Buster Keaton delight for a snowy day

They say our snow will turn to rain later on, but right now it’s perfect — just enough to feel snug and wintery. Enough to make me think that what we all need is 20 minutes of silent comedy — nay, not just any comedy, but the gymnastic antics of Buster Keaton. Top on the list of things to love about One Week (1920, in which he builds a house from a kit alongside his new bride) is the fact that she’s so game to participate in the manic house construction (and gymnastics), too. Cheers to Sybil Seely.

(Is it just me, or do those jaw-dropping scenes make your mouth open wide, and laugh out loud?)

New Year’s Eve: that overdetermined night

from Holiday Inn (1942)

My Facebook feed is full of people speaking optimistically about the new year, so I am driven to be perverse about it (it’s an election year, after all).

Which puts me in mind of a nice line from the BBC series Luther, spoken by the best character in the show: Alice (Ruth Wilson), the psychopathic serial killer. “People lie to themselves about three things: they view themselves in implausibly positive ways; they think they have far more control over their lives than they actually do; and they believe the future will be better than the evidence of the present can possibly justify.”

I do love a sardonic, serial-killing buzzkill. But don’t worry, friends: there’s a Masked Avenger here, too.

from The Gold Rush (1925)

New Year’s is so overdetermined. We’re trained to believe that we’ll kiss that special person at midnight (just like in When Harry Met Sally!); that singing Auld Lang Syne can only bring a sweet melancholy (what IS that song about, anyway?); that we don’t look stupid when we dance; that we’ll look gorgeous in our sequined gowns and black ties; that we’ll remember that night forever. That it will be a turning point toward happily ever after. If Wilson’s Alice were here to scour us with her cruel eyes, we’d feel much more acutely the folly of that wishful thinking.

from After the Thin Man (1936)

So instead I’m going to show you a few other images from Hollywood’s New Year’s Eve Past. For example, the party thrown by Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in her grand Sunset Boulevard (1950) mansion, intended to be a romantic event just for William Holden and herself. At least she had a great time, at least for a while.

A sweeter memory: Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) recovers from her suicide attempt and returns to C. C. Baxter’s (Jack Lemmon) miserable little place on New Year’s Eve in The Apartment (1960). “I love you, Miss Kubelik. Did you hear what I said? I absolutely adore you,” he says earnestly. “Shut up and deal,” she replies.

And finally, the sweetly anticlimactic conclusion of Radio Days (1987), when the Masked Avenger (Wallace Shawn), Sally White (Mia Farrow), and other radio stars file off the roof as the snow begins to fall. “Beware, evil doers, wherever you are!” the diminutive, funny-looking Avenger says to the world out there, as he shuffles downstairs.

That’s how I want to start this New Year: Beware, evil doers, wherever you are. (And that means you, GOP candidates.)

Female masculinities-en-scène

A little trans love for today.

Katharine Hepburn, always reliably mannish

Josephine Baker, dontcha know.

Gladys Bentley

Marlene Dietrich, who I could look at all day

Garbo as the eminently queer Queen Christina

Some days just call for women in suits. And why not a day when I hear all manner of nonsense from/about my former university. To use spelling shamelessly lifted from Comradde PhysioProffe (whom I secretly want to marry in spite of my obvious trans love and because of his excellent spelling, accuracy on sports issues, and cooking panache) in order to express my utter outrage at all things university/administration/department bullshitte:

fucke you too, with your goddamn motherfucken sanctimonious displays of “importance” shitte. The only thing you goddamn fucken white motherfuckers do is stabbe people in their backs, even better if they’re helpless grad student shittes. I know you do this bullshitte because you are fucken afraidde all the fucken time and that you have sought out the easiest motherfucken targets. In the meantime congrats on your displays of power, assholes. I can only trust in karma.

Dangerously in love with “The Artist” (2011)

I’ve fallen so deeply in love with this trailer that I’m afraid I can’t possibly love the real film as much — whenever I manage to see it. The Artist: it’s a silent film about the silent film era! Could there be anything more delightful?

