Believe it or not, this year’s class of inductees brings us to a nice round 100 films in the Muriels Hall of Fame. And despite a few blind spots (I’ll get to those in a bit), I think we’ve built ourselves a pretty darn good list of classic films. If someone was trying to learn more about film history, I’d proudly point them to our list as a good starting point.
Before we get to this year’s voting results, here’s something for all you statistics geeks out there:
- All but three of our inducted films appeared in the most recent “They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?” compilation of the greatest films of all time (the holdouts: Duck Amuck, Gojira, and What’s Opera, Doc?). 49 of the inductees are among TSPDT’s top 100. The highest-placing films that we haven’t inducted yet are: Battleship Potemkin (#14), Some Like It Hot (#28), La Dolce Vita (#29), Ordet (#33), and L’Avventura (#37).
- 75% of our inductees ranked in the 2012 Sight and Sound poll’s top 250 films list. Highest-ranked holdouts include: Battleship Potemkin [again] (#11), Late Spring (#15), L’Avventura (#21), Contempt (#21), and Ordet (#24). Hey, what do you folks have against Eisenstein?
- Twelve of our inducted films were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Three of them won (Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Lawrence of Arabia).
- Only two documentaries have been inducted thusfar. Not awesome, but maybe not surprising either. A lot of eligible documentaries are in a style that’s pretty different from what we generally associate with non-fiction filmmaking today, thus rendering folks like Robert Flaherty out of fashion. Side note: Pretty much every Frederick Wiseman film can be found on Kanopy!
- Muriel’s favorite filmmakers are: Howard Hawks (six inducted films), Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa (5 apiece), and Luis Buñuel (3).
- Three of our inducted films were directed or co-directed by women. That doesn’t sound like a lot, except that directing jobs for women weren’t exactly plentiful 50+ years ago. So hey – not too shabby!
- Five directors who’ve been inducted are still alive: Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising), John Boorman (Point Blank), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless and Weekend), Roman Polanski (Repulsion), and Michael Snow (Wavelength). Two more- Stanley Donen and Agnès Varda- were inducted while they were still alive but have since passed away *sniff*.
- 51 of the inducted films contain dialogue that is primarily in English. The next most-spoken languages are: French (16, not counting Battle of Algiers), Japanese (8), and Italian (3). Thirteen of the films are silent.
- 56 out of the 100 inducted films have been released on DVD and Blu-Ray by Criterion Collection or, in the case of Daisies, by Eclipse. This includes, believe it or not, every film with a primary spoken language other than English. I supposed that says something about the “Criterion-ization” of world cinema history, with the good folks at Criterion largely shouldering the burden for bringing classic foreign films to American audiences. However, that would be a job for a better writer than I, and someone with rather more space than I’ve given myself here.
- Finally, here’s the breakdown of the inducted films by decade: 1 from the 1900s (take a bow, Georges Méliès!), 9 from the 1920s, 13 from the 1930s, 20 from the 1940s, 26 from the 1950s, 30 from the 1960s. I could speculate as to why the distribution has been weighted toward more recent work, but one obvious factor is the 50th Anniversary Awards automatically inducting films, and considering we’ve only been voting in this category since 2007 (for 1957 releases), that certainly would skew the results.
Anyway, for those of you who are still with us, here are this year’s voting results. This year, we divided up the final ballot into three categories, as shown below. An asterisk denotes this year’s inductees.
Category A - Directors of Previously Inducted Films
* Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks, USA) [8 votes]
* Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, Howard Hawks, USA) [6 votes]
* Ikiru (1952, Akira Kurosawa, Japan) [6 votes]
* Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone, USA) [6 votes]
* Week-End (1967, Jean-Luc Godard, France) [6 votes]
5 votes
The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Black Narcissus (1947, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK)
Imitation of Life (1959, Douglas Sirk, USA)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski, USA)
4 votes
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles, USA)
A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson, France)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford, USA)
One Froggy Evening (1955, Charles M. Jones, USA)
Strangers on a Train (1951, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch, USA)
Vampyr (1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Germany)
Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)
3 votes
L’Avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy)
Chimes at Midnight (1965, Orson Welles, Spain)
Day of Wrath (1943, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
Gertrud (1964, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
The Gold Rush (1925, Charlie Chaplin, USA)
I Was Born, But… (1932, Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)
Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968, Alain Resnais, France)
Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray, USA)
A Matter of Life and Death (1946, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder, USA)
2 votes:
Belle de Jour (1967, Luis Buñuel, France)
The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick, USA)
Lola Montès (1955, Max Ophüls, France)
Lolita (1962, Stanley Kubrick, UK)
Sullivan’s Travels (1941, Preston Sturges, USA)
Umberto D. (1952, Vittorio de Sica, Italy)
1 vote:
The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder)
Summertime (1955, David Lean, USA)
Ugetsu (1953, Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)
Category B - Directors With No Previously-Inducted Films (English-Language)
* Night of the Living Dead (1968, George A. Romero, USA) [12 votes]
* It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra, USA) [10 votes]
* Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim, USA) [8 votes]
7 votes
Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich, USA)
6 votes
All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA)
5 votes
Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn, USA)
A Hard Day’s Night! (1964, Richard Lester, UK)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962, John Frankenheimer, USA)
4 votes
The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols, USA)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincente Minnelli, USA)
Portrait of Jason (1967, Shirley Clarke, USA)
Window Water Baby Moving (1959, Stan Brakhage, USA)
3 votes
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Lewis Milestone, USA)
Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith, USA)
Report (1967, Bruce Conner, USA)
Seconds (1966, John Frankenheimer, USA)
The Servant (1963, Joseph Losey, UK)
A Star Is Born (1954, George Cukor, USA)
2 votes
The Haunting (1963, Robert Wise, USA)
Park Row (1952, Samuel Fuller, USA)
Shadows (1959, John Cassavetes, USA)
1 vote
The Hitch-Hiker (1953, Ida Lupino, USA)
Category C - Directors With No Previously-Inducted Films (Non-English-Language)
* Eyes Without a Face (1960, Georges Franju, France) [12 votes]
* La Belle et la Bête (1946, Jean Cocteau, France) [11 votes]
* Children of Paradise (1945, Marcel Carné, France) [11 votes]
* The Leopard (1963, Luchino Visconti, Italy) [10 votes]
8 votes
Black Girl (1966, Ousmane Sembène, Senegal)
Elevator to the Gallows (1958, Louis Malle, France)
Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin, France)
6 votes
Pandora’s Box (1929, G.W. Pabst, Germany)
4 votes
Ménilmontant (1926, Dimitri Kirsanoff, France)
Unsere Afrikareise (1966, Peter Kubelka, Austria)
3 votes
The Cranes Are Flying (1957, Mikhail Kalatozov, USSR)
2 votes
Awaara (1951, Raj Kapoor, India)
Fires on the Plain (1959, Kon Ichikawa, Japan)
The Human Condition, Part I: No Greater Love (1959, Masaki Kobayashi, Japan)
Kanal (1957, Andrzej Wajda, Poland)
Orpheus (1950, Jean Cocteau, France)
Thanks to everybody for follow us for this year’s festivities. The site should be updated within the next week. See you this winter for this year’s Muriels!
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Eyes Without a Face (1960, Georges Franju)
“I first saw George Franju’s Eyes Without A Face on a gray market dupe under the title ‘The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus.’ It’s a title that, broadly speaking, fits the film even if the name of the doctor isn’t ‘Faustus.’ To describe the plot of the film, in which a mad plastic surgeon murders women in order to graft their faces onto the ruined face of his daughter, is to conjure up a lurid picture of an exploitation film. And the film lives up to that title, too, in a stomach-churning surgical sequence that’s filmed with a dispassionate, clinical clarity. It’s a film that is an affront to an unprepared audience.
