Thursday Minute
No. 165 | September 23, 2010

On a First-Name Basis

Our theme this week
Film titles that are first names of women

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Laura (1944)
Tuesday         —   Gilda (1946)
Wednesday    —   Lolita (1962)

Frances (1982)

Frances is Frances Farmer.  We had a Frances Farmer in our family.  She was a nun.  This is definitely a movie about a different Frances Farmer.

Frances Farmer the actress was a rising star in the 1930s.  For a time she was one of the hottest names in Hollywood.  She played the love interest of Bing Crosby in Rhythm on the Range in 1936, and that same year costarred with Joel McCrea, Edward Arnold, and Oscar winner Walter Brennan in the adaptation of Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It.  Some of her other starring roles were in The Toast of the Town (1937), with Cary Grant; Flowing Gold (1940), with John Garfield; and Son of Fury:  The Story of Benjamin Blake (1942), with Tyrone Power.  She was known for her beauty and her talent, and as time went on, for the increasingly erratic behavior that led to the early demise of her career.  It was over by the time she was 30.   She spent most of the 1940s committed to psychiatric institutions and was subjected to electroshock therapy, among other treatments.  After her release, she married a couple of times and moved to Indianapolis, where for six years she hosted a popular program on local TV, introducing movies and interviewing celebrities.  She died in 1970.  Her life was the subject of several films—today’s feature, the best known—and she was an inspiration for Kurt Cobain (“Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle,” from Nirvana’s 1993 album, In Utero).

The 1982 film isn’t a biography.  It’s a film based on the life of an enigmatic actress, illuminating some parts of her story, embellishing others.  The most noticeable inventions are the character of Harry York, Farmer’s lifelong friend, well played by Sam Shepherd, and the lobotomy the actress undergoes for mental illness.  Though her treatment was awful, even inhumane, apparently she never did have a lobotomy.

That said, the story of her life is riveting, and the acting especially.  Jessica Lange, as Farmer, and Kim Stanley, as her mother, give a couple of very powerful performances.  Both won raves and were nominated for Oscars.  (Lange won Best Supporting Actress that year for another role, in Tootsie.) 

Not only does Frances provide a great portrait of a rebel soul, it shines some light on Hollywood in the old days.  The studio system was a factory for churning out films, and the studios created stars too, bigger and more glamorous than ever.  But stars paid a price for their fame.  They traded their freedom for their careers, in many cases, with the studios controlling every detail of their lives.  It was not a kind world for anyone who didn’t play the game.  Frances fights to have it her way.  She fights to maintain control and for her dignity.  In the end she was lucky to survive with her life.

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Frances (1982)
Graeme Clifford, director
Eric Bergren, Christopher De Vore, Nicholas Kazan; writers
László Kovács, cinematographer
Trailer

More from Frances here.

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Movie Legends — Frances Farmer
Photos from her brief career

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Quote of note
Sergeant:  Your name?
Frances:  You jerks drag me down here in the middle of the night and you don’t know who the hell I am?
Sergeant:  Your name lady?
Frances:  Frances Elena Farmer.  Want me to spell it?
Sergeant:  And your address?
Frances:  Put me down as a vag, vagrant, vagabond.  What is this, a joke?  It’s a joke?  Assault and battery?  Huh?  I barely touched that bitch.
Sergeant:  Occupation?
Frances:  Cocksucker.
—Sergeant (Vincent Lucchesi), Frances Farmer (Jessica Lange), Frances (1982)

…58…59…60.

Wednesday Minute
No. 164 | September 22, 2010

On a First-Name Basis

Our theme this week
Film titles that are first names of women

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Laura (1944)
Tuesday         —   Gilda (1946)

Lolita (1962)

Lolita is a woman’s name, though in the movie Lolita is hardly a woman.  She’s fourteen years old (in the book, just twelve), and controversially, the object of affection for middle-aged professor Humbert Humbert.  The original source, of course, is the book by Vladimir Nabokov.  Lolita has been ranked among the great novels of the twentieth century by groups ranging from the Modern Library to Time magazine.  It’s a classic of literature, and also a popular favorite.

