Charlie Chaplin – So few critics, so many poets
Posts about Charlie Chaplin written by scottross79
https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico
So few critics, so many poets
By Scott Ross

Things, at least in the West, are now so wide open sexually (much too wide for many, what with sex now being optional and/or “assigned at birth” and women being referred to by government entities, officially and with what one presumes is a straight face, as “birthing persons,” but our voices don’t matter in the face of the push for universal Transhumanism) that it would be difficult to explain to someone born after 1981 just how great a cultural thunderclap the appearance in that year of Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies was. No one had ever published a book like it before, a serious cultural history on a topic in almost desperate need of addressing, and by a writer as dogged, informed and witty as Russo. For a young gay man besotted with movies but deeply leery of the hostile way they depicted people like me the book was something like, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron, profane Holy Writ — the urtext on its subject.

The 1995 documentary by Rob Epstein (The Times of Harvey Milk) and Jeffrey Friedman (together they wrote and directed Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt) came much too late for its original author’s full participation; Russo died of AIDS in 1990, the year after he appeared in Common Threads, and if the picture has an almost fatal lack, it’s the loss of Russo’s anger. Too many of the movie’s talking heads are like an older gay friend during the 1980s and ’90s who seemed grateful when there was any representation of homosexual characters in a movie. The viciousness with which most of them were depicted, and which enraged me, scarcely seemed to matter to him — the presence was what counted. Russo addressed the end of the first edition of The Celluloid Closet to exactly that problem, noting that too many of us were complicit in our own oppression, and that the party was over. (I wonder how he would have felt about his old pal Lily Tomlin, who as narrator of the movie pledged to its makers that she would use the occasion to finally come out of the closet herself publicly and then reneged, infuriating Armistead Maupin, one of the writer-participants?) I don’t mean to pillory Epstein and Friedman unduly, but it seems to me that Russo’s unique, angry voice is what is missing from the documentary “based on” his book.

The filmmakers are at their best when presenting pointed film clips, particularly one late in the show featuring a numbing, rapid-fire barrage of bits from then-recent American movies in which those picture’s heroes are seen and heard using the most vile epithets for other characters, with “faggot” (naturally) emerging as the universal favorite. This montage illustrates that, at least as of 1995, very little had changed in the nature of cinematic hatred of homos from the vicious-pansy-hitchhiker bit in Vanishing Point (1971), the hideous slaughter-the-transvestite-killer scene in Freebie and the Bean (1974) and the utterly hysterical gay-bar sequence in the 1962 movie of Advise and Consent, a moment that has no correspondence in the very good Allan Drury novel. Since the evidence suggests Drury was himself a closeted homosexual, that scene almost seems a deliberate slap in his face by the director, Otto Preminger, and the screenwriter, Wendell Mayes. (Although once can imagine Preminger, puffed up with his inviolable self-importance, thinking he was being a crusading, censor-baiting visionary for just showing a queer-bar in an American movie.)

Among the best (or at least, most interesting) clips in the documentary are Eric Campbell’s outrageous feigned-pansy act in Chaplin’s Behind the Screen (1916); Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers expressing their love for each other in Wings (1927); Dietrich in drag and kissing a female patron in Morocco (1930); the singing waiters in the gay bar in Call Her Savage (1932), probably a first in American movies; Garbo kissing her lady-in-waiting in Queen Christina (1933); the “boys-will-be-boys” scene in Wonder Bar (1934); Gloria Holden seducing Nan Grey in the otherwise ho-hum Dracula’s Daughter (1936); Cary Grant “going gay all of a sudden” in Bringing Up Baby (1938); Judith Anderson fondling Rebecca‘s underthings (1940); Peter Lorre sucking on that phallic walking-stick handle in The Maltese Falcon (1941); John Ireland and Montgomery Clift comparing… something… in Red River (1948); the jaw-dropping excerpts from the 1950 women’s prison picture Caged; Doris Day’s exuberant rendition of “Secret Love” in Calamity Jane (1953); Jack Lemmon explaining to Tony Curtis why a guy would want to marry a guy in Some Like It Hot (1959); Peter Finch kissing Murray Head in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971); the wonderful “Screw Maximilian!” dialogue between Michael York and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret (1972); Antonio Fargas assuring all and sundry that he is “more man than you’ll ever be, and more woman than you’ll ever get!” in Car Wash (1976); Michael Ontkean making love to Harry Hamlin in the 1982 picture of the same name; and Robert Preston and Leslie Ann Warren exchanging viewpoints in Victor/Victoria (also 1982, the year as well of Deathtrap and Personal Best. And O! how the appearance of four movies, out of hundreds in the theaters, in which gay characters were central shook up the press that year!)

On the debit side: Kirk Douglas telling Lauren Bacall she’s “a sick girl” in Young Man with a Horn (1950); Sal Mineo being gunned down by the cops at the end of Rebel Without a Cause (1955); John Kerr being taught how to “walk like a man” by his roommate, the stick up whose ass seems to have a stick up its ass (thank you, Al Franken) in Tea and Sympathy (1956); the faceless Sebastian Venable being devoured by a mob of angry boys in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959); Shirley MacLaine breaking down (“I feel so dirty!”) when she finally realizes she really is the Lesbian she’s been accused of being in The Children’s Hour (1961); the utterly ludicrous, wordless “I’ll exercise half-naked with you, and fondle you in the showers, and kiss your hand and even your lips, but I won’t make out with you because that would be faggy” sequence between Brad Davis and Norbert Weisser in Midnight Express (1978)*; and the horrific murder of a gay man who picks up absolutely the wrong trick in Cruising (1980). I think, however, that the filmmakers and their interviewees err in not recognizing, apropos the clips they feature and discuss from the 1968 Frank Sinatra thriller The Detective, how internalized homophobia is itself the chief villain in the movie, that fact intelligently juxtaposed by the screenwriter Abby Mann with Sinatra’s disgust at the vicious attitudes toward gay men of his fellow cops, which he very pointedly calls them on.

Re-watching The Celluloid Closet almost 30 years after its premiere, it is eminently possible, if you were alive and aware at that time, to feel a genuine pang of nostalgia for the many interviewees who have since joined the majority: Quentin Crisp, Jay Presson Allen, Mart Crowley, Farley Granger, Arthur Laurents, Tony Curtis. Stewart Stern, John Schlesinger, Daniel Melnick and especially Gore Vidal, whose sane, reasoned and invariably witty voice has never been more needed than it is now, in these days of Democrat pro-war agitation and deep affection for the Permanent Government’s inbred totalitarianism.

But here is one Vito unaccountably missed: Charlie Chaplin starting to undress for an (interrupted) assignation with a flirtatious cabin-boy in the 1915 Shanghaied. No one seems to have ever talked about that.

You can see the whole thing here. The moment in question is at 7:25.

Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross

*In his 2020 memoir Chasing the Light, Oliver Stone, who was given an Academy Award for his Midnight Express screenplay, says the fault for that scene properly belongs to Billy Hayes, on whose book the movie was based and who, Stone avers, deliberately kept his sexuality from the filmmakers, only coming out of the closet publicly after the movie had opened. There may be some validity to this. On the other hand, the picture was directed by that congenital liar Alan Parker who, with the singular exception of the 1982 Shoot the Moon (and for which I credit the screenwriter, Bo Goldman) never made an honest movie in his life. This is the man for whom, please remember, in 1980’s Fame there was only a single, sad, lonely gay teenager in the entire New York High School for Performing Arts. And since Hayes claimed that, unlike in the movie, no one in the Turkish prison ever tried to rape him, we may at best take Stone’s words at half face-value.

Post-Script: Here he goes again, Marge

I almost feel, reading over the following, that I should perhaps post it as a separate essay. But since it’s related to the topic, I’ll leave it here.

As if in proof that everything good in the world can be turned into something, if not precisely bad at least deleterious, Vito Russo’s groundbreaking study has (perhaps inevitably?) led in the intervening decades to an entire cottage industry of specious academic “study” under the rubric of something called “queer theory,” which can refract any-and-everything through an increasingly absurd prism using such idiotic non-words as “cis-gendered” and relying heavily on the ability to re-write social history to push a narrow agenda that will nevertheless find favor with a depressingly large swath of unquestioning True Believers.

