2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: All About Eve (1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

“Mary Orr’s ‘The Wisdom of Eve’ was the appropriately titled source material for Joe Mankiewicz’s classic ode to ‘the thea-tuh,’ All About Eve. Orr’s title begs the question: What wisdom did its cinematic adaptation impart over the 70 years it has been in existence? That bumpy nights require seatbelts? That ‘everyone has a heart except some people?’ That pianos are particularly adept at writing their own material? Or that a good story should have ‘everything but the bloodhounds’ nipping at its rear end? That last lesson is most definitely taught by All About Eve; its Oscar-winning screenplay is a master class in telling a story through delectable dialogue and ripe situations, both of which are brought to life by a murderer’s row of legendary actors. The cast includes Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Thelma Ritter, Celeste Holm, a pre-stardom Marilyn Monroe (as poor Miss Caswell) and, as that venomous fishwife, Addison DeWitt, George Sanders. That DeWitt is the cattiest character in a film filled with women is just one of the many surprises in store for viewers.

“Eve sets us down in the backstage world of the theater, where Eve Harrington (Baxter) is about to accept the Sarah Siddons Award for her latest role. In the audience is everyone she’s railroaded on her way to the top, including famed performer Margo Channing (Davis), whom Eve idolizes so much that she ingratiates herself into Margo’s life. Margo is about to turn 40, the apparent kiss of death for actresses. And while she still wants to act, there are younger, hungrier and yes, more conniving actresses hovering about, waiting for their moment to strike. Nobody recognizes that Eve is the enemy except former performer and current Margo caretaker, Birdie (Ritter) who, like some of this film’s detractors, sees Eve as a shoddily manufactured characterization. That Eve’s persona is nothing but a performance is a feature, not a bug, however, making her partnership with Addison all the more credible.

“Like the macho director Bill Sampson (Gary Merill) and the henpecked writer Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), Addison DeWitt is a Mankiewicz addition to Orr’s story, and each of the men serve as one-third of the director’s stand-in. But the writer-director is wise enough to know the women are far more interesting and unpredictable, especially Davis’ Margo, whose iconic characterization was strong enough to survive the camp-flavored trainwreck of Lauren Bacall’s Tony-winning recreation in Applause. Margo’s fears of aging out of her discipline are dealt with humanely, and she’s given further complexity when contrasting herself with her friend, the ‘happy little housewife’ Karen Richards (Holm). All About Eve is strong enough to support a happy or a tragic reading of Margo’s voluntary retirement and entry into Karen’s profession, as well as to support the additional irony of a new Eve mysteriously appearing to replace the old one.

“Though DeWitt is a critic and not an actress, he fits right in as a fellow shade-thrower, perhaps a symbolic representation of the woman his creator envisions he would be if nature had blessed him as such. He’s as quick as Margo is with a comeback, and just as deliciously catty, so much so that the Academy thought awarding the deserving Sanders would make up for shunning the equally deserving Davis. Of course, Miss Davis had a much more contentious category to deal with, but that’s another story. Since this piece is all about All About Eve, it should answer the question it originally posed. What does All About Eve teach its audience? The Wisdom of Eve may very well be that in life, everyone sees themselves as Addison DeWitt, but they are really all just poor Miss Caswells trying to eke out an existence by making the unhappy rabbits who rule the world happy. Whatever the lesson, All About Eve is magnificent despite not being, as the line goes, maudlin and full of self-pity.” ~ Odie Henderson

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Late Spring (1949, Yasujiro Ozu)

“Without generalizing too strongly, one of the core tenets of many informed viewers’ conception of the films of Yasujiro Ozu lies in contradiction. The traditional notion of his cinema is that of quietness and contemplation, using simple and repetitive notions and an unobtrusive style in order to explore family relations. The actual experience, meanwhile, can and often is radically different from this: his style of cutting together frontal medium shots at the level of the tatami according to highly metered rhythms would be frenetic under any other director’s hands, and indeed jars the viewer far more than one would expect. And yet this style, and the darkness and specificity of the post-war Japanese milieu, work in tandem with his more widely recognized tendencies; it is an expansive cinema, one that allows for as much lightness and even comedy as it does for tragedy and loss.

“All of these tendencies are readily present in one of Ozu’s greatest films, Late Spring (1949). Along with Tokyo Story, it is one of his most well-known works and exists within the loose Noriko trilogy that stars two of his most acclaimed actors, Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara. In a scenario that would be repeated at least a few more times by the director, Ryu plays a middle-aged widower who lives with his deeply devoted daughter, played by Hara; over the course of the film, he decides to arrange a marriage for her in order to ensure that she will not grow old taking care of him for the rest of his life.

