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Great Will Hunting

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Poster for State Fair (1933) with Will Rogers

Poster for State Fair (1933) with Will Rogers

Every August around this time, the Will Rogers Ranch Foundation and California State Parks stage an outdoor screening of one of Will’s films. Last night it was the original version of State Fair (1933) directed by Henry King and starring Will and Janet Gaynor, with Lew Ayres and Sally Eilers. The Foundation called it “Movies in Will’s Back Yard”, as it took place on the putting green adjoining the Will Rogers Ranch.

As Lew Ayres said about Will, he’s not really an actor at all: he’s just a character. He would never select a role that would call for anything but allowing him to be himself. The result was a series of great pictures made in the early 1930s before he died in an Alaska plane crash in 1935. My favorites are A Connecticut Yankee (1931), Doctor Bull (1933), Judge Priest (1934), Life Begins at Forty (1935), and Steamboat Round the Bend (1935).

Despite the fact that he “couldn’t act,” Will Rogers was the best-paid actor in Hollywood just before his death. (It must have been because people liked him so much that they couldn’t care whether or not he was a genuine actor.)

He was also America’s number one columnist. Somehow, he managed to pull off the neat trick of having both Republicans and Democrats love him. Now that Robin Williams is gone, who is there alive who can make that claim?

Every year around this time, I write a post about Will Rogers because I admire him so much. Let me leave you with this little quote from one of his talks:

The average citizen knows only too well that it makes no difference to him which side wins. He realizes that the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey have come to resemble each other so closely that it is practically impossible to tell them apart; both of them make the same braying noise, and neither of them ever says anything. The only perceptible difference is that the elephant is somewhat the larger of the two.

My Brother Sets Me Straight

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Now I Know What I’m Going to See There!

Now I Know What I’m Going to See There in Peru!

Last night, my brother left the following comment on my status on reading Nigel Davies’s book The Incas on Facebook: “How about The Dinky Incas”? That set me back for a minute. Who in blue blazes were the Dinky Incas? Well, there was only one way to find out: I Googled it. Then it all came back to me. There was an animated television series around 1959-1960 called “Clutch Cargo,” starring a ruggedly good-looking hero with an enormous jaw named Clutch Cargo who flew to strange locales with a small freckle-faced boy named Spinner and a dachshund named Paddlefoot. They engaged in the type of exotic adventures I recall from reading Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge comic books.

By the time my brother was of an age to enjoy the limited animation adventures of “Clutch Cargo,” I was already a teenager who was much too sophisticated for that type of stuff. Dan, on the other hand, was eight or nine years old and watched every episode.

Now You, Too, Can Follow Their Adventures

Now You, Too, Can Follow Their Adventures

The series on the “Dinky Incas” was about a missing archaeologist who was on a dig in Peru which resembled, more than anything else, a Mayan pyramid in the jungle. (The real Incas didn’t build pyramids and they preferred the higher-elevation altiplano to the jungles of the Amazon.) Clutch, Spinner, and Paddlefoot run into two unsavory characters who try to do away with them, because, of course, they’re after all the gold and jewels. But Clutch and his sidekicks take care of them right quick, as you can see for yourself if you have twenty minutes to watch the whole series, which is available by clicking here.

Mexican Bus Ride

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Still from Luis Buñuel’s Mexican Bus Ride (Subida Al Cielo, 1952)

Still from Luis Buñuel’s Mexican Bus Ride (Subida Al Cielo, 1952)

For various reasons, I am inordinately fond of the films that Luis Buñuel made in Mexico between 1946 and 1965. Since then, he has perhaps made greater films, but remember there is a big difference between fondness and admiration. Because these films were made in Mexico, where perhaps not enough money was budgeted for each production, the director had to use his ingenuity to make the films his own. And when he succeeded most, the results were wonderfully human and surreal. The films from this period that I liked the most are, in order of production:

