Miller's Crossing (1990)

Peter's Nite
Salmon, roasted potatoes, spinach, brownies, sorbet.
Stuart in Cannes cat burgling jewelry from celebrities

Time Magazine's Top 100 Movies:

Leave it to the Coen brothers -- the writer-producer-director team who were the film finds of the '80s -- to discover ferocious drama in words, character, atmosphere. Their inspiration for Miller's Crossing was a pair of Dashiell Hammett novels: Red Harvest (which provided the milieu of a corrupt city ruled by warring gangsters) and The Glass Key (which provided the plot of an aging boss and his young adviser involved with the same woman). To this blend the Coens have brought a teeming cast of sharpies, most of them spectacularly, thoughtfully venal. They speak wittily but often don't mean quite what they say; listeners must find clues in their equally eloquent silences.Like Red Harvest, but unlike most movies, Miller's Crossing has a good novel's narrative density. The film finds a dozen angles in the battle between Leo O'Bannion (Albert Finney), the Irishman who has run the town for years, and Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), the volatile, flirtatious Italian who is itching to seize control. Their bone of contention is Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro), a gambler too greedy to live long but too cunning to stay dead. His sister Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) has stolen Leo's heart and is ever ready to fence it. Nice crowd. Shuttling among them, wooed and wounded by them all, is Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), an existential hero with a black Irish soul. We spend most of the movie racing after Tom's mind, trying to figure what devious plan it will spin next.The Coens have tempered their style from the daredevil camerabatics of Blood Simple and Raising Arizona; they now seek the extra fillip of incident and character in the corner of every frame. Each of the hard gents in Miller's Crossing finds his own space and his own reasons for pushing others out of it. Leo, for example, is given a blaze of glory as he defends his life against Caspar's goons. To the strains of Danny Boy he strides from his home, machine gun flaring, a dinosaur who refuses to die. "The old man," one friend says wistfully, "is still an artist with the Thompson." The Coens are artists too, and their cool dazzler is an elegy to a day when Hollywood could locate moral gravity in a genre film for grownups.

Miller's Crossing,The Glass Key and Dashiell Hammett by Paul Coughlin via Senses of Cinema:

Joel and Ethan Coen's film, too, is influenced as much by the casting of Gabriel Byrne as any specific reference to Hammett's heroes. The Continental Op of Red Harvest is middle-aged, overweight and short. The casting of Byrne allows for the psychological assurance, self-confidence and icy demeanour to be physically reproduced in the sturdy and unruffled presence of the tall and lean actor. Tom is 'a man who walks behind a man, whispers in his ear', he is the brains behind Leo's operation, and he is the heartless centre of Miller's Crossing. Hearts and minds vie for attention in the Coens' film. Tom contemplates the importance of reason in his decisions, he uses an analytical approach to support a basis for all of his actions. On several occasions Tom is framed alone in his room, pensively smoking a cigarette, the consternation on his face signifying a man lost in the realm of his own thoughts. The central enigma of Miller's Crossing is Tom's agenda, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) suggests it is to woo and win her, Leo implies that Tom is motivated by loyalty, but Tom remains implacably obscure about his strategies and their intentions. Arguably, Miller's Crossing is precisely about Leo's revelation to Tom of his intentions to marry Verna, for it is this incident which precedes and then instigates the events which follow; events which culminate with a bonding so substantial between Leo and Tom that it must eventually become untenable.

The King of Kong (2007)

Nora's Nite
(Stuart flaked!)

AV Club interviews Billy Mitchell:

The story didn't end with the movie, though: Billy Mitchell, a successful restaurant owner and hot-sauce mogul in Florida, unsurprisingly took umbrage at the way he was portrayed. Though the beginning of the film paints him as a hard-working businessman who bettered himself via the same principles that made him good at gaming, it quickly casts him as a man who a) may have sent minions to examine his rival's game console, b) won't face a worthy opponent in a live match, c) may have cheated to keep his title, and d) is generally self-absorbed and awful. To what degree those things are true is a matter of debate. While Mitchell claims to this day that he hasn't seen the movie, he insists (in the few interviews he's given) that he was portrayed unfairly, and that the film is inaccurate. That's where The A.V. Club was willing to leave things—with an excellent documentary that, like all documentaries, can't possibly paint a completely accurate picture. Until about a week before the DVD release of The King Of Kong, when Billy Mitchell called our office.

