Ferdy on Films, etc.

The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969)
Director: Bryan Forbes

By Marilyn Ferdinand

By now you may know that I find year-end wrap-ups a difficult exercise. I don’t make lists, so I can’t fall back on that well-worn discussion starter. I hardly see any mainstream films, so I can’t form a common bond with the moviegoing audience at large. I look for the films in the attic, so to speak, so it’s not always easy to relate to even my most loyal readers. What I’ve decided to do to bid 2008 farewell is present you with a film that I think represents this moment in time—the fading of a dark and destructive era in the United States, and the rise of hope for a more peaceful, just, and generous country than we’ve seen in a long time.

The Madwoman of Chaillot started life as a play. Written in 1942 during the Nazi Occupation of France and first mounted in Paris in 1945, Jean Giraudoux story imagines good triumphing over evil, life enduring against living death, and above all, the survival of France and all that is unique about the country. Its fantasy quality and 19th century nostalgia are reminiscent of the fairytale and period films French filmmakers were forced to retreat to during the Occupation to appease the German authorities. Some of these films conveyed a veiled message of resistance that only their French audiences would understand. Thus, I imagine these films influenced Giraudoux in his protest against the Nazis, lending weight to this exaggerated parable. It’s a message that was current when the film was made, and unfortunately, it still reverberates today.

The film announces visually the turbulence of the late 1960s and the forces that will join to set things right: a street protest violently broken up by the Paris police and a tall, elderly woman dressed in fin de siècle garb moving through the streets causing minor havoc—cutting a surveyor’s line so that she doesn’t have to walk around it, pouring a window washer’s bucket of water into a window box of flowers. The woman is our madwoman, Countess Aurelia (Katharine Hepburn), on her way to her favorite café in the Chaillot district. She will ally with one of the young protestors, Roderick (Richard Chamberlain), nephew of the rich and lunatic Prospector (Donald Pleasence) who sets the plot in motion.

Roderick returns to his uncle’s home just as a new addition to The Prospector’s collection of toilets is being hung on the wall—a very rare outhouse from Johannesburg for which The Prospector paid 1.5 million francs. Roderick, bleeding from the blow he received from a policeman’s baton, goes up the stairs to tend to his wound. The Prospector complains that he is bleeding all over the towels. Roderick answers that he has been injured doing something that matters, to which The Prospector sneers that he’s all talk and no action. He then hands Roderick a large suitcase containing a bomb and tells him that if he really wants to take action, he should plant it in Room 22 of the Municipal Hall, where a truly nefarious bureaucrat is making plans for war.

The scene switches to a Chaillot café where The Reverend (John Gavin) and The Commissar (Oscar Homolka) sit at a table awaiting the arrival of the rest of “The Board.” The General (Paul Henreid) and The Chairman (Yul Brynner) arrive in a white limousine. Shortly thereafter, The Broker (Charles Boyer) arrives to tell The Chairman how, with a bit of market manipulation, he helped The General make 5.5 million francs. Happily, The Chairman announces he will pay for lunch, until he recalculates his profit and comes up with only 5 million francs: “You pay for lunch,” he instructs The Broker.

The usual denizens of the café, including a juggler (Gaston Palmer), a flower seller (Harriet Ariel), and The Ragpicker (Danny Kaye), come to The Board’s table, as they do to all the tables. The Chairman rudely dismisses them and shouts insults and orders at their waitress Irma (Nanette Newman). He tells the rest of The Board that he is waiting to see a man he has never met to receive instructions for his twelfth successful campaign. This is no ordinary rendezvous: the stranger will have the very key to the scheme and the proper name for it, and they will recognize each other through some strange look in the eye. As it happens, the man The Chairman is looking for is The Prospector. Indeed, The Prospector comes over to their table and having secured enough dirty secrets from each of them to insure against a double-cross, reveals the secret. He has been all over Paris sniffing and sampling the tap water and finally found what he was looking for—the taste of petroleum at this very café. “There’s oil under the streets of Chaillot,” he declares. The Chairman’s eyes light up as he orders the Board into the café to sample the tap water at the bar, bothered by the appearance of an eccentric—The Countess—demanding her usual table from its current occupant.

The only thing standing in the way of drilling is a pesky clerk who won’t issue a permit. The Prospector has seen to that by sending his nephew to blow the man up. Unfortunately for The Board, Roderick sees a family with small children sitting outside of Room 22 and runs to a bridge over the Seine and tosses the bomb in. He is mistakenly thought to be jumping, and gets punched unconscious by a policeman. The Countess and Irma see to his care. When he comes to, he and Irma lock eyes and fall in love. When Roderick realizes his uncle planned to do away with a simple clerk and the reasons behind the assassination attempt, he reveals all to the good people of Chaillot. The Ragpicker—the philosopher of the group—must explain to the Countess how the world has changed. “I looked at people, and they looked back. Now, they stare back with dead eyes.” Realizing that they are now living in an age of The Golden Calf, the Countess lays a trap to stop The Board from destroying the world.

The view from the café appears to be the same one used when little Pascal first finds his balloon companion in The Red Balloon, establishing Chaillot as a magical place for this viewer. Certainly to the “good guys” in this film, their world is indeed a wondrous place. For Countess Aurelia and her three similarly garbed friends—Gabrielle the virgin (Guiletta Massina, in a rare English-speaking role), Constance the Madwoman of Passy (Margaret Leighton), and Josephine the adjudicator (Edith Evans)—the world is an illusion into which they can slip when they aren’t living in their ancient memories of youth. The common men and women of Chaillot must break through this illusion to convince the Countess that the world has changed, grown coarse and mean, to rouse her to action. The Countess is, in fact, a representative of historical France—an aristocrat from the 19th century, when monarchy returned for a time to the French Republic. Her decision to exterminate the members of The Board is the type that an absolute monarch would make; it is Josephine who insists that a trial must take place, thus marrying the ideals of the Republic with the nostalgic place of the monarchy in France.

To lure her victims to her mansion, she plays on their greed. She visits each of them and shows them a sample of the oil that is under her home—in fact, a mixture created in the café kitchen. She has the opportunity to see for herself the darkness they spread. From The Broker she learns that to make futures trading profitable, crops that could feed thousands may be burned. She watches The General bumble around with nuclear missiles. The Reverend reveals himself to be an Elmer Gantry with an intolerance for other religions. And The Prospector and The Chairman are unbridled greed itself. These episodes may be preaching to the converted among many in the audience, but they are important in order for the Countess to enter the modern world and do what must be done.

The members of The Board are delightfully villainous. Yul Brynner and Donald Pleasence are yin and yang as The Chairman and The Prospector, their bald heads nodding in unison, their madness perfectly matched. Brynner assumes a maniacal glee as he plays his role large, not an unpleasant caricature by any means. Pleasence, however, really convinces as a man who trusts his nose. When the others wonder at his prediction of oil under Paris, he wags his nose in their faces, turning profile to emphasize its impressive size, as a phallic symbol of his power over nature.

The most compelling scene of the film—and also the most stagey—is the trial. Josephine (a shrill creation of Dame Edith) rules that the criminals can be tried in absentia as long as they are provided with proper counsel. The Ragpicker is chosen to defend them. This may be Danny Kaye’s finest hour on film. He presents arguments about the legitimacy of progress and the rights of innovators over those who would squander their resources, and wins Constance over. This alarming development encourages him, and he reveals more of his clients’ naked purposes. Revealing the true hubris of the oligarchs, The Ragpicker sums up his defense with, “We buy the legislators who make the law. We ARE the law!” Kaye’s performance taps the potential cruelty and arrogance in us all, infusing The Ragpicker with the integrity a defense attorney should have for his clients, but also their guilt. Those who only know Kaye as Hans Christian Andersen are in for a shock here.

Katharine Hepburn has a sufficiently imperial air to glide easily into the role of a nearly untouchable grand dame. Yet she fails to capture a real sense of madness, preferring to be a garden-variety eccentric in a role that calls upon her to commit some highly significant murders. We see moments of callousness in the Countess during the opening sequence and in her offhanded treatment of her mad women friends. But Hepburn softens her character so much, particularly by dissolving into tears early and often, that the strength and, yes, righteous cruelty she represents doesn’t come through. Her supporting cast offers little to bolster the sense of power that I always associate with a nation of commoners who could overthrow a monarch and establish a republic.

Bryan Forbes is entirely too enamored of the keyhole shooting style that was popular in England at the time. He frequently shoots Hepburn through a “gauze” of leaves, scenery, and monuments, perhaps to suggest her illusory life; to me, however, it just looked like he got his framing wrong. The cinematography in the Countess’ mansion is appropriately gothic, but not nearly as horrifying as it could or should have been as, say, the kangaroo courtroom in M was. The film’s look is at its best in the streets of Paris, where the cause the Countess and her friends are fighting for can be seen and appreciated.

While The Madwoman of Chaillot comes up short in various areas, the overall impression of a cautionary fable does its job. Standing at the doorway of 2009, I hope along with the rest of the world that the United States will be a better place in the coming year. But in keeping with the above title card, I’m not holding my breath. l

By Roderick Heath

Considering that I’ve always taken more pleasure in digging through the ephemera of the past and the detritus of pop culture more than pretending that right now is so bloody important, I don’t think I should feel as phony as I do writing this. For starters, there’s the absurdity of the notion that we all have the same “year”. This year saw my enrollment in a Film Studies class that played like a Gary Trudeau satire (now kids, you are to analyse the awesome artistry of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone). It also saw the release of a stupefying number of films, few of which I’ll ever see. And I inevitably wonder what’s being made today that will provoke interest, excitement, the thrill of the unexpected, the signs of the artful, in 40 years? Where amongst the avalanche of films released this year are the little gems, the future cult films? Are there any? What, in short, will last? Wasn’t it only a few years ago when people thought films like A Beautiful Mind or Crash were important in some fashion?

Doomsday; The Strangers

Many of the best movies I’ve seen in the past 18 months are strange mutts produced by similar lines of thought. Films like An Old Mistress, Boarding Gate, Doomsday, and The Strangers are works made by intelligent filmmakers hunting for the scent of real blood and bone in the suspect qualities of old-school trash, florid melodrama, film noir, and no-budget horror. The year that saw the death of “termite art” theorist Manny Farber could be called a vast aesthetic tribute to his ideas. Or is the increasing tendency to nail films as “Oscar bait” the final process in the dumbing down of pop culture, a great excuse to ignore everything except the new comic book movie, which, by the by, has to provide the requisite amount of “darkness” and “relevance” in “parable” in compensation for the dearth of serious cinema? Sometimes our contemporary culture feels like the victim of a car crash learning to walk again.

