The Screengrab : barbara stanwyck

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

MIRANDA AND STEVE, SEX & THE CITY (2008)

So, you know that whole thing about how men and women are different? Well, here’s a good example: for women, last year’s big-screen adaptation of the beloved HBO estrogen-fest was a feel-good romantic comedy, while for many straight guys, it was nothing short of torture-porn. And no, I’m not talking about Kim Cattrall’s sex-positive female drag queen Samantha, who got all the best lines and looked pretty damn hot wearing nothing but sushi. And I’m certainly not talking about the sweet pairing of Kristin Davis’ ray-of-sunshine Charlotte and her frog-prince fellah, Harry (the closest thing in the Sex-iverse to a normal, healthy relationship...albeit one padded by Davis’ relentlessly cheery demeanor, perfect cheekbones and boundless Upper East Side gelt). I’m not even talking about SJP’s Carrie and Chris Noth’s Mr. Big, two gigantic pains in the butt who truly deserve each other. No, the couple that curdles my gonads even worse than Norman Bates and his mama in Psycho or Kathy Bates and James Caan in Misery is, yes, Steve and Miranda, that terrifying nightmare combo of pussy man and man-eating pussy. David Eigenberg’s Steve is every spineless masochist convinced that low self-esteem = sensitivity, while Cynthia Nixon’s endlessly miserable harridan Miranda is the sort of castrating, ball-busting career woman stereotype that men get branded as chauvinists for perpetuating and women (at least Sex & The City fans) somehow find empowering. After months of celibacy and endless abuse, Steve finally cheats on Miranda, who subsequently withholds even more sex and unleashes even more abuse in retaliation, until she finally deigns to forgive Steve at a meeting in the middle of the usually romantic Brooklyn Bridge. But my only thought as I watched Steve (through my fingers) approaching his awful, awful wife was, “NO, STEVE! NO!!! RUN AWAY!!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!!” But Steve didn’t listen. Characters in horror movies never do.

HARRY LIME & ANNA SCHMIDT, THE THIRD MAN (1949)

Technically, as poisonous as it is, this shouldn’t be listed as one of the most toxic romantic duos in screen history; it really needs to be considered as a romantic triangle. In brief: Holly Martins is Harry Lime’s best friend, and Anna Schmidt is Harry Lime’s best girl. Holly Martins begins to suspect that Harry Lime is not such a swell fellow after all – as, not coincidentally, he begins to suspect that Anna Schmidt would be better off with him, anyway. Holly learns that Harry is a heel, but Anna not only doesn’t rush into the tender and loving arms of the upstanding Holly – she doesn’t give him the least bit of play, and goes on loving Harry even after it becomes clear to everyone that Harry didn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. There’s so much more to this amazing, groundbreaking noir film than that, but the impossibly frustrating relationship between the three people forever remains at the center of it: Harry’ selfish, caddish treatment of the people he claims to love; Anna’s impossible devotion to a man who loves her but never as much as he does himself; and Holly’s shock at the betrayal of his friend – and even greater shock at how Anna doesn’t react in the same way as he does to that betrayal. The Third Man is filled with moving, telling moments that portray both the depth and the damage of the relationship, from Harry doodling love notes to Anna in the window of a Ferris wheel to Anna’s heartbreaking long walk at the end. What makes it even more astonishing is that the movie accomplishes all this while never even showing us Harry and Anna in the same room together.

SID & NANCY, SID & NANCY (1986)

He was the immature, unstable bassist for chaotic punk pioneers The Sex Pistols. She was a shrill American obsessed with the band. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen’s love affair was one for the anarchic ages, a relationship forged by heroin and defined by violence and pathetic need. Ending in 1978 when Sid stabbed Nancy to death in New York City’s famed Chelsea hotel, followed a year later by his own fatal overdose while awaiting trial for her murder, their amour was of a blisteringly dysfunctional sort, and depicted by director Alex Cox with squalid, impassioned romanticism in 1986’s Sid & Nancy. Electrified by dual lead performances from Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb that reek of grungy, rancid desperation, Cox’s love story is a magnetic spectacle of sordid self-immolation, a tale of love’s consuming, destructive potential which the director – capturing both the intoxicating fervor of Sid and Nancy’s mutual infatuation and the foulness of their junkie downfall – depicts with equal parts disgust, pity and compassion.