(Don’t you just love his Thin Man-style wire-haired fox terrier?)

It stars Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, the excellent actors from OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (the French James Bond spoof, also directed by Michel Hazanavicius), in which Dujardin was so fabulous that he was nominated in the Best Actor category for the César Awards — a rare commendation for a goofy comedy. Both stars and the director have already earned a pile of prizes and nominations for The Artist, including a Best Actor win for Dujardin at Cannes last summer.

I was delighted with OSS 117 back when I watched it one Saturday afternoon with popcorn, and was especially impressed by Dujardin’s innovative, expansive talents. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve now watched this trailer, marveling over his tap dancing chops and light physical comic gifts that never seem too corny. Excuse me for gushing — and believe me when I insist that my effusive love is strongly mitigated by anxiety that the full-length feature can’t possibly live up. Note to self: this is why many professional reviewers don’t watch trailers first.

What she could do with her face

Gloria Swanson’s eyes were just so big, and her mouth so oddly small (it was the fashion in the 20s). When she made Sadie Thompson in 1928 she’s been acting nonstop for 14 years and yet was still only 29 years old.

America’s sweetheart, phooey — who wants to play an innocent over and over? Swanson got interesting parts like this one, as a former prostitute who runs off to an exotic island to start a new life. Based on a Somerset Maugham story — and there was no one better than Maugham at story twists — this film shows her at her sultry best.

Since I’m a recent convert to silent film, it’s hard for me to watch Swanson without thinking of her turn as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950), one of the greatest films ever made. But you can’t help starting to think that Norma was right about the greatness of silent film, and that they really did have faces then.

A closeup, with affection

From Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant (1925), a silent film told entirely with images — it doesn’t have the intertitles that most possess. It’s remarkable — and only 40-something minutes long. You can watch the entire thing on YouTube:

(Mostly) unexplained cinema

Photography grew more creative at the same time the movies did in the 1910s and 1920s, creating amazing images like this. This post is inspired by Unexplained Cinema, where Greg simply offers striking images, stills, screen caps, and movie posters virtually absent of comment; I look at it all the time and envy his idea. I found the image above, however, at the blog Seraphic Secret where Robert Avrech has a lovely description of this Jewish actress, Alla Nazimova, who at the time (1921) was a major Hollywood power. This still is from Camille, which I’ve never seen — but it’s all in the looking, isn’t it?

Clara Bow, topheavy with IT (1927)

“She’s a ripping sort, really,” someone says about Clara Bow’s character in It.  “She’s really topheavy with ‘IT’.”  Bow was the It Girl in the late 20s not just because she was popular.  “It” denoted a personal charisma that seemed to ooze from the pores of a few special individuals and not at all from others.  Perhaps sex appeal had something to do with it, yet Bow’s high-test caffeinated activity conveyed more best-girl good nature than the languid, sexy sultriness of other stars, from Louise Brooks to Gloria Swanson.  I’ve seen only two of Bow’s films (It and Wings, both made in 1927) and in both she conveys the same sparkly, occasionally goofy willingness to bounce around the screen.  Critics have simplified this to mean sex appeal, but I see a girl I’d have liked to go out dancing with.

First and foremost, Clara Bow was adorable.  She had a pile of indomitable curly hair cut in some kind of proximate of a 1920s bob, with enormous dark eyes and round, youthful cheeks better suited to hamming it up onscreen than to come-hither looks.  If we want to talk about “it” as meaning sex appeal, we must specify that her appeal came from the flirtatious fun that Bow insists on having in these films rather than something more serious; she’s the girl you take to the rides at amusement park and who has a hard time keeping her skirt from riding up to show her garters, as in the clip below.  What she showed onscreen was a willingness to show a little skin — but only in that offhand, accidental way that was both funny and a little titillating.  Bow was that good-time girl who was probably chaste but who showed an intoxicating familiarity with the men around her.  In It she sets out to win the heart of the department-store owner, and she does.

