Pic pick: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Walking with Frances Farmer: of bad girls and good dogs

Today I walked Kai near the house here in West Seattle where Frances Farmer used to live. I've done that a number of times and didn't realize it until about an hour ago, when this commemorative post by Kim Morgan (a former DVD Journal colleague) informed me that

"the bad girl of West Seattle," the troubled non-conformist, the short lived Hollywood star who rarely censored her thoughts

died 40 years ago this past Sunday. Kim's fine remembrance jogged my memory that, oh yeah, Farmer used to live not far from where I'm typing now. Thirty seconds of Googling later, I've made it a point to give the house a particular notice and a nod next time Kai and I stroll by.

It's a good neighborhood for dog-walking and — thanks to the bar named Shadowland after one of her biographies — raising a glass to "the freak from West Seattle."

For more, here's a 2008 post from WestSeattleBlog.

Scenes I love: Charlie Chaplin's science fiction movie (from "Modern Times")

Although you won't find it referenced in the Overlook Film Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the first segment of Charlie Chaplin's 1936 feature Modern Times gives us a tidy little science fiction allegory, one worthy of Kurt Vonnegut, that's a self-contained short film all by itself.

You could always recognize "a Chaplin film," but the man rarely allowed his work to succumb to cookie-cutter sameness. Here we can see a difference right from the get-go, with the introductory card that reads: "'Modern Times'. A story of industry, of individual enterprise ~ humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness." What we have is not just a story about a funny little man, but a morality fable, or cautionary tale, about people on the chuckholed road to the American Dream.

Created almost a full decade after the beginning of movie sound technology yet exhibiting its director's belief that movies didn't need dialogue to communicate effectively, Modern Times was Chaplin's final film to star the Little Tramp, and the difference between this Tramp and his formative years in the earlier classic shorts and features (1914-31) is worth noting.

Back then he was a little fellow alone in a nascent society of other immigrants and vagabonds and petty miscreants. Now in Modern Times he is billed as "a factory worker," and he doesn't exchange his work overalls for the familiar Tramp outfit until almost twenty minutes have passed. In earlier films the Tramp was an underdog up against the authorities or a unibrowed bully or the Alaskan frontier. Now he's a more emblematic Everyman, and his antagonist is society itself. The enemy is named in the movie's title.

The factory setting is a metal-enclosed world where men are nameless collective components in an immense machine. We never know what it is that "Electro Steel Corp." produces. All we need to know is that the Tramp is an assembly line drone in "Section 5," and his job is to tighten bolt after bolt on identical metal widgets whizzing by before him on a high-speed conveyor belt.

And wow — what a stylized look at the Machine Age this is! Our modern times are memorably represented in gargantuan dynamos that could have blazed from the cover of Amazing Stories magazine. The factory's boss — when he's not playing with puzzles or reading comic strips — observes the workers via giant two-way video screens. (The sparking Jacob's Ladder alongside his screen is a nice Frankenstein touch.) The Tramp can't even take a break for a smoke in the washroom without his sour-faced boss' wall-sized Big Brother mug (pre-Orwell, mind you) appearing and barking orders to get back to work. When the boss picks up a newspaper, we can imagine him reading about that nasty business involving the scientist Rotwang across the sea in the German super-city of Metropolis.

Al Ernest Garcia, uncredited, played the President of Electro Steel Corp. His film career dated back to 1911. In 1928 Chaplin gave him a credited role as the Ring Master in The Circus. He also appeared in City Lights, The Gold Rush, and a few of Chaplin's earlier shorts. This was one of his last films.

It isn't long before the Tramp has tightened so many bolts that when he walks away from the assembly line his body keeps up the herky-jerky robotic movements it has become conditioned to. The machine has infected the man, and we laugh while we get the message rising from the humor.

Or take the "Billows Feeding Machine" sequence. Thanks to a mechanical salesman that speaks via a phonograph record (with one significant exception near the end of the film, all human voices in Modern Times speak only through machines), the boss tests a new contraption designed to increase efficiency by eliminating a worker's lunch hour. The feeding machine is a chrome monstrosity, all jointed metal arms and servos, like something that would come crashing through the walls of a robot dentist's office. The recording exhorts us to admire "its beautiful, aerodynamic, streamlined body, its smoothness of action, made silent by our electro-porous metal ball bearing," and so on with all the language-abusing manipulations of modern product marketing copy.

