The movies in my head, part one

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Apollonia's sister Augusta came to the office recently, and we had a long and lively conversation about old movies. We are both addicted to Turner Classic Movies, as it turns out. She challenged me to come up with a list of my favorite movies. Impossible! But we started naming our favorites, and . . .

 

 

“Dodsworth!” Augusta proclaimed. Oh my god what a movie. It's based on a slender but uncharacteristically sweet Sinclair Lewis novel. Walter Huston is a patient man who gets dragged to Europe by his nervous silly wife Ruth Chatterton; he meets Mary Astor, and – well, I won't tell you more. But what a final scene! Who needs CGI when you have acting?

 

 

Okay, I'm up to this challenge. Five, four, three, two, one:

 

 

The Red Shoes. Spectacular Technicolor, classic plot, incredible acting. Featuring real ballet stars: Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, Leonid Massine. And featuring one of my favorite actors, the grave and handsome Anton Walbrook.

 

 

Holiday. Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Edward Everett Horton. Glorious Philip Barry 1930s dialogue, and a classy upper-crust setting, and a happy ending. And it has a charming air of insouciance, almost as if the characters were ad-libbing the dialogue – which is just as it should be. “Do you mean your father isn't even a Whoozis?”

 

 

Black Narcissus. Another Archers movie, like “Red Shoes,” based on a Rumer Godden novel. The colors and the scenery, oh my God. Apollonia can't stand this movie because of the male lead, David Farrar, an ugly hairy brute who's shirtless for maybe a little too much of the movie. But, for me, it just seems hilarious that this gargoyle actually seems attractive to the sex-starved nuns in the movie.

 

 

Witness for the Prosecution. I am not normally a fan of courtroom movies: too claustrophobic. But this one I'm okay with. Charles Laughton as a lawyer, Elsa Lanchester as his nurse. Tyrone Power! Marlene Dietrich! A complex twisty plot, with humor, yet! And every time you think the mystery's resolved, it snarls back up again . . .

 

 

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. As with courtroom movies, I am not warm to the war-movie genre. This movie is the exception: it's intense and simple and methodical. I understand why they made it: it was a war thing, they needed to show America striking back at Japan. It's the American version of something by Leni Riefenstahl.

 

 

Dune. I first saw first in the back yard of the Marine House in Tunis, under the stars, projected onto a sheet. It's one of the most peculiar, spaciest, funniest, scariest movies of all time.  It opens with the ethereal Virginia Madsen as Princess Irulan, floating calmly against a starscape, saying calmly, “A beginning is a very delicate time.” It's perfectly magical. The whole movie gets into your head if you watch it more than once. “Wait for my brother, Baron!”

 

 

More soon. This is fun.

 

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The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus

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For a while in the 1940s, British cinema was really spectacular. Four movies are my particular favorites: “Black Narcissus,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” and “The Red Shoes.”

All were directed and written by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. All are in beautiful Technicolor, or some mutant version of Technicolor that's even more vivid than the real thing. All four are full of contrasts: sincerity and cynicism, religion and worldliness, life and death. All four accommodate these contrasts with ease and grace and humor. All four feature fascinating actors and actresses: Deborah Kerr, Moira Shearer, Roger Livesey, David Niven, Anton Walbrook.

Powell loved extreme close-ups and theatrical gestures and bright primary colors. And Pressburger, a Hungarian who spoke better English than most native speakers (a regular Joseph Conrad type), wrote beautiful dialogue.

My favorite is “Black Narcissus,” I think. It's based on a Rumer Godden novel about a group of Anglican nuns who set up a convent in northern India near the Himalayas. It's too much for them. They fail spectacularly, against a background of spectacular scenery.

My friend Pat prefers “The Red Shoes.” She saw it when she was a kid – but let her tell it: “I was maybe eight or nine years old. The theater was several blocks away on a very busy street – 55^th Street in Chicago – and I went to the movies every Saturday afternoon for a double feature. In those days one could sit through the showings as many times as the movie was shown and I loved the Red Shoes so much I waited through the second feature until Shoes came on again. My mother wasn’t one for franticness, but she was pretty worried when I didn’t show for dinner. She didn’t scold much though, I think she thought it was clever of me to be so entranced. After that I had to have a coloring book of ballet dancers and I remembered that the ballerina in the movie had white makeup on her eyelids and black dots in the corners of her eyes. So, naturally, all the dancers in my coloring book had to have that too.”

When's the last time a movie made you feel like that?

In the words of Libby Gelman-Waxner: this is what movies are all about.

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Black Swan

 

Partner and I saw “Black Swan” on Sunday.

 

 

OMG!

