Monthly Archives: November 2015

  • Baby Face

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred E Green (1933)

    I couldn’t have named a single picture directed by Alfred E Green although his filmography on IMDB includes some well-known titles, notably Dangerous (1935), for which Bette Davis won her first Oscar, and The Jolson Story (1946).  Baby Face is fascinating as a piece of film history and a startling and entertaining movie to watch.   As Mike Mashon, Head of the Moving Image Section of the US Library of Congress, explained in his introduction at BFI, the film opened in Los Angeles in early 1933 to decent reviews but was then rejected in its original form by the New York State Censorship Board.  In order to revive Baby Face’s commercial prospects, Warner Bros had no option but to make changes:  these included softening the impact of a female protagonist who uses her sex appeal for personal gain and reducing the script’s references to Nietzsche – I’m not sure whether because the aptly-surnamed Lilly Powers treats Will To Power and Thoughts Out of Season virtually as a practical guide to building her venal career or because the work of a God-is-dead European philosopher was regarded as noxious anyway.  The uncensored version of Baby Face was lost until 2004, when it resurfaced in a Library of Congress vault.

    While she’s working in a New York City-based bank, Lilly is known by some of her colleagues there as ‘baby face’.  The sobriquet doesn’t fit Barbara Stanwyck, who plays Lilly.  (It would have made more sense with Jean Harlow in the role and it’s worth noting that Baby Face was seen by some at the time as Warner Bros’s answer to the MGM hit of the previous year, Red Headed Woman,  which has a basically similar plot and in which Harlow starred.)    Even in the restored original version that BFI was screening, Lilly undergoes an eleventh-hour character change that makes her a better person – but the person created by Stanwyck and Alfred E Green in the preceding seventy minutes is much too convincing for this transformation to be emotionally believable.   (In this respect, the Baby Face finale is similar to that of Dangerous.)  Otherwise, though, the film’s description of the remorseless self-advancement of Lilly Powers is remarkably sustained.  At the start, Lilly is suffocating in Erie, a Pennsylvania steel town, working in the speakeasy that her father (Robert Barrat) runs.  The work involves not only serving drinks but, on her father’s instructions, sleeping with the men who patronise the place.  There is one anomalous customer among the pawing, sweaty clientele – an elderly German-accented man called Adolf Cragg (Alphonse Ethier), a cobbler by trade but also a Nietzsche enthusiast.  When a fire destroys the joint and kills her father, Lilly, unsure what to do next, is urged by Cragg to get away from Erie to the big city, and to use her looks – her potential to exploit men – to make something of herself.   Lilly sets off for New York with Chico (Theresa Harris), an African-American girl who also worked in the speakeasy, became her friend and, once Lilly’s life begins to take off in New York, works as her maid for the remainder of the story.

    When she leaves Erie, the first man Lilly gives her body to in order to get her own way is a young railroad worker (James Murray) who, when he discovered her and Chico in the freight train they’ve hidden in, had threatened to call the police and have the girls thrown in jail.  Once she’s in New York, Lilly sets her sights on the skyscraper that houses the Gotham Trust bank.  Lilly literally works her way up the organisation, thanks to intercourse with, successively:  a personnel officer (Maynard Holmes); a colleague in the filing department (John Wayne – the John Wayne); the boss to whom this colleague recommends her (Douglas Dumbrille); a rising young executive called Ned Stevens (Donald Cook); and the bank’s first vice-president, J P Carter (Henry Kolker), who is also the father of Stevens’ fiancée (Margaret Lindsay).  (The camera makes clear that the mortgage department is on the floor above the filing department, accounts on the floor above mortgages, and so on.)  Alfred E Green’s telling of the story of Lilly’s ascent is both as hard-edged and as laconically witty as she is:  it comprises strong performances from all concerned, plenty of funny one-liners (by Gene Markey) for Lilly, delivered by Barbara Stanwyck with crackerjack timing, and amusing costume changes to summarise her inexorable progress.  This part of the film reaches its climax when the hopelessly-in-love Ned Stevens discovers that the man responsible for Lilly’s now luxurious lifestyle is his prospective father-in-law.  Ned puts two bullets into Carter’s heart then one into his own, killing them both.

