PRINCE POPPYCOCK

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

You can access the chatter at The House Next Door.

What an up-and-down experience was Bonjour Tristesse, the film based on Francoise Sagan's brief novel about a young girl with an unhealthy jealousy about her alleycat father. The Siren loved the book as a teen, but it had not aged well when she revisited it. Still, artistically the 18-year-old's debut book was more cohesive than Otto Preminger's movie.

Preminger is no great favorite of the Siren. Of what she has seen, the Siren wholeheartedly loves Laura, Angel Face and Advise and Consent; likes somewhat but does not understand the fuss about Daisy Kenyon and Anatomy of a Murder; withstood Carmen Jones only for the sake of Dandridge and Belafonte and River of No Return for Monroe and Mitchum; was bored or repelled in varying measure by The Man With the Golden Arm, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Whirlpool, The Moon Is Blue and Bunny Lake Is Missing; and loathed Saint Joan, Exodus, Hurry Sundown and The Cardinal.

Excepting the first three movies (and to a degree the second two), there is a funhouse-mirror aspect to the Siren's discussions of Preminger with just about anybody outside of James Wolcott. Where Preminger's fans see sophistication, the Siren sees coarseness and an unpardonably leaden way with jokes large or small. Where they find moral complexity, the Siren finds herself repeatedly poked in the eye with The Message. When admirers talk about the beauty of his compositions, the Siren does see the point in many instances; still, the Siren frets over lack of flow, occasional bizarre framing, particularly in the late movies, and how a scene or even a shot can wear out its welcome until pacing and its sister, suspense, clutch their hearts and keel over. Others talk of Preminger's women; the Siren thinks his movies push almost all of them into one side of a nympho/frigid label and when the film doesn't, as with the title character in Daisy Kenyon, Preminger keeps the audience so far from the character that she never seems quite real.




Now that the Siren has gotten that off her chest, and has royally pissed off all the Preminger fans (I'm so sorry Glenn, I swear I love you anyway), some good, if qualified, words for Bonjour Tristesse. Plot: Seventeen-year-old Cecile sashays through Paris in the black-and-white present, moving from flirtation to flirtation while accompanied by her aging roue of a father, Raymond (David Niven). Flashback to the Technicolor Riviera in the previous summer, where Cecile finds her idyll interrupted by Raymond's marriage proposal to the refined Anne (Deborah Kerr). Unwilling to have her frolics cut off by Anne's prim insistence on things like studying, and prompted also by sexual jealousy over her father, Cecile plots to break up the engagement, with sad results.

One pleasure that maybe should be minor for the Siren, but wasn't: It was shot in France. The locations are a little bit of heaven and Preminger does not stint in using them. The Siren found herself cheering for the characters to get into another car or take another walk, because it meant another fabulous shot of a street, or a beach, or Cecile and Raymond's villa, the most swoonworthy beach house this side of Contempt.

And then there's Jean Seberg, a limited actress whom the Siren will nonetheless watch in anything. (I mean anything. I sat through Paint Your Wagon for that woman.) She had a vividly original beauty and give Otto credit where he deserves it, he shot her like a man bewitched. She walks away from a scene and Preminger leaves the camera on her backside like he can't bear to see her go. Seberg is breathtaking, and Bonjour Tristesse gives you every angle on her that you could possibly have in 1958.

What is interesting about Seberg in this film is the way she handles her obvious insecurities as an actress. Most inexperienced and/or nervous actresses (think early Ava Gardner or Linda Darnell in most things) will concentrate on getting the line readings just right and neglect the whole-body approach you get with someone truly in possession of her craft. Seberg does the opposite. Her movements in Bonjour Tristesse are perfection, or close--whether she is planting a kiss on the boy she's chosen to take her virginity, reaching her arms out to her father on a dance floor, chucking a picture into a drawer in a fit of temper or just getting ice cream out of the icebox, Seberg's every bit of body language plays as truth. But--her voice. Seberg started with a handicap, a thin voice further marred by a field-flat Midwestern accent, but she makes it worse with intonations that suggest she's reciting in class rather than expressing any kind of emotion. The lines all sound the same--a world-weary remark to a suitor gets the same type of expression she gives to joking with her father or plotting Anne's downfall. In Breathless, Godard took Seberg's affectless delivery and married it to a character for whom it made perfect sense. No such luck in Bonjour Tristesse.

