Joseph L. Mankiewicz | The Ghost and Mrs. Muir / 1947

time passes—and passes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Philip Dunne (screenplay, based on a novel by R. A. Dick), Joseph L. Mankiewicz (director) The Ghost and Mrs. Muir / 1947

 

Basically a well-made romantic melodrama, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir would hardly be worth talking about without its three remarkable leads, Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, and George Sanders, and even then there’s not a great deal to write home about. Yet this comic tear-inducing film is strangely interesting just because of its nearly impossible structure.

     Briefly I’ll recount Phillip Dunne’s simple screenplay based on the novel by R. A Dick. Raising up her daughter in her mother-in-law’s house after the death of her husband, Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney) decides to go it on her own: over the objections of both Angelica (the mother-and-law) and Eva, her sister-in-law Lucy takes her small inheritance, their family maid Martha Huggins (Edna Best), and daughter (Natalie Wood) and moves to a seaside residence, Gull Cottage, to live in semi-isolation. The rental agency tries to dissuade her from moving into Gull, since—as we soon find out—it seems to be haunted by its former owner, Captain Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison), a former sea captain who is said to have committed suicide.

      Despite the ghost’s lame attempts to scare the new tenant off, Lucy stands firm, determined to stay put. When the small payments she has been receiving stop, the mine her husband had invested in having gone bust, the Captain dictates the unvarnished adventures of his life to her, she typing them up, putting the chapters in order, and selling them as Blood and Swash to a London publisher fond of sea tales.

     During the writing sessions, inevitably, Lucy and the ghost have fallen in love, both realizing that it is an impossible situation; even the Captain admits that she should find a “real” man, and disappears from her life.

 

                    Captain Daniel Gregg: You must make your own life amongst the

                    living and, whether you meet fair winds or foul, find your own way

                    to harbor in the end.

 

    Lucy’s new love interest turns out to be children’s writer, Miles Fairley (George Saunders) who writes under the name of Uncle Neddy. He visits her by the seaside, and she travels to London to visit him, there encountering his unexpected wife and hurrying off the moment she makes the painful discovery, the wife admitting that it has not been the first time.

    So ends this pleasant fantasy. The only problem is that the film still has more than a third of a reel—or so it seems—left! What to do with the remaining celluloid?

     Director Joseph Mankiewicz and writer Philip Dunne obviously had no clue, using that space for a long series of “time passes” sequences, as Lucy walks the beach through sun and storm, night and day, a signpost inscribed with her daughter, Anna’s name (facing in to the shore, instead of out to sea) gradually sinking into the sand. Were it not for Bernard Herrmann’s lush orchestral imitation of rolling waves, it would be nearly unbearable. As it is, the film grows  tedious enough, as the years pass and pass, that we are absolutely delighted with the sudden visitation of the now grown up Anna, her new beau in hand.

     In a mother-daughter conversation, Anna admits that she too, as a young girl, had fallen in love with Captain Gregg, of whom Lucy is now convinced has been only a thing of their imagination. Even so, she declares, she has her memories, something the audience, by this time, has nearly forgotten.

 

     Left alone once more, Lucy continues to age, dying in her favorite chair, freed, now that she is also a ghost, to join Captain Gregg for, one presumes, eternity—which the audience might feel it has already experienced.

     If only the Captain had hung around the living a little longer—as he did in the later television series—it all might have been more fun.

    

Los Angeles, March 18, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2012).

Woody Allen | Midnight in Paris / 2011

into the past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Woody Allen (screenwriter and director) Midnight in Paris / 2011

 

Woody Allen's romantic valentine to Paris, Midnight in Paris, is also his least intelligent film in that it presents the simplest of concepts embellished with the clichés of American Literature and Art History 1. For all that, there is something charming, almost magical about the flick, and despite what I'm about write below, most people will come away from the film having thoroughly enjoyed it.

