Fallen Angel (1945)

Peter's Nite

Nick Pinkerton in The Village Voice:

The elder son of a well-heeled Jewish family, Preminger was born in Austria-Hungary in 1905 and raised in Vienna. He was an erudite, successful theater director by his 30th birthday, though a premonition of the looming Anschluss inspired his relocation to America. He went to work at 20th Century Fox in 1936, but a flare-up of his famous temper toward Hollywood über-producer Darryl Zanuck meant banishment to New York (Preminger was always partial to Gotham—at the height of his influence, he made his headquarters on 55th Street).
After directing for the stage and playing stock SS man, he returned to the studio's good graces with a hit in the classic noir Laura (1944); for the next eight years, the quintessential maverick was a model company man, the go-to guy for thrillers and odd jobs. His noirs are knotty with thwarted sex, characterized by patient characterizations, ellipses of solitude, and the precision- haloed nocturnal photography of Joseph La Shelle. The culmination of this period is 1952's Angel Face, a dyspeptic terror that open-ends onto the abyss. Film Forum's program, however, testifies to the little-acknowledged diversity of Preminger's Fox résumé, with rarely screened one-offs that include a Joan Crawford melodrama (Daisy Kenyon), a Restoration period piece (Forever Amber), and an Oscar Wilde adaptation (The Fan).
Autocrat Otto's great period came with the disintegration of the studio system, from which he emerged as his own industry, an independent producer-director. It's here that his rows with Joseph Breen's censorious Production Code Administration office began—Preminger was the first man of consequence who wouldn't jump through hoops for its Seal of Approval. Self-interest and genuine liberal convictions happily aligned; what was good for Otto's p.r. was almost always good for America, and he helped banish a system that hamstrung popular entertainment with its arcane prudery.
From the innocuous but taboo-busting utterance of "virgin" in his farce The Moon Is Blue (for shame!) through the dope-sick Man With the Golden Arm, Preminger uncovered verboten new territory with every new production and found fresh pricks to kick against when he wasn't sparring with Breen. Bucking convention, he shot two big-money all-black musicals in the '50s—Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess (leading lady Dorothy Dandridge was a longtime girlfriend)—and hired the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to adapt Leon Uris's Exodus, giving Trumbo his first screen credit since the studios let their people go.

Chris Fujiwara via Film International:

When, years after he made them, Otto Preminger was asked about Fallen Angel (1945), Whirlpool (1950), and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), three of the four Preminger films that the British Film Institute has just released on DVD, he had, in substance, but one thing to say. On Fallen Angel: “I don’t remember the picture at all.” Whirlpool: “I cannot remember anything about this film.” Where the Sidewalk Ends: “I remember nothing about it.”
In his autobiography, Preminger likened his role as contract director (and producer-director) for 20th Century-Fox to the job of “a foreman in a sausage factory.” Apart from a few standard anecdotes (such as Spyros Skouras kneeling to the head of the Catholic Legion of Decency to plead for the lifting of the Legion’s condemnation of Forever Amber in 1947, or Joan Crawford requiring that the sets of Daisy Kenyon [1947] be ice-cold), Preminger always preferred, when recalling his career, to jump straight from Laura (1944), which established him as an important film director, to The Moon Is Blue (1953), with which he launched himself as an independent producer. Preminger drew a curtain over the intervening films, pretending that his involvement with them was merely that of an administrator or a technician. The films themselves belie this pretense. Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, and Where the Sidewalk Ends are great films, and Preminger’s personal commitment to them is unquestionable.
These three films constitute, along with Laura, The Thirteenth Letter (1951), and Angel Face (1952), what has been considered Preminger’s contribution to “film noir.” It is pertinent to remember that Preminger repudiated this term, as far as his own work was concerned. Seeing these films as “films noirs” is no more illuminating and no less destructive of any understanding of what the films are doing than seeing River of No Return (1954) as a Western; Carmen Jones (1954), the subject of the fourth BFI DVD, as a musical; or In Harm’s Way (1965) as a war film. Preminger’s films are absolutely heedless of genre, and Preminger never makes the slightest effort to adapt his style to generic norms.

In theme and style, Fallen Angel, Whirlpool, and Where the Sidewalk Ends—no less than Laura, their template in some respects—depart radically from the “film noir” pattern supposed to be exemplified by such films as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1946), Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947). This pattern is characterized by scheming femmes fatales, trapped and desperate male protagonists, and unhappy endings. In the four Preminger films, the only figure who remotely resembles a femme fatale, the waitress Stella (Linda Darnell) in Fallen Angel, is viewed realistically and sympathetically as someone who likes the attention of men but puts them on notice that her main goal is to land a husband; her femininity proves fatal only to herself, when one of her admirers turns homicidal. The four Preminger films share, moreover, the theme of a character’s struggle to free herself or himself from destructive behaviors and entanglements, and they all have endings in which the struggle appears to be resolved positively. (Even Angel Face, the sole Preminger film to conform, ostensibly, to the pattern I have outlined, remains demonstrably a work to which “noir” is irrelevant.) Preminger’s revising the end of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (in the 1955 film of the novel) so that the protagonist walks away free of his drug addiction and cleared of suspicion of murder is a vivid example of the director’s optimism.
Preminger’s handling of the therapeutic theme is, to be sure, frequently ambiguous, not least in Laura, in which he avoids presenting the rejection by Laura (Gene Tierney) of two inappropriate suitors in favor of the film’s policeman-hero, Mark (Dana Andrews), as a clear-cut bid for self-determination. Waldo (Clifton Webb) accuses Laura of being drawn to Mark because of his physique, and Waldo’s implication that she is still following an established self-destructive behavior pattern is allowed to stand unrefuted. Moreover, Mark’s obsession with the Laura he thought dead bodes ill for the future of his relationship with the living Laura: he has fallen in love with a portrait, not a woman (as Rita Hayworth put it, “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda and woke up with me”).

