Splendor in the Grass, alas (about the film and Elia Kazan)

From The Forum With No Name:

For some reason Kazan's Splendor in the Grass rubbed me the wrong way. I don't find there the same level of immediate realism as I found in, say On the Waterfront (surface realism I mean; even the characterization in Waterfront has its problems).

Part of it I think is that I'm never happy with the way Kazan scores his films, usually with Alex North's music (here it's David Amram, but it sounds pretty much the same)--what's happening onscreen may be drama, but the music reduces it to melodrama.

Part of it is the American youth movies of this period bother me; I always found even the younger children in European movies more persuasive (400 Blows, Forbidden Games, Zero for Conduct; for adolescent pictures, well, I Vitelloni comes to mind). And the sense you have that not just the Kansas folks but the movie itself finds the subject matter--repressed sexuality--sensational and shocking seems not a little funny (I suppose part of it is seeing this material today).

Warren Beatty is superb--carries the load of Adonis and troubled youth effortlessly on his square shoulders; even at this pretty-boy age you can see he's not just any pretty boy. Natalie Wood I find problematical--she's pretty, but I thought Barbara Loden far more striking. Doesn't help either that Sandy Denis is around--seeing her reminds you that she could play Natalie's role better and with less effort than a duck shakes off water.

Oh, and it's amusing to see Gary Lockwood play a cad; he shows more life here in his few minutes than in all of 2001. I remember him giving off some heat when he and Keir Dullea worried over HAL; he must have been really champing at his bit in Kubrick's movie to cut something--anything--loose.

TonyaJ: Glad you enjoyed Warren's performance, Noe - I thought you might. Yes, I have to say the last time I saw the movie last year, I found the music exasperating (but then you have to remember the era it was made in). Instead of simply providing a simple backdrop to the story, it threatened to overwhelm it. Yeah, we get it, we get it already! Overblown teenage hormones and emotions. I am fond though, of separate scenes in it, like Wood getting up and explaining what Wordsworth's poem means in layman's terms.

ChrisJ: Splendor IS dated and IS overwrought melodrama with a handful of superb scenes. However, I think that's the movie they were making. The gave us the movie they wanted to and we get as Noel has said some performances worth watching. Beatty is excellent. Wood always seemed a bit off, not up to the task of playing this role, I want to like her but she's not up to it and overshadowed by others as Noel pointed out.

However as these kinds of films go, it's an excellent one.

I have a very very sour taste in my mouth for Kazan but On the Waterfront is a great film and Face in the Crowd superb. Streetcar is a grossly compromised film partly because of censorship and partly because Brando just takes over the film--which you could argue he should.

Boomerang with Karl Malden's melodramatic performance is another top notch Kazan film.

Gentleman's Agreement never gets over the fact it knows it's an important message film (anti-semitism)and we've got serious script problems throughout. Peck is also miscast, but for me that works FOR the film.

PINKY is very dated and had censor problems and also suffers from the message film syndrome. Too bad the studio didn't let Lena Horne play the title role---Chickens.

Panic in the Streets is suspense thriller noir set in a very seedy New Orleans (take note) with a message of paranoia woven into the film that worked better a few years after the movie was made...then when it first came out. It's dated but I like this one a lot.

Viva Zapata is also an excellent film from a prize winning John Steinbeck script and featuring one of Brando's best performances. It's a strong step away from Hollywood's safe, somewhat cliched studio epic biographies.. but still has elements of the era that date it.

Baby Doll created a sensation, it definitely has a real sleazy and trashy feel to the film and part of that is created by the need to fudge and play within strict censorship guidelines pushing it here and there and not being able to push it in other ways. The acting and Kazan's direction are superb. Not my favorite On the Waterfront and Panic are those and I'd put Zapata ahead of it too), but one of Kazan's best.

DH1: The problems of Gentleman's Agreement for me were summed up by Arthur Laurents, who said that its central message was that "you better be nice to a Jew because he might turn out to be a gentile."