The vocal problem is particularly acute because Seberg narrates large chunks of the movie. When we are flashing back to the Riviera summer, she tells us how very happy they were, and how they didn't see anything coming, and now she wonders if it all could have been prevented. And when we move from the Riviera back to Paris, Seberg tells us how very very triste everything is, and where did it all go wrong, and now she and her father are just pretending to be happy. And she also has occasional thinking-out-loud-on-the-soundtrack narration, like where she's chasing after someone and thinking "should I tell her? no, why should I tell her! then again..." All right, I am caricaturing, but only slightly. The narration is dull, at times risible, at least 95% unnecessary, and it's an open question as to whether Danielle Darrieux or Barbara Stanwyck at the height of their powers could have made these interjections work. Seberg, in only her second movie, didn't have a prayer.




Bonjour Tristesse gets a big boost from David Niven in a role that hit uncomfortably close to his real-life reputation. The Siren loved how Niven shows the slight seediness of Raymond's charm, the character's calculation and essential callousness. And Niven gives Raymond just the right amount of flirtatiousness with Cecile--enough to suggest the man is sublimating something by going with his younger girlfriends, but not enough to be repulsive. Deborah Kerr starts off low-key but ends up heartbreaking as Anne, who is rendered a lot less comprehensible and substantive than in the book.




Many of the factors that put the Siren off Preminger are present, though. Attempts at banter among these idle, intelligent people are remarkably slow and unfunny and an extended joke about three maids with similar names is DOA. There was an improbable dance on the docks that reminded the Siren of much that she hated about Carmen Jones. The way Preminger splits up focus in widescreen can strike the Siren as crude, attention jerked hither and yon rather than smoothly drawn from one spot to another. During several conversations there was an odd motif of chopping off the tallest actor at the crown of the head, but that was nothing compared to Kerr and Niven's first big love scene, played in a convertible. This was shot through the windshield in a way that planted the rearview mirror bang in the middle of Kerr's forehead. The Siren simply cannot fathom the reason for this, unless Kerr had somehow incensed her director, a possibility that should probably never be discounted with Preminger.

But the shots that the Siren is complaining about are layered between others of great beauty; in particular the black-and-white scenes are put together with impeccable visual grace. The Siren was delighted with the long swoops of the cars around the Paris streets and Seberg's eyes over her dance-partner's shoulder.




Preminger has a wintry approach to love; romance is usually a distant bat-squeak, if it's there at all. Some directors who don't believe in love do believe in sex, and plenty of it, but despite his vaunted frankness Preminger usually isn't that sexy, either, his camera hanging back as if to say, "Now, if you will, please observe this procedure." But Preminger's attitude is not that far from Sagan's, and Bonjour Tristesse has some heat. The sensuality is almost entirely reserved for Seberg and her young men, with an occasional fatherly embrace from Niven that seems to linger just a hair too long.

Kerr, on the other hand, has her hair scraped tightly off her face, wears clothes that usually don't flatter her and is placed in two-shots with Seberg that emphasize her age (all of 37) in a way that borders on the cruel. Anne's intelligence and intrinsic worth as a person, very much a factor in the novel, are scaled back in the movie. When she reminds Cecile that a seaside tryst "can end up in the hospital" (a pretty goddamn reasonable reminder for a teenager even now) she just sounds prissy. The Siren forgave all this, though, when she saw the final sequences.




Lured by Cecile, Anne stumbles upon Raymond as he tries to lure back his much-younger former flame. As she listens to the man she had planned to marry mocking her age, her looks and even her love, Preminger keeps the camera on Kerr's face, and it's a brilliant choice. You watch this woman's agony grow and grow until you can't bear it any more than she can, and she runs off. It's so beautifully played by Kerr that in no way do you question Anne's suicide later, despite her eminent common sense to that point--what else do you do with that kind of betrayal?