     We should start with the successful aspects of this fable. Although Allen is best known, perhaps, for the stories he tells and the "Woody Allen-ish" slightly screwball way of seeing the universe, he is also, in fact, a talented cinematographer working with gifted lighting designers. He is particularly brilliant with interiors such as those of Hannah and Her Sisters. Here, however, he brings a glow to the City of Light that one seldom witnesses in Paris itself. The city is always beautiful, but in Allen's hands—beginning with a long prologue which takes us across much of the urban landscape—it becomes a glowing gem that on a sunny day absolutely radiates in the way Rome sometimes does, and on a rainy night, sparkles in a rainbow of colors reflected in small puddles. Wherever Allen takes us, it is so beautiful that we readily agree to the tour, particularly when the hero, Gil (Owen Wilson), travels back into the literary and art world of the 1920s. Much of this film, in fact, is concerned with tourist activities, as we visit Versailles, see Rodin sculptures, discuss paintings by Picasso and Matisse, and drop in at various antique shops. It is as if Allen was determined to take his audience on a small tour of the grand city, pointing out its wonders as we join him.

     If only the pedantic and braggadocio Paul (Michael Sheen) and the arch-conservative waspish prigs Helen (Mimi Kennedy) and John (Kurt Fuller) would stay home!  And then, of course, there is their daughter, Gil's contrarian fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams) who has so little in common with her lover that one can see their relationship is doomed from the start, and who gushes with enthusiasm over Paul, in Paris with his wife to lecture at the Sorbornne. Gil, who makes a good living by writing for Hollywood movies, feels that he is nothing more than a hack, and is attempting to change all that by writing a novel. A romantic, in love with the 1920s, he would like to remain in Paris, while Inez, whose parents are wealthy, wants Malibu for an address.

     In Owen Wilson the director has found a perfect stand-in for Allen himself, Wilson's Texan twang nicely ricocheting off of Allen's New Yorker whine. At times, the script comes dangerously close to Wilson's own personal history. While he could never be described as a hack, Wilson has acted in and written works that, it is evident, represent far less than his talents, and his love affairs have, apparently, left him depressed, resulting in rumors of an attempted suicide. Almost channeling Allen, Wilson creates another appealing fool of the kind who is behind nearly every one of the director's "heroes."

     But here the "charm" disappears. For the rest of the film, in the manner of the dislikable Paul, spews out pedantic-like statements that summarize Allen's simple theme and even simpler way of presenting the imaginary worlds into which his character enters.

     Gil, quite clearly, would like to live in the past, a phenomenon which Paul summarizes:

 

                           Nostalgia is denial—denial of the painful present...the name for

                           this denial is golden age thinking—the erroneous notion that a

                           different time period is better than the one one's living in—it's a

                           flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it

                           difficult to cope with the present.

 

     So here is Allen's theme, which the rest of the film will obviously play out. After a wine-tasting party, Gil, slightly drunk, determines he will not join Inez and her friends, Paul and Carol, who intend to go dancing. He walks the streets before becoming lost and sits down for a rest while a nearby clock strikes midnight. A 1920's car suddenly turns the corner as its inhabitants, drinking heavily, noisily invite him to join; they are on their way to a party. Once he has reached the event where everyone, it appears, is dressed in costume, Gil begins to perceive something is amiss. His friends, the Fitzgeralds, are named, just like the famous couple, Zelda and Scott. At the piano sits a man singing Cole Porter songs who looks very much like Cole Porter. Other famed celebrities of the period pass by. When Fitzgerald later takes him to a bar where he meets Ernest Hemingway, Gil realizes he has somehow entered a "twilight zone," that he has magically returned to his beloved past.

     Paris, in fact, as my poet friend Jerome Rothenberg once described it, is a "living museum." Nearly everywhere one goes in the city, there are small plaques reminding one of the famed figures who once lived or worked within. The city's several cemeteries, filled with the remains of renowned men and women, are regularly visited by both tourists and Parisians. I've been to all of them.

