Daily Archives: Friday, May 20, 2016

  • Yellow Sky

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William A Wellman (1948)

    At least I’ll know in future to avoid BFI screenings with an ‘extended’ introduction.  Yellow Sky, showing in the ‘Shakespeare on Film’ season, was preceded by a talk by Adrian Wootton, the Chief Executive of Film London.  Wootton would be ‘focusing on American Shakespeare adaptations’.  Although he assured us that he’d be ‘whizzing through’ each of its several sections, his talk lasted half as long as the film we’d come to see and was focused only in the sense that Wootton had a single point to make.  He took forty-five minutes to propose that Hollywood has always done better appropriating Shakespeare-inspired scenarios, for use in Westerns or sci-fi pictures or musicals, than making films of Shakespeare plays.  He rather oddly classified the former as ‘Shakespearean’ and the latter as ‘Shakespeare’ and showed a ‘mash-up’ of excerpts from Hollywood ‘Shakespeare’ and Hollywood ‘Shakespearean’.  Dominated by the ‘America’ number in West Side Story, this montage included some of the clips included in the trailer for ‘Shakespeare on Film’ that BFI has already been showing for several weeks.  The ‘mash-up’ was one of several overlong clips Wootton used to pad things out (one consolation of this was getting the whole of ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ from Kiss Me Kate).  He cited repeated examples of adaptations or reworkings of Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew and The Tempest but was sketchy on why these Shakespeare plays had proved especially capable of reinterpretation in different movie genres.  He started off saying that The Tempest was particularly appealing to Americans because of the (brave) New World references in the text.  He ended up suggesting the play was popular ‘probably because of the magic’.

    All this led, at last, to William Wellman’s supposedly Tempest-inspired Western Yellow Sky.  The characters include an elderly man and a young woman living in a largely deserted place – a post-Gold Rush ghost town.  Other major points of connection with The Tempest are less obvious.  A band of bank-robbing bandit treks through the California desert and eventually makes it to the ghost town.  This trek occupies the first third of Yellow Sky.  While their problem is a lack rather than a surfeit of water and while Shakespeare didn’t devote an act and a half to the immediate aftermath of the shipwreck of Alonso, Ferdinand et al, the antics of the more roguish of William Wellman’s bandits does remind you that a little of the drunken sailors in The Tempest goes a long way.  Fortunately, Yellow Sky is great to look at throughout.  Shot in black-and-white by Joe MacDonald, there are impressive chiaroscuro effects and the dusty, windswept terrain is highly atmospheric.  Wellman, MacDonald and the editor Harmon Jones put together action sequences that express a thrilling speed of movement.  The placing of human bodies in wide open spaces is very arresting – so are the compositions that show two characters facing the camera, one nearly in close-up and unaware of the other standing in the background.  The film’s title refers primarily to the name of the ghost town but the sky above the landscape has, even in monochrome, a sulphurous look.

    It comes as no surprise that James ‘Stretch’ Dawson, the leader of the gang, turns out to have been born of morally sound stock and that he reverts in due course to honest ways:  he’s played by Gregory Peck.  No surprise either that the initial hostility between Stretch and Constance Mae (‘Mike’) – the Miranda figure – turns to love.  Gregory Peck‘s straightness, both physical and temperamental, works very well in Yellow Sky.   He looks about ten feet tall:  dressed in black, he can seem threatening; his height also helps confirm the moral stature that Stretch eventually attains.  Peck’s deep, sonorous voice assists similarly – it’s capable of implying either menace or underlying nobility, as required.  Gregory Peck’s acting can seem a bit wooden in naturalistic drama but he gives depth to the character he’s playing in a stylised genre piece like this one.  He’s charming and amusing in Stretch’s prickly courtship with the pistol-packing Mike.   Anne Baxter doesn’t show a lot of range in that role but she’s an energetic, insistent presence.   Richard Widmark is monotonous as the nastiest piece of work in the band of robbers, who also include Robert Arthur, Charles Kemper, Harry Morgan and John Russell.  James Barton is Grandpa (Prospero).   Lamar Trotti’s screenplay, with decent dialogue, is adapted from a story by W R Burnett.  The climactic shoot-out in Yellow Sky felt overlong to me but I think this was the fault less of William Wellman than of Adrian Wootton.

