Vargas Speaks

Jean Louis Loved Muffs

2010-08-02T10:48:00.000-07:00

Muffs were a fashion accessory from the old days. Really, they were. These “nests” or “little barrels”, as they were called, were made of sable or skunk or musquash (aka muskrat) among other materials, and they kept the hands of fine ladies cozy from as early as the 15th century. Sometimes these charming hand warmers did double duty and carried a latchkey, a tiny dog, or a pistol.

Renowned costumer Jean Louis designed fabulous muffs for Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle and Rita Hayworth in Tonight and Every Night. In addition to a fuchsia muff, Kim wore opera gloves of the same colour in BB&C to accent her burgundy dress. That outfit was topped by a hooded cape of deep wine-red that flashed fuchsia lining when she walked. An enchanting look for a beguiling witch.

Jean Louis also designed the famous black silk gown for the striptease number in Gilda. There’s no muff in sight for this costume. The black opera gloves are all that get removed before Rita Hayworth’s troubled heroine is escorted from the stage. But the muff Rita sports in Tonight and Every Night had purpose beyond style – it hid Rita’s pregnancy.

In a career full of amazing frocks and headdresses and muffs, a standout was Marilyn Monroe’s rhinestone encrusted Happy-Birthday-Mr-President gown, which she had to be sewn into. Jean Louis was nominated for an Academy Award 14 times and won but once, for Judy Holliday’s chic threads in The Solid Gold Cadillac.

The Chairman of the Board

2010-05-01T12:51:00.000-07:00

12 years ago this month Ol' Blue Eyes checked out. This is my koo-koo tribute to Frankie and his wild, knocked-out, groovy cinematic oeuvre.

Suddenly, the Man with the Golden Arm (not The Oscar) was Out on the Town with all the Guys and Dolls in High Society getting Higher and Higher and feeling Young at Heart. Take me Out to the Ball Game, he demanded, then took the Road to Hong Kong and went Around the World in Eighty Days on Von Ryan’s Express, traveling From Here to Eternity with The List of Adrian Messenger which read: Ocean’s Eleven, Robin and the 7 Hoods, Sergeants 3, and 4 for Texas, those latter 4 being: Pepe, Dirty Dingus Magee, Pal Joey, and Tony Rome. All of them wanted to be The Manchurian candidate but only Some Came Running and none were dancing the Can-can. Not as a Stranger he prepared to Meet Danny Wilson but instead Johnny Concho showed up. With his Marriage on the Rocks and Never so Few on his Carousel, Johnny called The Detective who found a Lady in Cement and assumed there’d been an Assault on a Queen. He needed that like A Hole in the Head so he set The Tender Trap to catch The Naked Runner whom he suspected was also The Kissing Bandit, and wouldn’t that be Double Dynamite? Meanwhile The Devil at 4 O’clock declared The Pride and the Passion to be The First Deadly Sin which Cast a Giant Shadow over The Miracle of the Bells and Cannonball Run II. And while It Happened in Brooklyn, he declared: Meet me in Las Vegas in The House I Live In because that’s where None but the Brave and Kings Go Forth. Till the Clouds Roll By, Come Blow Your Horn and Step Lively, for The Joker is Wild. Anchors Away.

Every single movie that Sinatra made - good, bad, ugly - is in the above paragraph.

The Farm

2010-04-03T11:28:00.000-07:00

I once worked on a movie called The Farm. It starred Colin Farrell and Al Pacino. Fortunately its name was changed to The Recruit for release. I wouldn't have wanted that Hollywood formula flick to get confused with the excellent short The Farm. Fortunately for filmmaker Tom Henry, the fate that befell Cronenberg and his compellingly original and amazing movie Crash (thanks to Paul Haggis and his derivative and less than amazing movie Crash) will not repeat itself in this instance. Watch The Farm - I've heard Pacino makes an uncredited cameo appearance (he was being sheepish). Bleat.

Vargas Goes Mum

2010-01-27T12:17:00.001-08:00

I’ll be back - just like Jane Froman in With a Song in My Heart (Walter Lang 1952) except that my legs are fine and I can’t sing and I’ve never entertained the troops (?)

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when - okay I do know where: right here but I really don't know when.

Sayonara (Joshua Logan 1957)
Farewell My Lovely (Dick Richards 1975)
Goodbye Mr Chips (Sam Wood 1939)
Bye Bye Birdie (George Sidney 1963)
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman 1973)

See you in the movies!

Preposition Cinema Part 5: Up, Down, Over and Out

2010-01-23T17:12:00.001-08:00

Bringing up Baby (Howard Hawks 1938)
Downhill (Alfred Hitchcock 1927)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman 1975)
Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur 1947)

And with that Vargas takes a brief break from speaking.

Preposition Cinema Part 4: ON

2010-01-19T18:40:00.000-08:00

Right On:
Miracle on 34th Street(Geroge Seaton 1947)
On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan 1954)
Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock 1951)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean 1957)
Knock on any Door (Nick Ray 1949)

Preposition Cinema: Part 3: TO

2010-01-17T15:47:00.000-08:00

Much To(o) Marvelous:
To Sir With Love (James Clavell 1967)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Richard Mulligan 1962)
Mr Smith Goes to Washington(Frank Capra 1939)
Mr Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra 1936)
To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks 1944)
To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock 1955)
An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey 1957)
To Each His Own (Mitchell Leisen 1946)
Witness to Murder (Roy Rowland 1954)
From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann 1953)
Passage to Marseille (Michael Curtiz 1944)

Hope to Lamour to Crosby:
Road to Singapore (Victor Schertzinger 1940)
Road to Zanzibar (Victor Schertzinger 1941)
Road to Morocco(David Butler 1942)
Road to Utopia (Hal Walker 1946)
Road to Rio (Norman Z. McLeod 1947)
Road to Bali (Hal Walker 1952)
Road to Hong Kong (Norman Panama 1962)

Preposition Cinema Part 2: IN

2010-01-11T10:41:00.000-08:00

In Like Flynn:
Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti 1971)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai 2000)
Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci 1972)
A Place in the Sun (George Stevens 1951)
In Credible:
Love in the Afternoon (Billy Wilder 1957)
In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray 1950)
The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang 1944)
An American in Paris (Vincent Minnelli 1951)
Stars in my Crown (Jacques Tourneur 1950)
Singing in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly 1952)
Christmas in July (Sturges 1940)
Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch 1932)
Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu 1948)

Preposition Cinema: Part 1: OF

2010-01-05T19:12:00.001-08:00

Cream Of the Crop:
Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne 1945)
Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962)
Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming and King Vidor 1939)
The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford 1940)
Woman of the Year (George Stevens 1942)
Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks 1941)
Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick 1957)
Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock 1943)
The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton 1955)
Touch of Evil (Orson Welles 1958)
The Saga of Gosta Berling (Mauritz Stiller 1924)
The Talk of the Town (George Stevens 1942)
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog 1974)
Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur 1947)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston 1948)

Kind Of Fabulous:
The Pride of the Yankees (Sam Wood 1942)
Birdman of Alcatraz (John Frankenheimer 1962)
Of Human Bondage (John Cromwell 1934)
In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison 1968)
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols 1966)
The Sound of Music (Robert Wise 1965)

Also Of Note:
The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg 1928)
Confessions of an Opium Eater (Albert Zugsmith 1962)
Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky 1948)
Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett 1977)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes 1976)
Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway 1947)
The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler 1945)
Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger 1959)
Of Regret:
The Birth of a Nation (DW Griffith 1915)

I love old movies and I love this old earth. This is where those two loves intersect...

