The Day of the Locust (John Schlesinger, 1975)

It's no surprise that it took nearly forty years for Nathanael West's 1939 novel The Day of the Locust to get any sort of Hollywood treatment if only because Hollywood, in the year of its greatest flowering, could never countenance such a venomous critique of its ubiquity. But the New Hollywood brats were running amok by the 1970s and West's disdain for Tinseltown was tailor-made for mavericks like Schlesinger and screenwriter Waldo Salt. For one thing, no classical Hollywood director could get away with a faithful airing of the novel's pulpier aspects of nasty violence. For another, the impressionistic, foreshortened chapters found a home in the discursive narratives championed by the New Hollywood directors and their supporters. Like the best of those films, The Day of the Locust dazzles in its indigestibility - its heroless trajectory, its dead-end scenes, its hothouse zoom-cured graphics. 

The only problem with both film and novel is that they traffic in an unearned contempt for humanity. West deserves plaudits for pulling off the paradoxical trick of excavating the interiorities of his most vacuous characters. Nowhere is this more effective as when Homer Simpson [sic] (played with contents-under-pressure subtlety by Donald Sutherland in the film) tries to fill the emptiness of his home by singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" - "It was the only he song he knew." Pace Adorno, I cannot think of a more accurate depiction of a pathetic, incurious life. 

But because West subscribes to the theory that "nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure," his misanthropy gets wearying. Even in the opening pages, he portrays Los Angeles with no hope: "Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon."And as with any garden-variety misanthrope, he professes to know the interiority of the masses or at least the mass accrued outside a Hollywood premiere awaiting their allegorical death by immolation in the climax: "It allowed itself to be hustled and shoved out of habit and because it lacked an objective. It tolerated the police, just as a bull elephant does when he allows a small boy to drive him with a light stick." You get the impression that West feels they deserve the violence that befalls them because "[t]hey haven't the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure." That last is particularly galling since it attributes moral failing in part to a lack of wealth. And it leaves no room to honor those without money who have the equipment for leisure and pleasure, staving off a meaninglessness to which West so weakly succumbs.

Grade: A-minus

Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)

The feeling that comes through most palpably watching Duck Soup in 2024 is the desperation of the vaudeville circuit from whence the Marx Brothers act hailed, the go-for-the-jugular imperative to do something, anything to stay on stage and curry the audience's favor. If the jokes are falling flat, then do a dance. If the dancing won't sustain, then sing a song. If the song is a dud, then do some acrobatics or a magic trick or try another joke. And above all, remember - sing out, Louise! You can see this process in the Vitaphone shorts, early sound films capturing vaudeville greats just as film sound technology was beginning to torpedo vaudeville as a national pastime. Check out the Foy Family in Chips of the Old Block (1928) where in less than eight minutes the famous Seven Foys (down one here although the act had already split up by this point, reuniting only for the film record) sing songs, wear goofy costumes, tell jokes, recite a gruesome fairy tale, perform pratfalls, and hoof it like the rent was due yesterday. And in typical vaudeville fashion, there's no glue holding the activities together; they simply present their trades in an array they hope will tantalize. One brother pretends to choke on his fake teeth and once the other brothers slap it out of him, oh now I guess they're dancing again.

Certainly Duck Soup tells a story to link together the comedic spectacles. But it's the desperate energy of those spectacles that powers the film. The Brothers are constantly mugging, even directly addressing us at times to make sure we're loving it. Everything is a bit even if it may push the narrative forward. Obviously, this is the job of any comedian; witness the relentless quest for laughs in the hilarious new HBO Max series Conan O'Brien Must Go. But it's the buffet-style, take-no-prisoners nature of vaudeville that shines through here. As such, Duck Soup feels strikingly modern today. It's over-amped, nerve-wrecked, anarchic, loud, distracted, violent, all the things classical Hollywood cinema is supposed to lack according to viewers who couldn't stomach the black-and-white cinematography of Netflix's Ripley. 