Two film adaptations have been made, Stanley Kubrick’s in 1962, and Adrian Lyne’s in 1997.  Neither is completely successful in bringing Nabokov’s story to the screen, or on its own terms.  Kubrick’s added challenge was fighting the censors at a time when the Production Code was still in effect.  (If you want a peek into what it was like in 1962, see the story next to Andrew Sarris’s review in the Village Voice.  The New York Board of Regents had gone to the State Supreme Court to try to censor the film The Connection, claiming it was “obscene” for using the word shit eleven times.  You sure you want to make a movie about a pedophile?  Okay, Stanley.)  For Kubrick’s film, as you can imagine, the material was toned down.  Lyne could get away with more.  But the bigger difference between the two is that Kubrick treats the story as a darkly comic tale, and Lyne as more of a romance.  (It’s been too many years since I read the book, so better not to comment on how they compare with the Nabokov version.)

Kubrick’s film begins near the end of the story, an odd scene involving a vengeful Humbert Humbert (James Mason, in his fifties at the time) and a drunk Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers, the man of many disguises, warming up for Dr. Strangelove), with the professor finally killing his nemesis.  Then, in flashback, we get the rest of the story:  Humbert’s arrival in Ramsdale for a summer stay, finding a room to rent with the widow Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters), falling for her daughter, Dolores (Sue Lyon, the “discovery” of the day), who is affectionately known as Lolita and beginning to enjoy the attractions of men. 

Winters is wonderful, but she is doomed (you knew that already if you’d seen her as Alice Tripp or Willa Harper).  Once the mother is out of the picture, Humbert has his way with Lolita.  They go on a road trip, publicly as father and daughter, privately as lovers, then arrive at Beardsley College, where Humbert had taken a teaching position.  Eventually their relationship raises suspicions.  Humbert flees with Lolita, but before long she leaves him.  Years pass.  When he hears from her again, she is married, pregnant, and in need of money.  She tells him what had happened:  she had run off with Quilty, the playwright from Ramsdale, prompting Humbert to go settle the score.

I can only speak for myself, but I’d say the appeal of the Lolita story is no longer what it used to be.  Perhaps the times have changed, or perhaps I’m just older and see things differently.  Becoming a parent can do that to you.  It’s not that I have a problem with unsavory characters; they’re a basic ingredient for drama, and even child molesters have their place.  I don’t have a problem with their sympathetic portrayal, either; that’s welcome if done right .  But how the characters are treated matters, and there’s something about Lolita that seems a little off.  The characters care for each other while exploiting each other, and that seems to be the filmmakers’ approach to the audience.  We get a very well-done film, mixing everything from slapstick comedy to tender love story, but in the end it doesn’t all add up.

One other note, the film seems to have a blind spot in how the sexes are handled.  Both writer and director, Nabokov and Kubrick, are men, and that may account for why a certain perspective, a certain empathy, is missing.  Maybe this wouldn’t have been a problem in the hands of other men, but if a woman had told the story, no doubt we’d have a different movie.

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Lolita (1962)
Stanley Kubrick, director
Vladimir Nabokov (novel, screenplay), writer
Oswald Morris, director of photography
Trailer

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Lolita (1962)
James Mason, Shelley Winters, Sue Lyon

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Quote of note
“What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet, a veteran nymphet perhaps, this mixture in my Lolita of tender, dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity.  I know it is madness to keep this journal, but it gives me a strange thrill to do so.  And only a loving wife could decipher my microscopic script.”
—Humbert Humbert (James Mason), Lolita (1962)

…58…59…60.

Tuesday Minute
No. 163 | September 21, 2010

On a First-Name Basis

Our theme this week
Film titles that are first names of women

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Laura (1944)

Gilda (1946)

It’s the most famous poster in movie history:

The Bicycle Thief (Ladri di Biciclette) (1948) — A man desperate for work needs a bicycle for a new job, and his wife pawns the family bedsheets for the money to get the bike.  His first day at work, a thief steals the bicycle on a street in Rome as the man hangs a movie poster on a wall—a poster of Rita Hayworth in Gilda.

