Les Misérables, Anna Karenina and Welles: A Dissent

The Siren registers polite disagreement with Dave Kehr of the New York Times, and his review yesterday of new DVDs. I hope he didn't mean it when he said that the 1948 Anna Karenina and the double DVD set of the 1935 and 1952 Les Misérables were destined to sit "somewhere on a back shelf in high school libraries, to be shown whenever an English teacher feels like taking an afternoon off." Both releases have a great deal to offer film lovers.

The Siren saw that version of Tolstoy quite some time ago, and while Vivien Leigh could not compete with memories of Garbo in the same role thirteen years earlier, Ralph Richardson was a superb Karenin. It was also directed by Julien Duvivier, a fine talent who achieved greatness more than once with films such as Un Carnet de Bal and Pepe le Moko. As for Les Misérables, the Siren hasn't seen the 1952 version, though Robert Newton supposedly does a good job as Javert, and Lewis Milestone was no slouch. But releasing the 1935 version is a genuine event, for it contains Charles Laughton as Javert, a role recorded at the pinnacle of his artistry. It's been darned hard to find for lo these many years, despite virtues such as cinematography by the great Gregg Toland. The director was Richard Boleslawski, a veteran of the Moscow Art Theatre whose role in bringing the Method to America led Simon Callow to call him "Moses, or perhaps John the Baptist." Laughton's wife, Elsa Lanchester (Madame Magloire in the 1952 version), thought it Laughton's finest performance. And Gloria, if you are reading this and you have a multi-region DVD player, Amazon has it for $13.99, and they ship to Spain. The Siren's copy is on its way.

Finally, a word about Orson Welles as Rochester in Jane Eyre (1944), also released this week. The Siren cheerfully acknowledges her own Welles worship, but she still thinks his performance has been short-changed. Rochester in the novel is a frequently menacing figure, who at first frightens Jane as much as he fascinates her. The Siren sees little similarity between Welles's Rochester, with his air of privilege and his acid sarcasm at Jane's expense, and Heathcliff, the half-wild, uncouth orphan, desperately in love with a woman he cannot have. (Perhaps the association comes from Laurence Olivier. He was mesmerizing, but he played Heathcliff throughout with an accent more redolent of the Old Vic than the stable.)

Joan Fontaine did indeed play the spirited Jane a mite too close to Mrs. de Winter territory. But I would not call the novel's Rochester downtrodden, as Mr. Kehr does, not even at the end when, as Joyce Carol Oates wrote, "the blind and crippled Rochester is no less masculine than before." Rather than playing it safe, as a straight figure of romance, Welles brought out the neurosis in Rochester to a marked degree while retaining the arrogance of the aristocrat. That was a definite risk. As David Shipman put it, Welles "moved and looked the part, darkly romantic, but it was hard to believe that he wasn't as insane as his wife."

Macao (1952)

It's a shame the Siren didn't see Macao when she was about 16 years old. It has every ingredient her teenage self ever looked for in an old movie. Gorgeous leads, fabulous dresses, exotic locale, some musical numbers, a nice romance. I probably wouldn't have cared as much as about things that bother me now, like a so-what villain, a plot that telegraphs its every twist and a visual style that just doesn't know what it wants to be.

This is often classified as noir on DVD and rental sites, which must cause the occasional truth-in-packaging dispute. It is many things, but thematically it ain't really noir, more straight-up adventure story. There are no tormented loners or soul-sucking character flaws, no depredations of pitiless fate. Institutional corruption is played for laughs. Director Josef von Sternberg's The Shanghai Gesture is more noir than Macao. Then again, The Shanghai Gesture is more Sternberg than Macao. Like Come and Get It, this is a movie that was taken away from one celebrated director and finished by another, Nicholas Ray. Unlike the logging epic, with this one you don't get a clear stylistic delineation. There are Sternberg moments, and Not Sternberg moments. Little or nothing suggests Ray's innovative framing, his characters' intense sexuality or his interest in the psychology of violence. The younger director appears to have phoned in Macao from a very, very long-distance connection.

