Thursday, March 28, 2024

Gounod's "Roméo et Juliette" at the Metropolitan Opera: "Live in HD" Telecast (Metropolitan Opera, aired March 23, 2024)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Right now I’m listening to a 1976 radio broadcast of Charles Gounod’s opera Roméo et Juliette, featuring a capable cast – Alain Vanzo as Roméo and Andrée Esposito as Juliette – with Antonio de Almeida conducting the orchestra and chorus of the Opéra de Nice. This was the opera my husband Charles and I went to see yesterday afternoon in the Met’s “Live in HD” satellite telecast at the AMC 20 theatre complex in Mission Valley. The theatre management let us in free because there had been some dropouts when they tested the image, courtesy of interference from some storms that had been racking New York City recently, but in the end there was only a brief bit of digital dithering in the image towards the end. In these pages before I’ve noted my frustration that the truly great composers who contemplated writing operas based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet never did so while the lesser talents actually did. The first important opera based on the Romeo and Juliet story was composed by Nicola Vaccai (I wonder if he got teased as a kid because his last name derives from the Italian word for “cow”) in 1825 and was based not on Shakespeare’s play but on the original 1580 Italian story, the “Daysong” (so called because the good things that happen to the lovers all occur at night and the bad things happen during the day), by Luigi Da Porto that was also Shakespeare’s source. Vaccai’s librettist, Felice Romani, also worked from an intervening Italian play by Luigi Scevola called Giulietta è Romeo (note the reverse order of the names from the one we’re used to!) from the eighteen-teens. Later Romani recycled his libretto for Vaccai’s opera and gave it to Vincenzo Bellini for an opera called I Capuleti è I Montecchi, which was also based directly on the Italian sources rather than on Shakespeare. Both Vaccai and Bellini cast Romeo as a travesti or “trouser” role; that is, a male character played by a woman in drag. (I once mentioned this to my late roommate/home-care client John and he said, “Why did they do that?” Then I reminded him that in Shakespeare’s productions both Romeo and Juliet were played by males.)

In 1839 Hector Berlioz took up the Romeo and Juliet story but not, alas, for an opera. Instead, his Roméo et Juliette was a so-called “dramatic symphony,” which featured vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra in an opening movement that paid tribute to Shakespeare and the play, then four more or less conventional symphonic movements (though with choral interjections in the love and death scenes), and a final movement that dramatized the play’s epilogue, in which Friar Laurence presides over the joint funerals of Romeo and Juliet and at last gets the Montagues and the Capulets to settle their difference and stop the insane generations-long feud that has killed both their kids. The pattern of great composers falling through on their plans for a Romeo and Juliet opera while lesser talents did theirs continued; Tchaikovsky got as far as a “Fantasy-Overture” on the play (which I’ve never cared for, actually, being particularly annoyed by the cheaply gushing Big Tune for the lovers) and a duet on the balcony scene. Debussy contemplated a Roméo et Juliette opera for Mary Garden, the soprano who had created the role of Mélisande in Debussy’s one completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, but according to Garden this was one of many projects Debussy abandoned in the wake of the breakup of his first marriage and his remarriage to socialite Emma Bardac. Instead the composers who finished and premiered Romeo and Juliet operas in the 19th and 20th centuries were Charles Gounod and Riccardo Zandonaï.

Gounod is best known today for his opera Faust, based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s dramatic poem, and his Roméo et Juliette was premiered in Paris in 1867 at the Théâtre-Lyrique Impérial du Châtelet, the lesser theatre for composers who couldn’t make it into the Paris Opéra. At least Gounod and his librettist, Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, cast Romeo and Juliet as the characters’ actual biological genders – the only “trouser role” in this opera is Romeo’s page Stéphano – and gave them both a series of powerful and moving duets that form the heart of the opera. However, just about the only parts of this opera well known to modern audiences are Juliet’s aria “Je veux vivre” (“I want to live”), sung before she and Romeo even meet; and Romeo’s aria “Ah! Lêve-toi soleil” (“Arise, fair sun”), sung after he sees Juliet for the first time at the Capulets’ party which he’s crashed but before they’ve had any interaction with each other. As Charles and I were leaving the theatre I ran into an older straight couple and the man told me, “Prokofieff’s Romeo and Juliet is a masterpiece; this is just music.” I know what he means, though I’d substitute Berlioz’s for Prokofieff’s; Prokofieff was originally commissioned to compose a ballet based on Romeo and Juliet in 1936 but was told by the choreographer to give it a happy ending because “people can’t dance lying down.” Fortunately that original production fell through, and in 1940 a new choreographer, Leonid Lavrovsky, took a look at the score and approached Prokofieff about staging it. Lavrovsky asked Prokofieff, “Why does it have a happy ending?” Prokofieff replied, “Because the first choreographer told me people can’t dance lying down.” Lavrovsky told Prokofieff, “Write me the most intense and moving death scene you can imagine, and let me worry about what the dancers will do.”