Either way, I suppose in the next couple of months I may work up the enthusiasm to pretend that David Fincher is some kind of artist and that I care anymore about Clint Eastwood. There’s a host of said Oscar bait that’s been jammed into the last weeks of this year like a wholesale clearance at a high class but unprofitable carpet warehouse, and many other films anticipated still nowhere in sight (Hurry up, Let the Right One In. Avanti, Gomorrah. Please move your arse, Rachel Getting Married). More than ever, ambition in Hollywood has become a wage-slave in an Oscar-hungry boutique, trading desperately in the Christmas build-up and abandoning the rest of the year, like the Romans did their empire, to hordes of ravening cinematic barbarians.

Angel

I saw some of the best films I’ve ever seen in the past twelve months—trouble is, they were all from last year. My world was appropriately rocked by the glory of There Will Be Blood, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days (which both went on my all-time list), Death Proof (my current favourite film), Verhoeven’s gutsy Black Book, and Francois Ozon’s delightfully weird Angel, and I did not demand my money back for the likes of Atonement, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead; Eastern Promises; Romance & Cigarettes; Lust, Caution; No Country for Old Men; and Sweeney Todd either. Good, bad, and ugly, these were all works of real cinema that demanded at some point during their running time for us to ask just what our definitions of quality, invention, art, and entertainment are.

10,000 BC; Get Smart

Nonetheless, I know I’m not alone in kissing goodbye to one of the dullest years of cinema in living memory (and I lived through 2001). What can one say about 10,000 BC, the most boring caveman flick ever made (and that’s saying something—seen Clan of the Cave Bear lately?) or the utter catastrophe of Australia? The limp Get Smart? The pointless The Edge of Love? The instantly forgettable The Other Boleyn Girl? The last two especially would have been prime Oscar nets if they’d had the slightest idea of what they wanted to achieve.

If 2007 was the year for works of grandly calamitous art, reflecting the fullest measure of an anxiety-wearied age by mixing fury and fear in many measures, 2008 reflected a year of transition—it didn’t know what it was about, but knew it wanted things to improve. The strongest fare came from some tried and tested sources. My favourite for the year was Catherine Breillat’s Une Vieille Maîtresse, which forcefully interrogated assumptions about the past, about gender and love, and certain genres of film-making. Mike Leigh’s deft Happy-Go-Lucky, which was badly marketed and even more badly described by most critics, was his most entertaining film since Topsy-Turvy and his most sleekly assembled since Career Girls. More importantly, it extended artfully on themes long crucial to Leigh—the necessity of communal existence and the unnoticed but vital presence of the people who make that existence possible.

The Mother of Tears

It was impossible, after watching Asia Argento lick the blood off Fu’ad Ait Aattou’s bullet wound, to take the likes of The Duchess seriously. It was Asia’s year: as well as Maîtresse and her dad’s The Mother of Tears, she possessed the screen in Olivier Assayas’ gorgeously cryptic Boarding Gate. Assayas’ overcooked dialogue hardly obscures that he’s one of the few directors trying to stare modern dislocation dead in the eye; whereas Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor represents, to my mind, where indie cinema is, for better and for worse. Intense, well-acted, real-feeling, and a movie with something to say, it still leaned heavily on familiar props of the cute little film where people of different backgrounds come together, someone learns a life lesson, and our worthy multicultural fantasies come (temporarily) true—a kind of mix-tape for middle-age wannabe radicals. Still, it sported probably the year’s finest romantic coupling, and could be remembered as the signal Obama Year film. At least it wasn’t Juno.

As far as blockbusters went, I found it a year of mixed blessings. Steven Spielberg didn’t quite nail his return to his finest franchise, with the stupidly plotted, badly structured, anti-climactic Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But it delivered a master class in how to shoot comedic action scenes, and had a kind of breezy, throwaway sense of humour (particularly in the delightful support turns of Karen Allen and Cate Blanchett) that stood in high contrast to the dour, lacklustre pretension and sloppy edits of the year’s most astoundingly overrated blockbuster, The Dark Knight. The latter film operated like a straitjacket on one of the age’s finest actors (Christian Bale) whilst liberating another (Heath Ledger, in a good year for Aussies playing villains) all too briefly.

Iron Man

More entertaining than Knight and more solid than Indiana Jones was Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, a neatly done, disposable superhero flick that ended up looking like a masterpiece by default, and sporting some of the year’s best acting, even though it wasn’t really as good as we said. Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted had the potential to be the year’s greatest thrill ride, with its Fight Club-rapes-The Matrix set-up, but something went wrong thanks to garish cinematography and plotting so dumb (did the hero really bring down his enemies with a horde of explosive rats?) a five year old would have been offended. As far as genre bollocks went, Neil Marshall’s giddy, unconscionable Doomsday kicked all their arses: it dove head first into revved-up car chases, gross-out effects, and ’80s references so obvious that the film finally became something of a mix-tape of the films I grew up with—indeed, it’s a film that’s testimony of the unshakable effect of disreputable but fascinating movie-making of the past. I wouldn’t exactly call it good, but it wasn’t dead either.

The Black Balloon

Aussie cinema’s desperate straits yielded, under the great cloud of Luhrmann’s Australia, Elissa Down’s The Black Balloon, a meat-and-veg little-people film that won a bunch of Australian Film Institute awards chiefly because it made money. It told us that retarded people are occasionally irritating to be around, and that Gemma Ward is awfully cute. Yes, we knew that. Ward was better used—even though she had about three lines of dialogue and spent the whole film wearing a mask—in the best horror film of the year, Brian Bertino’s The Strangers. A thin but beautifully handled exercise in pure dread that proved that someone, at least, remembers what the cinematic frame is about, The Strangers offers the possibility that the horror genre may escape its dreadful rut. Of any of the films I saw with a chance of being remembered as the cinemaniac’s dirty little secret, it’s the type that could fare very well.

Andrei Rublev; Bend in the River

What else? The greatest film I saw this year—possibly ever—was Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, a titanic work of eccentric artistry that managed to be both austere and implacable, and yet immersive and accessible. Films like that only come along once in a generation. What else? Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata, Kagemusha and The Bad Sleep Well; Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us; Val Guest’s The Abominable Snowman; Sirk’s The Tarnished Angels; Reed’s The Key; Godard’s The Little Soldier; Carne’s Hotel du Nord; Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express; DeMille’s The Plainsman; Jack Hill’s Spider-Baby; Jesus Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos; Anthony Mann’s Bend in the River; Franju’s Eyes without a Face; Grèmillon’s Stormy Waters; and Fleischer’s See No Evil. These films all remind me that, in the end, cinematic culture is far from being only the mediocrities and minor triumphs of the moment—it’s an evolving thing, depending not just upon what comes out at the moment, but also on the perspective we gain from discovering its history. l

Boarding Gate (2008)
Director: Olivier Assayas

By Roderick Heath

Miles (Michael Madsen) is a middle-aged tycoon who owes large sums of money to some disreputable Chinese loan sharks. He announces to his partner Andrew (Alex Descas) that he’s going to sell his share in their business to them. Shortly thereafter, his ex-girlfriend Sandra (Asia Argento) reenters into his life. She had been pimped out to Miles’ business acquaintances and indulged in all the excesses of the high life, leaving her a pale, wraithlike, but still fire-eyed survivor. Entering his office one day, the pair swiftly click back into the taunting, provocative, addled rhythms of relating—she recalling his drugged-up impotence, he proposing that she really loved being his slave-for-hire—that tell the whole gruesome story of their affair. Now Sandra works for a furniture importing firm in France, run by Lester (Carl Ng) and Sue Wang (Kelly Lin), married business partners she met through Miles.

Sandra and her friend and coworker Lisa (Joana Preiss) have their own importing business, with a cocaine shipment coming through in the furniture Sandra plans to sell to finance her final escape from France. She wants to open a nightclub in Beijing, a project Miles refused to finance because he knew she’d never come back to him. But the drug deal turns sour, and Sandra only escapes thanks to the intervention of Lester. She’s having an affair with Lester, which he seems to be obscuring from Sue. Sandra is invited to Miles’ sterile villa, and their woozy relationship seems primed to pick up again, leading to such moments as her tying her belt around his neck and jerking him off, and he locking in her and promising to ravish her. Then, when he’s on his knees, handcuffed and giggling, she pulls out a gun and empties the clip into his back.

Up to this point, and despite the genre suspense of Sandra and Lester’s escape from the blown drug deal, Boarding Gate seems closer in sensibility to the likes of The Night Porter or Last Tango in Paris—an alienation-coated study of a cruelly sensual, destructive relationship, with two epic sequences in which Sandra and Miles converse, flirt, combust, and finally annihilate. Abruptly, the film changes tack with a dancer’s agility, becoming a Hitchcockian chase saga, as Sandra flees her act and we discover the reasons behind it. Into that Orphic realm—that place that Hitchcock defined as the essence of his style of thriller, the place beneath everyday life which must be ventured into to have a hope of returning to life.

Boarding Gate is, in some ways, a pure, reductive B-movie, with Argento as its manga-gorgeous muse (Sandra herself had created a sci-fi heroine for a website with whom Miles identifies her), and depending on Argento’s ever-ready love of stripping off and stripping down to shift from wilted orchid to Venus Flytrap in a blink. Yet it’s also deeply eccentric. Although the plot is more deftly constructed than first glance might suggest, the film never cares particularly about explaining it to us, and the final 20 minutes constantly pervert the expected. Sandra is a morally null heroine who acts through pure, outraged nerve whom we root for mainly because of her nihilistic determination to survive. Sandra’s killing Miles seems an act of amour fou, but actually is motivated by money: she’s been promised to be paid for knocking him off by Lester and Sue, who in turn, have been employed by a shadowy international network, and finally it leads back to Andrew, eager to eliminate his flaky partner. Sandra soon plunges down the rabbit hole. When she reaches Hong Kong, where she has been promised safe haven by Lester, she finds that her friend and confidante Lisa has been murdered by jittery local thugs, and that she, too, seems set for a shallow grave.

