Monthly Archives: March 2016

  • Gypsy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mervyn LeRoy (1962)

    Harry Stradling (Sr)’s camerawork and lighting give an impression of space and a plushy sheen to this adaptation of the Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents musical, first produced on Broadway in 1959.  You get no sense from the visuals that the monstrous stage mother, Rose Hovick (Rosalind Russell), is prepared to go anywhere in the theatrical world of Depression-era America to keep afloat her show business ambitions – embodied in her younger daughter June (Ann Jillian), then the elder one, Louise (Natalie Wood).  Rose, refusing to believe the days of vaudeville are numbered, is determined that June will be a song-and-dance variety star.  June knows better and wisely escapes from her mother by eloping with one of the backing dancers in the ‘Dainty June’ act.  When Rose and Louise are reduced to an engagement in a supposedly grungy burlesque joint in Wichita, Kansas, three of the performers there educate Louise in the ground rules of striptease:  the lesson takes place in a large, airy dressing room.   After one of the trio of strippers is arrested for shoplifting, Rose orders a reluctant Louise to take her place.  Louise gets off to a nervous, timid start but her burlesque career – as the famous Gypsy Rose Lee – soon takes off and Mervyn LeRoy uses a montage to summarise her rapidly increasing self-assurance and success.  The montage shows her performing at what are clearly meant to be more and more fashionable venues; Natalie Wood’s gowns get more elaborate as Gypsy Rose Lee’s striptease routines become more confidently daring.  But there’s no texture to the images – and, as a result, no palpable contrast between the upmarket joints and the showbiz lower depths from which Gypsy has risen.

    Lack of nuance is a pervasive and crippling fault of Hollywood’s Gypsy.  It’s reflected in the staging of the vaudeville numbers:  they’re meant to be bad – but they have a polished, movie-musical mediocrity, and a lack of vulgar energy.  It’s reflected in the Wichita strippers (Faith Dane, Roxanne Arlen and Betty Bruce), who are essentially and awkwardly wholesome, and the competent, flat caricatures of stage managers et al in crummy clubs.  The backstage personnel merge with the onstage performers and the lack of distinction comes across not as making a satirical point but as Mervyn LeRoy and the screenwriter, Leonard Spigelgass, playing unimaginatively safe.  It’s reflected most and worst of all in Rosalind Russell’s Rose.  Perhaps the rasp in her stentorian voice is meant to convey the character’s grim, desperate toughness but Russell’s naturally authoritative, almost grand manner is wrong for the part.  The Orry-Kelly costumes that she wears merely accentuate this.  Louise is frustrated that she can’t get through to her mother but the impermeability feels more like Russell’s, who performs in a vacuum, than Rose’s.  When June and Louise, in their different ways, both get away from her, the mother’s breakdown is quite unmoving because the endlessly proficient Rosalind Russell is always, and conspicuously, in control.  Nor is Natalie Wood right for Louise, at any stage:  she works hard but unavailingly at being dowdy and unconfident.  There’s no sense of her feelings of excited liberation when Gypsy becomes a star.  In the thankless role of Herbie Summers, Rose’s agent and ardent admirer, Karl Malden is a relief from the prevailing busy acting and ‘colourful’ dialogue.  At a railway station, Herbie asks if his train is late and gets the answer, ‘It ain’t late … but I will say you got time for a bowl of chili’.  (Thomas E Jackson makes the most of his station master cameo, to put it mildly.)  ‘Thanks’, replies Karl Malden in a politely resigned tone, perfectly in character.

    6 April 2015

  • Two Weeks in Another Town

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vincente Minnelli (1962)

    The editing became an acrimonious battle between MGM and the producer, John Houseman; it seems the outcome pleased neither party.  The film was poorly received by critics and an expensive box-office failure.   The melodramatic plotting and playing make it often ridiculous.  Yet, as early as 1973, Two Weeks in Another Town was being described, by William Bayer in his book The Great Movies, as – in combination with the earlier Vincente Minnelli drama The Bad and the Beautiful – ‘unmatched in the entire history of the sub-genre [of Hollywood self-laceration], as well as in the history of the cinema of trash’.  It was fascinating to see Two Weeks in Another Town for the first time just a few days after seeing, also for the first time, Robert Mulligan’s Inside Daisy Clover – another example of the sub-genre which Bayer has in mind.  Jonathan Rosenbaum’s description of Two Weeks in Another Town (quoted in the BFI programme) as ‘one of [Minnelli’s] last great pictures’ is a foolish overstatement of the film’s merits but the flair of the direction and the luscious look of Two Weeks make it a much more interesting movie than Mulligan’s.  Although this may not be fully intentional, Two Weeks in Another Town is, in effect, an example of a film that seems both an example of trash and an exploration of it.

    The protagonist of Two Weeks – with a screenplay by Charles Schnee, adapted from a novel by Irwin Shaw – is Jack Andrus (Kirk Douglas).  He’s a big-name Hollywood actor whom we first meet in the clinic that has been his home since the crack-up (broken marriage, alcohol problem, suicide attempt etc) that derailed his career.  Jack receives a telegram from Maurice Kruger (Edward G Robinson), an aging director with whom, over the years, he enjoyed a love-hate relationship and plenty of success.  Kruger wants Jack to join the cast for his latest film, which he’s shooting in Rome.  As usual with films-being-made-within-films, Kruger’s movie looks merely crap but the people Jack encounters on and off the set are more colourful clichés.  They include:  Davie Drew (George Hamilton), Kruger’s arrogant, petulant young male lead, who eventually learns from Jack lessons about acting and life; Jack’s glamorous, lethal ex-wife Carlotta (Cyd Charisse); and Kruger’s hysterically bitter other half Clara (Claire Trevor).  Hysterically bitter could describe Minnelli’s vision of Rome too.  The exaggerated opulence of the privileged lives on show functions virtually as a satire of La dolce vita, the excessively vivid cinematography by Milton R Krasner as a Hollywood attempt to top the elegant monochrome beauty achieved by Fellini and Otello Martelli.

    In one of the most startling sequences of Two Weeks in Another Town, Maurice Kruger is showing to Jack Andrus and other members of the cast and crew of his new picture an example of the great art he used to make.  This is a clip from The Bad and the Beautiful – on which Vincente Minnelli, John Houseman, Kirk Douglas and Charles Schnee had worked together ten years earlier. For William Bayer, Minnelli’s ‘outrageous nerve to use clips from his first trash masterpiece film about film’ is the proof of Two Weeks’ own ‘trash masterpiece’ status.  While I don’t disagree, I think Minnelli shows nerve here in the sense of courage as well as cheek (even if this is inadvertent).  The excerpt from The Bad and the Beautiful implicates Minnelli and Kirk Douglas in Two Weeks in Another Town in a way that a mock-up movie clip couldn’t have done.  The power games, the urge to self-destruction, the morals of the story (don’t (a) trust anyone or (b) live in the past) and the upbeat ending are entirely predictable yet their predictability fortifies Two Week as an illustration of essential Hollywood.  It’s worth noting too that, while the stylised overacting of Cyd Charisse and Claire Trevor (especially) is entertaining, the charismatic yet disciplined performances of Kirk Douglas and Edward G Robinson give the story an intermittent connection with reality.  (Douglas is good in the clip from The Bad and the Beautiful too!)  The cast also includes Daliah Lavi as the beautiful young Italian antidote to Jack Andrus’s cynicism; Rosanna Schiaffino as the sex-bomb star of Maurice Kruger’s picture; and Joanna Roos, as Kruger’s sternly protective assistant, the well-named Janet Bark.

    29 February 2016

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