Thus do we now get such irredeemably demented items as a recent Bfi Film Classics monograph on The Empire Strikes Back in which the author, whom no one outside a tiny cadre of presumably like-minded dolts in Great Britain has ever heard of, subjects one of the most popular and beloved movies of the last 50 years to a mind-boggling series of unhinged hypotheses. Rebecca Harrison identifies herself as “a feminist academic, culture writer and broadcaster [whose] award-winning research [award-winning research?] explores how our everyday lives are shaped by media and technology, and how in turn our encounters with machines [emphasis mine] are informed by experiences of gender, race, sexuality and class. She champions trans-inclusive feminist art and politics through events such as the Glasgow Feminist Arts Festival [I’ll bet that’s a laff-riot] and her work on gender-based violence.” Harrison’s staggeringly wrong-headed and virtually unreadable little book is thus dedicated to “to all trans, non-binary, gay, lesbian, bisexual, of colour, disabled, sex worker, indigenous, survivor, working-class and women [Did I forget anyone?] Star Wars fans…”

In this appalling thing the British Film Institute saw fit to hurl in the faces of the many Star Wars aficionados who had been waiting for it the writer claims, with what to me seems undisguised homophobia, that Darth Vader is gay because he is only interested in Luke, not Leia. Harrison’s other observations on Vader border on, if they do not spill over into, sheer insanity: “Carrying the weight of his queerness and blackness in his dominant stance above the young Jedi, Vader’s famous line is a multifaceted plot twist[…] It is an immaculate conception and a motherless birth; he is a black father, and a queer father, too.” Darth Vader is black. Why? Because James Earl Jones provided his electronically-altered voice. And he’s not just a gay father, but one who lusts after his young son. (That’s what I mean by homophobic.) Nor is the lunacy limited to the author’s main text; Harrison’s very photos captions cause the gorge to rise. Viz: “Luke and Vader clash in a slow-motion sequence of queer time” and “The black-and-queer-coded Darth Vader tries to entice Luke to the Dark Side.” It’s anyone’s guess what queer time is, let alone of the slow-motion variety, but I doubt it will surprise you to learn that the author determines Leia herself is an elitist… and a racist. (Of course she’s an elitist, you unbelievable twit: She’s a fucking princess!) One hopes the Bfi duly received its ESG points from Klaus Schwab for publishing this utterly worthless and certifiably deranged collection of indigestible bilge.

In addition to such spurious inanity passing as movie criticism, we are also told now that Stonewall was not an uprising of (mostly nelly) black, white and Latino men against a system that assumed it would always be able to oppress them but was instead led entirely by transsexuals. Black transsexuals, naturally. Big city “Pride” marches (which I argue have been unnecessary for years now and are pushed along largely by unquestioning complacency and social inertia) routinely exclude as planners and marshals any gay men at all, Caucasian or otherwise, in favor of Lesbian women and “trans,” both groups having marginal numbers among homosexual Americans†; elderly Stonewall veterans are assaulted by “transgender activists”; and I am lectured by know-nothing pipsqueaks that I, as a privileged white gay man, am the problem, that I am “hindering our progress as a queer community,” and that I damn well better step aside and if I do not have the good grace to die, to at least get myself buried somewhere. Inclusion for all! (Except you, white man.)

Well, if you will forgive the paraphrasing of Dylan Thomas — at least I know where it comes from — this old white gay man has no intention of going quietly into that good night of official erasure by a subset of psychologically damaged young people who are demonstrably incapable of rational thought or reason, whose parents were not even alive when the gay rights movement began and who, if Vito Russo was still was us, would no doubt label him a racist transphobe and demand he be removed from sight.

I realize that in the world as it is currently constituted opposition to both neoliberal warmongering and censorship and the bizarre, essentially reactionary, excesses of the alleged “left” is now considered irredeemably right-wing, much as belief in something we used to call freedom of speech is Trump (or is that Putin?)-directed. I also acknowledge that self-justification and personal explanation are a form of weakness; but if someone as socially and politically radical as yours truly is this annoyed and appalled by what’s going on, then what do you think is being engendered — a word very carefully chosen for this context — in the hearts and minds of those less enlightened? The backlash by the majority against mindless, sneering, reactive, me-me-me “Woke” activism is coming, folks. It is not going to be pretty.

†Lesbians comprise only 16% of the self-identified gay population. So-called transsexuals make up less than 1% of the world’s population, and their showing in the so-called “LGBTQ+” demographic is equally miniscule. Further, the evidence suggests most supposed “trans kids” are in fact gay and, if left alone to develop would likely come to terms with their homosexuality in time instead of feeling peer-pressured to presume they are girls-in-boy’s-bodies or boys-in-girl’s-bodies. But since until comparatively recently when “trans” activists figured out a way to highjack the gay-rights movement the transsexual population did not wish to be identified with us fags, I say zei gezunt.

By Scott Ross

As ever, click on the highlighted text for fuller reviews or related links.

Chaplin’s Essanay Comedies 1915 (2015) A Flicker Alley centenary Blu-ray collection from the period following that (see below) during which Charlie Chaplin became the most famous man in the world… to the knowledge of everyone, apparently, other than him; he was so busy toiling over the Keystone comedies that were making him immortal he didn’t quite realize how they were being received, with something approaching a national, and then an international, mania.

The Essanays aren’t as rich, as well-conceived or as excruciatingly funny as the Mutuals from 1916 and 1917, but they show Chaplin growing as a creative filmmaker. Many of his Keystone associates came with him to Essanay including the combative Billy Armstrong; the perennially outraged Ernest Van Pelt; the boyish hulk Bud Jamison; Charlie’s old Karno colleague Fred Goodwins; Leo White with his face like that of a cartoon Frenchman; the statuesque Charlotte Mineau; and, briefly and enticingly, Ben Turpin. (Chaplin quickly felt the cross-eyed comedian was deliberately upstaging him.) Leaving Keystone also separated Chaplin from Mabel Normand but his new leading lady, Edna Purviance, is now the screen actress with whom he is most firmly identified. Edna was not the knockabout Normand was, and she’s a more limited actress, but she’s so lovely in an Edwardian manner and has such a charming presence one can easily see why Charlie was besotted with her, off-screen and on.

Among the highlights of this Flicker Alley boxed set are A Night in the Show, Chaplin’s variation on the “Mumming Birds” sketch that made him famous when he was touring with Fred Karno and in which he plays two roles; The Champion, which is almost a rehearsal for the great boxing sequence in City Lights; The Tramp, which adds a note of pathos at the end… although Charlie cheers himself up before walking off alone; the very funny Keystonesque romp By the Sea; A Woman, in which Chaplin does a more than credible drag routine; The Bank, which also goes in for wistfulness (although I think Chaplin the director holds too long on Charlie the actor’s look of hurt); and the hilarious Shanghaied, which anticipates the later The Immigrant and contains a curious homosexual encounter between Charlie and a coquettish cabin boy that seems, surprisingly, to show the Tramp as erotically fluid. The Burlesque on Carmen shows the work of other hands (and isn’t that funny anyway) and Chaplin does a cameo in a “Bronco” Billy Anderson short called His Regeneration (Anderson was the “A” in “S and A”) which among other things illustrates what an appalling over-actor Anderson was.

The Gnome-Mobile (1967) Ellis Kadison’s mildly entertaining adaptation for Walt Disney of the delightful fantasy novel by Upton Sinclair. It’s not as good as it could be, but still superior to many of the Disney live-action comedies that succeeded it. Considering that Sinclair was a Socialist and that his 1934 run for the governorship of California was vehemently opposed by the Hollywood studio grandees, who forbade their employees to vote for him (O, how today’s liberals must envy that power!) it’s a bit odd that Walt would have championed one of his books. Particularly so since Sinclair’s 1936 novel The Gnomobile was, beneath its wit and magic, a warning about clear-cutting and the Disney company was then in the early stages of clearing an eventual 48 square miles of Everglades for its Orlando theme-park. (Look! Over there! Someone else is harming the planet!)

What’s most enjoyable about the picture are the double casting of Walter Brennan (with and without his teeth) as a paper mill magnate (with) and an excitable 1,000-year old gnome (without); Ed Wynn as another ancient gnome; Richard Deacon as Brennan’s long-suffering assistant; and the company, along the trip, of such old pros as Charles Lane, Gil Lamb and Maudie Prickett. Some of the effects are dodgy, however, and I could have done without the gimmick casting of, as the studio insisted on calling them, “the Mary Poppins kids” Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber. As if that was going to bring ticket-buyers into the theater.