“Certainly, continental directors spent a fair amount of time and energy making rip-offs of the film in the 1960s. The Spanish exploitation director, Jess Franco parlayed his own rip-off of Eyes Without a Face into a series of films about ‘The Awful Dr. Orloff.’ It borrows the plot and echoes the alternate title, but misses the poetry. It’s the poetry of Eyes Without a Face that lingers long after the bruise of its initial impact has faded. Its later imitators are more rarified (most famously, Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In and Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky). But even these are grasping after a phantom, an ineffable otherness that haunts the images in Franju’s film that cannot be replicated.
“It’s a film of primal images translated from the darkest European myths into a contemporary (in 1959) post war France. Dr. Genessier would have been a familiar figure to an audience for whom the Nazi doctors were a fresh memory. It’s a film, too, about identity. Genessier himself presents one face to the world while his true self is something else entirely. Like the Nazis, Genessier is an upright pillar of his community when he’s not committing atrocities. His nurse, Louise, presents a different picture: in his home, she’s the loyal servant, perhaps in love with Genessier to the point of madness. Out in the world, she’s something more sinister, dressed in her rain slicker, picking up potential victims. She’s a serial killer who believes in her crimes. Love is prime mover of this film’s plot, and it is well aware of the fact that horrors without number have been committed in the name of love. The film frames its images in a narrative that is by turns dreamlike and crystal clear. It looks backward to the symbolists and to Jean Cocteau and sideways at Alain Resnais, but in a French cinema that never made all that many horror movies, it is sui generis.
“I need to own up to personal elements of my relationship with Eyes Without a Face. When I had the opportunity to choose my own name after my gender transition, I chose to name myself after Edith’s Scob’s character, Christiane Genessier. She’s the masked princess drifting through the gothic castle of her mad sorcerer of a father. Obviously, the film is meaningful to me in a way that might not resonate with all audiences. For me, it strikes a deep chord of melancholy because it’s fundamentally about the imposition of gender norms on subjugated women by a patriarchy that has determined that a woman’s worth is found in what she looks like. It’s a microcosm of the concerns of feminism and humanity itself balled up inside a dark fairy tale, touching on the agency of women, women acting as the kapos of the patriarchy (this is Alida Valli’s sinister nurse), of bodily autonomy, of some women being disposable once men get what they want from them. I feel a deep kinship with Christiane Genessier, who is subject to a society and a father who believe her body has to appear one way even when that one way is impossible. In the end, she can’t live with the monstrosity in either such an oppressive family life or in herself. It’s every bit the same kind of nightmare as The Handmaid’s Tale or ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ Issues of bodily autonomy are literally the thread of life for me. If I was imprisoned in the body I was issued at birth, I would be dead. Christiane Genessier has no prince charming to save her, but she eventually takes control of her own destiny and saves herself, wandering into the night like a ghost, drifting to an uncertain future.
“This is one of the greatest of all horror movies.” ~ Christianne Benedict
Coming tomorrow: this year's voting results, plus maybe some remarks if I'm feeling chatty. We'll see.
“Certainly, continental directors spent a fair amount of time and energy making rip-offs of the film in the 1960s. The Spanish exploitation director, Jess Franco parlayed his own rip-off of Eyes Without a Face into a series of films about ‘The Awful Dr. Orloff.’ It borrows the plot and echoes the alternate title, but misses the poetry. It’s the poetry of Eyes Without a Face that lingers long after the bruise of its initial impact has faded. Its later imitators are more rarified (most famously, Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In and Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky). But even these are grasping after a phantom, an ineffable otherness that haunts the images in Franju’s film that cannot be replicated.
“It’s a film of primal images translated from the darkest European myths into a contemporary (in 1959) post war France. Dr. Genessier would have been a familiar figure to an audience for whom the Nazi doctors were a fresh memory. It’s a film, too, about identity. Genessier himself presents one face to the world while his true self is something else entirely. Like the Nazis, Genessier is an upright pillar of his community when he’s not committing atrocities. His nurse, Louise, presents a different picture: in his home, she’s the loyal servant, perhaps in love with Genessier to the point of madness. Out in the world, she’s something more sinister, dressed in her rain slicker, picking up potential victims. She’s a serial killer who believes in her crimes. Love is prime mover of this film’s plot, and it is well aware of the fact that horrors without number have been committed in the name of love. The film frames its images in a narrative that is by turns dreamlike and crystal clear. It looks backward to the symbolists and to Jean Cocteau and sideways at Alain Resnais, but in a French cinema that never made all that many horror movies, it is sui generis.
“I need to own up to personal elements of my relationship with Eyes Without a Face. When I had the opportunity to choose my own name after my gender transition, I chose to name myself after Edith’s Scob’s character, Christiane Genessier. She’s the masked princess drifting through the gothic castle of her mad sorcerer of a father. Obviously, the film is meaningful to me in a way that might not resonate with all audiences. For me, it strikes a deep chord of melancholy because it’s fundamentally about the imposition of gender norms on subjugated women by a patriarchy that has determined that a woman’s worth is found in what she looks like. It’s a microcosm of the concerns of feminism and humanity itself balled up inside a dark fairy tale, touching on the agency of women, women acting as the kapos of the patriarchy (this is Alida Valli’s sinister nurse), of bodily autonomy, of some women being disposable once men get what they want from them. I feel a deep kinship with Christiane Genessier, who is subject to a society and a father who believe her body has to appear one way even when that one way is impossible. In the end, she can’t live with the monstrosity in either such an oppressive family life or in herself. It’s every bit the same kind of nightmare as The Handmaid’s Tale or ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ Issues of bodily autonomy are literally the thread of life for me. If I was imprisoned in the body I was issued at birth, I would be dead. Christiane Genessier has no prince charming to save her, but she eventually takes control of her own destiny and saves herself, wandering into the night like a ghost, drifting to an uncertain future.
“This is one of the greatest of all horror movies.” ~ Christianne Benedict
Coming tomorrow: this year's voting results, plus maybe some remarks if I'm feeling chatty. We'll see.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Night of the Living Dead (1968, George A. Romero)
"I know you're afraid. I am too."
“The first time I saw George A. Romero's landmark horror film Night of the Living Dead, I was sixteen. I was staying over at my best friend Jim's place, as I often did in high school. His mother, though usually home, was away for some reason this particular evening, and though we'd often go downtown and hang out at the various coffee shops on Main Street, this night we'd decided to stay in and fart around. Flipping channels, we came across a local station filling time with a cheap horror film - Rospo Pallenberg's Cutting Class. That film, a dumb and clumsy thing that never quite figures out if it's intending or not to be funny, activated our natural teenage tendency towards mockery, and we had a good time riding it as hard as we could. Having built up a good head of steam, we decided to stick around for the next film, fully expecting to continue with our fun. That film turned out to be Dead. Jump to 2 AM, where we have be stunned into silence, our only reaction to be to slowly turn to each other and utter, ‘Whoa.’ I did not sleep well that night.
“Almost a quarter century later, after a dozen viewings, my most recent watch of Dead this past week still left me stunned into silence. I have over the years shown it to other people, people who aren't film buffs, and seen the same reaction happen. I'm not sure what else I can add to the conversation on this one - few films have been as poked, prodded, pulled, dissected, deconstructed and blown apart as this - so all I can do is concentrate on my specific reaction and what that says about the film. And beyond the vituperative social commentary, beyond the groundbreaking casting, beyond the fact that Romero straight-up invented an entire genre, beyond everything that makes this a game-changer... strip all that away, get down to the meat and bone of the thing, and you still have the most terrifying film ever made, a film that retains its cruel and incomparable power to disorient and disturb even after double-digit viewings.
