New release roundup for November '15

- The Peanuts Movie. Fun, true to the mythology almost to the point of bending over backwards for it, but in the end, it left me feeling a little unsatisfied, which is an odd thing perhaps, to say about a movie that tries so damn hard to live up to its legacy. The problem is simple: Charlie Brown is not supposed to win in the end. Schulz knew that, and you'd think his heirs would, too, but the round-headed kid gets a happy ending, and not the "Pyrrhic victory" kind, either. For any other character, you say fine, but CB is different. An ending like this, for him, is the wrong fit. It's too saccharine. Then again, maybe a melancholy ending for a children's movie in 2015 is too much to ask for.

That said, this movie isn't a complete slave to canon. Consider the little red-haired girl. She's given a face and a voice, which is more than Schulz ever (willingly) gave her, yet they stop short of giving her a name, which Schulz, of course, never did. Why not go the distance if you're willing to go that far, though? This is one area in which Schulz was wrong, but the filmmakers didn't correct it even after already deviating from the established mythos. (And yes, I'm fully aware of how I sound using words like "mythos" and "canon" when talking about Peanuts.)

This movie doesn't suck, and it's certainly good for the kids, and maybe that's all that matters in the end. But I had hoped for a little more.

Fred Astaire

When I was somewhere around ten or eleven, I went to a bar mitzvah for this kid I knew, Howard. Our fathers were co-workers and mutual friends. There was a reception afterward, in which there was much music and dancing.

Howard and I were friends, too, though we rarely saw each other. He had a sister, Susan, though for once I wasn't attracted to her. I doubt I even thought of her in those terms, though if memory serves, she was good-looking.

Anyway, at this reception, I felt like letting my hair down for once and I danced a lot. I'm not sure, but I think I might have been slightly self-conscious about it beforehand, and I might have conveyed this to Howard and/or Susan, because weeks later, I got a card from Susan thanking me for coming, in which she specifically complimented my dancing. You can imagine how good that made me feel.

To be a great dancer was an occasional childhood fantasy of mine. Naturally, Michael Jackson was my inspiration. My pals and I vogued at our high school prom, but sadly, I don't recall any slow dancing I might have done with my girlfriend. Maybe I didn't know how; maybe I didn't wanna embarrass myself in front of the guys; I don't remember for sure, and I wish I could. I must have slow danced with her, though.

In college, I was into grunge, and that meant moshing, which doesn't involve any particular talent - just a certain ruggedness and a high threshold for pain. Surviving the pit at a Lollapalooza remains a favorite music-related memory.

Astaire with frequent cinematic
dance partner Ginger Rogers

My most romantic dancing memory involves a girl I've told you about before. It was at her house. While she was away for a moment, I browsed through her CDs and spotted a CD single of Sarah McLachlan's "Angel," as beautiful a song as you're likely to hear. When she came back, I put the CD on and asked her to dance. I wasn't embarrassed about it this time.

I held my arms out, expecting to dance the way they do in the movies, with one arm around her waist and the other extended outward, holding her hand. To my surprise, though, she wrapped both her arms around me. I did the same to her and we didn't dance so much as move back and forth to the music. We didn't say anything. We didn't need to. When the song ended, we kissed. I'd have to say it was one of the most perfect moments in my entire life.

It's probably an old-fashioned fantasy to want to sweep a girl off her feet through dance - not John Travolta-in-Saturday Night Fever dancing, but with an orchestra playing, her in a fancy dress and me in a classy tux, the way Fred Astaire used to do. Of course, he was much more than a ballroom dancer; the man could also tap dance up a storm. I think most people, however, remember him best for those sensual, dreamy numbers he did with a variety of actresses throughout his spectacular career, especially in the ten films he made with Ginger Rogers.

In her book on marriage in the movies, I Do and I Don't, Jeanine Basinger talks about "love teams," a pairing of male and female actors over a course of different films that in the public's mind, linked the two romantically, on the screen if not in real life. Astaire and Rogers were one such team:

...Astaire and Rogers were the living metaphor of a perfect union, and they didn't have to play married to show it. Their swooning, yearning, swaying-like-two-chic-cobras romantic numbers spoke to audiences about desire, but also about a spectacularly balanced, perfectly beautiful physicality. Theirs was a marriage set to music, and their dance-floor coupling was real and romantic. (Fred and Ginger seldom kiss in their films. There's no need for it. Their sex life takes place when they have on their dancing shoes.)