Daddy Long-Legs (1955) Considering the source (Jean Webster’s charming 1912 novel) on which this Fred Astaire/Leslie Caron musical was based, and how gifted Johnny Mercer, who wrote its songs, was, that the movie is so poor is dispiriting. It’s hardly even a musical, since there are only three proper songs (including “Dream” and one of those New Dance Sensations That Aren’t, “The Sluefoot”) and, although its co-stars were nothing if not dancers, not much dancing, either… and what’s there is sub-par for an Astaire picture. The big “Daydream Sequence” ballet, for example, is a pale imitation of what the people in the Arthur Freed unit at MGM had been doing for years. It also says something significant about a Fred Astaire number when the ballet music (by Alex North) is of much greater interest than what Astaire is doing. Jean Negulesco’s widescreen direction is pleasing, anyway, as is the color cinematography of Leon Shamroy, and the lyrics for “Something’s Gotta Give” are among Mercer’s wittiest. Henry and Phoebe Ephron were responsible for the contrived and slightly creepy adaptation (at least in the book the girl’s benefactor wasn’t pushing 60) and, if you’re interested, it took the combined talents of Alfred Newman and Cyril J. Mockridge to compose the unmemorable score and five arrangers (Edward B. Powell, Billy May, Earle Hagen, Skip Martin and Bernard Mayers) to craft the merely adequate orchestrations for the songs. In supporting roles, Thelma Ritter and Fred Clark try to inject some humor into the proceedings but the script lets both of them down. Anne Codee, however, gives a brief, lovely performance as the head of the French orphanage and if you get bored (and you will) you can look for Barrie Chase in one of the dream ballet segments or note that the charming little French boy in An American in Paris who says “Non!” is, a couple of years older, one of the orphans.

The Circus (1928) This least well-known of Charles Chaplin’s silent masterworks is a beautiful, funny, haunting comedy that deserves a far higher reputation than it currently enjoys. In it, the Tramp stumbles into a down-at-heels circus, befriends (and pines for) the owner/ringmaster’s abused step-daughter and becomes the unintentional comic hit of the show. The great irony is that the circus needs him to satisfy the customers but he can only be funny when he isn’t trying.

The gags are marvelous, aided by a camera which allowed for special effects photography within the frame and enabled Charlie to seem to be in a lion’s cage with the cats, or for his disembodied spirit to enact vengeance on his romantic rival. Among the most hilarious sequences are the Tramp’s routine as an animated fun-house automaton and the way he ruins the magician’s act. The funniest recurring bit is both the simplest and the least explicable: The mule that goes insane and chases Charlie every time it sees him. The most astounding episode involves the Tramp having to improvise on the high wire, where he is beset by a bunch of terrified monkeys, one of which attacks him, repeatedly biting him on the nose. How Chaplin endured that without calling “Cut!” I can’t imagine, but it’s surely a testament to his artistic determination.

Merna Kennedy is the circus rider with whom the Tramp falls in love, Al Ernest Garcia plays the Ringmaster and Chaplin’s longtime associate Henry Bergman plays an ageing clown. The Circus, which contains one of Chaplin’s most memorable finales, was a famously troubled production. Not only were there delays and a major fire that destroyed the set but Chaplin was in the midst of a well-publicized and acrimonious divorce. (The period was so miserable he barely mentions the movie in his autobiography.) The 1967 reissue featured a pleasing new score by the writer/director and star that includes an expressive vocal at the beginning, which Chaplin’s amanuensis tricked him into recording. The words to the song are banal, but the sound of his worn yet still eloquent 78-year old voice is strangely touching.

The Parent Trap (1961) This enormously popular Disney marital comedy is also, mirabile dictu, an utter delight 60-plus years after its release. Adapted by David Swift from a novel by Erich Kästner (who also wrote the wonderful Emil and the Detectives) and directed by him, the movie has a charm and a direct, uncomplicated appeal that set it apart not only from many of Disney’s live action comedies but from the bulk of pictures made for children. Kids of all ages loved Hayley Mills as identical twins who, thrown together as antagonists at a summer camp, discover they’re related and decide to switch places and bring their estranged parents together. I imagine the adults in the audience felt more than compensated by the presence of Maureen O’Hara, Brian Keith, Una Merkel, Joanna Barnes, Cathleen Nesbitt and the ever-delightful Charlie Ruggles; and that’s not to mention, in smaller roles, Leo G. Carroll, Linda Watkins, Ruth McDevitt, Frank De Vol and Nancy Kulp. Swift’s screenplay is unusually intelligent and sophisticated, the movie was exquisitely shot by Lucien Ballard, the split-screen photography is generally excellent, and there are some pleasant songs by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, on their way to becoming Disney’s favored house songwriters.

Now for the note of dissonance, and it’s major: If you’re of a logical turn of mind you can certainly argue it’s utterly unlikely that divorcing parents, if they were entirely sane, would like metaphorical Solomons split their children up in infancy. Especially twins. Wouldn’t shared custody of both girls have been more likely, and more healthy? That’s the picture’s only real lapse, but it’s a major stumbling block to plausibility — and, ultimately, to appreciating the Keith and O’Hara characters. What sort of parents divvy up their children like family heirlooms and then never again see the child they don’t have custody of? And who, even a troubled adolescent, would want to bring such insensitive creeps back together?

A Night in Casablanca (1946) A minor (very minor) Marx Brothers comedy that is at least marginally better than the garbage Louis B. Mayer had been relegating Minnie’s boys to at MGM. It started as a Casablanca parody (the correspondence between Groucho and Warner Bros. about A Night in Casablanca is more entertaining than the movie) before being revised. But there is something wrong with a Marx Bros. comedy when it delays Groucho’s entrance by 10 full minutes, which it spends developing the plot. Did any of their fans ever go to see a Marx movie for the Goddamned plot? Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby used to be able to knock that off in a few lines. I won’t bore you with what the screenwriters Joseph Fields and Roland Kibbee are up to. Suffice it to say that Groucho becomes the manager of the Hotel Casablanca, Chico is the proprietor of a Yellow Camel taxi service, and Harpo is the valet of the Nazi villain played by Sig Ruman. (Just don’t think too hard about why an elderly Jew is a notorious Nazi’s general factotum.) Ruman wears a wig, we are told, because the identifying scar on his pate would give him away. Yet he walks around with an even bigger scar on his cheek? That’s the level of logic in this mishegoss.

Groucho has a few sharp lines, a nice running gag involving a champagne bucket, a phonograph, two glasses and a brace of roses, and a good scene in which he accuses a pompous businessman (Paul Harvey) of trying to book a room for an assignation with his outraged wife while Harpo and Chico each get a pleasant instrumental solo. The movie’s composer, Walter Janssen, apparently thought he was scoring a thriller; his is one of the weirdest comedy scores you’ll ever hear. And the director, Archie Mayo, seems fascinated by incidentals: Instead of focusing on Chico playing the piano Mayo repeatedly cuts to close-ups of his hands, and in a scene in which Groucho’s telephone rings adds an insert of the ‘phone even though Groucho is sitting right there beside it. The aeroplane finale is fairly ho-hum but the sequence preceding it, in which the boys keep removing Ruman’s clothing from his trunks as he’s trying to leave the hotel, is hilarious. The former animator Frank Tashlin was an uncredited writer on the picture, and I’d be willing to bet he devised this scene, which has the perfect logic, and the brilliant gag sense, of a great Warner Bros. cartoon. The rest of the thing is so tentative that when, in a pale retread of Walter Woolf’s horrible treatment of him in A Night at the Opera, Harpo is beaten by Ruman, none of his blows come close to landing and the filmmakers don’t even bother adding “slap” sound effects. This is the worst a bloodthirsty Nazi officer can do? Well, at least we’re not exhorted to cheer for the Nazis in this movie the way we’re being told we must either root for actual Jew-hating Nazis in Ukraine or risk being labeled anti-Semites(!) If A Night in Casablanca was being made today, Ruman would be the hero.

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum! (1933) One of the strangest movie musicals ever made. Al Jolson is Bumper, the Mayor of Central Park, where he presides over a motley citizenry of dedicated hobos, subsists on daily handouts from the Mayor of New York (Frank Morgan) and enjoys the freedom of homeless sleep beneath the trees. (No one ever says what he and his constituency do during those New York winters.) Bumper inadvertently gets himself involved with the Mayor’s suicidal/amnesiac girlfriend (the gorgeous Madge Evans), goes to work in a bank to pay her bills and then…

The picture was the brainchild of Ben Hecht and the screenplay was written by the witty playwright S.N. Berman with a few incidental songs (and occasional rhyming dialogue) by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, who appear in brief cameos. The direction was by Lewis Milestone, who indulges himself with fast cuts and camera tricks, only a few of which — like the framed photograph in which Morgan sees an event unfold from his recent past — work. Curiously and despite the title the musical numbers do not include the Harry McClintock Wobblies song which is the picture’s namesake (there’s a new one with the same name) and which Chaplin used so memorably in City Lights two years earlier. It does, however, contain the glorious ballad “You Are Too Beautiful,” sung with unexpected delicacy by Jolson. His entire performance in fact seems almost calculated to win over those who, like me, usually find him unbearable. It succeeds.

