PRINCE POPPYCOCK

As she's mentioned approximately 1,348 times in various social media, the Siren is off to Paris today for a visit with the in-laws. The Siren hates air travel--how heretical of her--but comforts herself with the notion that she could have in-laws in, say, Phenix City, Ala., a town where her father used to try cases and come back muttering that the movie flattered the place. (The Siren hastens to add for any readers in Phenix City that this was 25 years ago and Daddy may have missed the renaissance.)

The Siren always tries to do some shopping in Paris, however small, so here is a small anecdote regarding the perils of that pastime, from Billy Wilder in Hollywood by Maurice Zolotow.

Much of Love in the Afternoon was filmed on location in Paris. While Billy was over there, Audrey [Wilder] suddenly got the most irresistible craving for...a bidet! She had to have a bidet. She could not live without her very own bidet in the master bedroom. She cabled Billy to purchase a bidet and ship it to their Westwood apartment. Unable to locate a French plumbing supply firm which exported bidets, Wilder replied: IMPOSSIBLE TO OBTAIN BIDET STOP SUGGEST YOU DO HANDSTANDS IN SHOWER.

Over at Awards Daily, there is a poll about the Most Influential Film Critics. What struck the Siren about this poll is that there are only about a half-dozen, give or take, critics on the list whose good opinion is enough to get her watching. She won't tell you who they are, with two exceptions. Obviously the Siren's TCM tovarich Lou Lumenick carries much weight with her.

And then there is Glenn Kenny, the only critic named for an individual blog. The Siren suggests you go over and take the poll for the sake of voting for Glenn. The honor of the blogosphere compels you.

The poll, of course, is looking at which critics carry weight with the largest number of people (and in Oscar balloting, which to the Siren is like Kremlinology, only less transparent). But applying it to your own reading is an interesting exercise, and it made the Siren realize most of the critics left off the poll who wield substantial influence over her are either Web-based or have a large Web presence. Her own list would include (but is by no means limited to) Kim Morgan, Dennis Cozzalio, David Cairns, Dan Callahan, Peter Nelhaus, Tony Dayoub, Vadim Rizov, Dan Sallitt, Keith Uhlich, Jim Emerson, David Ehrenstein, Flickhead, Tom Shone and Girish Shambu. There are also wider-ranging bloggers whose film forays the Siren loves, such as James Wolcott (yes, I know he's primarily Vanity Fair, but he's a primo blogger so we like to claim him), Lance Mannion and Sheila O'Malley. And there's a few who've gone silent of late, but still make the Siren snap to attention when they do say something, like Filmbrain and Michael Phillips. These critics often share the Siren's tastes, but a lot of them also tend to like all sorts of things the Siren most definitely does not. They're all a pleasure to read, though, and often that's all it takes. Don't you think?

By that standard, the Siren could also name a lot of her commenters for that poll.

The Siren must now return to staring at her suitcases and waiting for them to speak up and tell her what she forgot. Before she leaves, one more critic who belonged on that poll had anyone consulted the Siren: Stephen Whitty. Please check out Stephen's marvelous exchange with Joan Lowell Smith, who once shared Hollywood digs with goddess-in-the-making Kim Novak.

That's all from Brooklyn for now. The Siren will be posting from Paris at her usual erratic rate. See you soon.

My final defeat, which made me cry real tears, came at the end of [Pandora's Box], when [G.W. Pabst] went through my trunks to select a dress to be 'aged' for Lulu's murder as a streetwalker in the arms of Jack the Ripper. With his instinctive understanding of my tastes, he decided on the blouse and skirt of my very favorite suit. I was anguished. "Why can't you buy some cheap little dress to be ruined? Why does it have to be my dress?" To these questions I got no answer till the next morning, when my once lovely clothes were returned to me in the studio dressing room. They were torn and foul with grease stains. Not some indifferent rags from the wardrobe department but my own suit, which only last Sunday I had worn to lunch at the Adlon Hotel! Josifine hooked up my skirt, I slipped the blouse over my head, and I went on the set feeling as hopelessly defiled as my clothes. Working in that outfit, I didn't care what happened to me...

I did not realize until I saw Pandora's Box in 1956 how marvelously Mr. Pabst's perfect costume sense symbolized Lulu's character and her destruction. There is not a single spot of blood on the pure-white bridal stain in which she kills her husband. Making love to her wearing the clean white peignoir, Alva asks, "Do you love me, Lulu?" "I? Never a soul!" It is in the worn and filthy garments of the streetwalker that she feels passion for the first time--come to life so that she may die.
--Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood

The Siren was recently designated a fashion blogger by a European site called Wikio, an honor that left her equal parts amused, flattered and puzzled. Aside from her annual rant about the costume awards at the Oscars, a tribute to Mary Astor's makeup and a brief series of posts about perfume, the Siren can't recall saying much about fashion here at her Web outpost, although certainly clothing and makeup rank high on her list of semi-private obsessions. Yet there she is, right next to the black-belt shoppers of Fashionista and seven notches below the cool gaze of the Sartorialist, who would probably stop the Siren in the street right around the same time Dorothy Lamour showed up in hell with a platter of Mai Tais.

Still, the unexpected accolade made the Siren start thinking about costumes in film. The period stuff does get most of the attention, but sometimes deservedly so, as with Walter Plunkett's incredible designs for Gone with the Wind. Those dresses are so brilliantly in tune with Scarlett's character and the events of the movie that you would swear they all must be in the book. The drapery dress is, but just about none of the others are. William Pratt points out that if Plunkett had followed Margaret Mitchell's descriptions to the letter, Scarlett would have spent 9/10ths of the movie wearing green, the author's favorite color. The "scarlet woman" dress that Rhett throws at Scarlett before Ashley's birthday party, for example, was entirely Plunkett's doing. And the Siren has always wanted a better look at the cloudlike indigo gown Scarlett wears in a brief scene of her New Orleans honeymoon. Look closely and you'll see it's adorned with nine stuffed birds--a witty commentary on the once-starving Scarlett stuffing herself with the finest in Louisiana cuisine.

Other great moments in period costume would have to include Marie Antoinette; Jezebel (that red dress was actually bronze, the better to photograph in black-and-white); The Adventures of Robin Hood (Olivia de Havilland spends most of the movie with her hair completely covered, so when she shows up in her bedroom with her hair down in braids, it's a potent sign of sexual yearning); and Queen Christina (the moment when Garbo turns so the firelight outlines her form under a man's shirt is one of the most sensual in all of 1930s cinema).

But the Siren is always drawn to contemporary costumes, particularly those for women. Louise Brooks's essay on Pabst contains what is still the best explanation of costume and performance that the Siren has ever read. Robert Avrech recently posted about designer Helen Rose, and in comments we discussed how an actor's clothing influences a performance. Confronted with that, plus her new job description, the Siren's palms began to itch and she got that yen, the one that says, "It's time to make a highly idiosyncratic list of things I like so that everyone can argue with me, politely."

As Yojimboen has pointed out, the ins and outs of costume credits in old movies can be worse than Kremlinology. Some of these were undoubtedly purchased off the rack, but as Annie or Daria could tell you, there's an art to selecting the right clothes, too. The Siren is mostly sticking with the screen credit, but if someone knows the real scoop on who did what, by all means tell us in comments and I'll update.

So, ten great moments in women's costume design. Let's hope this makes whoever clicks over from Wikio more happy and less confused.

1. Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (Orry-Kelly)

I’ll be wearing my white lace gown tonight. I’d like you to wear your black and white foulard.
--Gladys Cooper as Mrs. Henry Windle Vale

Cooper has a lot of bitchy moments in Now, Voyager, such as, just to pick one out of a hat, throwing herself down a staircase to ensure her daughter stays chained up as a nursemaid.

But the Siren thinks even trying to order the newly fashionable Charlotte back into this offense to the human eyesight is as evil as it gets. Have you ever seen anything to equal this horror? The hem that hits just the right spot to get that redwood-forest effect every woman wants for her legs. The neckline that rests at her throat only because the climb to the earlobes got too exhausting. The lace at the collar, probably thrown there by Gladys in one of her temper fits. The way the dress droops away from the body, yet clings enough to say, "There is a whole world of lumpy oatmeal under here and brother, you want no part of it." It's a goddamn triumph of costuming. Kim Morgan recently said every woman should have Claude Rains as her psychiatrist, and ain't that the truth--but Dr. Jaquith's one mistake is waiting to talk to Charlotte. The second she entered wearing that monstrosity, he should have said, "Right, we're outta here."

2. Jean Seberg in Breathless (N/A)

Michel: How old are you?
Patricia: A hundred.
Michel: You don't look it.

Throw a rock down any street in America and you will hit a woman wearing tight pants and a t-shirt. And not one of them, no matter how beautiful, will look one infinitesimal fraction as dangerous as Jean Seberg does in Breathless. Seberg wears this getup because it's her job to wear it, but when Godard's camera catches her calling "New York Herald Tribune," you see a warning sign that Belmondo does not. It's more than her beauty. It's the way she walks, not just casual in her clothes, but careless. Another down-market outfit, another wasteful American in Paris, ready to toss things aside for who knows what reason.

3. Audrey Hepburn's suit in Sabrina (screen credit, Edith Head; actual design, Hubert de Givenchy.)

You needn't pick me up at the airport. I'll just take the Long Island Rail Road and you can meet me at the train...If you should have any difficulty recognizing your daughter, I shall be the most sophisticated woman at the Glen Cove station.

Over at Glenn's place there is a discussion under way about the old saw that Jaws and/or Star Wars "killed the movies." The Siren remarked that the movies were neither dead, nor dying, nor even feeling a bit faint. Here she adds that this kind of chic, however, is deader than vaudeville. Just imagine showing up at the fetid underground bunker that is modern-day Penn Station wearing that suit. You'd get fewer stares wearing a sandwich board. The suit isn't the movie's most famous costume; that's the Sabrina dress, a version of which the Siren has in her own vintage-clothing collection. But this moment, as Wilder's camera gloats over Hepburn from the top of her hat to the little dog at her feet, is one of the most thrilling in the history of film fashion. Sabrina, the lovelorn chaffeur's daughter, has learned poise and confidence, the essential elements of style. Even the least observant visitor to Paris sees that a fashionable Frenchwoman wears chic clothing because she IS self-assured, not because she WANTS to be. This, this is what Paris and a genius designer can do for you!

4. Jean Harlow in China Seas (Adrian)

During my earliest days at Metro, I was put into movies with Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow, and I was always taking their men away from them. Temporarily. It was ludicrous. There would be Jean, all alabaster skin and cleft chin, savory as a ripe peach, and I'd be saying disdainfully (and usually with an English accent, I played a lot of Lady Mary roles) to Gable or Bob Montgomery, "How can you spend time with her? She's rahther vulgar, isn't she?"
--Rosalind Russell, Life Is a Banquet

The Siren would love to tell you this little number is a turning point in China Seas, Tay Garnett's lovable strumpet-on-the-high-seas melodrama from 1935. It isn't, although Harlow wears it in a drinking scene with thoroughgoing louse Wallace Beery, and the jeweled straps do suggest a trap. The neckline is almost modest--right up near the collarbone--as long as you ignore Harlow's obvious lack of underwear and those strips of fabric making an oh-so-scalable ladder down the pure-white arms. Russell was right; it is unlikely Gable would even realize there were other women on the ship.


5. Mary Astor & Ruth Chatterton in Dodsworth (Omar Kiam)

Edith: My dear...don't.

The British gave us the cruel expression "mutton dressed as lamb," but it's Americans who gave us its best illustration, in Dodsworth. Poor Ruth Chatterton. Her character may turn out to be a harpy, but here the Siren aches for her. That hairpiece, ridiculous on anyone who's out of the schoolroom, hellishly combined with the ill-judged white fabric and the simpering black-velvet bow at the too-low neckline. And, to complete the picture of humiliation, there's Mary Astor, a piece of carved ivory in a perfectly draped evening gown, necklace nestled in a neckline that's even lower than Chatterton's--yet somehow not the slightest bit vulgar. The scene is one of the most poignant in the movie, as Dan Callahan writes so well here, but the costumes take the contrast even further.

6. Barbara Stanwyck in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Robert Kalloch & Edward Stevenson)

General Yen: I'm going to convert a missionary.

From the second she dons a spectacular Chinese robe, every aspect of Stanwyck's movement changes. Her arms float away from her body, she takes longer strides around the room, she suddenly seems conscious of having breasts and hips under the fabric. And you sense, too, that the lack of underpinnings makes her feel just that much more vulnerable to the General, even though she is technically as covered up as she was in her missionary garb.

7. Kay Francis in Mandalay (Orry-Kelly)

They call her Spot White. It should be Spot Cash.

Like Harlow's China Seas dress, this one wins for sheer wow factor. Kay Francis, betrayed by the man she loves, winds up as the top earner in a Burmese whorehouse, and shows she won't let the bastard get her down by strutting down a staircase wearing this. She makes that piece of liquid silver seem worth a crash course in male perfidy.

8. Myrna Loy in The Thin Man (Dolly Tree, wardrobe)

Nick: Have you a nice evening gown?
Nora: What's that got to do with it?
Nick: Have you got a nice evening gown?
Nora: Yes, I've got a lulu. Why?
Nick: I'm going to give a party and invite all the suspects.
Nora: The suspects? They won't come.
Nick: Yes, they will.

The Siren can't remember whether the above-referenced "lulu" is the famous one in the above picture, or the halter-necked black gown Loy wears in the last scenes of the movie. No matter; every good husband who asks a question like that should be rewarded by the sight of his wife wearing something like this, even if nobody ever does show. Maybe especially if no one shows.


9. Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Helen Rose, costume and wardrobe department)

Maggie: You've got a nice smell about you. Is your bath water cool?
Brick: No.
Maggie: I know somethin' that would make you feel cool and fresh. Alcohol rub. Cologne.
Brick: No thanks. We'd smell alike. Like a couple of cats in the heat.

In New York City this past week it has been, as Auntie Mame would say, "hot as a crotch." So of course the Siren had to give a nod to Elizabeth Taylor, who set the standard for riding out a heat wave without air conditioning by donning a slip and trying to seduce Paul Newman. The Siren once had the pleasure of relating Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's censorship history to a confused Argentine male who had just watched it and could not get over, indeed seemed personally offended by, Newman's failure to respond to Taylor's come-on: "It was the strangest thing I have ever seen. There's Elizabeth Taylor! and she's wearing that slip! Thank god you explained this..."

10. Kasey Rogers in Strangers on a Train (Leah Rhodes, wardrobe)

Senator Morton: Poor unfortunate girl.
Barbara Morton: She was a tramp.
Senator Morton: She was a human being. Let me remind you that even the most unworthy of us has a right to life and the pursuit of happiness.
Barbara Morton: From what I hear she pursued it in all directions.

