A Dickens of a Story

Film: David Copperfield
Format: Turner Classic Movies on big ol’ television.

My mother is a big fan of the work of Charles Dickens. I’m not; I think it’s evident when you read Dickens that he was paid by the word. I don’t appreciate his wild coincidences and I tend to hate the ridiculous names of his characters. To that end, I’ve delayed the watching of David Copperfield until now. It wasn’t so much fear as an assumed dislike. I don’t like the author in general, so I likely won’t like a movie based on one of his overwritten novels.

That’s not quite the case. There are a number of things that are really going for David Copperfield. However, it is the case in the sense that the story isn’t really one of the things going for the movie. David Copperfield is less a plot-driven tale than it is a sort of biography of the title character, taking him from his birth to the approach of his second marriage.

Young (Cough) Love

Films: Romeo and Juliet (1936)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Strap in, folks; it’s going to be one of those reviews again. I knew that as soon the disc showed up in the mail today. The 1936 version of Romeo and Juliet wasn’t at the top of my queue, but it was close to the top, and that meant there was a decent chance that it would be the one that showed up. And, well, here we are. I knew I’d have to get to it sooner or later and I suppose at this point I’ve put it off about as long as I could.

So why my reticence? This had a couple of things going against it right from the start. First, it’s Romeo and Juliet, perhaps my least favorite of Shakespeare’s well-known plays. Oh, sure, I enjoyed it well enough when it was done with zombies as Warm Bodies, but generally speaking, it’s not a story I like. Even West Side Story and its glorious color and choreography are merely a beautifully-realized version of a story I dislike. The second hurdle is nearly as big: Leslie Howard. I’ve liked Leslie Howard exactly once (Pygmalion), and tolerated him a couple of times. Otherwise, I find him to be about as interesting as dry toast.

Treading the Boards

Film: The Royal Family of Broadway
Format: Internet video on laptop.

While there are still some beloved and frequently seen movies left in my Oscar lists, I am getting to the point where a lot of what I still have to watch are films that are pretty much forgotten. That’s absolutely the case with The Royal Family of Broadway. Honestly, I’m just happy that there was a version of this to watch on YouTube. This film evidently exists in terms of physical media only in a UCLA vault as a 35mm print. That there are versions that appear online is fortunate, because it would be easy for this to be a completely forgotten film.

The Royal Family of Broadway was evidently based on a stage play, which was itself a rough biography of the Barrymore family. We’re going to be spending a good bit of time with our theatrical family and dealing with all of their different foibles. For what it’s worth, there are going to be four main members of the Cavendish family that we will have to deal with. Fanny Cavendish (Henrietta Crosman) is the family matriarch and absolutely convinced that life in the theater is the right life for the whole family. Her daughter Julie (Ina Claire) is a stage actress as well, but is considering getting married to wealthy financier Gilmore Marshall (Frank Conroy). Julie’s daughter Gwen (Mary Brian) wants to marry Perry (Charles Starrett) and give up the life entirely. And then there is Tony Cavendish (Fredric March), the family’s prodigal, who has gone out west to be in movies and, because of his wild ways and wantonness, has been forced to leave the coast, return to New York, and attempt to book passage to Europe on Aquitania.

Cherce

Film: Pat and Mike
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’m evidently on a short sports kick. Yesterday’s movie involved sports and so did today’s. It’s also a Tracy/Hepburn collaboration, and that bodes pretty well. Even better, Pat and Mike is said to be Katharine Hepburn’s favorite of her nine movies with Spencer Tracy. Pat and Mike is a light comedy with a few fun surprise appearances in minor roles. It’s the sort of movie to watch when you’re not in the mood to be challenged by anything, and that’s more or less the mood I was in this evening.

Pat Pemberton (Katharine Hepburn) works in physical education and is an accomplished athlete. In fact, she has only one significant problem: whenever she’s being observed by her fiancé Collier Weld (William Ching, who looks sort of like a budget Peter Graves) she falls to pieces and can’t do anything right. We’re shown this in a golf match as the film opens. Pat loses a match embarrassingly to another woman who keeps up a constant litany of advice on how to play golf better. The match over and Pat at the end of her rope, she sees a set of golf balls teed up and drives them all perfectly down the fairway. A bartender at the country club notices and decides that Pat has some real talent and should play for an upcoming title. Pat quickly quits her job and decides to go for it.

Wild Horses

Film: Wild is the Wind
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’ve played around a little bit with Amazon Prime, but I haven’t used it much. It’s something my wife got a subscription to, and she and my kids use it pretty frequently. Me, not so much. There are maybe a dozen and a half movies on my Oscar list that I can only find on Amazon Prime, though. I’m loathe to watch them, since sometimes those movies eventually show up somewhere else and I can watch them for free. Then again, movies like Wild is the Wind sometimes show up on Amazon Prime for free and I can watch without concern about the additional cost.

