There Will Be Blood and Queen Elizabeth: The Golden Age

Thrilling and underrated is how I find ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE. I've read some of the reviews and probably waited this long because of them, but now I'd like to blow those critics back to the S&M Spanish Inquisition-themed dungeons they came from. Yes it's true the costumes and set design and CGI ships are all a little too fresh off the romance novel cover, and all the colors have been retouched to the point of tackiness. But coming to it after watching THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY THE EIGHTH I realize that this is how it's done when depicting the Monarchy, they need to stand very still, like tarot cards, while lighting technicians fuss over them as grooms of old.

Call me crazy, but with ELIZABETH, all the over-doing it kind of works - mainly because at the heart of it all is a great actor who nails the royal spirit down to the last nuance while still being "real" and alive with wit and sauce. Cate Blanchett! Charles Laughton brought a sprightliness to Henry, Blanchett brings that as well as sultriness to Elizabeth, and each without ever breaking their painted poses.

What does this have to do with THERE WILL BE BLOOD? Indeed, consider that both Plainview and Elizabeth eschew sexual partners in favor of becoming the stuff of legend; and each gets to smite down with DOGVILLE-style vengeance the rabid dogma of those who would convert them from their own narcissistic perfection. Then look at poor Henry--the breeding, mating, pleasure seeking Henry! He's nitpicked by Elizabeth's governess just about near to death, but the death wont come, because she wont let him eat more mutton.

I say this as a decree and a challenge. Cinema rides with Elizabeth against Joseph Breen and his Censorship Armada!

I love a good whipping as much as anyone, but not from Joseph Breen, who used Catholicism's mighty power to inflict a state of cinematic censorship so barbaric and stifling as to be akin to the Inquisition itself. In 1934, all the hitherto free flappers and sexually promiscuous lady aviators were tortured into submissiveness, chained in ugly skirts and pregnant to homey stoves and wed to sullen bullies like George Brent. Struggling for a moment's happiness, they'd have to be killed at the end if they dared have sex out of wedlock with someone flashy. Emphasis on the lock in that last sentence!

At last there are movies like THERE WILL BE BLOOD and ELIZABETH, which are free of censorship enough for their leading characters to skip sex altogether. That is power, like the eunuchs in Shaw Brothers Hong Kong films. In order to learn the last and most deadly secrets of kung fu, you must castrate yourself... quickly!

Though neither preacher nor virgin queen, I too have known perfect happiness in platonic love affairs with phantoms; Cate Blanchett as she rides out with long red hair flowing over cool body armor on a white horse is one such phantom. This is spirituality and love united and the flame of cinema shall never die. Now that all the world's a screen, Cinema is the only place perhaps where perfect love can happen. Oh ye repentant sinner, will you join hands with me in demanding, for the love of god and Elizabeth and freedom, a DVD release of the 1982 Italian trash classic, HEARTS & ARMOR, starring Tanya Roberts? Amen.

There Will Be Blood and the Emperor Jones

If you're looking for a DVD to watch that will give you that THERE WILL BE BLOOD amok capitalist feeling, I have a great recommendation: THE EMPEROR JONES, the 1933 independent film of the Eugene O'Neill play starring blacklisted communist activist and basso profundo singer, Paul Robeson.

Like Oscar-winning Daniel Day Lewis' towering display of "inner demon thou art loosed"-ness in THERE WILL BE BLOOD, Paul Robeson's performance in THE EMPEROR JONES is a jolt to the wildman bone, a powerful super-shock of id energy. Robeson was an intellectual actor-college football star-master of all trades who used his incredible creative energy, charisma and vocal power for the good and love of all men (and was thus persecuted and demonized for his troubles). A fitting dark mirror twin to Robeson himself, the character of Brutus Jones turns his big manly talents to purely selfish ends; he cheats, steals and blackmails his way up with such finesse that the corrupt white men around him can't help but be impressed; pretty soon they're lighting his cigarettes and floating him stock tips. Eventually though, he gets pinned with murder and hightails it to a remote island where he soon becomes dictator. "There's little stealin' like you does and there's big stealing like I does," he tells Smith, the British trader on the island. "For little stealing they get you in jail sooner or later, but for big stealing they make you emperor and put your picture in the hall of fame after you croak." For Robeson, it would be long after... but he's there now.