Morgan’s part is essentially dramatic but the baby-faced former silent comedy star Harry Langdon has a fine role as a Marxist sanitation worker, and is marvelous. The supporting players include the Keystone comic Chester Conklin and diminutive Edgar Connor as Bumper’s pal Acorn, who complains that Evans is the first woman who’s come between them and whom Jolson can’t seem to keep his hands off. I leave that to others to interpret.

To Catch a Thief (1955) A bright, colorful bauble that virtually defines the word “fluff.” It bears a strong relationship to Alfred Hitchcock’s British thrillers in its wit and air of lightness, although it’s slighter than the best of these because nothing terribly important is at stake, only the freedom of Cary Grant, and that’s an issue that’s not in doubt for a moment. The picture isn’t about anything except having a good time (and, possibly, giving the Hitchcocks a European holiday) and that, admittedly, it gives its audience. Although based on a novel by David Dodge it bears a certain faint resemblance to Raffles (which I suspect also influenced Blake Edwards when he and Maurice Ricklin wrote The Pink Panther). The sparkling screenplay was written by John Michael Hayes, whose collaboration with the director included the unnecessary remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and the sly black comedy The Trouble with Harry (1955). His first picture with Hitchcock, Rear Window (1954), was a masterpiece of setting, character, humor, observation and mounting terror; it was all lean, no fat. To Catch a Thief isn’t nearly that good but it does afford the viewer an opportunity to watch Grant and Grace Kelly, two of the screen’s most beautiful people, lob light but loaded barbs at each other with exquisite precision. Of course, Hitchcock can’t leave well enough alone and so lards his engaging narrative with the sort of daring innuendo only a bluestocking would find objectionable, such as Kelly offering Grant some chicken and pointedly asking whether he prefers a breast or a thigh. (Oh, Mr. Hitchcock! you devil!) That at least is brief. Alas, the extended sequence of the pair making love intercut with shots of fireworks going off outside their window, is not. Hitch never met a Freudian symbol he couldn’t shoehorn into a movie.

Robert Burks performed his usual miracle work as the picture’s cinematographer but Lynn Murray’s musical score is, as was so often the case with Hitchcock’s music in America between the time he worked with Franz Waxman and before his collaboration with Bernard Herrmann, wan and without distinction. The cast, however, is splendid. Grant had one of his two best 1950s roles (the other was also for Hitchcock, in North by Northwest) as John Robie, the former cat burglar and Resistance hero forced to seek out the imposter imperiling his liberty and that of his pre-war compatriots, and shows off his breathtaking handsomeness and his flair for clothes-horsery.Kelly, who is still not fully appreciated because of her enviable blonde beauty, was always interesting to watch. Appropriate to the niece of one of the early 20th century’s wittier playwrights she always had a way with a good line and even in dramatic roles she never pushed too hard or embarrassed herself with the effort; Kelly had the pulchritudinous fascination of Monroe but without the pneumatic excess or the unattractive neurosis. She was awfully good in Rear Window and I think she’s awfully good here. Brigitte Auber contributes a beautiful performance as the young French girl, daughter of one of Robie’s Resistance cohort, who smilingly twits him yet whose jests and gentle barbs mask her feelings, and John Williams gives his standard delightful performance as an insurance man hoping to save his employers from having to shell out money for yet another set of stolen gems. The strongest performance is by Jessie Royce Landis as Kelly’s wealthy widowed mother. By turns sly, forthright and witty, her character is a realist who is quickly tiring of the trappings of sudden wealth and, while maternal and affectionate is not above dressing down her daughter for what she sees as her romantic small-mindedness. It’s a marvelous performance that lends weight to an enterprise in need of something to keep it from floating away.

Filmed largely on the Mediterranean coast of France with lush, glamorous stars wearing attractive clothing and driving sporty cars around breathtaking scenery in VistaVision, To Catch a Thief was, naturally, a big hit.

The General (1927) I regard this tragical-comical-historical-pastoral epic based on a Civil War episode as Buster Keaton’s finest achievement and one of the absolute glories of the silent screen specifically and American movies generally. However, I am about to commit heresy about it, and him. Not because I prefer Chaplin’s pictures as a rule over Keaton’s — I’ve said elsewhere in these pages that comparing the two is a fool’s enterprise and I stand by that — but because Keaton is nowhere near the auteur he is claimed by his boosters among the cineastes. That Keaton is reflexively assessed as a great director (far greater than Chaplin, the line usually continues) by people who seem to have no idea that none of his best work was done without a co-director, is what gets my dander up. We’ll skip the early “Fatty” Arbuckle shorts in which he appeared, and with which Arbuckle is credited, since Buster wasn’t the star of them. But all of his own solo shorts, many of them (One Week, The Scarecrow, The Play House, The Boat, Cops, The Blacksmith, The Balloonatic) among the funniest of the silent era, were co-directed, usually with Edward F. (Eddie) Cline, who also directed the feature Three Ages with Keaton. All of Keaton’s best features had a co-director: Donald Crisp on Keaton’s funniest picture The Navigator, James W. Horne on College, Charles Resiner on Steamboat Bill Jr. and Edward Sedgwick on the often paralyzingly funny The Cameraman. Aside from the visually ingenious short feature Sherlock Jr., the pictures Keaton directed alone are among his weakest: Seven Chances (which despite that marvelous chase at the climax is a bit dull overall), Go West, Battling Butler. Even The General contains the credit “Written and Directed by Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton.” Note that in his titles Keaton’s name always follows that of his co-director. Was this merely generosity, or an indication of who was carrying the greater load? The unthinking, reflexive urge to credit Keaton with everything is the way with auteurists: They load up with half the required data and make ignorant proclamations which become, through repetition, fact.

Bruckman co-wrote several of Keaton’s best movies including Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., The Navigator and The Cameraman. (The adaptation of William Pittenger’s book The Great Locomotive Chase, later filmed under that name in a good serious version by Walt Disney, was by Al Boasberg, Charles Smith and an un-credited Paul Gerard Smith.) So is it to Bruckman, to Keaton or to both of them that we must credit the austere beauty of The General‘s photography, those images which have caused countless Keatonites, including Orson Welles, to swoon and deem them moving evocations of Mathew Brady’s art? And if so, isn’t that due as much to the cinematography of Bert Haines and Devereaux Jennings as to the director(s)? Yet no one ever mentions them either, only Keaton. This seems to me to be carrying auteurism to extremes. Is it perhaps superfluous collective guilt over how Keaton was treated? But how is giving him too much credit now any better than withholding the praise he deserved and had only begun to receive when he died?

Issues of authorship to one side, there are probably more great moments in The General than in any other (non-Chaplin) feature-length silent comedy. It isn’t as funny as some of Keaton’s feature work, due I suspect to its subject matter. Yet it’s every bit as clever, and as perfectly worked out, as his best purely comic pictures. Interestingly, Buster was pilloried by contemporary critics for finding humor in the grim Hell of war but the movie is far less gruesome than many of his short films, which rival in their embrace of the macabre even the most horrific of Stan Laurel’s black comedy ideas. The only gag I can recall that treats death comically in The General is the one involving Buster’s sword, and the “victim” of that is a Union sniper who’s been picking off Keaton’s comrades; I see nothing objectionable about it, and anyway it’s not the death the movie makes fun of but the faulty sword that keeps escaping its hilt, and Buster’s childlike faith that he can rise above it. Keaton’s initial chase after the stolen locomotive, on foot, handcar and, eventually, in another engine, is both brilliantly conceived and perfectly executed, the sight gags building organically from the props at hand. As funny as many of them are they’re also almost shocking in the physical risks Keaton takes, and that we can clearly see him taking, as when he sits, dejected, on the coupling rods of an engine, not aware at first that the train is moving or when he braces himself against the cow-catcher and hurls one railroad tie at another that’s blocking the tracks. Even as we laugh in surprise and delight we’re holding our breath.