Wild is the Wind is one of those films that can be summed up in a sentence or two. A Nevada sheep rancher named Gino (Anthony Quinn) misses his late wife terribly, so he sends to Italy for her sister Gioia (Anna Magnani) to marry her. There is some initial tension after she arrives, and much more tension later when Gioia falls in love with Gino’s adopted son Bene (Anthony Franciosa) instead of her husband. Sparks fly, there are wild horses, and passions run high.

Lend Me Your Ear

Film: Lust for Life
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

A number of years ago we took a family trip to Paris. In addition to my wife and me, my father and his wife, one of my brothers and his wife, both of my sisters and one of my sister’s husband were there. Spend a little time in Paris and you can’t avoid going to a few art museums. It’s sort of what you do. While my preferences tilt more toward the Louvre, pretty much everyone in my family peed themselves a little over the Musee D’Orsay. That’s the impressionist museum, filled to the brim with Degas, Manet, Monet, and of course Van Gogh. I say this to point out the fact that I didn’t pee a little over the D’Orsay. The impressionist school doesn’t do a lot for me. This is important because Lust for Life might well be called “The Vincent Van Gogh Story.” As a side note, if you’ve seen the movie Hugo, you’ve seen the D’Orsay. It’s housed in the old Paris train station used at the heart of that film.

We should clear up the pronunciation of the name, too. If you’re an American, you almost certainly pronounce the painter’s last name as “Van Go.” It’s pronounced myriad ways in the film, though—Van Goff, Van Guff, Van Go, Van Gog, Van Gah. Pick the one you like; I’m not going to care how you say it. The actual Dutch pronunciation is evidently Van Gokh, with the final sound being akin to hacking up phlegm. But I digress.

Still Waiting for Godot

Film: Edward, My Son
Format: Streaming video from TCM Watch on laptop.

Typically, when a rare film shows up on Turner Classic, I DVR it so I can watch it at my leisure. I was aware that Edward, My Son played a day or so ago, but I completely spaced on setting up the recorder, which meant I had to get it online within the week. So, rather than risk not being able to see it at all, I watched it today. I’m not sure if that was the right call. I realize that my goal is to see all of these films on this Oscar list, but it’s ones like Edward, My Son that make me question the wisdom of that decision.

The film starts with Spencer Tracy walking out and introducing himself as Lord Arnold Boult. In the world of the film, we’re supposed to have heard of him because he’s incredibly wealthy, and tells us he likely owns the theater he imagines us sitting in. He also tells us about his son, Edward. It’s sad for Boult that we never got to meet Edward but we can’t because Edward, his son, is dead. And before you can say “doodly-doodly-doop” we’re back in the past.

Little Women (1933)

Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I’ve made it a habit in general lately to stick all or most of the “very long wait” films on my NetFlix queue at the top of the list in the hopes of getting a film I might otherwise wait for months to get. It’s been working out in general, in no small part because I have so many of them that one of them is bound to be available. My luck continued, but also ran out this time, with the arrival of Little Women from 1933. I knew within the first 10 minutes of this that it was going to be a rough couple of hours.

I’ll put it this way—I thought upon watching Cavalcade that I wouldn’t come across another film of the same Oscar year that I found more tedious. Well, that ended tonight, because Little Women plays like a grade school stage play. This is acting broader than a typical silent film. I realize that the family in the film has fallen on hard times, but when they get sausages for Christmas breakfast, you’d think they’d all just won the lottery. And then, of course, they donate their breakfast to a poorer family who are starving and freezing cold and have a new baby, and oh! but it’s all so sappy and irritating.

Travels with My Aunt

Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

Who knew that there’s evidently a very small genre of films involving young men being whirlwinded around by eccentric old women? I’d have thought that Auntie Mame and perhaps Harold and Maude would have been the limit, but that’s before I knew anything about Travels with My Aunt. There’s a great deal of similarity between this film and those others in that we have a wildly eccentric older woman educating a younger, much more staid man. Travels with My Aunt throws in a lot more felonies to keep things interesting. From my perspective, it helps greatly that this is based on the work of Graham Greene as well, since he’s long been a favorite of mine.

We start at the funeral of the mother of Henry Pulling (Alec McCowan), a staid banker who cares for his flowers more than he cares for anything else in the world. At the funeral, he encounters his Aunt Augusta (Maggie Smith), whom he had thought dead. She is, however, very much alive and tells the suddenly shocked Henry that his mother was not, in fact, his mother. Augusta takes Henry home with her where he is introduced to her current lover, a fortune teller from Sierra Leone she calls Wordsworth (Lou Gossett, Jr.). Henry escapes when he can only to discover after a visit from the police that Wordsworth has stowed marijuana in his mother’s urn.

Watching Oscar: Born Yesterday

Film: Born Yesterday
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on big ol’ television.

I think it’s hard to play dumb convincingly. Sure, plenty of people in the movies play dumber than they are, but a lot of them don’t do it very well. That vacuous, nothing-going-on-behind-the-eyes look takes real talent. Judy Holliday could pull it off so well that it’s tempting to think she might really have been that empty between the ears. That’s talent. Bette Davis couldn’t do it and neither could Katherine Hepburn. If you really want to see someone very smart act very, very dumb, you’ll want to take a close look at Born Yesterday.

Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford) is a junk dealer, and one who has never really worried too much about the legality of what he does. Because of this, he has a great deal of influence and money and he’s looking for more of both. He arrives in Washington where he meets with Jim Devery (Howard St. John), his lawyer. Their discussion is (we gather—it’s never very explicit) on how to spend enough money in Congress to get some shady deals moved through.

Cool Your (Gas) Jets

Film: Gaslight
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

It’s currently in vogue (it’s actually always in vogue) to complain about remakes these days. It’s especially egregious when remakes happen almost immediately. This is something that happens in Hollywood these days—a foreign film grabs an audience, so the film is repackaged immediately with an American cast. For a few years, this was the thing to do with Japanese horror films like The Ring, The Eye, The Grudge and Pulse. For the last couple of years, it’s been Sweden, with Let the Right One In and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The most egregious example is the 2010 African-American reimagining of 2007 Caucasian-dominated Death at a Funeral.

The funny thing is that this is not a current problem. It has existed for years. When someone says The Maltese Falcon, you almost certainly think of the one with Bogart made in 1941. You probably don’t think of the earlier film of the same name (1931) or Satan Met a Lady based on the same story from 1936. Hitchcock made two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much and De Mille made The Ten Commandments twice. So it’s not too shocking that 1944’s Gaslight is a remake of a film from just a few years earlier.

I didn’t know what to expect going into this film. I knew from the start that Gaslight is a costume drama set in the Victorian era, which meant a lot of petticoats, giant ruffles, and posh dudes with elaborate coats. I don’t dislike period drama as a rule, but Victorian stuff seems to wash over me for some reason. It’s still oldish and a bit goofy, but desperately wants to be seen as modern. Victorian stories are sort of the awkward teens of literature, and so I tend to feel the same way about movies set in the period.

Gaslight is a period piece, but it seems to fall directly into the heart of film noir. Interestingly, I also seem to be experiencing a bit of a theme related to insanity lately, since that’s what I’ve been watching lately. Gaslight digs deeply into this idea of insanity in its characters, although it does so in a way very different from other films from the past few weeks.

Anyway, a famous singer named Alice Alquist is murdered, and the case goes completely unsolved. Her niece is sent away from London and packed off to the continent to receive vocal training. All of this happens in a few moments. As the film starts, we see the grown niece, Paula (Ingrid Bergman), leaving her lessons and taking up with a man named Gregory (Charles Boyer). The two marry, and as a part of Paula’s inheritance, they take up in the house of her aunt, revitalizing it as soon as possible.

And then the strange things start happening. Paula begins losing things and forgetting things. At night, when Gregory leaves to go to his studio to work on his composing, she hears voices in the blocked off rooms above her, and the flames in the gas lights dim as if someone is turning them on elsewhere. Worse, no one else seems to notice—not her hard-of-hearing servant Elizabeth (Barbara Everest, and yes, her hearing difficulty is important) and not her personal servant, the cheeky Nancy (played by a very young, still baby-fat faced Angela Lansbury). And then there is the mysterious man (Joseph Cotten) lurking about. All of this seems to be conspiring to drive Paula mad.

I’ll be honest—I expected going in that this was going to be just another in the list of films that are decent but forgettable from the earlier days. Imagine my surprise when I found myself actually personally involved in how the film played out. It’s extremely engaging as a film, and Paula is a compelling character. So too is Gregory, who seems a devious mix between caring, compassionate husband and angry tyrant. I’m a huge fan of Joseph Cotten in anything he appears in, and he’s great here, too. When I say that his character (Brian Cameron) is actually a detective working for Scotland Yard wanting to reopen the original case, I’m not really spoiling anything—we find this out early enough. But, of course, Paula doesn’t know this.

If I have a complaint, it’s the comic relief character of Miss Thwaites (Dame May Whitty), the stereotypically prim, nosy neighbor who can’t seem to get enough of her neighbor’s dirt. She’s supposed to be an injection of wacky fun and silliness in an otherwise pretty dark and heavy film, but I can’t help but think that in general it would have been better without her. She does become plot important once or twice, but only in minor ways that could have been left out with little loss.

Still, disregard her. Gaslight is great fun, and Bergman’s speech at the end is truly incredible.

Why to watch Gaslight: Far more compelling than you would believe.
Why not to watch: Miss Thwaites is really annoying.

Love and Death

Films: Ba Wang Bie Ji (Farewell My Concubine); Camille
Format: DVDs from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

While I try to be as active as I can be at seeing things I am not familiar with, there are plenty of things in the world that I know little to nothing about. Chinese opera is one of those things. In fact, all I really knew about it before tonight is that it is highly stylized, much like Japanese Noh theater. The stories are traditional, and a good actor plays the part to a very specific standard. Ba Wang Bie Ji (Farewell My Concubine) exists in this world, and gives the audience a real view of it.

