Roberto Galvaldón | Macario / 1960

living with death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Emilio Carballido and Roberto Gavaldón (screenplay, based on a work by B. Traven, based, in turn, on a story by the Grimm Brothers), Roberto Galvaldón Macario / 1960

 

Only a couple of weeks before the 2013 Dio de las muertas I saw Roberto Gavaldón’s “Day of the Dead” fable, Macario, as part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s series “The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema,” focusing on the cinematographer for the film, Gabriel Figueroa.

 

    Macario is a film woven through with dire conditions and death. From its earliest frames we realize that Macario’s family is near starvation. Working as a woodcutter, Macario (Ignacio López Tarso) brings home heavy loads of wood that hardly afford his family a full meal, and after witnessing a table of roast turkeys—none of them for himself or his children—the father determines that he will go hungry until he can eat a whole turkey for himself. Fearful for his survival, his wife (Pina Pellicer) steals a turkey, stuffing it without his knowing into his satchel as he heads off to work in the mountains. 

     Discovering the bird in his pack, he prepares to eat it, until suddenly a man appears before him, the Devil, tempting the poor worker in order to get a piece of its meat. Unlike Faust, Macario stands firm; he will eat the turkey by himself. A second stranger, God, also passes by, in the guise of an elderly man, similarly asking for a piece of the delicious looking turkey, but Macario again refuses.

    Only when Death appears, dressed as a peasant like Macario himself does the poor woodcutter gladly share the bird, which Death (Enrique Lucero) gratefully receives restoring his hunger for a century, expressing his wonderment that Macario has shared it with him while refusing the other two. Up until this moment, the fable, based on a work by B. Traven, itself a version of a story by the Grimm Brothers, is almost wooden in its fairy-tale like structure, but Macario’s answer—“Whenever you appear, there is no time for anything else.”—takes the film in another direction, toward the mordant wit that infuses Macario’s whole culture, taking us into the dark world of Colonial Mexican life wherein death and life are interfused. Death in this dark tale is everywhere, a far more powerful presence than even the figures called up by the Church.

    Because of easy engagement with the all-powerful figure, Death engages in a perverse kind of friendship with the simple worker, presenting Macario a container of water that, he insists, will work miracles, saving some of those who about to die. The catch is, however, that Macario must look to the head and feet any of those he might attempt to heal; if his “friend” appears at the head of the victim, he is condemned to death, but if he appears at the feet of the sick person, Marcario may cure her or him.

 

     The potion is quickly put to the test when Macario returns home to discover one of his sons has fallen into the well and is near death. Fortuitously, Death appears at the boy’s feet, and Macario’s son is miraculously cured. So begins, in this gossip-rich culture, Macario’s fame as a healer, as time and again, he cures local victims near death. In this poor and deprived culture it appears that nearly every family has someone dying, and Macario, accordingly, becomes a kind of local hero—although understandably he is hated by local physician, who has none of the simple man’s healing powers, along with the undertaker! Together these men contact the authorities, who quickly bring Macario’s actions to the attention of the church figures, who arrest Macario for heresy. They determine he is either a charlatan or a witch, promising, if he is the former, to cut out his tongue, or, if the latter, to burn him at the stake.

     At the very moment, however, fate seems to offer him another possibility. The Viceroy’s young son has grown gravely ill, and the authorities, accordingly, offer the prisoner an out if he can cure the boy. We can predict the outcome: the Viceroy’s son is condemned to death, as Death himself appears the head of the bed. The former woodcutter cries out for a different verdict, but Death is unforgiving, taking Macario—in the most spectacularly brilliant scene in this film—into his private cavern (filmed in Mexico’s Cacahamilpa caverns), where thousands upon thousands of candles represent the lifespan of every being. While the pleading Marcario looks on, death holds up the candle of the Viceroy’s son, snuffing it out before the peasant’s eyes. Death then holds up Macario’s own candle which reveals that the wax is low, the flame fluttering.

    Terrified by the prospect of his own demise, our hero snatches up the icon, rushing off, with Death on the chase.

