Elia Kazan Retrospective

http://www.theoneonefour.com/2010/04/04/in-review-elia-kazan-retrospective/

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (Charles Laughton, 1955)

New Review at theoneonefour.com:

http://www.theoneonefour.com/2010/02/04/in-review-the-night-of-the-hunter-charles-laughton-1955/#more-5669

THE HUSTLER (Robert Rossen, 1961)

When I first became interested in film, I would routinely watch my favorites many times. This was the mid-90s, and thus most of the films I've seen dozens of times come from this era: Miller's Crossing (1990), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Heat (1995), Casino (1995), etc. But there were also many classic films that obsessed me, usually noir, Hitchcock, or Bogart: The Third Man (1949), Rear Window (1954), The Maltese Falcon (1941), etc. Since coming to Seoul, I've had a few occasions to revisit these old VHS memories on the big screen, which can be like experiencing them for the first time. On Sunday at the Seoul Cinematheque, I was able to revisit another of my old beloved classics, Robert Rossen's The Hustler (1961). It was easily one of the best experiences I've had at the theatre, and vaulted the film to near the top of my best films list. I thought I would try to articulate both my passion for this film and try to defend my high esteem for it. (SPOILERS ahead)

In terms of context, The Hustler was made in 1961, at a time when the old studio system was fading, and bares the marks of this period. Although essentially a gritty noir drama, it is shot in widescreen, making great use of this extended frame. In terms of its content, it is highly doubtful the movie gets made under the more strictly enforced Production Code of the 1940s. There is a greater frankness here, a feeling that this is an adult drama but still as subtle and restrained as classical filmmaking at its best. Furthermore, 1961 marks the year after Dalton Trumbo was the first blacklisted writer to officially return to Hollywood by receiving writing credit for Exodus (1960) and Spartacus (1960). This is significant in terms of the thematic harshness on display in The Hustler. It is not overtly political, but certainly would have cast suspicions on its director had it been released in the 1950s. In fact, director Rossen was called before HUAC before eventually "naming names" in 1953 in order to return to work. Viewed in this light, The Hustler is both a return to the social realm of Rossen's earlier work (particularly 1947's Body and Soul, another noir film using sports as metaphor) and even a self-critical comment by Rossen on his betrayal. This is why the blacklist context increases my appreciation of this film, as compared to Elia Kazan's self-justifying On the Waterfront (1954).

The story of The Hustler is structured into a very tight, very classical progression while feeling very loose and rambling, conveying an art cinema level of verisimilitude. After a seven-minute cold opening, itself a characteristic that marks it as slightly post-classical, we get the title sequence and then enter the Ames poolroom. The next 30 minutes, consisting of the first act, is made up of a pool match between Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) and Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason).


This is the most extended sports scene in the film, and, unusually, it takes place as the first act rather than the conclusion. Following this, the second act shows Eddie living in the transitory noir spaces of bus stations, bars, pool rooms, and seedy hotels (all filmed on location in New York City).


He meets the damaged and alcoholic Sarah (Piper Laurie) and develops a romance with her. For many, this romance is the major weakness of the movie, even amongst its admirers, but I enjoy this aspect as much as the rest. Laurie's performance here is right on the edge, at times heavily melodramatic and thus potentially off-putting but ultimately exactly the kind of high emotion needed. The theatrical gestures can seem overdone, especially in the close-up lens of the camera, but Sarah is herself a performative character acting a role while also trying to live it.


At the mid-point of the second act (and of the film as a whole), there is a turning point. Eddie rejects his old partner Charlie, fights with Sarah, rejects a business offer from the gambler Bert Gordon (George C. Scott), and gets his thumbs broken after hustling money in a back alley pool game. In this castrated state, Eddie starts to become more thoughtful and reflective, no more so than in a picnic scene in the country with Sarah. After explaining how he was bothered by being called a loser by Gordon, he goes on to explain his love of the game. However, he still hasn't achieved any self-knowledge at this point, continuing to allow others, especially Gordon, determine his value.