The Tramp is conscripted to test the device, and one of Chaplin's most inspired scenes arrives when the gizmo goes haywire with the Tramp trapped like a torture victim by mechanical arms shoveling food into his mouth or onto his face, while the automatic "sterilized mouth wiper" keeps dutifully patting his mouth until, berserk, it whacks bang-bang-bang his besmeared face. What's the boss' opinion after he's witnessed his employee abused in such an undignified fashion? "It isn't practical."

Soon we come one of Chaplin's indelible images. It's the crazed Tramp being drawn into The Machine, where he's threaded through giant cogwheels, stopping only to blithely tighten another pair of bolts.

Right there Chaplin's genius hands us an ageless visual metaphor, one that any 21st Century employee who has clipped a Dilbert cartoon will greet with a knowing smile. Chaplin almost certainly planted a personal message of his own in those gears that grab and digest the Tramp: They look suspiciously like the threading path of a motion picture camera. The Tramp, a creation of pantomime in a medium that by '36 was all about sound, is overtaken by mechanization. After Modern Times he is never seen again.

Driven to the brink by it all, our bedeviled factory worker goes stark raving nuts. Like a man hypnotized, he wields his wrenches like weapons, tightening everything, such as the buttons on the back of a secretary's dress, before chasing after a bosomy matron with her own pair of ill-placed fashionable "bolts."

Fortunately, with insanity comes freedom. Released from his machine-like life, the Tramp dances and twirls in giddy drunken glee. Instead of robot-like repetition, his movements are now balletic, spontaneous, human. Wearing an enraptured — enlightened? — smile, he traipses about sabotaging the machinery and his fellow drones until he's captured and sent to a hospital to be "cured."

This is Chaplin's rage against the machine. In lesser hands, such industrial strength social commentary would be a blunt-object diatribe like H.G. Wells' Things to Come, released the same year. But this is Chaplin, so even pointing a lens at the soul-eating inhumanity of the workplace gives us a comic parable. Unlike Wells' technofetish polemic, Modern Times remains fresh for the 21st Century by living up to its title.

The YouTube clip below deletes the Billows Feeding Machine segment (replacing it with an intertitle card at the 4:38 mark), but otherwise the factory sequence is intact:



In this YouTube clip, the Billows Feeding Machine sequence starts just after the 3:00 mark. Unfortunately the clip ends before the sequence's wham-bam climax, and (at the time I write this) the follow-up clip has been deleted from YouTube:




There's plenty more to Modern Times, of course. After the factory worker is sent to the hospital, Chaplin abandons the "science fiction" scenario to follow the Tramp, now back in his famous too-tight jacket and baggy pants, into the outside "real" world. It's a world of hunger, political inequality, and good people getting by as best they can against powerful oppressive forces. The episodic structure uses comedy to pin down like beetles other contemporary topics much on Chaplin's mind. His takes on unemployment, poverty, drugs, strikes, strike-busting, and riots still pack a wallop of modern currency.

But it's the factory sequence that Modern Times is most remembered for, and you don't have to be a hardcore Chaplin fan to recognize "the one with the guy in the gears."

By employing science-fiction-like motifs (not that he'd use that term) to point an observant finger at the rumbling age of mechanized industrialization, Chaplin wasn't inventing allegorical musings out of whole cloth. Instead he was elevating and popularizing themes that had already been bubbling up in films and literature during the anxiety-making cultural and technological changes of the 1920s and 1930s.

As early as 1909, E.M. Forster's story "The Machine Stops" depicted a future of mechanized isolation that presages our current Internet age. Fritz Lang's slaves-to-the-machines fable Metropolis was nine years old by '36.

