|
|
Paramount Pictures is marking its 100th anniversary with a magnificent presentation of William Wellman’s 1927 “Wings” on Blu-ray, featuring a digitally restored image and a thundering DTS soundtrack that includes a re-recording of the original score by J.S. Zamecnik and sound effects supervised by Ben Burtt, of “Star Wars” and “WALL-E” fame. The new sound effects may seem a little obtrusive to silent film aficionados, inasmuch as they clearly point to a future technology and take the viewer out of the moment of the movie. But it’s the overdetermined sound that will probably put the film over for a modern audience whose only familiarity with the silent aesthetic comes from the even more aggressively anachronistic “The Artist.” My New York Times review is here.
On an alternate track, Paramount has included the pipe organ score recorded by Gaylord Carter when Paramount reissued the film on VHS in 1987 (as part of a package of a dozen silent films restored for the studio’s 75th anniversary — yes, times have changed). As near as I can determine (and I’d appreciate hearing from anyone with better information on this), “Wings” opened in its first run engagements in 1927 as a silent film, but by the time it went into general release in 1929/30, it had been outfitted with a Movietone track, now apparently lost, which would naturally have included sound effects. Wisely, Paramount chose not to “goat-gland” the movie by grafting on dialogue scenes, though the film was such a success — far outgrossing “The Jazz Singer,” as Donald Crafton has demonstrated — that it hardly needed any extra help at the box office.
Another mystery: the AFI Catalog lists the gifted Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast (“Laughter”) as an uncredited co-director, though without suggesting what scenes he was responsible for. As a certified Frenchman (imported by Chaplin to work as a technical adviser on “A Woman of Paris”) was D’Abbadie perhaps put to work on the Parisian night club sequence? With its dazzling establishing shot — an extended dolly/crane shot that passes between couples (including a forthrightly lesbian pair) seated at tiny tables before arriving at a drunken Buddy Rogers — the sequence seems outside the norm for Wellman, but who knows? Can any of the Wellmaniacs in the gang offer enlightenment?
Raro Video USA, the recently formed American arm of Italy’s most prestigious video publishing house, continues to demonstrate how little we know on this side of the pond about the classical Italian cinema, most recently with a pair of releases directed by Alberto Lattuada, “The Overcoat” (1952) and “Come Have Coffee with Us” (1970), both of which I review in this week’s New York Times column. Lattuada seems to have followed a path taken by several other directors of the postwar generation, moving from neo-realist principles (“The Bandit,” 1946), to stylish genre films (his 1951 “Anna” is a visually stunning blend of melodrama and noir stylistics) and into a series of dignified literary adaptations (“La Steppa,” 1962), before reinventing himself one last time as perhaps the driest wit of the “commedia all’italiana” of the 60s and 70s (“Mafioso,” 1962). His is another name to add to the list of filmmakers awaiting further investigation (which is to say, more extensive subtitling) that would already include Luigi Zampa, Antonio Pietrangeli, Valerio Zurlini, Luiciano Emmer, and no doubt another dozen or two with whom I am entirely unfamiliar. I’d welcome any other suggestions and amplifications.
Also on the further research front, the January/February issue of Film Comment is out, in which I devote a column to one of my favorite overlooked filmmakers, the immensely sensitive shaper of comic performances William A. Seiter.
The unremitting sleaziness of William Wellman’s 1931 “Safe in Hell” has earned the film a place in the pre-code pantheon, as well as a recent release as part of the Warner Archive Collection.
Playing a New Orleans prostitute who takes it on the lam after braining her ex-lover with a bottle of bootleg hooch, Dorothy Mackaill provides a memorably hard-bitten presence, but the role turns out to be something of an anomaly for the British-born actress, who had achieved minor stardom in the 1920s in a series of light, working-girl comedies made for First National. Mackaill worked with some of the leading comedy directors of the period, including Alfred Santell (“Subway Sadie,” 1926) and William A. Seiter (“Waterfront,” 1928), but the vast majority of her silent work is lost, making an accurate appraisal of her career an impossibility. Although she made an easy transition to sound, she was one of several First National stars whose contracts were not renewed when the studio was taken over by Warner Brothers, and by 1934 her career was effectively over.
Nevertheless, encouraged by the WAC release of a Mackaill double bill, “The Office Wife” (Lloyd Bacon, 1930) and “Party Husband” (Clarence G. Badger, 1931), as well as by the coincidental appearance of Thornton Freeland’s 1932 “Love Affair” as part of a TCM/Sony Humprhey Bogart collection, I press ahead in this week’s New York Times column with an attempt at an appreciation. If anyone has seen other Mackaill performances, or would care to recommend other overlooked performers of the period, please share.
A striking image from Lupu Pick’s cautionary New Year’s Eve tale of 1924, “Sylvester: Tragödie einer Nacht,” reminds us that the hour is upon us to compile our ten best lists for 2011. My ten best is more like a two best — I don’t think I saw anything better than Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” and (to my own astonishment) Jason Reitman’s caustic and courageously unlikable “Young Adult.” But I missed a lot in the last twelve months and I’m open to suggestions, which I hope you folks will submit in great profusion.
This week in the New York Times, I get back to three discs of note that slipped by me in the rush of holiday releases: the first-ever watchable release of William Wellman’s much-abused public domain comedy “Nothing Sacred,” in a high-def transfer from David O. Selznick’s personal print (Kino); “The People against O’Hara,” an MGM programmer from the socially conscious Dory Schary years, featuring Spencer Tracy as an alcoholic attorney, some workman-like direction from John Sturges, and some of John Alton’s wildest noir cinematography (Warner Archive); and Robert Mulligan’s hauntingly slow and sensitive “The Nickel Ride,” an elegiac crime film from 1974 featuring Jason Miller and the gently stylized cinematography of Jordan Cronenweth (Shout! Factory).