2009-10-19T07:08:00.000-07:00

Smoking. They’re always doing it in the old flicks, lending mysterious atmosphere and romantic ambience to plot twists. Oblivious to the damage it would eventually wreak on lungs and environment, the stars of the golden age puffed away. Bette Davis, one of cinema’s most famous onscreen smokers, had to hide her character’s nicotine habit in 1942’s Now Voyager. But by movie’s end, Charlotte Vale (BD) has come a long way, baby, and that includes public smoking. Her lover (played by Paul Henreid) famously lights two cigarettes at the same time, one for himself, one for the lovely Charlotte.

But if they were polluting the air with tobacco smoke in the old days, at least they get points for how they lit their cigarettes: wooden matches and shiny lighters. Witness Kirk Douglas’s wiseacre newsman in Ace in the Hole (1951) as he holds his unlit match to a typewriter carriage then flips the return: zing and the carriage ignites his match. His fag is lit and everyone knows what a smartass the new reporter is.The cigarette lighters of yesteryear were souvenirs, collectibles, keepsakes. They had sentimental and/or monetary value. They were sometimes beautifully designed and often inscribed. James Stewart unwittingly “steals” one from the wedding loot in the wealthy household of Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn) in The Philadelphia Story (1940). The refillable lighter was a valued piece of property not to be discarded, unless of course, it was the only clue to identify one as a murderer, as in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.

But rue the day lighters became disposable. Plastic lighters are part of the detritus that is turning our oceans into what Capt. Charles Moore has called “plastic soup”. Plastic is not biodegradable. And under 5% of all plastics get recycled. Under 5%! The rest ends up polluting the environment, most noticeably our oceans. Albatross chicks are dying at an alarming rate and dissections have shown bird stomachs full of bottle caps and other plastic items such as lighters. The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) would have cried over the fate of these beautiful winged creatures.Plastic got a boost after the end of WW2 when Life magazine rejoiced with a cover story titled: Throwaway Living. But for a while glass remained the container of choice: milk still arrived at your door in glass containers. In 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean stands exhausted by the refrigerator running a cold milk bottle over his forehead. And in Mr. Lucky, Cary Grant delivers big bottles of water for the office water cooler. No nasty plastic water bottles in sight, of course. Mildred Pierce (1945) has only real dishes in her restaurants including the porcelain coffee cups. And in countless domestic scenes groceries are brought home in paper bags, not indestructible plastic bags.

We had no idea what the full impact of Mr. Robinson’s one word of advice to Benjamin Braddock would be when in 1967’s The Graduate he uttered: “Plastics.” Objects made of plastic so thoughtlessly discarded are ruining our world. There are alternatives that we must embrace and soon. Remember that hot phone call between Donna Reed and James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)? So sizzling was it that you might have forgotten Sam Wainwright on the other end of the line extolling the future of “making plastics out of soybeans”. Sam was onto something. Hee Haw!

Planet in Focus International Environmental Film & Video Festival opens this week in Toronto. Oct. 21-25, 2009.

"Planet in Focus produces Canada’s largest and longest running environmental film & video festival. Its mandate is to produce an annual event that screens and promotes outstanding and compelling films and videos covering a broad range of environmental themes and issues by Canadian and International filmmakers. Our mission is to promote the use of environmental film and video as a catalyst for public awareness, discussion, and appropriate action on the environmental, ecological and social health of the planet."
www.planetinfocus.org

Ode to Technicolor

2009-09-07T15:19:00.000-07:00

Laurence Olivier and a black fog descend on London. Traffic teams, neon signs glimmer and silhouettes deepen as all turns a darker shade of grey in the depths of night. Olivier is forced to hole up in a hotel due to the weather. Suddenly as he enters the lobby it’s like Dorothy opening the door onto Oz: brilliant colour, divine light, another world: not the land over the rainbow but a rainbow unto itself.

It was 1938 and rare for a comedy to get the Technicolor treatment, colour being reserved for musicals and period pieces, but Alexander Korda was producing The Divorce of Lady X and he was in love with his leading lady. The credits list a Technicolor Photographic Advisor and a Technicolor Colour Director. Korda also enlisted award-winning cinematographer Harry Stradling Sr. The Art Director’s credit reads: Settings Designed in Colour by Lazare Meerson. And it looks as if Mr. Meerson took his palette from the candy store, the soda fountain, the cake shop. Sherbet, parfait, ice cream, cotton candy, cake, icing, candy, candy and more candy.

All eye candy! Merle Oberon makes her entrance waving a two toned blue feather fan and wearing a white wedding cake of a gown adorned with lavender bows. She’s attending a costume ball at the hotel and now she can’t go home because of the fog. But all the rooms are booked so she has to talk Olivier, a complete stranger to her, into letting her stay in his lavish and colourful suite. There’s romance and mistaken identities brewing and, of course, antics ensue. (I believe the studios had special writers for the latter, their doors labeled AE Department). It’s a romp, a farce, a romantic comedy but mostly it’s a colour extravaganza. Peacock, lavender, lemon, gold, bubble gum, violet, plum, rose, mint, pistachio: The Divorce of Lady X is one huge crystal bowl of gay assorted bonbons. Vibrant pastels play off jewel tones as energetically as Olivier plays off Oberon.

Olivier’s character is a barrister and the day after he shares his suite (most chastely) with Oberon a new client shows up wanting a divorce because his wife has apparently spent the night in a hotel room with a man. Olivier believes this man’s wife is Merle Oberon and he goes into a spin in his elegantly appointed office: slate grey doors, ice blue walls, warm caramel-coloured leather chairs, buttery yellow picture frames.

Ralph Richardson portrays the allegedly cuckolded husband. While he downs glowing amber whiskey at the club surrounded by pale aqua walls and glittering chandeliers, Binnie Barnes, his supposedly cheating wife, sits at her vanity in a smoky grey-mauve dress. Her huge apartment foyer has mint green walls interrupted by robins’ egg blue doors and her boudoir sports a daffodil yellow fireplace, peach lampshades, cream quilts, champagne carpets and the palest banana chachkas: the perfect setting to have AE.

There’s great dialogue and wonderful acting but also scene after scene of endless hand wringing and mischievous doings and it would be tedious if not for the sheen and glow, the satin and froth. What the plot lacks Technicolor makes up for. Olivier’s hair is black as midnight against a wall mural of sunshine yellow and dusky blue. Here on a red velvet banquet he converses with Merle who wears an ink black dress that highlights her blush-pink heart-shaped face and creamy décolleté. Her lips are like cherry candy.

As the revelation is about to unfold that Merle is not married to Sir Ralph she nervously flits about the parlour in a gown that rivals the hearth fire: orange-gold accessorized with a wisp of a red gossamer scarf. The fire burns deep orange and glimmers like jewels while Merle’s jewels sparkle like emerald fire and compete with her eyes. Sapphire blue carpeting, pale green seltzer bottles, silver coffee pots, yellow lamp glow, apple green and peppermint tapestry – what more could you want on a foggy grey day?

(PS You’ll have to find the DVD or catch this gem on TCM as you won’t see the colours I’ve described here in the youtube upload).

