Saturday, September 29, 2012

Mister Roberts (1955)

Mister Roberts (1955)
Directed by John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy
Screenplay by Frank S. Nugent and Joshua Logan, based on the play by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan, from the novel by Thomas Heggen
Runtime: 2 hr, 1 min
There are some actors whose mere presence is enough to sell a film to a moviegoer.  For me, two such men are Henry Fonda and Jack Lemmon; films such as 12 Angry Men and Days of Wine and Roses rank among my favorite movies.  So if you are a studio head and you want to guarantee that I’m intrigued (and you somehow have time travel), then put Fonda and Lemmon in a film together.  As far as I can tell, there’s only one such movie, and that’s today’s film, Mister Roberts.
Fonda plays the title character, a lieutenant on the USS Reluctant (aka “The Bucket”), a cargo vessel in the Pacific; the action takes place in the closing months of WWII.  The crew likes the lenient Roberts, but they bristle under the command of Morton (James Cagney), a strict captain driven by ambition but with no legitimacy.  The ship is only efficient because of Roberts, and Morton knows it, which is why he disapproves of all Roberts’ attempts to transfer to a combat vessel, won’t ever let the sailors on shore for liberty, and is just a generally not nice person to hang around.
The structure of this conflict would suggest that Mister Roberts is a drama—and indeed there are dramatic elements to it—but in fact the movie is broadly a comedy.  For the most part, the shenanigans that the crew partakes in are played for laughs.  Some of these sequences don’t quite flow properly, such as the overextended bit with the sailors watching women in the shower through binoculars.  That said, the tone of the film stays markedly jovial through a great share of the proceedings.
Lemmon proves the strongest in handling the comedic scenes.  He plays Frank Pulver, the officer in charge of laundry and morale and Roberts’ bunkmate.  He’s a hapless fellow; lazy and deathly scared of Morton.  He’s also the driving force for some of the film’s most memorable moments, including a very funny plot to get back at Morton which results in a whole mess of soap suds below deck.  It’s easy to see why this was Lemmon’s breakout role, and it ended up winning him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
This is not to diminish everyone who is not Jack Lemmon, except, well, no one is quite up to Lemmon’s level here.  Don’t get me wrong: Fonda is as strong as ever and completely demands your attention while William Powell’s turn as the ship’s doctor comes with a grizzled wisdom and one drop of light amusement.  But the characters aren’t very dynamic; they’re emotional ranges are of limited size.  Sure, Mister Roberts turns sullen during the second half of the movie, but that comes off as more binary, whereas Pulver is all over the damn place: goofy, enraged, depressed, failing to seduced the nurses, etc.
Still, those guys are all good.  Cagney, on the other hand, is not bad per se, but he leaves something to be desired.  His acting make Morton a bit too incompetent, and since this isn’t purely a comedy—the actors all get their dramatic moments in early and often between the jokes—it made me wonder what’s holding the central conflict together.  Morton is still tyrant, but there’s not much menace.  As a result, his connection to the story feels like it is meandering about, unsure of whether to play him as a threat or as a punch-line.
Setting the confusion regarding the villain aside, Mister Roberts actually does a fine job balancing drama and comedy.  Even after scenes such as the boys making “scotch” (alcohol, coke, iodine and hair tonic) so Pulver can give it to a nurse, there’s nothing jarring or out of place with Roberts contemplating the repercussions of his deal with Morton to give the sailors liberty in Polynesia.  I must hand it whichever director was on the film at the time, because maintaining good comedy with legitimate drama is quite the challenge.
This tendency, however, really falters at the very end.  Long story short, a major character dies off-screen, and the mood of the entire ship takes a dower turn.  This in and of itself would not be a problem, as it had been foreshadowed throughout and in fact seemed inevitable.  The problem arises when, after another character snaps, the closing frames have an almost sitcom-esque appearance to them—hello, someone just died!  There are few things more irksome than a poorly handled character death, and that sadly left a bad taste in my mouth.
But, while the ending needs some improvement, Mister Roberts remains a fun movie to watch.  I can see why this is one of my dad’s favorite flicks, and while I doubt that I will ever hold it in that sort of regard, I would certainly not object to watching it again.  If nothing else, it provides the answers to the question, “Hey, what’d happen if Fonda and Lemmon did a film together?”  What can top that?  Well, maybe throw Spencer Tracy somewhere into the mix, but other than that…

Saturday, September 22, 2012

The Last Laugh (1924)


The Last Laugh (1924)

Directed by F. W. Murnau
Written by Carl Meyer
Runtime: 1 hr, 30 min (U.S. cut)


About two years ago, I came across Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans by German director F. W. Murnau.  A simple fable of sin and redemption and featuring absolutely stunning cinematography and visuals, it quickly became one of my all-time favorite pictures.  Yet I concede I’ve yet to follow up on Murnau’s filmography; shame on me.  Well, after seeing Roger Ebert tweet about today’s movie for his “Daily Streamer” feature, I figured now was a good time to expand my film knowledge.  With all that said: The Last Laugh.

In The Last Laugh (German title: Der letze Mann, literally The Last Man), we follow the life of an unnamed man played Emil Jannings.  Jannings’ character works as a doorman at the glamorous Atlantic Hotel, a post which brings him much pride and admiration in his neighborhood.  Unfortunately, he is getting up there in years, and the hotel moves him from door man to washroom attendant.  The man is devastated, and tries to maintain the dignity which society has suddenly stripped from him.

