Last year, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows made it to number 24 on Swampflix’s Top 100 films, so naturally I spent the evening of last Christmas Eve closing that blind spot. If you’re a weirdo like I/we am/are (and if you’re on this site, that’s probably the case), you’ll likely find yourself recognizing the plot from its contours, because what Star Wars is to Spaceballs, this movie is to John Waters’s Polyester. Since Brandon had already written a review years earlier, I repurposed the review I couldn’t stop myself from writing to save for this year as an earnest recommendation to spend some part of your Christmas season with Sirk too, on the 70th anniversary of Heaven’s release.
Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a well-off widow in New England. Her life is quiet, with visits from her two college-aged children Kay (Gloria Talbott) and Ned (William Reynolds) growing fewer and further between. Her best friend, Sara Warren (Agnes Moorhead), takes her out socially; attempts to get her to pair off with older widowers in their social circle are unsuccessful, as she feels no spark with any of them. One day, she realizes that some new hunk is tending to her landscaping, and he introduces himself as Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), the son of the late Mr. Kirby who was previously engaged as the Scott family’s arborist. When she visits him at his home, she learns that he sleeps on a cot in a room attached to the greenhouse, and when he mentions planning to tear down the old mill on the property, she cajoles him into giving her a tour of the long-abandoned building, and she encourages him to convert it into a livable home instead. As their romance burgeons, their love is represented in ongoing changes to the mill house, which comes to resemble a livable home more and more. Ron takes Cary to meet some of his friends, a couple who have given up on the lifestyle of trying to keep up with the Joneses in New York and now instead tend a tree farm. As the night goes on, a party erupts, and the couple introduces Cary to their bohemian friends: birdwatchers, beekeepers/artists, cornbread masters, and lobster-catchers.
Cary has a wonderful, uninhibited time, but there’s trouble around the corner; her high society friends are rather snooty about her relationship, as are her children. When she mentions selling the house and moving in with Ron (post nuptials, of course), Ned becomes quite upset about his mother selling his childhood home and tells her that the “scandal” she’s bringing upon the family by dating someone who’s merely (upper) middle class could jeopardize his career options. The local gossip hound starts a rumor that Cary and Ron had been an item since before her husband died, which deeply upsets Kay, as she begs her mother to break things off with Ron. Everyone also seems to be utterly scandalized by their dramatically different ages. (Hudson was 30 and Wyman 38 at the time, and those are the ages that they appear to be to me, but the film may be trying to imply a greater disparity.) She acquiesces to the demands of her fairweather socialite friends and her ungrateful children, only to learn some months later that her sacrifice was in vain. Both of her children delay their Christmastime return to their hometown, and when they arrive, they reveal their own new life plans; Kay will be getting married to her beau in February when he graduates, and Ned will be leaving straight from his own graduation to take a position in Europe that will last, at minimum, a year. They present her with a Christmas gift that she doesn’t want (more on that in a minute), and Ned even suggests that they sell the house, since the kids won’t be needing it as their “home” any longer. Via a simple misunderstanding, Cary comes to believe that Ron is getting married to another woman, and the melodrama only unfolds further from there.
Sirk is a Technicolor artist, and this is a gorgeous movie, and a very funny one at that. One of the things that I really loved about this cast was the opportunity to see Agnes Moorhead play a kinder, more sympathetic role. Just a couple days after watching this one I caught her name in the opening credits of Dark Passage and thought to myself, aloud, “That woman was working.” And, wouldn’t you know it, I tuned into the New Year’s Twilight Zone marathon on H&I just in time to catch her episode of that:
Moorhead’s Sara Warren is the only real friend that Cary has, as she’s the one who encourages her to get back together with Ron when she sees just how heartbroken her friend is. We learn this in a scene that’s perfectly framed and is one of many pointed social critiques that the film makes. We cut to a shot of a housekeeper vacuuming a carpet, as the camera dollies backward through the doorway to the room in which Sara and Cary are talking, and Sara closes the door to shut out the noise so that the two women can converse. It’s a neat gag, but it plays into the overall social critique of the movie, in which even the most sympathetic member of the bourgeoisie is still an aristocrat shutting out her social inferiors, despite her softening her heart towards her friend’s desire to date a blue collar business owner. There’s also a great contrast between the country club cocktail party that Cary attends near the film’s opening scene and the lobsterfest that happens at Ron’s friends’ house, where the upper class is presented undesirably. A married man makes a pass at Cary, kissing her; a potential romantic interest tells her that there’s little need for passion at their age, to which she (rightfully) takes some offense; the town gossip queen is there to do her thing. Ron’s group’s party is a lively place, where he plays the piano and sings boisterously, and people dance with great fervor. It’s never commented upon, but it is present throughout.
Another fun little tidbit about this one is its distaste for television. Early on in the film, Sara suggests that Cary get a television to keep her company now that the house is empty, which Cary finds to be a contemptible suggestion. When a television salesman sent by Sara calls upon the Scott household, Cary shoos him away in a huff. In the final insult, however, Cary receives a television set as a gift from her children for Christmas. Ned even reiterates that Cary will be lonely and unfulfilled without her children and should have something in the house to distract her from her pitiful solitude, as if he and his sister hadn’t done everything in their power to sabotage her relationship with Ron. After the children have gone off to do their own things, their mother is left alone in the house, lit only by the lights of the Christmas tree and a duplicate fire: one in the hearth and its mirror in the flat TV screen — the giver of warmth and its cold reflected image. It’s striking and memorable, and the relatively tiny window that the TV might give of the world is visually contrasted with the vivid Technicolor world just on the other side of the panoramic windows that Ron has installed into the home he built to share with Cary. It’s good stuff.
The film doesn’t demand a winter or Christmas time frame to be viewed, but I think it works best in that context. I’m getting the word out now so you can put it on the calendar before we all get Christmas brained. And, while you’re at it, when was the last time you watched Polyester?
Imitation of Life is a weird document. All That Heaven Allows lives and dies based upon your investment in the happiness of its lead character, and Written on the Wind is a narrative about a wealthy American family in slow decline, rent asunder by internal forces of jealousy, desperation for approval, and poor parental love; both are also shot in glorious Technicolor. Imitation of Life, on the other hand, was marketed in much the same way as Heaven, namely that it was supposedly a romantic picture about a widow finding love again, but that narrative is by far the least interesting thing about the film. What it turns out to be instead is an unexpectedly heartbreaking story about a family that is torn apart by societal forces that even an abundance of motherly love can’t overcome, with the emergence of a new theatre star as the supposed primary plot of the film while actually serving as the background to a much more interesting story.
Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) loses her daughter, Susie, at Coney Island one day, then finds her in the company of another girl, Sarah Jane. Lora, delighted, meets who she first assumes is Sarah Jane’s nanny, Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), but learns that Annie is actually Sarah Jane’s mother. Annie describes her late husband as having been “close to white” and that Sarah Jane takes after him, rather than Annie. Upon discovering that Annie and her daughter are essentially homeless, she takes them into her apartment, as there is an extra room off of the kitchen (a common feature of the time, as Lora is essentially putting them up in the maid’s quarters, and their placement there is not an accident). The supposed A-plot features Lora seeking to make it as a star onstage in the big city; she successfully bluffs her way into the office of talent agent Allen Loomis (Robert Alda) and gets an invitation to a party that same evening where all the movers and shakers will be. When it turns out that this is a prelude to a casting couch situation, she leaves in an understandable huff, although this is all forgiven when Loomis ends up becoming her agent regardless. He gets her an audition for the latest play by David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy), and when she stands up to him about a scene not working as written, he’s likewise impressed with her moxy and gives her an even bigger part. This is counterposed with her budding romance with Steve Archer, a photographer whom she met that fateful day at the beach; he took a photo of the girls balancing an empty can on a sleeping man’s stomach that day and eventually sold it for use in advertisements for beer. (Incidentally, Steve is played by John Gavin, who you may remember as Marion Crane’s afternoon delight stud-muffin in Psycho; try not to let his character being named Sam Loomis there while his character here is romantic rivals with a different Loomis confuse you.) Steve and Lora grow closer until he finally proposes, but his insistence that she give up her career is a non-starter.
