PRINCE POPPYCOCK

Props to Dan Callahan. The Citizen Kane of bad movies is the best description evah. It's awe-inspiring, how no hint of talent or artistry crops up to mar the perfection of The Oscar's badness. No detail was too small to fuck up. My new life's ambition is to watch this with the Blogdorf Goodman crew and Beauty Addict, because the makeup is the world's most complete list of don'ts. Jill St. John's eyelids were turned into baby blue dinner plates and Eleanor Parker (ah, Eleanor, how you suffered for this one) had her coral lips drawn way outside the mouth edge (girls, don't ever do that). The costume designer signals which women are the tarts (St. John and Edie Adams) by dressing them both in doubleknit polyester that drapes straight down like a windowshade and has the added benefit of making their breasts look like lemons stuck to a wall. Even the hairstyles are awful, especially when they've been "mussed" to indicate a romp in the hay.



Parker, all of 44 in this movie and she would have looked 34 if not for the hair and lips, knocks Elke Sommer into a propeller beanie in the looks department. You get to compare the two Miss Es directly, as Eleanor plays her big topless scene on her tummy facing stage left and peeling the paint off the walls with her emotions; and Elke plays her topless scene on her tummy facing the same way and delivering her lines like she's announcing that the train will be held at the station momentarily. Joseph Cotten is the stalwart, integrity-stuffed studio head--lots of those in Hollywood-on-Hollywood movies, for that extra touch of versimilitude, one assumes.



As for Tony Bennett, in his big scene, his suit dusted with cornstarch to indicate a soul's struggle in the depths, the singer seems to be channeling John Garfield on a frequency that can only tune in to late-period Jack Webb.

Stephen Boyd anchors the cast, his dimpled chin working furiously to indicate the states of emotion he can't convey by squaring his shoulders. He also has the ugliest speaking voice the Siren has yet encountered, a bastard mix of Irish and American that drowns the consonants in his throat like kittens and forces the vowels back out through his nose. But it's Milton Berle, as the goodhearted agent done wrong by his two-timing client, who gives this peerless defense of the honor and decency of Hollywood:

Boyd: I'm no different from anybody else in this damn town.
Berle: That's not true, Frankie. Oh, if it comes to a matter of life or death, if we have no other choice, then we hurt others--but reluctantly.

The Pathécolor is hideous and the art direction was a trip down memory lanes marked Wood Paneling, Harvest Gold and Avocado. And the Siren still wants to know how many pairs of false eyelashes were on Merle Oberon for the finale, which was just as thrillingly god-awful as Yojimboen promised.

Need I tell you I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish it? My god, it was wonderful.

The Siren has been pondering auteurism. Some time back Girish had a long and fruitful discussion of it, and last week Glenn Kenny went over to the Auteurs to proclaim "an auteurist film is an interesting film."

Glenn is right, of course. But the Siren runs into two problems with auteurism. One is the tendency of some auteurists to overpraise their idols' lesser works. The other, more significant problem is what to do with Jean Negulesco, Jack Conway, Roy del Ruth, Vincent Sherman, Archie Mayo, Henry Hathaway or today's guest star, Sam Wood.

Sam Wood is an excellent example of a studio man who helmed some good-to-great movies--namely, Hold Your Man, A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, the 1937 Madame X, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Our Town, Raffles, The Devil and Miss Jones, Kings Row, Pride of the Yankees and oh, all right, some people like this one, For Whom the Bell Tolls. (Ivy, starring goddess Joan Fontaine, is also supposed to be pretty good, and Lord Jeff too.) Yet Wood garners career evaluations that range from tepid to eye-rolling. In the afterlife, Vincent Sherman probably reads Sam Wood mini-bios to make himself feel better.

Let's be frank. Wood's hard-right politics have played a part in how he is remembered, as his post-war anti-Communism went from vocal to obsessive in nothing flat. He founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and in that guise was a driving force behind the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, where he testified grimly that certain Directors' Guild members were trying to "steer us into the Red River." Such was Wood's fear of subversion that after his death in 1949, his heirs discovered a clause in the will stipulating that they had to take a loyalty oath ("I am not now nor have I ever been...") before they could collect a dime.

The result was that during the years when books and interviews and documentaries were brought forth to celebrate the Golden Age, a number of Wood's ex-colleagues had little good to say about him; "a fascist," was Groucho Marx's encomium. And later critics, mindful of Wood's role in the blacklist and with no Wood still alive to discuss anything, haven't been inclined to give him much credit. His bad or mediocre films (and they are many) have been deemed as much or more representative of his abilities than his successes. And Wood's successes were discussed without much enthusiasm for his role. Mind you, the Siren is all for giving ample credit to James Wong Howe, William Cameron Menzies and Gregg Toland, or Rudolph Mate, Cedric Gibbons and Norman Krasna, for that matter. But watch Kings Row on a double bill with Picnic and tell me if you think the difference is all Howe.



It is possible to read a critique of a Sam Wood picture and wonder if the thing directed itself. In fact, some have pretty much suggested that's what happened on the two Marx films. While Thalberg had the final say, and the Marxes drove many (all right, most) collaborators crazy, the idea of Wood as glorified traffic cop doesn't fit so neatly with Simon Louvish's statement that Wood "refused to take any Marx Brothers nonsense and insisted on endless and exhausting retakes" (a signature Wood technique, although his taste for takes doesn't seem to have been quite up to Wyler levels). The Siren would never argue for Wood's sole authorship of those movies, but she doesn't see why we should presume that he contributed nothing.

Anyway, the blacklist ended forty years ago, Wood's been dead for more than sixty and the Siren thinks no one need be ashamed to be caught loving a good Sam Wood movie. The fact is, pace M. Truffaut, I would much rather watch The Devil and Miss Jones than Hatari!; would curl up with The Pride of the Yankees well before I'd sit down with The Long Gray Line; and would take King's Row over Frenzy in a heartbeat. Does this mean that I consider Wood to be the equal of Hawks, Ford or Hitchcock? Nope. But it does mean I think he deserves to be taken seriously, and given credit for the things he did well.

There, that's my Sam Wood defense.

Unfortunately, it's all leading up to a brief discussion of a not-terribly-good Sam Wood movie, Saratoga Trunk.



"You can't go home again," said Thomas Wolfe, in a title the Siren first encountered via Charlie Brown. While there are few movie experiences as great as rediscovering the virtues of an old favorite, it's pretty depressing to go back to a movie you loved in youth and find that it looks kind of cheesy. The Siren was crazy about Saratoga Trunk when she was about 13 years old, but custom has staled this one something awful. There are good visual moments, such as the opening, a late-movie train chase and crash, Ingrid Bergman's untrammeled joy as she tastes her first jambalaya, and Bergman in her Saratoga hotel room getting tiddly on peaches in champagne. Bergman's mouth meeting peach is erotic as it got in 1945. She was quite the sensualist, was Bergman, one who loved her food, and the Siren wonders if that was why she was so hot to play Clio Dulaine. It couldn't have been the script.

Overall, however, it's a slog. Ingrid Bergman is Clio, a Creole adventuress who arrives in New Orleans to seek revenge on her father's snooty family for ruining her mother's life. The first scene is entrancing, Bergman arriving at a French Quarter mansion where the garden has taken over, walking around the broken-down rooms and reliving her mother's heartache. The Siren would definitely point to the sequence as an example of Wood's fluid but inconspicuous camerawork at its best.

But then Clio settles in, and the movie stagnates. There is way too much of Clio's "mammy" figure, Angelique, played in glowering blackface by Flora Robson and topped with eyebrows that would scare the daylights out of Frida Kahlo. (Blackface. Can you believe it? in a serious role, in 1945? and Robson got an Oscar nomination for it!) The character is a snooze, serving only to make you appreciate Hattie McDaniel. And there is too much of Cupidon, played by little person Jerry Austin and used in most early scenes as not much more than a terrier with a French accent (although he gets some better moments later on). For about 70 long, long minutes we watch Ingrid force the Dulaine family to pay her off, merely by showing up at various public places and looking like her mother. That's a long time to wait to get to Saratoga, and the meat of the story, such as it is. Perhaps the fact that Edna Ferber helped adapt her own novel accounts for Saratoga Trunk's length. It definitely smacks of a writer who wrote a long book and was going to get it all in there, by gum, no matter if pacing begins to stagger and finally falls in a ditch.