The cards, sad to say, are stacked against him.  Even though Jannings’ character is portrayed as being full of live, his employers see his age increase and immediately assume he’s too fragile to lift luggage and hail taxicabs.  Further, his superiors actively strip away his powers, tearing off his doorman’s uniform as he stands catatonic in the office.  Sent to the washroom, where he is merely to hold towels for hotel guests, everything that he treasures has been unceremoniously taken away.  It’s an immaculately emasculating sequence of events.

Hell does not stop chasing our hero when he leaves work: when his gossipy neighbors find he’s a washroom attendant, he becomes the laughingstock of the neighborhood and a shame to his family. Jannings totally sells his plight; his eyes are constantly nearly shut and his staggering slouch is never exaggerated but always present.  Yet Jannings also brings a certain resolve to the character, as well.  After all, this is a man who is willing to sneak through the hotel and run across a busy street to retrieve his uniform, just to keep up appearances back home.  No matter what society throws at him, he will not quit.

The Last Laugh raises a difficult question: how can man maintain dignity when society scorns him?  It’s not entirely surprising that the apparent answer is, “He can’t.”  Try as Jannings’ character might, the image of his laughing neighbors and the lost prestige of the uniform are inescapable; they dominate the latter half of the film.  The only place he can find a respite is in his dreams, and even those are incredibly hazy thanks to the incredible camera tricks that Murnau and company employ.  Even where all things are possible, it’s clear it’s an illusion.

Then again, there is also the possibility that the doorman’s plight is the tragic natural order.  Revolving doors are a major motif in the film, used to create optical distortions and suggesting the revolving, cyclical nature of life.  Man ages, moving from his strong and spry youth towards the grave, gradually losing utility to society.  Man gets fired or is forced into retirement, just to have another man take his post and repeat the process.  If this is the case, then life is a completely hopeless proposition.  At least if it’s the fault of society we could strive to change it.

Actually, this idea of natural obsolescence is a bit ironic, considering what happened to the silent movie as a medium.  In fact, The Last Laugh is perhaps the most “silent” silent film I’ve ever seen.  Aside from the introduction, there is exactly one intertitle, and there is no transcribed dialogue.  Everything, all thoughts, actions and emotions, comes from the characters’ facial expressions.  This means that the film is a challenging and demanding watch, but it provides for a very rich experience and a deeper connection to Jannings’ situation.

I should note, though, that the film's ending is, well, not very satisfying.  Apparently, Murnau's distributors demanded that the film have a happy ended to enhance commercial prospects.  At risk of losing the American audience, Murnau obliged, and the film is worse for it.  Now, Murnau is clearly aware of how terrible the finale is--the one intertitle introducing the epilogue says as much--but it's still hard to swallow after the soul-crushing first 5/6 of the film.  I personally can only justify the ending by assuming that the director is God, Murnau is humanity, and the last fifteen minutes represent unattainable heaven and divine justice.

Freely I will admit that the ending to the film is a bit of a letdown, but that was forced on the crew; I can forgive that.  When you combine the gorgeous visual work with Jannings’ top-notch performance, and mix it all up with some appropriately German angst, the end result will be an emotionally draining but enlightening work of cinema--even with the tacked-on happy ending.  This is one of the instances where I’d say, “Drop whatever you’re doing and watch this movie.”  It may only be the second film of his I’ve seen, but it may have made Murnau my favorite director ever.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Yet Another Journey: On the Monomyth and "American Gods"

I remember a lot about reading Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 10th grade English class.  I can recall hoping that Tom Sawyer would die a gruesome death by novel's end.  Or I could tell you about reciting Hamlet's "to be or not to be" solliloquy for some tangentially related extra credit.  But what sticks out most in my memories of that time is the paper that we had to write on it: a twenty-five page monstrosity on the monomyth.

The prompt was fairly straighforward: using Joseph Campbell's outline of the monomyth, compare The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and any other work of literature or film along the lines of the hero's journey.  With only about a week to do it, our teacher told us that all of our thoughts would be on the monomyth.  As a result, he continued, once we emerged from our bedrooms, essays in hand, we would be unable to look at at any piece of media without making monomythic comparisons.

For me, at least, that last part wasn't true.  I know that others in the class mentioned unconsciously linking everything back to some stage of the monomyth, but alas, I was not.  Recently, I've been wondering why that was.  After all, it's not as if I am incapable of unwillingly making connections between my studies and the outside world.  About a year ago I took a class on philosophy of science, which I barely understood, and last semester I was tying it in with absolutely everything.

And yet here I am today, three years later, thinking hard about the monomyth.  As I write this, I only a few hours ago finished American Gods, a 2001 novel by Neil Gaiman.  It's a wonderful book, one I highly recommend reading.  It's also, especially in it's early stages, very much in sync with the hero's journey.  More importantly, I quickly recognized that it followed that story arc.  Largely removed from when it was relevant to my life, only now am I seeing the monomyth in art.

