Michael Curtiz | White Christmas / 1954

my white christmas

by Douglas Messerli

 

Norman Krasna, Norman Panama, and Melvin Frank (screenplay), Michael Curtiz (director) White Christmas / 1954

 

It’s a bit odd to realize, as I have gradually come to see it, that Michael Curtiz’s beloved film White Christmas (1954)—Paramount studio’s first picture in “VistaVision”—is primarily a war buddy movie that, through comedy and music, attempts to ease the returned soldiers who might not have yet settled down in the eight years since the end of World War II into the 1950s’ concept of the American way of life, while at the same time reconfirming the choices of those soldiers who immediately married and hunkered down to raise families.

    This is the kind of movie that someone even like my father, who hated musical romances and seldom saw movies (I have written about the three drive-in movies to which he took me and my mother in my childhood, Carousel, Oklahoma! and a revival showing of Wings, the first two clearly through my mother’s prodding). Yet suddenly, about two years after original release of White Christmas, he drove his entire family an hour-and-a-half away from our hometown in Newhall, Iowa (population 400), through Cedar Rapids, to Marion—where we would move a year later—to see the film together. In retrospect, that seems to me almost a miracle, given that it only two times later would we see a movie as family, the occasions being Davy Crockett and Ben Hur. My father clearly related to this movie because it spoke to the wartime veteran in him.

      This Christmas tale begins, if you recall, on the wartime batttlefields where Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby) and Phil Davis (Danny Kaye) are performing a Christmas entertainment for their fellow soldiers. Major General Tom Waverly (Dean Jagger) interrupts their celebration to announce he’s leaving the force to be replaced by another, and his men who clearly love him, tear up before the performances continue, only to be finally interrupted by Nazi bombings. Phil saves Bob’s life by pulling him away from a falling wall, the two becoming friends, despite their vast differences, and after the war performing successfully together, by the time the movie formally opens having become noted producers. 

       At the moment they are in a Florida performing in their newest stage musical “Playing Around,” while nearby two sisters, Betty Haynes (Rosemary Clooney) and Judy Haynes (Vera-Ellen) are performing in a nightclub, Novello’s. The always amorous Phil, on the prowl for any girl he can find, is becoming frustrated with his partner Bob’s endless work ethic. Bob insists they haven’t time to enjoy the company of two chorus girls which Phil wants them to entertain because they have to look at an act, which just happens to be the Haynes sisters. Judy and Phil get on immediately, both hoping that Bob and her equally reluctant sister Betty might like one another enough that they might spend a little time with each other, and if things work out, find a few hours in their hard-working regimens to enjoy the opposite sex.

       This film is after all, a boy-meets-girl romance in which, after the usual diversions in the plot, they wrap their arms around each other and engage a deep kiss and the promise of marriage, except in this case it is a double helix which weaves in and out of their friendship with their beloved General, Waverly, who’s now running a failing ski-lodge in Vermont in a year—so Bob, Phil, and the Haynes sisters discover—in which there is no snow to be found. Hence the endless search through this pleasant diversion for the final “white” Christmas which closes the deal on all their romantic longings. Thank you Irving Berlin for all your lovely songs along the way! “May all your Christmases be white, and goodnight.”

       I loved this film, in part, because it was one of the most joyous moments spent with my not so generally harmonious family, and because of the fact that quite by coincidence, it took place in the very town which we would soon call home and in which I grew up, Marion, Iowa. The owner of that small movie theater, Gilbert Rathburn, would later become a friend of my parents serving on my father’s school board, my father hired a year later as the Superintendent of Schools.

