All right, so if you recorded absolutely nothing else for this festival, My Son John, at 8 pm EST, is the one to take a look at. Leo McCarey's impassioned anti-communist film is half a great movie, and better than you think it will be, I'll wager. Even the second half, cobbled together from Strangers on a Train outtakes after Robert Walker's terrible death, has its moments.
And if the Siren's word isn't good enough for you, there's someone else recommending it too.
The late, great Robin Wood had a piercingly accurate take on this film's great and not-great moments, here in a Google Books excerpt.
Vince of Carole & Co. has posted a preview at his Carole & Co. blog
John McElwee's piece at Greenbriar Picture Shows is well worth revisiting.
And my comrade-in-programming Lou Lumenick has posted his own complete rundown at his New York Post blog.
And for the rest of the evening, TCM is winding up things with a barrage that goes well into the wee hours. The other films are:
I Was a Communist for the FBI at 10 pm. The Siren found this one a chore, but if you're a Frank Lovejoy fan it's a must.
A short called Four Minute Fever (1956), which wasn't on our shortlist and which I haven't seen, but I am eager to check it out.
The Manchurian Candidate, the greatest of all Cold War paranoia thrillers, at midnight.
The Bedford Incident; the Siren saw this as a youngter deeply infatuated with Sidney Poitier. She still is, actually. At 2:15 am.
Scarlet Dawn (1932), which the Siren is dying to catch for the underrated Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Nancy Carroll, with whom she is criminally unfamiliar.
The Doughgirls (1944), at 5:15 am. I know nothing about this one, but all I need to know is Jack Carson and Eve Arden are in it.
More on the TCM Shadows of Russia films so far. Big Hollywood is showing the Siren some love by assigning its best writer, Robert Avrech, to cover the series; his thoughts on Night One are here.
The Way We Were: "Is this movie," demanded Mr. N, "going to be one long tracking shot coming to rest on Robert Redford?" My beloved husband saw this--imagine--as a flaw. Well, there are a lot of those shots. Sydney Pollack was a good friend of Redford's and in this movie apparently he decided to use the actor the same way John Ford used Monument Valley. At one point Mr. N went upstairs and I called up, "They just tracked to Redford on a boat." "I knew it," came the retort from above, "I could hear the music starting up."
Still, the film holds up well. It's still romantic and touching, and the Siren still sniffled over it, unlike Love Story. The tracking shots are just the camera yearning like Barbra Streisand. When those shots come to rest on Redford's face, you see everything Hubbell is holding back from. As Katie Morosky, Streisand's sincerity is so naked you want to shout at her to play harder to get; she sells the love affair, and the political dedication as well. If David Ehrenstein is right, and Katie is a self-portrait by screenwriter Arthur Laurents, then Laurents is gifted with self-knowledge as well as talent. The movie is frank about how difficult it is to be around a person of profound beliefs and constant activism. When Hubbell says to Katie, half-resigned and half-incredulous, "You think you're easy? Compared to what, the Hundred Years' War?" you have to agree. And yet Gardiner squanders our sympathy as he squanders the richest parts of his life, leaving his baby girl in the hospital along with Katie, choosing television and a Gloria Upson blonde. "People are their principles," Katie snaps at him, and the movie is one long demonstration that she is right. She will always be the person at the party trying to shame those telling vicious jokes, and Gardiner will always be the one saying, "Why bother?"
Reds: Spirited discussion of Warren Beatty at Glenn's place at the moment, tied to Glenn's slog through Peter Biskind's biography. When the Siren first saw this movie she thought it magnificent. Upon re-watching she sees more flaws, although it still should not have lost the Oscar to Chariots of Fire. (It should have lost to Atlantic City, in case you're wondering.) Vittorio Storaro's cinematography hasn't aged a minute. The witnesses remain one of the most clever exposition devices ever, and their extraordinary faces make the Siren ponder the fact that features deeply scored by time are a rare sight in mainstream movies and always have been. As Robert Avrech pointed out, most of the interviewees didn't know Bryant and Reed personally, but they are meant to be witnesses to the era. And the movie's real romance is with that moment for the American left, that optimism for the cause. The characters regard their unattainable love object--a true workers' state--in the dreamy way all such loves are seen, flaws somehow pushed to the periphery.
Beatty plays Reed with self-deprecating humor and Jack Nicholson is as drily perfect as I remember him, a precisely controlled performance free from the Jack-ishness that overtook him later in the decade. Diane Keaton is, however, nerve-wracking for the first hour and in the early episodes her connection with Reed seems shallow, as indeed does the character. Comes the revolution, however, and they turn on the heat.
What the Siren likes best about Reds, aside from the witnesses, the beauty, Nicholson and the moving conclusion, are the parts that show the self-knowledge Reed doesn't possess. Reed talks in abstractions, his concrete moments are all tied to Bryant. Emma Goldman, a small part played with burning dedication by Maureen Stapleton, anchors the movie to reality. In her first scene she interrupts Reed to insist that birth control is no distraction, but rather something that will make an immediate difference to countless women; in one of her last scenes she tries to tell Reed what his longed-for revolution is about to become. 
Spring Madness: A meringue, so light it does not linger. While Maureen O'Sullivan was much less tiresome than usual, with her mannerisms gone and some nice moments conveying young love, she did not convert the Siren to the "love" column. But hey, Burgess Meredith was amusing, and usually the Siren just stares at him and wonders what in the hell enabled this guy to land Paulette Goddard. Lew Ayres, an often fine actor and a man of principle to boot, was phoning it in, I am afraid. The good bits came from Ruth Hussey (velvet-voiced Ruth, as Exiled in New Jersey calls her), tossing off some lines worthy of Eve Arden--"Why, Mr. Thatcher, is that suspicion I see coming up in the dumbwaiter of your mind?" And also from Joyce Compton, playing the same daffy Southern belle she essayed in The Awful Truth. (The second-funniest scene in one of the funniest movies of the 1930s. Siren readers will know that the still is Compton in the McCarey film, but honestly it's the same character.) Compton is adorable here too, and gets the only line that refers to Russia as an ideology and not just an interesting choice for a postgraduate stint: "Say, is he a Communist, or just a meatball?" 