The film cunningly constructs a likeness of exploitation, and questions simple dividing lines between the types of abuse people can dole out to each other. Though Miles (like Madsen’s Budd in Tarantino’s Kill Bill) is filled with regret and shame for his evil acts, he also cannot resist resuming them, because they’re all that keeps him alive. He’s a clinically cynical vision of a modern man—a divorced father, consuming aplenty, driven by a nameless lust that only finds it satiety in Sandra, not by being with her but in possessing her. Sandra mocks him with his failed purchase of a Russian petrochemical plant and ebbing clout as a businessman, analogous to his failing grip on her. Her final murder of him is a claim of financial, sexual, and emotional independence, revealing a blunt desire to escape Miles’ intolerable idea of existence.

Director Olivier Assayas, who established himself with Irma Vep (1995), a tribute to a cinematic ur-text (Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampyres, 1916), specialises in films about a globalised world with an increasingly fragmented sense of humanity filtered through a hazy, kaleidoscopic visual sensibility that captures an era numbed by technological glaze and the comedown blues after a night of cocktails, Ecstasy, and kinky sex. Boarding Gate forms a loose trilogy withDemonlover (2002) and Clean (2004) as a globe-trotting study of terminal emotional exhaustion, the illimitable capacity for depravity, and the simplicity of decency. Assayas maintains a tenuous space between being a facile, faux moralist, video-clip director like David Fincher and an equally boring, plain moralist through his bare enjoyment of the spectacles of sex and excess and shimmering, surreal surfaces of modernity beneath which lies a grim Hades.

Eventually, astute critics will make a broad study of the modern world through the recurring images and moods in films like Assayas’, Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Matthias X. Oberg’s Stratosphere Girl, Zhang Ke Jia’s The World, and the last chapter of Hou-hsiao Hsien’s Three Times . These films are defined by the brutal edifices and labyrinthine guts of great, oriental metropolises and the great communality of modern culture, but also its increasing atomization. Their complex quotations and mockeries of genres and pop canards, their sense of vast paranoia that infuses the urban and suburban everyday form the core of a new breed of modern, internationalist filmmaking, broad in compass, sons and daughters of Antonioni and Batman. Assayas’ poor ear for English dialogue often results in scenes that hit their beats too heavily, but that’s pretty well beside the point. Indeed, Assayas winks at the corny tropes of genre dialogue, especially in Argento’s climactic encounter with a plot-explaining international woman of mystery (played, with a kind of robotic realism, by alt-culture goddess Kim Gordon) who plays gatekeeper to Sandra’s escape. Assayas conscientiously turns the trappings of the international jetsetter life into a glittering mockery.

As far as I’m concerned, 2008 is the year of Asia Argento: between this film, Une Vieille Maîtresse, and her father’s The Mother of Tears, she’s taken a hammer to every nicety expected of an actress today. She—not the woefully overexposed Angelina Jolie—is both the sex symbol and symbol smasher of the age. And if Madsen gets any cooler, by the time he hits 60, he’s going to single-handedly reverse global warming. Ng has a lean, Bogartian intensity, and it’s almost a disappointment that he doesn’t get to come out swinging as a badass. Assayas stages his scenes with an offhand brilliance, building to a breathless gunfight and chase through Honk Kong’s streets and a confrontation with the snide Sue in a karaoke parlour. This comes across as a particularly hellish devastation of the portrait of karaoke parlour as portal of international brotherhood and idealism in Lost In Translation. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux paints in stupefyingly beautiful widescreen frames images of office banality, sexual explosiveness, and exotic locales, all with the same glaze of slithery, icy clarity.

Assayas’ genre bending is a front to explore the nature of ardour. Sandra is no femme fatale, in that she is motivated not by a desire to destroy, but by her spurned capacity for love. The film’s finale is all the more taut for being almost a throwaway, as Sandra, believing Lester has betrayed and abandoned her, prepares to stab him and steal away with the bounty Andrew has paid him. The audience knows that Lester has not betrayed her and has left the rapacious, untrustworthy Sue, so experiences anxiety that she will kill the man who loves her, having been sucked in so far by this inhuman life. But she finally walks away, disappearing into the great contemporary haze, having, one hopes, recognised that she can’t escape her mistakes by annihilating those who hurt her. The simplicity of decency indeed. l

The Break that Refreshes

Billie Burke

By Marilyn Ferdinand

This season has been hell on some of my friends. While I was relieved of all responsibility for cooking and hosting the holiday dinner, some of them were not so lucky. Poor Millicent faced a crisis that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. It appears only she and I appreciate its seriousness...

Twenty Meme Redux: Actors

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Whether this is an official meme or not, I thought it only fair to give the masculine disciples of Thespis their day in the sun. I found out something interesting that piggybacks on something I read last night in Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies: “It is only recently that men have come to monopolize the popularity polls, the credits, and the romantic spotlight allocating to themselves not just the traditional male warrior and adventurer roles, but those of the sex object and glamor queen as well. Back in the twenties and thirties, and to a lesser extent the forties, women were at the center.” When I look over my choices for favorite actors, I see fewer from the Golden Age than I had among the actresses I chose.

If I’m honest, a number of the actors were included for the “hottie” factor, though I also think they’re good at what they do. You’ll also see that I have an inordinate fondness for chubby guys, no doubt an Oedipal connection to my rotund father. I’m somewhat surprised by some of my choices as well—where are Bogey, Grant, Tracy, Newman? Sorry, boys, you lack that je ne sais quoi for me. Choosing photos, I discovered that posing men with cigarettes was quite the thing, so if you're a man who smokes, you may have been inordinately influenced by the movie image of masculinity.

Once again, here are my favorites in alphabetical order.

Daniel Auteuil is a prolific French actor who just seems to get better and better. He’s in a lot of the films I see, lending a certain unspoken sadness to each of them. I’m particularly fond of his work in the very touching The Eighth Day and the film from which the above picture was taken Girl on the Bridge. As long as he keeps making pictures, I’ll keep watching them.

Antonio Banderas is absolutely gorgeous, but so are a lot of actors. He makes the list for that and for having a brilliant sense of humor to go along with his swoonworthy qualities. He makes every film he’s in a little better.

James Cagney is a fave rave of mine from way back. When I was young, I’d set my alarm clock to wake me when one of his movies was on TV in the middle of the night. Time has only shown me that he was more than a schoolgirl crush. He was one of the best actors we’ve ever seen.

Lon Chaney created dozens of amazing characters, undertaking physical distress to play the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the armless carney in The Unknown, and covering his face completely in The Phantom of the Opera. How he managed to make monsters sympathetic under all the make-up is beyond me, but he changed cinema forever by doing so.

Gary Cooper is the stand-up guy of cinema. Whether he’s playing a humble war hero, a dying ballplayer, or a friendless sheriff, he shows inner strength and courage better than anyone I can think of. I adore him.

Russell Crowe is my swashbuckler for the new millennium. His turn in Master and Commander cemented his stature in my eyes, becoming mythic in a realistic performance. I look forward to basking in his aura for years to come.

Johnny Depp first became a presence for me on 21 Jump Street. He wore his hair long in front so you couldn’t see his eyes. The network probably made him do that because his gaze is definitely too sexy for prime time. He’s become a fine actor with a particular talent for fantasy and imagination.

Keir Dullea has a quiet intelligence in his best roles. Watching him match wits with HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey is truly suspenseful, but I really fell for him in The Lathe of Heaven, where he could literally dream a different world.

Charles Durning is the first of my chubby guys. He’s a wonderful character actor who makes his presence felt wherever he appears, stealing his scenes with Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. I particularly like him as Charley in Death of a Salesman, truly being the only friend Willie Loman (Hoffman again, can’t that guy catch a break?) says he is. What a gentleman.

Bruno Ganz is a fantastic actor and will cause me to watch a film just because he’s in it. His most memorable role was the angel in Wings of Desire, but I can name so many films that are elevated because he’s in them. Truly a great actor of our time.

Gregory Hines is another of my hotties. I could watch him dance all day and night. Even just standing around in a cashmere sweater, he seems in magnificent motion. Tap has a place of honor in my film collection.

Boris Karloff has become a favorite of mine ever since I got a chance to see his work in such films as Bedlam and Targets. The latter film especially shows what an elegant, generous actor he was.

Klaus Kinski was the modern Lon Chaney, as out there as they get. One of the best things about our times is that a guy like Kinski could have a career playing something other than gunsels, though he did that, too.

Marcello Mastrioanni has attained legendary status based on his work with Fellini, but he’s so much more than that. His brilliant comic performance in Divorce, Italian Style showed me a new side of him. I love him. I really do.

Joel McCrea is an actor who has displaced others I used to admire. His performance in Sullivan’s Travels is fabulous, but it was Ride the High Country that really put him on my radar screen. I’m finding out more about him all the time, and I like what I’m finding.

Eduardo Noriega is the handsomest man alive, and yet, he played against that fact in Open Your Eyes. He was chilling in The Devil’s Backbone. He’s one of Spain’s finest.

Eugene Pallette is a wonderful character actor who created some indelible characters—Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood, Papa Bullock in My Man Godfrey, a political boss in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He made a ton of films in the studio system, so I’m constantly pointing delightedly while watching some obscure silent or 30s film and saying, “Eugene Pallette!”

James Stewart is one of the most versatile actors in motion pictures. His inherent likeability and a certain ardent romanticism made his performance in Vertigo both shocking and believable. If we have an everyman in films, he's it.

Rudolph Valentino has a small shrine in my office so I can gaze on his magnetic eyes whenever I want to. He jumps off the silent screen with the presence of Garbo, yet he also has a wonderful sense of humor that comes through in such films as The Eagle and Son of the Sheik. I worship him.

Anton Walbrook makes the list on the basis of two performances: Svengali-like Lermontov in The Red Shoes and German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. His range and his intensity are amazing, particularly in the latter film in which he ages 40 years and moves from open youth to sad disillusionment. He's a wonder.

Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962)
Director: Abe Levitow

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Oh, Magoo, you’ve done it again!

In 1941, John Hubley and several other animators who were on strike from Disney left that studio altogether to form United Productions of America (UPA) and produce cartoons that use what is now called “limited animation.” Hubley felt constrained by Disney’s emphasis on realism and wanted to create more stylized cartoons. In 1949, UPA came up with a very distinctive character—the short, bald, near-sighted Quincy Magoo, with actor Jim Backus as his first and only voice. The Magoo cartoons were hits, with two of them winning Academy Awards. When times got tough for UPA, Mister Magoo transitioned to television. It was there that Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol first appeared.