    The bank love-nest scandal is hot news and Lilly’s photograph appears in the papers.  The board of Gotham Trust, deciding they can regain confidence in the bank only by trading on the name of its respected founder, elect his playboy grandson Courtland Trenholm (George Brent) as bank president.  Lilly’s interview with the board is a turning point – all the board members agree to pay her off, to prevent Lilly selling her story to the press, until the alert Courtland overrules them.   Courtland accedes instead to her professed wish to disappear into anonymity.  Lilly, if she is to retain credibility as a pitiable victim of circumstance, can hardly refuse his offer of a new identity and a job in Gotham’s Paris branch.  By the time Courtland visits the Paris office, however, he finds that the resourceful ‘Miss Allen’, as she’s been renamed, is already head of the outfit’s travel bureau.  Courtney himself now succumbs to Lilly’s attractions and they marry.  The final part of Baby Face sees Courtland called back to New York to learn that the bank has failed and that he is to be indicted; he begs Lilly to sell the Cartier jewellery, and other gifts he’s showered on her, to finance his defence.  She initially refuses but, as she’s about to set sail back to Paris, experiences her change of heart.  In the meantime, Courtland tries but fails to commit suicide:  the film ends with him in an ambulance on the way to hospital (and, it seems, recovery).  His suddenly devoted and self-sacrificing wife is at his side.

    Although this final retreat into conventionality is an anti-climax, the more complicated mood that develops from the point at which Lilly goes to work in Paris is built very skilfully.   George Brent’s Courtland, although he falls for Lilly, does so with a greater self-awareness than the other men in the story; he also understands something, though by no means everything, of the woman she is.  Barbara Stanwyck is tremendous from her first appearance in the speakeasy and she stays that way.  Her mixture of deep jadedness and appetite for something else in the Erie sequences is compelling:  there’s a fine moment when Lilly angrily tries to wipe the industrial grime of the place from the plants in a window box at her father’s joint; she retaliates against the various men trying it on with her, her father included – both physically and with sarcasm that’s as weary as it’s acerbic.  Stanwyck also makes the bizarre Nietszche element almost persuasive:  the advice that Adolf Cragg gives Lilly fuses with something that the actress has already suggested is inherent (but hitherto unconscious) in her.  Once she’s in New York, Barbara Stanwyck gives the character a terrific heartless verve but the clarion truthfulness of her acting means that you never forget where Lilly started.

    3 May 2014

  • Sophie’s Choice

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alan J Pakula (1982)

    The reader of William Styron’s 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice is asked to endure three grim stories.  First, the concentration camp memories of Sophie Zawistowska, an Auschwitz survivor; second, the tale of Sophie’s death-bound partnership with Nathan Landau, a paranoid schizophrenic, in post-war Brooklyn; last and – in terms of wordage – by no means least, the sentimental and sexual education of the book’s narrator, Stingo, a young Southerner come to New York to make his name as a writer.  During the summer of 1947, when all three are tenants in a Brooklyn boarding house they call the Pink Palace, Stingo falls in love, in different ways, with both Sophie, the beautiful Polish immigrant, and Nathan, the well-read, charismatic Jewish-Yankee.  My paperback copy of Sophie’s Choice runs to 684 pages and Styron’s novel is in all respects distended.  The narrative structure is persistently unwieldy.  Sophie’s recollections, in conversation with Stingo, of her comfortable life in Cracow in the 1930s, of Auschwitz, and of the early days of her relationship with Nathan are transmitted by Styron sometimes in first-person direct speech and sometimes as a third-person account, filtered by Stingo.  The latter includes many details which are implausible as things that Sophie, for all that Stingo becomes her confidant, actually told him.  The plotting is clumsily contrived.  The serial improbabilities are never rooted in character:  they’re always the awkward manoeuvrings of an author wrenching the material into a storyline that delays revelations of the truth about Sophie and Nathan, and continuing to up the tortured, melodramatic ante.  Worse still are the events – mostly non-events – around Stingo’s attempts to lose his virginity.   The descriptions of these are remarkable both for their explicitness and their boringness; the prose is a queasy combination of profanity and orotundity.  The overwriting that is a feature of the novel as a whole is just as present in the verbose, leaden humour of the sexual coming-of-age episodes as in the ‘deep’ passages describing Sophie’s and Nathan’s death-in-life.

