gertrud

Dreyer's last film, Gertrud, is not so much difficult as it is dull. I watched it over Christmas and was fairly underwhelmed. The camerawork and staging are mesmerizing, a textbook in understatement, but the decision to never let the actors portray any facial expression or to let them make eye contact during a film that contains an hour and a half of two-person conversation is a poor one. I understand that the lack of passion and eye contact are an illustration of the emotional disconnect between the characters, but that point isn't remotely important when your characters don't have personalities.

Philip Lopate suggests that these intentional decisions are meant to be humorous. They are silly to be sure, but I'm not sure I give Dreyer enough credit to see the camp in his own pomp. Dreyer wanted to elevate himself as one of the most important filmmakers of all time. To him, making Gertrud a vapid, dull and nearly artless film was his way of proving his superiority over me: the guy who thinks himself informed but finds Gertrud vapid, dull and nearly artless. Certainly Dreyer's brain must have been much larger than mine.

But in the midst of your nap there are some concise statements about the relationship between a man's devotion to his work and his devotion to love. Most of all it critques our dramatic tendency toward martyrdom. By doing away with the anguish and crying and suicide that accompany most love stories, Gertrud instead martyrs herself by an internal death. Fascinating themes for a film, right?

Maybe. This thing really toes the line.

bad day at black rock

How did I miss this one until now?

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) is a masterwork. Spencer Tracy stars as Macreedy, a one-armed war vet who comes to a ghost town to give a medal to the parents of one of his fallen war buddies. The town is controlled by Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), who keeps Macreedy from contacting authorities when he discovers that the town has hidden the hate-crime murder of a Japanese American farmer.

The use of the frame creates a feeling of pending suffocation in the midst of blue skies and beautiful hills. Brilliant!

i love you again (or: i want to be william powell)

The Powell/Loy partnership rarely took a wrong turn and while never achieving the popularity of Hepburn/Tracy or Astaire/Rogers, it remains my favorite. For me it started with The Thin Man and continues as I manage to find the last 3 or 4 that I have yet to see. The latest of said remaining films is I Love You Again from 1940.

The teaming of Powell/Loy and W.S. Van Dyke began with The Thin Man and ended with I Love You Again (Van Dyke died in 1943). I Love You Again is a screwball comedy with William Powell as dual personality, with knocks on the head presenting either an uptight teetotaler or a slick racketeer. Racketeer Powell wakes up after being Teetotaler Powell for nearly a decade. He is shocked by his spendthrift habits, boy-scout citizenship and ultra-gorgeous Myrna Loy wife. But his wife is leaving him for another man.

Powell is equally funny as upstanding prig and sophisticated huckster (he is the latter imitating the former for a majority of the film). Myrna Loy is as beautiful and strong as always, but lets Powell handle most of the humor. The dialog isn't as snappy as in the Thin Man films, which is to be expected as the humor here is largely physical and situational. But it is consistently funny and often hilarious. It should be considered in the top 5 films that Powell and Loy made together.

Of other note: This film is being remade (slated for 2008), no other details are readily available. As with nearly all remakes, it is a shame that a film as timeless as this should be relegated to 'the old one.'

Of final note: I want to be William Powell.

holiday affair

I wasn't expecting this when I started watching. By 1949 Robert Mitchum was established enough as a badass that I was thinking something more noir-ish. Instead we get Robert Mitchum and Janet Leigh in a post-war Christmas soap. Leigh plays a war widow raising her son alone. Two years after her husband's death she is being courted by a milquetoast named Carl. She accidentally gets Robert Mitchum fired and conflict ensues as she, and her son Timmy, have to pick between the uncertain impetuosity of Mitchum or the safe blandness of Carl, the baxter.

It's a good movie actually, the courtroom scene in act three is much less funny than it wants to be, but Capra had the market on that one - plus a decade earlier. The part that works (and the only real connection to film noir) is the post-war disillusionment that both the Leigh and Mitchum characters feel. Leigh lost her husband and lives in the past, using her little boy as a surrogate husband. Mitchum lives in the harsh present, one without direction or meaningful employment for a man recently returned from the war. Both characters are essentially brought together through Timmy and reconciled to the world in which they must learn to live.

in the good old summertime

Musical remakes of already splendid movies can sometimes get it right. High Society, In the Good Old Summertime and A Song is Born may all be fine films, but they never survive under the scrutiny of comparison. Any time dialog is lifted from the original and given to the remake, it somehow seems lifeless and artificial. These films only succeed when they come up with their own ideas and words and place them in the familiar context of their predecessor.

Star quality is another issue when doing a direct comparison. Jimmy Stewart cannot be replaced by Frank Sinatra and certainly not by Van Johnson. Danny Kaye is no Gary Cooper and Peter O'Toole is no Robert Donat (though he is amazing in his own way). But In the Good Old Summertime has Judy Garland - the exception to the rule.

It isn't that Margaret Sullivan was a poor actor, but when paired with Jimmy Stewart's kind demeanor the bickering seems one-sided. The Shop Around the Corner's script has them both bickering, she is just able to sound so much meaner than Stewart can sound. This makes my sympathies lie with Stewart even more because he is a nice guy in love with an uptight nag. (This is really nitpicking as Shop... is as close to a perfect comedy as one can get) ...Summertime however tips the other way, slightly in favor of Judy Garland. The chemistry is poor, as it always is with Van Johnson, but the sympathy is with Garland, who is funny, beautiful and has a singing voice even angels must envy.

Garland out-performed another actress in a musical remake, but this time both the film and the performance were superior. The film is, of course, A Star is Born and it is one of the great tragedies of American Filmmaking. Both the original film and the oscar for best actress were cruelly and unfairly lost. Maybe Warner Bros. thought of A Star is Born as just another musical remake like ...Summertime, but it certainly wasn't the case.

Garland aside, the only other noteworthy high point of ...Summertime is the appearance of Buster Keaton. After years of criminal neglect, MGM let Buster show up on screen again and even in a marginal role he proves that he can not only still move like Buster Keaton, but he can also deliver deadpan lines finer than any other working actor at the time.