'Hara's autobiography dispenses with Sinbad in one line, and the Siren thinks this unfair. It's a most enjoyable movie, with a delicious framing device. There is a lighthearted, almost spoof-like aspect to it that works well. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. has the requisite dash, but unlike his dad he had a certain fey quality that hindered him as an action hero. Sinbad turns this into an advantage by emphasizing the title character's braggadocio. Is he a real hero, or a loudmouth con artist? You find out at the end, after plenty of sparring with O'Hara's trademark feisty princess.

As a girl I also enjoyed Son of Ali Baba with Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie. My memory has faded, but even watching that one on the Turner Superstation in the 1970s I think I realized Curtis was a lot more Brooklyn than Baghdad. They changed the ending of the old story, possibly because someone realized that in 1952, seven years after World War II, mass murder of forty thieves might not play in Peoria.

Piper Laurie even made another Baghdad-and-boobs flick in 1953, The Golden Blade, with Rock Hudson (stop giggling. No, I haven't seen it). Something about redheads seems to have made studio execs think, "Now where did I put that heavily edited edition of the Arabian Nights?" Rita Hayworth got the girdle-and-veil treatment, with a Biblical twist, in Salome. And while it isn't part of the genre, I still crack up when I see Shirley MacLaine as an Indian princess in Around the World in 80 Days. If you look closely you can see her freckles in a couple of close-ups. Wonder why they never got around to Moira Shearer?

Hollywood churned these things out by the urnful in the 1940s (often with poor, doomed Maria Montez) and into the 1950s, with occasional forays even after that, such as The Golden Voyage of Sinbad in 1974.

The only Baghdad-and-boobs saga that the Siren (and possibly anyone else) can consider a masterpiece is the 1940 Thief of Baghdad. Among its advantages were the brilliant Michael Powell, an uncredited William Cameron Menzies (six directors worked on the movie, all told), and dialogue by Miles Malleson that actually managed to evoke some cadences of a Khayyam translation without sounding ridiculous. It had the exacting Alexander Korda who, legend has it, looked at the Baghdad set and ordered, "Tear it down, build it three feet higher, and paint it pink." Finally, it gave us Sabu, a gifted and charismatic child actor who had the rare ability to react without mugging.

In case you're wondering, yes, the Siren does realize these films resemble true Arabic culture about as much as Mamie Van Doren resembles Marie Curie. But she cut her cinephile teeth on Busby Berkley musicals and figures realism is overrated anyway. These are fairy tales. If they teem with appalling Middle Eastern stereotypes (and boy do they), at least the heros are allegedly Arab or Persian too, albeit played by toothy Westerners. Talents like Turhan Bey and Sabu usually had to content themselves with supporting roles. Whereas today, of course, they'd be getting ... supporting roles.

Sabu's career was sadly limited by the typecasting of his time. When the Siren looks at something like The Mummy, however, she has to question whether he would have fared much better today. Perhaps he'd have found a place with independent filmmakers, but there wouldn't be much for him in the standard big-budget offering. The old days gave us patronizing Orientalism, but in the Siren's view, mainstream Hollywood manages to grow worse with age.