Comrade X: A likable movie, one of the last of the screwball comedies, and of course it has Eve Arden which ups a film's coolness factor by--I will have to calculate, but it's a lot. And Eve plays an ex-girlfriend of Clark Gable's, a woman of the world and not the man-hungry spinster she often had to play. More bonus points.
The Siren saw it once before and thought it wasn't so hot. This time, she tried to look at the film on its own merits and not compare the script to Ninotchka, and found Comrade X quite entertaining. It has some problems, including a slapstick tank chase that doesn't quite come off and, more seriously, a mass-execution scene midway through (I describe it here in my Moving Image Source article) that just kills the funniness deader than Trotsky.
Comrade X does have King Vidor's direction and a bright performance from Hedy Lamarr, the best the Siren has seen from Lamarr outside of H.M. Pulham Esq. (also, and not coincidentally, a Vidor film). It has Clark Gable mouthing phony platitudes about the proletariat, a concept that Gable understands is so inherently funny it should be underplayed. It has Felix Bressart and some great lines, including a couple of sideswipes at Communism that are even more explicit than Ninotchka. (Bressart: "The communists have ideas. But they found out you can't run a government with everybody going around having ideas. So what is happening, the communists are being executed so that Communism should succeed.")
Tonight, it's Our Pals in the Red Army, with The North Star at 8 pm and, for those who missed the BAM screening and want to know what the fuss is about, Mission to Moscow at 10 pm. We then shift to Diplomatic Immunity, movies about Cold War espionage, with one movie the Siren is dying to see, The Kremlin Letter, at midnight and Conspirator with Taylor beauties Robert and Elizabeth, at 2 am. In an overnight slot at 4:15 am, TCM picked a movie not on our shortlist, Counter-Attack, with Paul Muni, to go back to the Red Army theme. The Siren was tickled to notice that that this is the movie on the background marquee as Barbra Streisand goes to work in the opening of The Way We Were. (And as if that wasn't enough cross-movie series coincidence, The North Star was Farley Granger's film debut.) Read my series co-conspirator Lou Lumenick's preview here at the New York Post.
Here also at the Post website is an edited version of Lou and me chatting with none other than Robert Osborne. I do not like how I look in the picture so scroll quickly to the interview, which contains clips from My Son John. If you aren't salivating to see that one, you should be.
A gratifyingly large turnout for Mission to Moscow last night, and a lively panel discussion that was worthy of the movie, with all its surprises, historical interest, controversy and occasional loopiness. Glenn has his summary here, and Lou gives the lowdown here, along with Night 2 of the TCM Shadows of Russia festival. Ed Hulse was wonderful, putting the movie into its context within studio history and the war films being made at the time.
During her part of the panel discussion Siren spoke about the artists involved in making the film and offered some opinions about the drama and visuals. She lightly mentioned Ambassador Davies arriving on the Sea Cloud with his wife, heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, and their stepdaughter. "That's not true!" barked a lady from the back. This lady was none other than Joseph Davies' real-life granddaughter, the offspring of the woman played in Mission to Moscow by gorgeous Eleanor Parker. She took the mike and gave some family background for a few minutes, including an explanation of her half-Belgian background and why the family brought an enormous shipment of Bird's Eye frozen food to Moscow, and handed the mike back to Lou with explaining her interruption. So the Siren had to ask, did the Sea Cloud go to Leningrad? The family didn't arrive on the Sea Cloud, the lady explained sternly; the famed yacht joined them in Leningrad later.
For tonight, the Siren hopes everyone who hasn't seen Comrade X will tune in. It suffers by comparison with the magnificent Ninotchka, which screens directly afterward, but Comrade X is surprisingly watchable, via the great King Vidor. It boasts one of Hedy Lamarr's better performances as well as a funny turn by Eve Arden as Clark Gable's spurned lover and some unexpectedly sharp barbs.
Ninotchka--well, the Siren doesn't have to talk anyone into that one, does she? According to Wilder biographer Ed Sikov, William Powell was originally cast opposite Garbo, but he got sick and couldn't do it. The role was then offered to Cary Grant (he'd have been swell) and Gary Cooper (nope) and finally came to rest with Melvyn Douglas who was, of course, perfect.
The Way We Were was written up by James Wolcott in Vanity Fair some time back with customary panache. David Ehrenstein once stated in this blog's comments that he thinks Arthur Laurents was chronicling his own love for Farley Granger, a theory that, for the Siren, adds an extra bit of interest to the film.
Overnight, two that the Siren hasn't seen but will be recording: 1938's Spring Madness, starring Maureen O'Sullivan (who isn't a Siren love) and Lew Ayres (who is), and 1970's The Strawberry Statement, starring Bruce Davison and Kim Darby, whom the Siren hasn't seen in a big-screen movie besides True Grit.
The Siren is taking one last opportunity to promote her live, in-person, one-night-only appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of the panel discussing Mission to Moscow, and oh my goodness, is there a lot to discuss. Ed Hulse will be there. Glenn Kenny is already doing his homework. Lou Lumenick is ready, and how. And the Siren is also studying up. Do join us for a screening and get ready to talk about this, one of the most notorious films of the entire studio era: Jan. 12th at 7 p.m., at the BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn.
To paraphrase Virginia O'Hanlon's letter, Papa says, "if you see it in the Times, it's so." And if Dave Kehr himself says it, it's really really so. So the Siren points to the last sentence of this write-up and announces that she has added "critic" to her "blogger" status, or if you prefer from the Sunday edition, "film writer"--like a frequent-flyer upgrade, except that she suspects there won't be that much more leg room. The Siren isn't sure what to do now to indicate the changed status, however. Repaint the foyer?
Anyone wanting to know why the Siren and Robert Avrech get along swimmingly need look no farther than these posts (part 1 and part 2) on Big Hollywood about the top ten movies he screened in 2009. The latest date is 1950, and the film is Madeleine, a neglected classic and favorite of the Siren's. Most of the choices are pre-1934. Plus he digs Constance Bennett in a big way, too.
