Science Fiction and the Siren

Know what’s funny about random drawings? They’re so bloody random. To wit, the Siren takes requests, and gets two George Sanders movies. All righty then. She also gets a B movie, and the Siren’s B-movie viewing isn’t that extensive, and she gets a Hammer movie that could be loosely defined as horror, and she gets a science fiction movie.

Now, anyone troubling to read this blog over its near six-year existence cannot fail to have noticed that two genres haven’t exactly been examined in depth: horror and science fiction. You, shrewd readers, may have guessed that these cinematic subsets hold a lower place in the Siren’s affections. And her first impulse is to say that p’r’aps altogether, shrewd readers, you’re right.

But after some contemplation, the Siren has realized that she can, pretty easily, put together a list of science fiction films that she holds in high regard. It’s just that most of them aren’t all that old, or at least not old by the standards of this blog.

Plus, science fiction attracts...how shall one put this. Passion. Passion to the point where it seems to the Siren that people are reliably touchier about this genre than any other, save Movies Involving Caped Crusaders. “Did you ever notice your mother is cross-eyed?” “Why yes, yes I did.” “Did I ever tell you why I disliked The Matrix?” “YOU WHORE.”

The Siren isn’t enough of a connoisseur to have a stringent genre definition, and that also gets her into occasional trouble. But if you’ll permit her to list some “Favorite Movies That Include Aliens, Space and/or the Future,” here’s 20, all (repeat, all) of which she likes quite a lot, in extremely rough order according to her level of affection:





1. Wall*E (OK, that probably tips her hand right there. Still, the Siren proceeds.)
2. The Empire Strikes Back
3. Star Wars
4. Blade Runner
(Note: Much as she likes them, the Siren avoids the cult for numbers 2 through 4 on this list. When she spends too much time reading too-ardent worship, the Siren gets cranky and finds herself borrowing a line from Glenn Kenny about another good film staggering under its bundle of adoration: “It’s not Jesus Christ coming down off the cross, people.” She’d rather sit in her own little corner and quietly like them.)
5. Seconds
6. E.T.
7. Aliens (First one is excellent. Second one plays more to the Siren’s preoccupations.)
8. Avatar
9. They Live
10. Soylent Green (Edward G. Robinson. And Heston.)
11. 12 Monkeys
12. The Terminator (Yes. I like James Cameron.)
13. Brazil
14. The Thing From Another World (1951)
15. A Clockwork Orange
16. Strange Days (Do people like this one now? Because the Siren used to feel very lonely.)
17. The Stepford Wives (1975) (It’s my list and I’ll include robot women if I want to.)
18. The Invisible Man (1933)
19. Escape from New York
20. Fahrenheit 451 (I probably never mentioned my huge thing for Oskar Werner either, did I?)



There you are. Another side to the Siren. You no doubt noticed the tilt toward the relatively recent. Well, it’s like this. The other night the Siren was watching Nora Prentiss and there’s a scene where Ann Sheridan and Kent Smith are driving in a convertible, pretty fast if you believe the rear projection, and his hat remains neatly tilted on his handsome brow and Ann Sheridan’s fabulous hair is barely stirring. And the Siren noticed, but it didn’t bother her a bit. On the other hand, if she’s sitting there watching an old science-fiction film and the spaceship looks like a spray-painted shoebox, she slides down the cushions muttering “Oh brother.”

Is this fair? Probably not. But the Siren has never denied that there is such a thing as progress, and she does think science fiction movies were aided by the development of better special effects. It’s probably no coincidence that the older movies that did make her list tend to accomplish things with simplicity and indirection.

Finally, if you are wondering “where the hell is Metropolis?” the Siren says yes yes yes, it’s a great freaking landmark movie, but it isn’t her favorite Fritz Lang by a long shot, and she admires it much more than she loves it.

All of this is leading up to George Sanders in Wolf Rilla’s 1960 Village of the Damned, but the Siren is going to break off here and continue shortly. You may fire when ready.

P.S. Know what it is about lists? You always forget something. In this case, Demolition Man. By rights it belongs somewhere in the middle up there. Pretend I included it, please. Carry on.

More Nomad, More Miscellaneous

For the latest edition of Nomad Widescreen, the Siren participated in a year-end symposium with a number of distinguished contributors. Her 2010 musings can be accessed here, and her hopes for 2011 here, at least at the moment. Nomad continues to fiddle with links, so let the Siren know if these two suddenly decouple from the rest of the train.

Over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, the ever-lovable Dennis Cozzalio plays host to another group of highly worthwhile film brains, including the fabulous Sheila O’Malley, who does the Siren the honor of quoting her and goes on to make our kind of year-end list, here.