     The problem is that Allen's vision of the past is as empty as Paul's pedantic speeches. One by one many of his characters speak dogmatic statements that sum up the vision of college freshmen English texts. Here's Hemingway (Corey Stoll), for example, speaking of his own book:

 

                       Yes, it was a good book because it was an honest book, and

                       that's what war does to men. And there's nothing fine and

                       noble about dying in the mud unless you die gracefully. And

                       then it's not only noble but brave.

 

     Kathy Bates' Gertrude Stein seems to me more of a domineering scold than a great conversationalist; nothing is even mentioned about her being a writer. Other figures are names only: Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot. At least Cole Porter (Yves Heck) gets to sing, and Dali (Adrien Brody), in describing his Persistance of Memory (not painted until 1931), is humorously fixated on rhinoceroses. It is not even the fact that these people of the past are stick figures; perhaps that is the way Gil sees literary and art history. But by filling the most magical moments of the film with pop-up stereotypes, we quickly lose interest in Gil's nightly transformations. Few of these ghosts are figures any of us might wish to meet. Having met with and talked to Barnes—like Stein, a witty and imposing conversationalist—I cannot imagine her as a Charleston dancer of whom Gil quips, referring to her dominant lesbian behavior, "she wanted to lead." These silly one-liners drain any wonderment from the fantastical events. Only the lesser renowned Adriana (Marion Cotillard), Picasso's mistress, has any flesh and blood about her, and it is natural, accordingly, that Gil falls in love with her.

      Now truly torn between past and present, Gil must choose between his two loves: while it increasingly becomes apparent that he is not truly in love with Inez, how can he really embrace a woman living 90 years before his time? Besides that, for her the Golden Age is not her own generation but la Belle Époque, and while sitting one night in a cafe, the couple are magically invited to join people in a horse-drawn carriage. Together they attend a performance of the Can-Can at the Moulin Rouge, meeting, this time round, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Edgar Degas. Asked to design costumes for a play, Adriana takes Gil aside, suggesting they stay in her golden era. Finally coming to terms with his own "golden age thinking," Gil realizes he must face the present, while she is determined to remain in an even more removed past.

     But first, he must take one last trip into the 1920s, where Stein, again with evaluative pronunciamentos, declares Gil's novel to be of value—although Hemingway (who has also now read it) does not understand how its major character would not perceive that his fiancée is having an affair "right before his eyes."  The suddenly pained Gil turns away, suggesting "that might be described as self-denial."

     The inevitable moment arrives, as he declares he is staying in Paris and leaving Inez, her father revealing that he has had Gil followed. Each night the detective has observed Gil getting into a car, but the detective himself is now missing. We see him at the Court of Louis XIV, being chased by guards out of Versailles.

     In all his walks about Paris, Gil has fortunately met another woman, this one working in an antique shop that sells Cole Porter recordings. Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) accidently meets the down-hearted Gil walking along the Seine. It begins to rain, but like Gil, she enjoys walking in the rain, just as she loves her native city.

 

Los Angeles, January 3, 2012

Reprinted from Nth Position [England], (January 2012)

John Frankenheimer | Seven Days in May / 1965

code catchers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rod Serling (screenplay, based on a novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II), John Frankenheimer (director) Seven Days in May 1964

 

While watching John Frankenheimer’s likeable entertainment Seven Days in May again yesterday, I was struck with just how old-fashioned were its narrative structures. Part of the problem, is the result, obviously, of the pop-fiction work on which it was based, Fletcher Knebel’s and Charles W. Bailey’s novel of the same name; and no one has ever suggested that the film’s screenwriter, Rod Serling, was more than a kind of hack whose dramas are primarily dependent upon ironical shifts of reality. But, unlike the far wittier and more complex story of Frankenheimer’s earlier work, The Manchurian Candidate, this tale is told with an almost plodding commitment to a horizontal storyline. In fact, the director reminds us of its simple calendar-based structure again and again, counting down the days of crisis as if the film were akin to some kind of 1940s romance in which the pages of life flip, one by one, forward, the words “Time Passes” flashing across the screen.

