PRINCE POPPYCOCK

Last year the Siren was traveling from New York to Seattle with four-year-old twins and her 14-month-old in tow. Should you ever attempt this, the Siren has one word for you: Bribes. Our bribes consisted of factory-sealed juice and milk boxes, one for each kid, which careful reading of the relevant airline guidelines seemed to indicate was permissible.

The security guard, however, must not have read the same Web page, because she hauled out all of our toddler baksheesh and arranged it on the table with a scowl that said we were about to get busted, big time. "I'll have to call my supervisor," she said, with the air of one who says, "I'll have to call Judge Jeffreys." Said supervisor arrived, a small and stressed-out man in his uniform shirtsleeves. The guard took him aside and the Siren heard her saying, "It's too much, they're trying to bring way too much." But instead of glaring at the Siren and her rule-bending brood the supervisor cocked an eyebrow at the guard and the Siren heard him say wearily, "They're traveling with three kids, f'Chrissake. Let 'em take in the juice."

He turned and started to walk away and the Siren cupped a hand to her mouth and called, "HEY!" He turned.

"Merry Christmas!" called the Siren, with gusto that would have befitted the Cratchits. The supervisor grinned and mouthed, "You too."

To that supervisor, and all those who are willing to bend the rules to make a holiday brighter, the Siren dedicates this story.

It's from Anita Loos's completely charming book about her relationship with silent stars Constance and Norma, The Talmadge Girls. Anita, Constance, the third Talmadge sister, Natalie (who would later marry Buster Keaton), and the formidable Talmadge mother, Peg, decided one year during their 1920s heyday that a warm California Christmas just wouldn't do. So the four ladies took the storied Twentieth Century to New York City and arrived just after midnight on Christmas Day. They found a Christmas tree on Vanderbilt Avenue, but no decorations. They deposited the tree in their hotel suite and Peg went to bed but Constance, Natalie and Anita, being more adventurous sorts, went out determined to find something with which to trim the tree. After wandering the deserted streets they found a drugstore in Grand Central that was open and staffed by a handsome, but sleepy clerk. He immediately recognized Constance Talmadge, but sadly admitted that his drugstore had nothing for tree-trimming.

And we were on our way out when the clerk, seeing romance about to disappear from his life forever, called, "Oh, Miss Talmadge! Come on back!"

He proceeded to unearth a box of small objects wrapped in silver foil, which glistened in the light. When Nate asked what they were, he said evasively, "What does it matter? They look like icicles, don't they?

Dutch [Constance's nickname] agreed eagerly and purchased all he had of them. The young man now ventured further. "Could you use some balloons?"

"Terrific!" Nate piped up. At which our benefactor produced a package of small deflated balloons, which he explained could be blown up and secured with dental floss. After which our young friend bethought himself of surgical cotton to serve as snow. Then, in a parting gesture, he presented Dutch with the two strings of colored lights that were blinking above the cash register.

The drugstore clerk, utterly in love with Dutch at that point, carried the "decorations" back to the hotel suite where he, Anita and Talmadge girls decorated the tree.

"Let's wake Peg up to see it!" dared Nate. And it was agreed to risk Peg's fury. When she entered, wearing her nightie and sleepy-eyed, we waited breathlessly for her reaction.

"Why," she exclaimed, "it's absolutely gorgeous!"

Dutch's suitor now felt safe enough to introduce himself to the mother-in-law of his dreams. "Mrs, Talmadge," said he, "my name is Lester Noonan and I'm honored to make your acquaintance."

As Peg blinked at him, Dutch placed a caressing hand on his arm. "Lester dug up all the ornaments for our tree!" she announced.

But she spoke a little too fondly, for Peg immediately began to assess the young man's attractions. As if he were not even present, she asked, "And where did you dig him up?"

"At that all-night drugstore!"

"Drugstore!" Peg repeated in a tone that placed all drugstores in a category with cesspools. Suspiciously, she turned to remove one of the icicles from the tree, examined it, and then in smoldering fury she addressed Lester.

"Why you sonofabitch!"

"Peg!" we all remonstrated.

"Do you know what this thing is?"

"What?" asked Dutch.

"It's a suppository!"

Lester blanched and looked flat enough to creep under the wall-to-wall carpet.

"What's a suppository?" inquired Nate.

"That's right! show your ignorance!"