“The storyline is simple to summarize, but the film experience is anything but, filled as it is with a dense network of friends and family, a delicate balance between city and small town, and above all as detailed a depiction of the subtleties of conversation and inflection as has been put to screen. Nothing is left to chance or wasted, and the digressions, like the famed bike ride that Hara takes or a seven-minute long Noh theater performance, serve to make this a whole ecosystem that is under threat of becoming upset at any moment. Late Spring, ultimately, is all about the sacrifices necessary in love, but Ozu enacts these overwhelmingly heartbreaking moments with grace and ambivalence, always seeing every second’s nuances with a clarity nearly unmatched before or since.” ~ Kenji Fujishima

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman)

“My name is Isak Borg, and I am 78 years old.”

“Sometimes, and it isn’t always this way, it feels like we don’t see certain films until we’re supposed to see them. When the current lockdown situation began, the result of the early days of a global pandemic, I made a list and resolved to catch up with at least ten movies I felt embarrassed to admit I’d never seen. At the top of that list was Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). On the day that begins and ends the film, its central figure, Isak Borg, a respected inventor and physician, is about to take an afternoon’s drive on his way to receive an honorarium celebrating his long and distinguished career. On the day I first saw the film, about two months ago, my own father, who will turn 80 years old before I finish writing this piece, was admitted to the hospital with heart problems which cast his immediate future in doubt. Bergman’s great work is a brief consideration of a man late in life disturbed by restless nightmares of mortality who, in discerning ‘an extraordinary logic’ in contemplating various memory scenarios of his youth, and being forced to reconcile them with echoes of people and places in the present day, finds a modicum of relief from the haunting imposition and aggression of time.

“In Wild Strawberries, which is essentially Bergman’s contribution to the ‘road movie’ genre, Isak, played with world-weary elegance by the film director and actor Victor Sjostrom (who made silent films such as Lon Chaney’s He Who Gets Slapped), sets out with his intellectually imposing daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) for the university where he will be feted. The two have a testy relationship, but it is one gilded by mutual respect, which is perhaps more than either have for Marianne’s husband, Isak’s aloof, financially irresponsible son Evald (Gunnar Bjornstrand).

“Along the way, Isak stops at the house where he often summered as a boy with his family, and Bergman effortlessly glides into a series of remembrances, the aged Isak witnessing scenes from his youth in which the cousin he once loved, Sara (played by Bibi Andersson), confesses her feelings for the young Isak (who is never seen), all the while being pursued by his older brother. Sara is first recalled by Isak picking the wild strawberries of the film’s title, a gift for her uncle on his birthday, and a psychological touchstone that will go unmentioned elsewhere in the film, yet reverberate sweetly, nonetheless. Later he is awakened by another Sara (this one also portrayed by Andersson), a flighty young woman whose father now owns the property. She inquires about him (‘I lived here once, 200 years ago’) and then asks if she and her two boyfriends might tag along with Isak and Marianne for a ride into the city.

“Thus Bergman further introduces the film’s dramatic strategy of reflecting in his day’s journey key elements of Isak’s remembrances—youth as embodied by Marianne, Sara and her friends; memory, an insistent presence in the present- and past-days Saras, as well as in the testimonies to his stature as a local figure of regard from a gas station attendant (Max Von Sydow) they encounter along the way; the sour underbelly of marriage in the personage of a couple the travelers briefly assist after a car accident who cannot keep their contempt for each other at bay; and even Isak’s own feelings as a grown child bristling against the stern personality of his own mother, still alive, to whom he brings Marianne for a brief visit.

“There’s a grace in Bergman’s imagining of Isak’s past and present that is its own testimony to the great director’s own youthful dramatic empathy (Bergman was half Isak’s age when the film was made). Equally important to the film’s easy access to a viewer’s senses are its cadences-- unhurried, yet strangely urgent, as if time itself were in the back seat, persistent, yet just another rider on the road trip, always felt, never acknowledged except in the glistening, aged eyes, themselves caressed by great puffy pillows of knowing flesh around their edges, of the honorable, soon-to-be-honored driver.