Alfred Hitchcock's attention to what his actresses wore gets a lot of press, usually for Rear Window and Vertigo. Here's one that deserves more discussion. Every time the Siren sees this magnificent movie, she's struck again by the brilliance of Miriam's look, how it represents a summit of Hitchcock's oft-stated preference for buttoned-up women. We've already been told about this mantrap who's cuckolding handsome Farley Granger, and we're expecting maybe Linda Darnell. Instead we get a four-eyed tootsie wearing a simple print dress with cap sleeves and a daintily pointed collar, not nearly as tight, body-conscious or as low-cut as you could go in 1951. Miriam probably wore it because it was vaguely pretty and would be easy to clean if she got popcorn butter on it. And the glasses--the Siren can't be the only one mesmerized by Miriam's eyeglasses. Mind you, the glasses are vital to the plot, but Kasey Rogers wields them the way Dietrich wielded a cigarette. This is an everyday black widow we're dealing with, says that costume, the sort of woman who would show up to a backyard pool party in a full-coverage one-piece and a sarong and, given five minutes' opportunity, would still wind up behind the rhododendrons pulling the swimming trunks off the hostess' husband.

There's an awful of lot of sex in this post, isn't there? There are advantages to this whole fashion-blogger gig...

Last Wednesday the Siren went to the Grassroots Tavern, which she had not done in many a year, to record a podcast with John Lichman of Film Threat, Vadim Rizov of Indie Eye, and Dan Sallitt of Thanks for the Use of the Hall. It was a loose-limbed affair touching on many subjects, including fashions in directors, Kurosawa and Wilder, “Une Certain Tendance du Cinema Français,” Avatar and James Cameron, how to maintain civility on the Web, and a little bit of Anthony Mann. The Siren observed that the wine has improved somewhat since she frequented the place, although not all that much.

You can access the chatter at The House Next Door.

The Siren has no particular reason for posting this anecdote, other than the way it consistently cracks her up. It concerns Samuel Goldwyn, whose fate it was to figure prominently in many anecdotes that simply never happened. His occasionally fractured English was irresistible to Hollywood wags, and eventually publicity folks just started making stuff up. This story, however, is from A. Scott Berg's excellent biography of the mogul.

Sexual liberation in the sixties turned the motion picture screen into an orgiastic playground, and most of Hollywood's latest product turned Goldwyn off. His private screening of Blow-Up in 1966 was going just fine until the scene in which David Hemmings cavorts with a couple of young girls. "Oh God," Goldwyn cried out, calling a stop to the screening; "this is a goddamned dirty picture!" Not long after that, Goldwyn complained to Billy Wilder that he had seen an even more disgusting disply--Hello, Dolly! Wilder was puzzled--not only because he could not imagine anything scurrilous in that harmless musical but also because Darryl Zanuck had not released it yet. Goldwyn insisted he knew what he saw, and it was one of the filthiest pictures he had ever seen. Wilder asked him to recite the plot. "Sam," he interrupted upon hearing about the drug-taking and sex lives of three aspiring actresses, "I think you're referring to Valley of the Dolls." "That's just what I said," Goldwyn insisted. "Valley of the Hello Dollies."

As the Siren flips to the notes of Berg's books she sees that the source for this bit of utter hilarity is Billy Wilder himself, which may, may mind you make it a teensy bit suspect. Like John McElwee the Siren has never bought the old story of Wilder telling L.B. Mayer--Mayer!--"go fuck yourself" after the first screening of Sunset Boulevard.

But it's a great story, isn't it?

The Siren will be mostly off-line today but she invites you to catch up with the following, as she has been.

Speaking of old dark houses: Six Martinis and the Seventh Art brings you The Bat Whispers.


Film in Focus's Behind the Blog interviews fine film writer and all-around good guy Peter Nelhaus, one of the Siren's first friends in the blogosphere.



The Siren has been tracking Gareth's Watching Movies in Africa project and finally read his entry on Captain Blood, a feast for any admirer of red-blooded 1930s screen manhood.

Gloria uses a splendid photo of Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester as a jumping-off point for...well, go read it, I won't spoil it. And Elsa looks quite pretty.

Brian at Bubblegum Aestheticswrites a lengthy and utterly absorbing post on the intertwined, but not-so-parallel lives of two film legends who shared a birthday.

Raquelle at Out of the Past is writing up a storm about TCM's Latino Images in Film (did anyone else catch the original And Now Miguel? lovely film), and she endeared herself to the Siren no end by putting in a good word for George Stevens' great widescreen epic Giant. On a related note, last month Allure ran a post full of scans from Latin American movie magazines.

Another way to get on the Siren's good side: praise Charlie Chaplin.

This also goes back to March, but the Siren has to point out Greenbriar Picture Shows' beautiful elegy for Wallace Reid.

Not classic-era, but kudos anyway: Stinky Lulu issues a defense (albeit somewhat qualified) of Marisa Tomei's unjustly maligned Oscar-winning turn in My Cousin Vinny. Why does everyone complain, year after year, that the Academy snubs comedy, and then pitch a hissy fit when an extremely funny performance wins over actresses doing Important Drama? Yeah, Miranda Richardson was great in Damage. The movie was a mess, and the Siren says this as a longtime Louis Malle lover. The Siren's own pick that year would have been Judy Davis for Husbands and Wives, but all the same, if you fired up Vinny on the DVD player right now, the Siren would happily watch just for the part where Mona Lisa Vito gets out of the car and says, "I bet this place has lousy Chinese food." As an Alabama native, the Siren has to tell you truer words are seldom spoken on screen.

So the Siren has joined Facebook, as Campaspe Smith. She did this in July after being asked by a lot of people if she was on Facebook. When the Siren said no, it was as if she had admitted to having rabbit ears on her TV set. Eventually the peer pressure became too much.

Trouble was, little Luddite that she is, the Siren completely forgot she'd signed up until a couple of weeks ago when she got a friend request from Richard Gibson, and then later when she got one from David Cairns. The first time she got a Facebook email, the Siren looked at the "friend request" and thought "I read your blog all the time, does that not count for something?" Then she read further and realized it was that old Facebook wheeze. Then she had to remember when and how she had signed up. Then she had to figure out her password. And find Girish on there because that is the first thing a self-respecting film blogger does, find Girish. It's work, this Facebook thing, I tell you.

Anyway, it's all set up now and the Siren feels a bit like Irma on the street corner, all dressed up and waiting for people to drop by. Which brings me to this week's anecdote, from Billy Wilder in Hollywood by Maurice Zolotow:

Most of Irma La Douce was filmed on the back lot of the Goldwyn studio. They had put up a beautiful reproduction of a street near Les Halles--the shops, the bistros, the louche hotels. The most gorgeous starlets in town were cast as the whores. Filming the street scenes, Billy became aware that every day the set was jammed with reporters. He turned on them one day and snarled,

'Where were you bastards when I was filming Stalag 17?'

(The Siren suspects Sheila O'Malley happily would have hung out on the Stalag set 24/7, but of course Irma was filmed back when journalism was the most boyish of boys' clubs.)



Meanwhile, the Siren is digging into her unwatched DVDs because you people simply won't learn, and keep sending her more of the things. A particularly kind and knowledgeable reader is sending a new batch even as we speak, after dropping the Siren a line to tell her that she shouldn't identify something as "unobtainable" because people then take it as a challenge. This tempts the Siren to describe Four Devils and the original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons as unobtainable but that, unfortunately, probably won't work.