The Jeckyll and Hide of the artist also reflects in race issues still troubling our creative waters to this day: a white demon capitalist oil man mayeth have to surrender to salvation to get what he wants, but he also mayeth wreak vengeance on his holy oppressors in the safety of a drunken fog in his own bowling alley. Robeson's Jones is allowed to roar and bully in the beginning, but but only to cower and grovel all the way home, submitting his bowed head to the boot heel of salvation as voodoo drums hypnotize him back through black history to "first man." Striking socialist worker poses and breathing heavy in the big Long Island indoor studio jungle, Robeson panics and gets hysterical; he empties all his silver bullets against a flurry of superimposed ghost witch doctors, chain gangs, craps shooters and singing Baptists; he dies right back where he started, robbed of his epaulets and his dignity. White man Smith gets the last line, a sardonic kiss-off almost as sweet as Plainview's.

Emboldened by his contacts within the black intellectual community of Harlem, O'Neill was surely confident his good intentions compensated for any unconscious racism he may have had when writing JONES. So if the strokes he paints his Brutus with are harsh and crude we should endeavor to see this as an expressionistic affect common to depression-era theater. Plus it helps that Robeson's huge form is so thrilling to look at: His broad and shirtless black body is held in vine-wreathed medium shots through the long trek around the jungle set. All his visions and terrors are posed for as if an art deco sculpture. Meanwhile, over in THERE WILL BE BLOOD, Lewis' Plainview is allowed to grow old and soggy behind his desk, barely moving except to pour some more whiskey. One can't see Robeson playing a well-spoken alcoholic white collar power broker in 1933, not without Will Hayes firing up his troops. But if O'Neill and Robeson couldn't quite transcend the quagmire of African American stereotyping in the 1930s at least they could depict it as an actual quagmire, with vines, ghost crocodiles and a fade-to-black cynical enough for Billy Wilder. Man, you had me at hello.

Year of the Wildman

We've had the Night of the Iguana, the Day of the Locust and since around 1989, we've had the years of the disaffected sheep. Now I'd say 2007 Oscar Night heralds the Age of the Wildman.

We've got two movies up for big awards that seem of wed together already by primal masculine force: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Both have been supplying many men who have seen them with some missing nutrient in their diets.. they've been starving for it without even knowing it was missing.

What is this wild man force and how did we lose it? We had it in Jim Morrison, Robert Bly, Ken Kesey, Nicholson, Brando, Robards-- we lost it in the blinding Tom Cruise flash and lo, there was poofy hair and loud jackets. Then came the 1990s, dot-coms and a crushing need to stay edgy even with two kids and six figures. But let's face it, the masculine archetype fisher king is going to lie around in defeat eventually, it's the nature of the seasons. The only difference is in the spring-back, in how far down you hold the nerf ball under the water before it shoots up again. The longer man festers in his cubicle the louder the explosion when the Iron John yang energy comes hammering up out of the ground in great black oil sperm of my vengeance-style bit torrents and old-testament oratory.

It should have been the year of Josh Brolin as well as Daniel Day Lewis tonight at Oscar time, but I think Brolin has those old and comfortable voters a little confused; he's like an accusatory ghost from a time the academy had thought long dead and buried in a Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson VHS clamshell box bonfire.

Men who have grown soft with unearned privilege will probably not like Lewis in THERE WILL BE BLOOD and are probably the reason Brolin's not even nominated. The return of the true king is never welcomed by the pretender to the throne. The haters thought this sort of moustached hombre long vanished. Now he's back, covered in the dirt used to bury him, but his eyes are burning through the dust with the fire of a thousand Bronsons!

I guess part of it for both Brolin and Lewis is that they've been away from Hollywood for awhile, cobbling in Italy or wandering through Ireland, doing their own things. Stay in Tinseltown too long and even the noblest of men can turn into needy eaters in need of a good Camille Paglia-style beat down. Lewis and Brolin have the sense to wander out into the desert when they sense themselves growing soft with money and fame. This wandering away from civilization and its tiresome trappings for communion with the wildness of nature -- this was once part of something known as the Men's Movement, around the end of the 1970s, early 1980s. It was a time when men went into the woods to beat drums and bond; a time before the age of Irony, before day care scandals and AIDS made masculinity and fatherhood something to hide the way witches had to hide from the inquisition. Well, we see now that the wildman was just in orbit - he's returned with the tick-tock precision of Daniel Plainview's oil pumps!

Do We Really Need the Independent Spirit Awards?

I thought the Independent Spirit Awards were supposed to be some kind of alternative to the Oscars and the Golden Globes — recognizing films that were too genuinely "independent" to be acknowledged by the mainstream groups.

But take a look at what won this year — Juno, Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Cate Blanchett in I’m Not There, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Diablo Cody — all of which have received Oscar nominations. Makes the "Spirit" awards look redundant.