       From the very beginning, the director sets out his major opponents, President Jordan Lyman—a slightly paunchy and gruff liberal, Fredric March—and the dashing and passionately conservative General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster). In between them stands the intelligent assistant to Scott, Colonel Jiggs Casey, played with fierce determination by Kirk Douglas, whose cleft chin has never been more on display.

       Casey believes in the constitution, while the arch-conservative Scott apparently is ready to stage a coup, information about which piles up in the first few scenes as if the film’s creators were attempting to bombard their audience not through weapons but with word-bound clues. All but one of the country’s major generals has agreed to bet, apparently through Scott, on the Preakness horse race. An unknown desert base, ECOMCON, is suddenly mentioned in small talk. A right-wing Senator pays a late night visit to General Scott. All of this occurs at a time when the President is about to sign an anti-nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union, and just a few days before military maneuvers at Mount Thunder, where Lyman will be watching, out of sight of any of his staff or news reporters.

      When Casey brings up these coincidences to the President himself, both Lyman and his aides laugh it off. The fools! Don’t they know this is the way every coup begins?

       In short, Frankenheimer creates little tension, pouring out the story as if it were something he needed to quickly get off his chest, before settling down to the complications of Casey, Girard, the President’s aide (Martin Balsam), and Lyman’s political friend, the alcoholic Senator Ray Clark (Edmond O’Brien), are sent off in search of evidence. And even here everything goes pretty much by the book. Clark finds that there is, in fact, an unknown desert camp (and is held captive within); aide Girard tracks down the one commander who has refused to bet on the Preakness—code for going along with coup—and gets a signed confession (he dies in a sudden plane crash); Casey takes up Eleanor Holbrook’s (Ava Gardner) invitation for dinner since she has been Scott’s former lover. Holbrook refuses his offer of sex, but predictably provides him with what he seeks through a series of love letters Scott has sent. We never discover what are in those letters, but we know, vaguely, that they contain incriminating evidence.

 

      Understandably, the President suddenly declines to attend the war exercises, and, soon after—as if Frankenheimer is in a hurry to wrap his film—calls in the offender, laying his cards on the table and demanding the General’s resignation. Scott refuses, realizing that the President has little evidence (he actually has only the mysterious letters, which he, just as mysteriously, refuses to use). The General even attempts to convince the President that Lyman himself had long ago given his approval of ECOMCON! For a few precious minutes it appears that Seven Days in May might even have a plot complication. But no luck! With deus ex machina precision, Senator Clark is released, reporting back to the President, and the signed confession is discovered among the plane’s wreckage, hidden in Girard’s cigarette case.

      Scott and his cronies have no choice but to resign. The President goes on television to assure the nation that all is well, the director thus ending this slightly paranoiac film with a homily instead, as he (the President) had in The Manchurian Candidate, closed with a profanity.

      If at times it almost seems that this movie might take us into a secret world of unpredictable occurrences, writer and director seem to have determined to take the straight path to the conventional. Unlike the novel, General Scott doesn’t even have to die in a car crash, but presumably lives out his life in comfy obscuration. I should have mentioned, however, the opening credits are great!

 

Los Angeles, December 30, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2012).

Carol Reed | Our Man in Havana / 1959, USA 1960

inventing the enemy

by Douglas Messerli

Graham Greene (screenplay, based on his novel), Carol Reed (director) Our Man in Havana / 1959, USA 1960

 