Given the subject matter of American Gods, though, it's not that surprising that I made the connection.  Set in a world where every god conceived exists because humans believe in them, it is immediately apparent that mythology plays a crucial role in the story.  Given that, I can see how my mind could drift from classical gods to classical heroes, and from that point it's just a stone's throw to the classical hero's journey myth.

Way back in tenth grade, though, and the monomyth could not have been further from my mind.  Why is that?  Well, for one thing, I remember having a hard time thinking of a work to which I could compare The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  The teacher gave us a handout with a list of monomythic works.  After reading through it, I found that the only one I had read and liked was The Catcher in the Rye, so that became my comparative pieces.

I could use this incident to demonstrate my detachment from popular culture.  I am proud to say that I've never seen Star Wars, and I got two chapters into The Hobbit before throwing it across the room.  I feel no particular attachment to the Disney animated film canon, and I can't even remember the rest of the works he suggested.  As the kind of person who will self-deprecatingly say he likes works where people stand around and stare at each other, the hero's journey simply doesn't suit me.

On top of that, I found--still find, really--the notion of a monomyth a bit hard to swallow.  Not only does it seem male-centric and overly broad in its schemata, but it also strikes me as bizarre that one would need to codify it if it were truly ingrained in the collective unconscious.  Add to the fact that after The Hero with a Thousand Faces creators consciously tried to craft monomythic tales, and it's no wonder that I find the monomyth something artists should choose to avoid.

Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy writing about it.  Part of the fun was trying to fit the adventures of Holden Caulfield into the monomyth, as I find his travail neither heroic nor journey-based.  And part of the fun was making the filler; my favorites were arguing that because both Huck and Holden think about going west, they are quintessentially American monomyths, and that one could make a case that Holden's goddess figure is his little sister.

So, with this piece, I'm going to see if I can recreate some of that half-baked essay magic.  That's right--I'll be comparing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye and American Gods as variations on the monomyth.  Now, covering every stage of the hero's journey would take an inordinate amount of space for a blog, so I'll be confining myself to the first two parts: The Call to Adenture and The Refusal of the Call.

The Call to Adventure

The Call to Adventure is exactly what is sounds like.  The hero of whatever tale we speak is given the chance to start a grand journey.  The call may be someone literally calling on the hero to do action X for purpose P, or it may be an external force which forces the protagonist from his current situation and out into the world.  Either way, this is a crucial step in the story.  After all, if there's no impetus to get off the couch, why should the hero bother?

For Huck Finn, the call to adventure is two-fold.  The first part can be summed up as "survival".  Huck's father, who had been absent from Huck's life, returns to town to get at the money that Huck acquired in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  "Pap" manages to gain custody of Huck, and thus begins an abusive parentage.  Huck realizes that he must escape from this living arrangement, or else the whippings and neglect will continue.  As Twain has Huck narrate:
But by and by pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and I couldn't stand it.  I was all over welts.  He got to going away so much, too, and locking me in.  Once he locked me in and was gone three days.  It was dreadful lonesome.  I judged he had got drownded, and I wasn't ever going to get out any more.  I was scared.  I made up my mind I would fix up some way to leave there. (23; ch. 6)
Huck has a flight-or-flight stimulus to leave town, but he also has mental call as well.  Huck is not enthralled with the "civilized" world that has been thrust upon him since coming into money.  From the get-go, it is clear that Huck wishes to escape from this life-style as well.  According to Huck, "[I]t was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out" (Twain 1; ch. 1).  Huck real call, then, may be his desire to reject antebellum civilization.

In J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield also receives a two-part calling: an "ultimatum" and a "motivation", if you will.  Unlike Huck, though, Holden knows damn well what his ultimatum is and when it's coming: "I wasn't supposed to come back after Christmas vacation, on account of I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself at all" (Salinger 6; ch. 1).  Yet though he can forsee this part of the call, Holden is just as compelled to begin his journey right there and then.

However, Holden, like Huck, is driven by a fundamental mistrust of society.  In Holden's case, he is disgusted by what he calls "phoniness".  What exactly being phony entails is not entirely clear--hypocrisy? cynicism?--but given how he hates words such as "grand" and the upscale academic society that is Pencey, it bears at least some relation to the civilized ways against which Huck Finn chafed.  Granted, though, him describing the phoniness of Pencey Prep is a bit scattershot:
You ought to go to a boys' school sometime...It's full of phonies, and all you do is study that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football teamn loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddamn cliques. (Salinger 170; ch. 17)
Whatever it is that Holden resents about society, it is clear that both he and Huck Finn are ultimately driven by their views of the world around them.  The same cannot be said for Shadow, the protagonist of American Gods.  In fact, Shadow seems to be perfectly fine with the state of America.  After spending three years of a six-year sentence in prison, all Shadow really wants is to return home to Eagle Point, Indiana and to pick up his life where he left it.
No, Shadow's call is purely of the "what-else-can-I-do" variety.  A shady figure who goes by Mr. Wednesday, after telling Shadow that his wife is dead and that his job opportunity back home is gone, offers him a job as his errand boy.  Although Shadow makes it clear that he is not fond of Wednesday, he concedes that he's "at a loose end right now" (Gaiman 31; pt. 1, ch. 2).  After drinking some ceremonial mead, Shadow joins Wednesday and accepts the call.

