The Screengrab : jean harlow

Set Your DVR!: May 1 - May 3

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback is a documentary that puts a new spin on the concept of "world music." The Monks consisted of five American GIs who began playing together when they were all stationed in Germany in 1964. It was after they were discharged from the service that they fell in with Walther Niemann and Karl-H. Remy, a couple of artsy types who repackaged them as "the Monks", complete with Friar Tuck haircuts, black clothes, and nooses worn as neckties. The look made it a lot harder to confuse them with the Dave Clark 5, but the Monks already stood apart from the '60s pack for their lack of interest in lush and catchy melodies in favor of a focus on minimalist rhythmic experimentation. Heard today, it's easy to take them for a likely influence on the Velvet Underground and such post-punk giants as Wire and Gang of Four. Both well-informed and worshipful towards its subject, the doc achieves a tone somewhere between a 33 1/3 book and a raving fan who acts as if he's been up for three days, which is kind of appropriate. It makes its cable debut on The Sundance Channel on Friday, May 1, 11:00 PM central/midnight eastern, four days before its release on DVD, and four months after founding member Dave Day died of a heart attack.

This week's "TCM Underground" premiere on Turner Classic Movies is Sam Raimi's 1987 Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn [late Friday night, 1:00 AM central/2:00 AM eastern]. In addition to coming in handy for anyone who just can't wait until the June return of Burn Notice to get their Bruce Campbell fix, it may serve as a reminder to those working on the Farrelly brothers' Three Stooges revival that Raimi and Campbell already did it best, and with just the one actor. TCM Underground has been supplementing its cult beauties with vintage documentary shorts that are apparently chosen for their camp value, but they're following Evil Dead 2 with Changing [2:30 AM central/3:30 AM eastern], a 28-minute, 1971 film, sponsored by "the National Institute of Mental Health", that profiles a working-class family man who's been letting his beard grow out and developing what some around him clearly see as unsettling, radical attitudes; they include treating his wife as an equal partner in their marriage and refusing to work extra shifts because he needs the time to connect with his children. (He also wants to be able to pass a joint around when he's relaxing with his friends but also wants to reserve the right to worry about his kids learning to sniff glue.) The central figure, who today looks like three-quarters of the young male adult population of red state America, expresses disdain about being called a "hippie", and with good reason: he's just an average working stiff who's found that, by adopting some of the healthier changing social attitudes going on around him, he's been able to improve his life, though he's baffled and a little hurt that some people, such as his workplace "family", feel the need to react as if he'd betrayed them and the American Way of Life. If somebody today were to make a fiction film about someone in a similar situation in that place and time, it's hard to imagine it coming out as free of smugness and condescension.

In the mornings to come, TCM is running a few pictures worth seeing that don't happen to be (currently, legally, readily, whatever) available on DVD. The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951) [Saturday, May 2: 5:00 AM central/6 AM eastern] is the prize jewel from Budd Boetticher's career that got left out of last year's box set containing all the director's Westerns with Randolph Scott. Compared to those highly functional, economical B-movies, Bullfighter is a lusher, visually colorful, melodramatic work starring Robert Stack as an American who persuades a celebrated matador (Gilbert Roland) to tutor him as a bullfighter. TCM 's version is a good half hour longer than the version released by the studio, and is an often stirring testimony to the photogenic star power of Gilbert Roland and Mexico itself. Then on Sunday, May 3: 7:00 AM central/8:00 AM eastern, TCM runs Bombshell (1933), with Jean Harlow, Lee Tracy, Frank Morgan, and Franchot Tone, one of the earliest, and funniest, of Hollywood's self-satires.

Yesterday's Hits: The Carpetbaggers (1964, Edward Dmytryk)

Paul Clark — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made The Carpetbaggers a hit?: Americans have long been fascinated with the lifestyles and misadventures of the filthy rich. While the wealthy and powerful may have the same urges and appetites we do, their affluence allows them to exert these on a much grander and more ambitious scale, and in more lavish settings. It was this idea that drove the lurid, sex-soaked novels of Harold Robbins, one of the most popular novelists of the 1950s and 1960s. And for The Carpetbaggers he took his inspiration from perhaps the most famous millionaire of the day, Howard Hughes. Even more than in real life, the book’s Hughes surrogate Jonas Cord Jr. collected companies by day and female conquests by night, with no regard for the damage he caused. And while few readers would want to know Cord in real life, many of them enjoyed his exploits on the page, and the book would end up being the most-read novel of Robbins’ career.