Anyway, getting back to Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, it opens with a weird overture that reminded me of the one to Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman – especially the big string tremeloes that open it – and seemed more appropriate for a ship sailing through a storm than a tale of two star-crossed lovers. Then we get a chorus adapted from Shakespeare’s prologue about the generations-long feud between the Montagues and the Capulets, which segues into the Capulets’ party in which Romeo (Benjamin Bernheim, who despite his German-Jewish last name is actually French, and he gave an intermission interview in which he talked about how good it felt to sing in his native language instead of Italian, German or Russian) and his Montague friends crash the gate and worry about being found out. Romeo has been dating a woman named Rosaline (whom we never see) and Juliet (American soprano Nadine Sierra, who’s quite good) is being forced by her father (Nathan Berg) and mother to marry an obnoxious guy named Páris (Daniel Rich). (I noticed that the singers pronounced the “s” in Páris’s last name, presumably to distinguish him from the French capital, in which the “s” is silent.) But once the two lay eyes on each other at the party, they lose all interest in anyone else. The plot cycles through the familiar highlights from Shakespeare’s play: the balcony scene, the sequence in which Friar Laurence (Alfred Walker) secretly marries them, their one night of lovemaking, the catastrophic duel – incited, at least in this version, by Stéphano (Samantha Hankey) and the insulting song he sings about the Capulets – in which Capulet family member Tybalt kills Romeo’s friend Mercutio and Romeo kills Tybalt in revenge, the plot hatched by Friar Laurence to get Juliet out of having to marry Páris by giving her a drug that will make her look dead but in reality she will just sleep for a day, Romeo entering the Capulet family tomb and finding Juliet dead, Romeo drinking poison and then Juliet waking up from the drug, finding Romeo dead and then killing herself with Romeo’s dagger.

Like Berlioz and his librettist, Émile Deschamps, Gounod, Barbier and Carré worked not from Shakespeare’s original but from a rewrite by 18th century British actor/author David Garrick, who changed the ending so Juliet awakens after Romeo has already drunk the poison but before it’s killed him, so the two can sing a beautiful and heartrending final duet as they face the inevitability of their mutual demises and look forward to their reunion in death. (This whole business of being “reunited in death” is one of the sillier conceits of the entire Romantic era, though it’s one of the aspects of Romeo and Juliet that powered its rediscovery after having been largely forgotten in the intervening two centuries after Shakespeare’s death. At least Barbier and Carré didn’t have Romeo and Juliet survive at the end the way they did with Hamlet in their libretto for Ambroise Thomas’s opera on that play, based once again not on the original but a rewrite, this time by Alexandre Dumas père, best known today for The Three Musketeers.) Their last words are a prayer to God, “Forgive us!,” reflecting that in Roman Catholic theology suicide is a mortal sin and earns you eternal damnation. In one of the earlier duets for the lovers, they argue over whether a particular bird song they’ve heard is a nightingale heralding the evening or a lark heralding daybreak – a carry-over from the original “Daysong” origin of the story in which the good things that happen to Romeo and Juliet all occur at night and the bad things happen during daytime.

Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is a competent, workmanlike opera with some quite stunning moments – a surprising bit of world-weariness for Juliet in which, even before she’s met Romeo, she complains that her life seems meaningless and she longs for death; a late duet for the lovers called “Va, je t'ai pardonne” (recorded by Plácido Domingo and Renata Scotto on a quite impressive duets album for Columbia in 1978); and Romeo’s final scene in the tomb (recorded by legendary Polish tenor Jean de Reszke in 1905 but never approved for release by him, and no copy of the master disc exists). It also ends rather abruptly, with the deaths of the lovers and without Shakespeare’s epilogue in which Friar Laurence officiates at the joint funeral of Romeo and Juliet and at least tries to use the families’ grief at the loss of their kids to end their feud at last. (Since this is the one part of the play Berlioz set in operatic style, it might be interesting to graft the last movement of Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette onto a production of Gounod’s opera. At least they’re both from the mid-19th century and are both in French.) The Met’s production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette was basically well done and did justice to the story. Director Bartlett Sher and his production designers (Michael Yeargan for sets and Catherine Zuber for costumes) moved up the setting from the 16th to the 18th centuries, but it was still “antique” enough to fit the mood and not offer any of the outrageous anachronisms that infect modern-dress productions of Shakespeare. The Met’s current music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conducted with loving attention to the score and didn’t glibly rush through it the way he’s done in some previous productions.

The cast was stunning, especially the singers in the leads; for some reason the Mercutio, Tybalt and Friar Laurence were all Black, but that was a battle fought and won long ago (though I was still taken aback when a preview for the Met’s next “Live in HD” production, Puccini’s La Rondine, featuring soprano Angel Blue, a heavy-set African-American, less because she’s Black than she was dressed in a costume that made her look like Bessie Smith). While not an opera at the level of the very best conceivable adaptations (and I still mourn that we don’t have Romeo and Juliet operas by Berlioz or Debussy!), Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is still a quite capable piece of work and the Met’s current production (which debuted in 2017) does it justice. Oddly, though, it’s in just two acts; Gounod, Barbier and Carré wrote it in five short acts but the Met jammed it all together into two long ones, spotting the single intermission in between the two scenes of act three: a far cry from the Met’s 1930’s practice of either splitting long one-act operas like Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman and Das Rheingold to create intermissions or having Richard Strauss’s Salomé and Elektra preceded by curtain-raisers so there would be an intermission: a provision in the contract with their food-service provider required they have at least one intermission each time they performed!

Winchester.'73 (Universal-International, 1950)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, March 27) my husband Charles and I watched a DVD of the 1950 film Winchester ‘73 (that’s the original spelling, with an apostrophe before the number instead of a decimal point), a quite good movie which I’ve previously described as “a film noir in Western drag.” Winchester ‘73 was a quite important film in American movie history for reasons unrelated to its quality as a movie. Universal had absorbed International Pictures in 1946 and was anxious to upgrade its productions to compete with the major studios that owned their own theatres: MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount, Fox and RKO. One way Universal’s owners wanted to do that was to hire major stars, but their depleted coffers couldn’t match the asking price for big-name talent. James Stewart demanded $200,000 per picture, and that was too much up-front money for Universal. So instead Stewart offered to make the film for a percentage of its profits, and the film was such a huge hit it was estimated that he would clear $1 million just on his profit share. The actual amount, according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, was more like $600,000, but that was still a hefty sum for a single film in 1950. Winchester ‘73 began life as a short story by Stuart N. Lake (whose name was originally left off the credits and he sued the studio to get it listed) and was adapted into a screenplay by Robert L. Richards and Borden Chase. One of Chase’s own stories had just been filmed by director Howard Hawks as Red River (shot 1946, released 1948), so he knew something about not only Westerns but relatively deep, well motivated “psychological Westerns” in particular.

