Movies Til Dawn

So much of Otto Preminger's persona was severe and forbidding--the shiny bald skull, the tantrums, the thick Vienesse accent, the unrelenting work ethic--that I can't help but put him in the Jack Webb bin, which is to say that the more I think of it, the more Preminger's act seems to be a highly evolved form of comedy. Otto the Terrible was, in fact, a warm-hearted family man who clearly enjoyed his own persona and didn't mind sending it up here and there. I'm not saying that he wasn't really monstrous--clearly he could reduce co-workers to a dithering shambles of their former selves--but merely that he was his own best creation. Comedy is noticebly absent from his canon--his one straight up attempt, "Skidoo", was a notorious flop when it was released in 1968. The film is a collision course between old Hollywood (Preminger and his stars, who include Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, George Raft, Groucho Marx, Peter Lawford, Mickey Rooney) and the hippie ...

Below I've posted two of the best Saul Bass title sequences designed for Preminger's films. And here's an excellent, non-Wikipedia link on Bass's work. "Anatomy Of A Murder" is generally thought of as Preminger's best film (along with "Laura")--the score, by Duke Ellington, is minimal, hip and jaggedly convincing although completely unlike any other film score, and the acting--especially George C. Scott--is top notch (which is, weirdly, not always the case in Preminger's films. In the Hirsch bio, he gradually makes it clear that Preminger's tense, dictatorial style of direction tended to freeze up a lot of actors who might have done better in a more relaxed atmostphere). By the way, Ellington provides an amusing account in his memoir "Music Is My Mistress" of Preminger keeping him and his collaborater Billy Strayhorn on salary throughout the film, ostensibly to compose the themes as they go and be part of the development of ...

In 1980, a writer and filmmaker named Ted Gershuny published a "making of" account of Otto Preminger's penultimate film, the disastrous "Rosebud". The book, "Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture", is one of best looks at the behind the scenes misfires that can occur on pretty much any movie--though this film had certain ingredients, going in, that marked it as an all but certain cinematic calamity just waiting to happen. Gershuny's book--out of print and where did my copy go anyway?--really needs to be required reading for all aspiring filmmakers. For rather than mocking the bad material, blaming the aging director or rolling his eyes at the whole corrupt set-up, he shows what every director knows is the truth about filmmaking; it's a big, fat roll of the dice and sometimes, as the machine starts gathering momentum, mistakes occur and compound, luck with actors and behind the scenes technicians runs out, energies flag and--as with all movies--it ...

I'm reading an excellent new biography of the still controversial director and producer Otto Preminger, called "Otto Preminger; The Man Who Would Be King". (He didn't make that movie, by the way--John Huston did--and I'm not sure why the author, Foster Hirsch, chose that for the subtitle. I like my golden skull gag much more). Anyway, Preminger comes off in this book as an inexhaustible individual, constantly in motion setting up movies, buying "properties" and working with different writers often at night after a full days shooting of his current movie (all his shoots were, of course, tense and trouble-filled), and then going off and publicizing the finished films himself--going so far as to pick the exact theaters he wanted to show his films in in different cities, supervising the poster art, endlessly giving press conferences, throwing opening night parties etc. And then, when he wanted to relax, he'd stage a Broadway play... The main thing you c...

It seems inconcievable to me that this little blog has been chugging along for upwards of four months without a proper entry on Laurel and Hardy, my first favorite comedy team and, forty years after I first saw them, the ones that have truly stood the test of time. Perhaps there is too much to say. And perhaps I haven't really anything in particular to add--they haven't exactly been ignored by filmgoers and critics in the years since their demise. Let's keep it simple and begin with two clips from one of their earliest sound movies, "Men O' War." (In retrospect, it seems odd to imagine that there were silent L&H movies--their voices were so much a part of their characters and the pacing of their films seems antithetical to the silent comedy ethos). Yet there exist a number of silents L&H's--none of which, I have to confess, I find satisfactory, precisely because the pacing is too fast and I miss the voices. When talkies took over, many theaters ...