Assembly-line humanity features starkly in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World (1931), which opens in the "year of our Ford 632." 1931 also saw the issue of Modern Mechanics that asked "Is Man Doomed by the Machine Age?" ("Yet the present era of industrial depression, with millions of men thrown out of work—as some maintain, because machines have taken their places, working swifter and cheaper—has seen a renewal of the outcry against machinery.")

From Modern Mechanics and Inventions, March 1931

From the San Antonio Light, April 2, 1939

A German film from '34, Master of the World, features malevolent industrial robots and war machines threatening human labor and lives. H.G. Wells' own screenplay to 1936's Things to Come, which I've already mentioned, presents a civilization destroyed by machines of war and then revived by machines of creation and prosperity.

Later movies, such as the 1951 English serio-comedy The Man in the White Suit, use science fictional elements as a means for social or topical commentary in ways that Chaplin would, I think, applaud.

Probably reflecting the mood of our (modern) times, dire dystopian science fiction is on the rise again, both in the movies and on the book shelves. Yet as far as I can see, there's not a modern Chaplin out there saying that if this really is a Brave New World, we might as well go ahead and laugh at it. On second thought, there's Jon Stewart. That's good enough for me.

(From here on I'm simply giving myself an excuse to post pictures of Paulette Goddard from the film, as if I really need a reason beyond the obvious.)

There's a lot I love about Modern Times. Its lack of a strong narrative spine isn't one of them. Long-form story structure was not one of Chaplin's gifts, and Modern Times is almost cripplingly modular, not a single full-bodied story as much as a linked string of self-contained one- or two-reel shorts.

But running through the heart of it all is a love story between the Tramp and the "gamin," a "child of the waterfront, who refuses to go hungry." We meet her stealing bananas from a shipyard loading dock, tossing the food up to a gaggle of hungry street urchins. She is spirited and vivacious, almost feral. Alternately wild and coquettish, she sports the haughty swagger of a Robin Hood outlaw, then sweetly looks after her father ("one of the unemployed") and her two young sisters.

She's played by Paulette Goddard, one of the great classic Hollywood beauties (and eventually the best ex-Mrs. Chaplin).

Goddard was Chaplin's third wife, and is handily the loveliest and liveliest of his leading ladies. Today, after the better part of a century, her gamin is among the sexiest of ingenues — how many of the Tramp's other love interests first appear onscreen in a short rag dress and with a knife in their teeth?

After the gamin's father is gunned down in a labor riot, she's an orphan who prefers life on the lam to imprisonment in the hands of social workers who, like the police, are depicted as thuggish Authority types. The Tramp is also having his dustups with The Law. It feels inevitable when at last he introduces himself to the lovely, bedraggled young woman by offering her his seat in their shared police wagon.

Unlike previous women the Tramp has fallen for, the gamin is given equal status carrying the movie. The Tramp loves a girl who loves him back. Finally he has a partner. Chaplin called the duo "the only two live spirits in a world of automatons." They're jailbreakers who have busted out of the Establishment and are on the run for their own freedom.

For the rest of the movie they are companions, even sharing a tumbledown shanty together. Chaste? Yes, but Modern Times differs from its predecessors by giving the Tramp someone to share his story with. Neither character is subordinate to the other. Chaplin's message was good enough for Casablanca six years later: In this crazy, mixed up world sometimes all we've got is each other.

Near the end of the film, the Tramp and the gamin have finally found their place, and the former factory worker's humanity, in an environment that couldn't be more distinct from the mechanized hive where he began — performing before an appreciative audience. Although the scene is set in a restaurant where the Tramp and the gamin are employed, there's little need to wonder how much autobiography Chaplin was letting slip through here.

Happiness doesn't last, however, and before long the two vagabonds are forced back onto the open road for one of cinema's most wistful exits. Despairing alongside a country road, the gamin sobs, "What's the use of trying?" The Tramp — once again the scruffy no-surrender optimist the world had watched for an entire generation — urges her to "Buck up. Never say die. We'll get along!" Then he reminds her how to put a smile on her face. She agrees, and the spark returns to her eyes.

In Chaplin's best-remembered fade-out, the two tramps set off hand in hand down the dusty road toward a mountainous horizon, silhouetted against a welcoming sunrise. Two survivors, resolute and no longer alone, with the totality of their worldly possessions tied up in kerchief bundles, walk away toward an unknown, but also unprescribed and unmechanized, future.

