Monthly Archives: June 2019

  • The Little Foxes

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wyler (1941)

    Lillian Hellman’s narrowly negative approach is limiting but William Wyler’s expert direction and the mostly good performances make for an entertaining drama.   Hellman’s play The Little Foxes had been a big Broadway success in 1939-40 and she wrote the screenplay for the Hollywood version, produced by Sam Goldwyn, the following year.  (Hellman’s ex-husband Arthur Kober, Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell also get writing credits.)  Condemnation of the central characters is evident from the opening titles.  These explain:  the piece’s name, inspired by a verse in the Song of Solomon (‘Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines:  for our vines have tender grapes’); that there have been ‘little foxes’ throughout human history; that these particular vulpines lived in the American South in the year 1900.  They are the Hubbard family, greedy and unscrupulous capitalists.

    The Hubbard siblings – Ben (Charles Dingle), Oscar (Carl Benton Reid) and their younger sister Regina (Bette Davis) – represent the incipient industralisation of the South and new money that has married into old.  Oscar’s wife is Birdie (Patricia Collinge), whose father was a plantation owner.  Regina’s husband Horace Giddens (Herbert Marshall) is the wealthy scion of a similar ‘good family’.   (Both marriages are mutually loveless.)  Compared with the rapacious, arriviste Hubbards, the older order is in decline – as reflected in Birdie’s and Horace’s particular maladies.  She, incontinently nostalgic for the paradise of her antebellum youth, at first seems neurasthenic, is later revealed to be an alcoholic.  He is suffering from premature heart failure.  The plot revolves around the attempts of Ben and Oscar to build a cotton mill, in partnership with a Chicago-based businessman (Russell Hicks).  In order to seal the deal, the brothers need Horace to invest in the project too.  At the start of the film, he’s in Baltimore receiving medical treatment.  When he returns home, his prevarication threatens the Hubbards’ plans.

    Lillian Hellman’s political sympathies yield some benefits.  Regina, lacking her brothers’ independent wealth and freedom, is presented as in part a frustrated victim of a system of patrilineal inheritance.  One or two of the African-American characters prove less inanely content with serving their white masters than was par for the course in 1940s Hollywood (or than seems likely in the early scenes of this film).  But Hellman’s antipathy to her baddies is so strong that she won’t allow them, with the qualified exception of Regina, to be challenging or even to be colourful monsters.  Ben sparks only occasionally, animated by the pleasure of competition with Regina to be the nastiest member of the family.  Oscar is more dimly and repetitively obnoxious.  His son Leo (Dan Duryea) is such a fool that he mostly fails even to be objectionable.  All three of the actors concerned had played the roles on Broadway but these don’t come across as characterisations that are stagy or stale.  Although Duryea overacts, the essential problem in each case is in the reductive writing of the character.

    To get the $75,000 needed for the cotton mill, Oscar first proposes that Leo marry Regina’s daughter Alexandra (Teresa Wright), who is horrified by the idea and not only because she’s attracted to David Hewitt (Richard Carlson), a journalist on a local newspaper, whose mother (Virginia Brissac) is Regina’s dressmaker.  Plan B is to pressure Leo, who works at the bank which holds Horace’s monies and investments, to steal from the $90,000 of Union Pacific railroad bonds contained in Horace’s personal security box.  The deed is done and the mill project can proceed but Horace discovers what has happened and, shortly before he dies, tells Regina.  By the closing stages, Hellman has tied the villains of the piece in knots.  Regina blackmails her brothers into giving her 75% ownership of the mill business in exchange for her silence.  Ben, suspicious of the circumstances of Horace’s death, threatens to blackmail Regina in return.  Alexandra, appalled by what she has discovered about her mother and uncles, elopes with David.  Regina, now independently rich but completely alone, is terrified by her new situation.  Since there’s been no reason to think she’s emotionally dependent on anyone else, this comeuppance would be unconvincing, if not for Bette Davis.

    Regina Hubbard Giddens is recognised as one of Davis’s outstanding bitches (The Little Foxes is showing at BFI as part of their ‘Playing the Bitch’ season) yet in some ways it’s an uncharacteristic performance.  Tallulah Bankhead had played Regina on stage, to great acclaim, and Davis was supposedly reluctant to take on the role.  She and Wyler got on well when he directed her in Jezebel (1938), much less well on The Letter (1940) and even worse on The Little Foxes.   It’s possible that the uneasy quality that comes through in her portrait of Regina is Davis’s own but it’s one of the elements that make the portrait finally effective.   From an early stage, Davis is particularly striking in shots that show Regina’s face worried or uncertain.  We see hints not only of her dissatisfaction but also of her feelings of isolation in gestural and vocal details that seem incidental while the character’s malignity is salient but which give her final outbreak of fearfulness some kind of grounding.

