North By Northwest (1959): Rules of the Hollywood Canon

After writing that last entry, I immediately turned on the television. Of course it was already tuned to TCM on cable. The movie was improbably, North by Northwest (1959), which I have seen many times, and which certainly deserves its reputation as one of the finest movies in Hollywood history. 

I say improbably because last month I happened to be in the regional airport of Rapid City, South Dakota, in order to attend a conference in nearby Deadwood. A friend picked me up at the airport to give me and a few others a ride up to Deadwood. One of the people in the car has a podcast where he talks about classic movies. He was in the front seat. As we drove away from the airport, I asked my friend the movie buff in the front seat, whose name was Dave,

"Dave. Can I ask you a movie trivial question?" 

He said ok.

I said: "It's a fill-in-the-blank question. You have to complete the sentence. Here's goes:

I was so surprised flying into the airport just now. It didn't look anything like it did in _______"

He got the answer right away. It was easy.

The next day a bunch of us visited Mount Rushmore, which was being prepared for the upcoming 250th birthday of America celebrations in less than two weeks time. I told my companions about how the last time I was here, I had wanted to see the monument but did not want to pay the pig parking fee. So I had driven around the back of the mountain on the side road. Then I parked my BMW along a wide spot on the road. I then climbed up the back of the nearby mountain where I sat on the top of a hidden watertank and go a level view of George Washington and the other president. That was fourteen years ago.

My favorite scene in the movie is one between Grant (as Roger Thornhill) and Eva Marie Saint (EMS) (as Eve Kendall). IT is the one where Grant  returns to Chicago after the famous incident with the crop duster in Indiana.  He left Chicago thinking EVS was a gorgeous free spirited woman who had fallen in love with him. He returns with the realization that she is part of a plot to murder him. He sees their entire history in a new light.  He wangles his way to the front door of her hotel room and knocks on the door. She opens it and sees him. She thought she was sending him to certain death. She is shocked to see him but cannot reveal that shock. She has to play innocent. He treats her with contempt, this woman he had thought he loved, just a few hours before. She sees that but must play it straight.

But like a true heroine in love, she cannot betray her feelings for the man she loves. This is an breakable point of the old Hollywood canon. A woman in love cannot conceal her feelings completely. She can only try, and fail.

Grant moves past EVS to the center of the room, then looks back at her, staring daggers. She rushes from the door towards him and buries her face in his chest, overwhelmed with relief that he is alive. 

TCM Plus 20 Years: Remembering Susan Hayward

 Even when this was a movie blog, I didn't write about classic movies I saw on TCM (or rarely did so). I only wrote about a movies I saw in theaters as I traveled about the country and the world. 

But I don't go to theaters much anymore. My TCM viewership goes through phases. Mostly when Jessica is out of town, as she is fairly often for work, and as she is right now, do I revert back to my old practice from Fort Collins 20 years ago, of leaving TCM on all day long and in the evening to keep me company. I joke that I discovered TCM in summer 2006 and "left it on for the next two years straight," while living in the basement of my friend Sarah and Chad's house on Edwards Street, one block north of my old high school, while I put my life together while going through divorce.  

"Never get out of the TCM boat' became my motto (paraphrasing a line from Martin Sheeen in Apocalypse Now). The only exception I made to TCM on my tv was sometimes to change the channel to Comedy Central to watch the Colbert Report. Back in those days of the Bush presidency, Colbert was my go-to political commentary. I still feel the same way about Bush, but now I loathe Colbert and can't imagine giving him an ounce of attention at this point. But TCM survives. 

I can't believe it's been twenty years since I found TCM. I remember that Susan Hayward was the star of the month when I first turned over to TCM. Every time I see a Susan Hayward movie I get a little nostalgic for those early days. I was confused, miserable, and lonely. It became a challenge to keep my wits about me, and to feel like life had meaning

TCM is still a great network, but in some ways it has degraded. Robert Osbourne, the original host who died in 2017, is still unmatched. The web site used to be much, much better. Now it seems designed by idiots and each upgrade makes it worse. Thankfully the wave of extreme "woke" commentary about Hollywood history has receded a bit (Oh my gosh they did blackface Let's all rend our garments and wail!). It never got as bad as I feared, and I can tune out the DEI programming for the most part.

I am thankful that TCM is still there, and has survived the post-Ted Turner attempts to shut it down. the budget has been slashed multiple times. It is only still on the air because somewhere within the Hollywood power structure are people who great influence who treasure it as much as I and others do.