So last night the Siren tackled Christmas Holiday, which you can see in segments on Youtube if you can tolerate that format. (Update to add: here is the link to part 1 and the other parts follow.) Sometimes you see a movie that flopped upon first release and think, "This is brilliant and the initial viewers were dopes." And sometimes you see a good movie that flopped and wonder it got made at all. To this latter category belongs Christmas Holiday. Director Robert Siodmak and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz evidently decided to take every last one of the audience's expectations, and back over them with a Mack truck. Winsome, virginal Deanna Durbin has star billing. She is playing a (barely Code-concealed) hooker and she shows up about 15 minutes in, wearing an extremely vampy black halter gown. Gene Kelly plays a psychopath, "mother-fixated" which, as David Ehrenstein points out, once was code for homosexual--as if all the delicate talk of Kelly's problems and his mother's hopes that marriage will "fix" him weren't tipoff enough. (Did Vito Russo see this movie?) Kelly has second billing but he doesn't show up until about 10 minutes after Deanna.

The "holiday" referred to is a soldier's last leave before heading for the battlefield. The soldier is on his way home, quite possibly with plans to kill the fiancee who just married another guy. Christmas comes into play at a midnight mass where Deanna breaks down into sobs at the intonation of "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa." Irving Berlin's exquisitely sentimental "Always" is played like a funeral march. It's a wonderful treat of a movie, a real Christmas noir, but the Siren eventually began to wonder if the whole thing was a deliberate attempt to lose money, it is that perverse.

Adding interest to an essentially simple story is the narrative structure, which swerves around even more than Mankiewicz's screenplay for Citizen Kane. The story leaps back and forth, the first flashback showing the wreck of Durbin's marriage and the next showing its beginnings, then leaping back again to show the consequences. The Siren's favorite moments include that midnight mass, gleamingly beautiful and very moving. Then there are the sequences on the staircase of the New Orleans mansion Durbin is sharing with Gene Kelly and dear old mom, Gale Sondergaard. As Durbin goes about her domestic tasks in clean, chirpy, whistle-while-you-work fashion, she moves up and down, peers through windows and gradually comes to realize that Sondergaard is concealing a murder for Kelly.

Highly recommended, and many thanks to Goatdog. Onward we progress through the stack.

Postscript: In comments David Ehrenstein reminds the Siren that the movie wasn't actually a flop--it did fine at the box office upon release. But it's never been on video and--go figure--it never became a holiday TV staple alongside The Littlest Angel and Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey, to name two specials that always brought the Siren to what Mr. E calls the true holiday spirit of "suicidal despair." And Durbin added the protests over her attempting a fallen woman character to all the reasons she wanted to leave "that asshole business."

One summer when she was a teenager the Siren visited her grandmother in a small town in north Alabama. Like all grandmothers should, this one had a grand, high four-poster bed for her granddaughter to sleep in. And next to it, on a yellowed lace doily, was a glass bulb lamp with some kind of landscape painted on it. When you lit this lamp at night, and looked around at the bed's posters, you had the most shadowy, atmospheric reading spot you can imagine. The Siren was on a Daphne du Maurier kick and her book that summer was Frenchman's Creek. If I close my eyes right now I can remember the windowshades and the glow of the lamp and staying up late to read the romantic story of Dona St. Colomb and her pirate.

I only wish there had been something in Mitchell Leisen's 1944 film version that was half as exciting as devouring that book by lamplight in an old room.

It's a sumptuously beautiful movie, but as anyone who's tried to watch a Cindy Crawford performance can tell you, beauty only gets you so far. The film is way overdone, like a meal late in the movie that starts with a huge pile of shrimp and moves on to an enormous roast. In her autobiography Joan Fontaine says that it might have worked if done in black-and-white as a "story of doomed love." Instead Paramount spent a mint on making it in lavish Technicolor. The costumes are eye-popping ...



... albeit also overdone. Fontaine apparently did not get on well with the cast and while Leisen later said she offended the British actors by remarking one morning that it was hard having to carry the whole movie, the Siren also wonders if his wig didn't have the otherwise courtly Basil Rathbone a mite on edge. Fontaine also said that the premiere audience greeted certain parts with laughter and is it just me, or do you suspect we have captured just such a moment above?

"Show me a happy set, and I'll show you a dull movie," Katharine Hepburn once remarked, although that's no more universally true than the old theater superstition about smooth dress rehearsals. Here we seem to have the worst possible mix, a miserable set and a (mostly) dull movie. Romantic swashbucklers work best when everyone seems to be having fun, and doing it in a way that lets the audience in on it. That's true of all the Siren's favorites in the genre--Scaramouche, The Crimson Pirate, Sinbad the Sailor, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Black Swan, Captain Blood...you get the idea. Frenchman's Creek gives you that only intermittently.

Fontaine, who was under contract to David O. Selznick, says she spent most of the movie stewing over Selznick's having forced her to accept the loanout, and his keeping half her salary to boot. Arturo de Cordova, the famed Mexican actor who played (what else?) the French pirate of the title, was shorter than she was and his lifts made him teeter when he walked. One day she asked him why he'd taken the role, since he was already a major star in Mexico. Fontaine says this was twisted by Nigel Bruce and Rathbone into her having told him to "go back to Mexico." She dismissed the film's acting as "stilted and melodramatic."

If Leisen disliked her, it seems to have been mutual, as she airily says he was "mostly known for his musicals" (not really true then and certainly not now). She also said she knew that he would lavish more time on the sets and costumes than performances. Leisen, whose reputation is undergoing a well-deserved renaissance, certainly got that rap many times over the years. Billy Wilder sneered that Leisen was a "window dresser." But Leisen also had a reputation for being, if anything, too deferential to his stars, cutting bits from the movie if the star found it unplayable.* Years later they were to make Darling, How Could You? in relative harmony, but at this point director and actress were markedly cool to one another.

Despite all the tsuris there is pleasure to be had in Frenchman's Creek, it's just that it never comes together to give you any sense of either a love that passeth all reason, as Fontaine wanted, or high adventure, as Paramount seems to have desired. Cecil Kellaway is an excellent Cecil Kellaway, as ever, this time with an accent that is supposed to be Cornish. Maybe it is. It also makes him sound like Uriah Heep. Nigel Bruce is a creditable dimwitted milord. Fontaine had been playing a series of dewy-eyed innocents, but this role required her to be a woman simmering with sexual frustration. The Siren suspects that quality is the only one that really interested Fontaine as an actress, because those are the moments where she lights up and puts her energy and intelligence into it. And even if Leisen disliked her, he certainly didn't take it out on her close-ups. She looks gorgeous, perhaps as beautiful as she ever did.

Oh, the plot. Do you care? Well, Dona St. Colomb, a married lady of the court, flees London after her jelly-spined husband keeps trying to pimp her out to the dastardly Lord Rockingham (Basil Rathbone, who thank heaven does not spend the entire movie in that wig). She takes their two children to their remote estate in Cornwall. While she's resting, she discovers that a nearby creek is being used as a harbor for a French pirate known as "the terror of the Cornish coast." In fact, said pirate has been staying in milady's bedchamber while she's not there. One day she wanders too close to the vessel and is forced to come aboard. She meets de Cordova, and her reaction to him emphasizes every double entendre, as Fontaine is excellent conveying her very frankly sexual interest. After some breathless midnight meetings, she goes on board his ship as a cabin boy. De Cordova is obviously, and hilariously, inflamed by Fontaine in drag. The action part of the picture commences, and Fontaine has another marvelous moment as she, as Fernando F. Croce puts its, "gropes the ship's steering ram."

