It’s only a romance, but the modesty of scale and the willingness to take a tough ending are what make this picture survive, and seem fresh, when so many more pretentious ventures have turned to dust. You can see here what a charming heel MacMurray could be. As for Lombard, it’s difficult to watch any of her great films without feeling regret. She’s a girl anyone would die for. This was Paramount’s biggest hit of 1937, and one of those bittersweet delicacies where love story and musical are dancing together.
Swing Time (1936)
Consider American industrial production in 1936: Swing Time is 35 mm celluloid, 103 minutes. It cost $886,000, at the RKO factory. It grossed $1.624 million in the domestic market and $994,000 in the foreign. Apparently that made for a profit of $830,000. It was the Astaire-Rogers model, and some noted the curiosity that it had no musical numbers for its first twenty-eight minutes. Astaire’s character was known as John Garnett, or “Lucky”—he is a stage dancer, and something of a gambler. Rogers’s name is Penny Carroll, and she is a dance teacher.
Note that this is 1936, the height of surrealism, and consider that the blithe gem of a man, Garnett, is also drawn to gambling—the irrational pursuit of desire. Now, the triviality of the alleged story falls into place, along with the deliberate and entirely provocative first twenty-eight minutes without music or dance. This is a period of torment, a threshold of ordeal, a trial, before music is willing to begin. After that, it is a movie in which the classic Astaire-Rogers format of attraction-rebuff-happiness is doubled or tripled up, so that even within dance numbers there is the same repetition of structure, a hoppity tic within the toe-tapping, a hesitation or duplication of the beat, otherwise known as syncopation. This film was called Swing Time, though many critics noted that it made very little use of the jazz motifs or habits of “swing” music itself.
Pandro S. Berman presided in the form of producer at RKO. George Stevens was the director—and it may be worth adding that, for all his qualities, “swinging” is about the last verdict one would pass on the dogged, careful Mr. Stevens, which only suggests that these films did not really require directing. The dance director was Hermes Pan, whose principal function was to execute the desires of Mr. Astaire. The songs were written by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. Robert Russell Bennett contributed additional music, along with Hal Borne, Astaire’s personal pianist. The script—characters say things that resemble dialogue and plot points—was by Howard Lindsay and Allan Scott. David Abel was director of photography. Vernon Walker did the special effects; there is duplication of figures in the “Bojangles in Harlem” number, probably the first time Astaire had used such a device. Van Nest Polglase did the lovely sets in which rooms have the lateral length, empty space, and polished surface fit for dance. The supporting cast includes Victor Moore, Betty Furness, Eric Blore, Helen Broderick, and Georges Metaxa.
The numbers are “Pick Yourself Up,” in which he shows her that he doesn’t actually need to be taught to dance; “The Way You Look Tonight”; the “Waltz in Swing Time”; “A Fine Romance”; the “Bojangles of Harlem” number in which he dances with everyone except her; and “Never Gonna Dance,” in which he plays with the idea and woos her with the theory that he might not dance. As so often, therefore, dance is offered in these films as Astaire’s province or domain, a place where he will exist with a woman in unison, while alluding to the possibility of withdrawing permission. So dance is like an ecstatic or religious state controlled by the man, or the mannikin. If you love Astaire’s art on film, how long before you wonder about his gayness?
Arlene Croce felt that this was the height of the Astaire-Rogers films.
Sylvia Scarlett (1935)
George Cukor used to tell a story how, in the battered aftermath of Sylvia Scarlett, Katharine Hepburn had wondered whether or when he started to lose confidence in the material. There may be something in the suggestion. Cukor was earnest in his gay life, but he did not like to be too gay about it. He knew that there was only so far he could go. Sylvia Scarlett was attacked by every critic in town, and it found no audience. Only a few years later, Cukor got dropped from Gone With the Wind. I don’t think that had to do with his gay reputation, but Cukor never could be sure about that. He and Hepburn were the last people to be taking this risk. Who knows? If it had been Hawks and Margaret Sullavan, or La Cava and Stanwyck, Sylvia might be a classic.