Turns out, It was a Hollywood vehicle specifically designed to shine Bow’s star.  The filmmakers took a fluffy 1926 article from Cosmopolitan by Elinor Glyn, paid Glyn piles of money, and transformed it into a narrative about a shopgirl who turns the heads of wealthy men and eventually that department store man.  They even gave Glyn major writing credits for the film (though it had virtually nothing to do with her article) and had her walk into the restaurant at the Ritz to discuss her idea, as if it were as significant and complex as the theory of relativity:

[“IT” signifies] self-confidence and indifference as to whether you are pleasing or not — and something in you that gives the impression that you are not all cold.  That’s “IT”!  If you have “IT”, you will win the girl you love.

That pronouncement sets the tone for the rest of the film, which remains as unserious as Bow could keep it.  But one can’t help being convinced via her manic energy and that preposterously loopy head of hair that she really did have “it,” and that you want to watch her keep performing it onscreen.  The dreariest part of the film is when we are reminded, again and again, of Glyn’s simple idea.  Not that it weighs Bow down in the least.  As David Thomson puts it in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, she appears as “a lipstick butterfly veering between old adages and fresh opportunities.”  I’m going to keep watching.

Hollywood history in a month

Turner Classic Movies — that stalwart throwback of basic cable TV, the channel that still doesn’t have commercials or flashy series, is doing us all a public service this month:  they’re showing a new seven-part documentary on the history of Hollywood and moviemaking in America called “Moguls and Movie Stars.”  Tonight starting at 7pm EST/6pm CST they’ll show two one-hour episodes back-to-back:  “Peepshow Pioneers,” about the earliest days of film in the twentieth century, and “The Birth of Hollywood.”  Subsequent episodes will premier each Monday night until mid-December.  Best of all, tonight’s installments will be followed by a series of early silents that discuss race in film, starting with “Traffic in Souls” (1913) and “The Indian Massacre” (1912).

I’ve never had the luck to see “Traffic in Souls” before, but I’ve read about it — it played a big role in the early 20th-c. hysteria over white slavery.  White slavery had worked right-thinking members of the public into a lather since the mid-1880s, but had peaked in the 1910s with the passage of the famous Mann Act, or the White Slave Traffic Act, that forbade the interstate traffic of women “for immoral purposes.”  Like many public hysterias, this one got a good deal of its oomph from racist fantasies that nice white girls were being captured for sexual slavery by dastardly dark men (mostly Chinese and Jews); movies like “Traffic in Souls” and others were intended to keep fear alive, a la Stephen Colbert, so the public wouldn’t forget how terrible such crimes were.  Reputedly, however, film studios gradually cottoned on to the fact that audiences saw these films as titillating, so they got pulled from release.  No wonder that by the time Rudolph Valentino played “The Sheik” in the 1920s, women were well-primed to find his masterful quasi-rape of white women to be so wonderful as to be damn near pornographic.

TCM is following these two films up with D. W. Griffith’s classic “Birth of a Nation” (1915), that histrionically racist portrayal of the South and the KKK — one of those films that can only point out how much the 1910s were a foreign country.  But don’t despair, for immediately afterward will be shown one of the earliest films by a prolific black director, Oscar Micheaux, whose “Within Our Gates” (1920) exposes the nation’s history of lynching and mixed-race blending only loosely covered up by extreme white racism.  (I’m also glad to see, with this opening intertitle, that he challenges Northern fantasies of being altogether superior to those hicks in the South.)  I’ve never seen any of Micheaux’s films, and I’m looking forward to it.  It’s always good to know that there were prominent Hollywood directors who talked back to the movies’ racism even at one of the darkest points in American history. 

I know, after posts on “Buffy” and Julie Taymor this stuff is hopelessly geeky — and with that, I hope you’re as excited as I am.