When Hollywood came calling in 1964, it was only natural that some of the book’s racier elements would have to go. But while the scenes depicting brutal murders and such then-abnormal sexual practices as fellatio ended up being cut en route to the big screen, Edward Dmytryk’s film version was still decadent by the standards of the time. After all, the story more or less begins with Cord putting the moves on his father's widow. With its combination of upper-class soap opera and Hollywood story, The Carpetbaggers proved almost as irresistible to moviegoers as it did to readers. The film (sold with the tagline, “this is adult entertainment!”) was one of the top grossers of 1964, becoming Paramount’s biggest hit in nearly a decade. To quote another famously over-the-top film, “nothing exceeds like excess.”

What happened?: In both printed and cinematic form, The Carpetbaggers was distinguished primarily by virtue of its outrageousness. Trouble is, by the end of the 1960s, the qualities that once titillated audiences of the movie seemed positively quaint. With the fall of the Production Code, it was no longer particularly exciting for a movie to imply sexuality, not when people could see explicit nudity in a number of big-budget Hollywood releases. Decades later, the formula Robbins had perfected for literary success had mostly been co-opted by television dramas like Dallas and Dynasty. Most tellingly, before the film’s 2003 DVD release, Paramount submitted The Carpetbaggers to the MPAA for a rating, and the much-ballyhooed “adult entertainment” hit of 1964 earned a family-friendly PG.

Does The Carpetbaggers still work?: Not really. Oh sure, the sets and costumes look great, but the movie’s little more than a soulless product. Part of the problem is the direction by Dmytryk, a longtime studio director long past his prime. Dmytryk’s primarily concern when making The Carpetbaggers appears to have been to utilize the ‘Scope frame to bring out every bit of possible opulence from his settings. But he did so at the expense of any possible drama in the story. It’s never a good sign when two of the film’s principal characters are sharing an important moment and your eyes are too busy looking at the beautiful paintings and ornate statues to care what’s being said.

Not helping matters is the film’s conception of Cord as a blinkered, ego-driven monster. Throughout almost the entire 2 ½ hour running time, Cord’s actions are motivated almost entirely by his desire to keep the upper hand, to maintain his advantage over the rest of the world. George Peppard’s performance is just fine- he plays the role more or less as written, and plays it pretty well. The trouble is that there’s never anything underneath. He wants his life to be lived by his rules, and damn the consequences. As he tells his wife Monica (Elizabeth Ashley), “what I need is the most freedom and the fewest responsibilities.”

Consequently, when the movie finally does try to explain what makes Cord tick in its final five minutes, it feels like a cheat. To pin Cord’s psychological issues on a single trauma from childhood is the kind of horribly reductive Freudianism that afflicted far too many films during the period. Consider what Citizen Kane would have been like had Welles meant for the audience to take Rosebud as a genuine insight into the title character and you’ll have an idea how laughable the psychological aspect of The Carpetbaggers really is. Follow this with an eye-rolling final scene, in which the sensationalism of what’s come before is countered with a reassertion of family and morality, and you’ll see the central problem with The Carpetbaggers- not only is it not nearly as outrageous as it thinks it is, but it doesn’t even have the conviction to follow through to the end.

The Carpetbaggers isn’t a worthless movie. The production values are handsome, and the Hollywood material is fairly entertaining, especially when one tries to figure out which real-life figures are being represented in the story. A handful of supporting performances also work, in particular Alan Ladd (in his final big-screen performance) as Cord’s friend/conscience Nevada Smith, and Carroll Baker, who made for such an effective stand-in for Jean Harlow that Paramount cast her as the real thing in a biopic that was made the following year. But ultimately, The Carpetbaggers just isn’t much of a movie. The history of Hollywood’s blockbusters is chock full of movies like this, that made a splash in their time, but just haven’t endured over the years. Yet they remain out there, waiting to be rediscovered by folks like me who are curious to see what moviegoers enjoyed way back when.