After seeing a notable film on TCM, I often sit down and start writing up my reactions. Sometimes I finish them and publish them (see the last few entries), but often I poop out and leave them unfinished. I don't hold myself to any score. But it's always better to finish, and get something online and "in the can."'

I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955) may have been the first movie I watched TCM while living on Edwards Street in the summer of 2006.

Oklahoma! (1955) -- Underwhelming Except for the Songs

 

The best shot in the entire movie was the very opening. It was all downhill from there.

Believe it or not, in all my explorations of classic cinema, I had never seen Oklahoma!. But yesterday I had been thinking about the subject of my last post Shane (1952), and on whim I checked out the TCM schedule for the day and saw that Oklahoma was about to start on the TCM West feed. Thinking I had no excuse not to spend the next two hours filling in this gap in my knowledge of the Hollywood canon, I opened up my iPad and fumbled with my TCM app until the movie came up right as it was starting.

It opens with a wide vista of the plains and the opening theme song. Ah, this is what I need right now! I was expecting the grandeur of a classic M-G-M musical, one that is also a western. Everyone loves this movie, right?

But I was wrong out of the gate. To my astonishment, this is not M-G-M. It was made by RKO as an adaptation of the Broadway stage show, and it shows. The cinematography of the plains is nice (and very un-M-G-M, which had perfected soundstage murals for exteriors), but the movie clearly lacked something that can only be called spectacle. As such I had to temper my expectations downward so as to avoid disappointment. 

Of course the Rogers and Hammerstein score is top-notch. The songs are among the most recognizable singable in Hollywood history. But they existed prior to the movie as part of the Broadway show. The fact that the show is a good choice for high schools does not mean the motion picture will be of superior caliber.

Is there anything wrong with Oklahoma! per se? I suppose not. It's that I wanted it to be much more. I was expecting it to be the M-G-M movie that came out the previous year, also about pioneer settlers (of the other O-territory), and which was largely forgotten for decades, only to be resurrected as a bona fide classic largely through the singlehanded efforts of former TCM host, the late Robert Osbourne. To wit, I was expecting it to be Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

It's simply unfair to compare Oklahoma! to that last mentioned movie, which has some of the most elaborate and spectacular "barn dance" numbers even set to celluloid, all of them choreographed by the peerless Michael Kidd under the supervision of Stanley Donen. RKO's Oklahoma! equivalent "barn dance" number, The Farmer and the Cowman, offers nothing beyond the catchy singable tune. The choreography is utterly underwhelming and feels almost amateurish by comparison to Kidd's masterpiece. It feels like RKO's pale imitation of the M-G-M masterpiece from the year before.

To me, RKO felt out of its depth in this genre. M-G-M had been a factory for musicals for over a decade (at least since 1944). Seven Brides was the masterpiece swan song of that old M-G-M craftsmanship as the genre was fading from history. True the songs of the latter are not quite as recognizable as the Rogers and Hammerstein ones from Oklahoma!. Yet as for me, when I am walking a footpath on a sunny day, I am far more likely to break into Bless Your Beautiful Hide than I am to start singing Curly's famous aria Oh What a Beautiful Morning!, as grand as it is. But maybe that's just because my natural register matches Howard Keel's baritone much more than Gordon McCrae's tenor.

The story of Oklahoma! is much simpler as well, and not completely in the good way. Jud (Rod Steiger) feels too cardboard as villain. I wound up feeling sorry for him. The story's climax (with Jud's revenge deadly attack coming after the wedding of Curly and Laurie) was just plain awkward and destroyed the emotional flow of the plot for me. It might work on stage but it should have been reworked for the movie (despite the inevitable hew and cry from the Broadway purists).

Meanwhile Seven Brides tells a complex story with a dire struggle but without a villain. Everyone's point of view is understandable. The closest one gets to a villain is the hero, whose pride and stupidity set in motion the (temporary) misery of the other characters. He must grow beyond his previous beliefs in order to win his wife's affections.

And don't get me started on Eddie Albert's performance in Oklahoma! as Ali the peddler. He alone as roguish as any of the characters in Seven Brides.  Are we supposed to think he is not really a Persian but a Irishman masquerading as a Persian? It would go to his character in the movie, so I guess it makes sense. Like I said, it's a much simpler story.