If you don't think that last shot is a lump-in-the-throater, there's no hope for you.

Music: Muddy Waters, "The Blues Had a Baby and They Named it Rock and Roll"
Near at hand: Framed photo of "Shakespeare and Co." bookshop.

Inception — Scrooge McDuck & The Beagle Boys dreamed it up first

Click to embiggen.

Via Videogum and IWatchStuff.

Alternate universe movies: "The Empire" — an imaginary Saul Bass film trailer

I always enjoy some classic Saul Bass graphics (see Saul Bass on the Web). The Empire (2009) is a short animated homage to Bass's distinctive design style, in the form of an imaginary film trailer. It was created by a group of designers: Peter Arcara, Colin Hesterly, Jacob Smeraglia, and Justin Demetrician.

What a cast! And its producer and director — whoa!


The Empire from Colin Hesterly on Vimeo.

Via Roger Ebert.

Louis (2010) — Blow that horn, young Satchmo

www.louisthemovie.com

Directed by Dan Pritzker. Starring Jackie Earle Haley, Shanti Lowry and Anthony Coleman. Shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond as a modern re-imagining of early silent film, Louis is an homage to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Chaplin, beautiful women and the birth of American music. The grand Storyville bordellos, alleys and cemeteries of 1907 New Orleans provide a backdrop of lust, blood and magic for 6-year-old Louis (Anthony Coleman) as he navigates the colorful intricacies of life in the city.



The film will premiere in five US cities in late August with live music provided by Wynton Marsalis, along with pianist Cecile Licad and a 10-piece all-star jazz ensemble.

For more information, go here: "Louis" a Silent Movie with Live Accompaniment by Wynton and Jazz Ensemble to Premiere in August with a US Tour

Note: Louis is a companion piece to Dan Pritzker's feature film Bolden, a mythical account of the life of Buddy Bolden, the first Cornet King of New Orleans and starring Anthony Mackie (The Hurt Locker) Wendell Pierce and Lowry. Bolden is set for release in 2011.

Via Roger Ebert

Bugs Bunny: 70 years old and only one gray hare

Here's a bushel of carrots saying Happy 70th Birthday to Bugs Bunny, whose screen debut in the Warner Brothers animated short "A Wild Hare" occurred on July 27, 1940. Tex Avery directed.

I base my life on his teachings.



Also appearing for the first time on 7/27/40: the Billboard song charts.

The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966) — It's a Vlad, Vlad, Vlad, Vlad world

Ah, the good old days of the Cold War. Even though the planet's two most powerful adversaries threatened to bring everyone to nuclear annihilation, from our perspective today those sure look like simpler, purer times. At least it's difficult to imagine today's international tensions being lampooned by a dozen familiar character actors in a middlebrow comedy about enemy soldiers accidentally stranded in an apple-pie American town.

Then again, already this summer we had those strange few weeks in the news, something about deep-cover Russian spies out to make big trouble for Moose and Squirrel in suburban humdrum America. Of course, the news cycle boosted the made-for-reality-TV cuteness of Anna Chapman (rather, "Anna Chapman"), who's now back in Mother Russia where her Clairol Girl features accompanied her inherent ugliness in a hero's welcome. Still, if Firefly/Serenity's Jewel Staite plays her in the inevitable TV movie, maybe a greater international good has been served.

Meanwhile, the self-replicating crazy-makers drill their wells even deeper by telling us that foreign Islamist terrorists are sneaking into Real America by collaborating with Mexican drug cartels, as if we're being urged to imagine Blofeld and SPECTRE teaming up with Al Pacino's Tony Montana, probably with a bit of Grand Theft Auto thrown in for extra excitement.

And jeez, Edith, we just watched, eyes rolling, the Breitbart-Sherrod controversy. Because the universe has a keen sense of irony, that little imbroglio arrived gasoline-hosed by the Fox News Birth(ers) of a Nation Power Hour during recognition of To Kill a Mockingbird's 50th anniversary. Plus, hordes of invading American Muslims, like dirty Commies in the days of yore, apparently need to be refudiated here in the land of the free. Oh, and look — it's becoming clear that Vietnam more and more shares a big, porous border with Afghanistan (see History, doomed to repeat it).