All throughout, the film focuses on Annie and her relationship with her daughter, who is clearly struggling under the weight of her Black identity. When she and her mother first arrive at the Merediths’, Susie tries to give Sarah Jane her newest and most prized doll, which happens to be Black, causing Sarah Jane to resent the younger girl’s innocent insensitivity. When Annie is telling the story of Mary and Joseph’s trip to Bethlehem at Christmas time, Sarah Jane asks what color Jesus was. Lora tells her that Jesus is whatever color one imagines him to be, and Sarah Jane protests that this can’t be the case since they are being taught he was a real person. Finally, she says “Jesus was white. Like me.” Things really come to a head, however, when Annie comes to Sarah Jane’s school to bring her lunch and learns that her daughter has been passing as white among her peers and the teachers, and the realization among her classmates when they learn the truth bears out much of Sarah Jane’s fears about exposure and the mistreatment she can expect because of the racism of the society in which she lives. When I started that last sentence, when I got to the end of it, I had to rethink my initial plan to conclude that Sarah Jane is mistreated “because of the color of her skin,” because that’s exactly the opposite of what’s happening. Sarah Jane is being treated fairly because of her apparent whiteness, and injustice and unfairness enters into the equation when a white supremacist society inexorably forces its way into these dynamics. Annie laments that her heart breaks because she can’t explain to the daughter that she adores why reality is so unfair, because Sarah Jane was “born to be hurt” by the world because of no fault of her own.
Things are even worse for Sarah Jane when there’s a time jump from 1947 to 1958, the passage of time represented by continuously superimposed images of Lora’s name on various marquees and the accompanying year. Her newfound wealth has afforded them a manse in the countryside, where Annie and Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) continue to live with Lora and Susie (Sandra Dee). It’s unclear what exactly Annie’s role in this new house is, as there are other servants now. A charitable read of the situation is that Lora and Annie have essentially been coparenting both of the girls since Annie and her daughter first came into the Meredith household, with Lora in the breadwinner role and Annie as the housewife, but even if that’s what’s happening here, it ignores all of the power dynamics at play. It’s also clear that Lora has been paying Annie in addition to housing her, as Annie mentions having saved up enough to send Sarah Jane to college. I’m not sure, but how you read this situation can have a lot of bearing on how you feel about its participants. If we choose to read Annie as co-head of household, as she’s mostly treated, then her oversight of the house and meals feels a little funny but isn’t ultimately demeaning. If we choose to read that the relationship between Annie and Lora has changed from being two women trying to make it in the big city together to one that feels familial but is nonetheless employer-employee, then Lora becomes much less sympathetic. My ultimate reading boils down to how Lora reacts when the two are parted by death, and that although she truly loved Annie and considered her a partner in life and not a servant, she nonetheless found herself occasionally acting in the patronizing manner of the era despite her affection and devotion.
Sarah Jane, for her part, is having a rough go of things, continuing to seek inroads to the life of privilege to which she feels entitled and which her perceived whiteness gives her just enough ingress to see how things are on the other side. This reaches a point of harrowing violence, when she goes to meet up with the boy who’s talked about running away together and getting married, only to find him sullen and unable to look her directly in the eye. He demands to know if what he’s learned—that Annie is her mother and that Sarah Jane is Black—is true. Sarah Jane denies it, but he nonetheless beats her savagely. Meanwhile, she’s having to deal with all of Susie’s stories about finishing school and watching her not-quite-sister get a pony as a graduation gift; to get out, she claims to be working at the NYC library, but Annie discovers she is actually working as a sort of sexy lounge singer where men leer at her, and when Annie’s appearance once again outs her as non-white, she loses the job. This prompts her to flee even further, finally ending up as a chorus girl out west, but when Annie comes to see her one last time, she tells Sarah Jane that she has come to say that she won’t chase her anymore, and that she loves her daughter enough to accept her choices. When one of the other chorus girls finds them together, Annie pretends to be no more than Sarah Jane’s old nanny in order to preserve her daughter’s concealment of her true identity.
It’s this that serves as the film’s climax. Sure, there are other things going on. Lora and Susie are distant because Lora always put her career first. Steve re-enters the picture, and he and Lora make plans to travel together and get to know one another again that she immediately reneges upon when offered a part in a new film from an Italian art director. Steve keeps Susie busy that summer and she falls madly in love with him (who wouldn’t?). Susie tells her mother to just be with Steve, and they get together. All seems kind of rote and pale in comparison to what’s happening with Annie, doesn’t it? That’s clearly intentional, and even though there’s a kind of going-through-the-motions energy of everything happening with the Merediths, I was never bored by any of it. Everything happening with Annie just overpowers it, as she ultimately succumbs to (perhaps literally) a broken heart from losing her daughter, spiritually if not literally. Her funeral service features a performance of “Trouble of the World” from Mahalia Jackson, and it’s beautiful.
In many ways, this is one of director Douglas Sirk’s finest hours. Annie’s story is beautiful, thoughtful, and tender, while Lora’s is perfectly serviceable. It may be that the DVD I saw of this didn’t have a very colorful transfer, but where this one is lacking is in its visual panache. You can almost feel the chill of the blue snow in All that Heaven Allows, but the colors here seem muted, although that may be due to the fact that this was a Eastmancolor production, not a Technicolor one. Susie’s room in the country manse stands out for this reason, as her bubblegum pink room should really pop, but it feels rather dull. Infamously, a publicity stunt surrounding this film was that half of its two-million-dollar budget was spent entirely on Lana Turner’s wardrobe, and while there are many fine pieces, it feels like they’re lacking in some razzle dazzle that one of Sirk’s other pictures would have more effectively conveyed. There are also some places where the narrative seams are less than flush. For instance, the extended sequence of Sarah Jane doing a musical number at the NYC club seems to be a leftover sequence from when the film was conceived as a musical. Both Steve (demanding that Lora forsake the stage in 1947) and Susie (realizing that her infatuation with Steve is childish and relinquishing her mother of any guilt in pursuing him in 1958) make decisions that feel more narratively convenient than true to the characters. Nonetheless, this one is definitely a contender for Sirk’s greatest work.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Hanna made Brandon, Boomer, and Britneewatch Oliver! (1968).
Hanna: My Movie of the Month pick began with a grave mistake. My intention was to introduce the crew to one of the first musicals I ever watched, which held a prized position in my family’s VHS collection: Sir Carol Reed’s Oliver! (1968), the film adaptation of the stage musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s serialized novel Oliver Twist. I’ve probably seen it at least five times, although not since I was 10 or 11. Roman Polanski made his own Oliver Twist adaptation in 2005, and for some ungodly reason, I somehow melded his version with the Reed musical; I proceeded to tell many people (including the Swampflix crew) that Polanski’s version was one of my childhood favorites. I finally picked it for the Movie of the Month, so James, Brandon, Britnee and I settled in my apartment on a rainy Tuesday to dive into Oliver. After puzzling over basic elements of the film (including the lack of musical numbers, the jarring difference in tone, the striking unfamiliarity of the lead actors, and the realization that I was only 12 when the Polanski version came out), I got the sneaking suspicion that I had picked the wrong movie; after the first fifteen minutes passed without a single song, I was finally able to admit my mistake, but everyone agreed to finish the film anyway. Two days later we settled in for Oliver!, which I (thankfully) found to be just as delightful as I remembered. I’m honored to have undergone this Oliver journey with those that accept me in spite of my absolutely awful memory and sense of time.