The proprietor of the great Lombard fansite Carole & Co. occasionally comments here, to the Siren's delight, and last week he went a bit off-topic at his own place to offer a preview post for Shadows of Russia. Check the splendid photos of the St. Petersburg rail station.
The Siren watched Rasputin and the Empress and The Scarlet Empress live on Wednesday and is watching Reds and Red Danube off the DVR. So far she much say that the battle of the Empresses was won by Catherine in a walk, despite Dietrich's signal inability to play innocence. Don't get me wrong, I love Marlene, but that was one woman who emerged from the womb knowing the facts of life. But the stunning look of the movie had it all over Rasputin, despite Lionel's working his beard for all it was worth. The Scarlet Empress is one of the most beautiful black-and-white movies ever made, and also one of the most erotic.
As for Rasputin, it's a crash-course in scene stealing, with that art reaching its apex in the scene where John Barrymore first threatens Lionel. It's The Beard vs the Sword, as John refuses to look directly at Lionel, causing the monk to almost bulge his eyes out of the socket in an attempt to force eye contact. There's also the frightening scene where Rasputin forces little Alexi to watch a battle between a fly and an ant--hard to watch at times, between the terrorizing of a child and the grossness of seeing insects so close.
This week, it's the comedies, and the funny thing is that, as I note here in an article for Moving Image Source, the comedies have the most trenchantly anti-Stalin moments in the series.
Back soon with more thoughts.
The Siren's blog is approaching its fifth anniversary, and to borrow a line from the best, "things are looking up." The TCM Shadows of Russia series starts tonight, on Tuesday the Siren will appear at the august Brooklyn Academy of Music for a screening of Mission to Moscow, and traffic to her little corner of the Web is up. Time, says the Siren, to celebrate. Time, what is more, to give back some of this good fortune.
So as we swing into 2010, the Siren is doing something she never has before. She's asking you for money.
Not for herself, but for what brings people to this site and many, many great film blogs around the Web.
The Siren unpins her Lilly Daché hat and passes it around in hopes that you will donate to film preservation.
Together with the fabulous Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, from Feb. 14 to 21, 2010, the Siren will host For the Love of Film, a fundraising blogathon, with proceeds to go to the National Film Preservation Foundation. Here is the NFPF's mission statement:
The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. Growing from a national planning effort led by the Library of Congress, the NFPF began operations in 1997. We work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.
The NFPF raises money, awards grants, and organizes cooperative projects that enable archives, libraries, museums, historical societies, and universities to work together to save American films. Since opening our doors, we have helped preserve more than 1,560 films and assisted organizations in 48 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. In 2009, we partnered with the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia to preserve and make available on the Internet several American silent films that no longer survived in the United States; another such project will be announced later in 2010.
And here, also from the NFPF, is what is at stake.
A two-year study prepared by the Library's National Film Preservation Board documented that American films are disintegrating faster than archives can save them. The types of motion pictures most at-risk are documentaries, silent-era films, avant-garde works, ethnic films, newsreels, home movies, and independent works. These are not Hollywood sound features belonging to the film studios, but 'orphans' that fall outside the scope of commercial preservation programs and exist as one-of-a-kind copies in archives, libraries, museums, and historical societies.
Marilyn adds some sad stats:
According to estimates, at least 50 percent of all films made for public exhibition before 1951 have been lost. Move into the silent era, and the estimate shoots up to 85-90 percent. The nitrate film on which nondigital movies are recorded is flammable and highly susceptible to deterioration. All or parts of thousands of films have burned up, broken down, or ended up in a dumpster.
We hope that as many bloggers as possible will contribute a preservation-related post during the week of the blogathon, and we also hope all our readers will find it in their hearts and wallets to kick in some dough for a cause that is surely very dear to us all.
This blogathon-with-a-goal is a long-held dream of the Siren's, but it is Marilyn who has been working like a demon to pull the logistics together, and she deserves all possible praise and thanks. Greg Ferrara of Cinema Styles constructed the beautiful logo you see above, showing an artist from a period badly in need of preservation money. As Marilyn says, "the NFPF gets its operating funds entirely through donations and grants, so whatever funds we raise through the blogathon will make a real difference."
Please start by clicking over to our Facebook Fan Page and becoming a fan. Marilyn, Greg and I will be updating it in coming weeks with suggestions for post topics, discussions about the blogathon, facts and figures on preservation and other matters. We welcome suggestions there, too. And go to the For the Love of Film blog, where Greg has posted ads and commercials you can use on your own blog and Facebook page to promote participation and awareness.
On Jan. 12 of the fast-approaching New Year, the enduringly mysterious Luise Rainer turns 100 years old. Almost four years ago the Siren wrote one of her first true marathon posts on this actress, gaining in the process a great deal of respect and affection for her. She was talented, intellectual and free-spirited, and therefore a problematic fit for Hollywood in that age or this. But the Siren treasures those who refuse to let busted stardom crush them altogether. Rainer did what she could, and when that ebbed out she moved on and created another life, a fine one.
The Siren points out that in celebration of this birthday of one of the last of the great stars from the glory days, Turner Classic Movies will screen a marathon of Luise movies. The Siren recommends: The Great Ziegfeld (Rainer's scene is indeed quite special); The Good Earth (her finest performance and a moving film); and Big City (very good, gritty social drama with Spencer Tracy in fine form, directed by Frank Borzage and that last bit alone should make you set the DVR). The Great Waltz (directed by David Cairns' beloved Julien Duvivier) has definite, batty charms as well. The one going on the Siren's DVR will be The Emperor's Candlesticks. William Powell is always, wonderfully William Powell.
Here, then, for those who missed it the first time around, is The Luck of Luise, which the Siren now subtitles: We Should All Be So Cursed. It has been revised and updated to account for certain things like my not wanting to go off on the Golden Globes again, I've now seen Big City and Luise was just fine, and The Good Earth is out on DVD.