Although many consider this animated film a classic, you’re not likely to see it airing with the same frequency as A Charlie Brown Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In fact, you may not find it at all, and that’s a real shame. Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol tells a shorter, but still faithful version of Dickens’ story bookended with classic Magoo comedy and a glorious score by Jule Styne, composer of “Let Me Entertain You,” "Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow,” and many more great standards. The 1960s would see a radical change in musical styles, but since the setting of Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol is a Broadway stage, Styne produced a score fit for the Great White Way. (In fact, one song not used in the animated film went into a real Broadway show and became a hit—“People” from Funny Girl.)

The film opens with Magoo driving the wrong way down a Manhattan street singing the pizzazz-y “It’s Great to Be Back on Broadway.” Magoo narrowly misses hitting dozens of cars and ends up wrecking against a pole. Never missing a beat, he crosses busy streets, forcing cars to screech to a halt to avoid hitting him, and arrives at the theatre where his musical “A Christmas Carol” is playing to boffo B.O. Looking for the stage door, he misreads the sign of an adjacent restaurant and clangs and clatters his way through it and past a nervous stage manager to make his triumphal entrance in the offices of Marley and Scrooge. This opening is classic Magoo.

Once the musical gets underway, it’s played fairly straight. Magoo as Scrooge is drawn with a nasty scowl; his face only brightens when he begins counting his gold coins in “Ringle, Ringle.” The song becomes a contrapunctal duet with Bob Cratchit (Jack Cassidy), who contrasts Scrooge’s love of money with his own misery at working in the cold. The song ends as Scrooge stops Cratchit from taking any more coal for his stove. The famous confrontation between Scrooge and the men collecting for charity manages to remain as shocking in cartoon form as it is in live-action versions of the story.

Returning to his home, Scrooge sees a strange face overlaying his lion’s head door knocker—a bit of a joke on Magoo’s poor eyesight that fits perfectly into the story. No time is wasted once Magoo dons his night clothes and tucks into bed. Climbing up the stairs, only legs, chains, and strong boxes visible, comes the ghost of Jacob Marley (Royal Dano) to confront Scrooge. In response to Scrooge’s dismissals of his reality, Marley gives a truly frightening wail and points through the window to the other chained apparitions wandering the night sky. He tells a shaken Scrooge that he will be visited by three ghosts that night who present a way for Scrooge to save himself from Marley's fate.

The Ghost of Christmas Present (Les Tremayne) takes Scrooge directly to Bob Cratchit’s home to view his assistant’s meager Christmas celebration. All are waiting for Bob and Tiny Tim to come back from church. When they do, a line Bob speaks strikes a particular Christmas note: “(Tiny Tim) hoped the people saw him in church because he was a cripple and thought it might be pleasant to let them remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk and blind men see.” I could be wrong, but I don’t remember this line in other filmed versions of the story. Then a wonderful song, "The Lord's Bright Blessing," begins in quiet anticipation as the Cratchit children imagine what it would be like to have a Christmas tree, stockings stuffed with treats, and jars and cakes of "Razzleberry dressing," a particular obsession of Tiny Tim (Joan Gardner). When their humble Christmas dinner of soup is served, Bob leads them in the song's buoyant chorus.

The past provides two of the best sequences of the film. First, The Ghost of Christmas Past (Joan Gardner) takes Scrooge back to his boarding school where he has been left alone for the holidays. The song “All Alone in the World” has the kind of lyrics a child can relate to, but it is the animation that is particularly poignant. There is no rescuing sister in this version—only a chalk family drawn on a chalkboard. When young Ebenezer traces his four-fingered cartoon hand and attempts a handshake with it, he shows his frustration by smearing the chalk.

If you’re a believer in root causes, this simple song shows how a miserly heart can grow from one deprived of love. We move quickly through Fezziwig’s Christmas party, where Belle (Jane Kean) only dances with Ebenezer, to Belle’s rejection of Scrooge. “Winter Was Warm” is a lovely ballad that talks about the beginning and the end of love; it certainly ranks with some of the best love ballads written.

Scrooge does not return to his bedroom to await the arrival of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come; instead Scrooge is plunged into this part of the tale directly from Belle’s rejection. It is a bit abrupt, but there is something appropriate about juxtaposing the death of love with the death of the body. Nothing is left out of this part of Scrooge’s journey, from the businessmen talking about his death, to the scavengers who pawn his belongings in a ghoulish musical number, "We're Despicable (Plunderer's March),” to the death of Tiny Tim and Scrooge’s discovery of his own tombstone.

Scrooge's rebirth in the morning as a man of love and generosity is handled particularly well. As Scrooge flatters the young boy he sends to buy the prize turkey, the boy shows pleasure at every compliment—again something I don’t think I’ve seen in other versions. When the butcher arrives with an enormous turkey, the near-sighted Magoo pokes the butcher’s belly instead of the bird, a welcome visit by the star within the play. A rousing finale of “The Lord’s Bright Blessing” ends the show, and Magoo literally brings down the house with his bumbling.

I know I'm reflecting the bias of my own childhood in thinking that the simple animation and show tunes of Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol have an enormous appeal, but I also think that for children anyway, I'm right. Children's movies are the last refuge of movie musicals, reflecting the importance of music to children's development and entertainment. There are few children's films today that have music to match the quality of Jule Styne's score for this film, and with a return to realism in animation—hyperrealism, actually—visual experimentation of the type practiced at UPA is becoming something of a lost art. I know that illustrators are still interested in it, if the number of visitors linked to my review of The Dot and the Line through graphic design sites is any indication. If they can produce anything as pleasurable, intelligent, and graphically interesting as Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol, I'd personally like to encourage them to pursue movie-making for the whole family. To all those families out there, pick up the DVD of this wonderful seasonal cartoon and welcome a new-old classic into your home. l

The Break that Refreshes

Wendy Hiller

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Now I know we're all thinking about what gifts we're giving and likely to receive this holiday season. Well, almost all. I'm far more worried about my New Year's resolution—learning the new slang. Here's a clip from my instructional video so that you can see just what a challenge I've set for myself. But it's got to be done; I'm tired of being one of the old fogeys of film blogging.

Vera Drake (2004)
Director: Mike Leigh

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a final rule that favors “conscience rights” over the law. This rule protects healthcare providers from being denied employment or being fired for refusing to administer abortions, emergency contraception, or certain forms of birth control on religious or moral grounds—essentially giving pharmacists, physicians, and other healthcare providers conscientious objector status.

Hundreds of thousands of comments opposing this rule were submitted to HHS, in part because the rule does not require healthcare providers in private practice to inform women of their options. All supporters of a woman’s right to an abortion and the contraceptive method of her choice fear that reproductive health will be compromised and that unsafe, back alley abortions could again multiply. Those favoring the rule believe, at the very least, that it is wrong to discriminate against caregivers who cannot in good conscience prescribe birth control that takes place after conception, such as the morning-after pill or an IUD, or practice abortion. The perennially contentious battle over reproductive rights makes Vera Drake, a brilliantly realized tragedy set in England in 1950, a perennially timely film that looks at the issue from all sides with a good deal of—though not complete—objectivity.

Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton) is a woman in her 60s who is the “heart of gold” at the center of her happy, working-class family. She is in a loving, 27-year marriage to Stan (Philip Davis) and has a close relationship with her grown son Sid (Daniel Mays) and her plain-Jane daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly), both of whom still live at home. Stan works for his beloved younger brother Frank (Adrian Scarborough) at Frank’s auto repair shop. Frank’s wife Joyce (Heather Craney) is an upwardly mobile housewife who forces Frank to spoil her and disdains her husband’s working-class family.

Vera cleans the homes of the well-to-do, looks after her homebound mother, and unbeknownst to her family, “helps” girls who are unhappily pregnant “start their bleeding” again. Vera’s “partner” in this endeavor, Lily (Ruth Sheen), schedules Vera’s carbolic soap abortions to fit between her work and her domestic duties. Lily charges the abortion seekers two guineas; Vera takes no money at all for what she sees as a benevolent service and has no idea that Lily is profiting from it. Lily “pays” Vera by offering her discounts on hard-to-find foodstuffs in an England still recovering from World War II; she buys the goods with her abortion fees.

Vera has played matchmaker for her daughter by inviting the thoroughly decent, but shy Reg (Eddie Marsan, Scott in Happy-Go-Lucky) around for dinner. Reg and Ethel’s relationship prospers, and by Thanksgiving, both Stan’s and Frank’s households are in for some good news. Reg and Ethel are engaged, confounding Stan’s belief that they’d be courting for years, and Joyce and Frank are expecting a baby. The family is in the middle of their celebrations when a knock at the door changes everything; the police have come to arrest Vera for performing an abortion on one Pamela Barnes (Liz White), who developed serious complications that brought her near death.

Vera Drake is one of the very rare films that presents a social issue on thoroughly human terms. Vera is an efficient, energetic presence, happily making the rounds of the homes she tends and the sick she nurses. Mike Leigh and Imelda Staunton set the tone at the very beginning of the movie as his camera follows her on her rounds—she walking crisply up stairs, her rapid, decisive footfalls reflecting her sense of purpose, her insertion of keys into door locks just as crisp—a telling detail indicating the trust her charges place in her. In each home, Leigh lingers longer than other directors might to emphasize that Vera isn’t just rushing through the day, but rather takes time to provide sustenance for the souls of her invalids. Even in the home of one of her wealthy employers, Mrs. Wells (Leslie Manville), she chats pleasantly to the half-listening lady of the house as she vigorously polishes brass fireplace irons while on her knees. The physical positions of the two women in this scene are no accident.

Leigh wishes to contrast the treatment of a wealthy girl in trouble with that of the poor girls Vera tends. Mrs. Wells’ daughter Susan (Sally Hawkins, Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky), is a quiet, proper girl who is raped by a drunken date. When she finds herself in trouble, she contacts an acquaintance (Fenella Woolgar) and tells her the “a friend of mine” story before dissolving into frightened tears. Her acquaintance provides her with the name of a doctor and advises her to invent a crazy aunt; the psychiatrist to whom the doctor will refer her will want proof of mental instability to recommend a therapeutic abortion. For 100 guineas, Susan is set up in a private nursing facility and tended to by an efficient staff of nurses.