    Although she delivers her callous putdowns with flair, Davis isn’t as exuberantly outrageous as might be expected.  The gracious hypocrite charm the character can switch on and off is a shade too perfunctory.  Davis’s Regina is notorious largely because of a single, chilling sequence – in which Horace has a heart attack, desperately asks his wife to fetch his medicine from upstairs and she doesn’t move a muscle.  Wyler and the cinematographer Gregg Toland keep the camera on Regina’s face with Horace relegated to the background, as he stumbles towards and collapses on the staircase.  Otherwise, one of the most remarkable features of Davis’s playing is a sense of exhaustion suppressed with increasing difficulty.  Regina seems to become fed up even of being appalling.

    Herbert Marshall underplays most effectively.  His barely disguised Englishness helps reinforce the idea of Horace belonging to a different social order, almost a different race.  Marshall’s restraint expresses the character’s and his class’s effeteness.  Patricia Collinge (also reprising a role that she’d played on stage) complements Marshall by engaging ardently and affectingly with the desperately chattering Birdie whose husband speaks to her only to shut her up.  On one occasion, he dispenses with words and hits her instead.  Collinge is powerful as she admits, with a mixture of shock and determined candour, that she dislikes her son even more than she does Oscar.  Once Birdie has had her big scene – informing a gathering of the decent characters that she’s been drowning her sorrows for years – the film jettisons her.

    Teresa Wright, making her screen debut as Alexandra, gives a taste of what was to come in later films, including later Wyler films (Mrs Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives).   Wright is a very able actress and a reliably irritating one.  She conveys Alexandra’s petulance and entitlement well enough but her pained sincerity is effortful.   The principal black house staff are Cal (John Marriott) and Addie (Jessie Grayson).  Marriott, who had played Cal on Broadway, is the more nuanced; Grayson has pep but she’s mechanical.  The young, liberal, extrovert David Hewitt was an invention for the film – a means of introducing a romantic element and reducing the deficit of nice people in the story.  It’s in devising such a character, for such preconceived reasons, that the screenwriters’ talent comes through.   Thanks also to Richard Carlson’s relaxed, likeable presence and ability to make David’s occasional incisive lines count, the result is genuinely appealing.

    2 June 2019

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stanley Kubrick (1968)

    2001: A Space Odyssey was pivotal in Stanley Kubrick’s career – his first years-in-the-making, self-conscious masterwork – and is widely regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time.  In the most recent Sight & Sound decennial polls in 2012, it placed sixth among critics and joint second among directors canvassed.  2001 is even more widely regarded as the outstanding science fiction film.  A few Christmases ago, we went to our next door neighbours’ drinks party and got into conversation with another couple about films and what genres we liked most and least.  When I said I didn’t often like sci-fi, the next question was, ‘Not even 2001?’, which the man in the couple praised as ‘real philosophy’.  I can’t remember what I answered but the honest answer would also have been ‘I can’t remember’.

    I’d seen the film only once, as a student in Leeds, around 1978.  I did recall it as very long, though, and was pleasantly surprised, when this month’s BFI brochure arrived, to discover it’s not such a marathon – a few minutes under two-and-a-half hours.  I decided to give 2001 a second go.  It’s been the subject of graduate dissertations and doctoral theses, as well as countless critical analyses and think-pieces.  As I still can’t summon up a lot of interest in the film, this note won’t be more than a few, sometimes non-conformist observations.  As countless people have seen 2001 many times, I won’t bother including any kind of plot synopsis.

    Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke developed 2001: A Space Odyssey as a novel in parallel to their co-authored screenplay.  (The source material for both is Clarke’s short story The Sentinel.)  At this distance in time, the film is more impressive in anticipating the lunar iconography that the later Apollo space flights etc would soon make familiar than as a prediction of space exploration at the turn of the millennium.  But 2001’s cachet, like that of George Orwell’s 1984, exempts it, in spite of the date-specific title, from adverse criticism on the grounds of inaccurate prophecy.

    It’s worth comparing the very opening with that of Kubrick’s next work, A Clockwork Orange (1971).   Both are launched by a piece of classical music that compels attention.  Whereas Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary is almost immediately ambiguous and ominous, thanks to electronic distortion and what appears on the screen, Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, accompanying an image of the sun gradually rising above the earth and the moon, is unequivocal.  It announces a Very Important Picture.  Whatever one thinks of 2001, there’s no denying that the VIP tone established in these first moments is sustained throughout the film – and that the means of sustaining it is Kubrick’s exceptional technical skill.

    His ingenious image-making and fanatical attention to both the concept and the detail of a production are a main reason why so many have been convinced that 2001 is a work of intellectual depth and imagination.  Besides, the narrative involves major questions.  The first of its four ‘acts’ is entitled ‘The Dawn of Man’, the last ‘Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite’.  Kubrick is interested – upfront – in human evolution and aggression, artificial intelligence, our place in the universe, the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  The movie is visually and sonically formidable (the cinematography is by Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott, the sound editing by Winston Ryder).  The vehicles and sets whose design and building Kubrick supervised are a major feat of engineering.  The film wears its important themes on its sleeve.  It must be a thoroughly big deal.