Gary Cooper has to wear an oversized hat that brings up unfortunate Yosemite Sam associations, but when he takes it off and makes love to Bergman the Siren understands what first drew her adolescent hormones to this movie. Bergman's features look smashing with dark hair, but then we of later years already knew that. The beauty of the leads and the occasional good scene notwithstanding, this one would have been better screened in the Siren's cinema of the memory.

* The story goes that during one of the many tense moments on the set of A Night at the Opera, Sam Wood snapped, "You can't make an actor out of clay," only to have Groucho flash back, "Nor a director out of Wood."

For the longest time the Siren refused to look up anything about the New York Times' Verlyn Klinkenborg because she preferred her imaginings of the man--essentially, Uncle Henry in Understood Betsy. There's Verlyn is in the parlor of a 200-year-old farmhouse in Vermont, having his niece or nephew read Sir Walter Scott by an oil lamp while he mends some tack (whatever tack is).

Well, Verlyn is actually a rather trim fellow and much younger than Uncle Henry, and his farm is apparently in upstate New York. The Siren is happy to report, however, that his taste in reading material isn't too far from Uncle Henry's. Verlyn's a Dickens man, something which always makes the Siren feel comradeship with a writer. And he loves Eliot, and he likes to re-read his favorites:

Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens. Re-reading “Middlemarch,” for instance, or even “The Great Gatsby,” I’m able to pay attention to what’s really happening in the language itself — a pleasure surely as great as discovering who marries whom, and who dies and who does not.

The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is always there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard — always a stranger.

The Siren was struck, when reading these paragraphs months ago, at how you could easily substitute re-watching movies for re-reading books. The Siren wants to see some of the Oscar bait out this month (Up in the Air) and some of it she does not. (The Road--are you bloody well kidding me? I don't care how good it is, I am not doing cannibals for Christmas. And that goes double for Precious.) Well, the Siren would love to be one of those encyclopedic cinephiles who has seen everything, new and old (howdy, Glenn, Peter, Andrew, David and the whole sidebar gang) but she keeps running into the same secret, shameful vice:

She re-watches movies. A lot.

One of life's great pleasures for the Siren comes when, like a dolled-up old broad hitting the jackpot at the slots, she flips over to Turner Classic Movies and hits a well-loved film. Somehow it's better when it's random, and not the process of careful selection at the DVD shelves. There's a particular thrill to turning on a TV and finding a movie that suits your life or week or mood precisely, like Mr. Blandings coming on last week as the Siren unpacked, or White Heat popping up just when the Siren needed a shot of Cagney. And when you tune in to a scene you adore, it's like running into a well-loved friend on the street.

The holiday season is a good time for re-viewing, as you naturally hunger for familiarity and warmth. So, in the spirit both of confession and renewal, the Siren is naming, strictly in the order in which they pop into her head, 10 films she's seen about 10 times, and a favorite scene (or two or three). Some I've mentioned before, some I haven't, but you aren't going to find surprises on here. This isn't a list made to impress. It's made to make the Siren happy.

1. The Maltese Falcon: Chipping away at lead. "Well sir, what do you suggest? We stand here and shed tears and call each other names, or shall we go to Istanbul?"

2. The Thin Man: Myrna: You asleep?
Bill: Yes!
Myrna: Good... I want to talk to you.



(Not only does the Siren cherish this scene, she's played it.)

3. Citizen Kane: "A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."

4. Rules of the Game: The hunt. Octave and Christine in the greenhouse.

5. Letter from an Unknown Woman: Joan, suddenly come back to life in Jourdan's memory, holding the gate for him once more. The Siren has probably seen this movie only about six times because it kills her but she's listing it anyway.

6. The Band Wagon. All of it, but I particularly love trying to figure out what "Louisiana Hayride" is supposed to be doing in the show within the movie. The most utterly incongruous number in the history of American musicals, if you ask the Siren, and that is some accomplishment.



7. Footlight Parade: My favorite 30s musical. Any scene with Cagney makes me happy.

8. Now, Voyager: Claude Rains. Bonita Granville at her bitchiest. "My mother. My mother! MY MOTHER!"

9. Twentieth Century: "I close the iron door..." (A catchphrase with an old boss of the Siren's.)

10. The Pirate: The "Nina" number. Such perfect Gene Kelly, in so many ways.


Oh, what the heck. It's the season of generosity. Here's 10 more.

11. My Favorite Wife: Cary Grant in the elevator. Irene Dunne laughing over the shoe salesman, with one little hand gesture to indicate the guy's height, and another for Cary.

12. A Night at the Opera: When the orchestra strikes up "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" the Siren falls over, every time.

13. Stagecoach: "Looks like I got the plague, don't it?"

14. Captain Blood: Some of the 1930s' most amazing eye candy, but the Siren's favorite is Basil Rathbone, lounging around that prison. Ah, Basil.


15. Shadow of a Doubt: Joe and Herb, discussing the perfect murder. The most obvious counterpoint in the world ("on the nose," in a popular phrase the Siren can't stand for some reason) but Hitchcock makes it perfect, building on their innocent chatter until you find it as unbearable as Charlie does.

16. Stage Door: Any time Eve Arden or Lucille Ball is on screen. "A pleasant little foursome. I predict a hatchet murder before the night is over."

17. All About Eve: Not mentioned much, because it isn't one of those famous barbs, but Sanders, purring to Barbara Bates: "Tell me, Phoebe, do you want someday to have an award like that of your own?...Then you must ask Miss Harrington how to get one. Miss Harrington knows all about it."

18. Mildred Pierce: "Not too much ice in that drink you're about to make for me."

19. To Be Or Not to Be: The Siren's favorite part of the running gag: "So they call me Concentration Camp Erhardt." "I thought you'd react like that."

20. Singin' in the Rain: Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont is a desert-island performance if ever there was one. "What do they think I am, dumb or something? Why, I make more money than Calvin Coolidge--PUT TOGETHER!"



That's all the Siren will allow herself, but if anyone wants to chime in with a few of their own, that would make her happy too. Consider it a gift.

If sticking it out for two-and-a-half episodes of Season 1 and one episode this season can be called trying, the Siren has tried with "Mad Men". She sees the attraction, even if the hype blows her mind--everything from Banana Republic to Barron's, for heaven's sake. The Siren admires the cinematic qualities of the series, the fluid camerawork, the carefully angled shots, the flawless integration of sets and costumes. It's pretty. The actors are pretty. The period detail is enough to warm an old-movie hound's heart. But on the whole, the Siren just doesn't dig it.

Despite the stratospheric sex appeal of Jon Hamm, January Jones and Christina Hendricks, the show is just so goddamned dour. The Siren suspects series creator Matthew Weiner wanted to avoid the nostalgia trap, but this is too far in the other direction. A little soupçon of affection for the past will not turn Mr. Weiner's dead-serious critique into "The Wonder Years Meets Ad Age." The Siren has seen movies from the era, and in those movies, people have a good time--every now and then, you understand, between bouts of weltschmerz. As James Wolcott wrote in Vanity Fair, "Mad Men" "has a seductive look, a compelling mood, a cast that could have been carved from a giant bar of Ivory soap, but zero grasp of the elastic optimism and vigor of the Kennedy years, the let-go spring of release after the constriction of the Eisenhower 50s."