“Therein lies the extraordinary power of Dead - it's a destabilized film for and from a destabilized time, a work of narrative art in which the narrative is a series of shock waves meant to wreck the audience's sense of expectation. And within those shock waves lies its suffocating sense of dread, the mounting panic that stems from its eventual succumbing to the sense that everything is wrong and nothing will be okay. Cutting through the accumulated detritus around the film to find its core, this is the elemental truth to be found there - Night of the Living Dead works at a level most horror cannot hope to touch because, for any number of reasons relating to the time and place it was made, it posits a future where Nothing Will Be Okay. Fear is the only option. There's no road out. These are terrifying times, and this might be The End. I know you're afraid. I am too.” ~ Steve Carlson
“The first time I saw George A. Romero's landmark horror film Night of the Living Dead, I was sixteen. I was staying over at my best friend Jim's place, as I often did in high school. His mother, though usually home, was away for some reason this particular evening, and though we'd often go downtown and hang out at the various coffee shops on Main Street, this night we'd decided to stay in and fart around. Flipping channels, we came across a local station filling time with a cheap horror film - Rospo Pallenberg's Cutting Class. That film, a dumb and clumsy thing that never quite figures out if it's intending or not to be funny, activated our natural teenage tendency towards mockery, and we had a good time riding it as hard as we could. Having built up a good head of steam, we decided to stick around for the next film, fully expecting to continue with our fun. That film turned out to be Dead. Jump to 2 AM, where we have be stunned into silence, our only reaction to be to slowly turn to each other and utter, ‘Whoa.’ I did not sleep well that night.
“Almost a quarter century later, after a dozen viewings, my most recent watch of Dead this past week still left me stunned into silence. I have over the years shown it to other people, people who aren't film buffs, and seen the same reaction happen. I'm not sure what else I can add to the conversation on this one - few films have been as poked, prodded, pulled, dissected, deconstructed and blown apart as this - so all I can do is concentrate on my specific reaction and what that says about the film. And beyond the vituperative social commentary, beyond the groundbreaking casting, beyond the fact that Romero straight-up invented an entire genre, beyond everything that makes this a game-changer... strip all that away, get down to the meat and bone of the thing, and you still have the most terrifying film ever made, a film that retains its cruel and incomparable power to disorient and disturb even after double-digit viewings.
“Therein lies the extraordinary power of Dead - it's a destabilized film for and from a destabilized time, a work of narrative art in which the narrative is a series of shock waves meant to wreck the audience's sense of expectation. And within those shock waves lies its suffocating sense of dread, the mounting panic that stems from its eventual succumbing to the sense that everything is wrong and nothing will be okay. Cutting through the accumulated detritus around the film to find its core, this is the elemental truth to be found there - Night of the Living Dead works at a level most horror cannot hope to touch because, for any number of reasons relating to the time and place it was made, it posits a future where Nothing Will Be Okay. Fear is the only option. There's no road out. These are terrifying times, and this might be The End. I know you're afraid. I am too.” ~ Steve Carlson
Saturday, August 10, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: La Belle et la Bête (1946, Jean Cocteau)
“Fangs and bristly fur obscure the handsome face of Jean Marais, who plays both blowhard suitor Avenant and the title monster in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. He menaces Josette Day, who plays Belle, from either end of its pastoral romance. She's in the thrall of patriarchy within both mortal and mystical realms.
“The Beast wears glittering fineries, shot by Henri Alékan in inky blacks and luminous whites. His castle is a dreamland of surrealist effects work. Disembodied hands grip candles in its hallways; reversed footage and slow motion render bodies uncanny. The decor, like its master, is achingly vulnerable. Little else in film fantasy is as seductive as Cocteau's sui generis fairy tale.” ~ Alice Stoehr
Coming tomorrow: Our final day of inductions is Horror Day! Oooooohhhhh scaaaaaary!!! We spotlight a couple of creepy classics, introduced by two of Muriel’s finest. Come back and see the late two honorees… IF YOU DARE!
(Also, there'll be a little wrap-up piece with voting results and such. Sliiiiiightly lessssssssss scaaaary!)
“The Beast wears glittering fineries, shot by Henri Alékan in inky blacks and luminous whites. His castle is a dreamland of surrealist effects work. Disembodied hands grip candles in its hallways; reversed footage and slow motion render bodies uncanny. The decor, like its master, is achingly vulnerable. Little else in film fantasy is as seductive as Cocteau's sui generis fairy tale.” ~ Alice Stoehr
Coming tomorrow: Our final day of inductions is Horror Day! Oooooohhhhh scaaaaaary!!! We spotlight a couple of creepy classics, introduced by two of Muriel’s finest. Come back and see the late two honorees… IF YOU DARE!
(Also, there'll be a little wrap-up piece with voting results and such. Sliiiiiightly lessssssssss scaaaary!)
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Ikiru (1952, Akira Kurosawa)
“Even if Ikiru is one of the most beautiful, humanist and transcendent pieces of work ever created (directed by one of cinema’s great humanists), its outlook on life isn’t necessarily as hopeful as it appears at first glance. Sure, the movie’s inedible image is the bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe (character actor Takashi Shimura making his best work here) sitting on a swing, as he knows his own demise is approaching. But one forgets that this is a film that opens with an X-ray image of a cancer-riddled stomach, the stomach of the man that we soon see working at the city hall, filing away complaints, denying funds and moving on with his life. He’s already dead.
“Of course, the film shows us the moment in Watanabe’s life when he decides to make a difference, to make amends with his past as the ‘living dead’ and, instead, to really make the effort ‘to live’ (which is the translation of the title, Ikiru). But just when we’re about to see how he’s trying to create something good for the community, the film jumps forward… to his funeral. The mourners discuss his life, completely unaware of the changes he made in the shadows of government bureaucracy. So, he’s not only dead, he’s deader than death itself, as he won’t be remembered by anyone. Another anonymous death, another body turning to dust in the ground.
“But the way Kurosawa approaches the dead man fills us with hope all the same. Maybe it’s the feeling deep inside all of us that we’ll be forgotten, or that we’re not living the lives we should. It’s nice to think that one last act might redeem us, but is that really the truth? Kurosawa has the perfect answer for that: the kids laughing and playing in the park Watanabe made possible. Their energy escaping into the air, filling the screen – it’s the breath of life itself.
“If you seek Watanabe’s monument, look around you.” ~ Jaime Grijalba
“Of course, the film shows us the moment in Watanabe’s life when he decides to make a difference, to make amends with his past as the ‘living dead’ and, instead, to really make the effort ‘to live’ (which is the translation of the title, Ikiru). But just when we’re about to see how he’s trying to create something good for the community, the film jumps forward… to his funeral. The mourners discuss his life, completely unaware of the changes he made in the shadows of government bureaucracy. So, he’s not only dead, he’s deader than death itself, as he won’t be remembered by anyone. Another anonymous death, another body turning to dust in the ground.
“But the way Kurosawa approaches the dead man fills us with hope all the same. Maybe it’s the feeling deep inside all of us that we’ll be forgotten, or that we’re not living the lives we should. It’s nice to think that one last act might redeem us, but is that really the truth? Kurosawa has the perfect answer for that: the kids laughing and playing in the park Watanabe made possible. Their energy escaping into the air, filling the screen – it’s the breath of life itself.