AOYAMA & ASAMI, AUDITION (1999)

A lonely widower with a young son, TV producer Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is convinced by a friend to stage phony auditions in the hopes of finding a new spouse. That process leads him to Asami (Eihi Shiina), a prim, dainty, mysterious beauty to whom he grows dreamily attached over the course of a few dates. As implied by a scene in which she waits patiently by the phone for Aoyama’s call, Asami isn’t exactly what she seems. And neither, it turns out, is Takeshi Miike’s film, commencing like a patient, thoughtful Yasujiro Ozu-inflected domestic-drama meditation on marriage, responsibility and social pressures, and then shifting gears to become something far more unnerving. None of the director’s subtle hints at forthcoming horrors quite prepare one for the stunningly disturbing finale, which not only involves the immediate end of Aoyama and Asami’s relationship, but – viciously building upon their romance’s unequal economic, social and gender dynamics – reveals the film to be a proto-feminist nightmare custom-engineered to scar the male psyche.

WALTER NEFF & PHYLLIS DIETRICHSON, DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)

In noir, love and sexual desire are equally deadly, driving men (noble or corrupt) to throw caution to the wind and take risks that invariably spell their doom. A prototypical example of that recklessness is the case of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), an insurance salesman whose routine life is plunged into deadly disarray by Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), a platinum blonde beauty whose body goes vroom-vroom-vroom and whose eyes promise an early grave. When Phyllis asks Walter how she might take out a policy on her husband’s life without actually informing him about it, the agent balks, but such initial protestations are as sturdy as wisps of smoke, and it’s not long before the smitten Walter is knee-deep in a scheme to knock off Phyllis’ spouse and run away with her and the substantial insurance payout. As is customary in the doom-laden genre, however, all that awaits the couple is tragedy, Neff’s ignominious end a result of fate’s cruel hand and, just as fundamentally, a foolhardy romantic fantasy unattainable in a cold, indifferent world.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

The Rep Report (February 6 - 13)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Film Forum's lollapallooza four-week series "Breadlines & Champagne" lays out an awesome spread of 1930s Hollywood entertainments that might come in handy if you're looking to get some tips on how to handle the death of your stock portfolio with a little grace. In Guy Maddin's nostalgia-drenched The Saddest Music in the World (2003), a brash player in the contest to select the titular song promises to deliver "sadness with some sass and pizazz", and that's how the best early talking pictures responded to hard times, whether it took the form of mixing romance with wisecracks and slapstick (as in My Man Godfrey and the Preston Sturges-scripted Easy Living), hard-boiled tabloid melodrama (such as Night Nurse with Barbara Stanwyck and Three on a Match with a coke-crazed Ann Dvorak), and such varieties of escapism as the Mae West vehicle I'm No Angel and the bug-eyed Busby Berkeley musical Gold Diggers of 1933. Say hello to the bad guy with Little Caesar and the original Scarface; proclaim Hallelujah, I'm a Bum with an exuberant Al Jolson, and show up every Tuesday to participate in the free drawings as Film Forum revives the Depression tradition of Bank Night. These movies are reminders of a time when Americans saw themselves as all being in the soup together and managed to shave enough off the hard-won grocery money to come out to see movies that addressed their problems, both personal and societal, with an insouciant, nose-thumbing attitude and a can-do spirit. Of course, those Americans never dreamed that their great-grandhildren would someday queue up to pay twelve dollars for a movie ticket.

