The Screengrab : the great escape

New Film Books: Michael Sragow on Victor Fleming, Glenn Lovell on John Sturges

Phil Nugent — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

There have been a number of interesting movie books published this season, and two new volumes, both of them singled out for praise by Michael Fox, flesh out the careers of Hollywood directors who had important careers with major films to their credit but whose names generally don't make it onto the established lists of great filmmakers. Victor Fleming, the subject of Michael Sragow's Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master, has the distinction of being the credited director what might be seen as the most iconic American movie classics of the early color era, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz--both of which were released in 1939, and both of which were huge productions that Fleming was brought in to complete after other hands had started filming. (Fleming's was still working on Oz when Clark Gable decreed that he would only continue in the role of Rhett Butler if Fleming was brought in to replace George Cukor, who had also done some labors on Oz. King Vidor wrapped up Oz while Fleming made his way to the GWTW set. Sam Wood also worked on GWTW for a few weeks while Fleming was recovering from exhaustion.) Fleming, whose other credits include Red Dust, Bombshell, Treasure Island, and Captains Courageous, broke into movies as a camera assistant, much valued for his mechanical prowess, before moving up to directing silent action films. Fox writes that "Sragow’s great accomplishment... is effortlessly weaving together the various film-book genres. His digressions to illuminate the careers and characters of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy are meaty and delicious, while the making-of chapters...brim with well-chosen behind-the-scenes details that illuminate the bigger picture of Fleming as a fearless pro. Sragow also gives a strong sense of the dynamics of the studio system, while dropping in any number of contemporary references and critical assessments without slowing the narrative a whit." Fleming combined a sensitive side with the man's man aura that made someone like Gable so comfortable about putting his career in his hands. And whatever one thinks of Sragow's efforts to sell him as an artist on the level of, say, Howard Hawks, he certainly got a lot done with the time given to him. He died of a heart attack in 1948, at the age of 59; his last film was Joan of Arc, starring Ingrid Bergman, the last of a long string of leading ladies with whom he'd been enjoying an affair during their off-hours.

Glenn Lovell's Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges makes the case for a director of some of the best-loved action epics of the latter half of the twentieth century, especially The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven. Those pictures, and such smaller genre classics as Escape from Fort Bravo, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and Bad Day at Black Rock--probably the most critically respected of Sturges's films, because it doubles as a socially conscious expose about the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II--lack the depth and explosiveness of the work of someone like Sam Peckinpah or the flamboyant showmanship of Hawks, but they stand out among the run of routine action movies for the craftsmanlike precision that Sturges learned during his studio apprenticeship as an editor, and as a director working on training films during the war. Sturges might be better remembered today if he hadn't lasted as long; he ran out of gas after The Great Escape yet continued to plow on, grinding out sadly lifeless shoot-'em-ups such as The Satan Bug, Ice Station Zebra, Marooned, and the dreaded McQ, in which John Wayne, making a mad, eleventh-hour stab at playing his version of Dirty Harry, looked as if he might collapse during the chase scenes and attempt to lasso the villains with his varicose veins. And Sturges, like Fleming, might have done his work for the studios a little too well: Rhett and Scarlet and Dorothy and the Wicked Witch now seem always to have been with us, to such a degree that it seems weird to imagine that somebody directed them. Just as Sturges's two biggest hits helped to create so many action stars--Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, James Garner, just to skim the cream off the top-- that the fellow behind the camera got lost in the crowd.

OST: "The Man with the Golden Arm"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:15:00 GMT

By the 1950s, jazz was undergoing one of its most memorable revolutions. Swing was long dead, and bop had evolved into post-bop, with its moody blues tones balanced by often-jarring tonal shifts and improvisations that hinged on chords and scales rather than melodies. There was something about the most inventive post-bop that seemed perfectly suited to the era's urban vibe; just as hip-hop would form the soundtrack to the big-city crime dramas of the 1980s and 1990s, a certain style of post-bop, characterized by loud brassy stings and sizzling, sub-surface rhythms made up the "crime jazz" that characterized some of the greatest <i>noir</i> films of the fifties. Rarely did the studios entrust the writing of this style of music to actual jazz musicians, however, who in addition to being on the wrong side of the color line were considered unreliable, moody and temperamental. Though there were a few notable exceptions -- such as the appearance of Chico Hamilton's quintet in The Sweet Smell of Success -- generally, the work fell on classically trained white studio pros the producers felt could conjure up the proper mood.