Black Magic (1949) An initially engaging Dumas adaptation starring Orson Welles that gradually boils up and overflows the pot. Briskly mounted by Gregory Ratoff from a Charles Bennett and Richard Schayer screenplay (which Bennett said later was rewritten by Ratoff and Welles), the picture was beautifully shot by Ubaldo Arata and Anchise Brizzi. Welles has a high, hammy time of as Cagliostro, Akim Tamiroff provides good support as his surrogate father, Stephen Bekassy makes a meal of his role as the chief villain, Margot Grahame has a deliciously icy turn as Madame du Barry and Frank Latimore is a notable stiff as the hero. In the dual role of Marie Antoinette and the hypnotized object of Welles’ desire, Nancy Guild gives a truly weird performance. As the queen she is appropriately arch, regal and entirely European. As Marie’s innocent look-alike, however, she’s entirely American, and staggeringly bad. How did she manage that?

Doctor Zhivago (1965) The best things in this visually striking David Lean/Robert Bolt adaptation of the splendid Boris Pasternak novel are those scenes and dialogue that are not in the book, chief among them the sequences with Rod Steiger as the amoral Komarovsky and Alec Guinness as Zhivago’s half-brother. Steiger is so good, and Bolt’s lines for him so memorable, you may wish the narrative was centered on him instead of dewy-eyed Omar Sharif. Although Guinness is far too old for Yevgraf in his early scenes and is unconvincingly made up, his performance in the framing device — also created for the movie — could not be bettered; the way he speaks the movie’s final line (“Ah… then it’s a gift”) is so perfect, and conveys so many layers of meaning, it ends the picture on such a genuine high you don’t even mind the umpteenth reprise of Maurice Jarre’s balalaika theme for Julie Christie.

Most of Zhivago‘s cast in fact is excellent, from Christie’s ravishing Lara and Geraldine Chaplin’s Tonya, wiser and more perceptive than her husband knows, to Ralph Richardson’s rich evocation of her gentle father and Tom Courtenay as Lara’s doctrinaire radical husband Pasha, who becomes the feared and hated Soviet killer Strelnikov. Only Sharif struggles, in a role that calls for him to be emotive at periodic intervals and to act with his big, limpid eyes, through which is supposedly reflected Yuri’s poet’s soul. The worst example of this device is the St. Petersburg massacre of peaceful protesters, “seen” through Zhivago’s eyes, which although he is looking down from a balcony, frequently look upward. To Heaven? It’s as phony and “pictorial” — as studied — a sequence as can be found in Lean’s filmography.

Although for once I find Lean’s visual mastery overdone, there is much in the picture that, like the goggles hanging on the branch at the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia and the marchers whistling “The Colonel Bogey March” in Bridge on the River Kwai, can stay with you for decades: The funeral of Yuri’s mother; the soldiers on horseback thundering over the ice; Komarovsky running through the house when Lara’s mother attempts suicide; Zhivago’s trek across the snow-bound roads, his beard and mustache caked with frozen condensation; Lara’s red gown and the gun in her hand; the ridiculous but ethereally beautiful “ice palace”; the shock-cut to Courtenay’s Strelnikov just before the Intermission. Freddie Young’s cinematography, superb in a theater, still looks remarkable on a plasma screen.

The Shop Around the Corner (1940) That loveliest of all romantic comedies, with perfect direction by Ernest Lubitsch, a witty and rhapsodic script by Samson Raphaelson, glorious photography by William Daniels, a typically marvelous performance by James Stewart, a charming one by Margaret Sullavan and wonderful support from everyone else.

Chaplin at Keystone: An International Collaboration of 34 Original Films (1914) A nearly complete collection of restored titles from the year, and the studio, that made Charles Chaplin the most famous (and, more significantly, the most well-liked) man on earth in a single year. This 4-disc DVD set includes all the extant shorts in which Chaplin appeared and which saw his development as a natural screen comedian as well as the refinement of his Tramp character. Charlie isn’t the Tramp in every short; indeed, for most of them he’s not, although he’s usually clad in the same oversized boots and too-large trousers even when he’s supposed to be a workingman or a bourgeois. The Keystone Tramp is not quite the character Chaplin further refined during the year at Essanay (see above), and he’s often both lewd and aggressive. Mack Sennett’s studio emphasized the crude and the physical, and the whole team seemed at times inflicted with a curious fixation on the human rump. Charlie here is as eager as everyone else at Keystone to kick someone in the ass (men, women, children — it scarcely seemed to matter whose backside was assaulted) and as likely to have his own kicked. The Sennett plots were rudimentary, and they invariably end in some sort of chase. I suspect that, at the close of his Mutual contract, Chaplin was both invoking and saying a final farewell to the Sennett chase with his screamingly funny two-reeler The Adventurer; it’s the greatest Keystone comedy Mack Sennett never made.

It’s remarkable how often in his Keystone shorts Charlie portrayed a cad or a villain. In Mabel at the Wheel, for example, he reminds me of no one more than Jack Lemmon’s otherwise peerless Professor Fate in The Great Race. (I have a feeling that although he dedicated his picture to Laurel and Hardy, Blake Edwards had this two-reeler in mind when he and Arthur Ross created the character for Lemmon.) Although it was his second outing for Sennett, Kid Auto Races in Venice was the first in release, and started the vogue for the Chaplin Tramp. It’s marvelous to see it now, and to study a screen legend in situ, which but for Chaplin’s genius at pantomime might have been, as indeed it was intended, just another gag character in just another raucous Keystone comedy. It’s instructive to watch him at work opposite Ford Sterling, whom he was hired to replace. Sterling is Keystone personified, every gesture and facial tic amusingly oversold (no one in life has ever leapt into the air prior to running away, but everyone does it at Keystone) where Chaplin, who is often called upon to be broad, is broad in far subtler ways. This is not mere hindsight; you can see how his style contrasts with everyone else’s including that of the adorable Mabel Normand. We get in these shorts the rare opportunity to see Chaplin as he looked in life (Tango Tangles, during which Sterling hilariously plants a big kiss on Charlie’s lips) and in drag (A Busy Day, where he’s a pantomime termagant; and The Masquerader in which he is altogether more refined). We also see the germs of other, better, work to come.

The Flicker Alley set includes the Marie Dressler vehicle Tillie’s Punctured Romance, the first feature-length American movie comedy. Although the picture is only occasionally funny it’s fascinating to see Charlie as a heartless gold-digger and Dressler as a knockabout clown. (She gets kicked in the slats a lot too.) Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle stars in a couple of titles here and among the great supporting Keystone comedians are Chester Conklin, the Amazonian Alice Davenport and Phyllis Allen, Al St. John, Hank Mann, Edgar Kennedy, Harry McCoy, Slim Summerville, the young (and usually mustache-less) Charley Chase, the absurdly self-named Jess Dandy, the treasurable Minta Durfee, the great Mack Swain and even, on occasion, Sennett himself.

Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross

By Scott Ross

I discovered this morning that my August report mysteriously disappeared from the site and reverted to “draft” status. Before re-publishing I have deleted the new September post and combined it with August.

Confused? You’re not the only one.

August 2020

The Gold Rush (1925) Charles Chaplin’s epic comedy. James Agee: “Anyone who saw Chaplin eating a boiled shoe like brook trout in The Gold Rush… has seen perfection.”

The Way We Were (1973) A potentially great romantic drama effectively sabotaged, mostly by the usual spineless obduracy of Sydney Pollack.

One-Eyed Jacks (1961) An interesting, well-made, overlong allegorical Western, notable as the only movie directed by Marlon Brando. Like several such one-offs made by actors (The Night of the Hunter is the most notable) the picture demonstrates that the man who made it had a genuine gift for filmmaking even if, as Barry Gifford notes in Brando Rides Alone, his interesting little book on the movie, director Brando made sure star Marlon looked more beautiful throughout the picture than ever before on the screen, even as his weight fluctuated and his backside expanded as much as his belly.

Based on The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, Charles Neider’s 1956 variation on Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, the movie was part of Brando’s attempt to make himself independently wealthy as a producer so he could, he hoped, walk away from acting for good. Thanks in part to his father’s unreliability as a manager and to his own dithering, it was a doomed effort. The picture took years to go into production, years more to come out of it, and went through several screenwriters (Sam Peckinpah, Rod Serling, Guy Trosper, Calder Willingham and, ultimately, although uncredited, Brando himself) and one director (Stanley Kubrick) before its star took the reins. That it was seized by Paramount, re-cut, perfunctorily released and, eventually, allowed to lapse out of copyright and into cheap home video copies, is, in the area of classic irony, almost perfect. Fortunately, the picture has been restored and reissued via Criterion, allowing us to bask in the beauty of Brando’s glorious VistaVision images and to ponder what a filmmaking talent was lost in him when One-Eyed Jacks was a flop.