From February 6 through the 19th, Film Society of Lincoln Center remembers "Oscar Micheaux and Black Pre-War Cinema". Long a forgotten and even much-mocked figure, Micheaux has been unearthed in recent years as a pioneering African-American movie mogul and showman, a writer turned filmmaker who began his career with a film based on his own successful novel, The Homesteader. "Unhappily," the theater notes, "few of the films by Micheaux or his contemporaries—Spencer Williams, Richard Norman, Richard Maurice, William Alexander, and many others—have survived in pristine condition. The scratched, sometimes faded copies we’ll be showing are, for the moment, all that is available." But the fact that watching some of these movies now is like seeing something freshly recovered from a tomb may only enhance the alternative-universe-eye view that is part of their incalcuable historical value. Mixed in are some of the earliest attempts by white Hollywood to utilize the talent of black performers, including King Vidor's Hallelujah and Vincente Minnelli's endlessly enjoyable 1943 Cabin in the Sky, a pedestal to the sky-high talent of such entertainers as Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, and the peerless song and dance man John W. Bubbles.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

5. KATHARINE HEPBURN (1907-2003)

Given her longevity, and her four Academy Awards (out of a total twelve nominations), it's easy to forget what a tough time of it Hepburn had early in her career. With the aristocratic-goddess bone structure that was built to last and the tremulous voice and her no-nonsense regal quality and the tall frame and strapping physicality that went with it, she stood apart from the run of Hollywood ingenues in the 1930s: a Fox News commentator would proclaim her "elitist"-like. (In her first movie, she played John Barrymore's daughter. In her first Oscar-winning role, in Morning Glory, she played an ambitious young actress who cares more about her career than about finding love with Mr. Right -- exactly what the mass audience had been indoctrinated to view as an unsympathetic character.) She had great successes in such comedies as Bringing Up Baby and Alice Adams, but there was always a love-hate relationship going on with her and the movie audience, and after a string of flops (which included a number of deadly costume dramas but also the inventive and risky Sylvia Scarlett, where she was in male drag for most of the picture) got her designated box office poison by distributor's groups. She retreated to Broadway and came back in the film version of the hit play The Philadelphia Story -- which made her bigger than ever, but in a comedy whose point was partly to bring her down a peg. Her character there has to be humiliated a little so that she can be humanized and become more of a regular Josephine Sixpack, an idea that was also a constant of the many, mostly dull movies she made with Spencer Tracy. She left a more durable image co-starring with Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen -- a comic marriage of mismatched equals -- and in the very fine 1962 version of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. She spent much of her last several years tending to her image and the images of those closest to her in a string of books and interviews.

4. ELIZABETH TAYLOR (1932 - )

Taylor is one of those rare larger-than-life legends (not a fat joke!) who packed seven or eight careers into a lifetime. Or was it seven or eight marriages? Actually it was both (for the record, the total is eight marriages, seven husbands), and though her offscreen exploits always threatened to overshadow her movie career, there can be no denying her place in the pantheon of leading ladies. She became a star at twelve years old in National Velvet, making fans of young girls, adolescent boys and dirty old men as fresh-faced, buxom horse trainer Velvet Brown. She transitioned into adult roles through the original Father of the Bride and its sequel, but it was 1951's A Place in the Sun that set her on the path to superstardom. She was the first actor to crack the million dollar mark in salary for the title role in Cleopatra, which turned out to be a disaster of biblical proportions. She emerged unscathed, more famous than ever, although that had as much to do with her tumultuous marriage to co-star Richard Burton as her onscreen work. Taylor was always renowned more for her beauty and glamour than her acting talent, until those attributes began to fade in the late '60s. She emerged as a terrifying, emasculating force of nature in Reflections in a Golden Eye with Marlon Brando and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Burton, winning her second Academy Award for the latter (she'd earlier won for Butterfield 8). After that, her film career was more miss than hit, but she did have two indelible moments on the small screen: she cursed Luke and Laura on their wedding day in the most-watched episode of General Hospital in 1981, and she was the voice of baby Maggie in a 1992 episode of The Simpsons.

