Monthly Archives: September 2016

  • Born Yesterday

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Cukor (1950)

    I remember watching, on a flight back from Greece in 1993, the poor remake of Born Yesterday (starring Melanie Griffith, John Goodman and Don Johnson).  Ahead of this month’s BFI screening of the original film, I couldn’t remember if I’d already seen this too.  What made me suspect I had was nagging apprehension at the prospect of Judy Holliday’s famous performance as Billie Dawn.  Billie, the brassy girlfriend of a bullying business tycoon, comes to realise, under the tutorship of a Washington journalist, that she’s not as dumb as everyone – herself included – thought, and that the tycoon is even more despicable than she realised.  I knew that Holliday’s Billie was vocally extraordinary and had a feeling that her voice had got on my nerves.  She’d also played Billie during the long Broadway run of Born Yesterday (it opened in February 1946 and closed in November 1948).  Wasn’t Holliday’s recreation of Billie on screen a prime example of a performance that had been thoroughly worked out on stage – an act of reheating rather than a piece of creative acting?   Born Yesterday was showing at BFI in their ‘Member Picks’ slot.  I wasn’t encouraged either by the fairly baffling quote at the start of the programme note from BFI member Matthew Motyka (the picker, I suppose):  ‘Judy Holliday’s exceptional performance as Billie says so much about the contradictory messages of what it was to be a woman in Cold War America’.  The real pleasure of George Cukor’s film was in discovering that I needn’t have worried about any of these things (and I couldn’t have seen it before).  Judy Holliday is a delight.

    Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford), who began as a rag-and-bone man and graduated to scrap metal, arrives in Washington to make his latest dodgy business deals.  His entourage includes his cynical lawyer Jim Devery (Howard St John), a seedy factotum Eddie (Frank Otto) and the ex-showgirl Billie Dawn.  We immediately get what Harry’s like, as he bawls at the obsequious manager (Grandon Rhodes) about being given a suite rather than a whole wing of the hotel.  It’s a few minutes, however, before Billie Dawn opens her mouth at all.  When she does so, what first comes out is a high-decibel, screeching ‘Whaaaat?!’  It gets a laugh, of course, but this comical noise is also a good indicator of the intelligence of Judy Holliday’s approach (confirmed when the ‘Whaaaat?!’ is delivered a second time).  It comes across as an expression of Billie’s frustration with Harry’s bellowing – as a desperate, futile attempt to get her own back.  The combination of theatrical verve and sympathetic characterisation in her opening screech is what makes Judy Holliday’s playing of Billie successful and affecting throughout.  Her game of gin rummy with Harry is a deservedly celebrated sequence; the babyish Bronx accent and sashaying walk are remarkable technical feats.  But the voice and movement belong to a woman whom Holliday, while being very funny, also suggests is stubborn, bewildered and vulnerable.  (She stops short of implying this has anything to do with the Cold War.)

    Infuriated by his girlfriend’s dumb conversation and lack of social graces, Harry employs a journalist called Paul Verrall (William Holden) to improve her.  Paul introduces Billie to American history and politics, to art, music, literature and the law.  He also falls in love with her.  The last two things come in handy for delivering Born Yesterday’s happy ending, which sees Billie and Paul get married and Harry his comeuppance.  (On his lawyer’s advice, he signed over many of his assets, for purposes of tax avoidance, into Billie’s name.)  As you’d expect, Billie’s crash-course schooling involves plenty of malapropisms and thumbing through a dictionary and encyclopedia but the pupil isn’t simply transformed.  The literal meaning of education in its Latin root – a leading out – is significant here.  Paul Verrall helps Billie Dawn to realise her native intelligence. Judy Holliday, under George Cukor’s skilful direction, ensures this morally uplifting message doesn’t get too heavy.  In other respects, the comedy topping of Born Yesterday doesn’t obscure the pious and partisan heart of Garson Kanin’s play or, at least, Albert Mannheimer’s adaptation of it.

