Back at the Ranch

Now that the blog-a-thon is done, I've returned to writing reviews. I really need to go see a new film, though; it's been too long.

Michael Curtiz's Mandalay has one of the best coded shots in film history (by coded, I mean that it was designed to reveal something about a character without coming right out and saying it), in addition to a likeable performance from the odd-looking Kay Francis.

Busby Berkeley's They Made Me a Criminal wastes a lot of talent, from director Berkeley to John Garfield to Claude Rains, in what could have been a good film about a boxer framed for murder.

Top 10 of 2006: #6-#5

6. Crank. One of the most unjustly ignored films of the year, Crank is a joyful, witty celebration of excess from former commercial directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. It's an R-rated Looney Tunes cartoon, starring a hilariously deadpan Jason Statham and featuring the best female performance of the year from Amy Smart, whose skewering of the "dumb blonde" role I've already praised. It functions as an over-the-top action movie while simultaneously taking the genre down: Statham apparently destroys half of Los Angeles in his quest to get even, a cranked-up-to-eleven commentary on the sociopathic mayhem endorsed by most action films. Neveldine and Taylor's scenario gives them a reason to throw in every visual and audio trick they've learned; unlike films of the Tony Scott School, where it's all a masquerade for a bankruptcy of ideas, here all the slice-and-dice editing, spaced-out color palettes, and soundtrack jiggering flow from the story.

5. The Departed. Martin Scorsese's remake of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs is a free-wheeling, happily profane examination of honor and loyalty. The centerpiece is the giddily edited (thanks again to Thelma Schoonmaker and the sound design team) extended sequence detailing the rise of both the real cop/fake gangster (Leonardo DiCaprio, giving the best performance of his career) and the real gangster/fake cop (Matt Damon, remind us exactly how good he is). There's a plethora of great supporting turns, especially Mark Wahlberg's Mametian (near Shakespearean) cursing and Alec Baldwin's running stand-up routine. It's too bad the film is marred by yet another sloppy "crazy Jack" performance by Jack Nicholson and the script's inability to make Vera Farmiga's character seem like a person (although Farmiga does wonders with it).

The 1927 Blog-a-Thon

Thanks to everyone for helping bring this off—it turned out even better than I had hoped! There's one post still to come, so if you have anything you wanted to include but didn't get done in time, feel free to send me your last-minute links.

My own contributions are Now Showing in Chicago, detailing all 56 films playing at all 102 theaters in Chicago this weekend in 1927, and an article on Clara Bow and It.

The Entries (in order of appearance):

• Squish on the high price of transition to the talkies (and other goodies)
• Edward Copeland on Buster Keaton's The General
• My favorite art historian on Josephine Baker in Siren of the Tropics
• Operator_99, on a series of German Metropolis postcards
• Damian on 1927 as presented in Singin' in the Rain
• Pinky gives us an MP3 of "The Varsity Drag" (and promises more later this weekend)
• Film of the Year on the Technicolor short film The Flag
• Rocks That Move on film people conceived in 1927
• Nick on Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness
• Movie Time Capsule on films set in 1927
• Pinky's back with some love for Antonio Moreno in It
• Stevis on baseball in newsreels
• Samurai Frog gives us his top ten films of 1927
• Stevis is back with an "amateur's" take on The General
• Oggs on Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
• Cinemathematics on the Harold Lloyd film The Kid Brother
• Brian Darr on the two proto-"best picture" awards at the first Oscars
• Oggs is back with Peter Jackson's reimagining of film history in Forgotten Silver
• Stinkylulu on Pearl McCormack in The Scar of Shame
• Samurai Frog checks in again with Disney's Oswald the Rabbit
• New! Self-Styled Siren on Flesh and the Devil