Refusal of the Call

While it should be obvious that one must accept the call for their to be a story, the hero need not accept the call at once.  In fact, one of the seventeen stages that Campbell indentifies in the monomyth is the Refusal of the Call.  Early on, the protagonist may decide to ignore his calling and stay on his couch.  He might be scared of the other world, believe that the journey is immoral, or just content with his life as it is.

Not all hero's journey tales follow every step, though.  In fact, in both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, he narrative does not include a refusal of the call.  That this stage of the monomyth is not included is in large part due to the nature of the call.  Huck will die if he stays in the cabin with Pap, and in a few days Holden will be forcibly removed from the premises of Pencey Prep.  Refusing the call is impossible for both characters.

That said, given where both Huck and Holden are mentally when they receive the call to the adventure, it would go against character for them to turn it down.  In Huck's case, he had been trying to escape from the Widow Douglas' civilizing force since the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  Holden, meanwhile, has done nothing that would indicate he would like to stay at Pencey (e.g., applying himself), and it appears he's chomping at the bit to begin his journey:
But all of sudden, I changed my mind.  All of sudden, I decided what I'd really do, I'd get the hell out of Pencey--right that same night and all.  I mean not wait till Wednesday or anything.  I just didn't want to hang around any more.  It made me too sad and lonesome. (Salinger 66; ch. 7)
Neither Huck nor Holden are all that heroic as characters when their journey's begin, but one trait they both possess is a clear willingness to venture forth.  Neither can know what's in store for them, but once the ultimatum is delivered, they're out the door in a heart beat.  Such is not the case with Shadow.  Eagerness to journey is a trait which Shadow does not possess, and this becomes clear when he initially rejects the call to adventure.

On the plane from St. Louis to (eventually) Eagle Point, Shadow winds up in first class sitting next to Wednesday.  It is on the plane that Wednesday first makes his job offer, and Shadow turns him down several times during the flight.  Shadow's refusals aren't weak, either, but unequivocal: "'Mister whoever-the-fuck you are,' said Shadow, just loud enough to be heard over the din of the engines, 'there isn't enough money in the world'" (Gaiman 19; pt. 1, ch. 1).

Shadow does eventually come around--though not before getting off at another airport to get away from Wednesday.  It's a call that Shadow is unwilling to accept until it becomes clear that this is effectively an ultimatum.  Even when he does accept the call to adventure, he does little to mask his contempt for the man offering it: "I don't like you, Mister Wednesday, or whatever your real name may be.  We are not friends" (Gaiman 31; pt. 1, ch. 2).  Whereas Huck and Holden are eager heroes, Shadow is a reluctant one.

What Have I Learned?

In writing on the first two stages of the monomyth in relation to these three books, I wished to discover what it is about American Gods that reminded me of the monomyth, and why The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye didn't.  Factoring out the central presence of mythological beings in Gaiman's book, and I believe that it comes down to one thing: the fact Shadow first refuses the call.

One of the key elements of the any story is that the hero has something which he needs to overcome.  Whether it's societal rules or the protagonist's own immaturity, there is something which must be in some way conquered.  Yet if the hero is immediately willing to do something--even if in the end it plays no role in solving the problem--the payoff does not feel all that heroic; it's something of a foregone conclusion then.

However, if the protagonist at first is skeptical about making the journey, only later coming around on the idea, then, at least from my perspective, the stakes have been raised.  If it took so long for the hero to fully acknowledge that a problem must be conquered, then there's significant build-up, and the hero's journey itself comes into greater focus.  I'm not necessarily saying that the monomythic hero should be a relucatant one, but it would explain some of my reactions.

I say "some", because I can immediately think of counterexamples.  I've already mentioned how I could not stand what little I read of The Hobbit, and Bilbo Baggins is often held-up as the typical reluctant hero.  The same is true of Harry Potter: he would probably be more than happy to not be the chosen one, yet the series hold little appeal for me on a story level.  Both are unwilling heroes, but neither draw me to their journeys.

I suppose that further analysis might end up clarifying why the monomythic aspects of American Gods stand out to me, but that would probably require more time and space than I am willing to devote to the topic.  That, and reading over the essay I wrote back in tenth grade is excruciating.  This might be a topic I will return to in the future, but for now, I am willing to write off my observations on American Gods as pure coincidence.  I am, if you will, refusing the call.

Works cited:

Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. New York: William Morrow-HarperCollins, 2001. Print.

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. 1951. New York: Back Bay-Little, Brown and
     Company, 2001. Print.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. Garden City, NY: Nelson
     Doubleday, 1969. Print.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

The Steel Trap (1952)

