Buster Keaton's Birthday, at The Baffler

Buster Keaton was born 118 years ago today. Earlier this year, the Siren was asked by The Baffler to write about the 14-disc Kino Blu-Ray set of Keaton's films. The Baffler is an excellent magazine of arts and criticism, published three times a year out of Cambridge, Mass., and the Siren is proud to be appearing in its pages. You can subscribe here. As of today, Keaton's birthday, the Siren's complete essay is online and can be read at The Baffler's website. What follows is an excerpt.

Spending so much time with Buster, getting reacquainted with his genius and spirit, has been an extraordinary thing. The Siren admits now that when she says she loves Buster Keaton, she doesn't really mean it metaphorically.

The most iconic Keaton stance, according to Walter Kerr in The Silent Clowns, shows Buster in thought: body tilted straight forward about forty-five degrees, one hand acting as a visor while he scopes out what’s ahead. True indeed, but there’s another essential posture, the head-scratch, also deployed when data must be assessed and decisions made.

That gesture reaches apotheosis in Seven Chances (1925), which has Buster as a financial hotshot whose firm’s in hot water. He discovers that if he marries by 7 p.m. that very day, he’ll inherit $7 million that will keep him out of prison. (Wall Street denizens who fear prison also appear in The Saphead. This plot point has dated more than anything else in the set.) Buster’s overhelpful friend has put an ad in the paper, resulting in hundreds of women in improvised veils showing up at the chapel. When Buster leaves in a panic, they gallop after him, their flying veils making them look uncannily like extras from DeMille’s silent version of The Ten Commandments. This vengeful Biblical horde chases Buster down a hill, where he dislodges some rocks, and then some more.

And so, faced with an army of would-be brides charging at him from one direction and a quarry’s worth of giant rocks rolling downhill from another, Buster stops for a moment, and his hand starts scratching his scalp. This sort of lady-or-the-boulder choice cannot be made on the fly.

Wallace Beery and the Persistence of Rumor

The Siren can't tell you exactly when and where she first heard the rumor that Wallace Beery, the great star of such movies as Beggars of Life, Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight, Viva Villa! and Treasure Island (to name just a few of her own favorites) was a murderer. She's encountered it more than once. If the Siren dug hard enough she might find that it's popped up in comments here once or twice.

Beery, whose career included many lovable oafs as well as villains, does not appear to have been especially lovable in real life. Gloria Swanson gives horrendous details of her marriage to him in Swanson on Swanson, for starters. Louise Brooks had fond recollections of Beery; Margaret O'Brien did not.

Plus, Beery looks like a brute. Looks matter everywhere, and so does image, but in Hollywood, they are close to everything. So it's not hard to see why a certain allegation, that Beery was one of three men who beat Three Stooges creator Ted Healy outside the Trocadero nightclub in 1937, gained so much traction so rapidly. Supposedly, after Healy died of his injuries, Beery was hastily sent abroad by MGM VP Eddie Mannix, and the whole matter was hushed up because the studios were so powerful.

Still, surely we can agree that no one should be memorialized as a murderer without some damn good evidence. That also goes for Albert R. Broccoli, the latter-day James Bond producer who's also alleged to have been one of Healy's attackers; and it even goes for Pat DiCicco, the third man in this fable, a Hollywood figure who was married to Thelma Todd and whose second wife, Gloria Vanderbilt, says DiCicco abused her.

That is why Larry Harnisch, of the Los Angeles Times and the wonderful blog L.A. Mirror, deserves every last eyeball his series, "The Death of Ted Healy," can get.

Here's what Larry has done:

1. He found the relevant passage about the "Beery beat Healy to death" rumor in several different Wikipedia entries. (Larry does not like Wikipedia. He has excellent reasons. The Siren finds Wikipedia useful as a starting point and not much more; Larry builds such a case for the prosecution that going forward, the Siren may not even use it for that.)

2. Larry went back to the sources cited by Wikipedia.

3. He went back to the sources that were cited in the sources that were cited by Wikipedia.

4. And then, with precision and unflagging zeal, he went to newspapers and other records from the relevant period.

Does it count as a spoiler to say that Larry demolishes this story?

The Siren urges her patient readers, in the strongest possible terms, to read these posts. Follow this link to Larry's wrapup. Then, go and click on the links to all the parts. The Siren read the material in a couple of hours. Larry starts the posts with a disclaimer that his meticulous fact-combing is "tedious." It is not; it's enthralling.

The posts do, however, show that checking up on a good sleazy Hollywood rumor is a damn sight harder than popping by a website to say "I never liked Beery in The Champ and anyway I heard he murdered one of the Three Stooges."  

Facts matter; evidence matters; history matters. But with Hollywood, more than any other topic the Siren can name, rumor and innuendo hold sway. You want to say that General XYZ once shot a lance corporal because he didn't like how the guy was standing? (I made that up, folks.) In short order a military historian will show up to say "Hold the phone, Sunshine. What's your source?" You want to say a famed director was the Black Dahlia killer? Go right ahead. You might even get a book deal. (One of Larry's projects concerns the Black Dahlia case--the facts of the case.)

Everybody loves a bit of gossip; lord knows the Siren does. Used as an aside, and clearly identified as what it is, gossip gives spice to life. But it should never be dressed up to resemble a fact. Nor does wild, unsourced gossip deserve to be the echo you hear every time a star's name is spoken, like the horse-neigh for "Blucher."

Wallace Beery: a louse and a rapist, probably. (The Siren believes Swanson.) A murderer? Not only could you not get that to hold up in a court of law, you couldn't get the attention of a halfway decent shoe-leather reporter. Who's dead drunk. On a slow Tuesday night. At the Trocadero. Sitting under a photo of Ted Healy.

Thank you, Larry.