After recovering, he agrees to work with Gordon, beginning the final act as Eddie, Sarah and Gordon travel to Louisville during Kentucky Derby weekend so Eddie can play a billiards match with the aristocratic Findley. It is here where the climax occurs, as Eddie is losing to Findley and begging Gordon to keep playing.

Sarah tells Eddie not to beg him, but Eddie coldly rejects her. After this display of "character", Gordon tells Eddie he can keep playing, and he easily defeats Findley. Back at the hotel, Sarah degrades herself with Gordon and then commits suicide in his bathroom.


The denouement finds Eddie back at Ames to defeat Minnesota Fats and confront Gordon. In contrast to the opening, the pool game is almost perfunctory, with Eddie now easily winning. He rejects Gordon's offer to keep playing pool for him, and leaves he game completely.

But not before a memorable exchange with Minnesota Fats:

Eddie: Fat man, you should a great game of pool.
Minnesota Fats: So do you, Fast Eddie.

The Hustler is very much a character study of Felson, and it is difficult to imagine anyone else playing the role more effectively than Newman,. In later years, in interviews, Newman admitted to disliking the performance, finding a lack of the kind of understatement that would more and more define with later career. And while that subtlety works with the characters in The Verdict (1982) and Nobody's Fool (1994), I disagree with Newman and think it would not work at all with this film and this character. I think Newman's reservations, like those critics who dislike the character of Sarah, revolves around the distrust of the large emotions of melodrama. This is a film of large gestures and large themes that seem to clash with the more realistic elements that most critics tend to valourize. For example, take the following shot of Eddie just before he collapses after his loss to Minnesota Fats.

Both the scene and Newman's performance can appear, as Newman put it, as someone playing the violin too hard and producing a shriek. But so few films try for this type of intensity that I admire the film all the more for it, especially since the moments are earned and take place within a believable if stylized world.

If some criticize Laurie and Newman, no one I know has anything but positives for the third lead, George C. Scott, an actor often seen as "too big" for the movies and thus most effective when given scenery to chew (Dr. Strangelove, Patton). This is a magnificent performance, big and broad and yet utterly grounded. Maybe his best moment is his most atypical, as he tries to explain to Eddie about Sarah's suicide and then sobs in tears as Eddie attacks him.


The final confrontation between Gordon and Felson thus already feels like a more equal grounding, as if Eddie has learned something and Gordon has finally felt something. Equally good in this final scene, and throughout, is Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats. Although it is never explicitly stated, both Gleason's performance and Rossen's direction tell us an entire back story to this man.

Clearly, he has sold out to Gordon and recognizes everything Eddie says to Gordon to be accurate. By situating a sitting Minnesota Fats between the two men, Rossen is making the stakes involved for Eddie very clear. Thus the final great exchange between Fats and Eddie cited above is not only redemptive for Eddie, but for Fats as well, and Gleason's look and gesture convey this beautifully.

I want to conclude by recalling the political context and also remembering that this is a sports movie. I would call it maybe the greatest movie about sports, even if pool is not usually considered a sport but rather a game. I think it is a great sports movie because it gets at something at the heart of competition and its relationship with masculinity and capitalism. The desire to win, the desire to prove one's manhood, and the desire to make money are all corrupting of human relationships and corrupting of whatever value sports can have (if there is any, which is debatable). Eddie's speech about pool is touching not because he talks about winning, but because it is about "playing the game right" and earning self-respect. Eddie's tragedy is not realizing this until he has lost everything. Perhaps Rossen identified with this himself, having sold his soul to the Bert Gordons of HUAC and the studios to keep making money. He spent the 50s making largely forgettable spectacles. Now that the blacklist had started to clear, making The Hustler proved a certain redemption for him as well.

Classic Hollywood at the Seoul Cinematheque

http://www.theoneonefour.com/2009/12/20/hollywood-classic-special-at-seoul-cinematheque/

BIGGER THAN LIFE (Nicolas Ray, 1956)

My first screening at the cinematheque in a very long time (shame on me) was Wednesday night with Nicolas Ray's 1956 melodrama Bigger Than Life. The print was quite good and the theatre was full, making for an ideal viewing experience. This is in stark contrast to my first viewing of the film, which was a VHS copy of a TCM broadcast.