In Fallen Angel, on the other hand, if the triumph of the down-and-out hero, Eric (Dana Andrews), over his past appears conclusive, this is largely because of the force of the mise-en-scene and acting in the hotel-room scene in which he concedes bitterly that his life of hustling and scheming has left him “with exactly nothing.” This recognition, and the redemptive presence of June (Alice Faye), to whom he articulates it, prepare us for the plot resolution in which Eric takes charge of his destiny by gathering (offscreen) the evidence that clears himself of Stella’s murder and points to the retired policeman Judd (Charles Bickford) as the killer. The verisimilitude of this resolution may be questioned, but its emotional movement is convincing.

From internal and external evidence, it’s clear that the makers of Fallen Angel and Whirlpool made a conscious attempt to reproduce certain aspects of Laura. Signs of this effort are to be found in the records relating to the production histories of the films. On an early draft of the script of Fallen Angel, 20th Century-Fox production chief Darryl F. Zanuck penciled the notation: “Everything great up to last act­—needs hypo like Laura.” In script conferences for Whirlpool, Zanuck repeatedly urged Preminger and screenwriter Ben Hecht to draw on Laura for inspiration, noting that the villainous Korvo should be “just as interesting as Clifton Webb was in Laura,” remarking that Whirlpool “can have much of the quality and strangeness of Laura,” and proposing changes to the ending (that were adopted in part) that would put the heroine in jeopardy, after the manner of the last sequence of Laura.

Fallen Angel brings back, along with the male star of Laura, its cinematographer, Joseph La Shelle (who would also shoot Where the Sidewalk Ends); the trailer for the film, included as an extra on the BFI’s DVD, even contains the blurb: “The creator of Laura does it again!” Fallen Angel and Whirlpool are both scored, as was Laura, by David Raksin, and Fallen Angel associates its theme song, Raksin’s “Slowly,” with a female character (Stella), just as Laura had been identified with the famous theme of Laura. At one moment in Fallen Angel, Raksin again uses the musical special effect, a kind of tape manipulation that he called the “Len-o-tone,” which had contributed so memorably to the central scene in Laura of Mark falling asleep in the armchair in Laura’s apartment.

Alice Faye via Wikipedia:

Color film flattered Faye enormously, and she shone in the splashy musical features that were a Fox trademark in the 1940s. She frequently played a performer, often one moving up in society, allowing for situations that ranged from the poignant to the comic. Films such as Weekend in Havana and That Night in Rio (atypically, as a Brazilian aristocrat) made good use of Faye's husky singing voice, solid comic timing, and flair for carrying off the era's starry-eyed romantic storylines. 1943's The Gang's All Here is perhaps the epitome of these films, with lavish production values and a range of supporting players (including the memorable Carmen Miranda in the indescribable "Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" number) that camouflage the film's trivial plot and leisurely pacing.

Faye's career continued until 1944 when she was cast in Fallen Angel. whose title became only too telling, as circumstances turned out. Designed ostensibly as Faye's vehicle, the film all but became her celluloid epitaph when Zanuck, trying to build his new protege Linda Darnell, ordered many Faye scenes cut and Darnell emphasized. When Faye saw a screening of the final product, she drove away from the Fox studio refusing to return, feeling she had been undercut deliberately by Zanuck.

Zanuck hit back, it is said, by having Faye blackballed for breach of contract, effectively ending her film career. Released in 1945, Fallen Angel was Faye's last film as a major Hollywood star[1].

But seventeen years after the Fallen Angel debacle, Faye went before the cameras again, in 1962's State Fair. While Faye received good reviews, the film was not a great success, and she made only infrequent cameo appearances in films thereafter.

Linda Darnell via All Movie Guide:

Daughter of a Texas postal clerk, actress Linda Darnell trained to be a dancer, and came to Hollywood's attention as a photographer's model. Though only 15, Darnell looked quite mature and seductive in her first motion picture, Hotel For Women (1937), and before she was twenty she found herself the leading lady of such 20th Century-Fox male heartthrobs as Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda. Weary of thankless good-girl roles, Darnell scored a personal triumph when loaned out to United Artists for September Storm (1944), in which she played a "Scarlett O'Hara" type Russian vixen. Thereafter, 20th Century-Fox assigned the actress meatier, more substantial parts, culminating in the much-sought-after leading role in 1947's Forever Amber. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz followed up this triumph by giving Darnell two of her best parts--Paul Douglas' "wrong side of the tracks" wife in A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and Richard Widmark's racist girlfriend in No Way Out (1950) (though befitting her star status, Darnell "reformed" at the end of both films). When her Fox contract ended in 1952, Darnell found herself cast adrift in Hollywood, the good roles fewer and farther between; by the mid-1960s, she was appearing as a nightclub singer, touring in summer theatre, and accepting supporting roles on television. Tragically, Darnell died in 1965 of severe burns suffered in a house fire. Ironically, Darnell had a lifelong fear of dying in flames, speaking publicly of her phobia after appearing in a "burned at the stake" sequence in the 1946 film Anna and the King of Siam.