The Steel Trap (1952)
Written and directed by Andrew Stone
Runtime: 1 hr, 25 min

 
Time: it is the inescapable element to our existence.  Sure, we may go through extended periods where the passing of seconds is imperceptible, but all it takes is to hear the ticking of a clock to realize and feel time pass by.  One may panic at the awareness of time, seeing that he does not have as much as he would like, that there is something important that needs doing but that there is not enough time to do it.  It is this rush, this primal state that drives the concept of suspense—if time were limitless, where would the pressure come from?  It is also what makes The Steel Trap such an enjoyable ride.
For time is at the very center of this tale of crime.  In the film, James Osborne (Joseph Cotten) is a rising employee at a Los Angeles bank.  One day, he gets the notion to rob the bank’s vault and flee to Brazil, as a 1913 amendment revoked Brazil’s extradition treaty with the U.S.  Osborne tells his wife, Laurie (Teresa Wright), that he’s been sent to a meeting in Rio de Janeiro on the bank’s behalf, keeping the whole robbery business to himself.  The plan is to empty the vault on Friday afternoon and to reach Brazil before the bank reopens on Monday.
This being a movie, things do not go according to plan.  Whether it’s picking up their passports from the Brazilian consulate or making a connecting flight from New Orleans, Osborne is unceasingly racing against the clock.  The pulse does not slacken for a moment, as whenever one obstacle is overcome, a new one arises.  Or two will arise at the same time: While Laurie is scrambling to find a babysitter, Osborne must listen to his boss (Jonathan Hale) yammer on about his golf game before they can close up shop and let him escape with the dough.
These and many other obstacles take a toll on Osborne, and the finest part of Cotten’s performance is his ability to show the building stress that his character experiences.  Even in scenes where he is sweet-talking to his wife and reassuring that everything is on the level, Cotten allows traces of wear and tear to peek through.  Importantly, the strain increases gradually (more facial strains, compulsive watch checking, etc.), so that when a major snap does occur—say, Osborne yelling at a flight attendant he thinks is holding up a plane—the dramatic effect is potent.
It’s not just the pressure building in Osborne’s mind that drives the film; one gets the sense that the scheme is slowly collapsing all around them.  At first, it’s just Laurie trying to piece together what exactly her husband is doing in Rio, but soon Osborne’s co-workers, the customs officials in New Orleans and a whole host of others start chipping into the plot.  It’s only a matter of time, I kept thinking, that this whole scheme of quickly timed robberies, extradition laws and connecting flights falls apart at the scenes.  “Osborne’s going to fall hard,” I thought to myself.
But what actually give the fullest effect of time running out are the camera work and the sound mixing.  When Osborne actually removes the money from the safe, he is shown doing so in a mirror, bringing to the front the real possibility that someone could walk into the vault and spot him immediately.  Later, as a coworker (Eddie Marr) talks on the phone regarding what Osborne is up to, the shot at an ominously low angle.  The sound mixing has a similar effect: clocks ticking in the background are turned up; conversations in echo-y rooms and the loud scraping of eggs from a pan turn up the tension.
So far, what I’ve described is certainly a pulse pounding crime thriller, but it may appear to be a bit rote: dodging guards, making deals, wishing people would just shut up and let you do something.  Indeed, for the first three quarters of the film, The Steel Trap seems to be heading for a predictable resolution to what would still be a fun flick.  But then things take an interesting turn—one which I naturally shall not divulge, but the ending and its build-up raise some interesting questions about the concept of lawbreaking and redemption (some explicitly, some not).
It has been awhile since I have been this pleasantly surprised with a movie.  I made the decision to watch The Steel Trap at the last second, purely to fill the spot of another film.  While I would not dare call it a masterpiece of cinema—this is still a fairly simple heist movie, after all—it must have been doing something right.  That someone such as me, who normally finds the suspense thriller lacking in excitement, was so taken in by Osborne’s robbery scheme can only be seen as a unquestioned endorsement.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

My Blue Heaven (1950)