I remembered very little about the early scenes, in fact just about everything up until the last half. This is no doubt because I was first exposed to the film in clips from Martin Scorsese's 1995 American cinema documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. Scorsese uses Ray as an example of the director as "smuggler":

"Like Douglas Sirk, Nicolas Ray offered both the American family in suburbia and the psychotic undercurrents, the conventions and the contradictions, the sugar and the poison."

Scorsese emphasizes the poison, the ways in which the lead character, under the influence of cortisone, rebels against his dull, middle-class existence. But what is interesting about the film is how all the parts fit together, as well as the form of rebellion the character Ed Avery takes. Ed's breakdown is caused, the film implies, by overwork and the need to take two jobs to support his family's middle-class lifestyle. His wife believes he is having an affair, and Ray certainly implies that Ed would perhaps like an affair with his attractive co-worker. However, he doesn't have the time. Instead, he spends his nights as a taxi dispatcher, trapped in a modern equivalent of a call center. Ray sets up the audience, through this first act, to sympathize with Ed and understand the rebellion against this society that his cortizone addiction allows him to express. However, I think Ray is smarter than simply identifying with this character.

If one considers Ed's new philosophy carefully, it is clearly diametrically opposed to anything the leftist-anarchist Ray would actually endorse. Ed turns into a fascist, and while Ray encourages a certain identification with the criticism of the small-minded community in which he is trapped, Ed's rantings are that of a totalitarian madman. This to me is Ray's larger point. Not only has the American society of the 1950s trapped Ed in his routinized, quite literally deadening existence, but it has created even more demonic (if at the same time alluring) fantasies (or delusions) of grandeur.

Before an appropriately awkward finale at Ed's hospital bed, there occurs a fight between Ed and his friend Wally that results in the destruction of the bourgeois home. It allows for one of Ray's typically striking and genuinely odd compositions in which a jagged piece of railing figures prominently in the foreground. It provides an apt metaphor for this profoundly pessimistic film. Even the stripping away of social repression is dangerous in a world that can only imagined more grotesque, patriarchal alternatives.

A clip from the film is available here, featuring one of Ray's (and Hollywood's) greatest shots.

Upcoming: Sam Fuller Retrospective

Coming January 2-18 at the Seoul Cinematheque is a 10 film Samuel Fuller retrospective. The following seven films will be shown in 35mm prints:

Pickup on South Street (1953)
House of Bamboo (1955)
Forty Guns (1957)
Run of the Arrow (1957)
Shock Corridor (1963)
The Naked Kiss (1964)
The Big Red One (1980) (reconstructed version)

And on 16mm:

The Steel Helmet (1951)
Park Row (1952)
Underworld USA (1961)

Most unfortunately, I will be in Canada as of next week and won't be able to see any of these films. Those who are around in January, however, make sure to enjoy.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Billy Wilder, 1944)

I am currently teaching a course on American cinema here at the Korea National University of Art. It is a history of American film from the sound era up to the New Hollywood, relying heavily on the ideological reading offered by Robert Ray combined with more historical scholarship. The essay for the course is to analyze a film in relation to the course material. I decided to write a sample essay as a model and thought I would post it here in case it is of potential interest to anyone.

According to Robert Ray, most popular American films from the classical era followed both a formal and thematic paradigm. Formally, all techniques were meant to the “invisible” in order to conceal the choices necessary to tell the story. Thematically, incompatible values (such as individual-community) were felt to be reconcilable. These two tendencies in Hollywood cinema worked together to create a powerful ideological tool that reinforced the myth of America. But not all films shared this optimistic vision. During World War II, at the height of American optimism, there emerged a number of films that would later be dubbed “film noir”. The most popular of this group of films was Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). Rather than offering an optimistic view typical of Hollywood, Double Indemnity challenged both the formal and thematic tendencies of American cinema.