Some of the most memorable scores of the period followed this model: Henry Mancini's impossibly tense, Latin-jazz-influenced score to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, David Raskin's haunting, echoing, almost atonal work in The Big Combo, and legitimate jazz legend Duke Ellington's jarring, ringing, near-perfect score to Anatomy of a Murder should be counted with Hamilton's work in Sweet Smell as high points of the day. But Elmer Bernstein? Long a controversial figure amongst devotees of Hollywood soundtracks, his work neatly divides opinion between those who think he's a hard-working, underrated genius and those who think he's a hack whose reputation for greatness rests on nothing more than having stuck around so long. Bernstein was, likewise, no jazzman; his stuff generally had a formalist rigor that came from his classical training, and he possessed none of the soaring genius or improvisational acumen of his unrelated namesake Leonard. Bernstein had started out in Hollywood doing low-budget Poverty Row pictures (like the infamous Robot Monster) and graduated to fame and fortune writing material that was memorable for a particularly strong, solid hook: the martial drumming and soaring horns of The Great Escape and the rolling, triumphal stings of The Ten Commandments. He was a student of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, and the music he wrote was meant to uplift the spirit and stir the soul, not to accompany the mournful, half-crazy ruminations of a heroin junkie. Who could possibly have known that putting him in charge of the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm would be precisely the thing to do?

Frank Sinatra, for one. Sinatra knew Elmer Bernstein well from his early sojourns in Hollywood, and once he was cast to play the lead in Otto Preminger's adaptation of a harrowing Nelson Algren novel about a recovering junkie, he approached the director -- not known for his stylistic daring -- and tried to convince him that Bernstein could swing. Preminger decided to take a chance, and as a result, two careers were charged with new vigor: Sinatra won widespread praise for his performance, and convinced skeptical critics that he was capable of being a great actor. As for the composer, he turned in, to the surprise of everyone but Francis Albert Sinatra, one of the most compelling -- and compulsively re-listenable -- crypto-jazz scores of the 1950s. When combined with one of Saul Bass' most stunning title sequences, it all adds up to an absolutely riveting blend of music and visual. Anyone teaching a class about the particular spirit of that period of urban drama needs nothing more for their audiovisual centerpiece than the first five minutes of The Man with the Golden Arm.

BEST TRACKS: The finest tracks on the soundtrack for The Man with the Golden Arm are those where Bernstein collaborated with an actual jazzman -- conducter, arranger, trumpeter and former Woody Herman sideman Shorty Rogers. Rogers' bold, accusatory horn is a big part of what makes the movie's opening theme -- better known as "Frankie Machine", after the name of Sinatra's character -- so unforgettable, and his deft arrangement and understanding of Elmer Bernstein's distinct sense of melody, combined with his own rhythmic sensibility, also makes a success of the wonderfully chaotic "Audition". Other great tracks include the manic "Breakup: Flight/Louie's/Burlesque" medley and the mournful "Finale". Overall, it works thematically, but is still strong enough to stand on its own as a skillful period jazz record.

Related Posts:

OST: The Pink Panther

OST: Blue Velvet

Screengrab Presents: The Top 25 War Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:30:00 GMT

20. CASUALTIES OF WAR (1989)

Brian De Palma directed this fact-based story about a bunch of stressed-out American soldiers in Vietnam whose sergeant (Sean Penn) snaps after one of their number is killed and hatches a plan to abduct a young girl and carry her off into the brush, where she’s killed after having been gang-raped. Too painful to have achieved much commercial success, the movie is especially notable for having broken away from most other Vietnam films that came out around the same time, which to some degree or other adopted the line (increasingly fashionable as pundits and politicians insisted on putting that war behind us) that in the chaos of guerrilla war it was forgivable if our boys all went a little insane morally. The hero, played by Michael J. Fox, is the one soldier who won't participate in the rape and who does his damndest to try to get the criminals prosecuted. The irony is that, having been the only one in his crew who refused to shuck off his humanity, he's the only one who's haunted by what happened; he can't come to terms with the fact that he saw it all happen and couldn't do anything to stop it. That makes him the stand-in for everyone who knows that pointless wars are being hatched someplace and don't buy into them, but can't do anything to stop them, either.

19. THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963)

When Truffaut delivered his famed advice about the impossibility of anti-war film, he might as well have been talking about movies like The Great Escape. Not that it’s anything even remotely like an anti-war film: though its final moments contain some of the futility and brutality of war, they’re aimed squarely at the enemy, and the movie itself is a pure, unvarnished celebration of movie-style heroism and the fighting man at his best. But when Truffaut noted that action argues only for itself, this is the sort of thing he meant: even the ultimate futility of the real-life escape attempt fictionalized by John Sturges in this WWII classic is swept away on the back of all the thrilling set pieces, cunning scenes of calculation, defiant acts of heroism, and sheer thrilling action. Even if you know what’s going to happen to the individual escapees in the end, you can’t help but get caught up in the excitement of it all again and again, borne along by Elmer Bernstein’s unforgettable score and some larger-than-life performances by the likes of Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Steve “Hey, Guys, Let’s Throw a Motorcycle Chase Scene in Here, Why Not?” McQueen. Even the poster knew what it was selling, tagging the movie as “THE GREAT ENTERTAINMENT,” putting a good-times spin on the 30-years-later words of a rapper who issued his grim tales of ghetto warfare under the telling title Your Entertainment, My Reality. The Great Escape even spawned a genre of epic war pictures that clung to its formal elements: the dangerous-secret-mission plot, the all-star cast arrayed on boxes on the poster, all given colorful nicknames, the overblown heist-movie action elements. But the lousy quality of most of its imitators shouldn’t be held against it: its ‘reality’ may have been pure fantasy, but you can’t watch despairing anti-war pictures all the time.

18. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)

This awesomely well-executed slab of 1950s melodrama is based on the first novel by soldier turned writer James Jones, and it isn't actually set in wartime: it chronicles the frustrations and tensions that are building among the men killing time at a military base in Hawaii in 1941, which will explode when the Japanese attack on December 7. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr's scene on the beach deserves an automatic inclusion in any montage of legendary screen make-out scenes, and Frank Sinatra's supporting performance as the uncontainable Maggio more than justified both his career comeback and the gangsters-got-him-that-job rumors that were set in stone in the early scenes of The Godfather. (Even though, sadly, the rumors probably weren't true; it's more likely that Ava Gardner got him that job.) But the movie belongs to Montgomery Clift's beautiful performance as the doomed bugler Robert E. Lee Pruitt, who loves the army and can only say, when it's pointed out that the army is making his life miserable, "A man loves a thing, that don't mean it's gotta love him back." Which is pretty good advice no matter what you love, especially if it's the movies.

17. BEFORE THE RAIN (1994)

This Macedonian film, written and directed by Milčo Mančevski, shows how the passions that war thrives on spill over uncontainably into the lives of people who want no part of them. The Croatian actor Rade Šerbedžija plays a burned out war photographer who, after being affected by a violent ourburst in supposedly civilized London, goes home to retire in the Macedonian countryside and finds that the remote village that represents peace and tranquility to him has been split by civil war and the woman he left behind lives in fear for her daughter's life. The powerful-looking, bearded Šerbedžija does about as good a job as any actor ever has at suggesting an intelligently troubled man's desire for a peaceful life, and his feeling that no alternative could be worth living.

16. ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938)

(See #11)

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six & Part Seven

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Rose McGowan: TCM's Latest Essential

Phil Nugent — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

So it turns out that Rose McGowan is a total movie geek! (Man, does Robert Rodriguez's cup runneth over, or what?) As of last month, McGowan has been supplementing her income by co-hosting Turner Classic Movies' "The Essentials", a weekly slot where TCM host Robert Osborne chews over whichever film classic has just earned the title designation with a regular partner. The show has gone through a different co-host every season, and most of them have been best known for their behind-the-camera talents, even if some of them, such as directors Rob Reiner, Sydney Pollack, and Peter Bogdanovich, have also dabbled in acting. Before McGowan, Osborne's last couple of sparring partners for Osborne were film critic Molly Haskell and Carrie Fisher, who has evolved from actress to professional wisecracker. Whether it was just the luck of the draw or the gender differences had something to do with it, both Haskell and Fisher juiced the show up a little; they were more inclined to turn prickly and even quarrel with the programming choices than their predecessors had been. McGowan's selection may have something to do with the desire to add some youthful glow to its viewing demographic that once had TCM lure Rob Zombie to its studios so that he could stalk out onto the set of what looked like his mom's basement and lecture viewers about Arch Hall, Jr. at two in the morning. But to listen to McGowan talk about movies is to see that the woman does have game. And she likes The Great Escape!