My Blue Heaven (1950) 
Directed by Henry Koster
Screenplay by Claude Binyon and Lamar Trotti, story by S. K. Lauren
Music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ralph Blane
Runtime: 1 hr, 36 min
To engage in broad generalizations, there are two ways that a musical may integrate songs into the production.  One way is to make the numbers integral parts of the story telling procedure, and the other is to use the numbers as set pieces around which a completely unrelated plot is built.  The second may seem pointless, but it does have its advantages.  If either the music or the story falters, the other may counterbalance things and still make for an enjoyable experience.  Of course, if neither is particularly strong, then the film becomes all the more painful to watch.
My Blue Heaven, sad to say, is one of those films which falls short in both areas.  Directed by Henry Koster and starring 1940s pin-up girl Betty Grable, My Blue Heaven has its plot centered on a couple’s attempts to adopt a child.  Grable plays Kitty Moran, who, alongside her husband Jack (Dan Dailey), have a singing show on the radio which later moves to television.  Kitty, when the film begins, has just gotten news she is pregnant, but a car crash results in a miscarriage, and Kitty is told she will be unable to give birth again.
At this point in the film, a troubling development emerged for me.  The tone of My Blue Heaven is almost comically inconsistent.  In case the miscarriage development gives the impression that this is a purely serious film, I should tell you that the car crash follows both a trivial (if fun) song about income tax deductions and a jovial baby shower sequence.  The shifts between lighthearted fun and melodrama—yes, “shifts”, this happens so often I lost count—prevented me from either enjoying the dance numbers or taking anything that was going on seriously.
The uncontrollable tonal shifts are a shame, because at first it appeared that the film could work as a pleasant if unfulfilling distraction.  Grable’s Kitty is a likeable enough character, and her relationship with Jack doesn’t feel forced at any point.  (Likely helping this is that My Blue Heaven was the third film that Grable and Dailey did together).  In addition, while he soon wears out his welcome, their friend Walter Pringle (David Wayne) provides some appreciated snarky banter—apparently, the end of the world includes South Pacific playing to empty theaters.
Unfortunately, the quest to adopt a baby soon takes over.  Kitty and Jack follow two main threads to get a child.  The first involves trying to adopt from a legitimate agency, overseen by the absurdly old-fashioned Mrs. Johnston (Laura Pierpont).  The second—and far, far more uncomfortable—sequence revolves around an under-the-table adoption of a girl from the backroom of a roadside diner.  Neither goes according to plan at first, but in the case of that second strategy, one might wish that at no point it did.
Indeed, about halfway through the film, I had a hard time swallowing what was occurring on screen.  Some was discomfort, some was incredulity.  On the side of discomfort, joining the shady adoption dealings, is the fact that Selma (Louise Beavers), the only black person in this film’s universe, is naturally a maid.  I get that this was pre-Civil Rights Movement and that it might be unfair to judge a film with present-day societal standards, but when I hear a semi-frivolous black woman scared after the “poh-lice” get involved, there’s only so much I can stomach.
The racial element got me groaning, but that was tempered by remembering that this was 1950.  The plot developments, on the other hand, had me yelling at the television.  These occur in the last third of the film, so I won’t go into too much detail.  I will say that there’s a totally dumbfounding sequence involving near-adultery and the characters’ reactions to it, and that the resolution to the adoption quest comes so quickly and in such a contrived manner that I’m still not certain if it was meant to be a joke or not.  Suffice to say this is not a screenplay to emulate.
The story clearly falls flat (or up, or diagonally—I don’t even know).  The music does little to salvage things.  I mentioned that “It’s Deductible” was fun, but sad to say the music just declines from there.  Tunes such as “The Friendly Islands” and “Don’t Rock the Boat, Dear” either go on for too long or lack any melodic punch to be memorable.  In fact, the only consistently good element to the musical parts was Dan Dailey’s dancing.  He’s no Gene Kelly, to be sure, but he does maintain a level of energy that, frankly, the material does not merit.
That My Blue Heaven goes so far off the rails is a bit baffling to me.  After all, this is a film that clearly strives to do nothing deeper than entertain the audience for an hour and a half.  If this had to be a film about a couple trying to adopt children, fine.  Babies are cute, right?  Working that plotline into a musical should not have been so difficult.  So why on earth did the film’s creators feel the need juxtapose overly-precious animal reaction shots with miscarriages and adultery?  I’m not sure what I would change if I were the director—where the hell would I start?

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

GoldDigger: Fitz and The Tantrums and the Parasitic Archetype

Fitz and The Tantrums, an indie-soul band signed to Dangerbird Records, released their debut full length album, entitled Pickin' Up the Pieces, back in 2010.  I first heard them in late January 2011, and after giving the LP a couple of spins, I grew to be a fan.  And I still am one; a year later and I'm still pumping my fist whenever I hear one of their songs come through my speakers.  Yet there's a certain element to their work that is more than a little disconcerting.

Of the ten songs on the album, nine are about relationships, and most of those songs detail breakups (which is not that surprising, considering their first EP was called Songs for a Break Up, Vol. 1).  I certainly have no problem with the kiss-off tune, but when telling an ex-lover to leave, one does run the risk of resorting to problematic or offensive gender stereotypes.  For most of the tunes, the band avoids this problem.  Two songs, however, see the group slip into that troubling mode.

What I find a bit curious is that in both of these instances, Fitz and The Tantrums use the same gender stereotype: the gold-digger.  According to Orrin E. Klapp, in cultural works the gold-digger belongs to a category of villain characters he terms "chiselers or parasites".  Members of the class of villains are characterized by "exploitation of an unfair advantage in an underhanded way by a person whose relationship to society is essentially parasitic" (339).  In the case of the gold-digger, the character gets into a relationship in order to get at the partner's money.

This character type appears in popular culture with a great deal of frequency, especially in the world of music.  Prominent examples include Eartha Kitt's "Santa Baby", Kanye West's "Gold Digger" and, most recently, Cee Lo Green's "Fuck You!"  The gold-digger is almost always a female character, although there are a handful of male examples (Morris Townsend in Henry James' Washington Square, for one).  It is true, however, that this tends to be a female-exclusive character, which has the effect of reinforcing the notion that women are shallow and materialistic.

I shall discuss the two offending songs in the order they appear on the album.  The first track, then, telegraphs the use of the gold-digger character in the title: "MoneyGrabber".

"MoneyGrabber", the lead single to Pickin' Up the Pieces, is easily the best known song from Fitz and The Tantrums; it's also a song that's a little hard for me to critique, because I really like the song.  In fact, "MoneyGrabber" may be my favorite song from 2010.  A killer opening piano riff and an impassioned lead vocal performance will do wonders, I suppose.  Yet the song remains problematic--I mean, the gold-digger character is embedded in every fiber of the song.

It's possible that part of the reason that "MoneyGrabber" didn't really bother me until I actually began to think about it is that the verses seem to be aimed at one particular person.  In that respect it appears to take the form of the personal put-down song, a type of song to which I admit being a fan of.  Michael Fitzpatrick seems legitimately angry at the title character: she was "talkin' double" with her "hands in the pocket".  The lyrics are terse, but they do give the impression that the speaker had been taken advantage of.