Finally, Comrade Lou Lumenick does the Siren’s heart good with a trip back to Russia and our Shadows series for TCM.

The new banner is a woman with whom the Siren shares a birthday, January 17th: gorgeous Francoise Hardy, chanteuse, sometime actress and astrologer. (Tell me, Mlle. Hardy, are we still Capricorns?) The still is from Grand Prix, one of those star-laden behemoths that were everywhere in the 1960s. The movie has a number of fans, although the Siren can’t say she’s one of them, despite the movie's good looks and awesome racing sequences via director John Frankenheimer. But Hardy was, and remains, worth the journey.

The Siren’s blogosphere birthday-sharer? Bill Wren of Piddleville. Happy birthday, Bill!

Enjoy the holiday! The Siren will return shortly.

Watching Movies with My Entire Family, "Ain't I a Stinker" Edition

As we near the January halfway mark, the Siren wonders if her sister, brother-in-law and mother have forgiven her for tricking them into watching Leo McCarey's masterpiece, Make Way for Tomorrow, on TCM on Christmas Eve. The Siren baited her hook by telling them that it was one of Orson Welles' favorite movies, which it was.

Only after the fadeout, as her sister buried her face in the sofa cushions, her mother sat in dumbstruck amazement and her brother-in-law put his hand on his forehead, did the Siren mention that what Welles said was that "it would make a stone cry."

Yes, the Siren knows she's a stinker. But she's a stinker in a grand cause, yes?

Literary Interlude: "A Hollywood, California, Gul"

Being a conceit blatantly stolen from Glenn Kenny, whom the Siren hopes won't mind.

'I was in that preemy they had in Atlanta,' he would tell visitors sitting on his front porch. 'Surrounded by beautiful guls. It wasn't a thing local about it. It was nothing local about it. Listen here. It was a nashnul event and they had me in it--up onto the stage. There was no bobtails at it. Every person at it had paid ten dollars to get in and had to wear his tuxseeder. I was in this uniform. A beautiful gul presented me with it that afternoon in a hotel room...'

'This was a Hollywood, California, gul,' he'd continue. 'She was from Hollywood, California, and didn't have any part in the pitcher. Out there they have so many beautiful guls that they don't need that they call them a extra and they don't use them for nothing but presenting people with things and having their pitchers taken. They took my pitcher with her. No, it was two of them. One on either side and me in the middle with my arms around each of them's waist and their waist ain't any bigger than a half a dollar.'

--from "A Late Encounter with the Enemy," in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor.

Nomad Widescreen: Letter from an Unknown Woman

For Nomad Widescreen, the Siren fulfills her longstanding threat to write up one of her all-time favorite performances from any actress in any movie: Joan Fontaine in Letter from an Unknown Woman. Nothing but the best for Glenn.

Lisa has been living in this shabby-genteel boarding house with her mother, a woman who seems nice enough but as ordinary as a bar of soap. We get glimpses of the girl’s routine: shapeless clothes, drab furniture, dim-witted playmates, a whole day set aside each week to beat the dust out of the rugs. Lisa is one of those creatures who sometimes arise in such an environment, intelligent and sensitive in a way wholly unsuited to the life laid out for her. And so she falls in love, not with a face or a voice, but with the sound of a piano. Lisa listens to Stefan’s practicing with an expression as ardent as any she shows later. When Lisa finally sees Stefan and pulls the door open for him — which Fontaine does not tenderly, but with a swift jerk — she isn't enamored for the first time. She is already in love, her feelings bound up with his music. His handsome face is just the fulfillment.

*****

Elsewhere, at the New York Times the mighty Dave Kehr comes through with a beautiful piece on Hideko Takamine. The Los Angeles Times chimes in. And DJW at the consistently marvelous Lawyers, Guns and Money also gives the lady her due. Consider the Siren's heart warmed.

The Siren by Request: Ball of Fire (1941)

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Memoriam: Hideko Takamine, 1924-2010

The Siren confesses to disappointment that there has been little so far in the Western press about Hideko Takamine, the great Japanese actress who died Tuesday, age 86. Guardian? New York Times? Other big shots? Where y'all hidin'? Takamine was a supreme talent with a tremendous filmography. Once upon a time she was the Shirley Temple of Japan, a child actress with a huge following. She translated that into a long career as an adult actress, a feat that surely can't be much more common in Japan than it is here in the U.S. Even less common is a child actor who grows into an adult performer of such breadth and power.