And even more than that, the Siren loved Cecile and Raymond's car ride after he gets the inevitable phone call. They jump into his convertible and wind down the road, and for once Preminger's buildup isn't too long--the car stops in front of the roadblock at exactly the right moment, and its lurch throws you back even though you already know what you're going to see.

Then...back to Paris, and more narration. Lots and lots of narration. But it does build to a superb shot of Seberg, taking off her makeup and staring into the mirror, facing a future already bleak and loveless at the ripe old age of seventeen. That shot, and Kerr's last sequence a few moments earlier, make up for a great deal, even if they don't change the Siren's overall view on Preminger.

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."

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.

"You will get me to defend to the death a good melodrama any day of the week," Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films once said here. "It's an unfairly maligned form that I happen to love."

The Siren's been thinking about this most excellent observation (made on behalf of Million Dollar Baby, for the record) for the past few days, as the film blogosphere has one of its periodic kerfuffles. Remember when the Siren got rather worked up over the Oscar writer who dissed Sunrise right before the cinematography award? That was nothing compared to what Tom O'Neil of the Los Angeles Times dished out last week.

"Sunrise" is paper-thin, hilariously schmaltzy. All three primary characters are cartoonish clichés and their performances 3-inch slices of honeyed ham.

Mind you, I'm the kinda guy who'd normally side with the weepie. On my top 10 list of fave pix of all time are "Peggy Sue Got Married" and "Titanic." But I just can't shed a real tear when the farmer in "Sunrise" decides that he just — by golly! — can't off his sweet, dimpled wifey-pooh, after all. Nor could I cheer the scenes of the couple back together, all giddy smiles and kisses, posing for photos like newlyweds, dancing a happy peasant dance, joyous once he decided not to wring her scrawny little neck and hurl her over the side of the row boat.

What corn pone! Smothered in Cheez Whiz! "Wings" ain't Shakespeare or Scorsese, mind you, but it's better than that!

Reassured by the belief that their prime duty was to entertain, film makers bought material of great potential and intelligence, stripped it of motivation and complex overtones, and reduced the action to basic, easy-to-follow melodrama.

Even the dictionary defines melodrama with a certain distaste: "Drama marked by crude appeals to emotion."

The purveyors of entertainment find melodrama an invaluable asset. It requires not the slightest effort on the part of the audience. They are not required to think, they merely watch. They will not miss any subtlety because there will not BE any subtlety. The values are simple, the threat is clear and
the resolution action-filled and straightforward. There is seldom any characterization in pure melodrama, never any complex motivation. Life is reduced to the infantile level of an adventure strip.

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

The Siren was oversold on Le Samouraï, not by any critic, but by the Jean-Pierre Melville movies she saw previously. Having seen Un Flic, which she thought pretty good, Bob le Flambeur, which she thought excellent, and L'Armée des Ombres, which she thought a masterpiece, the Siren was all in a tizzy to Netflix this classic. Le Samouraï, after a patently phony epigraph, opens with a long shot of Alain Delon, barely visible on the bed in a dirty Parisian flat, smoke from his cigarette gathering above his head. And there was this squeak in the background, and the Siren tried to figure out what it reminded her of, until she thought, "Damn. That sounds like the windmill in Once Upon a Time in the West." It's Delon's pet bird, but the association really, really should have warned her. This movie is a cerebrally paced, meticulously framed, fantastically good-looking stiff. The Siren admired its stark construction but it was an endurance test, 105 minutes that felt twice as long as L'Armée did at 145.

In interviews Melville suggested that Jef, a hired assassin and the "samurai" of the title, is schizophrenic, but crazy people are usually livelier than this, at least in the movies. Somewhere around the time Jef got nicked by a bullet the Siren realized there was never going to be a point where she gave two hoots in hell about him. Instead she found herself looking at Delon's face, dour and unchanging in shot after shot, and remembering the verdict of his ex-lover Brigitte Bardot: "Alain is beautiful, but so is my Louis XVI commode." Nathalie Delon (married to Alain at the time) and Cathy Rosier, both gorgeous, apparently had the same acting coach as the star. The police chief (François Périer) was the Siren's favorite. He cracks jokes and has facial expressions.