Everyone on "Mad Men" goes around smoking and drinking and eating whatever they hell they want and having office affairs without once looking over their lovers' shoulders for process servers bearing class-action subpoenas, but does anyone enjoy it? Not from what the Siren has seen. It's like Saint Augustine wrote the scripts. Such laughs as "Mad Men" affords are tethered to hindsight--"We never indulge in such sexism/racism/anti-Semitism/homophobia now, and even if we do, we sure don't smoke."

Still, the Siren will probably watch more this season--between Wolcott's liveblogging and Lance's occasional commentaries, she doesn't want to be the clueless playground oddball. But in her heart, she'd rather watch a melodrama from the actual late Eisenhower-early Kennedy era. Good or bad, there's plenty to choose from.

So that's my justification for posting these brief takes on ten films actually made during the "Mad Men" period--dramas, because "Mad Men" is not, god knows, a comedy or a musical. These movies vary widely in terms of quality and critical repute, from bona fide masterpieces to simple soapers. But the Siren likes them all, as she likes a lot of the melodramas from this period. Many directors were exploring widescreen technique to admirable effect, and it was a great era for clothes and interiors. And when you watch the movies, you realize that people were far more aware of what was under society's facade than many suppose. (Two of the movies date to 1959--if Don Draper can fade out to Bob Dylan in 1960 then the Siren can cheat back a single year, she figures.)



Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)
Social Issue: Racism.
Sets and Costumes: Perfection.
Sex appeal (Low/Medium/High): Beside the point. But John Gavin was in the full flower of his lockjaw handsomeness and Susan Kohner and Sandra Dee were lovely.
Why the Siren Likes It: It's a masterpiece, that's why, one that belongs on any list of the great films of the 1950s. A master class in how to make a movie about misguided, surface-focused people trapped by a hypocritical society, without condescending to or withholding compassion from them. The proof is that 50 years after its release, the thwarted mother-daughter love still reduces many to tears. The Siren bristles when she hears this described as camp. There isn't a single unintentional effect in it. The falseness and glitter are there to throw race, this country's original sin, into high relief. But Sirk doesn't invite the audience to feel superior. He wants recognition, AND he wants identification. In the superb opening scene on the beach, when Lana Turner reacts with gooey middle-class "understanding" to Juanita Moore's having a white-skinned daughter, Sirk didn't want the white liberals in the audience to say, "What a hypocrite." He wanted them to say, "Shit, that's me." (The beautiful screen cap is from Ways of Seeing, the Siren's new blog discovery; several others, equally enthralling, right here.)

The Best of Everything (Jean Negulesco, 1959)
Social Issues: Working women and adultery (go together like a horse and carriage in Hollywood movies of all eras), unwed pregnancy, abortion, casting couch, alcoholism.
Sets and Costumes: Great New York exteriors and the ultimate in smart little suits. Best of all, the Mondrian-esque office interiors, which Negulesco, a painter, probably influenced.
Sex appeal: High; Suzy Parker, Stephen Boyd, Louis Jourdan, even Robert Evans looks great.
Why the Siren Likes It: Underrated, influential film whose critical reputation is slowly improving. One of a number of "three [or four] girls" movies from the era, direct ancestors of "Sex and the City." Enjoyable on a number of different levels--as highly informative social artifact, as a proto-feminist tract, as an aesthetic treat, as a showcase for newcomers and old pros. The Siren particularly likes good old Brian Aherne as an ass-pinching executive and Joan Crawford, refusing to play her role as straight office harridan, giving her character both dignity and sensitivity. The beauteous Parker (up top) gets the best line: "Here's to men. Bless their clean-cut faces and their dirty little minds." The best appreciation of this film that the Siren has read is over at Noel Vera's place; he pays great attention to Negulesco's use of Cinemascope.

From the Terrace (Mark Robson, 1960)
Social Issues: Alcoholism, adultery, class snobbery, cutthroat business practices.
Sets and Costumes: High-end all the way. Joanne Woodward doesn't look completely at ease in Travilla, though.
Sex appeal: High. Paul Newman rates an automatic "high" in this category, as does Myrna Loy at any age.
Why the Siren Likes It: A parable about life versus work that everybody calls dated, except "Mad Men" apes the same themes. The Siren wrote a bit about this movie when Newman died; his performance is very good but the direction is noteworthy too, as is the Elmer Bernstein score.



All the Fine Young Cannibals (Michael Anderson, 1960)
Social Issues: Racism, alcoholism, class snobbery, adultery.
Sets and Costumes: Ersatz Southern, then faux bohemian, but extremely well-shot by William H. Daniels.
Sex appeal: Medium, largely because the Siren doesn't get Robert Wagner.
Why the Siren Likes It: Supposedly based on the life of Chet Baker. Jaggedly uneven and no one seems to have a clue about real white Southerners. But deserves to be remembered, if only for Pearl Bailey's haunting performance. For the Siren and those like her, there's also the nifty bit of role reversal for Susan Kohner, the "tragic mulatto" of Sirk's Imitation of Life, in the same movie as the penultimate role for Louise Beavers, of John Stahl's excellent 1934 Imitation of Life. (Poster is from the great Cinema Retro site.)


Return to Peyton Place (Jose Ferrer, 1961)
Social Issues: Working women (don't kid yourself, that's still an issue), rape, incest, adultery, (disguised) abortion, xenophobia.
Sets and Costumes: Meh. The exteriors look great, though.
Sex appeal: High; Eleanor Parker, Tuesday Weld, Carol Lynley, Jeff Chandler if you happen to like Jeff Chandler.
Why the Siren Likes It: Um...hard to say, since by no stretch of the imagination is it a good movie. This one the Siren won't kill you for calling camp. There really isn't anything else you could call it. The first Peyton Place is camp too, but had real value in Franz Waxman's score (heaven), Diane Varsi and the New England ambiance. Return, well, Ferrer was no director, they added lyrics and Rosemary Clooney when Waxman needed neither, and most of the cast looks about as comfortable as a soaking wet cat. But I appreciate Carol Lynley's pursuit of a career over and above a love affair (similar to the reason I liked Valley of the Dolls' fadeout). Mary Astor is great, playing a full-out embodiment of small-minded paranoia and ugliness. And Tuesday Weld manages to have emotional sincerity in some scenes despite playing opposite the stiffest excuse for a Swedish ski instructor you ever saw in your life.


Susan Slade (Delmer Daves, 1961)
Social Issues: Premarital sex, unwed motherhood, the hazards of cigarette smoking.
Sets and Costumes: Beautiful exteriors by master cinematographer Lucien Ballard, and the vaguely Japanese-style house on the Northern California coast, given to Connie Stevens's father by Brian Aherne (there he is again!) is quite an eyeful.
Sex appeal: Medium, though Connie Stevens (above) does her best.
Why the Siren Likes It: Interesting, Sirk-esque late-career movie by the talented Delmer Daves, with several scenes that have lost none of their ability to shock. Dave Kehr: "To an America that needed to believe that 'nice girls don’t,' Daves’s melodramas responded, 'Nice girls do' — or did at least sometimes, when the appropriate distinctions had been made between lust and love, predatory older males and sincere young men, casual encounters and lifetime commitments." Kehr prefers Parrish and Rome Adventure to Susan Slade and the Siren pretty much agrees with him, but Slade is worthwhile and closest to the "Mad Men" school of social history. Peter Nelhaus has a fine review of the movie, in which he compares it to Daves' westerns.


Advise and Consent (Otto Preminger, 1962)
Social Issues: Homophobia, subversion, government corruption.
Sets and Costumes: Stiff, cold and forbidding, perfectly in keeping with the machinations of the plot.
Sex appeal: Low. Gene Tierney is in this but she wasn't looking her best. Perhaps because he was making a movie about politicians, Preminger shot everyone with a GargoyleCam.
Why the Siren Likes It: Another masterpiece, a fisheyed look at the Washington influence game, usually taken as a riff on Alger Hiss but full of other echos as well. The scenes of back-door-dealing and blackmail ring as true as they ever did. Those tempted to tag the young, upright conservative senator's operatic torment over his gay attractions as quaint should think back to Jim McGreevey, Larry Craig and their many brethren--not to mention their wives. Despite the Red Scare trappings (and those are somewhat back in fashion, if you've noticed), Advise and Consent is one hell of a prescient movie. (To see just how prescient, the Siren recommends you check out this article by Meredith Hindley, senior writer at Humanities, on "The Transformation of Advise and Consent.") The above is from Ways of Seeing, whose proprietor clearly has excellent taste; for more screen grabs to show just how good this movie is, please click over and check out the rest.


