*This article originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, Turner Classic Movies’s official blog in May 2011 (The blog was discontinued years ago and is no longer available available)
In the event-packed hurly burly of TCM’s second annual Film Festival in Los Angeles from April 28-May 1 of 2011, I didn’t have a chance to blog about all of the films or attending guests that I saw but here are a few that linger in the memory and deserve to be singled out –cinematographer/director Haskell Wexler, who participated in a Q&A with Leonard Maltin before a screening of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(1966), Hayley Mills, who appeared after a screening of Whistle Down the Wind (1961) with interviewer/author Cari Beauchamp, a midnight screening of The Mummy (1932) introduced by Boris Karloff fan Ron Perlman, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928) accompanied by a live orchestra score by Vince Giordano and His Nighthawks, the MoMA restoration print showing of 1933’s Hoopla (Clara Bow’s final film) and the underrated Ernst Lubitsch Pre-Code delight Design for Living (1933).
I’ll work backward from the last event I saw which was the Maltin-Wexler on-stage introduction of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Even in his mid-eighties, Wexler remains an early adapter of new technologies and fiddled with his flip-cam, recording his own on-stage interview, as Maltin plunged into the behind-the-scenes of the landmark 1966 film adaptation of Edward Albee’s play. A lot was at stake in this much-publicized Warner Bros. production. For one thing, Mike Nichols had never directed a film before but was the top choice of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (the latter knew Nichols through his Broadway work and had been friends with him since Camelot). Wexler praised Nichols, stating that he had never worked with a first time film director before who knew exactly what to do with the camera in every scene. Every decision, every instinct Nichols had about bringing the Albee play to cinematic life was the correct one.
Burton was more nervous about his cinematographer. He had seen some of his films and thought of him as a documentary filmmaker in terms of his raw, realistic style. Wexler wasn’t exactly a Hollywood insider either, having worked mostly on indie features like The Savage Eye (1960), The Runaway (1961), and Hoodlum Priest (1961) and less commercial but prestige movies like Elia Kazan’s America, America (1963) and The Best Man (1964). Burton’s biggest fear was that Haskell would accent his physical imperfections (his pock-marked face, for example, which was the result of acne scars) with his unvarnished approach.
Taylor was concerned about how she might look as well but realized this role was the chance of a lifetime and seized the day with her no-holds-barred performance. Wexler had nothing but complete admiration for her and very little gossip about the on-set, day to day filming. He did say that when it came time for her close-ups in the film, she would give him a conspiratorial wink which meant for Wexler to be as kind and generous as he could when lighting her.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which was nominated for 13 Academy Awards, won Wexler his first Oscar nomination and award for Best Cinematography. He recalled that in his acceptance speech he said, “I hope we can use our art for love and peace.” But the remark was not well received by many in Hollywood or the public as this was at the height of the Vietnam War and anyone advocating peace at that time was viewed by hawks as Un-American. Wexler has always been a man who has championed liberal causes but he admitted he was taken aback by the response to his statement with people saying things to him like “Love and Peace? Is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? your idea of love and peace?” He has weathered worst controversies in his film career and it was a priviledged moment in time to be able to watch one of his crowning achievements with Wexler in attendance.
Among the three Hayley Mills films being screened at this year’s festival (the other two were Walt Disney productions – The Parent Trap and Summer Magic), Whistle Down the Wind (1963) was the lesser known title and possibly the most rewarding for many attendees. Somber, understated yet emotionally gripping, the movie has a premise that could easily become pretentious and self-conscious in the wrong hands. A wanted killer eludes the police and hides in a stable on a remote farm in rural Lancashire. He is discovered by Hayley, the oldest of the three children that live on the farm, and mutters “Jesus Christ” before he passes out from a leg injury and pure exhaustion. Being an impressionable child and naïve in the ways of the world, she believes through her conversations about religion with other adults in the village that she is witness to the second coming of Christ. Along with her young sister and brother and all of the children in the community who are sworn to secrecy, she vows to worship and protect him. Yet she can’t ultimately protect this stranger (Alan Bates in his film debut) from the adults in pursuit and the film, on a visual and tonal level, reminds me of the earlier British New Wave films of the early sixties like A Kind of Loving, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
Mills gives a remarkably naturalistic and unaffected performance in the film but so do the other children who often threaten to steal scenes from her – no small feat indeed. And Alan Bates is impressive in his first movie, creating an unromanticized and often unsympathetic portrait of his confused and desperate murderer. Mills shared her recollections of the film with film historian/biographer Cari Beauchamp, stating that initially her father, John Mills, was slated to direct Whistle Down the Wind. But another commitment prevented him from doing it and the project was offered to Guy Green. He also had to refuse it and the movie was given to Bryan Forbes, who was still busy with his acting career. Whistle Down the Wind marked his directorial debut and the critical success of the film (it was nominated for four BAFTA awards including Best Picture and Best Actress-Hayley Mills) encouraged him to move behind the camera permanently by the mid-to-late sixties.