       Seeing the film today 65 years later, I’m rather startled at what I now observe and could not have way back then, when I was probably just nine years of age. At just 13 minutes into the film, as they stand backstage at the Florida Theater where the run of their show has apparently come to an end, their young male stage manager and assistant Albert comes strutting in to shoo-off the girls to their positions on-stage and report to Bob that he’s gotten them booked on a train to New York City, which given the season, was a difficult task. Although not overtly effeminate, it’s clear he’s a gay boy, as I now know him to have been, since he is my beloved friend poet Bob Crosson, who I knew only during his last decade before his death in 2001 at age 72. The role is so small, that for years I never even noticed it, but now it receives my full attention.

     Only 7 minutes later, Wallace and Davis are in their seats at the nightclub watching the Haynes girls perform their charming hit number, “Sisters,” and only a few dozen frames later, Phil and Judy have drifted out into the lakeside boardwalk to perform one of what I later realized was my favorite film musical dance numbers. I do recall even at 9 being absolutely mesmerized by their duet at the very moment I am certain my brother and father were rolling their eyes with impatience awaiting the next development of the plot.

       Although most people knew Danny Kaye as a kind of clown, he was also one of the best dancers of his day. Although he was married to Sylvia Fine, who wrote a great deal of his material, he was long rumored to be bisexual and, in particular, was said by Olivier’s biographer Donald Spoto to have had a ten-year secret affair with Laurence Olivier. That latter great actor, it is now pretty evident from the reports of Scotty Bowers and others was actively bisexual. I’ve read another report that Kaye and Olivier would regularly meet at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, with their wives’ knowledge, retreating to the bedroom, locking themselves in, remaining behind doors for several days.

        I wrote of Kaye’s dance with Vera-Ellen a few years ago in my collation of “My Favorite Film Screen Dances”:

 

     “I am a particular fan of Vera-Ellen, in part because she worked in some of the best musicals of film over just two decades before withdrawing from public life. But in the second major song of White Christmas, 'The Best Things Happen While You're Dancing,' it's Danny Kaye, dressed in a blue-slate suit and matching slate suede shoes, who truly shines.

 

   The dance begins just as another ends. Leaving the dance floor for the outside, the couple gradually move from the waltz to the fox trot as Kaye finishes the song's lyrics, and, crossing a small bridge whipped up, obviously, just for this piece, they use its metal posts for acrobatic swings, she moving out and around while he swoops higher over her petite body. An upside-down canoe is the perfect place for the couple to tap out the fox trot beat, a short tap-dance version of the jazzy rhythms, before they execute—the music accelerating—a series of spins, lifts, and falls, Vera Ellen ending with her body draped across Kaye's lap just as sister Betty Haynes (Clooney), wondering where they have gotten to, exits the inside dance floor to discover them.

      If Danny Kaye is usually goofy, his whole body awkwardly lurching forward and backward like a heap of Jello, in this dance he is expertly solid and graceful, a Romeo who has moved suddenly from the comic to romance, as he sings, ‘Even guys with two left feet come out all right if the girl is sweet.’ He seldom got other chances to so clearly display his dancing talents.”       

   In the very next scene Bob and Phil are performing in semi-drag (pants rolled ups, blue kerchiefs around their neck, and butterflies in their hair) version of “Sisters.” No one in my family gave it a second thought that their swishy performance was imitating many a gay camp rendition of drag performers

      Before long the quartet has gotten together on the train to sing “Snow” in the lounge car, and instead of heading for the RKO Theater in New York are now all on the way to Vermont and, unknown to them, Wallace and Davis’ former General commander. There, they call in their entire company to rehearse, performing the embarrassingly racist “Minstrel” number (although fortunately not in blackface) which they attempt to justify by contextualizing it within an historical context; and Danny Kaye mugs, this time as an effete gay priss, the song “Choreography” (“Chaps who did taps, aren’t tapping anymore, they’re doing choreography.”), which must have been a complete puzzlement to my parents who I imagine had never even previously heard that word.* 

    Although it is quite apparent that things are finally warming up romantically between Bob and Betty, the Waverly housekeeper Emma (Mary Wickes) overhears what she mistakenly believes is a deal between Bob and the TV variety program host Ed Harrison (read Ed Sullivan) to tape the entire show from the Waverly’s Pine Tree Lodge, which will advertise the General’s misfortune and Bob’s kindness. When she gossips to Betty the elder Haynes sister becomes furious with her would-be lover, breaking off her relationship with the producer and eventually heading off to New York to perform as a songstress in a club.