Growing out of the late 1950s and early 1960s cold-war hysteria, Our Man in Havana takes a comic look at British intelligence and spy-laden intrigues of James Bond and other later incarnations. But, in some respects, Carol Reed's seemingly light satirical version, is far darker than the others simply because of the diffidence of the central character, James Wormold (Alec Guinness). A vacuum cleaner salesman in pre-revolutionary Havana, Wormold is having a hard time making a living. He has a pretty daughter (Jo Morrow) whose education and penchant for lavish spending demands deep pockets. In one of the earliest scenes, the selfish Milly has just bought herself a saddle and horse, along with a need for a place to ride it, to say nothing of its feed and care. Coincidently, Wormold is visited by a "secret" operative, Hawthorne (Noel Coward), who parades through the city—much like the mad Englishman of his famous song—dressed mid-day in natty attire while being followed, inevitably, by a gaggle of young boys; even in supposedly “straight” films, Coward was presented as a gay man, or at least as being pedophilic attractive. Pretending an interest in Wormold's vacuum cleaners, he sounds out the salesman about the possibility of serving as "our man in Havana," a man on the lookout for suspicious activities. If nothing else Hawthorne has perfect timing.

     Their later meeting in the bathroom of a nearby bar continues to mock Hawthorne's role as an operative, as he runs water in all the sinks and lures Wormold into a cubicle as if he was about to commit a sexual act instead of simply informing him that his code name will be 559200 strike 5. Coward's public homosexuality further makes ridiculous the notion of Hawthorne's ability to cover things up!

     Now suddenly Wormold has a regular income, is able to join the country club, and throw his daughter the kind of birthday party which will continue to spoil her. But what does a spy do? And how can he attain further operatives? Without a pang of regret, Wormold decides to simply make them up, using the names of club members and other slight acquaintances. The London service, headed by "C" (Ralph Richardson) is delighted with his success. When Wormold further thickens the stew with imaginary drawings—based mostly on his vacuum cleaner equipment—of supposed rocket-launchers and other dangerous machines, he is paid even greater sums, finally allowing himself and his daughter the life she demands.

     That she has also attracted the eye of the local Cuban chief of police, Captain Segura (Ernie Kovacs)—known as a man who "beats his prisoners, but...never touches them"—further complicates things and draws even more attention to Wormold. The arrival of a secretary, Beatrice (Maureen O'Hara) and a radioman heats up the situation even further; Wormold now must work harder still to maintain his deceit. 

 

    Havana is played for all its tropical atmosphere, as a world of thick sweats, dark events, and strange goings-on. Wormold's best friend is a German, whom we later discover worships Bismarck in the way others had Hitler. When the friend is murdered, it seems that the weave of international intrigue is not simply something Wormold has "made up," but a mysterious reality that endangers his own life. Of course that is precisely the point, intrigue and paranoia only lead to further intrigue and paranoia; imaginary enemies eventually become real ones.

     Fearing for his life, Wormold is forced to reveal the truth of his situation, admitting the facts to Beatrice. Called to London, Wormold, together with "C" and Hawthorne, he agrees to fabricate yet one more tale: the missiles have been "dismantled," with honors bestowed upon Wormold, as he is awarded a London job—teaching espionage classes. Now he can send his daughter away to school in Switzerland and keep her out of the hands of Captain Segura.

     In short, having enemies, so it turns out, is beneficial to everyone. It is friends who are the dangerous folk. But then, US Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had already shown us that!

 

Los Angeles, March 7, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2012).

David Fincher | The Curious Case of Benjamin Button / 2008

turning back

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robin Swicord (screenplay, based on a screenplay story by Eric Roth and Robin Swicord suggested by the story by F. Scott Fitzgerald), David Fincher (director) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button / 2008

 

As perceptive critics have noted (as opposed to those, such as Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan, who dismissed this film), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, very loosely based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a love tale, a fable of love moving in opposite directions. The hero, Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), is born as a man of eighty -years old, who falls in love with a young girl named Daisy (Cate Blanchett), who, as she grows to a young teenager and, later, a young woman, continues to reenter and leave Benjamin's life until the moment when they are both nearly the same age and for a few precious years have a intense relationship, themselves bearing a child.

