Monthly Archives: April 2016

  • Love Me or Leave Me

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charles Vidor (1955)

    I knew nothing about the singer Ruth Etting (1897-1978) but it’s hard to believe Doris Day wasn’t wrong for the role.  A cursory glance at Etting’s Wikipedia entry suggests that the screenwriters Daniel Fuchs and Isabel Lennart (the former won an Oscar for ‘Best Story’ for this picture) simplified and sanitised Etting’s biography for the screen.  Nevertheless, the film begins in Chicago in the 1920s and is located throughout at an intersection of the worlds of show business and organised crime, a place where the congenitally well-behaved Doris Day does not belong.  Marty Snyder (James Cagney) – the owner of the club in which the film audience first encounters Ruth Etting and the man who becomes her manager and husband – was a Chicago gang boss.   Etting is desperate to break into the big time and is prepared to use Snyder, who becomes besotted with her, in order to do so.  At the start, she’s performing on stage as one of a group of dancers.  That she can’t dance is meant to be painfully evident but her clumsy moves, as expressed by Doris Day, come across as perfectly executed mistakes.

    Immediately self-assured and a fully realised vocal talent as soon as she opens her mouth to sing, Day doesn’t remotely suggest someone so desperately hungry for success that she’ll sell her soul.  Later in the film, when Ruth Etting has become a star, Day performs ‘Ten Cents a Dance’.  She makes a few, perfunctory raunchy movements but remains invincibly wholesome – as far away as one can imagine from the persona of the tawdry, weary taxi dancer who’s meant to be delivering the Lorenz Hart lyrics.  Doris Day is clearly trying hard not to be her usual perky self but she doesn’t go much deeper than withholding her brilliant-white smile.  She’s ill-served too by her costumes (by Helen Rose) and hairdo (by Sydney Guilaroff):  thanks to these accoutrements, Ruth Etting is perfectly groomed from the start, which reinforces the lack of development in Day’s characterisation.  Worse, her appearance (at this distance in time, anyway) suggests the 1950s rather than two or three decades earlier.  That goes for the look of the film more generally (the DoP was Arthur E Arling and Cedric Gibbons headed the team of art directors).  Every location seems spacious and spotless, whether it’s a supposedly poky dressing room, a gloomy police station or a swanky New York or Hollywood apartment.

    As Marty Snyder, James Cagney dominates Love Me or Leave Me.   The naturally dynamic rhythm of his walk, emphasised by Snyder’s gammy leg, gives ‘Moe the Gimp’, as he’s also known, the look of a creature of vaudeville as much as of gangland but it brings to life every scene in which Cagney appears.  In the first half of the film, the emphasis on Snyder’s infatuation with Ruth limits Cagney’s opportunities to dramatise the predicament of a man who is used to being in charge but who now finds himself in a more complicated power struggle.  But Cagney is compelling in the later stages of the story, as Marty Snyder becomes more violently tyrannical.  You feel the discrepancy between this display of apparent power and his increasing insecurity about his marriage to Ruth.  Although the two stars don’t exactly strike sparks off each other, Cagney and Doris Day do make you feel how grimly impacted Etting and Snyder’s relationship is:  he feels he can’t control her yet she feels trapped.  The film also features creditable performances from Cameron Mitchell, as the pianist and musical arranger who loves Ruth (and who became her second husband), and Robert Keith, as a principled agent.   The use of music as dramatic accompaniment, as distinct from the musical numbers, is unusually sparing for a product of mid-1950s Hollywood.  The last shot of the final sequence, in which Doris Day sings the title song, is oddly striking too:  Charles Vidor, rather than closing in on his leading lady, pulls the camera back from the diminishing figure on the stage.

    5 December 2014

  • Lord of the Flies

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Peter Brook (1963)

    For all its skill and thoughtfulness, Peter Brook’s adaptation of Lord of the Flies is eventually disappointing.  The film’s failure is exposed in its final scene.  Ralph, trying to escape Jack and his pack of hunters, scrabbles desperately across the beach to the feet of an officer from the ship that’s arrived on the island.  Brook weakens the encounter between Ralph and the officer anyway by interrupting it.  He cuts to the painted, more visually arresting faces of Jack’s savages and registers the grown-up’s reaction to them before returning to Ralph, and the boy’s tears.  But the sequence reveals a more fundamental problem with this adaptation of William Golding’s novel (for which Brook did the screenplay).  In Golding’s penultimate paragraph ‘Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy’ – and the savages weep too.  The final paragraph is:

    ‘The officer, surrounded by these noises, was moved and a little embarrassed.  He turned away to give them time to pull themselves together; and waited, allowing his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance.’

    For the reader, the gap between what Ralph is feeling and what the officer sees is chasmic.  For the viewer of the film, that terrible discrepancy isn’t there.

    Although it’s unrealistic in what’s supposed to be the extreme heat of the island (and in the aftermath of a plane crash that killed all the adults on board), Brook’s decision to keep the boys in their school uniforms at the start of the picture is shrewd.  The juxtaposition of dark-coloured shorts and blazers and the exotic landscape is surreally convincing (the film was shot on location on the island of Vieques and other places in Puerto Rico).  Golding did the same thing more selectively – he had the choirboys marching along the beach in their black cloaks, with head chorister Jack leading the way – and Brook naturally retains this striking anticipatory image.  But Raymond Leppard’s music, or Brook’s use of it anyway, seems a mistake.  The counterpointing of the choir’s Kyrie Eleison and the same boys’ ‘Kill the pig!’ chant, although obvious, is effective; but the semi-martial, semi-hymnal theme doesn’t contrast with the physical setting of the story in the way that the school uniform does.  (Even if did, it would be making a point the clothes had already made.)  Its effect is to put distance between the audience and the activity on screen – to keep reminding us that those on the island are English schoolboys.  I realise Brook means this to be powerfully ironic.  It isn’t, though, because the child actors are mostly not strong enough to suggest anything but English schoolboys.  Their looks are often striking – most of them are blonde-haired (including Tom Gaman’s Simon) – but once they start speaking lines they’re performers in a school play.  Jack (Tom Chapin) is a particular problem in this respect.  As Ralph, James Aubrey (who enjoyed a successful career as an adult actor on stage and television) is much more naturally expressive than the others.  (The boys also include Nicholas Hammond, who went on to play Friedrich von Trapp in The Sound of Music.)

    William Golding fully understood the meaning of the word education.  In Lord of the Flies he combined his abiding interest in the human soul with his professional experience, as a teacher of teenage boys in Salisbury in the years immediately after the Second World War.  He connected the power games of the playground and changing room in a single-sex grammar school with what he believed to be a fundamental human propensity for violence and cruelty.  Different illustrations of a kindred brutality are held in tension in Golding’s novel.  Brook’s approach is relatively objective (he doesn’t create a frightening momentum equivalent to the power of the novel’s narrative).  This, in combination with the limitations of the young cast, gives the film, in spite of occasionally shocking moments, an anthropological flavour.  We watch the behaviour of the boys in their extraordinary circumstances without being oppressed by a sense that this is what tends to be ‘led out’ of people at any time, in any place.  The post-recorded sound is at odds with Brook’s fluid, more documentary sequences of the kids mucking about and the strengths of the film are things that don’t count for much in the larger scheme of Lord of the Flies – especially Piggy’s explanation to some of the ‘littluns’ of how his home town of Camberley got its name.  Piggy’s words are wonderfully, naturally delivered by Hugh Edwards.  The mixture of fidgeting and attentiveness in his audience is just right too.

    30 October 2012

Posts navigation