The Blue Angel (1930)

The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel) is an excellent Weimar-era tragedy starring the great Emil Jannings. It feels very much like a play still (it is one – by Carl Zuckmayer), but its emotional force comes through.

I watched this on the Criterion Channel as part of a series on collaborations between Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg.

Thunderbolt

Thunderbolt is really brilliantly directed by Josef von Sternberg. It moves into saccharine melodramatic territory after awhile, but the photography in it is just so good, and Fay Wray is fabulous. Thunderbolt also contains rather a lot of African-American music, including a sequence in a black speakeasy.

Things I Didn't Know about Wings

I finally saw William A. Wellman's Wings from 1927, the silent film that won the very first Best Picture Oscar. (I have seen lots of movies from that first year of Oscar – my favorites have always been Murnau's Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans, Borzage's 7th Heaven, and Vidor's The Crowd; recently I also fell in love with Josef von Sternberg's Underworld – but I had never been able actually to get my hands on a copy of Wings. Until today. I came home (to my new digs in New Hampshire) and what was sitting on my stoop, but the Wings DVD from Netflix (thanks, Netflix).

And so:

Ten things I didn't quite expect from Wings:

1. Butts! Click on this image and you will see what I mean. When the two male leads go to sign up to be in the Air Force or whatever it was called in WWI, what does the camera find, but a room full of naked men behind door number one! I was shocked, to say the least! It is a film that was made before the Hayes code, of course, but that doesn't mean William Wellman needed to include a shot of naked men. In fact, the nude rear ends are in the center of the shot. The eye is unavoidably drawn to the door at the center of the shot, and then when the door opens: butts! It is an odd thing, indeed.

2. Gary Cooper! Coop isn't in Wings for very long, and I hadn't even noticed his name in the opening credits, but there he is in the film's first act. His appearance was so unexpected to me that I didn't quite believe it was even him until I realized that he was nearly a foot taller than his castmates, and then I was sure.





3. This movie loves Buddy Rogers who plays the lead, Jack. And I have to admit, I've never even seen any of his other films. I guess he married Mary Pickford and then started making music or something, because his film career didn't quite live up to his appearance in Wings, but Wellman loves this guy, and you can see why. He is a handsome devil.


4. There was a moment when I truly feared I was going to have to sit through the original Spielberg duck joke – this is a WWI film, after all. Thankfully, however, I was spared. This is the lone shot of ducks (or geese or other waterfowl) in the picture.





 5. Let's talk about Fokkers. I had never heard the term, but evidently it was in such common usage in the 1920s that it needed no explanation for Wings' first audience in 1927.



 


6. And while we're looking at title cards, let's speak briefly about typography. Wings' title cards all have that gorgeous elaboration behind their first letter (you can see it in the P above. And then look at this amazing typeface being used to indicate intermission. It's just so elegant! I want this for my résumé.

7. More butts. Wings is also interested in the female anatomy. It-girl Clara Bow appears nearly nude somewhere in act two, and during an extended sequence at the Folies-Bergères there are lots of lovely shots of butts and breasts. The camera, for example, has no reason to focus on the derrières above left, and yet it lingers there. Ditto the breasts above right. The woman in the shot fastens that pin, and the camera never looks away the entire time she does that.

8. Also: lesbians. This is no joke. Look very carefully at this image. It is extraordinary. As far as I can tell those are two women, dressed more or less as men, caressing each other and holding hands. Am I right?

9. The next image is the other amazing thing about Wings. The photography is excellent. You can see in the following image that the female couple is not in the foreground as the camera has moved through them to the couple behind them. There was a couple in front of the lesbians that the camera treated similarly.

Again and again, Wellman and his photographer, the great Harry Perry, show an artistic, unique flair with angles and tracking shots and perspective. Not only in the air during the spectacular flight sequences, but in the Folies-Bergères, at training camp, in No Man's Land. It is lovely work.

10. Wings is so homoerotic. I thought I had remembered a sequence in The Celluloid Closet in which we are shown the image of the two men whose friendship means more than anything else in Wings. But I hadn't quite remembered what it looked like. Well, it looks like this:

But what I wasn't prepared for was this:

Oh my goodness. It is lovely. These two men love each other so much, and while they are clearly not gay – it was 1927, after all – the whole thing is just so sweet! As I said earlier, much of Wings is erotic, and much of that is heterosexual, but the homoerotic is unmistakeably present in this film, and I found it just delightful.

Movie Sum-up Post

I have seen about ten movies since I last wrote about one in this space. This sucks as a movie blog. I hope no one's here for that because I'm not very good at movie-blogging as it turns out. Nevertheless, I bring you reviews (albeit, short) of the ten films I've seen this year that I haven't written about.

This afternoon: Robert Altman's very musical extravaganza A Prairie Home Companion, which is full of lovely jokes, down-home humor and the brilliant non-sequitor-filled silliness of both Altman films and Garrison Keillor's weekly radio program. There are some really fun segments of the show absent from the film, but one cannot have everything and the movie is a delight from start to finish, featuring really wonderful performances from a whole cast of greats, but especially Meryl Streep & Lily Tomlin and Woody Harrelson & John C. Reilly as two singing duos. My favorite performance in the film is from Marylouise Burke, who plays the lunch lady.