ChrisJ: Great line--but it was a difficult film to get released and taken seriously--which it was. It's an easy target to deride for a few reasons, but the message was important. Of course just because it was an IMPORTANT film doesn't mean it's a good one and if you could once consider it above average--time has been cruel to it.

Baby Doll's my fave precisely because it's so sleazy (right on, Chris); Kazan got that down pat. Splendor seemed off because you feel even for that time and place the kids were more sensible and crazier (in different ways) than on the screen.

We can call it "Sirkian," but even Sirk's melodramas are more persuasive, partly because he clues you in that it isn't exactly real life--it's very stylized.

My Neighbor the Yamadas

After watching the Disney-released English dub of My Neighbor the Yamadas, I've got to conclude that Takahata is at least the equal of Miyazaki, if not his superior, is a master at understatement and the domestic drama, and that this film is a major Ghibli production. Just because people including Disney think of it as an amusing family comedy doesn't mean it isn't a significant film--their boldest and most experimental effort, in both form and content, and the single most delicately beautiful use of digital animation I've ever seen. Period.

Saw this back in 1998, if I remember right, in Singapore, and much preferred it over Edward Yang's Yi Yi (A One and a Two), especially in its depiction of women.

Reacting to Thief of Bagdad

from a_film_by:

jpcoursodon: I am really surprised and disappointed that you, of all people, should come up with such a superficial and dismissive review of one of the greatest fantasy movies ever made. Your piece almost reads like one of those snotty, condescending reviews some pseudo-intellectual, movie-despising critics were always writing in the thirties and forties. Oh well... You put it up on a _film_by so you asked for it...

JPC

A reprimand that somehow comes across as a compliment!

But I'm simply putting forth my reaction to some aspects of the film that, when considering other films in other countries, made at an admittedly later period, seem not to hold up (I'm talking about the decor and the--I don't know how else to put it, the 'disposable' portion of the cast (y'know, like the singing couple nobody notices in the Marx brothers comedies)). I'll stand on the good things I did say of the film, and say that I do consider it a great fantasy--just one against which I hold some reservations.

As for throwing in Reiniger's film--personal opinion, as I said. But as you pointed out, I did put it up on a_film_by, and you gave your opinion accordingly. Comments accepted.

David Ehrenstein: Interesting, Noel. But you should keep in mind that this film was made on the run as Hitler was attacking England at the time. Korda and company had to come to Hollywood to shoot parts of it, and then rush back to England to finish it -- this the many directors. The split you note between John Justin's adult romantic lead and Sabu's adventurous boy MAKES the film for me.

It's all about childhood peering over the edge into adulthood -- and pulling back in favor of adventure.

A tension between growing up and going out? That's interesting. I wish they had at least modulated the characters, gave Ahmad a bit of a spine; as it is, I find it hard to respect him, find it far easier to love Sabu. And Veidt.

The Thief of Bagdad

Haven't seen Alexander Korda's The Thief of Bagdad (which Michael Powell and six other directors handled) in, oh, fifteen years, I think, and the opening image--a ship with gigantic blood-red sails, billowing at the screen--is an eye-popper.

The sets, however, are a bit of a disappointment: the colors are bright, but the design isn't as ornate or ostentatious as you'd expect from Islamic architecture. If you want extravagant film sets, you might want to take a look at K. Asif's Mughal-E-Azam, with its terrace after terrace of dancing women and intricate canal system; most of that picture was shot in black-and-white (I don't know why, but I suspect it's to give our overworked eyes some relief), but a climactic dance sequence in full color is shot in the famed Palace of Mirrors (the sequence might be compared to a lightning bolt striking a glacier, or a tornado scoring a direct hit on Tiffany's).

As for the cast, June Duprez and John Justin are nice-looking kids, but barely the kind of wondrous beauties you might expect to find in Bagdad, no matter how heavily they apply eyeliner to Justin's eyes; even the poorest Bollywood musical has a better-looking cast.