Anecdote of the Week: Blondell Crazy

Alas, the Siren has been up to her step-ins in work and has consequently been missing you all terribly. Since April, she's been doing some freelance film reviewing for (drum roll) the New York Post. The Post's Website is a strange and wonderful thing, but you should be able to access most of her efforts here. Last week's review of Bel Ami, in which Robert Pattinson and his cheekbones attempted to erase memories of George Sanders and his can-can, may be of particular interest. So anyway, between that and the blogathon and the usual demands of life chez Siren, opportunities to dig into a nice big post have been thin on the ground.

The Siren did manage, however, to spend a wonderful afternoon watching pre-Codes with Imogen Sara Smith, an extravagantly talented writer whose reverence for pre-Codes, noir and the art of classic-film acting should endear her to everyone who's ever visited this blog. Imogen has a book out now, called In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City, available from McFarland here. The Siren recommends it highly and plans to write more of it anon. Meanwhile, you can read Imogen's ode to the Pre-Code era at Bright Lights Film Journal.

One movie we watched was Blondie Johnson, starring Joan Blondell, everyone's favorite Depression blonde (right? right?). Imogen billed it as "the ultimate Blondell" and she's probably on the money. It's a blast watching Blondell go from desperate poverty to running a con-artist syndicate, even if you never do really believe Chester Morris would get past first base with this gum-snapping goddess.

Naturally this is all leading up to a story, one the Siren believes to be as trustworthy as the World Almanac, but like all good yarns, you can take it or leave it, toots.



Years ago the Siren worked for a venerable man (Will would have snorted and said, "Honey, I'm fuckin' old") who'd had as fascinating a life as you can imagine. One of his many incarnations was as a stage manager for a series of regional and summer-stock theaters in the early to mid-1950s. Through his productions rolled many a faded star, some trying to duck the blacklist, some trading on the last vestiges of a marquee name, and some of them just troupers who couldn't imagine not working.

To that last group belonged Joan Blondell. At that point in her career, Will said her off-screen persona had become very like the one she had on screen; whether the difference had ever been huge, he couldn't say. He adored her, naturally. Decades after he'd met Blondell, he still chuckled at the memory of her at a hotel-room party, shoes off and fully dressed, holding court on the bed with her then-paramour.



According to Will, Blondell enjoyed a post-rehearsal nightcap with cast, crew, whoever, it didn't matter. He said (and isn't this precisely what you want to hear) that Joan Blondell didn't have a snobbish bone in her body.

What she did have was a gift for improv, which Will discovered one night when Blondell, out with a group that was all male and rowdier than usual, slipped on the floor, went straight down--and stayed down in a heap, apparently out for the count. Her rather woozy drinking crew crowded round for a second, debating. Had she hit her head? A concussed star was no joke, but neither did they want "Hooched-Up Joan Blondell Passes Out in Saloon" as tomorrow's headline in the East Nowheresville Gazette, there to be picked up by the wire services. Someone went to the bar to get a glass of water, which took a minute as it wasn't what they were used to serving, and the bartender may even have needed directions to the tap.

And while the water was being fetched, Will, who was kneeling closest to Blondell, saw one enormous blue eye fly open to half mast, and shut almost before he was sure what he'd seen.

So when the glass was raised to Blondell's lips, and she snatched it and said cheerfully, "What took you so long?", Will was the only one who didn't jump two feet.

The Siren believes this story; don't you?

A Conversation with Whit Stillman: "She's Like a Perfume Herself"

For Joan's Digest, the new online feminist film quarterly founded by Miriam Bale, the Siren recently found herself interviewing director Whit Stillman, whose Damsels in Distress opens Friday, April 6. Miriam is known around cinephile circles as a curator and critic for the L Magazine, among many other hats. She knew that the Siren is a longtime Stillman devotee, having fallen in love with Metropolitan at an impressionable age and followed him through Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, and so Miriam arranged this meeting.

About three years ago, Dennis Cozzalio asked his readers which "living film director you most miss seeing on the cultural landscape regularly." Stillman's name was cited by at least a half-dozen of the hardcore cinephiles answering the quiz. Fourteen years have passed since The Last Days of Disco was released and (quite unjustly) failed to make back its money, a hiatus that's always mentioned whenever Stillman's name comes up. The Siren resolutely didn't ask him about that, on the grounds that he's discussed it in many other places, is no doubt heartily tired of the topic and at this point must have little to add to the sum of public knowledge about it.

Plus, to be honest, after seeing Damsels in Distress, the Siren had what she considered much better things to ask him about--like perfume, like Fred Astaire, like musicals. Damsels evokes all sorts of classic-film tropes, while maintaining its own surreal form of modernity.

The Siren thinks Stillman will strike most of her patient readers as a man after their own hearts, and as evidence she offers the following snippet from their conversation. For the rest of Stillman's musings on topics including who was Fred Astaire's best director and how Jean Brodie was ill-used, as well as why Stillman mimed putting a gun to his head when the Siren brought up A Damsel in Distress, you must click through to the article at Joan's.

Whit Stillman: ...The other thing I really love is from the Gold Diggers of 1935, and it's the original version of “Lullaby of Broadway.” It's just mind-boggling. And one of the things I'd like to do is The Gold Diggers of 2015. A Warner Brothers musical review set in the present day.

Joan's Digest: Oh yeah? Would you do wisecracking showgirls?

Whit Stillman: Of course, of course. You don't want any modern. There will be no punk rock.

JD: Wisecracking showgirls are one of my favorite things.

Whit Stillman: Well, I remember when we were getting a lot of grief for our talky films not being cinematic. And I remember favorite films, like Stage Door. And Stage Door is wall-to-wall dialogue.

JD: A lot of 30s movies are. So we have Sandrich, La Cava with Stage Door, probably My Man Godfrey too? Are there any other touchstones you go back to?

Whit Stillman: My Man Godfrey is actually not one of my favorites.

JD: Oh my god really? I love it. I'm so sorry.

Whit Stillman: No, I love the actors. I think they are better than the material. The material is a little subpar compared to other things. I wrote something in the Times in November about favorite holiday films, and I wrote about The Shop Around the Corner. I adore Margaret Sullavan, I like The Good Fairy also. There's so many films, even Three Comrades.