And perhaps the Brothers were savvy in hitting hard and fast. They were lucky enough to survive as a team (minus Zeppo after Duck Soup) into the 1940s when few vaudeville acts ever made it beyond a Vitaphone short. But their imperative is our blessing. Duck Soup is the Marx brothers' finest film, a noise symphony comprised of untranslatable puns, vicious parodies of patriotic anthems, battle sequences making warmongers look as idiotic and reckless as they are, Harpo dangerous with a huge pair of scissors, and the incomparable mirror scene featuring three Grouchos. All that and it's over in is-that-even-feature-length 68 minutes.

Grade: A

Till the End of Time (Edward Dmytryk, 1946)

This WWII-GIs-coming-home nugget has been overshadowed by William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives from the same year. But while it lacks Wyler deep-focus savvy, it often matches his film in intensity and compassion. There's a scene a third of the way through that is as harrowing as any in Best Years. At a restaurant, principals Guy Madison and Dorothy McGuire notice a marine (Richard Benedict) having a breakdown. They encircle him as a de facto shield from the public and get him to stop violently shaking. It's not only a moment of supreme humanity but it's also one of the most accurate depictions of a panic attack I've ever seen in a film, especially the fear that everyone around you is watching and judging your inability to keep it together. And later in the film, Madison and his buddy Robert Mitchum beat the crap out of some racists in a bar, always a welcome sight.

There's plenty of man flesh on display too. Guy Madison is comically beautiful; he looks like a cartoon character. Lucky Ruth Nelson, playing his mom, gets to touch his foot. And Jean Porter tells Johnny Sands that he needs to put some clothes on (calm down - he's 18). 

Bros (Nicholas Stoller, 2022); Fire Island (Andrew Ahn, 2022)

Bros may be "the first romantic comedy from a major studio about two gay men maybe, possibly, probably stumbling towards love," to quote Universal Pictures' proud press release. But Universal never seemed to wonder who in 2022 cares about gay content coming from a major studio. TikTok and Onlyfans and the Big Streamers shove more gay content down our throats than we can swallow. So while I always want the best for the talented, screamingly camp co-writer and star of Bros Billy Eichner, I wasn't sad when his project failed to set the box office on fire. 

A bigger problem is the "possibly, probably stumbling towards love" part of the equation, i.e., wedging gay characters into the quintessentially heterosexual rom-com formula. As a child growing up in the 1970s and 1980s with a relative paucity of gay representation, I always wanted a genre film with characters who just happen to be gay, say, a Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) where Arnold Schwarzenegger has the hots for Michael Ironside instead of Sharon Stone, no big whoop. Then I saw D.E.B.S. (Angels Robinson, 2004), a sort of lesbian Charlie's Angels, and realized that you cannot make a gay film with the master's tools. For the most part, you wind up with what Kristen Warner calls "plastic representation." To this end, the most perceptive critique of Bros I've encountered is SNL's trailer for Megan 2.0 in which they announce that "It's like Bros, but for gays." So while Bros is cute and funny and as gay as can be within the rom-com formula, the formula itself deadens the film's import.

Fire Island comes off as a critique of Bros avant la lettre, having been released a few months prior. It corrects for Bros' concentration on white characters with a gay/Asian director and a gay/Asian screenwriter and star, Joel Kim Booster. But structurally, the two films are de facto clones of one another. Fire Island even has a further structural burden in that it's inspired by Pride and Prejudice. Cute and funny too but so damn well-behaved in its adherence to formulae that it forestalls any obsessive reception.

Bros: B+

Fire Island: B+

Thunder Birds (William A. Wellman, 1942)

Dopey WWII propaganda film in gorgeous (is there any other kind?) Technicolor memorable only for the hot guys and (maybe) how fervently it courts Chinese participation on the Allies side. The most telling IMDb review discusses just one moment when "Gene [Tierney] steps out of the shower with ringlets in her hair that were captured by the Technicolor light in such a way as to take my breath away and have never forgotten it. Her hair was usually shown dry and perfectly coiffed and this is the only movie of hers I know where those fantastic ringlets were shown." That's the only way a film like this could work - in extremely fleeting images. In short, a movie to screenshot (as I did below with Ms. Tierney's ringlets), not watch.

