The Buccaneer (1958)

I was in the mood for some swashbuckling, and thought maybe I would watch The Buccaneer (the 1958 remake of the original Cecil B. DeMille film from twenty years earlier). This movie is a hot mess. In the first place, this movie is (bizarrely) directed by Anthony Quinn, the only film he ever directed. But the reason he did this was because his father-in-law DeMille was too sick to work on this movie.

This is a remake of the 1938 Buccaneer with Fredric March, but it's also clearly of a piece with DeMille's general interests – I recently watched Reap the Wild Wind from 1942, and it's also about pirates and going straight and comparisons between civilization and banditry.

But The Buccaneer might actually be dumber and worse than Reap the Wild Wind (though it certainly repeats most of its plot points). It stars Yul Brynner (who's great) and Charlton Heston (who is ridiculous) and Charles Boyer (who is perfect). Almost everything else is laughable. The screenplay is absurd. Just when you think the movie is done it introduces an entire stupid fourth act. The production design is awful. Every single scene looks like it was filmed on a cheaply made set. The costumes are perhaps the film's only redeeming quality. They're legitimately gorgeous.

Yul Brynner is delightfully shirtless on this movie's poster, but unfortunately appears with a shirt in all of the movie's scenes.

There is a most curious moment in the terrible fourth act that is relevant, perhaps, to theatre history. Jean Lafitte and his fiancée are dancing, and the blonde milquetoast fiancée is congratulated by Andrew Jackson on her dancing and he mentions his wife. What he says is something to the effect of: If my wife were here I'd have her teach you "Possum Up a Gum Tree". Everyone laughs and applauds. It's a really weird moment, mostly because no one today knows that song at all, but it was obviously a reference that many people were supposed to get (in 1958?). "Possum Up a Gum Tree" is a famous song that Charles Mathews used to sing in blackface in his show A Trip to America in the 1820s as a mockery of Black Americans (and Americans in general). Later, the African American actor Ira Aldridge would sing "Possum Up a Gum Tree" in his own act, incorporated into performances of Isaac Bickerstaffe's The Padlock. But The Buccaneer is set in the War of 1812, so the reference here is anachronistic. It's a very strange and gratuitous blackface reference in a film about the history of Louisiana.

Reap the Wild Wind (1942)

The weirdest thing about this weird film is that it really wishes it were Gone with the Wind. And that may seem a very odd thing to say about a movie that boasts an underwater battle with a giant squid as well as numerous storms at sea, a ventriloquized lapdog, and a besuited monkey, but here we are. First it's an action film, then it's a very silly romantic comedy, then it's an action film again – obviously written for Errol Flynn – then it becomes a courtroom drama for twenty minutes?? And then the giant squid shows up? This thing is insane. To make weird matters even weirder, John Wayne is not the hero. 

Of course, it is called Reap the Wild Wind, so the film itself knows very well it wants to be Gone with the Wind, and Cecil B. DeMille knows it too. The whole thing is just too stupid for all that. This is not, despite what the poster says, Cecil B. DeMille's greatest. Not even close.

Louise Beavers (who is always lovable) is doing her best Hattie McDaniel. Also Ray Milland is fine, but I kind of hate Paulette Goddard. She is no Vivien Leigh and that is for sure. Susan Hayward and Robert Preston both play smaller parts in this film. Both acquit themselves without embarrassment.

But I think the central trouble with Reap the Wild Wind is that DeMille's characters aren't people. They are so burdened with meaning and symbolism, that even a good actor like Ray Milland is playing a kind of symbol for the South and John Wayne a symbol for "untamed men of the sea" or somesuch business. And Goddard gets to symbolize Florida itself. The whole thing is so overwrought there's just no room for the humanity that might have appeared with these characters under circumstances other than a movie by Cecil B. DeMille.

As far as I can tell, Reap the Wild Wind isn't streaming anywhere. The DVD is hard to come by, and it sat in the very long wait section of my Netflix queue for a long time. But that's how I finally watched it.

The Sign of the Cross

I watched the ridiculous Cecil B. De Mille picture The Sign of the Cross the other day.

The picture is pretty much a mess for most of its running time. It unfortunately manages to do several really stupid things.

First, it conflates 20th-century Christianity with 1st-century Christianity, which – let's be honest – makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Also, The Sign of the Cross's version of Christianity mostly involves singing hymns, as far as I can tell. The idea here was just idiotic. And the film actually needs its version of Christianity to make sense, because The Sign of the Cross is a film about the Roman emperor Nero's persecution of ancient Roman Christians. As it is, the Christians all just sort of go to their deaths, but I couldn't quite figure out why they did.

All of the good stuff in the film is related to De Mille's normal predilections: ostentation, expense, costumes, gorgeous cinematography, and excellent direction of supernumeraries.

For example, Claudette Colbert takes a bath in a swimming pool of milk:

So that's fabulous.

The last 25 minutes of the film are dedicated to a pageant of gladiatorial games that are an absolute delight, though they have absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell, to do with the actual plot of The Sign of the Cross. Still, they are nearly the best thing in the picture, so I was glad they were there because the love plot (which is ostensibly the film's focus) between Fredric March (cute) and Elissa Landi (who?) is completely boring from its first minutes.

Here's a pair of elephants eating some guys at the Coliseum.

And here's half-a-dozen crocodiles about to devour a girl wearing only garlands of flowers:

And this is a tiger eating a girl:

There is all other manner of decadence. A small army of "pygmies" fights a group of "Amazons". And whenever the camera finds Nero (Charles Laughton, queening it out), he is applauding stupidly and being served grapes by this naked man:

My favorite images, though, are the lions that are released to kill the Christians at the very end of the movie. We don't see any of the Christians meet their deaths (thankfully), but check out this shot of lions running up a staircase to the main floor of the Coliseum:

And this one of a lion leaping over a bunch of his fellows:

Such great photography! I couldn't help but think of the lions in all of those amazing ancient Assyrian reliefs of King Ashurbanipal II.