My old friend (and frequent contributor to this space) Tom Brueggemann has begun a weekly box office report for goldderby.com. There’s no fixed url for his column, but as you can see from this week’s example, this is uncommonly — perhaps even uniquely — sharp, informed, insightful and independent work in a genre that is too often dominated by would-be power players and studio toadies. Congratulations, Tom, and keep up the excellent work.
Warner Home Video has just released that most serenely secular of holiday films, Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 “Meet Me in St. Louis,” in a Blu-ray edition that comes as close as contemporary technology will allow to majesty of Minnelli’s palette. But any excuse is a good one to return to this beautiful and profound film, poised between hope for the future and regret for the past, as moving an evocation of impermanence as anything the cinema has offered us. Here’s my review in the New York Times.
Just in time for holiday giving, Olive Films has at last released an American edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s decades-in-the-making (or at least, decades-in-the-rights-clearing) “Histoire(s) du cinema” — 266 minutes of Godardian goodness assembled from a dizzying array of sources cinematic, literary, musical and painterly. Flashes of lightning like coherence burst through billowing cloud banks of Godardian obscurity over the course of eight episodes. While the sage of Switzerland may not always have his facts straight (did you know that Erich Pommer founded Universal?), the project is a magnificent non-linear journey across the 20th century, occasionally touching on movies but just as often occupied with the moral paradoxes of Western culture — its highs (“Some Came Running”) and lows (Sarajevo).
I can’t imagine that there will ever be a definitive critical account of this sprawling, brilliantly associative, impossibly dense work, and while I certainly don’t have one to offer in this week’s New York Times column, I do have a few elementary observations, which can be found here.
Pictured above is a piece of concept art — undated and apparently unused — that’s currently on display in a must-see exhibit, “The Birth of Promotion: Inventing Film Publicity in the Silent-Film Era,” at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. My guess is that it’s from the 1930 reissue of “The Birth of a Nation,” and was meant to capitalize on the success of Griffith’s first talkie, the immensely successful “Abraham Lincoln” with Walter Huston.
Kino International’s superb new Blu-ray release of “BoaN” includes the spoken introductions — staged as an after-dinner between Griffith and his Lincoln, Walter Huston, in a soundstage drawing-room — in which Griffith again protests that he means no ill toward any particular ethnic group, but is simply reproducing the history of Reconstruction with no less an authority than Woodrow Wilson to back him up.
Griffith, of course, was no simple racist — he was a very complicated racist, full of contradictions (the romanticized portrait of Indian life in his early westerns) and even some hints of compassion (the rediscovered “Middle Passage” prologue from “Abraham Lincoln” is among the most harrowing depictions of the slave trade in American film). “Birth of a Nation” continues to astound and confound with its juxtaposition of the most delicate sentiment (the Little Colonel’s homecoming) and the most brutal insensitivity (the Ku Klux Klan depicted as the Jedi Knights of 1915). Whatever it is, it’s a work that demands to be seen and discussed — you can’t understand the movies, or America, without it. Here’s my review of the Kino disc in the New York Times.
I’m glad to have George Cukor’s 1964 “My Fair Lady” on Blu-ray, even if it does seem to be a tired-looking transfer of the Robert A. Harris restoration from 1994, but I’m more grateful to the Warner Archive Collection for remastering Cukor’s often overlooked late work “Travels with My Aunt,” a frequently brilliant adaptation of a minor novel by Graham Greene. The screenplay is credited to Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler, but Allen told Patrick McGilligan, in his “Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1960s,” that the script was entirely the work of Katharine Hepburn, with the exception of one speech Allen didn’t identify.
Hepburn, of course, was originally set to play the part that ultimately went to Maggie Smith, and while Smith’s performance is problematical, at least the casting of a younger actress made possible the stunning flashback sequences, which give the film its heart and soul. Cukor will probably be forever typed as an “actor’s director,” but the “Train Bleu” sequence alone in “Travels” seems sufficient proof that he was one of the medium’s great visual storytellers, an absolute master of blocking and framing.
My New York Times review is here.
Here’s another odd but welcome release from TCM’s Vault Collection — four also-ran titles from Jean Arthur’s Columbia years, presented under license from Sony in excellent transfers from the camera negatives held by the Library of Congress. “The Public Menace” is a gangster comedy — probably meant as a quick follow-up to Arthur’s star-making turn in John Ford’s 1935 “The Whole Town’s Talking” — that doesn’t do much to advance to case for Erle C. Kenton as an auteur (see “Are We Not Men?” below); “Adventure in Manhattan” finds the sporadically interesting Edward Ludwig (“Wake of the Red Witch”) grappling with an oddly conceived crime comedy that never regains its footing after a strange and sadistic opening act; “More than a Secretary” cries out for William A. Seiter (who really put Arthur on her feet with “If You Could Only Cook”) but gets Alfred E. Green instead; and “The Impatient Years,” which was Arthur’s last film under her Columbia contract, is a wobbly Irving Cummings effort that strains to recapture the wartime romantic urgency of “The More the Merrier,” with Lee Bowman standing in for Joel McCrea. My New York Times review of the set is here.
After a long, slow start in B westerns and serials, Arthur appeared in an amazing number of important and/or famous movies between 1935 and 1944, including Frank Borzage’s “History Is Made at Night,” Mitchell Leisen’s “Easy Living, Howard Hawks’s “Only Angels Have Wings,” and three major films by Frank Capra (“Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “You Can’t Take It with You” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”). Yet she seems not to have enjoyed a minute of it, and her personal demons kept her out of the public eye for much of her later years. Here’s a touching profile of her by Guy Flatley, written for the Times in 1972 when she was teaching at Vassar.
|
|
Recent Comments