Grade: C 

 

                                  

The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929)

I'm probably overrating this second Best Picture Oscar winner. But there's no use getting arrogant about the indifferent direction and the creaky story, not when the film features two dynamite performances from Anita Page and, especially, Bessie Love as the striving sister act Queenie and Hank Mahoney. Any hopes that silent cinema would remain the norm were dashed in the climactic dressing room scene when Hank breaks up the act. Sobbing as she slaps cold cream on her face, Love made such an indelible impression that it moved René Clair to opine "Bessie Love talking manages to surpass the silent Bessie Love whom we loved so well in the past." All that and several classic musical numbers including the titanic title song, a spontaneous outburst of "You Were Meant for Me," and an eerie "Truthful Deacon Brown" sung in falsetto by a guitar quartet. And it ends not with the formation of a heterosexual couple but with Hank's future left uncircumscribed out on the road where it's better to star in Oshkosh than to starve on Broadway. What's not to love?

Grade: A-minus

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)

I hate One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Hate it. Please tell me I’m not the only person who thinks Jack Nicholson (playing himself as usual) is way more the villain than Nurse Ratched and the latter isn’t all that evil (at least until way towards the end). And is it strawmanning to wonder why this movie (and its era) are held up as paragons of realism after the “lies” of classical Hollywood? I watched In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950) the same night and it felt like Direct damn Cinema in comparison. And does this movie celebrate American anti-intellectualism as much, if not more than, American anti-authoritarianism? And is it not as corny as Dead Poets Society? And is not Jack Nicholson a bad actor in the same way that Marlon Brando was a bad actor, i. e., always playing themselves like some rock star (Bob Dylan?)? ARGH!

Grade: C

 

Paula (Rudolph Maté, 1952)

SPOILERS!

 

Having never seen a Rudolph Maté film, I expected competence at best from Paula. But the film astonished me largely because I view it as an avant la lettre rejoinder to a genre I despise - the slasher flick. I don't want to reveal too much in order to preserve the surprise of its many twists. But I have to be specific about the one twist to explain my contention above. So SPOILERS AHEAD!

 

Loretta Young plays Paula, an upper-middle-class woman who hits an orphaned boy, David (Tommy Rettig), with her car. Consumed with guilt, she volunteers at the hospital where David is being treated and discovers he has lost the ability to speak. She takes him into her home and becomes his full-time speech therapist. The therapy goes well and David is warming up to his new life. But one evening, he becomes aware of Paula's involvement in the car accident and this is where the film gets astonishing. Paula fears that the discovery will derail his progress. So she taunts the boy into using his speech to get her arrested. In short, she becomes the anti-Jason/Freddie. Imagine that - a film where someone helps another person rather than leaving acres of dead bodies in their wake. I was so floored that I wanted to give Paula an A+ in the immediate aftermath of seeing it. But to hedge my bets...

Grade: A

Man of the West (Anthony Mann, 1958)

Mann's films (even more so than Fritz Lang's) are the ones I choose for people who think the classical Hollywood cinema was all rainbows and lollipops. Thoroughly unpleasant throughout, it has a feel for verticals in a wide landscape populated by evil psychos. The crane shots are doom-laden and there's a climactic shootout that takes place with the principals on top of one another. A stunner to the last non-formation of the heterosexual couple.

15 Fave Classical Hollywood Films!

A friend asked for my 15 fave classical Hollywood films. And since the world is in love with film lists lately, I was happy to oblige. Some of these don’t honor the Bordwell/Staiger/Thompson 1960 cutoff date. But I insist they’re of the classical era, if only apocalyptically. Still, I provided four titles to honor the date if I must...

1. Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)
2. Angel Face (Otto Preminger, 1952)
3. Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)
4. 7 Women (John Ford, 1966)
5. Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
6. Red Line 7000 (Howard Hawks, 1965)
7. The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)
8. Paradise Alley (Hugo Haas, 1962)
9. The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942)
10. The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943)
11. Day of the Outlaw (André De Toth, 1959)
12. Liliom (Frank Borzage, 1930)
13. Female on the Beach (Joseph Pevney, 1955)
14. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951)
15. Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948)

Thunderbolt (Josef Von Sternberg, 1929)
Sylvia Scarlett (George Cukor, 1935)
Curse of the Cat People (Gunther von Fristch and Robert Wise, 1944) 
The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)