The musical basically follows Dickens’s serialized story, which brings the viewers on a tour of the various social classes in early 19th century England. We start off at a workhouse, where Oliver Twist (Mark Lester), a waifish orphan boy with a voice like a velvety little petal, is ousted from a workhouse after meekly requesting more gruel at dinner. The owner of the workhouse, Mr. Bumble, auctions Oliver off as an apprentice to the lowest bidder, who happens to be an undertaker. Oliver eventually escapes to London, where he immediately falls in with a dashing young pickpocket, the Artful Dodger (Jack Wild); his crew of cheerful thief children; and their adult ringleader, Fagin (Ron Moody). The child thieves have a rickety old hideout in the upper levels of an abandoned building, but their den is downright cozy; Fagin puts Oliver to bed in a torn-up basket and a couple of ratty blankets, which looked extremely inviting all things considered. It would be a child’s paradise if not for the looming presence of Bill Sikes, a horrific character played by an (unfortunately) extremely hot Oliver Reed. Bill is accompanied by the kind, ill-fated Nancy (Shani Wallis), who is responsible for 50% of my interest in this movie as a child. The bulk of the film’s tension rests on who is in possession of Oliver, and whether he’ll finally get the chance to join a happy household. At various points throughout the movie he’s sold, arrested, adopted, kidnapped, forced into burglary, and kidnapped again; apart from the stolen fineries of wealthy Londoners, he’s the hottest commodity in the film while doing basically nothing that isn’t at the behest of someone else’s will.
I think this is a great musical! The sets are big and beautiful, and a few numbers (namely “Consider Yourself” and “Who Will Buy?”) have that old Hollywood scale of extras that makes you think, “This scene was expensive!” The majority of the songs are absolute bangers; they wormed themselves into my brain many years ago and, like little sleeper agents, unfurled themselves effortlessly as the film went on. I think the thing that struck me the most was that this film makes poverty-stricken 1820s London seem like an absolute ball; I really wanted Fagin to be my grandfather and live a little life of crime when I saw this as a child. It’s especially striking after seeing the Polanski adaptation, which is absolutely mired in the muck of that period. Police dutifully trot around the city; little chimney sweeps burn their sweet little trousers; life is pure joy! Nancy’s relationship with Bill is probably the harshest aspect of the musical, and it’s also my absolute least favorite part to watch. Brandon, do you think the cheer of the musical takes away from the point of the film? Should Reed have made me feel worse for these little orphans, or do you think the musical had a balance of glee and gruel?
Brandon: I don’t have any especially strong opinions about Oliver!‘s duty to maintain the grueling tone of the Dickens source material, but I get the sense that Polanski does. His 2005 adaptation is not only more faithful to the narrative beats of the novel, it’s also a deliberate corrective to its feel-good interpretations like Oliver! and Oliver & Company. If Polanski has a discernible “take” on Oliver Twist, it’s that audiences need to be reminded of how brutal the original story was, despite its recent cheery revisionism. As a result, the 2005 version is absurdly grotesque, almost laughably so. Every single image is aimed to discomfort & disgust, to the point where it’s just as difficult to take seriously as the song & dance numbers in the family-friendly adaptations he was bucking against. The conflict between form & content in the 1968 musical is much more genuinely engaging. The circumstances of orphan life in 19th Century London are just as brutal, but the song & dance numbers are a pure delight, and there’s something oddly charming about Fagin yelling “Shut up and drink your gin!” at a room full of pipsqueak children, when that should register as a horrifying act of abuse. What’s hilarious about Polanski being bothered by that cheery incongruity is that Oliver Twist already had at least two dark & gritty updates in 1996’s Twisted and 2003’s Twist, so his 40-year-old grudge against the musical just feels like another old man complaining about nothing. And since anything that irks that particular old man is a cosmic good, I almost wish that Oliver! was even more saccharine just to irritate him further.
I am not sure if Oliver! is wonderfully grim or grimly wonderful, but it’s certainly one of the two. There’s something perverse about a big-budget Technicolor spectacle being composed entirely in a spectrum of sooty browns, as if the form and the narrative are too directly opposed for the movie to function in any sincere way. When orphans sing about starving on a pure-gruel diet, or when their caretakers sing about selling those orphans away for a pittance (so as not to waste more money on precious gruel), it’s hard to resist chuckling at its self-conflicted tone, even though what you’re watching is objectively depressing. However, as Hanna already noted, the scale of its musical set pieces is massive. It may all be a swirl of slightly varied browns, but there are often hundreds of performers filling that sooty frame, singing & dancing their workhouse lungs out. It’s not at all skimpy when doling out its extravagant song & dance numbers either (unlike how the orphanage doles out its servings of gruel). The first hour is practically a sung-through musical, offering very few words of spoken dialogue between the show-stopping musical numbers before it settles into a more traditional movie-musical rhythm. Britnee, did you have any particular favorite songs or musical moments buried in that extensive songbook? Were you at all disappointed when the movie dropped its sung-through format to include traditional spoken dialogue between those songs?
Britnee: Our accidental watch of Polanski’s Oliver Twist had me a bit concerned about watching Oliver! a few days later. How could such a grim story be converted into an enjoyable musical? Would the songs be just as dull as the setting? I was put at ease when the opening number, “Food, Glorious Food,” kicked the film off. All those dirty little paupers lining up for gruel in the most Broadway way possible? I was immediately hooked! It was so catchy and so much fun, and thankfully, the other musical numbers followed suit. I truly enjoyed each and every one of them, but my favorites are “You’ve Got to Pick A Pocket or Two” and “Who Will Buy?”.
The catchiness and quirkiness of “You’ve Got to Pick A Pocket or Two” was such a good time, and it made me really enjoy Fagin’s character. Fagin in Polanski’s Oliver Twist was horrible. He was cruel and easy to dislike, but dancing, singing Fagin was the life of the party. As for “Who Will Buy?”, that was a damn masterpiece. It almost felt like a movie within a movie, and it had me so invested in all the happenings of that neighborhood. Right when I thought the scene was wrapping up, another singing group would come in and add another layer into the number. And most importantly, as the youth would say, the song slaps.
I think there was just the right number of songs peppered throughout. Not one segment of the film was more song heavy than others, which kept me excited and really held my attention. This is the sooty brown musical of my dreams! Something else worth mentioning is the beautiful set design. How the dirty London streets and filth surrounding the characters could look so gorgeous boggled my mind. Boomer, what are your thoughts on the set design? Were you as fascinated with it as I was, or did it seem too Broadway for a film?
Boomer: I might be the worst person to ask if something is “too Broadway,” because as someone who generally hates traditional musicals, I’m usually the first person to want to skedaddle the moment a half-pint starts warbling in a soprano—it’s been ten years since this happened, which is long enough that I’ll admit it, but I once left a live stage production of South Pacific during intermission despite being there in a professional capacity. I’ve professed before that I dislike musicals in general and often in principle as well, but that non-traditional musicals sometimes manage to pierce that veil (as demonstrated by my previous MotM nominations London Road and True Stories) in addition to a couple of traditional musicals that somehow manage to warm the cockles of my cold, dead heart. I think that this one manages to slip in under the radar a little for me for several reasons. Firstly, the music is actually pretty good, and I don’t feel secondhand embarrassment for the lyricist with regards to their being forced to craft dialog and exposition into certain meter and rhyme scheme; I was surprised to discover that “I’d Do Anything” came from Oliver!, as I’d always assumed it was just an old standard, but it’s actually rather lovely in this context. Secondly, it’s very evocative of two traditional screen musicals that I actually do enjoy: 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol and 1967’s Doctor Doolittle, both of which I loved as a child. For the former, it’s mostly that era of musical-making, where there’s a huge budget and the effects are largely practical, plus the similarity in musical styles overall; for the latter, it’s the staging. It might be a stretch to call a film that casts Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit “traditional,” but other than the presence of Muppet actors, the film takes itself fairly seriously, and that’s evident in the set design there just as it is in this movie, so I guess my answer must be “yes.” There might be something Pavlovian about my unconscious mental arithmetic of Dickens + musical = a good time because of the sheer number of times I’ve seen Michael Caine go flying through the air with Gonzo and Rizzo attached to his housecoat, but I actually enjoyed this one, and it kept my attention for almost all of its prolonged runtime.
