From 42nd Street

My favorite part of 42nd Street is when Ned Sparks, one of the producers, says of one of the other producers: "I don't like his face or any part of him. He looks like a Bulgarian boll weevil mourning its firstborn."

And then... mostly I thought this movie was pretty awful. It's terribly directed – the ending happens without any warning at all and without tying up two of the main storylines – and the two big musical numbers which close the show have nothing to do with anything, do not include both of the romantic leads, and generally make no sense. (Now, I don't always expect a musical number to make sense, but as the penultimate scene of a movie?)

I, of course, love Warner Baxter and George Brent. And Bebe Daniels, whose star faded pretty soon after 42nd Street, is just fabulous in this film - her drunk scene is absolutely amazing.

I am also a fan of Dick Powell, and the supporting cast is pretty uniformly good, but Ruby Keeler? She's awful. I am probably going to see Gold Diggers of 1933 in a week or two, and she's in that too, so I guess I will have another chance to see what she can do, but so far I just don't get it. She's flat and boring and just not that interesting. She dances beautifully, but next to a diva like Bebe Daniels, she looks like someone who could never have made it as a Hollywood star.

The important thing here is that the synopsis of this film says it is a Dick Powell-Ruby Keeler romance. It's not. It's a backstage musical with a single Busby Berkeley, ten storylines, and a romantic plot about George  Brent and Bebe Daniels (which is actually interesting).

Lest I sound like too much of a curmudgeon, 42nd Street did give us this fabulous song, and for that we should be grateful:

From The Smiling Lieutenant

Claudette Colbert: So you... play the piano.
Maurice Chevalier: Mmmhmm.
Claudette Colbert: Some day we may have... a duet...?
Maurice Chevalier: I love chamber music.

Bullhead

For a while, as I was watching Michaël Roskam's Bullhead, I thought that the film I was watching was a kind of artfully done melodrama – something like Götz Spielmann's Revanche, which got lots of great reviews and which I liked but didn't quite love. And for a while, Bullhead is precisely that: an artfully made melodrama.

And then something breaks in the film, or lurches. Roskam's film is able to describe – in a moment that I found totally unexpected and in clear filmic language – an event that is horrific and unspeakable. It is an event that is small, really, but which has an absolutely enormous emotional impact. This is something that will stay with me for a long time.

This event, however, doesn't really change the way that the film is attempting to function, and Bullhead stays a kind of melodrama, a film about a man's suffering and his inability to make his life work. The characters in the film's present day are all the same as the characters in the film's flashback sequences; they're just twenty years older now. It's a narrative we've seen before: young man cannot reconcile his own past; his past comes back to haunt him anyway.

Bullhead is also a crime thriller, a story about gangsters. And the flashback sequences, which happen quite early in the film, give us a backstory that makes whatever is to come  in the movie feel completely unpredictable. This is a man whose motives we do not understand, whose pain we cannot comprehend, whose actions we cannot anticipate. It makes the main character (his name is Jacky, but the police surveillance team calls him "Rundskop" / "Bullhead" in Flemish Dutch) absolutely terrifying. He's not scary in a traditional way either. He's scary rather like Ryan Gosling is in Drive – although this character is more lost, more confused, simply more stupid than Drive's protagonist.

Matthias Schoenaerts is absolutely phenomenal. I loved this character, and yet I knew he would do the wrong thing while trying to do the right thing. I never knew what he was going to do next, but I wished I could help him. This is a man who is simply caught in a trap – like so many cattle being led to slaughter. (The bulls are a central metaphor in Bullhead, but their metaphoric presence never overpowers, never feels contrived.)

And then, all of a sudden, Roskam's film is so much more than a simple or even a complex melodrama. It becomes clear in act three that everything from the film's first two acts was all about class. The people who carry the guns are the people in power, sure, but power differentials in mafia circles work in similar ways to power differentials in places like chic Belgian clubs where the owner makes you buy a dress shirt at the door or boutiques devoted entirely to luxuries like perfume.