Now Peg yanked one of the small balloons from the tree. "And d'you know what this object is?...It's a goddamn contraceptive!"

"What's a contraceptive?" asked Dutch.

"It's only due to my upbringing that you don't know!" Again Peg turned on Lester. "It's scum like you who give movie stars a filthy name!...Take that nasty thing apart before Walter Winchell gets wind of it! Or Town Topics! Or, God help us, Louella Parsons!"

We removed the unholy objects from our tree and Lester found a trash bin in the back hall where he could bury them.

We had scarcely finished when Norma and Joe [Schenck, later Norma's husband] descended on us from Atlantic City...

"Merry Christmas!" exclaimed Norma. But then, spotting the tree with its unlit bulbs and gobs of cotton snow, she gasped, "What is that thing?"

...But at that point Joe was already coming to the rescue. He picked up the phone, called the hotel management, and commandeered the enormous Christmas tree that decorated the downstairs lobby.

By that time the bells of St. Bartholomew's were chiming 'O Come, All Ye Faithful' and through the windows we saw snowflakes drifting like a benediction. There is nothing in the world that can warm the human heart like a snowy Christmas in New York. And as Lester forlornly approached Dutch to say "Well, Miss Talmadge, good-bye," Peg, in an upsurge of Christian spirit, invited him to join the family party. In reaction, Dutch's gaze took on the nearest thing to love light I had heretofore encountered.

Happy Holidays and a joyous New Year from the Siren's family, to yours.

(Above, the Talmadge girls in San Diego. Left to right: Constance, Natalie, Buster Keaton, director Clarence Brown (identified for the Siren by Rudyfan1926), Norma, Peg. Middle, Constance. Second from bottom, Anita. Bottom, Norma.)

After years of complaining that American directors all wanted to be the next De Palma or Scorsese, but nobody wanted to be Lubitsch, the Siren is finally seeing a favorite director get his moment: Douglas Sirk. Of course, Almodovar loves Sirk, and Fassbinder loved Sirk, and Sirk's visual fingerprints are all over something like 8 Women. But in American movies Sirk has been something of a rarefied taste, championed by John Waters but not many others, until recently. He started creeping back around the time of American Beauty (1999), where Sam Mendes and Conrad Hall created a suburb so lush it might have included some fawns wandering past had the filmmakers not chosen a plastic bag. American Beauty was interesting, because many people seemed to walk away liking it a lot, and then at some point, realized they had been had. The Siren will 'fess up to that reaction, since Glenn Kenny was already man enough to do the same. Then there was Far From Heaven, a better movie. Todd Haynes showed some Sirk love earlier than that, in the brilliant Safe, but Far from Heaven was an attempt to make a Sirk movie without the Production Code getting in the way, and it turned out worthwhile, if short of a masterpiece. Now on television there's Mad Men, which tries for The Apartment's bite in the office scenes and Sirk in the houses and bedrooms, though it is about twenty times more dour than either director ever thought about being.

So when the Siren's email turned up an invitation from an extremely nice publicist to go see Revolutionary Road, the Sam Mendes film adapted from Richard Yates' novel, she immediately thought, "Great idea. 1950s suburbia--why, I'll compare it to Sirk. That's what I'll do."

We've somehow been conditioned to look at a lushly photographed 1950s bedroom community and think Sirk, but Sirk's classic late melodramas didn't deal much with the middle class. Frequently his main characters are wealthy or about to become so, as in Imitation of Life, Written on the Wind and Magnificent Obsession. Even All That Heaven Allows, the most suburban of Sirk's movies, shows Jane Wyman as upper-middle enough to be part of the country-club set. Other characters, as with Rock Hudson in Heaven, Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner in Imitation and the flyers in Tarnished Angels, labor physically with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Characters like Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, toiling at medium-paying office jobs that are dependable, but suck the soul, are not as common. Rather, Sirk uses the glittering trappings that his producer Ross Hunter craved, and repeatedly demonstrates that a life of easy material comfort is still a life that American society can smother with appalling ease.

Sirk never met a flourish he was afraid to use, provided it had grace and beauty. The Siren loves nothing better than to sit and watch as the master throws it all at her--angel choirs, mirror shots, splashes of primary color, elegant widescreen shots giving way to close-ups as the music swells, Rock Hudson carrying around a sign marked "Danger," the camera down low to catch every twitch of Dorothy Malone's negligee or Susan Kohner drop-kicking a stuffed animal. The surface is so dazzling the films become subtle, as you are forced to look for the critiques behind the silk curtains.



