The Iron Petticoat

The Iron Petticoat (Ralph Thomas, 1956) There are many reasons a film can be withdrawn from circulation.  In some cases, like Frank Sinatra's withdrawal of Suddenly and The Manchurian Candidate, it is the fear that the influence of the film might have had on current events, in much the same way as Stanley Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange for many years in England, due to what seemed to be several copycat crimes related to it.

Bob "I probably should have done this with Phyllis Diller" Hope and his estate kept The Iron Petticoat out of America after its initial release until...November, 2012...when TCM showed it for the first time in this country since its release, (with the exceptions of a couple of private screenings).  It's been available in Europe and throughout the rest of the world, but not in the States, owing to a disagreement between Hope and the film's original author, the esteemed Ben Hecht, who wrote the thing for Katherine Hepburn, with an eye toward re-teaming her with Cary Grant.  But, Grant was still on his on-again-off-again retirement at the time and passed, Hope sashayed in, and proceeded to hand it to his gag-writers who refashioned the script more to Hope's style than Hepburn's...or Hecht's.  To be fair, stars do this all the time, re-writing scripts to their liking and their strengths, but Hecht took the issue public in the Hollywood press, leading to a Hope-ful response.  For whatever reasons, Hope, who had the distribution rights in the U.S., kept it out of circulation after its initial run, making it a curiosity. 

Would that the unearthing of this film, with the unlikely match-up of Hope and Hepburn, the first movie producing credit of Bond producer Harry Saltzman, be anything more than that.   But, like Schrödinger's cat, once seen, there is certainty, and in this timeline, it ain't good.  The story of a Russian aviatrix (Hepburn) who defects to Europe and is squired by an American Air Force Major (Hope) under orders to keep her on our side is a few notches shy of Ninotchka, and is almost entirely charmless.  No one's at the top of their game here, with the exception of some of the character actors (Robert Helpmann, James Robertson Justice).  Hope seems to have that hapless "I'm bombing here" look on his face without the curl to his lip that inspired confidence.  And Hepburn?  There's a distinctive overabundance of iron, as if she were trying to be her own Berlin Wall to hold her own in the project.  And where Garbo played Ninotchka with a stiff world-wary calm ("like a Vulcan" I compared it to), Hepburn is loud and forceful, projecting her words to the top of "the house" (more like a Klingon).  And if Melvin Douglas' ardent suitor in the earlier Lubitsch film softens his Moscovite's demeanor, Hope's stand-offishness—keeping her at golf-club's length—does nothing towards making this one either romantic or comedic.

No film should be locked away in a vault, but for this one, the only joy in it is  its seeing the light of day again. It is only when it sees the light of the projector that the disappointment starts.

I vitelloni

I Vitelloni (aka The Large Calves) (Federico Fellini, 1953) So many films have come down the strada since this one (American Graffiti, Diner) that bear a resemblance to this nicely melancholy collection of stories about the wasted lives of young men that fans of those later Americanized versions will find themselves in cozily familiar (if uncomfortable) terrain.  It has become a staple of film makers who have become nostalgic, but just smart enough to see their pasts with the lenses of irony and affectionate smugness.

In a provincial town, there are five men who, post-education and living with their parents, are poised on the edge of putting away childish things and becoming men—and they're doing it as slowly as possible: Alberto (Alberto Sordi) a flamboyant life-of-the-partier, which is fine for him but he's bothered by sister's dalliances with a married man; Riccardo (Riccardo Fellini, the director's brother) is a fine baritone with never-realized dreams of being an entertainer;  Leopoldo (Leopoldo Trieste), the intellectual, has the required "script-in-the-drawer," never published, never performed; the unofficial leader, Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), whom all the others look up to, is an unrepentant womanizer, good at seducing but bad at staying 'til morning; then, there's Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi), the youngest, who observes all the behavior, following in the others' footsteps if not down their paths.