    By coincidence, I saw Born Yesterday just a couple of days after Ace in the Hole:  Cukor’s film admires crusading journalism as simply as Wilder’s excoriates exploitative journalism.   (There seems to be no compelling reason for choosing a journalist to educate Billie or for Paul Verrall’s accepting the assignment:  it’s just that, after coming to the hotel suite to interview Harry, he’s in the right place at the right time.)   Born Yesterday is also, as Pauline Kael complained, a ‘civics lesson’ and an assertion of the fundamental rightness of the US political system:  a crooked congressman (Larry Oliver) with whom Harry is wheeler-dealing is described by Paul Verrall as a rare rotten apple.  George Cukor opens out the material to enable Billie and Paul to visit the Jefferson Memorial, the Library of Congress, the Capitol building, the National Gallery of Art, and so on.  This is apt enough, given the movie’s reverence for what these places represent, although the guided tour also tends to dilute the momentum of the story.

    Harry Brock is a problematic character – and not just in the physical violence he metes out to Billie at one point.  There’s no recognition of any virtue in Harry’s working his way up to wealth from nowhere (that is, from Plainfield, New Jersey – a real place).  Whereas Billie is revealed as innately bright, Harry is presented as inherently corrupt (and the foundation of his fortune is junk).  The argument that he’s a pantomime villain – even to the extent of his acolyte Devery turning on him – and not to be taken seriously doesn’t fit with Born Yesterday‘s evident seriousness about what’s good in American life.  Harry is a contemptible, philistine boor – as played by Broderick Crawford, a bore too.  William Holden does better.  He communicates Paul’s enjoyment of Billie’s company – possibly expressing Holden’s enjoyment of Judy Holliday’s – and is a willingly uncompetitive partner in their scenes together. Holden’s relaxed, natural style also deflates the pomposity of some of what Paul Verrall is given to say, though he can’t entirely disguise this – or that the role he’s playing is a weak one.   The supporting cast is no great shakes but Frank Otto is amusing enough as the crumpled Eddie, who never wants anything more than his next drink.  There isn’t a costume design credit as such but Jean Louis was responsible for the ‘gowns’.  I’m not sure if these included Harry’s garishly patterned dressing gown; they presumably did include everything Judy Holliday wears.  According to the website Hollywood’s Golden Age [1930-59][1], ‘Each outfit became more stylish to reflect the character’s growing self-knowledge’.  One of these outfits – I can’t begin to describe it – seems rather to illustrate a serious identity crisis.

    8 September 2016

    [1] http://www.hollywoodsgoldenage.com/

     

  • Ace in the Hole

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Billy Wilder (1951)

    Billy Wilder made Ace in the Hole immediately after Sunset Boulevard.  That film did for Hollywood; Ace in the Hole does for the press and broadcast news, and the public that partakes of them.  There are jabs along the way at self-serving politicians too.  Some of these targets were familiar from recent Preston Sturges films but the satire is packaged very differently, and often more surprisingly, in Sturges.  Ace in the Hole‘s misanthropic message is delivered, like that of Sunset Boulevard, in a lugubrious, hard-edged style, once the story is underway.  That implies a different style before then and the opening sequences of Ace in the Hole are certainly the best.  Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) marches into the becalmed offices of a New Mexico provincial paper, the ‘Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin’.  Tatum tells the owner and editor, Jacob Q Boot (Porter Hall), that he – Tatum – is exactly what the paper needs.  The calmly principled Mr Boot doesn’t necessarily agree but gives him a job anyway.   A year later, Tatum is still working there and verging on stir crazy.  The framed sampler on the office wall – its motto, ‘Tell the Truth’, embroidered by genteel Miss Deverich (Edith Evanson), the paper‘s household-hints columnist – epitomises all that Tatum despises, and is exasperated by, at the Sun-Bulletin.  But within a couple of days, he has stumbled across a scoop that he doesn’t intend to let go.

    Chuck Tatum has worked his way down the professional ladder, on a journey that’s taken him from New York to New Mexico.  He’s been fired from a succession of newspapers for a variety of reasons – libel suits, adultery with the editor’s wife, drink problem – but his desperation for any kind of job appears only to have sharpened his ambition and self-confidence.   Tatum is dismayed by his latest assignment for the Sun-Bulletin – he’s sent to cover a rattlesnake hunt, accompanied by the paper’s naïve young photographer, Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur).  En route, they stop at a store-cum-diner-cum-trading-post that advertises Indian curios.  (Its ominous appearance gives it a strange kinship with Norma Desmond’s mansion.)  Tatum and Herbie find in a room behind the bar a woman deep in prayer.  Mama Minosa (Frances Dominguez) is asking for the deliverance of her son Leo, who helps run the family business.  He is trapped underground, following a rockfall in nearby caves, where he was collecting Native American artefacts.  Tatum seizes his opportunity.  He and Herbie go to the caves to interview and photograph the stricken Leo (Richard Benedict).  Tatum then does everything he can to prolong Leo’s agony, and keep the story of his plight on front pages and in news bulletins across the country.