I wonder: Will the big take-away from the year 2010 be how often we've looked back to the 1960s and sighed heavily? The times they are rewindin'? Perhaps we can find comfort in the apostle Paul, who was there too and once wrote:

Paranoia strikes deep in the heartland,
But I think it's all overdone.
Exaggerating this and exaggerating that,
They don't have no fun.

These are, as Shakespeare might put it, tragical-comical-historical times, and you can decide for yourself what order those words should come in.

It can be instructive, or at least perspective-adjusting, or maybe just amusing, to let movies take us back in time a few decades to see that the more things change, the more some people, well, not so much. (Yeah, I know: I similarly hobbyhorsed Mockingbird and Blazing Saddles recently too. I'm like a dog with a bone that way.)

Therein lies my urge to revisit 1966's The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.

This is one I caught on Sunday afternoon TV quite often as a '70s kid, and even then I knew I was watching something from some vague "before" time. Still, I remember finding it humorous and fun. Every time I see Alan Arkin in anything, which isn't often enough these days, I flash back to enjoying him first here in the role that made the erstwhile Second City alum and Broadway actor a movie star. Indeed, Arkin, as the hapless lieutenant charged with getting his beached crewmates back home safe and sound — and spouting authentic Russian learned for the film — is worth the viewing all by himself. And back then, with my nascent critical eye, I could tell that this was a well-made piece of funny business; at least in my memories it has maintained a good-looking, A-list production gloss.

But does it hold up today, 44 years later? Like two others from 1966 I've written about here, Our Man Flint and Fantastic Voyage, the answer is a qualified yes, though this one — in its spoofing of stepping-on-rakes paranoia and "there be foreigners!" saber-rattling — is more tuned to the phobias of our times.



After a Soviet submarine runs aground near a Norman Rockwell New England coastal village, nine sailors (led by Arkin) venture ashore ("we are of course Norwegians") to quietly borrow a motor boat for a tug back to sea.

Naturally, it isn't long before misunderstandings on both sides escalate the incident and the "Russian invasion" boils over to potential cataclysm.

The running hither-and-thither townspeople include a vacationing New York writer (Carl Reiner in the longest sustained Jimmy Stewart impression on record) and his wife Eva Marie Saint. Young Sheldon Collins plays their son Pete as the same trigger-happy little shit be played in the following year's The President's Analyst.

Giving the film a balancing world-weary deadpan is Brian Keith as the straight-faced police chief. His placid existence receives an unwelcome kick from Paul Ford (The Music Man) as the VFW hawk out to secure the borders and defeat the invading Red legions. Assisting him is Jonathan Winters as, pretty much, Jonathan Winters. Theodore Bikel appears briefly as the Russian captain.

And it wouldn't be Hollywood without a syrupy romance between the Pretty American Girl (Andrea Dromm) and the Handsome Good-Hearted Russian Lad (John Phillip Law), with both actors making their Hollywood debuts.

Comely, sunny-haired Dromm caught my attention back in the day, looking for all the world like a Beach Boys song given form and flesh. I knew her best from TV reruns of her other 1966 role: "Yeoman Smith" in the second pilot episode of Star Trek. She spoke only one line ("The name's Smith, sir"), but she looked mighty cute there on the Enterprise bridge. I've read that Dromm was offered a choice between an ongoing role in the still-unproven TV series and a lead part in this big Hollywood movie. Choosing the movie was the obvious best move at the time, though she has said that if she'd known what an enduring hit Star Trek would become, she might have chosen differently. As it is, you probably don't have to Google hard to find Yeoman Smith fanfic steaming up pixels somewhere.

At 6'5" with a blue-eyed boyishness, it's only natural that Law went on to become a mid-list movie and TV sex symbol. Genre-film cognoscenti salute his presence in Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik! ('68), as the blind guardian angel Pygar kinking it up with Jane Fonda in Barbarella (also '68), as Snoopy's arch nemesis the Red Baron in Roger Corman's Von Richtofen and Brown ('70), and as the stout-hearted sailor-adventurer confronting nifty Ray Harryhausen creations in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad ('73).

