Ferdy on Films, etc.

The Kingdom (Riget I & II, 1994, 1997)
Directors: Lars von Trier (Riget I & II) and Morten Arnfred (Riget II)

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Shortly after Breaking the Waves came out in 1996, I got a hold of the script at my local Barnes & Noble and read it. And, well, I was so revolted by it, I vowed to skip Lars von Trier’s career forever and ever. A few years later, cooler heads prevailed upon me to revisit my decision; after all, I hadn’t even seen any of his films! They assured me that I’d LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Dancer in the Dark (2000), so I rented it. I hated it. Now confident that my original judgment was sound, I felt free to cross this Danish poseur off my list of filmmakers I needed to know about.

Then, wouldn’t you know it? The hubby, who I didn’t know when all the Lars and the Angry Girl stuff was going down, is a huge fan of von Trier’s TV series The Kingdom. This two-season series was released as a movie in various parts of the world, but the hubby moved mountains and fiords to get his hands on the actual TV episodes. He begged me on bended knee to watch it with him, promising I could leave the room at any time and find something more worthwhile to do, like reading my spam mail. So, because I love him and because it’s embarrassing to see a grown man grovel right there on the floor in front of our silly, little cat, I agreed.

Who’s sorry now? Unbelievably, not me. This series—which really should be seen in TV format for the oddly chilling comments von Trier makes over the closing credits of each episode—won me over immediately.

The Kingdom is a massive hospital in Copenhagen, the national hospital of Denmark as a matter of fact. According to the introductory opening of each episode, this house of advanced medical technology was built over a swamp where, many years before, Danish peasants used to bleach their cloth. The opening shows medieval Danes in rustic dress draping long sheets of fabric among thickets of trees, with vapors enveloping them in a presumably toxic fog. I’ll tell you right now that if you try to relate these actions to anything in the story, you’re wasting your time. It’s a nifty, little mood setter, but it’s a complete non sequitur. It is within the swirl of activity in the hospital that the story originates; we are introduced swiftly to a fairly large cast of characters whom we will grow to love, loathe, and pity through the course of some very strange goings-on.

The literal nerve center of the story is the neurosurgery unit, presided over by a imperious, obnoxious, xenophobic Swede named Helmer, played with malevolent glee by Ernst-Hugo Järegård. Helmer hates Denmark and, therefore, all of his colleagues, but was forced to leave Sweden amid charges of malpractice and malfeasance. He’s already thought to have caused irreversible brain damage in a young patient named Mona (Laura Christiensen), who is shown throughout the series twisted and drooling in her hospital room. Despite his dubious reputation and actions, he feels completely free to hurl insults at anyone who comes near him. When we first meet him, he is tangling with Krogshøj (Søren Pilmark), nicknamed Hook, for ordering an expensive CT scan for Mrs. Drugge (Kirsten Rolffes), the mother of burly hospital orderly Bulder (Jens Okking), whom he correctly diagnoses as a malingerer. This confrontation takes place in the daily neurosurgery meeting, which the head of the hospital Moesgaard (Holger Juul Hansen) attends to launch his morale-boosting program Operation Morning Breeze with a cheerful song. Helmer stares at him with contempt, refusing to sing with the assembled doctors, and leaves. He discharges Mrs. Drugge immediately.

Mrs. Drugge is a spiritualist who, during her frequent hospitalizations for imaginary illnesses, conducts séances. As she heads down the elevator, she is visited by a ghostly presence. Determined to investigate, she goes into a bathroom, runs her hand under cold water for some minutes, returns to the emergency room complaining of numbness in her hand, which is confirmed by a needlestick test she can’t feel, and is readmitted. Her investigation will take on gothic proportions as she discovers that the presence was a young girl named Mary (Annevig Schelde Ebbe), who was the victim of foul play and whose body is still somewhere on the grounds of The Kingdom. The killer, a supernatural being shaped like a man named Aage Krüger (Udo Kier), is key to a plot development in the second season—the birth of a strange baby that pops out of Judith (Birgitte Raaberg), another neurosurgeon beloved by Hook, that is a full-grown man (Kier) covered with slime who grows abnormally long legs and arms. Watching Kier’s head pop from between two legs at birth is an image of startling silliness (and not a small amount of sympathetic pain on my part).

As you can see, The Kingdom is fantastical and farcical at the same time. In a brief rundown of a few story lines in this soap-opera-like series:

++ Hook threatens to make public proof of Helmer’s mistake in Mona’s surgery. Helmer, learning of a Haitian poison that will turn people into mindless zombies from his would-be lover Rigmor (Ghita Nørby, playing a character similar to her role in Hamsun), flies to Haiti to get his hands on it and spikes Hook’s coffee with it.

++ Moesgaard’s son Mogge (Peter Mygind), rejected by a nurse, cuts the head off a cadaver that resembles him, puts it in a bag, and drops it at her desk.

++ The hospital staff gamble night after night on the time of arrival of an ambulance driver speeding the wrong way down a highway to the hospital.

++ A pathologist named Bondo (Baard Owe), has been doing research on an almost nonexistent form of liver cancer. He finds a dying patient with a liver tumor like the one he is studying, but the patient’s family refuses to donate his liver to science. In one of the most twisted parts of the series, Bondo finds a legal way to secure the liver by transplanting it into his own body.

Most comical of all is the Sons of the Kingdom lodge, a semi-secret society of senior doctors that performs all the strange rituals one expects of these bastions of brotherhood. Helmer joins the lodge to protect his precarious position on staff, but deplores everything about them—naturally. Below is a clip from the night of his initiation:

So, what are we to make of this odd assemblage of supernatural and subhuman stories? Like the savage satire The Hospital, The Kingdom skewers the medical profession by suggesting they are a careless, feckless, useless club of pseudo-gods (best represented by Helmer) that is empty gas at best. Since The Kingdom is the national hospital of Denmark, however, von Trier seems to be siding ever so slightly with Helmer in his contempt for the Danes:

Letting a Danish Miss Marple with extraordinary spiritual powers run loose and solve crimes in a place run by a lodge that sees science as the one true power is an interesting speculation on natural law, and certainly one that was in vogue when this series aired. But von Trier is a playful bloke. He was a member of the Dogme95 group, whose Vow of Chastity barred the use of advanced technology in order to capture “reality." Von Trier sticks to the rules in some instances—for example, the sepia tone of much of the series was caused by the use of natural lighting or a single light attached to his handheld camera. He avoids others by inserting himself into the film at the closing credits, thereby refusing to remain anonymous. In addition, he heightens the unreality of the series by employing two kitchen workers with Down’s syndrome as a sort of Greek chorus to illuminate or portend events. I rather liked them, though I didn’t feel they were all that necessary.

The last part of the vow is, I think, the key to von Trier’s vision for The Kingdom:

Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a "work", as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.

The expansiveness of a TV series allows its creators a chance to explore character, delve deep, and reveal truth. Although many of the actions in The Kingdom are outlandish or unbelievable, they do produce real moments. Judith’s love for her baby and her baby’s sacrifice to prevent more evil at The Kingdom is genuinely moving. Ernst-Hugo Järegård as Helmer is a tour-de-force depiction of a colossal asshole. I was also touched by Hook’s devotion to Judith, even accepting her baby and thereby proving himself to her. Bulder became one of my favorite characters, enduring his mother’s insults and after she is seriously injured, (Helmer’s comment: “Mrs. Drugge has become much more convincing.") welcoming them back as a sign that she will be all right.

The Kingdom is an utterly original creation teeming with lively plots and performances. It taught me not to be too pigheaded in my opinions—Mr. von Trier is back on the list. l

The 12 Movies Meme

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Piper over at Lazy Eye Theatre has come up with a new meme and, once again, he’s tagged me to participate. Here’s the pitch:

1) Choose 12 films to be featured. They could be random selections or part of a greater theme--whatever you want.

2) Explain why you chose the films.

3) Link back to Lazy Eye Theatre so I can have hundreds of links and I can take those links and spread them all out on the bed and then roll around in them.

4) The people selected then have to turn around and select 5 more people.

Lake Placid (1999)/Crocodile Dundee (1986)
Directors: Steve Miner/Peter Faiman

Two ridiculously fun crocodile films that play much better than you’d imagine. Betty White as the innocent-seeming midwife of monster-sized crocs has more fun than a barrel of pythons. Even moving Paul Hogan to Manhattan near the end of Dundee works beautifully (“That’s not a knife. THAT’S a knife."). These films put me in a good mood.

Baby Face (1933)/A Question of Silence (1982)
Directors: Alfred E. Green/Marleen Gorris

Barbara Stanwyck sleeps her way to success in a late pre-Code film in which women were never stronger or more sexually self-possessed. The weighty hand of patriarchy would start a squeeze thereafter that has really never let up. One lovely blow against this stifling presence is feminist director Marleen Gorris’ completely satisfying tale of female revenge. I watched both films with relish. I walked out of A Question of Silence grinning malevolently at the men in the aisle. What fun!

The Perez Family (1995)/Lucky Miles (2007)
Directors: Mira Nair/Michael James Rowland

Two stories about illegal immigration, the first a romantic comedy with uncommon wisdom and knock-out performances by Anjelica Huston and Marisa Tomei and the second a comedy that communicates the desperation of refugees who cannot find a safe haven. Both films make me laugh and think.

All the President’s Men (1976)/Secret Honor (1984)
Directors: Alan J. Pakula/Robert Altman

The film that launched a thousand journalism careers meets the president whose break with reality gave us the herculean performance of Philip Baker Hall. Both films are important studies of an important time with all the drama any film fan could ever want.

Days of Wine and Roses (1962)/I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955)
Directors: Blake Edwards/Daniel Mann

Alcoholics often make compelling, and sometimes repulsive, film subjects. Days of Wine and Roses is a tragic love story as one drunk (Jack Lemmon) converts his naïve girlfriend (Lee Remick) into a bigger souse than he is and loses her down the bottle. It’s a killer. Susan Hayward plays the show-stopping drunk Lillian Roth in a women’s picture of traumatic proportions. Sometimes the film goes over the top, but when Roth is at her lowest, Hayward’s performance pulls the mask off the true ugliness of alcoholism.