  1. Los olvidados (1950). In the U.S. variously titled The Forgotten and The Young and the Damned.
  2. Susana (1951). In English: The Devil and the Flesh.
  3. Subida al cielo (1952). In English: Mexican Bus Ride and Ascent to Heaven (the literal translation of the Spanish title).
  4. El (1953), In English: This Strange Passion and Torments.
  5. La Ilusión viaja en tranvía (1954), In English: Illusion Travels by Streetcar.
  6. Abismos de pasíon (Cumbres borrascosas) (1954), In English: Wuthering Heights.
  7. The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1954).
  8. Ensayo de un crimen (1955). In English: The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz.
  9. Nazarín (1959).
  10. El ángel exterminador (1962). In English: The Exterminating Angel.

Of these, the most admirable are the last two, just as the director was ready to step onto the world stage. But the ones I would like to watch over and over again are Mexican Bus Ride and Illusion Travels by Streetcar.

Mexican Poster for Mexican Bus Ride

Mexican Poster for Mexican Bus Ride

In the first film, a young man travels from a coastal village to a large market town on a long bus ride during which one passenger dies, another gives birth, and he himself is seduced by the lusciously ripe Lilia Prado (see photo above). Somehow all works out well, almost magically in fact. I have seen this film half a dozen times and am still not close to getting tired of it.

Illusion Travels by Streetcar involves—and tell me this is not unique—a hijacking of a streetcar in which a disconsolate streetcar driver who hijacks a streetcar, takes it on a route of his own devising while offering free rides to a motley crew of passengers who join him on his route.

Both films are hilarious and loving. It is obvious that Buñuel had considerable feeling for the people of Mexico, which shows through again and again.

 

Theta, Goddess of Television

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What Happened to the Promise?

What Happened to the Promise?

Back in the 1970s, the first truly great television channel was born. It was called the Z Channel, and it was available only through Theta Cable Television, a subsidiary of TelePrompTer Corporation. Here was a channel made for film freaks such as myself. I could watch not only popular films, but film classics, including French, Italian, and Japanese classics with subtitles.

The trucks belonging to Theta Cable bore the following logo, of which I could find only this very imperfect example on the Internet:

Theta, Goddess of Television

Theta, Goddess of Television

The Z Channel ended badly with a murder/suicide when program director Jerry Harvey shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself.

Around then, the Z Channel segued into the Sports Channel, which interrupted their movies with Stanley Cub playoffs. I remember calling my cable provider and demanding to cancel the hockey channel. They knew what I was talking about.

There were other hopeful beginnings, such as Headline News, CNN, Bravo, TNT, and even MTV at the beginning. Now the only cable channel of any worth is Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which still has no advertising, and which shows films uncut and unscanned (i.e., letterbox versions). As far as I am concerned, the rest is mostly sports (way, way too much sports), right wing news, and celebrity gossip. I would be in heaven if all that mattered to me were Kim Kardashian’s ass and how the Cubs are faring against the Hornets. Oh, yes, and Benghazi!

Cable television was once a land of promise. Then, I suppose, Eve ate the apple; and we were all drummed out of paradise.

 

American Noir

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One of the Greatest U.S. Noir Pictures

One of the Greatest Noir Pictures

Today, I came back from working on a Saturday to see the end of Warner Brothers’ High Sierra (1941) with Martine. There was Roy “Mad Dog” Earle, trapped on an Eastern Sierra cliff face and surrounded by police and reporters waiting to put an end to his career of crime. I had seen the film so many times that it was now in my blood. It was one of a handful of U.S. films that defined for me the whole American experience between the 1930s and the 1950s. I thought I would put together a list of the films in the genre that were my favorites.