JD: Oh yeah. Margaret Sullavan is very big with the commenters on my blog.

Whit Stillman: Oh my gosh, she's so lovely. She's like a perfume herself.

JD: That voice.

Whit Stillman: Oh, the voice.

Christmas Anecdote: "I Was Even More Nuts Than I Generally Am." (With Bonus Links)

The holidays are upon us, and it is time for the Siren's annual rituals. These include, but are not limited to:

1. Preparing to bake, the Siren's annual substitute for baking.

2. Cleaning out rooms in a frenzy that would do the Clean House crowd proud.

3. Forgetting one key Christmas present until the very last minute.



4. Tuning in to TCM to watching holiday movies that she's already seen. This year's selections include The Man Who Came to Dinner, because Ann Sheridan steals a couple of scenes from Bette Davis, and people stole scenes from Davis about once every leap year; It Happened on Fifth Avenue, because of all the character actors and the post-war jokes about not being able to find an apartment in New York; and the really not-very-good-at-all MGM Christmas Carol, viewed because

5. Charles Dickens is the Siren's favorite novelist and everything he ever touched spells Christmas to her, a fact that TCM is acknowledging this month, although technically their tribute is tied to his birthday.

6. Getting weepy over Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," which makes the Siren think of people listening to it during World War II.

That last has particular force this year due to the Siren's new Twitter addiction, which dependency she happily passes on to you: Real Time World War II, tweets from an Oxford history graduate, Alwyn Collinson, about what was happening on that day in World War II. (You don't have to join Twitter to read it, by the way, although it's worth the trouble.) The feed made its debut on Aug. 31, on the eve of the war's beginning, so we are in 1939. In the past months, the Siren has learned about Bernard Montgomery's short-lived campaign to get his men to use condoms with hookers, an idea that did not sit well with his superiors; the birth of the Molotov cocktail during the Soviet invasion of Finland; and that the most popular Christmas dolls in London in 1939 were Hitler and Neville Chamberlain. Though there's the occasional bit of comic relief, most of the tweets are as dark as you'd expect.

Still, given that the Siren loves movies from that era so much, it's an incredible thing to see the onslaught of news that was accompanying what some say was the greatest year in Hollywood history, Gone With the Wind premiering in Atlanta even as Finland fought desperately for its life.




Naturally, all this is leading up to an anecdote, from Rosalind Russell's autobiography, Life Is a Banquet. As Christmas 1942 approached, Russell was about five months pregnant with her only child, Lance. Her brother George was in California, training to drive tanks with George S. Patton's Sixth Armored Division. Russell went to visit him earlier that month and found him eating a mixture of meat, grease and blowing sand as he sat on the ground in the freezing desert wind. Instead of indulging in the Siren's routine at five months into a pregnancy, which included strenuous activities such as reheating leftovers and elevating her feet, Russell went to her brother's commanding officer and said she wanted to organize a Christmas party for the men. She went back to RKO, where she was making Flight for Freedom, and got the money from the studio.

When I think of the logistics involved in that party, I shudder. I was even more nuts than I generally am, because you are more nuts when you're carrying a child. I hired buses. I enlisted hundreds of women--starlets, secretaries, stenographers, pals.

We had a meeting on an RKO sound stage, and I told the girls what I wanted them to wear. Flat heels and warm clothes. Not one of them paid any attention; they came with the tall spike heels and the short flimsy dresses and nearly froze to death.

We had to figure out where the buses could stop so the girls could use the facilities, and we loaded the buses with coffee and Danish pastries. We sent a truck ahead with a portable dance floor and a Christmas tree. We took a whole show with us, orchestra and all. (Red Skelton came and played Santa Claus.)

The Siren pauses to let everyone digest that last image. Informed by George's CO that she couldn't invite one division and just leave out the other, Russell found herself arranging a Christmas party for two armored divisions. George, meanwhile, had been persuaded to go to officers' training camp and departed already. The Siren ponders the fact that it's Dec. 21 and she still hasn't decided what we're having for Christmas dinner, and continues.

Arriving at the base, we got out of our buses and beheld an astonishing sight. The dance floor had been put down, and it was surrounded by great M-4 tanks. The soldiers were studded on the tanks like flies on flypaper…

We roped off the dance floor and gave the boys tickets, like movie tickets. Each fellow had four or five, good for a dance apiece. The girls all stood in the middle of the dance floor, and three or four hundred soldiers were allowed on at one time, and they and the girls jitterbugged together. Then those boys would go off and three or four hundred more boys would come on. The girls really had to dance, and they were absolutely wonderful. The boys were, too. We didn't have a single untoward incident. I'd been very worried that if we got some dingalings in there, we'd be hearing screams from underneath the cactuses, but nothing like that happened….

I was the M.C. (I wore a fur coat, party because it got so cold in the desert at night, partly because I was trying to cover my pregnancy.) We had brought spotlights with us, and in the spillover from the lights you could pick out boys sitting all over the dance floor, and other boys piled up on those tanks. Some chairs had been set down in front for the brass, and before General Woods took his, he called for a lot of the soldiers who were stuck way in back to come closer. I remember a boy plumped down right in front of him. There was the general sitting, watching the show, and this kid leaned his head right back against the general's knees. It was very sweet, and I thought, only in the good old U.S.A. A kid couldn't lean against Hermann Goering's knees in Nazi Germany, he'd get killed.

Later Santa Claus handed out surprises, and there was more music. It was a great party.

On the way home we fed the girls again, at about three o'clock in the morning, in Palm Springs. They'd worked for forty-eight hours without an ounce of sleep. And those boys had been so glad to see something dainty and pretty. They were on their way overseas, and one knew some of them would never come home again.