Bullhead is a film made in Flanders, and the movie nods explicitly to the old tradition of Flemish landscape painting. Think of work like this:

Roskam shoots these kinds of landscapes (complete with bovine inhabitants) as a backdrop to his scenes with his protagonist, and each time he does this it felt to me as though he was recalling a history of the land in which his story took place. These views struck me not as nostalgic ways of looking at Flanders but rather as images of the Flanders that we think we know – tourist images from the history of European painting. The rest of the film is a battleground, filled with unimaginable violence and unexpected brutality.

I don't want to spoil Bullhead any more than I already have – and my narrative here omits the other character, le doulos, who is central to the film's story – but I want also to say that this film's ending is just superb. I needed to take a walk outside after it was over.

If you can handle the violence, I cannot recommend this film enough.

Sally

There is, perhaps, a lot to say about Sally and its preservation by Warner Bros, but you should read about it here instead of listening to me talk about it.

Sally itself is mostly unremarkable, but it's interesting enough as far as film history goes, particularly for its star, Marilyn Miller.

Aside from the dancing, Sally features extended comic sequences starring the very funny Joe E. Brown (you will remember him as the gentleman who says "Nobody's perfect!" at the end of Some Like It Hot). In one of these sequences, he plants a kiss on the straightman T. Roy Barnes. It is a bizarre, funny sequence, and immediately after the kiss, both men wipe their mouths and Barnes lights a match or something in order to clear the air (this part is in a long shot, so I couldn't quite tell what he was doing).

Anyway, check this out:

Strange, huh?

1920s cinema just keeps surprising me lately.

More from the Romans

Some random quotations from the six plays of Terence (which I've been reading this week):

From the Andria:
SIMO: Boys who are having an affair always take it hard when they're made to marry.
DAVOS: So they say.

From the Hecyra:
PHILOTIS: What's that you're saying? A boy went to bed with a girl, when he'd had plenty to drink, and managed to keep his hands off her? That's not a plausible story.

From the Hecyra:
PHIDIPPUS: I knew he had a mistress long before you did, Myrrina. But I've never judged that to be a fault in a boy; it comes naturally to them. The day will certainly soon come, though, when he even hates himself for it.

From the Heauton Timorumenos:
CHREMES: I'm a man; I don't regard any man's affairs as not concerning me.

From the Heauton Timorumenos:
SYRUS: The highest legalism is often the lowest cunning.

From the Phormio:
DEMIPHO: A man returning from abroad should always expect his son to have behaved badly, or his wife to have died.

From the Phormio:
CHREMES: Old age itself is an illness.

From the Phormio:
NAUSISTRATA: I wish I'd been born a man; I'd have shown him –

(It is clear to me that this sentence was repeated nearly word for word by Shakespeare in Much Ado about Nothing.)

From the Adelphoe:
MICIO: Is there a tart hereabouts that he hasn't had an affair with?

From the Adelphoe:
SYRUS: It was your fault!
SANNIUS: What should I have done?
SYRUS: You ought to have been obliging to the young man.
SANNIUS: How could I have been more obliging? I only made my face his punch-bag, didn't I?

From the Adelphoe:
HEGIO: As slaves go, he's not bad. And he's competent.

From the Adelphoe:
SYRUS: Can't you say you were giving them some help?
CTESIPHO: When I wasn't? It can't be done.
SYRUS: ... Yes it can.

***
Reading Terence was fun. These plays were read by nearly all the important playwrights in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, and this becomes apparent while reading the texts. I saw Shakespearean flourishes over and over as I read; John Ford uses Terentian names in his plays; Molière explicitly adapted these dramas; and any reading of Ben Jonson must also credit Terence as his obvious predecessor.

It is one thing to know this from theatre history books but quite another thing altogether to really sit with an author like this and get to know his work.

Also: ancient attitudes about rape are fascinating. Half of these plays involves a young man who has raped a young lady. In each case no one seems really to mind that he has raped her. Ancient Rome. So interesting.

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.