The "IT" and How to Get It

Screenwriter Anita Loos observed, "If Hollywood hadn't existed, Elinor Glyn would have had to invent it." But it did exist, so Glyn had to content herself with changing it to fit her opinions. Glyn was the British author of scandalous romance novels (her first novel, 1907's Three Weeks, had an unmarried couple cavorting on a tiger-skin rug) who had the gall to give the strongest roles to self-assured women. When Jesse Lasky put out a call in 1920 for well-known authors and playwrights to come write films for him, she accepted, despite having never seen a film before; indeed, according to some, she considered films to be vulgar until she saw one, despite recounting in her autobiography that "I am always proud to think that I was never one of those who belittled the artistic possibilities of the cinematograph industry" (Elinor Glyn, Romantic Adventure. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937, p. 293). (Of course, she spends the next two pages doing just that.) She took Hollywood by storm, quickly becoming Tinseltown's Grand Dame. Gloria Swanson commented, "Her British dignity was devastating . . . She went everywhere and passed her fearsome verdicts on everything. 'This is glamorous,' she would say. 'This is hideous,' she would say as she baby-stepped through this or that dining room or garden party. People moved aside for her as if she were a sorceress on fire or a giant sting ray" (David Stenn, Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild. New York: Doubleday, 1988, p. 80-81). Her greatest desire was "to stir up in the cold hearts of the thousands of little fluffy, gold-digging American girls a desire for greater joys in love than are to be found in candy-boxes and car rides and fur coats" (Glyn, 299).

From the opening title card: "IT" is that quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force. With "IT" you win all men if you are a woman—and all women if you are a man. "IT" can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction.

Brooklyn-born Clara Bow had come to Hollywood in 1923 after having won a magazine beauty contest. Benjamin Schulberg, former production chief at Paramount and proprietor of indie studio Preferred Pictures, decided she had what it took to be a star, and with his help (and under his thumb) she became one of the biggest stars of silent films. He exploited her ruthlessly, cashing in on her increasing popularity while paying her $200 a week, a pittance compared to what he was earning by loaning her out to other studios. He worked her half to death: she made 36 films between 1922 and 1926, 15 of them coming out in 1925. Most of them were garbage that played a day or two in a town before moving on (Stenn, 44-47). She was plagued by scandals involving her wide-ranging romantic exploits (no, the story about the USC football team probably isn't true, despite what Kenneth Anger said in Hollywood Babylon), including concurrent romances with director Victor Fleming, actor Gilbert Roland, and ne'er-do-well Brian Savage that ended in Savage's theatrical attempted suicide (Stenn, 66-67). After working with Fleming in a starring role in Mantrap (1926), she finally arrived: she strong-armed Schulberg, now back at Paramount mainly because he virtually owned Bow and all the money her films would bring in, into giving her a better contract: a cap on the number of films she'd have to make, an end to the loan-outs that had so overworked her, an exemption from the studio's mandatory morals clause (although they managed to get her on that anyway), and guaranteed star billing. Although she had few scenes in the first Best Picture winner, Wings, she was the only actor billed above the title (Stenn, 71). After filming Wings but before its nationwide release, she met Elinor Glyn.

From Glyn's original story, highlighted in the film: "IT" is that peculiar quality which some persons possess, which attracts others of the opposite sex. The possessor of "IT" must be absolutely un-selfconscious, and must have that magnetic "sex appeal" which is irresistible.

It happened in September 1926. Ben Schulberg was looking for a new Homeric epithet for his star, "The Brooklyn Bonfire" having failed to catch on the year before. He read Glyn's story in Cosmopolitan, and decided to buy it for Clara. Paramount paid the dowager $50,000 to bestow her blessing on Clara; Glyn publicly announced, "Of all the lovely young ladies I've met in Hollywood, Clara Bow has 'It.'" Schulberg arranged an introduction at his office. Glyn was wearing purple chiffon veils. Stenn describes the meeting so well, I'll quote him at length: "So this is Clara Bow," she said, approaching Clara with mincing steps. Once she reached her, Elinor placed both hands upon Clara's head as if it were a crystal ball. "You are my medium, child," she informed Clara gravely. "You are to portray the leading role in my story . . . 'It' is an inner magic, an animal magnetism. Valentino possessed this certain magic. So do John Gilbert and Rex" (p. 82). Rex was a horse. Later, creatures bestowed with Glyn's personal seal of "IT"-ness included Antonio Moreno (cast as the male lead in the film) and the doorman at the Ambassador Hotel.