Movienite question

Awesome site -- one question? When and how did Movienite begin?

East of Eden (1955)

Pamela's Nite

Discussion Questions (via ReadingGroupGuides):
1. Steinbeck has a character refer to Americans as a "breed," and near the end of the book Lee says to a conflicted Cal that "We are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil." What makes this a quintessentially American book? Can you identify archetypically American qualities-perhaps some of those listed above-in the characters?
6. Sibling rivalry is a crushing reoccurrence in East of Eden. First Adam and his brother Charles, then Adam's sons Cal and Aron, act out a drama of jealousy and competition that seems fated: Lee calls the story of Cain and Abel the "symbol story of the human soul." Why do you think this is so, or do you disagree? Have you ever experienced or witnessed such a rivalry? Do all of the siblings in the book act out this drama or do some escape it? If so, how? If all of the "C" characters seem initially to embody evil and all the "A" characters good-in this novel that charts the course of good and evil in human experience-is it true that good and evil are truly separate? Are the C characters also good, the A characters capable of evil?

Writing East of Eden via Steinbeck.org:

In A Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letter, the writer's diary of East of Eden, Steinbeck calls the novel “...the story of my country and the story of me.” The book spans the history of the nation from the Civil War to World War I and tells the story of two American families, The Hamiltons, Steinbeck's matenal relatives, are the “Universal Family” and the fictional Trasks are the “Universal Neighbors.”

Steinbeck's inspiration for the novel comes from the Bible, the fourth chapter of the book of Genesis, verses one though sixteen, which recounts the story of Cain and Abel. The title, East of Eden, was chosen by Steinbeck from Genesis, Chapter 4, verse 16.

The theme of East of Eden: “All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.”

Steinbeck called this book “The big one as far as I'm concerned. Always before I held something back for later. Nothing is held back here.”

Steinbeck kept track of things while writing East of Eden, and this is the record:

• Eleven years of mental gestation
• One year of uninterrupted writing
• 25 dozen pencils
• Approximately three dozen reams of paper
• 350,000 words (before cutting)
• About 75,000 words in his work-in-progress journal
• And a rock-hard callus on the middle finger of the writer's right hand.

Steinbeck's widow, Elaine, in looking back on the year that he worked on the book, said that his work on the novel affected him deeply. Perhaps the best way to put it would be to say that it was the last stage in putting himself back together after the years that had torn him apart.

As Steinbeck progressed through the early chapters, he noted that his voice would be more apparent in this book than in any other because he wanted it to contain everything he remembered to be true. He would be in this one and not “for one moment pretend not to be.”

Steinbeck states about East of Eden, “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years.” He further claimed, “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.”

East of Eden became a best seller so it was a natural for the movies. East of Eden, the film, was directed and produced by Elia Kazan and starred James Dean as “Cal.” The film opens at approximately Chapter 37 in Part Four of the novel. The film, shot in part in Salinas, California, was finished and released in 1955. The film has now reached the stature of a classic.

The Searchers (1956)

Nora's Nite

Time Magazine, June 1956:

The Searchers (C. V. Whitney; Warner) is another excursion into the patented Old West of Director John Ford. The place is Texas, three years after the Civil War, and the lone figure moving across the vast plain is none other than lean, leathery, disenchanted John Wayne, still wearing bits of his Confederate uniform, still looking for trouble. Trouble finds him. One day, while John's back is turned, Chief Scar and his wild Comanches swoop down and massacre his relatives, carrying off two young girls for their own fell purposes.

Wayne promptly fills his trusty horse with hay and sets off on a fiveyear, Technicolor, VistaVision search for the girls. His itinerary sounds like that of Lewis & Clark, but the camera never seems to get outside Arizona and Utah's beautiful Monument Valley. Tagging along is Jeffrey Hunter, who spends nearly as much time trying to soften Wayne's vindictiveness as he does hunting Indians. Though the film runs for two hours, it nevertheless races through its individual scenes at so breakneck a pace that moviegoers may be uncertain just what is going on. Director Ford indulges his Homeric appetite for violence of spirit and action. Coming on the corpse of a hated Comanche, Wayne shoots out the dead man's eyes on the debatable theological principle that the Indian's blinded ghost cannot find its way to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

One of the kidnaped girls is raped by four braves and killed off early in the picture. The other (Natalie Wood), when finally found, proves to be a contented member of Chief Scar's harem. Wayne is so annoyed that he tries to shoot her dead and is only thwarted by an Indian attack.

The lapses in logic and the general air of incoherence are only minor imperfections in a film as carefully contrived as a matchstick castle. The Searchers is rousingly played by what Hollywood calls the "John Ford Stock Company"—a group made up of Wayne, Harry Carey Jr., Ward Bond, a half-dozen bit players, seven stunt men who are repeatedly shot off horses, and many of the same Navajo Indians who have been losing battles in John Ford pictures since 1938. By now, all of them perform with practiced ease: the women know just where to stand on the cabin porch as they peer off anxiously into the haze and mesa-filled distances; the men automatically fall into line for a barn dance or a posse. In fact, they may be getting too practiced and familiar. Even John Wayne seems to have done it once too often as he makes his standardized, end-of-film departure into the sunset.