    BFI used as its handout not a contemporary review or an interview with Kubrick but thoughts on the film, after seeing it on its original release, from Margaret Stackhouse, a fifteen-year-old New Jersey student.  Her teacher sent Margaret’s notes to Kubrick and he replied:

    ‘Margaret Stackhouse’s speculations on the film are perhaps the most intelligent that I’ve read anywhere, and I am, of course, including all the reviews and the articles that have appeared on the film and many hundreds of letters that I have received.  What a first-rate intelligence!’

    Thanks to their author’s youth, Margaret Stackhouse’s speculations (available online) do make absorbing reading but the register of Kubrick’s reaction to them is instructive too.  His closing exclamation is the voice of the schoolmaster concluding a glowing report on one of his brightest students.  It’s tempting to think that this kind of searching, diligent appreciation is what Kubrick expected of his audience more generally.  He must surely have been delighted that 2001 has spawned so many solemn interpretations.

    It’s harder to decide if he was similarly pleased for the film to be embraced as ‘the ultimate trip movie’.  (Kubrick excised almost entirely from his version of A Clockwork Orange the drug-taking in Anthony Burgess’s novel.)   It’s a nice irony that the psychedelic visuals produced such a powerful connection between control-freak Kubrick and the late 1960s counterculture – a marriage made not in heaven but in Star Gate.  One of the film’s most notable creative consequences was David Bowie’s 1969 song ‘Space Oddity’.  As Bowie told Classic Rock in 2012:

    ‘It was the sense of isolation [in 2001] I related to.  I found the whole thing amazing.  I was out of my gourd, very stoned when I went to see it – several times – and it was really a revelation to me. It got the song flowing.’

    Unlike me, the two friends whose judgments I most feared as a teenager saw 2001 while we were still at grammar school.  I remember one of them, Andrew, contemptuously describing the reactions of other kids in the audience he was part of – in particular, how some girls giggled when the ape realised, in momentous slow motion, how to use a bone as a weapon.  I probably still wouldn’t dare tell Andrew but I also can see the funny side of this ‘classic’ moment.  Kubrick (according to Wikipedia),  made Daniel Richter, the mime artist who plays the leading apeman, ‘largely responsible for choreographing the “Dawn of Man” sequence, believing Richter could take the film away from Hollywood clichés of men in monkey suits’.  But men in monkey suits are definitely what these creatures are.  There was audible amusement in the NFT1 audience too but the cause of this was the sinister calm of the voice of HAL (supplied by Douglas Rain), the spacecraft computer.  HAL certainly becomes a major character in 2001 but it needs to be said that, even before ‘his’ behaviour becomes erratic, there’s negligible human competition.

    The actors are so blank and toneless that people who saw the film in 1968 could be forgiven for wondering if this was one more element that had to ‘mean’ something (those familiar with later Kubrick may recognise the bad acting as a sign of things to come).   A scene in which the US government scientist Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) meets with Soviet boffins illustrates the point.  Floyd is making a stopover en route to a US lunar outpost where a mysterious virus has supposedly broken out.  The Soviets ask questions about the epidemic; Floyd woodenly deflects the questions; except when they have a line to deliver, the other actors (who include Leonard Rossiter and Margaret Tyzack) might be in suspended animation throughout the exchange.  Keir Dullea, as the main astronaut Dave Bowman, is vocally much less expressive than HAL in the dialogues between them.  Dullea’s better, though, when he doesn’t have to speak – notably in Bowman’s facial reactions, after leaving his craft on Jupiter to investigate the Monolith orbiting the planet, as his pod is drawn into the Star Gate vortex.

    In the concluding scene, Bowman finds himself in a chamber with decor both baroque and clinical, where he ages from a middle-aged version of himself, still in his spacesuit, into an older man in a dressing gown and finally an ancient figure lying in bed.  The Monolith that has made regular appearances since the ‘Dawn of Man’ is at the foot of the bed and Bowman, as he reaches towards it, is transformed into the Star Child foetus that forms 2001‘s final image.   Margaret Stackhouse speculates that the ageing process may ‘represent the various stages in the life of one man or of all men’.   Surely the latter:  Kubrick shows no interest in humans individually, only in humankind.

    The Star Gate sequence is doubly remarkable.  The pace of  the apemen introduction is brisk enough but most of what follows in 2001 is of a magisterial slowness, including the famously ‘humorous’ space-station docking, scored to Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz.  The tempo, perforce, speeds up as Bowman ‘races across vast distances of space, viewing bizarre cosmological phenomena and strange landscapes of unusual colors’.  Those words (of Wikipedia) hint at what else is remarkable here.  High-class special effects illustrating out-of-this-world experience can make you wonder in more ways than one.  You feel admiration and amazement.  You also wonder whether, if such experiences were actually possible, the real thing could beat the cinematically imagined version.  Stanley Kubrick has been described by many (and condemned by some) as a ‘God-like’ director and in the bravura son et lumière display of Star Gate, he seems to take the comparison almost literally.  The wonderment this viewer felt, though, was for Kubrick’s technical command and nothing more.  I don’t find 2001 either moving or thought-provoking.  I’m glad I’ve seen it again but only in a mission accomplished sort of way.

    29 May 2019

     

     

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