I was not party to the fateful viewing of Polanski’s adaptation, and I won’t defend him, but I will say that I can see why there would be a desire to push back against the lyrical good times being had in this film. I’ve softened over the years with regards to my need for historical accuracy (I’d probably be more forgiving of, for instance, the Converse high tops in Marie Antoinette in 2022 than I was in 2008), but there is something to be said about the necessity of historical veracity. The thing is, Industrial Era London was horrible, possibly one of the worst times to be alive in human history outside of being directly involved in war. Poverty was rampant, the streets ran brown with human waste, sovereignty was presumed divine, and the gentry was landed. Dickens’s novels and writings were actually fundamental to encouraging empathy for the downtrodden and encouraging philanthropy in the same way that Sinclair’s The Jungle was a foundational text in the actualization of food safety (although that was not the latter author’s goal), and I can understand being annoyed at this film, which depicts chimney sweeps as just silly little dudes as opposed to children performing dangerous labor. When white supremacists prattle on about the treatment of the Irish when trying to invoke whataboutism with regards to historical injustices that continue into the present day, the inhumane circumstances of Victorian England are rarely discussed, but only because white supremacy as it exists in the contemporary United States actually exists to reinscribe current systems of power between labor and aristocracy that aren’t terribly different from their own goals (as seen by state-level Republican-led efforts to rebrand child labor as “employment of minors” and damage the laws that prevent kids from being taken advantage of by employers). When I was first reading everyone’s thoughts prior to meditating on my own response, my knee-jerk response was “Actually, depicting this with the brutal reality of that era would be the correct choice,” but the longer I sat with that idea, the more I kept thinking about “Oom-Pah-Pah” until music filled my mind so that it blotted out everything else. So for once, I’ll just enjoy the party and not be a pooper (until you get to the Lagniappe section below, I suppose).
Lagniappe
Boomer: For my money, the best version of “I’d Do Anything” is this one by Fall On Your Sword, the same folks behind “Shatner Of The Mount.”
I’ll also add that Oliver! is no Birth of a Nation or Gone with the Wind when it comes to whitewashing historical atrocities for the sake of storytelling, since not even the worst elements of life under Victorian aristocracy compare to chattel slavery, but I’ll end with a reminder that we can’t get too comfortable about such things and should always inspect them. Birth and Gone are products of their time, but we are never free of that kind of historical revisionism and it’s vital that we never get too comfortable with it, now more than ever. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Learning for Justice initiative is a great place to start, as it calls out lies in children’s literature, like Henry Cole’s Unspoken and Ramin Ganeshram’s A Birthday Cake for George Washington. The minimization of historical sins, like characterizing “Harriet Tubman [as] a very strong woman who left her farm without permission,” are part of the fascism playbook. Oliver! might get a pass, but there’s still work to be done.
Brandon: This was an educational experience in several ways, but the factoid from my Oliver! research that’s haunted me most was learning it was one of Michael Jackson’s pet obsessions. Apparently, Jackson befriended Oliver!‘s Mark Lester when they were both child-stars of the late-1960s, which led to persistent tabloid rumors that Lester was the sperm-donor biological father to Jackson’s children. A rumor that Lester himself has confirmed in interviews! It almost sounds too weird to be true, until you remember that Jackson was also so obsessed with the David Lynch film The Elephant Man that he attempted to purchase the real-life John Merick’s bones for his private collection (a bizarre venture that The London Hospital Medical College thankfully did not indulge). These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.
Britnee: Swampflix needs to declare the first week of March as Oliver Twist Week, committing to watch a different version of Oliver Twist every year to commemorate the occasion. There’s a buttload of Oliver Twist movies out there, so we could keep it going forever!
Hanna: Taking the Oliver! of my childhood and Polanski’s faithful adaptation into consideration, I’m really drawn to and impressed by the longevity of Dickens’s original story of innocence attempting to navigate a filthy, horrifying world. I didn’t even realize how many Oliver Twist interpretations there were until Brandon kindly brought them to my attention. So, cast my vote in favor of Oliver Week so we can delve into all its many permutations. I’m glad that the Swampflix crew enjoyed meeting this sweet little orphan.
There have been countless adaptations of Gaston Leroux’s Turn of the Century novel Le Fantome de l’Opera on stage and screen, but it’s hard to argue that any have been as influential as the 1920s silent film starring Lon Chaney. Along with Chaney’s turn in the silent horror adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the 1925 Phantom of the Opera was a massive hit for Universal Pictures, launching a decades-long moneymaker in the studio’s Famous Monster’s brand. Before Lugosi & Karloff would come to define the Universal Monsters look, Chaney was the (hideously disfigured) face of the production company’s horror division. The ripple effect of the silent Phantom of the Opera’s success achieved a far-ranging influence (from Lugosi & Karloff to, disastrously, Dario Argento), not even matched by the name-recognition commanding stage musical from Andrew Lloyd Weber. Not to shatter any illusions to the contrary, but shameless remakes & reissues of lucrative intellectual properties are far from new to Hollywood, so the Lon Chaney Phantom’s success meant it would be a well Universal returned to often – first in a 1933 reissue of the original film with a (since lost) soundtrack that mutated into a talkie, then as this 1943 Technicolor remake. Graduating to sound & color wasn’t the only cinematic adjustments Fantame de l’Opera had to make in those first couple of decades either. As much as the 1940s remake is obviously indebted to the Lon Chaney original, its aesthetic is so current to its time that it rarely shows its silent horror roots – or even resembles horror at all.
The basic plot of a standard Phantom of the Opera adaptation remains intact in this Technicolor remake, with Claude Rains taking over from Chaney as the titular Phantom. Here, the distantly admiring, disfigured creep who haunts the Paris Opera house and promotes the career of his favorite singer under threat of violence to those who might block her way to success starts the film as a violinist in the orchestra before being burned with acid & retreating to the shadows. Most of his subsequent kills in the periphery are lightly handled: off-screen stranglings, attempted poisonings, a recreation of the falling chandelier stunt from the previous version, etc. Even the reveal of the Phantom’s purplish acid burn scars feels delicately handled in comparison to Long Chaney’s genuinely horrific makeup in the original film. Some of the stark silent era horror influences of the original echo in this remake, especially evident in shots where the Phantom appears only as a menacing shadow on the wall. For the most part, however, this remake plays much more like a dramatic “women’s picture” of its era, focusing more on the opera singer’s choice between pursuing operatic career opportunities or a “normal” life as a housewife. It’s like The Red Shoes by way of Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor melodramas in that way, with the Phantom’s role being relegated to a side character in the female lead’s A-plot. This is more of a comedic drama about a woman at a professional crossroads than it is a shock-a-minute monster movie about a crazed, disfigured violinist.
In a 2010s update to this version of the Phantom tale, it’s likely the opera singer herself who would have been driven mad to the point of monstrous transformation, but actor Susanna Foster is never afforded her own proper freak-out in the style of a Red Shoes or a Black Swan or a Perfect Blue (so many colors!). That’s not to say that Claude Rains’s secret, murderous admirer of her work is entirely detached from the themes of her professional/romantic dilemma either. His menacing, pushy presence just out of eyesight in the opera singer’s professional life is in some ways a pitch-perfect representation of how all the men around her apply too plentiful & too intense romantic pressure she doesn’t ask for or need in the early days of her professional career. The Phantom is only one of three men in the singer’s life, joining the ranks of a police officer & a fellow musical performer, both of whom wish to court her into marriage. Just as the Phantom pressures the singer into making bold leaps in her still-early career at the opera house by threatening & murdering higher-ups on her behalf, the two suitors pressure her to choose romance over fame & art, giving up the stage for “a normal life.” The general mood of the film is light & flavored with comedy, especially as the suitors trip over each other in dual proclamations of love, but there’s also an underlying tragedy throughout in this poor woman being pressured to make choices between art & romance instead of being allowed to live as she pleases. It’s a very Sirkian conflict, one that’s handled with appropriate visual beauty & emotional melodrama.
