Fred MacMurray is not a great actor because today he is mostly remembered for being the father of My Three Sons on television, and although certain people have fond memories of that show, it's no one's idea of Great Acting.
Fred MacMurray is not a great actor because, unlike such well loved contemporaries as James Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, or James Cagney, he gave many of his best performances in romantic comedies, playing second fiddle to stars like Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, and Barbara Stanwyck.
Fred MacMurray is not a great actor because unlike that other romantic comedy star, Cary Grant, his appeal was not an unattainably glamorous sophisticate, but a charming, handsome boy next door, and when people seek out film stars of the past, they are typically drawn to the lost world of Hollywood glamour, not the guy who seems like he was probably born in your hometown.
Fred MacMurray is not a great actor because instead of working with Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford, he worked with "set dresser" Mitchell Leisen and king of the 50s melodramas, Douglas Sirk.
Fred MacMurray is not a great actor because one of his greatest, key performances, that of Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, is typically misinterpreted as a weak man who is led astray by a demon in female form, ignoring the fact that MacMurray and the screenplay carefully layer Neff's dark, smug restlessness long before he ever sees Barbara Stanwyck's anklet, making it not a tale of an innocent, weak man led astray, but of a callous schemer always looking to get a leg up meeting his seemingly perfect partner in crime.
Fred MacMurray is not a great actor because nobody took him seriously.
Fred MacMurray is not a great actor because it is very possible, if one really looked closely, if someone were to take even his lightest movies seriously and truly sit down and watch his performances, one just might find that he might be a great actor after all.
But, seriously, he's not a great actor. I mean, he played Rosalind Russell's secretary. What kind of great actor would play Rosalind Russell's secretary?
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Sunday, August 3, 2014
A Single Story in Possession of a Good Fortune
It is difficult to remember a time when Jane Austen was simply a lady writer from long ago that perhaps some people studied in school. Before she was a cottage industry for adolescent girls, a sort of literary successor to the Disney Princess line. Before reading Pride and Prejudice became a rite of passage. Before Colin Firth ever emerged from a lake.
However difficult it is to imagine, it was once a reality. Which is why, when MGM adapted Pride and Prejudice to the screen in 1940, they set it in the 1830s. With the wrong dresses. A cardinal sin that most Austen fans can never forgive (although one has to admire the way that famed costume designer Adrian changed the period himself because he wanted the dresses to be more opulent. Not many costume designers could get away with that). Which seems to sum up the current popular response to the film: it has the wrong dresses, and is absolutely the worst.
Yet one must remember that it was not 2014, but 1940. Nineteen years before a musical adaptation of Pride and Prejudice opened on Broadway not as Pride and Prejudice, or even Pride and Prejudice: The Musical!, but with the title First Impressions: evidently Jane Austen's original title, but hardly the thing one would pick for brand recognition (and although I'd love to hear Farley Granger as Mr. Darcy sing his act one number, "Gentlemen Don't Fall Wildly in Love," I admit I'm most excited of all to hear Lizzie and Mrs. Bennet sing their eleven o'clock duet, "Let's Fetch the Carriage"). It ran for a little over two months.
The thing is, although it is clearly not a faithful adaptation (it is, shall we say, very condensed), I remain quite fond. The thing is, the trouble with most Austen adaptations is that they cannot possibly convey the depth of her societal insight and satire, mostly because satire is difficult enough onscreen as it is; satire primarily expressed through prose is nearly impossible. We are, I think, too far removed from the world Jane Austen wrote in to intuitively understand how their impeccably ordered society worked. While reading, one can grasp it, but while watching?
So the reason I like this adaptation is because it was an MGM movie from 1940. MGM's house style was lush. Opulent. Full of excessive production values. And as artificial as anything ever was. With MGM, you know you're not getting location shooting, you're getting sets. The biggest, plushest, richest sets money could buy. And you're not just getting costumes, you're getting wardrobes. Fashion. Gowns, in the haute couture-iest sense of the word. And the performances will be Acting, in the Grand Old Hollywood style. And while most Austen adaptations of the past twenty years opt for period accuracy and realism, this opts for the glitziest artificiality a small army of seasoned professionals with an absurd amount of barely-not-depression money and resources at their disposal could imagine.
