Daily Archives: Wednesday, June 24, 2015

  • Anastasia

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Anatole Litvak (1956)

    A woman fresh out of a Paris mental asylum is groomed by a group of Russian expatriates to pass herself off as Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicolas II – the daughter, that is, persistently rumoured to have survived the massacre of the Romanov royal family at Ekaterinburg in 1918.  Anastasia was seventeen when her parents and siblings were assassinated; the story the film tells takes place in 1928.  The would-be Anastasia is played by Ingrid Bergman, a great actress who is not so great that she could be mistaken here for someone in her mid-twenties (Bergman was forty at the time).  It’s no surprise that no one remarks on the apparent age discrepancy:  this is a ludicrous picture in many ways.   The screenplay by Arthur Laurents and Guy Bolton was ‘adapted’ from a stage play by Bolton and Marcelle Maurette.  Those inverted commas are meant to signify what a perfunctory process the adaptation turns out to be:  there’s yards of dialogue and many dead-on-the-screen scenes.   With a kind of inverse Midas touch, the director Anatole Litvak manages to dissipate the tension that I assume (to give it the benefit of the doubt) the play may have had.  For example, the relentless, exhausting coaching of Anna Koreff/Anastasia to move and talk and reel off facts to prove a detailed knowledge of the Romanov household may have had an intensity in the theatre; it’s puzzling why Litvak couldn’t emulate this by skilful montage.  Instead, these short sequences just dribble away – they don’t build at all. The cinematographer was Jack Hildyard and the opening sequences in Paris at night – as Anna, frightened and disoriented, hurries through the streets – move with an almost scary urgency.  But Litvak is so impatiently anxious to show off the sets and costumes (which are, respectively, garish and unpleasing for the most part) and work up some dynamic, Rar-shan atmosphere that the camera can’t keep still whatever it’s recording.  This hyperactivity is no predictor of the stasis to come.  The lighting of the interiors is utterly bland.

    Bergman famously won an Academy Award and other prizes for this.  Perhaps it was a weak year but it’s hard to think she deserved them (the performance isn’t in the same league as the one in Gaslight which landed her the first Oscar).  She’s sometimes powerful but somehow just what you’d expect.  There’s a lot of hysterical laughter in her rendering of an unstable personality:  more crucially and disappointingly, she doesn’t dramatise Anna’s unstable sense of identity.  Unless we’re tantalised by the possibility that she may really be Anastasia – or believes that she is – the whole enterprise seems pointless.  General Bounine, the leader of the group who coach and promote Anna, is played by Yul Brynner with considerable panache – and mystery:  in fact Brynner’s Bounine is more interestingly impenetrable than Bergman’s Anna.   Both of them are good at suggesting the increasing, largely unspoken (for which much relief) attraction between their characters.   The best acting in Anastasia comes when Anna, after getting drunk (which Bergman does very well), is in bed and offscreen and calling out to Bounine:  Brynner stalks round outside her bed chamber looking possessed but uncertain.  You never get a sense of any of the characters longing to believe, for anything other than financial gain, that Anastasia survived.   Helen Hayes is unexciting as the Dowager Empress and Martita Hunt, although relatively entertaining as her lady-in-waiting, is very conventionally theatrical.  Apart from Felix Aylmer as some kind of royal court official, the playing of the smaller parts is at best very broad (Akim Tamiroff), at worst just bad (Ivan Desny, Sacha Pitoeff).  Most of the accents sound silly even though I guess some of the cast didn’t need to do much to produce them.   Whereas Hayes speaks with an accent (and it’s terrible), other native English speakers like Aylmer and Hunt aren’t required to.   I kept wondering how long Anastasia was going to go on then it was suddenly over, as if everyone had decided it just wasn’t worth wasting any more time.

    10 August 2011

  • Some Like It Hot

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Billy Wilder (1959)

    Some Like It Hot, although one tends to think of it as a one-off, is based on a story by Robert Thoeren, which became a French film musical of 1935 and was remade as a German one in 1951.  The IMDB plot synopsis for the latter, Fanfares of Love (‘fanfare’ is singular in the French forerunner), explains that:  ‘Two out of work musicians put on drag to get work in an all girl band. Inevitable comical romantic complications ensue’.  Billy Wilder and I A L Diamond turn the set-up into something decisively and dynamically American:  the insouciant saxophonist Joe and the fusspot double bassist Jerry, after accidentally witnessing, then dodging bullets at, the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, have urgently good reason to disguise themselves and get out of Chicago.  In spite of their alarming circumstances, the film is a bit effortfully frenetic until Joe and Jerry get into drag but from then on they’re a great partnership.

    The hyperactivity of the early scenes is what you always expect from Jack Lemmon but his performance as ‘Daphne’ is his finest hour on screen:  the involutions of the plot and the abundance of comic business in the script require breakneck comic invention and zest, which Lemmon supplies in spades.  His feminine evolution is very enjoyable.  At first, Daphne, trying desperately to be just one of the girls, comes across as a game spinster.  Then the idea of using his charms as a woman starts to grow on Jerry.  Tony Curtis’s Joe is perfectly complementary.  Curtis’s voice and mannerisms for Josephine are a masculine actor’s idea of what a woman is like; he’s nothing like as detailed or as comically ingenious as Jack Lemmon.  Yet Curtis, as a woman, retains the sex appeal he has as a man and he does a very witty Cary Grant vocal impression when Joe, in order to seduce Marilyn Monroe, puts on another disguise as a (male) millionaire.  (The impression is funny partly because it’s energetic rather than perfectly accomplished.)

    As Sugar Kane, the vocalist and ukulele player for Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators, Marilyn Monroe is at her most luminous and, at the point at which Sugar thinks she’s lost her millionaire, affecting.   When she performs the songs (which include “I Wanna Be Loved By You” and “Runnin’ Wild”), her sensual vividness is as elating as it’s amusing.  There’s too much of the gangsters – both at the start and in their climactic pursuit of Joe and Jerry in Florida – although they’re a great collection of ugly mugs.  (George Raft is the chief mobster; Edward G Robinson Jr is the man who eventually dispatches him.)  The film’s abrupt ending is convenient for ignoring Sugar’s reaction to the revelation of who and how low on funds Joe really is; but it’s also justly famous for the final exchange between Daphne and her persistent suitor, the vastly wealthy Osgood Fielding III, whom Joe E Brown, in a perfect performance, invests with the innocent, egotistic serenity of a little boy used to getting his own way.  ‘I’m a man!’ protests the exasperated Jerry, ripping off his blonde wig and eliciting from Osgood the classic last line, ‘Nobody’s perfect’.

    Postscript:  There was a nice extra touch to the screening of the film that we went to at BFI.  The silly front-of-house man whose public address announcements try to sound cool and end up incomprehensible came to the front of NFT1 to introduce a surprise guest:  one of the film’s cast members was in the audience.  He couldn’t quite rid his voice of a note of surprise that such a person was still alive but Marian Collier, who’ll be eighty-three later this month, entered from the wings and proceeded to give a modest and commendably succinct explanation of her uncredited role as Olga, one of Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopators.  Collier, who also reminded the audience that the next day would be the anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, asked us to look out for Olga’s big moment in Some Like It Hot, when she hands ice to Sugar and Daphne for the midnight drinking session on the train from Chicago to Florida.  Marian Collier certainly makes the most of delivering the ice.  She deserved the most likeable round of applause that I’ve ever heard at BFI.

    4 August 2014

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