Monthly Archives: August 2021

  • Old Acquaintance

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vincent Sherman (1943)

    The play Old Acquaintance was first staged in 1940; its author, John Van Druten, adapted it for the screen three years later, in collaboration with Lenore Coffee and Edmund Goulding.  Decades on, Hollywood film-makers were still drawing on Van Druten’s essential scenario – without acknowledgement in Herbert Ross’s The Turning Point in 1977, more explicitly in Rich and Famous, George Cukor’s last film, in 1981.  You might naturally expect the Golden Age progenitor to be well defined in ways that its successors – products of a less self-confident era of American movie-making – struggled to be.  Not so, at least as far as Old Acquaintance versus The Turning Point is concerned (I haven’t seen Rich and Famous).  The Ross film is no great shakes but at least Arthur Laurents’ spell-everything-out screenplay has the merit of clarity – unlike the script for Vincent Sherman’s picture.

    The action opens in 1924, when Katherine ‘Kit’ Marlowe (Bette Davis), a young New York-based writer, returns in triumph to her home town – the latest stop on a lecture tour, following the publication of her book ‘Bury My Soul’, which has caused quite a stir.  Kit will be staying with Millie (Miriam Hopkins), her best friend from girlhood, who’s now married to Preston Drake (John Loder) and expecting her first baby.  Millie will soon give birth to something else, too.  Although initially excited by the prospect of Kit’s arrival, she’s instantly irked by the adulation her friend receives, and has already taken retaliatory action by writing her own novel.  We never find out much about Kit’s work, except that it’s ‘serious’ stuff that takes time to write and doesn’t sell.  In contrast, Millie churns out romantic fiction at speed and with great commercial success.

    Eight years and as many published novels later, Millie’s husband and even her daughter Deirdre (Francine Rufo) take second place to her career.  The family visits New York for the opening of a play by Kit but the focus is on the accelerating demise of the Drakes’ marriage, and Kit’s increasing closeness to Preston and little DeDe (as her father and Kit call her:  Millie insists on Deirdre).  Preston walks out on Millie and wants to start a new life with Kit but she selflessly says no, out of loyalty to her old friend.  Ten years later, the US has just entered World War II and Kit takes part in a radio broadcast to promote the American Red Cross.  Preston, now an army major, hears the broadcast and gets in touch with her.  By now, Kit has a much younger boyfriend, Rudd Kendall (Gig Young).  On the point of joining up, he wants to marry Kit before he goes off to fight.  She asks for a few days to think the proposal over – time enough for Rudd, miffed by her hesitation, to transfer his affections to the now eighteen-year-old Deirdre (Dolores Moran).

    When she discovers Kit has not only met up with Preston but also invited Deirdre along to the reunion, egomaniacally delusional Millie sees an opportunity for rapprochement with her ex-husband.  She’s horrified that he agrees to see her only in order to request joint custody of their daughter and tell her he has a new fiancée.  Preston also takes the opportunity to inform Millie he was once in love with Kit.  This sends Millie into paroxysms of recrimination:  she tells Deirdre that Kit is a Jezebel; when Kit announces she’s going to marry Rudd, Millie also brands her a cradle-snatcher.  Once she finds out what’s happened between Rudd and Deirdre, Kit also goes into overdrive, though of an altruistic kind, rescuing Deirdre from a rake called Lucian Grant (Phillip Reed).  I can’t remember why, now that she’s Rudd’s preferred choice, Deirdre is in Grant’s clutches.  The men in the story are a dreary bunch (even Gig Young) and it’s obvious when Deirdre’s a little girl that she’ll always be a spoilt brat.  I got increasingly impatient with scenes involving her and the male characters – I couldn’t see why we were expected to be interested in what happened to them.

    A very few minutes into the film, you’re wondering how Kit’s friendship with inane, intensely selfish Millie survived even nursery school – and, for that matter, what attracted dull but civilised Preston to the woman he married.  You spend the rest of Old Acquaintance waiting for an explanation that never arrives – beyond Kit’s response to Preston, when he asks why she puts up with his wife, that Millie’s parents were kind to orphaned Kit when she was growing up.  (The heft of this emotional debt is never again mentioned.)  Once the action has moved to New York for acts two and three, it’s no easier to understand why Kit and Millie, who appear to have nothing in common, live in each other’s pockets.  Deirdre might seem to be the child that Kit has never had but her maternal feelings for the girl are less an expression of parasitic mothering than of a generous sense of responsibility – in the face of Millie’s self-absorption and consequent negligence of her daughter.