Here are thirteen of them, arranged in alphabetic order:

  • The Big Heat (1953), directed by Fritz Lang, with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame
  • The Big Sleep (1946), directed by Howard Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall
  • Criss Cross (1949), directed by Robert Siodmak, with Burt Lancaster, Dan Duryea, and Yvonne De Carlo
  • Detour (1946), directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, with Tom Neal and Ann Savage
  • Double Indemnity (1944), directed by Billy Wilder, with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray
  • Gun Crazy (1949), directed by Joseph H. Lewis, starring Peggy Cummins and John Dall
  • High Sierra (1941), directed by Raoul Walsh, with Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino
  • The Maltese Falcon (1941), directed by John Huston, with Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet
  • Out of the Past (1947), directed by Jacques Tourneur, with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas
  • The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), directed by Tay Garnett, with Lana Turner and John Garfield
  • They Live by Night (1949), directed by Nicholas Ray, with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell
  • Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), directed by Otto Preminger, with Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney
  • White Heat (1949), directed by Raoul Walsh, with James Cagney and Virginia Mayo

If this seems like a long list, please note that I could have stretched it to fifty or a hundred without too much difficulty. There were a lot of noir films made in Hollywood over a long period.

What are noir films? According to Alain Silver, James Ursini, and Elizabeth Ward’s Film Noir: The Encyclopedia (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2010):

Film noir is grounded neither in personal creation nor in translation of another tradition into cinematic terms. Rather it is a self-contained reflection of American cultural preoccupations in film form. In short, it is the unique example of a wholly American film style. “Film noir” is literally “black film,” not just in the sense of reflecting a dark mood in American society, but equally, almost empirically, as a black slate on which the culture could inscribe its ills and in the process produce a catharsis to help relieve them.

There is a whole galaxy of elements which, together or in unison, make up a film noir plot. They include crime, police, private detectives, “bad girls,” urban environments with “mean streets,” and both inner and outer darkness.

 

Tarnmoor’s ABCs: Film

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Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties

Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties

I was very impressed by Czeslaw Milosz’s book Milosz’s ABC’s. There, in the form of a brief and alphabetically-ordered personal encyclopedia, was the story of the life of a Nobel Prize winning poet, of the people, places, and things that meant the most to him. Because his origins were so far away (Lithuania and Poland) and so long ago (1920s and 1930s), there were relatively few entries that resonated personally with me. Except it was sad to see so many fascinating people who, unknown today, died during the war under unknown circumstances.

This blog entry is my own humble attempt to imitate a writer whom I have read on and off for thirty years without having sated my curiosity. Consequently, over the next few months, you will see a number of postings under the rubric “Tarnmoor’s ABCs” that will attempt to do for my life what Milosz accomplished for his. I don’t guarantee that I will use up all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I’ll do my best.

These Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties are not what you usually think of when you think of the movies, but that was about a hundred years ago. Film has been around for more than a century, and I have been  a film freak for almost half that time. It all started at Dartmouth College, where there were frequent free screenings at Fairbanks Hall. One afternoon in my freshman year, I saw Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943), about witchcraft in seventeenth century Denmark. I was hooked.

Although my original intention was to become a professor of English, somewhere during my second or third year at college, I decided to switch to film. The Hopkins Center had just opened, and there was a large beautiful theater for screening films. The Dartmouth Film Society put on an ambitious year-long Alfred Hitchcock Retrospective, and my career choice began to waver. When, finally, Arthur L. Mayer, the author of Merely Colossal, came to teach a class in film history, my mind was made up.

Dartmouth had a long history of ties with the film industry. Its Baker Library was the home of the Irving Thalberg collection of Hollywood scripts. Graduates included such film luminaries as Joseph Losey, Robert Ryan, Budd Schulberg, David Picker, and Max Youngstein. Even before my senior year, I had decided to do my graduate work in film history and criticism. During the summer of 1965, I went with my parents to New York, mainly to see Haig P. Manoogian, who ran the film department at New York University. Mr. Manoogian was kind enough to see me, but not kind enough to encourage me—although he was a favorite of Martin Scorsese, who went to school there. I guess he was more interested in film production. (That summer, I also saw the New York World’s Fair of 1964-1965.)

