Images from The Tulse Luper Suitcases (The Moab Story)

British auteur Peter Greenaway is an unabashed maker of art films. Regardless, he did have a commercial success of sorts with 1989's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover featuring a frequently naked Helen Mirren, and Michael Gambon as her gangster husband.

Since then, however, only a few of his films have been released in the United States (Prospero’s Books, 8½ Women, The Pillow Book) while others - including some of his best (The Baby of Macon, Darwin) - have had commercial showings only in Europe.

Among the works unreleased over here is a multimedia project - encompassing three feature films, a 16-episode TV series, CD-Roms, and books - known as The Tulse Luper Suitcases. The title character, Tulse Luper, is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and traveler - an alter-ego of Greenaway himself, credited with making Greenaway’s films. Per Greenaway, "His life is reconstructed from the evidence of 92 suitcases found around the world - 92 being the atomic number of the element Uranium."

The images above are from a Region-2 DVD of the first feature in the series, The Moab Story, starring J.J. Feild as Tulse Luper, Caroline Dhavernas as the oversexed "Passion Hockmeister," and Kevin Tighe (best known to American viewers as Locke’s evil dad on Lost) as a Mormon patriarch. The story, such as it is, follows Tulse Luper through 3 episodes: as an English child during World War I, as an explorer in Mormon Utah in the 1930s, and as a writer in Belgium during the rise of fascism. Blondie’s Deborah Harry appears briefly as a Belgian bureaucrat.

The narrative is amusing enough, but the real reason to watch this film - like any of Greenaway’s films - is for the visuals. First and foremost a painter, Greenaway loves to use modern video editing technology to play with the image - to write on it (as in Images 1 & 3, above), to paint on it (as in Image 2, above, deliberately coloring the Utah skies to resemble a Maxfield Parrish painting), or breaking up the frame into multiple moving subparts (Images 1 & 4). At other times, he is content to create beautifully lit compositions in the manner of the Italian Renaissance or Flemish/Dutch masters (Image 5).

Greenaway’s films are, in short, eye candy for the thinking film viewer.

The Termites of Plainview

Hey gang, Erich here. Sorry I haven't written any entries of late, but things have been rough, what with our new baby recently brought home from the hospital (which means no sleep for the missus or myself), and the move to the country and the job change and blah blah, anyhoo.

Ah hah! April fools in advance. None of the above. No kids, no moves, just edgy city living, right in the meat of things, George, which is where I got to be.

It just seems that's the way so many blogs start out these days--the family announcement sheathed in pop culture itemizing-- don't it? I got nothing against rugrats, as long as you keep 'em on the west side.

Since my reason for not blogging more recently stems from doing lots of Big Thinking and Writing about THERE WILL BE BLOOD-- a film free of romance and so refreshing in its jaundiced expression of "family values," I figured it was somehow fitting to do a fradulent family man opener. In reality I'm a happily divorced parent of one black dog only and if I had any property in Coyote Hills, or in this case, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, it's long since been sold along with my milkshake and drilling rights. And I'm fine with that! I do my own drilling now, into the forehead of the American mindset, going for the stark black venom that lies south of the soul, where archetypal shadows walk tall and tentacled Lovecraftian behemoths plot their repressed returns. And I drink it up!

The few critics who dismiss THERE WILL BE BLOOD as undeserving of its hype--due to story weaknesses or hammy acting, usually--tend to be the ones who are "trying" to be different, and so would pay less respect to the fearless soul searchers and kamikaze love hipsters like Welles and Godard, Gondry, Ray, Hawks, Baumbach and Martel. These critics perfer the "workmanlike" precision of the best mappers - the Coen Brothers, Kubrick, Spielberg, Hitchcock, Payne--those who perfect the lines and feel out new fissures in the rock that the explorers have excavated, that Manny Farber's termites have eaten through. For fans of the mappers, the gaping plot holes, inconsistencies of style and meaning and haphazard story construction of the explorers--the ungodly mess, in short--can be unforgivable. For we lovers of the explorers, any story holes can be stepped over without the smallest break in our stride if it leads us ever deeper into the cinematic danger zone, Where celluloid burns wild and out of control. There's some that try to control it, quench it, put it out, and there's some that go wild-eyed and giggling, cooing and giggling like the late beloved Richard Widmark. A unique example to discuss of a mapper in explorer's clothing would be John Huston. His films tend to be adaptations of classic "explorer" works: Under the Volcano is a fine example of Huston being too busy getting period details of 1933 Mexico down, polishing up the quaint old cars and setting his actors to staggering just so, that he misses the thrust of Lowry's novel, which is as an apocalyptic mirage of one man's drunken dying soul bleeding into those around him and its reflection in the tide of fascism and blah blah. One mustn't put modern in with the classical, or must one?