The single most exciting evening I spent in a movie theater last year was at a mixed media presentation of Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain, a film which I note didn’t receive a single "Spirit" nomination. Too independent, I guess.

Thank you, Gondry!

Leave it to a Frenchman to have to show whites and African Americans how to play nice together. Michel Gondry's BE KIND REWIND fuses the multi-racial harmony vibe of his 2005 concert film, DAVID CHAPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY with the raw inventiveness of his previous film, SCIENCE OF SLEEP to tell the story of a dilapidated Passaic, NJ video rental store that's headed for destruction as a new condominium goes up on its block. When the tapes are all accidentally erased, employees Mos Def and Jack Black put on a show in the form of redoing all the films. What starts out as just off-the-cuff tomfoolery quickly escalates into the equivalent of a neighborhood film home movie festival as Mia Farrow and the whole neighborhood get along together, recreating classic moments from MEN IN BLACK, GHOSTBUSTERS and RUSH HOUR 2 and of course DRIVING MISS DAISY.

While this touching film succeeds on just about every level, it strikes warmest and sweetest at the color lines. We've become too cool and ironic to get behind the fearless bravery of artists like Capra and Fred Rogers, but the Gallic Gondry moves right past these barriers. He's like that French guy that rescues Dexter Gordon in ROUND MIDNIGHT, but he's rescuing a whole neighborhood. Yet as the kids of the hood come together to make a final epic biography of allegedly local hero Fats Waller, we see how the sweet ignorance of those not born into our checkered culture can still ruffle our feathers.

Jack Black, in blackface with pencil moustache and bowler, is clearly the perfect choice for Waller. It's not just that he's fat, but he looks like Waller as well, and could probably sing just like him after studying a few records. Danny Glover has to take Black outside to wordlessly imitate a minstrel softshoe to spell out why despite these assets, even a painted light brown face is too close to the shameful racist past.

One imagines a similar explanation perhaps being needed for Gondry at one point and it's sad to think of anything standing in the way of his good-hearted vision. Black can't go nuts as Waller as his showboating nature would permit, but must defer to the much thinner but blacker Def. Now, Waller was very light-skinned. Why couldn't Black play him instead of Def? The question is rhetorical of course, dating back to antebellum bullshit about one one hundreth of a drop of black blood or whatever. But rhetorical or not, it's clearly worth asking, and Gondry gives us a safe space in which to ask it. We may not get an answer, but even better is Gondry's indication that, if our shared culture should one day become our shared property, we may not need one.

In a time when commercialization has come to equal homogenization, where black characters still can't pair romantically whites right out in the open (don't want to lost that important southern market!) but instead are delegated as side-line afterthoughts, Gondry's all-included cinematic generosity feels positively subversive, an escape back to the SESAME STREET cred of prejudice-free childhood, before the poison of adult corporate divide and conquer consumer strategies made strangers of us all. Thanks to Gondry's community-uniting efforts, there may be hope for us yet. We just need to be kind and rewind back to analog media, non-pre-fabricated housing, and the liberating power of play-acting. So, thank you, Gondry, you Gandhi of the post-modern age! The rest is, as they say, up to us.

A WOMAN"S FACE, and a man called Veidt

Conrad Veidt has been slithering around my head all day after catching A WOMAN'S FACE (1941) out of that new Crawford set. The story of a disfigured woman ensnared in blackmail and child murder schemes, A WOMAN'S FACE is an uneven but highly original and enjoyable mix of melodrama and madness. What makes it a cult classic is the obvious affinity that gay (as far out as you could go at the time) director George Cukor and Veidt (Wikipedia notes that he starred in a 1919 gay rights film) had with the film's villain, the embittered (coded) homosexual Swiss aristocrat, Torsten Barring. What could have been a rote turn of Nazi trumpeting turns as shadowed and twisted as you like it.

Watching Veidt's monologues flow leisurely but unstoppably towards Nazi-flavored misanthropy and megalomania is one of the darker delights of my recent cinema viewing. While vamping for Joan on his salon piano, Veidt at one point indicates a painting of his ancestral homestead with waterfall high in the Alps, where lives the little boy heir that stands between Torsten and an ancestral fortune. Giddily, he plays a small leitmotif to illustrate the river's "treacherous" current. A nihilist of the old Nietszchean school, Torsten's evil willingness to murder a child seems understandable and Joan's complicity is exciting. Veidt's Torsten is so charismatic he's sickening; he comes coded in so many different ways the signifiers break off like booster rockets in reverse and he morphs into a throbbing mad swirl of grandeur and delusion. No matter how twisted he gets, he keeps his intelligence on point; he never cracks under his own pressure. Initially absorbed by Crawford's burnt ugliness, he seems genuinely saddened once she's all pretty and normal again and he's able to convey this with only a vague flitter of a smile.