Mostly Fontaine and Cordova have little chemistry. Despite their on-set friction, however, Fontaine does have a couple of really good scenes with Rathbone. The Siren loves Basil Rathbone. Every time he shows up he gladdens her heart, even when he's in a fright wig. He has a way of taking a villainous line that might be pure Snidely Whiplash from another actor, and giving it such a dry snap that the threat becomes leavened with wit. (Alan Rickman has the same ability. It's rare.)

Frenchman's Creek is not on DVD, and the Siren saw it through the kind offices of the awesome Goatdog. It certainly deserves to be on DVD, if only for its place in Leisen's career and the marvel of its visuals. Over at Senses of Cinema David Melville says the movie is in need of reassessment:

Not even Leisen's greatest fans will deny that Frenchman's Creek, Golden Earrings and the 1934 musical Murder at the Vanities are monuments of camp. Their fervid artificiality, their feverish riot of costume and decor, tend inexorably towards that “theatricalization of experience embodied in the Camp sensibility.” Popular yet critically savaged, Leisen's more flamboyant films need reassessing. Directors as diverse as Kenneth Anger and Baz Luhrmann, Pedro Almodovar and Paul Bartel have redefined our notions of camp. No longer just a failure of taste, camp is fast becoming a genre all its own.

It could be that another viewing of Frenchman's Creek (which won't happen any time soon) would reveal another side of the movie to the Siren. At this point, she isn't sure she'd characterize it as camp. Camp is usually more fun than this film. Certainly it swerves in that direction--the cross-dressing, the singing pirates and the fantastic shot where they're trying on all the ladies' finery in the hold of a captured ship, the wigs and the mincing noblemen. If Frenchman's Creek achieves the status of camp, it isn't through the medium of bad taste, however. It's from an overload of good taste, Paramount's amazing production values piled into the hold until the ship finally slides beneath the waves.



*Once such incident, with Charles Boyer on the set of Hold Back the Dawn, was at the root of Wilder's dislike. That's still a terrific movie, however, one of Leisen's best.

(bumped)

In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing why, we look up suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our gallery of intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony and fear coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of at our familiar curb, a cab-driver deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens for us and bids us enter; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous hate, affection and fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a sudden douse of rain--and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers.
--O. Henry, "The Green Door," from the collection The Four Million

E.B. White once divided New York, like Gaul, into three parts. First is the New York of the native, who takes the city and its treasures for granted. Second is the New York of commuters, "devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night." Then there is the last, and what White considered the greatest, the New York of the immigrant, "of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something."

For her contribution to the Derelict's New York City blogathon, the Siren is indulging herself with a mighty piece of presumption, and adding another New York to White's three categories. For it's always seemed to me that there is a New York of the mind, where the past incarnations of the city bump up against its Neo-Gilded Age present. Which corner of your psyche the city occupies is a personal matter, of course. You may think of it as "Gomorrah on the Hudson," as O. Henry called it, a daily assault on all that's otherwise righteous in the country. You may see yourself reflected in Tiffany's window, eating a bagel like Holly Golightly, or sipping a cosmo like her spiritual offspring, the Sex and the City ladies. But over it all hangs the spirit that O. Henry describes above. Could he be describing any city besides this one? It's easy to set a movie in New York because in the city of our minds, any type of adventure--or debacle--is possible.

The Siren knows that Lists Are Bullshit because Glenn Kenny told her so, and this is not a list. Truly, if it were a list it would horrify the Siren, as there are some big omissions. This just a group, an agglomeration if you will, in which each movie represents something the Siren has observed, experienced or yearned for in New York, some good, some bad. And this is the New York of the mind, not geography, so you will notice that not all were even shot entirely on location. In fact, we'll start with one that captures a great deal of New York's allure, and did so almost entirely on a Paramount soundstage.




Jeff, you know, if someone came in here, they wouldn't believe what they'd see. You and me with long faces plunged into despair because we find out a man didn't kill his wife. We're two of the most frightening ghouls I've ever known.

People-watching - Rear Window. The word voyeurism is usually linked to sexual matters, and lord knows there is plenty of that in Rear Window, both overt and implied. But for a New Yorker there is more than a mere sexual thrill in observing other people. It's part of the attraction of the place. There is an endless amount of people-watching, and most of all, the people are interesting. Usually not trunk-murder interesting, but more vivid and watchable than what you'd see across a backyard in Plano, I'll bet.



Sally: But Sidney, you make a living. Where do you want to get?
Sidney Falco: Way up high, Sam, where it's always balmy. Where no one snaps his fingers and says, "Hey, Shrimp, rack the balls!" Or, "Hey, mouse, mouse, go out and buy me a pack of butts." I don't want tips from the kitty. I'm in the big game with the big players... In brief, from now on, the best of everything is good enough for me.

Ambition - Sweet Smell of Success. Ambition is New York's defining characteristic, as everyone from Billy Wilder to Kander and Ebb could tell you. That's why this poisonous, cynical, glittering little fable is, for most of us, the defining movie about New York. Burt Lancaster is superb as J.J. Hunsecker, the Walter Winchell-based columnist with an unhealthy obsession with his sister. But the real thematic meat of the movie is Tony Curtis's Sidney Falco, and watching him try to climb the ladder, suck-up by suck-up. He gets told off a lot, if you notice, by people who have a lot of noble things to say, but he keeps right on keeping on. His persistence is more realistic than some of the huffy speeches directed at him, in fact, as is his fitful self-awareness. Falco knows he's throwing away pieces of his soul, but he's had his soul wrapped up in an old newspaper in the back of the closet for some time. Curtis later told what attracted him to the part: "All I had to hear was New York. I was raised in that city."



It shrinks my liver, doesn't it, Nat? It pickles my kidneys, yeah. But what it does to the mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly I'm above the ordinary. I'm competent.

Addiction - The Lost Weekend. For years the Siren worked retail at a rambling store in an old building below 8th Street. Her coworkers were usually young and hungry, just like she was. Come late afternoon on Tuesdays and Fridays, the Siren would be rearranging the fingerless lace gloves over at the accessories counter, and it would start: "BAM! BAM! BAM!" The hammering. Customers would almost jump through the display case as part-timer Janine (not her real name, believe me) came through on her hands and knees, wielding a hammer and whacking down any stray nailheads in the old, buckling floorboards. "What is WITH her? I don't even see nails anymore," the Siren asked coworker Bill one day, tired of the ritual. "Her shift's almost over. She's got to burn off the time before her next line somehow," came the reply.

When the Siren saw The Lost Weekend a year or two later (at the much-lamented Theater 80) and watched Ray Milland staggering up Second Avenue in a fruitless attempt to hock his typewriter on Yom Kippur, she immediately thought of Janine. If you live long enough in New York, you'll know someone either bottoming out or (we hope) recovering. In many ways Wilder's movie is truthful about the city, as Ed Sikov discussed in his Wilder bio. In production meetings Wilder insisted that the skyline be visible in the shot of the whiskey bottle hanging from Ray Milland's window; he fought to make sure the kitchen was a realistically tiny specimen. Wilder filmed from a camera concealed in a truck, and then spent weeks cutting out footage of New Yorkers scratching parts of their anatomy that the Breen Office didn't want to know about. But most of all, in the character of Don Birnam, Wilder got at a certain type of New York addict. He's smart, he's talented, he has standards, but in all categories he's a near miss. None of it is quite getting Birnam to the spot he feels he should have--none of it, that is, until he has that drink.