It turned out that Schulberg had paid Glyn for the concept of "IT" and little else (I'm following the film's combination of capital letters and quotation marks). He ditched the details of her novella, hiring Louis Lighton and Hope Loring to write a new story that would show off Bow's qualities, including her "IT." Clarence Badger was brought in to direct the film, which started shooting on October 7, 1926. It was released in February of 1927 and shattered box-office records. Variety enthused that "Clara Bow really does it all, and how" (Feb. 9, 1927), but not everyone was enthusiastic about the film. Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times groused that "although this subject is not annoying, it could never be assured of possessing a fraction of suspense or one iota of subtlety" (Feb. 13, 1927), and Mae Tinee in the Chicago Tribune spent more time talking about the stage show at the theater than about the film, admitting "there's not much to the story, but the acting is clever" (Feb. 8, 1927).

Definition provided by Glyn, who appears in the film as herself: "IT" is self-confidence and indifference as to whether you are pleasing or not—and something in you that gives the impression that you are not all cold.

On the basis of these definitions, Clara Bow does not have "IT," or at least she does not demonstrate in this film, the very one designed to highlight her "IT"-ness. It's there, in that third definition, which, in the film, comes straight from Miss Elinor Glyn's mouth (via a title card): "indifference as to whether you are pleasing or not." Everything about Bow's performance, which is indeed something to see, is designed to be noticed. She plays a shopgirl who wants to attract the attention of the wealthy son of the owner, newly in charge of the store. She engineers meetings, flirts, shows off her legs, drapes herself over his desk, bats her eyelashes, and wiggles. Mostly, she wiggles, all to attract the attention of a man. How, I ask, does this fit with a definition of "IT" that demands "indifference as to whether you are pleasing or not"? Of course, one look at Bow in the film clears everything up: Elinor Glyn's elaboration on "IT" is wrong. Bow has something, and that something must be "IT."

Two months after It was released, Charles Lindberg made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. I don't want to disparage his heroic feat, but he was a little behind the times: Clara Bow had already broken the sound barrier. She's a nonstop ball of energy in It, wiggling, bouncing, rolling her shoulders, kicking up her feet, waving her arms, and generally vibrating fast enough to microwave food she comes into contact with. Adolph Zukor had previously said, "She danced even when her feet were not moving. Some part of her was always in motion, if only her great rolling eyes. It was an elemental magnetism, an animal vitality, that made her the center of attraction in any company" (Stenn, p. 70). There's an extraordinary scene in which she's preparing for her big date—not with the man of her dreams, but with a man who can get her near her dream man. Her audience had come to expect some skin, so we're treated to caressing closeups of her lovely bare shoulders as her friend powders them. All the while, Bow bounces, and it's electrifying. Often I look at female stars from the silent era and completely miss the sex appeal, but with Clara Bow it's immediately apparent why she was so beloved. She had, for lack of a better word, "IT."

She plays Betty Lou, a shopgirl at Waltham's, the biggest department store in town. Antonio Moreno plays Cyrus Waltham, the handsome new boss. The first time she lays eyes on him, she announces her intentions: "Sweet Santa Claus, gimme him!" Bow surprised and irked director Clarence Badger during the shooting of this scene. She gives Waltham a complicated look that caused Badger to yell "Cut!" Demanding an explanation, she told him, "if ya knew your onions like ya was supposedta, you'd know the first look was for the lovesick dames in the audience, and the second look, that passionate stuff, was for the boys an' their poppas, and the third look . . . well, just about the time all them old ladies're shocked an' scandalized by the passionate part, they suddenly see that third look, change their minds 'bout me havin' naughty ideas, an' go home thinkin' how pure an' innocent I was. An' havin' got me mixed up with this girl I'm playin', they'll come again when my next picture shows up" (Stenn, p. 83). And she's right: it's there in the film, exactly as she described it.