By contrast, Vera’s girls are a mixed bag—from young girls, to an adulterous wife, an overburdened mother with an already large brood, and a woman who uses abortion as after-the-fact contraception. Her first client in the movie is frightened but compliant, and has to slam the door on the man who knocked her up—the suggestion is that he might be abusive to her—as Vera is leaving. The second is a “darkie,” probably a prostitute who will be unable to earn a living if she’s pregnant, who is all alone and afraid something will go wrong. Vera reassures her in a rather clipped manner using language we hear again and again over the course of the five abortions Leigh films. The caring depersonalization shows us how Vera maintains a psychological distance that allows her to break the law and keep her activities entirely secret from her family. It also allows her to say to the police, when they interrogate her, that none of her girls has ever gotten sick before. Perhaps she really believes it. She doesn’t seem to know any other abortionists with whom to compare notes; it is only in prison that she learns from two other abortionists that their girls died and that they are in for a second stretch.

The police detectives and female patrol officer (a wonderful Helen Coker) are extremely decent in this film. After finding out from Pamela Barnes’ rather uncooperative mother Jessie (Lesley Sharp) about Vera—the coincidence of Vera and Jessie working at the same laundry 20 years before does her in—they spend time in the Drake home talking with Vera in private. “I know why you’re here,” she says in a quiet, choked voice. We watch this seemingly angelic woman crumble right before our eyes. Her movements become slow, her gait unsteady, her back stooped, her voice muted. Completely in character with her desire to help people, she is utterly compliant with the police and produces her abortion kit without complaint.

Detective Inspector Webster (Peter Wight) does his duty and believes in preventing young girls from dying at the hands of amateur abortionists—how he feels about the act of abortion itself is never explored—but he’s aware of the tragedy of the situation. He is as gentle with Vera and her anxious family as he possibly can be and guesses that Vera defines abortion as helping girls because she herself was in trouble. Vera never confirms this, and we know that she doesn’t know who her father was, so it may be that she is simply the product of an unintended pregnancy, possibly through incest. Nonetheless, Vera has in some way walked in the shoes of the girls she tends and feels that without her, their lives could become intolerable. She’s probably right.

Seeing the contrast between the experience of Vera’s girls and Susan emphasizes the two-tiered justice of the haves and the have-nots. Neither abortion is legal, but Susan’s does exemplify the exception for which conservatives seem to make a bit of room—rape or incest. Money buys safety, and the social position of reputable doctors goes a long way in guaranteeing their safety from investigation. Still, Vera has been providing abortions for “a long time,” so the community she serves also wishes to protect her. She’s all they’ve got. Without money or influence, they either have to give birth or try to perform an abortion on themselves, which usually is ineffective or has dire consequences. (A picture I saw of a dead woman, Gerri Santoro, who did just this haunts me still.)

From the point at which Vera is arrested, the film is extremely hard to watch. All of the actors give soul-searing performances; I’ve got a lump in my throat now just thinking about their anguish, about how a happy family was destroyed by the legal and financial barriers to abortion that made Vera do what she did. Yet, she is not an innocent in this drama. Whether or not you think abortion is murder, there’s no question that even well-meaning abortionists kill women—and let’s face it, illegal abortionists weren’t and aren't the angels of mercy Vera seems to be (see 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days for a more realistic look at an abortionist). It is for this very reason that so many worked so hard to make abortion legal, and continue to fight to keep it available. It’s a fact that women will always seek abortions if they feel they need to; as a society, we continue to grapple with the question of whether they have the right to an abortion or whether they ought to be left to stew in their own juices. Vera Drake presents the issue of abortion and the conditions under which women seek one and asks its audience not to argue and picket, but rather to step into their shoes and understand their pain and frustration. l

The World of Suzie Wong (1960)
Director: Richard Quine

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Last night at a birthday party for a friend of mine, conversation turned to major events of the day. Here in Illinois, speculation is rampant about whether Jesse Jackson, Jr. offered to pay his way to a U.S. Senate seat. Some didn’t believe it; others said it would be just like the offspring of an opportunistic, anti-Semitic father who stuck his face in front of cameras early and often. The hubby said, “You should have seen those guys driving around in poor Atlanta neighborhoods in Cadillacs!” I countered that better the civil rights leaders than the drug dealers. The idea behind riding in a Cadillac is aspirational—this can be yours if you reach for it and stop settling for what The Man gives you.

Whether that argument sits well with you or not, there can be no doubt that poor people without the advantages of schooling, connections, or visibility still aspire to a better life. The World of Suzie Wong is a film that contrasts the haves with the have-nots in colonial Hong Kong and more subtly than insistently shows how difficult it can be to climb out of poverty. Surrounded by the candy wrapper of pretty costumes, happy hookers, little violence, and tidy environs, The World of Suzie Wong delivers a potent message to an audience that normally wouldn’t go anywhere near it. This is a Hollywood-style romance—it’s actually a British production—with some real heft.

Shot on location in Hong Kong, Suzie Wong opens with a breathtaking view of the colony from the water. Against a backdrop of steep, populated hills, Chinese junks, commercial vessels from other lands, and ferries mark the location as a lively hub of commerce. A 40ish American man named Robert Lomax (William Holden) is sitting on a ferry sketching its Chinese passengers. He catches sight of a pretty girl (Nancy Kwan) cooing happily at a baby in its grandmother’s arms. When the girl sees him, she becomes angered. He tries to explain what he is doing, but she insists over and over, “No talk.” She walks off, leaving her purse on her seat. The elderly woman asks Robert to return it to her; when he does, she accuses him of stealing it. The misunderstanding is straightened out to the policeman who intervenes, and Robert and the young woman strike up a less contentious conversation. She says she is Mai Ling, daughter of a rich hotelier. She is readying herself for a trip to America to marry her rich fiancé, a man she has never met. Robert is aghast, but Mai Ling shrugs; this is the Chinese way.

When the ferry docks, Mai Ling tells Robert to go away. Her father is sending a car to meet her, and he would be very upset to learn she had been speaking to a strange man. She disappears, and Robert gets into a cab. In response to his request for a cheap hotel, the cabbie takes him to the Nam Kok, a modest establishment next to a very loud tavern in a poor section of town. Encouraged by the fact that there is a great rooftop view of Hong Kong, Robert engages a room for a month. He learns quickly after a couple of sailors knock at his door that he has been given the regular room of a prostitute named Minnie Ho (Yvonne Shima). He also learns when he goes to the adjoining tavern that his extraordinary rental of the room for a whole month has made him the talk of the small community he has now become a part of.

Robert sees Mai Ling get into a ricksaw outside his hotel. He asks around about her, but nobody knows a Mai Ling. Soon, when he sees her in the tavern chatting up and dancing with a number of men, he learns her real name is Suzie Wong. She’s illiterate and was abandoned by her family at the age of 10, forced by lack of skills and opportunity to be a Wan Chai girl (prostitute).

Robert is strongly attracted to her but wants to be free of distractions. He has made a promise to himself to spend the next year trying to be a serious painter. If he fails, he’ll go back to San Francisco and resume his career as an architect. He asks Suzie up to his room, but rather than pay for her body, he offers to pay her to model for him. She's insulted and worried about losing face, but nonetheless, agrees. Over the months they work together, she and Robert let their walls down and come to know each other on a deeper level. She makes up stories about herself, about what she would like to be, to keep hope for a better future alive. She is aspirational, as are all the Wan Chai girls. Their best hope, as with so many movie hookers, is to get an exclusive boyfriend or possibly even a good husband. Naturally, it’s a long shot.

Unlike Suzie, Robert is an easy fit into the British overclass. Merely by visiting Mr. O’Neill (Laurence Naismith), a banker who will look after his nest egg, Robert gets letters of introduction to allow him to do business freely all over Hong Kong. He also meets O’Neill’s daughter Kay (Sylvia Syms), who takes a romantic shine to him and offers to help him show his paintings in a London gallery. At the same time, Ben (Michael Wilding), a recently separated British businessman who met Suzie the same night Robert finds out who she really is, comes back into her life with an offer to take care of her.

To its credit, this film lowers the volume on these love triangles and delivers on its promise to show us Suzie Wong’s world. The Wan Chai district is filled with British and Australian sailors and businessmen looking for a good time or an escape from their worries, and the marginal young women who provide them. Although the hotel, tavern, and streets are cleaned up for the comfort of the viewing audience, they still breathe with the lives of their people. Having a john beat one up out of jealousy is a mark of honor among these girls. Picking up a guy only to ditch him is a way a prostitute can avoid breaking the law against unaccompanied women going into bars.

Part of Suzie’s world is racist, and it gets an airing during a dinner party at the O’Neills. I thought a bit of Gentlemen’s Agreement, except that here we are seeing the British completely relaxed being themselves with their own kind. There is a bit of tweaking Mr. O’Neill engages in by inventing a sister married to a Chinese man, but fiction is about as close as he wants to get to equality. It is only in the honesty of the love that has grown between Suzie and Robert, beautifully realized by Kwan and an amazingly sexy William Holden, that we truly get beyond racism.

Most of all, Nancy Kwan gives a powerhouse debut performance. Suzie is an amazing creation. She has her catchphrase “For goodness sake” and “no talk,” which, had Robert had been more worldly about Hong Kong when he met her, would have tipped him to her real profession ("No money, no talk."). She reaches her emotions honestly while still showing them in an understated Asian way. For example, when a sailor beats her up, and probably rapes her, she shows up at Robert’s room with a bleeding lip. Contrasting with Robert’s horror, Suzie just says, “Sailor hit me,” as a commonplace.

But Kwan’s true genius in tackling the role of Suzie is her use of her extraordinary body awareness. Trained as a dancer, Kwan moves better than just about any actress I’ve ever seen. She is kinetic without being frantic, sexually suggestive without being tawdry. In one scene, Robert follows her into the hillside neighborhoods where she maintains a secret life; it is her walk rather than an astute camera that keeps her on our radar screen, an individual presence standing apart from the chaos of humanity through which she makes her way.

In a rather clichéd manner, the director uses wardrobe to cue a change in Suzie—going from satin, side-slit dresses of one, bright color to demure white blouses and pedal pushers. This wasn’t necessary, as Kwan made that character transition without any help. Thankfully, the paintings Robert makes in this film actually are quite good, worth quitting a prosperous career to pursue; they are the work of Elizabeth Moore, who also contributed paintings and sculptures to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Certainly, this world is a bit idealized—no drunken or drug-addicted whores in this bunch—and collapses a bit into flaming melodrama involving the rescue of a baby from a landslide. Nonetheless, The World of Suzie Wong escapes many of the pitfalls of “travelogue” motion pictures and delivers a solid drama and a new star in Nancy Kwan. l

The Break that Refreshes

Shirley Henderson

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Now that I've picked my top 20 actresses for Nathaniel's movie meme, I thought I'd show you why I like them. Consider these clips, one each week, the break that refreshes.

