***When The Frame Won’t Fit- Won’t Fit Big Time- Jimmy Stewart’s “Call Northside 777- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Call Northside 777.

DVD Review

Call Northside 777, starring Jimmy Stewart, Lee J. Cobb, Richard Conte, directed by Henry Hathaway, 20th Century Fox, 1948.

Hey, I ‘m just like the next guy I don’t want to see a right gee step off, step off big time, on a murder one rap and maybe a quick jolt, although in this case he caught 99 years (99 years of hell by the way) but these crime noir film noir police procedurals leave me cold. No guy wronged by some wicked femme fatale or some wrong gee getting his just desserts for being a blight on the community leaves me decidedly chilled.

Worst is a story where the right gee wronged is championed by the fourth estate (ya, the press for the clueless) in order to see that some rough justice (and an increased circulation) is done in that aforementioned wicked old world. And then to have mild-mannered, intrepid, if off-handedly seen-it-all (at first anyway), Jimmy Stewart come out of left field to save the day, save the gee, save motherhood, save apple pies and save the American way of life, well, like I say give me a wrong gee or a wicked femme to chew on anything.

Here is the skinny on this one though for those who like this kind of crime noir plot line (and there must be plenty given the large number of film and television police procedurals far more sophisticated that this slightly soapy one). Frank nobody from nowhere 1932 high-wire “wet” Chicago steps into a frame, a frame set just for him, when a copper is killed in the “line of duty.” He gets that quick 99 and that is the end of it, right? No, Ma has to see that her boy, her innocent boy, is set free after she has scrubbed floor for eleven years to buy a little piece of mind. So she ponies up some dough for information about the murder, the press (in the person of Stewart and Editor Lee J. Cobb) takes an interest and bing bang bing (added no little by modern photo enhancement technology) an hour or so later Frank nobody from nowhere Chicago 1944 is free, free as a bird, And likes it, likes on the outside just fine. Yawn, I wonder what femme fatale Gilda is up to these days.

***Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Slows Don’t Knows- Magical Realism 101

Sweated dust bowl nights, maybe dog day July or August, as my memory’s eye keeps returning to sweated scenes those months inevitably play their assigned sullen-producing role. After all who would, metabolism whacked out or not, temperature climes hard-wired genetically fixed or not, sweat (really perspire but we will not hang the writer on that, okay) in say January or early February in cold northern hemisphere artic winds drift. But let’s just call it sweated, hand the guy a towel or handkerchief and let him run himself silly this moonless dank night (something more was needed, something more of a handkerchief, than that old railroad man’s rusted red one found in some abandoned track siding on another sweated night, that time working his furrowed eyebrow to freedom roads, freedom roads before his time, before his generation’s on the road time, and certainly before magical mystery tour yellow brick road search for the great multi-hued America West nights time, and finding them, for a while).

The night part is easy, a little cooler time for our sweated boy, but the dust bowl part stands in need of explanation. Simple explanation really, for those who have been around a track. No, not tout track, bet your life on the next sure thing and happiness track, a running Olympic track and field track. A boyhood North Adamsville Hollis Field track which doubled as kickass practice football tract come fall. But year round a running track. Oh, I forgot, and this will tell you sometime about the damn place, five laps to a mile. Aficionados will laugh, so laugh knowing that in all the English –speaking world, at least in the 1961 English- speaking world, there are four laps to a mile. But there is more, more afterthought description. Said track was deeply rutted, summerfallwinterspring, from the lowest contract bidder surface materials scattered, generations scattered, on the pathway. And in all seasons, except the mucks, dry and dusty at the human step, and hence dust bowl. But enough of sweats, mop-moist red handkerchiefs, heavy breathe exhaustions, and dust. This was fun.

No, not the fun of innocent watching (and hoping) shaded windows for visions of irish maidens, ready with prepared notes (a spiel, okay) , frequently revised, and waiting for just that one moment that would bring forth the sweated exotic atlantic cheerleader glance nights but something else fun.