Burt's Revivalist Do

2009-05-09T17:20:00.000-07:00

The best thing about Elmer Gantry is Burt Lancaster's hair. His unruly locks vie for attention with his pearly whites but the coif wins hands down every time. This is Lancaster’s hobo hair. His hard drinking, whoring, boxcar-riding hair. But when he hooks up with the Bible thumpers his hair gets religion and calms down and sometime after that I lose interest. Okay, it’s not just the loss of his erratic mop that causes me to yawn. To be precise I go AWOL when Elmer first kisses Sister Sharon.

I blame Jean Simmons. Too pure and sweet for the part of Sister Sharon Falconer, Simmons simpers her way through the movie while Burt blazes. Shara (as Elmer calls her) needed some edge and Jean just didn’t have it. She was a well trained thespian, perfect as Ophelia opposite Olivier's Hamlet, sublime playing Ruth Gordon in The Actress and spot on as the helpless waif in So Long at the Fair. But I am always perplexed that she was cast twice opposite Marlon Brando while so many other actresses of the era would've been much better suited to play alongside the brooding star.

In Desiree she plays the title character to Brando's Napoleon and in Guys and Dolls she trills alongside his Sky Masterson. In the latter she is once again cast as a religious prude, and prude she could do; it was her melting-of-the-prude-in-the-arms-of-the-brute that I never found convincing. I couldn't understand the casting behind Gantry until I discovered that the director, Richard Brooks, was married to her at the time.

So who could have put some bite into this itinerant girl evangelist? The character was modeled after Aimee Semple MacPherson, the Canadian born traveling preacher whose mission it became to spread the Gospel worldwide in the 20s and 30s. McPherson famously disappeared for 35 days in 1920 and when she finally emerged (after having been presumed dead) she claimed to have been kidnapped. But all signs indicated that Aimee had been holed up with a married man in various hotels around the country. A song popularized by Pete Seeger at the time went: “The dents in the mattress fit Aimee’s caboose” and in 1976 a movie was made about that time in her life. Titled The Disappearance of Aimee it starred Faye Dunaway. Now that's good casting.

But who could have matched Burt’s passion and hair back in the late 50s when Lewis’ novel was being adapted for the screen? Katherine Hepburn would have been a good choice but Kate and Burt had already starred together in similar roles in The Rainmaker (1956) where he plays a fast talking con man (black cowboy hat covering hair) to Kate's shy virgin spinster.

I think Barbara Stanwyck would have been perfect for the lady preacher. And so did Frank Capra when, in 1931, he cast her to play a McPherson-inspired character in his movie The Miracle Woman.

So how about Susan Hayward? By 1960 Hayward had portrayed a number of hardcore characters – fiery, bad, rotten even – but always vulnerable. Smash-up: The Story of a Woman brought her the first of five Academy Award nominations. And when she gave real-life convicted murderer Barbara Gordon a heart in I Want to Live! she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She’d have matched Burt’s fire just fine. And she had great hair.

It took me a few attempts before I finally watched Elmer Gantry all the way through. Rewrites and Hayward would have helped make it a better flick. Still, Burt is a joy to watch. He won an Academy Award for playing the Midwestern preacher/huckster in this sprawling wreck of a movie. He deserved it and so did his hair.

Coming Soon...

2009-04-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

Vargas Speaks about Elmer Gantry...soon.

April 3,1924: A Star is Born

2009-03-30T10:58:00.000-07:00

As Don Corleone in The Godfather he stuffed wads of toilet paper into his mouth and reportedly read cue cards. As Paul in Last Tango in Paris he buttered Maria Schneider up and mooned the stuck up dancers in the ballroom. In Teahouse of the August Moon he turned Japanese while as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls he danced and crooned softly in Jean Simmons's ear.

In his long and controversial career Marlon Brando embraced a wide range of characters from the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata! to the grotesque sci-fi drag queen Dr Moreau in The Island of Dr Moreau. Along the way he was both hailed as the greatest actor of all time and severely criticized for squandering his talents.

But whatever Brando’s failures and successes, both personal and professional, he did give us some beautifully rendered scenes. Among the best of these is his improvised encounter with the body of his deceased wife, Rose, in Last Tango in Paris. No tricks, no holds, no prisoners. For me that scene is right up there with Dirk Bogarde dying in Death in Venice, James Dean traversing his land in Giant, Peter O’Toole going on a killing spree in Lawrence of Arabia, Jack Nicholson ordering a chicken salad sandwich in Five Easy Pieces. If Brando’s entire oeuvre had consisted of only that scene I would still be inclined to declare him a celluloid genius. Thankfully, that scene wasn’t the only jewel he gave us.

His brooding sexual presence and fine emotional interpretations made films like The Ugly American, Sayonara, Burn! and Reflections in a Golden Eye worth watching and rewatching. And then, of course, there’s his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, his second movie and the one that made him an overnight sensation.

It was that same sensual impulse, stripped of Stanley's brutality, that informed his performance in On the Waterfront, made three years after Streetcar. As longshoreman Terry Malloy, Brando uttered what have become some of cinema’s most famous words: “I coulda had class. I coulda bin a contender. I coulda bin somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am."

Some have said that in the years following Waterfront, Terry’s speech took on an ominous quality regarding Brando’s life and career. He was a difficult man to be sure. As a child he endured the abuse of his alcoholic parents. As a young man he came to fame much too suddenly. And once the world discovered him they would never let go. Relentlessly pursued, worshiped, vilified his was no easy road to travel.

Marlon Brando belonged to a generation of actors who rejected the controlled British approach to acting and instead embraced the raw improvisational techniques of the Method. Elaine Stritch said: ''Marlon's going to school to learn the Method was like sending a tiger to jungle school.''

In 1964 Brando made a comedic romp called A Bedtime Story wherein his low class smooth operator bounces off of David Niven’s high class gigolo. When the two first meet they engage in a discussion on the art of picking up women. Brando, unaware of the older man’s superior skills as a pickup artist and mistaking him for a "picked peach", sets out to enlighten him. In his signature mumble he tells Niven: “Let me put some new colours in your paintbox, Dad.”

That line says more about Brando's life and career than any of Terry Malloy's speeches. Marlon Brando gave us new, bolder colours. And he had class.

Stella by Starlight

2009-02-25T20:08:00.000-08:00

Were she still alive Stella Adler would have turned 108 this month but she would have told you she was a mere girl of 102. For many years Stella fudged her birth year to keep her true age a mystery. I went to see her lecture one drizzly April day at Toronto's Town Hall in the mid 80s when she was in her eighth decade. Looking stunning in black evening gown and honey-coloured curls she walked on stage to a standing ovation. You would not have known she was 82 and she certainly wouldn't have told you. But she was willing to tell us plenty else that day with this caveat: "I'm not going to tell you anything you don't already know. I'm just here to remind you, to reawaken your imagination."

And before really getting into her subject matter she implored us to give her our undivided attention. "New York actors," she said, hoping the comparison would make us more astute, "are very bad at listening. It's not sitting back. It's not just with your ears. Listening is with everything you have. Listening is with your blood and your bones."

Of the members of the legendary Group Theatre, Adler was the only one to have actually studied with Stanislavski, the great Russian actor and teacher whose systems and teachings the Group took for their own. "One of the things Stanislavski taught me was the importance of location: Where are you? Where?" And then she told us an anecdote about preparing to play Nora in A Doll's House. "Because I wasn't joining in the conversation at a dinner party the host asked me what was on my mind. I answered: 'Norwegian topography.'"