(In 1974, I was named 'Sweetheart of the Super Sixth' and invited to a reunion that was being held down in Disneyland. I went, and there in the convention hall I looked around at all the men with their bald heads and their paunches and their wives, and it struck me with a shock that the Christmas party had been thirty years ago. If a young man had gone into the army at thirty, he'd be sixty now; if he'd gone in at twenty-five, he'd be fifty-five…

Now the children of Patton's army smiled up at me with their shiny, untroubled faces. I told them that they must think about some of the men who hadn't come back, but I knew there was no way for them to feel what I was feeling.)

*****

In the holiday spirit of gift-giving, the Siren now shares some of what she's been reading about the blogosphere lately.

David Cairns' Late Films blogathon was splendid, and you should read the full lineup. But the Siren is going to point out two in particular, starting with David's analysis of Roscoe Arbuckle's last film. Then, to get all the Christmas weepies out of the way, do read this beautiful post at a blog that is new to the Siren, Robert Donat, written by Gill Fraser Lee. The post is about the great actor's last role, in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.

Now that she has reduced everyone's stash of Kleenex by a factor of five, the Siren turns to more cheery links...or, er, OK, this could be cheery, depending on your mood. One of Kim Morgan's festive obsessions this month is the original (in the Siren's mind, at least) madman-in-a-sorority-house epic, Black Christmas. The Siren has seen and very much liked Black Christmas, and while it doesn't exactly make you want to run out and sing Christmas carols to strangers, it could be a real pick-me-up for the day when you've been at the mall, you heard Wings' "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime" for the 217th time and you have some serious aggression to work out.

Once you are feeling better, catch up with the TCM festival coverage of the dauntless Dennis Cozzalio, at Slant Magazine's House Next Door blog. If you missed the fest, you won't feel as though you did after you read Dennis' epic tribute.

In preparation for holiday dissipation, Peter Nelhaus, at the Siren's request, posted his reminiscences about the Night He Got Drunk With Nicholas Ray. You will definitely want to read.

Raquelle of Out of the Past has a review of Piper Laurie's new autobiography that makes the Siren want to read the book, even if Ms Laurie, oddly, does not seem to hold Son of Ali Baba in the same fond regard as does the Siren.

At Silent Volume, Chris Edwards has The Wildcat (1921), from Ernst Lubitsch. Not exactly a Christmas movie, evidently, but it has snowmen, and Pola Negri, so, good enough. The Siren particularly loves Chris' description of Paul Heidemann's peculiar smile: "Think of the smile you might put on if your wife ran into your girlfriend at the king’s dinner party, and no one could really afford to look bad, and so things are a little strained, but really, you suspect, you’ll be scoring a three-way out of it later." Ah yes, we all need a specific smile for an occasion like that.

The Siren's eternal favorite screen-cap blog (and she loves them all, as a general rule) continues to be Six Martinis and the Seventh Art, from which this year's Christmas banner (any guesses as to the movie?) is shamelessly borrowed. Want some snow scenes? You got 'em.

Rachel, who graces the comments section here from time to time, has a great blog: The Girl With the White Parasol, which title alone the Siren loves for reasons she need not explain to her patient readers. Latest post is on The Wicked Lady, the number-one box office hit in 1946 Britain, because it gave the people what they wanted: "...kinky sex. Lots of kink. They wanted to see Margaret Lockwood in corsets so tight they had to be censored for U.S. audiences. They wanted to watch her do wicked, awful things like shooting people and poisoning them and sleeping with James Mason outside on the grass. They wanted to see Patricia Roc and Margaret Lockwood get into a slap-fight. They wanted to see cross-dressing and secret passages and noblewomen seducing robbers." Wait, what? Surely the great British public still wants all that? Well, the Siren does, in any event.

The delightful Caftan Woman's choice for Christmas Eve viewing is the same as the Siren's.

Finally, should you be interested, the Siren contributed a year-end Top Ten list to Indiewire. Her list is right here and the full lists from 162 critics are here.

Now, a Christmas gospel interlude, because the Siren doesn't know when her next opportunity to bring up Mahalia Jackson will arise.

This marks the Siren's sixth Christmas at her old building-and-loan-blog. May the Siren's patient readers all have a holiday season that is even merrier, and brighter, than Technicolor.

Nomadic Existence: The Big Clock and The Reluctant Debutante

From the July 20 edition of Nomad Wide Screen, my appreciation of Kay Kendall in Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante. For the record, I adore Les Girls , and Kendall is a joy in that one as well.

When certain killjoys decide to amuse themselves by asserting that MGM, the most widely known and successful of the major Golden Age studios, wasn't really a great studio at all, I try several methods to silence them. I start with George Cukor, move on through The Wizard of Oz, wave the flag for the Freed unit. If the conversation really gets irksome, however, I play my trump: Vincente Minnelli.

It's a curious thing, then, at least for auteurists, that the spirit that dominates Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante isn't that of the director, but of the star, Kay Kendall. The plot hews to every convention possible; you could take it and graft it onto a mass-market romance paperback with scarcely a single change. The charm of the film is tied closely to Minnelli’s eye for beauty, but even more than that it’s in the playing, and the players are led by Kendall. It was her penultimate movie, and when she made it she was already gravely ill with the leukemia that would kill her two years later. But it's a bright, vivacious performance, the only hint of her health coming from how thin she is.

Kendall had an exceptionally lovely speaking voice, pitched right mid-range with the merest hint of huskiness and an occasional crack in it that is oddly redolent of a British Jean Arthur. She was a tall woman with limbs that seemed to go everywhere at once, but her control of her body was impeccable. Nobody stumbled quite like Kay Kendall--up go the arms, the legs bend and curve, then glide back. It's a bit like watching a Mobius strip try to straighten itself. She had huge eyes, a flawless complexion and a long, strong-boned face; "Careful how you photograph my Cyrano nose, darling," she told Vincente Minnelli before filming. Nose or no nose, the overall effect was gorgeous. Kendall belongs to that rare sorority of beautiful women who are also great clowns.