The Light in the Piazza (Guy Green, 1962)
Social Issues: Mental retardation, class snobbery.
Sets and Costumes: Stunningly beautiful Italian setting (Guy Green was a highly accomplished cinematographer), Christian Dior dresses for Olivia de Havilland.
Sex appeal: High; Yvette Mimieux, George Hamilton and Rossano Brazzi, and de Havilland is much lovelier than the frightening lip color above suggests.
Why the Siren Likes It: Tender romance with a great performance by de Havilland, who carries the movie. Recently turned into an acclaimed musical that the Siren, alas, did not see. She does think the movie's insistence on the primacy of love, both parental and romantic, makes it a good choice for a musical treatment. At a time when the common practice was to shut the mentally retarded away in institutions, the notion that a developmentally delayed girl (albeit a beautiful one) deserved to marry a prince of an Italian and have babies was nothing short of revolutionary.


The V.I.P.s (Anthony Asquith, 1963)
Social Issues: Cutthroat business practices, tax evasion, adultery, domestic violence, depression.
Sets and Costumes: Enough to make you fly to Heathrow and wait to get fogged in--if flying were still like this.
Sex appeal: High. (Elizabeth Taylor at this point in her career does the same for a movie as Paul Newman. Elsa Martinelli was nothing to sneeze at, and neither was Richard Burton or Louis Jourdan.)
Why the Siren Likes It: See Return to Peyton Place. Plenty of lush period visuals, and there are pleasures to be had from Orson Welles even in unworthy roles (this one tinged with painful self-parody). But it's a pretty bad movie, though hardly the offense to all civilization that Walter Chaw paints it, and Elizabeth Taylor is an unconvincing version of Vivien Leigh. (Note to Mr. Chaw: Rod Taylor was a native Australian.) The Siren likes this primarily for Maggie Smith as the devoted secretary. I do love Dame Maggie. Christina Hendricks is good, but she still could learn something from what Smith accomplishes with a cliched role. Smith's scene with Richard Burton is the highlight, the so-so writing propped up with perfectly timed and calibrated reactions and beats.


Love With the Proper Stranger (Robert Mulligan, 1963)
Social Issues: Premarital sex, abortion, unwed motherhood.
Sets and Costumes: Supposedly low-end, but a mite too clean for all that. Steve McQueen made everything he wore look like a well-broken-in motorcycle jacket.
Sex appeal: High. Look at that publicity shot and tell me different.
Why the Siren Likes It: Has comic moments, but at heart a rather melancholy movie about a still-relevant topic, with legendary leads giving warm, authentic performances despite a wan third act. McQueen seldom let his vaunted cool slip to as much effect as here. When "Mad Men" gives a nudge about how far we've come, we should remember Wood planning an abortion, without hysteria. How many recent Hollywood movies or TV shows have let a beautiful, sympathetic lead do the same?

All right, so it's been a while, have at it. Tell me why I'm wrong about "Mad Men." Point out the movies I missed. (The Apartment isn't there and doesn't belong there; it's a comedy, and a satire, and very funny, and "Mad Men" isn't any of those those things.)

But, as always, play nice. The new banner, which MrsHenryWindleVale recognized without a telescope, is courtesy of the great Glenn Kenny. It is of course Dorothy Malone, from another Sirk masterpiece, The Tarnished Angels. Dorothy is meant to illustrate the Siren's general mood for the past month and probably the next.

Postscript: I've added a link to Peter Nelhaus's fine writeup (with lovely screen caps) of Susan Slade. Despite the deliberately provocative title, my main idea in writing this piece was "Hey, these early-1960s films that I love deserve a second look." So if anyone else has a post on some of these, or a similar movie from 1959-1963, post a link in comments by all means and I'll add it here. I'll start by also linking to Peter's post about Strangers When We Meet (b/w Town Without Pity, which also roughly fits our parameters despite the German setting). The Siren forgot about Richard Quine because--well, see banner above. Because of that.

Awesome screen caps from The Best of Everything right here. Apparently my mistake was not Googling "Suzy Parker."

Nathaniel of The Film Experience has been doing a series on movie references in Mad Men; one post involves a Draper household pillow-talk discussion of The Best of Everything that the Siren is sorry she missed. Great for "Mad Men" fans but rewarding for non-watchers too.

MORE UPDATES:

Vertigo's Psyche gives some love to Siren darling Sandra Dee and her exquisite performance in A Summer Place.

Arthur S., one of the most astute commenters in the film blogosphere, links us all up to a Douglas Sirk interview that is not to be missed.

The Siren is giving up on commenting at Big Hollywood. She likes to pounce occasionally on threads about movies she likes, but as noted by one critic who also quit commenting (because he kept getting deleted, bless him), "aw, nobody wants to play with Campaspe." Not a creature was stirring--nothing, no action. Dullsville.

So anyway, Mildred Pierce. Great movie that prompted a commenter to recall an alleged feminist interpretation wherein Mildred is "punished" for daring to step outside her assigned gender role and pursuing a career. The idea that Mildred is punished doesn't jibe with the Siren's viewing; instead, the "happy" ending where Mildred goes off with the drip she was married to at the beginning of the movie just indicates that in Hollywood at the time, if you wanted a happy ending you had to have the heroine go off with someone. Anyway, the marriage roles are a sidelight in the movie, as the Siren pointed out in the following comment. Maybe one of her patient readers would like to respond.

I don’t think Mildred Pierce has much to do with marriage and wifehood at all. James Agee was one of the critics who pointed out that the movie is much more focused on class, social climbing and attitudes toward money. Mildred’s moral unraveling becomes worse even as she gets richer. The really subversive part isn’t Mildred going to work, which she does out of necessity and abandons when she’s able, after finding a rich partner and a higher station. It’s the movie’s fisheyed look at maternal sacrifice. Instead of being beatific and ennobling, as in Stella Dallas, mother love is perceived as unhealthy, obsessive and narcissistic in the fullest sense of that word. Veda is a sociopath, but it’s Veda whom Mildred really loves, more so than any man in the movie and more even than the angelic Kay. “Don’t tell anyone what Mildred Pierce did!” could mean covering up a murder, but in the end it’s the unanswerable question of whether Mildred’s love “did” something to Veda and created this monster, or whether Veda (with the very name and spelling connoting “venal”) was what she was from birth. Mildred’s independence at the end, such as it is, results from her having taken Eve Arden’s joking advice and “eaten her young”–finally (and reluctantly) leaving Veda to her fate. Although, so tied to her dreadful offspring is Mildred that I’ve always wondered if Veda was able to work more machinations on her mother even from behind prison bars. Veda would fit in well in Caged.

And...Jack Carson is pure joy in this movie, as is Arden, who is the movie’s example of a woman happy and secure in herself–and single.

(The above photo is from Legendary Joan Crawford, a beautifully maintained site which has the most awesome collection of Joan Crawford photographs on the Web, bar none. You could spend hours there--I have.)

P.S. Please run over to The Auteurs, where Glenn Kenny has a weekly column about Foreign-Region DVDs. This week's item was requested by the Siren, and he delivers: a write-up of the Frank Borzage-directed, Ernst Lubitsch-produced Desire, which has been released in the U.K. Go, read and see if the screen-caps alone don't explain why the Siren mentions this every time the subject of "not out on Region 1" comes up.

