Monthly Archives: June 2015

  • The Member of the Wedding

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fred Zinnemann (1952)

    Carson McCullers’ novel, The Member of the Wedding, set in a small town in the American South during 1944, is a brilliant, poetic exploration of the mystery and horror of the coming of self-awareness.  The protagonist, Frances ‘Frankie’ Addams, in her thirteenth year, is thrown by the unshakeable apprehension that she is she and will be until she dies.  Frankie’s sense of difference – she’s unusually tall for her age and still growing apace – and isolation is acute.  Her mother died giving birth to her; her father spends more time at his jeweller’s shop in the town than at home; now Frankie has become aware of her inexorable separation from the childhood routines that have represented security – conversations in the kitchen of the family home with the Addams’ black maid, Berenice Sadie Brown, and Frankie’s younger cousin, John Henry West.  Frankie, alone as never before, is increasingly fascinated by the possibility of connection with other people – at one point she tells Berenice that she wants to know everyone in the world.  She has an elder brother, Jarvis, who is serving in the military and about to be married.  The realisation comes to Frankie that Jarvis and his bride-to-be, Janice (although Frankie has met her only once, and recently), ‘are the we of me’.  Frankie decides that, when Jarvis and Janice get married, she will leave with them and the happy couple will become a threesome.

    Although it describes an event in the poet’s life that occurred just before her seventh birthday in 1918, Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘In the Waiting Room’, written in 1976, is strongly reminiscent of what the somewhat older Frankie Addams is experiencing:

    ‘… I felt: you are an I,
    you are an Elizabeth,
    you are one of them.
    Why should you be one, too?
    …

    I knew that nothing stranger
    had ever happened, that nothing
    stranger could ever happen.
    …
    Why should I be my aunt,
    or me, or anyone?
    What similarities
    …

    held us all together
    or made us all just one?’

    A stronger link exists with the work of Sylvia Plath, who much admired Carson McCullers. Rereading The Member of the Wedding this week brought to mind Plath’s almost explicitly autobiographical Ocean 1212-W (1962), in which the birth of her younger brother terminates the pelagic egocentric unity of the narrator’s childhood:

    ‘… I lay in a watery cradle … [then] one day the textures of the beach burned themselves on the lens of my eye forever. … I who … had been the centre of a tender universe felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones …’

    There’s a chasm between Frankie Addams’ previous summers and the one she is now living through.  McCullers’ novel begins as follows:

    ‘It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old.  This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member.  She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world.  Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.’

    These words chime (in my mind) with the memorable closing sentence of Plath’s short story, Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit (1955), even though its season is winter:

    ‘That was the year the war began, and the real world, and the difference.’

    In the early morning of Frankie’s brother’s wedding day, his sister perceives that:

    ‘… the sky was the dim silver of a mirror, and beneath it the grey town looked, not a real town, but like an exact reflection of itself …’

    Later in the novel, Frankie prepares, after the failure of her attempts to accompany the newlyweds on honeymoon, to leave town alone – she stares at train tracks that ‘gleamed silver and exact’.   Plath obviously used these words and images for the opening of the poem ‘Mirror’.

    Carson McCullers herself adapted The Member of the Wedding for the stage and the play, which opened in 1950, enjoyed great success:  it ran for 501 performances.   I had never before seen Fred Zinnemann’s film, released at the very end of 1952, in which the three principals from the Broadway production – Ethel Waters, Julie Harris and Brandon deWilde – reprised their roles.  The film, intelligent and absorbing but limited in comparison with the novel, was not a hit with audiences and it’s not difficult to see why.  If you know the book, the movie’s successes and failures in expressing its qualities are of real interest; if you don’t, the story that Zinnemann, working from a screenplay by Edna and Edward Anhalt, tells is liable to be, to say the least, puzzling.   It’s inherently difficult for film to recapture something like the repetitive routine of the kitchen chats in The Member of the Wedding; McCullers, on the printed page, manages to convey this even though she’s relating, for the most part, the conversations of one particular day.  Something Zinnemann might have done was use the soundtrack of a radio – in the novel this provides a nearly continuous background in the kitchen (and when the radio is switched off the silence is eloquent).  Alex North’s score, although good enough in other respects, is no substitute for this.