In a later scene, Joan and Conrad wander up to an attic room at the chateau to discuss the rapidly unraveling plot. Some dusty old flags throw all sorts of protean fascist shadows on the dimly lit wall behind Veidt as he confesses his evil heart out. It's a scene of such powerfully heartfelt venom that we can't help but be lured along as he dives into the mire of Teutonic, egomaniacal, closeted, genius homicidal insanity; he flowers into a poisonous bloom worthy of Sebastian's garden in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. And despite our loathing and horror at his third act unveiling of his fascist streak ( a horror which we share with the newly "normalized" Joan [she's fixed courtesy the scalpel of a gallantly underplaying Melvyn Douglas]) we still feel a deep, pitying connection for our twisted Torsten; he's so decadent he's nearly transcendent. In a way we're glad to see this Nazi side surface at last, for it gives us a platform on which to pull ourselves out of his slime and join the side of the bland and the good.

Simultaneously, Crawford captures the horror of facial disfigurement--not the "don't look at me!" pain of the moment, but the bitter result of long-term social isolation--and she raids her private stock of real-life narcissistic insecurity with thrilling recklessness. These two parts were tailor made for great actors with bone-filled closets like Crawford and Veidt, and they wring their lines until they snap like the necks of weaker mortals. It's a conspiratorial thrill to despise the banal masses with them and relish their artistic snobbery; the twist comes with the plastic surgical "curing" of Joan's ugliness, which turns her traitor to the cause, so to speak, like Hickey getting sober in THE ICEMAN COMETH.

Maybe I'm still reeling from the beauty of Heath Ledger's performance in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, but to my ever-widening eyes it seems like the messages I've seen lately seems to indicate that the twisted end product of sexual repression can actually be beautiful; longing even at its most wretched and stunted can still be transfigured into art. Is this what Ang Lee and Wong Kar Wai and George Cukor and James Whale have been trying to convey all this time? I'd say in Veidt's case, the proof is in the poisoned pudding! It's so hellish it's heavenly!

Favorite Screenwriting Device No. 42 - The Sympathetic Listener

Zooey Deschanel (above) and Casey Affleck (below) in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Much has been written about the scene in There Will Be Blood in which Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) confesses his innermost feelings to his purported half-brother, Henry Brands (Kevin J. O’Connor). "I have a competition in me," says Plainview, "I want no else to succeed. I hate most people" The Brands character serves a number of functions in Anderson’s film. Among other things, he represents a potential for a positive human connection that Plainview never quite achieves. But his primary function is that of a sounding board, an excuse for Plainview to explain himself, much as a Shakespeare character like Hamlet or Iago might explain himself by talking directly to the audience.

I thought of that scene while watching Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The character of saloon girl Dorothy Evans (Zooey Deschanel) appears to have no other purpose than to: (a) add a touch of feminine beauty to a mostly all-male film, and (b) serve as a sounding bound for Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) to explain his motives. "Why did you kill him?" she asks. And Ford answers, "He was gonna kill me ... And the reward money ... You know what I expected? Applause. I was only 20 years old then. I couldn’t see how it would look to people." Brands in There Will be Blood and Evans in The Assassination seem to come out of the same drawer in the screenwriter’s cabinet of tricks, the one marked, "Sympathetic Listeners."

Don’t get me wrong. I liked The Assassination of Jesse James quite a bit. (Its Oscar nominations for Roger Deakins’ cinematography and Casey Affleck’s performance are well deserved.) I also wonder if there is any historical basis for this saloon gal girlfriend? There is a similar character in Sam Fuller’s I Shot Jesse James (1949) of which Dominik’s epic film is a virtual - though uncredited - remake. However, the saloon girl in Fuller’s film has a different name, Cynthy Waters, and a much more important role. Ford kills Jesse for her - so that he and she can use the reward money to buy a farm. The way Dominik introduces his saloon girl in The Assassination of Jesse James recalls yet another Fuller film, Shock Corridor (1963), in which we see the hero’s stripper girlfriend (played by Constance Towers) emerge from a fan of white feathers almost exactly like the ones flourished by Deschanel in Dominik’s film. Imitation is indeed the sincerest form of admiration.

Barbara Britton as Cynthy and John Ireland as Robert Ford in I Shot Jesse James.