Winchester ‘73 was directed by Anthony Mann, who’d worked with Stewart in the 1930’s on stage but whose directorial career had mostly been making films noir for cheap studios like Republic and Eagle-Lion (the former PRC). The cinematographer was William Daniels, who’d been employed for years by MGM as a glamour cameraman (he was Greta Garbo’s favorite, he shot 17 of Garbo’s 24 films and in later years he said his one career regret was that Garbo never made a color film so he couldn’t show her beautiful blue eyes in color). Then he abruptly quit MGM and went over to Universal, where he explored the dark side both figuratively and literally, shooting noir classics like 1948’s The Naked City. For Winchester ‘73 he used red filters throughout almost the whole movie, giving a deep, contrasty Western “look” and achieving some of the claustrophobia of film noir even in a wide-open environment like the Old West. The plot of Winchester ‘73 is basically “boy meets gun, boy loses gun, boy gets gun back.” Lin McAdam (James Stewart, playing a dark, driven character quite different from the unambiguous heroes he’d been portraying most of his film career) arrives in Dodge City on July 4, 1876 to compete in a contest honoring the American Centennial. The prize is a new, rare Winchester ‘73 rifle, a gun so great it’s marketed as “One in a Thousand.” Unfortunately he has an especially determined opponent, Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally, Universal’s go-to guy for black-hearted villains then). The two end up neck and neck for the prize until Lin offers to shoot a hole through a postage stamp affixed to a charm from a Native American bracelet. He pulls it off and wins the rifle (according to imdb.com, the shot was actually executed by Herb Parsons, who was sent out by the Winchester company to train James Stewart in the proper handling of their gun), only Brown and two of his associates mug him for it and steal it.

Since they’re otherwise unarmed – Dodge City sheriff Wyatt Earp (Will Geer) and his deputy insisted that all the out-of-town gunslingers competing for the prize rifle check their own guns at the door and use only locally sourced rifles for the shooting contest – Brown and his gang have to give the precious Winchester to Joe Lamont (John McIntire) in exchange for $300 in gold pieces plus guns from Lamont’s stock of six-shooters. Then Lamont is ambushed by the Natives he was going to sell guns to, and their chief, Young Bull (Rock Hudson in a very early role that had my husband Charles laughing at his costuming and war paint to make him look Native; after that another later Big Name, Tony Curtis, turns up as a U.S. cavalry officer), turns down the old, worn-out guns Lamont wanted to palm off on him. Instead he demands the Winchester, and when Lamont refuses the Natives scalp him and take the gun anyway. Meanwhile, Wyatt Earp has chased local prostitute Lola Manners (Shelley Winters) out of town on a stagecoach in a sequence strikingly similar to Mae West’s treatment at the start of My Little Chickadee (1940), also a Universal film. Lola insisted she was there to meet her fiancé, Steve Miller (Charles Drake), who turns out to be an ineffectual coward who leaves her stranded when Natives attack their wagon. Ultimately Steve finds a cavalry detachment from the U.S. Army who are after the same Natives, and he and Lola end up in their camp despite facing near-certain annihilation from the Apaches. Lin McAdam and his sidekick “High-Spade” Frankie Wilson (Millard Mitchell) also show up at the camp, and Lin teaches the cavalry commander, Sgt. Wilkes (Jay C. Flippen), the most effective ways of fighting Natives, including waiting for their second charge because that’s when they’ll use their most impressive weapons, the large repeating rifles that won them the Battle of the Little Big Horn. (Word of George Armstrong Custer’s annihilation is just starting to figure down to the Kansas Territory where Winchester ‘73 takes place.)

Ultimately the whites win the battle (darnit!) and Young Bull drops the precious Winchester as he falls. But Lin McAdam doesn’t recover the rifle because he misses it completely – we can tell which one it is because it’s got a silver plate screwed to its stock which was supposed to be engraved with Lin’s name, only it was stolen from him before that could happen – and Steve picks it up from the battlefield. He and Lola ride to the Jameson place, owned by his family which they’re going to pass down to him and Lola, only he’s really a crook in league with Henry Brown and outlaw Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea in one of his best psycho performances; he takes charge of the screen in every scene he’s in). Dean is determined to kill Steve and kidnap Lola for himself, and to that end he stages a home-invasion robbery of the Jameson place and, when that doesn’t flush her out, he loads a wagon with incendiaries and sets the house on fire. Steve gets killed and Waco grabs Lola, but his partner-in-crime Dutch Henry Brown (ya remember him?) insists the Winchester is his and demands it. The misbegotten gang attempts a robbery at a town called Tascosa in Texas, but it goes about as well as all the other crimes in the film: Lin ambushes Waco and kills him (reportedly 1950 audiences gasped at the sight of James Stewart calmly and methodically gunning down Dan Duryea because none of his previous movies had prepared them for the sight of James Stewart, Action Hero), then stages a gun battle with Dutch Henry Brown. Lin’s sidekick Wilson tells Lola and us that Dutch Henry Brown is really Matthew McAdam, Lin’s brother, giving an air of Cain and Abel to their final confrontation, which takes place on some rocky ledges.

