Preston Sturges | The Miracle of Morgan's Creek / 1944

the trapped boy next door

by Douglas Messerli

 

Preston Sturges (screenwriter and director) The Miracle of Morgan's Creek / 1944

 

If you were to believe Preston Sturges’ 1944 film (filmed a couple of years earlier before its release), nearly all the young soldiers heading off to World War II were sexually potent beings who in a kind of desperate attempt to link with the women they would have to leave behind, were ready to marry and fuck one grand last time, a kind of “love them and leave them” routine outlined in so very many movies of the period.

 

     That, at least, is what the small-town Morgan’s Creek girl Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) seems to discover. Attending a last night dance for the soldiers, Trudy ignores the warnings of her policeman father, played by the ever grouchy William Demarest, and with the unwilling help of her admiring 4-F small-town admirer, Norval Jones (the ever sad-eyed, nervous and stuttering innocent, Eddie Bracken), dismisses her father’s stern refusal to let her have her pleasures, which includes a dance and a follow up night-club after-hours event, with a final drunken vow for of all the young soldiers to suddenly marry the women who have joined them.

     Using false names and hiding behind their one-night girlfriend’s drunkenness, the soldiers marry the girls, with poor Trudy suddenly realizing she has spent the night in bed with a man whose name might have had a “z” in it: Razkywatzy of Zitzkywitsky. She doesn’t remember exactly, despite that she is now, she soon after discovers, pregnant with his child.

     Visiting a local lawyer, she attempts to have the marriage annulled, without success, and then attempts to woo her previously discarded lover, Norval, to save her name and help bring her child into a more normalized world.

      Sturges always played at the edges of traditional morality, and the Hays Committee, almost shot this film down because of its open flaunting of traditional morality, its young 14-year old’s (the precocious Dynna Lynn) quite cynical observations of her elders, and the film’s later flirtation with bigamy and numerous other crimes.

     Given her father’s bluster, Trudy’s new would-be husband, Norval, who finally convinces her of his long-time attempts to be close to her—including even taking a high school cooking class—is arrested on 19 charges (all of which we know him to him to be innocent), including, soon after, an escape from jail.

      I remember as a young man watching this film with great dismay. How could such a decent person become so intensely punished for crimes he never committed—reminding me a little of the black eye awarded Jack Lemmon in The Apartment for having had a nonexistent affair with Shirley MacLaine. Both characters are even a little bit proud for their travails which slightly redeems their damaged manhoods.

       But then the floozie-like Hutton was just not my type. Annie Get Your Gun, in which she later starred, with its absurd shooting sprees and distastefully racial song “I’m an Indian Too,” were not events I enjoyed, even as a child. If she was the most beautiful girl at the soldier’s ball, I didn’t want to be soldier. Like poor Norval, I was deemed by the Selective Service as a 4-F—in my case because of my sexuality, which saved me, I am sure, from dying in Viet Nam and allowed me to continue my relationship with my now-husband Howard.

      Underneath this film’s comic veneer—which allowed it to join The National Film Registry—there is a strong suggestion that, if Norval (dubbed by his atrocious name), is not exactly a “pansy,”—he goes to movies instead of the dances—is not truly worthy of the sexy Trudy’s love.

       This time round, I laughed more than I sneered, as the brassy Hutton began to realize that she was desperately in need of a local man—especially with the appearance of six healthy babies. A call to authorities suddenly frees (or perhaps I might argue, dooms the loving Norval), to an endlessly restricted life of a father.

        Even Sturges’ film-end quote, after Norval falls in a faint upon hearing the news:

 

But Norval recovered and

became increasingly happy

for, as Shakespeare said:

"Some are born great, some

achieve greatness, and some

have greatness thrust upon

them.”

 

All of which suggests a passive rather than proactive role for this would-be Shakespearian hero. If he has saved the princess of his dreams, he has closed-off any future possibilities, while the soldiers have marched off to another kind of herodom, without any of the repercussions of the own sexual acts.  

     If there was ever an argument for the #METOO movement, Norval, as well as Trudy, might have claim to the impact which such blatantly sexist behavior has had upon their lives.

     I now, as an elderly man, realize what I didn’t like as a young kid about this movie. No one here seems to have any moral choice to behave as they might have. I love Sturges highly comic films, but not his moral possibilities—twins, even double-twins, might have been able to make their own sexual choices, a young unconquering hero, might have been allowed to outwardly speak the truth, an older director in search of those lost to the Depression should not be imprisoned for his search. Yes, order in Sturges’ movies is turned upside down, but simply laughing about those facts is not quite enough.