Cinebeats 2007

I recently picked up the Fantomas DVD of Japanese industrial espionage flick BLACK TEST CAR on the recommendation of the excellent Kimberly of Cinebeats. Am I glad I did? You bet ya!

Part IV of her Best of 2007 DVD list is finally up and it's essential - replete with great screenshots, informative and acumen-rich writing, and style style style. It's a given that if you love 1960s-70s cinema, you will love most if not all of her recommendations. A fearless purveyor of Japanese pink and Italian giallo among other colors, she's worth visiting for the photos alone! A treasure trove of slink, kink and post-modern loucheness!

Noir's Positive Animas - The Guardian Angels

In film noir, the anima (a female projection of the male unconscious) often takes the form of a femme fatale, a figure that lures the male protagonist to his doom. But as Bright Lights correspondent Eugenia points out, "There is another type of femme who figures there—a guardian angel type."

Just as the femme fatale is noir’s negative anima, the guardian angel is noir’s positive anima. Here are a few examples:

Alice Faye with Dana Andrews in Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel (1945). Andrews plays a con-man and drifter who seduces and marries well-to-do smalltown virgin Faye in order to run off with dark-haired femme fatale Linda Darnell. The title doesn’t refer to either of the women, but to Andrews’ character, a man with suppressed good qualities who is ultimately redeemed by Faye.

Maureen O’Sullivan as the woman who saves Henry Fonda from the electric chair in John Brahm’s Let Us Live (1939). This beautifully lit closeup by cinematographer Lucien Ballard recalls his work with Dietrich and Von Sternberg.

Sean Young as the replicant, Rachel, in Blade Runner (1982). If replicant-hunting Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is himself a replicant - as director Ridley Scott insists - it makes perfect sense that the anima who redeems him would be a female replicant, embodying everything about himself that he denies.

In Luc Besson’s noirishly lit and composed Angel-A (2005), the guardian angel figure is literally ... an angel (Rie Rasmussen). In the scene above, she teaches the esteem-challenged protagonist (Jamel Debbouze) to look into a mirror and say, "I love you."

Brokeback Lubitsch

Hrrat for the Lubitsch musicals DVD set! Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald look even weirder and more menacingly sexy than they ever have, especially on a good digital projector. The pomp and ceremony displayed in such abundance would all be gone with the atomic wind. What you see beginning in movies set in Shakespeare times, all the royal gallantry and guffaws, the servant systems and serfdoms, reaches its zenith in the Lubitsch froth, then is crushed out under the fascist heel of the Nazis and then the House of Unamerican Activities. Before all that though, we have time to laugh and sing; Lubitsch enters the age of sound with high European style, money and good humor. The wittiest and most decadent traits of silent cinema are brought along, with grand castles, marching soldiers, attending maidens and matrons, Eugene Pallette and accompanying fathers, singing dogs and their bitches, and canons!

The first one in the Criterion Eclipse set is "The Love Parade." wherein Chavalier sneers and serenades; he's in the moment! The second in the set, "Monte Carlo" suffers from Chevalier's replacement, a grinning British stage crooner named Jack Buchanan. While Chevalier coasts into the modern age on his instinctive sense of absurdity, the by-the-numbers Lavenderhood of Buchanon comes off as BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN-style repression. When Chevalier leered, it was with a heterosexual Frenchman's genuine sense of sexual ease. Watching the outmoded mannerisms of Buchna--his ghoulsih smile plastered on as if permanently painted--is to see leering at its most closeted-dysfunctional; the sort of persistent closeness he exhibits is the stuff of restraining orders in these more enlightened times. Chomping at the misogynistic bit, Buchanan seems to pursue the countess only to prove himself "a man" to his two buddies, Tyler Brooke and a doe-eyed hairdresser hunk (John Roche). When this gay threesome sings "Trimmin' the Women" the double entendres become triples, and the fun leaks out, it's more Neil LaBute sexual cruelty than feel-good Broadway

Jeanette MacDonald survives though. She shines with the Criterion cleaned, Klieg-lit goddessliciousness. Lubitsch never lets a shot of her go to waste - she's always framed Mouscha-like around long drapes and ornate bedposts. The MONTE CARLO plot has her fleeing a rich suitor played by jovial twit and coded queer Claud Allister, and that would be fine but it's out of the frying pan into the fire. At least Allister seems to be "out" somewhat, Buchanan seems sworn to try and pass. Meanwhile, the stoic MacDonald can only sing her love convincingly to the drapes and night table.