The thing is, I think it's a great visualization of not the period, but the society Austen wrote about. You can see the artificial boundaries and limitations imposed on people. You see women gliding about in elegant yet ostentatious dresses that are so impractical and restricting that a woman can't walk across a room without brushing up against all the furniture. You see, above all, that this society has been artificially created to foster precisely the pride and prejudice inherent in the characters: to value appearance over substance and stick with truths universally acknowledged. And when Greer Garson fires off a clever one-liner, you really feel like she's getting away with something.
While this film is hardly the most faithful to the matter of the story, I can't help but think it quite faithful to the subtext of the story. And while the satirical aspect does not seem to be what a great many people love about Austen, it is, in fact, what I appreciate the most about her. So maybe it's just that this 1940 adaptation is my adaptation, because it combines the wit of Austen with the artifice of the most fabricated studio in golden age Hollywood, and I find the combination to be an unexpectedly delightful match. And I even wonder if Adrian might have been right about the dresses...
However difficult it is to imagine, it was once a reality. Which is why, when MGM adapted Pride and Prejudice to the screen in 1940, they set it in the 1830s. With the wrong dresses. A cardinal sin that most Austen fans can never forgive (although one has to admire the way that famed costume designer Adrian changed the period himself because he wanted the dresses to be more opulent. Not many costume designers could get away with that). Which seems to sum up the current popular response to the film: it has the wrong dresses, and is absolutely the worst.
Yet one must remember that it was not 2014, but 1940. Nineteen years before a musical adaptation of Pride and Prejudice opened on Broadway not as Pride and Prejudice, or even Pride and Prejudice: The Musical!, but with the title First Impressions: evidently Jane Austen's original title, but hardly the thing one would pick for brand recognition (and although I'd love to hear Farley Granger as Mr. Darcy sing his act one number, "Gentlemen Don't Fall Wildly in Love," I admit I'm most excited of all to hear Lizzie and Mrs. Bennet sing their eleven o'clock duet, "Let's Fetch the Carriage"). It ran for a little over two months.
The thing is, although it is clearly not a faithful adaptation (it is, shall we say, very condensed), I remain quite fond. The thing is, the trouble with most Austen adaptations is that they cannot possibly convey the depth of her societal insight and satire, mostly because satire is difficult enough onscreen as it is; satire primarily expressed through prose is nearly impossible. We are, I think, too far removed from the world Jane Austen wrote in to intuitively understand how their impeccably ordered society worked. While reading, one can grasp it, but while watching?
So the reason I like this adaptation is because it was an MGM movie from 1940. MGM's house style was lush. Opulent. Full of excessive production values. And as artificial as anything ever was. With MGM, you know you're not getting location shooting, you're getting sets. The biggest, plushest, richest sets money could buy. And you're not just getting costumes, you're getting wardrobes. Fashion. Gowns, in the haute couture-iest sense of the word. And the performances will be Acting, in the Grand Old Hollywood style. And while most Austen adaptations of the past twenty years opt for period accuracy and realism, this opts for the glitziest artificiality a small army of seasoned professionals with an absurd amount of barely-not-depression money and resources at their disposal could imagine.
The thing is, I think it's a great visualization of not the period, but the society Austen wrote about. You can see the artificial boundaries and limitations imposed on people. You see women gliding about in elegant yet ostentatious dresses that are so impractical and restricting that a woman can't walk across a room without brushing up against all the furniture. You see, above all, that this society has been artificially created to foster precisely the pride and prejudice inherent in the characters: to value appearance over substance and stick with truths universally acknowledged. And when Greer Garson fires off a clever one-liner, you really feel like she's getting away with something.
