I'm Telling My Girls to Elope

Film: Father of the Bride
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

I like Spencer Tracy pretty well, so I’m always at least interested when I encounter one of his movies that I haven’t seen. It feels like I’ve seen a ton of them, but I’m sure I haven’t hit half, or even a quarter of everything he was in. Father of the Bride is one that was at least well enough thought of that it was remade not that long ago. In fact, even the sequel got remade. With a name like Father of the Bride, there’s not a great deal of shock or surprise where this one is going to go. If you don’t know what you’re going to get here, go back to that title and read it one word at a time.

Father of the Bride is one of those movies that starts at the end, with Stanley Banks (Tracy) sitting in the aftermath of his daughter’s wedding reception, trying his best to come to terms with the fact that his daughter Kay (Elizabeth Taylor) has gotten married and is off on her honeymoon. While Banks speaks to us in voiceover, we flash back to a few months before when Stanley and his wife Ellie (Joan Bennett) discovered the existence of one Buckley Dunstan (Don Taylor), the latest young man in Kay’s life. After Kay speaks gushingly of Buckley, Stanley asks her (almost joking) if she’s planning on marrying the guy, and she says that she supposes she is—they’ve talked about it, evidently.

Screwball

Film: Designing Woman
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

The heyday of the screwball comedy was the 1930s and the early 1940s. It was a sort of escapist fare, sex comedies without the sex because of the Hays Code. The whole point of a good screwball was to pit a strong-willed woman against a strong-willed man, toss them into a crazy situation, and make ‘em fall in love. It was a good enough formula for a number of years when people wanted 90-120 minutes of escapism from crushing poverty. With Designing Woman, the question is how well it would work in the late 1950s.

Like any good screwball comedy, Designing Woman features a perfect storm of events, starting with our romance. Sportswriter Mike Hagen (Gregory Peck) goes on a bender at a golf tournament and wakes up the next morning wondering where the money he’d won on a crazy bet had gotten to. Even more importantly, he’s wondering if he filed his copy on the golf tournament and still has a job. He finds the answer to where the money went when he encounters fashion designer Marilla Brown (Lauren Bacall). He finds out the second when he talks to his editor Ned Hammerstein (Sam Levene). His story did get filed. Turns out he wrote it with Marilla, and he gave her $700.

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.

The Rest of Them Walked

Film: Some Came Running
Format: DVD from Somonauk Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I hear the name “Vincente Minnelli,” I think of musicals. I tend to forget about films like The Bad and the Beautiful and instead remember things like An American in Paris and the regrettable Gigi. It’s not merely his success with musicals that causes me to think of Minnelli as a musicals director. It’s that even his non-musicals that I’ve seen tend to have quite a bit in common with that genre. Take a film like Some Came Running. There’s a larger-than-life quality to this film despite the fact that the film itself is not of earth-shaking importance.

And that’s really the thing about Some Came Running. It’s a small story about small passions and people, but it plays out like a grand drama. Normally this would put the film in danger of being overblown, but somehow, this one works. Small lives writ large. It works, but not nearly as well as large lives writ large. The draw isn’t so much the drama, but the cast and the novelty of the first on-screen pairing of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

All Singing, All Dancing

Film: On the Town; An American in Paris
Format: VHS (On the Town) and DVD (An American in Paris) from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on big ol’ television.

Sing the refrain with me, folks: I don’t like musicals that much. I have, however, been very good about crossing them off my list. In fact, I think I’ve crossed off all but a few after today. I try very hard to take each one for what it is and I always want to like whatever I watch. Sadly, I have a feeling I’m going to catch some hell for disliking On the Town (I’m looking at you, Siobhan). This is a musical that hits every main point a musical needs to please the fans of the genre. What I mean by that is that it’s more than just the people singing and dancing that make this a most musical of musicals. Its attitude, situation, and wacky hijinks throughout place this firmly into its genre.

Ready for the plot rehash? Three sailors get a 24-hour leave in New York. Two of them find girls to spend the day with immediately while the third creates a fantasy girl for himself, then finds her, then loses her, and spends most of the day trying to get her back. That and a shit-ton of singing and dancing are the whole film.

Climb Aboard

Film: The Band Wagon
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

The Band Wagon from 1953 is one of those musicals that strikes at the whole meta-quality of a lot of musical theater. We sit and watch a film called The Band Wagon in which a cast of characters puts on a stage show called “The Band Wagon.” It’s also the sort of musical in which virtually every uttered syllable is done as broadly as possible to make sure that we in the audience get that it’s funny. An early scene in which the two playwrights talk about their idea is filled with shouting and whooping and a shit-ton of congratulations but pitifully little about their actual idea. Rough ride, right?

Well, yes and no. See this is also a musical comedy that features the talents of Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. It’s physically impossible for me to completely dislike something with Fred Astaire in it because I like Fred Astaire. I feel the same way about Gene Kelly, just for the record. Astaire is a likeable actor, and even with a thin plot and considerable overacting from most of the cast, he’s a pure pleasure to watch dance. I mean, really, if you can’t sit back and smile when Fred Astaire is swinging Cyd Charisse around, you may not have much of a soul.