    9 May 2016

  • Proof

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Madden (2005)

    Well-acted but implacably uninteresting, Proof is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Auburn, who did the screenplay with Rebecca Miller.  The film didn’t make money or win awards; it’s customary in cases like this to hear claims that the screen version isn’t a patch on the stage original.  It’s hard to see, though, that the basic material has been much changed in transposition and Auburn seems to rely heavily on theatrical clichés like the close proximity of genius and insanity, terror of a forebear’s madness being hereditary, precocious talent burning out early, etc.  He places these in a university setting, which some people seem to think is enough to transform them into something intellectually respectable.   It’s remarkable what you can get away with when your story has an academic context.  If your characters talk in improbably wordy, well-turned sentences (as the characters in Proof often do), it’s fine because that’s what professional clever dicks do, don’t they?

    It’s a truism too that mathematicians reach their creative peak very early.  In Proof the mathematics professor Robert (Anthony Hopkins) did brilliant, ground-breaking work in his early twenties, which was followed by decades of mental illness.  He went off the rails at the age of twenty-six.  His daughter Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow), now twenty-seven, is scared of going the same way.  She’s spent years looking after her father in their Chicago home.  When he dies (although he pays Catherine at least one posthumous visit), Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), a former student of Robert’s, also in his mid-twenties, arrives to go through his mentor’s hoard of notebooks in search of the proof of an important theorem.  Needless to say, he finds it and gets into a relationship with Catherine in the process, although she’s been nervous that Hal will, when he finds the proof, try and appropriate it for his own glory and career.  She then claims she’s actually the author of the proof (you practically see the interval curtain come down as Catherine makes this announcement).  The Wikipedia article on the play helpfully explains that the title refers both to the mathematical proof at the heart of the drama ‘and to the play’s central question: Can Catherine prove the proof’s authorship?’   Subsidiary questions include (a) is Catherine’s insistence that it’s her own work proof that she’s going crazy and (b) is the fact that the proof is in her father’s handwriting evidence of the daughter’s self-delusion or of her extraordinary kinship with him?    The answer to all these questions is another question:  who cares?

    As the doomed Robert, Anthony Hopkins is uneven but often impressive.  His movement seems edged in a way that really does suggest, and not obviously, someone not in control of himself – whose mind, and what it wants to express, is imprisoned in the body it belongs to.  Gwyneth Paltrow is a very good actress but, when she dramatises melancholy, she does tend towards forlorn whingeing (she was far too pallid as Sylvia Plath in the poor 2003 biopic).  Jake Gyllenhaal is inherently unconvincing as a geeky mathematician but he commits to the role wholeheartedly and his enthusiastic vitality – when, for example, the maths fraternity confirms the proof is good and Hal rushes downstairs excitedly – is likeable, and a necessary complement to Paltrow’s fine-tuned mournfulness.  Catherine’s sister Claire (Hope Davis), arrived from New York for the father’s funeral, is also relatively invigorating:  she seems to be visiting from the real world even though the character is condescendingly written.  I liked the suppressed hysteria which was always there in Hope Davis’s voice, and especially when Claire was being determinedly upbeat.  (You hear a similar quality in Gwyneth Paltrow’s voice in Catherine’s more animated moments so that this becomes a believable family trait.)  The stage play was a four-hander, and the small roles introduced for the film are perfunctory:  there’s a particularly mechanical exchange between Catherine and a maths professor played by Roshan Seth.

    John Madden is a good director of actors and he does a decent job in trying to keep the film in motion.   He makes the most of the fractured time sequence and takes us in and out of scenes at surprising moments (the editor is Mick Audsley).  But there’s a dullness in Madden’s diligent professionalism:  it exudes respect for the ‘prestigious’, life-of-the-mind material – you hear that in Stephen Warbeck’s score too.    It’s typical of the director’s approach that in Robert’s study, which is meant to express the dynamic chaos inside his head, the untidy heaps of books appear to be carefully arranged.  Even the wonky venetian blind looks deliberately, neatly wonky.

    18 February 2011

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