     On the same day on which Macario’s wife has sent him off with a full roast turkey, she is worried when he does not return home. She and her neighbors discover him lying in the woods as if he had simply fallen asleep. He is, of course, dead, his half of the turkey left untouched.

    In this Mexican picture, it is not so much Death who controls the characters’ fates, but the characters’ everyday association with and acceptance of the dark forces of the world around them that predetermines their own destinies. In the little village where Macario lives every day is “the Day of the Dead.”

     If this simple tale seems, at times, predictable in its moral simplicity, the beautiful camerawork of its cinematographer, its assured acting, and director Gavaldón’s skills at cinematic storytelling transform Traven’s far clumsier and fatalistic tale into a gem of cinema history. The film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film from the Academy Awards and shown at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.

    

Los Angeles, October 12, 2013.

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2013).

 

John Huston | Key Largo / 1948

tintypes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Brooks and John Huston (screenplay, based on a play by Maxwell Anderson), John Huston (director) Key Largo / 1948

 

The plot of John Huston’s Key Largo might be described, basically, as a series of coincidental events that work toward getting the major characters and actors together in one or two rooms. A hotel, owned by James Temple (Lionel Barrymore, with pants pulled up over his belly) and run by his daughter-in-law, Nora Temple (Lauren Bacall), has been “occupied”—in both the ordinary and military meaning of that word—by gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson), his moll, Gayle Dawn (Claire Trevor), and his cronies and thugs, “Curly” Hoff (Thomas Gomez), “Toots” Bass (Harry Lewis), and Ralph (William Hade). Into this tense situation walks Major Frank McCloud, by accident choosing this very moment to share his war-time memories with the Temples, and a Deputy Sheriff, Clyde Sawyer (John Rodney).

   While passions and violence simmer inside the oppressively hot Key Largo hotel, outside a hurricane begins to bluster, drawing the local Seminole Indians and two escaped Indian prisoners, John and Tom Osceola, to the hotel doors. Obviously, now that the cast has all come together, the tough talk can begin and the fireworks set off.

       Based on a poeticized play by old-time wordsmith Maxwell Anderson, the highly revised script by Richard Books and John Huston takes on various groups of actors, one by one, accommodating each of their demands, needs, and emotions with Huston’s camera dutifully following. What they say is fairly stereotypical, with Bogart, once again, playing the disillusioned idealist, Robinson, the loud-mouthed gangster, Barrymore the fearless liberal, Bacall the quiet and needy would-be lover, and Trevor a drunken and abused ex-singer. The others serve as variations and oppositions to these types. But that is part of the story’s theme: each of these figures is caught, to some degree, within the limitations of his or her human nature. They are figures trapped by their own stereotypical identities.    

     Given the stagey gimmickry of this wooden play, it is almost a wonder that it remains watchable today. The acting, obviously, is what sets it apart from the hundreds of Petrified Forest imitations filed over the decades. Like his Rick of Casablanca Bogart as McCloud, at first bowing out of any heroism, ultimately becomes the hero by killing all of the bad guys, one by one, on a boat in which they are trying to escape to Cuba. The Bacall character, despite having hardly any lines, is, as always, so beautiful that she is destined to get her man. Barrymore gets a chance to strut his stentorian voice, and Trevor to slur her words. Most of the others are doomed to die. It is almost as if we are witnessing an audition for various character types—but then, these are not just ordinary actors, and that’s what makes this work, at times, crackle with energy and radiant delight. Perhaps because we do know these actors so well and get to watch them here so play to type, the movie, amazingly, comes alive.

     Robinson has been better elsewhere, sputtering out his ego-driven evil, Bacall has been far more sexy and clever (it is no accident, surely, that the archetypal macho director Huston hardly knows what to make of her), and Bogart has certainly been more self-assured in his pretend-cynicism as he attempts to cover over his own heroic past, but the chemistry that comes from having them all in one room, at moments, is as exciting as the footage of the furious storm stolen from the Ronald Reagan melodrama, Night unto Night.