Macao's plot and setting had a lot for Sternberg to relate to, little to interest Ray. A hard-bitten beauty with a taste for high rolling and low company (Jane Russell) escapes to an exotic locale, battling and then teaming with a stranger escaping his past (Robert Mitchum). There they meet a traveling stocking salesman who dabbles in smuggling (William Bendix, in the movie's most enjoyable performance). Then they run afoul of a mysterious crime kingpin (Brad Dexter, not nearly mysterious or menacing enough, which really hurts the movie). The beauty goes to work in the kingpin's cabaret. Occasionally we encounter the kingpin's moll, Gloria Grahame--given nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, to do aside from wearing a spectacular bolero jacket, the sleeves of which terminate in a glittering pair of gloves. Otherwise Grahame mostly glares from doorways. Songs are sung, wisecracks are traded, wallets are lifted, a negligee is tossed over a dressing-room screen. (That last is one of the Siren's favorite old-movie cliches. It's even better if the heroine gets to pop her head and bare shoulders over the top, or if she sends a filmy something sailing over the top to hit the hero in the head.) Anyway, I ask you, does this sound noir? Macao has some crime, some moody lighting and some night shots. Otherwise it is a heck of a lot closer to something like Morocco.

The story of the filming is more dramatic than Macao itself, but that doesn't mean the movie is without interest. Any fan of The Shanghai Gesture (Siren pal Girish is one) should see Macao to compare its casino, full of railed landings going further and further up, with Mother Gin Sling's Dante-like gambling hell, a series of circles leading inexorably down. Again and again in Macao we see light coming through Venetian blinds, casting vertical bands on the characters. In noir this effect is usually suggestive of prison, either literal or figurative. In Macao the light-through-blinds seems more like a cobweb--beautiful, hemming in the characters, but nothing a determined adult can't break through. The most striking sequence, one that truly screams Sternberg, is a dockside chase that closes the movie. In the opening sequence (maybe Ray, maybe not) the actors race over floating docks, bobbing and weaving on the unstable piers. The end has the characters running around the same docks, but now the sets are strung with close-knit fishing nets. Sternberg's camera glides around this new obstacle, no more trapped by it than the characters are.

This was made at RKO and Howard Hughes' fingerprints are all over Russell's wolf-whistle costumes. One gold lamé dress was the subject of a memo from Hughes so schoolboyishly detailed the Siren is embarrassed to quote it. Russell's breasts somehow stay in frame no matter what else is going on. Still, Sternberg's most famous collaboration had been with Marlene Dietrich, and together they paid obsessive attention to her lighting and costumes. Russell was nowhere near the screen presence of a Dietrich--her chief asset was likability, her persona a Buddy with Boobs--but having the camera dawdle over a gorgeous woman was second nature to Sternberg.

What a pity, then, that according to film historians Russell disliked Sternberg, and Mitchum positively hated him. Sternberg's precision, his fastidious and haughty demeanor struck them as ridiculous. His career was in fadeout, his celebrated movies more than a decade in the past, and the rising young stars saw no reason to take orders from the ceremonious old has-been. Together with Bendix they made Sternberg's set a torment to him. The Bad and the Beautiful, a book on Hollywood in the 1950s, tells of the trio toppling von Sternberg's tent when he was changing clothes and rubbing Limburger cheese on his car engine. In his Mitchum biography, Lee Server describes how Mitchum mocked Sternberg's speaking manner: "Where did you get that accent, Joe? You're from Weehawken, N.J." (Sternberg grew up in Vienna and New York.)

Jane Russell remembered, 'According to Sternberg, we were not supposed to eat or drink on the set. No grip was allowed to have a Coke in the corner. Nobody.' Mitchum began bringing in bags of food and coffeee, and handing them out to one and all. Sternberg was enraged, told MItchum he was going to be fired. Mitchum said, 'If anyone gets fired, it'll be you' ... Mitchum began having his lunch [at Sternberg's lecturn], leaving half-eaten pickles and greasy wax paper all over the director's pages.