The view is one of intense brutality. Young children are taken in to be trained as actors and acrobats, and this becomes their entire life. The training is grueling, praise is rarer than hen’s teeth, and punishment is constant. A young boy named Douzi (Mingwei Ma) is taken to join the opera by his prostitute mother, but the opera will not take him because he has a sixth finger. The mother chops off the offending digit with a cleaver and takes him back, and he is accepted and his training begins.

The person he ends up training with the most is Shitou (Yang Fei). Shitou is trained in male roles and Douzi in female ones, essentially becoming a woman from all outward appearances. The two endure their life of brutal punishment and end up being stars of the stage in large part because of their performances of an opera called Farewell My Concubine. In this play, the king is abandoned by everyone, and he tries to send away those things and people that have stayed with him. The concubine commits suicide rather than exist without the king.

Where this goes is to a bizarre love triangle. It’s evident when Shitou and Douzi (as adults played by Fengyi Zhang and Leslie Cheung) are performing on stage, it’s less of a performance four Douzi. Also at this time, the two adopt stage names; Shitou is known as Duan Xialuo and Douzi as Cheng Dieyi. And this is where we need a femme fatale—and one arrives just when we need her. This is another prostitute named Juxian (Li Gong). Xialou tells an angry mob that the two of them are engaged as a way to calm them down. And he lives up to the promise he made. This impending marriage creates a huge rift between the two actors, and Cheng Dieyi.

Around all of this story, World War II, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the communist takeover and the cultural revolution occur, and all of these things have tremendous impact on the characters.

More than any of the other characters, this seems to be Cheng Dieyi’s film since all of the controversies either swirl around him or are at least tangential to him. His defining characteristics are his inability to forgive anything and his incredible ability to play the martyr card. He’s actually difficult to like; he seems to want to live a particular romantic ideal, even to the point of his own destruction.

It’s worth noting that there is a great deal of Chinese opera in this film, and that should not be surprising. And here’s the thing—Chinese opera is really hard to deal with if you aren’t used to it. The female characters sing in this incredibly affected style that is high-pitched and piercing and has the effect on me of nails on a chalkboard. It absolutely drove me to distraction. Fortunately, the rest of the movie is quite good and laced with tragedy and history that it kept my attention. But I was really ready to stop hearing these guys sing like elf women with nasal conditions.

Camille is another film in which the road to love is rocky and the ending never seems like it will be cheerful. Marguerite Gautier (Greta Garbo) is a woman in mid-18th century France who lives essentially as a kept woman by making men fall in love with her. Her current target is a man named Baron de Varville (Henry Daniell), who has enough money to keep her comfortable for the rest of her life. This idea of “the rest of her life” is important, because Camille is sickly, and by sickly I mean that she is consumptive.

Unfortunately for Marguerite, she doesn’t quite get the results she wants when she meets de Varville. While he certainly falls for her and not her frenemy Olympe (pronounced o-LAMP and played by Lenore Ulric), she is instead captivated by a young man named Armand Duval (Robert Taylor). Armand doesn’t have the same sort of money that Marguerite needs, but he’s young, smart, and pretty. However, because she is a spendthrift and always in debt to everyone, she ends up having to become essentially the kept woman of de Varville.

And that’s really the story. Marguerite attempts to keep earning a living from de Varville while leading Duval on romantically. She’s essentially forced to make that age-old choice of comfort and money or love. And, of course, she is consumptive, but she’s consumptive in that mid-1930s Hollywood way in which she gets sicker as the movie progresses but always manages to look exactly like Greta Garbo at the height of her film career.

You know what? This film failed for me on almost every level. Camille is an offshoot of the “manic pixie dreamgirl” except that instead of being a free spirit, she’s just shitty with her money management skills because she’s far more intent on having a good time and being the center of attention. She’s a sort of low-grade Scarlett O’Hara. Additionally, Duval is a complete sucker and a sap, a man so deeply in love with the object of his affection that he’ll do anything for a minor sliver of attention. He gives guys a bad name. As a man I really just wanted him to grow a pair.

In fact the only character I really like is de Varville. It sems like he really got the short end on everything in this film. I feel badly for him.

Of course, the focus is on Marguerite, though, and she’s undeniably annoying throughout. She’s supposed to come off as fun loving and free spirited and whimsical with a touch of tragedy, and she instead comes across as completely fake and not worth spending a lot of time around. Sorry, old movies—this one falls flat and falls hard.

Why to watch Ba Wang Bie Ji: A story in China as it changed and changed again.
Why not to watch: Chinese opera is really hard on the ears.

Why to watch Camille: It’s a pretty little romance.
Why not to watch: Everyone in this film is annoying.

Battle of the Sexes

Film: Adam’s Rib
Format: DVD from Rockford Public library on rockin’ flatscreen.

First, a note on the format. I’ve often watched films in my living room on the television Sue and I got when we were married nearly 20 years ago. The television was damaged when we moved 12 years ago by the movers, but it hung on. Still, like an old horse, it was starting to die off and it finally kacked it a couple of days ago. We’d been talking about replacing the old beast for awhile and this weekend, we finally did. The “middlin’-sized living room television” is dead. Long live the flatscreen.