See, there's a problem: Moraldo's sister (Leonora Ruffo), who's just been named "Miss Siren of 1953" at the end-of-Summer bash, is pregnant with Fausto's baby.  When she faints after being crowned, the whole town becomes aware of the scandal and Fausto is forced to marry her, then take on a job as a clerk, which he despises.  Already, Moraldo's loyalties are divided, between loyalty to family and friends, between fun and responsibility, and right and wrong, and it creates a new perspective from which he observes his friends as they listlessly make their way from Summer to Summer (their season to shine) free, but not care-free...and not entirely rootless.  Time goes by, getting by, and all are shown lessons they don't want to learn—about compromise, about self-reliance and duty.  But there's always another party to go to, another prank to pull, another alley to duck into when the going gets uncomfortable.  There's no time to lose, as time can't be wasted, only spent.

It's all set to the sad swagger of Nino Rota's perfectly-in-tune score, and it is one of those rare Fellini films that ends with a resolution, rather than a wry shrug.  There is hope, and an indelible last image that hangs in the memory (and not because it's freeze-framed) that shows how brilliant Fellini could be when he kept things simple (and he had to on this film, shot over six months, with different cinematographers).  The last line is also curious, as it is dubbed, not by the actor, but by Fellini himself.  He would insert himself more and more into his films, until they merged, the two indistinguishable for a time, the man and his work, his dreams made real.

Sittin' on the dock of the bay...wastin' time

.

Baby Doll

Baby Doll (Elia Kazan, 1956) On December 16, 1956, the Catholic Church's Cardinal John Spellman denounced this film in his sermon as "grievously offensive to Christian standards of decency."  Calling the film "revolting" and "morally repellent," he extended his reach with a Power Grab, declaring "In solicitude for the welfare of souls entrusted to my care and the welfare of my country, I exhort Catholic people to refrain from patronizing this film under pain of sin."

In order to drum up business he might have said, "If you see it, say two Hail Mary's and call me in the morning."  Ironically, he probably ended up driving up attendance for the film, whose worst sin was bad timing, but more questionable booking decisions have been made during the Christmas season.

A week later, Time Magazine, in its review of it led off with this line: "Baby Doll (Newtown; Warner) is just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited." Then, in the same paragraph, goes into double-Time-speak stating "Baby Doll is an almost puritanically moral, work of art."  Thanks for the clarification.

Well, lightning bolts notwithstanding—and all the participants in Baby Doll led nice, long lives—it can be seen with the perspective of time (rather than "Time") that Spellman just had a bee in his biretta, using his bully pulpit (emphasis on the "bull") to pass Holy Judgment on a film he probably didn't see, or, if he had, mis-read.  Suggestive, yes.  Baby Doll is very suggestive, in the style of Italian comedies coming out at the time, where everything is implied, but nothing is seen, portrayed or shown.  What happens off-screen (or off-frame) is in the prurient mind of the beholder, and if such is the case His Eminence probably should have broken out the birch branches and started flailing.

Tennessee Williams' original screenplay features Karl Malden as Archie Lee Meighan, a Southern gentleman of Benoit Mississippi who's fit to be fried.  Archie Lee gets no respect, y'all, not from the town, not from his employees, and not from his child-bride Baby Doll (Carroll Baker), on the cusp of her twentieth birthday, a significant event for the couple.  Baby Doll has moved from father-figure to father-figure, agreeing to her father on his death-bed to marry the middle-aged cotton-gin owner, who might be able to provide for her.  Part of the bargain is that Archie Lee would buy her a fabulous mansion, the biggest in Benoit (although it is in disrepair), and wait until her 20th to consummate their marriage.  This leaves Archie Lee is a peripatetic state of frustration.