Server says Sternberg chose the wrong way to develop a rapport with Mitchum, trying to make chitchat by remarking that the warmed-over script was a "piece of shit" and comparing Russell's talent to that of his cigarette case. Mitchum responded tartly, "She must have something. Lots of ladies have big tits." Actually, at the time what Russell had was Hughes and his breast monomania, but Mitchum's on-and-off sense of gallantry had been offended.

Throughout his book Server makes his relish of Mitchum's bad-boy attitude very clear, but the Siren is resolutely uncharmed. Sternberg was obviously a difficult person, but he was also a great talent, and when the Siren reads about the stars' juvenile behavior she wants to go back in time and ground them. Mitchum never did have enough respect for himself or his profession, which is why for every great performance (and he was often superb) there is another where he's a shambling bore, drifting by on his looks and sexual magnetism. The actor has developed a cult in recent years, but the Siren subscribes only to the acting part of the fan club (well, okay, the eye-candy part too). "It was just a crummy melodrama," Mitchum carped in later years. Well, the atmosphere on the set undoubtedly helped ensure that.

The film tested poorly in previews, Sternberg either pushed off or was pushed, and Hughes, the perpetual tinkerer, brought Nicholas Ray on board for retakes. Server estimates that about one-third of the finished movie was directed by Ray. At the time Ray was married to Grahame, but the couple was divorcing. Grahame, thoroughly sick of her insipid part, told Ray she'd forego alimony if he would cut her out of the movie. Scenes went in, scenes went out, Mel Ferrer (!) directed a few more scenes, Mitchum started to complain that "his character would come through a door and run into himself on the other side." (Server) The script, already worked on by George Bricker, Edward Chodorov, Norman Katkov, Frank L. Moss, Walter Newman, Stanley Rubin, Bernard C. Schoenfeld and Bob Williams, got additional dialogue from Mitchum. No wonder the movie feels aimless, even though the action stays in Macao.

Crossfire (1947)

A celebrated early noir that is essentially a police procedural with a message about anti-Semitism. Somewhat disappointed in this one; time has diminished its impact.

It's a good-looking flick. Directed by Edward Dmytryk, with cinematography by J. Roy Hunt, the movie makes a virtue of stripped-down minimalist sets and lighting designed to look like it is coming from real-world sources. The alternating angles in certain sequences, like the savage beating that opens the movie, are striking indeed. Robert Ryan is superb of course, but John Paxton's script leaves his character pretty one-dimensional, an anti-Semite with no background, explanation or even other characteristics, aside from cunning and sadism. Mind you, that is quite realistic in itself. Raging bigots in real life frequently don't have "reasons;" they simply are shits. Movies, however, thrive on fleshing things out, and Ryan's obvious dreadfulness allows the audience too much distance from his bigotry.

Robert Young was as good as he could be with the policeman character, quietly waiting for Ryan to hang himself. The Siren often finds Young underrated. Not much he could do with a lengthy speech about prejudice, however. It involves Young's Irish grandfather and the bigotry he faced, and the Siren wasn't quite sure of the point: "Oh my GOD! you mean they discriminated against CHRISTIAN WHITE PEOPLE too?" Seemed sufficient to the Siren that the victim was killed for being Jewish. Even in 1947, did they have to drag larger segments of the audience into the Great Oppression Sweepstakes so they would understand that this was wrong? Perhaps so, the Siren afterthought, as she recalled that same year's Gentleman's Agreement, in which we learn about anti-Semitism by watching a Gentile suffer from it.

It is mentioned often, but worth noting again, that in the novel Crossfire is based on, the victim was a homosexual. He was changed to a Jew to get past the censors. In the movie, despite the presence of a girlfriend, the murder victim gives a distinct impression of picking up a young soldier in a crucial early scene in a bar. Doubtless this did not register with many 1947 audience members, but the Siren still thinks it was deliberate.