He was ostensibly just thanking us for ordering some of his hot sauce—and looking for our suite number for the shipment—but after I'd chatted with him for about 10 minutes, I asked if he'd like to continue our conversation, and make it an official interview. He agreed, and an hour of sometimes-pointed, sometimes-rambling conversation followed. To his credit, Mitchell is well aware that a Donkey Kong score isn't the most important thing on earth, or even in his life. But he's at least slightly bitter—and heartily determined to get his side of the story across. He comes across as friendly but almost amazingly self-centered, and a good deal more charming than Kong lets on. (Some of the DVD's bonus footage offers a better glimpse into what may be the "real" Billy.) He had plenty to say about specific points the movie raises—for instance, he says that in one key scene, the filmmakers edited out several seconds to make it look like he snubbed his nice-guy rival. In the interest of fairness, The A.V. Club tracked down Ed Cunningham and Seth Gordon to respond to some of the allegations. And the saga continues. What follows is two separate conversations that took place about a week apart, the first with Mitchell, and the second with Cunningham and Gordon. They're edited together for the purposes of clarity and flow.

Billy Mitchell: You see me in the movie, and I'm wearing different types of patriotic ties. You saw the movie. What impression did the movie give you? And then I'll tell you the real truth.

The A.V. Club: Well, the movie clearly makes you out to be the bad guy. Or do you mean specifically about the ties?

BM: Did I come across like a staunch Republican, or like a NRA guy or a 9/11 guy, or something like that? The truth is, I started wearing those ties to competitions in 1999, because in the race for a perfect game of Pac-Man, there was another guy, a counterpart from Canada who's really good, and we were in our race, in our quest for a perfect game. He called himself Captain Canada, and he actually wore a Canadian cape, a flag. I just wasn't gonna be that goofy. The American flag tie's about as goofy as I would go. Sometimes interviews take a funny angle like that. Sometimes they want real serious questions about truth and lies and deception. And sometimes they just want the humor, the funny stories, and that's fine, too. And whatever you wanna do is fine.

AVC: Let me ask you about a specific scene in the movie…

BM: Okay, I'm ready. You're gonna ask me about the scene where I walk behind Steve.

AVC: Yeah.

BM: Do you believe that I actually told you the question you were gonna ask me? So find humor in that, and go ahead and put it in your review.

AVC: I'd guess this is a question you're getting a lot.

BM: Either that, or I can read your mind, and you should hang up the phone quickly. Recall the scene in your mind. I'm walking with my wife—my trophy wife, which we'll talk about later. Um, what part of the country are you in? Chicago? Is that where you were born? Or where you grew up?

AVC: I grew up in Milwaukee.

BM: Very good. That plays a point later… We're on the record here so, I'm gonna watch what I wanna tell you. Are we on the record?

AVC: Yes.

BM: After spending a night out with my family, and dropping off one of the people who was participating in the contest there, I went to drive away, and my wife said, "You don't wanna go inside?" And so we walked in, and Ed Cunningham put the microphone on me. I didn't have any objection to that. I wouldn't—I mean, I don't have anything negative, period. Walking into the arcade, I went game to game, and at each game, I reminded my wife who the person was that was playing. One of the very first games—I don't know that it was the first, but it was one of the first—was Steve playin' Donkey Kong. And as I walked past him… Now you've got the movie in your mind, the camera is looking at me from behind or from the front? As I'm walking toward him.

AVC: I don't recall.

BM: You've gotta watch this movie, man! I'm givin' you these test questions! Okay, so the camera's watchin' us, and as we walk past him, this guy in the movie [Sarcastically.] who I've never met and I've never even said hello to, because I'm so nasty and arrogant… As I was just about behind him, he turned and he said, "Hi, Billy." Okay. You don't really—somebody you've never met—would you just say "Hi, Billy," that casually? Then it cuts from a perfectly good camera angle that's following us to the opposite side, where me and my wife continue walking, and I say something to the effect of, "Some people, I don't wanna spend too much time talking to." Is that what you're talking about?