Le Grand Voyage (2004)/Le Fils (2002)
Directors: Ismaël Ferroukhi/Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Fathers and sons are the subjects of these two films. The first is an unforgettable road trip a Muslim makes with his very modern son from Paris to Mecca. The beauty of their relationship, the experiences they have on the road, and the rarely filmed and wonderful sight of Mecca full of pilgrims inspires awe. Le Fils (The Son) is another one of the Dardenne brothers' intense portraits of troubled souls that collide. This one has a tension and urgency that make me feel very alive and raw.

I'm afraid my end of the meme stops here. Carry on. l

My Father, My Lord (Hofshats Kaits, 2007)
Director/Screenwriter: David Volach

By Marilyn Ferdinand

“You know what you know about life from your encounter with it, but you react to life while building it." (David Volach)

David Volach’s much-honored debut film helps us encounter a world that is a self-protected mystery to many of us—that of the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews. As one of 19 children raised in a Haredi family in Jerusalem, Volach understand this world well. My Father, My Lord tells of one week in the lives of one such family—the elderly Rabbi Abraham Eidelmann (Assi Dayan), his much-younger wife Esther (Sharon Hacohen), and their 7-year-old son Menahen (Ilan Griff). In a well-honed Jewish method of teaching, Volach constructs his tale as a parable—actually, a sort of counter-parable to the biblical tale of the binding of Isaac.

In this tale, Rabbi Eidelmann is very much like his biblical namesake, Abraham. He is the extremely devout spiritual leader of a Haredi congregation in Jerusalem. We first meet the so-far nameless rabbi doing what rabbis usually do—studying scripture closely at a desk and making notes. We view him at lower than eye level through a space between the stacks of books piled around him. He is shaky, having trouble keeping to his task. Eventually, he stops, throws his head back, and starts to weep. We then see him going through the doors of his synagogue. The men of the congregation, engaged in animated conversations, pause and move to let him pass. The rabbi climbs the few stairs to the altar and leans wearily at the podium. He looks over at an empty seat with a brass nameplate. The subtitle translates it as “Menahen Eidelmann." We assume he is weeping for this missing congregant, who must have died. A birds-eye shot passes over the congregation, with its table set with food for after the service.

In the next scene we meet Esther and young Menahen (could this be the missing congregant?) in a scene of domestic bliss. We hear Esther call to her son as the boy sits on the edge of a full bathtub, twirling with his finger some wet hair that must be his father’s floating on top. Menahen is a curious, observant boy, filled with wonder about everything, particularly things of nature. He has some breakfast and then goes with his father down the street to school. On the way, the rabbi quizzes him about the purposes of the prayer boxes called tefillin Haredi wear on their forehead and arm. To get high-quality tefillin, the rabbi tells his son, they will have to order them four or five years before Menahen's bar mitzvah.

In class, the instructor is teaching them songs of praise to G_d; the song they are learning today is the story of the binding of Isaac. Menahen is distracted by a mother dove that has built her nest on his classroom’s window sill and is caring for two chicks. On the playground, he shows a classmate an educational card from a National Geographic set that shows a tribal African in exotic make-up beating on a drum.

At home, he shows the card to his mother and asks, “Is this idolatry?" Esther calls Abraham in to look at the card, and he confirms that it is idolatry. He orders Menahem repeatedly and harshly to tear up the card. When their son starts to cry, Esther suggests that he can have another card. The rabbi, angry, asks, “Next, are you going to reward him for observing the Sabbath?" Finally, Menahem holds the card in front of him and tears it in two.

Menahem is very excited that they are to spend time at the Dead Sea and goes through the bag of things his mother has purchased for the trip—plastic sandals, a new bathing suit. He asks her where the water wings are. She says they are in the bag. Then he says, “you don’t need water wings there. You just lay back and float," a comment on the high salt content of the Dead Sea. On the day they are to leave in a private transport—a treat to Menahem from the rabbi—the teacher at Menahen’s school rushes out to the car to fetch the rabbi. He is brought to the nest of the dove, where he recites a prayer, and shoos away the mother bird in observance of a Torah commandment. Then he finishes the prayer asking G_d to honor him and his wife with many sons and daughters, which is part of the ritual. When Menahen asks him why he made the chicks motherless, the rabbi replies, “We do everything in the Torah without asking why." Esther tries to reassure Menahem that the mother bird will come back to the nest. She knows that Menahen has observed the feelings—the souls—animals have, which his father has told him they do not.

Menahen’s love of nature and his father’s love of the Almighty will lead to the tragedy we fear is coming. Indeed, this is a film filled with love. I found myself quite moved by Menahen’s inquisitiveness and the beauty of the shots Volach shares with us—a window onto the soul of earth that even Abraham acknowledges is a wondrous gift from G_d—and fell quite in love with this sweet, little boy. Esther is a gift of a mother, gentle with Menahen and angry on his behalf over the torn card. She writes a note to Abraham when he comes to bed that night (not permitted to speak after she says the cleansing prayer of sleep) to express her anger.

But what of Abraham? He loses his son because he “was wrapped in the arms of the Almighty" at afternoon prayer. Does that mean he loves G_d more than he loves his family? It would be easy to judge Abraham as a kind of careerist too devoted to his work—or as a religious zealot, which a number of reviewers of this film have charged—but this is a complicated issue that doesn't smack of zealotry to me. Abraham believes that the Lord determines the fate of men, and he must accept that this loss was G_d’s will. He also knows that the biblical Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his miracle son Isaac on an altar to show his love of G_d. He is an old man who has devoted his whole life to Torah; its laws are his life. He never learned how to deal with a little boy. His contrition in the face of Esther’s anger about the torn card shows he would like to learn, but unfortunately, he must learn about the sanctity of life the hardest way of all.

When Menahen and his father are at the seashore, the boy brings over a fish he has caught in a plastic bag from a nearby stream. Abraham says the fish is from the mountain streams that run to the sea. Since it is a freshwater fish, it will die when it enters the salt water. Now that Abraham has come down from the mountaintop and swum in the salt water of sorrow, what will happen to him and his faith? David Volach poses a worthy question in an incredibly moving and lyrical film. l

Famous Firsts
Focusing on the debut feature work of famous, and infamous, figures of film

The Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)
Debut film of: Monte Hellman, director

By Roderick Heath

It’s harder to judge the quality of a directorial debut when that debut is not, as Sanshiro Sugata and The Sugarland Express were, sponsored by a fully functional, well-financed, major studio or, indeed a current film with access to cheap, yet sophisticated technology that can make even a shoestring production look good. The Beast from Haunted Cave is a bald example of a genre that is long gone—the ultra-low-budget drive-in movie—a category that runs the gamut from startling works of invention like Night of the Living Dead (1968) to the oeuvre of Edward D. Wood. Beast was made under the aegis of Roger and Gene Corman and AIP, the only people to turn such fodder into a minor cultural phenomenon.

Monte Hellman is a shadowy legend of American New Wave cinema, joining such rare figures as his mentor Roger Corman, John Cassavetes, and John Waters as true mavericks of Hollywood. Unlike Corman, he didn’t stick to specializing in trash when his efforts to break out of the ghetto met lukewarm responses; unlike Waters, he never made himself cuddly for a mainstream breakthrough. With his near-legendary pair of cheap, but poetic, westerns, Ride in the Whirlwind (1965) and The Shooting (1967), and his nigh-unseen, interior dramas, Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter (1974), one might have expected Hellman to burgeon into a Malick or Coppola. His vision, however, ultimately was too esoteric, and his only real achievement of note in the 30 years since has been producing a very famous first—Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992). It’s worth noting that Hellman might have been drawn to that project because it, like his distant debut, centered on the robbery getaway by a group of hardened, but human criminals.

The Beast from Haunted Cave is easy to laugh at. It’s cheap, tacky, badly shot, with lousy sound, and features what looks like a cobweb-strewn pile of cabbages as a monster. It was recycled out of Corman’s own Naked Paradise (1956) and itself spun into Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961). It’s also an oddly gripping and inventive little film that doesn’t so much show how far you can go with a small budget— perhaps Val Lewton’s films and Night of the Living Dead are better examples of that—but of how a solid script and a neat idea promise a film that, with a little more cash and love, could have been pretty good. Writer Charles B. Griffith was responsible for the handful of decent films around this time that Corman either directed or produced.

Beast begins in a ski resort in the Black Hills outside of Deadwood, South Dakota. Alex (Frank Wolff), Marty (Richard Sinatra, Frank’s cousin), Byron (Wally Campo)—the thieves posing as Chicago businessmen—and Alex’s gangster moll Gypsy Boulet (Sheila Carol) are planning a robbery of gold extracted from a local mine. Their plan is to set explosive charges in the mine, causing a cave-in that will draw off attention whilst they raid the gold storage. They then plan to take off cross-country, posing as recreational skiers, to hole up in a mountain cabin. To this end, they’ve hired local ski instructor Gil (Michael Forest) and rented his own cabin.

Marty, a would-be hipster (“Is knitting your scene?") and ladies’ man, sweet-talks Gil’s sister (Kay Jennings) and barmaid Natalie (Linné Ahlstrand, Playboy’s Miss July 1958). He and Natalie sneak off together and, under the guise of sating his curiosity over the mine, Marty plants the explosives. But they are attacked by a mysterious spidery beast (played by Chris Robinson, who also built the monster suit and plays a barman), newly hatched from an egg and apparently disturbed from millennia of gestation by the miners. It snatches Natalie away, and Marty returns breathless and panicked to his confederates. His half-coherent explanations are dismissed by the relentlessly pragmatic Alex. The next day, a mine worker discovers a strange cobwebby material in the shaft just before he’s blown up by the charge. The thieves do their job whilst Gypsy keeps Gil distracted, and then depart on their trek; occasional glimpses of the beast’s hairy tentacles show that it is following them.