Then again, the Siren doesn't have much room to talk. She first saw Takamine only about five years ago, at the Toronto Cinematheque. When she settled down in her seat to watch When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, not once had the Siren heard Takamine's name. Most of the actresses the Siren knows and loves were discovered in childhood, or adolescence at the latest. The experience of seeing a performance like Takamine's, in a film the adult Siren knew nothing about--beyond the fact that Girish, bless him, told her to see it--was a cymbal crash. It was a coup de foudre.

The film was directed by the man most associated with Takamine, Mikio Naruse, and shot in widescreen format that he used perfectly for the small-scale, agonizing tale of a Ginza bar hostess and her attempts to find a stable and dignified life. The camera is usually at a bit of a distance from Keiko, a.k.a. Mama-san (Takamine), so the frame can show you the dreariness of the bar where she works, the noisy banality of the more upscale establishment run by her former protege, the sterile luxury of the apartment she keeps to maintain appearances. Frequently you see Mama on one side of the screen, crowded and seemingly pushed there by her customers, the manager who collects her bills, the banker she loves, the family that drains her emotions and her finances.

It was the ideal introduction to Takamine's qualities. In most great women's pictures, the misfortunes of love, of just being a woman, descend like nightfall, and if the actress plays only the pain she will surely become a chore, and the film like seeing a kitten kicked around the room. Takamine's weariness is everywhere in this movie, and those stairs she climbs to the bar might as well be K2 in terms of the odds arrayed against her. But the primary impression of Takamine as Keiko is courage. This woman gathers herself like a battle-hardened soldier, the sole remaining goal being the next sunrise.

The Siren will give herself this: Once she encountered Hideko Takamine, she was hooked. She took out the schedule for the Naruse retrospective then running, and carefully marked off each film with Takamine, rushing downtown to see each one she could. Thus did the Siren encounter Hideko the Bus Conductress, made when Takamine was 17 years old, and a movie that showed off her lightness and charm in the beginning, and her ability to shade into sorrow toward the end. There was her turn as the lively but trapped daughter Kiyoko in Lightning, again showing that Takamine could time a comic-relief line in an essentially somber movie and keep everything perfectly, flawlessly in tune. Takamine was an exquisite beauty, but she could push that aside as writer Fumiko Hayashi in A Wanderer's Notebook, playing an occasionally unscrupulous woman with a grimly poor early life and little claim to beauty. Takamine showed Hayashi's plainness through manner and gesture, not makeup--a seething portrait of a writer constantly observing the way her own emotions look to others even as she tries to get them on paper.

The movie the Siren most wanted to see, Floating Clouds, was sold out--frustrating, but on the other hand, good for you, Toronto. She had to see it later, once more through Girish's kind offices, and discovered what is probably Takamine's greatest performance, a portrait of heedless, headstrong, doomed love that Davis, Crawford, Sullavan or Fontaine would have recognized as part of the sisterhood.

Often when the Siren writes about the death of a great actor, she weaves in her knowledge of the life. She doesn't believe that is off-limits. The image of a star is tied up with the screen. When an artist dies, a life ends along with the work, and the Siren never thinks it wrong, when possible, to pay tribute to them both.

The Siren has been told before, however, that such matters are irrelevant--that the fact that one actor was ornery, another gracious, one darkly violent, another longsuffering, has no bearing on the work. And that is also a legitimate view, one borne out by Takamine. The Siren can't tell you much about the woman's life; a long marriage to director Zenzo Matsuyama and a dignified, largely silent retirement argue a person of refinement and intelligence, but that is guesswork. Truly, it doesn't matter. Seek out Hideko Takamine, and you will love her as the Siren did, without needing a scrap of foreknowledge, and at first sight.

*****

An excellent piece on Yearning at Peter Nelhaus's place.

Passionate Naruse fan Keith Uhlich on A Wanderer's Notebook (he didn't like her in it, but the Siren did); Floating Clouds, Lightning and Yearning, and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.

A brief, rare interview with Takamine, from 2008.

Many Hideko Takamine films, like those of Naruse himself, remain frustratingly difficult to obtain, and the Siren suggests any chance you get should be seized immediately. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is available via Criterion, as well in this BFI box set that includes Floating Clouds and Late Chrysanthemums (no Takamine in that one, but it is a masterpiece). Flowing is part of this British DVD set, which also includes Repast and Sound of the Mountain--again, no Takamine in the latter two, but very great movies. Twenty-Four Eyes, directed by Keisuke Kinoshita, is also available via Criterion; the Siren hasn't seen that one, and she intends to remedy that.

Meanwhile, Cladrite Radio points out in comments that TCM is running Ozu's Tokyo Chorus, featuring a childhood performance by Takamine, Sunday January 2 at midnight EST. The Siren plans to pounce.