Anyway.

I had high hopes going into Adam’s Rib. The main reason my hopes were up was because of the famous chemistry between stars Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The chemistry truly is there, too. I realize that the two had an open secret affair for years despite Tracy’s marriage, and this was an opportunity to see the two of them onscreen together and see how they really cooked.

The problem with Adam’s Rib is that it frequently gets in its own way with the message it is trying to present. The overall intended message is a good one. What kills the film for me in a lot of ways, though, is that the way the film works seems to undercut that message it tries to project. In other words, if we accept the film’s ultimate message, the film itself disproves it. And around and around the mulberry bush we go.

Everything starts when harried and ignored wife Doris Attinger (Judy Holliday in her first-ever film role) attempts to kill her husband Warren (Tom Ewell) and his mistress Beryl Caighn (the always-marvelous Jean Hagen). The attempted murder fails. District attorney Adam Bonner (Tracy) is given the case of trying Mrs. Attinger. His wife Amanda (Hepburn) sees this as a case in which a man would be treated differently than a woman for the same crime. Since she is also a lawyer, she takes the case defending Mrs. Attinger. Plot achieved.

The Bonners have an idyllic marriage that is thrown into complete chaos by this arrangement. Adam does everything he can to get her to drop the case, but she won’t, and so the two prepare to square off against each other in court while attempting to remain a truly happily married couple on the home front. But, since this is a romantic comedy, you know going in that things aren’t going to work that way.

Things are complicated in a small way by the neighbor across the hall. Kip Lurie (David Wayne), an effeminate songwriter and pianist who appears to be as close as a character in 1949 ever got to being gay, has a massive crush on Amanda and doesn’t really care that much if Adam knows about it. He’s less real competition than he is someone to act as additional comic relief.

What follows shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has ever seen a movie ever. The case proceeds, the two lawyers banter back and forth in the courtroom, things become heated at home, and the courtroom turns less into a place where the law is decided and far more into a circus, a fact that only benefits Amanda and damages Adam’s case.

The outcome of the trial is fairly predictable, but I’m more comfortable putting such things under a spoiler warning.

*** THE JURY DELIBERATES ***

Naturally, the jury decides to acquit because Amanda’s closing is compelling (if this were a man defending his home, you wouldn’t imprison him) and because Adam’s closing arguments are muddled and interrupted by Amanda. When I said at the top that the film seems to disagree with its own premise, this is what I mean. Amanda turns the courtroom into a circus throughout the trial, which seems to indicate that she can only win the case through tricks and feminine wiles. In short, the film claims that women are the equal of men—a fine sentiment—and then essentially claims that women must resort to tricks, to crying, to acting like a female stereotype to get what they want.

As the marriage appears to break up, though, Adam confronts Amanda in Kip’s apartment as Kip tries to get her drunk and put the moves on her. In what is justifiably the most famous scene in the film, Adam threatens them both with a gun (as with the original court case) until he gets Amanda to admit that no one really has the right to break the law, man or woman. And then Adam puts the gun in his mouth and bites off the end, since the pistol is actually made from licorice. It’s a cute moment.

And, of course, since this is a comedy, they don’t really split up. Adam cries as they divide their assets and she takes him back, and he tells her later that the tears weren’t real, but conjured up so that he could get what he wants.

** WE HAVE A VERDICT ***

This is a difficult film for me to judge. On the one hand, the obvious chemistry between the two stars is palpable and a great thing to watch. The two really do belong on the screen together. On the other hand, I simply can’t get around the fact that the film, while perhaps well meaning and ahead of its time in the sentiment of actual equality for women, seems to indicate the exact opposite of what it intends.

Final analysis? Not guilty by reason of mental defect. It doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, so it has two personalities.

Why to watch Adam’s Rib: Tracy and Hepburn. Why else?
Why not to watch: It shoots its own message in the foot.

Loverly Lyrical Linguistics

Film: My Fair Lady
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

I just had my laptop rebuilt, which cost a little more than I’d like, but the gent who rebuilt it provided me with DVDs that will allow me to rebuild it myself should the worst happen. I appreciate that, because while it’s a pain in the backside to have this happen, being able to handle it myself means not having to shell out the cash when it’s needed. So, after reinstalling Office and recovering my backup of this blog’s archive, it was time to christen the machine with a movie.

Admittedly, for a horror/thriller/action movie fan like myself, My Fair Lady seems like an odd choice. Re-christening the machine with My Fair Lady says you; re-christening the machine with Audrey Hepburn says I.

For those not otherwise aware of it, My Fair Lady is one of the more lavish musicals coming at the tail-end of the Hollywood blockbuster musical period that bloomed in earlier decades. Our heroine is Eliza Doolittle (the always-wonderful Audrey Hepburn), a poor Cockney flower girl by trade. We discover early on that Eliza is not the brightest crayon in the box of 64, but whether this is by accident of her low-class birth or lack of native smarts, we aren’t sure yet. She is warned about a man taking down her speech, and immediately wigs out.