While this film is hardly the most faithful to the matter of the story, I can't help but think it quite faithful to the subtext of the story. And while the satirical aspect does not seem to be what a great many people love about Austen, it is, in fact, what I appreciate the most about her. So maybe it's just that this 1940 adaptation is my adaptation, because it combines the wit of Austen with the artifice of the most fabricated studio in golden age Hollywood, and I find the combination to be an unexpectedly delightful match. And I even wonder if Adrian might have been right about the dresses...
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Why Is It Always Blue Mutants?
I have grown disenchanted with superhero films: perhaps inevitable due to the genre's ubiquity (never a good way to keep my affection), but a bit disheartening when I remember how much I really appreciated superheroes once upon a time. Whether because I always liked the X-Men or whether the films simply grabbed me when I was young enough, the first two X-Men films have remained my favorite. Yes, even the first one (it's got issues, but every superhero movie ever has issues and I cannot be bothered to care about much beyond personal affection).
It's fairly obvious ("Have you tried... not being a mutant?") that the two films intentionally reference gay rights, what with gay rights being the most topical civil rights struggle of the time, the director being openly gay, and Ian McKellen's presence as Magneto. It's obvious with Bobby Drake and his parents, with Magneto's rants, with Senator Kelly trying to ban mutants from schools or Rogue having a traumatic first sexual experience that she doesn't understand and has difficulty coping with (and my favorite... that moment in Alaska when "mutants" come up on the TV and Rogue's eyes dart to it and Wolverine's eyes dart to it, and they notice each other and they know...).
Which brings us to Nightcrawler, a.k.a. Kurt Wagner, played by Alan Cumming. His immersion in the gay subtext is instantly obvious from the casting, but the character is where the real matter lies: a very religious mutant with a visible, unalterable mutation who is used and exploited, forced into acting against his kind, feared equally by both sides, yet holds confidently and gently to both his body and his faith: seeing no discrepancy with evolution or his demonic appearance; seeing no war, only forgiveness. The strength of the portrait may have been borne home more if the film had given Stryker any religious correlations, like the comics, but Kurt isn't really a lead anyway, and there's no point in giving Stryker religion if the guy's just supposed to be Wolverine's backstory.
The thing is: even though it's subtext, even though the character of Nightcrawler isn't actually gay (we know this from the comics), even though he's a very minor character... has there been a better example of a gay Christian, man or woman, in film? Or other fictional mediums? Maybe I'm forgetting something? Because I'm drawing a blank. Most projects I've seen that actually use gay Christians tend to make them hysterical hypocrites, delusional frauds, shallowly sketched foils for atheists, or doubters who lose their faiths in order to more fully embrace their sexuality. All of which can be, I'm sure, valuable characters, but none of which reflect anything I'm interested in seeing. Even Angels in America starts out creating a complex, gay Mormon, investing him with weight and emotional heft, only to use him as a punching bag in scene after scene of the second play, no longer a protagonist, but a scapegoat to bear the full brunt of everyone's judgment and/or self-loathing.
I'd like to think there's something I'm forgetting, or there's too much I haven't seen yet. Otherwise, I'm just in awe of how important X2 really is to me... and how ridiculous it is that a superhero movie, of all things, has given me the closest cinematic representation of one of the most significant combinations in my life.
Which is, I guess, what superheroes are there for?
Whatever. I'll take it.
It's fairly obvious ("Have you tried... not being a mutant?") that the two films intentionally reference gay rights, what with gay rights being the most topical civil rights struggle of the time, the director being openly gay, and Ian McKellen's presence as Magneto. It's obvious with Bobby Drake and his parents, with Magneto's rants, with Senator Kelly trying to ban mutants from schools or Rogue having a traumatic first sexual experience that she doesn't understand and has difficulty coping with (and my favorite... that moment in Alaska when "mutants" come up on the TV and Rogue's eyes dart to it and Wolverine's eyes dart to it, and they notice each other and they know...).