      Meanwhile Judy, totally misunderstanding the reasons for her sisters’ abandonment, believes that if only she wouldn’t think she had to care for her young sister, things might be rectified. As Dan Butler describes actor Danny Kaye in Mark Rappaport’s The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender (1997), “In role after role he’s identified as a soft man. Danny, in short, is your basic ‘girlie-guy.’” Faced with Judy’s proposal, his character Davis immediately attempts to get out of the situation by insisting as gay men had done for centuries, “I’m not the marrying kind!” When Judy assures him “It’s just an engagement,” he moves even further way, commenting that he’s not “the engaging kind either.” Her question, which Butler posits is never answered: “Then what kind of man are you?”

      In her new club gig, Clooney sings the memorable “Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me,” accompanied by a male quartet of pretty-boy dancers, including a young pre-Bernardo George Chakiris, looking every bit as gay as some claim he has been throughout his lifetime. The gay director Jacques Demy must certainly have thought so in casting him as another pretty dancer in his Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967

 

       Predictably, Betty discovers the truth, that Bob just wanted to get the old boys together again to prove to the General that they still love him. Everyone gets a Christmas kiss, and of course it snows, covering everything over in white as the movie has been effectively doing all along.

      The White Christmas I so enjoyed in 1955 or 1956, I still find to be full of pleasures—except for very different reasons.

*Even I could not have known just how truly gay the last-named number was. “Choreography,” a spoof on the modern dance techniques, according to gay historian William J. Mann is particularly based on the chorographical talents of one the men who were described of as “Freed’s Fairies,” Jack Cole, “one of the most visible gay presences in Hollywood [who] created some of the most overt gay images on the screen since the days before the Code.” Arthur Freed, a heterosexual, headed up MGM’s famed Film Musical unit, who with his assistant Roger Edens, a gay man, hired some of the best and gayest talents in Hollywood for work on their numerous musical compositions, librettos, dances, scoring, wardrobe, sets, and everything in between.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).

John Greyson | This Is Nothing / 1999

nothing and everything

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Greyson (screenwriter and director) This Is Nothing / 1999 [8 minutes]

 

In many respects, Greyson’s short undercover caper film This Is Nothing, despite its terrifying commentary about the daily NATO bombings of Belgrade in 1999 prompted by Yugoslavia’s ethnic cleansing of Albanians which led to a NATO interim peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, is also an almost comic variation on the numerous CIA missions as documented on television and film.    

    While his former lover Dimitri (Greg Atkins) in Belgrade daily emails Jack Rivers (James Gallanders) about his experiences throughout the bombings, Jack imagines himself as a CIA hero, assigned to take out a Boston professor, war theorist Noam Bombski (Gordon Jocelyn), clearly a reference to libertarian socialist commentator Noam Chomsky. Rivers is furious that he is not being sent to Belgrade, but his handler explains that Bombski is Belgrade, evidently the source of all the evil action occurring in real time.    

     Yet nothing is fully explained ever in this oddly humorous short: “Facts were the targets he chased, but now the facts were chasing him.” And again, the narrator shouts out, “In wartime words become double agents.”

     The actions with which camera reveals Jack is involved—a bucket of water with a lemon twist being tossed into his face, a face-to-face inquiry with two Bosnian-like thugs, and a meet-up with a buxom woman who seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with anything in the discombobulated story—seem anything but terrifying. In quick flashes throughout this film, we see Jack and some other male, shirtless, sitting in high window in a half-hug. “In wartime, words become bombs,” screams out the narrator (Scott McLaren) of what appears to be a film trailer.