P.S. On an unrelated note, if you are near a newstand this month and happen to see a copy of the January GQ--that would be the one with a half-naked Rihanna--please consider buying it and turning to page 32. There is, I admit, no naked Rihanna on that page, but you will find me listed as critic Tom Caron's "Fave Film Blogger." The Siren is tickled to death at the honor and thanks Tom profusely, although she hopes finding out her real identity wasn't truly as big a letdown as finding out that Kissinger wasn't Deep Throat.
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The start of the annual awards season has the Siren contemplating the mysteries of awards in general. So let's talk about Luise Rainer, the most famous double-Oscar-winning flameout in the history of Hollywood. Her career couldn't even be termed a brief candle--more like the brilliance and timespan of a bottle rocket.
On Jan. 12, Ms. Rainer turns 100 years old, bless her. The last time she showed at the Oscars, in 2002, she looked astonishingly good, as you can see from the photo here. When her Hollywood career was finished, she married a wealthy publisher and retired, and she now lives in London's Belgravia, surely one of the world's most beautiful neighborhoods. So obviously, Luise is doing much better than all right. That she made so few movies is our loss, but happily it doesn't seem to have been hers.
Born in Vienna in 1910 (some accounts say 1912, and others claim she was born in Dusseldorf, Germany), she was brought to Hollywood by an MGM talent scout. Apparently in the mid-1930s MGM was full of talent scouts who heard a European accent of any sort and immediately thought, "the successor to Garbo!" L.B. Mayer often used an up-and-comer as a none-too-subtle threat to an established star. (For years, Rosalind Russell was the threat behind Myrna Loy, unlikely as that sounds. Russell recalled an occasion when she was being fitted for a costume. Loy walked in and said "They signed my contract," and Russell had to disrobe on the spot. Fortunately, they were friends and could joke about it.)
So the dark, elfin Viennese came to California to line up behind the blonde, chiseled Swede like a taxi in front of a hotel. For a while she was given no roles but then, according to film historian David Shipman, Myrna Loy declined Escapade and Rainer was given the part. (Where was Russell?) The movie was forgettable, but Rainer photographed well, and the studio decided to cast her as Anna Held, The Great Ziegfeld's first wife.
The Siren enjoys The Great Ziegfeld (1936), though when she remembers it won the Academy Award for Best Picture over Modern Times she does tend to put hand to forehead. Rainer has an astonishingly short role, with but one evergreen scene. She calls Flo Ziegfeld (William Powell) on the telephone, to congratulate him on his marriage to Billie Burke (Myrna Loy). She still loves him, but she's determined to maintain her dignity. He tells her he's happy. She says she's happy, too. Tears pouring down her face, smiling all the while, she remarks on how funny it is, two former spouses "telling each other how 'appy we are."
Pause now to consider what the Oscars were like in 1937, the year Rainer won. The dinner was open to favored members of the press but was nothing like the lavish stage show we see now. Stars were usually filmed for newsreels after the ceremony, giving canned versions of their speeches. Extras were permitted to vote, which they did in huge numbers, resulting some say in ex-extra Walter Brennan's extraordinary run--as Shipman put it, three Oscars, one performance. MGM also commanded a hefty bloc vote of people on its payroll who, essentially, voted as their bosses wanted them to. The power of that bloc endured for years.
Rainer got her award in the first year the Supporting Actress category was added, but MGM nominated her for a leading role anyway. It was the most powerful studio in town and its brass did as they pleased. The telephone scene is very nicely played, but I doubt most people nowadays would grant it an Oscar. But win Rainer did, over Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey among others. In later years, Rainer would claim the first award was no lucky break, but a harbinger of career doom.
David Shipman's essay on Luise Rainer starts with an anecdote about Raymond Chandler preparing to go to an Oscar ceremony. The writer, no fan of Hollywood, still was nervous over his nomination for Double Indemnity. His wife told him to relax, that an Oscar was no big deal--"after all, Luise Rainer won it twice."
Since Rainer left Hollywood in 1940, judgments on her career have fallen into two categories. Mrs. Chandler summarizes one line of thinking, echoed here--Rainer was a zealously promoted, so-so actress whose Oscar wins over the likes of Lombard, Garbo, Dunne and Stanwyck are an enduring mystery. The other you can find here and here, with Luise described as an early Hollywood rebel, a great talent whose intellect couldn't suffer the film colony gladly.
After spending the week looking at all the Luise material she could find, the Siren thinks Luise was a little of both. Hers was not a broad talent, but on the strength of her best performance it is hard to argue that more could not have been made of her.
In 2003, before appearing in a line-up of former Academy Award winners, Rainer gave an interview to the BBC, describing the night in 1937 when she won her first Oscar. Her endearing catalogue of small disasters involves a breathless maid, an oversized mattress sent by her father-in-law and a spat on the way to the banquet that forced her to ask the driver to circle the block a few times so she could pull herself together and go inside. The squabble was with playwright (and Barton Fink model) Clifford Odets, whom Rainer had married earlier that year. It would not be the last time he caused her grief.
Whatever you think of Odets as a playwright, as a husband his desirable qualities were scarce indeed. There is a persistent story that at times Odets refused to sleep with his wife owing to his belief that ejaculation drained away his creativity. When Luise became pregnant after one period during which Odets evidently decided his creativity could take the strain, he talked her into having an abortion. During the marriage Odets also carried on an affair with the luckless Frances Farmer. (While few would name Odets as the source of Farmer's legendary instability, there appears to be consensus that he sure as hell didn't help.)
Whatever the home situation, Rainer's career was at its apex. Soon after her first Oscar she won the role of Olan in Irving Thalberg's swan song, The Good Earth. The decision broke the heart of Anna May Wong, the stunning Chinese-American actress who had tested several times for the role. But once Rainer's fellow Austrian Paul Muni was cast as Olan's husband, Wong could not play the part without triggering the wrath of the Hays Office. High on that useless body's list of things it didn't want Americans seeing was on-screen miscegenation, actual or depicted. Anna couldn't even get the secondary role of the concubine Lotus, and had to watch that go to yet another Austrian, and a dancer at that, Tilly Losch. As a result the movie gives the odd impression that Chinese women tend to sound German. (Some secondary roles are played by Asian actors, notably the wonderful Keye Luke as the Elder Son.)