Which brings us to Nightcrawler, a.k.a. Kurt Wagner, played by Alan Cumming. His immersion in the gay subtext is instantly obvious from the casting, but the character is where the real matter lies: a very religious mutant with a visible, unalterable mutation who is used and exploited, forced into acting against his kind, feared equally by both sides, yet holds confidently and gently to both his body and his faith: seeing no discrepancy with evolution or his demonic appearance; seeing no war, only forgiveness. The strength of the portrait may have been borne home more if the film had given Stryker any religious correlations, like the comics, but Kurt isn't really a lead anyway, and there's no point in giving Stryker religion if the guy's just supposed to be Wolverine's backstory.
The thing is: even though it's subtext, even though the character of Nightcrawler isn't actually gay (we know this from the comics), even though he's a very minor character... has there been a better example of a gay Christian, man or woman, in film? Or other fictional mediums? Maybe I'm forgetting something? Because I'm drawing a blank. Most projects I've seen that actually use gay Christians tend to make them hysterical hypocrites, delusional frauds, shallowly sketched foils for atheists, or doubters who lose their faiths in order to more fully embrace their sexuality. All of which can be, I'm sure, valuable characters, but none of which reflect anything I'm interested in seeing. Even Angels in America starts out creating a complex, gay Mormon, investing him with weight and emotional heft, only to use him as a punching bag in scene after scene of the second play, no longer a protagonist, but a scapegoat to bear the full brunt of everyone's judgment and/or self-loathing.
I'd like to think there's something I'm forgetting, or there's too much I haven't seen yet. Otherwise, I'm just in awe of how important X2 really is to me... and how ridiculous it is that a superhero movie, of all things, has given me the closest cinematic representation of one of the most significant combinations in my life.
Which is, I guess, what superheroes are there for?
Whatever. I'll take it.
Monday, May 19, 2014
1920s Footwear
When I'm not watching three year old movies, I watch ninety-three year old movies. The Blot is a 1921 film directed by Lois Weber, once thought of as one of the greatest directors in Hollywood. She has since been largely forgotten, with barely any of her films surviving. Because sometimes the critical establishment sucks.
A social message picture about wealth and class, Weber was the perfect director for it. For one because she obviously cares about this message a great deal, and nothing will kill a message picture faster than a creative team that doesn't believe the message. The other reason is more interesting: one thing that makes Weber unique among silent film directors I've seen is her incredible facility with using silent film techniques to show communities. Not just undifferentiated extras, but communities full of individual members, each of which has his or her own standing and relationships within that community. It was one of the remarkable things about Hypocrites, her 1915 fable, and it's almost entirely the point in The Blot.
The most frustrating thing about the film (besides that I can't help but think Amelia ends up with the wrong guy, even if he is the lead and the other actor doesn't even get credited... seriously, silent film records, you are the worst) is that it just has too many intertitles. Later message pictures' key flaw of Too Much Talking About the Issue is the one thing you'd expect to get away from in a silent film, because, hey, silent. The difference is that instead of being repetitive, they're superfluous. Weber tells us everything we need to know with the production design.
Distressingly (again, silent film records), there is no credited art director, production designer, set dresser, costumer, or anything. Not even a crew. So I don't really know who to give credit to, except whatever random people Weber had working for her production company. Because the sets in The Blot are fantastic: a fine middle class house that's disintegrating before your very eyes; another middle class house on its way up the pay grade; a minister's small, dark, but very cozy den; a country club that seems expensive without seeming especially exciting, a fascinating counterpoint to the art deco fantasias belonging to 1930s heiresses. And Weber and her DPs (Phillip R. Du Bois and Gordon Jennings) know exactly when to give us a closeup on the ratty chair, the hole in the carpet, the characters' contrasting shoes. It's not so much attention to detail as it is devotion to detail. You know from the cars, the kitchens, and the shoes everything you need to know about the income differentials of these people. You know which characters notice these things, which characters are insecure about them, and which characters hardly notice it at all. No one needs intertitles.
