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Revolutionary Road
Posted January 20, 2009
2008 Dir Sam Mendes Cast Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Shannon, Kathy Bates IMDb
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I feel like I must apologize, and you must forgive me, for how very, very much I loved this movie—but surely you must have a movie like it, which is so hideously close to you that you are blind to its faults. If it were otherwise, perhaps I could call this a classically adequate Hollywood prestige piece, give it a perfunctory 7 or 8, and get on to more exciting things. But to start with, let us say, it is a little bit Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (TOTAL WAR! + total Albee absurdist moments, eliciting and deserving much uncomfortable laughter in my theater), it is a little bit A Woman Under the Influence (RELAX AND COME BACK TO ME!), it is a little bit Jeanne Dielman ( ), and so it would always have been a film for me. And it is a lot all my own stupidest dreams and worst fears—worst fears are always so much closer to one than realistic concerns, aren’t they? How I’ve believed in a kind of natural specialness and superiority, planned escape, never really tried at anything, succeeded »»»
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Brief Encounter
Posted January 17, 2009
"Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long."
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Due to hateful weather, I shut myself in last weekend, and regrettably missed the screening of Brief Encounter. I loved the film when I first saw it several years ago, I loved it anew on my laptop today, and at the end of this survey it will probably stand as my favorite among Lean’s films (although I continue to be a great cheerleader for The Passionate Friends). But I’ve missed my chance with this film to have the grand romance and absorbing emotional experience that I’ve so far found in his work on the big screen, and I must meet this unhappy fact with stoic resignation.
So I’ve learned to face life’s disappointments from Laura and Alec, the thwarted lovers in Lean’s last and by-reputation best adaptation of a Noel Coward play. What makes Brief Encounter so powerful, and really so unsentimental, is that the ultimate rejection of their mutual desire represents more »»»
As my introduction to experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin this went over much better than expected, although I can’t say it didn’t test my patience at times to spend up to twenty minutes regarding the close-up of a person’s face. (But I made it through Blow Job; I could handle this.) This possible frustration doesn’t negatively impact my opinion of the film, as so much of it deals with direct confrontation: with oneself, with another person, and certainly with the viewer. So that is merely the truth of my response given such a confrontation: evidently I can watch a woman slowly, quietly break down, and after ten minutes look away without making the sorrow my own. There, I have learned something about myself.
Dwoskin has said his films aren’t meant to be shown for a large audience in a theater but rather »»»
Wull crap, I took a look at TCM’s lineup and decided I couldn’t go to bed.
Truth be told I’m watching Saturday Night Live at the moment—how I hate to admit it when the show is actually funny—but let us make our preparations for TLC’s first actually live liveblog. (This may be an abortive effort, if I try to take a quick nap at 1am, but let us try.)
TCM is airing more Jean Harlow pre-Codes (recall that I forgive all for pre-Codes), more gangster films, their gangster doc (perfect timing—after Little Caesar I decided to pursue them), Jean Arthur comedies in the morning… Yes, I have better things to do and watch, and for that matter I like my sleep, but this is just irresistible.
Liveblog starts with Hold Your Man at 1:30AM EST. Excuse me while I make a fresh pot of coffee.
1:30AM Jean Harlow, “one of the most enduring sex symbols of the 1930s” per Robert Osborne. I really do have a hard time understanding what audiences ever saw in her, let alone how she can have “endured” on this level. Once in a while she manages to be adorable but honestly she is too unself-consciously innocent to strike me as sexy — not the innocent-but-oozes-sex of Marilyn Monroe, but pure, aw-shucks, completely straightforward and unlayered innocent.
1:35AM Early 30s Clark Gable without a mustache is still a face I am unable to quite reconcile.
1:40AM Jean Harlow to me: say a line, hit a mark, say a line, slouch a little, repeat. For a sex symbol she can’t throw a look, or play with her victim, or convincingly tease or flirt or give in. There’s just not a whole lot there. But y’know what she does have seems to go over a bit better next to Gable than I’ve seen it before.
1:56AM This should be played more amusingly. What is with the dramatic strings all of a sudden? It wants to be Depression-era commentary too.
2:01AM  This is a Loos film—why does Hollywood always take the zip out of Loos scripts? There is no reason this should not be more amusing. I’m staying up to be amused, dammit.