Shirley Henderson (center principal) singing "Three Little Maids" from Gilbert and Sullivan's light opera The Mikado in director Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy (1999).

Twenty Actresses All in a Row

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Another day, another meme. I was tagged by Rick Olson for the 20 Actresses Meme, which is the brainchild of Nathaniel at The Film Experience.

Once again, I was faced with trying to come up with some criteria that could help me choose 20 noteworthy actresses. Should they be the most beautiful? Should they be the finest at their craft? Should they be of a certain age? Again, I decided to choose 20 actresses I find fascinating to watch, actresses who draw my eye to them no matter what else might be going on, actresses whose work I'm always ready to sample. Here they are, in alphabetical, order.

Louise Brooks is the American Garbo, but with more range. She could play temptresses with an American wildness Garbo lacked, but also was believable in comedic and sentimental roles. And, she's stunning!

Billie Burke always captivates me with her birdlike voice, her apple cheeks, and her charm. She's one of the great character actresses of the 1930s who deserves to be remembered for more than playing Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz.

Leslie Caron has the gamine appeal that I am always attracted to in actresses. Beyond that, she is the definition of grace, with a wise innocence that comes through in her best films. I could watch her in Gigi over and over and over.

Peggy Cummins is a face you see every day on this blog. I was so taken with her in Gun Crazy and I so wanted to project what she had in that film, that I took her as my stand-in. As you can see in this picture, she's not only naughty, she's also nice, very nice.

Laura del Sol may not be a familiar name and face unless you have seen the dance films of Carlos Saura. Once viewed, she's unforgettable—an intense beauty and passionate dancer. I've seen Carmen more times than I can remember. She's just amazing.

Catherine Deneuve is easily one of the most beautiful and talented women who ever lived. She can delve deeply into sexual perversion, madness, and bitterness. She can also take a bourgeois character and bring out unknown courage. I always want to go wherever she leads.

Gloria Grahame has a face you never forget. Interestingly beautiful, she often played women whose looks play strongly into their fate, from Violet in It's a Wonderful Life to Debby in The Big Heat. I can't pass on a film she's in.

Shirley Henderson is an actress you've seen more than you think you have. She's been in Trainspotting, 24-Hour Party People, Yes, and even one of the Harry Potter films (as Moaning Myrtle). I was completely captivated by her performance in Topsy-Turvy, where she works her beautiful soprano voice and coquettishness as an alcoholic singer who is the personification of Yum Yum in The Mikado. She puts me into a trance whenever I watch her.

Wendy Hiller is a versatile actress who has had a long career, still as interesting today in look and demeanor as when she was a fresh-faced, cheeky Scots actress in Pygmalion and I Know Where I'm Going. I like her a lot!

Isabelle Huppert is a force to be reckoned with in any film she's in. Utterly fearless and frequently diabolical and intimidating, she lends authority to any film in which she appears. She's a miracle.

Milla Jovovich is a little hard to explain. Yes, she's beautiful and charismatic. But even in her strictly popcorn films, she brings something more than a model's presence to bear. She's got a kind of vulnerable command that I find very compelling. So sue me.

Katy Jurado has charisma up the yin yang. It is impossible to take your eyes off her when she's on screen. She even managed to upstage Grace Kelly in High Noon. She's a singular and memorable actress.

Nancy Kwan burst on the scene in The World of Suzie Wong. It was a memorable debut film for one of the iconic actresses of the 60s. How can you not enjoy her being a girl!

Angela Lansbury, the thoroughly pleasant Jessica Fletcher on TV, often shows up on most evil villian lists for her turn in The Manchurian Candidate, one of the few women to have this distinction. I love her ruthless Mrs. Iselin, but she always breaks my heart as sweet, doomed Sybil Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Anna Magnani wears her heart on her sleeve, her hips, her legs, and most especially, her face. A symbol of martyrdom in Rome: Open City, her natural intensity and earthiness were often on display in such films as The Rose Tattoo. She's simply unforgettable.

Colleen Moore just had to make my list, didn't she. My love of her is well known and will continue as long as I can watch her perfect comic sensibility and adorably versatile face in action. And then maybe longer.

Cathy O'Donnell is one of those actresses who always seems to pop up in older movies, and I'm always delighted to recognize her. They Live By Night, Side Street, and of course, The Best Years of Our Lives reveal her as a sympathetic, sweet presence. I just always feel warm when she's around.

Christina Ricci is my favorite contemporary actress. There's nothing she can't do. She even made being tied up half-naked in Black Snake Moan interesting. She'd be my only choice for the part of Molly O if The Man with the Golden Arm is ever made into a decent film. I just wish she hadn't gotten so skinny.

Theresa Russell is a subtle, mysterious actress I'm completely fascinated with. Black Widow is a minor masterpiece of the 1980s because of her duel with Debra Winger.

Michelle Williams is not an actress I ever thought I'd find so watchable when I saw her first film forays. She's grown into a mesmerizing presence for me, and has improved exponentially as an actress. Only a little more time and she'll lose all those youthful mannerisms and enter the major leagues. l

The "baker's dozen" silhouette at the beginning of this article is Greta Garbo.

The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971)
Directors: Walon Green and Ed Spiegel

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Poor Marcel Ophüls. A man ahead of his time, his masterpiece, The Sorrow and the Pity, which discusses the nature, details, and reasons for the cooperation of France’s Vichy government with Nazi Germany, would have been a shoo-in for an Oscar any time over the last decade or so. Unluckily, he made the film in 1971, in an era not yet ready for Hitler, and had to compete against The Ra Expedition, which documents Thor Heyerdahl’s Atlantic crossing in a papyrus boat; Alaska Wilderness Lake, a film about which I can find nothing except that it was produced by Alan Landsburg, the man behind many of the National Geographic specials, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and Porkys II: The Next Day; and On Any Sunday, a documentary about motorcycle racing featuring stars of the sport, including Steve McQueen.

And then there’s the film that won the Oscar, The Hellstrom Chronicle, a film that strictly speaking isn’t what I’d call a real documentary, even given today’s tolerance for reenactment. The narrator of the film, Dr. Hellstrom, a maverick scientist drummed out of teaching posts and polite science circles, is a fictional character played by prolific actor Lawrence Pressman. And a farmer he interviews isn’t a real farmer either; he’s actually played by a TV actor named Conlan Carter. So what was all the fuss about?

I’ll start off by saying that I saw this film on its initial release, and the impression it made on me was indelible. Over the years, I’ve wanted to get my hands on it, but it’s another one of those rarities that’s difficult to track down. So imagine my joy yesterday when the hubby opened up a shipment of Beta cassettes he ordered to go with his recent acquisition of a Beta machine and found among the detritus The Hellstrom Chronicle. “We’re watching this tonight,” I commanded, and we did.

The film posits a theory any science fiction buff would glom onto in a second—that dominion over the world will come down to a battle between two classes of Kingdom Animalia, Man and insects, and that insects will win. The way Pressman plays Hellstrom is reminiscent of Jeffrey Combs' unforgettable creation Herbert West in Re-Animator, lending a comic, incredulous air to the “evidence” the good doctor presents. It is that evidence, however, that makes this film truly amazing.

You’ll be hard pressed to find better microcinematography than what Walon Green and Helmuth Barth put up on screen—or any that is more gag-inducing. We get up close and personal with a wide variety of insects and their homes. In one instance, Hellstrom zooms in on the hierarchy of the average honey bee at a field of hives. The sterile female workers go out to collect nectar, build honeycombs and fill them with food, feed the drones that are so specialized as studs for the queen that they can’t feed themselves, and tend to the larval and young bees and the queen herself. Hellstrom removes the queen so we can see what happens next. The workers convert several larval bees into potential queens by feeding them royal jelly. When the first two queens emerge, the worker bees surround them and force them to fight to the death. After a victor emerges, the larval queens are eaten. Drones are sent out of the hive to chase the new queen and impregnate her. After she is able to reproduce, the worker bees drive all of the drones out of the hive, dooming them to starve to death. The hives themselves are attacked by bee-killer wasps, and we get to witness the entire, desperate battle and the dismemberment of legions of bees and wasps whose strewn body parts continue to twitch.

The Hellstrom Chronicle shows us many large-scale battles, for example, locusts rising up in giant clouds to attack and consume a crop that could feed a million people, a crop-dusting plane made blind and grotesque by the smashed bodies of locusts on its windows; ants at home in their tunnels and at war with another species over the delectable morsel of a dead bee; a broken termite mound—a truly spectacular construction—that must be defended from predators while workers furiously rebuild the damaged area using secretions from their bodies.

The film also shows us domestic battles, for example, the throbbing body of a female black widow spider, made more titillating by Hellstrom’s description, attracting a tiny male that approaches with both desire and fear. After mating, of course, the female quickly wraps him up for a tasty meal later on.

The film takes care to show us some of the beauty and wonder of the insect world, from the metamorphosis of a Monarch butterfly to a shimmering spider’s web woven in high-speed, time-lapse photography in a matter of moments. The clever camouflage of some insects is particularly emphasized as a snake looking for a meal crawls right over an insect that resembles a branch. Stuff like this is pretty amazing.

Hellstrom likes to zero in on how defenseless human beings will be against insects. Humans will not sacrifice themselves mindlessly the way insects will for the good of the whole. Humans, in trying to poison crop-eating insects, end up making their fields unsustainable, while a few generations of mutations make the insects invulnerable to their sprays. This is the part in which the fake farmer talks about having to burn his fields because they are hopelessly contaminated with DDT.

The final sequence—the one Hellstrom has been saving as a sobering look at the destructive might of insects—is the relentless march of the driver ants. The ants make bridges of their bodies over water, the bottom layer drowning in the process. They find a hideout and prepare for an assault on all living things. They take down large lizards on the ground and in the trees, overrun everything edible, and carry it home for the entire colony to feed on. The music by Lalo Schifrin punctuates the battle sequences with drums and frantic violins that seem to be made to sound like insects.