Something not endless walked about, something done, or with the promise of done, for something inside, and for the free spirit rant hammering my brain inside. At least at first after winning a couple of local races against slow (as it turned out) sullen corner boys full of mother’s corn beef, cold misbegotten cheapjack knickerbocker beer, cigarette smoke, unfiltered camels naturally, and larcenies, great and small. Strictly amateur stuff you see, done, done under coercion, truth, to keep a place in corner boy society, or else. Or else endless running, running the gauntlet, every time that corner came into view and some punk (inside I said punk, not for public disclosure even now, just in case, okay), some beef-fed, beer- bloated, cancerous- smoked felon in the making decided to impress some off-hand girl hanging off his off-hand arm (or better, sitting all dolled-up, cashmere sweater-wearing and worthy in his felon’s goods car, a ’57 Chevy maybe).

He had to laugh, laugh out loud (and it was okay since the closest houses surrounding the field, ah, the dust bowl, were not within earshot and he could have disclaimed the Gettysburg Address in high octave and no one would have heard) that his corner boy fears, and desires, had driven him to this fun. This sweated, dank, summer night fun. And to gather in a sense of worth out of it. It was laughable, really laughable. Especially (and here the night proved an ally too) the absurd notion that there would be some sense of worth in the moldy white tee- shirt, mildewy white shorts, who knows what diseased sneakers, Chuck Taylor sneakers, he was wearing. All kind of, well, as Billy Bradley, king hell king of the North Adamsville hard corner boy night and nobody, I mean nobody, disputed that title, used to say, kind of faggoty-looking, or girlish.

But there he was night after night once the weather got too hot to face the blistering hot and foot-burying sands down at daytime Adamsville Beach, daytime girls noticing his appearance too and probably thinking kind of, just like Billy king hell king thinking, yes, kind of faggoty, and knowing, marrow bone knowing, not girlish.

There he was pushing the night away and the red-faced Irish winds, harder, harder around the oval, watch tick in hand, looking, looking I guess for immortality, immortality even then.

Later, in bobby darin times or percy faith times, who knows, call it jack kennedy time if you like, but sometime before the third British invasion and before jack death, sitting, sitting high against the lion-guarded pyramid statute front door dream, common dreams, common hero dreams, all gone asunder, all gone asunder, on this curious fact, no wind, Irish or otherwise propelled him forward. No champion dusted field sweeper of all before him, maybe genetically hard-wired that way too although he always favored being poorly coached as excuse better. And hence he, dream champion on sweated July (or maybe August like I said before) dust bowl nights lived with the slows, the anaerobic slows, and was left with only desire, wet clothes and one minute good feels when he hit his practice strides. And many years later he felt that same good feeling whenever he logged more than one jogged mile. Who would have figured that one?

***Three’s Company- Noel Coward’s Design For Living- A Film Adaptation

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film adaptation of Noel Coward’s Design For Living.

DVD Review

Design For Living, starring Gary Cooper, Frederic March, Miriam Hopkins, from a play by Noel Coward, screenplay by Ben Hecht, 1933

Noel Coward, at least in the New York theater scene, is having something of another revival which prompted me to take a second, or maybe third look, at his work. No question he had a serious sense of plot and language when it came to writing “manner” plays addressing “high society (or what passed for high society in his day),” a look at that society from one who came to appreciate its frills and follies from a personal past of barely rubbing two nickels together. That is the case here with the film adaptation of the somewhat autobiographical sketch play, Design for Living (along some material help from his coming up from obscurity friends, the actors Lunt and Fontaine).

As with many adaptations from books or plays the relationship to the original source can be, well, attenuated as it is here, at least according to Mr. Coward, on the use of dialogue. But the general plot outline is similar- two guys, two artsy guys (one Gary Cooper who passes for the Midwestern All-American boy complete with ah shuck) and a world-weary gal get all balled up in a threesome, a love triangle, comedic or not, and for a while nobody could win. It all gets sorted out by the end but not before what passed for 1930s humor, including deadpan and slapstick humor, got a workout. This one is probably too tame for today’s audiences having seen every kind of social possibility on the screen by now but in the 1930s this was, and rightly so I think, regarded as sophisticated comedy, and certainly the subject matter raised eyebrows. Not the best Coward (or Cooper and March) but interesting.