AVC: Yes.

BM: Okay. Now this is what you do for a living? I'm only being funny here to drive a point home. I don't want you to put across that I was mean to you, because I'm not, I'm happy here. But let's think of this: This is what you do for a living? Now I'm gonna say it again, and you tell me what this means: "Some people, I don't wanna spend too much time talking to." You don't hear somethin' in that?

AVC: I'm not getting it. You'll have to let me know what I'm missing.

BM: I obviously stood there and talked to him. "Some people, I don't wanna spend too much time talking to." That's why they cut one camera angle to the other, 'cause when I stood behind him, and I waited for the precise moment, knowing Donkey Kong… You know where the monkey falls down on its head? You've got like, maybe 10 seconds of little rhetoric that you can, whatever, without disturbing somebody? And I reminded my wife, "This is Steve, remember we met him? He's the guy from Seattle. He's the other Donkey Kong guy." She goes, "Oh, yeah." I go, "How they treatin' ya?" That—my line to him is, "How they treatin' you," or "How is it treatin' you?" And he said, "Not good." And I go, "No?" He goes, "No, I just can't get it together," and he didn't get a good score that weekend. And I said, "All right, well, hang in there." And I walked away.

AVC: And you're saying they cut that out, right? None of that's actually in the movie.

BM: Right. So what they did was, he says, "Hi, Billy," cut! And then it's: "Some people, I don't wanna spend too much time talking to." If I stood there and talked to him and his guy died, [people would say] "Look at this: He can't even let the guy play in peace." You can see that angle, right? I didn't wanna stand there, I didn't want him to feel intimidated, I didn't want anyone to think that I was stealin' his secrets.

Move Over, Darling (1963)

Pamela's Nite

Trivia via Wikipedia:

This was originally to be a comeback vehicle for Marilyn Monroe, under the working title of Something's Got to Give. Dean Martin was cast as Nick Arden, and the director was George Cukor. Monroe was fired for seldom showing up for shooting early in its production cycle, appearing in only about 30 minutes of usable film. Unable to complete the movie, and having already sunk a considerable amount of money into the production and sets, 20th Century Fox went ahead with the project, under a new title, new director, and recast stars. At first, they tried to continue with Lee Remick in Monroe's place, but Martin balked at working with anyone else and that version was never completed. Doris Day and James Garner were eventually cast in the roles originated by Irene Dunne and Cary Grant in My Favorite Wife. Chuck Connors played the Randolph Scott role, replacing Tom Tryon, who'd been cast in the Monroe version.

Garner accidentally broke Day's rib (during the massage scene, when he pulls her off of Bergen). Garner wasn't even aware of what had happened until the next day, when he felt the bandage while putting his arms around her.

The producers scheduled the scene with Doris Day riding through a car wash for the last day of shooting because they were concerned that the detergents might affect her complexion. When the scene went off without a hitch, they admitted their ploy to Day, then used the story in promotional materials for the film.

Context via DVDVerdict:

Perhaps the most fabled movie of the 1960s, this one was meant to be a comeback vehicle both for Marilyn Monroe, whose career was reeling from three years of flops, and Fox, which was reeling from big budget overruns on Cleopatra. The blonde bombshell was to be teamed with laid-back swinger Dean Martin for some risque business—including a few modest glimpses of a skinny dip on camera.

However, it was not to be. Monroe was fired from the movie for absences due to sinusitis. The actress went on a publicity offensive to win back the role, but died before she could return to the set. Thus, it became Marilyn Monroe's last, unfinished movie—a permanent reminder of a comeback that might have been. The project was buried, but since Fox had a script and was still under financial pressures, they decided to resuscitate it with Doris Day and James Garner as the couple reunited by fate.

Of course, you might not remember those things immediately, since the movie was fabled as Something's Got to Give. When it finally hit theaters in 1963, it had been made over as Move Over, Darling.