“If you seek Watanabe’s monument, look around you.” ~ Jaime Grijalba
Friday, August 9, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: The Leopard (1963, Luchino Visconti)
“Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece The Leopard is one of the most celebrated period dramas in cinematic history, and for good reason – every set, every prop, every stitch of clothing looks and feels impeccable. What distinguishes Visconti’s film, adapted from a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, from so many other films like it is that the settings and costumes don’t seem glamourous or lush. Indeed, everything feels a little worn, as if one might pick up a random candlestick to find a discolored patch underneath, the tablecloth faded from too much sunlight and dust over the years. This is very much in keeping with the tale the film has to tell, that of an aging Prince in the autumn of his days, on the cusp of outliving the society he’s belonged to since before he was born.
“The Prince, known as Don Fabrizio, is played by Burt Lancaster, who then as now seems an unlikely choice to play an Italian aristocrat. And yet it works (despite the obvious ethnic differences), because Visconti recognized the intangible qualities that Lancaster brought to the part. Lancaster’s athletic background allowed him to inject a masculine virility into his roles, even as age took over, and this helps him cut a slightly larger-than-life figure as the renowned Don. Combining this with the touch of aloofness Lancaster conveyed lets him glide just above the proceedings, seeing the larger context of the story in a way the characters around him can’t.
“And then… he dances.
“When he accepts an offer to dance from Angelica (Claudia Cardinale!), the fiancé of his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), the Prince suddenly (if briefly) changes back into the Don Fabrizio that society once knew, and the Burt Lancaster the audience knows from his younger days – dashing and romantic, a beautiful woman in his arms, at the center of the action. But with this comes another change, this one within the Prince himself. As he gets another taste of the life he once enjoyed, it only serves to drive home emotionally what he previously was able to acknowledge intellectually – that his world, such as it is, no longer belongs to him.
“Not long ago, I caught up belatedly with Visconti’s 1954 classic Senso. Watching that film, I was struck by how similar its ending feels to The Leopard’s final scene. In both cases, we see the protagonist (Alida Valli as Countess Livia in the earlier film, Lancaster in this one) walking through the streets alone, trying to deal emotionally with the dramatic changes that have occurred in their respective lives. But unlike Livia, sobbing and wailing into the blackness of night, Don Fabrizio ponders his future silently in the early morning sun. A new day is dawning in Italy, a world for young opportunists like Tancredi, for middle class families like Angelica’s. As for the Prince, all that’s left for him to do in the story is to duck down an alleyway and disappear.” ~ Paul Clark
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Coming tomorrow: No cool unifying factor between our next two inductees. I mean... they're both more than 50 years old, and... uh... they're awesome. But hey, isn't that enough?
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks)
“Bringing Up Baby is the slightly askew story of a boy, a girl and her leopard. The leopard’s name is in the title, but she escaped blame when Howard Hawks’ frenetically paced screwball comedy flopped back in 1938. Audiences didn’t know what to make of this aggressive comedy of aggravation, a film whose main characters were allegedly described by its director as ‘crazy.’ The inspired lunacy of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn cemented the latter’s status as box-office poison, a distinction she shook off two years later when she reteamed with Grant for The Philadelphia Story. That film had a famously drunk Jimmy Stewart; this film has Stewart’s co-star from After the Thin Man, Asta the dog.
“Asta is tasked with burying the film’s MacGuffin, the intercostal clavicle bone that will complete the dinosaur skeleton built by Dr. David Huxley (Grant). The pooch is owned by Susan Vance (Hepburn), whose constant run-ins with Huxley form the basis of every mishap he will suffer. Vance is an intense and destructive force of nature whose Meet Cute with Huxley begins with her playing his golf ball on the course and ends with her inadvertently stealing his car. Things go rapidly downhill from there. Vance keeps misreading Huxley’s antagonistic reactions to her as romantic intent, because her shrink told her that ‘the love impulse in men frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict.’ Vance is further confused by Huxley’s profession—she thinks he’s a zoologist—so she introduces him to Baby, a tame leopard with a narcissistic penchant for songs that include her name. Huxley’s attempt to escape Vance’s clutches is thwarted once that dinosaur bone goes missing. Huxley has to get it back by any means necessary while also avoiding the possibility that he might be eaten by a leopard. Mucho mayhem ensues.
“The comedic impulse in Bringing Up Baby frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict, and Hepburn and Grant practically drown in conflict. Much of the humor stems from Grant’s exasperated response to whatever fresh Hell Hepburn tosses at him. Susan Vance is one of Hepburn’s most daring performances—she’s as exhausting and demanding as the slapstick in a Tex Avery cartoon. If viewers aren’t on the screwball level Hawks’ direction demands, Vance can be extremely off-putting, which might explain the original box office numbers. Yet several decades later, Bringing Up Baby has deservedly earned vindication: it appears on multiple AFI lists and has been designated a classic of its genre. In addition to ‘going gay all of a sudden’ thanks to Hepburn’s lingerie, Grant also engages his acrobatic talent for pratfalls and double-takes. Hepburn proves equally adept and limber with the verbal humor scripted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde. Both actors alternate as the straight man in their comedic duo, and their flexibility is just one of the numerous, impressive feats performed by this bonkers contraption of a movie.” ~ Odie Henderson
Thursday, August 8, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim)
"No other film in the history of cinema fills us with such a sense of both awe and loss. Loss because of what the characters go through during the film’s duration, but even more for the loss of the director’s original intention. Greed was butchered like no other film was butchered, and unlike many such films of the modern era, there is no chance of a director’s cut ever emerging. Von Stroheim’s masterpiece was edited down from well over a hundred hours of stock footage to an original length of 8½ hours, from which it was cut to exactly seven for its premiere. When Irving Thalberg insisted he cut it down to a commercial length, Von Stroheim sent it to another artist on the MGM roster, his friend Rex Ingram, whose editor Grant Whytock helped him cut it down to 3¼ hours. Refusing to cut any more, Ingram handed it back, but it was then further cut by June Mathis to 2¼, as it survives to this day. It’s amazing it still stands as a masterpiece.
“The story is made into a tragedy of human despair and greed worthy of Hugo and Zola, as we follow McTeague from his beginnings in a gold mine in 1908 to his being sent away by his mother to learn dentistry from a charlatan. Setting up in San Francisco, he comes to know Marcus, who introduces him to Trina, a delicate young girl whose teeth he fixes. Marrying her, their life is thrown into turmoil when Trina wins an illegal lottery and she hoards the money from husband and friend alike, while McTeague is slowly driven to madness and violent retribution.
“Von Stroheim always said he could never cheat the audience, and so he sent crews out to film on location in San Francisco, even shooting the interiors on location. It certainly led to a realism that was rare for this period (as in the sequence where his dentist’s office looks out over the street and we see the trolley car taking Trina away from him go past the surgery window). More impressive still is his visual command, from the contrasts of the gloomy interior of the goldmine to the green splendor of the surrounding forests and to the final immortal sequences in Death Valley. Shot on location in temperatures pushing 125 degrees, with actors and crew alike almost driven mad, Von Stroheim gave us the most savagely ironic of endings, one ingrained on the psyche of American cinema itself. Yet this is only one of many great sequences; who can forget the incredibly dark, forbidding and almost funereal wedding ceremony, or the dissolves into glorious richness as Pitts dreams of her golden gains?