3. INGRID BERGMAN (1915-1982)

At a time when an actress could still seriously damage her career by having an extramarital affair, Ingrid Bergman jeopardized a reputation as one of the greatest of all Hollywood stars by falling in love with Italian director Roberto Rossellini, by whom she soon became pregnant. While most Europeans shrugged with indifference (Bergman continued making films in Italy to great acclaim), America went apeshit, and for several years, the moralistic fervor of the ‘50s cost us the good graces of one of the shining lights of cinema. Bergman was simply too good for this world; when she finally died in 1982, she was assumed directly into Heaven, where God immediately put her to work making a sequel to Casablanca and gave St. Peter a dirty look for even daring to mention her affair behind closed doors. She was always something special, even in the early days: she was tall and striking in an era of waifs, she rarely wore makeup in an era of kohl and lipstick, and she remained resolutely Ingmar Bergman when Lucy Fay LeSuer was trolling around for a more cinematic name. And, happily for American moviegoers, she was never one to hold grudges: after years of being treated shabbily for the crime of falling in love, she favored us with Anastasia, for which she won her second Academy Award. She always wore her heart on her sleeve, much like many of her most famous characters: when she finally returned to Hollywood in 1958 as an Academy Award presenter, she was given a standing ovation by a crowd who, presumably, couldn’t stand to see her cry.

2. AUDREY HEPBURN (1929-1993)

Audrey Hepburn’s early career was the stuff of Hollywood legend -- plucked from relative obscurity (a handful of minor roles in European films) to star in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday, she proceeded to charm the pants off of moviegoers worldwide, and took home an Oscar for her trouble. Throughout the 1950s, Hepburn sustained the stardom that her breakthrough performance had brought her, using her dancer’s grace and petite, almost elfin beauty to bewitching effect in movies like Billy Wilder’s Sabrina and the musical Funny Face, in which she starred opposite Fred Astaire. But it wasn’t until her performances became a little more melancholy that she revealed what a truly great star she was. 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is fondly-remembered today largely for Hepburn’s turn as the soulful party girl Holly Golightly (and admittedly for Henry Mancini’s score), and she proved surprisingly adept within the thriller framework of Charade and Wait Until Dark. Best of all was Stanley Donen’s Two For the Road as the increasingly dissatisfied wife of Albert Finney, a role that takes her character through the many seasons of a marriage. It’s perhaps her most down-to-earth role; yet at the same time that unmistakable Audrey Hepburn glow is always in abundance. In the last few decades of her career, Hepburn worked sparingly, with memorable roles in Robin and Marian and They All Laughed (let’s forget about the star-studded stink bomb Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, shall we?). But despite being mostly absent from the screen, she remained busy as a fashion icon and goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, all the while raising her children and keeping them largely out of the limelight -- an appropriately graceful life for a star who practically embodied the word.

1. BARBARA STANWYCK (1907-1990)

According to her IMDb bio, Barbara Stanwyck is best remembered today for her work on TV’s The Big Valley and The Colbys. To which we can only say -- what? Any true pop culture maven will at least recognize Stanwyck from her iconic turn as Phyllis Dietrichson, one of the most famously fatale of film noir femmes, and the owner of cinema’s most legendary anklet. And any cinephile worth his salt should be familiar with a number of her priceless comedic roles, particularly the irresistible con artist Jean Harrington in The Lady Eve and gangster’s moll Sugarpuss O’Shea (who else could have pulled off that name?) in Ball of Fire. But lest one think Stanwyck was all about tough-talking dames, there’s also her performance in Sorry, Wrong Number as a bedridden woman who picks up the telephone and overhears two men plotting a murder. In short, Stanwyck was one of classical Hollywood’s most complete stars, male or female. She was equally at home in a racy pre-Code drama (like Ball of Fire, in which she played a shameless social climber) as she was in a Breen Office-approved weepie (King Vidor’s Stella Dallas), and equally adaptable to the worlds of Frank Capra (Meet John Doe), Fritz Lang (Clash by Night), and Sam Fuller (as the “high-ridin’ woman with the whip” Jessica Drummond in Forty Guns). We could keep going, but you get the idea -- Stanwyck was a true-blue movie star to the core, and to suggest that her most memorable roles came on two late-period TV series is tantamount to cinematic blasphemy.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Paul Clark