This sad casting history, and the offense a later age feels at Caucausian actors in yellowface, have marred The Good Earth's reputation. The Siren hopes that won't submerge it entirely; it was released on DVD in 2006. The movie is a dazzling piece of old-style filmmaking, the definition of the sort of epic we shall not see again, and at times it is very moving, due in large part to Rainer's touching performance.
The Siren's knowledge of Chinese history is pitifully inadequate, but she suspects The Good Earth is not an exact depiction of Chinese peasant life before the rise of Mao. She respectfully suggests it shouldn't be judged that way. The art direction by Cedric Gibbons and the costumes are beautiful, and Karl Freund's cinematography is astounding. This is an archetypal story of peasants fighting against nature and their own baser impulses. It has more in common with Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels or even Renoir's The Southerner than it probably does with, say, some of the Chinese talkies my Cinemarati colleague Filmbrain has written about. (See his striking take on "The Orientalization of Myrna Loy" here.)
Rainer's method of conveying Chinese-ness relies less on broad strokes and indication than Muni's. Her makeup is minimal, leaving her eyes unhampered for the camera. Given little in the way of dialogue, Rainer's performance has effects similar to the best silent acting, with emotion conveyed by the flicker of an eyelid or the position of a hand. Her greatest moments come during the long, agonizing famine scenes. Her character is often derided as a doormat, but look at the scene where Olan gives birth as the family is starving. There is a brief cry, then silence. Rainer appears and tell Muni their child is dead. "But I heard a cry ..." Muni begins. "The child is dead," replies Rainer, with an intensity that silences her husband in mid-sentence.
Convinced she couldn't possibly win two years in a row, Rainer opted to stay home on Oscar night in 1938. Then came another phone call, and another headlong rush to the banquet. In photos from that night she looks almost as though she's still panting. Her win came, notoriously, over contenders that included Garbo for Camille. Despite high regard for Rainer's performance the Siren, for her part, would have voted for Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth. To this day, however, Oscar tends to go home with someone who's perceived to have tackled a "difficult" role--meaning, heart-rendingly dramatic and preferably something that requires the actress to look plain, or at least de-glammed. The Academy evidently decided that for a Hollywood actress, a starving peasant is more of a stretch than a kept woman.
Rainer rounded out the year with The Emperor's Candlesticks (some titles seem designed to warn you off, don't they?) and Frank Borzage's The Big City with Spencer Tracy. She made little box-office impression in either, although the Siren can attest that she's swell in the Borzage. Shipman says Rainer, with two Oscars for support, asked MGM for more money. I haven't been able to track down whether she got it, but the fact that she disappeared for part of 1938 suggests "no." On hiatus at the very time she should have been expanding upon her success, Rainer finally made The Toy Wife.
The Siren caught this one a few years ago on Turner Classic Movies. Rather than the fiery Southern belle you get in Jezebel or that Selznick movie, in this one you get Southern Belle Version 2.0, the doomed variety. Rainer's character is named Frou Frou, in imitation of the sound her skirts make. She was educated in Paris and returns to her native New Orleans with a German accent. She marries Melvyn Douglas, but has an affair with Robert Taylor, and for whatever reason, Rainer was about 100 times more convincing as a Chinese peasant. The one moment where the Siren thought she saw an actress was a scene where Frou Frou's small son comes to wake her up. She bounces around on the bed and plays with him, and in this small moment displays an unaffected sparkle that she never summons again, not in this movie.
She finally got another hit with The Great Waltz, Julien Duvivier's venture into the MGM musical. Or is operetta? or biopic? or historical romance? The movie is so transcendently weird that you can take your pick. My favorite interpretation so far is the IMDB review that insists the movie is a political allegory about the Anschluss. Well, The Great Waltz has at least as much to do with the Anschluss as it does with the life of Johann Strauss. (Shipman notes dryly that "It was a great success, notably in Russia, where audiences were perhaps impressed by the five-minute revolution in the middle of the plot.") As the wife, Rainer did a good job with what the script gave her. Unfortunately, the script left her to dangle her bonnet and mope after Fernand Gravet's Strauss as he pursues Miliza Korjus and composes waltz after waltz. Luise had the billing, but Korjus got to help compose "Tales from the Vienna Woods" in a single carriage ride.
The next movie, Dramatic School, was intended as a showcase for Rainer. It flopped. Rainer was given six months' leave, Shipman says, to visit Odets and prop up their shaky marriage. Her contract was not renewed. She did a couple of plays in London and returned to Hollywood in 1939. There was no way Rainer, Jewish and proudly left-wing, would go back to Europe, but as Shipman tells it, the months slipped past and no cameras began turning on a Luise Rainer movie. In 1940 she returned to New York with Odets, divorcing him later that year.
Shipman says "her potential was exhausted." Later writers would say that L.B. Mayer offered Rainer a series of roles that were beneath her. Rainer, they say, became frustrated with the sheer dumbness of Hollywood, a place "where clothes were a major preoccupation."
Hollywood bored her right out of a career. Plausible. But, to quote the lyrics from a song by a composer who did just fine in movies, it ain't necessarily so.* When the Siren hears someone--particularly a German-speaking actress--calling the Hollywood of 1940 an intellectual Sahara, her eyebrows just about disappear into her hairline. By that year the film community was awash with refugees, including some of the century's finest European minds. Many of them met regularly at the home of Garbo's favorite screenwriter, the Austrian Salka Viertel. If Luise had wangled an invitation (and surely two Oscars would at least get you that) she could have chatted up Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Gina Kaus, Bruno & Liesl Frank, Berlin Alexanderplatz novelist Alfred Döblin and Grand Hotel author Vicki Baum. If she had stuck around until December she might have encountered Alma Mahler-Werfel and husband Franz Werfel. Bertholt Brecht arrived the next year. Anyhow, you see my point. The idea that there was nothing in Hollywood to interest an intellectual and politically engaged woman doesn't entirely wash. Especially if you have seen The Toy Wife.
Her marriage over, Rainer spent the war years doing the occasional play and selling war bonds. In 1943 she did a movie at Paramount, Hostages. The Resistance drama did not rekindle interest in her. She didn't make another movie until 1997's The Gambler. She married publisher Robert Knittel, returned with him to Europe after the war, and by all accounts has led a contented life.