The Shawshank Redemption (1994) — A prisoner in the state pen conceals evidence of an escape tunnel he’s building behind a poster of Rita Hayworth, which he had ordered during a screening of Gilda.

Mulholland Drive (2001) — A beautiful and mysterious woman survives a horrific car accident and can’t remember her name.  When asked to identify herself, she picks a name from a movie poster on an apartment wall—the poster for Gilda.  She becomes the film’s femme fatale known as Rita.

The poster’s popularity is a testament to the iconic status of Gilda and its magnetic star, Rita Hayworth.

The film stars Glenn Ford as Johnny Farrell, his first big role after returning from the war.  A craps player just arrived in Argentina, Farrell is being robbed of his winnings near the waterfront when he is rescued by a stranger named Ballin Mundson (the distinguished and always capable George Macready).  Mundson offers an invitation:

Mundson:  With your luck, why don’t you go where there’s some real gambling?
Farrell:  I thought it was illegal in Buenos Aires.
Mundson:  Oh, it is.
Farrell:  Oh, I see—just like home.

Farrell visits a casino where, against Mundson’s advice, he cheats the house.  He’s taken to the owner, who turns out to be Mundson himself.  Mundson takes a liking to the newcomer and hires him on.  Soon Farrell is on his way to becoming Mundson’s right-hand man, earning respect from everyone but the washroom attendent, Uncle Pio, who refers to him only as “Peasant.”

Poor Glenn Ford.  He gives a winning performance and in any other movie he’d be the star of the show.  But everything changes with the arrival of Mrs. Ballin Mundson.  That would be Gilda, the knockout beauty portayed by the one-and-only Rita Hayworth in the role she was born to play.  Gilda can’t help herself but flirt with every man in the room, and her husband assigns Farrell with the task of keeping her out of trouble, unaware that Farrell has a long history with Gilda.  They loved each other once, and what’s more, they came to hate each other.  As Gilda tells him later, “Hate is a very exciting emotion.”

There’s a plot to the movie somewhere, something about a tungsten cartel, a deal and a double-cross with Nazi collaborators, government agents on the prowl, and a shooting at the casino.  It’s all very Casablanca-esque, intentionally so, I presume.  The main action, though, is the intense relationships, a ménage à trois of sorts, between Gilda, Johnny, and Ballin.  It’s quite a twisted triangle, and barely within the limits of what was possible in the 1940s as they go places that the trio of Rick, Ilsa, and Victor never imagined.

Rita Hayworth was the daughter of a dancer and danced on stage from an early age.  Her dancing skills served her well on film.  Even when not performing a song-and-dance number (she has a couple in Gilda, though her voice is dubbed), she could move as few other actresses could.  She was graceful, fluid, and of course, seductive.  She had perfect comic timing, as well.  Her films didn’t always make best use of her talents, but Gilda certainly did.  It was a film and a role for the ages.

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Gilda (1946)
Charles Vidor, director
E.A. Ellington (story), Jo Eisinger (adaptation), Marion Parsonnet (screenplay), writers
Rudolph Maté, director of photography
Trailer

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Gilda (1946)
“Put the Blame on Mame”
Allan Roberts, Doris Fisher, songwriters
Jack Cole, choreography
Rita Hayworth (with the dubbed voice of Anita Kert Ellis), Glenn Ford, et al.

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Quote of note
“If I’d been a ranch, they would’ve named me ‘The Bar Nothing.’”
—Gilda (Rita Hayworth), Gilda (1946)

…58…59…60.

Monday Minute
No. 162 | September 20, 2010

On a First-Name Basis

The movies featured last week were men’s pictures.  In three of them, in fact, the cumulative screen time with women in the frame was no more than a few minutes.  This week will be different.

Let’s take a look at names.  Most folks have a first name and a last, though when we talk about people we don’t always use both.  Sometimes one is enough.  Which we use is often a matter of how we know a person (or how we’d like to know them).  First names are intimate and inviting, commonly used with family and friends.  Last names are more formal and functional, often employed in our societal roles.