Lulu rising in “Pandora’s Box” (1929)

It would be easy enough to say that the biggest difference between silent films and the “talkies” of the 30s is subject matter.  “Pandora’s Box,” after all, offers us the transcendent 22-year-old Louise Brooks as a happy-go-lucky dancer, Lulu, in a series of plot twists that give you whiplash:  her fortunes take a turn for the worse when she marries a wealthy doctor, snatching him away from another woman; the film then threatens her with both sexual slavery and Jack the Ripper.  Good thing she’s protected by a lesbian, an acrobat, and a drunken dwarf!  With that kind of plot, the Hays Code would have squelched it by about 1933 or so (Hitler later banned it as “degenerate art,” and he wasn’t the only one; it was also banned in Finland, Portugal, and Norway).

It’s not that the plot is irrelevant.  In fact, it was based on turn-of-the-century plays by Frank Wedekind (who also authored the play “Spring Awakening” in 1891, which Duncan Sheik turned into a Broadway musical over a hundred years later) designed to criticize contemporary perspectives on sexuality and morality.  But when watching the changeable Louise Brooks one tends to lose track of a coherent message.  One minute, she’s smiling at us adorably and cocking her tiny eyebrows at us to accentuate her enormous black eyes; the next she’s stealing someone’s fiancé and giving the jilted woman a look of utter malice.  She moves lightly on her feet like the dancer she was, yet overall her body appears unusually strong for the day, like her long, strong neck.  More than any other silent film actor, it is Brooks who has given me a whole new perspective on the Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) character from “Sunset Boulevard” (1950).  “We didn’t need dialogue.  We had faces then,” she pronounces to the cynical Joe Gillis (William Holden).  Swanson overdid it a bit to help us identify with Gillis, but now I know she was right.

The director G. W. Pabst (who shot Brooks in “Diary of a Lost Girl” the following year) was so certain that she was right for the part that he turned down Marlene Dietrich at the very last moment on learning that Brooks had agreed to star.  And after seeing Brooks on the big screen no one can doubt that the camera falls in love with her.  Pabst constantly sought innovative ways of using that luminescent quality of silent film, in which the whites seem almost to sparkle in 3-D, to enhance the mood and show again and again her beauty.  In fact, Brooks seems to have been special-ordered to personify the fantasy of female sexual vulnerability.  This fantasy is pernicious enough on its own, of course, but it seems tragic to me that so many of her fans (and perhaps even Brooks herself) came to draw an overly tidy equivalence between the character of Lulu and Louise herself, who called her 1982 book of essays Lulu in Hollywood.  The headline might be, LULU SETS BACK FEMINISM BY DECADES.

I could go on about the details.  The prevalence of the menorah in her apartment at the beginning of the film (is Pabst trying to signal that she’s Jewish?) contrasted with the heavy Christmas morality at the end.  The breakneck pace of the scenes backstage at Lulu’s theater as she changes costume and watches the beautiful black dancers onstage — the movement of the props and people is so tight it could be a Buster Keaton comedy in which someone is always about to have a house crash on him.  The close-close-closeups contrasting hard men’s faces with Lulu’s.  But instead, let’s engage in a little double nostalgia for both Louise and the 1980s band OMD (who clearly believed that one can never, never! over-use a synthesizer):

A final quick note:  for those of us convinced of the inequity of the filmgoing experience between places like LA and the rest of the universe, I have to confirm that it’s true.  Nothing is better proof of that fact than the existence of the Silent Film Theater in West Hollywood, where they showed “Pandora’s Box” last night with a live performance by the Cabeza de Vaca Arkestra, which performed their original score to the film — a moody, evocative soundtrack that contrasted so sharply with Brooks’ wide smile but foreshadowed the dark turns of plot.  (The Silent Film Theater even offers comfy SOFAS.)  As if I weren’t already jealous of the fact that old movies are shown outside on the grounds of the Hollywood cemetery on beautiful evenings.