    The film also exhibits a familiar nervousness about adapting ‘talky’ material for the screen.  The tactful movement of Zinnemann’s camera guards against the scenes in the kitchen becoming static but he and the Anhalts succumb to the temptation to dramatise events as they occur and the effect is counterproductive.  The impact of the arrest and imprisonment of Berenice’s brother, Honey, and of John Henry’s death from meningitis is much greater in the novel, in which they are described retrospectively.  (That allows you to understand how Frankie has – and hasn’t – succeeded in assimilating her experience of these happenings.)  The crime in which Honey is involved and the news of John Henry’s grave illness are diluted in the film by being inserted as linear plot developments. The screenplay re-orders Frankie’s experiences outside her home and thus reduces the sense of her venturing into another world before the wedding; instead, you’re given the impression that her encounter with a soldier in the town is, like her short-lived attempt to run away from home, merely a reaction to her not getting her own way about joining Jarvis and Janice on their honeymoon.  Nevertheless, the Anhalts do retain plenty of Carson McCullers’ beautiful, witty dialogue and narrative – and (if they’re not simply repeating what McCullers had written for the stage adaptation) they do a creditable job of turning some of the narrative into dialogue.

    Ethel Waters is a noble, splendid presence but that presence is wrong for the role of Berenice.  In the novel, Berenice, although she’s hefty, is short of stature, and not without reason; the lack of height is a physical expression of gangly Frankie’s feeling of unstoppable separation from the woman who has been the most stable, reassuring presence of the girl’s childhood.  (It’s her growing spurt that has also caused Frankie’s father to tell his daughter that she’s too big to continue to sleep in his bed, which she’s always done until now.)  Ethel Waters is monumentally maternal.  When Berenice, with Frankie and John Henry cuddling up to her, leads them in singing the famous spiritual ‘His Eye Is On the Sparrow’, the power of Waters’ voice reinforces her comforting massiveness – the two children look to be nestling in the everlasting arms.  (The song seems a wrong choice anyway:  its lyric confirms the powerful sense of security radiated by Ethel Waters, when the atmosphere in the kitchen on this particular afternoon should be fraught with a sense of something ending, of uncontrollable uncertainty.)  Ethel Waters is also more benign than the persistently (though lovingly) contrary Berenice of the book:  Waters’ Berenice, although exasperated by Frankie’s flights of fancy and melodramatic volatility, is not a natural scold.   Waters is superb, though, in the very last scene of the film, in which Berenice – who knows, as the family prepare to move house, that Frankie will leave her behind – appears to have shrunk physically.  The effect may be thanks in part to how cleverly Fred Zinnemann photographs Waters but I think it’s also thanks to her own physical acting skills.

    Although it was her first film, Julie Harris was coming up twenty-seven when The Member of the Wedding was made.  It’s naturally difficult to avoid judging her portrait of a pre-pubertal child as quite-remarkable-considering, but here goes.  It may well not have been a problem on stage but there are times, as the camera comes in close, when Harris’s face is unmistakeably that of a young woman pretending to express a child’s artlessness.  But there are also times when, magically, her face really is that of a twelve-year-old.  Harris convinces with the raw voice she gives to Frankie, and with the gestures – dynamic, expansive but still angrily frustrated.  She also succeeds in making the tomboyish child androgynous to such an extent that, according to Pauline Kael, some viewers of the film on its original release were confused into thinking Frankie was a boy.  Casting an adult in the role of an unusually tall child doesn’t pay dividends as much as it might have:  Fred Zinnemann tends to shoot Harris to make her look smaller – as if that will also make her seem younger.   There is, though, at least one moment that’s enhanced by Harris’s actual height.  The film begins to suffer a loss of narrative rhythm once it moves outside the kitchen but the scene in which Frankie has to be dragged from the newlyweds’ car and stumbles to the ground, screaming and weeping, is really upsetting.  Because she’s played by a grown woman, Frankie here is an unignorable physical presence – this makes it impossible to minimise the incident, to dismiss Frankie’s despair as ‘merely’ childish.  Julie Harris’s performance is the most dependent on familiarity with the novel:  the character of Frankie is bound to be reduced without Carson McCullers’ description of all that’s going on inside her head.  But if you know the book then Harris’s interpretation of Frankie works extremely well.