     Robinson, in particular, is moving—or we might say, pathetic—in his inabilities to perceive his limitations, refusing to accept the destructiveness of the growing storm outside the hotel windows or the larger “storm” of change churning up the world around him which has made his type a figure of the past, replacing it with somewhat more sinister forces that no longer offer the values of “protection,” “loyalty” and “courage.” One might even describe Huston’s version of Key Largo as a sort of dirge for a world that for a multitude of reasons (and excuses) could no longer exist.

      And then, out of the blue, so to speak, Trevor/Gaye Dawn is asked to sing one of her old torch songs. She refuses to do so without a drink, but Robinson barks out another command. Slowly and unsurely, the actress begins “’Moanin’ Low” a cappella, in a voice that might once have been fairly sweet, as if crying out against the awful situation in which the world as suddenly found itself entrapped.

     Legend has it that Trevor believed the song would be dubbed, and kept asking Huston to rehearse it, he assuring her there was still plenty of time before the shoot. One day, however, he announced that it was time for the song, and demanded that she perform it on the spot. If the song begins all right, the tune soon goes off key, slows down, falters, and breaks off. It was a take! Bogart, a gun pointed at his heart, goes to the bar, pours out a drink and offers it to her: “You deserve this.” Trevor won an Oscar for Supporting Actress for what one might describe Huston’s mean trick!

     Still, I’ll surely watch Key Largo next time it flickers across the television set.

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2013

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (December 2013). 

Andrew L. Stone | Stormy Weather / 1943 [dance only]

the nicholas brothers, katherine dunham and company: the greatest dance film

 

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frederick J. Jackson and Ted Koehler (screenplay, based on a story by Jerry Horwin, and adapted by H. S. Kraft and Seymour B. Robinson), Harold Arlen (music), Andrew L. Stone (director) Stormy Weather / 1943

 

One of two major studio movies with all black casts (the other being Vicente Minelli's Cabin in the Sky) Stormy Weather was packed with great performances by Lena Horne, Dooley Wilson, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, and the great dancer, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. But nothing in this heady concoction of music and dance can quite match the leg work of Fayard and Harold Nicholas. The two not only tap dance up and down stairs in near-perfect unison, but work as a linked duo, mirroring each other's movements in reverse, before jumping into the orchestra to leap from oval to oval (which recalls Robinson's "Drum Dance" elsewhere in the film), seemingly some of kind of gigantic music stands for the musicians. 

     Soon the tuxedoed duo hoist themselves up upon a piano, looking perfectly at home there, before they tap up a double staircase, and, in a series of leapfrogs over one another that land them each time in perfect leg splits, they again reach the bottom, coming together only to tap up the staircase once more, this time taking a slide down to the floor. The audience can only be wowed, and wonder how their torsos have endured their acrobatic maneuvers.

     Fred Astaire has been quoted as describing this performance as "the greatest dance number ever filmed." Enough said.

 

    Although Lena Horne's sultry rendition of the song "Stormy Weather" is at the center of this film, Katherine Dunham's dance with her company to the same song is worth viewing again and again. The dance begins in a rainy street scene where couples soon begin to jive; Dunham, however, seeming to be somewhere between a streetwalker and sleepwalker conjures up a balletic version, wherein she is quickly joined, in her dreamy imagination, by a whole company of men who lift the women in rapturous grasps before laterally holding their partners and returning them to the floor. The most notable aspect of this dance is the constant flow of the wind machine, which makes the silky costumes seem to be in eternal motion, which Dunham reflects time and again through the movement of her hands and fingers.