A "classic" example of the explorer vs. mapper would be Welles' cinematic MACBETH vs. Olivier's HAMLET. Olivier's film is a stunning masterwork with each line of text lovingly orated. There's plenty of deep focus expressionism for those who like that sort of thing, but not enough to drown the bard in Ophelia's bathwater, so to speak. Welles' MACBETH on the other hand is a roaring, sweaty delirious fever dream-catastrophe.

Welles plays Macbeth like someone just waking up in the drunk tank after a three-day crystal meth blackout. Soldiers cast in hand-me-downs from Republic studios old serials seem to drip down from their weird cavern pathways onto him, like expressionist maggots from a Polanski skyway, and he squirms in horror at the sight of them. He bellows great lungfulls of melodious brougue, staggering drunk and hallucinating. He chews so much scenery he gets woozy and seems about to fall over into the witches' bubbling pot at any second, but I'll order ham on welles over hamlet olivier anyday. There's mad genius power with Welles; his is the termite art that never stops to count the receipts or weigh the meanings but rather plunges reckless through the walls until all is black and sweet childless silence.

RECYCLING

I was depressed to hear about the Village Voice’s firing of critic Nathan Lee. (GreenCine Daily has collected links here.) Lee was one of the best film writers in the country – see, for example, his very New York specific review of Cloverfield – but apparently the Voice thought it didn’t really need him so long as they could recycle reviews from the West Coast’s L.A. Weekly.

In the interest of further such cost-saving and recycling, let me suggest the following newspaper headlines which can be reused on virtually a weekly basis:

CHILD FOUND IN WELL

WHITE WOMAN DISAPPEARS

GAS PRICES UP

POLITICIAN EMBROILED IN SEX SCANDAL

[Recycled image courtesy of Glenn Kenny.]

James Carville - Life Imitates Art, Sort Of

It was more than a clever casting joke when director Andrew Dominik cast former Clinton aide, James Carville (above right - with the great Michael Parks), in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Carville played the Governor of Missouri, the politician who persuades Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) to act as a Judas by betraying his outlaw friend Jesse (Brad Pitt) in exchange for reward money and a pardon. Carville not only had the right look for the part, but gave a credible realistic performance.

Now Carville has accused former Clinton cabinet member, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, of being a "Judas" for endorsing Hillary Clinton’s presidential rival, Barack Obama. Said Carville, "Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic." Given Carville’s role as a modern Pharisee in the Jesse James film, it is not so much a matter of life imitating art, as reflecting it in an odd funhouse mirror kind of way.

Why We Still Fight - Part 1

Yo, I had to review NEVER BACK DOWN? The Yo MTV Fight Club movie? Shit was awesome, a PG-13 coming-of-age 8 MILE VS. FIGHT CLUB down at the MILLION DOLLAR BABY gym sort of vehicle. Shit was tight! All this bashing around on concrete and not one tooth lost. Everybody's pretty and glowing two minutes later.

The big difference between my fighting years and now though is how all the kids have video camera phones, so every punch is recorded for posterity, glory and possible incarceration. Talk about your worst adolescent fears finally coming true! Now everyone in the world really does know what an idiot you were last night.

FIght clubs have been springing up all over the country, putting their bouts up on myspace and youtube, which can be dumb if that's were schoolboarding parents will see them, as in this case up in Boulder Colorado. Imagine, with all these little bastards videotaping all the time on their little cameraphones, anything you do or say, EVER might be studied by the police, your mom or your employer or even your school principal. It's not Big Brother we have to fear, but little brother with his little iphone!

At last it makes sense why all the himbos in all the WB-network dramas in all the world are so taciturn; the slightest hint of emotion will appear instantly on every cell phone in town, betraying your real feelings. In the high school of today, your poker face has to be worn 24/7.