At first Dutch t/n Matthew has the advantage because he’s higher up, but Lin manages to sneak behind enough rocks to get above him and take him down (represented by one of the least convincing dummy shots ever in a major film), and ultimately Lin recovers the gun from his brother’s corpse. He did not end up with Lola as per traditional Hollywood conventions, and Shelley Winters was withering in her scorn for this film in later interviews. “Here you've got all these men … running around to get their hands on this goddamned rifle, instead of going after a beautiful blonde like me,” she said. “What does that tell you about the values of that picture? If I hadn't been in it, would anybody have noticed?” But she did praise James Stewart for yielding on the issue of how their faces should be photographed during their scenes together. Both thought their left sides were their best sides, but Stewart agreed to be filmed from the right side in scenes with Winters so she could show her best side to the camera. Winchester ‘73 today holds up surprisingly well even though it wasn’t even the first film noir Western (that honor goes to Blood on the Moon, made two years earlier at RKO by director Jacques Tourneur and echt noir star Robert Mitchum, though well before the noir era John Ford’s tragically underrated 1926 silent film Three Bad Men had had surprisingly noir-ish elements that anticipated the so-called “psychological Westerns” that were all the rage in the early 1950’s, largely on the strength of Winchester ‘73’s huge commercial success as well as that of High Noon, two years later). It’s a film that holds up surprisingly well even though Broken Arrow comes off as more politically progressive in its treatment of Native Americans, but Broken Arrow isn’t as good a movie overall and it’s handicapped by being in color, which plays against the darkness of its material while the black-and-white Winchester ‘73 ironically seems more true to life and faithful to the mythos of the West.

Monday, March 25, 2024

The Boob (MGM, 1926)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 24) I saw a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies that unwittingly had something in common: they were both surprisingly mediocre (or, in one case, even worse than that) efforts by directors with major reputations. The first was a “Silent Sunday Showcase” movie called The Boob, a not-particularly-funny comedy made at MGM in 1925 but not released until a year later. It was directed by William A. Wellman and was such a total flop that MGM production chief Louis B. Mayer fired him after its release – whereupon he decamped to Paramount and made the first Academy Award winner for Best Production, Wings, in 1927. Then Wellman moved on to Warner Bros. and directed James Cagney in his star-making role in The Public Enemy (1931) and made a minor masterpiece, Safe in Hell, a precursor to film noir and a great movie in which, given a script with two African-American characters speaking in Hollywood’s stupid excuse for “Negro dialect,” he overruled the writers and told the actors, Nina Mae McKinney and Clarence Muse, to speak their lines in normal English. I was thinking of this because “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, who’s African-American herself, criticized The Boob for its stereotypical Black character, “Hamm,” a boy played by an actor unidentified on imdb.com – though actually the Black boy is smarter than just about any of the white people in the movie and his dog, “Benzene,” is smarter than any of the humans!

The writing credits on The Boob are typically convoluted for a late silent: George Scarborough and Annette Westbay get credit for the “original” story (quotes definitely merited!); Kenneth B. Clarke for “scenario” and Katharine Hilliker and H. H. Caldwell for writing the intertitles. The Boob lists four principal cast members: Gertrude Olmstead, George K. Arthur, Joan Crawford and Charles Murray, in that order – but the two men get a lot more screen time than the two women. Plot-wise it’s the old chestnut about the country hayseed, Peter Good (George K. Arthur), whose girlfriend Amy (Gertrude Olmstead) has dumped him for a city slicker, Harry Benson (Antonio D’Algy – and given the overall creepiness of his character, it’s entirely appropriate that he be played by an actor named after a slimy underwater plant), who turns out to be a bootlegger. Benson is there to supply a new roadhouse called “The Booklovers’ Club” which, in one of the few genuinely witty touches in the script, dispenses alcoholic potables out of fake books with titles tweaked to reflect their real contents. Benson takes Amy to “The Booklovers’ Club” and promises to marry her the next day, much to the discomfiture of his gang, who understandably don’t want a woman – especially an innocent country girl who at best will be a fifth wheel on their operation and at worst might blow the whistle on them – tagging along. In case you’re wondering where the young Joan Crawford fits in (The Boob was her 11th movie and it’s pretty obvious that MGM didn’t yet know what to do with her; she’d had bit roles in great movies like Stroheim’s The Merry Widow and the 1926 Ben-Hur and she’d just come back from a loanout to First National for Harry Langdon’s first starring feature, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp), she plays a Prohibition enforcement agent named Jane who’s part of a crew of feds staking out The Booklovers’ Club and trying to bust Benson and his gang.

Though Charles Murray, as “Cactus Jim,” is billed fourth, he actually gets more screen time than any of the principals; he’s shown repeatedly breaking the glass flask containing his bootleg booze (one wonders why it never occurred to him to buy one of the metal flasks my husband Charles and I have seen in many other movies set during Prohibition and often made while it was still in effect), and as I once said about rustic comedian Bob Burns’s role in the 1937 Jack Benny vehicle Artists and Models, it’s unclear just why the people at the studio thought a film that was already a comedy (at least, as Dwight MacDonald put it, in thought and intent) needed a comic-relief character, and such a stupid, oppressive and unfunny one at that. The low point in Murray’s performance comes when the bootleggers dump a cache of illegal liquor to avoid getting caught with it, and Murray thinks he’s in hog heaven and picks up as much of the booze as he can grab. He ends up looking like a porcupine with bottlenecks sticking out of him at every conceivable hiding place, and ultimately he drinks his whole stash in one night, with predictable results. (The Black kid and the dog come upon him and try as best they can to sober him up.) The gimmick is that Peter Good thinks he can win Amy back by becoming a free-lance detective and busting Harry Benson’s bootlegging ring, and to ready him for this task Cactus Jim outfits him in a preposterous outfit of pseudo-Western dude-ranch decorations that, when Amy sees him, she actually compares to Tom Mix’s costumes.