Other lessons passed down from the master: "All plays take part in the present. It is up to the actor to create the past. You don't think so?" Adler challenged, her kolh-lined eyes scanning the audience. "Well let me do the thinking. I gave up a lot of fun to think. I could've been a real fun time girl!"

Everything save the audience's attention moved down an octave as Adler spoke in a soft low voice to unravel the dark mystery that was August Strindberg, a man who hated woman as much as he loved them, a man who wanted to marry a virgin, and who, in pursuit of this goal, wed and divorced three actresses in succession. A fact that produced a delighted guffaw from Adler.

"Strindberg," she told us, "created what he called the 'thrid sex': the emancipated woman." A sex he could never quite abide, for he felt essentially that woman's place was beside man, caring for him and his offspring. "How do you like him so far?" she asked us, and a woman in the first row yelled: "If he weren't already dead I'd kill him!"

But for all his dark complexity and obvious misogyny, Adler told us she still respected Strindberg and his work for having posed the questions that concern us all and for having so embraced the daily struggle that confronts us all. Adler then performed a small piece from Miss Julie. "...I climb and climb, but the trunk is so thick and smooth and it's so far to the first branch. But I know if I can once reach that first branch, I'll go to the top just as if I'm on a ladder. I haven't reached it yet, but I shall get there, even if only in my dreams."

Having covered Strindberg and touched on Ibsen, Adler's assistant, a young man whom she addressed as Eddie, all but tugged at her sleeve to get her to wrap it up as she had gone into overtime. As she quietly had words with him the audience caught a name (she talked in a stage whisper, of course) and broke into applause. The name was Tennessee Williams.

Adler read from an account written by Tennessee about his sudden move from poverty to riches following the success of The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. Williams recounts in the piece the spiritual vacuity he'd found whilst living like a king in an ivory tower. Swamped with insincere accolades and false attentions he finally fled his Manhattan hotel suite and escaped to anonymity and the earthly reality of Mexico.

"Success," he wrote of the time, "is like a wolf waiting to eat you, each and every fang one of the small vanities..." At this metaphor Adler nodded knowingly and sadly, her golden curls quivering under the hot stage lights. Her eyes sparkled with tears as she told us she could feel Tennessee writing this with all the stops pulled out. She read on: "...the public Somebody you are when you have a name is a fiction created with mirrors...the only somebody worth being is the private solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath."

Concluding with a piece from Orpheus Descending, Adler was youthful in her delivery, ancient in her comprehension. Total silence reined as the last line was delivered. Then with eyes raised towards the clear blue of an imagined sky, she summarized: "A bird that can't be seen..." remembering the one who'd written of that bird, the one who had longed to be "a kind of bird with transparent wings the colour of the sky, a bird you can't tell from the sky..."Stella Adler, who, as a member of the Group Theatre in the early 30s, helped to remove "starism" (as she called it) from American acting, has nevertheless earned a place among the stars - not so much Hollywood's constellation (it has been said that her career in movies was dwarfed by the anti-Semitic bent of the 40s and 50s) but among the celestial bodies of the heavens: beautiful and pure: Stellar Stella.

Ladies of the Silver Screen and Why I Love Them Part Two

2009-01-16T10:44:00.000-08:00

Marge Gunderson (Fargo): "I'm not sure I agree with you a hunnert percent on your police work, there, Lou." Frances McDormand as the smalltown cop. Strong, compassionate, pregnant, a trooper in more ways than one.

Susan Vance: (Bringing Up Baby): Cary Grant plays opposite Katherine Hepburn in this first rate screwball comedy: "Now it isn't that I don't like you, Susan, because, after all, in moments of quiet, I'm strangely drawn toward you but - well, there haven't been any quiet moments..." Delightfully daffy, seriously screwy, elegantly cuckoo, Kate at her wacky best.

Charlotte Vale (Now Voyager): Bette Davis with caterpillars for eyebrows.

Mrs Henry Windle Vale (Now Voyager): Gladys Cooper as Charlotte's bad mother, the mother who never tells her daughter about plucking or other activities that rhyme with plucking or anything the least bit plucky. Cooper was a stage actress extraodinaire and it shows.

Stella Dallas (Stella Dallas): Big jewelry, big heart, big sacrifices. If Mrs Vale was one of the nastiest mothers in cinema then Stella wins for being the most loving and sacrificial. In her clanging baubles and gaudy frocks, Barbara Stanwyck aces the part.

Loreli Lee (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes): Upon discovering that the tiara really does belong on top of one's head, Marilyn Monroe as Loreli Lee declares: "I just LOVE finding mew places to wear diamonds." I always understood Loreli's attraction to the sparkly stuff, and Marilyn played the diamond-digging Loreli ("a girl such as I") with her usual winning platinum aplomb.

Baby Jane Hudson (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane): Wearing ringlets and rouge not fit for courtesan nor streetwalker, Baby Jane (former child star now in her 60s) taunts and tortures her crippled sister: "But ya ah in a wheelchair, Blanche, ya ah." BD chewing up the scenery.

Madame X (Madame X): Lana Turner doing the sacrificial wife/mother bit in this superb hanky soaker. Her costars are formindable: Burgess Meredith, John Forsyth, Keir Dullea, and Ricardo Montalban as her sleazy lover. With Constance Bennett playing her evil mother-in-law the cast was complete.

Billie Dawn (Born Yesterday): Judy Holliday originated the role of this not-so-dumb-blonde-gangster's-moll on Broadway but almost didn't get the screen part. Good thing she did: her gin game is the prize in this box of Crackerjacks.

Norma Desmond (Sunset Boulevard): Gloria Swanson as the hasbeen star of the silent screen. "We had faces then." Full of silent actress gesturing and grand dame overacting Swanson is perfectly creepy in her stagey, needy turn as Norma Desmond.

Prissy (Gone With the Wind): "I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies!" Butterfly McQueen's glorious high pitched voice was once described in print as "a clarinet with a cold". In later years McQueen would be called "Uncle Thomasina" for taking on the stereotypical role of Scarlett O'Hara's maid. I include the character here because McQueen once said: "Now I am happy I did Gone With the Wind. I wasn't when I was 28, but it's part of black history. You have no idea how hard it is for black actors, but things change, things blossom in time." Butterfly was one of the blossoms.

Scarlett O'Hara: (GWTW): The girl had a way with drapery. After I saw the flick in the 60s I made a frock out of my mother's tablecloth. Not as stunning as Vivien Leigh's velvet creation but certainly suitable for the Swinging Decade.

Blanche DuBois (A Streetcar Named Desire): "Oh, look we have created enchantment." Here Vivien Leigh calls upon her vocal chords to help create the last-ditch-attempt and bruised reality of Blanche DuBois: dipping way down low then rising to a frantic pitch, she inhabits Blanche's unhinged mind with characteristic expertise.

Sally Bowles (Cabaret): Liza, Liza, Liza! (With a zee.) I painted my nails green after seeing Cabaret and in my small town that non pink nail polish rocked the small boats of the small people almost as much as my tablecloth dress and my other eye catching sartorial creations.

The Girl (Seven Year Itch): Marilyn in that marshmallow pink ensemble, Marilyn in that iconic white dress, Marilyn in anything (including her underwear which she keeps in the icebox in this heat saturated movie). When I was little I thought Tom Ewell was very funny but now that I am all grown up (kinda) I wish Wilder had gotten his first choice: Walter Mathau.

Judith Canfield (Stage Door): Lucille Ball wasn't always the card we knew from I Love Lucy. In her early movie career she tackled serious roles, this one opposite Kate Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Eve Arden and Ann Miller.