Before Ginger, though, and Rita and Cyd and Leslie and all the rest, Astaire's first dance partner was his sister Adele. As kids they had a dance act that took them from vaudeville to Broadway and London. When Adele got married, the partnership broke up, and though he found solo success on Broadway, and eventually Hollywood, he was understandably reluctant to pair up with someone else on a regular basis again. The success of Astaire and Rogers in their first movie together, Flying Down to Rio, changed his mind, and the rest is history.

While there are a number of actors today who can dance, and dance well, none of them have made a career of it the way Astaire did, partly because musicals aren't as popular as they once were, but also because Astaire was unique. He belongs to the Old Hollywood era, the one closely tied to vaudeville and Broadway; where the hunger for the kind of glamour associated with RKO and MGM musicals was at its peak. Still, if the continued success of Dancing With the Stars is any indication, we still crave a touch of that kind of glamour, exemplified by the dancing of Fred Astaire.

Next: Cecil B. DeMille

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Movies with Fred Astaire:
Top Hat

Previously:
Jack Lemmon   Jean Arthur   Edward G. Robinson
Rita Moreno   Frank Capra   Bernard Herrmann

Joan Blondell   James Dean   Ethel Waters
William Powell   Tod Browning   Edith Head
Joel McCrea   Thelma Ritter   Douglas Fairbanks
Gloria Swanson   Robert Wise   Saul Bass
Ruby Dee   Vincent Price   Shelley Winters

Watch on the Rhine

Watch on the Rhine
TCM viewing

The work of playwright Lillian Hellman continues to inspire the modern theater. An online search leads to the following sampling: Toys in the Attic played in midtown Manhattan in 2007; The Little Foxes was revived in Chicago earlier this year; and The Children's Hour played in London in 2011 with, among others, Keira Knightley, Elisabeth Moss, Carol Kane and Ellen Burstyn. As a Hollywood screenwriter, Hellman adapted some of her work and wrote original material as well, and she even survived a blacklisting from the anti-Communist crowd in Washington during the 50s.

A New Orleans native, she first came to Hollywood in 1930 with her first husband after studying at New York University and Columbia, as well as touring Europe. She was a reader for MGM, and while trying to unionize her fellow readers, she met and fell in love with Maltese Falcon writer Dashiell Hammett. Eventually, she divorced her husband and began a long-term affair with Hammett, despite him being married. It was he who encouraged her to try her hand at writing, and Hour was her first professional work. In her subsequent plays and screenplays, she found outlets in which to express her liberal views on society.

Watch on the Rhine, in particular, addressed World War 2 before America was drawn into the conflict. The play opened on April 1, 1941 and ran for 378 performances. A Washington, DC society woman marries a German and raises a family with him in Germany. Along comes the Nazis, and hubby joins an underground resistance group. When the heat gets too hot, he decides to take a vacation back to America to see her family. Little do they know, however, that forces are at work even there to flush him and his comrades out.

Warner Brothers bought the film rights and Hellman's lover Hammett was recruited to write the screenplay when she herself was unavailable. Much of the stage cast was brought on board for the film, including Eric Roberts, Frank L. Wilson, George Coulouris, Lucille Watson (no relation) and star Paul Lukas.

Bette Davis was super-excited about Hellman's play and was eager to appear in the film adaptation, but she was less sanguine about having her part built up just for her. She was okay with taking a supporting role because she believed strongly in the story, but in the end, she got star billing anyway.

Rhine first came to my attention when Jacqueline wrote a piece about it earlier this year, with an emphasis on Coulouris' role as the heavy. I liked the film, though it took me awhile to get into it. I didn't expect it to begin like just another snooty high society family drama. I guess I wanted to see Nazis from the get-go, and I didn't care about Watson's character fluttering around her mansion bossing everyone in sight. Once the situation became clearer, and I recognized what Coulouris' agenda was, then I became more interested. Lukas was very good. He reminded me a little bit of Gary Cooper if he were European.

Hellman wrote several successful autobiographies later in life, but was dogged by accusations of inaccuracy and misrepresentation in her work by third parties. Indeed, by her own admission, Hellman wrote what she considered a highly subjective version of the truth in her autobiographies. Regardless, she remains a highly influential and respected playwright of the twentieth century, and a pioneering woman in what was, at the time, a male-dominant field.

Shelley Winters

The What a Character Blogathon is an event devoted to the great character actors of classic Hollywood and the often memorable supporting roles they played throughout film history, hosted by Once Upon a Screen, Outspoken & Freckled, & Paula's Cinema Club. For a complete list of participating bloggers, visit the links at any of the host sites.