Like with Sirk or The Red Shoes to follow, the Technicolor Phantom remake is at the very least worth seeing for its staging, especially for the intense use of rich, bold color in its costuming & lighting. Even if the trading in of silent era horrors for love triangle humor & one woman’s professional indecision is not what you’re looking for in a Phantom of the Opera adaptation, the film is still worthwhile for the visual pleasures & emotional payoffs therein. Even though it chooses to conclude on a comedic note, its adaption of the Phantom’s lingering, unwanted threats & pressures to its central narrative of a woman stuck between competing men’s designs on her life’s plan is also a new angle on the material that justifies the impulse for a remake in the first place, no matter how light on horror. There would be plenty of pointless Phantom of the Opera remakes to come in the decades following this big studio Technicolor melodrama as filmmakers grappled with the original film’s influence on horror at large. It’s doubtful there are many that are this purposeful in their modernity-minded updates to the source material, however. 1943’s Phantom of the Opera seamlessly incorporates the basic elements & structure of the original silent work into a genuine participation in the “women’s pictures” of its own day, to great artistic & thematic payoff. A brief glance at the disparity in terror between Lon Chaney & Claude Rains’s makeup as the unmasked Phantom is alone enough to indicate the differences in those film’s basic intent, but what the Rains version loses in horror it more than makes up for in another, unexpected genre.
Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.
Where Young at Heart(1954) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 158 of the first edition hardback, Ebert explains his general taste in cinema. He writes, “I don’t care much for movies that get all serious about their love affairs, because I think the actors tend to take it too solemnly and end up silly. I like it better when love simply makes the characters very happy, as when Doris Day first falls for Frank Sinatra in Young at Heart.”
What Ebert had to say in his review(s): Ebert never properly reviewed the film, but when reminiscing about Frank Sinatra’s legendary career onscreen, he wrote, “The image that lingers is from Young at Heart, when he pushed back his hat, lit a cigarette, sat down at a piano and sang to Doris Day and broke her heart. He never had the looks to be a matinee idol, but he had a voice – the Voice – and he had a screen presence, and for a time in the 1950s, Frank Sinatra was one of the most interesting and successful actors in American movies.”
The Hays Code had a peculiar way of obscuring intent in older Hollywood fare. Films that superficially appear to be wholesome & chaste can sometimes be subversively disguising much darker, less moralistic themes than what that infamous production code permitted. It’s also tempting to read too much into that subversion in attempting to parse out artists’ intent vs. what Major Studios of the one era would allow. The musical romance Young at Heart operates within this historical grey area, concluding a schmaltzy musical reverie with an absurdly handed tragic conclusion that’s incongruous with the film’s overall tone, then immediately reversed. The film either doesn’t have the heart to follow through on its own devastating implications or was obstructed by Studio heads’ demands for a happy conclusion to a generally happy story. Its ending can be read either way, both literally blissful or figuratively tragic, making it only increasingly, frustratingly bizarre the longer you sit with it.
A remake of a popular 1930s musical titled Four Daughters, Young at Heart functions on the surface as a well-behaved Technicolor romance. Doris Day stars as an eligible bachelorette at the center of a musical family mostly made up of daughters desperate to be married off. With an alarming focus on anxieties of weight loss & living single, the desperately lonely girls (adult women, really) are all awestruck by the arrival of a handsome, overconfident songwriter played by Gig Young. As he’s employed to write songs for the family, the girls all separately pine for his affection, something that’s awarded to Doris Day’s lead, to her sisters’ jealousy. Much of this early stretch of the film is dependent on the simple joy of watching Doris Day sing, a talent that’s dedicated to culturally toxic, marriage-obsessed diddies like “Til My Love Comes for Me,” “Ready, Willing, and Able,” “Hold Me in Your Arms,” and “Make it Soon.” Thankfully this nauseous love fest is disrupted by the arrival of Frank Sinatra as a troubled, dangerous piano player and friend to the songwriter beau. For her sisters’ sake and because she’s genuinely turned on by his talent, Doris Day’s protagonist leaves her dream man for this sad puppy dog of a romantic rival. This much-needed interjection of danger & sexuality opens the film up to an increasingly tense conflict of hurt feelings, romantic betrayals, and declining mental health. This all culminates in a climactic suicide that feels miles & miles away from the sunny, romantic (even if unhealthily marriage & weight obsessed) disposition of the film’s opening stretch.
Or does it? In an incredibly bizarre denouement, the tragic suicide that tears this family apart is undone with an idyllic Easter morning get-together, the attempted death being retconned as a failure. The 1930s version, Four Daughters, stuck to the implications of the suicide while Young at Heart tacks on a happy ending so artificially saccharine it can almost be read as dream of Heaven. As Four Daughter was also produced under the Hays Code, it’s unclear whether the suicide was not allowed by the studio for moral reasons, its actor‘s vanity, or a general preference for romantic musicals to end on a happy note. What’s even more unclear is what director Gordon Douglas (who helmed the horror classic Them! this same year) intended to convey in its ending. Is the final scene supposed to be taken as a literal happy conclusion to a dark chapter in these sisters’ lives or is it a subversive workaround that concludes the story on a more logical beat, subtly indicating that its image of peace & romantic calm is actually a vision of Heaven? I honestly have no idea what to make of it, thanks to more notorious Hays Code & Studio System shenanigans, which almost makes for a more intriguing conclusion than the straightforward approach of Four Daughters.
If you read Young at Heart as a straight, well-behaved Technicolor romance, it’s a kind of unremarkable, modest pleasure. Doris Day & Frank Sinatra are compelling performers, but most of the material is a cookie cutter approach to movie magic. The in-the-moment intensity & absurdly incongruous fallout of the film’s climactic suicide scene is what really makes it interesting as a Studio System relic. It’s impossible to know what Studio Notes or Hays Code adherence might have steered Young at Heart to such a bizarrely artificial conclusion., but it created an interesting tension in the process. Just as Sinatra’s arrival earlier in the film disrupted its chaste, serene romance, Gordon’s return to that chastity after such a tensely bleak suicide sequence feels like just as much of an intrusion, so much so that the scene can be comfortably read as a supernatural broadcast from Heaven above. The censorship of the Hays Code era encourages that kind of skeptical, overreaching reading of what movies are doing on the surface vs. what they’re getting away with beneath it, whether or not that kind of interpretation is warranted here specifically.
Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.
Where The Wizard of Oz (1939) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 158 of the first edition hardback, Ebert explains his general taste in cinema. He writes, “Of the other movies I love, some are simply about the joy of physical movement.” One of his examples includes “when Judy Garland follows the yellow brick road.”