But Cukor and Hepburn had volunteered to do it, rather as if some daring urge wanted to see if they could get away with it. It comes from a novel by Compton Mackenzie, and the script was by Gladys Unger, Mortimer Offner, and John Collier—though Cukor claimed that Collier did the real work. Henry Scarlett (Edmund Gwenn) has just lost his wife and fears an audit of the lace-making company where he works in Marseilles—he has borrowed funds for his gambling. So he and his daughter, Sylvia, decide to escape to England; she cuts her hair and dresses as a boy, “Sylvester.” Why? Well, to avoid being caught? Because she… feels like it? The bold stroke is not substantiated. She needs to be on the run.
On the boat, they meet Jimmy Monkley (Cary Grant), a con man, and then the film is off—swindling and traveling theatricals, worlds in which Sylvia’s masquerade feels as legitimate as any in the Forest of Arden. Of course, it is going to have to be explained—and then it gets awkward and stilted again, notably with the character of Michael Fane (Brian Aherne), Sylvia’s true love. There’s another key character, Lily (Natalie Paley), who ends up with Jimmy. But I think the problem Hepburn and Cukor had was the sudden shock of self-incrimination through this hokey material (the novel is Edwardian).
Pandro Berman produced the picture, Joseph August shot it, and Van Nest Polglase did the art direction. Over the years, it has always had a cult following, as if gays felt a duty to defend it. I think the task is forlorn. The picture really doesn’t work, and I suspect that a more fixed heterosexual actress would have had the confidence it needed, and the wit to find extra flirtatious possibility. In a remake—if anyone had the courage—you could play it straight, or you could open up the gay angles. Best of all, Sylvia should be unaware of how fond some girls are. So often in Hollywood, the most daring treatments of gender have occurred when leading parties had no idea what was going on—like Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur, or Marilyn in Some Like It Hot. The real humor rests in the whispered question, “Can’t you see she’s a girl?” and the answer, “No, but my eyes felt something!”
Tabu (1931)
It is a story that demands a movie in itself: how two men felt the same sort of gravitational pull toward the South Seas, not just for the sake of the light there, the chance of idyllic native life, or because of the steady flux of the sea, but because their other world had gone sour on them. This was 1929 and ’30, with the Great Crash seeming to indicate that every other social assurance was vulnerable. Would there have to be another war? Could anything survive that?
One of the men was Robert Flaherty, born in Michigan in 1884, an explorer in northern Canada who made Nanook of the North in 1922, and on the strength of that unexpected hit had got money to make Moana and then White Shadows of the South Seas, a documentary and a feature, set in the South Seas. But he knew he had not filmed the real thing there yet. The other man was Friedrich Murnau, German, born in 1888, an assistant to Max Reinhardt, a flier in the war; he later made Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, and then went to Hollywood for Sunrise. And was then himself drawn to the South Seas. Murnau was homosexual, hardly free in that life, and he had seen enough of Berlin and Los Angeles to have the most mixed feelings about the modern city. Two men, both capable of genius, very different, but joined in friendship.
They are transfixed by what they find, which is a few islands still untouched, still places where native peoples fish and dance and procreate and simply exist in the light. We are talking about the friendly peoples that changed the sense of law, society, and happiness for some of the men on the Bounty. But then on other islands “civilization” has reached out and turned the native life into business, with the b
eautiful people left defeated by money, toys, syphilis, and tuberculosis. So Murnau and Flaherty saw what seemed to them the last of the natural world, and as truth tellers and storytellers they were locked in their desire to film it.
The result is Tabu, a simple and even silly story about a fisherman who falls in love with a girl who has been declared untouchable: forbidden love, the heartthrob of Murnau’s work as an artist. The music is strange and lofty, the plot is daft, and Murnau was resisting sound for its own sake and because he hardly knew how to direct the Tahitians. But the dancing, the movement in light, the imagery—in the hands of Floyd Crosby (he won an Oscar)—is not just the acme of silent cinematography, it is one more example of Murnau’s ability to reach the soul through appearances.