From the Aug. 2 Nomad Wide Screen, a considerably rewritten and spruced-up version of a post I once did on The Big Clock:

Not all film noir takes place in a seedy underworld; sometimes noir arrives on the commuter train wearing a custom-made suit. So it goes with John Farrow’s The Big Clock (1948), which sets its dark doings and flashback narrative in a top-flight New York corporation that occupies a swank (if somberly lit) Midtown office tower.

The hero (or if you prefer, since this is film noir, the primary sap) is family man George Stroud (Ray Milland), an executive in the massive publishing empire of Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton). One night Stroud gets himself into a terrible pickle by getting drunk with Pauline York, played by Rita Johnson as a trampy soul with a chic exterior. Unfortunately for Stroud, Pauline is also Janoth’s mistress, and Stroud must exit her couch the next morning when their boss drops by unexpectedly. Mistress and magnate fight, and fifty years before anyone ever saw a Viagra ad, Pauline’s tirade shows off some choice euphemisms for “impotent”: “You think you could make any woman happy?...You flabby, flabby...” And that last word is one of the last Pauline utters, as Janoth bludgeons her to death with a sundial.

Well, what’s a self-respecting titan to do in such a situation, except use every last bit of his power to pin the blame on someone else? And the someone else just happens to be Stroud. The main twist in Jonathan Latimer’s highly twisty script (based on a novel by Kenneth Fearing) is that Janoth doesn’t know who he’s after, and Stroud must extricate himself without Janoth’s finding out...

it is Laughton who rules over The Big Clock. In Hollywood movies, most tyrannical managers are openly and loudly abusive. Laughton as Janoth keeps his voice low, forcing subordinates to lean close, which they wouldn't do otherwise. That’s because getting close means they have to look at Janoth’s weedy little moustache and the way he strokes it with one finger, in a gesture as suggestive as it is repulsive. He won't make eye contact, emphasizing his employees' wormlike status. And Laughton speaks every word in an affected, maddeningly casual drawl, underlining that he doesn't give a hoot if he just screwed up someone's life.

Finally, yesterday was the 100th birthday of the fabulous Lucille Ball, and there was a blogathon ball which the Siren, dearly though she loves all of Lucy's incarnations, could not attend, alas, as her opera gloves were at the cleaners. However, the roundup post is right here at True Classics, and the Siren strongly suggests that all Lucy fans click and start reading. The Siren has been working her way through all of them, and is in heaven. Some highlights (so far): Caftan Woman on Lucy's four films with Bob Hope; Clara at Villa Margutta 51 on the use of Spanish dialogue in I Love Lucy; old friend Ivan G. Shreve at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear on I Love Lucy's radio antecedents; R.D. Finch of The Movie Projector on fifteen character actors who appeared on the television show (jaw-dropping, the amount of talent it attracted); a post about Lucy's memoirs at Erin's Silver Screen Scribblings; Ivan again at Edward Copeland's wonderful blog with a 360-degree tour of Lucy's career; and Vince of Carole & Co. on the friendship between Lombard and Ball.

(The wonderful image of Lucille Ball in Stage Door, a movie that is high on the Siren's list of the best of the 1930s, is from the terrific tumblr blog Classic Film Heroines, which is full of such goodies.)

Anecdote of the Week: "That's Just Not an Orgasm."

When paraphrasing from memory the immortal words of movie composer Dimitri Tiomkin, below, the Siren tried to link to an old post about this anecdote that she did for Nathaniel R. Alas, it has disappeared. Well, this cannot be allowed to stand. The story, in its full glory, must be available somewhere on the Internet for all to…savor, if that is the word we want here.

From Otto Friedrich's forever fabulous City of Nets, the story of Tiomkin, David O. Selznick, and the orgasm music.

David Selznick summoned Tiomkin to his studio one day and asked him to become the seventh composer to try writing the music for Duel in the Sun (1947). He wanted, he said, eleven main themes: a Spanish theme, a ranch theme, a love theme, an orgasm theme--

"Orgasm?" Tiomkin said. "How do you score an orgasm?"

"Try," said Selznick. "I want a really good shtump."

Tiomkin labored for weeks on his eleven themes, then assembled an orchestra and played them for Selznick. Selznick was pleased. Tiomkin labored for weeks more to produce a complete score. It included forty-one drummers and a chorus of one hundred. Selznick kept worrying. He asked Tiomkin to whistle the love theme for him. Tiomkin whistled.

"Fine, fine," said Selznick. "Now the orgasm theme."

Tiomkin whistled. Selznick shook his head somberly.

"That isn't it," said Selznick. "That's just not an orgasm."

Tiomkin went away and worked some more. He combined the sighings of cellos and a brassy stirring of trombones, all in the rhythm of what he later described as a handsaw cutting through wood. Once again, he was summoned to Selznick's studio, once again the orchestra assembled…Everything seemed to go splendidly until the orgasm theme, which Selznick wanted to have repeated, and then repeated again.

"You're going to hate me for this, but it won't do," he finally said to Tiomkin. "It's too beautiful."

"Mr. Selznick, what is troubling you?" Tiomkin protested. "What don't you like about it?"

"I like it, but it isn't orgasm music," said Selznick. "It's not shtump. It's not the way I fuck."

"Mr. Selznick, you fuck your way, I fuck my way," cried Tiomkin. "To me, that is fucking music."

*****

The Block Museum at Northwestern University has posted podcasts of the two panels on which the Siren appeared last month. The first, Past Perfect—Critical Histories, Seminal Touchstones, and Rediscoveries, was moderated by Nick Davis and included Jonathan Rosenbaum, Fred Camper, Dave Kehr and Gabe Klinger. It is available here.

The second panel, Critical Voices: Style, Substance, and Scope—The Art of Film Writing, was moderated by Hank Sartin and included Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Wesley Morris, Scott Foundas, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. It is available here.

The Siren will just go ahead and said it: Nobody, print or online, writes about the art of acting with more insight, detail and profound respect than Sheila O'Malley. To prove the point, please treat yourself to her post about a single scene in Steve McQueen's Hunger.