The man proves to be professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) a phoneticist with a penchant for pegging people within a few miles of their home. He claims that Eliza is a guttersnipe not because of her clothing, but because of the way she speaks, and with proper training, she could be passed off as a society maiden inside of six months. As it turns out, he makes this boast to a man named Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White), who is himself a student of Indian dialects, and the two wander off, leaving Eliza on her own. We’re also introduced to Eliza’s father, who is a wastrel. After slipping him a little cash, she remembers the conversation from the night before, particularly the part about getting her a job considerably better than hawking flowers. She arrives at his house and demands lessons.

Higgins tries to get rid of her, but Pickering, who happens to be there, wants Higgins to make good on his boast of the night before. He agrees, she tries to back out, he bribes her with chocolate, and we have a plot.

As painful as it is for me to say this, Audrey Hepburn is really annoying for the first hour of this film. Oh, Audrey…you’re a good girl, you are, but you need to shut up.

Regardless of this, what we get is lessons for poor little Eliza, who struggles to overcome her poor background. It doesn’t seem to be working until, in that movie way that things happen, it suddenly does, and Eliza can say “mainly” and “plain” instead of “minely” and “pline” and “a cup of tea” instead of “cuppatea.” And it becomes time for Professor Higgins to test the girl out at a day at the races. Everything goes amusingly until she becomes very excited at one of the races and yells for her horse to “move [its] bloomin’ arse.” Despite this, she’s charming enough that she catches the eye of Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Jeremy Brett). It’s somehow important that Freddy and his mother are the people who bump into Eliza at the start of the movie, because they certainly don’t recognize her now.

Then we jump forward to the night of the bet, and Eliza is the hit of the night. Importantly for Higgins and Pickering, one of the guests at the ball is a Hungarian language expert named Zoltan Karpathy (Theodore Bikel). He determines to find out the truth of Eliza’s origin, and after a dance and some study, he determines that she is actually Hungarian royalty, which fills our phoneticist friends with glee. They congratulate each other for their cunning scheme, completely ignoring Eliza.

So, of course she runs away, back to where she started, but quickly discovers that she doesn’t fit there either. And, of course, Henry Higgins realizes just how empty his life is without her now that she’s gone.

This is a movie that pulls me in a variety of directions. On the one hand, it’s a musical, and it’s the type of musical in which people suddenly break into fully orchestrated song at the drop of a hat, making me wonder when they all had time to rehearse. That bothers me on a deep level. Whether because it’s a musical, or simply because of the time in which it was made, there’s also that lack of verisimilitude of Eliza suddenly changing her accent at the drop of a hat that galls a bit. Her accent at the end of the movie cannot be placed. She actually does sound like English is her second language, with perhaps Hungarian being her first.

So that’s the bad. Here’s the good. We can start with Audrey Hepburn, and as far as I would normally be concerned, we could stop there. Audrey Hepburn covers a lot of faults. But more than that, this is a film about language. Henry Higgins’s opening song/speech (more on this in a sec) is dead on—people are often kept in their positions because of how they speak. Many a person on the fringe of society could move toward the middle if he or she could quit speaking in an un- or undereducated patois.

As a guy with a degree in linguistics, I appreciate the fact that linguistics takes a central role in one of the great musicals in Hollywood history. Admittedly, Higgins is far more proscriptive than descriptive, which is sort of a linguistic no-no, but no matter. It’s cool to see the stuff that I geek out about take center stage in something that other people geek out about for different reasons.

Finally, a word on Rex Harrison. He doesn’t so much sing as talk his parts in rhythm with some attention to the notes. It works for me. I couldn’t take a steady diet of it, but I really like his take on a lot of the songs.

Why to watch My Fair Lady: Because despite all the singing and musical film unbelievability, it’s about linguistics! Yay, linguistics!
Why not to watch: Because most linguists are not so proscriptive.

Judy, Judy, Judy

Film: A Star is Born
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop

Ah, Judy Garland. It is the stock in trade of the entertainment business that such stories happen more than we may like. A person with enormous talent is, in the end, destroyed by that very talent that made him or her a star. This is a theme we will revisit when I watch La Vie en Rose about the life of Edith Piaf. But this is not the film of the day, which is a musical in a very different tradition from the norm. How fitting that the story is one that matches the life of its star in many ways.

A Star is Born features Judy Garland as the supremely unfortunately named Esther Blodgett (changed in the film to Vicki Lester). She’s a talent, as revealed in the first few minutes of the film in a performance on stage at a Hollywood benefit. Her act is nearly destroyed by the drunken entrance of a fading star named Norman Maine (James Mason), but Esther manages to turn this into an entrance that gets him an ovation.

Maine, once a matinee idol, is now a drunken has-been of the (name your own favorite drunken has-been) variety. After Esther saves his bacon, he realizes that his drinking is a problem and he needs to do something about it. He recognizes that Esther has talent and promises her a career in the movies, but loses her address, number and any way to contact her. Esther, having quit her act, is forced to take menial jobs to support herself, singing in commercials when she gets the chance. Much of this (and other parts) is shown in a sepia-toned montage that is surprisingly effective.