What only a hardened few in NEVER BACK DOWN and FIGHT CLUB understand though is that boys gotta fight. It's in their blood. You either let them have outlets for it, or you pay the penalty. And by outlets I dont mean videogames and football. I mean combat, man to man, hand to hand, and it's got to hurt, it's got to have fear involved, otherwise they can't bond over it, there's nothing to snap them out of their couch-fed stupor. A good blow to the face can clear the cobwebs. That's the underlying principal behind hazing rituals, for example, and it's something that the namby pamby academics of the world refuse to understand, citing video games, TV and the internet as the causes for this "antisocial behavior" like you can just cross your ivory tower fingers and wish away the murder and insanity that got our World Conqueror DNA where it is today! AGHGHGHGHGHG! GIVE ME THE BLOOD, LORD! AND LET ME GET AWAY!

King of Lears - Paul Scofield (1922-2008)

Shakespeare's King Lear is a classic incarnation of the wildman archetype (previously discussed by Erich Kuersten here and here). Lear's problem, leading to tragedy, is not only his age - and what seems to be encroaching senility or dementia - but the fact that throughout the height of his power no one apparently ever dared to tell him, "No."

I have seen and heard numerous performances of Lear — a Shakespeare in the Park presentation featuring James Earl Jones as Lear and Raul Julia as Edmund, an abbreviated '50s TV production starring a wheelchair-confined Orson Welles, another television production starring a past-his-prime Laurence Olivier as Lear and a memorable Diana Rigg as Regan, yet another television production starring the underrated Michael Hordern, an avant-garde stage production directed by Robert Wilson (like a three-ring circus in slow motion), and a Jean-Luc Godard film adaptation featuring one Lear played by Norman Mailer and another by Burgess Meredith (a mafia godfather named "Don Learo") with Molly Ringwald as his Cordelia.

Many interpretations, all of them fascinating in their way, but the only one who really nailed it, as far as I'm concerned, was the late Paul Scofield - not in Peter Brook's spare Bergmanesque film version (though that may be the best of the productions I've mentioned so far), but in an audio version directed by Howard Sackler (author of The Great White Hope) and released on long-playing records. Where Peter Brook's 1971 film was intentionally low-key and underplayed, Sackler's audio version lets the Shakespearean language soar. And who better to speak that language than Mr. Scofield with his keen intelligence and drier-than-autumn-leaves voice?

The excellence of the Sackler/Scofield audio Lear makes me wonder if film - or even theater - is the ideal medium for Shakespeare. Not that there haven’t been many fine examples of Shakespeare on film (Julie Taymor’s Titus, Ian McKellan’s Richard III, Olivier’s Hamlet, all of Welles’s Shakespeare adaptations), but in a first-rate audio performance one gets Shakespeare’s language - and most importantly, his imagery - undiluted by someone else’s visualizations.

Similarly, Paul Scofield was never less than effective on film, but given that the essence of his art lay in his voice, I suspect his ideal medium might have been radio drama. [ADDENDUM: Per the U.K. Guardian obituary, it was a medium Scofield loved and "where he did some of his very greatest work."]

Let us take a moment to mourn the passing of both of them.

Scarlett to Direct

We knew the girl was bright – and politically active (a prominent Obama supporter) - so it doesn’t surprise us to learn that, like her near-contemporary, Sarah Polley (writer/director of Away From Her), Scarlett Johansson is going to try her hand at directing. The multi-talented ScarJo is slated to direct an episode of the anthology film, New York, I Love You, featuring her Boleyn Girl co-star, Natalie Portman. The film is a follow-up to last year’s Paris, je t’aime, an anthology of short films about Paris. Per the IMDB, Beijing is scheduled to receive similar treatment in 2010.

[Click image to enlarge.]

Hands Across Iraq

Hands Across Iraq
(Tom Sutpen; 2008)

On March 17, 2003, President George W. Bush interrupted the primetime programming lineups of all major television networks and a handful of Cable outlets, to deliver an ultimatum to the ruler of Iraq.

"All the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end," he stated, with an ominous diminution of his usually well-rehearsed Texas twang. "Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing." Within 72 hours, major combat operations in a campaign whose objective -- the liberation of an otherwise sovereign nation from the once-useful tyranny of its President -- has met with no resistance from anyone in a position to stop it, commenced.

Today it endures . . . as do us all.

With that in mind, I would like now to mark the fifth anniversary of Pres. Bush's determined resolve to end decades of deceit and cruelty, through the vehicle of a piece entitled Hands Across Iraq.