      Meanwhile, we hear somewhat coherent messages from Dimitri, while Jack’s hackwork film fantasy becomes increasingly confused with a dying couple on a sideway expressing they last words: “This is nothing,” she responding, “This is everything.” Dimitri’s mother in fact may be dying because of her refusal to go to the shelters in her attempt to call her sister to check on her well-being.

      While Dimitri talks of real bombs, Jack seeks out the meaningless Bombski and writes his friend about his last visit to Canada when they evidently slept on an empty floor of a newly built high rise, now filled with offices. Even in the midst of the crisis Dimitri has been watching on TV the film Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson’s 1997’s work which itself is a dark political satire in which to cover up the President’s sexual indiscretions, a political operative creates a fictional war in Albania—and which Greyson’s work itself is also fast becoming as the ridiculous and the tragic are given equal time.

      Suddenly there are no new messages on Jack’s server. Jack observes that the news of the poison gas factories is “really scary.” Maybe Dimitri’s e-mail simply is “down.”

      Meanwhile the imaginary film Jack has conjured up becomes even more ludicrous as Jack Rivers is announced as being played by Ben Afleck, and the strange woman (Sarah Polley) who keeps appearing is described as Penelope Cruz. With Dustin Hoffman as Noam Bombski.         

     Finally, Jack Rivers puts a gun to Bombski’s head. The frightening theorist responds: “This is nothing,” before muttering “This is everything.” As the narrator continues to scream out about Jack being pushed to the edge and the fate of the world, Jack puts down his gun and turns to the camera, thinking for a moment back to the no message sign on the screen of his computer, before walking off, leaving the narrator in a kind of stunned stutter.

       This short film makes quite clear the difference between everything and nothing, between the real worlds and the fantasy fictions about international battles. Yet it is often hard to tell the difference between the two, except perhaps that one ends in silence, real death, while the other shifts only into a strenuous stutter. And where, in all of this, is love? A few seconds, apparently, give evidence to it, without us fully being able to even determine the reality of even that.

 

Los Angeles, December 23, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

M. J. Roche | Amour et science (Love and Science) / 1912

alternative realities

by Douglas Messerli

 

M. J. Roche (screenwriter, based on a story “Liefde en Westenschap,” and director) Amour et science (Love and Science) / 1912

 

In this wonderfully clairvoyant short film from 1912, a young genius, Max Pledge (Émile Dehelly) is attempting to perfect his new invention that will enable someone speaking on a telephone to see the person in action, a sort of early imaginative vision of a home cinema or what we now use every day in our cellphone technology.

     Pledge is so involved with his work that several men who come to call on him are turned away by his butler. And so too are his fiancée, Daisy, who has arrived with her friend Maud to discuss their wedding plans.

      In the meantime, Max, tinkering with his telephonic-cinematic invention, discovers that it actually works, and he immediately calls his sweetheart to schedule a telephone conversation later that afternoon.

      Still upset and angered by Max’s seeming disinterest in even discussing a definitive date for their wedding, Daisy decides to play a trick on Max.

      Trimming off some of Maud’s beautiful bangs, she suggests that her friend dress up as a man, using the trimmings for an outrageously large moustache. At first Maud refuses, but as the two engage in dressing her up as a male, they so laugh and enjoy themselves in the process that for a few moments it appears that real focus of the film might almost be said to demonstrate the pleasures of drag, the process of dressing up as someone far different from the self you have been born into and never fully explored. In all the films of the early 20th century, dressing in drag was never again revealed as being so much fun. RuPaul would love this prescient short movie.

       In the telephone conversation we see the screen split, another cinema first, showing both Max on his end of the line and Daisy in her bedroom. As the two speak, Maud, dressed as a gentleman caller, suddenly appears in the background and moves closer to Maud to begin to kiss her fervently—which almost takes this short film into lesbian territory—seeming to affirm that Max’s fiancée is two-timing him.