Though the film is fine in and of itself, it suffers the way a family suffers when the father lives a lie. Imagine Edward Everett Horton crossed with Lon Chaney Senior in THE MAN WHO LAUGHS - fine as a a horror icon, but not so much a romantic lead. We in the audience might titter occasionally, but we can't relax, anymore than the families of the repressed cowboys in BROKEBACK can.

16, and trés prescient

Strange Wilderness, in case you were too busy exploring the lesser treasures of the noir canon to notice, is this flick about these guys who go looking for Bigfoot. “garrettlarson2” of Lethbridge, Alberta explains it all for you:

A Cult favorite- or at least if you liked grandmas boy You'll love this

I just went to go see this movie today, my mom bought me a ticket and she went to something else she did not want to come to this I am a 16 year old, it was a lot funnier then grandmas boy because it was more vulgar. I've been waiting for this movie to come out since 2006 and now it's finally out, it was worth the wait, don't listen to everyone who says this movie is just for stoner's, its for everyone who wants a good laugh, if you are a fan of Happy Madison go see strange wilderness you'll like it. its got a lot of swears but trust me if it didn't it would not be the same, there was a total of 20 people i think in the movie all i heard was laughing every minute. this movie will not be in the theaters that long so go and see it before it comes out on DVD

I’m guessing, it is funnier than Grandma’s Boy, but I’m still not sure if I’m going.*

*Somehow, I'm also guessing that Garrett is the only person in the world who's been waiting two years to see this flick.

Mother of Mirrors! It's Marnie!

Faded Youth Blog has brought to our attention the Vanity Fair issue this month, featuring the 2008 Hollywood Portfolio. Clearly a must-purchase, it's a tribute to Hitchcock with everyone from Josh Brolin to Jodie Foster striking poses and recreating classic Hitchcock stills!

And Naomi Watts is MARNIE! (Above).

If you've not read "Naomi Watts: Cinema's Post-Modern Mother of Mirrors" in the current issue of Bright Lights, this would be the perfect time!

You don't need Camille Paglia to tell you why Naomi Watts is the perfect choice to pose as the fractured, complicated Hithcock antiheroine Marnie. In the film she was played by Tippi Hedren, who was also in Hitch's previous film, THE BIRDS. And Naomi Watts is signed on to star in THE BIRDS remake. But that's not the only reason; Watts is cinema's new post-modern mother of mirrors, that's the other reason, and this is what post-modern mothers of mirrors do, they reflect reflections of refracted reflections. I don't know if Watts looks like Marnie in the photo above, necessarily, but she's suffused with that uncanny quality Hitch would have loved - the blonde ice-capped inassimilable returned gaze of the objet petit a!

Bye bye...

Roy Scheider 1932-2008.

He was an amazing presence... a great actor and one of the great 1970s masculine personae, as Brody in JAWS and Gideon in ALL THAT JAZZ particularly. I know I'll be watching JAZZ tonight and crying with transcendental melancholy at that crazy final number. RIP, Mr. Scheider.

Overlooked Noir - John Brahm and Let Us Live (1939)

Conventional wisdom tells us that the first "true" film noirs were made in the early 1940s, with 1941's The Maltese Falcon generally considered "the unofficial beginning of the noir cycle" (Alain Silver). Conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong.

Take a look at these frames from John Brahm’s Let Us Live (1939), and ask yourself if there is any way this film could be mistaken for anything other than a classic film noir?

Many of the best noir directors - Lang, Siodmak, Wilder, Ulmer - were German/Austrian expatriates. John Brahm, born in Hamburg, was one of them. Brahm came from a family of performers, and was a performer himself. He got his directing start as an assistant to D.W. Griffith on a British remake of Broken Blossoms (1936) starring Dolly Haas, Brahm’s wife. When Griffith left the production, Brahm took over. The result was good enough to attract the attention of Hollywood, specifically Columbia Pictures’ Harry Cohn, who signed Brahm to a directing contract.

Did the noirness of Let Us Live come out of nowhere? Of course not. If anything, it seems like a deliberate attempt by Columbia to emulate Fritz Lang’s seminal Bonnie-and-Clyde proto-noir, You Only Live Once, which came out in 1937. Let Us Live has the same star, Henry Fonda, in a similar role and, in Brahm, a director whose visual style is as Germanic as Lang’s. Clearly, as demonstrated again and again in his filmography, Brahm had an eye, and a sense of atmosphere. In this particular instance, he was immensely aided by his cameraman, Lucien Ballard, who had just worked with Josef Von Sternberg on Blonde Venus and The Devil is a Woman.