Home Video Rep Report: "Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

As Paul Clark recently pointed out, this is the week that No Country for Old Men came out on DVD. Which is all well and good, but I just saw it a few months ago. So did you, probably, but when's the last time you saw Clark Gable, in a mondo-bondage chauffeur outfit, punch out Barbara Stanwyck for interfering with his plans to keep their employer drunk so he can starve her children to death, or Humphrey Bogart taking one look at wide-eyed Ann Dvorak and miming sniffing something powdery while flashing his dirtiest grin and snickering, "Uh-oh!" These charming relics of Hollywood's early wildcat period can be found in the new three-disc set Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2, assembled from the vaults of Turner Classic Movies. (Volume One, which came out last year, included the long-lost Stanwyck vehicle Angel Face and the giddily scandalous Jean Harlow movie Red Headed Woman.) The discs provide a handy sampler of what Hollywood comedies and melodramas got into in the Pre-Code days before censors roused the rabble and threw a corset around Mae West. For sheer entertainment value, the new set is worth picking up just for 1931's Night Nurse, the hard-headed, hard-boiled nifty starring Stanwyck, Gable, and the platinum wisecrack dispenser Joan Blondell, and the 1932 Three on a Match, in which Blondell is the smart good girl who gets the guy, Ann Dvorak is the good-time girl who doesn't appreciate the guy, and Bette Davis is the one who makes contemporary audiences go, "Jesus Christ, Ann Dvorak makes Bette Davis look like a whipped mouse!" Match makes the case that the cult icon Dvorak, best remembered now as Paul Muni's sister in the original Scarface, deserves to be remembered as the quivering embodiment of the Pre-Code spirit. In the inevitable TCM documentary that's included in the DVD set, she's likened to a sputtering live wire, and she seems to be having a more exciting time than anyone else onscreen whether she's resisting temptation (which was something she never did for long), giving in to temptation (diving in with both feet), or paying for her sins by diving out a window with instructions to the police written on her nightie with lipstick.

The set also includes two Norma Shearer pictures, The Divorcee, which won the boring old thing an Academy Award for Best Actress of 1930, and A Free Soul, which came out the next year and won a Best Actor Award for Lionel Barrymore, who played her father. As that data may suggest, these were A-pictures in their day, but they don't hold up as well as the B's do. But they do have some historical interest, in part because they reveal what people who thought they were looking for something wild and steamy but who couldn't deal with the sight of Ann Dvorak in full writhe were prepared to settle for. Coiffed and dressed to the nines, Shearer could pass for a pretty hot number, though she could never act for shit, and the whole point of her pictures was to let her get just enough of a whiff of liberated hedonism to get her to run back to hubby and daddy. Like Night Nurse, A Free Soul is notable for bottling the dirty essence of Pre-Code Clark Gable, who is once again cast as a magnetic crook who keeps a highborn gal, Shearer, in sexual thrall, to the point that her fiancee. Leslie Howard, is obliged to shoot the blighter. (After that, Barrymore, a lawyer, is obliged to defend Howard in court by telling the jury that none of this would have happened if he'd just had the foresight to lock his daughter in the bedroom until her hormones settled down.) Also included is Female (1932), which stars Ruth Chatterton as a rich car company owner whose casual affair with George Brent turns all serious and shit. It falls between the two stools set by Dvorak and Shearer; Chatterton gets to have some fun early on treating her employee pool as her own personal stud stable, but by the end she's imploring Brent not just to marry her but to take charge of her company so she'll be free to stay at home and turn out enough kids that they can start their own baseball team.

Romantic Comedies: Where's the Love?