“Much of the credit here must go to his crew, particularly the photography of Daniels and Reynolds, but the performances are equally grand in stature. Gibson Gowland’s Mac is one of the great silent performances, full of a repressed anger and horrific in the way he is slowly driven to domestic violence and murder, and Jean Hersholt, too, was never better than as the ultimately treacherous and doomed friend Marcus. But topping all in the memory is ZaSu Pitts’ Trina, refusing her husband sexual favours, hair rolled up like a turban, rolling her eyes and rubbing her hands with avaricious glee at her hoarded wealth, literally stripping off into bed to roll around naked, to feel the cold touch of the coins on her skin. As one caption says, ‘gold was her master’, and as long as such monetary lust exists in the world, Greed will continue to astound and amaze. A four-hour version with two hours of still footage was released in the late nineties, and it only serves to whet our appetite for the lost masterpiece, the greatest film probably ever made and lost, slithered away like gold dust through a prospector’s sieve.” ~ Sam Juliano
Coming tomorrow: One’s a zany comedy! One’s a period drama! What could they possibly have in common?
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Children of Paradise (1945, Marcel Carné)
“Even if it had just been a film made by craftspeople as a standard, hourly job under traditional-if-artistic custom, Les Enfants du Paradis would be one of the most remarkable films ever produced in the first five decades of cinema as we know it. But it was never just a film as a job. And if time has elevated the circumstances under which it was made, that’s perfectly fine, because it has kept one of the most endearingly beautiful works of art about the creative impulse and the ability- no, the imperative- to create art by whatever means you can.
“But in the midst of the Nazi occupation, what Carné, and Prévert, and Arletty and Barrault and Kosima, and each of the staggering array of people involved managed to create was something transcendent- a film that existed, and exists, as a period piece, an expose, and a vision of a better future. In Theodore Roszak’s epic novel Flicker, Les Enfants du Paradis is ‘a thing of beauty that had been bravely raised up in an act of defiance by its creators against the barbarian intruder.’ And it endures as one of the preeminent works of resistance art in the twentieth century, Beset by Nazis, the anti-Jews Vichy laws, collaborators, international financing issues, and the very elements themselves, the film survived, rightfully held as a superb example of emotionally epic cinema.
“A love pentagon of both epic and tragic proportions, the array of men pining for O.G. model/actress/hooker/waitress (to quote the great philosopher Courtney Love) Garance span all social strata. Desire is one of the most enduring of common denominators, and it is in the way that Baptiste, Lacenaire, de Montray, and LeMaître are each captivated, changed, and reinvented by their time with Garance. She is a woman of beauty, yes, but also a character of will and agency who shakes the very Boulevard du Temple to its stones.
“The epics by their nature become absorbed into the subconscious. They are part of the artistic world around us for long enough that their influence becomes something elemental, and the legacy supersedes the actual work. But here, not so. To fall under its spell is a phenomenon one never becomes immune to. The DCP of this film, prepared by Gaumont during the earlier days of digital restorations, is an atrocity. Shorn of all texture and grain, the image seems waxy and artificial, which is a grotesque slight against the film, which has always brimmed with life and fire. But I watched this restoration in the old Film Forum seats, fearful of an aneurysm or blood clots or persistent numbness, knowing that what had been done to this film was not quite right.
“But still it enthralled, holding me in its tender, severe embrace. It was 2012, so it’s not like I had to fight Nazis like I would have had to do to make the film, or to enjoy it today. But I hold it in the special vault where the heart and the brain and the eyes all agree on the essential, and I recommend it to all.” ~ Jason Shawhan
Wednesday, August 7, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Weekend (1968, Jean-Luc Godard)
“Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 scathing black comedy, has lost none of its bite over the decades and perhaps has gained even more relevance in the current rancid political climate as 2020 draws near. It was a fin de siecle moment in Godard's career marking the end of his New Wave period, but as an avant-garde contemplation of society's descent into apocalyptic barbarism, it holds up a challenging mirror to society in any era.
“Opening with a bourgeois couple, Corrine (Mireille Darc) and Roland (Jean Yanne), each having an affair with someone else and each hoping and planning for the death of the other, Godard's bourgeoisie are neither discreet nor charming but rather creatures of their ids, powered by assumed privilege and lust for material wealth, an illusory soulless symbolism of success.
“Godard generates laughs at them and society through absurdist sight gags like a woman trying to fend off a man by hitting tennis balls at him or Corrine and Roland haplessly trying to steal a car. The dark comedy comes in the form of a casual mention from Corrine that she's been poisoning her father for 5 years or Roland getting out of the car to inspect a hitchhiker, staring at her legs, hiking up her skirt, before he decides to let her in. When a proletariat's words, ‘We're all brothers, as Marx said,’ bothers Corrine, Roland corrects her, ‘It wasn't Marx. Another communist said it. Jesus said it.’ Also Godard, as he is wont to do, breaks the fourth wall and has Roland claim, ‘What a rotten film, all we meet are crazy people,’ after they encounter Emily Bronte.
Weekend is made up of numerous memorable set pieces, the first of which is an intimately framed conversation with Corinne, half silhouetted, as the camera pans across her body only in bra and panties in front of white drapes. Corinne tells an intense erotic story of her engaging in a kinky menage a trois, perhaps Godard's response to Ingmar Bergman's Persona released the year before. The film's most famous set piece and one of the most famous in all of cinema is the audacious tracking shot of a traffic jam. It occurs in two unbroken takes, the first 2 minutes and 40 seconds, the second 5 minutes 10 seconds. This is Godard's version of a Hieronymus Bosch triptych with all of society is on display.
"’The Extermination Angel’ segment, named after the Luis Bunuel film, is perhaps the most hilarious in Weekend. Joseph Balsamo, named after the Alexandre Dumas character Cagliostro, kidnaps Roland and Corinne after they stop to pick up his hitchhiking companion, Marie Madeleine. Balsamo explains that he is the son of Dumas and God, an old queer. He proves his divinity by having Corrine pull a hare out of the glove box and tells them he can give them anything they desire if they drive him to London. Roland asks for a ‘big Mercedes sports car’ while Corinne requests ‘an Yves St. Laurent evening dress’ or to make her a natural blond. The comedy is all in Godard's deadpan delivery.
“The ‘Musical Action’ segment is, in its own way, as equally audacious as the traffic jam. A pianist plays Mozart's final piano sonata, K. 576, while delivering a tirade against post-war classical music, which he describes as the ‘biggest disaster in the history of art.’ He cites The Beatles and Rolling Stones as the true inheritors of Mozart's melodies while Roland yawns to the music. All of this is in a single 6 1/2 minute take while the camera pans around and around in circles culminating in one of the film's most memorable lines, ‘Mozart's too easy for beginners and children, too hard to virtuosi.’ The scene could be seen as an early bit of experimental formalism that would soon be practiced with greater rigor by the likes of Michael Snow.
“The movie is essentially a road trip delving into the hearts of darkness 12 years before Apocalypse Now with Weekend's forest dwelling revolutionary cannibals and animal slaughter. The latter portions of the film will divide most viewers as Godard foregrounds political polemics while becoming ever more abstract. The New Wave Godard finally disappears and the radical, militant Godard of his next period emerges. Though Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu's underrated and far more apolitical Happy End has a few similarities, there's nothing else in cinema quite like Weekend. It's Godard's caustic outburst culminating eight of the most fruitful years by any creative force in film history. Before the film's final title card, ‘End of Cinema,’ Weekend displays a boldness rarely seen before or since.” ~ George Wu
Coming tomorrow: two of the all-time great big-screen epics.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone)
“Once upon a time, in Hollywood, about 10 years ago, I took my daughters, then aged 10 and 8, to see a screening of The Magnificent Seven (1960), and my eldest surprised me on the way out. She was moved by the death of the Charles Bronson character and the response of the two Mexican boys to it, and she said to me, ‘I didn’t know cowboy movies could be so emotional!’ I think of that moment and my daughter’s comment almost every time I see Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), which might be one of the most emotional movies of any genre that I’ve ever seen. I encountered it for the first time cropped, panned-and-scanned, and stuffed to the gills with used car lot commercials on Sunday-afternoon TV when I was a kid. But I didn’t see it projected in 35mm until I was in college, and that’s where the love affair truly began. Just about every screening of this movie I’ve been privileged to see since that first one has been accompanied by a vision of its super-charged vistas and operatic visual and aural flourishes warped and blurred by inevitable tears.