Mills had a particularly amusing anecdote about child actor Alan Barnes who plays her pugnacious little brother in Whistle Down the Wind. He was a local kid from the Lancaster township where it was filmed and completely guileless and natural in front of a camera. When he arrived on the set the first day, she recalled, he saw all of the chairs for the important key talent lined up with their names on the back. As he noticed the name Alan Bates on a chair, he said, “You’ve got my last name wrong. It’s Barnes, not Bates.”
Mills also talked briefly about her memories of Walt Disney and the ice cream/movie parties at his house and shared some anecdotes about the making of Pollyanna (she chopped off her bangs the night before filming began which created an uproar in the hairdressing/makeup department the following morning). The most surprising thing she admitted was that she was approached to play the lead in Lolita. Of course, she was still under contract to Disney then and he wouldn’t allow it. But Hayley, as a curious young teenager, had read the book and was fascinated by it even though she “didn’t really understand it.” Even if Disney had agreed to such an improbable loanout, it is doubtful that Hayley’s parents would ever have allowed their child to star in the Stanley Kubrick picture. Still, it would have been something to see Hayley go from Pollyanna and Whistle Down the Wind to Lolita the next year; instead she appeared in Disney’s In Search of the Castaways.
It is always a treat to watch a classic Universal horror film on the big screen, especially when Boris Karloff is the star. But The Mummy, screening at the Egyptian Theatre, got extra points by having the ideal guest host introduce it – Hellboy himself, Ron Perlman. For an actor who has spent a good deal of his career in the makeup chair, he knows the grueling physical reality of making fantasy/horror films, but also the challenge of projecting believable emotions and feelings while buried under layers of a cosmetic exterior. Like Karloff, Perlman has appeared in many guises on screen – Quest for Fire (1979), the TV series Beauty and the Beast, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), and the Hellboy films to name a few – and he was clearly in awe of Karloff’s ability to humanize his monstrous creations.
In the case of The Mummy, Perlman pointed out, Karloff was playing three roles – which meant three different shooting schedules of makeup hell. For the gauze-wrapped title character, Imhotep, who only appears in the film’s opening, Karloff would go to the set’s makeup department in the morning and not emerge until around 8 pm when the all-night shoot would begin. For his scenes as Ardeth Bey, the mysterious, wrinkled Egyptian, who sets the latter-day plot in motion, his makeup took at least four hours a day. Then there was the famous flashback sequence with Karloff as a young pharaoh (Was Karloff ever young?) who defies the gods of his faith by trying to revive his deceased lover with sacred incantations. It is a stunning performance (actually three performances) by any standard yet curiously unheralded by film historians today. But Perlman did Karloff proud at the Egyptian at midnight and showed us why moviegoers are still flocking to see his films almost a century later.
I have always been immensely fond of The Cameraman but it wasn’t one of the titles I would usually recommend first to friends who had never watched a Buster Keaton film before – Steamboat Bill, Jr., The Navigator and The General were my usual top suggestions. But after watching the silent 1929 film again recently in a superb 35mm print accompanied by the live music score accompaniment of Vince Giordano and His Nighthawks, I think I need to revise my opinion. I had last watched The Cameraman in 2004 when it was released by TCM Archives in a set with Keaton’s Spite Marriage and Free and Easy and some of the sequences are still burned into my brain such as the entire Chinatown tong war and the antics of the organ grinder’s monkey who becomes Buster’s companion. But the main thing that struck me as I watched it again on the big screen at the Egyptian Theatre (Leonard Maltin gave a stirring introduction to the movie) was how much detail I had previously missed from watching it on a small screen TV over the years. It was like seeing The Cameraman for the first time and I’m sure other film festival attendees had this same revelation watching a favorite movie on a theatre screen this year. Also, watching it with a full audience while enjoying the playful, inventive live score of Giordano’s orchestra brought it to life in ways that a solo viewing at home could never achieve.
Some of Buster’s physical stunts (such as riding a section of a collapsing building down into the street below without a break from his filming) earned thunderous applause from the audience and other scenes such as Buster’s misadventures at the bath house had people doubled up in laughter for minutes at a time. There were so many wonderful little touches in it – Keaton’s lovestruck gaze as he peers at Sally (Marceline Day), the pretty office girl, over the top of his camera while she notices his staring; the scene in the rain where the neighborhood cop tests Buster’s reflexes because he suspects he’s mentally unbalanced; the final rescue scene in the water which the monkey captures on Buster’s hand-cranked projector.