Screenplay structure guru Syd Field gropes for meaning in a cruel, indifferent universe:

While I was watching The Searchers, I tried to relate Campbell's concepts to Ethan's journey. Though Ethan is placed in a situation where he confronts a series of obstacles in order to achieve a higher state of consciousness, he refuses to bend his principles, or his beliefs, to the issue at hand. His journey is both a physical as well as spiritual one, because it takes place inside his head as well as outside in the obstacles he confronts. In Campbell's work, the hero in his journey experiences a symbolic transformation of death and resurrection as he casts off the old parts of his life; he needs to be re-born and emerge into the "birth" of his new self. In mythological terms, Campbell says, the heroes' journey is one of acceptance; the hero must accept his fate, his destiny, no matter whether it is life or death.

This is not the case in The Searchers.
he first thing I noticed is that John Wayne's character doesn't change. There is no transformation in his character; he's exactly the same at the end of the movie as he was at the beginning. Wayne's image, as a man of action, is heroic precisely because he does not change; he refuses to give up, bend or alter his ways until his mission is accomplished; to find and rescue the kidnapped girl. And when he does find her, we don't know whether he's going to kill, or embrace her. Finally, in a dramatic scene, he relents and embraces her. At the end, when the family enters the house to celebrate their return, Wayne remains outside the doorway, a desolate, homeless drifter doomed to wander "between the winds."
In Campbell's analysis, the hero weathers every obstacle but returns home a wiser and better person, sharing his newfound awareness with his fellow man. That certainly doesn't happen in The Searchers. At the end of The Searchers, it is his very strength of character that leads to his isolation and loneliness. In comparing it to other films of the period, this is the start of the "anti-hero," the character who goes his own way even though it may be against the laws of society.

What makes this film a classic, I think, is that the traditional moral lines of good and bad, or right and wrong, and black and white, are blurred. It's is a tribute to Ford's genius that he could combine both the look and feel of an epic Western, as well as reflect the social nature of the times and the very ambiguity of the changing times.

Tim Dirks via Filmsite.org:

The Searchers (1956) is considered by many to be a true American masterpiece of filmmaking, and the best, most influential, and perhaps most-admired film of director John Ford. It was his 115th feature film, and he was already a four-time Best Director Oscar winner (The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952)) - all for his pictures of social comment rather than his quintessential westerns. The film's complex, deeply-nuanced themes included racism, individuality, the American character, and the opposition between civilization (exemplified by homes, caves, and other domestic interiors) and the untamed frontier wilderness.

With dazzling on-location, gorgeous VistaVision cinematography (including the stunning red sandstone rock formations of Monument Valley) by Winton C. Hoch in Ford's most beloved locale, the film handsomely captures the beauty and isolating danger of the frontier. It was even a better film than Ford's previous Best Picture-winning How Green Was My Valley (1941). However, at its time, the sophisticated, modern, visually-striking film was unappreciated, misunderstood, and unrecognized by critics. It did not receive a single Academy Award nomination, and was overwhelmed by the all-star power and glamour of the Best Picture winner of the year, Around the World in 80 Days (1956).

The film's screenplay was adapted by Frank S. Nugent (director Ford's son-in-law) from Alan Le May's 1954 novel of the same name, that was first serialized as a short story in late fall 1954 issues of the Saturday Evening Post, and first titled The Avenging Texans. Various similarities existed between the film's script and an actual Comanche kidnapping of a young white girl in Texas in 1936. The film's producer was C.V. Whitney - a descendant of Eli Whitney, who was a pioneer in the mass production of muskets in the first firearms assembly factory in New Haven, CT.

Ten to fifteen years after the film's debut, and after reassessing it as a cinematic milestone, a generation of "New Hollywood" film directors, French film critics and others, including Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Steven Spielberg, John Milius, Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, and George Lucas, praised the film. They traced their own fascination with film to this mythic John Ford western, and in reverence, reflected his work in their own films (e.g., Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1968), and Mean Streets (1973), Lucas' Star Wars (1977), Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), and Schrader's Hardcore (1979)). Even rock musician Buddy Holly wrote a song based on John Wayne's trademark line: "That'll Be The Day," popularized by the Beatles.
The Searchers tells the emotionally complex story of a perilous, hate-ridden quest and Homeric-style odyssey of self-discovery after a Comanche massacre, while also exploring the themes of racial prejudice and sexism. Its meandering tale examines the inner psychological turmoil of a fiercely independent, crusading man obsessed with revenge and hatred, who searches for his two nieces (Pippa Scott and Natalie Wood) among the "savages" over a five-year period. The film's major tagline echoed the search: "he had to find her...he had to find her."

The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)

Stuart's Nite
First movie out of the giant boxed Janus set.

Wilde biography via Official Oscar Wilde site:

In December 1881, Oscar sailed for New York to travel across the United States and deliver a series of lectures on aesthetics. The 50-lecture tour was originally scheduled to last four months, but stretched to nearly a year, with over 140 lectures given in 260 days. In between lectures he made time to meet with Henry Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt Whitman. He also arranged for his play, “Vera,” to be staged in New York the following year. When he returned from America, Oscar spent three months in Paris writing a blank-verse tragedy that had been commissioned by the actress Mary Anderson. When he sent it to her, however, she turned it down. He then set off on a lecture tour of Britain and Ireland.