Finally, although Shirley Jones was delightful in her breakout role (fifteen years before she'd be in The Partridge Family) I simply didn't mind Laurie's "dream sequence" under the influence of the smelling salts. The fact that RKO saw fit to use different actors for both Curly and Laurie in that is understandable, given the intricacies of the dancing requirements in that scene, The on screen "hand off" to the substitute Curly and Laurie is one of the bizarre and confusing things I've ever seen on screen. No doubt there is a story behind this but sheesh, M-G-M would have never thought to do that.  M-G-M's system was famous for "teaching anyone how to dance." They would have gotten actors who could sing and dance for that part. RKO couldn't do that and it weakened the film tremendous. How much better it would have been to see the real Shirley Jones being held aloft in her beauty.

Part of me feels like a real party pooper was saying I was underwhelmed by Oklahoma! Surely I can't be the only one with this opinion? 

I realize that for "modern audiences", Oklahoma! is probably far more palatable than Seven Brides. For the former, all you would need is a proper "land acknowledgement" at the start of the movie, whereas the latter is, well, sheesh, extremely problematic. I myself love it, and would defend it's humor and irony (not to mention the heteronormative gender roles), but that's me. Oklahoma! is heteronormative as heck to be sure, in the 1950s way, but at least the "hyper-toxic masculine" is defeated at the end in favor of only the normal toxic traditional patriarchy. Blood sacrifice is obtained against the toxicity, whereas in Seven Brides, (trigger warning!) the Patriarchy triumphs big time, and as a result, everyone in the whole story lives happily ever after under the oppressive yoke of frontier-society gender roles. 

If you want to know deep insights about the psychology men and women offered through art and narrative, guess which one I'd recommend? Answer: the one with Julie Newmar in it.

Reeeeeee!!!!! Can no one can take a fucking joke anymore?

Shane (1952) -- My Mother's Favorite Movie

If there was a movie I could identify as the favorite film of my late mother, it would probably be Shane which was made in 1952. It starred Alan Ladd in his most famous role, a  gunfighter trying to escape his path, but who is forced by circumstance into his old life, in order to defend the innocent. 

As I trype this I am watching this on Turner Classic Movies. It was famously shot in glorious Technicolor in the open country around the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. It is probably the most famous depiction of this range in film.

The story has a Zen-like simiplicty to it, slow moving like the open frontier itself, but then bursting into a fury in episodes, including the famous climax pitting good versus evil. 

Against it all is the famous supporting performance by 10-year old Brandon de Wilde as Joey, who idolizes the stranger who rides into the family ranch one day and changes their lives.

For my mother was a lifelong feminist, before it particularly popular. It is easy to see in retrospect that so much of this was driven by her frustration is finding the strong masculinity of her own father, a World War II veteran. She spoke of the character Ladd made famous on screen with almost romantic dreaminess, in the same tones as the little boy in the movie, repeating key lines, including the famous parting words at the end. As such the character Shane is somewhat embedded in me as the ideal of the masculine--stoic, reticent, strong and protective. This is probably true for many boys raised in the post-war years. I may have been one of the last ones to experience Shane in that way. It might be fair to say that the character Shane is embedded into the psyche of the men of the Baby Boomer generation in a way that was impossible to live up to.

As for myself, I noticed that the movie is a good example of my theory of the "Magic Cow of Happiness".  Thas my pet idea that the depiction of cattle in a Hollywood movie mirrors the theme and emotion of the story at large. The very first use of cattle we see at the ranch is as Shane arrives. We see a cow with calf beside it. The calf is the little boy Joey.

The movie came out at what might be called the peak of American Post-war culture. It is about as "straight" of a western as one will find, perhaps the archetypal 1950s western reflecting the ideas of American culture at the time. At the time my mother was probably the same age as the little boy in the movie.

One element of the movie that stands out prominently as making it a "classic western" is that the action takes place "100 miles from the nearest U.S. marshal." It is about Americans attempting to create civilization in the absence of governmental authority. This is the unique feature of American westerns, and reflects the unique self-organization of us as the American people. Classically it is the essence of American liberty, the bedrock of our idea of ourselves as a free people. By the 1950s we had developed the structure of government but still felt ourselves in contact with the old model in living memory.  Arguably this has retreated in our culture, as had the classic ideals of masculine protectiveness. Men today yearn to fill that role but often feel frustrated in that. We believe ourselves less and less to be a self-organizing people with each passing day.  

Now I'm going to watch the rest of the film. It's been a long time.