It's a comedy reborn from a tragedy in another respect as well, since it was inspired by 1911's Enoch Arden, a silent drama based on Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem about a man lost at sea who returns to find his wife remarried. If you're paying attention when Doris Day talks with Polly Bergen about an old movie she recalls, you'll realize that this one had a previous comic treatment—as My Favorite Wife, with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.

Repulsion (1965)

Peter's Nite
Microscopic portions of salmon, baked vegetables, brownies
Or, as Stuart would put it: "Dead rabbit, dead rabbit, dead rabbit..."

Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy" via Greenmanreviews:

One could easily get the impression from his films that director Roman Polanski does not recommend apartment life. Three of his films, forming an unofficial trilogy, concern characters -- apartment dwellers all -- who variously succumb to different kinds of insanity.

In Repulsion, Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a young Belgian manicurist, lives with her sister and her sister's fiancee in a London apartment. The couple go away on a vacation, leaving Carol alone in the flat. While they are away, Carol begins hallucinating that she is not alone in the apartment. A man appears in her dressing mirror for a split second then disappears. Hands reach out from the walls and molest her. She is unable to function otherwise, forgetting to eat and leaving food out to rot.

This culminates in a rape sequence where Polanski hints at the reality by including only the "real" sounds -- a clock ticking, Carol's own breathing and heartbeat, and the rustle of the sheets as she fights her "attacker." The trauma of this experience completes Carol's break with reality. When a friend later calls on her, concerned that she hasn't been to work, she takes him for an intruder.

Upon viewing Repulsion, many psychologists commended Polanski's accurate depiction of schizophrenia. They were surprised when Polanski admitted that he and co-screenwriter Gerard Brach had simply written Carol's behavior as a natural response to the circumstances. They had done no research.

Biography on Polanski:

Director, actor. Born Raimund Polanski, on August 18, 1933, in Paris, France. At the age of three, Polanski moved with his family to his father’s native city of Krakow, Poland. In 1941, his parents were imprisoned in various Nazi concentration camps, where his mother eventually died in Auschwitz. In order to escape deportation, Polanski lived with several different Polish families until he was reunited with his father in 1944.

As a teenager, Polanski developed his acting skills in radio dramas and films. In 1954, he enrolled at the Polish National Film Academy in Lodz, where his body of work consisted of short films and documentaries. Upon his graduation, he appeared in a number of movies—many of which were the work of famed Polish director Andrzej Wajda, including Lotna (1959), Innocent Sorcerers (1960), and Samson (1961). In 1962, he directed his first feature-length film, Knife in the Water . The international recognition that followed, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, gave Polanski the chance to bring his movies to a more mainstream audience. The following year, he moved to London, where his next offering, the psychological thriller Repulsion (1965), was considered equally compelling by critics and audiences.

In 1968, Polanski moved to Hollywood, making his American film debut with the classic thriller Rosemary's Baby, which featured exceptional performances by Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. Despite his burgeoning film career, Polanski endured a devastating tragedy the following year when his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered by members of the Charles Manson cult. The extreme violence experienced by Polanski throughout his life was often reflected in his films, which tended to focus on the darker themes of alienation and evil—most notably, in the modern film noir Chinatown (1974), featuring John Huston, Jack Nicholson, and Faye Dunaway.

In 1977, Polanski was indicted on six criminal counts for having sexual relations with a minor. The alleged act took place with a 13-year-old girl, in the home of the actor Jack Nicholson. Both Nicholson and his longtime girlfriend, actress Anjelica Huston, testified against Polanski when the highly publicized case was brought to trial. Polanski pleaded guilty to one charge of unlawful sexual intercourse and underwent six weeks of psychiatric evaluation at a state prison in California. Although additional criminal charges were still pending, Polanski fled the United States after his discharge. (While authorities are not actively seeking him out, he does face the possibility of prison if he returns to America.)