We sure notice her, but Waltham doesn't. His friend Monty (William Austin), a self-proclaimed "old fruit" portrayed as a sexless, wide-eyed ponce, has read Miss Elinor Glyn's latest story and recognizes that the sloe-eyed Betty Lou has "IT." She convinces Monty to take her to dinner at the Ritz, prompting the aforementioned bouncing scene as she's getting ready. She finally catches Waltham's eye at the restaurant, and he's immediately smitten, despite his near-engagement to society girl Adela Van Norman (Jacqueline Gadsden). The mismatched pair go on an energetic date at Coney Island, designed mostly to put Bow in positions where she has to show off her bare legs.

Misunderstandings inevitably occur. When snooping welfare agents attempt to repossess Clara's friend Molly's (Priscilla Bonner) baby, Bow pretends the baby's hers, and Monty believes her. He tells Waltham, who offers Bow a deal: all the benefits of marriage, including lots of jewelry but no ring. She's incensed at this offer of "one of those left-hand arrangements" and walks out on him and his store (a title informs us "Betty was too poor to quit her job—and too proud to stay. So she quit!"), but she decides that what she really needs is revenge: she'll convince him to propose to her despite her supposed lack of virtue, then she'll laugh in his face.

Clara Bow isn't the only reason to watch It—Badger's direction is clean and efficient, and the script and titles have some zingers, but it's all about making Bow look and sound good. She's completely free of the exaggerated movements often seen as emblematic of silent-film acting (which, once you see more than a few silent films, you realize weren't as ubiquitous as you might have thought). She makes each of her scenes feel loose and improvised, and some of them were: in addition to the complex gaze she describes above, Stenn informs us of an improvised routine just after she's slapped Waltham for kissing her on their first date. Badger later admitted that he'd "set up the camera, explain the scene to her, and just let her go." He told Lulu Brooks, "I get mad because she's doing all these things. And then I run them, and they're wonderful" (Stenn, p. 84). Badger wasn't the only one at a loss about how to deal with Bow's energetic improvisation. Cameraman Artie Jacobson said that "she was difficult to follow with the camera because she was a free soul on the set. She'd fly all over the place, which was part of her charm. Complete abandonment" (Stenn, p. 85). The film deftly balances Bow's two main attractions (no, not the two that Dorothy Parker was referring to when she said, "It? Hell, she had those"): her relentless sex appeal, and her down-to-earthness. She's not an unattainable glamour queen like Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, or Greta Garbo. Bow made men hot, but she also made them want to go out to a ball game with her. She was the Joe Sixpack of the Hollywood elite, and this film gives us both aspects of her personality. During the film, her romantic rival sniffs and says that she "seems to be rather lacking in reserve," to which Waltham replies, "personally, I think she has plenty—in reserve!"

Bow's star remained in the heavens well into the talkie period; David Thomson tells us that her career only faltered in 1930, under the weight of scandals, lawsuits, and prudish public backlash (David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film New York: Knopf, 2002, p. 99). Elinor Glyn remembers Bow as "a wonderful little actress [who] had a most remarkable personality and great talent," and praises her courage in the climactic yachting scene, when Bow has to jump off the boat, rescue her romantic rival, and then hoist herself up onto the ship's anchor (Glyn, 323-324). Bow, on the other hand, soon got tired of Madame Glyn's offscreen etiquette instructions and started referring to her as "that shithead" (Stenn, 86). Glyn's last comments about her are bittersweet: sad that the talkies ruined her career—"I believe she might have learnt to speak 'Hollywood' English well enough, and that in time she would have become one of the greatest artists on the screen"—but happy that she has retired "into a happy married life I am glad to think" (Glyn, 325). If only Bow could have had Glyn's happy ending; her own long ending entailed nervous breakdowns followed by institutionalization, diagnosis of schizophrenia, shock treatment, and a lengthy seclusion until her death in 1965.