Does Shelley Winters get a bad rep sometimes, you think? She's a double-Oscar winner, who worked with some of the greatest stars and directors of the Old Hollywood era, and while she's probably better remembered for her roles in middle age and beyond, she was a total hottie in her youth. Yeah, she had her diva moments, but so did plenty of Old Hollywood actresses. Yeah, she made some crappy movies later in life, but she wasn't alone in that, either.

Was it her choice of roles? She had a knack for dying in the second act of lots of her best-known parts (she died at least three times by getting hit by a car!), including A Place in the Sun, one of her greatest films. I watched this one again a few months ago. When I first blogged about it, I had said that I didn't buy her relationship with Montgomery Clift. Truth is, though, I think that was more the fault of the story than the acting. Winters and Clift may seem like a mismatched pair, but they're both so excellent in their roles that it almost doesn't matter. It's also worth noting that Winters was turned down for the role at first because she was too sexy. She had to prove to director George Stevens that she could make herself look ordinary before he accepted her.

Winters seemed to specialize in playing plain-janes and/or jilted women: Sun, Night of the Hunter, Lolita, Executive Suite, etc. That, in and of itself, doesn't mean anything other than typecasting. (At this stage I should probably say that it's been a very long time since I last saw The Miracle Worker, and the one time I saw A Patch of Blue (it was my father's VHS copy), I thought it was super-saccharine.)

Was it her multiple marriages and affairs? This alone certainly does not make her unique, although the number of actors she claimed to have shagged reads like a Hollywood who's who: Brando, Holden, Connery, Lancaster and Flynn, for starters. Personally, I try not to get caught up in all of that kiss-and-tell gossip; like I said, Winters was gorgeous in her youth, and if that meant she went with a lot of actors, well, that's hardly a surprise.

Was it her always bragging about knowing Marilyn Monroe before the latter became a superstar? Gee, I dunno, I think I'd brag about that too, if I were her. I know I've told certain stories, over and over again, about encounters with certain celebrities, or people I knew in school before they became famous (mostly comics artists; I doubt you'd know their names).

Surely it's not for making a movie as cheesy as The Poseidon Adventure? People forget that she was Oscar-nominated for that, too. She gained 35 pounds for it (and by her admission, she was never able to lose it afterwards), and trained with an Olympic swim coach as well. We may look back on Poseidon now with a cynical and ironic gaze, but Winters took it as seriously as any of her other roles.

If Shelley Winters is remembered in a... campy way, or is perhaps not taken that seriously, maybe it's because the really good films from her youth aren't as well-remembered as they ought to be. And to be fair, she herself contributed to her image as a brassy, lusty broad - the kind of woman who would douse Oliver Reed with her drink on television for making fun of women's lib. The kind of woman known for saying things like, "I have bursts of being a lady, but it doesn't last long." And maybe her outrageous behavior had a way of obscuring her talent at times... but she had the goods. So what does it matter how people remember her?

Next: Fred Astaire

---------------------
Films with Shelley Winters:
A Place in the Sun

Previously:
Jack Lemmon   Jean Arthur   Edward G. Robinson
Rita Moreno   Frank Capra   Bernard Herrmann

Joan Blondell   James Dean   Ethel Waters
William Powell   Tod Browning   Edith Head
Joel McCrea   Thelma Ritter   Douglas Fairbanks
Gloria Swanson   Robert Wise   Saul Bass
Ruby Dee   Vincent Price

Spartacus

The Criterion Blogathon is an event examining the films within the Criterion Collection, hosted by Criterion Blues, Speakeasy and Silver Screenings. For a list of participating bloggers, visit the links at the host sites.

Spartacus

from my DVD collection

I first collected Criterion DVDs back when I worked video retail, in the late 90s-early 00s. It was my co-workers' fault. They were much bigger cinephiles than I was at the time. As my appreciation of movies grew - quality movies, not just whatever was playing at the multiplex that weekend - I began to notice patterns. One of them was that lots of quality movies being released on this new format called DVD were under the Criterion label, and they were the ones my co-workers talked about a lot.

I remember going to the Virgin Megastore for them, either in Times Square or Union Square. Virgin was one of my favorite hangout spots in the 90s because I could buy CDs, DVDs and books there, and often did. I also supported smaller, independently-owned record shops and bookstores, but Virgin had a section specifically devoted to Criterion DVDs, which held a big appeal to someone like me, who was getting an on-the-job education in classic cinema at work.