“I thought of my father, a man nothing like the intellectually accomplished, professorial, grand yet unpretentious Isak, often while watching Wild Strawberries two months ago—it couldn’t be helped, I suppose. Yet in the film’s journey, and especially its conclusion, in which Isak realizes the value of the comfort he draws from the bittersweet memories of his own childhood—less nostalgic, and more revealing of his own flaws of his character as well as surges of unexpected strength—lent support to my own worries in imagining (hoping) my own father might also be nearing his own sort of similar reckoning. As Isak deals with ghosts, with past yearnings and shortcomings, and with a present fast approaching its inevitable conclusion, the peace Bergman crafts for him feels appropriate, well-earned, perfectly right. That peace is yet another form of grace, which in Wild Strawberries is in rich supply. ~ Dennis Cozzalio

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: Modern Times (1936, Charlie Chaplin)

“Over a shot of a clock shaped to the size of the screen a terrible fanfare wails. An introduction one might find more befitting a Universal horror film than the newest Chaplin masterpiece. So begins Modern Times, Chaplin's final film centered on his iconic Little Tramp character, as well as being essentially his last silent film. Really a ‘part-talkie’ with fully synchronized music, sound effects and brief speech, though released in 1936, nearly a decade since sound was introduced and rapidly adopted industry wide, making Chaplin at this point in danger of coming off as a dinosaur. A first though for Chaplin was the more specifically critical and political perspective he expressed of modern industrial society, politics and capitalism, themes that would run even more strongly in the films made subsequently and lead to strong backlash and reversals in popularity (especially in America) over the course of the rest of his life.

“Which speaks to why Modern Times remains one of Chaplin's most iconic, timely, and most seen films today, and contains perhaps his most beloved routine, the Little Tramp at the factory sequence at the beginning. Encapsulating some of the best physical comedy ever filmed, sight gags, innovative sound effects, ominous music, brilliant set design and biting satire, the opening sequence finds the Little Tramp as a human cog in the industrial assembly line, struggling to tighten bolts as the big wig sits in his office watching from his futuristic video monitor keeps demanding the line increase their productivity. The Little Tramp becomes a guinea pig for feeding machine, the purpose of which is to automatically lift food directly into employee's mouths while working, eliminating the need to provide lunch breaks, increasing productivity and lowering overhead (is it a stretch to guess this is a problem that continues to keep the Elon Musks and Bezoses up at night?). As the machine quickly begins to malfunction, horrifically and hilariously dealing abuse upon the poor little tramp, it highlights what a brilliant actor Charles Chaplin was as he comically reacts and out of sight of the camera operating the machine himself, instills a menacing personality onto every movement it makes. The sequence climaxes with the Tramp overwhelmed the repetitive motions and fast pace as becomes more and more insane and manic, not even noticing as he's literally sucked into the machine and wound though it's gears. It's a brilliant (and much copied) sight gag whose visual metaphor unfortunately still carries a sting of recognition for anyone who has found themselves punching a clock for a large corporation nearly 90 years later.” ~ Patrick J. Miller

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: L'Avventura (1960, Michelangelo Antonioni)

“Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, simply put, is one of the most influential films ever made. Along with Jean Luc-Godard's Breathless, it helped usher cinema into modernism. It came out in 1960 a few months before Psycho. Like the Hitchcock, a woman opens the film and is established as the apparent lead before disappearing from the narrative altogether early on. The film sets this up as a mystery to be solved, but radically, Antonioni leaves it unanswered; instead, turning his attention to the affair that springs between her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti).

“L'Avventura was startlingly new when it made its debut at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival where the audience reaction was largely one of derision. But critics acclaimed it as an instant classic and in the 1962 Sight & Sound poll, it ranked behind only Citizen Kane among the best films ever made. Its impact has been so immersed in film language though that today, L'Avventura's innovation doesn't stand out so much even as it remains an indubitable achievement in film form.

“Antonioni's subject in L'Avventura is the decadent idle rich. Claudia may be the most sympathetic among them, and while Monica Vitti has great screen presence, none of the characters are particularly likeable. They are self-righteously privileged and morally vacuous. Claudia and Sandro only meet 3 days before Anna (Lea Massari) disappears during a trip to the Aeolian Islands and Sandro makes advances on Claudia almost right after his lover goes missing. Claudia resists at first, but they encounter infidelity everywhere and that resistance is fleeting.