What Ebert had to say in his review(s): “The elements in The Wizard of Oz powerfully fill a void that exists inside many children. For kids of a certain age, home is everything, the center of the world. But over the rainbow, dimly guessed at, is the wide earth, fascinating and terrifying. There is a deep fundamental fear that events might conspire to transport the child from the safety of home and strand him far away in a strange land. And what would he hope to find there? Why, new friends, to advise and protect him. And Toto, of course, because children have such a strong symbiotic relationship with their pets that they assume they would get lost together.” – from his 1996 review for his Great Movies series
As I spent my high school and college years mostly tracking down transgressive films from the 70s, 80s, and beyond that broke away from the Old Hollywood studio system tradition, I lost touch with the merits of what that mammoth system could produce. My entry back into the strange (and often problematic) majesty of Old Hollywood triumphs has been the miracle of Technicolor, a discontinued color film treatment that produced the most intense, intoxicating hues to ever touch celluloid. My interest in Technicolor was initially piqued by giallo pictures like SuspiriaandBlood & Black Lace, but as I’ve gotten further down the rabbit hole more mainstream titles like The Red Shoes & To Catch a Thiefhave been even more rewarding in their use of the medium. It was wonderful, then, to return to the Technicolor mecca of The Wizard of Oz by watching it on the big screen at the storied Prytania Theatre at this point in my life. Narratively, I know every beat in the Hollywood Classic by heart thanks to its omnipresence on television in my youth, but returning to its Technicolor delights after this decades-long break was a downright magical experience for me, one of my all-time most affecting trips to the cinema.
Although there are plenty of behind the scenes stories about the technical feats & real world evils that had to be pulled off to make The Wizard of Oz possible, the film still feels like a magical object that was conjured into the world instead of being made by human hands. 80s years have passed since its initial release, but the film’s bizarre energy & Technicolor beauty feel just as potent as ever, as if they were broadcast directly from a teen girl’s dream instead of being staged by a crew of hundreds on a movie studio sound stage. A production design triumph & featuring lavish costumes by Adrian (who also designed the fashion for fellow 1939 Technicolor wonder The Women), The Wizard of Oz is blatant in its artificiality at every turn, yet through some kind of dark movie magic fools you into seeing beyond its closed sets into an endless, beautifully hellish realm. I’m sure there were plenty musicals released in 1939 that have been forgotten by time, but it’s no mystery why this is the one that has endured as an esteemed classic. Even when staring directly at the seams where the 3D set design meets the painted backdrop of an endless landscape, I see another world, not a mural on the wall. It’s the closest thing I can recall to lucid dreaming, an experience that can be accessed by the push of the play button.
When recalling the visual delights of its Technicolor fantasy, it’s easy to forget that the reverie depicted in The Wizard of Oz is a stress dream, essentially a nightmare. Young Kansan teen Dorothy Gale has an especially awful day on the hell hole farm where she lives with her aunt & uncle, thanks to an evil neighbor who vows to have her dog Toto “destroyed,” as well as a tornado that threatens her home & knocks her unconscious. This early sequence is shot in the grim sepiatone of a German Expressionist film, which harshly contrasts with the intense Technicolor submersion of the dreamworld the tornado transports her to, Oz. Dorothy’s subconscious processes the terror of her day through a dream quest that reinterprets the people in her life, good & bad, as fantasy characters: talking lions, animated scarecrows, wizards, witches, etc. Along with her newfound fantasy friends, Dorothy journeys to find qualities within herself she didn’t know she was missing: wisdom, compassion, bravery. As with other films I watched on loop as a child (especially Burton titles like Beetlejuice & Pee-wee’s Big Adventure), her journey feels much longer & more enduring in memory. Returning to it as an adult, the whole ordeal flies by and Dorothy is clicking her ruby slippers home in no time. There’s an intense energy to The Wizard of Oz that adapts the L. Frank Baum books of its 1900s source material into a kind of narrative whirlwind that tears across the screen like Kansas flatland.
The Wizard of Oz is just as terrifying as it is gorgeous. The special effects of its opening, reality-distorting twister still feels like a technical marvel, much more tactile in its impact than any modern CG disaster film. The indoor, hand-constructed sets of Oz feel like a kind of amusement park (and Oz was, indeed, made into a North Carolina amusement park that has since mostly been abandoned), but the sweeping camera movements & impossibly rich color suggest a majesty far beyond any knowable reality. The army of flying monkeys & bright red hellfire commanded by the main villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, are appropriately nightmarish, but also impressive in their construction. The massive cast of little people who populate the film’s Munchkinland sequence bear a real world horror in the actors’ mistreatment & exploitation, but the visual effect they amount to as they swarm across the screen is undeniably impressive. Even the film’s songs, which could afford to be shoddy given the visual majesty that surrounds them, are beautiful in their emotional tragedy. It’s difficult to imagine a world without Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as Dorothy, but the ubiquitousness of that performance’s cultural footprint has done little to undercut its emotional gutpunch or its gorgeous tones. There’s an amoral evil lurking behind The Wizard of Oz‘s ancient production history that makes both the terror & the majesty of its Technicolor allure feel eternally relevant & almost crippling.
I’d have to write an entire book (and I doubt I’d be the first) to cover the entirety of The Wizard of Oz’s merits & impact, from cultural echoes like Wicked to queer adoption of Dorothy’s travel companions to the sordid backstage rumors that taint its onscreen magic with an undercurrent of real world terror. As many people already see the film annually thanks to television broadcast cycles, I can’t even do much in the way of recommending the world give it another look. It’s always getting another look. All I can really report for now is that in terms of constructing a Technicolor dreamscape, there’s still nothing quite like it. It was one of the first and it’s still one of the best, a legacy I understand even more clearly now that I better grasp the merits of Hollywood’s studio system past and have had the chance to see it projected it big & loud with an appreciative crowd.
Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.
Where Signin’ in the Rain (1952) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 158 of the first edition hardback, Ebert explains his general taste in cinema. He writes, “Of the other movies I love, some are simply about the joy of physical movement.” One of his examples includes “when Gene Kelly splashes through Singin’ in the Rain.”
What Ebert had to say in his review(s):Singin’ in the Rain has been voted one of the greatest films of all time in international critics’ polls, and is routinely called the greatest of all the Hollywood musicals. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. There are other contenders–Top Hat, Swing Time, An American in Paris, The Band Wagon, Oklahoma, West Side Story–but Singin’ in the Rain comes first because it is not only from Hollywood, it is about Hollywood. It is set at the moment in the late 1920s when the movies first started to talk, and many of its best gags involve technical details.” -from his 1998 review for the Chicago Sun-Times
“There is no movie musical more fun than Singin’ in the Rain, and few that remain as fresh over the years. Its originality is all the more startling if you reflect that only one of its songs was written new for the film, that the producers plundered MGM’s storage vaults for sets and props, and that the movie was originally ranked below An American in Paris, which won a best picture Oscar. The verdict of the years knows better than Oscar: Singin’ in the Rain is a transcendent experience, and no one who loves movies can afford to miss it.” -from his 1999 review for his Great Movies series
I’ve become so used to seeing Gene Kelly function as a talisman of big budget musicals of cinema past in throwbacks like Xanadu& The Young Girls of Rochefort that it was exciting for me to finally see him star in an example of The Real Deal, a musical he co-directed himself in his prime. It was strange, then, to see that picture participate in the exact Old Hollywood nostalgia I’d already come to associate him with. Recalling recent films like The Artist & Hail, Caesar!, Singin’ in the Rain is a movie about the storied past of movies as an artform. A comedy about a fictional movie studio’s struggles to transition from the Silent Era to talkies, Singin’ in the Rain takes great pleasure in staging Technicolor recreations of old forms of entertainment like black & white silent romance pictures & traditional vaudeville acts. Hollywood’s favorite subject in general has always been itself, echoing an even more ancient tradition of art about art, and Gene Kelly’s career seems to be an essential part of that introspective self-indulgence.
The biggest hurdle Singin’ in the Rain had to clear in its path to greatness is that its first act is so immaculate that it’s difficult not to feel a little let down once the dust settles. Gene Kelly stars as a Gene Kelly-type star from the 1920s. We meet him on the red carpet at the premiere of his latest silent picture, where he addresses the pandemonious crowd cheering for his presence with an oral history of his life on the big screen. As he gloats about his past as a trained thespian of great prestige, we’re visually treated to his real past in bars, pool halls, vaudeville stages, and dangerous stunt work in a humorous montage. After the screening of what’s sure to be another smash hit (in an old-fashioned theater very similar to The Orpheum, where we watched this picture), Kelly’s handsome hero escapes the roar of his fans by crawling on top of a speeding streetcar and leaping into the passenger seat of a complete stranger’s car in a real life application of his on-screen swashbuckling skills. This passing stranger, played by (the recently deceased) Debbie Reynolds, is an aspiring actress herself, but pokes fun at Kelly’s leading man with verbal jabs like, “Movies are entertaining enough for the masses,” and “Once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.” Their flirtatious sparring as they trade cruel embarrassments at each other’s expense is one of the film’s great pleasures, so much so that it’s somewhat of a letdown once they wholly join forces to save a movie studio from the unavoidable disaster of adapting to talkies.