Both Glyn and Stenn think the talkies killed Bow's career, and they're partly right. Her Brooklyn accent was a shock to viewers, and the immobile cameras limited her ability to roam around the set. But films quickly recovered from this immobility—look, for example, at 1929's Applause, with its roving cameras—and a voice coach could have taken care of much of that accent; besides, even a strong accent wouldn't be that farfetched given her everywoman image. But she was tired, and her hereditary mental illness was manifesting more and more. From the little I've read about her, it seems that even if the sound revolution hadn't occurred, Clara Bow's career would have come to an end soon enough.

Top 10 of 2006: #8-#7

8. Volver. Aside from the five outstanding performances (I've singled out Penélope Cruz and Blanca Portillo, but kudos also to Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, and Yohana Cobo, as well as the more peripheral characters), I loved Volver for what it refused to become. There's a murder that fails to turn the film into a suspense film, a parent back from the dead who isn't interested in turning it into a ghost story, and a hunky film producer who can't edge his way into a romantic comedy; instead, it's a comedy-drama about women interacting with each other, via family and neighborhood relationships. It doesn't want to be any more than that, which makes it so refreshing: to see mature, engaging, well-written female characters who don't rely on men. Maybe it's more a comment on the sorry state of mainstream Hollywood film, but Volver's refusal to be about men was like a bolt of lightning. It's perfect in its own small, self-assured way.

7. Peep "TV" Show. As the one-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaches, Hasegawa, a professional voyeur in Tokyo, installs hidden cameras in people's houses and broadcasts the footage on a website called Peep TV Show, sharing space with footage of the planes hitting the World Trade Center and narratives of the hijackers. Moé, a "gothic Lolita," is intrigued by the site and joins him in his search for the "real" (or, after they start charging monthly service fees, REAL). In this shotgun-style (and at times incoherent) examination of post-9/11 angst, public grief, surveillance society, and the role of technology in simultaneously separating people and drawing them together, director Yutaka Tsuchiya uses guerilla-style video techniques to question our role as the voyeuristic audience. What we're seeing constantly shifts meaning as the "identities" of the cameras are revealed: webcams, hidden cameras, security cameras, still photos, and the filmmaker's supposedly invisible camera ebb and flow in prominence, and the characters' disconcerting tendency to stare into the lens blurs the line between performance and, for lack of a better word, "reality" (or at least the reality inside the film).

Hateful Little Bastards

Christy Lemire of the Associated Press had the temerity to give a bad review to 300, a film that I disliked as well. However, she had the additional gall to be a woman who gave a bad review to 300. This was a clarion call to all the misogynist, hateful, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, adolescent fuckheads, who came out in force on Rottentomatoes.com's new "comments" feature, which allows one to rate a review and provide pithy comments. This feature is apparently unmoderated, as nobody has cleaned up the massive, horrific, woman-hating, and sometimes vaguely threatening stream of bile that's currently cluttering the comments thread attached to her review. I'm glad that some of the commenters are defending Lemire's right to exist, but it's too little, too late.

Don't think it's about misogyny? Read the comments, and note that there are 168 of them attached to her review; the next highest total is 44 for Frank Switek's review. This strikes me as a good reason to jettison this poorly conceived, poorly implemented, and poorly carried out new "feature," which seems more like a bug to me. (See also Nick's experience with this feature.)