The Siren feels as though she's Auntie Mame. Vera Charles just swept in and asked "have you spoken to your broker?" and when the Siren asks what's happening, Vera replies "Oh, not much, just that nothing is WORTH anything anymore." In this version, Vera adds, "And Siren darling, you just bought yourself a nice big banking system." Perhaps it's time for the Siren to get a job in the roller-skate department.

So what better period to be looking at right now than the 1930s? and what better actress than our own dear Kay Francis? The Siren has been planning to recap the Kay movies she caught during TCM's September Star of the Month festival. In order of preference:

1. The House on 56th Street (Robert Florey, 1933). There was a teensy bit of grumbling about this one going on in the comments to the Siren's earlier post and elsewhere, and Kay herself didn't seem to think much of the movie. Most Kay sources tsk-tsk that it was originally intended for Ruth Chatterton, as though film scripts are like evening gowns and shouldn't be handed down lest they get shabby. After revisiting the film the Siren informs everybody, as diplomatically as possible, that she's right and you're wrong. This is an excellent movie, not a standard sudser at all, with a remarkably grim plot that links Kay's fate to the declining fortunes of a New York City townhouse. (For the record, Filmbrain likes it too.) Lawrence Quirk calls it a "sociological romance," a good way to put it; the device of connecting Kay's declining fortunes to the house off Park Avenue is unusual and very effective.

When the Siren tries to pin down what she likes about a movie like House on 56th Street, she always comes back to structure. It's 68 minutes, and there is not one extraneous scene. Director Robert Florey (later of Beast with Five Fingers fame) quickly establishes his set of visual symbols--the house as both Kay and New York itself, the cherub as the dream of family love she will never have, the gambling as a rigged and unwinnable system--then deals them out with careful economy, like the cards that recur through the plot. Since it's a Kay Francis movie, the best analogy the Siren can use is clothing. An item at a typical mall store may look all right on the hanger, but turn it inside out and you'll find a mess: seams unpressed, unfinished and raveling, no tape on the hems, threads escaping from the buttonholes, great big scratchy tags everywhere just in case you forgot the BRAND NAME. Turn a vintage item inside out sometime and you'll be shocked at the difference. The seams are perfectly sewn down and pressed in, there is hem tape on the hem, the buttons are firmly attached and the lining is as beautifully tailored as the outside, with tiny stitches holding down certain folds so they won't bulge.

Here our Kay starts out as a brunette showgirl, dancing on tables and falling in love with a wealthy, upper-class New Yorker, who buys the house for her and tells her she belongs there "forever," as she touches a melancholy little cherub engraved in the plaster over the fireplace. But his family dislikes her, as families do. The plot plays out with such fatalism it might have served as noir if made 15 years later. Kay is imprisoned for 20 years for a crime that she not only didn't commit, but was trying to prevent. Her husband is killed in the Great War, her daughter is told she is dead. And all the while we see the house, earlier connected to innocence and happiness, becoming grimier and shabbier. When Kay is first sent to prison the house's windows are boarded up; the shot is like looking at someone who's been blinded. She gets a terrible blonde dye job explicitly to cut all ties with her past self, and its harshness adds to the theme. Both Kay and the house are still beautiful, but permanently marked.

Kay runs into an old shady acquaintance and winds up dealing cards in a gambling den that's run out of the very house she once lived in. Over at IMDB you can see some viewers rolling their eyes over this, but the Siren has zero patience for such Gradgrindian quibbles. There's a difference between things that make mathematical, logical sense and things that make poetic, symbolic sense. In the world of the movie, no course other than Kay's return to the house would be possible. And her daughter's appearance in the illegal casino is also needed to maintain symmetry, as is the daughter's mistake that occurs after Kay tries to help her, as Kay was trying to help the man whose death sent her to prison twenty years before. Margaret Lindsay as the daughter is, as usual, grating to the nerves, but that is also deliberate. The point is the quality of Kay's love and sacrifice, not the worthiness of the object.

It's very much a Depression movie, one that looks back at past gaiety, beauty and love and can't stop grieving for the way it's all been snatched away. The sheer bloody unfairness of what happens to Kay must have been so real to an audience whose hopes for comfort had been brutally rescinded through no sin of their own.

2. Jewel Robbery (William Dieterle, 1932). Also a Depression movie, and how, but with a far more pleasant conceit--rich people making clowns of themselves and getting taken right down to their garters by someone more clever. William Powell makes off with the rocks of the title, but also with the "jewels" of Kay's virtue, all with criminal panache ("I studied in Paris," he explains). As John McElwee pointed out, this movie must have been great escapist fun in 1933, and still is. It seems to be the favorite of everyone who caught it last month, and if the Siren has a slight preference for The House on 56th Street that's probably due to her mood. Jewel Robbery is a pip, falling just short of being good enough to be called "Lubitschian," but coming damn close with moments like Powell explaining how he lifted a necklace at a charity ball: "The lady stood beside me. The Prince of Wales was announced. I could have removed her dress." The Siren was sure she was going to like this one from the second she saw Kay in the bubble bath--not a chaste Hays office bubble bath, but a heels-kicking, whoops-that-was-close bath. Francis is so lively and happy in these early movies. Powell is deliciously funny although maybe he had pissed off the cameraman, as his overbite was never more obvious than here.

3. Confession (Joe May, 1937). The Siren has her own confession, that she missed the end of this one, but it was going swimmingly up to that point. It's similar in some ways to House on 56th Street, including the theme of mother love and sacrifice, once so common in American movies and now about as frequent a film element as wipes or noble politicians. (In current big-budget movies mothers with plot prominence usually turn out to have committed infanticide. Mothers who actually give things up for their kids are confined to Lifetime, a channel so ghastly that when the Siren sees it advertised as "television for women" she feels like suing for libel on behalf of her gender.) Anyway, Kay appears rather late in this movie, but when she does show up the plot goes from zero to sixty in a scene that reminded the Siren of both The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Letter. Kay's love scenes in flashback are very well played, as she's aided a great deal by Basil Rathbone, who gives a perfect take on the familiar role of "I am an Arteest and therefore a Tomcat." It's said to be an almost shot-by-shot remake of the German original, Mazurka. Julius Epstein had a hand in the screenplay, as he also did with

4. Secrets of an Actress (William Keighley, 1938). One of the supposed throwaways Kay made when Warner Brothers had her with one jeweled heel out the door and the other on a banana peel. But it's very bubbly and cute, with some nice snappy dialogue. Kay plays an aspiring actress with no discernible secrets, so I don't know what that title was about, much less the plot, which hurtles so hard toward the denouement you no more notice the holes than you do bird poop on the rollercoaster. Part of the reason I liked it was--wait for it--George Brent. I swear I'm not saying that just because it's been a while since we've had a good George Brent debate. He was good in this movie, very funny in the scenes with Gloria Dickson as his scheming not-yet-ex wife, and he had some nice chemistry with Kay.

5. Allotment Wives (William Nigh, 1945). One of the three Monogram cheapies Kay made as her career reached its close, this is a well-executed B picture that shows Kay might have made a good noir dame if only given more of a chance. Here she is running a criminal scheme that has women in Europe marrying multiple GIs for their allotment checks. She has a daughter, of course, and tries to keep the girl out of harm's way at a private school. This works about as well as it ever does in the movies. Paul Kelly, more than fifteen years past his real-life role in a memorably violent and sordid Hollywood triangle, plays the hardboiled investigating major in the same way he'd have probably played it if he'd gotten the Otto Kruger role as Kay's accomplice. Kay gets a fabulous B-noir exit, too.


6. Dr. Monica (William Keighley, 1934). Not a good movie, but has some historical interest for those who want to see how unwed motherhood, infidelity and infertility were treated just on the cusp of the Production Code's implementation. Kay plays the titular ob-gyn, and sports the most amazingly chic outfits you ever saw as she glides from office to operating room to drawing room. Her husband (Warren William, so underused his biggest scene has him trimming a Christmas tree) has had an affair with a young friend of Dr. Monica's (Jean Muir) and gotten her pregnant. He doesn't know that. Dr. Monica at first doesn't know that either. Later Dr. Monica does find out but Jean Muir doesn't know Monica knows. Nobody really knows anything in this movie.