St. Brakhage Day

Via GreenCine Daily, I want to direct you all to this terrific blog post by Dennis Cooper dedicated to the late, great Stan Brakhage (January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003). Brakhage was the finest and most creatively productive of America’s abstract filmmakers. By "abstract," I mean that Brakhage routinely abandoned several of the elements we associate most often with filmmaking - acting, dialogue, soundtrack, and story - in order to concentrate on film’s visual and poetic aspects. Cooper’s post combines biography, analysis, frame enlargments, and no less than ten YouTube videos of Brakhage’s short films to provide a thorough introduction to Brakhage and his work.

Brakhage’s films divide [very] roughly into two categories: (1) films that he "shot" in the conventional sense, and (2) films that were created by painting directly on the celluloid. (The latter category would also include films like Mothlight that were created by gluing things onto the celluloid.) Black Ice (1994, above) was created by painting on strips of celluloid, and then combining the results with an optical zoom. The result is, one might say, awesome. You can view the silent Black Ice as Brakhage’s anticipation of his own death, or you can look at it as a penetration into a new and unknown world (a birth, just as much as a death). In either event, you are likely to find it well worth the 1 minute and 50 seconds it takes to view it.

Also highly recommended: the Criterion DVD anthology entitled By Brakhage.

A Free Soul... for Ten Dollars a Fifth.

You know that TCM Forbidden Hollywood Vol. 2 set? If you get it and expect a good time, well, watch out for Norma Shearer, that's all I can say. She's trouble. She's in the first two films: MGM's THE DIVORCEE and A FREE SOUL. If sex, drugs and hot jazz were cake, Shearer has her cake and eats it too, then feels guilty about all the calories and heads off to the Ladies room to "heroically" renounce her past actions.

That's not heroism, Norma; that's bulimia!

Where MGM makes its error is in presuming that their audience genuinely believes that pre-marital sex is an evil on par with murder or (gasp) gambling. Where Warners throws scenes of changing out of underwear all over the place, MGM has Shearer do it all behind partitions. When Shearer is courting her different men and raking in jewelry, we see only her hands and his and the exchange of jewels, never any mention of the implied quid pro quo, and the scenes have the un-enjoyable air of something done in a bathroom stall, sober, terrified, with three paranoid look-outs. As Dave Kehr puts it: the "heavy hand of MGM respectability presses down," forcing her to realize "that such dalliances are meaningless without love, marriage and the promise of a family."

(To read the rest of this, which goes off on a tangent about Andrew Sarris and William Wellman, go to my Acidemic site, "hiccup!").

The return of the original Canonical List of Weird Band Names

Back in 1995, a few of us at Bright Lights Film Journal launched a side project called "The Canonical List of Weird Band Names," a dizzying list of strange-but-true band names from around the world (Above Average Weight Band, The Do I Look Like I Give a Fucks, JFKFC... you get the idea). Eventually, we turned over the list to a fan, who maintained it for a while before disappearing. Anyway, while Googling down memory lane, we discovered that over the years, our beloved list has been reproduced on hundreds of other websites. Strangely inspired by this, we've relaunched the site and are actively updating it. It's at brightlightsfilm.com/weirdbandnames. Check it out, and feel free to send us some names to add to the list.

If you don't like MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, I'll get you... in your sleep!

Finally got around to seeing MARGOT AT THE WEDDING last night. FOUR STARS! Sorry, but if you're a critic who badmouthed this movie, you need to find a new line of work. I'm gonna jot your name down from its grandfathered position on Rotten Tomatoes, and follow you around shouting that you're a communist... until the restraining orders arrive.

Too harsh? I don't know. Maybe it's that some of these critics, and I wont name names, are just frustrated fiction writers and they're mad at Baumbach's insider view of the fiction writer world. Honeys, would it help to know that most fiction writers are really just frustrated critics? Nicole Kidman's character, Margot, is a semi-famous writer of the New England snob variety, and a total bitch, but a believable one... a true one. And if as a critic you think a movie must be bad if all the characters are unlikeable...well, would you pan OTHELLO for the same reason?

I don't like OTHELLO either. Man, what a downer of a play... it makes my insides hurt. But I think the problem people have with MARGOT really boils down to their fear of bad parenting (Margot is running from a marriage to a steady-keeled dullard played by John Turturro--hell, I'd run too--and is turning their son into a Norman Bates). These hater critics must either be scared they are bad parents or are afraid they had bad parents themselves and, either way, they don't want to go to therapy to find out.