Tracy Lord (Philadelphia Story): My, Kate was yar - especially in that sleek, sexy, sparkly white evening dress by Adrian.

Dinah Lord (Philadelphia Story): Virginia Weidler as the spirited little sister of Tracy. Only Groucho could out do her rousing rendition of "Lydia O Lydia, say have you met Lydia, Lydia, the Tatooed Lady. She has eyes that folks adore so and a torso even more so."

Kate Trask (East of Eden): Jo Van Fleet won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing James Dean's mom in both his first film and hers. She was 41 years old at the time and had up until then been a stage actress exclusively.

Ladies of the Silver Screen and Why I Love Them

2009-01-06T10:32:00.000-08:00

Leslie Crosbie (The Letter): Bette Davis pumping bullets into a man in a white linen suit on a moonlit veranda in Manila. I would love to play this part but BD has pretty much defined it for all time. No remakes allowed.

Mrs Hampton aka the Eurasian Woman (The Letter): Gale Sondergaard parting the bead curtains in the opium den revealing her mysterious and regal self while that crazy opium addict snickers in the background. Sondergaard's biggest career mistake (or not; see below*) was turning down the role of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.

Maude (Harold and Maude): "My body is in the earth, my head in the stars." When I was a teenager I performed a monologue from the play The Actress for an audition. I didn't get the part but it was the beginning of my appreciation for the woman who wrote that autobiographical script: Ruth Gordon. Eighteen years after The Actress appeared on the silver screen Ms Gordon breathed life into Harold's Maude and gave us the most vibrant free-spirited octogenarian in all cinema.

Holly Golightly (Breakfast at Tiffany's) Audrey in Givenchy! It made me want to go to Tiffany's. I finally got there a few years ago, just stood outside like Holly did in the movie.

Margo Channing (All About Eve): "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night". Another great turn from Mother Goddam.

Mrs Robinson (The Graduate): She loses in the end but with Anne Bancroft playing this sexy mom/seductress could she ever really be considered a loser? I first saw La Bancroft in The Miracle Worker as the kindhearted Annie Sullivan. This switch up to the cold and calculating Mrs R endeared her to me forever.

Jeanne (Last Tango in Paris): My hair was poker straight so naturally I wanted Maria Schneider's full head of curly hair. But that was all I coveted of hers. Brando was cruel to say she'd be playing soccer with her breasts in a few years but it made me like my slender silhouette even more (Twiggy had already given me a pretty good appreciation for skinny).

Sylvia Scarlet. Alice Adams (from movies of the same names): Because Katherine Hepburn played both.

Kitty Foyle (Kitty Foyle): Never seen it, just like her name.

Fran Kubelick (The Apartment): Another great name (Wilder specialized in them). In that fabulous career girl coat Shirley MacLaine gave Fran a touching and elegant vulnerability. I admire Wilder's decision to shoot in b & w.

Irma LaDouce (Irma LaDouce): French prostitute packing a mean poodle. The awesome Ms MacLaine in another Wilder jewel. This one in Technicolour for jewels have to be colourful especially if they are in Gay Paree!

Elmira Gulch (The Wizard of Oz): "I'm all but lame for the bite on my leg!" Not lame enough to stop her from pedaling a mean bike.

*Wicked Witch of the West (The Wizard of Oz): Margaret Hamilton's career never recovered from the typecasting but she gave us one of the great evil ladies of cinema. As a child I always wrote a witch part for myself into the plays I put on in my basement. Hamilton's crone was a terrific role model.

Glinda (The Wizard of Oz): Billie Burke in sparkly splendor with that inimitable dance of consonants off her enchanted tongue: "Toto too." Ah, the glitter and glimmer of Glinda! I once found a dress in the garbage outside a tony downtown shop that was much like Glinda's garb except that it was blue and falling apart: a cross between the Good Witch's frock and Miss Haversham's rags.

Dorothy Gale (The Wizard of Oz): Every year they showed The Wizard of Oz at Christmas when I was a kid. Since we only had a b & w set I watched it for several years without that splendid change to colour when Dorothy lands Over the Rainbow. Still I was entranced. I'm so glad Shirley Temple didn't play Dorothy as planned. I love Judy.

Stars

2008-12-28T13:40:00.000-08:00

Movie of the Month Club: the Ninth Month. Woody Allen gets screen time in September with his movie September. MMC members also settle in for autumnal viewing of September Affair, a 1950 romance drama which includes Walter Huston's recording of September Song. Written by Kurt Weill, September Song has been recorded by many artists - Frank Sinatra, Betty Carter, Willie Nelson and the best: "Schnozzola" aka Jimmy Durante. Lou Reed turned in an especially boring rendition for the film September Songs which MMC members like to watch as part of that month's line up, although they fast forward through Lou and a few others that didn't quite hit the Weill mark. One worth sitting through, or drinking and smoking through, is Nick Cave's Mac the Knife.

Also up for the ninth month viewing is September 30, 1955, a film about a James Dean fan who goes crazy when his idol dies (the film title is JD's DOD).

It's been 53 years since that fatal car crash and still fans from all over the world flock to Fairmount, Indiana where Dean was raised by his aunt and uncle after his mother died. They come to honour him, enamoured as they are of the farm boy turned actor who tore up the screen in a mere 3 movies and was dead at the age of 24 before 2 of those flicks had even been released.

Fairmount plays host to Dean festivals and celebrations year round but September finds it crawling with fans attending parties, walking tours and memorials. There's Jimmy Dean Jeopardy, Best Car contests and Best Look-a-like contests. Fans have their snapshots taken wearing signature red jackets or cowboy hats in front of Dean's old high school or in front of a brick wall where there used to be a window that Jimmy once posed next to for a photo. There are memorial luncheons and dinners and services at his graveside.

They purchase JD t-shirts, wind breakers, plates, salt and pepper shakers, dolls. And of course, lighters and ashtrays. After all, cigarettes were practically a part of Jimmy's wardrobe, a smokin' symbol of his smouldering sexuality. And cigarettes were apparently the medium by which James communicated after his death with his old pal Maila Nurmi (who died earlier this year). Known to the public as Vampira, this waif of the occult hung out with JD in Hollywood coffee shops during his stay in Lalaland.

In an interview from a few years back Nurmi claimed that Jimmy had been contacting her from the other side by causing nearby ashtrays to spontaneously combust. Appropriate paranormal behaviour for an actor who set a generation of adolescents on fire in the mid 50s and whose performances often still ignite passionate responses more than 50 years later.

It's not as if this admiration and devotion is unfounded. Dean had a gift and a way and great hair to boot. And before he came along all the kids had was Andy Hardy whose popular refrain "Let's put on a show!" was supposed to be a soluti on to all their problems. Personally I still think it's a pretty good remedy but when Dean cried out "You're tearing me apart!" in Rebel Without a Cause it resonated throughout the land with the disenchanted and restless post war youth.

Whatever mysterious alchemy brought forth the shooting star that was James Dean, public behaviour since his death mystifies even more. Shortly after his death one of his closest friends went to visit his grave. As he drove past a sign saying "Fairmount - birthplace of James Dean" he realized that they were going to turn his pal into something he "would never recognize again".

R.I.P James Byron Dean. (I don't know, do you think he's resting in peace or rolling in his grave?)