    As John Henry, Brandon deWilde is more physically robust than you might expect (this is a ten year old playing a six year old) but he gets the boy’s eccentricity very well – and he’s funny mincing around the kitchen in Berenice’s hat and shoes.  It’s hardly surprising, given the sexually ambiguous aspects of both children, that The Member of the Wedding has attracted critical interest as ‘queer’ literature; and the theme runs deeper than Frankie’s crew cut and John Henry’s infant transvestism.  When the three conversationalists discuss how they’d like to change the world, Berenice recommends that everyone should have the same (light brown) skin colour, Frankie that boys should be able to change into girls and vice versa, and John Henry that people should be half-male, half-female.   The playing of the minor characters is adequate but no more than that:  the film’s supporting cast includes William Hansen (Mr Addams), Arthur Franz (Jarvis), Nancy Gates (Janice), James Edwards (Honey), Harry Bolden (T T Williams, Berenice’s current beau) and Dickie Moore (the soldier).

    2 November 2014

  • Sweet Charity

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bob Fosse (1969)

    When a film’s on ITV in the small hours, they usually have a man signing it for deaf viewers.   The presence of this miniature figure is utterly destructive to suspense:  we gave up after a minute of Don’t Look Now a few months ago.   But I thought it was worth persevering with Sweet Charity – it’s decades since I last saw it but I hoped that wordless sequences and vivid singing and dancing would be in sufficient supply to eclipse the dun-coloured homunculus in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.   He kept getting in the way of people’s heads in close up but there were compensations:  he really entered into the spirit of ‘The Rhythm of Life’ and his constancy on screen gave a small new dimension to the heroine’s unavailing search for a man she could rely on.  I look forward to ITV screening The Artist at 2am, years from now, although it’s possible there’ll be a cameo for someone to sign  ‘Wiz pleasure’.  In the meantime, I’m really pleased we didn’t give up on this recording and delay seeing Sweet Charity again.  Pleasure is what this film gives abundantly:  as I watched, I kept realising I was smiling.

    The original stage production of Sweet Charity was a big hit on Broadway, where it ran from early 1966 to mid-1967, but the film was a box-office flop:  it cost $20m and recouped only a fifth of that.   You can see why it wasn’t a simple crowd-pleaser:  Bob Fosse’s choreography and hyperkinetic camerawork may have seemed odd and disorienting; there’s also the unhappy ending.  (According to Wikipedia, Fosse filmed an alternative, upbeat ending in case Universal wouldn’t accept the real one.)  Yet the commercial disaster still seems surprising.   Sweet Charity has a first-rate, highly varied song score (words by Dorothy Fields and music by Cy Coleman) and clever, often funny dialogue (Peter Stone adapted Neil Simon’s book for the stage musical).  The marvellous dancing includes sequences that are easily enjoyable as well as the stylised Fosse movement that may have been too innovative for most tastes.  The romantic story, based on Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, is strong and Shirley MacLaine in the leading role gives one of her very best performances.

    The film is also of great interest as Fosse’s screen directing debut and for the ways in which it anticipates Cabaret:  in ‘Big Spender’ the attitudes of the dancers-for-hire at the Times Square Fandango Ballroom foreshadow the look of the Kit Kat Klub girls.  Although the look of Sweet Charity doesn’t have anything like the power or the coherence of the visual scheme of Cabaret, Fosse and his cinematographer Robert Surtees get across in the Fandango sequences some of the same tension between glitz and shabbiness.   There are occasional resonances with Cabaret in details of the orchestration too.  Fosse had choreographed three movies in the 1950s (My Sister Eileen, The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees) but one assumes it was his success with the Broadway Sweet Charity, which he directed and for which he won a Tony for his choreography, that allowed Universal to entrust him with the screen version.  Given the scale of its financial failure, it seems a miracle of film history that Fosse was given a second chance with Cabaret.