“Much has been and will continue to be written about the movie’s two justifiably lauded opening set pieces—the ecstatically extended confrontation at a train station between three hired gunmen (Western icons Jack Elam and Woody Strode, alongside Canadian character actor Al Mulock) and a mysterious loner with a harmonica (Charles Bronson), and the brutal slaughter of a family of immigrants by a group of assassins in long duster coats, led by a man with an ice-cold stare and an even more dispassionate demeanor who turns out to be Henry Fonda, cast about as against type as any actor ever has been, who pulls the trigger on a young boy unfortunate enough to hear one of the killers utter his name.
“But for me the movie really becomes Sergio Leone’s vision of movie-fed memory and desire, greed, manifest destiny and revenge, in the sequence that follows. Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), the woman who belongs to that slaughtered family, an ex-prostitute who has secretly married its now-dead patriarch, arrives at the train station expecting to be greeted by her new son, daughter and husband. She glances disconcertedly at the train station clock, and then her own watch, as the first strains of Ennio Morricone’s incomparably lovely theme begins to waft onto the soundtrack like tiny fragments of shattered glass born on an ominous breeze. She makes her way across the vast, virtually empty station yard and enters the station, while the camera tracks along with her, eventually framing her in a window (one shaped in the same aspect ratio as the expansive Panavision of Tonino Delli Colli’s cinematography) as she queries the stationmaster about the missing party whom she expected to greet her.
“The stationmaster points the way toward the main street where she’ll catch a coach to take her to her new home, and as she and the station workers make their way toward the front door, the camera elevates toward the roof, Morricone’s beautiful music swelling in anticipation. That swelling builds to a perfectly choreographed moment, cresting precisely as Delli Colli’s camera lofts over the station roof to a grandiose wide shot of Jill making her way through the bustling main street and into a new world that will entirely justify the vaulting melancholy of Morricone’s theme. I have not been able to watch this passage as an adult without bursting into tears. When I hear cinephiles (especially young cinephiles) proclaim this moment as one of the greatest in all cinema, I quietly roll my eyes—yes, but how much have they really seen? And then I see the sequence and the movie again and think, if they’re not right, then at least they’re damned close. From this point on the waterworks seem to come in different places, at different moments throughout, but always to the same overwhelming end, an involuntary response to the passion Leone has infused into every frame of this masterpiece.
“In the introduction to Christopher Frayling’s gorgeous new book Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece, the Italian novelist and journalist Alberto Moravia is quoted on the subject of Italian westerns (and no, he doesn’t call them ‘spaghetti westerns’):
’The enterprising directors who have acclimatized the Western to Italy have found themselves facing problems of expression which are somewhat different to those of their American colleagues. There is no West in Italy; no cowboys or bandits on the frontier; no frontier; no gold mines; no Native-Americans; no pioneers. The Italian Western was born not from an ancestral memory, but rather from the middle-class Bovaryism of directors who had loved American westerns when they were children. In other words, the Hollywood Western was born of a myth; the Italian one of a myth about a myth… And so often you end up asking yourself, So many stories and then what? Just a fistful of dollars? Or is there more?’
“It seems obvious in the face of Leone’s ultimate Western and its enduring legend (it was not a hit upon its initial release, at least not in the country where its emotions are securely rooted) that there is much more. That Leone and his screenwriters, Sergio Donati, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, in indulging their deepest feelings about a world of the past which had no connection to their own youths beyond its representation as cinema, high and low and all points in-between, should emerge with one of the two or three greatest Westerns ever made as a result certainly speaks to the presence of Moravia’s ‘more.’ That it is a movie which looms so large in the imaginations and regard of so many people 50 years after it was first seen only confirms that Once Upon a Time in the West speaks most eloquently in that shimmering zone where myth and history comingle to carry on a battered storytelling form forward, a zone where it has properly mesmerized several generations of film lovers ever since.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio
“Much has been and will continue to be written about the movie’s two justifiably lauded opening set pieces—the ecstatically extended confrontation at a train station between three hired gunmen (Western icons Jack Elam and Woody Strode, alongside Canadian character actor Al Mulock) and a mysterious loner with a harmonica (Charles Bronson), and the brutal slaughter of a family of immigrants by a group of assassins in long duster coats, led by a man with an ice-cold stare and an even more dispassionate demeanor who turns out to be Henry Fonda, cast about as against type as any actor ever has been, who pulls the trigger on a young boy unfortunate enough to hear one of the killers utter his name.
“But for me the movie really becomes Sergio Leone’s vision of movie-fed memory and desire, greed, manifest destiny and revenge, in the sequence that follows. Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), the woman who belongs to that slaughtered family, an ex-prostitute who has secretly married its now-dead patriarch, arrives at the train station expecting to be greeted by her new son, daughter and husband. She glances disconcertedly at the train station clock, and then her own watch, as the first strains of Ennio Morricone’s incomparably lovely theme begins to waft onto the soundtrack like tiny fragments of shattered glass born on an ominous breeze. She makes her way across the vast, virtually empty station yard and enters the station, while the camera tracks along with her, eventually framing her in a window (one shaped in the same aspect ratio as the expansive Panavision of Tonino Delli Colli’s cinematography) as she queries the stationmaster about the missing party whom she expected to greet her.
“The stationmaster points the way toward the main street where she’ll catch a coach to take her to her new home, and as she and the station workers make their way toward the front door, the camera elevates toward the roof, Morricone’s beautiful music swelling in anticipation. That swelling builds to a perfectly choreographed moment, cresting precisely as Delli Colli’s camera lofts over the station roof to a grandiose wide shot of Jill making her way through the bustling main street and into a new world that will entirely justify the vaulting melancholy of Morricone’s theme. I have not been able to watch this passage as an adult without bursting into tears. When I hear cinephiles (especially young cinephiles) proclaim this moment as one of the greatest in all cinema, I quietly roll my eyes—yes, but how much have they really seen? And then I see the sequence and the movie again and think, if they’re not right, then at least they’re damned close. From this point on the waterworks seem to come in different places, at different moments throughout, but always to the same overwhelming end, an involuntary response to the passion Leone has infused into every frame of this masterpiece.
“In the introduction to Christopher Frayling’s gorgeous new book Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece, the Italian novelist and journalist Alberto Moravia is quoted on the subject of Italian westerns (and no, he doesn’t call them ‘spaghetti westerns’):
’The enterprising directors who have acclimatized the Western to Italy have found themselves facing problems of expression which are somewhat different to those of their American colleagues. There is no West in Italy; no cowboys or bandits on the frontier; no frontier; no gold mines; no Native-Americans; no pioneers. The Italian Western was born not from an ancestral memory, but rather from the middle-class Bovaryism of directors who had loved American westerns when they were children. In other words, the Hollywood Western was born of a myth; the Italian one of a myth about a myth… And so often you end up asking yourself, So many stories and then what? Just a fistful of dollars? Or is there more?’