But here is something that can go ignored in discussions of Sirk: He often does allow individuals their victories. They're trying, good lord they are trying so hard, and Sirk respects that. There's nothing like the exceptional nastiness in American Beauty's depiction of the Marine next door or, for that matter, poor Annette Bening. There are selfish and cruel characters, certainly, like Jane Wyman's children in All That Heaven Allows, but Sirk's camera shows them as stunted and conformist, not as gargoyles. And in the end, as in most classic melodramas, love is allowed its moment of triumph. Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson manage to stay together at the end of All That Heaven Allows. Rock Hudson drives off with Lauren Bacall in Written on the Wind, as they both escape the tentacles of the Hadley money. Rock Hudson breaks through his callow narcissism and finds a vocation, as well as Jane Wyman, in Magnificent Obsession.

You can argue that these endings are intended ironically, but the Siren thinks not. They are shaded, certainly, by what we know about the forces arrayed against the characters, but they are still, as Lawrence Quirk argued for All That Heaven Allows, "paeans to individualism and spiritual freedom." When Sirk needed a tragic ending, he gave us one, as in Imitation of Life, where the characters had to be crushed by the American psychosis about race. To suggest otherwise would be laughably phony, and phony is something Sirk never was. Flamboyant, yes, flashy even--false, never. To find falseness in Sirk means you aren't looking hard enough.

If you try to grasp happiness itself, your fingers only meet a surface of glass, because happiness has no existence of its own, and probably exists only inside yourself.
--Douglas Sirk, quoted in The Bad and the Beautiful

So the trouble with the Siren's game plan was that Revolutionary Road is only partially Sirkian. And that long introduction was a tangent, but as the Siren explained to Glenn Kenny, the urge to discuss Sirk sometimes just takes over. Here we come to that rara avis on the Siren's blog, a new movie.

Revolutionary Road is beautiful to look at, but its visual style (via DP Roger Deakins) is unobtrusive. There are no Mad Men-style "how cool, that is SO period" flourishes. And that's good; you shouldn't be sitting there wondering where can you get a dress just like Kate's. This is a chamber piece, dependent on the filmmaker's ability to draw you into a couple's claustrophobic marriage. Sirk managed that even as he used an extremely strong style, but it is hardly fair to a filmmaker to say he isn't Sirk. The Siren misses the presence of an extraordinary directorial vision, as did Dan Callahan in his perceptive review, but Revolutionary Road is still a good, though not great, movie. Mendes' decision to get out of the way, as Dan puts it, lets the movie swoop in on Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio, both of them as good as they've ever been. The movie is also aided immeasurably by a supporting cast (notably Kathy Bates and a superb Michael Shannon) who must carry a lot of the thematic load, but can do so only in small, telling scenes.



Let it be known that the Siren has not read the book, although now she wants to. Several reviewers have said the movie is a different experience for someone who loved the book, but alas, that is always so. Plot summary doesn't take long. It's 1955. Frank and April Wheeler once dreamed of a life of ideas and importance, leading to some sort of vaguely bohemian, and special, destiny. Now they have two children and live in a house in a Connecticut suburb. April feels life closing in on them; Frank less so, but he certainly feels April's unhappiness. April hatches a plan to ditch it all and move to Paris where she believes, with passionate delusion, she will easily obtain a high-paying secretarial job and Frank will find something to do other than sell stuff he doesn't believe in to people and companies he doesn't give a damn about. As do the characters around the Wheelers, we suspect the plan is DOA. And indeed it is, strangled as Frank's cursory performance at work leads him to a promotion, and April's temporary joy in her marriage leads her to pregnancy. Like the sharks in Moby Dick, the spouses encircle and consume one another, the wife's desperation growing as the husband embraces his fate.

The Wheelers' harrowing arguments are full of the precision cruelty you can experience only with someone you love. Few longtime couples will be able to sit through the scenes without at least one small déjà vu, even if the Siren did frequently wonder why the children never showed up in the middle of things as they do in most small houses. Mendes just ignores the kids as his movie bears down on the marriage. In this world, children are a sideline. They cannot fulfill your life and indeed, their mere existence can ruin it. That is why the Siren found one small part of the denouement out of key, even before she found out that it wasn't from Yates.