Beast was penned by Charles B. Griffith, who was also responsible for the clever screenplays of Bucket of Blood (1959) and Little Shop of Horrors (1960), films that gained credible attention for Corman. Griffith’s script is surprisingly strong, especially in the characterizations and dialogue. It combines elements of The Thing from Another World (1951) and Key Largo (1948), and predicts Alien (1979), which may even have been influenced by it. The main dramatic conflict in Beast centers around two self-contained males—Gil and Alex—competing over Gypsy, which, curiously, anticipates the central pas-de-trois of Two-Lane Blacktop, in which James Taylor’s Driver and Warren Oates’ GTO compete for the admiration of The Girl (Laurie Bird). Wolff’s Alex even somewhat resembles Oates’ character; gruff, antisocial, mustachioed, prone to hiding behind dark glasses and affecting a vaguely existential hipster cynicism slightly at odds with his air of the middle-aged lay-about. The difference is that Alex is definitely a villain, a self-congratulatory winner in a Darwinian world, who plans to knock off Gil at his first opportunity and take off with the loot to Canada.

Meanwhile, the drunken, forlorn Gypsy is desperately attracted to the rugged mountain dweller, and Marty, believing the monster remembers him and is stalking them to ensure their destruction, keeps an eye out for the beast. One night, he is horrified to stumble upon the monster guarding the cocooned, still semiconscious body of Natalie. Later, he discovers the entrance to a cave where the beast’s tracks lead. The monster attacks Marty, and then drags off Gil’s housekeeper Little Dove (unidentified actress), who has crush on Byron. Byron follows to snatch back Little Dove, but he is soon caught and cocooned alongside her, and the two have to watch Natalie’s blood being sucked out. When the beast tries to do the same to Byron, Little Dove tries to stab it, which provokes it to kill her. Gil, warned of his charges’ deadly intentions by Gypsy, has already made a break for the countryside. An oncoming storm forces Gil and Gypsy to shelter in the cave. Marty insists on heading there with Alex to get the beast, packing rifles and flare pistols. Interrupting the beast’s attempts to eat Gil and Gypsy, Alex is chomped and Marty mortally wounded, but he fires the flares into the creature, setting it ablaze, before expiring, leaving Gil and Gypsy as the solitary survivors.

Despite the ratty production, Hellman’s sense of film grammar and his touch with actors, especially Wolff, Sinatra, and Carol, are well in advance of the average director on Poverty Row. He successfully draws out intelligence from Griffith’s script—in Alex’s übermensch rants, Gil’s meditations on the superiority of his mountain life over city life, and Gypsy’s teary confession of how she got involved with Alex and why she can’t get away. It’s a pity then he can’t really generate any dramatic intensity for the situation, and the film feels awfully padded at a scant 75 minutes. The effect of tacking on a monster yarn to a dully plotted gangster melodrama doesn’t exactly make for high tension, despite Hellman’s and Griffith’s attempts to solidify the drama. The film only achieves eeriness in a couple of places—when Marty finds Natalie’s cocooned body and the death throes of Byron and Little Dove—and builds to a climax during the battle with the perambulating spinach monster, where Hellman compensates a little with some nifty editing and lighting. His gift for drawing a sense of healthy atmosphere out of location shooting, which was to serve him well in better films, makes the best of the snowy terrain and stony caves where the action takes place.

A film like Beast is a borderline case, rudely built as a cinematic seat warmer for other films, some better, some worse. Yet it displays glimmerings of a quality that money can’t always buy and the lack of it can’t always obscure, standing in contrast to the utterly mercenary banalities of Friday the 13th. Despite having nothing to work with, Hellman produces something. l

Grade

Promising...just

Daisies (Sedmikrásky, 1966)
Director: Věra Chytilová

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I’ve read numerous summaries of Daisies, a seminal film of the Czech New Wave, as well as a few analyses, and I must say that I feel rather dissatisfied with all of them. Among the many labels attached to this film is that it is feminist. I’ve mulled this experimental piece of pop art quite a bit, and darn if I can find anything particularly feminist about it. I guess that’s just a boilerplate assumption about movies directed by women. Certainly, if I had to characterize the approach Chytilová takes with this film, it would be feminine, not feminist. She’s a delightful, spirited girl who likes nothing better than to misbehave. She scribbles all over her coloring book, imaginatively making things the wrong color, and moves her “dolls" through various pretend-to-be-adult games, like going on a date with father, having grown-up drinks in a nightclub, and being a beautiful woman with whom all men fall in love.

The film opens with an aerial view of bombed-out buildings, then moves in on a machine grinding through its gears. Two sisters, Jezinka (Ivana Karbanová) and Jarmila (Jitka Cerhová), sitting in bikinis against a wall, move mechanically with machinelike sounds emanating from each bending joint and wonder what to do. They get up and walk through a very green thicket to a large tree hung with brightly colored fruit. Each pulls a piece of fruit off the tree and chows down. The girls then head into the world for a series of madcap adventures.

Jezinka is at a restaurant with an elegant older man, when Jarmila comes in and makes herself at home. She orders with abandon and eats like a horse. The old gentleman is taken aback by Jezinka’s sister, but tries to be polite. Jezinka worries about her train. The trio race to the train station and play a game of Chinese fire drill. The train carries the man off without Jezinka. The sisters are gleeful at pulling this trick off, but Jezinka worries that Jarmila will tell that she goes around with old men. The pair pulls this stunt several times in scenes Mack Sennett would have been proud to include in his Keystone Kops comedies.

The girls go to a nightclub, entering through a backstage door and disrupting the tango dancers on stage. They take a booth, start drinking, and begin jumping up and down in their box (surely a trampoline is hidden below), while the dancers glare at them and soldier on to the end of their act. The drunken sisters are escorted out and go home.

“It’s so nice to be home," they say, using one of several cliched lines that pop up throughout the film. Their home looks like a little girls’ room, with pictures pasted on the walls. Paper streamers and apples are strewn about. They paint their eyes with long slashes of a paint brush, the kind of improvised make-up kit girls would use to be like Mommy.

Jarmila goes out on a date. She enters her date’s room, which is covered wall to wall with butterfly specimens. Jarmila removes her clothes and holds two cases, one with two butterflies and the other with one, over her breasts and genital area. She moves coyly across the room when the man plucks the lower butterfly out of its frame. He whispers words of love as he does so. Jarmila runs back home with the words echoing around her as she sits with Jezinka on their bed. We can imagine the echo comes from all of the “butterflies" in the man’s collection, and Jarmila is completely unmoved by them in her remembrance. Nonetheless, she takes a pair of scissors and cuts Jezinka’s dress to pieces, saying, “You don’t mind, do you?" This line is repeated several times until they light the contents of their home on fire in an aggressive scene of destruction.

The climax of the film is the food orgy. The sisters smuggle themselves up a dumbwaiter into a banquet hall resplendent with elegant and exotic dishes and proceed to eat, throw food at each other, and smash dishes with abandon. After this epic food fight, they end up swinging on the crystal chandelier hanging above the table. They suddenly must repair everything they have broken, placing pieces of dishes together like a mosaic and piling cakes back into something like the shape they started in. The busy-bee buzzing of the voices of the girls working at this pathetic repair are frantic, mechanical, with the film speeded up. When they finish their task, they lay down in the center of the banquet table. The chandelier comes crashing down on them, and we switch to another aerial view of carpet bombing.

Daisies is the kind of film that just sweeps one along in its antic merriment. The eye-popping cinematography and editing of Jaroslav Kucera and Miroslav Hájek, respectively, are a dazzling array of color, super-quick cutting, and strong close-ups that envelop the viewer in the detail of the moment. One scene, in which the sisters cut each other with scissors, is a riot of floating heads, limbs, and torsos. Karbanová, as the dark-haired sister, seems slightly more demure than Cerhová, her daisy-crowned sister, who subtly acts as the leader of the pair. Her playful sexual awakening seems to unleash a certain aggression, escalating to the banquet scene--a painful act of destruction that is, nonetheless, a lot of fun to watch. I felt very happy to spend time with these girls.

The Czech government was not at all amused, however, wondering how public funds could be thrown away on "trash" that made no sense. They also didn't like the display of wasted food. Chytilová was unable to make films for years until she wrote an impassioned and lengthy letter vowing her dedication to socialist principles and explaining that the film was meant to show how small acts of destruction can build up and create an atmsophere in which greater destruction can take place. Well, this is one way to look at it, and since she's the director, I guess she ought to know. What I tend to think is that she let the genie out of the bottle, bringing vibrance and life to what had become a drab existence under Communism. Her playfulness, sexual freedom, and flower power attitude are very much in keeping with the Czech films I've seen (especially I Served the King of England by Czech New Waver Jirí Menzel) and still have their allure today. l

The Dark Knight (2008)
Director: Christopher Nolan

By Roderick Heath

There will be spoilers.

My favourite Batman movie is the one with Adam West. Perhaps it’s the retro-camp fan in me. But who doesn’t still remember the old show’s theme, or recall, with a bit of a smile, the endless variations on “Holy (whatever) Batman!" For dumbed-down Lichtenstein, the ’60s Batman was still a truly pop-art creation. It was stylish, funny, mocking, and zippy.

I’ve never really been sure what to say about what’s come along since then. Tim Burton’s films came close to pop-art with their totally created Gotham City and overinflated story and character gestures. But they were more in love with their set design than their dramatic aspects, and Burton’s lack of emotional engagement kept asserting itself in moments of cruelty that were at odds with the films’ shiny, shallow textures. Since Burton turned Bruce Wayne from a playful hipster into a dour, brooding near-psycho, Batman himself has consistently been the least interesting aspect of his own films. Burton didn’t seem able to find any love for his characters, in the way that he could embrace Ed Wood or Edward Scissorhands. Joel Schumacher’s entries were barely tolerable audiovisual assaults best watched mildly toasted.