The more you know about Brando, and about his tortured familial relationships, the more you may appreciate the way One Eyed Jacks expands upon the actor’s seeming need to be martyred onscreen and the dark father/son surrogacy at the movie’s core. Aside from Charles Lang’s painterly cinematography and some pungent dialogue, the picture’s chief virtue is that it is wonderfully cast; even Karl Malden is more subtle than usual. Along with his own, beautifully considered performance, Brando gets wonderful work from the entire cast: The tragic, delicate Pina Pellicer (she committed suicide three years later); the always intelligent Katy Jurado; Larry Duran in a fine turn as Brando’s Latino sidekick; the monstrous Timothy Carey as a murderously belligerent drunk; Elisha Cook Jr. as a timorous bank teller; and, especially, Ben Johnson as a slyly duplicitous outlaw and Slim Pickens as a bullying coward of a deputy sheriff. Hugo Friedhofer has never been a favorite movie composer of mine — his supposed compositional genius eludes my ears — but his work here is stellar and includes a genuinely great major theme for Brando and Pellicer.

Tex Avery Screwball Classics Volume 1 (1943 – 1958) Friz Freleng once noted of his old Termite Terrace colleague that Avery’s MGM cartoons were the products of a desperate man, and their speed and relentlessness lend credence to that observation. They can feel, as they did to a college roommate of mine to whom I once showed a clutch of them on video tape, like assaults. But at their (and his) considerable best they are probably funnier than almost anyone else’s cartoons.

Watership Down (1978) Martin Rosen’s striking adaptation of the beautiful Richard Adams novel about a group of rabbits seeking safety and refuge in a new warren is one of the few genuinely serious, even grim, animated features made before the modern era and, while only 90 minutes long, somehow manages to limn most of the important incidents of a beloved 500-page novel and even to retain a great deal of that book’s strong emotional impact.

The Chaplin Revue (1959) A compilation of three two-reelers from Chaplin’s First National years, two from 1918 and one from 1923. Supervised by the filmmaker and including his own fine newly composed scores, this omnibus package represents an excellent glimpse of what the most original and revered comic mind of the era was up to then, and at least this time Chaplin didn’t, as with his 1942 reissue of The Gold Rush (1925), include any intrusive narration. A Dog’s Life has a genuine, un-sticky sweetness, even if it does switch the sex of Charlie’s canine companion at the end; Shoulder Arms gives a good account of the misery of life at the front during The War to End Wars, leavened by Chaplin’s usual genius for finding the comic even in the face of absolute despair; and The Pilgrim has a good time at the expense of the pious, especially in the long Sunday afternoon visiting sequence where Charlie, disguised as a preacher, is bedeviled by a derby coated in frosting and pestered by little Dean Riesner as a brat with a bent for smacking adults in the face.

Deep Rising (1998) I wish I could explain, even to myself, my affection for this big, dumb, loud, CGI-laden action comedy written and directed by Stephen Sommers,* who later struck gold with his equally dumb (and equally loud) Mummy pictures. It has all the subtlety of a brick dropped on the head from a great height: It takes its narrative and structural cues largely from the Alien movies; most of its humor is of that same sour, wise-ass variety that has killed real wit in American movies; the computer-generated sea monsters are a let-down, as these things tend to be; a little of Kevin J. O’Connor’s tremulous weaseliness is more than sufficient; and, even worse, Anthony Heald, perhaps the single worst American actor aside from Hart Bochner, is also on board to stink up the joint with every word he speaks. Yet something in it appeals to me. That its central actors are Treat Williams and Famke Janssen doesn’t hurt, nor does Wes Studi’s presence as one of the main villains, and Jerry Goldsmith’s propulsive score is a favorite of mine among his later work, perhaps because it doesn’t take itself seriously, or rely on synthesizers, as so many of his later action scores did.

*Robert Mark Kamen was the first, and un-credited, screenwriter before Sommers took over the project.

Charlie Chaplin First National two-reelers (1919 – 1922) A mixed bag, although every one of them is funny in the old Mutual manner. Sunnyside (1919) is among Chaplin’s strangest movies; he often didn’t know how the picture he was working on would develop, and improvised his way through, but on this one he was really stumped, and it shows. A Day’s Pleasure (1919) which depicts a middle-class lark on board a pleasure cruise is inconsequential but frequently hilarious: Charlie performs a routine with a deck chair that would do Buster Keaton proud, and the climactic sequence involving a traffic cop and some hot tar is a gem. Payday (1922) is a rarity, in that Charlie is a working stiff and married, to Phyllis Allen as an Amazonian harridan; the best (and best shot) sequences involve his drunken attempts to get home, and the teeming rain he encounters is beautifully lit and filmed. Finest of the lot is The Idle Class (1921), a classic Tramp set-up with some side-splitting comic business. The first half involves the Little Fellow attempting to play through on a Florida golf course and encountering Mack Swain and John Rand, whom he inadvertently sets at each other’s throats. The second concerns the Tramp’s being mistaken first as a pickpocket and later for his own double, a wealthy sot with a disaffected wife (Edna Purviance). Although the climax, on a slippery dance floor, borrows a bit from both The Rink (1916) and The Adventurer (1917) it is nevertheless wildly funny.

The Warner/M2K Diffusion DVD includes A Study in Undercranking, a very informative documentary by the silent movie specialist and accompanist Ben Model on how varying film speed heightens or dampens the effectiveness of Chaplin’s comedy. Since he authorized the later change to a uniform 24 frames-per-second (the silent standard was 18f.p.s.) Chaplin himself, oddly, sometimes sabotaged his own best gags.

Unknown Chaplin (1983) This splendid three-part examination of Chaplin’s working methods was a revelation 27 years ago, and retains its fascination. Availing themselves of the filmmaker’s carefully stored outtakes, the silent movie historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill reconstructed the means by which Chaplin developed his pictures. Not through a script — which almost no one in those days used for comedy — but by in essence writing on film: Setting up a potential scenario, trying this idea or that, and only gradually discovering what his movie was. Among comedians only Chaplin, the most well-known and popular figure in the world by 1915, could have afforded or gotten away with it. As a result, his use of raw stock was profligate; indeed, Brownlow and Gill cite the astonishing intelligence that in creating The Immigrant (1917) Chaplin ultimately used up as much film on that two-reeler as Griffith did on the whole of Intolerance. James Mason’s pleasing narration is a decided asset, as are the interviews with Chaplin’s leading ladies (Georgia Hale, Virginia Cherrill) and his ex-wife, Lita Grey, which have the added benefit of reminding us, in this age of plastic surgery addiction, how lovely old women used to look.

Chaplin’s Mutual Comedies (1916 – 1917) Flicker Alley’s terrific set of two-reelers from Charles Chaplin’s first great creative period, lovingly restored, most of them looking better than they have in a century. (A century — imagine!)

Rules Don’t Apply (2016) Warren Beatty’s entertaining fantasia on Howard Hughes cannily mixes fact, fiction, events and dates in a way that will either confound or delight you, depending on whether you get what he’s up to. I was delighted.

Oklahoma Crude (1973) An engaging comedy-drama by Marc Norman from his novel, wonderfully acted by George C. Scott, Faye Dunaway and John Mills.

The Great Train Robbery (1978) Michael Crichton’s witty, sumptuous-looking adaptation of his own entertaining novel based on the 1853 event looks, and sounds, better with every passing year.

Murder by Decree (1979) This beautiful, sad, moving mystery/thriller pitting Christopher Plummer’s magnificent Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper is not only a relic of another century; compared to the stupidity, cynicism and slick manipulation abounding in Western cinema today its intelligence, humanism and sheer craft feel as if they belong to entirely different civilization.

Pygmalion (1938) Few pictures of its period provide the refreshment, intellectual and otherwise, that this marvelous edition of Bernard Shaw’s comedy of ideas does.

September 2020

Bananas (1971) Woody Allen’s second feature as a scenarist and director, which like the 1969 Take the Money and Run was co-written with Mickey Rose. It isn’t as funny as it could be, and never was, but it has several good belly-laughs, especially the scene at the airport in which the singer Eulogio Peraza has the best gag in the picture, and gives its funniest performance.

everything you always wanted to know about sex* (*but were afraid to ask) (1972) An intermittently amusing takeoff by Woody Allen on the vile David Reuben bestseller with two good sequences: One inside the body a man about to have intercourse and the other with a transvestite hilariously played by Lou Jacobi.