Josef von Sternberg's Morocco starring the totally fabulous Marlene Dietrich in her only Oscar-nominated performance is fairly standard fare as films go... or so I thought for the first half hour or so. The film's plot is standard, but Dietrich herself is a force with which to be reckoned. The much-talked about scene with her performing a cabaret act in a tuxedo and kissing a woman full on the lips is in Morocco and I must confess that it took me completely by surprise and I was instantly in love. The movie is only okay, but Dietrich is incredible. I'm hooked.

Sudden Fear is a later Joan Crawford vehicle starring a past-her-prime Crawford and a supposedly charismatic and charming Jack Palance (!). For me the film failed on all counts, except that it features the compelling-yet-irritating Gloria Grahame (who I grudgingly love). I don't like Joan Crawford; I've decided. I know it's, like, sacrilege, or something. ...And here's the thing: I don't think it's a rational dislike of Crawford. I think I dislike her because Bette Davis so disliked her. As one of my co-workers said, I should start to hate half of old-Hollywood if my loyalty runs so deep: Ms. Davis could've paved a street with the names of people she despised, but I really think that's it. Still it isn't rational. I love Celeste Holm and Ms. Davis loathed her, so... I have no explanation other than I think Ms. Crawford can't act for shit, doesn't particularly have nice legs (a feature with which Sudden Fear seemed obsessed) and isn't particularly pretty--by any yardstick. Sue me in gay court later.

I really liked Jason Reitman's Thank You for Smoking. I thought it was very, very funny in an offbeat, irreverent, punishing sort of way and the script is really clever. The acting is good, for the most part, with some excellent performances from Robert Duvall and Maria Bello, especially. I loved the kid, too: Cameron Bright (from the lackluster Birth). Mostly this is just a funny, funny movie. Three things, though: 1) Katie Holmes looks like a little kid. I cannot believe her in any role. I couldn't believe her as a lawyer in Batman Begins, and I didn't buy her for a second as a reporter in Thank You for Smoking. She looks like she couldn't even buy a pack of smokes if she wanted to. 2) My boy Aaron Eckhart's hair. Couldn't they have hired someone to fix it. It looked awful throughout and he tried, like, three different styles. The last thing 3) is my favorite performance in the film: Adam Brody as Rob Lowe's assistant. He plays the role perfectly, with excellent timing and an excitement I am unused to seeing.

George Cukor's Born Yesterday features the performance that beat both Bette Davis's All About Eve turn as Margo Channing and Gloria Swanson's genius turn as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. I have generally avoided Born Yesterday for this reason (more solidarity with Ms. Davis: see above). But I was mistaken. This one's a crowd pleaser. The script is wonderful and Judy Holliday is absolutely wonderful. I adored her character and fell in love with her. It's a great star turn and worthy of all its accolades.

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle Rouge is the epitome of cool. I liked it even better than Le Samouraï. It's not quite as good as Army of Shadows, but, then, few films are. I find Melville's ideas about the prices men have to pay for the things they do slightly objectionable. I prefer Woody Allen's ideas about men (i.e. I like them to get away with things.) The films are so cool, though, that Melville has to be forgiven. Watch Le Cercle Rouge and your teeth will hurt the movie is so fucking cool. I swear to god.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a sort-of remake of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, the film on which Todd Haynes based his gorgeous Far from Heaven. Fassbinder's film is beautiful and ugly, harsh, soft, shocking, horrifying, sad and dificult all at the same time. I became connected to the characters instantly and the emotional work that Fassbinder is doing is undeniable, but his filmmaking skill is so pronounced, his language so stark and stunning and his references to Sirk so clear, that it's hard not to pay attention to the look of the film and let go of the matter of the film. To do so would be to miss so much, though. Ali is a fascinating, subtle tale with much to say about German xenophobia and fear of "the other" in general.

I'm not sure why everyone is so apeshit about Jean-Luc Godard's À Bout de Souffle (Breathless). It's good, sure, and it's cool. Maybe I'm too old. The only thing I really loved about it was the ending, which is really quiet and subtle... I think that's what I don't love about the film: I feel like it isn't doing anything very subtle, or perhaps the legacy it has left has so overwhelmed the context of the film that I can't see the forest for the trees. Maybe it's been copied so frequently and so poorly that even the original lacks luster for me.

Okay... last one:

Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential is stupid. I may have laughed a couple of times. When it is exploring the nature of art and asking us what is good and what isn't, I found the film really interesting, but all of the silliness and its ludicrous cast of characters (every single stereotype imaginable) had no charm for me. I have a lot of bad things to say about this movie: almost nothing good in fact, so I'll shut up now. Suffice to say that I didn't like the film at all. Max Minghella is a cutie, but I hope he sticks to better stuff than this in future. And I so liked Ghost World...