But, the tamped fires at home aren't his only reason for agitation—his cotton-gin business is failing, due to the conglomerate cotton-gin run by Silva Vaccaro (Eli Wallach) doing big business downtown.  In a fit of pique, Archie Lee burns down the demon gin, leaving him open to negotiate a deal to do the work.  But Vaccaro has other things in mind.  He suspects Meighan as the arsonist, and so he hangs back from the mill, in an effort to gain information from the rather vapid Baby Doll, who is very susceptible to falling for Vaccaro's tricks.

Suggestiveness ensues.  But also hilarity.  It is, after all is said and done (rather than implied and imagined), a comedy—a Williams "Southern"—like a Western, a story about the civilizing of an uncivilized situation, where the brutes are dispatched and the naive gain some wisdom, balancing the scales to Williams' own vision of the charming, graceful South he knew and wanted to recreate.

And the part that everyone was hung up about—the scene on the swing between Baker and Wallach that Kazan shot in tight close-up?   Seems the fact that you couldn't see the hands of the players was extremely questionable and prurient to outraged viewers.  The documentary included with the film has the answer: Kazan shot the scene in close-up, so you couldn't see the very large heaters keeping the actors warm on that supposedly very hot day shot in the cold temperatures of Benoit.  One more example of the mystical power of film—and why what isn't in the frame is just as important as what is.

The Man Who Never Was

The Man Who Never Was (Ronald Neame, 1956) I first read the story of the off-beat plan to distract the Nazis from British invasion plans in grade-school with a scholastic printing of Ewen Montagu's fascinating book.  I knew there'd been a short-lived TV series with Robert Lansing in the 60's—more live-spy than the actual event—but this had nothing to do with that.  This one was a true story.  It started a fascination with the morally ambiguous world of spies (in WWII and beyond) that still fills my trench-coat to this day.

But this story was true; the name of the corpse washed ashore was changed to protect the Allies on the invasion route to Sicily.  

On April 30, 1943, the body of Major William Martin of the Royal Marines was washed ashore on the beach of Huelva, Spain.  Chained to the loop of his trench-coat was a briefcase containing personal documents (so they wouldn't be transferred through official channels) that hinted that the invasion, code-named Operation Husky, would land at Greece and Sardinia, and that  deceptive intelligence efforts would be made to convince the Germans that the invasion would take place attacking Sicily.

It was all a hoax.  There was no Major Martin (although his obituary did appear in The London Times), and the body was a plant by British intelligence forces to sway the Germans from the actual Husky invasion of Sicily, a strategic "must" for the invasion of first Italy, and then the Eastern pincer move on Germany. (Winston Churchill once remarked that "Everyone but a bloody fool would know that it's Sicily").  The plan, dubbed "Operation Mincemeat"—in the hope that the Germans would "swallow" it—was concocted by Flight Lt. Charles Cholmondeley* and Lt. Cmdr. Montagu.  A corpse (that of a 34 year old Welshman Glyndwr Michael, who had no immediate family) was obtained, an elaborate back-history created, documents forged (including love letters and family correspondence), and dumped by submarine off the Spanish coast.

The Germans bought it...to the point where they still anticipated the attack two weeks after the Allies landed in Sicily.  The film of the book by Montagu (played in the film by Clifton Webb) takes a few liberties—it romanticizes some of the incidents (for instance the authorship of the love letters) and creates a follow-up operation that ensures the information is transferred by a German agent (Stephen Boyd, in his film debut) without embellishment to the enemy, but it's an interesting dramatization ("It's the most outrageous, disgusting, preposterous, not to say barbaric idea I've ever heard, but work out full details and get back to me in the morning!") about one of the wierder operations in a war full of them. 

* Cholmondeley got the idea from a multi-schemed memo by one intelligence officer named Ian Fleming (who was inspired by a novel by Basil Thomsen), who in 1953 would create his own intelligence agent, James Bond.

Written on the Wind

"Written On the Wind" (Douglas Sirk, 1956) Consummate trash is still something to be celebrated, and "Written on the Wind" is consummate trash; so soap-opera it squeaks, it has pretensions towards Tennessee Williams but with dialogue straight out of Indiana Jones, and sophisticated airs that smell a little fetid, like last night's twelve course meal left in the sink.