7. Transgression (Herbert Brenon, 1931). Stagey tale of a wife straying, then moving back. The Siren thought it was pretty dreary and Kay was not at her best. But I did like the scenes in and around Ricardo Cortez's Spanish country house, which had a nicely sinister air somewhat redolent of the Mitteleuropean settings of Frankenstein and Dracula.


8. Cynara (King Vidor, 1932) and 9. Raffles (George Fitzmaurice, 1930). Hardly Kay Francis movies at all, these are both about Colman, and therein lies the reason the Siren didn't much care for them. Colman, she has recently realized, usually bores the everloving bejesus out of her (A Tale of Two Cities and Random Harvest are notable exceptions). He's so clipped and restrained and polite, there's no underlying pathos and sensitivity, as with Robert Donat, and no dash either, as with Grant or Flynn. If Colman withdraws from the room with a bow, the better to preserve your virtue, he isn't doing it with a wink and a sexy little flash of regret. He's doing it because he really truly does care about your virtue. No wonder David Niven was so much more fun as Raffles. No wonder the Siren didn't believe for a moment that Colman would actually succumb to Phyllis Barry at a swimsuit competition. Like McElwee, the Siren did enjoy Kay's sleek chic and "butched-out hair" but that was about it. I also expected more snappy direction from the Vidor than I got.

The Siren couldn't resist re-watching One Way Passage and a bit of Trouble in Paradise as well. All right, your turn. Any Kay discoveries to share?

The Siren has always mentally divided Hollywood dance sequences into different types. There is the first kind, the dance as staged interlude.



There's the type that Busby Berkeley perfected for all time, Dance as Spectacle. As a girl this was not only the Siren's favorite type of dance, it was her favorite type of movie, period. If she could switch on the television and spot showgirls with marcelled hair making big flower-blooming patterns, the Siren's week was made. Since these were always backstage musicals she was convinced for at least the first decade of her life that somewhere there was a stage big enough to accomodate "The Lullaby of Broadway."



Later on the Siren became acquainted, through Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, with dance as courtship ...



... and, when she was old enough to get the idea, with dance as consummation.



Astaire and Rogers did this brilliantly but they were far from the only ones. Over at Raymond de Felitta's place you will find him posting a Cyd Charisse number with James Mitchell (later to be Palmer Cortlandt on All My Children) that is indescribably lustful.

But it wasn't until fairly late in the Hollywood musical's flowering that we got what is perhaps the purest form of film dancing, dance as soliloquy. There were few dancers who could carry this off, and in fact Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly have this category almost to themselves, with at least one exception noted below.

In essence, the character's emotions reach such a pitch that he's gotta dance. It's romance that pushes him to this point, usually, either from pure happiness or despair. The most famous dance-as-soliloquy of all time is "Singin' in the Rain," which the Siren adores as much as anyone else but won't discuss here since what's left to say? Another favorite from Gene Kelly is this one, "I Like Myself" from It's Always Fair Weather.



In some ways this is the perfect example of what the Siren is talking about--Kelly is not only ecstatically in love with the ravishing Cyd Charisse, but also celebrating a new outlook on life, after a depressing afternoon in which he discovered that not only can you not go home again, as Thomas Wolfe told us, you also can't go back to the Army or its comradeship. I suppose you could look at it as a re-run of "Singin' in the Rain," which has an almost identical set-up for its centerpiece soliloquy, but in this as in the rest of the film, IAFW is darker and more complicated. The breathtaking impossibility of Gene's dancing around on roller skates is matched with the point in the plot--this kind of happiness is also impossible, fragile and won't last, any more than the giddy trash-can-dancing camraderie in the first part of the movie has lasted.

It's Always Fair Weather was, as de Felitta notes in this splendid write-up, just about the last gasp for the Freed unit. And the Siren completely agrees with Raymond that it's a great shame, because Kelly was poised to take the musical in even more varied and unexpected directions. If you ever get a chance to catch it on TCM, the Siren highly recommends Invitation to the Dance to her readers who are true dance addicts.

But in this category, as in so much, it has to be acknowledged that Astaire got there first, as in this snippet from the spellbinding "One For My Baby" number in the otherwise not-terribly-interesting The Sky's the Limit.

This is a number to savor. There's the perfection of Astaire's take on this type of "romantic" drunk--the way maudlin self-pity alternates with the compulsion to fight anything, up to and including the bar glasses. As in "I Like Myself," there's the fact that while the movements look organic and natural and seem to flow from the character's mental state with great ease, Astaire is expressing it all with steps no mortal man can equal.

Astaire could do that with other soliloquy dances too, including an early example such as "No Strings" from Top Hat, with Astaire singing about the joys of being a bachelor (since before Shakespeare's time, a sure way to mark yourself for Cupid's arrow), then turning it into a sand dance when fate, oopsImean Ginger, intrudes. There's the immortal "Dancing on the Ceiling" from Royal Wedding, where the gimmicky-ness of the turning room actually distracts a bit from how tender the moment is. Or there's the short but lovely number "Yolanda" from the criminally underrated Yolanda and the Thief, where Fred dances with a harp.

The final example the Siren is posting here is Cyd Charisse's exquisite solo from Silk Stockings. This musical is highly regarded by some, including de Felitta and David Thomson, but the Siren finds it pretty thin gruel, perhaps because she treasures every moment of Ninotchka, and while Garbo was a lousy ballerina, Cyd was no Garbo. But this snippet is one of the loveliest parts of the movie, expressing not just love, but the joy to be had in savoring your own beauty. That's definitely a part of all the soliloquies--for a few minutes, these dancers draw the audience, no matter how pudgy, flat-footed or hopelessly arrhythmic, and let us share the way they move. I like myself, indeed.

NOTE: The Siren tried hard to post the video clips in here and failed, utterly, so you'll have to follow the links. This post is a humble and (very) belated offering in Ferdy on Films' Invitation to the Dance blog-a-thon.

Let's try an experiment. Find the most precious object in your life, the light of your eyes. Place him/her/it in the middle of the room. Get the most fake-nice person you know to circle your precious, take notes, simper a lot, and make little enigmatic remarks like "Of course, they all do things at different times." While this is going on, bring your upper right arm across your face and try to French kiss your elbow. Do this every morning for several hours, for about two weeks.

You have now replicated the experience of trying to get your kid into a good kindergarten in New York City.

Anyway, between this and a youngest who thinks 3 am to 5 am is, by god, the best time of the day, the Siren is not up to anything cohesive. She has, however, spent what free time she has sacked out in front of the television set, glued to her Netflix choices and TCM, so here are some loose-knit thoughts on John Garfield and Hedy Lamarr.

About a month ago Blonde Venus Kim Morgan wrote a wonderful birthday tribute to John Garfield. The more the Siren watches, re-watches and reflects upon Garfield, the more she thinks that he--not the inarguably magnificent Brando--was the definitive American screen actor, the one who divides it all into Before and After. The Siren just saw him in two movies, the excellent He Ran All the Way and the dreary Tortilla Flat, and damn but the man was wondrous in anything. He Ran All the Way, Garfield's swan song, makes you weep for what could have been had he lived past 39. The actor was years too old for the part but that didn't occur to the Siren until J. Hoberman pointed it out. His character is a mess of sweaty jitters, doom stamped on him as clear as the marks on a UPS parcel. He's an armed robber on the run, but he's no John Dillinger. Garfield's character can't keep it together for more than a quarter-hour at a time, flipping out first on Shelley Winters in a public pool, then again at her house when he reveals to her family that he's on the lam. The suspense comes from wondering what his next ghastly burst of paranoia will bring. Garfield's line deliveries are a joy--never just a straightforward tough-guy reading, always something coming from a different angle. When he tells the family, "all I wanted was a place to hole up for a couple of days. Something you'd give an alley cat," it has the force of both accusation and elegy. Garfield gives so many different aspects to a man who could have been played far more simply. You see his yearning for a real family life in his scenes with the mother (Selena Royle) and his instinctive resentment of authority, even as he craves direction, in his frightening confrontations with Winters' father (Wallace Ford). Winters, for her part, gives Garfield someone worth playing against, with her own achingly sad performance. Genius James Wong Howe's cinematography makes the broiling hot summer days look even more menacing than the nights, until the inevitably tragic fadeout--but with a twist that the Siren hadn't seen coming. No wonder Morgan cites this as her favorite Garfield film. Give it a few more viewings and it may yet be the Siren's.