The Dark

Why Are Your Poems So Dark?
By Linda Pastan

Isn't the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn't the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn't banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
"Why are you sad so often?"

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.

The Man with the Golden...

Has anyone noticed the gay subtext in The Man with the Golden Arm? Surely essays must've been written about this before.

Frank Sinatra is a drug-addicted poker dealer, but the way director Otto Preminger frames the drug use in the film is always in this erotic way. For one, the dope dealer always injects the heroin for Frank, and this means that they're A) always doing drugs together and B) that they're in a small room with the shades pulled. It's all very erotic. And because the dealer is trying to get Frank hooked again, he keeps saying things like "I'll be waiting" and "Just come up to my place" and "You know you want it." It's exactly like an affair.

So late in the film, Frank is dying for a fix, and he barges in on the dealer (played by Darren McGavin) and because I'm all into this subtext, I'm chuckling to myself about how sexy the whole thing is.

McGavin and Sinatra have just come back from some card game that lasted like twenty-eight hours or something, and McGavin is tired and undressing in the room, while Frank, going totally out of his mind for the fix, is rolling up his sleeves. At the same time, McGavin (who is obviously the villain in this film) is gloating, saying things like "oh, wow, it wears off quickly for you now," and "we'll have to try something new" or something to that effect.

And I'm thinking, all that needs to happen now is for McGavin to take his shirt off and Frank to promise him sex. And then:

I mean, the drugs are not really a metaphor for homosexual sex in The Man with the Golden Arm as much as they are the same thing as homosexual sex.

And as soon as Darren McGavin is out of the picture (permanently) Frank is able to kick his drug habit. He wasn't a sucker for the drugs so much as he was a sucker for what McGavin had to offer.

Someone else has to have written about this.

Incidentally, you can watch this movie in its entirety for free online, but you should start with the totally awesome opening credits sequence by Saul Bass:

And check out the entirety of the all-jazz score here if you have Spotify.

Love Poem

My friend Michael shared this on tumblr a few weeks ago and I haven't been able to loosen its grip on me, so I thought I would (re)share it on here.

LOVE POEM
by Linda Pastan

I want to write you
a love poem as headlong
as our creek
after thaw
when we stand
on its dangerous
banks and watch it carry
with it every twig
every dry leaf and branch
in its path
every scruple
when we see it
so swollen
with runoff
that even as we watch
we must grab
each other
and step back
we must grab each
other or
get our shoes
soaked we must
grab each other



Yes.

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while. I am trying to keep this head above water in whatever way possible. Soon.

Tyrannosaur's Wrecks

Sometimes it doesn't matter how well a movie is made, or how much a movie impresses me.

I thought Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur was unsparing, beautifully shot, excellently acted, skillfully directed, timely, fascinating, and surprising, as well as sensitive, intelligent, and very, very sad.

Which doesn't really mean that I liked it. Yes, it is all of those things, and actually, I did like it, but it's the sort of bleak movie that doesn't let a person go after it's over. I might even feel a little depressed by Tyrannosaur. And, honestly, the film is not totally without hope, so I am not sure why I am finding so affecting.

Maybe it's that I've been watching so many war-effort films from the 1940s and so I wasn't really prepared for the brutality of a film about today, or maybe it's that I read a disturbing play today and just couldn't handle so much violence in one twenty-four-hour period. I'm not sure. But no matter what it is that's making me so sensitive today, I appreciated Tyrannosaur, but I don't think I'll be recommending it to anyone I know. It's a serious film, with some great performances, but it packs a real wallop, so enter with care.

But that poster! Can we talk about that? It's fantastic!!