However, the verses do contain some troubling lines.  Two examples stick out.  In last line of the second verse, the speaker goes beyond the gold-digger stance and combines it with accusations regarding her sexual nature: "I don't pay twice for the price of a cheap-time whore".  This is not merely an off the cuff insult; the speaker implies that at the end of the relationship, the title character was good solely for (dirty) sexual uses.  This takes the song off focus and suggests that he has more problems with this particular woman.

A line in the first verse, however, I find more disturbing.  According to the speaker, the "MoneyGrabber" was "always made to want it all".  In stating that her gold-digging ways extend into the past, the speaker presents the possibility that being a materialistic woman out to take a poor sap's money--or more generally, being greedy--is somehow a part of her genetic makeup.  Is one supposed to infer that she was born to be a gold-digger?  So much for free will there.

For the most part, though, "MoneyGrabber" keeps its focus on one subject.  The only time that the song makes any generalizations comes in the first lines of the chorus: "Don't come back anytime/I've already had your kind".  It is a nasty generalization, and the whole "you and your kind" business is never inoffensive, but it's not entirely ridiculous.  After all, humanity in general tends to get greedy.  This doesn't forgive its transgressions, but it keeps the song from going too far.

But, yeah, I still dig the song, a lot.  Maybe I'm just able to do the mental gymnastics and see Fitzpatrick as being deep in character.  He's just initiated a bitter break up, and now they're in a heated argument by the front door.  He's sure angry, perhaps justifiably, but in the heat of passion he says a lot of things he may come to regret not too long later.  It's possible, I'll admit, but now I'm engaging too much in apologetics.

Actually, I may just be trying to reconcile the fact that I love "MoneyGrabber" despite its use of the gold-digger stereotype, yet I hate "Rich Girls" precisely for the sexist lyrics.


Well, okay, it's not entirely because of the lyrics that the song bothers me.  The tune doesn't gel with the rest of the album's musicality and it lacks the musical punch that songs such as "Pickin' Up the Pieces", "MoneyGrabber" or "Don't Gotta Work It Out" possess.  In fact, had they replaced this song with "Darkest Street" or "We Don't Need Love Songs" from their EP, it would have greatly improved the record, though some track reordering may have been called for.

But that's not why I'm talking about "Rich Girls".  No, that'd be the lyrics.  Whereas "MoneyGrabber" largely refrained from generalizations, the chorus of "Rich Girls" revels in them:
Don't matter what you do
'Cause the rich girls will break your heart
The poor girls will take your money
I confess and I repent
For the things I've done; this soul is spent
From this chorus alone, one can see a disquieting viewpoint emerge.  Because what one does is irrelevant, one can infer an either-or proposition: Either you take the haughty rich girls, or the lower-class girls looking for cash.  That's quite the narrow view of women, isn't it?  Even if the last two lines of the chorus suggest that the speaker may be to blame in some way, from the rest of the song, I can only conclude that he's "repenting" for bothering with women at all.  Even I can't take that broad bitterness.

I shall skip over the first verse, the one that deals with rich girl Susie, not because it's uninteresting or unproblematic but because it doesn't involve the gold-digger character; Susie just won't give the speaker the time of day.  The second verse, about poor girl Shawnee, is where the stereotype comes into play:
Shawnee came from a broken home
Her mama's sick and her daddy's long gone
Got a job but it don't pay no bread
Lookin' for a man who's well-fed.
At first, Shawnee appears to be a sympathetic character: a tough life growing up, an ailing mother she may be caring for, and working a job which pays little to nothing.  In fact, had I fallen asleep during the chorus, I might have thought that "Rich Girls" was actually a song condemning wealthy women who have it made in favor of the struggling working class women.  I could certainly see the appeal to that kind of song.  Who doesn't love a good takedown of the snooty one-percent crowd?

Granted, that still would involve writing stereotyped characters, which is, yes, still an issue, but in that case it wouldn't include the gold-digger character and I wouldn't be a writing a blog post on it.  Instead, that fourth line starts the turn.  I mean, I would imagine that someone in that situation would not object to finding a partner who happens to have money, but is that Shawnee's number one criterion?  Well, let's look at the other half the verse:
She got the low-rent, underground padlocked studio
Blues and a bus fare to take her to school
She sure needs a steady man
Always got a perfect plan
For you to pay up for playing the fool
It's at this point where the gold-digger character shines through.  The speaker asserts that Shawnee consciously seeks out someone with cash and is more than willing to leave him a sucker.  On top of that, that Shawnee "needs" a man with dough suggests that the only way for the poor girls to get money is to start panning in the river.  Combining the gold-digger with the notion that women really do need men, that, that's quite the feat.

Furthermore, what in Shawnee's character would indicate that she would take advantage of people in that way?  What on earth has she done besides be poor?  I don't know if she's a good person or not from the song, but should I just assume she's a bad apple?  Am I supposed believe that non-wealthy women are just naturally gold-diggers?  At least in "MoneyGrabber", the song made it sound like the woman was in fact evil.  What in "Rich Girls" suggests the same for the poor girls?

When all is said and done, the speaker in "Rich Girls" comes off as an immature teenager who, after some failed relationships, comes to the conclusion that all women must be arrogant or greedy materialists.  There's a jaded edge to the subject matter, which is odd, since I think the performance is kind of jokey.  If that's what they were going for, then I think it makes the song even worse.  If it were sincere, I could still write it off as roleplay (thought it would be more difficult).  But the tone makes it more like a "sandwich" or "women's rights" joke.