Not unexpectedly, the two directors were pulling in different directions: Flaherty had documentary principles he adhered to; Murnau was a poet. I think it’s also plain that Murnau felt a love for the natives that Flaherty could not share. So they parted ways, not in anger, but Murnau bought Flaherty out and made what is a Murnau picture. Seeing the film in 1931, a young Lotte Eisner responded to one moment: “A sail unfurls like a sheet of shining silk, and suddenly the dark bodies of natives are seen among the rigging like ripe clusters on a grape vine.”
That is great film commentary, and it is the kind of feeling that runs through the whole film. Murnau had made an ode to a paradise that was vanishing. A week before his great film opened, he was dead, killed in a car crash, with a handsome new chauffeur.
A Tale of Two Cities (1935)
If only David O. Selznick had been told to confine his movie adventures to the works of Charles Dickens. He had begun so admirably with David Copperfield, and here in the same year is a splendid Tale of Two Cities—easily the best on film—even if it can’t help but flash its royalist sympathies at us. But Dickens yielded to the same escape in the grim face of the guillotine. The novel is not one of the longest, but at just two hours the picture is crammed with detail and rarely flags. Dolly Tree’s costumes are especially good, and Cedric Gibbons did the excellent sets in a photographic style that is invariably nocturnal—Oliver T. Marsh was the cameraman.
By 1935, Selznick was giving a lot of his time to thoughts of going independent, and that may have helped W. P. Lipscomb and S. N. Behrman with their studious adaptation of the novel. Some say that Dickens wrote for a screen and a medium that had not been invented yet. And certainly he had a way of signaling key moments. But I think the secrets to any successful approach to the classics rest in art direction and screenplay first and foremost. And one of the tricks of A Tale of Two Cities is to handle the way Sydney Carton is in fact on the periphery of the main story without any awkwardness resulting.
In turn, great credit is due to Ronald Colman, who is wise enough to see that Carton is only a supporting player, and who turns in a magnificent study of a self-loathing alcoholic. It is possible that this performance was based on observations of David Selznick’s brother, Myron, the agent—in which case, the film is all the more somber in its sense of a life that has been wasted. In hindsight, it’s startling that Colman was not even nominated for the Oscar—instead, nods went to Paul Muni, Gary Cooper, Walter Huston, William Powell, and Spencer Tracy—and Muni won as Pasteur.
The other keynote to the classics is the group playing, and here we have so much to behold: Edna May Oliver outstanding as Miss Pross; Reginald Owen as Stryver; Basil Rathbone, deeply cruel as St. Evremonde; Blanche Yurka, fixed in malice as Madame De Farge; Henry B. Walthall as Dr. Manette; and even Elizabeth Allan as Lucie Manette. Jack Conway directed—and without any evident problems. The best tribute to him is that one can imagine this as a theatrical show organized by Dickens himself. Of course, that is the highest tribute one can find for literary adaptation. What it also amounts to is the realization that in his unique fusion of the melodramatic and the solemn in theme, Dickens had made the movies more likely. We know he loved theater and performance, and it is clear from his writing that he was thrilled by drastic transition—such as the cinema made possible. But, years ahead of the screen, he made us see stories.
The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)
In 1950, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger took up the suggestion of Sir Thomas Beecham to do something else in the manner of The Red Shoes. He suggested Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, and Beecham turned up at their meeting and went through the whole score on the piano, humming along, indicating the action. When he was done, he looked up with a bright idea: What about using that girl from The Red Shoes—Norma Shearer?
Moira, I think, said Michael. And before long he and Pressburger were sitting down with Vincent and Alex Korda. Ah yes, said Vincent, “Hoffmann, the hero of his own tale… There is a prologue in a beer hall where Hoffmann tells his fellow students the story of his three loves. Then, there are three acts, each one with a different love, each one with a different girl. At the end of his stories he is drunk and when his first love comes to see him he has—what you say—passed out. And she goes off with another boy—his rival always.”
Alex Korda looked up: “Three girls?” It’s always the same, you can film the Bible or Wittgenstein if there are girls.