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

ED WOOD (1994)

Some idiots still go into the motion picture business to get rich...but the ones who stick around long after the dreams of fame and fortune have curdled into a nasty hangover of disappointment and massive credit card debt are the genuine addicts, driven by an overpowering, irrational desire to project their inner landscapes onto the real world in search of validation, a little fun and a taste of immortality. I’m guessing Tim Burton’s the type of guy who would’ve found a way to keep making movies even if his star had never risen over Hollywood and he’d wound up shooting cable access fantasias on his days off from Applebee’s. And without a budget, an art department or professional actors, his flaws as a director would have been more obvious, his obsessions would have seemed more silly, his distinctive aesthetic would have been reduced to cheesy, ticky-tack attempts at grandeur, easily mocked by a society incapable of distinguishing between talent and success. Ed Wood, Jr. was a similar addict, and it’s definitely arguable whether he would have eventually developed into a better director if he’d ever gotten the breaks and budgets he so desperately craved, but regardless of his ultimate worth as a filmmaker, Burton clearly recognized a kindred spirit in the cross-dressing auteur’s bizarrely inimitable proto-Goth sensibility, which (combined with a perfect storm of pitch-perfect career highpoints from Johnny Depp, Martin Landau and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, working from the fascinating Wood biography Nightmare of Ecstasy by Rudolph Grey) resulted in one of the greatest films ever made about the potential for transcendence in even the shittiest art.

GODS AND MONSTERS (1998)

For the most part, this beautifully imagined story about the last days of the great cult director James Whale (Ian McKellan) is set long after Whale had retired from that Hollywood silliness and stopped setting foot on soundstages. But it remains a fine tribute to the surprising lasting power of movie images, and it does have one terrific moviemaking scene, when Whale flashes back to the experience of directing Ernest Thesiger and company in The Bride of Frankenstein. No one in a movie has better captured the appeal of making movies than McKellan when he rhapsodizes about how much fun it was, "working with your friends." And Brendan Fraser, as Mr. Jimmy's hunky new friend, contributes one of his best screen performances ever when, having watched the movie with his razzing pals, he gently feels relief wash over him as Whale reassures him that, yes, parts of it are supposed to be funny.

BOMBSHELL (1933)

Jean Harlow was an usual critter in her day, a woman who, once she had a few hits to her name and a few scandals notched in her belt, was unimaginable as anything but a movie star. Compare her to Madonna or Angelina Jolie and now it's clear that she was decades ahead of her time, but in her own decade she must have seemed quite the freak. Luckily, she knew how to laugh at herself, and this early talkie, in which she plays a glamourpuss celebrity so seedy yet so artificial that she has the Wizard of Oz for a father, remains the classic template for Hollywood's satiric take on itself in the studio-contract era. Co-starring Lee Tracy, who in the talkie era was to reporters and press agents what Seth Rogen is today to scoring out of his league.

LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF (2003)

Thom Anderson's dense, meaningful masterpiece works on so many levels that, even at over three hours long, the more one sees it, the more one notices what is omitted as much as what is included. Incredibly ambitious, relentlessly formalist, and bearing both the eye of an artist and the soul of a documentarian committed to social justice, Los Angeles Plays Itself is almost totally unique among modern films. Piecing together a century of Hollywood's portrayals of its own surroundings, from the gorgeous Art Deco-tinted luxury of early films to the deliberately hazy nostalgia of Chinatown to the socialist-realist depictions of filmmakers like Charles Burnette, it's a movie that not only presents an almost complete vision of a modern city – and presents that city with love, respect, disappointment and rage, as appropriate – but also manages to do something quite profound at the same time, which is to use film as a medium for portraying how film changes the way we think, perceive and remember a place. Legal issues will likely prevent Los Angeles Plays Itself from ever getting the wide theatrical release it so richly deserves – it features footage from hundreds of films and television shows, and the clearance rights would be ruinously expensive for any production company – but it turns up occasionally at festivals and academic screenings, and the entirely of the movie was, until recently, available on YouTube. (Keep checking -- the copyright cops work slow.) Not only one of the finest movies about filmmaking imaginable, but one of the most unique films ever made, period.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

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.