***Playwright's Corner- Tennessee Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for American playwright Tennessee Williams' "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof."

Play/DVD Reviews

Enough Mendacity To Sink A Ship

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, The Theater of Tennessee Williams, Volume Three, New Directions Books, New York, 1955

The first couple of paragraphs here have been used as introduction to other plays written by Tennessee Williams and reviewed in this space. This review applies to both the stage play and the film versions with differences noted as part of the review

Perhaps, as is the case with this reviewer, if you have come to the works of the excellent American playwright Tennessee Williams through adaptations of his plays to commercially distributed films you too will have missed some of the more controversial and intriguing aspects of his plays that had placed him at that time along with Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller as America’s finest serious playwrights. Although some of the films have their own charms I want to address the written plays in this entry first (along with, when appropriate, commentary about Williams’ extensive and detailed directing instructions).

That said, there are certain limitations for a political commentator like this reviewer on the works of Williams. Although his plays, at least his best and most well-known ones, take place in the steamy South or its environs, there is virtually no acknowledgement of the race question that dominated Southern life during the period of the plays; and, for that matter was beginning to dominate national life. Thus, although it is possible to pay homage to his work on its artistic merits, I am very, very tentative about giving fulsome praise to that work on its political merits. With that proviso Williams nevertheless has created a very modern stage on which to address social questions at the personal level, like homosexuality, incest and the dysfunctional family that only began to get addressed widely well after his ground-breaking work hit the stage.

“Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” is a prime example of the contradiction that a radical commentator is placed in. The themes of duplicity, latent homosexuality, adultery and dysfunctional families topped off by more than enough mendacity to sink a ship are the stuff of social drama that NEED to be addressed as outcomes in the modern capitalist cultural sphere. However, in the end nothing really gets resolved truthfully here. Old 1950’s-style All-American boy Brick, the ‘great white hope’ of the family, may or may not sober up after the ‘lost’ of his dear friend and fellow football player, Skipper. Saucy and sexy wife Maggie (the cat) may or may not really get pregnant by Brick and save the family heritage for him, or die trying. The only certainty, despite all that above-mentioned mendacity, is that Big Daddy is going to die and that 28,000 acres of the finest land in the Delta is going to need new management, either by Brick, brother Goober (along with his scheming wife and their ‘lovely' brood of children) or some upstart. Off of these possible outcomes, however, I would not get too worked up about the final outcome.

In the movie version, done in the 1950’s as well, which starred the recently departed excellent actor Paul Newman as Brick and a fetching Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the question of Brick’s possible homosexual relationship with Skipper is far more muted than in the play. The implicit question seems to concern Brick’s fading youth, his search for perfect meaning to life in Mississippi and that one’s existential crisis can be eliminated by reliance on the bottle. The relationship between the dying Big Daddy and his ever suffering wife, Big Mama, is less dastardly than in the play as well. The scheming Goober and wife and family and those ‘lovely’ children, however, run true to form. My sense of the movie, unlike the deeper issues of the play, is that a few therapy sessions would put old Brick back on the right track. The play was far less hopeful in that regard.

***Adam Smith Or Karl Marx?-Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story- A Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story

DVD Review

Capitalism: A Love Story, directed by Michael Moore, 2009

No question the premier documentary director, Michael Moore, knows how to convincingly and artfully put together a collage propaganda (in the traditional sense) film. And he does not fail here. He shows the raw face of capitalism as it has ravaged his America, particularly over the past several decades when the working people of this country have taken it on the chin, repeatedly taken it on the chin, at the hands of today’s robber barons and economic royalists (okay, okay the 1%). His interviews of those who have been beaten down by home and farm (don’t forget those in the recent past) foreclosures at the hands of the merciless banks, the conscious “race to the bottom “ by American corporations to drive the wage rate down by outsourcing and off-shore operations, and the perfidious nature of the recent crop of politicians from selectmen to president most more than ready to do the bidding of the ruling class (okay, 1%) all are graphically and powerfully portrayed in this documentary.