As I watched this film, I was both fascinated and horrified. Watching the termite queens—throbbing white masses laying eggs—seemed as otherworldly as any scifi movie I’ve ever seen. Indeed, The Hellstrom Chronicle samples from Them! to continue its theme of Man vs. Insect. Oh, and this film is very un-PC in that use of the term “Man” for humanity; it drove me just a little crazy listening to it for the duration of the film. Dr. Hellstrom hasn’t proven his thesis (although the film shows a title card at the end that says his theories have a basis in the scientific literature—this was, after all, the heyday of sociobiology), but we have been given a thorough nature lesson. The last shot is of a rhinoceros beetle raising it menacing claw against a setting sun. If, after all that has gone before, that doesn’t scare the hell out of you, nothing in this movie will. l

Black Orpheus (Orfeo Negro, 1959)
Director: Marcel Camus

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I always like it when awarding organizations get it right, and when the Big Three of the Western film world—AMPAS, the Golden Globes, and the Cannes Film Festival—named Black Orpheus Best Foreign-Language Film, Best Foreign Film, and Palme d’Or winner, respectively, they most certainly got it right. This Brazilian/French/Italian coproduction reimagines the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as a doomed romance between descendents of freed black slaves in the hillside favelas (shantytowns) surrounding Rio de Janeiro during Carnival. In doing so, Black Orpheus connects this pre-Christian story with the Christian Passion in a place watched over by a giant figure of Christ.

The title card shows a Greek frieze from antiquity into which the figures of Orpheus and Eurydice have been chiseled. Then we are plunged immediately into a favela readying itself for Carnival. Musicians in bright, satin costumes create a pulsing African beat to which the townspeople sway, even women carrying large bundles of laundry on their heads. Soon the music gives way to the quieter rhythms of village life, scored by Luiz Bonfá—specifically, “Manhã de Carnaval,” which becomes the running theme song of the movie. We meet a smiling Serafina (Léa Garcia) watching two boys, Benedito (Jorge dos Santos) and Zeca (Aurino Cassiano), flying kites. The arrival of a streetcar pulls us into the plot.

Streetcar driver Orfeo (Breno Mello) conveys passengers, including the young and beautiful Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn), into town. Orfeo is a natural flirt who has left a string of lovers all over town, though one of them, Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira), has pushed him aggressively into a promise of marriage. Filmic love triangles are plentiful, but one member of the triangle usually knows at some level that a grand passion is in the offing. I am reminded of Gene Kelly as he pursues a reluctant, then compliant Leslie Caron in An American in Paris. Black Orpheus confounds this formula by having Orfeo flirt with and then dismiss Eurydice as too young; for her part, Eurydice is single-minded in her desire to get to cousin Serafina’s home, and Orfeo is an unwelcome roadblock.

Orfeo returns to his home, which adjoins Serafina’s, and his menagerie of animals—a reference to Orpheus’ ability to charm all the beasts with his music. He has gotten his precious guitar out of hock in time to play at the Carnival festivities. Zeca brings Benedito to Orfeo, claiming that Orfeo makes the sun rise with his songs. Benedito asks Orfeo what songs he plays—are they religious? No, says Orfeo, “I just make them up.” He then starts to improvise a song, the aforementioned “Manhã de Carnaval,” improvising lyrics about the rising of the sun and love. Eurydice hears the song, and in keeping with the Orpheus myth, is enchanted. When Orfeo discovers that she is now his next-door neighbor, he tries to seduce her. She runs. When he catches up with her, she is crying. “I was attracted to the song,” she says. Orfeo—a handsome and virile man—is not accustomed to women appreciating his creative inner life, and his heart is touched.

Unfortunately, Eurydice is a troubled young woman. She has run away from home; both she and Serafina know that if her guardian finds her, he could kill her. Eurydice has an additional worry right where she is. Previously, when Mira and Orfeo went to the marriage license bureau, a clerk, jokingly referring to the myth, says “Orfeo loves Eurydice,” without knowing there really is a Eurydice in town. Mira has noticed Orfeo’s transfer of affection and vows to kill Eurydice.

The vital heart of Afro-Brazilian culture is on display in this sweetly intense film. There isn’t a musical note or drumbeat struck that there isn’t also a swaying or dancing group of people responding. Although young, Eurydice comfortably allows the music to reach inside her. She and Orfeo dance with pleasure in a scene that communicates love of life rather than merely sexual or romantic intrigue. We’ve seen love dances before—again, I’m reminded of An American in Paris—but in Western films, the dances always tell the story. In this film, the dance is part of the story, part of a life in which both women and men find pleasure and expression. There’s no need for a Gene Kelly trying to persuade men that dancing is macho. How foolish this would seem to these Brazilians.

The film reaches a peak during the actual Carnival parade. Orfeo, dressed in gold like a Greek god, is the major domo of his town’s dance crewe whose theme is the rising sun and who dress rather ironically in colonial garb. During this celebration that ushers in a period of sacrifice leading up to Easter, Orfeo and Eurydice will enact another such sacrifice. Eurydice has seen the figure of a man dressed as Death (Ademar Da Silva) before the parade; frightened, she runs to Orfeo, who promises to protect her always. During the parade, Eurydice has taken Serafina’s place; veiled, she can dance with Orfeo without Mira being the wiser.

Unfortunately, Serafina and her dumb boyfriend can’t resist coming to the parade, and Serafina calls to Eurydice. Both Mira and Death, who has been watching Eurydice, take after her, but only Death manages to separate her from the crowd. In the empty trolley depot, they play a truly frightening cat-and-mouse game, moving in the troughs under the tracks and above the ground on the trestle structures, Death glowing red with menace. Orfeo reaches them; Eurydice yells his name. He throws a switch for more light, but only succeeds in electrocuting his beloved.

The descent of Orpheus into Hell is handled in a truly wonderful way here. An elderly streetcar conductor named Hermes (the messenger) takes Orfeo to the Bureau of Missing Persons (guarded, of course, by a dog named Cerebus), a building empty save for a janitor sweeping up miles of paper recording missing persons who are never found. Again, this seems a subtle reference to the Sacrifice of the Cross by which all humanity is saved. However, Orfeo seeks Eurydice in a pre-Christian ceremony in which spirits possess the singers and dancers. At Hermes’ urging, Orfeo joins in the singing, and Eurydice’s voice comes to him. He wants to see her, but she warns him not to turn around to view the source of the voice, or he will lose her forever. Impetuous, he disobeys her and is told by the old woman whom Eurydice has used as a vessel that she is lost to him forever.

Orfeo insists on seeing Eurydice, and in a beautifully shot and symbolic scene, descends a spiral staircase to the morgue. In an unnecessarily comic scene involving a morgue worker with a cold, he finds Eurydice, claims her body, and lets her “lead” him wherever she will. He walks with her body up a bluff, thanking Eurydice for taking him on a beautiful path surrounded by flowers. He will be met on this path by a furious Mira, who will decide his fate. The tragedy played out, life renews itself as Benedicto, Zeca, and a very young girl dance to Bonfá ‘s “Samba de Orfeo” and wait for the sun to rise.

The fabric of one corner of Brazilian life is on full display in Black Orpheus, including actual footage of Carnival that seems to have been shot by Camus. Camus has a spectacular eye for the majesty that is Rio, utilizing the natural beauty to accent and lend power to this timeless love story. At the same time, comic interludes of varying degrees of success reminded me of Shakespeare’s construction of tragedies. Music, both primitive and contemporary, fill this film; besides Bonfá, Antonio Carlos Jobim contributed music, including the now classic “A Felicidade.”

Finally, we have the sensitive lovers themselves. Breno Mello was a soccer star appearing in his first film; while he and the rest of the nonprofessional cast are sometimes awkward, Mello’s heartbreak over the loss of Eurydice is deeply touching. Marpessa Dawn, an American dancer with acting experience, is the shining light of this film. She manages to be a real person despite the whole weight of cinematic love stories pressing in on her. In a rather touching, though coincidental coda to this film, Mello died this past July, and Dawn followed only six weeks later.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the hubby was friends with Marpessa when they both lived in Denver. He said she had a serenity and confidence that drew people to her. He did not know she starred in Black Orpheus, and had never seen it. Marpessa said it was playing at the Ogden that week and agreed to meet him for the screening. The house was packed, and the hubby couldn’t find her. Finally, in the dark, he called, “Marpessa, are you there?” A disembodied voice called back, “I’m here.” When he told me this story, I immediately said, “You were Orpheus!” l

December 6, 2008, high noon

"Our Backstreets" #25
Ferdy on Roof, etc.

By Marilyn Ferdinand

When I'm not watching something on a screen, cooking, eating, or any of the other things I do in my off hours, you might find me out birding. Reports of a snowy owl had my birding buddy Eleanora ready to run out of the house last night. Owling normally is done at night, but knowing snowys are easy to spot during the day, I said, "Curb your enthusiasm." This charming lady owl was waiting for us today when we got to a building near the corner of Sacramento Boulevard and (get this) Ferdinand Street. I've named her Ferdy. l

”Our Backstreets" #24
Yours Truly

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Over the past few weeks, a few of my fellow movie bloggers have revealed parts of their home movie libraries. They weren't big show-and-tells, but they provided a glimpse at the person behind the curtain, so to speak. Now, I've never hidden my identity or a lot of the details about my life, but I am a bit private when it comes to my home. Not that it's some kind of sanctum sanctorum, mind you, though the computer room/den comes very close to being a staging area for macabre rituals thanks to the hubby's delight in collecting gargoyles, mini-guillotines, pagan altar pieces, and other bizarreiana. But I've broken the ice a bit for myself by posting a picture of my cat and one of my fish, and I'm ready to show you just what kind of a film geek I am.

As a collector, I'm as piddling as someone who never goes to the movies. I don't have a lot of books or DVDs. I had a lot of videos, mostly recorded off my TV; it was hard to rent or buy them at a reasonable price for quite a while, so my VCR was once my best friend. I don't have a lot of memorabilia other than ticket stubs, because I live in a condo without a lot of storage space and I really hate the feeling of clutter. So what you'll see here represents the items I've deemed worthy of taking into my home, some rather randomly, some foisted upon me by others, but mostly because I feel better knowing they are giving off energy in the place I am most relaxed and inspired.