“Instead of narrative or commiserative characters, Antonioni captivates through film form: composition/camera placement, extensive use of deep focus photography playing with foreground and background, imaginative blocking of the characters, and most of all, the usage of space, mostly to indicate the emptiness of these lives despite all the beauty around them. There are so many shots of lone figures dwarfed by their surrounding landscapes. The great scenes or shots come one after another - Claudia waking in the morning to a beautiful sunrise, she and Sandro talking with a stunning cloudscape behind them, Claudia delighted with the communication from other church bells, Sandro casually ruining the art of a young man in an act of wanton cruelty, Claudia pacing her room and making faces in the mirror when she is unable to sleep, and Claudia's run down the vast empty hall of the San Domenico Palace Hotel.

"Easily the best of the trilogy of existential ennui that Antonioni made with La Notte and L'Eclisse, L'Avventura pushed formalism to the foreground while narrative receded to the background. Earlier filmmakers like F.W. Murnau and Josef Von Sternberg with their striking sense of composition, camera movement, and indulgence with space and time presaged Antonioni and soon after L'Avventura, films like Last Year at Marienbad and Antonioni's own Red Desert would take this style much further. L'Avventura though was the lynchpin and its influence can also be seen from Theo Angelopoulos, Bela Tarr, and Hou Hsiao-Hsien to Kelly Reichardt, Jia Zhangke, and Andrei Zvyagintsev today.” ~ George Wu

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame inductees: The Wild Bunch (1969, Sam Peckinpah)

“Westerns, a staple since the early days of cinema, were still important in 1969. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was the year’s highest grossing movie. True Grit won John Wayne an Oscar. But the world was changing rapidly, and many filmmakers were eager to move beyond simple games of cowboys and Indians, approaching the time-honored tradition with new approaches and perspectives. One notable example: Sam Peckinpah with The Wild Bunch.

“Maybe egged on by the envelope-pushing violence of Bonnie and Clyde, the stylish reinvention of the genre in Italy, disgust with the war in Vietnam, hunger to overcome recent professional failures, or some combination of those things, he made a film that was revisionist in both form and content. It was technically groundbreaking, experimenting with new lenses, filming speeds, editing techniques and even gun sounds. But since Peckinpah chose not to sanitize the gore and death of the west, many were too revolted by the bloody, high casualty shootouts to celebrate his masterful craftsmanship.

“Which was, of course, the point. The film unmasks Hollywood cliches of heroism with its regretful gunman protagonist and a tone that frequently shifts from thrilling to melancholic. Starting with the opening scene, where children gleefully feed a live scorpion to a mob of ants, Peckinpah takes aim at the brutality of humankind. Innocent bystanders, including a tuba player from the South Texas Temperance Union parade, are shot dead in the streets, caught in a greedy war between a railroad company and our team of outlaw protagonists. There are always children nearby, playing guns, riding alongside a general, smiling at the bandits’ jokes about whores, or being breastfed beneath a bandolier.

“It’s a portrait of human ugliness that hits you in the gut. Yet its band of reprobate anti-heroes manages to find some manner of honor in this world when they agree to risk it all for a friend they left behind. Somehow Peckinpah was able to cut open the western, pull out its guts, and still make a classic of the form.” ~ Vern

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2020 Muriels Hall of Fame: Welcome!

Hey everybody! Welcome to the (counts fingers) eighth year of Muriels Hall of Fame inductions!

I had hoped to unveil this year’s inductees last week, but due to some tech problems I had to postpone the announcements. It’s boring – no reason to go into details.

Anyway, I’ll be posting three times every evening this coming week, at 7 PM, 8 PM, and 9 PM, until we’ve announced all the nominees. But before we get into that, I’d like to send out a warm thank-you to this year’s voters!

Josh Bell
Andrew Bemis
Christianne Benedict
Scott W. Black
Kevin Cecil
Paul Clark
Dennis Cozzalio
Phil Dyess-Nugent
Steven Erickson
James Frazier
Kenji Fujishima
Caden Mark Gardner
Sean Gilman
Luke Gorham
Odie Henderson
Jenna Ipcar
Daniel Cook Johnson
Sam Juliano
Craig D. Lindsey
Matt Lynch
Wendy Mays
Jeff McMahon
Patrick J. Miller
Matt Noller
Jason Shawhan
Melissa Starker
Ryan Swen
Scout Tafoya
Melissa Tamminga
Ian Scott Todd
Hedwig van Driel
Vern
Clayton Walter
Brian Wilson
George Wu

Stay tuned all week for this year’s Muriels Hall of Fame announcements!