There is a sting, however, in her latter-day remarks about Hollywood, one that suggests some regret. Her IMDB bio quotes her saying in 1997, "I was dreaming naturally like anyone to do something very good, but after I got the two Academy Awards the studio thought, it doesn't matter what she gets. They threw all kinds of stuff on me, and I thought, no, I didn't want to be an actress."
Though Rainer has, admirably, never emphasized this, her marriage to the insufferable Odets couldn't have come at a worse time. There's nothing like a turbulent personal life to bleed a career. You can deduce, too, that in addition to her scorn for the sucking-up a Hollywood career thrives on, Rainer may not have been all velvet to work with. Lana Turner's autobiography described Rainer holding up production on the set of Dramatic School. Federico Fellini wanted Rainer for a part in La Dolce Vita, but she asked for rewrites and he abandoned the idea. Demanding rewrites from the director of La Strada suggests, shall we say, a certain perfectionism.
Curses make for cute headlines, but lousy analysis. The Hope diamond didn't doom Harry Winston, the discoverer of King Tutankhamen's tomb died in bed, and Rainer's career was undone by a combination of bad timing, a bad husband and some bad choices. She made only eight movies in the 1930s. She's pretty good in three of them and very good indeed in one more. Looking at the chic, beautiful old woman as she stands in a line-up of past Oscar winners, her confidence evident in every line of her carriage, the Siren concludes that Luise was lucky indeed.
*Odd factoid: Porgy and Bess lyricist DuBose Heyward did some uncredited script work on The Good Earth.
Via Lou Lumenick's blog, I can now inform my patient readers that as part of the promotion of the Shadows of Russia series on Turner Classic Movies, there will be a showing of the very rare, very weird Mission to Moscow at the Rose Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Jan. 12 at 7 p.m. After the screening, I will be appearing as part of a panel discussion with Lou, who is the chief New York Post film critic and series co-creator, as well as film writer Ed Hulse and (the Siren can't better Lou's description) "sardonic film expert and Girlfriend Experience star," and Siren pal, Glenn Kenny.
So if you have yearned to see the Siren in person, here's your chance. If Brooklyn is too far a commute you can also just bop over to Lou's place, where a picture of me taken by a Post photographer adorns the announcement. Adorns, hell--the picture is huge. If you look closely you can spot Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint trying to scale down it.
And if that isn't enough, Lou and I will also be making a brief TV appearance on the January edition of TCM's "Now Playing: The Show,'' at 5 a.m. the evening of Dec. 17/morning of Dec. 18. It will be repeated on Dec. 21 (6 a.m.), Dec. 23/24 (5:30 a.m.), Dec. 27/28 (5:30 a.m.), Dec. 29/30 (5 a.m.), Jan. 2/3 (5:15 a.m.) and Jan 4 (2 p.m.)
Today the Siren fulfilled the dearest dream of many a classic-film buff: Thanks to Jack Warner, New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick, and the wonders of email, she helped program a film series at Turner Classic Movies. Here's the TCM press release.
This January (the Siren's birthday month, and what a present it will be), TCM is screening a month-long film series, Shadows of Russia. The selections focusing on the many views of Russia and communism to be found in American movies. Some films are masterpieces that the Siren and her readers know almost by heart (Ninotchka, The Manchurian Candidate, The Scarlet Empress), others the Siren loved on viewing but needs to get re-acquainted with (Reds, The Way We Were), still others are oddities deserving of a more focused look (Rasputin and the Empress, Red Danube, Conspirator, Comrade X). And there are some rare films being shown, including Leo McCarey's film maudit My Son John, with poor doomed Robert Walker in the lead; The North Star, of which I am told TCM has located a good print that should show off James Wong Howe's cinematography; and I Was a Communist for the FBI.
And all this goes back to Mission to Moscow, and therefore, in a roundabout way, to good old Jack Warner.
Here's how it went down. Lou Lumenick, who in addition to his movie-reviewing duties at the Post is a formidable student of film history, posted an alert in February that Mission to Moscow, the bizarre 1943 Warner Brothers paean to Stalin's Russia, was showing on TCM on a Sunday morning. (His original post is gone, but you can read his thoughts on the DVD here.) The Siren watched, posted her thoughts and discussed the movie with Lou via email.
We agreed it was a shame that Mission to Moscow, which TCM seldom shows, hadn't had a prime-time airing where it could get a thorough intro, because if ever a movie needed a detailed intro with background and context, it's Mission to Moscow. That led to a discussion of American movie depictions of Russia and communists over the years. These movies ran a surprisingly large gamut and their bent tended to coincide with U.S. politics and viewpoints more than with Russian history and realities.
Many of these films have languished, unshown and nearly undiscussed. Wouldn't it be great, we e-dreamed, if we could get TCM to show some of them. Better yet, suggested Lou--a whole month of them. Lou decided to contact the TCM programmers. The rest of the story can be found at his place.
And yes, that's my real name there on the release and at Lou's place, Farran Nehme. Pleased to meet you. I figured it was as good a time as any to come out. If my name is going to be mentioned at the TCM sites I want it to be my real moniker and not some mistress of Alexander the Great's.
So here is the list of films and times for January. The Siren hasn't seen all of these herself, as some have been scarce indeed. The schedule is the result of months of lists and suggestions going back and forth between Lou and me, and the skill of the expert programmers at TCM. The Siren has a widely varying group of readers and she thinks there is something for almost everyone here, whether you are left or right, auteurist or anti-auteurist, Warner Brothers or MGM. She hopes you will all be around in January to discuss the films with her.
Wednesday, Jan. 6
Part One: Twilight of the Tsars
8 p.m. The Scarlet Empress (1934) – starring Marlene Dietrich and John Lodge.
10 p.m. Rasputin and the Empress (1932) – starring John, Ethel and Lionel Barrymore.
Part Two: Red Romance
12:15 a.m. Red Danube (1949) – starring Walter Pidgeon and Ethel Barrymore.