Day of the Outlaw (1959) This stark, intelligent, intensely beautiful black-and-white winter Western starring Robert Ryan and directed by Andre DeToth improves with each new viewing.

Five-Star Final (1931) An early talkie with some terrific performances yolked, alas, to a godawful bunch of ham goody-goodies.

A Little Romance (1979) The lovely romantic comedy by Allan Burns out of Patrick Cauvin, beautifully directed by George Roy Hill, as beguiling now as it was a little over 40 years ago.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) William Goldman’s very original tragicomic Western, marvelously directed by George Roy Hill and beautifully filmed by Conrad Hall.

The Seven-Ups (1973) A sort of unofficial sequel to The French Connection, concocted by one of the two real key cop figures of that picture and directed by its producer, this tense, grim New York police procedural boasts a splendid central performance by Roy Scheider, a very fine supporting turn by Tony Lo Bianco, and a car chase sequence that, in its grittiness and excitement rivals if it does not in fact surpass those in Connection and Bullitt. Interestingly, Scheider and his elite police team use tactics at least as fascistic as “Dirty Harry” Callahan, but unlike with Eastwood or Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle, no one at the time seemed to notice.

Indiscreet (1958) It’s difficult to believe a comedy as painfully labored as this one could have been directed by Stanley Donen and starred Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Yet writers continually rhapsodize, with little justification, over its alleged “sophistication” when the words that best describe it are two others beginning with an s: “Stagy” and “smarmy.” Based by Norman Krasna on his play Kind Sir, the picture concerns the clearly erotic (not mere conventional movie “love”) affair between a rich economist and a stage actress (who, although obviously Swedish, comes complete with a just as obviously British sister). Indiscreet is so uncertain about its tone that, when we are supposed to be observing Grant and Bergman falling in love she first babbles like a middle-school student over-excited on tea then, as they walk along the streets of London together, descends into a silence that resembles deep depression. Next thing we know, hey presto! they’re lovers. Donen, using the split-screen techniques he was so enamored of, depicts the two, daringly for the period, in separate beds but seemingly in the same one and has Cary appear at one point to be patting Ingrid’s ass (oh, naughty!) Along the way we get such delights as breathless paeans to NATO, keys hidden in urns, and a butler roped into pretending he’s the insanely jealous Bergman’s secret lover. About the only saving graces of this witless endeavor are Grant briefly launching into a Curly Howard routine at a dance, a single good line of Bergman’s (“How dare he make love to me and not be a married man!”) and a marvelous supporting performance by Cecil Parker as her diplomat brother-in-law. I’m normally predisposed to be charitable to Grant, Bergman and Donen, but Indiscreet is the kind of movie that could put you off all three for life.

The Offense (1973) A disturbing cop drama that, while occasionally effective (if not especially true) as a character study, is also maddeningly directed by Sidney Lumet. Based by John Hopkins on his own play This Story of Yours (neither it nor The Offense are good titles) the picture violates the basic movie rule of confusing its audience by not identifying its location; perhaps if you live in or are otherwise familiar with the Greater London area you wouldn’t be as lost as I was, but far too much of my viewing time was wasted trying to figure out where the story was taking place. Then there is Lumet’s baffling penchant for extended takes in which a car is driven or a young girl walks down a lane. The individual shots mean little, yet we sit there thinking they must add up to something because they’re going on so long. Add to that the utter impenetrability of many of the actors’ thick regional accents, the strikingly dated and correspondingly annoying electronic “score” by Harrison Birtwistle which is somehow both “played by” the London Sinfonietta and “realized” by someone called Peter Zinovieff, the enigmatic slow-motion opening which must then be explained in detail (and in pieces) and the sheer, stagy, Sam Shepard-like unbelievability of the story and characters (you know as you’re watching exactly which scenes were lifted intact from the play) and what you mostly have to cling to are the performances by Sean Connery as a police detective enraged as much by his identification with a child molester as by the crimes themselves, Ian Bannen as the suspect, Trevor Howard as the Superintendent trying to understand what happened when Connery killed Bannen, and Vivien Merchant as the detective’s long-suffering wife. Good as they all all, even they are not enough. It’s all depressing as hell, which I mind far less than its having irritated me too.

Men in War (1957) Van Van Praag’s World War II novel Day Without End, transposed by Ben Maddow to Korea, starring the great Robert Ryan, starkly photographed by Ernest Haller and directed with taut verisimilitude by Anthony Mann.* Every time you feel the narrative move toward a war-movie cliché, Maddow and Mann turn away from it, so that at the end there are only the survivors, and that ugly, blasted hill they’ve taken at so terrible a cost. Tellingly, the Pentagon declined its assistance, allegedly over some of the men’s attitudes toward orders. Balls. That’s happened time and again in war pictures. I suspect they saw Men in War for what it really is: A perfect illustration of the futility, and the ultimate folly and obscenity, of war.

Aside from Ryan, giving one of his usual impeccably understated performances, the fine cast includes Nehemiah Persoff, Phillip Pine, L.Q. Jones, a young Vic Morrow, James Edwards as a gentle staff sergeant, Aldo Ray as a belligerent non-com concerned only with saving his shell-shocked colonel, and, as the colonel, the splendid Robert Keith, who gives a nearly wordless performance of exceptional eloquence. The brief, effective Elmer Bernstein score is in keeping with the movie’s admirable restraint.

*Look in vain for Maddow’s by-line, however; even on the Olive Films Blu-ray, almost 65 years after the picture’s release, his blacklist-era front, Philip Yordan, still gets the credit.

Text copyright 2020 by Scott Ross

By Scott Ross

If one loves movies, and movie soundtracks, one presumably has a mental wish-list of scores that never received a commercial release. I can vividly remember letting out a very audible gasp the day I stumbled across the Varѐse Sarabande studio recording by the conductor Laurie Johnson’s of Bernard Herrmann’s North by Northwest score in the soundtrack bin at Sam Goody’s in 1980. True, it wasn’t the actual soundtrack, but it was North by Northwest! A cherished score that, from its debut in 1959, had — inexplicably, to me — never been issued on LP. I was equally excited to stumble across a Herrmann-conducted Psycho album some time later, although seeing the movie again made me realize that the composer had slowed down the tempos far too much (often by half), losing a great deal of slashing terror in the process.

The turn of the century saw the emergence of specialty labels devoted to preserving and issuing the work of the great movie composers. Film Score Monthly was the leader, and more either followed, or expanded: Buy Soundtrax, Prometheus, Intrada, Varѐse, Perseverance, Percepto (although these last two seem to have disappeared), La-La Land, Quartet, Kritzerland and (briefly, before Time-Warner took it over and began farming out the soundtrack jobs to other labels) Rhino/Turner and Rhino Handmade. That last must have really hurt, as Rhino, through Turner, had been the hands-down leader in releasing quality discs of musicals and dramatic scores from the vast MGM library, in fulsome packages that, unlike the MGM albums of the period (and the 1970s reissues) presented the scores entire, with previously truncated songs heard complete for the first time. Singin’ in the Rain in particular benefited from Rhino/Turner’s handling if it.

Now, of course, we’re told that the compact disc itself is a dying format. Based on the difficulty in finding a decent used CD player these days (there are no new ones), I have to assume it’s true… or at least, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know that a host of problems attend these things, not least of them dealing with studios and musicians’ unions over what are called “re-use rights.” But while even the venerable FSM has lately given up the ghost, a few of the labels above are still kicking, and they’re going at the problems full-tilt. So, the soundtrack nut can perhaps be forgiven for hoping that a few of his favorite scores, up to now only available on LP (if at all) will one day make the leap to digital. The following constitute my personal wish-list.

10. 1776. This one holds a special place in my heart. Seeing the movie of the Sherman Edwards musical play in 1972 turned me on to both musical theatre and American history, and I daresay that over time I wore the record down to the sonic equivalent of a hockey-puck through over-playing. I managed to come across a CD boot once, on EBay, presumably made from the laser-disc (at the time the only way to see it with the additional footage, since restored and reissued on DVD and Blu-ray) and saddled with some dialogue, but to date there has been no professionally-produced release and there damn well ought to be… although I’m not holding my breath on this one.