That left the University of Southern California (USC) and UCLA. One of my Dartmouth classmates from the Class of 1965 had attended UCLA. When he came up to Dartmouth to visit, he discouraged me about USC, which he said was a slum and Smog Central.

So I came out to Southern California, where I still live. I attended graduate school at UCLA for several years until Professor Howard Suber put the kibosh on my budding career as a film professor. He was a lackadaisical academic who supposedly was working on a shot-by-shot analysis of Citizen Kane and who didn’t much like movies. I was about to write a thesis about the Westerns of John Ford with Robert Epstein as head of my thesis committee, but then Suber replaced him with himself. At that point, I knew I was finished, as there was little love lost between us. Years later, I joined a letter-writing campaign to have his tenure denied, calling him a cross between Mr. Pickwick and Caligula.

Although I’ve always loved film, I had by this time taught myself how to operate and program computers, and I got a job at System Development Corporation in Santa Monica. Curiously, the person I replaced at SDC was a young woman who had been murdered by a UCLA film student. So here I am today, a computer expert at a Westwood accounting firm, still in love with film, though greatly disappointed because all the great filmmakers I idolized are dead, and the quality of films now being produced has fallen markedly.

Of Celtic Cats and Consonants

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What Do They Do With All Those Consonants?

What Do They Do With All Those Consonants?

The other day, I was browsing through Compton Mackenzie’s classic novel Whisky Galore when I ran into a passage that confused me mightily:

I remember my mother once sat down on the cat, because you’ll understand the plinds were pulled down in our house every Sabbath and she didn’t chust see where she was sitting. The cat let out a great sgiamh and I let out a huge laugh, and did my father take the skin off me next day? Man, I was sitting down on proken glass for a week afterwards. [No words have been misspelled: The novel is in Hebridean Scottish dialect]

What made me sit up is that cat cry: sgiamh. Can someone please pronounce that for me? I have never heard any creature, human or otherwise, make a sound like that; and, not being of the Celtic persuasion, I have not the slightest idea how that is sounded.

Incidentally, Mackenzie’s book was turned into a delightful film variously called Whisky Galore or Tight Little Island by Alexander Mackendrick in 1949. Starring were Basil Radford and the delightful Joan Greenwood. No cats were harmed in the making of that film, and none were coached into crying sgiamh!

Back to Bedlam

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Title Shot of Val Lewton’s Bedlam (1946)

Title Shot of Val Lewton’s Bedlam (1946)

Originally, it was called Bethlem Royal Hospital or St. Mary Bethlehem. Over the years, the British mental hospital has moved from Bishopsgate to Moorfields to Southwark, where it is now, a reputable institution associated with Kings College London. From its period of notoriety in the 18th century, where the glitterati paid admission to see loonies chained to the wall, it was better known as Bedlam.

There is a wonderful Val Lewton film of the same name, starring Boris Karloff, that was released by RKO in 1946 (see above). In it, a sane young woman is forcibly admitted to the insane asylum when she refuses to odious attentions of a powerful rake. Like almost of all of the Lewton films I have seen, it is a delight. It includes a rebellion of the inmates against the infamous Boris Karloff, who plays the head physician at Bedlam.

Poster for Val Lewton’s Bedlam

Lobby Card for Val Lewton’s Bedlam

The reason that Bedlam the movie comes to mind is my realization that we have little progressed from those bad old eighteenth century days when the mentally ill were mistreated for the amusement of visitors. Now, things are almost worse. Ever since the 1980s, the mentally ill have been on their own.When they receive any attention at all, it is usually by the police and prison guards. Instead of getting the medication that helps keep them on an even keel, the mentally ill are mistreated by guards who punish them for their non-normative behavior.

Recently, several Orange County, California police beat up and killed a mental patient named Kelly Thomas who was living on the street. In their various police academies, the police are trained to deal with malefactors, and not with persons who have a tenuous grip on reality. The police were tried and acquitted by an Orange County jury.