Formally, Double Indemnity differs in two ways. First, there is both a voiceover narration and a flashback structure that breaks with the “invisibility” demanded of classical storytelling. Instead of unfolding objectively from an omniscient point of view, Double Indemnity is a subjective story told from the perspective of the character Walter Neff. The opening scene tells the viewer who committed the murder. The rest of the story consists of the murderer telling us how it happened and why he did. This interest in the subjective character psychology of a murderer differentiates Double Indemnity from American films of the time. Second, Wilder uses expressionist lighting in many scenes. Usually American films make all stylistic decisions relate to the story. The lighting in Double Indemnity instead makes the character and the story less clear and more difficult to comprehend. The intent is to create a dark, pessimistic mood rather than simply advancing the story forward quickly.

Thematically, Double Indemnity is an even greater departure from the Hollywood paradigm. The film makes it clear that although Walter may be killing his lover’s husband for money and lust, he is also interested in the adventure of the crime. Walter is an insurance man, hardly an adventurous occupation. But the fact that Walter is thirty-five and unmarried (as we are told in the first scene) indicates a reluctance on his part to not be a domesticated family man. Instead, he wants the myth of adventure that is no longer possible in the modern world. He wants to prove his manhood. But why does he have to do this? The answer is in the traditional mythology that idolizes the outlaw hero adventurer as being the “ideal man”. Hollywood may confirm the ideology of marriage, but it also sees the domesticated male as emasculated and boring, not a romantic, mythical figure. Walter falls victim to this myth, and has to be punished for his transgression of the law. Walter is the outlaw hero/adventurer, but in film noir, this character cannot be redeemed. He is both a murderer and a disturber of the capitalist status quo. He not only murders his lover’s husband but he also attempts to rip off the insurance company he works for. The film punishes him for his misdeeds, but Walter is also a sympathetic figure for the audience simply because he is our identification figure. The film focuses on Walter’s psychology and asks us to identify with his desires. The audience knows, because of the conventions of the Production Code, that Walter is a doomed figure. But this only adds to his appeal. The phrase “straight down the line” keeps getting repeated in order to emphasize Walter’s inability to escape the assembly line of industrial production. Because the viewer is in a similar place in this same society, Walter cannot be simply dismissed as an “evil” character. Rather, he falls victim to the incompatible values that most American films try to reconcile.

A key scene in illustrating the thematic of the film occurs in Walter’s office (42:22). Walter is sitting on his desk when Keyes enters from the back of the frame. Wilder decides to shoot their extended dialogue exchange in a single long take lasting approximately 130 seconds, signaling its importance by breaking with the shot/ reverse shot convention that sutures the viewer into the cinematic story world. The content of the sequence consists of Keyes trying to convince Walter to become his assistant. Keyes argues that unlike Walter’s current salesman position, being a claims investigator is exciting, adventurous work. But before he finishes his argument to Walter, the phone rings. It is Phyllis telling Walter that their murder plan can now go ahead as planned. The next eleven shots alternate between Walter and Phyllis, with Keyes lingering in the background of Walter’s shots. Tellingly, the phrase “straight-down-the-line” gets used here again. After this dialogue finishes, Wilder shoots Walter and Keyes in another extended take as Keyes exits from the door in the back of the frame. Keyes asks Walter why he has never married and then tells the story of his own unwillingness to become domesticated (he could not stop investigating the woman). Walter decides not to take Keyes’s offer of adventure. Keyes exits by telling Walter that he isn’t smarter than the rest of the office workers, only a little taller. Of course, what Keyes does not know is that Walter is planning to prove him wrong. He does not want Keyes’s desk job because he recognizes that the adventure is purely in Keyes’s mind, not in reality. He wants the real adventure that Phyllis offers. Also, he does not want to be Keyes’s assistant. He wants to prove he is better than Keyes, that he can outsmart him. Committing a murder and stealing money from the insurance company is Walter’s way of accomplishing this goal.