Finally, the National Film Preservation Foundation is bringing out a box set on September 27, Treasures 5: The West, 1898-1938. This is wonderful news for us all, especially Marilyn and Greg, because the 3-DVD set with book includes The Sergeant and The Better Man, saved through our very first For the Love of Film Blogathon, and 38 other early films about the West. We will all be watching for it.

Oops, one more very important note: TCM's Star of the Month is our very own beloved Jean Simmons. Among the rarities, tonight (tomorrow morning) at 2:15 am EDT, Uncle Silas, which the Siren has always wanted to see as she's crazy about that crazy J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

Anecdote of the Week: No Small Parts

One of the Siren’s new movie books this year is King of Comedy, by Mack Sennett. The Siren doesn’t know that much about the very early days of silent film, so she can’t attest to Sennett’s reliability as a memoirist. Judging by Sennett’s style, he seems to be more of a yarn-spinner than a meticulous recorder of an important historical era in the development of the cinematic arts.

He’s funny as hell, though, so who cares.

Here is Mack Sennett, working his way up in Little Old New York, not too long after the era of The Strawberry Blonde.

I hung around the Bowery, picked up an acquaintance here and there through boardinghouse connections, and got a job. At first I was handed a broom and told to sweep out. My rise was sudden. One night they needed a gifted fellow to play the hind legs of a horse, and so I made my debut in this character part.

My vis-a-vis, you might say, was a young and handsome man named Stu Krauss from North Carolina...Stu Krauss moaned when I was made the hind legs of the horse. “I have been the front legs for two months,” he complained, “and I had hoped for promotion. Now you come along and grab the star part of the act.”

I thought that over.

“I don’t get you,” I said.

“Anybody can be the front legs,” Stu said. “The front legs is--or are--[Stu was educated] the straight part. The hind legs do all the acting and get all the applause.”

I thought that over.

“I guess talent will come out,” I said. “I have been recognized.”

“Indeed you have,” said Stu. “The minute you appeared I said to myself, ‘Here is a man who is destined to be the rear end of a horse.’ “

I thought that over.

“I shall try to be humble,” I said.

Above, a picture of Mack Sennett with the love of his life, Mabel Normand, taken from a swell fan site called Looking for Mabel Normand; it has lots of pictures and abundant film clips, too.

*****

Speaking of film history, These Amazing Shadows, in which the Siren can be briefly glimpsed during a segment about The Wizard of Oz, continues to be screened around the country. The Siren’s favorite part of These Amazing Shadows consists of the details about restoration and the Library of Congress archives. Peter Nelhaus recently caught it in Denver and saw director Kurt Norton speak. Raquelle at Out of the Past saw it, also liked it, and sneaked a cellphone shot of the Siren on screen. She says she hopes I’m not mad. I’m not. I just want my readers to know that my skin is not gray in real life.

Further screenings are being held around the country, and the film is still available through video-on-demand. It will be available on DVD through PBS Video and is scheduled to screen on PBS around December 27.

Further to the Siren’s George Stevens Resurrection Drive in partnership with Raymond de Felitta, the estimable Glenn Kenny has started a Tracy-Hepburn Project in which Glenn plans to watch all of their co-starring films. And he's watching them with his better half, Claire, known to Glenn’s readers as “my lovely wife” or “MLW” for short. The first selection was Woman of the Year, and Glenn and Claire agree with the Siren that it's a neglected masterpiece and a landmark in the positive portrayal of career women on screen. Just kidding. He and Claire had pretty much the same problems with it that the Siren did. It's a witty exchange, and the Siren is looking forward to Keeper of the Flame, which is up next.

Michael Phillips, the artist formerly known as Goatdog, can be heard here discussing his horror-film series coming up in Chicago. Michael's series, Shock Theater from the Cinema Dementia Collection, will be running a double feature at the Wicker Park Arts Center in Chicago on the first Friday of each month, starting in June. There's an extensive profile of Michael, a razor-sharp man and devoted cinephile, here at the Shadows and Screams blog.



Finally, the Siren’s longtime blog pal Flickhead has an affectionate post about a new three-disc Blu-Ray set of the three films that Sophia Loren made with Vittorio de Sica. Flickhead puts them in the context of their time, discusses the ebb and flow of de Sica's reputation and most importantly, assures us that Sophia and Marcello Mastroianni look great on Blu-Ray.

More Link Love

Available to be read in full at Fandor's Keyframe blog, my list of highlights from the Illuminating the Shadows conference at Northwestern University's Block Museum. Below, the moment that may interest my readers the most; should it prompt a comment urge, the splendid Fandor editor Kevin Lee would love to hear from you over there.

3. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, co-host of Ebert Presents At the Movies with Christy Lemire, mischievously remarked during the panel on the art of writing that he considered Jean-Claude Van Damme to be a movie artist on the level of Buster Keaton. Or near the level of Buster Keaton. Worthy to be mentioned in the same declarative sentence with Keaton, anyway. I don't remember the precise phrasing; I was on stage next to him for the same panel, and PTSD caused me to lose track of my pen. Despite my own appreciation for Van Damme (perhaps one day Fandor will hire me to write up Universal Soldier), I believe I gave Vishnevetsky what is usually referred to as the "side-eye."

At Nomad Wide Screen, my two most recent Retro-Fit columns. First, a piece on Raoul Walsh's fabulous pre-Code, Sailor's Luck, which was screened at the Block conference by the great Dave Kehr.

In a March 6 [New York Times] column about distributors and viewers’ move away from DVDs toward Blu-ray discs and streaming video, Kehr acknowledged the lack of enthusiasm many old-movie hounds feel for yet another shift in format. We greet these shifts, he wrote, with “a mixed sense of hope and fear. Hope, to the degree that the new distribution strategies may make it economically feasible for a broader range of movies to enter the marketplace; fear, grounded in past experience that suggests format changes invariably leave legions of once widely available titles in limbo.” Last week, at a conference held by Northwestern University’s Block Cinema, Kehr introduced a screening of a brilliant movie that is stuck in that very limbo.