It’s in one of these commercials that Norman Maine hears that angelic voice once again, and tracks her down. He convinces his friend Oliver Niles (Charles Bickford) to give her a small role in a film. This changes once Niles hears her sing, and she gets a major role in a musical, which proves to be a whopping success, making her a bona fide star. She marries Maine in celebration.

But this is when tragedy strikes. She wins an Oscar, and a drunken Maine barrels up on stage, speaks wildly, and mistakenly slaps Esther (now Vicki) across the face. Realizing he has a problem, he checks himself into a drunk tank and sweats it out, but hops off the wagon when his former agent (Jack Libby) rides him for surviving on Vicki’s talent. What happens next is best left to spoilers.

*** A SPOILER IS BORN ***

Vicki tells Oliver that she will give up her career to nurse Norman back to health. He overhears the conversation and, realizing that giving up her stage life will kill her emotionally, he walks out into the ocean and drowns himself. Vicki is naturally despondent, but is convinced to return to show business when told that she is wasting the career that Norman died to save. At a gala benefit, not unlike the start of the movie, she introduces herself as “Mrs. Norman Maine” to wild applause.

*** A SPOILER RETIRES AND LIVES IN SECLUSION ***

One of the problems I tend to have with musicals is that they are so ready to push the happy ending on everybody that they strain the limits of believability and reality. A Star is Born does not do that at all. Instead, we get a real story that happens to have musical numbers in it that don’t do the whole “break with reality” thing so common and frustrating in many other musicals. What we get here instead is tragedy, reality, pain, and the angelic voice of Judy Garland.

Frequent readers are probably already tired of my complaining about my distaste for musicals, but it’s a distaste that’s at least honest. A Star is Born doesn’t rank in that list of films I dislike, because it holds together as a story and because the production numbers all make sense in the grand scheme of the film. I liked All That Jazz for the same reason. The musicals I dislike fail for me because they want me to buy into a world that I don’t believe in—a world where people break out into song and perfect choreography—or a world I don’t care about—where everyone is talented, on stage, sassy, and lives happily ever after.

A Star is Born works because the musical numbers, which are the real selling point of any musical, are secondary to the workings of Norman Maine and Esther/Vicki. It doesn’t hurt that I love James Mason (especially as a villain), and it doesn’t hurt that Judy Garland could sing anything handed to her and make it her own.

Is it too long? Probably. The big musical numbers really are big. “Born in a Trunk” goes on for what feels like the first half of the film. This isn’t to say it’s not worth watching, but it is the Energizer Bunny of musical numbers, and thankfully leads into the intermission. At roughly three hours running time, there’s a few places that might stand a trim. However, at that length, there isn’t a ton of fat here, particularly with the sepia montages. As per my penchant, I’d cut from the musical numbers.

Why to watch A Star is Born: Judy Garland at her best.
Why not to watch: This is not a happy musical.

A Different Kind of Love

Films: The Philadelphia Story, Belle de Jour
Format: DVD from Davenport Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop (Philadelphia); DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television (Belle).

What do you get when you take three of the finest actors of their generation and put them in the same movie? If you answered “a crap shoot,” you’d be right. Put that many powerful egos in one place and you’re apt to get a mess. Of course, if you can get them all to work together, you can end up with something significant. Of course that takes a significant director; fortunately George Cukor is up to the task.

The Philadelphia Story is the sort of film that made Hollywood great back in the day. It opens with perhaps the greatest break-up scene in movie history. C.K. Dexter Haven (the great Cary Grant) is being kicked out of his house by his wife, Tracy Lord Haven (Katharine Hepburn). His arms are full of bags, and she follows with his collection of pipes and his golf clubs. With nowhere for him to hold the pipes, she drops them unceremoniously on the ground, then does the same with all but one of his golf clubs. That, she breaks over her knee, then walks back to the house. Dexter follows her, and when she turns for a last retort, he mimes punching her, thinks better of it, palms her face in his hand, and shoves her to the ground. From there, we get the title card, “Two Years Later.”

Here’s where our other players enter. First, we have Tracy’s younger sister, Dinah (Virginia Weidler), who is at that strange age of innocence and not-so-innocence. She clearly misses Dexter and dislikes Tracy’s current fiancé, George Kittredge (John Howard). Kittredge is an up-and-comer with possible political aspirations. We also need to encounter Macaulay Connor (James Stewart) and Elizabeth Imbrie (Ruth Hussey), a writer and photographer for the society magazine Spy.

Spy also happens to be the employer of one C.K. Dexter Haven. The job of Connor and Imbrie is to get into the big society wedding and get a story for the magazine, with any help that Haven can muster. Of course, Haven isn’t too pleased about the wedding, and might be causing the story himself.

While all of these characters are real characters, the one I enjoy the most without any reservation at all is Dinah. The kid cracks me up. When she and Tracy discover the real reason that Connor and Imbrie are at their house, they do everything they possibly can to give the reporters the impression that the entire family is out of its collective mind. Dinah prances like a ballerina, talks in French, and wallops out a nice version of “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” on the piano before running off because she might have smallpox. Great stuff.