The Boob actually has two quite good special-effects sequences, a movie-within-the-movie illustrating Cactus Jim’s boasts of his prowess as an Indian fighter and a remarkable dream in which Peter is driving Benson’s white car and it takes off and flies, with various other characters falling out of it as it travels through the skies. It ends about the way you’d expect it to, with Peter busting the bootleggers and earning a $2,000 reward and the promise of a federal enforcement job whenever he wants it, and while I was hoping he’d take the job and end up with Joan Crawford at the end, he returns to Amy and his dull hayseed existence after the other members of Benson’s gang inform him, to absolutely no one’s surprise, that Benson can’t marry Amy because he’s already married. It was ironic that Crawford made this movie right after working with Harry Langdon because, with my habit of mentally recasting classic-era movies with other actors who were around at the time, I’d been thinking of Langdon as the right actor to play Peter. With Langdon’s peculiar talent of bringing his baby-ish character and his adult reality into comedically effective contrasts, he could have made Peter sympathetic and even lovable in ways that totally eluded George K. Arthur.

All These Women (För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor) (Svensk Filmindustri, 1964)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, the next film on the Turner Classic Movies schedule March 24 was even lamer: All These Women (1964), a rare attempt at comedy from Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Alicia Malone, who hosts TCM’s weekly showcase for foreign films, said this was his attempt to do a box-office hit after his dour faith-based trilogy, Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963), which had been released to critical acclaim but not much of an audience. Its original Swedish title was a real mouthful, För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor, and Bergman not only directed but co-wrote the script with Swedish comedian Erland Josephson. For the first time in Bergman’s career he worked with color – Eastmancolor – and he used his regular cinematographer, Sven Nykvist. (American cinematographer Conrad Hall once said he was professionally jealous of Nykvist because of Sweden’s relative position to the sun, which gives it naturally indirect light.) All These Women is set in the 1920’s – as we learn from the elaborate cars of the period and the use of overly strident records of 1920’s songs like “Yes! We Have No Bananas” – and deals with an internationally famous cellist, Felix (we get a couple of glimpses of him but no one is identified on imdb.com as playing him); his biographer, Cornelius (Jari Kulle), who’s also a composer trying to get Felix to play a piece of his and hinting that the book he’s writing about Felix will make him look good, or not, depending on whether Felix plays Cornelius’s composition; and the harem of women Felix has assembled around him.

He calls them his “mistresses” and he’s given them names different from the ones they were born with: Bumblebee (Bibi Andersson, top-billed), Isolde (Harriet Andersson), Adelaide (Eva Dahlbeck), Traviata (Gertrud Fridh), Cecelia (Mona Malm) and Beatrica (Barbro Hiort af Ornäs). You’ll note that at least some of these characters are based after famous pieces of music – “Adelaide” is from a song by Beethoven which gets croaked by Jari Kulle as Cornelius in a raspy non-voice – though the main girl in Felix’s harem (Ghislaine Maxwell to Felix’s Jeffrey Epstein, as it were) is a heavy-set middle-aged woman named Madame Tussaud (Karin Kavli), named after the proprietress of the famous London wax museum (which actually gets name-checked in the script). Felix also has a long-suffering manservant and butler named Tristan (Georg Funkquist), who used to be a major cellist himself until Felix beat him at an international music competition, whereupon he withdrew from his career like Erich von Stroheim with Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and devoted the rest of his life to serving the Great Man. There’s also Felix’s manager, Jilliker (Allan Edwall), who has to deal with Felix’s refusal to announce the programs for his concerts in advance (Felix insists that the audiences come to see him perform and don’t care what he’s playing) and who ultimately quits after he’s appalled at Felix’s open flouting of conventional sexual morality. The film actually begins at Felix’s funeral, in which all the women in his life parade past his coffin and say, “He looks just the same – only different.” Then it flashes back to the last four days of Felix’s life, in which we see one of the mistresses shooting at statues of Felix in his garden; it’s not clear just how Felix is supposed to have died, though the hint is that he was shot.

There are some clever gags in the movie, including a scene in which we get a title saying that because of censorship the director won’t be able to show Cornelius and Bumblebee actually having sex and then the scene cuts to a black-and-white shot of them doing a Valentino-esque tango dance. But for the most part it’s just a dismal assemblage of would-be gags. One irony is that Bergman had proven in his 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night that he could do comedy, but Smiles of a Summer Night was a romantic farce while All These Women is slapstick, and badly staged slapstick at that. I had much the same feeling about All These Women as I’ve had for years about Wagner’s Die Meistersinger – both are the works of basically serious artists who tried to make us laugh and couldn’t (though at least Die Meistersinger has moments of genuine pathos and a few drop-dead gorgeous set-piece arias of the kind Wagner deliberately avoided in his other mature works) – and I’d be tempted to offer All These Women on a double bill with Woody Allen’s Interiors as a pairing of works by highly regarded artists each trying to play on the other’s turf. (Other examples I’d have in mind include a double bill of Bela Lugosi playing the Frankenstein monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Boris Karloff’s one vampire role, in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath; and a pairing of Alfred Hitchcock’s one musical, Waltzes from Vienna, with They Made Me a Criminal, a quite good 1939 thriller directed by Busby Berkeley.)