On May 29, 1884, Oscar married Constance Lloyd. Constance was four years younger than Oscar and the daughter of a prominent barrister who died when she was 16. She was well-read, spoke several European languages and had an outspoken, independent mind. Oscar and Constance had two sons in quick succession, Cyril in 1885 and Vyvyan in 1886. With a family to support, Oscar accepted a job revitalizing the Woman's World magazine, where he worked from 1887-1889. The next six years were to become the most creative period of his life. He published two collections of children's stories, “The Happy Prince and Other Tales” (1888), and “The House of Pomegranates” (1892). His first and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was published in an American magazine in 1890 to a storm of critical protest. He expanded the story and had it published in book form the following year. Its implied homoerotic theme was considered very immoral by the Victorians and played a considerable part in his later legal trials. Oscar's first play, “Lady Windermere's Fan,” opened in February 1892. Its financial and critical success prompted him to continue to write for the theater. His subsequent plays included “A Woman of No Importance” (1893), “An Ideal Husband” (1895), and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1895). These plays were all highly acclaimed and firmly established Oscar as a playwright.

For more on Joan Greenwood, see the Movienite posts on Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Man in the White Suit (1951).

Amazing connection via ScreenOnline:

The last and most popular of his social comedies, Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnes opened at London's St James' theatre on Valentine's Day 1895. Its initial run, however, was cut short by Wilde's prosecution for immorality, which ironically was brought by one of his social acquaintances of the time, the then Home Secretary (and later Prime Minister)Herbert Asquith. In a somewhat bizarre turn, Asquith's son Anthony eventually made the first film version.

Geoffrey Macnab on the neglected Anthony Asquith via Guardian Unlimited:

"Puffin" (as his mother nicknamed him, because of his bird-like profile) is one of the most exotic and eccentric characters in British film history. A tiny figure with a fay and gentle manner, he was famous for wearing a blue boiler suit on set, and for sitting cross-legged beneath the camera during shooting. "He dressed like one of the electricians. If anything, he was less well groomed," actress Wendy Hiller recalled of him. Despite his aristocratic background, he was the first British director to join a trade union, serving for 30 years as president of industry body the Association of Cinematograph and Television Technicians (ACTT). In the process, he helped improve pay and conditions for workers, and played a key role in the battle to prevent the government closing down film production during the second world war. "He was a unique and indispensable figure in the British cinema," observed Harold Wilson after Asquith's death in 1968.

Actors and technicians revered Asquith. "He was delightful, charming as a man. To me, he was the best director I have ever worked with," says Jean Kent, one of the leading British stars of the 1940s, who made three films with him. Otto Plaschke, second assistant director on his 1958 feature, Orders to Kill, agrees: "Everybody adored Puffin. He was the most enchanting man." While making The Way to the Stars, Asquith struck up one of the more unlikely friendships of his life with Joe Jones, owner of a transport cafe in Catterick, who subsequently employed him as a dishwasher and waiter. "He used to serve the lorry drivers at breakfast time," Jonathan Cecil says. "They [Joe's family] were a kind of surrogate family to him. Joe helped Puffin to kick the alcohol."

Between his stints at Joe's cafe, Asquith was making films such as The Importance of Being Earnest and The Winslow Boy. He was also trying to curb his drinking at a notoriously tough "drying-out" clinic. Even here, Cecil recalls, his trademark courtesy did not desert him. "They'd bring him a bowl of whisky with vinegar in it so it would make him nauseous. They had all these fighting drunks, cursing and being held down, and they'd bring this bowl of revolting muck for him to drink and he'd say, 'Oh, my dear ... that's so kind.' "

By making adaptations of Rattigan, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw plays, Asquith ensured that he would be pigeonholed as a purveyor of tasteful, middlebrow fare. The influential critic Raymond Durgnat coined the phrase "Rattigasquith" to dismiss these literary adaptations.

In their own unfussy way, Asquith's best movies are superbly crafted. The Importance of Being Earnest, for example, works so well precisely because he doesn't try to open up the material for the screen. Calling it "an artificial comedy of the theatre", he celebrates rather than disguises its stage origins. He also elicits exemplary performances from Margaret Rutherford (to whom he once fed whiskey to calm her nerves), Redgrave and others. "He had a marvelous way of coaxing what he wanted out of you," Jean Kent says. She, at least, is convinced that he is woefully undervalued. "I don't think he was ever given his due ... not that his reputation ever mattered to him."

You are a slacker

This man has the answers you and your friends have been so desperately seeking, go to www.waltswisdom.com before it's too late!

Breaking Bad Poster

I know, I know. This blog isn't about Breaking Bad but I can't resist this poster, I think it's the best one yet:
Also this article describes a set visit, the reporter describes Walt and Hank smoking cigars and drinking -- a scene I wrote. What a thrill. Additionally, take a look at the Breaking Bad interactive site! And, if you're so inclined, the Facebook Game: "Breaking Bad: Chemical Codebreaker"! Better yet, watch the show starting on Sunday, January 20th.

The Lost Boys (1987)

Pamela's Nite

He has the look, attitude, and lifestyle of a rock star, but David would make the hardest rockers cower in fear.

As the leader of a ruthless vampire gang, Kiefer Sutherland became one of the most memorable villains of all time.

Now he gets the deluxe treatment as part of Series 6 of NECA's Cult Classics with the Cult Classics Lost Boys David Action Figure.