9. Cactus Flower Aside, possibly, from the Johnny Wesley vocal “I Needs to be Bee’d with,” and it’s been years since I watched the picture so I can’t say for certain, I don’t think there’s a note on this record that shows up in the movie in the format Quincy Jones adopted for the “soundtrack” LP. With its numerous funky Jones arrangements of then-current Columbia/Bell pop hits (“To Sir with Love,” “She Hangs Out,” I’m a Believer,” “I Wonder What She’s Doin’ Tonight?”) it has the feel of a marketing ploy rather than a genuine movie soundtrack. It also contains four separate versions of the main title song (“The Time for Love is Anytime”) by Jones and the underrated lyricist Cynthia Weill, each in a different style: Vocal (the sublime Sarah Vaughan), trumpet and harpsichord-led mood version, piano and strings and a final pass accented by electric piano. Although I prefer Sassy’s vocal in the movie, it’s a lot shorter than the one here, and the entire record has a happy late-’60s quality that captured me when I found the record in a trim-bin at 11 — it was my introduction to Vaughan’s rich contralto and peerless phrasing — and which still makes me smile. Hell, the whole record gives me joy.

Post-Script: December 2020

Having just seen the movie again for the first time in decades, on the Mill Creek Blu-ray, I can happily attest that I was almost entirely incorrect about the LP not being a true soundtrack. While all but one (or possibly two; the sound in the sequence was dialed down so low I couldn’t tell for sure) of the instrumental versions of the title song are not in the picture (and neither is Sassy’s record vocal, although she sings abbreviated versions in the main and end titles) the rest of the Jones-arranged pop instrumentals absolutely are; they’re heard in the various scenes at a trendy Village discotheque where the more outrageous complications of the elaborate farce-plot occur. Mea culpa, Q.

8. How Sweet It Is! An old favorite, with, alas, no CD reissue… yet (Kritzerland? Quartet? La-La Land?) I don’t remember much about the movie, and I don’t recall it being especially funny (except for one riotous moment involving Debbie Reynolds and Vitto Scotti, depicted in pink on the album cover’s kaleidoscope.) But I love this score. I’m not sure how much of it is actual soundtrack and how much filler, or re-recorded for the album, both heavy practices in the late ’60s. It was my introduction to Patrick Williams, and to Jimmy Webb as a name; he wrote two kooky, exceptionally melodic, beautifully arranged and very likable songs for it. (I’d already heard many of his compositions on the radio, of course, without knowing he’d written them.) Pat Williams is not nearly as well-known as he ought to be. This was his first movie scoring job. It’s very much of its period (1968) but unlike, say, David Grusin’s banal background score for The Graduate, you can listen to even the dance music in it with great pleasure, and no embarrassment at how upper middle-class/pseudo-hip and “dated” it sounds. I doubt this one will ever get a CD release, as it’s far too esoteric. But a boy can dream, can’t he?

Update: 2017

The British label Vocalion released How Sweet it is!, all 28 glorious minutes of it, in 2016. A brief recording, but a wonderful one. It can be ordered on Amazon.

7. That Darn Cat Robert F. Brunner’s bright, jazzy caper music for the likable 1965 Disney comedy, bookended by Bobby Troup’s vocal renditions of the Sherman Brothers song. One of the few pure orchestral scores Disney ever released on LP, and we still have no CD edition. Intrada has been releasing some well-loved Disney scores of late (John Barry’s The Black Hole, Paul Smith’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Elmer Bernstein’s The Black Cauldron, etc.) so perhaps wishing for this one is not as wild an idea as it might seem.

6. The Bad Seed Alex North was a far greater, and more important, film composer than his public profile would indicate. Here, he limns the depths of a murderous pre-pubescent through the motif of a childish piano exercise, filtered through a demonic orchestration that builds to terrifying heights. Not, alas, on CD, at least in America.

Update the second, 2017

La-La Land reissued this one late in 2017. Two down, eight to go…

5. Silent Movie John Morris was Mel Brooks’ house composer, and his score for Silent Movie is half the fun of the entire enterprise. That this absolutely treasurable comic score has not been reissued (and expanded) on CD is a source of unending dismay and frustration to me.

4. Lawrence of Arabia The score for David Lean’s unmatched epic for the intelligent audience received a reissue of the original 1962 soundtrack LP (on Varѐse) in the ’80s and a fine 2-disc studio reading by Nic Raine on Tadlow; additionally, the 50th anniversary BluRay boxed set contained a soundtrack CD with two extra tracks not on the official release. But the complete soundtrack remains a dream. I’m not a great fan of Maurice Jarre in general, and this is quite possibly not even his best work in a notably spotty career. Still, it’s a score whose original tracks deserve to be heard in their entirety, and the theme itself is so inexorably wed to our image, not only of David Lean’s remarkably intelligent epic, but of the Arabian desert itself that it almost constitutes an entire new genre of movie scoring.

3. Modern Times Chaplin’s “Smile” theme became ubiquitous, especially after Jerry Lewis adopted it. But this is, quite simply, a great comedy score. Chaplin was aided immeasurably in its preparation by David Raksin, but the music is pure Charlie: Startling, wistful, uproarious, and intensely melodic. In 2014, Timothy Brock prepared and conducted a beautiful studio recording of the complete score, but the only commercial release I know of the soundtrack on CD was for a European compilation that paired the original United Artists LP tracks with Raksin’s Laura suite and Herrmann’s Jane Eyre.

Update the third, 2019

The original Modern Times LP tracks too have become available, in a European stand-alone CD from Gonzo Distribution L. There is also an officially-sanctioned boxed set from Chant Du Monde called Charlie Chaplin: The Complete Soundtracks, which contains the complete score. The major drawback: Far too much of the music has not been isolated from the sound-effects tracks. Do you really want, every time you listen to The Kid, to hear glass breaking? But all of the scores for Chaplin’s feature-length pictures are here, as well as those for several of the First National featurettes (Shoulder Arms, A Dog’s Life, The Idle Class, The Pilgrim.)

2. Psycho “Black and white music” for an iconic thriller, performed by string quartet. Nothing ever sounded like it before, and it’s been endlessly imitated since. I don’t think any theme before Jaws evoked so much unease in so many people as Herrmann’s slashing, scarifying “Shower Murder” with its bird-like, screeching strings. Even when you’re expecting the outburst, it still packs a wallop. The above artwork is from a Russian LP release that claimed to be the real thing, but I note that nowhere does it sport the word “soundtrack,” so I’m dubious. (It’s one of two such boots I’ve seen in recent years.) As I noted previously, Herrmann’s own languid re-recording leaves a lot to be desired. Joel McNeely’s on Varѐse is far better, and closer to the film’s fevered tempi. But why Universal, which made a mint on Psycho in 1960, did not deign to release a soundtrack LP at the time, remains an utter mystery to me. (They similarly eschewed an LP of Herrmann’s Cape Fear, and that picture too was profitable. And this at a time when studios released soundtrack albums for damn near everything.) Agonizingly, the original film tracks have since been lost. It’s a fate Psycho shares with all too many classic American scores.

Update the fourth, 2019

The Soundtrack Factory label has recently issued a very good Psycho CD, coupled with the previously-released Vertigo. It’ll do, but it’s not as good as an official release undoubtedly would be.

1. To Kill a Mockingbird That Elmer Bernstein never won an Academy Award for composing is telling. (His sole Oscar is for scoring the non-song portions of Thoroughly Modern Millie.) That he didn’t win one for this one is an outright scandal. It’s my favorite, not merely of his work, but among all movie scores, but my preference is incidental: No one had ever captured the wistfulness and terror of childhood so well before, and no one other than John Williams has come close since. The resolution of those final, elegiac, chords, never fails to send chills of bliss down my spine and tears of emotional release springing to my eyes. Bernstein himself re-recorded it twice, once for his subscription-only label (which was subsequently re-issued by Warner Bros.) and once for Varѐse. The 1962 Ava Records soundtrack showed up on CD, briefly, in the late 1980s, but the reproduction was wretched. A later Intrada edition, in a boxed set of Bernstein’s Ava releases, is of infinitely better quality. Although there is still no complete reissue of the entire score, Universal has been cooperating of late with Intrada on items like full restorations of key Henry Mancini scores of the early 1960s. And so as George Herbert observed I live in hope, dancing without musick.

Update the fifth, 2019

Soundtrack Factory has also released a good digital edition of the original Ava To Kill a Mockingbird soundtrack LP, which has the added incentive of being coupled with Bernstein’s irresistible 1958 studio instrumental jazz album Blues and Brass. But I still don’t believe it contains the entire score as heard in the picture, and it’s not as sonically perfect as an official release could be. What is it with Universal, anyway?

Text copyright 2013 by Scott Ross