    Perhaps the Stingo sex bits are meant as comic relief but giving them, in effect, the same amount of coverage as the Sophie-Nathan elements is an example of the novel’s tastelessness – even if Styron’s treatment of the relationship between Sophie and Nathan is more seriously offensive.  (I’m not lamenting being short-changed on the death camps and mental illness – I wanted much less of everything.)  Sophie was raised in a middle-class Catholic family; her father was a university professor.  She’s oppressed by the persisting awareness of how she lived through Auschwitz and by its legacy of guilt.  She now finds herself regularly abused, verbally but sometimes physically too, by a Jewish man, who repeatedly demands an explanation of how shiksa Sophie survived the death camps in which so many Jews perished.  Styron’s story is distinctive because the protagonists aren’t what you’d expect in this literary territory:  Sophie has a number tattooed on her arm but she isn’t a typical Nazi victim; Nathan, obsessed with the Holocaust and what the Nazis did to his fellow Jews, maltreats a death camp survivor because she’s a Gentile.  Nathan keeps breaking off then resuming their relationship; Sophie finds him increasingly impossible to live with but can’t live without him; they eventually commit suicide together.  (The day Stingo arrives at the Pink Palace, he hears Nathan ask his lover the anguished question ‘Why can’t you see, Sophie – we are dying?’)

    William Styron implies strongly (to put it mildly) that the pair’s fatal liaison speaks of something fundamental about the psychological and emotional injuries inflicted on people on the receiving end – however differently – of what the Nazis did.  Once the nature and history of Nathan’s illness are revealed, however, this is exposed as a monstrous ploy on Styron’s part.  How can Nathan represent Jewish perceptions of the Holocaust?  He is, in the words of his elder brother, Larry, ‘quite mad’ (and Nathan’s schizophrenia was diagnosed when he was a child, well before Nazism was into its genocidal stride).  Styron encourages the reader to wonder too if Sophie’s guilt about her past has drawn her to someone who punishes her in the way that she feels she deserves.  This too is a cheat.  Larry Landau makes clear to Stingo that Sophie knows nothing of Nathan’s illness.  His behaviour is, from her point of view, bewilderingly volatile.  It’s hard to see, therefore, how Sophie can masochistically rely on Nathan to make her pay for what she did in, and en route to, Auschwitz.

    The viewer of Alan Pakula’s screen adaptation of Sophie’s Choice has a better time than the reader of the novel.  The film is dignified by Meryl Streep’s rightly celebrated portrait of Sophie, Peter MacNicol’s admirably alert playing of Stingo, and Marvin Hamlisch’s lovely, affecting score.  The middle-aged Stingo’s retrospective narration (read in voiceover by Josef Sommer) is minimal.  The sexual aspect of Stingo’s summer-I-became-a-man is very considerably pared down (although what remains still grates).   Pakula’s screenplay is often skilful and judicious.  Yet the movie is hamstrung by his respect for Styron; as a result, the thoroughgoing defects of the original are also those of the film.  Pakula consistently emulates the novel’s lack of momentum and some of his compressions of the narrative, although they might read well on paper, don’t play.  The flashback episode to Sophie’s time in the household of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Günther Maria Halmer) is especially shaky and one bit of this in particular makes no dramatic sense.   Sophie overhears a conversation between Höss and another SS officer but she doesn’t see the latter’s face.  This other man is eventually revealed to be the Nazi doctor (Karlheinz Hackl) who forced Sophie, on her arrival at Auschwitz, to make the terrible choice between her two children – which one to save (at least for the time being) and which to condemn to immediate execution.  Since the film audience doesn’t know this when we see the doctor talking to Höss, his identity means nothing to us; so that Sophie’s failure to recognise his voice doesn’t register either.  Other moments in the film are weightless simply as a result of slack direction:  Stingo’s discovery from Sophie that her father was a rabid anti-Semite and not, as she’s previously claimed, a champion of Polish Jewry is one such anti-climax.