Along came Christopher Nolan, a Brit would-be auteur with middling talent as a director and much talent as a poseur. Memento (2000), Batman Begins (2005), and The Prestige (2006) were, at least, all ambitious and intelligent, but they were also gimmicky, overlong, and lacking in depth. Despite their exertions, they, too, were disengaged films without heat, love, or real art. They were, to quote his own work, all Pledges and no Prestige, byproducts of our cleverness uber alles era.

The Dark Knight indicates that Nolan seemed aware of his missteps on Batman Begins. The story is simpler, the landscape less cluttered, the characters better drawn, the action tighter, and it tries for some genuine emotion. Aspects of the tale, like Harvey Dent’s (Aaron Eckhart) idealistic plight and Jim Gordon’s (Gary Oldman) conscientious despair, reach a pitch of operatic effort, if not result. Nolan’s new Gotham City is a normal-looking place with a minimum of CGI and silliness. The stringent, almost noir realism is refreshing at first, aiming for an aesthetic pitch that isn’t too far from Michael Mann. The trouble with this is that to a certain extent, it subtracts what’s attractive about a comic book in the first place—the colour, the invention, the defiance of reality in vivid print. Nolan attempts to transpose the surreal into the real world.

It doesn’t actually work. Batman just seems like an unnecessarily showy self-promoter in this milieu, and Dent’s eventual transformation into Two-Face presents just a scarred, scared, sorry bastard rather than one of the strip’s delightful grotesques. Here Nolan finds the limit of his ambitions—he can’t get real enough to explore Dent’s fate as tragic, but he’s turned his back on the twisted fantasy it began as. Nolan’s tone-deaf to the finer points of style and symbolic value. The dualism of Batman and the Joker, and Two-Face Dent between them fulfilling both of them, is both emphasised with the subtlety of a jackhammer, but also still feels fudged. The fact that Batman is a do-gooder who wears the apparel of traditional evil and the Joker is a villain who poses as a bringer of laughter, seems slightly too witty for this context.

One creation in Nolan’s new film, however, bridges the divide, and the catalyst for that is Heath Ledger’s inhabitation of The Joker, a figure who invents himself and plays up his own unreality. Indeed, it’s probably closer than any other version to the comic strip’s version of the character. The Joker, and Ledger’s performance within, is a piece of high-wire performance art, Dadaist in effect and nihilist in intent. It’s a brilliant idea that Ledger, who seemed to have worked himself to emotional exhaustion in conjuring it, certainly lives up to. When he inhabits the screen, there is the genuine, and genuinely exciting, feeling that anything can happen, and he is, for once, a villain of true weight to match a hero of depth. The character is wrapped in mystery—his name is never discovered and even his own story of how he gained his cut-up mouth, which he partly obscures behind make-up, keeps changing. He’s a force of pure, taunting chaos, and this charges his scenes in the film with something that has eluded all of these films until now—a note of moral urgency. Unlike Jack Nicholson’s entertaining but absurd Joker, this is a truly malevolent force, a vicious psychopath dedicated to proving that “everything burns."

It’s a pity that the script can’t really keep up with him, as it keeps writing him out for long stretches whilst indulging Nolan’s fondness for convoluted plotting that moves with the grace and dexterity of a steamroller and his poor sense of scene structure and emotional rhythm. And the realism only goes so far. The Joker is captured (briefly) through an utterly ridiculous method. There’s stupid bits of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook involving cellphone sonar and fingerprints taken off shattered bullets that violates the film’s sheen of terse believability and lurches it into the realm of blockbuster tomfoolery. There’s one scene where a mob boss (Eric Roberts) is sitting drinking at a nightclub. Then Batman’s there, hitting people. It’s so arbitrarily staged, with such poor establishing shots that you might as well have suddenly had a break-dance battle or a dog show, and it would have made as much sense. Nolan has no ability in filming action, his sequences dissolving in blurry shots, frantic cutting, and finally, little excitement. The filmmaking in the action “climax" isn’t as tedious as that in Begins, but it still depletes the tension that Ledger’s antics so commendably earned.

It’s also a pity that Bruce Wayne and his leather-clad alter ego have been shrinking steadily to the point where he’s just a growling, mumbling chin under a hood. Christian Bale is an actor who can do anything, except, it seems, paint with black on black. Wayne is a bore. His lack of an emotional or sexual life of any substance and his moribund moodiness, render him a totally unengaging hero. Wait, oh yeah, the script reminds us that he’s not a hero; he’s a “dark knight"—whatever that means. There are some throwaway gags of Wayne the playboy’s hiding behind his gentlemanly loafing, pursuing models and ballerinas, but that’s strictly window dressing. One mildly rousing scene has Batman belt the Joker, who has broken into the fundraiser he throws for Dent and threatened Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), his ex-girlfriend. It’s a corny stunt Nolan pulls where Batman’s timely intervention and pith show up this walking spiritual void, and it’s cool. But Nolan elsewhere has no skill at melodrama, and that’s a fatal lack for what is, let’s face it, not really art, really not deep. The moral conundrums The Dark Knight puts up are shot down in a few lines of Zen wisdom by Alfred (Michael Caine). Sure, it’s deep compared to where the good guy in the bright spandex always beats the crap out of the bad guy in the black silk. The dark, moral dilemma of the finale is nearly exactly the same, and isn’t actually any more cogent, than the one faced at the end of Spider-Man, and that one was considerably better staged.

But what was the comic book anyway, other than a mishmash of Zorro, Fantomas, Arsene Lupin, with some inspiration from Sherlock Holmes and Vidocq? Is it too much to ask that some filmmaker who grasps both the comic’s essential, semi-surreal stylisation and its roots in urban noir pulp to properly balance these aspects? What’s with this high-concept pressure to explore issues of terrorism and vigilantism? Maybe it’s the only avenue in which filmmakers can explore these issues today, considering that no one goes to see films that are actually about those things. Yet it demeans both forms. After some of the hard-to-swallow plot turns and the general let-down of the last third, I’m not so persuaded that I really wanted that more than I wanted Schumacher’s incoherent psychedelia. Nolan lets his usual faults of going on too long and not being able to shoot action finally get the better of his very real efforts to make a more meaningful than usual comic book drama. Particularly in the deft, emotionally convincing perfor- mances of Gyllenhaal and Eckhart, the film gains a centre that slips away when one dies and the other goes psycho. That finally leaves Oldman holding the bag as a man trying to defend his family whilst all the freaks fight each other to stand-still.

The Dark Knight is not a bad film at all, but it’s also light years away from the instant, legitimate noir classic it’s being hailed as. It may take a new, revved-up Catwoman to drag a reaction from this Batman that doesn’t sound like he merely needs a cough lolly. l

Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File (Bunt. Delo Litvinenko; Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case, 2007)
Director: Andrei Nekrasov

By Marilyn Ferdinand

In 2006, the world was shocked when a former member of the KGB and its successor after the fall of Communism—the FSB—named Alexander “Sasha “Litvinenko died in a London hosptial, a victim of poisoning from exposure to the radioactive compound polonium 210. His slow and agonizing decline and death were captured in a media circus, particularly in Britain, where he had sought political asylum several years before after going public with information that the FSB ordered contract murders and was corrupt.

Andrei Nekrasov, a Russian filmmaker torn by grief at the fate that had befallen his friend Sasha, set out to investigate the possible reasons for his murder. His journey took him through Russia, Germany, France, and England, where he met people who knew Sasha, worked with him, loved him, and hated him. What he assembled from archival and original footage is a wide-ranging, rambling scar of a movie—a cry of despair and outrage from its maker. Watching Poisoned by Polonium is an exhausting, confusing, sometimes mesmerizing experience in which Nekrasov piles up facts, events, and ideas without really making sense of them.

During the first part of the film, Nekrasov spends an inordinate amount of time on himself—literally. The camera rarely leaves his face as he absorbs what is happening to his friend and reflects on on-camera interviews he conducted with Sasha, presumably for another project, in which Litvinenko railed against what he saw as the nexus of corruption in Russia—Vladimir Putin. In pursuit of the truth, Nekrasov probes the history of late Soviet Russia and events up to the present.

For much of the scene setting, Nekrasov discusses the bombing of apartment blocks in Moscow in 1999, called by the government acts of terror by rebels from Chechnya that eventually precipitated war. In a technique Nekrasov uses frequently in the film, normal life in Chechnya is shown, only to be contrasted with the devastation of war. This rather unnecessary emphasis that war is hell is followed by another frequently used technique—changing locations before a new establishing shot pulls the viewer out of the previous one, thus thoroughly confusing Nekrasov’s point. He seems to want to say that the Chechens are the poor unfortunates by showing their bombed-out homes and war dead, but before we know it, he’s showing Russian war dead and grieving Russian mothers. Of course, this was reality, but then he moves directly to Russians saying that the Chechens deserved it for bombing the apartments and on to conspiracy theories that the FSB planted the bombs themselves to secure Putin’s rise to power. As someone with hardly a nodding acquaintance with current events in Russia, the timelines and particulars of these events were not familiar to me. Nekrasov does little to enlighten me.

What he does do is show how Litvinenko became notorious in Russia for outing the FSB’s corruption and murder schemes. Litvinenko contended that an FSB internal affairs agent Mikhail Trepashkin was framed by other FSB agents for weapons possession because he revealed evidence that the FSB was involved in corruption and may have been involved in the apartment bombings. He was found not guilty but immediately rearrested for revealing state secrets. Nekrasov is told that the judge who dismissed the charges was removed from his position and replaced by one “bought" to serve the FSB and government interests. Litvinenko himself said the FSB tried to buy his participation on their hit squad, but that he refused. He released videos taken through a hidden camera that show his boss Alexander Gusak and others talking about murdering certain individuals. Gusak is interviewed by Nekrasov about the hit squads and Litvinenko, whom Gusak mentored. Gusak now thinks of Litvinenko as a prick.

