Summer Film Roundup, Part 4: Back to the Golden Age

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Before there was Dr. Strangelove, there was The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.  It's an extraordinarily compelling film noir, or twisted melodrama, if you like.  It owes more than a few debts to Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, released three years earlier, also produced by Paramount, also starring Barbara Stanwyck and with a score by Mikós Rózsa, who shamelessly plagiarizes his work from the earlier, better film. (Some of the melodic themes of the film are virtually identical to the ones in Double Indemnity, so much so that when Barbara Stanwyck is talking to her husband Walter O'Neill and saying "Walter," I almost felt she was talking to Walter Neff in the earlier film.)  Even the story itself bears similarities to Wilder's film, and we pretty much know how it will play out after the first 20 minutes or so, though the ending was a bit more ham-handed than I'd expected. In his debut film, Kirk Douglas is somewhat improbable as a weak-willed alcoholic, but he mostly manages to pull it off, with only a couple of moments where he's obviously "acting."  Judith Anderson is great at playing a cold, sadistic bitch , but Stanwyck gives her a good run for her money. 

The stylish Gothic imagery is courtesy of director Lewis Milestone; the script by Robert Rossen is filled with ominous plot twists and crackling dialogue.  Rossen new thing or two about secrecy and betrayal: he was later blacklisted for refusing to name names to House Committee on Un-American Activities, then changed his mind and named 57 people, enabling him to continue his career and direct his masterpiece, The Hustler (1961).  The relationship between Van Heflin and Lizabeth Scott bears more than a slight resemblance to the one between Paul Newman and Piper Laurie in The Hustler.  In both films the couple "meets cute" in the Hollywood tradition, though they also "meet dark," the romantic and enigmatic dialogue bristling with apprehension.. Rossen seemed to have a fascination for mysterious women  with complicated pasts. (But then who doesn't?)  Things work out a bit better for Heflin and Scott  than for Newman and Laurie, but it's evident that Stanwyck and Douglas are doomed from the start. 

At first I thought the sailor whose hitched a ride with Van Heflin in Heflin's first scene was Kirk Douglas -- we never got a good look at the sailors face, and from a distance it appeared to my eye to be Douglas. It turns out according to the IMDb that the sailor was played by a young Blake Edwards, years before he would achieve fame as a director.

Kirk Douglas turned 100 this year. He's still going strong, and he and his wife of 62 years have a new book out, Kirk and Anne: Letters of Love, Laughter, and a Lifetime in Hollywood.  It's been a long, wild ride since that first film performance in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.

The Last Tycoon (2017)

Inspired by Clive James' recent book, Play All: A Binge-watchers Notebook, I binge-watched a long-form TV series for the first time. It helped that I only had one day left of my free Amazon Prime trial and had until midnight to watch 9 of the 10 episodes of the first season of the Amazon series based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon.  I've long been a hopeless sucker for anything  about Fitzgerald' final years in Hollywood, and have read The Last Tycoon  three or four times and agree with the general consensus that it's the best novel  ever written about Hollywood, even in its incomplete form. (The scholarly consensus now asserts that Fitzgerald's preferred title for the novel was The Love of Last Tycoon: A Western, and some of the new editions of the novel bear that intriguing name.  The series has been called "Mad Men for Hollywood in the 1930s," and there seems little doubt that the producers were interested in playing that angle. It's a handsomely mounted production with fine performances by Kelsey Grammer, Matt Bomer, Lily Collins, Dominique McElligot, Jennifer Beals (yes, that Jennifer Beals) and Rosemarie DeWitt, among many others. Iddo Goldberg as the imperious and perverse Fritz Lang is particularly amusing.   And yet, nearly 10 hours of television each episode is 51 minutes) did not substantially deepen or add to what Fitzgerald created in his unfinished novel of 140 pages. The storyline goes off in many directions that have nothing to do with the original novel -- Nazi interference in Hollywood movies with insistence on script approval, the subject of two recent books, is one area the series explores that Fitzgerald never wrote about. Much as I enjoyed seeing the characters go through twists and turns unimagined by there are original author, I never felt they were adding anything essential to what he had written. 

With that in mind, you can enjoy the series as an entertaining riff on Fitzgerald's work, and appreciate the 21st century sensitivity to the often mistreated young actresses and neglected wives of the Hollywood moguls, as well as the rather wretched conditions that screenwriters were forced to work in despite the high salaries they drew. (Fitzgerald would probably have appreciated the latter point, considering how hard he labored at his novel between screenwriting gigs before dropping dead of a heart attack at the age of 44.)  A factory is a factory, even if the paycheck is much better than the average American's at that time.  And as the series shows, many of these writers weren't simply cynics who took the money and ran but sincerely wanted to write good films, despite the immense odds against them. So sit back and enjoy the ride, which is as filled with wonderful implausibilities as any Hollywood film of the era.

If you enjoy this series, I urge you to read Fitzgerald's novel as well as the excellent examination of how it was written, Matthew J. Bruccoli's "The Last of the Novelist": F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Last Tycoon.  And don't forget to take a look at Aaron Latham's entertaining and heartbreaking book, Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood.