I don't want to give the impression that these two songs are representative of the band.  Taken as a whole, the oeuvre of Fitz and The Tantrums seems to be about the spectrum of heartbreak, from rage ("News 4 U") to regret ("Tighter") to a bit off both ("Breakin' the Chains of Love").  On top of that, other than "Rich Girls", every song they've put out sounds fantastic.  Yet the use of the gold-digger stereotype is fairly prominent in their body of work, and may turn listeners off to some great new music.

I'm still a fan; there are just some lyrical issues that must be discussed.  With any luck, their next album will rectify them.

Works cited:
Fitz and The Tantrums. Pickin' Up the Pieces. Dangerbird, 2010. CD.

Klapp, Orrin E. "American Villain Types." American Sociological Review 21.3 (1956):
     337-40. JSTOR. Web. 21 June 2012.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Torrent (1926)

Directed by Monta Bell
Adaptation by Dorothy Farnum, based on the novel Entre naranjos by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
Titles by Katherine Hilliker and H. H. Caldwell
Runtime: 1 hr, 28 min
Whenever I get the chance, which unfortunately isn’t that often, I try to watch some silent cinema.  I’m not entirely sure what it is, but the form of the silent picture attracts me.  Further, in my quest to catch up on the history of film, I realized that I had never seen a picture starring Greta Garbo, the Swedish actress whose presence in a talking picture became sufficient for a tagline.  Torrent, the first film that Garbo made in America, provided a chance to satisfy both of these urges.
Garbo, who was just 20 at the time of the film’s release, plays Leonora, a Spanish peasant girl with a talent for singing.  At the start of the film, she is in a relationship with the son of her family’s landlords, Don Rafael Brull (Ricardo Cortez).  This is much to the displeasure of Rafael’s mother (Martha Mattox), who plots throughout the film to keep the two apart, including arranging for her son to marry the wealthy daughter of a pig farmer, Remedios (Gertrude Olmstead).
The summary is a gross over-condensation of the plot points, as a great number of events occur between Leonora and Rafael over a period of many years.  It’s just that most of these happenings are not fleshed out well; it would have been better for the filmmakers to trim out some encounters and actually develop the rest.  We see the two in bedrooms, during floods, backstage in between acts of an opera, but all too often Torrent feels like a slideshow of a couple’s life.
Indeed, a film such as Torrent suffers when the subplots to the central romance are more interesting that the main thread.  Leonora’s subplot involves her budding singing career, including her tutelage under the town’s barber, Cupido (Lucien Littlefield), who early on is a scene stealer, though somewhat tonally out of place.  Meanwhile, Rafael must struggle with the influence his mother has over his love life; these scenes in particular do a fine job of establishing Rafael character and allow Cortez’s acting chops to shine.
The problem with the plot is compounded upon consideration of the story’s structure.  When we begin, Leonora and Rafael are already together; if the audience is to root for the characters to make it by the end, then the audience is effectively rooting to maintain the status quo.  There is very little forward passion in such a tale; the only way to progress the relationship would be to break it apart.  As such, I knew from about ten minutes in that the resolution to the conflict could not be satisfying from an intellectual or emotional perspective.
This is not to say that every scene between Leonora and Rafael fails.  One of the film’s strongest moments occurs after Leonora, who has become an operatic sensation by the name of La Brunna, returns to her home and stands in her family’s orange grove.  Rafael enters the garden wanting to rekindle their romance, but ends up saying he wants to look at the orange blossoms.  The resulting few minutes showcase the built-up resentments and frustrations that both characters feel after all the time that’s passed.
Indeed, this sequence showcases some of Garbo’s better acting moments in Torrent.  I got the feeling, however, either that Garbo was still attempting to nail down her technique or that she was getting conflicting directional cues.  In particular, her facial expressions sometimes stand at odds with what’s supposed to be occurring on screen.  This is especially true during her characters first reunion with her mother (Lucy Beaumont).  Rather than appearing overjoyed or bitter or any expected emotion, Garbo appears in a semi-seductive pose; it’s as if the film were improperly spliced together.
While such an editing error seems unlikely, it would not be out of line with the film’s somewhat convoluted production history.  Originally, when MGM brought Garbo over from Sweden, it was not her but her mentor and director, Mauritz Stiller, whom MGM really wanted.  Garbo was only included in the deal to satisfy Stiller (who, as it turned out, never directed a single film for the studio).  Further, Garbo was not the original actress of Leonora—it was Alma Rubens, the wife of Ricardo Cortez, who had to pull out due to illness.  Finally, Stiller was at one point slated to direct Torrent, but was ultimately replaced with studio hand Monta Bell.
The seemingly aimless nature of the movie’s production fits the finished product a bit too well.  Torrent has much to recommend in it: aside from the main performances, the title flood sequence is quite exciting, even if it appears to be occurring at an exceptionally goofy pace, and the musical accompaniment by Arthur Barrow is simply superb.  But all of this together cannot compensate for the pedestrian story telling.  From an historical perspective it is worth a look, but for pure enjoyment, it’s a film that can safely be passed over.