Another interview subject for Nekrasov is Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who, at the time of the interview, had just published an article about the rape of Chechen women by Russian soldiers. Nekrasov is shown going all over Moscow trying to find a copy of the journal that published her article—nobody is selling it. Abruptly, we move forward in time to Politkovskaya’s own murder in her Moscow apartment building. Obviously, criticism is taken very seriously in the new Russia.

The film is no marvel of cinematography or editing. Whoever was filming Nekrasov didn't seem to know how to hold a camera or what to film. While I've read charges that Nekrasov appears self-indulgent in this film because he's in so many of its frames, I'm inclined to think that he had so little usable footage to work with that he had to make do.

More importantly, do all these events and inferences add up to a plot at the highest levels to silence Litvinenko? Nekrasov seeks the advice of French philosopher André Glucksmann, who notes that Russians, subjected for centuries to czarist rule, have a slave mentality—they want a strongman to pull the strings. I admit that I have sometimes thought this myself, but if Putin was a strongman, he’s really not much different from George W. Bush, who was elected by the supposedly most democratic nation in the world. Russian lawlessness during the transition to democracy seems to have progressed much as one would expect in a country where basic deprivations still existed. As prosperity has slowly risen, social order has gained a foothold.

Nonetheless, Nekrasov’s empassioned document, returning belatedly to Litvinenko’s murder and his grieving wife Marina, left me wondering if perhaps there wasn’t something to his theories. I’m usually the first person to pooh-pooh a conspiracy theory espoused by the more-suspicious hubby. This time, the hubby pooh-poohed Litvinenko.

I decided to contact David Southwell, an author of books on organized crime as well as the recently published Conspiracy Files. I became a fan of his blog English Dreaming, English Rain, where he and I became slightly acquainted. David mentioned the death of Litvinenko on his blog, and I wanted his opinion of the documentary and its allegations. Here’s what he said:

"While I could not call Alex a close friend, we had talked, and he had provided useful contacts when I was writing about Russian organized crime. However, what a lot of people seem to have forgotten about him since his death was that he was a conspiracy theorist. His bogeyman was Putin, but often behaved in the same way as those whose see Freemasons or the Mafia behind every event from the death of JFK to the name change of Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC. At times, Alex on Putin was like Abbie Hoffman on Nixon circa 1970.

"What I found disappointing about Rebellion is that it was short on context. Putin's rise to power did not need the bombings; there was little exploration of how much of a failed state Russia already was or how normal this type of false flag conspiracy is. Often, the best you can do is find evidence of a conspiracy, but showing one existed will rarely tell you who was responsible for it. Rebellion failed to provide the tools for its audience to judge which allegations had genuine—and therefore frightening—substance and which, like the claims Alex so often made in person about Putin being a paedophile, were free from the burden of demonstrable facts.

"Using the blunt scalpel on common sense and as much of an investigation as I could muster, I concluded last year that Alex was murdered not by agents sent by Putin, but by his friends. Irony indeed that he may have died in a false flag murder to provide a martyr, his strange, lingering death broadcast globally.

"Although I am steeped in conspiracy research, I believe that probably only 5% would qualify as genuine conspiracies and even then, determining those responsible is exceptionally difficult. Plausible deniability often means that someone such as Putin would have little direct knowledge of any false flag operation being conducted in his name.

"Nekrasov's problem is that he takes that one conspiracy (the death of Alex) means proof of another. While I think there is good proof that the apartment bombings were a conspiracy, the death of Alex does not provide proof that they were the direct work of Putin. Nekrasov also seems so blinded by anger and grief, that the 'investigation' into the death of Alex is terribly lopsided. The film reminded me of a father whose son has been killed in a hit-and-run spewing out allegations, some of which may be likely and true (the bastard must have been drunk) but over which no evidence is presented. Some allegations that come from rage, frustration, and pain and say more about Nekrasov and the world view of those anti-Putin than they do about reality.

"I have recently turned down writing a book on Russian crime because of the possibility of writing both safely and accurately is limited. The subject fascinates and is worthy of study, but I feared I would only end up producing another partisan, emotional mess like Nekrasov."

I'm sure you'll agree with me that David's thoughts are illuminating, and I thank him for allowing me to quote them here. As a Chicagoan, I'm more than familiar with corruption and violence among those charged with protecting citizens; just today, John Kass wrote in the Chicago Tribune: "Chicago politics have historically been important in the selection of police commanders and top brass. Just a few years ago, even the Chicago mob had a big say in who worked where in the top echelons of the department." But I think I'd have to agree with David—when it comes to someone you know or something you care about, it's hard not to end up with an emotional mess. If you can deal with that, Poisoned by Polonium has some solid information for the neophyte to the way Russia works today. l

Famous Firsts
Focusing on the debut feature work of famous, and infamous, figures of film

The Verdict (1946)
Debut film of: Don Siegel, director

By Roderick Heath

A tale of a vigilante policeman that begins with the peal of a church bell—this could describe Dirty Harry (1971), the biggest hit of Don Siegel’s career. And yet it also describes The Verdict, Siegel’s directorial gambit of 25 years earlier.

Siegel had been for many years the top editor at Warner Bros, contributing his superb montages to films like The Roaring Twenties (1939) and Across the Pacific (1942). As Siegel put it: “I actually shot more footage for Warner Brothers than any of their highly touted directors, but when I went to Jack Warner and said I wanted to be a director…He said ‘Look, I can get directors a dime a dozen. But who am I going to get to do the action sequences, the inserts, and the montages?’ So I said, ‘Fine, pay me what you pay the directors, and I’ll carry on doing that stuff for you.’"

After a couple of shorts and a lot of patience, he finally got to helm a vehicle for one of Hollywood’s strangest, and yet most entertaining, double acts: Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, who had proven their star worth without Humphrey Bogart in two terrific films, The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) and Three Strangers (1946). The Verdict is Victorian era, and right from the brilliant opening shot where Siegel’s camera swoops in on the tower where the bell tolls in Newgate Prison’s chapel tower for a condemned man on a fog-wreathed night, it’s easy to spot his talent. As well as establishing Siegel’s visual fondness for vertiginous heights and angles, the shot also anticipates one in Dirty Harry in which Siegel’s camera swoops upwards dizzyingly from Harry Callahan’s (Clint Eastwood) torture of Scorpio (Andy Robinson) in the centre of a football field; both shots entwine the sometimes cruel and salutary nature of a thirst for justice with godlike perspective.

The condemned man here is Harris, convicted for the murder of social scion Hannah Kendall. The man who convicted him, Supt. George Grodman (Greenstreet), meditates on the ironies of a profession where success means taking a man’s life: “I have no personal feelings. We are only instruments of justice, like the court that condemns." But Grodman is in for a nasty shock. Called in by his superior (Holmes Herbert) at Scotland Yard, Grodman learns from his chief rival—the ambitious, supercilious Supt. Buckley (George Coulouris)—that he has proven Harris’ innocence. Scandal erupts and tars the Yard’s competence, and Grodman is forced to retire. The case haunts him, not just because of Harris’ fate, but also because the murder victim’s nephew, Arthur Kendall (Morton Lowry), is his next-door neighbor and friend. Grodman sets out to write an account of his career.

Grodman’s best friend, artist and bon vivant Victor Emmric (Lorre), attempts to cheer him up by throwing him a birthday party, inviting Kendall and another next-door neighbor, liberal MP Clive Russell (Paul Cavanaugh). The pairing of Kendall and Russell is disastrous. Russell detests Kendall who, as a mine owner, exploits and degrades the men who are Russell’s constituents. Russell threatens to silence him once and for all when Kendall promises to pressure him with the identity of his secret mistress. Kendall, not a popular man this night, also argues with his girlfriend, singer Lottie Rawson (Joan Lorring), before settling down to bed. The next day, Kendall doesn’t answer the knock at his door by his batty, smitten landlady, Mrs. Benson (Rosalind Ivan), and she runs next door to fetch Grodman. He busts through Kendall’s door, and warns Mrs. Benson not to look…

It is assumed that whoever killed the aunt returned for the nephew. Buckley leads the investigation, and casts his unctuous suspicion on everyone. The case is baffling, as there’s no explanation for how the killer got out of the locked room—even a burglar (Clyde Cook) can’t work out a method. Grodman is hugely amused by Buckley’s floundering, and he and Victor begin a little sleuthing, chiefly an excuse for Victor to romance Lottie.

Lottie is suspect when she attempts to retrieve a valuable watch fob she gave to Kendall, and is caught by Buckley. Attempts to locate the fob prove fruitless until it’s suggested it was buried with Kendall, prompting his exhumation. Lottie is released when the fob is found, but is now stalked by a shadowy presence assailing her with warnings not to talk about Russell and his mistress. But Lottie has already blabbed about that to Buckley.

Russell becomes the chief suspect, and his refusal to divulge the name of his lady friend entraps him. Meanwhile, Victor’s suspicions are closer to home, and he searches Grodman’s apartment. When the stalking presence tries to enter Victor’s bedroom, he takes a shot at it. Russell is tried, and sentenced to death. Grodman convinces Russell to let him track down his mistress, the estranged wife of a Lord, and convince her to confirm his alibi. Grodman pursues her all over France, only to catch up with her at her funeral.

With all avenues of saving Russell from the gallows exhausted, Grodman triumphantly confesses to the murder. Having realized that Kendall killed his own aunt for her money, and then used Grodman in setting up Harris for the fall, and with no way of proving it, Grodman took justice into his own hands. He used many contrivances designed to muddy the waters and fool Buckley as much as possible, but won’t let Russell pay the price for his acts.