Let Us Live’s story is as noir as its visuals. (Its screenplay was co-authored by Anthony Veiller, who would later help script two of the definitive noirs of the 1940s, Orson Welles’ The Stranger and Robert Siodmak’s The Killers.) Fonda plays "Brick," a cabdriver engaged to "Mary," played by Maureen O’Sullivan (Mia Farrow’s mom), both of them trying to weather the harsh economic realities of the Great Depression. Through a series of fatalistic coincidences (see Ulmer’s Detour, and numerous other noirs), Fonda is mistaken for someone who robbed an automobile showroom, killing a security guard in the process. He is tried and convicted for the crime. It’s an archetypal "wrong man" scenario, one that Fonda would reenact throughout his career, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956).

While Fonda languishes in jail awaiting the electric chair, O’Sullivan searches desperately for the evidence that will exonerate him. At the last minute she succeeds, but Fonda’s character emerges from the penal system broken and embittered. No happily-ever-after here.

After directing a couple more films at Columbia, Brahm moved on to Darryl F. Zanuck’s 20th Century Fox, where his first assignment was a horror film, The Undying Monster (1942), followed by two erotically-tinged "period noirs," The Lodger (1944), a Jack the Ripper story, and Hangover Square (1945). (All three are included in the Fox Horror Classics box, reviewed by Peter Nellhaus here.) Hangover Square, about a composer (Laird Cregar) subject to fits of homicidal insanity, is such a successful blend of music - by Bernard Herrmann - and Victorian grand guignol horror that it inspired a fan letter to composer Herrmann from a 15-year-old Stephen Sondheim — who would later compose his own exercise in Victorian horror, Sweeney Todd.

Hangover Square is remembered for two of Brahm’s most magnificent set-pieces. In the first, the homicidal composer carries the body of the femme fatale he has just murdered (Linda Darnell) to the top of a Guy Fawkes Day bonfire, and leaves it there along with the straw-stuffed effigies carried there by other revelers - while torch-carrying celebrants circle the bonfire, singing and chanting. In the second, the film’s climax, the composer continues to play his piano "Concerto Macabre" in a burning concert hall while everyone else is fleeing for their lives, the cutting, the swooping and soaring camera movements, the images of past crimes that flash through the composer’s mind, all carefully synchronized to Herrmann’s brilliant score.

If there were any doubt concerning Brahm’s status as a genuine auteur, it can be resolved by a viewing of The Locket, a 1946 film noir released by RKO. Fans of The Locket cherish it for its neurotic heroine (Laraine Day) and its flashback-within-a-flashback-within-a-flashback plot structure. The Locket’s climax echos the climactic montage of Hangover Square, with the heroine, now a bride, moving toward her wedding altar, while all the previously seen traumatic moments of her life flash surreally through her mind.

The protagonist of The Locket is victimized by internal forces beyond her consciousness or understanding. Just like the mad composer in Hangover Square. Just like the serial killer in The Lodger. Just like the wolf man in The Undying Monster. In Let Us Live, Henry Fonda’s character is also victimized by forces beyond his control, only in his case the forces are external.

John Brahm made few notable films after the 1940s, but his career was far from over. Moving from film to television, Brahm became the greatest director of TV horror ever, contributing episodes to The Twilight Zone ("Time Enough at Last," "Shadow Play, "Mirror Image"), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour ("Final Performance"), The Outer Limits ("ZZZZZ" and "The Bellero Shield"), and, especially, the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller. One of Brahm’s Thriller episodes, "The Cheaters," from a story by Robert Bloch, is possibly the most frightening show ever broadcast. (It certainly scared the hell out of me.) While Andrew Sarris and others have suggested that Brahm suffered a decline following his ‘40s film work, I would argue to the contrary that with Brahm’s fantasy work for television in the early 1960s, this master of atmosphere hit some kind of peak.

Bright Lights Film Journal 59 posted

Bright Lights Film Journal #59 just went live with 24 articles.

from the editor

Because we care . . .

features foyer

The Double Standard: The Twins of Two-Faced Woman and Sylvia Scarlett — "She is both sentimental and shameless."

Peter Watkins and the Politics of Expression: On Edvard Munch (1974) and The Freethinker (1994) — "Watkins' filmmaking bravely seeks an insistence on personal truth — his own and the viewer's."

False Consonances and False Consciousness: Contrarian Notes on the Ideology of Film Music — "Defenseless against music, I must submit to its despotism and, depending on its whim, be god or garbage." — E. M. Cioran

articles antechamber

Naomi Watts: Cinema's Postmodern Mother of Mirrors — "We're home free in the new mediated womb of the Naomi persona — which is to say, trapped, by our own desire."