David includes interchangeable heads, hands, and feet, blood bottle, and detailed base. Link

Ace in the Hole (1951)

Peter's nite

Editor and Publisher Magazine, "The Best Movie About a Reporter Ever":

Large segments of America may distrust or despise them, but Hollywood still loves reporters. They have served as compelling heroes and villains since the dawn of cinema. You only have to go back to 1931 to enjoy "Five Star Final" (if you can find it), with Boris Karloff starring as the shifty journalist. Between the birth of the talkies and today, Hollywood has produced hundreds of films that revolve around newsrooms. But somehow, until last month, I had missed the best, Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole."
Rarely seen in recent years, the movie finally came out on DVD this past summer. About 15 years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing the very friendly (and, yes, hysterically funny) Wilder for a book I was writing on a California political campaign in which he played a tiny role, and he recommended this cult classic during one of our talks. If you haven't seen it, rush out to get it, or do that Netflix thing.

Although something of a box office flop in 1951 — and later released under a new title, "The Big Carnival" — it was way ahead of its time in anticipating the feeding frenzy of media coverage today. But like Larry David and "The Simpsons," it is an equal-opportunity mocker, poking malicious fun at everything from gullible common folk to the police. Its most famous line comes from the no-nonsense wife of its chief victim, who says she doesn't go to church because "kneeling bags my nylons."
....
Yes, I'm aware that yellow journalism and media circuses existed long before this. In the film, Tatum even mentions a real-life precursor — the Kentucky cave-in in 1925 that made W.B. Miller of the Louisville Courier-Journal a household name (and landed him a Pulitzer). State troopers with bayonets had to hold tourists back at the Sand Cave, and that victim perished, also.

But "Ace in the Hole" still stands as a savage — and highly entertaining — reminder of one reason the media has lost so much standing. To be sure, Hollywood has fallen just as far: They truly don't make movies like this anymore.

Molly Haskell via Criterion:

The 1951 movie, fascinating in the sweep and savagery of its indict­ment, and a flop when it opened (and again when it was released as The Big Carnival), points to the direction noir would take in the fifties, hiding in broad daylight in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk. But if Hitchcock diabolically upended our expectations of the lead­ing man, Wilder went much, much further. This satire of the media circus that would envelop us all goes beyond noir into saeva indignatio, and beyond Swift into something more intensely and disturbingly personal. Rarely, if ever, have there been such brutally antipathetic leads in a mainstream film as Kirk Douglas’s scoop-or-die reporter and Jan Sterling’s breathtakingly callous victim’s wife. However prophetic Wilder’s vision of a press and a public drunk on sensation, this issue ends up seeming almost peripheral to two main characters so monstrous in their mutual, and mutually despising, selfishness that it’s astonishing the movie got released at all.

Fresh from his star-making turn as the self-promoting prizefighter in Cham­pion (1949), a ferociously determined Douglas gives one of his great over-the-top, sadomasochistic performances as Chuck Tatum, bent reporter (a liar, a fabricator, an adulterer just begin to count the ways), desperate for a scoop, a ticket back to a big-city newspaper, who winds up in the hick town of Albuquerque. Before landing him in the newspaper office, an extended opening scene features one of cinema’s great entrances: Douglas’s convertible, having broken down in the desert, is being towed in to the local shop as he sits like a catbird in the driver’s seat, reading a newspaper, with the camera tracking alongside. The image is that of a man both crippled and defiant: to be carless—see Sunset Boulevard (1950)—is to be emasculated, but this born opportunist and exploiter has turned the truck driver into his charioteer. Having now acquainted himself with the local paper, Tatum strides into its storefront office and, with characteristic chutzpah, condescends to the locals—“How,” he says to a Native American, and sneers at the secretary’s handmade sampler “Tell the Truth”—before penetrating the office of the kindly editor-publisher, played by Porter Hall. In an outrageous Wilderian aria of simultaneous self-promotion and self-contempt, he makes his pitch: “I can handle big news,” he boasts; all he needs is “just one good beat,” as he comes down in price—“Fifty dollars . . . Forty-five dollars.” There is something already frightening, if funny, in the mixture of self-abasement and aggression. It’s the self-abasement that is the aggression, as if he’s getting the jump on you by saying the very worst, bragging about what a liar he is, even as he confesses each sordid detail of his firings from various newspapers. He talks himself into and out of a job several times over and is finally hired for sixty bucks.

As he settles in, we can’t help but respond in some degree to his abject down-and-outness, his hunger and desperation, not to mention the New York hustler vibe he brings to this white-bread environment, where there are no pickles, no chopped liver (a sly reference to Douglas’s—and Wilder’s—Jewishness?), no Yogi Berra, where never is heard a discouraging word and the homemade “Tell the Truth” sampler reeks of small-town naïveté.

Guy Maddin via Criterion

Wilder’s effects and Douglas’s priapic performance are in the ser­vice of a story that was lambasted as hopelessly cynical by the critics of the day. Since most critics considered themselves news­paper­men and therefore within the target range of the movie’s furious contempt, this makes a certain sense. But the picture isn’t cynical at all, it’s spot-on! There’s no denying it travels darker territories: the secret wish of a bored housewife, for example, to have a hundred tons of rock dumped on her Baby Duck–and–Minute Maid husband, or the parents happy to offer their children ringside seats to death because it could be “very instructive.” Of course, the main theme is the rapacious hunger of tabloid news gatherers for their scoops, and of a public for blood (an appetite in this case as sexy and naked as it was in Caesarean times). But these things are nothing more than accurately represented in the movie. The earnest young shutterbug who starts the picture as Tatum’s nemesis is utterly corrupted by him within seconds; the lad’s whiplash transformation from annoying goody-goody to sycophantic ponyboy puts the Oscar-winning mutative wizardry of Rick Baker to shame. Others within Tatum’s orbit—the sheriff and the contractor, particularly—undergo Fredric March–like personality shifts as well, though the cave rat’s wife, the perfectly cast Jan Sterling, appears to have come pre-Hoovered of all scruples. By the time the Great S&M Amusement Corp. rolls in, poor, mad Minosa is clearly doomed to die like a dog in his cave.