Ryan's guilt is telegraphed early and the script does only a so-so job of stretching out suspense concerning his fate. Instead of furthering gripping the audience, developments like a sequence involving Gloria Grahame playing (what else) a floozy just seem like padding. The Siren's favorite part of the movie was Robert Mitchum, whose presence is a touch ironic considering some intemperate anti-Jewish remarks he made when well into his sunset years. But here he looks great, sounds great and does a lot with a smallish part that is also somewhat underwritten. The Siren will long treasure the look Mitchum gives his own shoulder, seconds after Ryan's character has given it an unwelcome, brotherly pat.

Goatdog's 1927 Blog-a-thon: Flesh and the Devil

(This marks the Siren's slightly belated contribution to Goatdog's 1927 Blog-a-thon, which was this past weekend. Please follow the link to Goatdog's place and read the other contributions as well, for a wonderful trip in the 80-years-back machine.)

Why is the word "modern" considered an accolade, much less the word "realistic"? When she wants modern, the Siren watches modern. Most of the time, the Siren prefers old-fashioned things, like romance and superimposition shots and duels filmed in silhouette. There are times when it is a good thing to show your age. When you're a bottle of vintage port, for example, or when you're a rare manuscript, or when you are 61 years old but, by God, you are Helen Mirren. And, the Siren would argue, it is a fine and glorious thing to show your age when you're a silent movie like Flesh and the Devil. Very little of this movie's atmosphere or plot smacks of 1927 (or 1926, when it was filmed) and in fact there are some decidedly 19th-century aspects to it. The clothes are 1920s-looking, but the rooms are lit by candles, people travel via horses and the settings are military boarding schools, castles and the like.

To put it mildly, there is a lot of baggage attached to this one. Baggage, hell, it drags a freight train full of Hollywood history, foreshadowing and hindsight into your living room the second you hit "play." This lavish MGM production was made to showcase the pairing of their most valuable male star, John Gilbert, and their soaring new female star, Greta Garbo. When Flesh and the Devil was released in early January 1927, The Jazz Singer was only 10 months away, and Gilbert's great period of stardom had only a couple more years to run. In less than a decade Gilbert would be dead--of a broken heart, said his friends; of cardiac arrest brought on acute alcoholism, said the doctors. Garbo, for her part, was just three films into a Hollywood career that would defy all attempts at comparison, then or since.

The movie also began their celebrated love affair, though some maintain that was more image than reality. Maybe. For those who argue Gilbert-Garbo was the real romantic deal, Flesh and the Devil is mighty strong evidence. Gilbert caresses a flower stolen from Garbo's bouquet, Garbo purses her lips slightly to light a cigarette, they play a horizontal love scene as Garbo hovers over her man's face and kisses him with lips slightly parted. Eighty years on, the erotic charge between these two still flashes off the screen, despite the older acting style, despite the 1920s fashion for putting lipstick on a leading man.

Going strictly by the plot, the true love in the movie is between John Gilbert's character, Leo von Harden, and his best friend, Ulrich von Eltz, played by Lars Hanson. Their attachment probably draws some titters from "sophisticated" audiences unacquainted with eras when passionate declarations of love and fidelity weren't limited to those sharing a bed. It is a movie truth universally acknowledged, however, that two single men in possession of a good friendship must be in want of a vamp. So here comes Felicitas (Garbo, of course), ready to fascinate and seduce Gilbert from the moment he spots her at a train station. They meet again, they waltz, they smoke and then they burn. Gilbert tosses a lit cigarette out the window, alerting Garbo's husband, Count von Rhaden (Marc McDermott), to the goings-on in his wife's boudoir. Husband? did she mention a husband? Gosh, no, she didn't, but there he is in the doorway, giving director Clarence Brown a marvelous shot--a Garbo-Gilbert clinch viewed through the wronged husband's outstretched fingers. A duel must follow, of course, and its filming is justly celebrated. We see it in long shot, the actors as silhouettes. Leo and von Rhaden march ten paces to the side of the screen, each stops just out of the frame, and we see two puffs of smoke.