We sailed the seas and played a bit of poker
Way in Mandalay
We've walked the streets till the night was over
And we can safely say
The most fabulous sight is New York
In the light of day, our only day.

Adventure - On the Town Okay, so they jettisoned much of Bernstein's landmark score and put in some novelty numbers. But can anything beat that opening, even with the bowdlerized lyrics? That's the spirit, damn it. That's the way to approach the city, wide open to appreciate anything it brings. Those boys are O. Henry's "true adventurers," and honorary New Yorkers if ever there were any.



Roberta kept a diary. Great stuff. "Couldn't sleep. Went into kitchen. Gary came in, turned on light. Gary left. Finished birthday cake." Pages of it. It's got to be a cover, nobody's life could be this boring!

Romance - Desperately Seeking Susan Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was the Madonna movie, back then because it was her first, and now because it's the only one where she's good. But the Siren loves this film for the sweet-natured love story between Rosanna Arquette and Aidan Quinn. Seidelman's movie is one of the few that has any sense of what 1980s downtown New York looked like. The movie also shows how finding a place to crash in this overcrowded, overpriced town can lead to all sorts of entanglements, good and bad. The scene where Arquette is trying to leave Quinn's apartment, then accidentally dumps her suitcase and winds up kissing him on the floor, is pure sex to me, without so much as a button unbuttoned. Of all the films in this post, this is the one to make the Siren all maudlin and nostalgic for the things she found when she first came to the city, and the things that took her a lot longer to find.



On November 1st, 1959, the population of New York City was 8,042,783. If you laid all these people end to end, figuring an average height of five feet six and a half inches, they would reach from Times Square to the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan. I know facts like this because I work for an insurance company - Consolidated Life of New York. We're one of the top five companies in the country. Our home office has 31,259 employees, which is more than the entire population of uhh... Natchez, Mississippi. I work on the 19th floor. Ordinary Policy Department, Premium Accounting Division, Section W, desk number 861.

Drudgery - The Apartment. The Siren could file this one under ambition, too, but that's a peripheral theme. In addition to the love story, it's about being part of The Crowd (the masterpiece to which it is indebted). There's the loneliness, the grind, the way you search out something interesting--preferably cute and interesting--in order to feel like you aren't just another cog. But in reality, you know that Fred MacMurray is right, and for most New Yorkers, it's gonna take years to work your way up to the twenty-seventh floor, and thirty seconds to be out on the street again. One of the Siren's favorite moments in this movie is a very small one--Jack Lemmon finally returning to his empty apartment to nurse his cold. Bosses and their affairs aside, the Siren's lived that scene. Haven't you?



Bin Laden can drop another one right next door. I ain't moving.

Resilience - The 25th Hour. Spike Lee is the Siren's favorite working American filmmaker. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, boys. And one of the many reasons is the way he gets New York, not just the look and feel of the city--hell, all kinds of directors have managed that--but the way New Yorkers react and process things. With a few simple images and a bit of dialogue, this movie got at something fundamental in the way New Yorkers reacted to 9/11 in a way almost no other artist has. 9/11 has been so thoroughly and, in many cases, disgustingly co-opted that having it crop up in a movie based on a novel written before the attack set off some warning signals. But instead Lee used it to underpin his story about the pursuit of redemption. The 25th Hour was about making amends for the wrongs you've done, but it was also about the far more difficult task of moving past the wrongs that were done to you.

Still out there? Good. The Siren has raised the blinds, put away her lace-trimmed hanky and is ready to face down Gladys Cooper, or whatever else gets dished out this week. She is still working on her Nightmare Alley thoughts, but the sudden, unwelcome spike in film obituaries has spurred her to put some down some old rambling thoughts.

Hell of a time for film fans, isn't it? RIP, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Michel Serrault and László Kovács. More interesting than the end-of-an-era stuff, however, is the subsequent scorekeeping. We cinephiles tend to pooh-pooh Greatest 100 Films of All Time Lists, then dive like Greg Louganis into debates over whether or not a director is an all-time heavyweight. In the most recent round, Jonathan Rosenbaum had critics all over the blogosphere uncorking either the champagne or the smelling salts when he ran a New York Times opinion piece on Bergman that the editors, in a moment of inspired chutzpah, titled "Scenes from an Overrated Career." Roger Ebert wrote a spirited defense, and discussions ensued all over everywhere, particularly at Scanners, a_film_by, Elusive Lucidity and Girish.

It is fascinating how the general tone in the treatment of a director or other film artist changes over time. If you admired Bergman in 1973, the year of Scenes from a Marriage, chances are you still do. But in that year you wouldn't have been contending with nearly as many reservations as have been heard in the two weeks since his death.

Other directors are also getting fewer awed reactions than in the past. When in her late teens the Siren started trying to watch movies in an intellectuallly engaged manner--reading up on history, seeking out serious critics, trying to mix as many highly regarded films into her viewing as possible--it was axiomatic that John Ford was a towering great. That was a while back, and Ford's status has slipped for some; he even got a sideswipe in Rosenbaum's piece. David Thomson and Richard Schickel, both veteran Ford haters, have a lot more company now.

On the other hand, back in the 1980s the Siren had a hard time getting a serious discussion of Billy Wilder going, unless she wanted to talk about his supposed misogyny. (She didn't want to talk about that, because she doesn't think he IS a misogynist, but that's another post.) Reagan was in office and, not coincidentally in the Siren's view, Frank Capra was fashionable. It was a go-go era, a time of vocal patriotism, even more so than now. Capra was better suited to it than Wilder, with his mordant view of what success means for Americans, and what we will do to achieve it. With the publication of Cameron Crowe's book and the tributes after Wilder's death in 2002, suddenly the Siren had no trouble finding Wilder admirers. He is better suited to the tenor of our own times than Capra--Ace in the Hole is a lot closer to the age of reality television than Meet John Doe--so it isn't surprising that Wilder now is more in vogue.

In vogue, if not in full pantheon membership. According to Brian Baxter of Britain's Guardian, Wilder is still "second rung" (though "never second rate"). In this Guardian obituary for Ingmar Bergman, Baxter names a "handful of geniuses--Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir, [and] Roberto Rossellini" who outrank Bergman and Antonioni, and by the way, they're also better than Wilder, Visconti, Kurosawa and Ray. You might think that with six Film Pageant Runner-Ups (if Mr. Bresson cannot fulfill his duties as Greatest Director of All Time...) you would have just six different ways of getting pissed off. But the Siren's initial reaction was "What about Max Ophuls, huh?"

Her readers can replace the name of Ophuls with their particular favorite. We all have our teacher's pets, no matter which directors are being debated more in film classes. Year by year, with pious patience, the Siren sits waiting for Mitchell Leisen to get his due. And she loves John Ford, but has resigned herself to the naysayers. Now the Siren can read David Thomson's vituperative Ford piece in A Biographical Dictionary of Film without recourse to ripping out pages, scribbling in the margins or calling her cousins to rant. On some directors she retains a certain touchiness, however. When you trash Ernst Lubitsch, smile, cowboy.

The Siren is firmly on the side of the Bergman lovers. His "private psychodramas" still say many large and universal things to her. She does think, however, that people should give Mr. Rosenbaum a break about not seeing Fanny and Alexander. For one thing, Antonioni's death sent the Siren scurrying to her Netflix queue in embarrassment--even though he isn't really in her chosen specialty, boy, does she need to get cracking on his filmography. For another, she is exceedingly fond of Fanny and Alexander and does not wish to hear it nitpicked, by Mr. Rosenbaum or anybody else. Far more painful than someone loving a movie you loathe is someone who hates a movie that you consider a work of genius--or, worse yet, waves the movie aside as old hat.