    The Fosse dance style – with angularity and sinuousity equally exaggerated – is especially conspicuous in the amusing, socially satirical ‘Rich Man’s Frug’ number.  His stop-go rhythms (the alternation between withholding of movement and physical release, thereby heightening both the tension and the dynamism of the dancing) are used in exciting combination with the music in each of Sweet Charity’s three best numbers.  All of these – ‘If They Could See Me Now’, the ‘America’-ish ‘There’s Got To Be Something Better Than This’ and ‘The Rhythm of Life’ – are elating.  The light-hearted martialness of ‘I’m a Brass Band’ doesn’t give him the same opportunity and the number goes on too long but it’s redeemed by an affectingly diminuendo ending, as the figure of Charity recedes down a city sidestreet.   Fosse makes expressive use of the constrast between variously constraining indoor settings (the Fandango, the wardrobe where Charity’s secreted by the film star Vittorio Vidal, the lift she gets stuck in on her first meeting with Oscar Lindqvist, an all-night diner, more than one phone box) and the possibilities suggested by the scale of the city streets outside and the height of the buildings.   The whirling camera movement is sometimes too much but the use of freeze frames, although it seems dated now, is often emotionally effective in what it captures in the expressions and gestures of Shirley MacLaine.

    The risk that the actress in the role of Charity Hope Valentine, the funny, sweet-natured, shopsoiled-but-innocent loser, will condescend to the character she’s playing can hardly be overestimated.  Casting Shirley MacLaine as Charity may not have been imaginative but it was the best imaginable way of eliminating that risk.  She is completely empathic with Charity.  She’s also a great comedienne whose comic effects are always rooted in character.  There are many marvellous things about this performance:  for example, MacLaine invests Charity with a strong streak of awareness that things aren’t going to work out but that awareness doesn’t detract from her determined optimism or from the sadness of things going wrong again.  If MacLaine’s dancing doesn’t have the effortless snap of Chita Rivera and Paula Kelly as Charity’s co-workers in the Fandango, it’s still very good; besides, the relative effortfulness connects with Charity’s personality.   Her singing isn’t vocally brilliant but it’s tuneful and appealing.   Dorothy Fields’ lyrics are consistently witty and gently incisive.  Shirley MacLaine interprets them with such understanding that this is one of the relatively few musicals in which the musically unmremarkable, talking-to-myself numbers – like ‘It’s a Nice Face’ – are compelling because you feel they’re genuinely telling you more about a character.  (It’s a pity, though, that ‘Where Am I Going?’, the very last number, is the weakest of the lot.)

    As the well-mannered, anxiously strait-laced Oscar Lindqvist, who wins and breaks Charity’s heart when he flees their City Hall wedding, John McMartin repeats his stage role.   It’s tough for McMartin that he has to be spectacularly neurotic virtually as soon as he appears on screen – in his attack of claustrophobia in the stuck lift – but he’s a fine partner for MacLaine once Charity and Oscar start dating.  McMartin gives Oscar a persistent underlying selfishness that gives an edge to his mild bachelor niceness and helps to makes his eventual rejection of Charity inevitable rather than merely predictable.  Chita Rivera is essentially a stage performer and it shows in her line readings; as the warm-hearted but wary Nickie, her vocal rhythms are very set compared with MacLaine’s.  The same goes for Paula Kelly, although, like Rivera, she’s likeable and a splendid dancer.   Ricardo Montalban is easily funny and charming as the Latin heartthrob Vidal.  Stubby Kaye is a bit too benign for the role of Herman, the manager at the Fandango:  this reduces what should be the impact of surprise in his ‘I Love To Cry At Weddings’ number, although it’s still jolly enough.  Sammy Davis Jr has just a few minutes of screen time as Big Daddy, the high priest of the Rhythm of Life movement, but they’re not ones you’re likely to forget.  The dancers include Ben Vereen, who went on to great success as the star of the Broadway production of Pippin in 1972, Bob Fosse’s annus mirabilis.

    30 March 2012

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