Conrad Veidt, however, is wonderfully villainous, and actually not as one-sidedly evil as you might think: with the princess in his hands, he hesitates, because for all his powers he does love her and wants her to love him of her own free will. At one point, he confides to the princess' captor: "Love she has yet to learn. But I'm here to teach her;" later he declares "Forget Ahmed. He's no longer blind. For a man with eyes the world is full of women. Only I am cursed, that I can see only you." Justin's Prince Ahmad can only show a fraction of Veidt's passion, and about a hundredth of his initiative; truth to tell, Ahmad is something of a limp rag, and you wonder why the princess just doesn't dump him in favor of the older, far more intense lover.

The problem may be that the Prince Ahmad character has been divorced from the thief character (unlike in the Raoul Walsh silent version, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), with the resulting decrease in, well, character (not to menton balls) in the former. When things get rough, Justin's Ahmad throws himself down in despair; Sabu as Abu, the thief of Bagdad (and real hero of the film), doesn't give up so easily.

Sabu is a joy, of course, and gets all the best lines; he has many adventures, but none so memorable as the ones he has with the genie (Rex Ingram), a far more malevolent and unpredictable creature than Robin Williams' fuzzy old dear. I'm assuming the character split was made so that they could use Sabu (who's too young here to be a romantic lead--or is it they didn't think an Indian actor could be a romantic lead?), and still have a romance, in which case I suppose the split was the best compromise they could make under the circumstances. A wonderful fantasy, despite my reservations, mainly thanks to Ingram, Veidt, and Sabu, though (in my opine) it can't possibly hold a candle to Lotte Reiniger's wonderful, wonderful The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

"All About My Mother" and "The Sea Inside"

All About My Mother and The Sea Inside

Michael Powell's "The Edge of the World"

Michael Powell's The Edge of the World (1937) is about an island called Hirta (actually Foula doubling as Hirta) off the coast of Scotland, and as beautifully bleak and lonely and windswept a place as any on earth (an introduction tells us that when the Romans sailed around Britain they saw this cloud-enshrouded isle in the distance and called it 'The Edge of the World'). The islanders are a closed, tight-knit community, and as a result they're dying out--all the young ones are leaving, and the remainder are old and few.

The foreground drama--about a pair of lovers cursed with bad luck because, as the legend puts it, they saw the coast of Scotland through the cloud covering--seems to be so much salad dressing to hold together what Powell was really interested in: that is, all the dramatic shots of rock and sea and sky, and any combination of the three, he can find on that island. You can see Powell's influences--late Eisenstein, Robert Flaherty, and Dozhenko come to mind. I'd almost consider it a silent film, as what feels like more than half of the picture is devoted to gazing at men struggling wordlessly against nature in this barbaric landscape. Wonderful little film.

A History of Violence

Some reservations with regards to David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (Warning--plot discussed in detail):

1) Everyone is too cheerful about Viggo Morentensen's character getting all that press; if you live in a small town, I imagine the attention would be more annoying. Mortensen is guarded; I'd have thought he'd be more freaked out, maybe even panicky. And I'm not sure such an incident would reach national news; it probably would have to be an extremely slow news night.

2) Looking out your window after being accosted by a news crew and seeing a black sedan outside, I'm not sure I would assume that's yet another news crew (in a black sedan?), and I'm not sure I would be so complacent about it. People see these reports, they tend to get crazy ideas; the people here should be more aware of that.

3) The sheriff expresses skepticism that gangsters from Philadelphia would show their hand so completely unless they have the wrong man, but expresses NOT ONE WORD about him being able to dispatch three men singlehandedly, or almost. Also, that for a small-town man he seems to end up in the hospital with some regularity.

4) I suspect the movie follows the graphic novel pretty closely (as closely as the fight sequences?). The fact that the film seems to dwell more on the violence than on the consequences of living with it, I think this tendency come from the novel. It's the most entertaining way to go, but not necessarily the most thoughtful, useful, or even interesting.

That said, it's probably one of the best mainstream films of the year, right up there with The Constant Gardener, Land of the Dead, and Corpse Bride. This isn't a great year for films, I think, from the few I've seen, but it seems to be shaping up to be better than last year, anyway, qualitywise.