Kim Morgan on Repulsion:

The obscure, slippery and decayed complexities of such desire are conveyed brilliantly in Repulsion. The diseased atmosphere of Carol's womb is meticulously created with Polanski's use of camera angles, sound effects and images of clutter. Though music is used effectively, Polanski relies more on amplifying the sounds of everyday life--the ticking of a clock, the voices of nuns playing catch in the convent garden, the dripping of a faucet--to convey the acute awareness Carol acquires in response to her fear. Polanski also dresses the film with pertinent details that further exemplify both Carol's madness and the aching passage of time: Potatoes sprout in the kitchen, meat (rabbit meat, no less) rots on a plate and eventually collects flies, various debris of blood, food and liquids form naturally around Carol. The film's inventive use of black-and-white film, wide-angle lenses and close-ups creates an unsparing vision of sickness, and Deneuve's performance is effectively mysterious. The viewer, however, is able to empathize with Carol, which is how she lures us into her web in the first place. As Polanski cameraman Gil Taylor muttered during filming, "I hate doing this to a beautiful woman."

Yet one loves to do this to a beautiful woman, especially one like Deneuve--at first. Deneuve's loveliness makes Carol's madness more palatable (her unfortunate suitor thinks she is odd, but he can't help but "love" this gorgeous woman), but eventually it becomes horrifying. Carol is not simply a Hitchcockian aberration of what lies beneath the "perfect woman," she is the reflection of what lies beneath repressed desire--in men and women. Polanski has a knack for casting women who are nervously exciting (Faye Dunaway in Chinatown is a blinking, twitching mess), and therefore dangerous to desire. He makes one insecure about longing for them. Deneuve is certainly nerve-racking. She is so physically flawless that she often seems half human: An anemic girl, she can barely lift up her arm, yet at the same time she is highly sensual, an ample, heavily breathing woman with more than a glint of carnality in her dreamily vacant eyes. Deneuve makes one feel the confusion of a corrupted child: She is an arrested adolescent who, like an anorexic, cannot face her womanliness without visions of perverse opulence and violence. Carol is the personification of sexual mystery--she is what lurks beneath the orgasms of pleasure and pain. What Polanski finds intriguing and revolting is perceptively female, making Repulsion a woman's picture more women may want to know.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Nora's Nite

Screenonline:

Originally shot for television in six weeks on a low budget, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) was directed by Stephen Frears, from author Hanif Kureishi's first screenplay. Originally shot on 16mm, it was so well received by critics at the Edinburgh Film Festival that it was internationally distributed for cinema on 35mm. Heralded as one of Britain's most commercially and critically successful films of 1986, it earned Kureishi an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.

My Beautiful Laundrette was ground-breaking in its bold exploration of issues of sexuality, race, class and generational difference. It also sparked controversy, particularly within the Asian community, which was disgusted by its perceived degrading representation of Pakistanis. At a New York demonstration by the Pakistan Action Committee, banners called the film "the product of a vile and perverted mind".

Much of the outrage was targeted at the homosexual affair between Omar and Johnny, whch develops from a genuine mutual fondness through the buzz of sexual experimentation, before hinting, at the end, at something deeper. On the way, it survives several obstacles, including Johnny's racist connections and Omar's resentment.

The film highlights a dilemma at the heart of the immigrant experience - the desire to belong to Western society while maintaining a clear sense of Pakistani identity. The two brothers, Nasser and Papa, demonstrate this cultural conflict. An ardent intellectual socialist, Papa belongs to old school Pakistan because, like most first generation immigrants, he believes fervently in education combating racism and is vehemently against the greed and conservative economics of Thatcherism.

Shakespeare in Love (1998)

MOVIENITE 10TH ANNIVERSARY BLOW OUT!!!!!!
Pamela's Nite

Tom Stoppard via New York Times:

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and educated in India and England, Tom Stoppard has consistently brought an insider-outsider's amused detachment to playwriting and a buoyant theatrical athleticism to philosophy, physics and semantics. Born in 1937, he became an international celebrity with his first produced play, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (1967), which re-told Shakespeare's "Hamlet" from the perspective of two hapless courtiers on the sidelines of the main events. The verbal pyrotechnics and philosophical game-playing that animated Rosencrantz" have been part of his signature ever since.