     There is something a bit ridiculous with this, reminding one a little of the song "They're Doing Choreography" in White Christmas, but Dunham manages to take some Martha Graham-like gestures into the realm of sensuality.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2011

 

Michael Curtiz | Yankee Doddle Dandy / 1942 [dance only]

james cagney: a man without guilt

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Buckner and Edmund Joseph (screenplay, based on a story by Robert Buckner), Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein (writers, uncredited), George M. Cohan (songs), Michael Curtiz (director) Yankee Doddle Dandy / 1942

 

For those who have only seen Cagney in his gangster films such as Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and G Men, it will come as a surprise, I am sure, that he was also—if almost accidentally—one of Hollywood's greatest dancers. Playing George M. Cohan performing in one of his musicals as a jockey who has been accused of fixing a race, Cagney awaits a signal from a nearby ship to tell him of the decision of the jury: he has been acquitted and his dance to the tune of "Yankee Doddle Dandy" is a joyfully nervous tapping out of his absolute delight that is so original in its combinations of straight tap, turns, spins, and occasional leaps that it is clearly something that he has created himself, outside of the more conventional dance numbers of the film choreographed by Seymour Felix and LeRoy Prinz.            Cagney's whole body is so naturally jumpy that he seems like a marionette on strings, as others have described him; but unlike Ray Bolger's puppet-like Straw Man, Cagney's legs, hands, and shoulders appear never to come to rest, as they dangle at the very moment his torso seems to rise. Instead of being pulled back to earth by gravity, Cagney seems unable to come to rest, his feet nervously tapping away something like the horses this jockey might have raced. Given the heaviness of most of his verbal roles, we are understandably stunned by his lightness of foot. And he can even sing!

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2011

Victor Fleming, George Cukor, and Mervyn LeRoy | The Wizard of Oz / 1939 [dance only]

 

ray bolger and judy garland: if i only had a brain

by Douglas Messerli

 

Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allan Wolf (screenplay, based on the book by L. Frank Baum, Irving Breacher, Willliam H. Cannon, Herbert Fields, Arthur Freed, Jack Haley, E. Y. Harburg, Samuel Hoffenstein, Bert Lahr, John Lee Mahin, Herman J. Mankewicz, Jack Mintz, Ogden Nash, Robert Pirosh, George Seaton, and Sid Silvers (credited and uncredited dialogue), Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg (songs), Victor Fleming, George Cukor [uncredited] and Mervyn LeRoy [uncredited], directors) The Wizard Of Oz / 1939

It seems as if everyone in Hollywood was, in one way or another, involved in the writing of directing of the great film classic The Wizard of Oz. But the enduring song, “If I Only Had a Brain,” had only a composer and lyricist, the incomparable team of Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg. Originally written for the 1937 Broadway musical, Horray for What!, it was cut from that production. Writing new lyrics, Harburg featured it in his great score as a perfect song for he movie’s talking, dancing scarecrow.

    Dancing as if he were a straw-stuffed puppet whose strings were pulled from somewhere on high, Bolger, always an entertaining and comical dancer, outdoes himself with the lightness of his feet. At times his entire body seems almost to float, as if he really were stuffed with hay instead of bones and gristle. Yet, as a straw man, each attempt to fly off into dance ends, sadly, with gravity’s pull, and his body’s collapse.

 

        I could wile always the hours

        Conferrin’ with the flowers

        Consultin’ with the rain

        And my head I’d be a scratchin’

        If I only had a brain.

 

     He and Dorothy (Judy Garland) end this wonderful dance number in their memorable skip-to the-lou down the yellow brin road, which also demonstrates the dancing talents of the young Garland. Garland, while not a great cancer has certainly shone in several dance numbers. Her pairing with Fred Astair in “We’re a Couple of Swells” in Easter Parade and her memorable struts in “Get Happy” in the musical film Summertime immediately come to mind. But in her bingham dress and red ruby shoes, she is unforgettable. Even the dog, Toto, trots along in cue.

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2011

 

 

Roy Del Ruth | Broadway Melody of 1936 / 1935 || Norman Taurog | Broadway Melody of 1940 / 1940 [dance only]

 eleanor powell and fred astaire: got to dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack McGowan and Sid Silvers (screenplay, based on a story by Moss Hart, Harry W. Conn, additional dialogue), Roy Del Ruth (director) Broadway Melody of 1936 / 1935

Leon Gordon and George Oppenheimer (screenplay, with uncredited writing by Walter DeLeon, Vincent Lawrence, Albert Mannheimer, Eddie Moran, Thomas Phipps, Sid Silvers, and Preston Sturges, based on a story by Jack McGowan and Dore Schary), Norman Taurog (director) Broadway Melody of 1940 / 1940