Return to the Hollywood Canteen!

Almost two years ago, I did a post on the Hollywood Canteen, the World War 2-era nightclub for American soldiers created and run by the film industry, in which movie stars served and entertained enlisted men. My post was in the form of an original short story, centered around an old film star remembering her time there, as well as the boyfriend she had to leave behind. At the time, I wrote it with one eye focused on trying to convey information about the Canteen and the war effort in general, and as a result, it wasn't as much of a fictional narrative as perhaps I would have liked. 

Therefore, I went back recently and revised it, with the goal to make it read more like a proper story. If you look at the original version, you'll see there's not enough going on; it's basically Nan, the main character, reminiscing about the war and why she and her old beau Matthew didn't stay together. So what I've done is to give their conflict more of a central role, while trying to capture some of the magic of the Canteen at the same time. I'd appreciate any and all comments about this new version. I believe it works better as a story than before.

Because I'm terrible with titles, I've given this the tentative title Nice Work If You Can Get It. I would greatly appreciate a better one.

*          *          *

The raucous laughter and music hit him as he entered. A faint scent of old wood wafted through the air, mixed with cooking smells and draft beer. Other servicemen crowded around him, clustered in groups at the bar and at tables. 

What stood out for Matthew the most, however, was seeing the movie stars. Here was Joe E. Brown at the bar, serving drinks. There were Dick Powell and George Raft, bussing tables. And on the dance floor: Claudette Colbert, and Paulette Goddard, and Jeanette MacDonald, all dancing with servicemen just like him!

The Hollywood Canteen was everything Matthew had heard it was.

No Way Out

No Way Out
YouTube viewing

Joseph L. Mankiewicz is one of the most successful triple-threats - producing, writing and directing - in Hollywood history. Chances are you've seen his two biggest hits as a writer-director, A Letter to Three Wives and Best Picture winner All About Eve. As a producer, he was behind such big hits from the 30s and 40s as The Philadelphia Story and Woman of the Year, among others. In addition, his brother Herman co-wrote Citizen Kane with Orson Welles, the highlight of a long career going back to the silent era, and his son Tom had a notable stint as a writer-director, co-writing two Superman movies and three James Bond movies.

Mankiewicz was co-nominated, with original scenarist Lesser Samuels, for the Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay for No Way Out. He made it the same year, 1950, as Eve, whose screenplay was also Oscar nominated. A young black doctor has to treat two brothers, criminals, but when one of them dies under his care, the other, an unrepentant racist, accuses him of deliberately causing it to happen. The doctor must obtain permission for an autopsy in order to prove his innocence, but that only leads to further, and wider-ranging, complications.

I was really impressed with this one. This was the feature film debut of Sidney Poitier, and he is as good as you would imagine him to be, but there are a variety of roles for other black actors in this film that allow us to see different perspectives of the black experience. Dots Johnson's elevator operator represents the militant side, chafing under the oppression of white society and itching for an excuse to strike back somehow. Amanda Randolph's housekeeper, who could've easily been nothing more than a one-note background character, is given an important role to play in the third act that lets us see her as a person.

It was uncredited screenwriter Philip Yordan, however, who suggested, among other things, letting us see the family of Poitier's character, Luther. Mildred Joanne Smith plays Poitier's wife, and she gets several wonderful moments in the film. Sadly, her career was cut short by a plane crash two years after making No Way Out, according to her IMDB listing. She survived, but never made any other movies. She did, however, switch to singing. She died earlier this year. What would her acting career had been like without that plane crash...?

Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis are in this movie! For Davis, it was also his feature debut, as well as the first film he and Dee would share. She plays Poitier's sister; Davis plays Dee's husband. They get to share a few lines together over a dinner table with mom Maude Simmons. Davis' character takes part in the [SPOILER] in Act Two, though it's also not clear why he does so. I would've liked just a tiny bit of clarification, since he doesn't come across as militant as Johnson's character.

Big shock: No Way Out was somewhat controversial when it was released. How so? Read this and find out. I found producer Darryl Zanuck's attitude towards this film fascinating: he already knew that southern theaters wouldn't want to show it, which would mean a significant loss of revenue, yet he greenlit it anyway. Not only that, but he changed his mind about the ending, in a manner that suggested he gave the story serious thought. He wasn't thinking in terms of capitulating to the audience in some way that would make the movie more palatable. He wanted to make money on No Way Out, no question, but he also thought hard about the film's integrity, and that's admirable.