The industry-specific nostalgia about The Rise of the Talkies has its charm, even if it struggles to stack up next to Kelly & Reynolds’s first act attraction/animosity. Singin’ in the Rain is a much cleaner version of 1920s Hollywood than you’ll find in a harsh, gossipy exposé like Hollywood Babylon, but it does have its critiques. Spineless studio executives, closeted queer performers, and actresses whose shrill voices were never meant to interrupt the reverie of Silent Era pantomime color the changing world around Kelly & Reynolds. As much obvious affection as the picture has for the past, it also no qualms with poking fun at the medium’s early limitations, as well as drawing direct comparisons to 1950s studio musicals’ own reliance on blatant pantomime & vaudeville style entertainment. In the end, a return to simple vaudeville pleasures like singing, dancing, and rigidly structured one-liners is what saves the fictional not-ready-for-talkies movie studio from going under. It’s also the exact formula Singin’ in the Rain relies on for its basic entertainment value. The movie is both a critique of and a nostalgic participation in an artform that never really died, but more or less mutated instead.
Within that sense of vaudeville tradition, the song & dance numbers of Singin’ in the Rain more or less float independent from the plot in a vacuum. I can’t honestly say the songs themselves were my favorite aspect of the film. They’re mostly fine. What’s stunning is the spectacle of the production design that supports them: intensely artificial dream spaces packed with high fashion, glitter, an army of extras, and intensely colored lights. A few straightforward numbers were entertaining for their own sake. Watching Gene Kelly joyously splash about in puddles during the titular song (despite an intense fever he was suffering from during the shoot) has an infectious self-amusement to it. The Jim Carrey-esque best friend character played by Donald O’Connor (who was as undeniably queer as any best friend character I’ve ever seen onscreen) perform a “Make Em Laugh” number that’s initially funny in its basic indulgences in pratfalls, but then crosses into chillingly creepy as the pratfalls become an endless purgatorial loop of eternal punishment and the routine involves a headless female doll as a dance partner (*shudder*). It’s the larger than life Busby Berkeley throwbacks that overwhelm in their sheer enormity, though, allowing for surreal, glamorous imagery to elevate the film from movie industry comedy to fine art. Disembodied gams float in a florescent green void of Technicolor glitter. The high fashion runway walks of The Women are extended into an ultimate reality dreamscape of superb set design. Singin’ in the Rain is just as gorgeous as it is silly & self-indulgent.
It doesn’t seem as if Singin’ in the Rain was especially fun to make. Gene Kelly was reportedly cruel to Debbie Reynolds on-set for her perceived shortcomings as a dancer and the movie was only a modest financial success upon its initial release. You can feel a strain to convey joy despite the technical demand of the production seeping in from the corners of the frame, which might explain why its early adversarial flirtations are its most rewarding exchanges. Still, the film’s love & criticism of Hollywood as an industry & a tradition are powerful opioids even for a modern viewer. In an early scene where Kelly is strolling across a studio lot in conversation with his gay bestie, the pair pass several genre-variant film shoots in a ridiculous display later echoed in one of my all-time favorite films, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. That kind of gleeful enthusiasm for movie magic far outweighs any energy lost after the pleasure burst of the glorious first act and the movie overall feels timeless despite its obsession with the present & the past of its own medium. That seems to be a recurring theme within Gene Kelly’s overall career, not to mention an obsession of Hollywood at large.
The tagline for the 1939 comedy The Women is “It’s all about men!” This is a blatant lie. The Women was initially written as a stage play based on gossip overheard in a nightclub powder room. Including the playwright and the film’s two credited screenwriters (Clare Boothe Luce, Anita Loos, and Jane Murfin), that makes three women behind its script, which is a remarkable feat for a Studio Era feature. What makes The Women even more remarkable is its enormous all-female cast. Men are never seen nor heard in the picture, a casting choice that even applies to the women’s yipping lapdogs. The joke in that “It’s all about men!” tagline, then, is that when these (uniformly white, wealthy) women are alone together, all they discuss is the men in their lives. I suppose that’s technically true in a broad sense. It is odd that it could be questioned if this all woman-starring feature would pass the Bechdel Test. That doesn’t meant the film is about men at all, though. The off-screen men referenced constantly in The Women‘s dialogue as husbands, ex-husbands, and secret lovers aren’t functioning in their corresponding women’s lives as conquests of romance, but rather as bargaining chips. They’re pawns, foot soldiers, personality-free tokens that represent wealth & power, but not much more. The Women is better understood not as a romantic comedy, but as a social circle war film where its female cast of characters gun each other down with rapid-fire barbs & insults. Divorces & marriages are like battles temporarily won; the men are territories claimed. Nothing matters as much as the women calling the shots in the war room, though, which in this case happens to be an upscale health salon.
Norma Shearer stars as a wealthy mother whose husband is becoming increasingly absent as he spirals further into an extramarital affair. She had previously held illusions that their marriage was a modernist arrangement of equal partnership. Her mother suggests, coldly, that she remain married and keep her feelings about the affair to herself, suggesting an age old tradition in their social sect. It turns out many wives treat their husbands this way, allowing for secretive betrayal as long as they can publicly keep the wealth & social status. Others march through a long line of divorces & affairs to match their needs as they shift through time. Our protagonist has two enemies in her fight to retain her dignity in her decision to remain in a loveless, compromised marriage. The obvious enemy is the husband’s mistress, played by a devilishly callous Joan Crawford, who is nakedly exploiting the man’s lust to improve her drab life as a futureless counter girl at the social circle’s central meeting place: the salon. The less obvious enemy is one of her closest friends, played by the deliciously wicked Rosalind Russel, who deliberately stirs shit among her peers out of pure, idle boredom. She specifically sends Shearer’s character to the salon to hear the gossip of the affair from a chatty manicurist instead of telling her directly or letting her be. She herself also gossips behind her friend’s back for sport and, worse yet, joins forces with the mistress against her as soon as it’s personally beneficial. This picture is soaked to the bone in gossip, so it likely won’t win over anyone disinterested in overtly catty power plays, but watching Shearer’s dignified defiance openly clash with Crawford & Russell’s gleeful cruelty is intoxicating fun for those onboard. The film is frank & darkly humorous in its discussions of adultery & marriage, an impressive honesty for its 1930s cultural climate.
The pacing & dialogue saturation in this film is immediately overwhelming, opening with some of the most rapid-fire wordplay this side of a cattle auction. What’s truly impressive amidst that dialogue, though, is how much Rosalind Russel is able to outshine Joan Crawford as the film’s central heel, despite not playing the romantic rival. Drag queens looking for tips on how to construct #iconiclooks & #classicreads are advised to bring a notebook and keep their eyes locked on Russell, who eats up the screen no matter how many hundreds of women she’s asked to share it with. Crawford’s part is relatively small by comparison, especially given its impact on the plot. You could easily cut yourself on her eyebrows or put out an eye on her shoulder pads, but most of the damage laid in her warpath is dwarfed by Russell’s larger than life Gossip Queen persona. I will say, however, that Crawford is afforded the single best line in the film, when she complains to her coworkers at the salon, “Can you believe him? He almost stood me up for his wife!” Her coldly calculating efforts to gain power as a rich man’s mistress is an early sign of the shockingly modern-feeling territory the film eventually explores for laughs. There’s a 1950s musical remake of The Women titled The Opposite Sex that I gather isn’t nearly as daring or as subversive as the version that came before it. in the remake, men share the screen and generate in-the-moment romantic conflict with the women at the helm. In The Women, any argument held between a married couple isn’t heard directly by the audience, but rather filtered through gossip in later retellings & traded like currency. There’s a real subversion to that kind of one-sided perspective, especially for its time. As a great as Norma Shearer is as the film’s lead, it’s Russell & Crawford’s gleeful indulgence in that subversion as a deliberate tactic of social war that really makes it feel special. I imagine that’s all lost in the neutered-looking musical.