Bottom line #1: this is cinema, not life! You don't have to agree with characters to enjoy them. Free yourself of morality's leaden albatross. Baumbach is, if nothing else, a bona fide American new waver. With his heavy use of jump cuts and close-ups you can feel echoes of Argentine director Lucretia Martel (THE HOLY GIRL, LA CIENEGA) and right there, you got art, mister.

What you haters also need to know: bad apple hotties like Kidman's character really do create shit storms wherever they go. Cars crash, neighbors go rabid, idiots in diapers played by Jack Black cut down trees. I've seen it! None of that stuff is exaggerated.

Bottom line #2: If you don't like cinema only escapism, If you're just another sheep who gets angry when your pre-chewed audio-visual cud turns rancid and causes you to wretch instead of going all glazed-eyed into warm fantasy oblivion, then you are not a writer, you are a knee-jerk reactionary. For if you were to vomit that rancid cud up with love and lack of judgment you would in fact be a sheep no more, but expelled from the belly of the whale, shot from your amniotic matrix and into the cold light of real world of the true cinema lover, the cinema of Nicholas Ray, Hawks, Godard, Truffaut, Welles, and Martel! This is the cinema that is epicac, cinema as syrup of squill, not the cinema that is escapist feel good TRIPE!

Short People Got / No Reason

Watching the last of the sophisticated and sassy Lubitsch box, ONE HOUR WITH YOU, I'm suddenly, painfully, anguishedly aware of the heavy burden the short guy "wimp" characters bear in all matters of pre-code l'amour. The benefits of being tall--and able to sing--are tremendous in comparison to the short guys, played by Charlie Ruggles, Roland Young, Charles Butterworth, and Tyler Brooke. Maybe it's tall guy guilt, but I found the uneven distribution of power in the seduction quadrangles of HOUR offensive to short people! You can't slim down to be taller, or take a pill to grow or hang from a branch; those poor bastards are socially scarred for life, from the get go. No wonder they're all craven and wild-eyed from unfulfilled desire. Little rat fuckers...

I found myself clocking how many hours I must have spent in the cinema, watching Young or Butterworth or Ruggles bust moves and flatter away and get nowhere in pre-code cinema. It's never funny (at least it hasn't aged well, at least to me), it seems to be neccessary as reassurance and/or shading, to highlight the good qualities of the hero by having a schmuck around to bear all the odious ones, like Danny DeVito in TWINS.

It's fine but it's not fine, it's damaging. We learn by seeing, and kids like me grow up thinking it's okay to have short people hit on your wife, because hey, you're tall and so what? And short people learn that they're meant to be terse and acidic and bald and never get the girl. Movies teach us that short people are meant to squirm with longing and gradually turn venomous, after which their Napoleanic codes get so complex that James Bond must sometimes be sent in.

All the short guys in these films are rich, otherwise they wouldn't even be in the romantic quadrangle in the first place; they buy their way in. And then when the hero steals their hottie wife away, these rich short guys hire detectives, and shack up with the maid. Man, you see that on the streets all the time, the little investment bank guys with their maid-cum-wives...

I guess for the end product of short people venom, we look to the book of Hithcock, as we should for everything. Claide Rains in NOTORIOUS is the nadir of the short guy crisis. As the Nazi aristocrat Sebastian, Claide Rains is hiding out in South America with his mom and a nuclear cabal; and so he can't help be suspicious when his lifetime love (Ingrid Bergman) decides to magically appear and marry him. Rains squirms with wry self-deprecation in the presence of the taller and very luminous Bergman. That's to be expected, but what's heartbreaking is how Rains shows us glimmers of a genuine romantic hero; he lets his character dare to think tall. It's ten times harder to bear because you know what's coming. Oh cruel Hitchcock! And cruel world and cruel world, that is to say, us, we, I that do file and label and judge and dismiss when heaven is right there onscreen. Are not short people just as worthy of love as the tallest? And all of us mere food for worms, and all one, once the masks at this mass masquerade are removed? Aren't we all just a cosmic puppet show put on by god to amuse himself in the empty cosmos? So would a finger puppet master be nicer to one of his fingers than another, just because that finger was shorter?