The Osborne-McGowan team has also torn through The Music Box and The Bad and the Beautiful, a movie that McGowan should probably remake, just so we can see her name on the posters next to that title. Of the selections coming up, McGowan is especially high on Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, a hallucinatory masterpiece starring Robert Mitchum as a murderous preacher. “It’s heavy-handed, sure, I get it. It’s just so smart. It’s very much a classic metaphor for the big person to proclaim for all to hear how Christian he is, and then there’s Lillian Gish, who probably only weighs about 90 pounds. … And she’s the quiet Christian, and it’s her behavior that speaks for her about her Christian belief.” Of the TCM gig itself, McGowan says, “I had no idea that they were even going to pay me. Seriously, a job where I get to sit and discuss these movies? Are you kidding me? I’ve been boring my friends for years!” One can't help but wonder how any lost soul could become so miserably jaded as to ever be bored by the sight of Rose McGowan rhapsodizing about Laurel and Hardy, but perhaps she has better tastes in movies than in friends. Rose, call us! We'll introduce you to some really cool new people at Trivia Night.

In Other Blogs: List-o-Mania

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Our “In Other Blogs” survey team has been working around the clock to determine exactly how best to serve you, the “In Other Blogs” reader. The results are in, and it turns out: you like lists! This works out well for us, since our research also indicates that other blogs love to run lists. Here’s a roundup from the week in ranking pop culture ephemera.

Spout offers up both the 5 Best and the 5 Worst Directorial Sellouts of All Time. Any such “worst” list seems incomplete without Francis Ford Coppola’s Jack, and it’s hard to view Michael Moore’s Canadian Bacon as a sellout since nobody was buying. We can't argue with Finding Forrester, though. “After the huge success of Good Will Hunting, Hollywood would let Gus Van Sant make anything he wanted. Unfortunately it was a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, which was deemed the biggest-budgeted experimental film of all time. When that deservedly tanked, Van Sant went for this, his real sellout.”

The sci-fi blog io9 presents 15 Great Movies You Didn’t Know Were Science Fiction. After reading the list, we still don’t know about most of them. For example, the 1992 undercover cop thriller Deep Cover apparently qualifies simply because it contains “a fictional designer drug created by a combinatorial chemist.” And consider us decidedly unpersuaded by this argument for Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: “He's a black samurai who works for the Mafia, and he communicates via carrier pigeon. He clings to the Bushido, the way of the Samurai, in the midst of a world of randomly murderous thugs, and seems to have almost superhuman fighting abilities. Plus he can communicate somehow with his friend who only speaks French. (Telepathy?)”

While we’re in the science fiction realm, how about Mahalo’s list of the Best Evil Robots? Of course, the T-1000 and Mechagodzilla are given their due, but we’re more impressed by the inclusion of the grotesque Bicentennial Man. “I defy anyone to watch the trailer for Bicentennial Man without feeling your soul in peril. Not only is Bicentennial Man singlehandedly responsible for destroying Robin Williams' career, but it's just plain evil through and through. Director Chris Columbus must be a sick, depraved individual to have thought: ‘Hey, I think I'll follow up on Mrs. Doubtfire with a sequel of sorts. Except instead of a cross-dressing man invading the privacy of his ex-wife's life, I'll have a robot, played by the same actor, infiltrate a family! Over the course of 200 years, he can trick everyone into acknowledging him as a sentient being, all the while waiting and biding his time, trying to marry the youngest daughter of the family! Then when that doesn't work out, I'll have him fall in love with her daughter!’”

Finally, someone calling himself the Sports Blawger weighs in with the Top 10 Guy’s Guy Movies. Most of his choices are what you’d expect: The Great Escape, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and The Dirty Dozen are perennial favorites at the Screengrab’s Manly Man Movie Night gatherings. But Mr. Blawger’s top choice has us questioning his usage of the phrase “guy’s guy”: “300 has freaking awesomeness all around it. The Spartans were history's original guy's guys. Spartans would look at today's metrosexual ‘guys’ with contempt, and then stab them through the stomach with their spears so they would die the slow and painful death they deserve. Spartans don't get manis and pedis. Spartans exist for one reason: to be AWESOME. Is there anything that says ‘guy's guy’ than 300 guys armed with only swords and spears, protected by only helmets and shields, destroying a million man army?” He forgot to mention all the glistening hairless chests.