      Both figures of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek become entrapped into lives that they had not originally sought out, even if they now pretend to accept a world of complete social normality. And Norval may one day wake up and realize that he’s not truly the “marrying kind.” And how, one might ask, will Norval, a lowly bank-teller pay for his six new children’s survival? The miracle at Morgan’s Creek, alas, is not miracle at all, despite the reporter’s call to the Governor, who can’t even quite perceive that this small town exists in his state.

 

Los Angeles, December 23, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2019).

 

       

Jacques Tati | PlayTime / 1967

playing with time

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Tati and Jacques Lagrange, with additional English text by Art Buchwald (screenplay), Jacques Tati (director) PlayTime / 1967

 

PlayTime, Jacques Tati’s 1967 film, is perhaps his most unusual, in part because the director/actor as the famed Monsieur Hulot alternates between the lead and a supporting figure, and seems to be walking throughout the film through a maze of high-rises that did not truly exist during the time of Tati’s filming. Tour Montparnasse, the tallest building in Paris other than the Eiffel Tower, for example, was not built until 1973, and Tour First was not built until the following year.

      The film also, a bit like Mon Oncle, takes us through a gadget-crazed world, with moderne black plastic chairs covering Styrofoam so that after sitting upon them they pop back into shape, improbably complex entry buzzers that even the doorman hardly knows how to use, brooms with headlights, and apartments with large glass windows without curtains which even the most voyeuristic or exhibitionist-inclined New Yorkers might never have imagined possible.

      As François Truffaut commented, PlayTime is “a film that comes from another planet, where they make films differently.”

      The movie begins in a medium-sized high-rise, which at first site, with nuns walking down the hall, a couple whispering consoling words to one another, the entry of what appears to be a woman in a wheel-chair being taken down the corridor, and a military officer anxiously pacing the hall, seems to be a hospital; yet soon after, when a gaggle of mostly middle-aged American tourists suddenly appear, we recognize it as Orly Airport, and the fun begins, the women mumbling the absurd truisms of so many US travelers—in this case penned by humorist Art Buchwald: “I feel at home everywhere I go,” “Look at how little their cars are!” and “It’s the same everywhere.” Surely Noel Coward had this touring group in mind when, a few years earlier, he wrote his satiric musical about travel, Sail Away.

      These women might just as well have stayed home to look at pictures of that beautiful city instead of traveling to it. Indeed, to save money in this highly expensive work (Tati went bankrupt making the film), he often used pictures of the major tourist spots instead of filming them; he saved his camera expenses for elaborate studio-built constructions, described as “Tativille. Besides, his tourists seem more impressed by the futuristic airport light fixtures than in seeing the older Paris neighborhoods. And like small children on a school outing, they are constantly being counted by the tour-guide as if he were their somewhat frustrated teacher having to deal with their stupidities.

      The only tourist he cannot quite keep track of is a younger woman named Barbara (Barbara Dennek) who keeps slightly wandering off to find the “real” Paris, sometimes in the most unlikely places, such as a flower-seller ensconced a street of concrete structures.

       There is no real plot to Tati’s movie. Rather, when he’s onstage, Hulot simply wanders. Why he is determined on visiting the first high-rise, we never quite discover. Yet he must be expected, since an endlessly heel-clicking (a sound device the director had previously used in his Mon Oncle) assistant travels a very long hallway to temporarily retrieve him.

       The clumsy, always umbrella-toting Hulot, is left alone in a large reception room, but still gets lost even in the building’s elevators, and wanders away, much like Barbara—a parallel surely intended—from whatever destination he might have intended to arrive at.

       Yet the small office units, much like cargo containers, he witnesses in his voyage through corporate France says nearly everything. This is not a world big enough to contain the lumpen Hulot and his umbrella.

       In scene after scene, Hulot stumbles through the world in which he seemingly lives, attending with another mad gathering of tourists (this time Japanese businessmen) into a trade exhibition where he, mistaken as a salesman, successfully selling one of the lamps; and later a brand new (they literally finish the décor as the first guest arrive) trendy restaurant, where the waiters serve up food that is never eaten, sprinkling it again and again with lemon and pepper, and in other occasions simply forgetting to serve the orders up.

      Fortunately, there is also a dance floor where everyone, a bit like in the 1963 movie Charade suddenly takes openly to celebrate, Barbara (dressed in a shimmering green gown mocked by the patrons, dressed mostly in black) and Hulot—who along with most the film’s other figures—finally meet up, the perfect pairing, given the fact of her finally being able to discover, so Tati suggests, the “authentic” France—a kind of foolish but just as romantic Maurice Chevalier, stumbling instead of singing his way through the city of light.