     The tragedy of this tale, however, is that before long Benjamin is doomed to grow too young to care for the child at the very moment when Daisy is becoming too old to care for them both. Accordingly, he leaves her, and she marries another man who is a good father to her young daughter. Benjamin disappears into youth, meeting Daisy only once for a brief sexual encounter, and reenters her life again as a young boy for whom she cares as he descends into infancy and, finally, as a baby, dies.

    If this had been the entire focus of the film, and if Swicord and Roth had let the piece remain, as it is in Fitzgerald's original, as more of a fable than a veristic story, the film might have had a sort of bittersweet charm that could have swept audiences up its myth. But the authors and director David Fincher have added numerous unrelated adventures, setting the story in a New Orleans about to undergo Hurricane Kathrina and propelling Button and other characters to the bitter cold of Minsk and into heroic adventures of World War II, all the while alternating these highly realistically- portrayed events with a kind of moralistic essay on the superior humanity of the film's Black figures and the gentle wisdom of its old. Although the movie skirts general sentimentality, it toys with it in its simplistic messages centered around carpe diem.

 

     Fortunately, this film is saved by another, more subtle theme, which I believe gives it an epic weight that justifies its length. While Benjamin moves solidly through the film backwards in time, the other characters moving forward are forced in their encounters with him to rethink their lives and face up to their failures in the past. This results in a kind of "turning back," a decision to change the errors of their past, and in that sense, leads for a kind of redeeming of life for each of them.

      Benjamin's father, Thomas, faced with the horrific specter of an eighty-year-old infant, a child moreover that has ended in his wife's death, has cruelly abandoned the child on the steps of boarding house over which a black woman, Queenie presides. Upon discovering the child, Queenie readily adopts it, allowing it to grow up old in a house of old people. Yet Thomas, upon encountering the child years later, at a time when Benjamin is closer to 50, invites him to dinner and further encounters, ending, as the father grows old, in his revelation to Benjamin that he is his son. At first, Benjamin is outraged by the fact of the abandonment as opposed to the continued kindnesses of his Black mother. But Benjamin, in some senses, is presented as a blank slate, and ultimately a reunion between the two, however shaky, is accomplished, and he nurses his father into death.

      Similarly, the older woman, Elizabeth Abbott (wonderfully played by Tilda Swinton) with whom Benjamin has an affair in Minsk, is encouraged in his gentle love to look back upon her failed marriage and her own lack of initiative. Once a great swimmer who attempted, unsuccessfully, to swim the English Channel, she has done little since except suffer the empty relationship of her marriage. By film's end, and at the unlikely age of 62, she successfully achieves the goal she had previously abandoned.

   So too does the heavy-drinking captain Mike of a New Orleans-based tugboat shift, upon encountering Benjamin, from braggadocio and whoring to heroic accomplishments as his small craft rams a German U-boat that has destroyed a large Allied warship.

      Daisy, intrigued throughout the story by Benjamin, rejects his proffered love simply because he will not go bed with her the one night she is in town. Later, upon his visit to her in New York, she resists his love because of an affair with another dancer; and finally, suffering from an automobile accident that has robbed her of the possibility of ever again being able to dance, she demands he leave her bedside. Months later, however, she too "turns back," returning to him in New Orleans where they have their intense if brief love affair.

      Despite her anger over Benjamin's decision to leave her and their daughter, she gradually recognizes that it has been for the better, and as he descends into boyhood and, ultimately, infancy, she takes over the role of his mother, nursing him back into the metaphorical womb.

       Her own daughter, Caroline, has clearly been distanced from her mother, but in the framework of the narrative, has returned to New Orleans to her hospital deathbed during the advance of Hurricane Katrina. She too, accordingly, has turned back, coming to the aide of her mother, as her mother, turning back one more time, insists Caroline read the autobiography of Benjamin Button which reveals the girl's own parentage.

       In short, each of the major figures, faced with a being moving in the opposite direction of the flow of life, are encouraged to reexamine their own forward rush into death. The result is a redemption far deeper than the easy lessons on the surface of Fincher's interesting but deeply flawed film.

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2009

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (January 2009).