Top Ten of 2006: #10-#9

10. Casino Royale. James Bond is back, and he's dead serious. Daniel Craig sweeps away almost 40 years of camp in this muscular, energetic action film as the first Bond who looks like he could kick your ass. He's handsome, but not yet quite suave, more of a blunt instrument that will be honed in later films. The filmmakers have taken a series of one-liners and turned him into a human being who's slowly learning that his new job requires him to be less of one. But it doesn't skirt on the action: stunning setpieces abound, such as the pre-credits origin story, the amazingly acrobatic chase across a construction site, and the desperate death-match in a staircase. Sure, it's too long, and the poker scene is interminable, but Craig's performance and the darker, more serious tone of the film made it one of the best of 2006.

9. Duck Season. A lot has been made of the "Three Amigos" (Cuarón, Iñárritu, and Del Toro) and their highly successful films in 2006, but the best Mexican export slipped under the radar. Two guys, a girl, and a pizza delivery man spend a lazy Sunday coping with their boredom in a Mexico City apartment building. Over the course of the afternoon, they explore romance, sexuality, divorce, guilt, lost dreams, and missed chances. Shot in black and white, in long takes with a stationary camera, the film is starkly beautiful; director Fernando Eimbcke and cinematographer Alexis Zabe poured a lot of love into each frameable shot. It has its share of faults: too much is made of the painting that provides its title, and the setup is pretty mechanistic—think The Breakfast Club meets Strangers in Paradise—but this only makes the film's later depth, sensitivity, and emotional acuity more surprising.

2006 Goaties: Best Actress

Penelope Cruz's performance in Volver took some time to grow on me. I went in with painful memories of her English-language films, where her difficulties with the language and the films' tendency to require little of her aside from beauty turned her into a gorgeous set decoration. And the first time around she wasn't even the most noticeable in the cast: there are at least five great performances, with Cruz neck-and-neck with Blanca Portillo as Agustina (I should probably add her as a runner-up in the Supporting Actress category). But after some agonizing thought and the unexpectedly rewarding experience of seeing the film again, I decided to depose the woman who had been queen (and still is The Queen) until recently.

I loved the little moments best, the gestures and expressions that revealed such depth: her somewhat disturbed "what kind of person did I marry?" expression when she hears her husband pleasure himself when she's too preoccupied to comply; the subtle range of emotions that cross her face when she sees her sister Sole after their fight over Aunt Paula's belongings, her expression flowing from anger to confusion to a softening smile tinged with maybe a little shame at her overreaction; and the little nod she gives her daughter at the river. She's full of fire when she's angry: notice the almost swanlike hissing that her S's take on when she's upset, a perfect verbal complement to the way she draws her head back. But I think it's when the screenplay turns to comedy (it's never very far away) that she's at her best: watch the hilarious hand-flutter when she dismisses the blood on her neck as "women's troubles," or the bemused but troubled cast of her brow when she assures Sole that Paco isn't coming back: "You can tell these things."

Part of what's so great about her performance is how she works with the screenplay's resolute refusal to get entangled in the man-centered subplots that keep wanting to pop up. Her flirtatious conversations with the hunky film producer keep raising the possibility that this might turn toward romantic comedy territory, but she's in control enough to let us know that she's not going to let it go too far; "coltish" is the word that I wrote down, and it's apt, given the combination of playfulness and her long-limbed form. Throughout, she's more mature and rounded as an actress than I'd come to expect, a real live person instead of something wispy and insubstantial.

Runner-Up: Up until a few days before the Oscars, Helen Mirren was going to get yet another award for her performance in The Queen. I even had a banner made up for her. Part of my decision to demote her was the realization that I didn't have any desire to watch her performance again. I still think she was phenomenal, but I don't think it's something that would grow on further viewings.

Home Sweet New Home

Three bedrooms, a sunroom, a big dining room with built-in cabinets, two claw-footed bathtubs, and lots of windows facing the southeast, which means lots of light. We get to move in on May 1. Now there's the problem of cleaning the current place out and selling it.