      After a brief visit to a friend in the house of windows—perhaps another kind of version of the city of light—Hulot meets up again with Barbara, presenting her with a couple of small memories of his city, primarily a scarf which she proudly dons as her tourist bus back to the airport and numerous cars make a seemingly endless circle as opposed to the wandering paths of their former voyages, that can only remind one of Tati’s later film, Trafic.

      At first, I didn’t know what precisely to make of the film’s title. Of course, “play time” reminds one immediately of children—which all of these characters, in one way or another, are—being allowed to simply “play,” an important development of children in their transition to adulthood. Yet, I finally realized, Tati was also talking about playing with time, allowing oneself to move through space with utter freedom, lacking any certain goal. The characters here, not one of them, know where they are going, only wandering through a kind of new wonderland without knowing the good or bad of that world into which they have entered.

     The openness of Barbara and the gentle, often witless charm of Hulot, are exceptions to the way all the others play with time. And in Hulot, particularly—a role evidently that Tati had tired of playing—everyone seems to recognize someone from their “playing” at life who they know. Throughout Tati’s film people keep coming up to raincoat, umbrella-carrying figures (a British traveler, a black man, a miniature version of Hulot) to greet him, as if in fond-farewell for the bumbling innocent in all of us.

 

Los Angeles, Thanksgiving, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2019).

Hirokazu Kore-eda | 歩いても 歩いても (Aruitemo aruitemo) (Still Walking) / 2008

moving ahead in order to celebrate a broken past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hirokazu Kore-eda (screenwriter and director) 歩いても 歩いても (Aruitemo aruitemo) (Still Walking) / 2008

 

Over the years of watching films by the great Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda I have come to rely on his art for visions of slightly disoriented yet loving families, and in that sense, as Roger Ebert has commented, this director is the direct heir of Yasujirō Ozu—except, perhaps, Kore-eda has updated his family stories and turned what was nearly always horizontal into basically vertical worlds.

      This is particularly so in his 2008 masterwork, Still Walking, whose title alone suggests an endless forward push, or, at least, a repetition of movement through space.

       Yet, as in Ozu, Still Walking, is fascinated with tradition. The father of this rather large brood, Kyohei Yokoyama (Yoshio Harada) is seen quite often simply sitting, as are Ozu’s figures, and pontificating his viewpoints from tatami mats and office chairs. If he has once been a caring and loving local doctor, while perhaps ignoring his family—he was away at the time of his elder son’s death and he has evidently had extramarital affairs in the past—he has now turned into something of a curmudgeon, highly opinionated and hardly speaking to his hard-working wife, Toshiko (the excellent actor Kirin Kiki), who is the true force behind the Yokoyama family, and who, in many respects, is as hard-fast in her beliefs as is her husband. Just like her husband, moreover, she loves music—he classical and jazz, she pop tunes.

       The family has gathered, as it has annually for 15 years, to commemorate the death of their heroic first-born son, Junpei, who drowned while saving another boy’s life.

         Her second-born son, Ryota (the handsome Hiroshi Abe) and the Yokoyama daughter,  Chinami (You) have obviously had to suffer this annual ritual without being so highly appreciated, and memorialized as their elder brother, for whom Toshiko cooks and orders up enough eel, sushi, and other dishes to feed an army, while Chinami’s children rush around wildly, and Ryota’s adopted son, born of the widower he has recently married after his own divorce, is somewhat more of an introvert, wanting to grow up to be a piano tuner (like his father) or, after a conversation with Ryota’s father, perhaps a doctor—much to his father’s chagrin.

      Moreover, it’s also clear that the two younger siblings have not necessarily had very successful careers. Ryota, an art restorer, is between jobs and spends much of the film on the telephone attempting to find employment without telling his parents about his predicament. Chinami attempts to convince her mother to allow her noisy family to move into the rather large parental home yet makes little progress with the recalcitrant older woman. “Who could bear all of that noise?” she ponders.

     As for Ryota’s son, she treats him less like family than as a kind of uninvited guest, purchasing new pajamas for her son, while providing nothing for the child, with whom she demands his father bathe within their crowded bathtub. There is a slight sexual embarrassment in the event; he is not the son’s father, and bathing with a young alert boy is annoying—and perhaps a little dangerous.

      Yet for all the tensions and uncomfortable situations all experience, we sense, the love between them. They walk to Junpei’s grave to place flowers and wash down the headstone, evidently a Japanese custom, during the overwarm day. They take Ryota’s son to the beach, while warning him, understandably, not to enter the water. Surely, it was here that Junpei drowned.