Siegel handles the stringent production expertly, slathering the action in fog and shadow. With some terrific actors, Siegel conjures the kind of ripping yarn that’s a pure pleasure to watch. Even the awful Cockney accents of the bit players add cheesy fun. Siegel replies to the evidently low budget with an economic, but technically accomplished style, with expressionistic camera angles, careful lighting (witness the ghoulish delight that is the exhumation scene), and inventive model work (as in the opening shot) to conjure an elegantly bogus Victorian London that looks like the one you imagine when reading a Sherlock Holmes story. Indeed, The Verdict was based on a novel, The Big Bow Mystery, by Victorian writer Israel Zangwill. Zangwill’s novel was a social satire and riff on the detective genre that was already cliché-ridden. Siegel and screenwriter Peter Milne toy with the novel’s elements to give it a more individual moral imperative. The murder victim is changed from an orator of leftist values into a filthy example of capitalist evil, and the progressive, Russell, is the pillar of conflicted conscience whose life must be saved. Grodman’s actions and motivations have been altered to make his crime utterly sympathetic.

But it’s the detail of Grodman’s ironic status as both avenger and murderer that proves Siegel was fascinated by the idea of breaking the law in a heinous fashion to achieve justice, which casts Dirty Harry, still often regarded merely as a sop to reactionaries, in a different light. Harsh reversals of moral expectation and identification are a Siegel trademark—witness the people who have to fear and kill their own neighbors in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the schoolgirls who are far more dangerous to the soldier than he is to them in The Beguiled (1969), or the criminals who gain our empathy in Escape From Alcatraz (1979). Many Siegel heroes are criminals, bastards, or not what they appear to be. He took that last device to an extreme in Body Snatchers, but also including heroic figures like Robert Mitchum’s army officer pretending to be a gangster in The Big Steal (1949) and Shirley MacLaine’s whore-dressed-as-a-nun in Two Mules for Sister Sara (1971).

The Verdict is a transitional film. It straddles genres that were running out of puff in post-war Hollywood—the crisp, quaint mystery yarn with an Anglophile bent, Charlie Chan, Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Moto, Philo Vance, The Falcon, The Saint, and all the other detective franchises and one-offs and the Universal-style gothic chiller. The Verdict pays homage to these, whilst, simultaneously, the harder, dark-drenched, morally ambivalent noir genre was taking grip. Siegel toys with the structure, sympathies, and style of The Verdict to make it count as a noir work; though the first two-thirds of the film are fun in the Holmesian tradition, the last third in which Grodman’s efforts to save Russell gain in grim urgency, take it to another level.

Siegel observed of Greenstreet and Lorre, who work together so well on screen they seemed to have been doing it for decades, that they actually had very different work habits: “If you changed so much as a comma, Sydney was upset…He wanted to get his cues down to the word, and studied his part very carefully. On the other hand, not only didn’t Peter study, but he would come on the set as if he didn’t even know what studio he was in." The Verdict riffs on their screen personas. It’s fun seeing Lorre play a party animal and ladies’ man, but Victor is also incurably morbid, crowing, when Kendall’s body is exhumed that “I’ve always had an unconscious desire to see a grave opened, especially at night!"and complaining, in illustrating Grodman’s book, “I’ve done three stabbings in a row! How about a nice juicy strangling?" The film uses Lorre’s real-life hobby of sketch art creatively. And there’s a recurring gag where Grodman remarks on Buckley’s attempts to fill Grodman’s britches, emphasizing the capacious girth of Greenstreet’s posterior. Backing them up is Coulouris, always a joy at playing slimy arrogance. The weak link is Lorring’s lousy accent.

It’s far from being a great or perfect film. It’s weighed down by standard touches, like clumsy comic relief and the ever-tiresome staple of the shoehorned song-and-dance number, here a “racy" song performed by Lottie, in a “Royal Music Hall," which looks more like a bad theater restaurant. Although it portends many of the themes and interests of Siegel’s career, in other ways, its retro, studio-bound class is at odds with the style the director would develop. With The Big Steal, Siegel dragged the noir film out on location and kept it there, leading to the stark, utterly modern stylishness Siegel had mastered by the time of Coogan’s Bluff (1969) and Dirty Harry. But The Verdict is a delightful melodrama and the sort of film that stands for what Old Hollywood at its best was all about. l

Grade

Promising

The Self-Involvement Blog-a-Thon

Restoration (1995)
Director: Michael Hoffman

By Marilyn Ferdinand

This is an entry in the Self-Involvement Blog-a-Thon hosted by Culture Snob.

In 1995, I was a few months separated from my first husband, living with my mother in my childhood home, sleeping in my childhood room, and completely broken and lost. I had already quit my job, unable to carry the responsibilities my boss had in mind—publishing two magazines instead of our current one without adding staff to our two-person operation—and freelancing a bit and working a part-time job at a local YMCA. I needed to be around children, think about life renewing itself, instead of feeling less than dead. I wasn’t yet a film buff, I wasn’t blogging. Hell, I’m not sure there were blogs yet. I wasn’t sure of anything. I was turned inward, wondering if I’d ever return.

At the time, the Morton Grove Theatre, a small movie house literally yards away from my mother’s home, was still in operation. It had gone from the first-run house I frequented in the early 70s, to a second-run, cut-rate house. The day I went to see Restoration wasn’t much different from others; I’d spent an extremely undemanding day at the Y and then gone for my usual mega-lap swim. Exercise was my main release back then, which was a great relief to my mother, who feared I’d turn to the bottle for escape.

It felt good to sit alone in the dark. It was something I used to do a lot as a kid. I used to lose myself in my dreams. Now, I’d lose myself in someone else’s dream. Seemed appropriate, because I’d just done that for the past seven years, trying to be someone I wasn’t to please my mate. I didn’t know who I was. Maybe Restoration could tell me.

The story takes place in the 17th century, during the reign of Charles II of England, a restoration of the monarchy after the overthrow of Oliver Cromwell. Robert Downey, Jr. plays Robert Merivel, a gifted physician who comes to the notice of the king when he is observed reaching into the chest of a man who walks around with a metal plate covering a hole and holds the man's beating heart in his hand. Merivel’s lack of superstition about the human heart fits perfectly with Charles’ (Sam Neill) Enlightenment attitudes. The king summons Merivel to his castle, shows him his models and contraptions, and then engages him as a royal physician—for his dogs. Robert, though loathing the assignment, feels he cannot say no. Soon, he becomes another one of the court wastrels, indulging in the decadence that has come back with a vengeance after the previous 11 years of Puritan severity under Cromwell.

Charles has a beautiful mistress at court, Celia Clemence (Polly Walker), which is beginning to vex the queen. He decides to marry her off to Robert to make her seem safe, and then carry on his affair in a less conspicuous manner. Robert does the unthinkable—he falls in love with Celia. In a poignant scene, the newly married couple repair to their marriage bed—Robert clumsily clad only in a feather-festooned cap covering his genitals. Robert blindly hopes they are to consummate their marriage, only to watch Charles take his place beside Celia, thank Robert for his service to the crown, and laughingly embrace the bride. Robert’s sad, humiliated face tells all.

Robert leaves the king’s service and wanders in a daze. He eventually meets a woman named Catharine (Meg Ryan) at an insane asylum where he finds employment and takes her as a lover. She has a peculiar habit of walking in a circle in the courtyard using wide, heavy steps. She calls it the “leaving step." "Every man on earth has his leaving step. If my husband had been a small man, he would not have been able to leave me. But he was a large man, and stepped over me as I slept, one great stride," she explains. Catharine becomes pregnant and listens to hear Robert’s leaving step. But he doesn’t go. He takes her to London where he intends for them to become a family. Unfortunately, when Catharine’s time comes, her baby is breech. Robert must perform a C-section to save the baby, but he tells Catharine that she will die. She accepts her fate and asks only that Robert care for the baby and name it Margaret if it is a girl.

Robert mourns Catharine, but becomes a restored man in fathering Margaret. The 1666 Great Fire of London engulfs Robert’s home, and he risks everything to save Margaret. He can’t lose himself again, now that he has rediscovered his gift as a doctor and removed the steel plate from before his own heart and felt what it is to love.

I had no real idea what Restoration was about when I went to see it. I only knew that Robert Downey, Jr. was in it and felt a kinship with his troubled soul. I cried as though I would never cry again, feeling so much the hurt of thinking I loved someone who ended up only using me, of giving up on my own being and gifts to rest in an institution to which I rushed in panic at being 30 and unwed. I cried because I tried to please someone who never would have been pleased with me, and experienced his leaving step. I hadn’t yet been restored to myself—that would take 10 years of hard work—and was terrified that once I got there, I would lose it all again. But I saw that there was a road ahead, that I might not always feel empty and bereft, and that my gift—writing—might yet pull me through.

I walked home, went up to my small, safe, childhood room, wiped my eyes, and put on some audiotapes a kind soul had given me to help me understand divorce and recovery. I can honestly say that this heartfelt, well-crafted, visually stunning movie with sincere performances all around changed my life by giving me a mirror onto my own experience and, along with it, hope. l

Mary Stevens, M.D. (1933)
Director: Lloyd Bacon

By Marilyn Ferdinand

"Men trusted her with their loves, but not with their lives…"

In my travels around the classic film blogosphere, the name “Kay Francis" makes a mighty roar. It comes up so frequently among classic film buffs that I had to wonder what was wrong with me that I had never heard of her or even seen one of her pictures. Delving a little deeper, I found out that she was in Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise. As a big Lubitsch fan, I wondered why I hadn’t seen that film or registered her connection with him. I should have made Trouble in Paradise my introduction to Kay Francis, but instead, the first film I laid my hands on was a lesser work, Mary Stevens, M.D. Serendipity, I suppose, that this late pre-Code film also costars Jonathan Lapper’s fave rave Glenda Farrell. He’s got a picture of Farrell holding a cat at the top of the right rail on his blog and greatly admires (as do I) her performance in another 1933 film, Mystery of the Wax Museum. So this one’s for all the legions of Kay Francis fans and for you, Jonathan.