But it's directed like a dream (with the occasional diversion into night-sweats) by Douglas Sirk, who may be the most manipulative film director since Hitchcock, steering an audience's sight-lines like a Dutch master, by means both sly and obvious.

There's been a bit of a kerfluffle on the cin-terwebs recently over Sirk's worth as a director. Well, it's one thing to design the sets and wardrobe and choose the colors and decor, but it's quite another to orchestrate all those things and design a course through it to make an image that complements, makes explicit or counters the words on the script-page (that, at the time Sirk was working, had to be approved by a censor, mind you). Call it "Dancing through the Hays Code" and Sirk's direction cuts quite a path of stylish elegance while presenting the mire of the "comfortably well-off." It's a bit like trying to keep your dignity running through a cow-field.

The story is about the Hadley family, thick—almost gooey—with the oil business, and something of a gusher when it comes to spilling their muck in all directions, soiling those in their vicinity. Take Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), son of a farmer who worked the Hadley property and school-chum to the Hadley scum of a scion, Kyle (Robert Stack), an intense guy who always comes on a little strong to the ladies. Mitch, on the other hand, is hard-working, poor, and a perfect gentleman. Even when Kyle sweeps Lucy, the girl Mitch has his eye on (Lauren Bacall), off her feet and out of Mitch's grasp with a dazzling display of Hadley life-style. Simple enough. Then toss in Kyle's sister Marylee (as in "...we roll along")(Dorothy Malone*), who's been in love with Mitch since they were kids, and things get real complicated. In fact, they get as wild as the wind, which blows and batters the Hadley Estate in a show of Nature's distaste—a protest as violent as Akira Kurosawa's dust-devils.

Not too worry, though. Sirk is the tour guide through this E-ticket sexual Disneyland. Enjoy the ride (and keep your hands in the vehicle at all times).

Let's start off with something safe. Women's heads as a proscenium arch—their curiosity points us to and frames the principals.

Sirk used a moving camera sparingly and with a great deal of control. He let you see what he wanted you to see when he wanted you to see it. In this set-up, the eye would wander to what's around the corner (the garish red on the wall attracts your eye)—patience, Sirk will take you there in a minute. In the meantime, there is a large mirror, incongruously in front of the check-in desk, that allows you to see the characters coming out of an elevator before they approach the lady at check-in. Your eyes move to that. Sirk likes to make entrances interesting by having them reflected in mirrors.

After a bar fight that leaves Kyle defeated and humiliated, everybody's showing him the door without saying anything, the beaded curtain forming a light-weight barrier. When he violently goes through it, the body of Dorothy Malone's character Marylee will follow the sway of the beads before she turns and follows her brother.

Where do your eyes go? The camera has followed Bacall and Hudson into the bar, where they stop, looking for Stack. If their body positions didn't point you in the right direction, Sirk has put Stack between the two brightest things in the room—the white-shirted bartenders.

Lucy and Mitch bring the drunken Kyle home to recover—that's Mitch climbing the stairs in the background, Kyle's the limp sack over his shoulder—while a mortified Lucy explains to father Jasper...well, *sigh* it's probably a story's he's heard before.

And if you think the director's taking this florid stuff too seriously, brothers and sisters, you aren't looking close enough. Get out your de-coder rings. There'll be a quiz.

Doesn't get more obvious than this...you couldn't show sex on the screen in the 50's (without pan-aways to roaring fires and crashing ocean waves)—but you can show this and it isn't any surprise when Marylee is revealed to be having an affair with the pump-jockey (who for a perverse bit of trivia is played by Grant Williams, "The Incredible Shrinking Man").