Next shot ... Garbo, trying on mourning bonnets, the slightest of smiles on her face as she decides which veil is the most becoming. A perfect sequence, in 1927 or any other era.

Gilbert is exiled for five years. To protect the honor of Felicitas, he pretends the duel was about a dispute at cards. Hanson is enlisted to take care of Felicitas while his friend spends a few years in South Africa living in a hut. Okay, take a wild guess what happens next. Why, yes, that's exactly right. Hanson falls in love with Garbo, and they marry. Flesh and the Devil has many virtues; a surprising, twisty plot ain't one of 'em. So Leo comes back, but the love between him and Felicitas still burns. Leo is determined not to betray his friend, but Felicitas has other ideas.

Ah, this movie is lovely to look at, delightful to behold. Visual techniques of silent film were at an incredibly high point, about to plummet back to ground-bound staginess when the talkie craze took over. Shot after shot from William Daniels, who also lensed Greed and The Merry Widow, makes you want to pause the film and drink it in, whether it's a view across a frozen lake to an island with a man-made folly on it, or a simple close-up of Garbo's silk shoes, covered with snow. (Legend has it that the ethereal beauty had big, decidedly clod-hopping feet. To the Siren, Garbo's feet look fine, but her gams were no threat to Marlene.) Cedric Gibbons did the art direction and gave the interiors that certain fairy-tale look common to MGM's every depiction of aristocratic life.

Gilbert gets dissed quite a bit by modern critics, and the Siren isn't sure why. He is very dashing and handsome, less effete than Valentino if less menacing than Barrymore. As for Garbo, most critics note that she was sui generis, a brand-new type for the movies. The Siren adds that this quality was Garbo's alone, not the script. Felicitas is written as a man-eating vamp like dozens of others in films of the era. It is the actress who conveys a soul behind the frippery. Favorite moment, for the Siren: Garbo nonchalantly touching up her lipstick, as a priest denounces her from the pulpit as a modern-day Bathsheba. Second-favorite, minutes later: the priest passes the communion cup, adjusting the rim to give each family member an untouched place to sip. Garbo stops him, turns the rim back to where Gilbert's lips had just touched it, and drinks from that spot. Her body and the angle of her head are perfectly ladylike and composed, but her expression of abandon is worthy of Salome. (Now there is a part Garbo could have torn up.)

Among the cast is an ingenue named Barbara Kent, playing Hanson's sister Hertha. Her pure unselfish love for Gilbert must compete with the evil, manipulative Felicitas, and naturally Hertha doesn't stand a chance. She is rather charming, however, her tiny frame used to compose several amusing shots. She survived the talkie transition and made some other pictures, including the 1932 Vanity Fair and the 1933 Oliver Twist, then retired from the screen in 1949. Incredibly, she is still alive today, having turned 101 on Dec. 16. According to Wikipedia, she is one of only three prominent silent players still surviving, the others being Anita Page (age 96) and Dorothy Janis (who turned 97 on Feb. 19). Alas, Ms. Kent refuses all interviews. Still, it is wonderful to think that somewhere in Idaho there lives a link to the more sumptuous, romantic world of 1927 and this film.

Four Weddings: The Siren Does Not Hold Her Peace

Here's one for the "What was I thinking?" pile: Four Weddings and a Funeral. When the Siren saw this in 1994, she thought it was darling. She saw it again recently and was, well, appalled. She must have been Blinded by The Hugh. Grant is a handsome devil, he knows how to time a line and he lends some appeal to his drippy character. But the rest of the cast--my god. It isn't that they are bad actors, they certainly aren't. It's that they are playing the most off-putting collection of conceited twerps this side of "The Simple Life." What's supposed to be so funny about these charmless snots sitting around weddings and mocking anyone who happens to be less rich, less slim, less witty or less drunk than they are? The primary love on display in this "romantic" movie is self-love. Hugh has to spend his time pursuing Andie Macdowell, whose prettiness cannot disguise the fact that her every performance since sex, lies and videotape confirms Ivan G.'s "Blind Squirrel" theory of cinema. The Siren now sympathizes with Martin Amis, who said if they had released Four Weddings in the 1960s, people would have torn the seats out of the theatre. In conclusion, Hugh yes, this movie, no.