The film, Sailor’s Luck from 1933, was directed by acknowledged master Raoul Walsh during the freewheeling era before the Production Code was implemented.

[snip]

Since it’s a Pre-Code feature, there are elements in Sailor’s Luck that would disappear just a year or so later, including Sally Eilers putting on her underwear and Esther Muir leaning over a crystal ball and giving Walsh a chance to point the camera more or less directly between her breasts (albeit from a tactful distance). Enormous hip flasks are brought out at intervals. Jimmy [James Dunn] climbs in a car with possibly the drunkest driver in all of 1930s cinema — giving Walsh an excuse to demonstrate just how good early rear-projection could be, the camera whirling around for queasy-making views of walls, the curb, lampposts, unwary pedestrians.

A scene between Dunn and Eilers dwells on the possibility that they might sleep together; it’s played quietly, in her furnished room, and blocked with enthralling precision, as Eilers sits in a chair across the room, Dunn plops on the bed, Dunn invites her to the bed, she moves only to a closer chair, Dunn lowers the window shades, she raises them. Also startlingly frank is the way the movie deals with the physical peril Eilers finds herself in when she encounters overeager men; confronting Baron Portola (Victor Jory, in the first role of what would be a career full of such parts), she opens the door that he just closed with a mixture of sass and uneasiness.

Next up at Nomad, another postcard from another conference, a film-noir fest at Manhattan's New School that was hosted by celebrated director Guy Maddin and the fine film writer and all-around goddess Kim Morgan of Sunset Gun. Guy presented The Chase, from 1946, starring a not-bad-at-all Robert Cummings (stop giggling); and Kim gave a loving introduction to Wicked Woman from 1953, starring the mesmerizing Beverly Michaels:

Morgan is a huge partisan of this work, calling it a “Poverty Row masterpiece,” and the film lived up to its introduction. Wicked Woman has a naturalistic feel, its low-rent atmosphere giving it a sense of realism that you don’t get from most higher-budget studio films of the era. Morgan particularly loves the movie for its star, whose character Morgan described as a woman “overcompensating for being in a man’s world"...Her character, Billie Nash, steps off a bus in a one-horse town early in the film, and just watching her lounge into the station and ask where she can find a cheap room is enthralling. The maintenance routines of a down-at-the-heels blonde are right up front, with Michaels rummaging around for something to wear and touching up her platinum roots with a slight grimace over the burning bleach. The movie constantly uses Michaels’ height (she was five-foot-nine, but looks taller), as she folds her limbs into a cheap chair that’s too small or stretches out a lanky arm to grab something from the fridge. (“I could watch her open a beer all day,” says Morgan.) Michaels’ stature gives a piquant flavor to her interactions with neighbor Charlie Borg (Percy Helton), one of the oiliest lechers I’ve ever seen—as Morgan put it, “every sleazy man who ever hit on a woman rolled into one.” Helton is so short that his bald head is level with Michaels’ collarbone, and his conversations with Michaels find him mostly talking to her breasts.

Raymond De Felitta, the Siren's email correspondent below, has put part one of his George Stevens musings online at Movies Til Dawn. The Siren has an abiding love for anyone working to resurrect a neglected or downtrodden reputation in classic film, and this promises to be a great effort. The Siren herself has a high opinion of Stevens, especially Shane, A Place in the Sun, Giant, Gunga Din, Swing Time, The Talk of the Town, Penny Serenade, Vivacious Lady and The Diary of Anne Frank. She loves Raymond's contention that Stevens' "sense of time and space within an individual scene became increasingly abstract and--paradoxically--more emotional as his work went on after the Second World War." Worth reading even if Stevens has not been a personal favorite--perhaps particularly if that's the case. The Siren also realized, looking at Stevens' filmography, that pre-1935 and Alice Adams (another good film), his credits are a viewing black hole. So if anyone has a recommendation for early Stevens, let us know, by all means. Update: "There is nothing about this that even vaguely resembles what was then considered 'normal' directorial staging": Part Two is up, with a close look at scenes from A Place in the Sun and The More the Merrier.



Libertas, the Website run by Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, has undergone a remake over the past year. Once marked by a hectoring tone that was not to the Siren's taste, Libertas is still very much an explicitly conservative film site--which would appeal to some of the Siren's readers, and not to others. But Apuzzo and Murty have worked to turn it into a place that's focused on pointing out films they love, rather than decrying films they can't stand. In terms of the Siren's own cinematic inclinations, she has long been a fan of Jennifer Baldwin, who has commented here from time to time as The Derelict and has her own blog at Dereliction Row. She's a good writer who covers classic film with a passion anyone here can identify with, and the Siren recommends her essays to one and all. The Siren, a Fritz Lang freak from way back, was especially smitten with Jennifer's post about Human Desire; she focuses on the great Gloria Grahame.

At Laura's Miscellaneous Musings, another pre-Code that ties in neatly to a couple of things I screened recently: Made on Broadway, from 1933. Haven't seen it. Sounds nifty. It stars Sally Eilers, so fresh and adorable in Sailor's Luck, and Laura says it has overtones of Chicago.

Nomadic Existence: In Memoriam, Elizabeth Taylor

This week's Nomad Wide Screen is devoted entirely to Elizabeth Taylor...as it should be. Free 30-day trials are available here. The issue includes Glenn Kenny's "Auteurist's Guide to Elizabeth Taylor," Tony Dayoub's tour of Taylor on DVD, and Vadim Rizov's analysis of the many Taylor obituaries and two extensive photo galleries.

An excerpt from my own tribute follows.