Rosenbaum himself gave a nod to the way reputations cycle when he showed up at Jim Emerson's place and remarked, "I don't think I could have written such an article for the Times WITHOUT it being to some extent a piece about fashion." The Siren thinks Bergman will swing back into fashion; he's too good not to. One rediscovered movie is often enough to do it. When I Vitelloni had a brief re-release in theaters some time back, the Siren went to see it. As she sat in the audience she felt a sense almost of surprise coming off some other patrons--the startled laughter and enjoyment of people who weren't expecting to be wowed. Fellini has also been out of style--try Googling Fellini and "overrated" and just look at all the opinions that come up--but the movie is so good it constitutes its own form of rebuttal. So does Fanny and Alexander.

Anyone wish to share some perceptions of who's in favor these days, and who seems to be getting more knocks than in the past?

Because she likes the number 9 better than the number 10. In reverse order, the Siren's problems with who made it, Ma, and who didn't:

9. This morning, my daughter was playing with a set of wooden blocks. There are 30 blocks in the set. Her twin brother reached out and tentatively grabbed one block. This left her with 29. His sister let out a howl that could probably be heard in Newark: "No, MY BLOCKS! MINE!" And I had the same conversation as always. There are a lot of blocks here. Your brother can have his one block.

What reminded the Siren of this scenario was the presence, once again, of Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai on this list. These films weren't merely created by a British director, like Vertigo. They are culturally and thematically British, about British history and British empire. Who cares about which country put up the money? Kwai had one American star and two American screenwriters, it is true, but one writer was in France and the other in London because we had, you know, made them leave in order to get work.

We have a massive film industry. We have our own blocks and furthermore, unlike this morning's combatants, we are not four years old. We don't have to take away movies from the British. (The Siren assumes that the howls over the prior inclusion of The Third Man as "American" must have made a dent, since its omission can't be explained otherwise.) And while we are on the subject, A Clockwork Orange, despite Kubrick, doesn't make much sense as an American movie either.

8. No Fritz Lang. Come on--no Scarlet Street? no Woman in the Window? Well, the second one has been hard to see for some time. The Siren hasn't seen it since the 1980s, but its DVD-less state is about to be rectified.

7. Sophie's Choice really isn't a good movie. It is a pretty bad movie with one great performance and an unforgettable climax. The other movies on the list that the Siren considers unworthy can be justified in terms of cultural impact or later influence--even (the Siren swallows hard) something like The Sixth Sense. But Sophie's Choice was recognized as a deeply flawed movie even at the time, and if it had lasting influence on anything other than subject matter and Meryl Streep's (well-earned) career the Siren has missed it.

6. The Siren loves James Cagney. Worships him, in fact. And she loves Yankee Doodle Dandy. But if you are going to do only one Cagney, the one to do is White Heat.

5. Similar beef with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Swing Time is great, but everyone knows Top Hat is the one to beat.

4. You out there, yes you, the one whining about Citizen Kane. Cut it out. No, it is not a "boring movie." No, it did not achieve its status strictly because of "technical stuff." It is one of the most thematically complex movies ever made in this country, an astoundingly rich statement on American success and American failure, as relevant today as it was in 1941. The Siren finds Paradise Lost boring. Nevertheless she does not waste people's time by trying to argue that this means Milton is overrated.

3. If, however, you wish to argue that The Magnificent Ambersons has as much of a right to be here as Kane, the Siren will listen.

2. Famous exchange at Ernst Lubitsch's funeral:

Billy Wilder: No more Ernst Lubitsch.
William Wyler: Worse than that. No more Lubitsch pictures.

While this thought depressed the hell out of Wilder and Wyler, a lack of Lubitsch does not unduly ruffle the mandarins of the AFI. That is ten different kinds of wrong.

1. As Ebert points out, this list is more a marketing tool than anything else, designed to shift DVDs. Given the amount of attention the list generates, and the fact that it is compiled by "filmmakers, critics and historians," does it have to be so SAFE? So many Oscar winners. So many epics and adventure stories, so few women's pictures, so little grit. Everything already widely seen and widely available. Live a little, guys. Is a bit of a surprise too much to ask?

Postscript: Mucho morning-after discussion on this, of course. Edward Copeland tracks the ins and outs on the list, and M.A. Peel at Newcritics looks in depth at the Top 10. Here is Chuck Tryon, giving his thoughts on the value of lists in general, and speculating about the "why" behind some of the MIA. Jim Emerson gives his thoughts, and links to his own list at the bottom of the post. Lots of love to the Reeler for the best two-word summary of the AFI list, and his constructive suggestions for alternatives. A list of "100 Forgotten Films"--now that is something the Siren could applaud.

Still more--Daniel at Check the Fien Print has no tolerance for the D.W. Griffith entry, and a lot of skepticism over how it was chosen.

Inspired, as she so often is, by James Wolcott, the Siren would like to offer her own Department of Corrections. You may wonder why the hell she bothers. Well, there's her general cussedness and her regard for Hollywood history. And a grudge--the last time the Siren tried to rise to a point of order at Libertas, pointing out here that Darryl Zanuck did not edit Wuthering Heights, she was ignored. And she got irked. So she is taking her ball and going home, to her own blog. Here are offered some points of refinement to this post at Libertas.

The piece has already been cleaned up to eliminate a sentence about Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse that implied that the film was made in Hollywood (the "das" and "des" evidently being insufficient clues) and that Fritz Lang left Germany in part to escape "third world poverty." However, the new paragraph is not much of an improvement. (Grammar and punctuation are left as in the original, because the Siren hasn't got all day.)

1933 was a year when filmmakers like Fritz Lang were brave enough to face up to the threat of anti-Semitism and totalitarianism within their own native Germany. Lang not so subtly made out the villain of “Mabuse” to be a Hitlerian criminal mastermind - one who like the Bin Ladens of today thrives on chaos and terror - and his film was banned by the Nazis as a result. When Fritz Lang was forced to flee Germany[1] shortly after making this film - Hollywood took him in [2] - along with numerous other talented German emigres like Billy Wilder[3], Josef von Sternberg[4], Ernst Lubitsch[5], Marlene Dietrich[6], William Wyler[7] - and they went on to enjoy highly successful careers in America.[8] Hollywood at that time was a place filled with those who had fled persecution[9] and third world-level poverty[10] — filled with those who appreciated freedom and understood that liberty was worth fighting for. The left often tries to co-opt these older films;[11] twisting the subtext to suit a current agenda; but these filmmakers were true artists whose brilliance and subtlety allows an audience to see what they want — a talent lost on todays insecure message makers.