The film opens to immediate action. A medical dispatcher takes an emergency call and hops in the ambulance with the doctor on call. When they arrive, an Italian immigrant named (whatta ya know?) Tony (Harold Huber) is hysterical with worry. When he sees that the doctor answering the call is a woman—our girl Mary Stevens (Kay Francis)—he refuses to let her near his wife. She asks him what’s wrong with his wife, and he says she’s going to have a baby. “Is that all?" she replies. He becomes incensed, saying that they lost another baby during delivery. He pulls out a cheese knife that looks more like a machete and tells her he will kill her if anything goes wrong. Her assistant Pete (George Cooper), worried about Tony, calls the police. By the time the baby arrives, the entire neighborhood is roused and the stairwell to Tony’s apartment filled with cops. Just another day in Little Italy. Just the kind of thing you’d expect to happen around a lady doctor.

Despite this first taste of prejudice, Mary graduates medical school with her childhood friend Don Andrews (Lyle Talbot), whom Mary considers her boyfriend. They open a practice together, he as a GP and she as a pediatrician. Glenda Carroll (Glenda Farrell) becomes their wise-to-the-world nurse. Business is slow for Don and slower for Mary. One night, Don breaks a date with Mary, making some poor excuse. He has met a glamour girl, the symbolically named Lois Rising (Thelma Todd), and falls in love with her and her well-connected father (Charles Wilson). Mary is downcast to hear that Don is going to marry Lois, but wishes him well. When Don’s father-in-law gets him a patronage job as head of the workers compensation office, Don invites Mary to take an office across from his in a location where she can get more than charity cases. She accepts and brings Glenda along.

Mary’s practice grows, but she still pines for Don, who has begun drinking because he is dissatisfied with both his phone-in job and his marriage. Mary, struggling to forget Don, takes off for a vacation. Don, who, with his political sponsors in government, is under suspicion for fraud, is told to leave town for a while. He and Mary end up going to the same place and eventually confessing their love for each other. Don says Lois wants a divorce as much as he does; Mary, reassured, spends the night with Don and makes plans for a future with him. In the morning, Don learns that he’s in the clear and feels free to quit his job and go back to practicing medicine the way he intended to.

Lois’ father gets wind of the pending divorce and forbids Lois to go to Reno, saying it will look suspicious if Don suddenly quits the Rising operation. Lois feigns pregnancy. Meanwhile, Mary really is pregnant. She arranges to go to Europe, where she will adopt her own baby, and then there will be no scandal. On her return with Glenda and baby Don, an outbreak of infantile paralysis (polio) is detected on board their ship. A race to get serum to the afflicted children in time gets underway, but tragedy waits in the wings.

This film may sound a bit melodramatic—and the trailer won’t disabuse anyone of that impression—but it actually deals with social problems in a fairly realistic way. Like all women’s films, Mary Stevens, M.D. has a heroine facing challenges in her life. The unwillingness of patients to accept her as their doctor, the scourge of polio and infant mortality among the immigrant classes, the difficulties faced by unwed mothers, and the perception that professional women are dowdy and masculine (helped along by the very unglamorous look Francis is given in the beginning of the film) were real obstacles.

On the other hand, the film’s indulgence in ethnic stereotypes, from Tony to a Jewish mother and her nebbish son, are a bit hard on the nerves. Mary transforms from ugly duckling to swan when she is with Don in their little hideaway, and her clothes conveniently start to fall dangerously low on her shoulders. Indeed, in the scene before Mary goes to Don’s room for their night of love—and there is no mistake about what they are up to—Francis has a top of some kind under her robe. When she shows up in Don’s room, the top is conspicuously missing.

Kay Francis is not only a beautiful and charismatic actress, but also a very good one. She brings so much nuance to her characterization of Mary, a woman trying to have it all in 1933! The pre-Code aspects of this film are important to that characterization, because we can see Mary as a sexual being without the lurid attractions of other pre-Code films. While her unwed mother isn’t quite as realistic as Margaret Sullavan’s in another 1933 film, Only Yesterday, it does show that audiences didn’t used to be cowards about the facts of life.

Lyle Talbot isn’t bad as Francis’ love interest, but he’s less able to make hay out of a somewhat sketchy role. Glenda Farrell is a little too wisecracking in this film for my tastes—an annoying characteristic of sidekicks through the ages—but she shows herself to be a solid friend and warms her Glenda up very nicely as the film progresses. In general, she’s a delight to watch. I also liked Thelma Todd in a small, but snappy role. Lloyd Bacon, the director of such fine films as Footlight Parade, Larceny, Inc., and Brother Orchid, kept a firm grip on the more hammy portions of the script and somehow made this 72-minute film seem very full.

Mary Stevens, M.D. is a solid women’s film from an era in which women were allowed to be real human beings on the silver screen. I hope we can see a resurgence of great leading ladies who, in their prime career years, are allowed to be mature women as well. l

Famous Firsts
Focusing on the debut feature work of famous, and infamous, figures of film

Friday the 13th (1980)
Producer/Director: Sean S. Cunningham
Debut film of: The unpleasant Voorhees clan

By Roderick Heath

There’s a large dose of irony underlying the attention Friday the 13th and its endless sequels receive these days, not dissimilar to the sarcastic ebullience that greets my friends when they perform Vanilla Ice at karaoke. It’s so lame, it’s classic. Yet it demands attention as a foundation of ’80s film culture and the modern horror genre. Make no mistake—Friday the 13th is a shitty film. Perfunctorily written, boringly directed, dimly plotted, and awkwardly acted, it’s hard to see what made it so damn special, which is, perhaps, the point. Friday the 13th has no ambitions to being special. Its aim is to be efficient. Friday represents the apotheosis of cinema as mass production. Taking elements provided by better films, Friday puts them together cheaply with infinite capacity for repetition.

The story is almost Euripidean in its simplicity and compression. A period prologue—a common feature of ’70s horror films, plus pinching the first-person camerawork of Halloween’s opening—introduces the rural Camp Crystal Lake, which, though the setting is kept obscure, is revealed by both the shooting locations and stray details as being in rural New Jersey. Two camp counselors sneak off for a bit of crumpet, and are promptly slaughtered by an intruder. The present-day bulk of the film takes place in a period of about 12 hours. Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer), who seems to be a bit of a counterculture wash-up, is reopening the camp as a refuge for “inner city kids," and has hired a crew of flaky break-year teens as counselors. One, Annie (Robbi Morgan), hired as a cook, has difficulty making it to the camp. Dropped off in the nearest town, she encounters a local drunk, Ralph (Walt Gorney, playing a part that ought to be Dwight Frye’s), who warns of the evil that haunts the camp, beginning with a boy who drowned in the ’50s and followed by the still-unsolved murders seen near the film’s opening. Then she gets a lift with a truck driver (Rex Everhart), who cagily repeats the warning and leaves her at a crossroads. She then gets a ride in a jeep, whose unseen driver slices her throat.

Meanwhile, the general idiocy of the counselors is revealed by their attempts to kill a snake in the room of Alice Hardy (Adrienne King), who, it’s hinted in the film’s barren dashes of character development, is an art student with some unexplained baggage preoccupying her who is romantically interesting to Steve. Jack Burrell (Kevin Bacon, defining the power mullet as we know it) and Marcie Cunningham (Jeannine Taylor) are the appointed pair of pretty lovers, Ned (Mark Nelson) is a manic nerd jealous of Jack, and Brenda (Laurie Bertram) and Bill (Harry Crosby) make up the numbers. Steve departs for the evening, night falls, and a buffeting rainstorm descends. The night is—well, Snoopy would know how to describe it.

Godard famously remarked that all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun; Friday adapted these slightly as a girl in underwear and a big knife. The anxieties that Friday exploits are so basic that the film nearly works as a pure Jungian experience: night, shadows, isolation, the vulnerability of being unclothed whether having sex or taking a shower. Films that can be easily identified as influencing Friday include Bava’s Sei Donne per l’Assassino (1964) and Ecologia del Delitto (1971), Argento’s L’Uccello dalle Piume di Cristallo (1970), Richard Fleischer’s See No Evil (1971), and Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). But the elegant games of cinematic space, construction, and identification that Bava, Argento, Fleischer, and Carpenter learnt from Hitchcock and employed are totally absent from this film’s mercenary, witless proficiency. From Carpenter especially, it steals mercilessly, hamfistedly reproducing his style down to the title; in this first episode, at least, it is supposed to be Friday the 13th, but I don’t think this ever came up again.

In quick succession, Ned, Jack, Marcie, Brenda, Steve, and Bill are either dispatched or disappear to turn up riddled with holes later. Tom Savini has long been rightfully acclaimed for his gore effects, and his work here is cunning, but not exactly chilling. Effects like the arrow that sprouts from Bacon’s neck and the axe that lodges in Taylor’s face are lividly entertaining, but never actually look like real violence happening to real people, and the weak editing doesn’t help. Back when I first saw these films, late night on TV, they’d been cut senseless, but I’m not really sure why. I’ve seen better gore at Halloween parties.

About half an hour from the end, Friday remembers to throw in a perpetrator and motivation—Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), who makes an unexpected visit, claiming to be a friend of Jack’s, but who soon starts rambling about her disfigured son Jason, the boy who drowned back when and whose birthday this is. To nobody’s surprise but Alice’s, she is pursuing a psychotic revenge for her son’s death that she blames on horny incompetent counselors and is given to taking on Jason’s voice (which pleads for her to “Kill, mommy!"). Her appearance was only a ruse to draw King out of her besieged readiness. This incredibly somnolent piece of oh-yeah plotting reminds us why screenwriter Victor Miller is still neglected by the Nobel committee. Rather than hide in the vast dark forest or take a boat out onto the lake—you know, places where you’d be hard to find and attack—Alice locks herself in a cupboard with a frying pan.