Men and women, as with many things, don’t get equal treatment when it comes to names.  The most obvious difference is that men usually keep their surnames through life.  Women who marry often do not.  Yet another difference, one I’ve observed over the years, women are called by their first names more often than men, whatever the context may be.  Perhaps that is changing somewhat, but it still happens, at work, in sports, in politics, what have you.  For instance, some famous women we know:  Oprah, Venus, Hillary; some men:  Leno, Federer, Obama.  I realize there are plenty of exceptions; the difference is subtle.  But when we know both names, we often choose one, and one factor affecting the choice is a person’s sex.

Movie titles offer some good examples.  Many films are named for their lead characters.  Among the men, there’s a host of single-surnamed biopics:  Milk, Capote, Kinsey, Chaplin, Ali, Gandhi, Patton, Nixon, Becket, Disraeli, among others.  On the roster of films named for fictional men:  Arrowsmith, Dodsworth, Bullitt, Goldfinger, Greenberg, Hancock, Hook, Maverick, Rambo, Zelig, and Zoolander, to name a few.  Of course, some pics named for men use first names—Marty, Charly, Alfie, Arthur, Dave, et al.—but it’s a shorter list.

For women’s films, it’s very much the opposite.  For single-named titles with women’s surnames, Salt and Silkwood come to mind.  I almost added Klute, but then remembered Klute is the cop played by Donald Sutherland, not the prostitute played by Jane Fonda.  Gigli?  Had to look that one up:  named for a guy.  I’m sure there are others, but you get the point.

The supply of titles with women’s first names, however, could stock your shelves.  Amélie, Elizabeth, Gigi, Julia, Nell, Rebecca, Roxanne, Sabrina, Salome, Tess, Yentl.  There are dozens.

Why the difference?  Movies more often are made by men, and that may have an effect, but I’d guess the movies generally are reflecting something about the way we relate to men and women in society.

Whatever the case, we’ll look at five of the films named for women in this week’s theme.

Our theme this week
Film titles that are first names of women

Laura (1944)

Laura is Laura Hunt.  She’s dead.  That’s what we learn the first line of the movie:  “I shall never forget the weekend Laura died.”  The voice is Waldo Lydecker’s.  Played by Clifton Webb, he’s an influential newspaper columnist.  We meet him sitting in the bathtub where he greets Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), who makes a call while investigating Laura’s murder.

Nevertheless, we get to know something about Laura, the inevitable star of the show (Gene Tierney).  We see her portrait on the wall of her apartment.  We meet her in flashback, when she met Lydecker, who became her mentor, and when she was engaged to the well-off Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price).  McPherson questions all the relevant parties, and the men at least all appear to have been enamored of the beautiful young woman.  The more the detective learns, the more obsessed he becomes with the case, and with Laura herself.  Midway through, the mystery takes a surprising—even shocking—turn. 

The story involves a fair dose of Hollywood hokum.  However it may have played in 1944, there’s more than a little disbelief asking to be suspended, for my taste.  That said, the film has some worthy merits.  The direction by Otto Preminger is first-rate.  An unsettling mood pervades the film, for which the theme song by David Raksin is partly responsible (Johnny Mercer added lyrics, and the song went on to become a jazz standard).  The acting also is unnerving, particularly from Webb, who gave Lydecker a highly mannered, effete edge that is more than a little creepy (not to mention, Lydecker has thirty years on Laura, for whom he has an unwelcome interest).  Price and Judith Anderson played society types, and the only characters for the audience to warm to are the roles of Andrews as the quiet, steady cop, and Tierney, who shines.

Laura is one of those films that may divide people (which is to say, I’m not with the consensus).  It’s a film highly regarded by many people:  Rotten Tomatoes’ critics rate it 100% fresh; voters at IMDb give it an 8.1 rating.  I’ve heard and read raves.  (At the Hollywood Bowl this month, TCM host Robert Osborne made a very strong pitch for it.)  I think it’s a fine film, yet I don’t see it as an enduring classic.  It’s a well-done murder mystery that settles for being a murder mystery, nothing more.  (In contrast, another ’40s film, The Third Man, starts as a mystery but goes much deeper and darker.)  Laura is often listed among the canon of film noir, but I’d say that’s not the best label for the movie.  It has noirish elements, certainly, but in the end it takes a turn that’s melodramatic, not noir.  I may be less enthusiastic than some others, but I’d say it’s a film still worth seeing, if for nothing else then to find out what all the fuss is about.