Seneca on Anger

Instead of writing this article about pornography that I'm supposed to be writing, and instead of editing my dissertation (which I kind of need to do), I felt like reading Senecan philosophy. There's a series out by the University of Chicago Press that proposes to publish the Complete Works of Seneca in new, exciting translations, and I couldn't help but buy myself the volume Anger, Mercy, Revenge, which, as it happens, is pretty much ancient Roman violence theory. What a delight! Seneca, the famous Stoic philosopher, relates wisdom such as:

Missiles rebound from a hard surface, and solid objects, when struck, cause pain to the one striking them; just so, injury cannot cause a great spirit to feel it, because it is more fragile than the thing it attacks. How much finer it is to rebuff all injuries and insults, as though impervious to any missile! To take vengeance is to acknowledge pain: a great spirit is not bowed down by a wrong. The one who has harmed you is either stronger or weaker than you: if he's weaker, give him a break; if he's stronger, give yourself a break.

Later, he relates this story:

When Plato was angry with his slave, he couldn't get himself to grant a delay but ordered the slave to doff his tunic and offer his back for lashes, which he intended to administer with his own hand. After he realized he was angry, just as he raised his hand, he kept it raised in midair and stood there like someone poised to strike; then when a friend who happened on the scene asked him what he was doing, he said, "I'm punishing an angry man." Like someone paralyzed, he maintained the pose—grotesque for a wise man—of someone on the verge of savagery, having now forgotten the slave because he'd found another more deserving of rebuke.

Seneca's writings are filled with these tiny wise tales, and much sound philosophy. Reading him is also giving me a much fuller picture of what this ancient playwright was like – his plays are brutal grotesqueries, though his philosophy is restrained and generous. Such a complicated man deserves a much more full reading than what I have known up until now about his work.

Spillin' Tea

The title of this blog (tea to pour) comes from slang for sharing gossip. Among gay Southerners, pouring tea means dishing the dirt or telling tales about other people. Sometimes a bit of good gossip is described as hot, as in:

Girl, this tea is hot, you better sit down.

And sometimes people who can't keep their mouths shut when they ought to know better are referred to as spilling, as in:

That old queen was spilling the tea all over until I dragged her onto the lanai and told her to shut it.

All of this as a (gay) prelude to this song, in which tea gets two shouts-out if you're listening. I know I don't normally post music (because, frankly, I am never up to date), but this is just too good.

Anderson for Youngsters

While Wes Anderson's last film, which I loved, was definitely a movie for children, his new film Moonrise Kingdom, is a film that is about children. Moonrise has really got me thinking more about all of Anderson's output as films about childhood.

(This is sort of a duh moment for me, actually. 

Of course they are all films about childhood.)

At any rate, Moonrise has some of the usual suspects in the Wes Anderson universe and some new faces, as well. Bruce Willis is excellent. Edward Norton is better than I've seen him in a long time as an ineffectual and rather depressed boy scout leader, and Tilda Swinton plays it completely straight (and typically intense) as a social services worker who goes by the name "Social Services" for the entirety of the film.

It's a very funny movie, of course, and quirky in the standard (but completely endearing) Wes Anderson way. I enjoyed the whole thing. The film has a kind of omniscient narrator who is in the film and played hilariously by Bob Balaban. It's all charming and quirky and overly clever, but it also – and this is the surprising part – avoids treating childhood in a whimsical or nostalgic way. Anderson's kids are occasionally violent; they are complicated and mysterious, and they make decisions through circuitous trains of thought. One of the things I really loved about the movie is that it treats children neither as miniature adults nor as uncomplicated heroes (I'm thinking particularly of the films of David Yates).

And then there's the music. Music is always noticeable in Anderson's movies, and Moonrise Kingdom is no exception. The film opens with Benjamin Britten's "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra", and ends with a kind of Young Person's Guide to Alexandre Desplat's Score. Britten recurs and important places in the movie's narrative, as well. Anderson has some of the characters perform in Britten's opera Noye's Fludde, and because the plot is about young love, the two-by-two idea of Noah's Ark resonates nicely, and then... the film also includes its own flood. The whole thing fits together beautifully.

Also: here's a little Moonrise Kingdom commercial...

Cousin Ben Troop Screening with Jason Schwartzman from Jason Schwartzman

More on Prometheus

From the brain of Justin Michael via the always-clever Kevin Manwarren:

Stanley Kubrick Filmography

Well, this is beautiful.