2:30 a.m. Reds (1981) – starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson and Maureen Stapleton.
Wednesday, Jan. 13
Part Three: The Lighter Side of the Revolution
8 p.m. Comrade X (1940) – starring Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr.
10 p.m. Ninotchka (1939) – starring Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas.
Part Four: The Left on Campus
Midnight The Way We Were (1973) – starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford.
2:15 a.m. Spring Madness (1938) – starring Maureen O’Sullivan, Lew Ayres, Ruth Hussey and Burgess Meredith.
Overnight Feature
3:30 a.m. The Strawberry Statement (1970) – starring Bruce Davison, Kim Darby and Bob Balaban.
Wednesday, Jan. 20
Part Five: Our Red Army Pals
8 p.m. The North Star (1943) – starring Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews and Walter Huston.
10 p.m. Mission to Moscow (1943) –starring Walter Huston, Ann Harding and Oscar Homolka.
Part Six: Diplomatic Immunity
12:15 a.m. The Kremlin Letter (1970) – starring Bibi Andersson, Richard Boone, Max von Sydow and Orson Welles.
2:15 a.m. Conspirator (1949) – starring Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor.
Overnight Feature
4 a.m. Counter-Attack (1945) – starring Paul Muni and Marguerite Chapman.
Wednesday, Jan. 27
Part Seven: Spies Among Us
8 p.m. My Son John (1952) – starring Helen Hayes, Robert Walker and Dean Jagger. John McElwee's excellent rundown on this seldom-shown film can be found here.
10:15 p.m. I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) – starring Frank Lovejoy and Dorothy Hart.
Part Eight: The Height of the Cold War
Midnight The Manchurian Candidate (1962) – starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury.
2:15 a.m. The Bedford Incident (1965) – starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier.
Overnight Features
4:15 a.m. Scarlet Dawn (1932) – starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Nancy Carroll.
5:15 a.m. The Doughgirls (1944) – starring Jane Wyman, Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith and Eve Arden.
Expansively, [Warner] acknowledged that leftist writers kept trying to slip bits of radical propgaganda into their scripts, but since they knew that he, Jack Warner, would cut out all such propaganda, they persisted in their effort in what Warner called 'a humorous vein.'
'Not only humorous,' said J. Parnell Thomas, sounding a bit shocked.
'Well, strike the word humorous,' said Warner. 'I stand corrected.'
'You might say in an insidious vein," said Thomas.
'Yes, insidious,' Warner agreed.
--Jack Warner testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee about Mission to Moscow, as described by Otto Friedrich in City of Nets
The Siren has finally achieved a personal movie-viewing goal and watched Mission to Moscow, Warner Brothers' legendary mash note to Uncle Joe Stalin. Many thanks to Lou Lumenick, who wrote a great post on the film, with great links too, and pointed out that TCM had stuck this rarity on the schedule at an odd late-morning hour.
So. Mission to Moscow.
I don't know even know where to begin.
There are good movies and bad movies and interesting movies and boring movies and funny movies and campy movies and then, there is Mission to Moscow. It's the sui-est generis-est damn thing you will ever see. Three days after viewing it, the Siren still feels as though somebody rewired her brain. It's based on the book by Joseph E. Davies, detailing his stint as the second U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, and his, uh, impressions of the country.
The Siren can't recommend Mission to Moscow as a piece of filmmaking. Michael Curtiz was the prime example of a stellar studio craftsman, but this, his follow-up to Casablanca no less, doesn't find him at his best. The Siren had heard that the movie worked fairly well as a drama. It does not. You could make a case, though, that in the hands of a lesser talent Mission to Moscow might be unwatchable. It displays Curtiz's facility with talky expository scenes and his singular gift for pacing, but even that cannot save a script that is just one conversation after another.
Honestly, you can't understand just far this thing deviates from the historical record until you see it. The movie is a vigorous condemnation of both isolationism and appeasement of fascism, which Hollywood Goes to War points out would have been as notable to a 1943 audience as the movie's benign view of Russia. The critique of prewar isolation is part of why the Office of War Information, the Roosevelt-created body that oversaw Hollywood's role in the war effort, thought it was swell. But the other, equally important idea was to sell a skeptical American public on Russia as our allies. So Stalin's Russia is portrayed as a plucky place working toward the day when they will be a democracy, a day that is just around the corner...the corner of Lubyanka Prison, where only saboteurs are sent anyway.
There is a long introduction by the real-life Davies tacked on to the beginning, and its stupefying dullness gives you an idea of how Davies thought a story should be structured: Tell, don't show. Then you get shot after shot of Davies (as played by Walter Huston) looking grave from the other side of someone's desk, starting with that of Roosevelt, who wants this Dodsworth-like businessman to see if the Russians can be counted on in the fight against world fascism. (The president is given the same voice he has in Yankee Doodle Dandy, the voice of the famous speeches, so that the viewer gets the impression Roosevelt said "please pass the butter" exactly as he said "a date that will live in infamy.") So off goes Davies to visit Russia and sit in front of more desks. It's a realistic view of diplomacy, I suppose--get off the train, talk to the Germans, get off another train, talk to the French, go back to Moscow, talk to the Japanese at a fancy ball, go to the ballet, talk to a Russian official.
But lord, it is boring, or would be if you weren't busy reminding yourself to close your slack jaw, as you watch something like the scene where Davies explains that the Soviets invaded Finland to protect it. Curtiz and cinematographer Bert Glennon come up with some striking compositions, especially during the series of arrests leading up to the Moscow show trials. But the best-looking sequences are the montages using actual historical footage from the Soviet film companies--which had been instructed to cooperate with Warner Brothers--as well as newsreels and other sources including, if the Siren isn't mistaken, Triumph of the Will.