       The revelation is disastrous, with Max destroying his invention before he falls into a faint, over the next few days remaining into a kind of semi-catatonic trance of depression from which the doctors are unable to restore him. One of the doctors suggests that only by re-witnessing the scene might Max return to normal life.

        We see Daisy consult a filmmaker in his studio to convince him to film just such a scene. Visiting Max in his workshop, where she has set up her cinema version behind the very machine which he had created, Daisy and others bring in Max and seat him before the “screen.” As Daisy hides, we observe a similar scene in which, as Daisy is speaking on the phone to Max, her suitor (Maud in drag) suddenly appears. But this time Daisy begins to giggle, which again turns into hearty laughter as she tears off Maud’s whiskers, Maud pulling off her wig and waving it like a trophy, the two finding the whole stunt hilarious.

 

        Max, at first, doesn’t even view the screen, but hearing Daisy’s voice turns toward it to witness the same horrors as early before finally perceiving that it has all been a stunt. He returns to his normal self, as Daisy reappears to hug him. All is forgiven.

        Not only has this early film used drag to explore a science fiction-like new media of the future, but further takes cinema into its future, and perhaps unfortunate role, as a device for altering reality—or in this case, altering a misconception that the medium had earlier conveyed. Roche’s short film explores how the movies themselves might be used to present alternative realities.

 

Los Angeles, June 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

 

Alfred Hitchcock | To Catch a Thief / 1955

to catch a husband

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Michael Hayes (screenplay), Alec Coppel (contributing writer, uncredited), Alfred Hitchcock (director) To Catch a Thief / 1955

 

With the recent multi-million jewelry robbery at Cannes—at the Carlton Intercontinental, the very hotel featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 movie, To Catch a Thief—I determined to revisit that film, which I have seen many times in my life.

      The general feeling about this film is that it is nothing but a light entertainment, a romantic caper that has little, if any depth. And, indeed, that is, for the most part, the obvious way to read Hitchcock’s early work, particularly in light of the far greater and complex works such as Shadow of a Doubt of 1943 and his deft cinema of only the year before, Rear Window. Yet, there are far deeper issues at play just underneath its witty script and the tourist-like documentary of its surface.

     Part of the problem is that the plot, such as it is, is centered upon a very weak conceit: several former jewel thieves, mostly working separately, came together during World War II to work for the underground, earning pardons from their numerous post-war crimes in return for their commitment to live crime-free lives. Some of them, such as the noted “Cat” John Robie (Cary Grant) have ended up quite well off, he living in a lovely stone house above the Riviera, tended by a loyal servant, where he grows grapes in his vineyard, and tends to other garden plants. A former crime friend, Bertani (Charles Vanel), now owns a posh restaurant serving up meals to wealthy tourists, with another former thief, Foussard (Jean Martinelli), working as his restaurant assistant. Others, now serving in the restaurant’s kitchen, have made little financial progress in their lives, despite their straight living, and are still quite bitter about the apparent class differences. More importantly, someone has again begun to steal from Cannes’ wealthy visitors, using the same methods of the famed Robie; both the police and his former friends suspect he has gone back into business.

     Realizing his predicament of having every day to prove his honesty, Robie decides to go “under cover” in order to find out just who is the “copycat.” In truth, any suspense about who is the actual thief, hardly matters. What Hitchcock slowly reveals to us is that almost anyone and everyone of the film’s numerous figures might as well be thieves, from H. H. Hughson (John Williams), the insurance agent whose company has insured most of the jewelry, and has no problem about stealing soap and towels from various hotels and deducting free meals from his expense account, to Foussard’s daughter, still in love with the dashing Robie—who has taught her English—and is perfectly willing to run away with him to South America. Nearly all of his old associates are equally suspects.