“It seems obvious in the face of Leone’s ultimate Western and its enduring legend (it was not a hit upon its initial release, at least not in the country where its emotions are securely rooted) that there is much more. That Leone and his screenwriters, Sergio Donati, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, in indulging their deepest feelings about a world of the past which had no connection to their own youths beyond its representation as cinema, high and low and all points in-between, should emerge with one of the two or three greatest Westerns ever made as a result certainly speaks to the presence of Moravia’s ‘more.’ That it is a movie which looms so large in the imaginations and regard of so many people 50 years after it was first seen only confirms that Once Upon a Time in the West speaks most eloquently in that shimmering zone where myth and history comingle to carry on a battered storytelling form forward, a zone where it has properly mesmerized several generations of film lovers ever since.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, Howard Hawks)
“The 1953 comedy Gentleman Prefer Blondes begins with an explosion of music and Technicolor wonder as stars Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe sing ‘Two Little Girls from Little Rock’ while dressed in glittering red gowns. The pre-credit sequence promises joy and sexy fun and pure giddiness, and luckily the film, a Howard Hawks helmed adaptation of a 1949 Broadway hit starring Carol Channing, delivers. The rather nonsensical plot follows these showgirls on a cruise to Paris, zeroing in on their taste in men. The cynical Dorothy (Russell) likes them to be tall, good-looking, and handsome. What's in their wallet doesn't matter. Meanwhile, the more starry-eyed Lorelei (Monroe) is quite blunt about what makes her heart tick. She loves diamonds, and plenty of them.
“Throughout the movie, potential love interests appear: Lorelei's nerdy daddy's boy rich guy fiancé Gus (Tommy Noonan), a private investigator (Elliott Reid) who develops a thing for Dorothy, a wealthy older man nicknamed ‘Piggy’ (the priceless Charles Coburn) smitten with Lorelei, and a whole bunch of athletes who make up the US Male Olympics team on board the ship. But ultimately, what matters here, and what the movie work so well, is the chemistry between Russell and Monroe. They work beautifully together, developing a bouncy comical rapport that makes the viewer grin. Even as the story takes some creaky but still entertaining turns (a missing tiara, a young boy passing himself off as a worldly gentleman), Russell and Monroe command attention throughout.
“People most remember the musical numbers from the film, and for good reason--two of them are especially unforgettable. What's interesting to note is that there are only 5 songs in the movie. And only 3 (‘Two Little Girls from Little Rock,’ ‘Bye Bye Baby,’ and ‘Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,’ written by Leo Robin and Jules Styne) are from the original song-heavy Broadway musical. Two of the songs (‘Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?’ and ‘When Love Goes Wrong,’ written by Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson) were written for the movie. There is a long stretch between musical number #3 (‘Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?’) and #4 (‘When Love Goes Wrong’).
“In this regard, Gentleman Prefer Blondes reminds me of the 1944 classic Meet Me in St. Louis, another movie remembered for its music but not really containing many actual numbers. Thanks to Charles Lederer's witty, innuendo-heavy screenplay (up for a Writer's Guild of America award for Best Written Musical; it lost to the Leslie Caron vehicle Lili), the non-musical scenes crackle. Yet when those musical numbers happen, the movie soars to another level.
“Much has been written by ‘Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,’ the transcendent Monroe number with the star in an iconic pink dress surrounded by suitors under her spell. Many stars have paid homage to this glorious sequence, with Madonna's clever ‘Material Girl’ video perhaps the most memorable. Equally fun and vibrant is Jane Russell's hilarious ‘Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?’ which has her playfully delivering sports-punny lyrics about needing some affection while the aforementioned stoic jocks, dressed in nothing but their flesh-colored briefs, perform impressive gymnastics routines around her. Oh, what naughtiness do they get away with here! Both songs capture the stars at their best, and represent their characters' POV about love. The other numbers are also quite good, and Russell's Dorothy, dressed as Monroe's Lorelei for a courtroom scene (love her Monroe impression), does a knockout ‘Diamonds’ herself in a reprise.
“Monroe and Russell are so good together, you wish that they too had a reprise. Another match-up. They make a great comic team. Alas, that never happened. A project fell through in 1954. But at least we have this sunny charmer with its subversive sexiness and lovely happy ending. The chameleon-like director Hawks (who could do comedy, gangster films, westerns), brought out the strengths of all involved, and delivered a memorable comedy with music that still stands the test of time.” ~ Brian Wilson
Coming tomorrow: two films that benefitted from the 1960s’ loosening of the restrictions of onscreen violence, and which approached their violent scenes in very different, but equally vivid, ways.
“Throughout the movie, potential love interests appear: Lorelei's nerdy daddy's boy rich guy fiancé Gus (Tommy Noonan), a private investigator (Elliott Reid) who develops a thing for Dorothy, a wealthy older man nicknamed ‘Piggy’ (the priceless Charles Coburn) smitten with Lorelei, and a whole bunch of athletes who make up the US Male Olympics team on board the ship. But ultimately, what matters here, and what the movie work so well, is the chemistry between Russell and Monroe. They work beautifully together, developing a bouncy comical rapport that makes the viewer grin. Even as the story takes some creaky but still entertaining turns (a missing tiara, a young boy passing himself off as a worldly gentleman), Russell and Monroe command attention throughout.
“People most remember the musical numbers from the film, and for good reason--two of them are especially unforgettable. What's interesting to note is that there are only 5 songs in the movie. And only 3 (‘Two Little Girls from Little Rock,’ ‘Bye Bye Baby,’ and ‘Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,’ written by Leo Robin and Jules Styne) are from the original song-heavy Broadway musical. Two of the songs (‘Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?’ and ‘When Love Goes Wrong,’ written by Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson) were written for the movie. There is a long stretch between musical number #3 (‘Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?’) and #4 (‘When Love Goes Wrong’).
“In this regard, Gentleman Prefer Blondes reminds me of the 1944 classic Meet Me in St. Louis, another movie remembered for its music but not really containing many actual numbers. Thanks to Charles Lederer's witty, innuendo-heavy screenplay (up for a Writer's Guild of America award for Best Written Musical; it lost to the Leslie Caron vehicle Lili), the non-musical scenes crackle. Yet when those musical numbers happen, the movie soars to another level.
“Much has been written by ‘Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,’ the transcendent Monroe number with the star in an iconic pink dress surrounded by suitors under her spell. Many stars have paid homage to this glorious sequence, with Madonna's clever ‘Material Girl’ video perhaps the most memorable. Equally fun and vibrant is Jane Russell's hilarious ‘Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?’ which has her playfully delivering sports-punny lyrics about needing some affection while the aforementioned stoic jocks, dressed in nothing but their flesh-colored briefs, perform impressive gymnastics routines around her. Oh, what naughtiness do they get away with here! Both songs capture the stars at their best, and represent their characters' POV about love. The other numbers are also quite good, and Russell's Dorothy, dressed as Monroe's Lorelei for a courtroom scene (love her Monroe impression), does a knockout ‘Diamonds’ herself in a reprise.
“Monroe and Russell are so good together, you wish that they too had a reprise. Another match-up. They make a great comic team. Alas, that never happened. A project fell through in 1954. But at least we have this sunny charmer with its subversive sexiness and lovely happy ending. The chameleon-like director Hawks (who could do comedy, gangster films, westerns), brought out the strengths of all involved, and delivered a memorable comedy with music that still stands the test of time.” ~ Brian Wilson
Coming tomorrow: two films that benefitted from the 1960s’ loosening of the restrictions of onscreen violence, and which approached their violent scenes in very different, but equally vivid, ways.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: It's a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)
“In the first two minutes of Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life the credits turn like pages of a Christmas storybook, voice over prayers seep in for the troubled protagonist George Bailey and his suicidal ideations, newly engineered fake snow envelopes a small town built entirely upon a studio lot, angels in the form of heavenly bodies discuss Bailey’s fate: the film’s setup immediately sweeps one into a fable of pure cinematic magic. An embodiment of the holiday spirit, the movie hurtles forward full of miracles and joy but, naturally, with the bubbling conflicts of any great story. It’s A Wonderful Life takes on the prototypical battle of good versus evil but it is how these two concepts are defined that make it the quintessential American classic it has become.