A Cheerful Touch of Misogyny

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

I have a friend named Lori who loves musicals. Loves them to death. She gets mad at me when I complain about musicals. Then again, she’s more cinematically limited than I am, in that there are a good dozen genres she won’t watch. Anyway, every now and again I talk to her about the stuff that I’m watching. When musicals on The List came up, she flat out told me I shouldn’t watch Gigi. It wasn’t because she didn’t think I’d like it. It’s because she absolutely hates it. Lori was right.

Hate isn’t a word that I bandy about loosely, either when writing about film or talking about anything else, and it’s probably too strong a word for my feelings about this film. It’s safe to say, though, that I really didn’t like it, and I had a difficulties paying attention to it at times. It’s a film that features the sort of joyful misogyny that only a musical from the ‘40s or ‘50s can. That, more than anything, is my biggest problem with the film.

Two-Legged Sharks

Film: The Bad and the Beautiful
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

There’s a particular type of film that is told from the back end forward. It’s always an interesting writing decision and directorial decision to essentially let the audience know the basics of how the story is going to end, or at least the point that we’re going to come back to in an hour or so. The Bad and the Beautiful starts this way, and this is a film in which the thought of starting at the end actually makes good sense.

We’re introduced to a trio of people refusing to speak with a man named Jonathan Shields. One is Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), a successful film director. The second is Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), one of the most popular leading actresses in Hollywood. The third is James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell), a highly-sought-after scriptwriter. None of them will take the man’s calls. All three are brought into the office of Harry Pebbel (Walter Pidgeon), who asks the three to relent. The crew then talks about their history with James Shields, one of the most powerful men in the movie business.

Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) is the man of the hour here, a powerful man in the business, but in the eyes of these three, Shields is also the most hated man in the business. And we learn something about how each of these people really got their starts in the business, and how Jonathan Shields is inexorably tied up in both their success and in their own personal tragedies.

We learn about Fred Amiel first. When Shields’s father dies, the man was so hated that Jonathan had to hire extras for the man’s funeral. One of those is Fred Amiel, who works as an extra at times and also works behind the camera. The two end up becoming friends and starting their own company and go to work for Harry Pebbel, producing (Jonathan) and directing (Fred) poverty row pictures and cheapies, but getting something actually out of them and turning out interesting films. But then, at the moment of their big break, Jonathan gives Fred’s script to another director, cutting his friend out of his moment of glory.

Georgia began life as the alcoholic daughter of an alcoholic star. Slumming around Hollywood for bit parts and a little male companionship, Georgia is a wreck. But it’s Jonathan who saves her, and makes her into a star. That he does so by letting her think he has fallen in love with her and stringing her along to get the performance he needs from her before letting her go.

And then there’s Bartlow, who Shields brings out to Hollywood to write the script of the book he’s just written. Bartlow is plagued by a Southern belle of a wife (Gloria Grahame) who interferes with his work and spends all his money. To get the script he wants, he sends her off with one of his stars, who proceeds to get both him and the Southern belle killed in a plane crash. But Bartlow’s career is made.

And then we’re back to the start. Shields is looking to get a new start in the film business, and wants this group of people to work with him. Will they or won’t they? Will they continue to hate him for the lies and the deception, or will they decide that for as much as he did wrong, he also did right and helped make them who they are? It’s a decision that we understand at a greater depth at the end of the film, and the decision the three characters make says as much about them as it does about Jonathan Shields.

This is another case where I probably saw the movies in the wrong order—I should have watched this before I watched The Player, because there are some real similarities here, although without the whole murder/crime/cover-up/vengeance angle. But this is a film that is very much about the dark underbelly of the Hollywood system and the star system. And at the same time, this is a film that is simply about success and business. Apart from the glamour, this story wouldn’t be that different if it took place in the steel industry or advertising or book publishing. It’s a story of success by any means, failure on the grand scale, and people who are very good at what they do, but who are not always very good at being people.

Of all of them, I suppose I have a certain level of sympathy for Amiel and Bartow. Amiel trusts Shields to help his own career as much as he will help Shields, and Shields sells him out at the first opportunity. Bartow treats Shields like a friend, and loses his wife because of it, because Shields wanted the script more than he wanted Bartow having to deal with his wife’s distractions. And yet, even there, my sympathy is tempered. Even more, I don’t have much sympathy for Shields himself. He’s ruthless in getting what he wants, vicious, arrogant, and heartless when it serves his purposes.

While there is certainly a plot here, this film serves more as a character study than a plotted story. But, it’s one hell of a character. Minnelli might be better known for musicals, but The Bad and the Beautiful shows that he wasn’t limited to them.

Why to watch The Bad and the Beautiful: Can Hollywood ever really be skewered enough?
Why not to watch: It’s really difficult to sympathize with assholes.