      They even annually invite the boy Junpei saved, now an overweight underachiever, to a tea and drink ceremony, which is so uncomfortable, the now older man almost begging for their forgiveness, that Ryota suggests they should not do it again; to which his mother admits the invitations are only to punish him.

      Mostly they cook, Chinami and her mother spending hours in the kitchen, talking and slightly arguing, but working up a feast to celebrate the long-ago event. We slowly come to realize that Junpei is no longer the center of this celebration, even if together they pretend and even insist it is the reason they have come home. Rather it is a begrudging love they feel for one another, despite all they personal failures and inability to fully express that love. Even the somewhat bitter Kyohei, the gruff former doctor, forges a relationship with his now adopted grandson, whose fascination with the piano that lies at the foot of Junpei’s home memorial, attracts the child to play its keys, which suggests he truly might become a piano-tuner, or even maybe a pianist someday. Skepticism, patience, and love play equal parts in this lovely work.

 

     Their relationships are based in familial love, the lessons they have learned by living so many years together, and, at one point, when a yellow butterfly enters the room to settle on Junpei’s memorial, on superstition—a crazy mix that is at the heart of most family relationships.

      Strangely, I watched this movie on Christmas day, remembering through its difficult expressions of family love just how many of those who return for family gatherings equally hate and enjoy those events. And by the end of this film, we realize, as we all must, just how short-lived those sometimes-terrifying reunions truly are.

      In a voice-over near the film’s end Ryota reveals that just a few years later his father died, his angry mother dying soon after. I recall in one of Anthony Powell’s great fictions, part of his 12-volume series of A Dance to the Music of Time, how a couple who openly daily argued among friends, died only a few days apart, the male, in this case, absolutely unable to bear the loss of his much-belittled wife. Could Edward Albee’s Martha and George ever live apart?

     Families argue, families hate, families love and can never retrieve those emotions or must live with them the rest of their lives. In the last scene, we see that with the beautiful widow whom Ryota has married he has begun a new family, a young daughter to join his deeply curious son, who is perhaps, in the end, the center of this film, a representation of the next generation pondering all the never-ending confusions of the previous generation and vowing, surely unsuccessfully, to never repeat them.

     Kore-eda manages in his films to reveal the failures of family life, while still forgiving them all. 

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2019).

Jacques Tati | Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday) / 1953, revised 1978

going hungry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Tati and Henri Marquet (screenplay), Jacques Tati (director) Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday) / 1953, revised 1978

 

In 1953 the actor-director Jacques Tati introduced one of the most likeable, well-meaning, clumsy clowns since the early days of the cinema of Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

     Yet, Hulot was something more than these sad-sack comedians; with his constant, unlit pipe, and his strange tri-cornered hat, he was far more dapper than that Chaplin or Keaton, and despite his slightly pop-eyed visage, was fairly well-dressed and might almost have been accepted by the terribly bourgeoise society in which he was engaged, in this film, located in Sint-Marc-sur-Mer, primarily at the Hôtel de la Plage—if only he hadn’t present a sense of chaos whenever he appeared: massive windstorms arrive just as he does, terrors of sharks occur when even attempts to take a seaside journey out a small boat which, cracking in half, embalms him into his innards, and major fireworks display occurs when he stumbles into a small beach cottage, not to speak of his constantly puttering Citroën 2CV car for which even dogs won’t rise up from their naps in the street and which constantly collapses into a vehicle unable to go any further.

     Although beneath Chaplin and Keaton’s films there was always a deep sense of satire against the society, these figures’ enormous self-pluck, despite their ineffectual gestures, was at the center of those early US works; for Tati and his Hulot the society itself is the true satiric aim, in this case the endless vacationers, who rather like a horde of lemmings move en masse at the whistle-blow of a train or horn of a bus. It all reminds one somewhat of Noel Coward’s song from his musical Sail Away:

 

                  Travel they say improves the mind,

                  An irritating platitude, which frankly, entrenous,

                  Is very far from true.

 

                  Personally I've yet to find that longitude and latitude

                  can educate those scores of monumental bores

                  Who travel in groups and herds and troupes

                  Of varying breeds and sexes 

 

      Indeed, these travelers, taking the renowned French vacation, seem absolutely unable to speak to one another. The boring round-bellied businessman is called repeatedly to his phone (reminding one a bit of the Hollywood producer in Altman’s Gosford Park). The Major (André Dubois) can only recount his war-times experiences—mostly made-up we are certain—to a couple of elderly British women. The hotel proprietor (Lucien Frégis) clearly hates his waiter (Raymond Carl), a socialist and political pair talk only to one another, and an early dining couple escape the trouble of having to deal with any of the others. Yet all are greedy, rushing each time the bell rings to call them to breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

      Meanwhile Hulot, mostly because of his later arrival to these events—not all of them intentional—basically goes hungry. Both the proprietor and waiter obviously perceive him as a threat to the bourgeois community which they serve.