Then the Siren watched Tortilla Flat, and ay yi yi, as the characters are made to say whenever you are in danger of forgetting how Very Ethnic They Are. Garfield made this movie on loan to MGM. It's based on a John Steinbeck novel, and neither Garfield nor Steinbeck were at all suited to the MGM attitude which was, generally, "realism be damned." Spencer Tracy, one of Garfield's acting heros, has the main part. Tracy is a Mexican with a bit of his godawful Portuguese accent from Captains Courageous but, gracias a Dios, not too much. Garfield plays his best friend, and they're both in love with Hedy Lamarr. Garfield wisely doesn't try the accent, he just gives his speech some vaguely Spanish cadences. (The Siren finds that actors using accents frequently get the sounds right, but step all over the rhythm of a dialect.) Anyway, the movie is dishwater dull, providing interest only in a rather sweet sequence concerning a baby, and when Garfield is fighting with Lamarr. Despite being miscast the actor gives real believability to his love for Lamarr and strikes sparks off the frosty beauty.

TCM's article on Tortilla Flat has a funny story from filming:

Garfield recalls shooting his first scene with Fleming at the helm: "The director called a halt and shouted: 'For Christ's sake, Garfield, you have to do better than that. I fought like hell to get you in this picture, so don't make me look like a fool.'" As Tracy snickered in the background, Fleming railed at Garfield some more and they shot the scene again. "Take it easy, Garfield, don't get too good. A lot of your scenes are with Hedy Lamarr. She's not what you'd call unoutclassable, and we can't let that happen. Let's take it again. Be better than you were the first time, but worse than the second."

Ah, Hedy. It's hard to feel sorry for one of the most beautiful women in film history, but sometimes the Siren does. Shirley Temple got more respect as an actress. In one of life's glaring inequities Lamarr was a beauty and an intellect, so she probably knew her colleagues thought she couldn't act her way out of a lipstick tube. Her "autobiography," Ecstasy and Me, indicates an ego the size of Guam but it also reeks of tall-tale ghostwriting more than any star memoir the Siren has ever read (and as we all know, I've read too many). Lamarr later sued the ghostwriter for embellishing the book and was mocked for her pains. People snickered that she hadn't realized it would make her look like a mix of Baby Jane and Messalina and so, they said, Hedy decided to pretend it was all made up. Well, the Siren thinks that if Hedy could invent frequency-hopping (do you understand how that works? because I sure don't) she could read a manuscript and know how it would sound. There probably was some fabricated stuff, maybe even a lot. It was the lurid sex passages that caused a sensation in 1967--"Hollywood is prudish," shrugged David Shipman. And it's the sex scenes that sound a lot more like a male writer's fantasies than a woman's reminiscences. Of far more concern to the Siren was how Lamarr lovingly details her adoption of a son and her fight to keep him after her divorce--then barely mentions him after she has biological children with a second husband.*

Hedy is TCM's star of the month for April and the Siren has made a discovery: one reason for Lamarr's reputation as a dreadful actress is that her most famous films contain her worst performances. Ziegfeld Girl? Judy Garland blows her off the screen; hell, Lana Turner does too. Samson and Delilah? Her midriff does most of the acting. Algiers? She doesn't have that much screen time and what she does have is excruciatingly self-conscious. And then there's White Cargo, probably her second-most-famous role after the Philistine woman. Man, this is a dreadful movie. Just re-viewing the first hour last night put the Siren in such a grumpy frame of mind she didn't have energy to figure out how to record Experiment Perilous. Lamarr sports hideous brown body makeup, although the Production Code's repulsive miscegenation clause meant she's half-breed but not really half-breed and even though they're in Africa she's certainly not THAT kind of African, my goodness no, here's this letter about her parents. Hedy's pidgin syntax, her sarongs, the way she conveys evil intent by narrowing her eyes, seductiveness by parting her lips and tilting her head back--is this where Claudia Cardinale picked up her technique? The only fun parts are the violent tantrums from Walter Pidgeon when one character complains again about how it's "beastly hot." "STOP SAYING THAT!" shrieks Pidgeon. It's like an early colonial version of Office Space.



But Hedy wasn't always terrible. The Siren has seen two movies in which Lamarr's quite fun, although she does benefit from low expectations. In Edgar Ulmer's Strange Woman, a movie she produced herself, she Vivien-Leighs all over the place, adopting every one of that actress's gestures and movements as Scarlett. But Lamarr is still most enjoyable as a Maine belle with an unexplained accent who uses her sexual allure in an unexpectedly explicit manner, including an implied S&M scene that you truly don't want to miss. Plus, you get Ulmer's direction. Who knew Down East was this erotic?

The second movie is Come Live With Me, a romantic comedy that seemed to owe quite a bit to the previous year's Remember the Night, from Paramount, not to mention It Happened One Night. While not nearly as good as either of those two Come Live With Me has its own points, including excellent performances from James Stewart as a frustrated, then lovelorn writer and Ian Hunter and Verree Teasdale as a posh publishing couple with an open marriage. Lamarr's part as a European refugee is potentially unsympathetic. She starts out as a kept woman breaking up a marriage, then proceeds to a green-card marriage with Stewart. But for once her essentially cool persona serves her well, as you don't know precisely how her feelings tend, and the script keeps offering good reasons for her behavior. Stewart also helps, as he was a premiere romantic actor, able to inject tenderness into scenes with even the least promising leading ladies. Here, a year past The Philadelphia Story, he's another average Joe teasing an ice princess down off her mountain top. Lamarr fares less well when he takes her home to the farm--she's walking around all delighted at the decor when you just know she wouldn't have been caught dead in the place. But she regains her footing with the farcical denouement.

The Siren recorded King Vidor's H.M. Pulham, Esq., which Lamarr frequently cited in Ecstasy and Me as the sort of role she wished she'd had more often. After viewing it, if inspired, the Siren will let you know whether Hedy knew what she was talking about, or was exhibiting the critical facilities that made her say sarongs and hip-swinging would make her a "memorable nymphomaniac" in White Cargo.



*Biographer Patrick Agan claims here that her treatment of that son wasn't as bad as it sounds.

Can it be that after 30 years of having one book following a few paces behind any discussion of Joan Crawford, it is finally time for a revival?

A real revival, as an actress and screen presence, and not as some embalmed artifact of camp?

Could be, could be. Witness this new boxed set, with some movies that had been hard to see for a while. Check out this cogent piece by Dave Kehr, who treats her acting and persona with respect. And finally there's this new book, Not the Girl Next Door, Charlotte Chandler's rebuttal to Mommie Dearest that contains a lengthy conversation with Cathy, one of Joan's adopted daughters, who has never been particularly accessible to the press. The Siren hasn't read the book although she did devour the Vanity Fair excerpt. And now here we are, at the 100th anniversary of Crawford's birth.

Oops, maybe not. 1908 is the date on her headstone, but almost no one believes it. Crawford was always said to be lopping two years off her actual age. Never mind, the Siren grew up in Alabama, where a lady never revealed her true age, and if she leaned across her walker and adjusted her hearing aid to tell you, with an air of flirtatious secrecy, that she was "frankly forty" you faked astonishment that she was a day over 35. So the Siren smiles and says to the shade of Miss Crawford, "You know, I'd have said 1928, myself."