I have a lot more artwork than I have room to hang it, but this piece will always have a place of honor in my home. The advertising cards are all from films I've seen, and none of them ever made a big splash, though most film buffs will recognize them and may have seen them. The card on the right in the second row is my version of historic preservation—the 2001 line-up of films from the late, lamented Shooting Gallery; two of the cards in the frame, The Low Down and The Day I Became a Woman, are from that series. I have the most awesome framer who I've been going to for decades, so I'm really pleased with how this looks.

On to the memorabilia. Above is one piece in a small collection of Rudolph Valentino items that includes a couple of vintage photos and a paper doll collection. I keep the bulk of the collection at work, but this cookie tin kept rolling off my desk, so I brought it home where the hubby has surrounded it with other vintage items from my mother and his.

Now the ticket stubs. Here's what holds them:

I can't show them all to you, so I've selected some that have some special interest for me. The first Ebertfest had some beautiful tickets. (They got grayer and more subdued over the years.) A three-piece band from Michigan called Concrete played their own score for Battleship Potemkin. Director Paul Cox did a Q&A about his wonderful A Woman's Tale.

Here's one from the Silent Summer Film Festival. Do you know that I forgot I saw Twinkletoes? Unbelievable. But going through all these ticket stubs, I saw a lot of film titles I didn't recognize at all, including, believe it or not Bunuel's The Milky Way, which I claimed not a week ago to never have seen and, in fact, to have avoided! However, the other two on this page, Lost in Translation (Did I really see that at the Siskel Center? How odd.) and Cloverfield, I remember well.

Here are a few from the defunct Taos Talking Picture Festival. Sorry I didn't get a better picture. The significant ones for me are Vera and Whale Rider, which was unknown in the States when I saw it. It didn't stay that way.

Below are some different styles of Chicago International Film Festival ticket stubs. I quite like the first ones, with elegant type for the festival name over a grayscale image of the festival logo—Theda Bara's eyes. By 2004, the stubs were the usual Ticketmaster style they are now. No character. Oh well. The stub for The Exiles is not from the CIFF; it's sort of my way of bragging that I discovered this film a long time before the hordes of cinephiles who now, thankfully, have easy access to it.

Finally, I've got a smattering of films I saw at the Siskel Center. The tickets not only tell what film was shown, but what series it was a part of; for example, Sound of the Mountain was part of an extensive Naruse retro. The Iberia ticket means a lot to me because Carlos Saura was there for the screening, where I got a chance to thank him for his unique dance films and get his autograph on a VHS tape of Carmen and a DVD of Blood Wedding.

I like to go to films when I'm on vacation. I had a few stubs from Hawaii, but the photo didn't come out. I wish I had the stubs from my trip to Johannesburg, where I remember seeing Center Stage and the first X-Men movie. Then again, I wish I had all the stubs over the decades. "What we've missed, Lucia, what we've missed."

On to the DVDs. This is pretty close to all of them; a couple of photos didn't come out. Yeah, I know: "Is that all?" Hey, I've got a kickass library collection and Facets to rent from. The hubby is responsible primarily for the horror films and stuff like Mondo Bubba, Dogville, and Dogma. A number of the films have Chinese characters on them; those came from my Shanghai connection.

I was going to put up pictures of my books, but there are only about 35, and none of them is all that "important." Nonetheless, I have a few favorites: Silent Star, Colleen Moore's autobiography, Foster Hirsch's Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen, and Andrew Bergman's We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films.

Whew, I'm glad that's over! It's not as easy as I thought it would be to put this out into the world. I don't exactly know what you'll make of all this. Let me know. l

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

Only Yesterday (1933)
Director: John M. Stahl
Debut film of: Margaret Sullavan, actress

By Marilyn Ferdinand

According to actress Louise Brooks, Margaret Sullavan remains "mysterious... like a voice singing in the snow." While this description may itself seem a bit inscrutable, if you think about how snow refracts and muffles sound, then there certainly is something to this comparison. Margaret Sullavan was an actress who made only 16 films, almost all of them hard to find and view. She might be entirely forgotten today if not for her starring role in the only recognized classic she made, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940). Yet it wasn’t really the paucity of performances and the obscurity into which most of them fell that made Margaret Sullavan an actress who was hard to pin down. She had a presence that seemed to hold dark, tragic secrets, an old soul who seemed mature beyond her years, even in her screen debut. Indeed, Only Yesterday began a string of screen deaths to which Margaret Sullavan would bring her special brand of stoic poignancy.

The story begins on October 29, 1929—the day that marked the end of the Roaring 20s and the beginning of the Great Depression. Frantic traders milling at the New York Stock Exchange share their collective misery as their fortunes crumble around them. One dejected man moves as though bent by a strong wind; he is persuaded by an eager worker to climb up on his shoeshine stand. Before his shine is finished, the man rises, gives the fellow some money, goes into a nearby men’s room, and blows his brains out.

In the next scene, we see a gay couple under a shop sign, the slyly named Deux Freres (Two Brothers), catching a taxi to attend one of the nearly daily soirees held at the home of society doyenne Phyllis Emerson (Benita Hume). The stock market crash is the talk of the evening, but it doesn’t supplant the usual intrigues. Phyllis cozies up to her lover, who wants her to leave her husband Jim (John Boles); Phyllis would rather play games with Jim’s latest lover Letitia (Noel Francis), who has just arrived at the party and is flashing the “famous” pearls Jim has not so discreetly bestowed upon her. Phyllis admires the pearls and then tells Letitia to be sure to pay for them—a great line that leaves Letitia nonplussed.

Jim arrives home and puts off the guests who seek his financial help. The Emersons are wiped out, too, and Jim sneaks off to his study, where he prepares to end it all as well. He sits down at his desk, pulls a gun out of one of its drawers, lights a cigarette, and goes through his mail. One letter catches his eye, and he opens it. Inside is the story of a woman who knew Jim long ago. The film moves into full flashback as we follow the story told by the letter writer, Mary Lane (Sullavan).

The flashback takes us from the Emersons’ sophisticated New York party to a much more quaint affair—a ball given by a good Virginia family for soldiers about to muster out to fight in the First World War. Mary Lane, just 18, flirts outrageously with Captain James Stanton Emerson, flippantly remarking that she has been in love with him for years. When he asks her to dance, we see from her looks and the way she holds him that this flip remark is absolutely true. The pair leaves the ballroom and goes for a walk in the formal garden. They disappear under a leafy canopy; when they return, Jim is helping Mary refasten her sash. The party’s over, not only for the guests at the ball, but also for Jim. Mary is the last thing on his mind when he musters out a couple of days later. Soon, Mary learns she is pregnant and elects to move in with her suffragette Aunt Julia (Billie Burke) in New York to spare her family embarrassment. She eagerly awaits the end of the war, when Jim will return to her and little Jimmy, the son she bears in his absence.

The end of the war and return of the troops have all of New York out in the streets to welcome them home. Mary works through the crowds, trying to catch sight of Jim, and then running the gantlet of well wishers to reach him as he leaves the parade to join Phyllis and some friends. The series of screen caps below wordlessly tell the story as Sullavan embodies Mary’s quiet excitement, and even quieter disappointment and hurt, as Jim looks her square in the face and fails to recognize her. Once at home, she yields to her broken heart and dreams, then forthrightly faces the reality of her life now as an single mother with little hope of uniting with her baby's father.

The director, continuing to use devices like the calendar to place the characters in time, shows Julia perusing a newspaper whose headline indicates that the 18th Amendment (Prohibition) has been passed. That makes the year 1919, only a few months after the troops returned following the 1918 Armistice, and in that time, Mary has made no attempt to contact Jim. That day, however, Mary tells Julia she intends to end her torment and tell Jim who she is. Too late. The newspaper serves a plot-related purpose as well—Aunt Julia shows Mary the Emersons' wedding announcement in that same paper. (It would have been fitting to have another newspaper announce the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote, because Mary becomes the epitome of the modern woman—an unwed mother supporting her child by becoming a success in business. Alas, the film’s greater interest in Mary’s private life counts as a missed opportunity, even though forward-thinking Julia and a suitor of Mary’s look at her unwed motherhood as something that “just happened.”)

The final meeting between Mary and Jim occurs again at a party—New Year’s Eve at the St. Regis Hotel. Mary and her date are out with Julia and her younger husband. Jim passes behind them and joins his party at a nearby table. Mary is happy and carefree until she notices Jim. He mistakes her stares for flirtation—it’s clear to the audience in this scene and the one that follows in which Jim and Mary take a taxi to his bachelor pad that Mary is very angry. Her every word is a veiled recrimination against a man too superficial and careless with the feelings of an 18 year old—a time when first love can mean everlasting love—to remember a night that meant the world to her. Again, Sullavan’s understated emotions simmering with indignation allow us to understand her as Jim never could have and make her obsessiveness through the years—a telegram every December 31 to Jim from “One Who Does Not Forget”—a bit easier to take.

This ability to act both text and subtext believably would serve Sullavan extremely well in The Shop Around the Corner, where her Miss Novak maintains a prickly, insulting demeanor with her coworker Mr. Kralik (James Stewart) while melting with genuine admiration and affection at the letters this same coworker—obviously a completely different man to her—sends her pseudononymously. However, in playing Miss Novak, it is Sullavan this time who is blind, who reacts to circumstances as they occur, just as Jim Emerson had. Yet, Sullavan’s ability to suggest emotion with the slightest of gestures—for example, the sight of her hand (shot from the rear of a bank of mailboxes) reaching into her mailbox, feeling around her cubbyhole thoroughly for an expected letter from “Dear Friend,” and then shrinking slightly and slowly sinking in disappointment to the bottom of the cubby—always allows audiences to identify with the woman beneath the prickly or stoic exterior.

Sullavan's first performance is slightly mannered; even though she really was a Virginia belle, her giggly girlishness at the beginning of the film seems somewhat put on. Her deathbed scene in Only Yesterday is a bit of a wallowfest, but she'd soon learn to tame that tendency. In two other films of hers I’ve seen, The Mortal Storm (1940) and Cry Havoc (1943), she uses her emotional containment to embody bravery during wartime; she goes to her death in each of these films with the same clear-eyed realism tinged with emotional idealism with which she started her film career. Thus, remarkably, Sullavan's screen persona seems pretty close to fully formed in Only Yesterday, elevating what could have been an ordinary melodrama (reproduced by Max Ophüls in his more sudsy 1946 film Letter from an Unknown Woman) to a memorable debut picture. l

Dan Callahan provides an excellent review of Margaret Sullavan’s career in the August 2005 edition of Bright Lights Film Journal.

Grade

Promising