Of course, it seems like exactly the kind of thing easily dismissed by the kind of manly critic who refuses to take Douglas Sirk seriously (a message picture about shoes? Not a chance). But as I grow less and less enchanted with plot-based storytelling (plot descriptions are inevitably my least favorite part of any movie review), I grow more and more intrigued by artists who let other elements do their storytelling. And any film director who can make magic out of a closeup of shoes has to be doing something right (in a way, this film really is kind of all about shoes).
A social message picture about wealth and class, Weber was the perfect director for it. For one because she obviously cares about this message a great deal, and nothing will kill a message picture faster than a creative team that doesn't believe the message. The other reason is more interesting: one thing that makes Weber unique among silent film directors I've seen is her incredible facility with using silent film techniques to show communities. Not just undifferentiated extras, but communities full of individual members, each of which has his or her own standing and relationships within that community. It was one of the remarkable things about Hypocrites, her 1915 fable, and it's almost entirely the point in The Blot.
The most frustrating thing about the film (besides that I can't help but think Amelia ends up with the wrong guy, even if he is the lead and the other actor doesn't even get credited... seriously, silent film records, you are the worst) is that it just has too many intertitles. Later message pictures' key flaw of Too Much Talking About the Issue is the one thing you'd expect to get away from in a silent film, because, hey, silent. The difference is that instead of being repetitive, they're superfluous. Weber tells us everything we need to know with the production design.
Distressingly (again, silent film records), there is no credited art director, production designer, set dresser, costumer, or anything. Not even a crew. So I don't really know who to give credit to, except whatever random people Weber had working for her production company. Because the sets in The Blot are fantastic: a fine middle class house that's disintegrating before your very eyes; another middle class house on its way up the pay grade; a minister's small, dark, but very cozy den; a country club that seems expensive without seeming especially exciting, a fascinating counterpoint to the art deco fantasias belonging to 1930s heiresses. And Weber and her DPs (Phillip R. Du Bois and Gordon Jennings) know exactly when to give us a closeup on the ratty chair, the hole in the carpet, the characters' contrasting shoes. It's not so much attention to detail as it is devotion to detail. You know from the cars, the kitchens, and the shoes everything you need to know about the income differentials of these people. You know which characters notice these things, which characters are insecure about them, and which characters hardly notice it at all. No one needs intertitles.
Of course, it seems like exactly the kind of thing easily dismissed by the kind of manly critic who refuses to take Douglas Sirk seriously (a message picture about shoes? Not a chance). But as I grow less and less enchanted with plot-based storytelling (plot descriptions are inevitably my least favorite part of any movie review), I grow more and more intrigued by artists who let other elements do their storytelling. And any film director who can make magic out of a closeup of shoes has to be doing something right (in a way, this film really is kind of all about shoes).
Thursday, May 15, 2014
Coming Out Is So Three Years Ago
I finally (three years late) caught up with Pariah, the first feature of writer/director Dee Rees. It's good. Really good. Too flawed to be great, perhaps, but the direction, cinematography from Bradford Young, and lead performance by Adepero Oduye are all thrilling achievements.
The thing is, Pariah is the most cliched gay story imaginable: the coming out story. When it was new and anyone at all was still talking about it, the unoriginality of the film came under some scrutiny: "sure, it's good, but it's just another one of those. Can't we get a bit more creative?"
I resent this. I don't dispute it: the coming out story is not original. It was, not too long ago, but it isn't anymore. No, I dispute the idea that it should be more original. The coming out story is as original as romance. Or tragedy. Or a coming of age story. Because, effectively, it is a coming of age story. We've had millions of those. We will have millions more. The thing about a coming of age story (or any other broad plot structure), is that it's basic. It's a common experience upon which infinite variations can be played. There can be as many coming of age stories as there are adults; as many romances as there are couples; as many coming out stories as there are people who come out.
The exciting thing is that the coming out story is uniquely gay. Sure, the language has been co-opted to mean any time anyone reveals something that was secret, but that doesn't make it less gay... that just makes our culture that much gayer. Romances can be straight, gay, whatever. Coming of age is something anyone can go through. Coming out? That's gay.