"Jumpers" (1972) is a metaphysical murder mystery, while "Travesties" (1974), set in Zurich in 1911, imagines an encounter among Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara. Occasionally criticized for emphasizing intellectual cleverness at the expense of emotional substance, much of Mr. Stoppard's work in fact directly addresses the conflict between head and heart, between philosophical ideals and debunking reality -- themes eloquently pursued in "The Real Thing" (1982), "The Invention of Love" (1997), "The Coast of Utopia" (2001), a three-play cycle about 19th-century Russian intellectuals, and "Rock 'n' Roll" (2006), set in Czechoslovakia and Cambridge in the late 1960's and the 1990's. Mr. Stoppard's work as a screenwriter includes "Brazil" (1985) and "Shakespeare in Love" (1998)

Mel Gussow on Stoppard and Shakespeare via NYT:

With ''Shakespeare in Love,'' Mr. Stoppard takes a more leisurely approach, opening up his story to include the world of Elizabethan theater: its factionalism, chicanery, self-interest and rigidity. Periodically, Mr. Stoppard has touched on theatrical matters: the play within the play in ''The Real Thing'' and in ''The Real Inspector Hound.'' But in ''Shakespeare in Love'' the theater is center stage, and all contemporary resonances are intentional, as when an actor asks a producer his identity and the man replies, ''I'm the money.''

Queen Elizabeth herself, as incarnated by Judi Dench, proves to be a figure of surprising liberality, at least in the arena of theater and romance. In addition to Marlowe, John Webster is in the lineup as a youth with a sadistic streak, and there is more than a hint that the lady Viola will inspire a future Shakespearean comedy.

Rashômon (1950)

Stuart's Nite

Ebert on Rashomon:

Shortly before filming was to begin on "Rashomon," Akira Kurosawa's three assistant directors came to see him. They were unhappy. They didn't understand the story. "If you read it diligently," he told them, "you should be able to understand it, because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible." They would not leave: "We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don't understand it at all."
Recalling this day in Something Like an Autobiography, Kurosawa explains the movie to them. The explanation is reprinted in the booklet that comes with the new Criterion DVD of "Rashomon." Two of the assistants are satisfied with his explanation, but the third leaves looking puzzled. What he doesn't understand is that while there is an explanation of the film's four eyewitness accounts of a murder, there is not a solution.
Kurosawa is correct that the screenplay is comprehensible as exactly what it is: Four testimonies that do not match. It is human nature to listen to witnesses and decide who is telling the truth, but the first words of the screenplay, spoken by the woodcutter, are "I just don't understand." His problem is that he has heard the same events described by all three participants in three different ways--and all three claim to be the killer.
"Rashomon" (1950) struck the world of film like a thunderbolt. Directed by Kurosawa in the early years of his career, before he was hailed as a grandmaster, it was made reluctantly by a minor Japanese studio, and the studio head so disliked it that he removed his name from the credits. Then it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, effectively opening the world of Japanese cinema to the West. It won the Academy Award as best foreign film. It set box office records for a subtitled film. Its very title has entered the English language, because, like "Catch-22," it expresses something for which there is no better substitute.
The first time I saw the film, I knew hardly a thing about Japanese cinema, and what struck me was the elevated emotional level of the actors. Do all Japanese shout and posture so? Having now seen a great many Japanese films, I know that in most of them the Japanese talk in more or less the same way we do (Ozu's films are a model of conversational realism). But Kurosawa was not looking for realism. From his autobiography, we learn he was struck by the honesty of emotion in silent films, where dialog could not carry the weight and actors used their faces, eyes and gestures to express emotion. That heightened acting style, also to be seen in Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" and several other period pictures, plays well here because many of the sequences are, essentially, silent.
Film cameras are admirably literal, and faithfully record everything they are pointed at. Because they are usually pointed at real things, we usually think we can believe what we see. The message of "Rashomon" is that we should suspect even what we think we have seen. This insight is central to Kurosawa's philosophy. The old clerk's family and friends think they've witnessed his decline and fall in "Ikiru" (1952), but we have seen a process of self-discovery and redemption. The seven samurai are heroes when they save the village, but thugs when they demand payment after the threat has passed. The old king in "Ran" (1985) places his trust in the literal meaning of words, and talks himself out of his kingdom and life itself.

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.