Phil Nugent — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

A. O. Scott contemplates the decline of the Hollywood romantic comedy and wonders how it is that so rich and noble a genre, a form used by Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch to fully explore the complexities and frustrations of love's pursuit and all its attending derangements, could have degenerated into a way to grind out fodder to fill theaters in the late-winter season and keep Kate Hudson employed. Compared to those earlier great works, "the dry martinis of the past have been sweetened and diluted. We emerge lulled and soothed, but rarely intoxicated." Sure, some of this is the nostalgia talking, but it's not as if the man doesn't have a big ol' point. For some "stars", such as Hudson (and Matthew McConaughey, her co-star in the new Fool's Gold), steady work in such movies as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Alex and Emma, Raising Helen and Failure to Launch — paper-thin flicks just passing through theaters on their way to steady rotation on cable — is the movie equivalent to being a cast regular on one of those TV series, such as Wings or Coach, that seem to stay on the air for fifteen years even though you've never met anyone who watches it. What's depressing is how the ambition seems to have leaked out of the genre, and not just ambitious filmmaking, but any ambitions regarding serious romance.

In the glittering surface of classic screwball comedy, this ambitiousness was most obviously expressed in torrents of language. In Sturges's The Lady Eve Henry Fonda tells Barbara Stanwyck, "Every time I've looked at you here on the boat it wasn't only here I saw you: you seemed to go way back…I know that isn't clear but I saw you here and at the same time further away and then still further away and then very small…like converging perspective lines… no, that isn't it, more like figures following each other in a forest glade. Only way back there you were a little girl in short dresses with your hair falling on your shoulders, in the middle distance your hair is up but you're still gawky like a colt…then when you get nearer you look more like you do now, except not so pretty…but I've only told you half of it, because way back there a little boy is standing with you, holding your hand, and in the middle distance I'm still with you, not holding your hand anymore because it isn't manly, but wanting to. And then still nearer we look terrible: you with your legs like a colt and mine like a calf…what I'm trying to say, only I'm not a poet I'm an ophiologist, is that I've always loved you. I mean I've never loved anyone but you. I suppose that sounds as dull as a drugstore novel, and what I see inside I'll never be able to cast into words…but that's what I mean. I wish we were married and on our honeymoon." And he's supposed to be one of the inarticulate ones! Then there's Unfaithfully Yours, the conductor hero played by Rex Harrison, upon learning that his brother-in-law has hired a private detective to keep an eye on his wife, lashes out: "No man who employs detectives should ever be disappointed. I hope every time you've engaged these vermin you've discovered you had antlers out to here, that you were the laughing stock of the city, and that you came crawling out of the agency your face aflame, your briefcase stuffed with undeniable evidence of your multiple betrayal, dishonor dripping from your ears like garlands of seaweed," and responds to the man's offer to "forgive your insults" by saying, "I forbid you to forgive me anything on any grounds whatsoever and I may still punch you in the nose at any instant! Now go away and never speak to me again unless it is in some public place where your silence might cause comment and embarrassment to our wives." Given special tutoring and help from a CGI effects team, could Matthew McConaughey say all that? Maybe in a month's time, if you let him take a break every three words to fortify himself with bong hits.

Of course, while a glib tongue may be of great use in courting ladies fair [insert joke here], it's not the only thing. Still, it's sobering how little some of the people in these current movies are willing to settle for. In Fool's Gold, McConaughey is good-looking, dim-witted, lucky, and probably a fun guy to have a beer with. Just because these are the qualities Tim Russert looks for in a president, are they really all you could ask for in a fantasy boyfriend? Hudson is actually chastised for expecting or wanting more — though it's not clear that she wouldn't find all that perfectly satisfactory if it just came yoked to a shitload of money. In the great romantic comedies, the hero and heroine test each other, challenge each other, ultimately prove that each is special enough to deserve the other. For filmmakers who prize niceness above everything else, this may smack of bad sexual politics. But even if there's some hostility in the concept of romance as a challenge, seeing the leads prove themselves worth of the challenge made for a payoff that was worth it. In most of what passes for romantic comedy nowadays, the hero and heroine are resigned to ending up together because they're the best-looking people onscreen, and have nothing to do but yell and bicker and engage in wacky shenanigans to postpone the inevitable until the picture has achieved feature length. The really unsettling thing about this is that there may be something more to it than a worry in Hollywood that making a movie about people who really seem special, and not just special-looking, might irritate the lumpen drones in the audience. Scott singles Juno out as an example of a movie that does have some of that old magic, and Ellen Page is definitely worth slaying a dragon over, but for some of us, the weirdest thing about that picture is how abnormally reluctant the heroine is to simply admit that she kinda likes the best friend who got her pregnant, even though, as Michael Cera plays the part, he's openly yearning for her to give him a sign that his feeling for her is reciprocated. The fact is that when a modern romantic comedy like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does tap into something imaginative and deeply felt, it often ends inconclusively, if not in outright despair. It's as if the few filmmakers left who want to bring their A-game to this kind of material are also the ones who are too wised-up to believe in happy endings.