The movie is a collection of scenes and vignettes, as episodic in its way as Words and Music. The beautiful, vivid Eleanor Parker (now there's an underrated actress) plays Davies' daughter and gets a number of irrelevant scenes doing stuff like sleigh rides and ice-skating with a bunch of Russians who spontaneously break into a Cossack dance. Well, actually, the good spirits didn't seem outlandish to the Siren, based on her lifelong love for Russian culture and a too-brief visit to Moscow.* (Nobody did a Cossack dance for me, though. Damn it.) Also included is the film debut of an uncredited "Sid" Charisse, dancing as Galina Ulanova in a ballet attended by the American diplomats. She looks nothing like the muscular, rather plain-faced Ulanova nor does she dance like her, but Charisse still stops the movie cold. When Davies and his family gush over the ballerina, for possibly the only time in the movie you believe every word.
Ann Harding plays Davies' wife, legendary high-living socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post, here portrayed as a warm and dutiful housewife having tea-drinking chats with "Madame Molotova" in the latter's perfume shop. In the movie, this is a glittering bijoux of a boutique to rival Leslie Caron's perfume palace in An American in Paris. In reality, Molotova's perfume works were confiscated from the original owners by the Bolsheviks. After nationalization they produced basically just one scent, Red Moscow, an overwhelming carnation soliflore that was no great shakes but still a precious item for an average Russian woman. (My dear pal Victoria of Bois de Jasmin, whose childhood coincided with the last gasps of the Soviet regime, told me she had such strong memories of Red Moscow that for years she avoided carnation scents like the plague, and she echos that in her post on Russian perfume: "The moment I smell it, I am 10 years old again, being lectured on the young pioneer’s creed by some female Communist Party functionary.")
Perfume is an old Siren obsession so this relatively minor obsfucation stuck out to her. What really boxes the viewer's ears are things like the Moscow trials sequence, which beggars description. According to the movie, this purge wasn't aimed at consolidating Stalin's power, but at rooting out Nazi and Japanese "fifth columnists." The character actors in the dock are lit to look even creepier than their natural resemblances to the real-life officials would make look them anyway. Walter Huston leans forward to solemnly tell whatever dialogue-receptacle is accompanying him that based on years of trial experience, he believes the accused are "Guilty, guilty, guilty!" No, not really, I'm quoting Doonesbury. Huston just says "I believe they're guilty." It's still disturbing as all hell.
"Is it your opinion...that Mission to Moscow was a factually correct picture, and you made it as such?" [HUAC Chief Investigator Robert E.] Stripling asked.
"I can't remember," [Jack] Warner said.
"Would you consider it a propaganda picture?" Stripling persisted.
"A propaganda picture--" Warner echoed.
"Yes."
"In what sense?"
"In the sense that it portrayed Russia and Communism in an entirely different light from what it actually was?"
"I have never been in Russia," Warner protested. "I don't know what Russia is like...so how can I tell you if it was right or wrong?"
Well, couldn't Warner have hired some expert to tell him whether the planned film would be accurate? "There are inaccuracies in everything," Warner said.
--City of Nets
Mission to Moscow differs from such propaganda pictures as Ivan the Terrible Part I and I Am Cuba in its far-lesser script and lack of visual flair--both of the other pictures have absorbing stories and stunningly original directorial visions. But the most apt comparison probably isn't even with Song of Russia, the MGM singing-and-dancing ode to our Russian Allies that is next up on the Siren's must-see Red List. The movie that Mission to Moscow brought to the Siren's mind, in its dogged insistence on rewriting a bloody history to a more pleasing narrative, is They Died With Their Boots On. That's the Raoul Walsh Western that turned the Little Big Horn into a noble attempt to buy time to save the West's entire supply of white settlers (because we were about to run out of those). Controversial episodes such as the "battle" of Washita are given the old spit-and-polish. Unlike Mission to Moscow, the Walsh film is brilliant moviemaking, but both create a Warner Brothers narrative, an adventure story, out of what would play as tragedy if it were told fully and truthfully. James Agee went to the heart of the matter when he said Mission to Moscow "indulges the all but universal custom of using only so much of the truth as may be convenient."
And the real irony of Mission to Moscow is that the impulses behind the Curtiz and the Walsh films were both patriotic in part--one designed to glorify the past, the other made to please an administration. Ambassador Davies later said he approached Harry Warner to make the movie; Jack Warner said FDR himself broached the idea, an assertion Warner backed off from in HUAC testimony. But there is no question that Warner Brothers was aiming to please the administration and promote the war effort. Asked to make a picture that would placate the public about our alliance with the Russians, Warner Brothers went all out, in the truest studio fashion.
For his big-budget attempt to improve America's view of its ally, Jack Warner later found himself zigging and zagging in front of HUAC, although like the other studio heads he got off easy--screenwriter Howard Koch, who had written the script at Warner's insistence, was blacklisted (or graylisted, according to this article). An exasperated Jack Warner later summarized the feelings of many Hollywood executives before him, and many to come: "There are some controversial subjects that are so explosive...that it doesn't pay for anyone to be a hero or a martyr. You're a dead pigeon either way."
So, given all these drawbacks (to understate the matter), what value does the movie have? Plenty, for what it tells us about the extent to which movie studios were on board with the war effort, how little some people knew about the real-life Soviet Union (although many, from Manny Farber** to the usually clueless Bosley Crowther, knew enough to give the film a major thumbs-down) and for the Warner Brothers aesthetic, its approach to politics and history and its working methods in general. TCM shows this, according to Lumenick, every other year, usually during their 30 Days of Oscar festivities (it was nominated for Best Art Direction). The Siren has dissed the Oscar month heavily but it does have some oddball selections from time to time. What the channel needs to do is get this on during hours when there can be an introduction, because if any movie needs context, caveats and discussion, it's Mission to Moscow.
*Ayn Rand would have disagreed. During her HUAC testimony, Pennsylvania Republican John McDowell asked her, "Doesn't anybody smile in Russia anymore?" and received the reply, "Well, if you ask me literally, pretty much no."
**Farber, quoted in Hollywood Goes to War: "This mishmash is directly and firmly in the tradition of Hollywood politics. A while ago it was Red-baiting, now it is Red-praising in the same sense--ignorantly. To a democratic intelligence it is repulsive and insulting."
(Material on the history and subsequent HUAC troubles of Mission to Moscow comes from City of Nets and Hollywood Goes to War. As Lou says, there is a good set of notes at TCM and an interesting monograph on the movie available here.)