The Siren can understand the admiration for the steel-colored perfection of Le Samouraï's look. But watching Delon dart around the Metro, in fear for his life, left her as cold as Harry Lime looking down from the Ferris wheel. The Siren has resigned herself to more lonely iconoclasm, but she did find this. Merci, M. Rosenbaum, for expressing a few reservations. And apologies to Girish.

Above left (click to enlarge): Alain Delon, right three-quarters view; Alain Delon, left three-quarters view; Alain Delon looks at a gun; Alain Delon looks at Cathy Rosier; Cathy Rosier looks at Alain Delon. Special bonus: Compare the second shot with this snap of the Delons' son. Joie de vivre runs in the family.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Famous exchange at Ernst Lubitsch's funeral:

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

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

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

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

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

Many critics have a terror of going down in history like Bosley Crowther, as the relic who looked at a seminal moment in movie history (in Crowther's case, Bonnie and Clyde) and reached for the smelling salts. The Siren has no such anxiety. She wears her fuddy-duddiness with pride. Describe her taste as 1950s and she will be flattered. Call her Depression-era and she will buy you a drink.

The film of the moment is, god help us, Hostel Part II, and some excellent critics either love it or expect to. Michael Guillen and D.K. Holme loved it. Kim Morgan, Cinebeats and The Bleeding Tree are eager to see it. Dennis Cozzalio has posted a thoughtful consideration of the movie and what it means for the horror genre.

Still, the Siren examines her end of the bar for the other relics and finds some good company. Here is Filmbrain, a blogger the Siren unreservedly adores, and a man no one can accuse of having a low bloodshed threshold. James Wolcott looked at the "Quentin Tarantino Presents" imprimatur on the Hostel Part II posters and summed up the erstwhile wonder boy as "a pimp for geek sadism." Jeffrey Wells and David Poland could definitely use a double martini after sitting through the movie. The Siren believes she owes S.T. VanAirsdale a drink now, should she bump into him. And Damian Arlyn posted a most eloquent defense of his refusal to see Eli Roth's minimum opus. I didn't think I could add much to Damian's piece. Do read it, he does a splendid job. But for some reason--maybe it's those repulsive print ads I keep stumbling across, maybe it's this impromptu blogathon we seem to have going--I have to say my piece anyway.

The Siren won't be seeing Hostel or its sequel, or Saw and its spawn, or The Hills Have Eyes remake or Wolf Creek, or any of the antecedents like Cannibal Holocaust or I Spit on Your Grave, for that matter. First Amendment absolutist that she is, the Siren in no way argues for the banning of these movies, although when she reflects that Martin Scorsese had to spend many long days cutting down Goodfellas to avoid an NC-17, the irony just about asphyxiates her.

When the Grand Guignol shut down in Paris in 1962, its final director remarked, "We could never equal Buchenwald." The likes of Eli Roth and Greg McLean can't equal the Iraq war, but that hasn't stopped people from flocking. Well, the Siren requires no elaboration on the "why" behind the grosses for Hostel or its siblings. Our time has no need for catharsis or satiation that plausibly can be called unique. Read William Makepeace Thackeray's description of the crowd at a London hanging in 1840, and you will have all you ever need to know about what draws us to the most brutal side of horror. It is as fundamental a human taste as any other.

And the Siren doesn't think having that taste says much about a person. Her longtime roommate in the 1980s adored slasher movies. This was a man who never saw a baby he didn't want to cootchy-coo at, apologized to his cat when he moved it off the couch and wouldn't eat in a restaurant on Thanksgiving because he felt sorry for the waiters. He's the reason the Siren saw a long list of slasher flicks in the Nightmare-Freddie-Jason-Chucky-Hellraiser era, until she finally gave up trying to see the point of them and started retreating to her room with a book.