2008-12-03T21:13:00.000-08:00

Jelly Donuts

When I was small, it seemed to take forever before I got to the prize inside the jelly donuts my mother brought home from the bakery. My mouth was little then and I had to munch through a whole lot of powdery doughy stuff to get to the strawberry gold. But when I did my taste buds stood up and cheered; they danced, they sang!

The movie Giant directed by George Stevens (1956) is a jelly donut. This is the kind of movie where you have to chew through and try to digest a lot of white doughy footage before you get to the magic.*

Edna Ferber didn't write a jelly donut book and George Stevens translated it well enough to the screen. But it just doesn't pop, at least not until the jelly walks on screen. Which is ironic since Stevens loathed everything about the Indiana farm boy turned actor that was the jelly that saved his movie.

Liz Taylor is good as the beautiful Leslie. Rock Hudson does a good job with his character, Bic, but together they are bland - amusing and occasionally sexy but mostly bland. If you watch Liz with Monty Clift in No Place in the Sun (another Stevens flick - but all jelly, no dough) they sizzle, they pop. Giant has no such s & p.

At least not until Dean illuminates the screen as Jett Rink. Half hidden beneath a cowboy hat, lariat in hand, mumbling, shy, Dean gives this ignorant bigoted character a depth that goes deeper than the oil drill he labours over.

Savour the jelly as he:

- plays with his lariat while the fat cats try to swindle him.

- surveys his land (one of my fave scenes in all cinema; best on the big screen)

-drives up covered in black crude to Bic and Leslie's doorstep, boasting: "I'm a rich 'un." Then makes a pass at Leslie, telling her in front of her husband that she looks "pert nar good enough to eat."

- ages into a slick 'n' sleezy rich dude in his late 50s then makes a pass at Leslie and Bic's teenaged daughter Luz (played by newcomer Carol Baker).

Jelly Dean, pert nar good enough to eat.

* the jelly donut movie classification is not based on the kind of jelly donut you get at Tim Horton's. That isn't jelly, that's artificial sweet goop, which is also a movie classification but Vargas does not wish to go there.

2008-11-27T16:04:00.000-08:00

More food & drink in film.

Charlie Chaplin making his dinner rolls dance in The Gold Rush. Paul Newman making coffee in the opening of Harper. James Dean making tea for Elizabeth Taylor in Giant (then later telling her she looks "pert nar good enough to eat" just before her husband's fist meets his black-oil-covered face). James Dean pressing that cold bottle of milk to his forehead in Rebel Without a Cause. Bette Davis as Baby Jane Hudson serving her wheelchair-bound sister a special treat in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? Brando's description of how he'd eat a rat if he had one in Last Tango in Paris, and, of course, the butter scene from the same movie. Also, Brando with the orange at the end of The Godfather.

Lucille Ball gave us many wonderful food moments in I Love Lucy. Yeah, it's TV but her routines are right up there with the best in cinema. There's the episode where William Holden stares her down as she tries to casually eat her lunch - great spaghetti slapstick; the beloved chocolate factory episode; and my favourite: the way she eats her bread crumbs after starving herself on a diet. She also did a rollicking food scene in The Long Long Trailer, a second rate but entertaining movie she made with Desi Arnaz.

Woody Allen being scared of the lobsters in Annie Hall, Alastair Sim savouring his gruel in Scrooge, Joan Crawford baking pies in Mildred Pierce, Kate Hepburn flipping olives in Bringing Up Baby, Shirley Temple singing Animal Crackers in My Soup (do funny things to me...)

Lastly, a truly brilliant bit of food footage: Too Many Ritz - the soup scene.

2008-11-22T19:58:00.000-08:00

I never eat my crusts. I never have and I never will. Live with it.

My favourite eating scene in a movie is in The Marx Brothers' Room Service. All meals should be like this, no talking, just comedic hunger, the funny side of famished. The last scene in Woman of the Year where Kate makes breakfast and serves it to Spencer is also dialogue-less brilliance. Agent Cooper with his pie and coffee in Twin Peaks. Billy Madison with his sloppy joe. Toni Colette eating that popsicle in Little Miss Sunshine. Steve Carell saying "a la mode" in the same flick. Tom Jones. Tom Hanks nibbling the tiny corn in Big. Stanley clearing the table with his greasy fingers in A Streetcar Named Desire. Jack and the chicken salad sandwich scene. And, of course, that climactic dinner scene in The Miracle Worker, a riveting dramatic bookend to the Marx Brothers' comedic noshing.

I'm hungry.

2008-11-21T18:07:00.000-08:00

June really gets around but she never gets top billing. Henry and June. Walter and June. Benny and Joon. In that last one she changed the spelling of her name but it does no good. June gets around. She also occasionally gets ditched as in Walter and Henry (directed by Daniel Petrie who also helmed the compelling Sybil).

Movie of the Month Club is a group of people who get together to watch movies with the name of the current month in the title. This month they are watching Sweet November starring Keanu Reeves and Charlize Therron. Also, November starring Courtney Cox. I have not seen either of these movies but I used to hang out with Keanu before he became a superstar. I think one of his best roles was Siddhartha: "If you tighten the string too much it will snap and if you leave it too slack it will not play...dude."

In December members will be treated to December Bride with that woman we all want as our grandmother - Spring Byington. In January it's Captain January with Shirley Temple and Buddy Ebson, then January Man which was directed by Pat O'Connor who also helmed Sweet November. He was also responsible for A Month in the Country. Movie of the Month Club members want to know which month that was exactly that was spent in the country.

There are no movies with February in the title (Mr. O'Connor, anything?) so members watch The Leap Years (from Singapore) and Leap Year, a movie never released in the US because it was made by Fatty Arbuckle after the Virginia Rappe scandal. For March there's March of the Wooden Soldiers, March of the Penguins and members like to include Middlemarch.

In April the club stocks up on popcorn because there's quite the list: April in Paris, The April Fools, April Fool's Day, April Love, Enchanted April, Sometimes in April, Pieces of April, April in Love and April Showers. April in Paris stars Doris Day and April Showers stars Pat Boone. His white shoes, her platinum hair: Day-Boone!

The following month members will gather round the screen for May directed by Lucky McKee. Also included: Mayday. June is the above mentioned flicks about that harlot June (aka Joon) plus June Bride and June Night. July is Preston Sturges' wonderful film Christmas in July and the 1995 effort Feast in July. They sound like they could be the same movie but actually, except for the month, they have little in common.

I'm saving the last three months' movies for another time. September is a good one.

Cats in Cinema

2008-11-18T19:17:00.000-08:00

Today one of my dinner companions used the word "trickle". He said, "Wasn't the big bailout supposed to trickle down to us?" My other dinner companion responded: "Perhaps we have to lie on our backs and open our mouths really wide." We laughed.

I was drinking a chocolate martini and thinking that I should have used the word "trickle" in my musings about toilets in movies (see yesterday's post). Trickle. The sound of liquids trickling. Not only is it a good word but my grandmother, who was very English, used to use it as her euphemism for urinate. "Do you have to trickle?" she'd ask my sister and me when we were just small. Or she'd simply say, "Trickles?" Just the sound of it made me have to go.

My grandmother's name was Olive Valentine Auchterlonie. Back in the dirty 30s she and her seven children lived across the street from a family called the Allys. Both families had pet cats and the Alleys used to call the Auchterlonie's cat the Auchtopus while the Auchterlonies used to call the Ally's feline the Alley Cat. Which brings me to cats in movies.