 

First of all, Natalie Portman is just about perfect. Why does it always amaze me when a movie star actually turns in a good performance? Well, hers is better than good, it's terrific. She goes from fragile to terrifying and back again. And there's a great supporting cast: Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, and especially Winona Ryder as a washed-up ballerina who, ahem, isn't taking retirement very well at all, and who just about spontaneously combusts in her three or four little scenes.

 

It made me think of that other really excellent ballet movie, “The Red Shoes.” In “Red Shoes,” an innocent young ballerina becomes a star by portraying a role in which she dances herself to death. She falls in love with the young ballet composer, she leaves the ballet, she finds she can't live without it, she's torn, she goes back . . . Well, I won't tell you the ending. But it ain't very cheerful.

 

Same in “Black Swan,” but with a difference. The heroine is told, over and over again, that she can't dance meaningfully unless she understands the emotions underlying her role. The story of the innocent white swan and the wicked black swan starts to invade her everyday life. Creepy things start to happen. Or do they? Doesn't matter, because she dances better and better. It's the old Romantic fable of the suffering / struggling / crazy artist, except that it feels mighty real, even when people start sprouting feathers and such.

 

It doesn't matter if you like ballet or not. Just jete your little Early American butt down to the local cineplex and see it.

 

If you don't come out doing a plie and a cabriole and a grand arabesque, you're just not a human being.

 

 

 

I'll take the low art, and you'll take the high art

 

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The Bravo Network had a new show this season called “Work of Art.” Its format is the same as that of “Top Chef,” and “Project Runway,” and “RuPaul's Drag Race,” for that matter: get a bunch of aspiring cooks / designers / drag queens / artists, throw them in a room, give them a box of crayons and a Taiwanese newspaper, tell them to create something interesting, and then allow a group of “experts” to evaluate the results. (Don't worry if you haven't heard of these “experts” before; you're just asked to assume that they're well-known in their fields. I grew up in the era when Marcus Welby was thought to be a real doctor, so I can go along with the gag.)

 

Jerry Saltz, one of the “Work of Art” judges, recently wrote an interesting piece in New York about his participation in the show. This evoked a blizzard of commentary from the readership – much of it revolving around two issues:

 

• Art is much too important to be the subject of a competition.

• Anything created in the context of a reality TV show can't be good art anyway.

 

(Some readers also thought that, as an art critic, Saltz was also somehow subverting the creative process. Well, subversion of the creative process is just what critics do. I should know.)

 

Let's take those two big points one at a time.

 

Competition. This is sort of a condition of life, I think. Artists, like the rest of us, compete all the time – for attention, for an audience, for money. Most artists make little secret of it. Beethoven wrote amazingly awful dreck because he needed money. Philip Dick wrote novel after novel at top speed, also for cash. Andy Warhol did magazine illustrations. The Italian Renaissance painters were intensely aware (and envious) of one another's work and success. Bach and his contemporaries challenged one another to, ahem, organ competitions, and fought and begged for patronage. Picasso said smugly to Gertrude Stein: “I will paint you one apple and it will be as fine as all of Cezanne's apples.”

 

Sounds like competition to me.

 

So much for that.

 

“Low art” isn't “art” at all. This is the root of pretty much every bit of snobbery in the Art World, even back when I was a schoolchild back in Ur of the Chaldees. In “The Red Shoes,” the dictatorial impresario Lermontov famously declares of ballet that “For me, it is a religion.”

 

Hats off to Monsieur Lermontov, but not everyone subscribes to his religion. Sometimes, dancing is just dancing.

 

This “low art = no art” fallacy takes many forms. When the Harry Potter books were coming out, people were alternately praising J. K. Rowling for getting kids to read, and worrying loudly that kids weren't reading “the right thing.” What is the right thing to read? “The Joy of Cooking”? “Crime and Punishment”? “Guns & Ammo”?

 

Another fallacy, more central to this discussion: you can't really produce anything memorable using a “low” medium like comic books, or TV, or graffiti, or reality TV. This is the main point of many of the critics of “Work of Art.” It's a reality show, and nothing good - nothing worthwhile - can come from a reality show.

 

Nonsense, nonsense. There's beauty and meaning to be found everywhere, loads and loads of it. And artists and cooks and drag queens and designers are working like gangbusters to create something new and worthwhile and unique.

 

And if it makes money and makes some poor zhlub on a cable show successful for a few minutes: fab-u-lous.

 

Those who disagree can go read “Crime and Punishment” or “Guns & Ammo,” or build a plinth in the backyard, or do a watercolor of the First Cuckoo of Spring, or whatever it is they consider to be a serious use of their valuable time.

 

I, in the meantime, will be watching RuPaul.

 

Because, as Ru says so pithily: Girlfriend, if you don't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?

 

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