“Evil is portrayed by Potter, the greedy banker out to destroy the lives of everyday folks just trying to survive. Good takes on the form of love and opportunity, a fight for the American dream embodied by Bailey and his community of Bedford Falls. In the face of a lost bank deposit and the possibility of financial ruin, it is spiritual forces and what-ifs that reset Bailey to recall a truth he used to hold sacred: it is through human kindness that life is made worth living, not money. Yet, one cannot ignore that ultimately money does play an integral role in reviving Bailey into seeing his future: individuals touched by Bailey’s caring hand raise high their hard-earned dollars to save the fate of his loan office. Constant selfless acts add to Bailey’s list of reasons to live but, in a scene of original crowd funding, he is upheld through the kindness of others waving the power of the almighty dollar.
“Fittingly, what saved It’s a Wonderful Life from near obscurity was also the driving force of capitalism. After the film fell out of copyright in 1974, forgotten due to its financial failure and a clerical error, PBS began airing the aging masterpiece during the (commercially produced) holiday season. Like the town of Bedford Falls, people united to celebrate this lost gem of humanity and filmic wonder but, like the menacing rich man threatening their peace, other broadcasters and distributors followed suit in the name of profits, producing everything from multiple chintzy colorized versions of the luscious black & white film to one of the first ever CD-ROM home releases. The on and off-screen conflicts of It’s A Wonderful Life feel just as-- if not more-- relevant today. Anyone can end up grappling their fate like George Bailey but it is the tiny town of Bedford Falls collectively striving for a future that can give everyone the life they deserve to live.” ~ Donna Kozloskie
“Evil is portrayed by Potter, the greedy banker out to destroy the lives of everyday folks just trying to survive. Good takes on the form of love and opportunity, a fight for the American dream embodied by Bailey and his community of Bedford Falls. In the face of a lost bank deposit and the possibility of financial ruin, it is spiritual forces and what-ifs that reset Bailey to recall a truth he used to hold sacred: it is through human kindness that life is made worth living, not money. Yet, one cannot ignore that ultimately money does play an integral role in reviving Bailey into seeing his future: individuals touched by Bailey’s caring hand raise high their hard-earned dollars to save the fate of his loan office. Constant selfless acts add to Bailey’s list of reasons to live but, in a scene of original crowd funding, he is upheld through the kindness of others waving the power of the almighty dollar.
“Fittingly, what saved It’s a Wonderful Life from near obscurity was also the driving force of capitalism. After the film fell out of copyright in 1974, forgotten due to its financial failure and a clerical error, PBS began airing the aging masterpiece during the (commercially produced) holiday season. Like the town of Bedford Falls, people united to celebrate this lost gem of humanity and filmic wonder but, like the menacing rich man threatening their peace, other broadcasters and distributors followed suit in the name of profits, producing everything from multiple chintzy colorized versions of the luscious black & white film to one of the first ever CD-ROM home releases. The on and off-screen conflicts of It’s A Wonderful Life feel just as-- if not more-- relevant today. Anyone can end up grappling their fate like George Bailey but it is the tiny town of Bedford Falls collectively striving for a future that can give everyone the life they deserve to live.” ~ Donna Kozloskie
Monday, August 5, 2019
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)
“Half a century later, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey hasn't lost its power to inspire awe. It's still a divisive movie, but it can't reasonably be dismissed. Special effects have evolved - particularly in the depiction of space vehicles - without making 2001's look silly. The pacing of entertainment has sped up, only making its long, meditative scenes feel even more hypnotic.
“It has a reputation as a cold and distanced movie. Its human characters aren't much more emotive than its A.I. antagonist, and Kubrick seems to put us in a God's-eye perspective, stepping far back enough to see a continuum from primitive apes to mankind's discovery of a space vortex. Yet it's joyful in its use of image and sound, turning a space walk or the movements of celestial bodies into ballet.
“Everything about it feels enormous, demanding the biggest screen available. A single edit spans millions of years, suggesting a story about the entire history of the human race, or at least a topic as broad as ‘man's use of tools.’ Yet it ends intimately, with one man alone inside the vastness of space, of time, of his mind. Maybe. I'm not sure. Luckily you don't have to be able to follow 2001 to feel it deeply. There doesn't seem to be a shelf date on the potency of pure cinema.” ~ Vern
Coming tomorrow: we induct two Hollywood crowd-pleasers, including the only film that has appeared on the final ballot every year since the Muriels Hall of Fame began.
“It has a reputation as a cold and distanced movie. Its human characters aren't much more emotive than its A.I. antagonist, and Kubrick seems to put us in a God's-eye perspective, stepping far back enough to see a continuum from primitive apes to mankind's discovery of a space vortex. Yet it's joyful in its use of image and sound, turning a space walk or the movements of celestial bodies into ballet.
“Everything about it feels enormous, demanding the biggest screen available. A single edit spans millions of years, suggesting a story about the entire history of the human race, or at least a topic as broad as ‘man's use of tools.’ Yet it ends intimately, with one man alone inside the vastness of space, of time, of his mind. Maybe. I'm not sure. Luckily you don't have to be able to follow 2001 to feel it deeply. There doesn't seem to be a shelf date on the potency of pure cinema.” ~ Vern
Coming tomorrow: we induct two Hollywood crowd-pleasers, including the only film that has appeared on the final ballot every year since the Muriels Hall of Fame began.
Muriels Hall of Fame, Class of 2019: An Introduction
Okay, everybody! It’s time for the unveiling of this year’s Muriels Hall of Fame inductees!
We’re going to kick off this year’s announcements in earnest tonight at 9 PM with our 50th Anniversary Award winner from 1968, previously announced in February of this year. From there, we’ll be announcing two inductees every day, at 7 PM and 9 PM, until we’re finished. We’ve got some great films on the way, and a few surprises.
But before we begin, I’d like to offer my gratitude to everyone who was able to contribute to the Muriels Hall of Fame voting this year:
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Danny Bowes
Steven Carlson
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Philip Dyess-Nugent
Molly Faust
James Frazier
Caden Mark Gardner
Jaime Grijalba
Glenn Heath Jr.
Eric Henderson
Odie Henderson
Sam Juliano
Donna Kozloskie
Craig D. Lindsey
Jeff McMahon
Patrick J. Miller
Matt Noller
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Bridgett Taylor
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig van Driel
Clayton Walter
Brian Wilson
George Wu
Enjoy!
We’re going to kick off this year’s announcements in earnest tonight at 9 PM with our 50th Anniversary Award winner from 1968, previously announced in February of this year. From there, we’ll be announcing two inductees every day, at 7 PM and 9 PM, until we’re finished. We’ve got some great films on the way, and a few surprises.
But before we begin, I’d like to offer my gratitude to everyone who was able to contribute to the Muriels Hall of Fame voting this year:
Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Danny Bowes
Steven Carlson
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Philip Dyess-Nugent
Molly Faust
James Frazier
Caden Mark Gardner
Jaime Grijalba
Glenn Heath Jr.
Eric Henderson
Odie Henderson
Sam Juliano
Donna Kozloskie
Craig D. Lindsey
Jeff McMahon
Patrick J. Miller
Matt Noller
Jason Shawhan
Alice Stoehr
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Bridgett Taylor
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig van Driel
Clayton Walter
Brian Wilson
George Wu
Enjoy!
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