The Cameraman was the last feature Keaton made at MGM where he had a good deal of creative control over his productions but he still had to make studio compromises during its production. One wonders what the film would have been like if Keaton had been left alone to craft it himself. Still, as it stands, The Cameraman is an endlessly clever and ingenious romantic comedy, structured as a series of connected vignettes, that now ranks as one of my favorite Keaton films.
Another festival revelation was the Museum of Modern Art restoration print of Hoopla (1933), Clara Bow’s final film, which was introduced by MoMA film curator Katie Trainor and film historian David Stenn (author of Clara Bow: Running Wild). While the film might not match the quality of her best silent era hits, Hoopla proves once and for all that Bow’s film career was not a casualty of the sound era and that her speaking voice is as vivid and distinctive as the mischief-making characters she plays. Bow was already finished with Hollywood when she made this film and was simply fulfilling her contract. In fact, when Fox approached her to make more pictures for them after Hoopla, she reportedly said, “I’ve had enough…I don’t wanna be remembered as somebody who couldn’t do nothin’ but take her clothes off.”
It’s true Bow was often stereotyped as vixens, party girls and uninhibited flappers and even in Hoopla she is playing a variation of this – a streetwise carnival worker who is paid to seduce the naïve son (Richard Cromwell) of the carnival barker (Preston Foster). But it’s her performance that elevates and enriches the cliched story. With her expressive eyes, wry sense of humor and a complete lack of artifice in her acting, Bow was one of the most natural movie actresses of her era and creates a kind of wondrous alchemy on-screen that makes a direct connection with the audience.
The movie has a magical opening. A train, traveling through the countryside by night, makes a stop and a young man hops out of a boxcar. The camera travels behind him as he wanders toward the bright lights of a carnival in the distance. This is no rear screen projection trick and instead appears to be an elaborately designed carnival complete with rides and sideshows built on the Fox backlot. The film is full of vivid moments – Bow and Cromwell’s moonlight swim in a pond during a train stop, a wild, out of control crowd riot on the midway that is frightening in its intensity, a hilarious drinking scene between the carny women in their train berths and the moving climax in which Bow’s face runs through a gamut of emotions as the movie fades out on an unexpected but welcome happy ending. Some people in the audience were moved to tears. The film may have its weak points (Cromwell is a lame, uncharismatic leading man and the pacing is uneven) but Bow’s performance is alive and electric and makes me want to see a Clara Bow retrospective. This is the sort of thing TCM does so well and maybe the programming department will honor this fantasy.
The other title I wanted to mention was Design for Living (1932), which TCM has shown on the network before but this screening, introduced by film critic Lou Lumenick, showcased a newly mastered 35mm print courtesy of Universal Pictures. Based on Noel Coward’s popular play about a menage a trois with three bohemians – a painter, a writer and a commercial artist – the film version, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, faced censorship problems from the very beginning from the Production Code office. But Lubitsch also wanted to retool some of the original dialogue and scenes anyway, thus eliminating the stagy quality of the play and transforming some of Coward’s high toned British wit into a more Americanized earthiness. Ben Hecht (His Girl Friday) was brought in to do the screenplay with contributions from Lubitsch and what they ended up with is one of the most sparkling and stylish of all Pre-Code comedies, yet is seldom mentioned among discussions of Lubitsch’s early Hollywood films.
Design for Living deserves to be as well known as Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise and would make a great companion piece to the latter film but probably the reason it isn’t as well known is because it was considered a failure at the time of its release. Fans of the Coward play attacked it for throwing out most of Coward’s dialogue and altering the story and characters. And the general public didn’t seem interested either. Considering the cast, that’s quite a surprise.
All three of the stars have rarely looked better – Fredric March and Gary Cooper are dashing, sleek and matinee-idol handsome, and Miriam Hopkins is delectable with her silky blonde beauty, creamy complexion and sexy body language – watch the way she drops down on a divan as if in an erotic swoon. Her way with a line is also impeccable: “It’s true we have a gentleman’s agreement but unfortunately I am no gentleman.” The biggest surprise for me here was Gary Cooper’s light and nimble comic performance. I expected him to be forced and artificial in such a stylized chamber piece but he defied all of my preconceived notions of his ability to shine in a sophisticated farce of this nature. Don’t miss an opportunity to see this if you get the chance. It’s a total delight.
Other links of interest:
https://theasc.com/articles/the-dramatic-photography-of-virginia-woolf
http://www.clarabow.net/filmography/hoopla.html
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2104-design-for-living-notes-on-the-play
Cinema Sojourns 