Their romance is the vessel from which the movie's Make Love, Not War oils are poured, as in the sugary charm of their Capulet-Montague seaside dialogue:

Alexei: "In Union of Soviet, when I am only young boy, many are saying, Americanski are bad people, they will attack Russia. So all mistrust American. But I think that I do not mistrust American... not really sinceriously. I wish not to hate... anybody! [He chucks a stone into the sea] This make good reason to you, Alison Palmer?"

Alison: "Well, of course it does. It doesn't make sense to hate people. It's such a waste of time."

Beyond Arkin's performance, what saves The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming from being just a cloying, farcical fossil is a clever screenplay by William Rose (The Ladykillers, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) and director Norman Jewison's steady hand on the tiller.

The even-handed script parades no simplistic evil empires or Old Glory platitudes. Instead it mines the nervousness and paranoia on both sides, and the climax comes with townsfolk and submariners literally staring down each other's gun barrels — a tidy little metaphor for the Cold War. The crisis' contrived resolution may leave you either wiping a tear or rolling your eyes (as if those are mutually exclusive), with World War III narrowly averted by good ol' hands-across-the-water pluck.

Pub Trivia Contest points: Rose based his screenplay on a 1961 novel, The Off-Islanders, written by Nathaniel Benchley. Later, Nathaniel's son Peter found his own way in life by writing the novel Jaws, which Steven Spielberg turned into another little look-what-showed-up-on-the-beach movie you might have heard of.

It's easy to see why The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming was welcomed as a warm and affirming counterpoint to its darker cinematic cousins such as Fail-Safe. It skewers hawkish reactionism and mob militancy, and its sympathetic portrayal of the beached Russians — not to mention the panicky buffoonery of the Americans — probably gave the more rabid Commie-haters conniptions.

It was popular in its day and praised by contemporary critics, with Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Arkin), Editing (future director Hal Ashby), and Adapted Screenplay. It won the Golden Globes for Best Musical/Comedy and Best Actor (Arkin), with noms for Best Screenplay and Most Promising Newcomer (both Arkin and Law).

Although it's frozen in amber now, it remains an amusing (if dated and overlong) slice of the 1960s. To Boomers above a certain age it's a fondly remembered piece of fluffy nostalgia. For everyone else it's an entertaining-enough time portal to another epoch. DVD film-fest this one with Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove for a snapshot of how a previous generation's fears played out in popular culture.

In 44 years, what comedies will they be making about us and our time? I have some ideas....

Music: The Red Elvises, "Tchaikovsky"
Near at hand: An origami globe built from intersecting Hearts suit playing cards.

Harlan Ellison: Dreams With Sharp Teeth (2008)

A literary hero of my youth, and a writer whose best work I admire on different levels now. I've met him a couple of times at writer conventions and such, and can testify that when he makes eye contact with you it's like having a stare contest with a cobra.

I got to know him a bit in a different way when he called me and Elizabeth at our home more than once to ask how he could help out with a friend of ours, a well-loved fantasy novelist, who was dying of cancer. Despite how he comes across in his self-maintained and self-mythologizing enfant terrible, "I'll punch you in your hamburger hatch, asshole" demeanor, that's how he made his biggest impression on me. Well, that and his writing, of course. But you know what they say about books and covers.



Written and directed by Eric Nelson.

More here.

Harlan interviewed at The Onion A.V. Club here.

Harold Lloyd Compilation

MsBluecat did the good work here.

Music: Moby, "Run On," a traditional folk song also known as "God's Gonna Cut You Down."

Hat tip: Roger Ebert

My blushes, Watson!

I'm mentioned in an article with Arthur Conan Doyle, Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, and Nicholas Meyer. Also Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Norman Mailer, and Gore Vidal. Wish it had spoilered the plot of my story correctly, but hey, I'll take it.

Pic picks: Bacall of the wild

“You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and… blow.”