Daily Archives: Monday, August 1, 2016

  • The Adventures of Robin Hood

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Curtiz, William Keighley (1938)

    It’s always fair weather in Warner Bros’ The Adventures of Robin Hood.  The quality of light in Sherwood Forest – the sunlight filtered through the trees – is magically nostalgic.  It evokes the world of your childhood when you first read Robin Hood stories – or, at least, what you now feel that childhood world was like.  (A memory that’s more definitely genuine:  as a young boy, I found Robin particularly accessible because our next-door neighbours’ surname was Hood.)  The ornate script and graphic curlicues of the opening credits and scene-setting legends have a quality that’s heraldic in both senses of the word:  the whole lustrously Technicolored movie turns out to be like a richly illustrated old storybook come to life (or – again – how you like to imagine such a book).  Antiquated phrases such as ‘splendidly caparisoned in gold and scarlet’ are given new meaning through what Hollywood put on the screen here:  the colouring of the costumes (by Milo Anderson) is often intensely gorgeous.  Some of the compositions also suggest art-historical references though, needless to say, I can’t identify the specific paintings in question …

    The action sequences – mainly fights but including other contests too (Robin’s first encounter with Little John on the bridge, the archery competition) – function rather as the song-and-dance highlights in a musical:  these set pieces are splendidly choreographed.  The alliance of Claude Rains’ Prince John (would-be usurper to the absent Richard the Lionheart’s throne), Basil Rathbone’s Sir Guy of Gisbourne and Melville Cooper’s Sheriff of Nottingham also invite musical analogy:  they’re like an orchestra section in supplying complementary notes of malignity and cravenness.  The picture’s score, by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, is justly famous (and, as Neil Brand explained in his 2013 BBC 4 series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies, proved highly influential on later generations of film-music composers).  Because Errol Flynn is legendary in swashbuckling roles, it’s interesting, watching him as Robin, to be reminded that Flynn isn’t all about imposing physique and light-on-his-feet athleticism:  he has a mobile, humorous face and a voice which, although it’s not greatly expressive, is supple enough to keep self-conscious heroism at a safe distance.  As Maid Marian, Olivia de Havilland is very beautiful, able to suggest plenty going on behind the wimple and, characteristically, a little bossy:  the combination is a delight.  Patric Knowles’s Will Scarlett is upstaged by his outfit and it’s rather an anti-climax when Ian Hunter’s King Richard removes his ‘disguise’; but other supporting performances – especially from Alan Hale (Little John), Eugene Pallette (Friar Tuck) and Herbert Mundin (Mutch) – more than compensate.  Marian’s maid Bess is played by Una O’Connor and Marian’s horse by an uncredited animal called (at the time) Golden Cloud.  This was one of the first movie roles for a future equine celebrity:  Roy Rogers’ Trigger.

    Although Michael Curtiz and William Keighley shared the directing credit, the former actually took over from the latter.  The screenplay, ‘based upon ancient Robin Hood legends’, was by Norman Reilly Raine and Seton I Miller.   The cinematographers were Tony Gaudio, Sol Polito and W Howard Greene.   Korngold, Ralph Dawson (film editing) and Carl Jules Weyl (art direction) all won Oscars.  The film is a triumph of secure and appealing tone.  All concerned – behind the camera and in front of it – are aware of telling a tall story in a broad style:  they do the job so wholeheartedly and sympathetically that The Adventures of Robin Hood is irresistibly cheering.

    28 July 2016

  • Close Encounters of the Third Kind

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Spielberg (1977)

    Jaws was nothing if not single-minded.  In spite of the predictable attempts made by some critics to freight the picture with insights into man’s terror of the unknown deep and comparisons with Enemy of the People and Moby Dick, it was clear this was an unadorned, streamlined adventure and that the director, Steven Spielberg, hadn’t consciously used elements that might compel audiences at a subconscious level.  (The film’s successor as all-time top-grosser, Star Wars, has invited plenty of speculation about the need, in our troubled times, to see the forces of good prevail unequivocally.)  Jaws gave Spielberg the status and freedom to make more ‘personal’ films.  The disappointment of Close Encounters of the Third Kind is that it is basically impersonal – thin, and, ultimately, a gorgeous pyrotechnics show.  The effects are often more resonant than anything in Jaws, thanks to the subject matter, but the director doesn’t seem to recognise the potential of his material.   Spielberg, hired for a purely commercial project like Jaws because of the precocious ‘film sense’ he demonstrated in the made-for-television Duel and the critically-acclaimed The Sugarland Express, suggests here that his tastes are no more sophisticated than the tastes of a large part of the Jaws audience.

    Close Encounters also illustrates that high quality, naturalistic American screen acting can be less effective in this kind of sci-fi territory than one-dimensional playing by physically striking performers whose looks establish their character.  Hugely proficient actor though he is, Richard Dreyfuss fails to convince as the hero, Roy.  The film mixes traditional American adventure elements (and attributes – like the maverick spirit) with the condescension that underlies heart-warming stories of the little man who beats the system (and, in this instance, does an exchange with an extra-terrestrial).  This little man is a little fat man and in the world of adventure movies, lack of athleticism severely undermines pretensions to heroism.  Dreyfuss’s avoirdupois is rather unkindly exploited.   At a pivotal exciting moment Roy keeps slipping down a mountainside and all you can feel is that it’s not surprising with that excess poundage.

    Dreyfuss isn’t really fat, of course – he’s just heavier than a young, Hollywood leading man is expected to be.  He’s not only an intelligent actor; he’s also capable, like others who have emerged in recent years, of projecting a character’s intelligence.  In close-up, Dreyfuss can think with the best of them (Robert De Niro, William Atherton) but his physique works against him – it makes him innocuous.  I haven’t yet seen The Goodbye Girl but it seems appropriate that Richard Dreyfuss should have won the Academy Award for his work in a Neil Simon piece, where dialogue completely overshadows all other elements.  Dreyfuss’s movement in Close Encounters is occasionally comical:  Roy’s tug-of-war with a bin man over a trash can made me laugh out loud but I think this was mainly because Dreyfuss’s tubbiness made him look silly.  (This isn’t an inevitable consequence of overweight:  Oliver Hardy’s elephantine grace provided a beautiful counterpoint to his fat.)  Although casting a short, waddling actor certainly emphasises Roy’s ordinariness, it also emphasises what a condescending conception he is.  Struggling against his inexpressive body, Dreyfuss is forced into occasional overplaying – histrionic hyperventilation, for example.  And why choose a cerebral actor for the part of an American everyman who becomes a believer in UFOs?  Dreyfuss is scrupulously sympathetic but he never really convinces as a man of faith.

    [1978]

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