Unique among minorities, the LGBTQIA community is not visually separated from the dominant culture, but internally separated. It's a great, terrifying, empowering, painful moment when an individual finally leaves the closet. Can't we treat that moment with respect? Can't it exist in infinite permutations, being told and retold again and again and again? No one should silence a lesbian from telling her coming out story just because they've heard coming out stories before. That's prejudice disguised as aesthetic judgment.
Hopefully, in the future, the closet becomes less of an issue. As society grows more tolerant, it becomes easier than ever for younger and younger people to come out. This doesn't negate the coming out story: it transforms it. No longer the slow, extended torment of the closet, of double lives and lying. Instead, the sunny confusion of adolescence, the alternating timid and brash explorations of sexuality and identity, the multiplicity of LGBTQIA experience. What other character study (a coming out narrative is, fundamentally, a character study, since by necessity it kind of has to be more about character than plot) is devoted almost exclusively to our community?
It seems like every time another celebrity comes out these days, they are greeted with cries of, "eh." On the one hand, this is a sign of tolerance, that whether or not you're gay is not your defining quality, that sexuality isn't an important issue. It's progress. Inevitably someone will say some variation on "Big deal. Who cares?"
I care. Because sexuality may not be a big deal anymore, but it's important. Because sexuality does not define us, but it is part of us. Because there can never be too many coming out stories.
As with most story structures: the key is not "do it differently." The key is, "do it well."
The thing is, Pariah is the most cliched gay story imaginable: the coming out story. When it was new and anyone at all was still talking about it, the unoriginality of the film came under some scrutiny: "sure, it's good, but it's just another one of those. Can't we get a bit more creative?"
I resent this. I don't dispute it: the coming out story is not original. It was, not too long ago, but it isn't anymore. No, I dispute the idea that it should be more original. The coming out story is as original as romance. Or tragedy. Or a coming of age story. Because, effectively, it is a coming of age story. We've had millions of those. We will have millions more. The thing about a coming of age story (or any other broad plot structure), is that it's basic. It's a common experience upon which infinite variations can be played. There can be as many coming of age stories as there are adults; as many romances as there are couples; as many coming out stories as there are people who come out.
The exciting thing is that the coming out story is uniquely gay. Sure, the language has been co-opted to mean any time anyone reveals something that was secret, but that doesn't make it less gay... that just makes our culture that much gayer. Romances can be straight, gay, whatever. Coming of age is something anyone can go through. Coming out? That's gay.
Unique among minorities, the LGBTQIA community is not visually separated from the dominant culture, but internally separated. It's a great, terrifying, empowering, painful moment when an individual finally leaves the closet. Can't we treat that moment with respect? Can't it exist in infinite permutations, being told and retold again and again and again? No one should silence a lesbian from telling her coming out story just because they've heard coming out stories before. That's prejudice disguised as aesthetic judgment.
Hopefully, in the future, the closet becomes less of an issue. As society grows more tolerant, it becomes easier than ever for younger and younger people to come out. This doesn't negate the coming out story: it transforms it. No longer the slow, extended torment of the closet, of double lives and lying. Instead, the sunny confusion of adolescence, the alternating timid and brash explorations of sexuality and identity, the multiplicity of LGBTQIA experience. What other character study (a coming out narrative is, fundamentally, a character study, since by necessity it kind of has to be more about character than plot) is devoted almost exclusively to our community?
It seems like every time another celebrity comes out these days, they are greeted with cries of, "eh." On the one hand, this is a sign of tolerance, that whether or not you're gay is not your defining quality, that sexuality isn't an important issue. It's progress. Inevitably someone will say some variation on "Big deal. Who cares?"
I care. Because sexuality may not be a big deal anymore, but it's important. Because sexuality does not define us, but it is part of us. Because there can never be too many coming out stories.
As with most story structures: the key is not "do it differently." The key is, "do it well."
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