My favourite cat movie when I was a kid was The Three Lives of Thomasina. It was full of magic and mystery and a cat that came back from the dead. She didn't really, she was actualy still alive when the kids thought she'd passed and held a funeral for her. The witch in this movie isn't really a witch either. The kids just think she is.

But Bell, Book and Candle had real witches and real magic! Long before there was Harry Potter there was Jack Lemmon as a warlock making the streetlamps of Greenwich Village go off and on in the depths of the hushed night, and Kim Novak casting her spell over James Stewart. They'd starred together earlier that same year ('58) in Vertigo (B, B and C would be Stewart's last romantic lead). Add to that Ernie Kovaks as a famous novelist and Hermoine Gingold at her witchy best and Elsa Lancaster as a witch named Queenie (which incidentally was my grandmother's ncikname) and you've got a heady brew, a cauldron full of surprises and wonder.

Now add to that potion the mysterious powers of the cat. Pyewacket, Kim's beautiful Siamese cat, her faithful familiar. Pyewacket was the cat's real name and she is listed on IMDb as an actress. B,B and C was her only film. But she was brilliant! I named one of my cats after her and she became but one in a long line of my faithful familiars. (More on that later).

And who doesn't remember Cat from Breakfast at Tiffany's? Cat was played by Orangey who won his second Patsy Award (Picture Animal Top Star of the Year) for this role. Orangey's first Patsy was for playing a cat named Rhubarb in the 1951 movie of the same name.

Other celluloid cats of note: Tao in The Incredible Journey, Milo from Milo and Otis, Lucifer from Cinderella, Abraham de Lacey Guiseppe Casey Thomas O'Malley, (and all the others) from The Aristocats, Jones from Alien and Aliens.

And my all time favourite top cat of the cinematic world: Baby from Bringing up Baby.

Purrrrrrr.

2008-11-17T18:10:00.000-08:00

I was sitting on the toilet today at the dojo. The bathroom there is a spacious room with a shower in one corner and an aquarium burbling in another. It's a friendly place with a lot of natural light and a few exposed pipes and I got to thinking about toilets in movies.

Psycho broke new ground by showing a toilet. The Production Code censors had always been against showing toilets let alone flushing ones and they asked Hitch to take it out, that and the word "transvestite", but their power was on the wane in 1960 and Hitch left both offensive items in.

Fourteen years after Psycho, The Conversation took that flushing toilet to a nightmarish extreme. Toilets are the stuff disturbing dreams are made of and I used to have nightmares about them all the time. Not so much since my trip to Honduras this past spring.

I had to use a bathroom one scorchingly hot, beer drinking day and it turned out to be one of those ones from my nightmares. We were on the tiny cay of Bonacca which is built on a coral reef. Its buildings are all ramshackle and jammed together, many on stilts suspended above small canals or the vast ocean itself. I'd just downed a cool beer in a makeshift cafe/bar and I had to pee.

This bathroom was a tiny dark room and I hardly remember the actual toilet but I do remember that I could see the ocean through the floor boards. In one corner of the tiny room there was a pipe that drizzled water into a bucket. This freaked me out, all those dripping drizzling gurgling water sounds and a pipe from nowhere slowly filling a bucket up with water or... what?

It's precisely this fear of the unknown - especailly this damp, metalic, deep, winding unknown - that JK Rowling tapped into when she created the regurgitating toilet in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I think that if the movie had been around when I was a kid it would have helped me get over my loo dread.

But sitting there in that john in Bonacca that day I made major headway with my fear. I stared down the bucket and the pipe as I sat on the toilet till they became just what they were rather than the apparatus of a grotesquely moist Beelzebub. And then I noticed above me the most enchanting little window. Just a little square opening with no glass and a yellow curtain fluttering in the breeze and beyond it an extraordinary blue sky. Suddenly the pail and the pipe were my friends.

But the Hayes office did not view toilets as friends! And they could no more be shown in movies than a double bed for a married couple could be.

For twenty-five years Louis B Mayer ruled over MGM and he demanded only family pictures. No dark stuff for Louis and his public, no crime films, no gangster films, no film noir. Of all the films that were made at MGM while Louis was studio head the Andy Hardy series was most dear to his heart and it is those movies that he thought would go down in history. Not Singin' in the Rain, not An American in Paris, not Mrs Miniver. And certainly not John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle.

Louis B Mayer confronted Huston one day: "Tell me, John," the old man began, "does your wife go to the bathroom? Does she pee, does she sit on the toilet and take a crap?" Huston had to answer in the affirmative. "Does she lock the door, John, when she goes to the bathroom? Tell me, does she lock the door? Why does she lock the door, John? Why does she do that? Why doesn't she open the door and say come in everybody, come in look, I'm taking a pee! That's realism, John! So why doesn't she do that? I'll tell you why she doesn't, John. Because it's ugly, it's not pretty, it's not exciting, it's not glamorous to see a woman sitting on a toilet with her dress pulled up and her private parts naked, taking a pee or a crap!"

(Vargas' aside: if you google "toilets in movies" a lot of porn sites come up).

Louis continued: "It's disgusting. But it's realism, John. It happens many times a day with every woman. And she locks the door, she keeps them out. That's what we do in our pictures. When something is ugly we lock the door, we keep it out, because we don't want our customers to look at things that ugly and say 'Ugh!'"

Mayer's days were numbered at MGM. Huston went on to make his realistic films. I don't know whether he ever showed a woman on a toilet (Reflections in a Golden Eye perhaps?) but he certainly tore down Mayer's metaphor and showed us a darker side of life.

I have to go pee now.

-------

2008-11-16T21:55:00.000-08:00

My bed lamp has gone crazy. Purchased at Home Depot, it's a tri-light that turns on at the touch of a hand. As if warming to the attention it shines ever brighter with each additional touch, up to two. But suddenly this little lamp has started lighting up all by itself in the middle of the night when all is still and dark and nothing is touching it at all. Snoozing in the quiet darkness I am awakened by its golden glow. I put it back to bed with a soothing touch: hush lamp now sleep. But it will stubbornly come back on again an hour later. It will do this during the day as well, just turn on or go up a notch when no one is even near. Sometimes in the evening I am lying on my bed thinking and it will come on as if to signify the arrival of an idea before I've actually had one. I now call the lamp God. Or I unplug it, light a candle and call it defective.

2008-11-15T20:34:00.000-08:00

Barbie had a pink one. And I wanted one just like it (only bigger) so that I could stay in bed all day eating chocolates and chatting with friends. A powder pink princess phone fit for a princess. I never had a Barbie. I had the cheap imitation known as Mitzi. But one Christmas my Mitzi got her rich cousin's phone anyway.

It was the kind of marshmallow pink telly that Doris Day should have used while soaking in her bubble bath in Pillow Talk. But she usually had one of those classic 1950s rotary phones, often as white as Doris herself - that is, its pristine whiteness underlined her purity. But occasionally her phone was a sunny and enviable yellow to match her perfect kitchen decor and disposition.

Pottery Barn has an old fashioned rotary phone (or cradle phone) for sale. They have Doris' virginal white but they also have a black one more suitable for Sam Spade or Jake Gittes: striped shadows, whirling ceiling fan, gum shoes up on a cluttered desk, a hardboiled ear to one of these black beauties.The one at PB isn't really rotary - the dial conceals push buttons - but it comes in a variety of colours: red is dangerous, silver is classy but black is classic.

The black is the one Grace Kelly used in Dial M for Murder. Her conniving husband calls her from a polished wooden phone booth in a posh men's club and she picks up the black classic. Today you would have to call the film Push M for Murder. Doesn't have the same ring, does it? Oh... rings...well, that's a whole other topic within the topic of the Telephone Genre.