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Coogan's Bluff (Malpaso Productions, Universal, 1968)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On my way back from the Musica Vitale “Celebrating Women in the Arts” concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on Saturday, March 23 (https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2024/03/musica-vitale-brings-life-to-widely.html), I had excellent bus luck and had no trouble getting home in time to watch two noir-ish films on Turner Classic Movies I really wanted to see. The first was Coogan’s Bluff, made in 1978 by Universal in association with Malpaso Productions, a company started by the film’s star, Clint Eastwood. Eastwood’s career had had a rather quirky beginning; he was signed as a contract player by Universal in 1955 and put in an unbilled bit role in the 1955 sci-fi/horror film Revenge of the Creature as an inexperienced lab assistant who loses one of the four rats in his care. In 1959 he landed the second lead, “Rowdy Yates,” on a Western TV series called Rawhide that ran six seasons and had a long afterlife on reruns. In 1964 an Italian studio was about to shoot a U.S.-set Western called A Fistful of Dollars and they wanted the male lead of Rawhide, Eric Fleming, to play the lead. When Fleming turned it down, the Italian casting director no doubt thought, “Wait – why don’t we ask the other guy in that show to do it?” So they offered the part to Eastwood, he said yes, and when A Fistful of Dollars was released it became a worldwide hit and made Eastwood and director Sergio Leone international stars. It also sparked a whole cycle of Italian films about the U.S. West inevitably nicknamed “spaghetti Westerns,” including two more with Eastwood: For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Eastwood was suddenly in demand in his homeland, and after making a U.S. Western called Hang ‘Em High he ended up doing a modern-dress police thriller titled Coogan’s Bluff that was in essence the beta version of his 1971 mega-hit Dirty Harry. Both films were directed by Don Siegel and co-written by Dean Riesner, who’d had an interesting career backstory of his own; his father, Charles Riesner, had been an assistant to Charlie Chaplin in the early 1920’s and later a director himself. Under the name “Dinky Dean,” the five-year-old Dean Riesner played a bratty boy in Chaplin’s The Pilgrim (1922), and decades later he was establishing himself in Hollywood as a screenwriter and ended up working on both these Eastwood projects. Coogan’s Bluff is a nicely done thriller in which Coogan (Clint Eastwood) – no first name, at least none that we ever learn – is a sheriff’s deputy in Arizona whom we see taking insane risks trying to arrest a Native American in the Arizona desert. Though his quarry shoots at him with a high-powered rifle while all Coogan has is a standard-issue handgun, Coogan ultimately gets his man, but then antagonizes his boss, Sheriff McCrea (long-time Siegel “regular” Tom Tully), by leaving the prisoner hog-tied on a front porch without formally arresting him or reading him his rights. Then McCrea sends Coogan to New York City to pick up another prisoner, James Ringerman (Don Stroud), who’s wanted in Arizona but managed to escape to New York. Coogan ends up in the Big Apple and writers Riesner, Howard Rodman and Herman Miller cook up a lot of fish-out-of-water gags for him.

When Coogan hails a cab to take him to the police precinct where Ringerman was being held, he’s told by the cab driver the ride will be an extra 50 cents because he was carrying “luggage” – a small mini-suitcase – and later when he checks in at the spectacularly misnamed “Golden Hotel” (a sleazy dive whose main business is obviously renting rooms to prostitutes and their clients), he’s told he’ll need to pay $7 instead of the posted rate of $5 because he doesn’t have luggage. Coogan makes it to the police station, only Lt. McElroy (Lee J. Cobb), the precinct captain, tells him that Ringerman is in Bellevue Hospital after he OD’d on LSD (our Hayseed Hero asks how he got LSD while in custody, and I was wondering why he would want such a chancy drug instead of something more predictable like amphetamines or heroin). McElroy tells Coogan the procedure he has to go through, including petitioning the New York Supreme Court for an official writ of extradition and then getting the authorities at Bellevue formally to turn over custody of Ringerman to Coogan, only Coogan can’t be bothered. When I first heard of this movie I’d assumed “Coogan’s Bluff” was a geographical feature, but it really refers to the elaborate bluff Coogan pulls on the hospital authorities to get Ringerman by pretending he’s already dotted the bureaucratic “i”’s and crossed the “t”’s. Coogan gets Ringerman but almost immediately loses him again, thanks to an ambush staged by Ringerman’s girlfriend Linny Raven (Tisha Sterling, whom director Siegel remembered as just as much of a handful during the shoot as her character is on screen) and two male thugs, one of them played by the young Seymour Cassel.

The Terrible Trio manage to steal Coogan’s gun (a piece of symbolic castration the writers apparently borrowed from Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 film Stray Dog, another modern-dress police thriller), and Coogan’s subsequent attempts to recapture Ringerman lead to him harassing Ringerman’s mother Ellen (Betty Field) and compromising an elaborately staged NYPD “sting” operation involving Sgt. Jackson (James Edwards, who in 1949 starred as a Black serviceman victimized by racism in Stanley Kramer’s and Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave and briefly looked like he’d be the first African-American actor to be a star in leading roles, but his career didn’t take off while Sidney Poitier’s did). McElroy threatens to arrest Coogan, pointing out that while he may be a cop in Texas (there’s a nice running gag in which people assume Coogan is from Texas because he wears a cowboy hat, and he continually corrects them and says, “Arizona”), in New York he’s just another private citizen subject to arrest for obstruction of justice. Meanwhile Coogan cruises Linny Raven’s probation officer, Julie Roth (Susan Clark), and gets her to have sex with him by sheer persistence and star prerogative. Later he encounters Linny herself at a 1960’s-style discothéque called The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel (a name Siegel said he got from his then pre-pubescent son Kris), goes home with her and they have sex – only when he asks her where Ringerman is, she leads him into another trap. Siegel was particularly proud of this plot twist; he said he was tired of movies in which the hero gives the villain’s girlfriend such a good fuck she changes sides and betrays him, and in his film he’d have Coogan’s male ego set him up for her trap. The film climaxes in a motorcycle chase in which Ringerman is driving his own bike and Coogan follows in a cycle he’s commandeered from a middle-aged straight couple who were thrown from it after Ringerman crashed into them. “What are you doing with my bike?” the man futilely complains.