Most of us have a limited amount of viewing time relative to what we like to call "real life." Netflix just sent me L'Armée des Ombres, and I have not watched it yet. Anyone want to tell me that Hostel Part II is worth my time as much as that one? Is there a single performance in the latest round of jolly little splatterfests that can withstand comparison with one in Jean-Pierre Melville's movie? How about the dialogue, the camerawork, the editing, the sound, the art direction, the goddamn costumes even? Is there "social commentary" in any of the gorefests that could sustain an intelligent discussion for more than ten minutes?

You can argue that "torture porn" movies entertain. Rock on. So do a lot of things. Say that they are really about survival; the Siren does not buy that one, but you can argue it. You can point out that some of the techniques make their way into more mainstream fare. Fair enough. Dickens was influenced by the Newgate Calendar. That doesn't make Dick Turpin into Oliver Twist.

Praising the most gore-splattered subset of horror becomes supportable only by drawing in movies that really don't fit, such as the original Halloween or the wildly overrated Psycho, both of which achieve their effects far more through suggestion than through explicit violence. You could draw in John Ford--this John Ford--or John Webster , but there is, shall we say, a certain difference in script quality. The only other way to argue for these movies as anything other than disposable crap is to compare them with other blood-soaked horror films (comparing them with something like Val Lewton only exposes their limitations further). Hostel Part II may look great judged by the standards of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Is it--or any other torture porn flick--great relative to Melville?

P.S. Guess I have my answer. Ian Pugh, of the very good site filmfreakcentral, compares Hostel Part II to Bunuel. Scoot over, Bosley. The Siren owes you a drink.

The Siren registers polite disagreement with Dave Kehr of the New York Times, and his review yesterday of new DVDs. I hope he didn't mean it when he said that the 1948 Anna Karenina and the double DVD set of the 1935 and 1952 Les Misérables were destined to sit "somewhere on a back shelf in high school libraries, to be shown whenever an English teacher feels like taking an afternoon off." Both releases have a great deal to offer film lovers.

The Siren saw that version of Tolstoy quite some time ago, and while Vivien Leigh could not compete with memories of Garbo in the same role thirteen years earlier, Ralph Richardson was a superb Karenin. It was also directed by Julien Duvivier, a fine talent who achieved greatness more than once with films such as Un Carnet de Bal and Pepe le Moko. As for Les Misérables, the Siren hasn't seen the 1952 version, though Robert Newton supposedly does a good job as Javert, and Lewis Milestone was no slouch. But releasing the 1935 version is a genuine event, for it contains Charles Laughton as Javert, a role recorded at the pinnacle of his artistry. It's been darned hard to find for lo these many years, despite virtues such as cinematography by the great Gregg Toland. The director was Richard Boleslawski, a veteran of the Moscow Art Theatre whose role in bringing the Method to America led Simon Callow to call him "Moses, or perhaps John the Baptist." Laughton's wife, Elsa Lanchester (Madame Magloire in the 1952 version), thought it Laughton's finest performance. And Gloria, if you are reading this and you have a multi-region DVD player, Amazon has it for $13.99, and they ship to Spain. The Siren's copy is on its way.

Finally, a word about Orson Welles as Rochester in Jane Eyre (1944), also released this week. The Siren cheerfully acknowledges her own Welles worship, but she still thinks his performance has been short-changed. Rochester in the novel is a frequently menacing figure, who at first frightens Jane as much as he fascinates her. The Siren sees little similarity between Welles's Rochester, with his air of privilege and his acid sarcasm at Jane's expense, and Heathcliff, the half-wild, uncouth orphan, desperately in love with a woman he cannot have. (Perhaps the association comes from Laurence Olivier. He was mesmerizing, but he played Heathcliff throughout with an accent more redolent of the Old Vic than the stable.)

Joan Fontaine did indeed play the spirited Jane a mite too close to Mrs. de Winter territory. But I would not call the novel's Rochester downtrodden, as Mr. Kehr does, not even at the end when, as Joyce Carol Oates wrote, "the blind and crippled Rochester is no less masculine than before." Rather than playing it safe, as a straight figure of romance, Welles brought out the neurosis in Rochester to a marked degree while retaining the arrogance of the aristocrat. That was a definite risk. As David Shipman put it, Welles "moved and looked the part, darkly romantic, but it was hard to believe that he wasn't as insane as his wife."