2:10AM Pre-Code though it is, it has indeed been messed about with:
Writer Anita Loos and Harlow were also a winning team. Loos would write five Harlow films, of which Hold Your Man was the second. The amoral character Harlow had played in their first collaboration, Red-Headed Woman was one of the reasons the studios’ self-regulatory Hays Office had tightened its Production Code. Loos’ original story for Hold Your Man makes it clear that Harlow’s Ruby and Gable’s Eddie have premarital sex. But MGM chief Louis B. Mayer demanded that Ruby be punished for her sins. Loos’ solution was to send Ruby to reform school, and to devise an ingenious way of getting the couple married. There were few complaints. The Variety critic commented, “earlier sequences have plenty of ginger, but the torrid details are handled with the utmost discretion while conveying a maximum of effect.”
2:20AM Still there are exchanges like:
-Lily Mae used to pass the plate around at her father’s church.
-That ain’t all!
2:21AM Girlfight!
2:24AM I like the feisty socialist inmate. “Machines are responsible for the Depression!”
2:33AM Oh, yeah it’s still clear that Ruby & Eddie have premarital sex. Yes nice work Anita—and it’s always interesting to me what was considered indecent and what was considered perfectly acceptable.
2:56AM Lame. I’m very tired. More coffee. The next one should entertain at the least.
3:03AM First, Warner Brothers Pictures would like to clarify that it by no means intends to glorify the hoodlum or the criminal. Neither does your humble blogger. Now shoot ‘em up, boys.
3:12AM So what I’m going to do is lay down, see, and stay awake and watch this, yeah that’s it, and roll over once in a while to make a dumb comment, myeh. …I must at least hold out until the grapefruit scene.
3:31AM Hahaha, the tailor scene, this is so offensive. Cagney watches him suspiciously as he measures the inseam. Oh, oh dear.
3:34AM Ah, Joan Blondell is terrific. There’s a woman with personality—who can move across a room with grace and sass, convey much with those huge expressive eyes of hers, flirt, play, understand. Harlow please pay attention.
3:48AM Grapefruit scene… so wrong. So great.
And en-tray Harlow.
4:03AM I’m still awake, honest, but this liveblog is pants. Soon to be abandoned. But it must be noted that Harlow has dark brows in this one and thus looks especially goofy. If I’d rewatched Dinner at Eight and Platinum Blonde tonight I’d've had nicer things to say—she’s far better in comedy (which is not to say good).
4:16AM Cagney does menace better than Robinson, perhaps, Little Caesar always seeming a bit cartoony and naive where Tom Powers is colder and more natural. Could also be the difference between Wellman and LeRoy, or between angry homophobe and comfortably out bear of a gangster. On the whole I think I prefer Little Caesar, being the more fast and fun picture; Public Enemy goes too deep into the character’s past without forming interesting conclusions for my liking. It’s superior in many ways, though—the characteristic Wellman craziness—like that delivery of the body there, sweet ending.
Phew, made it through that, but will likely drop off early in the TCM documentary and have to save the Arthur films for another day. This is likely goodnight.
In the interest of equal time, I give you my many men. You will see I enjoy a man who is fairly pretty, and fills out a tux well, but hardly takes himself too seriously. Most of my men have a goonish side. They tend to be quite British — give or take a handful of Frenchies. They speak well, they are witty, and they ooze charm. These are the twenty men I’d most like to take back to 1930s Manhattan with me for a screwball life of romance and adventure.
Well, it’s easier to limit myself to twenty men, and I confess I’ve only been obsessed with about half of them. There are even some men on this list I merely enjoy and admire! But I’m always happier when any one of them is on my screen.
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Leave it to Noel Coward to write (and direct, and star in, and produce, and compose the music for) the most charming war film ever made. It is the story of the HMS Torrin, its captain (Coward) and crew, their separate lives and their mutual, abiding love for the ship in which they serve. Told largely through flashbacks, each major character recalling significant events leading up to the sinking of the destroyer by an enemy plane as they watch it slowly disappear into the abyss, the film feels at first episodic and disjointed. It shifts in style and tone, not always satisfyingly: the long opening detailing the construction of the ship is a semi-documentary; the flashbacks are full of classic Coward romantic sparring; it features several epic battle scenes to rival any of its coevals. And at first glance the characters seem crafted from molds: the stiff-upper-lip lifetime naval officer, the humble working class patriot, the enthusiastic able-bodied young man, and the faithful women who love them.