 

Watching Eleanor Powell's last number in her first starring film role, Broadway Melody of 1936, it is difficult to not be completely dazzled by her movements, while in the same instant perceiving those movements as somehow a bit clunky or, at least, executed with too much intention and force. It's partly her body—she appears taller and lankier than most dancers—and partly her costume, dressed as she is in long stripped satin pants and shirt with rhinestone coat whose tails come down seemingly lower than her knees, all topped with a rhinestone-covered hat. The Yankee Doddle Dandy look gives her a sense of being even taller than she probably was, which helps to make her hips even more central to her physique.

     Yet, moving through Got to Dance, how she can tap, bend her body backwards nearly to the floor, and spin and spin and spin as she were on ice instead of a gravity-pulling stage. If she hits each tap a little too forcefully, we are still stunned by their impact. It is little wonder that Ann Miller describes Powell as being the major influence upon her entering that career.

     Fred Astaire perhaps said it best: "She 'put 'em down like a man', no ricky-ticky-sissy stuff with Ellie. She really knocked out a tap dance in a class by herself." There is something almost manly about her technique, and that is perhaps what makes her taps seem, at times, so emphatic.

     

     Yet when she dances Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" with Fred Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940, we see another, slightly softer side of her. This time dressed in a flowing thin white skirt and a halter trimmed with spangles, Powell seems completely to move with the flow of the Latin rhythm that is often used contrapuntally against the song's tune. Dancing across a black marble floor against a black backspace upon which small pin lights reflect what appear to be stars, Powell matches Astaire nearly perfectly step by step with a grace that seemed to elude her in that earlier number. Together they seem the perfect match.

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2011

Mark Sandrich | Top Hat / 1935 [dance only]

fred astaire and ginger rogers: heaven

by Douglas Messerli

 

Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor (screenplay, based on a play by Sándor Faragó, Alada Laszlo, and Károly Nóti), Irving Berlin and Max Steiner (music), Mark Sandrich (director) Top Hat / 1935

 

With great song and dance numbers such as "Isn't This a Lovely Day," "Fancy Free," "The Piccolino" and "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails," it seems almost impossible to select just one dance! But of all Astaire's and Rogers' performances throughout their years as a duo, the most memorable may be their brilliant "Cheek to Cheek."

       In terms of the plot, the number might never have happened. Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers) is furious with Jerry Travers (Fred Astaire), whom she believes to be her good friend Madge Hardwick's husband, Horace. Travers has flirted with Tremont, but Madge seemingly doesn't care, for, in reality, she is trying to marry off Travers, suggesting Tremont as the perfect match. It is with due hesitation, accordingly, that Tremont accepts his offer to dance. As he begins the love song, moreover, she turns several times to Madge, pondering what to do, but Madge merely motions that they should get closer together.

    The dance begins as a simple waltz, with Travers (Astaire) stopping several times to sing the famous lyrics ("Heaven, I'm in Heaven / And my heart beats so loudly I can hardly speak / And I seem to find the happiness I seek / When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek"). After each stop they dance for a while, until suddenly, at the music's crescendo, they swing upstairs, she spinning before laterally jumping, Astaire moving into a soft tap. Both leap, moving backwards, then forward, until in a final pas de deau, Rogers being gently lifted before Astaire lets her down, the two spin, returning to the quiet waltz.

      Perhaps the most notable thing about this dance is Roger's beautiful white feathered dress (at least it appears white on the screen; the lining, so I have read, in reality was blue) that is so absolutely breathtaking a costume that we might forgive them, he in his tuxedo and she in the gown, if they merely stood there talking. Yet their graceful dancing equally transports us into "Heaven."

      Astaire and the director had tried to dissuade Rogers from wearing the dress, and as she began to dance, just as they feared, the feathers flew off every time she made a move. Astaire described it as something akin to "a chicken being attacked by a coyote." You can still see some few feathers floating through the air at scene's end. And after this event, Rogers' nickname became "feathers."

 

Los Angeles, April 16, 2011