Director Cunningham had produced Craven’s seminal The Last House on the Left, and he brought with him from that film assistant producer Steve Miner. Friday shares with Last House a fond visual contrast between leafy, pacific surrounds and grim violence, plus a dash of barely coherent social-conservative critique. What it lacks that Last House has is a level of actual thought to what it’s portraying, as well as dramatic structure and depth. It could be argued that the intense moral and intellectual indolence of the series’ hapless teens leads them to become easy knife fodder, and so they’re a general condemnation of the audience that laps them up. But that is, frankly, crap. The element of slasher-film-as-reactionary- statement has in being so oft-reiterated perhaps been over-emphasised. The sexual element of the slasher film feels less intellectual, in the sense of being about a moral caution, than the sheer visceral exploitation of young people’s sexual anxieties. The vulnerability of coitus is especially loaded for people under 20, who worry about being caught by their parents, spied on by friends, catching diseases, getting knocked up, etc. Ironically, the Friday series probably did more for the cause of back row nookie than any other films.

Technically, the film hangs together. It’s well-shot by Barry Abrams, and aided especially by Harry Manfredi’s score, with its pseudo-Psycho strings and those indelibly creepy sounds that accompany the stalking (ki-ki-ki ma-ma-ma), which is actually Palmer’s mantra of “kill, mommy!" edited and remixed to suggest the underlying motivation. Cunningham builds a modicum of atmosphere as the camp is swallowed by the storm. But it would be Miner, a fairly talented director who made the series an iconic one, through Friday the 13th Part II (1981) and Friday the 13th Part III (1982), by introducing the lethal, supernaturally spurred Jason Voorhees, who, in his hockey mask, was an anonymous embodiment of thuggish violence, a genuine monster whose utter malevolence can only be temporarily contained.

But the plot of all the films is the same, and the tensions that made them mildly, repetitively entertaining in Miner’s more talented hands, are laboriously set up here. The swift, casual brutality of the murders committed on the unsuspecting and exposed, most of whom are too involved in their sex lives or lack of one to notice the danger, makes the final pursuit of the last survivor, always a girl, especially fraught. The mechanical stunt where Alice keeps knocking Pamela down and leaving her for dead, only to be attacked again, is repeated no less than four times. This contrast of the lack of killer instinct in ordinary people compared with the remorseless nature of the villains is, of course, vital to the genre, and also a great device for a lazy director. Alice finally gets bloodthirsty enough to cleave off Pamela’s head with a machete, in a palpable climax insufficient to make up for the lousiness of the preceding 90 minutes.

Cunningham here throws in another stunt that would become a tiresome hallmark—the exasperatingly fuzzy conclusion that leaves us wondering whether what we saw is a traumatic dream or real event. Specifically, King, who gets the idea to take a canoe out into the lake after killing Mrs. Voorhees, awakens in the morning when the local deputy arrives, but then seems to be attacked by the drowned, part-rotted remains of young Jason, only to awaken in hospital, raving about the boy in the lake. The very last shot is of Crystal Lake, its surface pocked by small ripples, and the audience sensing its placidity is charged with menace. Well, mild nausea, at any rate. By pure coincidence, when I watched this, it was followed on cable TV by House of Wax—the one with Vincent Price, not Paris Hilton—which, with its perfervid colours, energetic acting, strong script, classical references, and overall sense of gothic fun, was like stumbling into the daylight after slogging around in the dark. l

Grade

Unpromising

Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
Director: Michael Curtiz

By Marilyn Ferdinand

My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you.

So ended the popular vaudeville act of The Four Cohans, who entertained audiences across the country with their singing, dancing, and clowning around in the late 1800s. So, too, did those words burn into my impressionable adolescent brain and remain with me to this day as perhaps the most memorable line of that traditional 4th of July movie, Yankee Doodle Dandy. It’s not Independence Day yet, and Yankee Doodle Dandy is now only a traditional offering on Turner Classic Movies, but I’d like to put this movie out there for consideration by a new generation of film buffs, particularly those who might like to get a handle on films of the 40s, a rich and often misunderstood era.

James Cagney won his only Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of showbiz phenomenon George M. Cohan. Did he deserve it? Compared with the other nominees (Ronald Colman in Random Harvest, Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees, Walter Pidgeon in Mrs. Miniver, and Monty Woolley in The Pied Piper), I’d say that he probably did. Cornball and boisterous he was indeed, but that is exactly how Cohan was always described. Cagney was also charged with that special something he always got when he had the rare opportunity to perform in his favorite kind of film—a musical. Here was the intensity he brought to his gangsters—Tom Powers, Cody Garrett, Martin Snyder—in service of a tour de force performance of pure joy. His singing (not so hot, but expressive), his dancing (eccentric and strange to modern eyes, but masterfully entertaining and done in Cohan’s style), and, of course, his acting, which could turn from bravado to playful to soulful in just the right measure, all came together like a force of nature to tell perhaps the ultimate showbiz story.

The film opens in 1940, recounting the historic awarding of the Congres- sional Medal of Honor to Cohan for writing the patriotic song “Over There," an unofficial fight song for military men who fought in World War I and then in World War II. Cohan, the ultimate flag waver, is intimidated as he follows the Negro footman (the frequently working but often uncredited Clinton Rosemund) up a winding staircase to meet President Roosevelt (voice of Art Gilmore). In broad tones, with his back to the camera, Roosevelt reminisces about The Four Cohans, and Cohan launches into a full-blown flashback, with voiceovers from time to time to connect the scenes.

We go all the way back to George’s father, Jerry (Walter Huston), on stage and waiting to hear word about his wife Nellie (Rosemary DeCamp), who is in labor. When the baby who would grow up to be George M. arrives, Jerry rushes through a 4th of July parade to Nellie’s bedside. Jerry suggests they name him George Washington, but must settle for George Michael. An unironic shot of baby George shows him with an American flag in his tiny fist.

We move swiftly through the birth of George’s sister Josie, who, grown-up, is played by Cagney's real sister, Jeanne Cagney; stints on the vaudeville stage; and on to a production of “Peck’s Bad Boy," with young George (Henry Blair) as star. George’s ego gets the better of him backstage when the Cohans get word that an important scout for a top vaudeville circuit wants to speak with them. He offers them a contract, but George fouls up the deal. He receives a spanking (“here’s a part without any talent") after Nellie warns Jerry not to hit him in the mouth (“he has to sing") or the hands (“he has to play the violin").

The Cohans appear in a regional play, with George in white beard and wig playing his mother’s father. An 18-year-old girl named Mary (Joan Leslie) comes backstage to ask the advice of the wizened professional. She thinks she has talent and demonstrates her dancing abilities to George, who playfully gives her contradictory advice about her dancing style and then assures a beautiful chorine who sticks her head into his dressing room that their date for the evening is on. Mary, confused, asks if she’s his grand- daughter. George replies, “Well, I do have to make up older than I really am," and starts peeling off his whiskers and erasing his greasepaint wrinkles. When he pulls off his wig, Mary screams. He drops the wig to the floor, stomps on it, and says, “Got it." Mary becomes part of the Cohan troupe.

George has begun writing plays. Our introduction to Cohan's long-time partner Sam Harris (Richard Whorf) is a humorous meeting in the offices of theatrical agents Dietz & Goff (George Tobias and Chester Chute). Harris is trying to sell them a melodrama with Indians and flames and stampeding horses. George is pitching “Fifty Miles from Boston," with Mary along to sing "Harrigan." Dietz & Goff don’t like either of them. Both budding playwrights go separately to a tavern to drown their sorrows. Harris tries another pitch to German theatre angel Schwab (S.Z. Sakall). Schwab says he wants pretty dancing girls. George, overhearing their conversation, pretends that Harris is his partner and tells him Dietz & Goff may be interested in his musical. Schwab, disconcerted that Harris has been sitting on a musical, asks, “Why is Dietz’s wife’s money better than my wife’s money?" With a covert introduction and a handshake, Cohan & Harris is born, with one hit after another backed by the creative team. This scene is pure hokum and very far from the truth about the formation of the team, but it is extremely well-written and performed with the razor-sharp comic timing Cagney perfected with Pat O’Brien in Boy Meets Girl and Joan Blondell in Footlight Parade.

Cohan moves on to court Broadway star Fay Templeton (the marvelous Irene Manning) to headline his new musical. Templeton's agent is urging her to hitch her wagon to the hottest thing on Broadway, but Templeton finds Cohan too vulgar for her refined image. When Cohan comes to call on her, she openly scorns him, but is won over by a song he wrote while she was on stage, "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," which becomes the name of the show. She debuts the song "Mary, It's a Grand Old Name," in the show, while the real Mary, now Cohan's wife and for whom the song supposedly was written, watches adoringly from her theatre box.

In 1904, Cohan opens the musical "Little Johnny Jones." I think it's interesting what a critic of the time says of this musical:

At the Providence Opera House last evening George M. Cohan, one of "the Four," with a good-sized company, began a week's engagement in his latest musical offense, "Little Johnny Jones." The production still has "four Cohans," although Josephine has deserted the fold. Father and mother are still with the show and so is Ethel Levey, who is Mrs. George M. in private life. The combination shows its familiar styles of varied talents neither better or worse than when last seen in this city and the entertainment is about of the usual Cohan standard, although there are features in this offering that have never been seen on any stage before. The extremely large audience present left no doubt as to its hearty approval of the whole affair. The applause was frequent and there were curtain calls and a speech by the "author actor." All of which was in sad contrast to the comparatively slim and indifferent greeting extended to Miss Eleanor Robson, week before last, as well as to many of the previous attractions of marked artistic merit.

Now take a look at the Warner Bros version of this musical offense:

Certainly, we can see the cornball to which the reviewer objected, but this is a magnificent entertainment made even moreso by Cagney's cocksure charisma.

The dramatic moments in the film are generally fine, though Leslie and Cagney generate the fire of a wet match. Even a wholesome musical ought to make marriage look like a pleasure, not something you retire to. Some moments, however, are quite poignant. For example, Josie and George talk at the family farm, and Josie tells him she is getting married and retiring. This scene actually took place between Jeanne and James, who were a vaudeville team, and thus, there is a personal note that I find moving. In another scene, George, walking alongside some soldiers getting ready to ship out during World War II, is chided for not singing their marching song: "Don't you remember it?