Monthly Archives: December 2015

  • Cabin in the Sky

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vincente Minnelli (1943)

    It’s hard to know how to respond.  An all-black cast in an MGM (Arthur Freed-produced) musical of the time assures the film’s place in cinema history.  The collection of performers on display – they include Ethel Waters, Eddie ‘Rochester’ Anderson, Lena Horne, John W Bubbles, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington – is breathtaking.  This was Minnelli’s first Hollywood feature and the whole thing is very well and tightly directed – especially if you see it, as I did, just twenty-four hours after The Harvey Girls. The song score is a mixture of old and new, and of mixed quality too, but the best-known number – ‘Taking a Chance on Love’ – became a standard, and truly belongs to Cabin in the Sky:  it was written, by Vernon Duke, John La Touche and Ted Fetter, for the Broadway stage version in 1940 (which George Balanchine choreographed).

    Yet the racial assumptions of the piece leave you repeatedly shocked and once or twice open-mouthed at what a white audience of seventy years ago was prepared to accept in depictions of African-American lives.   The comedy-drama of the battle for the soul of lovable rascal Little Joe (Rochester) presents characters of moral simplicity – simple-mindedness – that would surely have been ridiculed if the story had been about white folks of any class or creed.  The religious conceptions are hard to take, not just because they’re literalised tackily but because they reflect the minds of people who are conceived of as children.  It takes time to get used to Ethel Waters, as Joe’s lovingly tolerant, devout wife Petunia:  she’s occasionally overpowering but she manages the several speeches she addresses to God skilfully and she’s great when Petunia briefly turns ‘bad’ and dances with John W Bubbles (who also does a spectacular tap solo).   Rochester himself is very good – he’s surprisingly naturalistic.  Rex Ingram as Lucifer Junior has an astonishing (though overused) laugh; Kenneth Lee Spencer, his divine counterpart, is sonorously wooden – he speaks his lines like the opera singer he was.   I can’t explain why Lena Horne as the temptress Georgia Brown made me uncomfortable but she did – maybe a suspicion that in order to present a black woman as convincingly sexual she had to be as light-skinned as this.  And Horne works too hard, and unnecessarily, to be seductive.

    9 November 2011

  • Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da

    Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2011)

    About ninety minutes into this film, one of the men investigating the crime at the centre of the story starts typing a report into his laptop.  He asks another man to confirm the location of where they are – I can’t remember the name of the place but it begins with K.  The other man gives a lengthy explanation which boils down to ‘It depends’.  (They’re in a valley, K is on one side of the valley and somewhere else not beginning with K is on the other side, and so on.)  The man who asks the question is exasperated by the reply.  So was I, although from the chuckles to be heard in the Renoir it was clear not everyone in the audience felt the same way.  I enjoyed Corneliu Porumboiu’s humorous dramatisation of the boredom of detective work in Police, Adjective (2009) but I can’t understand how anyone can care what happens, or doesn’t happen, in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.  (It was stupefying to see this film so soon after The Kid with a Bike, with which Ceylan’s movie shared the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2011.)  The characters’ conversations – switching from the here and now (food, urination) to the metaphysical (musings about time and death) and back again – are clearly an important part of what appeals to its admirers but the unanswered question about K brought me to my feet and out of the cinema.   There was still over an hour to go.

    Although Ceylan is dealing with a very particular place and describing the social rituals and the attitudes of the people in it, fans of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia seem to see the murder investigation in the film as something larger – perhaps they even see universal, there-are-no-simple-answers-in-life significance in the uncertainties about the place beginning with K.   A question more easily answered – in the negative – is whether the droll philosophical discursions of the script would be reckoned to have humour and depth if the film were in the English language. Ceylan’s reputation being what it is, he can hardly fail with some critics with this take on the police procedural:  he bores us and is praised for masterly subversion of the genre.  He did the screenplay with his wife Ebru and Ercan Kasel – the same trio who wrote Ceylan’s previous film Three Monkeys (which was also overpraised but considerably more watchable than this one).   As in Three Monkeys, there is symbolically extreme weather and plenty of other beautifully composed images, perfectly lit by Gökhan Tiryaki.  These are often images of men’s faces which, because some of them are heavy and not obviously sensitive, are all the more remarkable because the actors’ eyes are emotionally alert.  For me, though, the direction drains the characters, and what they’re doing and saying, of interest.

    27 March 2012

     

     

     

     

     

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