Revolutionary Road is a much better movie than American Beauty, simply because you have room to breathe when it comes to how you see the characters. The Siren, for example, didn't find Frank as much of an asshole as many others did. Di Caprio, who's never been able to show menace, sure can show other things. There's the scene where Frank has lunch with his smug, coarse boss (Jay O. Sanders) and asks if the man remembers his father, who worked for the same company for more than 20 years. The boss gives an indulgent smile and repeats the name, as though searching his memory for a lost umbrella, and Di Caprio's look shows us both what Frank fears, and what he will nonetheless become.

Winslet is even better; she breaks your heart. She's grown into her lovely face, which used to suggest a Victorian painting even when she was in a modern movie. Now Winslet can play April and be transparent as rainwater for most of the movie, as in an early scene where she stands in the foyer after Frank has left for work, holding her washrag and staring at the pointless drudgery of the day as though it walked in before he closed the door. We read April so easily for so long, that we do become angry with Frank for turning away from the obvious. Then, toward the end, when April despairs, it's like someone switched off the lights, and in Winslet's face and gestures we can no longer find anything to read. Like Frank and the neighbors, we have to piece together April's thoughts from her final actions.

Sirk's pointed critiques of conformity apply to more than his own time, more than just the U.S. And while at least one crucial plot point in Revolutionary Road is tied to the era, it isn't just a slam at the 1950s. Charles Peguy said the only tragedy was not to be a saint; in Revolutionary Road the tragedy is to discover that you are not an artist. Like Sirk, in David Thomson's phrase, "social decorum smothers love and lovers;" unlike Sirk, in this movie an individual doesn't stand a chance. There's another, and possibly more apt, comparison to be made, with King Vidor's towering The Crowd and its hero who must learn to accept his place among "the seven million that believe New York depends on them." But that movie tells us there is meaning and love to be found in the simple stages of a life--childhood, courtship, marriage, children--and courage in the finding. Revolutionary Road sees each stage as another key turning in another iron door.


(Revolutionary Road opens Dec. 26 in limited release.)

The Siren just got through reading about the hard times ahead for critics. She also read this piece at Jim Emerson's place and that pointed her to this piece, about how critics are irrelevant in the first place but super-duper-extra-tall-grande irrelevant if they don't like The Dark Knight (got that, Keith)? The Siren must be worse than irrelevant because she never saw the blasted thing and, let's face it, The Dark Knight is not a film she is likely to clutch to her bosom.

However, two can play at this game, damn it. In tune with Jim's first commenter, the Siren plans to start an "Ignore Max Ophuls at Your Own Peril" campaign right after, well, right after she gets done with some other stuff.




However, let it not be said that the Siren refuses all opportunities to expand her viewing horizons. The Siren watched Profondo Rosso some time back. Yes, she did. And she kind of liked it. She didn't like it in the way that might, for example, prompt her to watch it again--ever--but you could say she respected it. So, pending the last of the Constance Bennett thoughts, from another era and continent altogether, the Siren is bringing Profondo Rosso star David Hemmings onstage to cheer us up as we contemplate a world where film critics must love Batman, or suffer the consequences. This one is for Glenn Kenny, who wrote a splendid piece that touched on an encounter with the indefatigable Hemmings in Toronto on 9/11, for Kimberly Lindbergs, who has written of her liking for this unconventional 60s sex symbol, and for Belvoir, because redheads ARE sex symbols, too. Here, in his posthumously published Blow-Up and Other Exaggerations, Hemmings discusses the ways in which actors whiled away their free time in Swingin' London.

...I was invited to join the Bang Club, which involved most of Alvaro's regulars of a Saturday lunchtime and whose principal purpose, as devised by Ian [McShane], was to make friends look foolish.

Once a month, a person was elected 'victim,' and the remainder had to hunt him down, preferably in circumstances that would cause maximum embarrassment. The hunters would then point their index finger with thumb raised and three fingers curled and say, or mouth, 'Bang!', at which point the 'victim' had to die in the most atrocious way possible--in a second. No hesitation was allowed, or procrastination. They had to die on the spot, no matter who the witness or how great the damage. [Screenwriter Ian] La Frenais took out an entire dessert trolley at the White Elephant, having been 'Banged,' and several tables along with it. Few have topped this, and there can't be much more stimulating than to destroy someone's lunch by careering into their table, sprawled across a desert trolley like one of Clint Eastwood's victims across the back of his trusty steed. Of this you can be sure. Trust me--I'm an actor.