I once had a roommate who possessed a modern candlestick phone in faux ivory and gold. I coveted this phone even though it used to pull my hair out when I hung up, all that complicated receiver hardware. Still, this baby made me feel like I was Rosalind Russell talking over Cary Grant's witty repartee in His Girl Friday.

These phones had cords that prompted much physical comedy: witness Roz putting her stylish coat on while talking on the candlestick phone. She gets all tangled up with the cord running up her sleeve, a symbol of her growing entanglements. Growing entanglements describes a wonderful candlestick phone scene from It's A Wonderful Life: Mary is talking to Sam (hee-haw) Wainwright and she wants George in on the conversation.

They are pressed close together with the receiver held between them. George is a bundle of conflict and desire. He is so close to Mary he can smell her hair and it drives him crazy. But he wants to see the world, gall darn it! It's a steamy scene with George's passion turning to near violence.

Other notable movies of the telephone genre: Butterfield 8, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, The Slender Thread.

2008-11-14T16:21:00.000-08:00

I forgot to say something yesterday. Because, you'll remember, it wasn't Remembrance Day. It was two whole days away from the Day of Remembering so I forgot. I believe we should declare a Day of Forgetting. That's your day to really let it all go, all that stuff you've been hanging on to: the time your husband called your haircut "moribund" or the day your mother said "You're no son of mine!" It'll take more than a minute of silence but you can do it. I declare today National Forgetting Day.

Now, where was I?

O yes. Silence. Yesterday I was cogitating on movies with mute characters (not to be confused with silent films). I mentioned The Miracle Worker which belongs to what I call the Mute Genre. Other films in this genre include Johnny Belinda, Children of a Lesser God, Little Miss Sunshine, There Will Be Blood and any of the Marx Brothers movies. Mime Movies do not count: Blowup and the great Les Enfant du Paradis are not of the Mute Genre. They are of the Mime Genre.

Now, what was it that I wanted to say?

O yeah. So after Anne Bancroft starred in the mute movie she starred in its opposite, The Slender Thread, where only her voice is heard for most of the film. Only her voice on the telephone being broadcast over a speaker on the wall of the crisis call clinic where Sidney Poitier works frantically to keep her on the line.

Sydney Pollack cast well (it was his first movie)! AB's voice is like a dark velvet night when all the stars are twinkling and a cool breeze ruffles your hair. Sid also has a great voice.

The Slender Thread belongs in what I call the Telephone Genre as does Pillow Talk which features Doris Day in bed glowing like radioactive cotton candy, receiver to ear on a split screen with that cad in a cowboy hat, Rock Hudson; and Dial M for Murder; also Adaptation because Meryl Streep does dial tone. We should have known La Streep could do the various dialects of phone which collectively are known as Phone-ese (pronounced like phoneys).

I'm off to forget. Happy Forgetfulness Day!

2008-11-13T21:22:00.000-08:00

Vargas feels pretty mum today which is better than feeling pretty dumb or pretty numb but not better than feeling just plain pretty. Or it is? It is important to be mute sometimes. Well, mute by choice. But mute as in Helen Keller, that's just tough. Hers was an important and monumental struggle. When I was a little girl I got to order a book through my school and I chose her autobiography. A book in the mail with a pale blue cover, what a thrill, what a read.

Arthur Penn and his crew did a bang up job on The Miracle Worker. Of course, the one person who's opinion we would like to have known could neither watch nor hear the movie. I would also have loved to hear Anne Sullivan's review but she was long gone by the time Anne Bancroft played her on Broadway then on the screen.

Anne Bancroft did some wonderful silver screen roles: Inga, the woman on the line at the crisis call centre in The Slender Thread. Sidney Poitier is just a volunteering student when he gets her call. What a voice! The kicker is she has already swallowed a lethal dose of pills. Sidney has to keep her talking till the call can be traced. It was 1962 and the film is noted for its physical tracing of the call.

And I really liked her portrayal of Miss Haversham (whom they renamed) in the modern day version of Great Expectations. Alfonso Cuaron is a good director but this flick didn't really pan out. Only La Bancroft is left untarnished as the tarnished Miss H. in this overwrought remake.

Her best role (neck in neck with Anne Sullivan) was, of course, Mrs Robinson.

What a mum. Truly does leave me mum.

2008-11-12T17:54:00.000-08:00

It is no longer Remembrance Day but I still remember.

Amarcord (I Remember) - a film by Fellini which I watched over and over again when I worked at a second run movie theatre called Cinema Lumiere. It was operated by a coke addict whom we called the Snow Plow. Sometimes the audience would be munching popcorn in their seats but the Snow Plow couldn't pay for the reels for that evening's show. The night we advertised 81/2, for instance, we only had 63/4 in the can with a full house awaiting the masterpiece. The Plow always worked something out with the guys holding the reels though and so I saw many good films many times over. Amarcord among them.

Amarcord is a bildungsroman. Basically that means "coming of age" and is usually meant for novels ("roman" being German for "novel") but has been co-opted by film afficianados. When I saw Amarcord at the Lumiere I had a few years prior been through my own bildungsroman and was now firmly rooted in my kunstleroman (developement of an artist).

So after the show each night I skipped across the road to the tobacconist's shop to buy hot pink cigarettes with shiny gold filters called Chaliapin (after the Russian opera singer). I smoked them at the Embassy Tavern uptown while listening to old war vets with medals and jowls tell their tales over tall glasses of beer.

See, I told you I still remember. I remember everything. And I remember nothing.

2008-11-11T19:19:00.000-08:00

It's Remembrance Day. I remember pictures of my father and my uncle in uniform (they never went overseas), I remember my grade five teacher stabbing the air as she conducted the whole class in a recitation of In Flanders Fields, I remember stories of those who fell.

And I remember postwar Vienna through Carol Reed's cockeyed lens. And Harry Lime who said:

"You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Orson wrote that line (though the screenplay was scripted by Graeme Greene). After the movie came out Orson said that the Swiss very kindly pointed out to him that they had never made any cuckoo clocks.

Welles, always inventing. The Swiss did actually make cuckoo clocks; they were famous for their Chalet Style concieved at the end of the 19th century. Welles, genius, theif or cuckoo? All of the above? None of the above?

Soon I will move on and forget these nagging questions about Orson. But for now -

I remember Orson.

2008-11-10T17:37:00.000-08:00

It's funny that the name of this blog is Vargas Speaks because I have nothing to say. If you've ever seen A Touch of Evil you'll know that is where I take my name from. Vargas was the main character in that movie.

I like Orson Welles. I don't like Charleton Heston but I think Welles did right by casting him as Vargas. Vargas was a bit of a drip. If you haven't seen the movie watch the opening on youtube. Very cool.

A few years ago Walter Murch recut the movie according to Welles' notes. That was a lot of work. But some say worth it. Was Orson Welles a genius or just a thief with an overinflated sense of himself? All of the above? None of the above?

If I could work with Welles I would want to play Deitrich's part in A Touch of Evil. No, Marlene was too perfect. No, if I could name my project with la Orson it would The Ravishing of Lol Stein based on the book by Marguerite Duras.

In fact, I think I'll get to work on that screenplay in memory of the Great God Welles (genie ou voleur?) That is, just as soon as I finish my screenplay-in-endless-progress, Exploding Violet.

Told you I had nothing to say.