Cotillard vs. Tautou

At any given moment in Hollywood history, certain actors will fill a certain niche. One such niche is the cute little French girl or gamine. During the 1940s, that niche was occupied by Simone Simon. During the ‘50s, it was filled by Leslie Caron. From approximately 2001 (Amélie) through 2006 (The Da Vinci Code), America’s favorite gamine was the big-eyed, waifish Audrey Tautou.

However, in 2007, a new star arose to challenge Tautou’s supremacy. Her name was Marion Cotillard, and even if you didn’t see her as singer Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose, you probably caught her at this year’s Academy Awards where she won the Best Actress Oscar for her Piaf portrayal.

Cotillard had previously appeared in Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003), making a negligible impression as the young spouse of Billy Crudup’s character. She was far more memorable in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement (2004, above left), acting in support of - yes - Audrey Tautou (above right). A Very Long Engagement was Jeunet and Tautou’s epic follow-up to their very successful Amélie. Tautou played a young Frenchwoman searching for her fiancé who disappeared somewhere in the trenches of World War I. In a parallel subplot, Cotillard played a prostitute who is systematically murdering the officers responsible for her boyfriend’s death in those same trenches. (We see her getting ready to murder one such officer in the frame below.)

Tautou and Cotillard both scored César nominations (the French Oscar) in respectively the lead and supporting categories for their Very Long Engagement work. Cotillard won! Here’s another odd parallel. In 2002, Tautou garnered raves as a Turkish immigrant, part of London’s underground immigrant economy, in Dirty Pretty Things (from a screenplay by Stephen Knight, author of the similarly themed Eastern Promises). A year earlier, Cotillard played temperamentally opposed twins in a French neo-noir entitled simply ... Pretty Things (Les Jolies choses).

2006's The Da Vinci Code may not have elevated Mlle. Tautou’s status in the eyes of critics, but the film was an astounding financial success, grossing more than $217 million worldwide. Meanwhile, Mlle. Cotillard, noting perhaps the trend to give awards to performers who (a) play real-life celebrities, particularly celebrities with substance abuse problems, and who (b) significantly uglify themselves in the process, scored not only critical success, but an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and a César for her performance as the alcohol and morphine addicted Piaf.

But Tautou fans need not despair. The ever-adorable Audrey will soon be appearing as real-life dress designer and perfume magnate Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel in Coco avant Chanel. Watch out, Marion!

Miriam Hopkins & the Pre-Code Menage-a-trois

Imagine Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston deciding to live together and share Brad Pitt! How hot would that be? But no, now we live in a much more (as in less) enlightened age, but once, long ago, these sorts of things happened...in pre-code films... to Miriam Hopkins.

There's no Miriam Hopkins to be found on the recently released DVD set, Forbidden Hollywood Vol. 2, but frankly, when I think of pre-code sexiness, it's Miriam who comes to mind. Sure, Joan Blondell, Mae Clarke, Greta Garbo, Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Harlow, etc. are all hot and brilliant, but often they are too full of sarcasm and/or aloofness to be sexy in the demure, warmly inviting way we shy sensitive guys secretly long for.

Hopkins is the benchmark for that sort of inviting sexiness. You can see it all over DESIGN FOR LIVING, when she falls onto the dusty bed in a semi-feigned swoon in the Parisian garret shared by Frederic March and Gary Cooper; or when she calls Gary Cooper "barbaric" and her eyes glaze over in dreamy lust... or check out the warm sapphic frisson generated with Claudette Colbert in THE SMILING LIEUTENANT (avail in the also recently released Lubitsch Musicals collection from Criterion). Hopkins was an actress who could maintain incredible poise and confidence all the while yielding totally to the tide of gushing sexual desire. The tide of sexual desire actually made her smarter! Her whole body and soul seemed to waken and respond to it, like a wave of summer heat on a cold day.

Perhaps it's this rare gift which makes Hopkins so great in ensemble work: her sense of liberated sexuality overflows the boundaries of the two-person pair-bond. One just can't imagine her "making do" in a conventional post-code relationship.

Thus, in pre-code films, Hopkins became the ideal third party for any menage a trois--as in Lubitsch's DESIGN FOR LIVING. If a menage a trois almost happens but ultimately is not be--as in THE SMILING LIEUTENANT--Hopkins still makes time to work things out with the other woman, she even tries later on in the decade with mean old Bette Davis. Babs or Jean Harlow would be more inclined to "settle the score" with a gun, but sweet Hopkins visits her rival with cheek-turning sisterly goodwill and shared tears, be it Colbert in LIEUTENANT or Kay Francis in TROUBLE IN PARADISE.