In many ways, Double Indemnity is the dark mirror of classical films. It exposes rather than denies the contradictions inherent in the social structure. For example, compare Double Indemnity with the most famous Hollywood film, Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). Ideologically, a film like Casablanca works at reconciliation. Rick is the outlaw hero/adventurer who works for the good of the community and is capable of love (potential husband). Laszlo is the domesticated male (husband) but is also a resistance leader (adventure). Ilsa is believed by Rick to be a sexually adventurous woman but is revealed at the end to be a domesticated wife/mother. Double Indemnity, on the other hand, reveals these contradictions. Walter is the outlaw hero/adventurer, but in film noir, this character cannot be redeemed. Similarly, the femme fatale in film noir cannot be saved by love. Both the outlaw hero and the femme fatale must die for their trangressions. The film can offer no happy ending to deny the contradictions inherent in the culture. Casablanca finally reconciles its lovers in a key scene of romantic embrace (1:19:20). Double Indemnity replays the scene, but instead of a reunion, the two lovers shoot each other (1:34:24).

As much as Double Indemnity differs from classical films, it is still a product of Hollywood. Despite its unusual storytelling devices and expressionist techniques, it still mostly conforms to the invisible style. Thematically, it forms a “good couple” at the conclusion (Lola and Zachetti) to try to provide some sense of optimism. Also, the Production Code would not permit the execution of Walter in the gas chamber that would have completed the “straight-down-the-line” motif. But the fact that the Production Code would not allow Walter to be executed is telling. In 1932, it was demanded that the lead character of Howard Hawks’ Scarface be hanged in order to provide the proper punishment and avoid a glamorous death scene. With Double Indemnity, however, the audience is attached to Walter psychologically and emotionally in a way not possible with the classic gangster film. This is the really subversive aspect of the film. Double Indemnity challenges the formal and thematic paradigms and shows that Walter is ultimately a victim of the very mythology Americans are taught to believe in.

Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985): 25-69.

DEAD RECKONING (John Cromwell, 1947)

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

One of the many positive aspects of film culture here is the availability of very affordable DVDs of Classical Hollywood and art cinema releases. This allowed me to view a film noir I've always been interested in seeing, Dead Reckoning. I was familiar with the film from the last chapter of Frank Krutnik's great study of noir and masculinity, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (1991), "A Problem in 'Algebra': Dead Reckoning and the Regimentation of the Masculine". Krutnik's book is one of the better studies of noir, but, perhaps because I had not seen the film, I found the last chapter difficult to follow. I look forward to revisiting it.

Part of the difficulty may be with the film itself. Dead Reckoning is one of the oddest films I can remember seeing. Although made in 1947, it comes across almost as a pastiche of noir. It stars Humphrey Bogart as a returning veteran who investigates a pre-war murder case involving his war buddy. As in many noirs, this investigation focuses on a woman, his friend's former lover who Bogart quickly falls for as well. Bogart's character, however, does not trust women as easily as his duped friend. He gives a speech early in the narrative about wanting to shrink a woman down to pocket-size so he can control her, only having her become full-size when he wants (presumably, when he wants her physically, although the dialogue is only implicit about this). This is such a hyperbolic expression of the usual noir anxiety over female sexuality that it reminded me of R. Crumb's comics about the headless woman. It is so blatant and obvious that it feels like a postmodern noir reworking rather than a film made before the term itself had gained any widespread popularity.

The casting plays a role here too. Bogart seems to be referencing his former roles as a detective in films such as The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) and The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946). There are actually lines taken almost directly from the former, in a manner reminiscent of a recent neo-noir like Brick (Rian Johnson, 2006). And Lizabeth Scott as the female lead bares an uncanny resemblance to Lauren Bacall, Bogart's co-star in the later. Also recalling The Big Sleep are aspects of the plot revolving around a gambling house and its boss. And the finale (Figure 3) recalls the more well-known Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), although it was released earlier in the same year. Thus what this seems to suggest is not so much a knowingness about all or maybe even any of these affinities but rather a confluence of elements now considered central to the definition of noir.