Anyway, you can feel free to skip this.

The Greatest Show on Earth?

Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 movie The Greatest Show on Earth may be one of the strangest movies I've ever seen in my life. Stranger still, it kinda works. The Greatest Show on Earth is your standard melodramatic plot structure: girl (Betty Hutton) loves boy (Charlton Heston); boy loves work more than girl; girl finds new boy (Cornel Wilde); boy pretends he doesn't care; boy learns to love girl more than work; girl gets boy. This plot, which is totally ridiculous, but somehow totally intriguing, is interspersed with extremely long performance sequences featuring various circus acts. The movie is filled with elephants and horses, acrobats, tight-rope walkers, clowns, lions, you name it. The majority of these sequences has nothing to do at all with the romantic plot. There is also an intrigue plot, featuring a scheming guy in a suit. I never figured out what any of the guy-in-the-suit's machinations were about. It was totally incomprehensible as far as I am concerned. Making the whole combination even more strange, the movie is filled with documentary-style sequences where the audience learns about the circus and all that goes into producing this show. These documentary sequences are narrated by DeMille himself and are basically a commercial for the circus. The film even ends with a huge musical number exhorting everyone to come out and see the circus when it comes through town.

There is a little more to it: there's a huge train wreck near the end of the movie, that looks like it was done with model trains, and there is some good acting... by Gloria Grahame. (Funny, I just finished hating on her for her work in Oklahoma! and here I am loving her again.) The actor who plays Charlton Heston's rival (Cornel Wilde) is gorgeous. I'm not normally into really muscular guys, but for him I'd make an exception. Oh, and Dorothy Lamour is in this movie too for no reason at all. The film totally forgets about her after awhile and she is given no plot at all. And I forgot: Jimmy Stewart is in the movie too. He is a clown with a secret past. His plot is boring.

I'm telling you though, the movie is not half-bad. It's a weird patchwork of a movie and it's too long, but I rather enjoyed its histrionics.

And speaking of clichéd plots. Walter Lang's With a Song in My Heart is the true-life story of Jane Froman, played in the movie by Susan Hayward. Zzzzzz. Oh my lord it's boring. The worst part of it is that it's a musical, and Jane Froman's real voice is used for all the sequences (much like the producers of The Jolson Story did with their movie) but Jane Froman's music is boring. She'd take an interesting song and make it slow and flavorless, I swear. The plot is hideous, too. There's a husband who can't get a break and he spends the whole movie moping about it. Skip this one for sure.

I saw three more movies the last couple of days. Luis Buñuel's Robinson Crusoe is some of the most racist shit I've seen in a long while. Do not see this unless you feel like getting pissed off.

And I saw two gay movies: André Téchiné's Les Témoins (The Witnesses) is a story of Paris in 1984 during the free-love period right before the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. Les Témoins is the story of a very young man and his platonic relationship with an older man and the older man's married friends. It's a very interesting, movie with an intelligent, queer sensibility, and the married couple (Sami Bouajila and Emmanuelle Béart) are both wonderful in it. I loved them both. The movie sort of loses speed near its end, but it's still worth catching. It's not on the heartbreaking level of Longtime Companion, but it's intriguing to see the Paris side of the war on AIDS anyway.

I also watched the 1919 silent film Different from the Others (§ 175) which is a pro-gay propaganda film from Germany directed by Richard Oswald, and engineered by Magnus Hirschfeld. It's interesting, but I didn't watch it to enjoy myself; I watched it to see what they were up to in 1919. It's a fairly standard thing: blackmail plot, gay suicide, etc. And there are (of course) long sequences where we hear about how gay people can't help it (they're born that way!) and how Paragraph 175 ought to be repealed. It's a pretty cool thing, all told. It's 1919 for heaven's sake!

Today...

Today is the birthday of Pulitzer prize-winner August Wilson, whose first play was Jitney (1982), and who wrote a cycle of plays about the black experience in the United States. The cycle includes ten plays, each of which represents a single decade of the Twentieth century. The most recent plays have been King Hedley II, about the 1980s, Gem of the Ocean, about the 1900s, and Radio Golf, about the 1990s. Wilson died in 2005. The plays have yet to be published in an anthology. As usual, I think the Library of America should be on top of that. (Do you hear me, Library of America?)

And I recently watched Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments which was campy and fun. I thought it was going to be more fun than it actually was, but it was pretty hilarious all the same. John Derek is really hot and he runs around shirtless throughout the film. And I have to say, Yul Brynner (also shirtless most of the time) is really hot as well. Anne Baxter is pretty ludicrous in the film, and the movie itself is totally absurd. The titular commandments finally make an appearance during the fourth hour of the movie, and the rest of the movie is pretty much your standard biopic, except that it's about a character about whom we know almost nothing. I thought the movie was kinda racist. It's definitely anti-Semitic, but I also think it's got a strong Orientalist sentiment running through it. I don't know. It's flashy and silly and anachronistic at times. There was stuff in the movie that I had forgotten was in the Bible. Plus, I had always thought Moses' wife Zipporah (was that her name?) was black. For some reason I had that in my head as a child. In this movie she is most certainly not black. Anyway, I had never seen it, so I thought it was about time.

School is out. I have a little work to do before I'm done: final grades for the students and such. And I also have some meetings with faculty before I call it quits for the year. But it feels like this year has flown by. And suddenly the city is deserted. It's kinda crazy. I have to write a post about being friends with undergrads, too. It's so... precarious, I guess I should call it.