    In her mid-thirties when the film was made, Bette Davis is completely convincing as the twenty-something Kit.  Her wit and vibrancy are elating in these early scenes and Davis is entertaining throughout – Old Acquaintance would be a miserable affair without her – but her character makes less and less sense.   Kit – to Millie’s chagrin – becomes a leading light of New York literary society, and a publicly respected figure, but there’s little evidence of either; most of the time, she might as well be Millie’s self-sacrificing, unmarried sister.  Preston and Rudd are the only men in Kit’s life (though it’s hard to see how the latter arrived in it).  I couldn’t buy the received wisdom that Davis’ and Miriam Hopkins’ off-screen enmity gives an edge to the set-tos between Kit and Millie:  Hopkins’ hammy monotony persistently gets in the way.

    Kit’s eventual loss of patience is worth waiting for.  She’s about to take her leave, after an exchange of home truths with Millie, when the latter comes out with a straw-that-breaks-the-camel’s-back remark.  Kit puts down her shopping, walks back across the room; in exasperation, she takes hold of Millie’s shoulders and shakes her vigorously.  Kit then calmly says ‘Sorry’, picks up her shopping and exits.  Davis plays this wonderfully but the moment is powerful largely because what Kit does to Millie is what the viewer wants to do to Miriam Hopkins.  The leading ladies’ last-scene reconciliation – for the sake of and to the strains of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ – feels quite mechanical.   It’s not just that Millie is in no way a reformed character.  There’s never been plausible substance to the women’s enduring friendship – supposedly the heart of the story.

    11 August 2021

  • The Story of a Three-Day Pass

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La permission

    Melvin Van Peebles (1967)

    La permission was one of several novels Melvin Van Peebles wrote in French during his years in France (the 1960s, more or less).  His screen adaptation of La permission appeared the same year the novel was published.  In plot terms, the film is exactly what its title says.  Stylistically, it’s more complicated.

    Turner (Harry Baird) is a Black soldier in the US Army, stationed in France.  Summoned to the office of Captain Lutz (Harold Brav), he’s informed that he’s getting a promotion and a three-day pass for the weekend ahead.  Turner had hoped for the extra stripe; the pass is an unexpected bonus.  He spends the weekend in Paris, where he meets and falls in love with Miriam Duval (Nicole Berger), a white girl who works in a shop and suffers from poor health.  They spend two nights together in a hotel and take a day trip to a beach in Normandy, where three of Turner’s white colleagues from the army base also turn up.   When Turner returns to the base early on Monday morning, Lutz strips him of his promotion and confines him to barracks – for what the senior officer terms a betrayal of trust.  Turner’s punishment ends when a Black female gospel choir, on a European tour, calls in at the base and Lutz wants someone to show them round.   Turner eagerly takes advantage of his restored freedom to run to a phone box and call Nicole.  A male voice on the other end of the line tells him Nicole isn’t there and that she’s sick.  The film ends where and how it began, with a freeze frame of Corporal Turner on his dormitory bed.

    The BFI handout introduced the screening as ‘part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour’ and comprised a New Yorker piece from June 2020 by Richard Brody, whose view that this is ‘among the great American films of the sixties’ was also quoted in this month’s BFI programme brochure.  I know Brody’s writing well enough not to take such a judgment too seriously but I was keen to watch The Story of a Three-Day Pass, of which I’d never heard, and I’m glad to have seen it.  I don’t really get it, though.  Made in black and white, the picture is evidently influenced by the visual techniques of the French New Wave (freeze frames aren’t the only means used to interrupt the narrative, often to disorienting effect).  Richard Brody is a connoisseur of Godard, Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, which may partly explain his enthusiasm for Van Peebles’ movie, as well as his confidence in reading it.  Here’s an example of the latter.  Describing the fantasy sequences which occur as Turner and Miriam prepare to sleep together for the first time, Brody writes:

    ‘Turner’s [fantasy] is of himself as a velvet-cloaked and lace-bedecked aristocrat, sipping wine by the fire and approaching his lady fair on her canopied bed; whereas Miriam’s fantasy is of being captured in the wild by grass-skirted, spear-bearing, pelt-wearing black men and rescued by a similarly garbed and styled Turner.’