Still and all as powerful as all of this work is as propaganda for an anti-capitalist (and maybe even a pro-socialist) perspective) I would, and gladly, take the expose more seriously if Brother Moore didn’t always find time to be front and center at every Democratic National Convention he can find, including last year’s edition. One should at least be able to take one’s own conclusions seriously before asking others to do so.

***The Once And Future King- “The King’s Speech”-A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film The King’s Speech.

The King’s Speech, starring Colin Firth, Helen Bonham Carter, directed by Tom Hooper, 2010

No question Mr. Darcy (oops) Colin Firth deserved every accolade, including the coveted Oscar, for his performance as the stammering King George VI (the current monarch’s father). Anyone from king to kid (including this writer) who has had even a passing acquaintance with stammering can relate to the story line here, and the sheer talent necessary for an actor to convincingly produce such a realistic portrayal (especially that climatic pep talk speech to the empire). And hats off to Geoffrey Rush as the unorthodox tutor who sees the king through his travails. However, at the end of the day and as the good king himself was painfully aware, good republican that I am I was left with the gnawing feeling that the monarchy
(and the monarch) portrayed add nothing to our accumulated historical experience. Old Oliver Cromwell and his boys had it right in 1649-and it hasn’t been right since 1660.

***A Girl Has Got To Do What A Girl Has Got To Do-19th Century-Style- “Jane Eyre” –A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the latest film adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

DVD Review

Jane Eyre, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, 2011.

Okay, okay I will freely confess that as a boy I did not, I steadfastly did not, read a girls’ book, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. And I did not, as we live a confessional age, read her sisters’ books or even, damned to hell, Jane Austen’s stuff. And you would not have either (or at least not have said so publicly) any place near my corner boys society growing up absurd in the 1950s old North Adamsville neighborhood. See you either didn’t read, and made a big virtues out of it preferring chasing cars and girls, or for those like my corner boy, Frankie Larkin, and me, who did we read mad Jack Kerouac, or besotted Scott Fitzgerald, or best of all, the max daddy mad adventurer Ernest Hemingway. Period.

Moreover if we didn’t read guy novelists then we were crazy (and make that I was crazy) for history books. But not girls’ books, no way. Which is a shame in a way because the trials and tribulations of Jane Eyre (and other female characters created by 19th European women writers, and not just women writers either, like the aforementioned Jane Austen) related experiences of class, race and social oppression (intertwined with a little off-hand romance to sell books then, and now, to the female reading public) that resonate with this writer today.

So it is something of a gift from the heavens that over the past couple of decades many of the writers that I did not read, steadfastly did not read in case you forgot, have had their work adapted to the screen. Happily this is true for the film under review. That means that this reviewer gets to, as he has on other occasions, see the story line of the book unfold in order to determine whether he would decide to read this book after viewing the film.

And the judgment? There is now a high bar for British romances set by Ms. Austen, most notably with her Miss Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darby in Pride and Prejudice in the matter of 19th century sensibility. While that standard was not surpassed in this film Ms. Bronte (and the actors here) did give a very decent sense of the oddball (to our eyes), anti-democratic and socially savage way that women, women of no means (or no known means), were shunted off in the backwoods of society.

But spunk is a value we can all appreciate and to use a more modern phrase than would be proper in jolly old England back in the day to describe the evolving plot line- a girl has got tot do what a girl has got to do. On that level this thing is a classic girl (okay woman, Ms. Eyre) meets boy (okay man, Mr. Rochester) story. And, lo and behold, the girl is actually ten times stronger than the boy. And, frankly, twenty times more interesting. Maybe that is why I, steadfastly, did not read Jane Eyre and the others then. But I will now.