But for all that ought to count against it, it is truly the most charming film, and sincerely so. After investing time with each character, and getting beyond initial displays of their on-deck heroism and back-home domestic rituals, they begin to emerge as dear and well-characterized individuals. As Lean puts it, Coward’s thesis was that “you ought to know what they would eat for breakfast, though you never see a scene in which they eat breakfast.” And he achieves something close to this, not merely because they are such clear stock types. Each character plays a definite role, as the film itself played a clear propagandistic role for wartime morale, but in a succession of quiet moments it earns its authenticity, then spends it all in emotional climaxes that land squarely on a viewer who wishes she had more resistance to the stuff — at least, that was my experience.
In some ways this is much more Coward’s film than Lean’s, the former having total creative control by contract and partly in fact. Lean was chosen for his technical expertise, having made a name for himself as a workhorse editor in the 1930s and gaining renown more recently for Major Barbara and 49th Parallel. Lean fought for the credit as a full co-director and was entrusted with virtually all technical and cinematic aspects of the shoot, freeing Coward to work primarily with the cast. Lean also seems to have had the ability to reign in Coward’s attachments and excesses, protesting that Coward’s initial script “would run for five hours on the screen” and winning the argument. Coward was disinterested in the process of lighting, setting up, and photographing scenes, eventually giving it up completely: “Look, my dear, you know what you are doing. I’ll leave it to you.”
At any rate, the partnership served this film well. Lean would of course go on to direct a number of Coward works solo. Coward seems to have lost interest in film after this lark (the medium had long disappointed him anyway — and me too, come to think of it — for its lackluster adaptations of his work), while Lean would soon become the preeminent British director of his generation. The film is first-rate for a debut, achieving as they set out to a fitting tribute to a ship and the lives that intersect on her deck “without sentimentality, but with simplicity and truth.”
Clearly I will have to go a bit further back to get the whole David Lean experience, to some of his best efforts as a film editor. 49th Parallel is the only one I have seen — aside, now, from this, his last credit in this capacity until his final film, A Passage to India. To this end, I will probably add Major Barbara and Pygmalion to the project at least — any other recommendations?
In terms of films viewed, 2008 was a very light year for me. Personally, it was a year of turmoil. One can glean a number of correlations between my viewing patterns and my life this year, from months of unemployment (high: 46 films viewed) to months of beginning a new job (low: 8 films seen). I chose uplifting screwball comedies during lean times, and turned back to old favorites like Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck; when things looked up, I tested new waters in world art cinema again. I first began to attend screenings at the Cleveland Cinematheque regularly in 2008. The crop of new releases has been fairly good (and many of the critics’ darlings lie ahead of me). I’ve plunged into some new realms of cinema and waded ever deeper into the areas I’ve set out to become expert in. Overall, it was a very good film year — in quality, if not quantity.
To satisfy my obsessive-compulsive instincts, a few other ways to sum it up:
Total films seen (new viewings only): 275
 8 (3%)
 29 (11%)
 65 (24%)
 60 (22%)
 70 (25%)
 28 (10%)
 10 (4%)
 2 (<1%)
 1 (<1%)
(Not rated) 2 (<1%)
Complete 2008 viewing log
20 Best New Films
Major Preoccupations
In quasi-chronological order, some things that commanded my attention, from ongoing interest to all-consuming obsession.
TLC MoM January 2008 — Although Celine & Julie became one of my ten favorite films in 2007, I was somehow never motivated to dig deeper into the director’s filmography. Everything else is so perfectly in tune with that masterpiece that I’m kicking myself for not getting to him sooner — but at the same time I’m glad I still have L’Amour fou and Out 1 ahead of me for 2009.
 It’s not often that I nurse a cinematic fixation on a male actor, and true to form this one was an offshoot of a girlcrush to start with (last year’s epic Irene Dunne-a-thon) and petered out after a handful of films. But for a while, I was ensorceled.
A few stalwart bloggers spent the better part of their February racing to finish Lubitsch’s eternally delightful filmography — and I believe at least three of us (myself included) saw literally every film of his we could get our hands on. From his silents to his bawdy operettas to his screwball comedies, this was probably the biggest solid block of fun I had all year.