Another one of these characteristics is the use of the noir cityscape in what appears to be a small Southern city (Figure 1) and the use of the flashback structure. The presence of both of these ingredients feels odd, particularly the flashback, which is esoteric in the fact that it is not really needed. The film begins with Bogart telling his story in a church to a priest (Figure 2) (even though he isn't Catholic), but the flashback is only half of the story. Eventually it ends and the last part of the narrative is told linearly. The flashback seems to have no clear purpose, which is unusual for classical cinema. Even noirs like Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) and The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946) have a clear design for their use of the device. Here, we have to look at the device as purely ornamental and atmospheric, or use an art cinema reading strategy and search for possible thematic resonances. Or, it could be just an awkward and lazy way to give the audience narrative information and establish a closeness with the protagonist.

The final coda is also intriguing. Bogart, with arm broken, stands over the dying femme fatale (Figure 4). She is shown wrapped in white (Figure 5), saying how scared she is and how she wishes she could be in his pocket. Bogart then calls her "Mike" (his nickname for her) and tells her to (metaphorically) jump out of the plane just like he and his friend Johnny did during the war. The film ends with this image (Figure 6). The misogyny is blatant, but so is the homoeroticism (complete with the line that he loved Johnny more than her). And the film is made more incoherent by having the female character join the regime of masculinity. It is like a parody of a Howard Hawks film.

Ultimately, this is a classical film that, as a classical film, is a failure. It lacks the aesthetic distinction of a great auteurist and also fails as an entertainment. It is simply too stilted and too absurd for there to be any real emotional resonance. However, its intertextuality as an example of noir gives it an idiosyncratic appeal. That said, I'm more excited to read more about the film than to ever watch it again.

Jeonju Film Festival II: Val Lewton

On the second day of the festival I saw the Kent Jones documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows along with the Lewton-produced The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943). Being in South Korea, I was unable to see the Lewton documentary when it aired on TCM. It is an intriguing piece of criticism in arguing for the producer as auteur, and performs this task quite well. The documentary was narrated and produced by Martin Scorsese, and on a meta-level it can be seen as a producer-authored work; it is hard not to see the film as part of Scorsese's history of cinema documentaries as well as being a work of criticism by Jones.

The one reservation I have about the film is that it leaves the debate around Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur hanging. Jones includes interview footage of Tourneur and clearly implies that they were both auteurs of Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, and The Leopard Man (by comparison, Lewton is positioned as the author of the other RKO horror films to a much greater extent than directors Mark Robson and Robert Wise). It is disappointing that Jones did not bring this up and pursue the question more explicitly. It would have added a needed edge to a project that it useful enough but rarely as illuminating as one would have hoped for.

The Seventh Victim remains a very effective horror film, a work not as well known as Tourneur's films with Lewton because of the lack of a known director but just as unsettling. It is more lacking in story than either Cat People or I Walked With a Zombie, with the romance angle particularly sudden and disjointed, even by Hollywood conventions. But the main concern is with the same themes of those films: innocence/corruption, and even significantly rationality/the supernatural. It is remarkably sophisticated on these topics, which makes the sillier aspects of the story stand out even more. The ending remains one of the most shocking in Classic Hollywood (it seems unlikely it would have been approved with a larger budget). The film also gains in resonance with a knowledge of Lewton and the other RKO horror films.

I think The Seventh Victim also looks forward to many later psychological horror films, such as the work of Roman Polanski. As we were leaving the theater, my wife commented that it left her with a disquieting feeling reminiscent of Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968). In Korean, this feeling is called isanghae (이상해). Given the greater emotional and expressive range of the Korean language, this may be a better description of the Lewton effect than I can offer.

THE PIRATE; THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL; TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN

I saw these films at the Minnelli retrospective over the past few days, and are a fascinating trio of films to consider together. The Pirate (1948) is a musical starring Minnelli's then wife Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. This is one of the genres in which Minnelli made his reputation, and The Pirate may be Minnelli's peak within this form. The Bad and the Beautiful is closer to Minnelli's other genre specialty, the melodrama, but it also one of the earlier films in another sub-genre of films about Hollywood itself. Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) is in many ways a follow-up to The Bad and the Beautiful, using the same star, Kirk Douglas, and also exploring what it is to work within Hollywood. But by 1962, the idea of what Hollywood was had changed a great deal. (On Wednesday, The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks in Another Town will both be showing on a double bill. The print of The Bad and the Beautiful is only average, with many scratches and even a few splices, but the print of Two Weeks in Another Town is terrific.)