It’s worth noting that not all of The Women‘s strengths begin & end with its deviously witty dialogue. The film also impresses as a grand visual spectacle, an expensive-looking feat of Studio Era craft. The salon setting that stages most of the film’s social battles is a cavernous compound complete with mud baths, gyms, ballet studios, perfume counters, and a central foyer decked out with massive landscape murals & a modern art fountain in the shape of a woman’s hand. It’s staggering. The camerawork often matches the majesty of the production design. In one pivotal scene, Norma Shearer is confronted with a shocking detail of the gossip surrounding the affair in front of a mirror that reflects three images of Rosalind Russll (a dream, that); stunned, she walks away in a daze directly towards the audience in a momentum-heavy tracking shot while the world around her slips away. I’d also be foolish not to highlight the film’s The Red Shoesstyle centerpiece that breaks up its black & white cinematography for a single sequence filmed in Technicolor. Described in-film as “an adventurous voyage into Fashionland,” the Technicolor sequence is a narrative-free fashion show that pushes the film just over the edge from sharply-written comedy to aggressively feminine high art. There are plenty of other visual achievements to drool over. I’m especially in love with the set design of a scene where Joan Crawford smokes & chats on the phone in a see-through bathtub, complete with its own set of drapes. There’s just something about the Technicolor fashion show fantasy that elevates every scene around it by proxy. My only complaint about the entire movie, really, is that I had to leave the fantasy of that sequence. My reality felt comparatively drab after that.
The opening credits of The Women pairs each of its main players with their animal kingdom equivalent, suggesting a world of predators & prey: a deer, a lamb, a leopard, a fox, etc. I didn’t see the film’s conflicts as an extension of animalistic nature, however. Rather, the carefully planned, deceptively complex attacks of gossip & romantic maneuvering in The Women feel more like strategic war games & game theory to me. To say this film is “all about men!” was drastic misunderstanding of its basic rhythms by the film’s marketing. I’m honestly not sure I’ve seen many films less about men in my entire life (although Sofia Coppola’s recent The Beguiledremake does come to mind). I’d love to see any other film on that same intensely feminine wavelength, whether from the 1930s or just last month. There’s certainly enough immersive dives into masculinity out there to require a counterbalance.
I recently caught To Catch a Thief at The Prytania, New Orleans’s oldest operating cinema. It was an early morning matinee where the theater’s ancient, adorable operator introduced the Hitchcock thriller with half-remembered stories about cameos & eggs and promises of complimentary coffee & cake after the screening. I knew nothing of the picture before I arrived to the theater except its stars, Cary Grant & Grace Kelly, as advertised on the poster. Before Rene Brunet’s introductory story about Hitchcock’s hatred of eggs, I didn’t even know who directed it. What followed was a Technicolor dream of gorgeous visual indulgences in simple pleasures like flowers & fireworks, beautiful people exploring even more beautiful locales, and a nonstop assault of witty, but juvenile sex jokes. I’ve certainly been more impressed with Hitchcock as a visual craftsman & a generator of suspense in more prestigious pictures like Psychoor Rear Window, but I’ve had never had more fun watching one of his films as an all-around entertainment experience. It was the exact exhilarating feeling of seeing high art visual craft married with the genre film pleasures of a trashy heist plot people have been gushing over Baby Driver for (even though I didn’t quite enjoy that Edgar Wright work myself). That’s why it deeply saddened me after the screening to learn that To Catch a Thief is widely considered to be a “lesser Hitchcock” and a dismissible, frivolous picture.
Cary Grant starts as a retired jewel thief known in the papers as The Cat, thanks to the gymnastic stealth needed to pull off his heists. Hanging up his cat burglar’s costume in the years since World War II, The Cat is attempting to live a quiet life outside of crime. He’s not quite a Robin Hood figure; he kept all the money he stole before the war. He did make a point only to steal from “those who wouldn’t go hungry,” though, which does have a sort of nobility to it. His peaceful retirement is interrupted when a copycat thief begins to stage crimes that fit his exact M.O., raising police suspicion that The Cat is back on the prowl. Grant’s handsome, ex-criminal protagonist decides to catch the new burglar himself (recalling OJ Simpson’s mission to “find the real killer”) with the help of an insurance agent who might be able to predict the next victim based on his clients’ claimed jewelry. This leads him to a Cannes Beach Club where he’s shamelessly flirted with by a young debutante played by Grace Kelly, whose mother’s jewels are in imminent danger of being stolen. The mystery of who the copycat jewel thief is doesn’t feel as complex or as suspenseful as the central mystery of most Hitchcock films, as the answer is fairly obvious earlier than it likely should be. This doesn’t matter in the slightest. The lush colors, playful mood, and overly stylized production value of To Catch a Thief make for a film so fun it feels like an outright comedy while still holding claim to some of the most striking imagery Hitchcock ever produced.
To Catch a Thief plays with the same lush production design & Technicolor lighting that made Douglas Sirk’s 1950s “women’s pictures” like All That Heaven Allows feel like high art despite their shameless indulgence in melodrama. A foot chase through a flower market, a swim on a French beach, or a picnic on the edge of a cliff, all in proudly-boasted “VistaVision”: you can tell this was an expensive production, made with Major Studio pride. What makes it such a delight, however, is that Hitchcock perverted those Sirk sensibilities with the tawdry jokes about boobs & Grace Kelly’s virginity. This clash is most glorious in a hotel room scene where Kelly’s young flirt is seducing Grant’s retired criminal, only for their attraction to be consummated with a Technicolor fireworks display. It’s scene that encapsulates everything To Catch a Thief is in its best moments: funny, sexy, gorgeous, and crude. A more sophisticated palette might better appreciate the tightly controlled tension of a Rear Window, but give my raccoonish taste buds the pretty colors and cheeky sex jokes of To Catch a Thief any day. Hitchcock’s perverted humor usually lurks in the corners of his best respected thrillers, but here it runs wild, swimming in its skivvies on gorgeous French beaches and sneaking across rooftops looking for hearts & jewels to steal through bedroom windows. It breaks my heart to hear that kind of immediate pleasure isn’t better respected.
I don’t mean to imply that there’s no tact or taste to To Catch a Thief’s humor. An early montage of a black cat sneaking across roofs to steal jewels, a literal cat burglar, feels a lot like the director’s peak form as a humorous craftsman. There’s also an early chase scene involving several fake-outs that’s almost Friedkin-esque in its clear staging of cat & mouse police pressure. Going in expecting the typical meticulous hand the director brings to his work might be a mistake, however. To Catch a Thief seems to be entirely a result of Hitchcock letting loose, having fun with the romantic & mysterious set-ups of his easygoing narrative. Even the double meaning of the film’s title (as both Kelly & Grant are attempting to catch a thief of their own) suggests that the whole thing is a kind of off-hand joke. Watching a world-class craftsman afford that joke the visual care & lusty passion that should likely be reserved for a more refined work makes it feel like jokey genre fodder elevated to the heights of fine art. If the world has room in its heart to praise the much lesser Baby Driver for achieving that exact kind of heist film elevation, I’d hope there’d also be room for an undervalued Hitchcock title to retroactively receive that same treatment.
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