    Tatum has some willing accomplices.  The greenhorn Herbie soon forgets the journalistic ethics that Mr Boot taught him and is smitten instead with ideas of selling his photographs of Leo to Life.  Leo’s sullen, bored wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling) despises her husband and wants out of life in the middle of nowhere but she’s willing to postpone her departure, once a press pack and tourists descend on the site of the accident and start spending money in the Minosas’ bar.  Lorraine is also happy to stay put for as long as Tatum  is around:  she fancies him though he treats her rough.  The local sheriff (Ray Teal), who’s running for re-election, likes the idea of making a name for the place.  On Tatum’s suggestion, Sheriff Kretzer puts pressure on Sam Smollett (Frank Jaquet), the contractor supervising rescue attempts, to drill into the caves from above instead of from the side – as a result, the rate of progress down to Leo is painfully slow.  Within a short space of time, the land round the caves has become a grotesque, ghoulish holiday venue, with fun for all the family.   (The film was renamed The Big Carnival by Paramount shortly before its release.  It regained its original title some years later.)

    We watch and listen to Tatum, after a whole year’s stagnation at the Albuquerque paper, fulminating about its piddling ambition and his own talents going to waste.  His colleagues don’t react much, although you feel he would long ago have become a barely tolerated office bore:  it’s not before time, from everyone’s point of view (including the audience’s), when his scoop materialises.  From this point onwards, however, the plotting of the story – Wilder wrote the screenplay with Lesser Samuels and Walter Newman – is remarkably unsurprising, and the same goes for Kirk Douglas’s performance.  He makes a fine initial entrance.  On his way into the Sun-Bulletin offices, Tatum exchanges a few words with a blue-collar worker; the man addresses him as ‘sir’; but Douglas, a moment after he’s walked past him, does a little double-take, as if to indicate Tatum’s displeasure that he hasn’t been acknowledged as much as he deserves.  The opening pitch to Mr Boot is entertaining but Douglas is soon and increasingly hard to take.  He gets his teeth into the role of Tatum in such an aggressive, condemnatory way that there are moments when you feel sorry for the anti-hero:  the character is being savaged by the actor playing him.

    It’s a pity Billy Wilder didn’t extend to casting of the lead the carry-on-Sunset–Boulevard aspect of Ace in the Hole.  William Holden might have brought some shadings to Chuck Tatum – Kirk Douglas puts on a hyperkinetic show but there’s no development of the character until Tatum tries, too late, to get Smollett to revert to the quicker procedure for reaching the doomed Leo.  The journalist’s outburst of bitter, snarling self-reproach is an instance of seeing the light Hollywood-style:  here Wilder adds – one assumes inadvertently – to the satire of the movie world he launched in Sunset Boulevard.  The ending of Ace in the Hole has a curious resonance too with that of Champion, which I’d seen two days earlier (both films are part of BFI’s season to celebrate Kirk Douglas’s imminent hundredth birthday).   In neither movie do you feel the protagonist, bad as he is, deserves to die.  In both movies, the melodramatic finale enables Kirk Douglas to go out with the bang he’s been straining to achieve all the way through.

    Jan Sterling gives Lorraine a distinctive disgruntled sultriness although the character is one-dimensional.  Porter Hall is very good, at least for as long as Mr Boot’s honourableness is conveyed in a droll register.  Boot’s later switch to more righteous dismay at what Tatum and Herbie are up to, makes him one of the few people in the story presented as acting from motives other than base ones.  The other exceptions include the humble Minosa parents (John Berkes is Papa), the priest (Lester Dorr) who delivers the last rites to Leo, and sundry Native Americans in bit parts:  Billy Wilder’s exemption of these ‘simple’ folk is condescending.  His command of the enlarging scale of the media and other circuses setting up in the New Mexican desert is impressive but only in a technical sense.  The point Wilder is making in Ace in the Hole – it is essentially just the one point – has already been repeated ad nauseam.

    6 September 2016

Posts navigation