Wikipedia:

Jan Sterling (April 3, 1921 – March 26, 2004) was an Academy Award-nominated American actress. She was born Jane Sterling Adriance in New York City, into a prosperous family. Sterling was educated in private schools before heading to Europe with her family. She was schooled by private tutors in London and Paris, and was enrolled in Fay Compton's dramatic school in London.

As a teenager she returned to Manhattan, and billed with such aliases as Jane Adriance and Jane Sterling, began her career by making a Broadway appearance in Bachelor Born, and went on to appear in such major stage offerings as Panama Hattie, Over 21 and Present Laughter. In 1947, she made her movies debut in Tycoon, now billed as Jane Darian. Seldom cast in passive roles, Sterling was at her best in parts calling for hard-bitten, sometimes hard-boiled determination. Actress Ruth Gordon insisted she change her stage name and the two hit upon Jan Sterling.

In 1948 she broke into films as the scheming floozy who tries to take the baby of Academy Award winner Jane Wyman's character in Johnny Belinda, but ultimately ends up helping "Belinda" (Wyman) by clearing her of murder. Shuttling between films and television, she showed up in nearly all the major live anthologies of the 1950s, playing in "bad girl" film roles in Caged (1950), Mystery Street (1950), The Big Carnival (1951), Flesh and Fury (1952), The Human Jungle (1954), and Female on the Beach (1955), while making a more sympathetic impression in Sky Full of Moon (1952).

In 1954 Sterling was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The High and the Mighty. Also the same year, she travelled to England to play the role of Julia in the first film version of George Orwell's 1984, despite being several months pregnant at the time. During the following years, she appeared regularly in movies like Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, Kathy O, and The Female Animal. She retired from films in favor of the stage in 1969 and returned before the cameras in 1979 to portray Lou Henry Hoover in the TV miniseries Backstairs at the White House.

Married and divorced to actor John Merivale in the 1940s, Sterling's career slipped down after the death of her second husband, actor Paul Douglas, in 1959. In the 1970s, she entered into a long lasting personal relationship with the late actor and American expatriate in the UK, Sam Wanamaker, but they never married.

As Tears Go By (1998)

Stuart's Nite

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece via Popmatters:

Fluid and erratic, viscous and elusive, Wong Kar-Wai's films are feats of dream logic. Scattered across genres and generations, they reveal that, despite their strangeness, they concern familiar human experiences: loyalty, sadness, obsession, and, of course, love. Wong Kar-Wai's genre reference and twisting brings to mind other cinematic masters, from Jean-Luc Godard in Chungking Express (Chong Qing Sen Lin, 1994) to Martin Scorcese in As Tears Go By (Wong Gok Ka Moon, 1988). But Wong also creates a filmic space entirely his own, with his signature use of bright colors, strobe effects, handheld camerawork, pop music, and broad themes.
In nearly all of Wong's work, vibrant color hints at bottled up emotions or unexpressed desire. At the end of As Tears Go By, just before Wah (Andy Lau) is shot, the camera peers at the foreboding parking lot where he is to meet his fate through orange plastic curtain flaps. In this sudden glimpse of color, we see the location of Wah's death before he even arrives. It is both distancing and shocking distancing because we are forced to take a step back, to examine the establishing shot through a filter, and shocking because the color is unlike any other we have seen yet in the film. Up to this point, it's been all neon blue and muddy browns, and now with a simple switch in foreground color, Wong Kar-Wai eerily sets the stage for an equally shocking ending.
Such sentiment drives all of Wong Kar-Wai's films, the desire to live in a dream, to make the external world as beautiful as the internal one. His dreams evoke the splendor of the everyday. At the end of Chungking Express, when Faye (Faye Wong) takes a job as a flight attendant in order to see California, she bringing her dreams into real life. And that is Wong Kar-Wai's gift to his audiences, bringing his dreams into our real lives.

Breaking Bad -- Coming in January!

The Long Good Friday (1980)

Nora's Nite

Neil Young's Film Lounge:

Shand is a gang-boss of the old school, perhaps even a direct successor to the Kray twins - he refuses to have anything to do with drugs, and retains some smatterings of a social conscience. Harold sees himself as the bridge between the old (London's seedy criminal past) and the future: he has his eye on docklands development and has pieced together an ambitious deal reliant on funding from the American mafia - represented, in a nice casting coup, by veteran film noir star Eddie Constantine.