 

     Nonetheless, Hulot is loved by the most beautiful woman visiting this small town and he has more in common with the often-mischievous young boys (reminding one of Jean Vigo’s slightly older students in Zero for Conduct) and is popular with the young beach boys as well. It is only the tourists who dislike this foolish man, for the locals realize themselves as fools as well, preening to the beautiful woman tourist, and pretending equally clumsy tricks so that they might cover up their voyeuristic pleasures.

     In an important way, Hulot is almost a radical, shaking up whatever notion of what are the proper—and in this case quite boring—demands. Despite going hungry, it appears that the gangly Hulot goes home quite happily after his visually disastrous vacation. He has made things happen that his elderly hotel visitors might never have otherwise experienced, allowing the wind, literally, in to clean out their dusty lives, along with a true sense of politesse and even courtliness, along with the excitement of a shark-sighting, and the wonderment of fireworks.

     Unlike both Chaplin and Keaton, Hulot is not truly a badly treated fool, but a blind innocent who might even be described by someone like Montaigne as a “holy fool,” a kind of remembrance of Christ. Certainly, he cannot control the increasingly fixated economic world we hear from the radio reports, but he can change water into wine, a few slices of meat into a thousand loaves, and a barren vacation into a celebration. Even if he goes hungry, he is filled with belief in the world, and he stutters home in his 2CV car enjoying, unlike all the others, his holiday. The name Hulot, perhaps not accidently, means, if reversed, in several African languages, “to God.”

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Reivew (November 2019).

William Dieterlie | Dark City / 1950

three dark cities

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Meredyth Lucas (screenplay, based on a story by Larry Marcus), William Dieterle (director) Dark City / 1950

 

William Dieterle’s 1950 melodrama, Dark City, one might argue, is a grade B movie with a grade A cast. With the go-to noir actress Lizabeth Scott, such 1950s regulars as Viveca Lindfors, Dean Jagger, Don DeFore, Jack Webb, Ed Begley, and Harry Morgan, and with new-comer hero, Charlton Heston (in his first Hollywood film), how, one wonders, could this movie have failed?

 

      Well, we might begin with the plot. It’s overly simple: an upright business man accidently falls in with some petty criminals—Heston and his gang run an often raided bookie joint—Arthur Winant (DeFore) gets hoodwinked in two nights of poker games, losing, in the process $5,000 of his company’s money. Shamed by his own behavior, he hangs himself. And for the rest of the movie, Winant’s “crazy” brother stalks Danny Haley (Heston) and his gang (Webb, Begley, and. Morgan).

     Ulcer-sufferer Barney (Begley) is the first to go, and the police (represented by Jagger) suddenly realize that, somehow, Haley’s gang is involved in Winant’s death. The others spend their time simply trying to survive, Soldier (Morgan) speeding off to Las Vegas, and Augie (Webb) nervously following his boss to Los Angeles, just to get a picture of the “crazy” brother who’s after them. Augie is the second to go. And, oh yes, Haley loves Fran Garland (Scott). It’s hard to keep such a simple plot going, let alone spinning it out into interesting scenarios.

    Scott, dressed in slinky gowns while lip-synching several torch songs, does her very best, while trying not to show how much she’ll do to hang onto her wary lover (there’s a momentary back story that suggests Haley lost his first, European-born love during World War II). Composer Franz Waxman whips up a first-rate score, almost as if he were composing for a Hitchcock film. 

     But the German-born director, William Dieterle, was never much known for his subtlety nor adventurousness, even though, during the 1950s he was briefly suspected for having Communist ties, particularly since he was a friend of Bertolt Brecht; and he struggles, white gloves (which we usually wore to work so that he wouldn’t get mussed) on hands, to create a noir, in this case, while basically asserting Haley’s inner goodness. Haley does truly love his torch-singer girlfriend, and even falls, temporarily, for Winant’s widow and young son. The police try to save him as well. And in the end, hardly the making of a true noir, Haley is saved to return to the woman he loves.

     When a movie begins with a chiseled-face hero walking down the credits with a ribbon-bound box within which sits a stuffed Easter-rabbit in it, you know you’re not in noir country, but have instead entered a darkly-lit melodrama, closer to Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians than Heston’s true noir, Touch of Evil. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But it might have been so much more interesting if the director had got his hands just a little dirty.

 

Los Angeles, October 26, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2017).