I’m not entirely sure where to place this film in terms of genre. Is it a screwball comedy? Kind of, but not the sort I’m used to seeing. It is loads of fun though—rather than simply wacky hijinks, the constant situation is one of an elephant in the room. Connor and Imbrie eventually get wise to the fact that they’re being played. The Lord family, particularly the family matriarch Margaret Lord (Mary Nash) knows exactly what’s going on but refuses to admit that there’s anything fishy with her daughters both claiming that her brother is her husband or Imbrie’s constant photographing of everything around her.

This is beautifully played comedy. As Margaret attempts to keep things looking normal, Tracy and Dinah act in a manner to give the reporters a real sensational story, Uncle Willie (Roland Young) is completely confused, Haven stands in the middle attempting the ruin the impending nuptials, and through all of it is the not-so-subtle click of the camera that constantly stops conversation for just a half second each time a new picture is snapped.

This of course says nothing of the fact that there is an evident attraction between Tracy and Connor. She is touched by his evident skill as a writer. And, of course, Kittredge is something of a sweet, little nobody. This is further complicated by the fact that Connor and Imbrie are, without really saying it, something of an item. It’s less a love triangle than sort of a love pile-up.

The way a film like this works, the place to really start paying attention is right around the middle. Dexter Haven absolutely dresses down his ex-wife in a way that can only happen in the movies. And he’s right—Tracy Lord is a scold, a nag, and has the sort of standards that are impossible for anyone but her to live up to. Any deviation from what Tracy wants, since Tracy has always gotten what she wants, cannot be handled. Her father, who has run off with a dancer, tells her essentially the same thing. She doesn’t like it, but she can’t deny it. She is a snooty prig.

Of course, it’s a 1940 romantic comedy, so everything works out in the end. The ending is perhaps a little too pat and cutesy, but it’s still damn fun. And really, Cary Grant in this movie simply reaffirms that he was the most suave man to ever put on pants.

As for Belle de Jour, I’m not really sure where I should start. I’ve had the movie in my possession from the library for close to three weeks and simply haven’t had the courage to watch it until tonight. When a film is called Luis Bunuel’s “erotic masterpiece,” I start to worry a bit. Flatly, erotica makes me a little uncomfortable.

I shouldn’t have been worried. Certainly, Belle de Jour is a sexy film, and that’s most definitely one of the selling points of this movie, but it isn’t the entire point. Rather, it’s about desire and the blurred line between reality and fantasy.

Severine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve) is the young housewife of a doctor named Pierre (Jean Sorel). In her mind, she lives in a fantasy world of kinky and somewhat degrading sex, but in the real world, she’s pretty frigid—to the point where she and her husband sleep in separate beds per The Dick van Dyke Show. A friend of her husband’s, Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), gives her the creeps because of his rather open sexuality and evident desire to see more than might be appropriate of Severine.

A friend tells her of a mutual acquaintance of theirs who has garnered a new job for herself—working in a local Parisian house of ill repute. Evidently the money is pretty good and it’s exciting, so she keeps doing it. Husson tells her the same thing, and also of a similar place he used to go to that is still in business. Looking for a way to free herself from the boredom of her life, Severine goes and becomes the newest member of the staff.

This isn’t easy for her at first. Madame Anais (Genevieve Page) christens her “Belle de Jour” (beauty of the day) because she can only work during the day. It takes her a few clients to get it right, but Severine quickly takes to this new double life of hers, finding the “work” to be both exhilarating and something much more than she had with her marriage.

The trouble starts with a young client named Marcel (Pierre Clementi). The two are almost immediately attracted to each other—him by her obvious beauty and her by the fact that many of his teeth are metal from an accident and just as much by the fact that she is terrified of him. The problem becomes obvious—Marcel can’t have her, and he wants her. And he’s a violent criminal and will not stop at anything to have her.

The lines blur in this film between the fantasy sex world Severine lives in and the reality of her new life with Madame Anais. This is inherently interesting, of course. What I find more interesting is Bunuel’s incisive look into the human mind and spirit. One of Severine’s early clients is a gynecologist who wishes to be degraded, beaten, and otherwise humiliated. Severine is told to observe so that she can learn something, but she is disgusted by what she sees. This is a brilliant counterpoint to many of Severine’s fantasies, which involve her being degraded, beaten, covered in muck, and then forced into sex. Degradation is fine for her, evidently, but her embarrassment of this leads her to severely judge others who want the same thing.

This is an interesting film, and while there’s plenty of sex, legs, and a naked back or two, it’s not particularly racy in anything more than subject matter. I’m not sure I’d watch it again, but I was certainly wrong to dread it.

Why to watch The Philadelphia Story: A remarkable romance that goes in a lot of directions.
Why not to watch: If you’re at all like me, you’d rather slap Katherine Hepburn than kiss her.

Why to watch Belle de Jour: An interesting look into human psychology with a side of sexy.
Why not to watch: It’s not as sexy as you may be looking for.