Anyway, this renewed interest is good news for those of us who love Joan, who find great pleasure in her movies and don't want to hear about the goddamn wire hangers anymore. The Siren believes the book alone probably wouldn't have permanently altered Crawford's image to the extent that it has. It was the movie, with Faye Dunaway playing Crawford as a cross between Maleficent and Gregory Peck in The Boys From Brazil, that really did the extensive damage. Thank god nobody ever filmed the atrocious My Mother's Keeper or we'd have to go through the same routine every time we wanted to talk about Jezebel. The Siren already discussed the image. Let's discuss a movie or two.

You'd have to watch the way she came in...If Joan was wearing a pair of slacks, that meant you'd go over and slap her right on the ass and say 'Hiya kid. You getting much?' In turn she'd be as raucous as Billie Cassin from Texas at that moment and you'd have an absolute ball. She could come back the next day wearing black sables and incredible sapphires, and by Jesus, you'd better be on your feet and click your heels, kiss her hand, and talk with the best British accent you had, but never in any way indicate she was different in any respect from the way she was yesterday, because the following day she'd come in in a dirndl or a pinafore and you'd be on the floor playing jacks with her. I loved it. You had to be an actor and be adaptive to what she was playing, though the moment she left my office, I went back to what I was before she came in.
--Joseph L. Mankiewicz (who had an affair with Crawford), quoted in Kenneth L. Geist, Pictures Will Talk

The Siren ordinarily does not venture into drive-by psychoanalysis, but the way Joan Crawford worked all her life to improve, educate, refine and otherwise alter herself is striking indeed. One facile observation often made about actors has to do with innate insecurity--they don't like themselves inside and so they venture into other personas. The Siren doesn't find this particularly true or even logical. Anyone who has watched a child try on one character after another knows that an active, expanding intelligence and the magic of imagination have at least as much or more to do with the drive to act. But that is on-screen, not off. Crawford, who claimed she never originally wanted to be an actress, carried on her constant self-alterations in real life, as Mankiewicz tells us.

And so it isn't surprising, considering Crawford's almost complete lack of formal technique, that her most memorable roles were also women scrambling to better themselves, usually through sex. Jean Harlow, to whom Crawford lost several roles, played a lot of lower-class women on the make, but sex is a romp to Harlow's characters. Sex is serious business to Crawford, the one thing that will either be her lifeline or her undoing, and not infrequently both in the same movie.

Take her role as Flaemmchen, Grand Hotel's big-eyed stenographer, longing to break into movies but meanwhile trying to get what she can out of the Wallace Beerys of the world. The Siren loves Crawford in this movie. The star was never more magically beautiful and she gives a startlingly subtle performance, conveying at every turn Flaemmchen's determination to get all she can out of her looks and men, and the price she pays for doing so.

Look at her exchange with Beery's character, Preysing, when the wolfish businessman wants to get on a first-name basis. Some of the Siren's other 1930s tough-tootsie favorites might have played it broader, but Crawford's delivery is very matter-of-fact, funnier and several times more stingingly accurate: "Suppose I met you next year and said, 'How do you do, Mr. Preysing?' And you said, 'That's the young lady who was my secretary in Manchester.' That's all quite proper. But supposing I saw you and yelled 'Hi baby. Remember Manchester?'" When Beery laughs, she continues imperturbably, "Yeah, and you were with your wife. How would you like that?"

Crawford lets us see the stenographer's distaste for Preysing, but you also see that she loathes poverty much, much more. She doesn't play Flaemmchen as a stereotypical "bad" girl--she's just trying to get by, like everyone else in the movie. (She's helped, of course, by a Pre-Code script that doesn't force her character to get an attack of conscience or die saving a baby from a fire or something.) Instead you get scenes like the one Goatdog describes in his review, where Flaemmchen and Preysing are clearly negotiating her price as his escort. No one but Crawford could do quite as superbly in the moment while she stops, smokes and considers her "up-front" expenses for an interlude in England. Her expression is equal parts avarice, gambler's calculation, and resignation to the gross physical fact of Preysing.

She was very much the star. I think that's a very important to thing to remember about her, that she was in command of what she did. Now, if she was not that confident herself, she certainly gave a damned good performance of somebody that was!

--Rosalind Russell, quoted in Movie Talk

As the Joan Crawford Encyclopedia points out, the idea that she played a lot of shopgirls in the 1930s isn't borne out by her filmography. In fact, during the decade she only played three. It's probably more accurate to say, as one British critic did, that she was the shopgirl's delight. Her ascent to the upper classes, or her presence there from the movie's beginning, is sweet revenge if you're trying to alter your own lot in life. And lord knows there were plenty of people desperate to do that in the 1930s.

But Crawford closed out the decade with a shopgirl role, perhaps the shopgirl role of all time, Crystal Allen in The Women. Playing a woman who's supposed to be as hard and transparent as her name, Crawford still compels--well, sympathy is the wrong word. Admiration, of a kind, and fascination. Oh my yes, she fascinates from the second she appears. The woman is such an operator; as Virginia Grey puts it, "Holy mackerel, what a line."

A few posts back we were all agreeing that Mary Astor's perm in The Maltese Falcon did nothing for her. Mary's hair had nothing on Joan's in The Women. She was stuck with this frizzy mess because MGM's head hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff had to spend all his time of a morning putting together Norma Shearer's hair, which is also pretty horrendous to modern eyes, but let it pass. (Guilaroff had Rosalind Russell wear a lot of hats.) At this point Irving Thalberg was dead and Shearer's star was waning, but she still had the power to make Crawford grind her teeth. Forget the overhyped Bette Davis feud. Everything the Siren has read suggests it was Shearer whom Crawford loathed above all others. One of the few amusing moments in Mommie Dearest comes when Christina finally realizes that when her mother compares her to Shearer, it isn't a compliment.

Crawford spent years losing part after part to Shearer. Some of them, like The Barretts of Wimpole Street, were less than ideal for our Joan but others, like Idiot's Delight, might have been good indeed. "What chance have I got," Crawford snapped to her friends. "She sleeps with the boss." Less famous, but even funnier, was Crawford's response upon losing the lead in Idiot's Delight. Writer Shaun Considine says Mayer himself told Crawford that Thalberg had left Norma all his voting stock, enabling her to cause a great deal of trouble if displeased. "Christ," said Joan, "she really rode through this studio on his balls, didn't she?"

During The Women, while George Cukor was filming Shearer, Crawford sat on the sidelines knitting an afghan with the biggest, loudest needles available, until Shearer pointed out the distraction to her director and Cukor ordered Crawford back to her trailer. Shearer, impeccably ladylike in public, still was not immune to pettiness herself, having Crawford's trailer re-aligned when it protruded one foot past hers.

Since the Siren has never much cared for Shearer she's firmly on Crawford's side, and that's the charm of The Women. Joan just wipes the floor with her rival. In their big confrontation scene Joan bites off her lines like gunpowder cartridges. "What have you got to kick about?" she asks Shearer. "You've got the name, the position, the money..." Shearer replies that her husband's love means more. Crawford's response pretty much sums up the Siren's feeling about Shearer's character: "Can the sob stuff, sister. You noble wives and mothers bore the brains out of me." Shearer does get more interesting later on, when she starts to fight instead of posing and preaching, but round one goes to Crystal, and how. Next to her, Shearer looks dumpy and overbred. Even later, when Crawford says "I guess it's back to the perfume counter with me," she says it in a way that tells the audience the ladies haven't heard the last of Crystal.

"It's a classic film, really, and I'm proud to have appeared in it, but I don't think Crystal wormed her way into the public's heart," Crawford said later. The Siren hates to contradict a lady on her birthday, but Joan couldn't have been more wrong.

P.S. The Siren has been avoiding all mention of the remake that's in postproduction, but she decided to look up who's playing Crystal and oh dear, not good. (You have no idea how hard I had to look to find a picture of this woman that was safe for work.)
(updated 3/24)