Even in the nightmare reflection of this civilized approach she is faced with doubles, forced to endure a DEAD RINGERS-style meltdown dealing with Frederic March x2 in DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1931). Her pleading with Jekyll for protection from Hyde is the stuff of childhood nightmare.

Hopkins' penchant for menage a trois action would continue even in post-code films where she played romantic rival/best friends to Bette Davis (THE OLD MAID, LONGTIME ACQUAINTANCE) and for her troubles was forced to pretend she liked George Brent (the censorial inquisition equivalent of being broken on the rack). Davis called Hopkins a real bitch to work with, but that bitchiness doesn't show much on screen. One wonders if it's not that Hopkins just aged better than Davis, and was able to convey effortless sexuality and warmth while Davis could only rage along on her splumes of egotistic grandeur. I can't imagine Davis being a desirable or willing third party in a menage a trois, not unless both other parties payed sole attention to her and ignored each other. Davis almost makes it happen with Warren William and Joan Blondell in THREE ON A MATCH, but gets stuck with the nanny job instead (she's too practical, eschewing the dope habits and reform school charm of her peers in favor of a drab life in the stenographer's pool).

Bitch or not, the character Hopkins plays in DESIGN FOR LIVING stands tall in cinema even today, as one of the few free-thinking women who challenge the pair-bond system without flinching, backing down or succumbing to a third act change of heart. Even today that's all too rare. God knows how many of my friends I've had to watch "chicken out" of their radical stances and go marry the Edward Everett Horton of their real life mis-en-scene. Thank god for Miriam Hopkins, who walked it like she talked it, 'til Joe Breen slapped her down!

This post continues with praise for DESIGN FOR LIVING over on Acidemic. You can read more on the unjustly under-celebrated Miriam Hopkins and her upcoming biography on Alternative Film Guide.

Pisces is a Sign for lovers

of cinema, that is! And yeah, the time is now! It's Pisces season!

As a Pisces myself (born March 2, just like Lou Reed and Ricky Ricardo), I can assure you that we're loving, caring, deeply artistic souls, and, yes, often alcoholic sex addicts, but that's to be expected in this crazy world.

Sounding like the church bells of the damned throughout the land of Erich's favorite blogs are celebrations of Pisceans and their cinematic legacies:

Kimberly of Cinebeats has been delving deeply into the canonical nether-regions of one of cinema's great sets of lushes, I mean lovers, Richard Burton and Liz Taylor (b. Feb. 27). Today's special, an in-depth portrait of BOOM!

I foolishly sold my VHS of BOOM! (for a small fortune) a few years ago (it's currently OOP in any format). So while we wait impatiently for it to turn up in the dregs of some Liz and Dick boxed set of the future, we can still at least netflix DOCTOR FAUSTUS, and you will want to once you see Liz all done up in silver face/body paint (like Shirley Eaton in GOLDFINGER, only silver) in Kimberly's awesome FAUSTUS screen shots.

In addition to her praise of Desi Arnaz, the mercurial Kim Morgan celebrates her love for John Garfield (b. March 4) over at her Sunset Gun. I wish I could pipe in on Garfield, but I've seen criminally few of his films. Thanks to Kim, all that can now change...

A 1970's man like Jeremy Richey knows action speaks louder than words, that's why his Harry Moseby Confidential is having a birthday tribute to Fred Williamson (March 5) with posters! posters! posters!

An ADDENDUM LINK -- after C. Jerry Kutner's comment to the original version of this blog (see: comments!), I hastily, lovingly and dare I say verbosely, paid tribute to Dean Stockwell (b. March 5) over on ACIDEMIC!

So there you have it, just a handful of the great Pisces actors you probably wont even see mentioned on 98% of the internet sites that traffic in such stuff... and I'll leave you with this quote from NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, starring Richard Burton: "(drunkenly translating the oaths sworn at blonde dullard Hank by Maxine's beach boys): "He says you're a brave man with a fish... if it's a dead fish." In other words, nobody messes with us Pisces... except may Gemini, Scorpio, or the elusive Capricorn!