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Laura (1944)
Otto Preminger, director
Vera Caspary (novel); Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, Elizabeth Reinhardt (screenplay); writers
Joseph LaShelle, cinematographer
Trailer

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Laura (1944)
Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price

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Quote of note
“I can afford a blemish on my character, but not on my clothes.”
—Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), Laura (1944)

…58…59…60.

Friday Minute
No. 161 | September 17, 2010

It Was a Very Good Year … 1957

Our theme this week
Notable films of 1957

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Sweet Smell of Success
Tuesday         —   The Bridge on the River Kwai
Wednesday    —   12 Angry Men
Thursday        —   Wild Strawberries

Paths of Glory

I was ten when I first saw 2001:  A Space Odyssey, and I left the theater that afternoon with a new idea about what movies were all about.  I followed Stanley Kubrick’s career from then on.  Eventually, I caught up with his earlier films, but somehow I made it into my thirties before ever getting to Paths of Glory.  I shouldn’t have waited.  It’s one of his best.

Paths of Glory is a devastating portrayal of the French army during World War I.  For two years, the French and Germans have been engaged in a standoff, neither side advancing, neither retreating, locked down in the trenches.  The losses are measured in the hundreds of thousands.  Orders come down from above for the French soldiers to take the Anthill, a position held by the Germans.  It’s a suicidal mission, and when it’s not successful, General Mireau (George Macready) lays blame with the soldiers for their failure to muster sufficient effort.  Three men are court-martialed for cowardice.  Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) attempts to present a defense, but as the saying goes, military justice is an oxymoron.  The men are convicted and sentenced to die.

Kubrick made an antiwar film, but his target was more than just the military.  Paths of Glory is a parable for the battle between class divisions in society.  The general’s headquarters is a palatial estate, where at night grand balls are held.  It’s safely away from the fighting, where soldiers duck in the trenches as bombs blast a few yards away.  The officers fret over their petty careers, the men pay with their lives.  The enemy is said to be the Germans, but they’re never once seen on the screen.  As Orwell said in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.”  In Paths of Glory, General Mireau orders strikes against his own troops.  As General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), Mireau’s superior, explains later to Dax, “One way to maintain discipline is to shoot a man now and then.”  That’s bluntly put, but the point is made.

It’s been said that all war films—even antiwar films—tend to glorify combat.  I never get that sense here.  The action is well-staged—it’s extraordinary, really—but there’s no appeal to it.  Kubrick makes his point and leaves no doubt.  War is hell, combat is frightening, life is not fair, and death is painful.

Paths of Glory is one of the great films of 1957, or any other year.  The writing is superb, with Kubrick and others adapting a 1930s novel by Humphrey Cobb.  The editing and sequencing of the the action is very effective, and there are many memorable scenes.  I’m especially fond of several, including one with the two generals discussing plans for the operation;  they speak in coded language, careful not to be too coarse about putting their careers over the lives of their men.  The acting is first-rate too, with Douglas, who carries much of the movie, at his best.  As Dax, the one officer with any decency, he finally lets his rage fly without concern for the consequences, and it’s a cathartic moment; he can’t change the gross injustice that’s occurred, but it gives the audience some relief to know that he, at least, is clear with the truth and will not be corrupted.

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Paths of Glory (1957)
Stanley Kubrick, director
Humphrey Cobb (novel); Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham, Jim Thompson (screenplay); writers
Georg Krause, cinematographer
Trailer

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Paths of Glory (1957)
Battle Scene

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Quote of note
Paris:  See that cockroach?  Tomorrow morning, we’ll be dead and it’ll be alive.  It’ll have more contact with my wife and child than I will.  I’ll be nothing, and it’ll be alive.
Ferol [he smashes the cockroach]:  Now you got the edge on him.
—Corporal Philippe Paris (Ralph Meeker), Private Maurice Ferol (Timothy Carey), Paths of Glory (1957)

…58…59…60.