The two confront each other at The Cloisters, an old religious building we’ve seen before when Julie tried to take him there and he couldn’t have been less interested; Ringerman falls off his motorcycle and he and Coogan have a fist fight which Coogan wins. Then Coogan announces to the New York police that he’s making a citizen’s arrest of Ringerman, and in the film’s final scene the two are handcuffed together in a helicopter taking them to the airport and Coogan offers Ringerman a cigarette and lights it for him. (These days it’s a shock to see anyone smoking on board an aircraft.) As I noted above, Coogan’s Bluff is essentially a warmup for Dirty Harry: in both films Eastwood is playing an incorruptible but single-minded cop who’s so intent on pursuing his prey (a word that’s actually used in this script) he doesn’t care about such minor little details as the U.S. Constitution and its guarantees of equal protection and due process. It’s also very much a film of its time in its open ridicule of the hippie movement and in particular its pretensions about being for “peace” and “love” (among the fixtures in Linny Raven’s apartment are a plate for a light switch that says, inevitably, “You Turn Me On”) when hippies really – at least in this movie – protect and hang with lowlifes and crooks. It’s not really much of a film noir – the characters are too black-and-white (while the film itself is in color) and Lalo Schifrin’s musical score too bouncy and not dire enough – but Coogan’s Bluff works as a police procedural, a fish-out-of-water story and a way of fitting Clint Eastwood’s Western character into a modern-dress tale.

Where Danger Lives (Westwood Productions, RKO, 1950)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Coogan’s Bluff TCM ran an Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation of a really quirky film by director John Farrow (Mia Farrow’s father) from the Howard Hughes-owned RKO in 1950, Where Danger Lives. This one had high-powered talent at the typewriters: the original story was by Leo Rosten and the script by Charles Bennett, the British-born thriller writer who had worked for Alfred Hitchcock on six films from 1934 to 1940, including the first The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), and earlier one of his plays, Blackmail, had been the basis of Hitchcock’s first talkie in 1929. I’ve long thought Bennett was to Hitchcock what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford or Robert Riskin to Frank Capra: the writer who helped an auteur in the making crystallize his style and set his overall basic themes. The film is credited as “A John Farrow Production” – which seems to have been one way RKO lured Farrow from his previous studio, Paramount, where he made two back-to-back film noir masterpieces, The Big Clock and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, in 1948 – though the credits list two other producers, Irving Cummings, Jr. and Irwin Allen. (Allen would later become a major Hollywood figure specializing in disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno in the early 1970’s.)

Where Danger Lives is an odd movie in many ways; though the original poster art promoted Robert Mitchum and promised, “MITCHUM IN ACTION!,” the film itself makes Mitchum’s character, Dr. Jeff Cameron, pretty much a patsy in the hands of a scheming woman, Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue in her first major release, though Howard Hughes had bought her contract from Warner Bros. in 1941 when she was only 15; Warners had changed her name to “Faith Dorn” but Hughes changed it back and spent the next nine years starring her in a film called Vendetta that cycled through four directors – Max Ophuls, Preston Sturges, Stuart Heisler and Mel Ferrer, as well as Paul Weatherwax and Hughes himself in a few scenes – over five years of pre-production and four years of actual shooting before Hughes finally released it a month after Where Danger Lives). Unlike most of Hollywood, Robert Mitchum actually got along with Howard Hughes; in 1948, as Hughes was buying RKO, Mitchum got himself arrested for possession of marijuana. Hughes worked out an ingenious plan to get Mitchum released from state prison; he dredged up a pretty stupid script called The Big Steal and had one of his aides present it to the judge in Mitchum’s case. Hughes’s agent persuaded the judge that he had 120 people on his payroll ready to shoot this movie in Mexico, and if the judge didn’t release Mitchum he’d have to lay off all those workers. It worked; The Big Steal got made (it’s a pretty mindless action movie but also a lot of fun), and Mitchum was once again available for future projects while his bad-boy image was actually bolstered by his pot bust. Unfortunately, Hughes preferred to use Mitchum as a basic weakling and a sucker for a pretty female face and a hot bod attached to it.

Dr. Cameron meets Margo in an emergency room in San Francisco where she’s been taken after an attempted suicide. Once she’s well enough to be discharged, the two start dating, to the understandable discomfiture of Dr. Cameron’s nurse, Julie Dorn (Maureen O’Sullivan, then Mrs. John Farrow and Mia’s mother), who’d been in love with him herself and was hoping they’d get married when he left the hospital staff and started his own medical practice. Jeff is anxious to meet the mystery man whom he’s been told is Margo’s father, Frederick Lannington (Claude Rains in a part that ends way too soon; he plays with the cool authority he showed in Casablanca and Notorious), and when the two finally meet Jeff tells him he wants to marry Lannington’s daughter. “I’m afraid she’s not my daughter,” Frederick tells the shocked Dr. Cameron. “She’s my wife!” Jeff and Frederick end up in a brawl in Frederick’s fancy living room and Frederick repeatedly beats Jeff with a fireplace poker. Then Jeff pushes Frederick to the floor near the fireplace, though John Farrow is careful to show us where Frederick’s head landed: not anywhere near an andiron, which in previous people’s movies had meant certain death. Given how high Claude Rains had been billed (third, on an above-title card below Mitchum and Domergue) and how well his character had been established, I was fully expecting him to return later on in the film, not dead at all but just embittered and out for revenge. Alas, he’s dead, all right, and Jeff and Margo flee the country, or try to, sure that they’ll be arrested as soon as Frederick’s body is found.