The outlook for the mentally ill who are loose on the streets is not a good one. Perhaps even the old Bedlam would have been an improvement.

The Wizard, the Beast, and the Beauty

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Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)

Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)

For the last few weeks, I have been thinking about one of the strangest actor/director partnerships in the history of the cinema. There have been many famous ones, such as Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, Greta Garbo and Clarence Brown, Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa, and Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher; but the strangest of all was between Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog.

I say “strangest” because Kinski was that most unusual combination: A brilliant actor and a raving maniac. According to his friend and mentor Werner Herzog, Kinski was a complete egomaniac. When he felt that attention was being diverted away from him, Kinski went off the rails. He would start screaming with his eyes at the maximum bug-eyed setting, with his face at times two inches away from whomever he was directing his rant, During the filming of Fitzcarraldo (1982), the chief of the Amazonian Indians in the cast asked Herzog’s permission to kill him. This story is recounted in Herzog’s book about the making of the film, The Conquest of the Useless.

And yet, there have been few actors quite as outstanding and natural as Kinski. He knew how to make an impression onscreen. At times he could be loving and tender, as he was with Claudia Cardinale in Fitzcarraldo and Eva Mattes in Woyzeck (1979).At worst, he was a disruptive force that could destroy a film production and leave it a gutted ruin.

Why, considering this reputation, did Herzog decided to make five films with Kinski? These films were Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972); Nosferatu the Vampire (1979); Woyzeck (1979); Fitzcarraldo (1982); and Cobra Verde (1987). Three or four of these would be considered in any list of Herzog’s best films—and Kinski’s, as well!

After Kinski died of a heart attack in 1991, Herzog directed a documentary about his contentious, and yet rewarding relationship, with the actor which he called My Best Fiend (1999). To see an excerpt from this documentary, click here.

Klaus Kinski’s Daughter, Nastassja Kinski

Klaus Kinski’s Daughter, Nastassja Kinski

And now we come to the strangest part of the story. The bug-eyed demon, Klaus Kinski, was the father of one of the most beautiful actresses who ever lived, Nastassja Kinski. The daughter did not have an easy relationship with her father:

“He was no father. 99 percent of the time I was terrified of him. He was so unpredictable that the family lived in constant terror.” When asked what she would say to him now, if she had the chance, she replied: “I would do anything to put him behind bars for life. I am glad he is no longer alive.”

She managed to escape being sexually abused by Kinski, but just barely.

I find it surpassingly odd that someone so out of it as Klaus Kinski could work successfully with a director like Herzog and give birth to a woman with such unearthly beauty as Nastassja.

Noir

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"William Irish" Was a Pen Name Used by Cornell Woolrich

“William Irish” Was a Pen Name Used by Cornell Woolrich

Over the past several months, I have been reading the large Library of America omnibus volume entitled Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s. Included were the following titles:

  • James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (filmed by Tay Garnett starring John Garfield and Lana Turner)
  • Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Sidney Pollack’s 1969 film of this starred Jane Fonda)
  • Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us (made into a great Nicholas Ray film called They Live by Night)
  • Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock (made into a great John Farrow film with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton)
  • William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley (another great John Farrow film, this time with Tyrone Power)
  • Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man (published under the pen name William Irish)

So many of the noir novels of the period were turned into classic films that I begin to think the whole genre is a mirror in which we as Americans see ourselves. Although the British are just as famous with their detective novels, it was an American who invented the genre with Edgar Allan Poe’s stories such as “The Gold Bug,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” And while Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, and countless others were practicing their craft in Britain, their American counterparts created works that were more urban, more mean, and more essentially American.

Frankly, I came to the novels by way of the films. I was a collaborator (though in a minor way) with my friends Alain J. Silver and James Ursini in their genre-defining book Film Noir: The Encyclopedia published by Overlook Press. Other great resources are the same authors’ The Noir Style (also Overlook) and the Taschen Book entitled Film Noir.

Both the novels and the films generally tend to be excellent and well worth your time.