    In his cinema debut, Kevin Kline does remarkable things as Nathan.  Kline’s combination of menace and humour as a performer serve him well:  the ability to make instant, complete switches between voices and personas enables him to suggest, at least superficially, Nathan’s alarming unpredictability.  Alan Pakula’s fidelity to Styron means, however, that the secrets and lies of Sophie and Nathan are exposed mechanically and every new revelation is meant be a shocking one.   It’s usually Stingo who is being enlightened and he is bound to be shocked because he is, in spite of being a major novelist in the making, utterly lacking in curiosity.  He never speculates, for example, as to the causes of Nathan’s mania.  (When Larry eventually explains things to him, Stingo doesn’t even murmur, ‘Well, I did wonder …’)  This is more of a problem on screen because Peter MacNicol’s Stingo, although convincingly boyish, radiates intelligence as well as naïveté:  you can believe that he’s dazzled by Nathan’s wit and force of personality; you can’t believe that Stingo instantly puts out of his mind Nathan’s crazily aggressive episodes – a convenient amnesia on which Styron’s storytelling repeatedly depends.  As in the book, the Holocaust is used – that’s to say misused – chiefly as lurid context for the doomed love affair between Sophie and Nathan.

    Meryl Streep’s transitions between the fun-loving, electrically animated Sophie and the numbed woman who gradually discloses her past create a genuinely tragic figure:  we see Sophie’s appetite for sensual pleasure and joyful companionship; we also sense that she’s willing herself to enjoy the present as a means of keeping down the bitter reflux inside her.  The numbed quality is partly thanks to the alcohol that Sophie drinks increasingly:  Streep realises brilliantly both the anaesthetising effects of alcohol and in vino veritas (Sophie’s numbness is also in part a consequence of telling and, in so doing, confronting the truth).  The early days in Sophie’s and Nathan’s relationship, when he finds her collapsed from malnutrition, in a New York library, and nurses her back to physical health are among the best in the film:  Streep is beautifully frail and eccentric, Kevin Kline complements her wittily and tenderly, Pakula directs them sensitively.  Streep often makes Sophie’s broken English really funny (the dialogue in the novel tries but heavy-handedly fails to do this).  Seeing the film again for the first time in decades, I’d forgotten the little sounds she makes when Sophie is lightly scolding or disagreeing with Stingo.  There’s a maternal flavour to this scolding, which, because of Sophie’s history as a mother, is very touching.  It’s a measure of how fully Streep has absorbed the Polish accent that these non-verbal, guttural noises are as accented as the words that she speaks.

    Pauline Kael wrote about Meryl Streep in this film as follows:

    ‘She has, as usual, put thought and effort into her work.  But something about her puzzles me:  after I’ve seen her in a movie, I can’t visualize her from the neck down.  Is it possible that as an actress she makes herself into a blank and then focusses all her attention on only one thing – the toss of her head, for example, in Manhattan, her accent here?  Maybe, by bringing an unwarranted intensity to one facet of a performance, she in effect decorporealizes herself.’

    Not sure how much sense the theory makes (if Streep decided to concentrate on a character’s limp, would Kael not be able to visualise her from the waist up?) – but that’s beside the point.  By the time she reviewed Sophie’s Choice, Pauline Kael was determined to be as negative as possible about Meryl Streep, however much ingenuity it took to be negative.  If she’d wanted to see the work here in a favourable light, Kael might have reckoned Streep’s face and voice memorable because they are her most, rather than her only, compelling features.  If Kael had wanted to be no more than fair, she would have acknowledged that Streep, for much of the time she’s on screen in Sophie’s Choice, is photographed, by Nestor Almendros, as a talking head.  (Later in her review, Kael, with good reason, dismisses the film as ‘a novel being talked to us’.)  Pauline Kael chose the wrong Meryl Streep movie to use as a launching pad for this particular missile.  Streep embodies Sophie fully and complexly:  in repose or when she’s in an embrace with Nathan or Stingo, Sophie is corporeally very present; in motion, she conveys a sense of urgency – the sense of a woman anxious to escape herself.   In this role, Meryl Streep meshes completely her movements, expressions and gestures with the underlying feelings that generate them.  It’s a great performance.

    10-11 November 2015

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