...It's odd to comb through old pieces about Taylor and discover how frequently people — usually men — felt the need to say hey, she wasn’t that beautiful. There’s Rex Reed’s vicious description of her “enormous derriere” in Hammersmith Is Out (1972), a movie in which, whatever else you want to say about it, the 40-year-old Taylor was still breathtaking. Or Raymond Chandler, complaining about too many close-ups of Taylor in A Place in the Sun (1951): “I could have gagged.” “Plumply pretty” was how the New Statesman waved off her supernal looks in Cleopatra (1963). Even Richard Burton once remarked that she “has an incipient double chin, her legs are too short and she has a slight pot belly.”

This is what’s known as a defense mechanism, I suppose. Elizabeth Taylor was beautiful all her life, and for a period that lasted into the 1960s, she was the most beautiful woman in movies. She never needed to blossom, she was a goddess from the cradle — ravishing as a child, stunning as a teen, heart-stopping through adulthood and middle age, through weight gain and weight loss, bad hairstyles and caftans, whether lacquered up at the side of a senator or, as she often was in the final years, ushered into an event in a wheelchair. Her looks were the central fact of her life, and she must have been used to that, and occasionally bored with it, quite early on. An ordinary woman hears someone say she’s lovely and glows with pleasure; to Elizabeth Taylor, it was probably like hearing, “My goodness, you have teeth.”

There were riders to that awestriking gift, however. There was the minor matter of her voice, an unexpectedly girlish, high-pitched mew that had charm when she gave a good performance, but grated when she did not. Stewart Granger noted the “rather squeaky voice,” but added cheerfully, “You can’t have everything, can you, and she had practically everything else in abundance.” True. Unfortunately for Taylor, that also included an abundance of health problems, usually tied to random catastrophes of some sort. Back injuries, an emergency tracheotomy, hospitalizations — the problems occurred with such regularity that it seemed the gods scheduled meetings to plot revenge on Taylor because they gave her too much in the first place.

“Everything else” also included a life that was never, in any real sense, private, despite the fact that she was far from the most forthcoming of stars. She got a great deal from that bargain with fame, but what it cost her was brought out by Bob Geldof in his memoirs. Geldof described speaking to a photographer who had been in the scrum of paparazzi at Richard Burton’s grave after the actor’s death. Taylor had pleaded with them to let her pay her respects to her former husband without the flashbulbs popping. And, uncharacteristically, they all agreed — except one, who said his job was to take a picture and that was what he intended to do. The others couldn’t agree to be scooped, so no deal. And Taylor left without visiting the grave.

Kitty Kelley called her Taylor biography The Last Star, but she had it the wrong way round. Taylor was instead the first star of the modern era, the first whose fate it was to have the public image smother the one on screen. Particularly for any movie she made after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), it requires conscious effort to watch Taylor without her legend intruding. Curl up on the couch with Franco Zeffirelli’s 1967 The Taming of the Shrew — one hell of a problematic Shakespeare play in any case — and just try to crowd out the images of Burton and Taylor falling in adulterous love, marrying, separating, then marrying again. It would require an exorcism. Even early movies like Father of the Bride (1950), or Conspirator (1949), with Taylor as the almost indecently young bride of Robert Taylor, arrive with her immature marriages to Conrad Hilton Jr. and Michael Wilding hovering around like escorts who don’t know their place.

The way to judge a Taylor performance, then, is to seek out the ones for which the headlines and the gossip discreetly exit the cinema and don’t come back until the lights go up...

Nomadic Existence: Cover Girl

For the Siren's Retro-Fit column at Nomad Widescreen, a meditation on the very delightful 1944 Cover Girl, Charles Vidor's first major contribution to the eternal Rita Hayworth mystique (the second being Gilda). Billy Wilder claimed his first idea for a directing project was to make a big, candy-colored Hollywood musical, but when he saw this, he figured he'd been right to go with Double Indemnity: "I knew that no matter how good my musical might be, people would say it's no Cover Girl."

So, how are the numbers? The music is by Jerome Kern, the lyrics are by Ira Gershwin, the choreography is by Gene Kelly, and the numbers are swell. There's the title song, the climax of the show, a delirious memory lane of mostly long-gone print dinosaurs arrayed on a stage with a ramp big enough to make Busby Berkeley bite his wrist in envy: The American Home, Liberty, Mademoiselle, Collier's. Each magazine has its own visual theme and chorus girl, the music turning into a nursery jingle when one small girl appears on the cover of Look. (That was a bit creepy, to be honest, but never mind.) At the end, Hayworth appears at the top of the ramp, wearing a heavily sequined dressing gown because… well, because we get to see her take it off. And then, there she is, in the most beautiful costume in the movie, a flowing gold lame strapless that flies around her as she dances down the ramp toward a bunch of chorus boys that the camera never even tries to seek out because who cares? Rita Hayworth is dancing!

I imagine that this is the point at which Billy Wilder said, "Forget it. I can't compete."

Even better, though, is an earlier number called "Make Way for Tomorrow," which starts at an oyster bar where Hayworth, Kelly and Silvers romp in, wave their hands over the oysters and chant, "Come on, pearl!" (I dearly want to try this myself at multiple oyster bars before I die, just to see if a single waiter gets the reference.) And then, oh magic, they dance out onto Columbia's idea of the Brooklyn docks and use trash cans as cymbals and mock-row with oars and lock arms for a kick-step, until they encounter one of those cops who always turns up whenever you're in a musical, minding your own business with the orchestra in the background, just trying to dance your troubles away. They get away from the cop and continue into the Brooklyn streets where they gallop up and down stairs, interrupt a canoodling couple, do a time-step with the milkman — how much poorer movies are now that no one ever encounters a milkman.

It's interesting to note, with regard to our other topic of the week, James Agee, that the critic quite liked Cover Girl, particularly for Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth "at her prettiest," although his dislike of lush Hollywood orchestrations was such that he even complained about too much music in his musicals.

Further to Hayworth, the Siren has linked to this before; but this post from Raymond de Felitta's archives, at Movies 'Til Dawn, remains one of the most poignant things you'll ever read about her. Also, Raymond pointed out (and the Siren neglected to mention) that Vidor didn't direct the musical numbers; that was somebody else you may be familiar with.