1. Although Mabuse had indeed been banned, by his own account Lang was fleeing a job offer, one made by Joseph Goebbels himself. Lang claimed he turned down the chance to run UFA studios. Lang declined and went to Paris, and he seems to have been able to take most of his money with him. Also, Lang was Austrian, born in Vienna.
2. Actually, France took him in. Lang made Liliom there and arrived in Hollywood shortly afterward.
3. Austrian, although Wilder did in fact flee Hitler, in 1933.
4. Also Austrian. Born in Vienna, spent much of his childhood in New York. Came to take up a contract with Paramount Pictures in 1930, before the Nazis came to power.
5. Came to Hollywood, at the invitation of Mary Pickford, in 1922.
6. Came to take up a contract with Paramount in 1930, along with Sternberg.
7. Arrived in 1920, at the age of 18, after being offered a job at Universal Studios by his cousin Carl Laemmle. By that time his birthplace, in Alsace, was part of France.
8. Lang's Hollywood career nose-dived in the early 1940s, after an attempt at a musical bombed, and again in the early 1950s during the blacklist era. As his agent famously told him, "There's no blacklist, but you're on it." After a forced hiatus ended with his personal plea to Harry Cohn, Lang returned to brilliant form with films like The Big Heat. But his legendarily difficult temperament caught up with him, and by the end of the decade he returned to Germany after the offers in Hollywood dried up.
9. We'll spot the writer this one and assume he is talking about some of the studio founders and people like Wilder and Bertolt Brecht.
10. With the exception of von Sternberg, who grew up poor in New York as well as Vienna, none of the people named in this article grew up poor, and the use of "third world" here is a dreadful anachronism.
11. While she does not contend that Marxist readings of Mabuse do not exist, the Siren has tried mightily, but can find no examples on the Web at the moment. Indeed, some question whether Mabuse is all that political at all. Most Web sources say that Lang's politics were unexceptionally liberal small-d democrat. She does note, however, that a capsule review touting a bin Laden analogy for a 1933 film is, perhaps, not the ideal place to discuss left-wing critics "twisting the subtext."

We just got through with Spring Break at the Siren's house, which meant mucho time playing puppet theater and story time at the library and multiple showings of, god help me, Piglet's Big Movie. Not much blogging time. But funny we should mention von Sternberg, because the Siren did get a chance to view one of his movies, Macao--or at least, Macao is part von Sternberg. It is also part Howard Hughes, part Nicholas Ray, part noir, part musical, part travelogue and all weird. More to come.

When you see Ace in the Hole (and the Siren does hope that is "when"), you will immediately understand why, upon its first release, the movie stiffed colder than Harry Cohn's heart. Austrian-born Billy Wilder always claimed affection for his adopted country, but you would never know it from this very great movie and its portrait of what H.L. Mencken called the species Boobus Americanus. There we are--grasping, foolish, gullible, addicted to lousy food and cheap entertainment, as distractible as a toddler. This film is bitter medicine even in 2007. Send not to know for whom the bile flows--it flows for thee.

Ace in the Hole's Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas at his best) is a big-city reporter, a sharp cookie who's made himself unemployable. When the movie opens he is talking his way into a job in New Mexico, despite his open contempt for the surroundings. "Even for Albuquerque, this is pretty Albuquerque," is his review of the local paper. With a single dissolve, Wilder establishes the passage of a year, and we find Tatum's contempt has turned to desperation. He hasn't found a single story capable of getting him back into large circulation. But while on his way to cover a rattlesnake roundup, Tatum stumbles across a one-stoplight town called Escadero. There, Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) lies trapped by a cave-in after going too far into an Indian burial site. Here's the human-interest story Tatum's been waiting for--if only Minosa will stay buried long enough for the reporter to milk the pathos.

The local contractor believes he can rescue Leo just by shoring up the walls, which would take about 16 hours. Good for Leo, bad for Tatum. With the connivance of the local sheriff, who is up for re-election, Tatum strong-arms the contractor into drilling through the top of the mountain, a process that could take five days. Thus begins the great ghoulish parade of people seeking something out of Leo's plight. Tatum, of course, wants his career back. His sidekick Herbie (Bob Arthur), a callow young photographer, wants to hitch his wagon to Tatum's. Leo's wife Lorraine, played so dense and so hard by Jan Sterling you could use her to pound a piling, wants out of her Escadero existence and away from the sad-sack Leo.

You can read this movie as an attack on tabloid journalism, which it certainly is, but the press isn't the main target. Tatum is a heel, but he does have a conscience, albeit one that kicks him only faintly and too late. None of these characters have pretty motives, but worst of all are the crowds of people who arrive to camp out, buy souvenirs and eat junk food while waiting for a man to be rescued or to die. Wilder includes a beautiful long shot of a train pulling into Escadero after years of passing the whistle-stop by. What pangs trouble the passengers as they jump out, so eager to mill outside a possible tomb that they leap before the train stops moving? The same that trouble millions of reality-TV viewers, that is to say, none. The throngs believe they are just indulging their God-given American right to be entertained.

Wilder didn't much care for the common American, but he dearly loved the common man's lingo. Here he uses the matchless variety of mid-century Americanese like a dimmer switch, taking the movie from bright to dark. The script starts off funny, as Douglas delivers each staccato burst of sarcasm con brio. "I can handle big news and little news. And if there's no news, I'll go out and bite a dog," he says. To the Albuquerque paper's editor, Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall), he remarks, "I've done a lot of lying in my time. I've lied to men who wear belts. I've lied to men who wear suspenders. But I'd never be so stupid as to lie to a man who wears both belt and suspenders." Asked if he drinks, Tatum says, "Not a lot. Just frequently."

The one-liners continue, finally climaxing in the biggest laugh of the picture, Jan Sterling to Douglas: "I've met some hard-boiled eggs in my time. But you? You're twenty minutes." The laughs are quieter from that moment, until all smiles cease together, as Leo's chances get smaller. Nobody laughs when, late in the movie, Douglas tells Boot, "I'm on my way back to the top, and if it takes a deal with a crooked sheriff, that's all right with me! And if I have to fancy it up with an Indian curse and a brokenhearted wife for Leo, then that's all right too!"

As scalding as he is, Wilder doesn't leave audiences utterly without hope. A Wilder picture almost always has at least one character who acts as moral grounding--Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity, Arlene Francis in One, Two, Three, Nancy Olson in Sunset Boulevard. You can measure the movie's cynicism by the amount of respect and exposure that character gets. The Apartment, often called bitter, is one of Wilder's most optimistic films, in that the character whose essential decency anchors the movie turns out also to be the protagonist, Jack Lemmon.

In Ace in the Hole, the last good man is the editor Boot. He has about four brief scenes. He may believe in truth, so much so he has his secretary cross-stitch "Tell the Truth" on a sampler, but he is badly outnumbered.

Ace in the Hole is based in part on the real-life story of Floyd Collins. In the movie Tatum talks about the incident, without mentioning Collins' eventual death. No, what's notable to Tatum is the payoff for the reporter on the scene. Listen for Douglas, saying "Pulitzer Prize" the way you hear "Medal of Honor" intoned in a John Wayne movie.

According to Wilder biographer Ed Sikov, the movie also has roots in the even more tragic story of Kathy Fiscus , a three-year-old who fell down a well in 1949. Jockeys showed up, offering to be lowered to rescue her, as did the Philip Morris cigarette midget and some other little people from the circus. This may have sparked Wilder's decision to create the full-scale carnival that springs up next to Leo's mountain prison. See the director's camera come to rest on the trucks delivering the Ferris Wheel and other fairground rides: "The Great S&M Amusement Corp." Sikov notes that head Production Code enforcer Joseph Breen objected to the word "lousy" in the script, but apparently the carnival name flew right over Breen's flat little head.

He didn't work on the script, but we'll let later Wilder collaborator I.A.L. Diamond have the last word, as quoted in Sikov's biography:

Sure, they called it cynical. And then you see thousands and thousands of people turning up at Idlewild airport in New York to watch a plane coming down with bad landing gear. People clog the runway waiting for it to crash--and you ask yourself how cynical Ace in the Hole really was.

Note: This entry is cross-posted at Newcritics, a new outpost for Web criticism that is the brainchild of Tom Watson. The Siren hopes you will visit it frequently.