TLC MoM March 2008 — To celebrate Women’s History Month, the TLC board joined me in discovering the work of lady-directors. Several were entirely new talents to me, and many became new favorites. Although I enjoy the work of women behind and in front of the camera year-round, I intend to make the almost-exclusively devoted month an annual event.
TLC MoM April 2008 –
Having enjoyed quite a few at the end of 2007, I decided to immerse myself properly in the seedy, sexy world of pre-Codes this year, and for a long time I wanted to watch nothing else. Not surprisingly, I mostly stuck with the films that form a kind of girls gone wild of the era. Project page
Bette Davis has ranked high on my list of favorite actors from the beginning. But when I stay away from her too long, I sometimes forget how magnificent she really was. For her centenary, I was inspired to have another run at her filmography and reacquaint myself with her crazy brilliant presence.
Barbara Stanwyck could and did do everything, so she served as a great starting point for many projects I set out on this year: screwball comedy, pre-Code Hollywood, film noir. She can inhabit any one of those cinematic moods and character types with equal skill and be as dependably, wonderfully Stanwyck as always.
 The quadrupling of my Wellman viewing history may have been purely incidental to other projects undertaken — Stanwyck, Chatterton, pre-Codes, 1928 films, random TCM binges — but there is no doubt that he was tops among directors in each, and is now one of my very favorite directors of the studio age.
Perhaps the only full-on new obsession of the year, Ruth Chatterton put a final end to my desire to see any pre-Code without her after I watched (and re-watched, and re-watched) Female. I loved her in Dodsworth and certainly had it in the back of my mind to check her out later, but it was when I realized what humanity, naturalness, and almost unmatched sexual frankness she brought to the early 1930s that there would be no one else for me.
TLC MoM August 2008 —
I have long had a fraught relationship with film noir, and wanted to set that right with a binge on the stuff to rival my foray into pre-Codes. Ultimately, I enjoyed what little I did see but couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to carry on with it for long. Hopefully, they’ll have another day with me yet. Project page
2008 marked David Lean’s centenary. 2009, then, would be his 101st year — a fitting time to undertake a beginner’s course in his life and work, eh? The play-on-numbers is not my own, but borrowed from the staff of the Cleveland Cinematheque, which hosts a retrospective in January and February. The Cleveland Museum of Art will also show four Lean films in February and March.
David Lean was one of the leading filmmakers of the 20th Century. He directed only sixteen feature films, in a forty-year career, yet many of these appear regularly in critics’ and filmgoers’ polls of the greatest films of all time. Five of his films appeared in the top thirty of the BFI’s Top 100 Films, voted by the film industry in 1999 – Brief Encounter was placed at number two and Lawrence of Arabia at number three. Great Expectations was placed at number five.
British Film Institute
The BFI has put together some excellent resources on Lean and his work, and their restored prints of his early films are making a tour through the US & Canada.
I will also be reading Gene Phillips’ biography of Lean, and plan to update this main post as I learn more.
Over the next two months I will try to watch all of Lean’s feature films. I have seen embarrassingly little to date, for years ignoring his most lauded works. I approach the project having seen only Brief Encounter and Summertime years ago, plus the exquisite Passionate Friends shown last month as a preview.
Schedule
For any possible locals, more information on Cinematheque/Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) screenings here and Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) screenings here.
4 Dec CIA The Passionate Friends (1949)
5 Jan CIA In Which We Serve (1942)
11 Jan CIA Brief Encounter (1945)
18 Jan CIA Great Expectations (1946)
18 Jan CIA Oliver Twist (1948)
25 Jan CIA The Sound Barrier (1952)
31 Jan CIA Summertime (1955)
8 Feb CIA The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
11 Feb CMA This Happy Breed (1944)
14 Feb CIA Dr Zhivago (1965)
18 Feb CMA Madeleine (1950)
22 Feb CIA Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
1 Mar CIA A Passage to India (1984)
4 Mar CMA Blithe Spirit (1945)
18 Mar CMA Hobson’s Choice (1954)
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 Lauren, 27, librarian, & like you, obsessed with film. My tendency is to immerse myself in long & obsessive projects to the exclusion of all else, but you'll typically find a lot of classic Hollywood, 60s/70s world cinema, & contemporary awards bait on these pages.
Review archive — Favorite films — Viewing log
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Waterloo Bridge (1931)
Ladies of Leisure (1930)
Charming Sinners (1929)
The Spiral Staircase (1945)