Summer Film Roundup, Part 2: Masterpieces and Missed Opportunities

Throne of Blood (1957)

Akira Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth might be the most watchable film version of Shakespeare ever made. The film discards Shakespeare's poetry (admittedly a loss for those of us who still thrill to Macbeth's bitter words, "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," despite Shakespeare's erroneous use of "that" instead of the grammatically correct "who") and substitutes striking visualisations which carry the story forward with both beauty and irresistible thrust.  Kurosawa drew on certain conventions of the Japanese Noh plays in his compositions and in the facial expressions of the actors, which resemble drozen masks while still remaining very naturalistic.  Obviously the great Toshiro Mifune's riveting performance as the Macbeth character is at the heart of the film: this murderous Scottish King  may not be able to spout poetry  in either English or Japanese translation,  but his  actions and physical bearing give life to the sound and fury of Shakespeare's verse.  And the actress who plays the Japanese version of Lady Macbeth is truly chilling.  All in all, a better film than the 1948 Welles Macbeth, though I'm still fond of Polanski's early 1970s version which keeps the poetry and all the violence Shakespeare kept discreetly off-stage gorily front and center.  When one of the arrows Macbeth's enemies her let him in such profusion suddenly pierces the left side of his neck and emerges out the right side (a startling visual effect done simply by  stopping the camera and applying the two sides of the arrow  two  Mifune's neck; the speed of the arrows flying around him help the view or believe an arrow has actually shot through him before our eyes)  And speaking of eyes: Mifune's enormous eyes instantly open even wider with the realization that he has been killed and that his death truly signifies nothing at all.  His hour of strutting on the stage is over.

Throne of Blood is an unforgettable portrait of bloodthirsty ambition, and you can't help but think that Kurosawa was reflecting on his own country's actions of only a dozen years before.  Not only one of the best Japanese movies ever made, but one of the gretatest films of world cinema.

The Picasso Summer (1969)

Wouldn't most of us have liked to meet Picasso?  In 1969, when this film was made, it was still possible. And fewer people then were aware of what most of us know now: thatt Picasso may have been a brilliant artist but he was a pretty awful human being.  Ray Bradbury wrote a beautiful short story about a young American couple in the south of France  who have an encounter with of sorts with Picasso. This dreadful film adaptation of Bradbury's story  pads  it out to feature film length and in the process completely destroys what was  so moving about  the original work.  I knew Bradbury was displeased by the final result, not only because it's so self-evidently bad, but because one of the listed screenwriters is "Douglas Spaulding," the name of the protagonist of one of Bradbury's novels.  Clearly Bradbury wanted his name taken off this disaster, so he sent a message to his fans via the pseudonym, just as Harlan Ellison has frequently removed his name from television shows he's written when the finished product ("product" and "finished" are particularly apt in these cases) dismays him, employing the name "Cordwainer Bird" in the credits in place of his own

Much like the far better film Two for the Road, Albert Finney is again an architect traveling in the south of France with his wife, this time Yvette Mimieux instead of Audrey Hepburn.  Milieu lacks  Hepburn's emotional vulnerability  though there's no denying she looks good in a bikini. Finney has gotten it into his head to track down Picasso to thank him for all the joy his art has given him. There are several lengthy sequences in the film which are animated versions of Picasso's paintings, and are alternately interesting and garish.  Robert Sallin's genuinely awful direction relies heavily on flash cuts and zooms all over the place, plus endless shots of the couple bicycling and holding hands in beautiful locations with Michel Legrand's music pour over every scene like maple syrup that's much too sweet. Do the couple ever get to meet Picasso? You'll have to endure the film to find out. The distributor thought it was so bad that it was never released in theaters but pops up on TV now and then. This was the first film that Robert Sallin directed -- and the last. What a disastrous adaptation of one of Bradbury's best stories.

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)

While ostensibly based on Irwin Shaw's novel of the same name, this Vincente Minnelli film fashions itself as a kind of "sequel" to the far better The Bad and the Beautiful, directed by Minnelli and starring Kirk Douglas in 1952.  Two Weeks in Another Town reunites Minelli with Douglas and composer David Raksin in a story about the movie business in the early 1960s. Douglas is a washed-up film actor and Robinson is a washed-up film director, and both wind up working on a low-budget film in Italy, which leads me to suspect Godard was somewhat inspired by this film when he made Contempt a year later, though it's somewhat difficult to imagine anyone being inspired by this film in any way at all.  The characters  in this story are different from the ones in the 1952 film,  but the connection to the earlier Minnelli film is underscored when the leads are all in a screening room in Rome watching one of the great films the Robinson character directed in his heyday ten years earlier.  The scene, of course, is one with Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner from The Bad and The Beautiful.   and acting are locked into the style of Hollywood from a decade before, and you can't help thinking how hopelessly old-fashioned this movie must have seemed compared to the cutting-edge new films being made by Antonioni and Fellini in Italy at the same time.  

Nonetheless, the camera compositions and rich palette are pure Minnelli and a delight to the eye, and Douglas's scenes with Robinson, though wildly overheated, are almost worth the price of admission.  But ultimately  one remembers David Raksin's score: a bit too lush, perhaps, but suffused with a melancholy that suggests everyone concerned with this film knows that the age of Minnelli is passing while the age of Scorsese and the film school generation is waiting in the wings.