Their first plan is to use the plane tickets to Nassau Frederick had bought before his death to take himself and Margo on a Caribbean vacation, but they get scared by a page asking “Nicholas Lannington” to come to the desk at the airport. It’s just a letter bidding him bon voyage signed by his office staff, but the two guilt-ridden love/hatebirds run out on their flight thinking it’s a sign that the police are after them. Messrs. Farrow, Rosten and Bennett pull the same gag later when Jeff and Margo pull up at a police roadblock – though it’s really just an agricultural quarantine inspecting people’s fruits and vegetables for pests. The two unlikely fugitives finally make it to Arizona and prepare to cross the U.S.-Mexico border at Nogales, but in the meantime they’re taken into custody by the sheriff in Postville, Arizona. It seems that Postville is in the middle of its annual “Wild West Whiskers Week,” and every male in Postville is required to wear a beard – real or fake – during the event. Down to their last $13, they are forced into a quickie wedding and given the bridal suite, which they won’t be allowed to leave. They finally work up an escape plan involving a traveling carnival (one of whose entertainers is a buxom woman who sings a raucous version of the song “Living In a Great Big Way” from the 1935 RKO musical Hooray for Love) and $1,000 in money a local pawnbroker paid them for a valuable bracelet Margo was carrying, but in the end Jeff learns that Margo is certifiably crazy – she was under the care of two New York psychiatrists – and, what’s more, she killed Nicholas by smothering him with a pillow and Jeff had nothing to do with it and is in the clear legally. Ultimately the police kill Margo in a shoot-out at the border and Jeff goes back to San Francisco and the waiting arms of Julie Dorn (ya remember Julie Dorn?), presumably to marry her and set up his own medical practice.

Robert Mitchum is hardly the late-1940’s Hollywood actor you’d think of in terms of playing a doctor, but he’s good enough to create a tough and multidimensional character out of what Farrow and the writers have given him. Aside from that, however, Where Danger Lives is pretty much a mess – a stylish mess, it’s true (Nicholas Musuraca is the cinematographer; he was a master of RKO’s frequent attempts at shadowy menace, and looks it), but still a mess. I was especially disappointed in the whole Postville sequence; as in the next film Mitchum made for RKO with Farrow as director, His Kind of Woman (1951), the film’s climax is terminally silly but also a sheer delight for overwrought camp, but it’s the sort of madcap humor that really doesn’t belong in a film noir. And I was wondering just how the issues surrounding Jeff’s future were going to sort out: remember that he and Margo were legally married before the cops croaked her, and that would presumably mean that with both Lanningtons dead Dr. Jeff Cameron would hold the entire Lannington fortune and he’d have no trouble with the seed money to start his practice.

Friday, March 22, 2024

Law and Order: "Façade" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 21, 2024)


by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, March 21) I watched a three-episode run of Law and Order shows on NBC, and my husband Charles joined me midway through for the last half of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and all of Law and Order: Organized Crime. The flagship Law and Order series episode was called “Façade” and was directed by Michael Smith from a script by Art Alamo and Ajani Jackson. It opens with a chilling prologue in which a woman on her way home late at night on the New York subways first has a homeless man burst out at her from his encampment in a subway station. Then she’s approached by three young thug-type men and she changes to another car, where she runs into a Black man named Ellis Joyner (Tyler Thomas Moore). In the next scene we see the police detectives Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) and Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) arrive on the scene, only when they pull back the cover on the dead body it’s Ellis Joyner’s corpse we see, not the woman’s. It turns out that Ellis was a) a Black stand-up comedian, b) an asthmatic and c) a closeted Gay man. The police initially investigate an older Black comic, Malcolm Paige (SaMi Chester), whom Ellis had “dissed” in his act (were the writers thinking Hamilton Burress and Bill Cosby here?), but Paige has a solid alibi. Then they zero in on a white man, Brandon Arnou (Daniel Marconi), who trains at a gym run by Domhnall Kovac (Kevin Makely). Arnou is taking a class Kovac teaches on “urban combat,” which not surprisingly turns out to be a front for white supremacism and urban terrorism. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi, an Israeli actress playing an Arab-American) indict Arnou for Joyner’s murder, but just when they appear to have the case won the defense attorney springs a surprise witness on them. (“Surprise witnesses” are a staple of crime fiction but almost never occur in real life because the rules of courts require that each side notify the other in advance of all the witnesses they intend to call; if you want to add an extra witness in mid-trial you have to petition the judge for permission and have a good explanation of just why you couldn’t have mentioned this person in previous proceedings in the case.)

The surprise witness is Rebecca Lasky (Ashlyn Fitch), the woman in the prologue, who insists that she was being attacked by Ellis Joyner and Brandon Arnou was a hero who came to her rescue and saved her from the proverbial Fate Worse Than Death. Price does the best he can to rehabilitate his case in cross-examination, including getting Rebecca to concede that what she interpreted as him grunting like an animal in anticipation of raping her might have actually been him having an asthma attack, but he also sends the cops out to Kovac’s gym to see if he can uncover evidence that Brandon was a racist and he attacked Joyner out of prejudice. They find it, all right, but the person who offers it to them is an undercover agent for the federal government (probably the FBI, though we’re not told for sure) who’s been infiltrating Kovac’s operation for nine months and has just got wind of a major terrorist attack they’re planning in New York City. Unfortunately, having him testify against Brandon Arnou on the Joyner murder case would blow his cover, and Price and his boss, District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), agree not to call him for the “greater good” of stopping the terror plot. So Brandon Arnou is acquitted, and the last shots are of him, Kovac and their cronies high-fiving each other outside the courtroom as they get to go home. Usually Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners would end an episode like this with a hint that the bad guys were arrested anyway and put away for long stretches for their terrorist activities, but this show didn’t go there and instead left the story chillingly open-ended with a shot of Ellis Joyner’s partner, Michael Zane (Kameron Kierce), obviously devastated that Ellis’s murderer got off scot-free on grounds of “justifiable homicide.”