       Although we know they are not guilty of the crimes, we might equally be tempted to call the two American women, Jessie Stevens (the wonderful Jessie Royce Landis) and her beautiful daughter, Frances (Grace Kelly) as being thieves themselves, one the wife of a wonderful American rogue on whose Oklahoma land oil was discovered, while her daughter, whom she declares was “finished” in finishing school, is on the hunt for a wealthy husband, and, quickly seeing behind Robie’s cover as an Oregon lumberman, is only too ready to become the “cat’s” new “kitten.” Even Robie’s servant has once strangled a German with her bare hands. In short, there is not a single character in this “comedy” who is entirely admirable, which is, in part, what makes it more fun and more complex as a work of cinema than it first appears. Each character wants more out of life than he currently has—except, perhaps for Robie, who admits:

                               Why did I take up stealing? To live better, to own things
                               I couldn’t afford, to acquire this good taste that you now
                               enjoy and which I should be very reluctant to give up. 

        The world of To Catch a Thief is less interested in finding the thief behind the recent jewel heists than it is in acquiring the good things of life and, in the case of the authorities, of saving face. And everyone in this film, as Hitchcock makes clear, is only too ready to “gamble” :

                            Frances Stevens: Maybe Mr. Houston doesn’t care for
                                         gambling.
                            Jessie Stevens: Everyone likes to gamble in one way or     
                                          another, even you!
                            Frances Stevens: I have an intense dislike for it.
                            Jessie Stevens: Francie, dear, when the stakes are right,
                                          you’ll gamble!

     And gamble she does, high-jacking Robie as he attempts to check out wealthy and jewel-rich families, offering up a chicken picnic:

 

                            Jessie Stevens: You want a leg or a breast?

                            John Robie: You make the choice.

     Taunting Robie with her own diamond necklace (which he immediately recognizes as an imitation), she offers herself up to him in a verbally rich fusillade of sexually suggestive comments—recoiling only in this consumer-based paradise when the “cat” steals her own mother’s diamonds! Hitchcock’s women, apparently, are all ready to gamble as long it isn’t the family jewels. Only her utterly down-to-earth and honest mother admits she does not miss the baubles—as long as they’re insured!

       Despite Francie’s new disdain of her “Robin Hood” hero, she is still willing to play along in one final caper, in which Hitchcock again reveals not only the consumerism (Kelly dressed in a gold bullion gown), but the complete sexual surrender that goes along with such societal behavior, demonstrated in his wonderful after party scenes at the mansion, where the variously costumed attendees are portrayed as if mimicking some Hollywood version of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”      

     Once more the bisexual Grant as Robie, as in so many of his films, brushes off almost all of Francie’s sexual advances:

 

                            Frances Stevens: I’m in love with you.

                            John Robie: Now that’s a ridiculous thing to say.

   

      And throughout Robie seems more comfortable with the British insurance agent, who he quickly invites up to his bachelor lair than with the American female beauty. Indeed at the fancy costume party where they finally hope to catch the thief, the fussy Brit actually becomes Robie's double—what else but a Nubian slave serving the gold-digging Yankees, as Robie stalks the rooftop in wait of his cat bandit, as far away as he can get from Francie's domestic treacheries. 

       Time and again, he defuses Francie’s sexual swoons, moving throughout the film in a calm demeanor against her and Danielle’s sexual insinuations. In this work, more than in almost any other of his career, Grant’s self-conscious bemusement and seeming absence of sexuality makes him even more attractive to anyone who might be drawn to his beautiful exterior. Everyone knows he’s ripe for the taking, except himself. And his final capture of the new “cat,” Foussard’s daughter Danielle, suggests his own emasculation: he has been quite successfully replaced by a female protégé.

        Hitchcock culminates his consumerist satire with the final purchase, Francie rushing up to Robie’s lair immediately after his innocence is confirmed, insisting, just as had Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey years before, her purchase of a new world: “So this is where you live? Oh, Mother will love it up here?”

 

Los Angeles, July 31, 2013

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2013).