PRINCE POPPYCOCK

This week's anecdote was inspired by Glenn Kenny, whose blogging has been on a tear of late. He posted recently about a Blu-Ray edition of Black Narcissus, available in the UK. Now the Siren's attitude toward technical advances in home viewing, born of bitter experience, is that it's bad news for classic films. We all know the drill. The studios won't want to invest money in releasing niche items on the new format, much less rarities, and instead there will be a gazillion different superhero movies to choose from. (Because we were running out of those, you know.) There are far fewer titles available on DVD than were on VHS, and I see Blu-Ray making that worse. I'll believe it's an unqualified good for classic movie fans when I hear about the Blu-Ray edition of Desire.

But even the Siren has to admit that the news isn't all bad for those of us who don't want the latest Pirates of the Carribbean on high-def. Glenn has some excellent news about this new version of Black Narcissus. Click over and see what he has to say, and the very revealing screen captures he's posted. It prompted a mini-discussion of Technicolor, and Jack Cardiff, and the Siren's signed edition of Michael Powell's marvelous autobiography, A Life in Movies. And that, in turn, prompted this anecdote of the week.

It's from the section in Powell's book about filming The Thief of Baghdad. Together with cameramen like Cardiff, Georges Périnal and Christopher Challis, Powell made the most beautiful Technicolor films anyone will ever see. (And one thing the Siren likes about Powell's books is that he always gives due credit to the DP.) This, however, did not mean Powell worked free from interference by Natalie Kalmus, the "color advisor" moviemakers were saddled with if they wanted to film in Technicolor. She was universally regarded as a pain in the ass, having a meddlesome, high-handed personality coupled with dreadful taste. But producer Alexander Korda, while talented, was no picnic either, as we shall see. Powell says that although "my name is on the picture, as one of the directors...the film is really the swan song of the Korda brothers--Alex, Vincent and Zoli [Zoltan]."

I had never directed a colour film, but I found the crossover easy. "Make the colour work for you, don't start working for the colour," I said to myself.

And when Natalie Kalmus was firing off her cliches at a grumbling Vincent Korda as she stalked about the big sets on the lot, I said to myself, "We are not making coloured picture postcards for Technicolor."

Mrs. Kalmus, naturally, went by the book. She was not an artist, and the sight of one of Matisse's canvases of that period would probably have sent her to bed for a week. Alex [Korda] knew even less about painting, although he pretended he did, and Vincent had bought him a Manet to hang on one of his walls. I have been with him and Vincent and Nuisance and Frank Walker, the chief of construction, as they walked around the huge pink set of the marketplace and looked at the elaborate foreground miniatures of the city on the hill which were being put in place. Alex, on principle, was never content with anything his brothers did, and he would grumble: "Vincent! What do you think this set is supposed to be?"

"It is the palace, Alex."

"It's a piece of shit. Tear it down and rebuild it four times as big and paint it blue."

"Pink, Alex."

"Pink, then!"

For years around the Siren's former Harlem household, which she shared with two gay men she misses a great deal, a major catchphrase was "Four times as big, and paint it pink."




Here are some other pieces the Siren has been catching up on around the blogosphere:

Raymond de Felitta has switched gears to blog the filming of his new movie, City Island, right here in New York with Alan Arkin, Steven Strait and Emily Mortimer. Andy Garcia plays an everyman, a prison guard with yearnings for art--a type of art that is dear to the Siren. Already there is a lot to enjoy, such as this post about Arkin.

Bob Westal has been devoting himself to the fabulous Michael Caine, one of the Siren's favorite actors of any era. Start here and follow to the magazine. Bob's got clips, reviews and career retrospective. But Bob, where is the love for Caine in Mona Lisa?

Over at Goatdogblog Michael Phillips was blogging his European travels, but the Oscar From the Outside In project is still in full swing. Nick's Flick Picks has the one the Siren was looking forward to, Crash vs. All Quiet on the Western Front, and the Siren was delighted that there was not unmitigated hate for Crash. I still haven't seen Crash, mind you, but I love a contrarian viewpoint, even a partial one. And anything nice about Crash is contrarian. And now The Film Experience has Cimarron vs. Million Dollar Baby. Adding--the Siren's new favorite catchphrase, from Michael discussing the thematic complexities of Cimarron: "Did they mean anything except 'look at this huge budget'?"

Speaking of contrarian, here's Peter Nelhaus: "I know there are some who love El Dorado. Too often, I got the feeling that Rio Bravo was a river that should have been best visited once." The Siren feels the same way about El Dorado; definitely lesser Hawks. I have been waiting to hear Peter's opinion of Lee Server's Robert Mitchum biography, and here it is, in tandem with reviews of El Dorado and Man in the Middle.

Dennis Cozzalio, who once met John Belushi, has an open forum on Animal House going.

Kimberly Lindbergs has great news about a CD release of movie music by John Barry.

The Siren tries to read every word of Greenbriar Picture Shows for its impeccable research and intelligence. John McElwee always has something different to add to the discussion. Three posts the Siren has particularly loved recently. There is this two-parter on the wild and woolly experiments with movie theaters in the late 1920s, and how early widescreen was snuffed out in the 1930s, darn near taking the careers of Raoul Walsh and John Wayne with it. And then there is this sympathetic look at not just the tragedy, but also the work of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.

Noir of the Week tackles the best film poor doomed Barbara Payton ever made, via her biographer John O'Dowd. Talk about a star-crossed dame.

Finally, Ivan at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear is the antidote to the sour sentiments expressed here a few weeks ago about Red Skelton. And Ivan just wrote up Anthony Mann's "historical noir" Reign of Terror (aka The Black Book), which the Siren has waiting for her in a stack of recorded DVDs even as we speak. She recorded it off TCM in hopes of getting a better look at John Alton's cinematography, but no dice. Ivan reports that it's the same crappy print that's everywhere else.

Which brings us right back where we started. I know I'm a curmudgeon, but I have company. Blu-Ray, schmu-ray.

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

(bumped)

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

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

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

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




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

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



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

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



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

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

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


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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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