    I don’t see how Brody knows to whom these fantasies belong (assuming, though this too seems arguable, they belong to any individual character and aren’t, rather, ironic conceits on Van Peebles’ part).  Couldn’t Turner’s fantasy just as likely be Miriam’s and vice versa, especially given the attitudes they both express in a relatively realistic episode in the film?  The lovers go to a club where the performers are Spanish.  The emcee, noticing the couple, refers to them humorously as ‘Señorita Big Eyes and Señor Blackie’.  Turner is infuriated, a fight breaks out in the club and he’s thrown out.  Trying to calm him, Miriam tells the still angry Turner the emcee didn’t intend a racist slur.   She goes on to say something along the lines that people are just people and racial difference doesn’t matter.  Why, then, would she fantasise about being at the mercy of African tribesmen?  There’s nothing else in the story to suggest that white girl speaks with forked tongue.  Mightn’t it be Turner, sensitive to whites seeing Black men as ‘savages’, who imagines himself exceptional?

    Miriam’s remarks outside the club anticipate her wishful thinking later in the film.  As soon as his fellow soldiers see her with him on the beach, Turner fears the worst.  Miriam assures him the other men won’t tell tales at the base; later, she says that, even if they do, she’s sure Captain Lutz won’t reprimand Turner.  Miriam’s whiteness consistently blinds her to the racial implications of which Turner, for all that he’s mostly genial, is all too well aware.  That awareness is regularly expressed by his looking in the mirror where his reflection talks back to him.  At the start, as he excitedly prepares for his interview with Lutz, this alter ego tells Turner that, if he is to be promoted, it’s because ‘You are the captain’s new good colored boy, you are the captain’s Uncle Tom, baby!’   After Miriam has sought to allay his concerns about Lutz’s reaction to what he’s told by the other soldiers, the mirror image smiles, ‘I’m not so sure’.

    The exchanges between Turner and his reflection are Van Peebles’ strongest device (and Harry Baird does his best acting in them).  With the help of the cinematographer Michel Kelber, Van Peebles also offers a distinctive picture of Paris, thanks to the mostly unlovely people and places Turner encounters before Miriam – a suspicious bookseller, a sparse strip-show audience, a deserted, windswept park, and so on.  There are memorable moments.  In a club, Turner gazes at a white woman (not Miriam) before imagining himself moving in slow motion towards her:  the white clientele on the dance floor parts, Red Sea-like, on either side of him.  But I couldn’t make sense of why, on arrival in Paris, he changes out of his military uniform into trenchcoat and fedora, and wears shades – the get-up doesn’t appear to correspond to either his self-image or his idea of how others see him.  Turner’s perceptions and experience of racism gradually eclipse the ingenious style(s) of The Story of a Three-Day Pass, reducing its technical highlights to just that.  Although this film doesn’t look like a conventional inter-racial drama of the time, it increasingly feels like one.

    The piece is emphatically unrealistic, though – not only visually but also in the plotting and the supporting performances.  The three white soldiers happen to make their way to a beach that’s totally deserted except for Turner and Miriam; the gospel choir chooses a US army base as a port of call.  The overplaying of Harold Brav as Lutz and Tria French’s Mrs Abernathy, the first lady of the gospel choir, is intensified by Van Peebles shooting them in tight close-up.  (Lutz, when he’s talking to Turner, speaks to camera.)  In the lead roles, imposingly handsome Harry Baird and fragile, unassuming Nicole Berger are complementary and charming presences, evem though they’re required to indulge in an awful lot of unnatural laughter.  Still, the love scenes between Turner and Miriam are beguilingly shot and carry a real erotic charge.  Their unhappily short-lived romance is given extra meaning, sad to say, by the real-life fates of the actors.  Nicole Berger was killed in a car crash even before the film was released.  Harry Baird, after losing his sight, retired from acting in the mid-1970s.

    Richard Brody rightly notes that ‘Reality overtook the movie’ in other ways, too.   When it premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival in October 1967, there were no longer any US troops stationed in France – the result of Charles de Gaulle’s edict of March 1966.  By the time the film opened in American cinemas in mid-June 1968, de Gaulle was still in the Élysée Palace only by the skin of his teeth.   In light of May 68 and the protests still taking place the following month, the surprisingly empty streets of Paris in The Story of a Three-Day Pass must have looked very strange to audiences coming to the cinema straight from watching television news.

    10 August 2021

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