The common link in all three films is the role of art and artists in society. This is obvious enough in the two Hollywood films, but is also present in The Pirate with its focus on acting. The Pirate closes with the number "Be a Clown" (the same tune is more famous today for its lyrical reworking "Make 'em Laugh" number from Kelly and Donen' s 1952 Singin' in the Rain, another MGM musical) and offers up a celebration of the artist and their role. But, even more, it views art as a way (the only way?) to escape from the confines of society. The heroine Manuela dreams of being taken away by the pirate Macoco (or Mack the Black) in order to escape her dull soon-to-be husband. Teh twist of the film is that this husband is (or was) Macoco and gave up that life to try to be a respectable mayor. The myth of Macoco is just that, a story the heroine reads to open the film. The only illusion that is real is art itself, represented by the acting troupe and, of course, by Minnelli's musical sequences, certainly the high point of the film. The happy ending Minnelli provides is thus one that only exists within the world of illusion. Thematically, The Pirate has a lot in common with Minnelli's earlier musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), a seemingly optimistic film that nevertheless reveals the contradictions of society.

The Bad and the Beautiful is Minnelli's Citizen Kane, only set in the world of movies. It has a triple flashback structure to deal with the story of Jonathan Shields, a Hollywood producer with certain parallels to both Val Lewton and David O. Selznick. The film shows a clear affection for the Hollywood of this period. But it also seems to point to a new system (by 1952, the producer package deal was coming in, as the film's frame story shows). And, the film has a decidedly love-hate relationship with the business, as represented by Shields himself. By the time of Two Weeks in Another Town Hollywood was effectively gone. The film is set in Italy at Cinecitta studio, with Douglas as an actor recovering from a nervous breakdown. He is reunited with his director, and in the film's most famous sequence, they watch a clip from The Bad and the Beautiful and both celebrate and lament their past. The film's attitude towards art is increasingly pessimistic, especially in terms of the negative effect it can have on the individuals participating, although it is still ultimately the only thing Minnelli does have some faith.

The three films are also intriguing to compare stylistically, with the color and Academy ratio of The Pirate, the black and white and Academy ratio of The Bad and the Beautiful, and the widescreen colour of Two Weeks in Another Town. Minnelli's style, with its focus on long takes and mise-en-scene, adapts very well and may even be said to be suited to the widescreen format. However, Two Weeks in Another Town is the weakest film of the three, and in many ways proves the point about the advantages of the Hollywood system that are implied by The Bad and the Beautiful. The first hour has a great fascination, but the weak story material and hodgepodge of actors eventually derail the film in its second half. The Bad and the Beautiful, by comparison, while the least stylistically dazzling of the three films, is the masterpiece of the group, a film that compares with the best of Classic Hollywood and with the best of films about the cinema itself.

THIS WEEK: PREMINGER

This week, in addition to the continuing Minnelli retrospective at the Cinematheque, Film Forum is showing 3 films by Otto Preminger over the weekend. The schedule is as follows:

Bonjour Tristesse (1958): Friday 6:20, Saturday 2:30, Sunday 8:30
Advise and Consent (1962): Fri 3:30, Sat 8:00, Sun 5:30
River of No Return (1953): Fri 8:30, Sat 6:00, Sun 3:30

A note on Bonjour Tristesse: this was the second of Preminger's two films with the actress Jean Seberg. Preminger discovered Seberg in a nationwide talent search/ publicity stunt for the lead in his film Saint Joan (1957). After the critical disaster of that film, Preminger cast Seberg in his next film, Bonjour Tristesse, possibly, as Mark Rappaport speculates in his great essay film From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), to disprove Seberg's critics. This film also was seen as a failure, but it did attract at least one critic, that being Jean-Luc Godard, who cast Seberg in his debut film the next year, Breathless (1959). Godard has even suggested that Seberg's character was based on the one she plays in this film. Bonjour Tristesse is also a favorite of Preminger fans, although don't go in looking for a great story.