The film begins with Shand, a pugnacious, strutting little bantam of a man, at the crest of a wave - he has his glamorous, classy girlfriend Victoria (Mirren) on one arm, and the world, so it seems, on a string. But, over the course of one Easter weekend (the film, despite the title, spills over from Friday into Saturday) Harold's world falls apart. Close associates are killed, the showcase pub he owns is blown up, another bomb is found in his casino. As the mafia grow increasingly jittery about these high-profile attacks, Harold is spurred into increasingly desperate courses of action...
Largely due to Hoskins, Harold's problems take on increasingly epic dimensions as the film unfolds. London is his city, and he sees himself as the king of his turf, a theme subtly emphasised by the names of both his girlfriend (who, we are told, once knew Princess Anne) and his pub, the 'Lion and Unicorn.' But Barrie Keefe's script keeps on adding layers - though he's basically an East End boy made good, Harold's vivid, heightened vocabulary has distinct echoes of Shakespeare ("I'll have his carcase dripping blood by midnight"), and this enriches the tale of his downfall with tragic elements of self-defeat and inevitability. The film also hints at an ever grander aspect of Harold's self-image - his references to blood, Judas and crucifixion suggests he sees his persecutions and troubles, if only at some subconscious level, as an echo of Christ's - why else set the film on this particular weekend?
Hoskins' intensely physical performance brings out every nuance of the script, and goes beyond it to engage directly with the camera - there's tension in the way the flat planes of his face slope backwards from the camera, even when his body seems to be leaning into it. Like Harold, Hoskins bridges the old and the new - he's a direct descendant of Jimmy Cagney and Edward G Robinson, while foreshadowing Robert De Niro's strutting Al Capone from The Untouchables. It's a fantastic role for any actor, but Hoskins makes it his own - he carries out a shocking attack with a broken bottle that's as hardcore as the hammer scene in The Honeymoon Killers, while the film's final close-up of Hoskins' face (marred only by a couple of cutaways) surpasses its closest predecessor, Garbo in Queen Christina.

Michael Sragow via Criterion:

Harold Shand, the London crime boss at the center of The Long Good Friday, is more than an antihero. He’s the Antichrist, uniting bourgeoisie and barbarians in a simultaneous Pax and Pox Brittanica. With the “legitimate” help of cops and city councilors, Shand controls a criminal empire built on every vice except narcotics. His gun moll is a vision of class, aptly named Victoria; you can’t tell whether she’s joking or for real when she says she played lacrosse with Princess Anne. In this feverish 1979 thriller, Shand plans to buy up moribund London dockyards and redevelop them for the 1988 Olympics. His call for a “new London” wickedly echoes the Christian call for a “new Jerusalem.” Yet on the very Good Friday that Shand meets with an American Mafia chief to seal a financial partnership, somebody kills two of his right-hand men, attempts to murder his mother, and blows a favorite pub to smithereens.
Directed by John Mackenzie and written by Barrie Keeffe, The Long Good Friday is a rabidly engaging, complex melodrama, brimming over with moxie. Unlike classic gangster heroes like Little Caesar, who fought their way out of the faceless mob and were punished for brutality and ambition, Harold Shand struggles to control his animal urges and to act like a civic-minded businessman. He detests anarchy and tries to use violence only as a tool. If he’s doomed, it’s because his left-handed brand of capitalism can’t defend itself against the terrorism of the IRA. Harold Shand becomes a sacrificial lamb for all our Western sins. After Shand—the apocalypse!

A student's blog entry on a Q & A with Barrie Keeffe (all spelling and punctuation hers!):

‘Kind of luck sometimes” he said when referring to how he was able to write “Long Good Friday’ in 3 days and get the right funding after a screening in Edinburgh festival and the right actor who came to the audition to keep a friend company and hearing the right bit of dialogue in a pub or a sign on the van leading to the ‘hotdog line’ in the last scene.

From there he segwayed into advice for the beginning screenwriter.
“It’s a collaboration so don’t write it like a novel. What it should do is give the smell of it.” He said with also noting we (the students) should get the script to our favorite film, read it bit by bit and watch the film as we go to see how much description is actually used.

“I’m an ease dropper. I sit at the pub with the Evening Standard but I’m really listening.” - BF

His passion for theater and the actor’s journey really came through when he spoke in our hour and a half session. He writes characters as parts he, as an actor, would want to play. (Hoping to be a young British James Dean back in his time) he was disappointed with the options for actors and began to really make sure that even if he wrote a small part it would be exciting and interesting, a real full person. He mixes in with people he has meet in real life or heard about to help round the characters out.

“I’m not afraid to be a voyeur and leech” BF

His antidotes of teasing reporters/critics and real people to tell a story or to get one were very amusing. When he first sat down I thought goodness that man looks tired. As we began he became alive, blunt, and funny with his stories in screen trade and theater.

“It’s a lonely job.” - BF

Along with witty antidotes about the business he also told us more then once how his passion for writing broke up his first marriage because he wouldn’t take a holiday, he would write from Friday to Sunday, selfishly he said. He repeated his mantra of ‘it’s a lonely job’ over and over. His drive for succeeding as a working writer was evident in his stories of his youth. He made mention of if you are a writer how everyone says they have an idea for you, or if you get something produced they say they could have done better then that, with the all talk and little action notion.

“I like to be judged on the work over my life time.” When asked about being a beginning writer he made it known that your first script won’t sell and that you will get many rejections. That it is a progression. When you finish one script start another so when you get those rejections it’s okay because you have another project you are excited about. “You have to be cocky.” He told us more then once with his… ‘It a lonely job.” But then with that came… “ Do you know the best two words in the English language are?” ‘The end.’

(I have to say we all went to the pub after and when introduced to him he asked)
BK: What part of America are you from?
Me: Well born and raised in South FL, went to school in Chicago,
then moved to LA, then NYC.
BK: Wow I’m surprised you remained sane after all that.
Me: Who says I did? It’s always the crazy ones that seem the most
sane.
I continued to hold my deadpan expression. Once again I made another memorable and idiotic first impression. He smiled politely, fiddled with some clothe on his jacket and hightailed it to several other students on the opposite end of the pub. I guess he doesn’t need any character research on crazy American’s.