McShane suffered an invidious fate, though, at the hands of the Bang Club. As he was being presented, almost on bended knee, to Princess Margaret at the Empire, Leicester Square, at some premiere or other, from behind the silken ropes the rest of us stood up and, over a rampart of black-tied shoulders, as one we pointed fingers and mouthed 'Bang!'

Ian was caught, dead to rights, between the eyes. Eastwood would have been proud. Theoretically Ian should have fallen on the hapless princess, rolled her down a couple of staircases, taken Richard Attenborough and Judi Dench out with him and generally put the proceedings in peril and confusion. But he chickened out and disaster was, sadly, averted. There is, however, a sort of satisfactory conclusion to this short story. At the far end of the line, waiting patiently, was Vanessa Redgrave. She had not an inkling of the Bang Club, but being sightless, assumed the guns--merely fingers, you realize--were the real thing. She clutched the person next to her...and fainted dead away on the podium. All guns were then turned on Vanessa, as if she had been the target all along. But she revived in moments, as Redgraves will, to curtsy elegantly in front of HRH.

"As Redgraves will"--love it. At one point in his book the actor remarks, "They say Hemmings gives good yarn," and he certainly does. Highly recommended, if you can locate a copy. Hemmings has much to say about location work and the vagaries of an actor's career. Also contains the priceless story of how Michelangelo Antonioni kept shaking his head from side to side during each take on Blow-Up. Hemmings was almost prostrate from performance anxiety until he realized that what he thought were emphatic "no good" signals were in fact Antonioni's tremors from a physical condition.



The links to the 20 Actress meme are piling up even as we speak:

David Cairns eschews mere physical beauty and gives Spring Byington her due. (By the by, David, who is this alleged MP who usurps your rightful place at the top of a "David Cairns" Google search?)
Feta at Terminal Sigma comes up with splendid photos of some silent actresses.
Operator_99 of Allure gives some love to number 21 and has a great picture of a very young Ida Lupino.
Marilyn of Ferdy on Film picks Wendy Hiller. Will the Siren's omissions never cease to haunt her?
Flickhead does indeed get very Continental on us.
Laura plumps for the ravishing Hedy Lamarr.
J.C. Loophole demonstrates impeccable taste.
Jacqueline had an equally hard time as the Siren but all is forgiven because she named Teresa Wright.
Sheila O'Malley ties one hand behind her back and picks favorite performances as well. Show-off.
Cinebeats grooves it, baby. I have seen nothing with Meiko Kaji but she is turning up more places than Marilyn.
Brad Wrolsted wins a link by naming Harriet Andersson.
Hazel at Let's Fold Scarves impressed the Siren no end by also naming performances, and including a Bette Davis film that the Siren actually hasn't seen. Well played, ma'am. Careful, you may get tagged next time. Just ask J.C.
MovieMan0283 does a version with clips.



Jon Swift identifies an important new school of film criticism, derrièrism. Surely criticism cannot be dead when brilliant new schools of thought keep emerging. Take that, Cahiers.

And John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows also does his bit for the critical lexicon, writing up the non-Sirk thrillers of Ross Hunter as Fashion Noir, an inspired term the Siren is adopting as of this very minute. Part one, on Portrait in Black, ends with a touching tribute to the Siren's beloved, doomed Sandra Dee. Part two, on Midnight Lace, ends with a vignette of a Hollywood-dream contest in Texas that will haunt you for days.

Roy Edroso of Alicublog evidently moonlights as some sort of medium, achieving whole-mind psychic melding with Jonah Goldberg. Don't take these sorts of risks for us, Roy. It's only blogging.

Tonio, who has been saying Easy Living is fluff? Send 'em to the Siren, she'll straighten them out. Easy Living is manna from heaven, that's what it is.

(Top, David Hemmings demonstrates the apparent future of critics who do not worship The Dark Knight. Middle picture of David Hemmings on set with Dario Argento is blatantly lifted from Cinebeats. Third picture of David Hemmings with Jane Birkin in background chosen as a lagniappe for David Ehrenstein and Yojimboen. Bottom picture of Lana Turner and Lloyd Nolan in Portrait in Black chosen by the Siren for her own amusement.)