The very ambitious production went ahead on a modest budget, with the entire score prerecorded (Beecham conducting), and the action mimed to the music—it was the way Hollywood musicals were done. And it was the swansong of the Archers group. Powell and Pressburger made a script from Dennis Arundell’s adaptation of the Offenbach. Frederick Ashton did the choreography. Hein Heckroth did the very simple sets, and Christopher Challis ran the Technicolor cameras.
It is a story of the artist and his muse, brilliant in art and wretched in life, and it was a summation of Michael Powell’s very self-conscious quest to make love to his stars. In the prologue and epilogue, Robert Rounseville was Hoffmann, Moira Shearer was Stella, Robert Helpmann was Lindorf, Ashton was Kleinsack, and Pamela Brown took the non-dancing role of Nicklaus.
The three scenes that followed had Moira Shearer, Ludmilla Tchérina, and Anne Avars as the three girls, with Robert Helpmann and Léonide Massine sharing the male roles. The singing was handled by a cast headed by Owen Brannigan, Monica Sinclair, Rene Soames, and Bruce Dargavel.
Hoffmann is true to its original, and full of good, melodramatic dancing. But it is most cinematic as a series of jokes or asides about eyes and watching. Ten years ahead of Peeping Tom, and under the veil of artistic respectability, Powell had delivered an essay on voyeurism, or the love that travels on sight lines, that was obsessive, yet guilty, too. The design was amazing, but ordinary viewers never swallowed the story line. It was a film for the Festival of Britain, whatever that odd fair or the uncertain Britain would make of it. As he made it, Powell had plans to go to Stravinsky to do part of The Iliad, or a version of The Tempest. It is a line of filmmaking that did not advance until Moulin Rouge (which has a strong story and compelling characters). But in the British cinema of, say, 2006, it seems a flight of fancy or wild hope that The Tales of Hoffmann was ever considered, let alone made.
Targets (1968)
In 1966, a student named Charles Whitman climbed the bell tower on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. He had a selection of weapons with which he killed or wounded forty-six people. Two years later, Peter Bogdanovich (who was twenty-nine) and his wife, Polly Platt, seized upon an offer from Roger Corman. He gave them a few days of Boris Karloff, the chance to use footage from The Terror (1963), and… According to Bogdanovich, Corman calculated that with 20 minutes of Karloff, 20 from The Terror, and 40 of something new he could have a brand-new Karloff picture. It was up to Bogdanovich and Polly Platt to find the new stuff and knit it all together.
Bogdanovich thought of Charles Whitman, and he did a script (inspired and helped by Samuel Fuller) in which the killer would end up behind the screen at the premiere of a Karloff film—he was called Byron Orlok in this new film, a disillusioned veteran of horror, increasingly aware that maybe the viole
nce of his own pictures was leaving an imprint in society.
Corman gave the go-ahead: He said if the picture was picked up properly for distribution they’d call it Targets—and if it ended up with American International, then it was Blood and Candy. It cost $100,000, and Paramount picked it up with an advance of $300,000. Alas, released in 1968, the film coincided horribly with real assassinations: As a serious picture it was death; as Blood and Candy it might have broken records.
And it is a quite fascinating little picture and a terrific debut. The Whitman character is played by Tim O’Kelly, and we see the end to his home life before he goes on the rampage: He shoots his wife and his mother and a delivery boy. There is no explanation to this, thank God. What works best of all is the arbitrariness of what “Bobby” does and his own inability to work out a reason or even a context. It is the elderly actor who is driven to be seer and teacher, and it turns out that this is a burden that suits the elderly English gentleman in Karloff very well. Indeed, coming just a year before Karloff’s own death, Targets is a gentle valedictory to him and a legitimate apprehension that maybe screen violence goes somewhere, from the screen to us.
You could argue that it was a film critic’s film, not just in its urge to ruminate over the social place of movie, but in its several fond quotations from Hawks and Hitchcock. But it is also a very cool, authoritative piece of work, admirably shot by Laszlo Kovacs, and really a triumph in bringing together its disparate parts. Bogdanovich himself plays the young director in Orlok’s film—a kid called Sammy Michaels. There’s a lovely moment when the two film buffs—aged star and novice—fall asleep, side by side in the same bed. And as one great career ended, so another began with enormous promise.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 136