Forgotten Films: "Remember the Night" (1940)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Of all the movies that might have become perennial stocking-stuffers over the years, none has been more undeservedly forgotten than the 1940 Remember the Night. The first few times I came across the title, I thought that I'd seen it already, and that it was about the Titanic. Instead, it's a romance starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, four years before their more acidic teaming in Double Indemnity, and directed by Mitchell Leisen, from an original screenplay by Preston Sturges. Three years earlier, Leisen had directed Easy Living, one of the funniest Sturges scripts from before Sturges started directing them himself. This film, though, is less a screwball farce than a gentle comedy than turns more and more into a swooning love story. Luckily, Stanwyck's just-barely meltable hard edge and Stanwyck's way with a wisecrack keep it just this side of mushiness. (The terrific movie blogger the Self-Styled Siren has observed that it was "written soon after Sturges's marriage (his second of four, but a honeymoon's a honeymoon)."

MacMurray plays a hard-nosed assistant D.A. whose last job before Christmas break is to prosecute Stanwyck, a shoplifter. (Explaining why she couldn't just plead to being a kleptomaniac, she sweetly explains, ""You can't try to sell the stuff afterward, or you lose your amateur status.") Recognizing that he's on the verge of losing the jury, MacMurray gets a continuance, figuring that they'll be in a less forgiving mood after the holidays. Then, nagged at by guilt over the thought of the new glittering babe in his life spending Christmas in jail, he bails her out, just so he won't feel like a grinch, yeah, right. He winds up giving her a lift home to see mom for Christmas, planning to drop her off before continuing on his way to his own family get-together, which is presided over by Beulah Bondi. The all-embracing, loving warmth of the MacMurray homestead sometimes threatens to be a bit much, but it's counterbalanced against the cold-eyed cheerlessness of the frost-covered shack from whence Stanwyck's character sprang; the thought of having grown up there is so godawful that the scenes with Ma Bondi couldn't entirely erase the chill if her house was set in front of a butterscotch waterfall with pet unicorns romping on the lawn. Unavailable on video, Remember the Night made its belated debut on Turner Classic Movies last year, and it doesn't seem to have returned this year. But this fine tribute by the aforementioned Siren does much to convey its sweet, distinctive flavor.

Stop Smiling: Hollywood Edish

Peter Smith — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Movie lovers will find a lot to enjoy in Stop Smiling 32, the "Hollywood Lost and Found" issue: interviews with Robert Towne and Robert Evans (not in the same room, thank God) and Bruce Dern, Susan Tyrrell, and Harry Dean Stanton (ditto); film scholar and Los Angeles Plays Itself director Thom Anderson and Diane Keaton offer their takes on L.A.; a Jim Hoberman essay on Sam Fuller's The Steel Helmet, illustrated with pages from Fuller's World War II notebooks; tributes to Barbara Stanwyck, Preston Sturges, Fritz Lang, Louise Brooks, Dorothy Malone, Frank Tashlin, and other worthies; and reflections on the movies by poet John Ashberry and underground comics god Kim Deitch. All this plus a photo, from 1985, of cinematographer Caleb Deschanel letting his tiny daughter, Zooey, take a look through the camera lens, that will redefine your previous conception of the term "Awwwwwwww!!" — Phil Nugent