Some enterprising youtuber has posted the entire movie "Gilda" in ten or so parts. (And the producers think that the writers are crazy for suggesting that soon we'll all be watching tv and movies on the internet?) Below, I've posted a chunk--part eight, it is. Since the plot of "Gilda" makes little sense, you don't need to know anything in particular about what leads up to this section in order to understand it and, happily, there are no "spoilers" possible since the ending of the film doesn't follow logically from anything that proceeded it. This doesn't prevent the movie from being anything less than entertaining at any moment. Indeed, the below section contains three of my favorite scenes; the post-new years eve nightclub murder--it's the conversation between Macready as the mysterious Ballan Munson and Glenn Ford in Munson's private suite above the nightclub--complete with lunatic mentions of Munson's plans to "rul...

The years of the second world war have been remembered most recently as the years of the "greatest generation". (My father is one of them, I'm proud to note. He was a pilot and flew troop carrier missions). And every red-blooded, armied or navied-up young man had a picture of a starlet in his kitbag to remind him of "what he was fighting for". Of all the girlfriend's of the greatest generation era, Rita Hayworth was probably the most prized, the most desired, the most universally loved. Was it because of her delectable looks? Her immense dancing abilities? Her raven-haired temptresiosity-ness? Perhaps. Yet I think it also had something to do with her vulnerability. What I see in Hayworth--and I think others did too--is her frailty, her own discomfort with her bombshell persona, the sense of a beautiful girl who desires and requires protection from a world bent on picking her to pieces. This is largely due to the fact that that's exactly who she was. B...

Check out this number from "Cover Girl" (it's called "Make Way For Tomorrow") and tell me that this isn't, in fact, a first draft of Kelly and Donen's sublime solo song and dance of "Singing In The Rain" from the film of the same name (which you may have heard of...) The backlot urban street, the use of the sidewalk and gutter, the lightpole, the disapproving cop. Nice as this number is, it's not socko. But clearly Kelly and Donen liked the elements and revisited them eight years later, to immortal effect. Another nugget on Donen, re: Kelly, and my DGA oral history interview of Donen. I asked Donen one too many questions about his films with Kelly and he waived it off and said: "I was co-directing. There's no such thing as co-directing!" Having just finished a movie where the star was also the producer and, thus, my co-director I was all to aware of his pain and irritation. So--case closed. Later I read a quote of Donen'...

Film critic and historian Arthur Knight considered "Cover Girl" the second best musical ever made after "Singing In The Rain". Frankly, he may have a point. ("The Bandwagon" is, for my money, the only other serious contender). Though not often shown on the usual cable suspects (can't imagine why but the Columbia library seems to me quite seriously underplayed), "Cover Girl" remains vivid in my memory for a number of reasons, cheif among them that it is the first musical in which Kelly was given some creative control over his material and it shows. The results, of course, were immesurably better than his first few MGM outings and when he returned from this loan-out, Louis B. Mayer has the good sense to allow Kelly considerably more creative leeway than any other actor/performer on the lot had ever had. "Cover GIrl" co-stars Rita Hayworth at her lovliest and a pre-Bilko Phil Silvers. The lovely songs are by Jerome Kern and Ira Gersh...

One of the unfortunate side effects of the camping up of Judy Garland by her 'followers' is that we've lost sight of her as the truly luscious, sexually alluring female star that she was in her heyday. Judy as bombshell simply sounds perverse now--either we think of her as Dorothy in pigtails (or whatever her hair was in "Wizard") or we think of the later, stage-bound, cigarette and vodka drag-queen idol. But in her youthful maturity (1942-50) Judy was also just a helluva hot dame. Minelli, her second (or third?) husband was clearly in love with her through a lens--it's in "Meet Me In St. Louis", "The Clock" and "The Pirate" (all of which he directed) that the camera gazes at her the most lovingly. And she, in turn, gets naked in these movies in a way she simply doesn't when being directed by Charles Walters. This past summer, I had the opportunity (briefly) to work on a pitch for a movie about Judy's life--her best biogr...