Only the Pictures: We’re All Editing, Ed — But about this audit

Hillbilly Hustle: The Thin Line Between Hillybilly Sexploitation and Blaxploitation in Trash Cinema — "How you gonna keep um' down on the farm after they seen all this?" — voiceover from the trailer for the 1972 sexploitation film Sassy Sue

Wes's World: Riding Wes Anderson's Vision Limited — Paging crackle, energy, and wit. Come in, please.

Presence and Absence: Towards a Working Conception of Screen Characters — "A basic consistency on the actor's part remains uniquely convincing as character, no matter how simplistic that character's definition."

little stabs

Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror): Random Short Reviews of the Worthy and the Worthless in Recent and Old-School Cinema — "Don't snatch! Don't grab! They're ugly!"

recent cinema roundabout

Stunted Lives: On 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days — Unsettling and unmissable

A Boy and His Dog: On Will Smith, Apocalypse, and I Am Legend — "Neville remains wholly oblivious, falling into each trap the ferals set . . ."

When Virtue Sleeps: The Moral World of Denys Arcand's L'Âge des Ténèbres — "We are asked to think morally: is the happiness these characters seek possible or desirable?"

The Foxy, the Dead, and the Foxier: Re-Visiting Death Proof — "He's old enough to be my dad!"

interrogation alcove

Rebel, Rebel: Gregg Araki Reflects on The Living End and His Totally F***ed Up Career at Sundance 2008 — "My whole thing, all my life, was march to your own drummer."

the empty guest room

On the Walkabout: Remembering Heath Ledger (1979-2008) — "Wasn't he just there, standing right in front of us?"

Nuts to the Squirrels and Roués Redeemed: The Discreet Charm of Charles Boyer — "In Boyer, self-belief and theatrical technique are seamlessly fused together."

documentary dormer

Innocence Lost or Regained? The Clear-Eyed Vision of Jesus Camp — "Real things happening to real people"

film festival flying buttress

Onward and Inward: On the 2007 Thessaloniki International Film Festival — "Each work limns a moral dilemma that has no discernible answer."

Tickets to the Dark Side: The 43rd Chicago International Film Festival — "We will see whose heart is sharpest!"

revival room

Downward Mobility: On Roger Corman's Bloody Mama — "You never could make a decent living . . . you never did mount me proper."

Communication Breakdown: Reboarding Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train — "You only need one leg to get around. Sure helps to have two."

Thank God for Uncle Tom: Race and Religion Collide in The Green Pastures — A kinder, gentler condescension

Ode to Lili: And Leslie Caron — "This MGM movie is studio-system filmmaking at its most protective, and it's designed entirely to showcase Leslie Caron . . ."

bright sights

Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Our Hitler, Sawdust and Tinsel, Black Sun, Marketa Lazarova, Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu, Automatons — An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

Interview with Gary Morris

Film Annex has posted an interview with Gary Morris, the publisher of Bright Lights Film Journal and Bright Lights After Dark.

A nose for all seasons

Watching the Criterion YOUNG MR. LINCOLN the other night I was amazed at Fonda's chamelon-like presence in the title role. From scene to scene--even moment to moment--he resembles a wealth of different actors, this as a result of a truly astonishing false nose.

The last time a false nose really wowed critics was Nicole Kidman's Oscar winning nose in THE HOURS. But this 1939 nose on Fonda is really something, because of the wealth of other actors it makes him look like. Fonda looks distinctly "human" with this elongated nose; he looks young, modern, familiar. A fine actor though he is, Fonda's mythic humility and grace is always with him-- but here he's able to disappear into the Lincoln persona, becoming much more animated and complex than the "simple guy with a noble heart" roles he usually plays. With a mischievous twinkle in his eye and the expressionistic, Caligari-esque way in which he looms over scenes, he's a Frankenstein Monster by way of James Dean.

My thesis here is that by attaching such an expert false nose, Fonda unmoors his archetypal presence; becomes "un-Fonda-ed" and so assumes a free-floating identity, neither one person nor all, but a different one from scene to scene. Just as Dylan was played by different actors in the recent I'M NOT THERE, so too does Fonda's Lincoln recall different actors. While watching I actually took notes of all the different actors I saw--as if cameo mirages--in this augmented Fonda visage:

1. Bruce Campbell
2. Michael Douglas
3. Robert Downey Jr.
4. Farley Granger
5. George Hamilton
6. Young Jack Nicholson
7. Roddy McDowell

How many can YOU spot?