Did I Remember to Tell You ... (Movies in Brief)

The Siren is very, very hung up on proper writing and essay construction, and she sometimes forgets that this isn't what blogs are always about. So from time to time she plans to offer some brief takes on movies viewed over about a 20-month period.

Inaugural post: The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941). Screwball well past its sell-by date, with two very, very great actors, Bette Davis and James Cagney, who simply didn't have the gossamer touch for this sort of thing. Bette Davis (who had just gotten married in real life) looks glowingly pretty, but watching her posterior plunk into a cactus plant--twice--feels like lèse majesté. From a distance of more than 60 years, you want to yell, "Bette! They can't treat you like that!" This time the talented Epstein brothers seem to have had no script ideas beyond "rough up the dame! it'll slay 'em!" They made Davis's character unbearable as well as unbelievable--the sort of spoiled heiress who finds herself in an airplane going someplace she doesn't want to go, and reacts by trying to parachute out. In high heels. Cagney has some appeal here, but his main job is to react to the heiress's latest piece of idiocy. Then he has to convince you he has fallen in love with her. He fails. The great Jack Carson, one of the Siren's pet character actors, gets almost nothing to do. Overall, a catastrophe.

"Caesar Borgia Was No Better Able to Care for Himself": Portrait of Irving Thalberg, 1927

In preparation for Goatdog's 1927 Blog-a-Thon, coming up March 23-25, the Siren is posting some brief excerpts from a 1927 Vanity Fair article about Irving Thalberg. The article is by Jim Tully. One thing that strikes the Siren when reading film articles of the past is that the writers were often a great deal more prescient and perceptive than we give them credit for today.

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He is considered a genius by many of the leading citizens of Hollywood. In the cinema world the word genius is more common than a threadbare plot...

I would have considered [Thalberg] a real boy wonder had he curbed with understanding the torrent that was Stroheim. For ... Stroheim is likely to be considered the first man of genuine and original talent to break his heart against the stone wall of Hollywood ...

To Thalberg, all life is a soda fountain. He knows how to mix ingredients that will please the herd on a picnic ...

He has inspired and sponsored such productions as The Big Parade, The Merry Widow, Tell It to the Marines, The Scarlett Letter, and Flesh and the Devil. He has been a firm rung in the ladder that led to the success of such stars as Lon Chaney, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, William Haines and many others...

No person could dominate a world of cheap intrigue and fierce economics with a set of emasculated virtues. He can be relentless and suave. He can strike back from any angle. In a world where friendship is as shadowy as figures on a screen, Thalberg relies on no man. He has retained a level and a clear course through the helter skelter of the cheapest form of intrigue known to mankind--studio politics....

He is so wan, so tired-looking and so appealing, that women, ever on the alert to evade logic, often become sentimental about him. The feeling is wasted. Caesar Borgia was no better able to take care of himself...

The young supervisor's outstanding achievement for 1927 is Flesh and the Devil. The director, Clarence Brown, must be given full credit for this excellent film. He was ably assisted by the fine work of Greta Garbo. If Mr. Thalberg guessed these two people into their respective roles, which is quite likely, he should be given full credit...

In one respect Thalberg is superior to most producers. He reads books...

[quoting Thalberg] 'A young woman came to me from one of the fan magazines and said, "Mr. Thalberg--I realize that you are of the new order in films--a young man with ideals."

'I interrupted her. "If you mean that I think I'm superior to the so-called cloak and shoe and glove manufacturers who have really given their lives and their pocket-books to this business in order to allow us something to build on---why then--you are wrong. I respect them very much--they had ideals also." '

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Above, Irving Thalberg and his wife, Norma Shearer, photographed by Edward Steichen in 1931. They really do look to be in love, don't they? For a look at the Thalbergs' celebrated beach house, go here.