This is an insert shot. It was deliberate and could have been edited out without hurting anything, and yet it remains. It occurs when Lucy tours the hotel suite Kyle Hadley has arranged for her and opens a drawer...of clutch-purses. How many purses have been snapped in anger (and in men's faces) over the cinematic war between men and women during the Hays Code? Lots, because purses with those snapping openings were a metaphor for a woman's genitalia. And when a woman got mad at a man--SNAP!--she would loudly shut the purse...thereby showing her disdain for the man by metaphorically denying him sex (Things were that complicated in the Hays Code days). Lucy should have inferred how much Kyle played around by this little collection and ran like hell. *

Kyle Hadley starts this conversation on the right side of the frame in front of the bed, then as he becomes more ardent, the bed is uncovered. And oh, by the way, rival-for-Lucy's-affections Mitch is seen in the mirror between them, but because he's on a different plane from Lucy and Kyle, he could be on another planet. So, although he comes between them, he's little (diminutive, in fact) threat. There's a lot of triangulation in this family.

Some friend. Now here's Kyle's sister Marylee (Dorothy Malone) a hyperbolic hyphenate of dipso- and nympho-manias.* She's been in love with Mitch since they were kids, and despises her brother with a passion that practically pops the buttons off her blouse. Sirk makes sure we see her pouring the booze in the Cinemascope frame. Or she's so drunk, she has to hold it that close to avoid spillage.

Marylee in her well-ordered, yet cluttered room. The room is orderly, tidy—everything in its place, including her intended in a thick, wrought-iron frame—with the occasional wild errant splash of color...that being red—including her phone. Looking at this angle from above, the angles of things would look crazy and at odd angles--they're directing your attention to her, but she's small and trapped by her surroundings. Of course she is. Her room is a reflection of her own roiling mind, shadowed and complicated and morbid like a funeral hall.

Speaking of reflections, Sirk does a lot with this shot. Marylee plunks herself down, inserting herself into Lucy's mirror (she likes the attention), and adjusts her hair as Lucy brushes. Marylee thinks they're just alike, with their attachments to Mitch and Kyle linking them...but she's alone, posing in that mirror. She is the storm to Lauren Bacall's calm, seemingly incapable of remaining still, where Bacall is all stillness. They're counter-points, not reflections.

Dysfunctional family portrait.
Father Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith), old and frail and ineffectual, has put all his strength into his oil business—check out his portrait—and his kids have run out of control (Their mother's dead—they probably ate her after they were born, like the spiders they are).


Your turn! Now what (oh, what) could Sirk be saying with this shot?

Nothing. I just like this shot. Thanks for playing. Exits by the mirror on the wall. Mind the gap.

* Malone won an Oscar for her role. It's easy to see why—she put a lot of work and jitter-bugging energy into this performance (see the video). Even at 24 frames per second it's hard to keep up with her. Both Malone and Bacall had worked with Bogart in "The Big Sleep" (Bogart, by the way, hated this movie and told Bacall she should stay clear of this sort of material).

** If you think my theories are a bit far-fetched, I can only remind you of the story of the woman who went to a psychiatrist who gave her a rorshach test. "Now, what does this remind you of?" he asks her, and she says, "That's a vagina." "How about this one?" "That's two people making love." "Interesting, what do you see in this picture?" "That's another picture of making love." "And what's this one?" "Well, that's a penis." "Well, it's obvious," says the shrink. "You're obsessed with sex." "I am!" says the woman. "You're the one with the dirty pictures!"

The Bad Seed

"The Bad Seed" (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956) I was probably just emerging into my "terrible two's" when "The Bad Seed" premiered, so I suspect my parents never saw it, as my up-bringing was limited to stern looks and measured tones. "The Bad Seed," however, is such a gleefully over-the-top pot-boiler that toys with murder, matricide, infanticide, and pure evil in the form of a child (Patty McCormack, a wise, knowing performance...with just a touch of gonzo sadism...for one so young), I wonder how many children suffered at the hands of it.

Believe me, I've heard the stories of children's lies being used to destroy adults and it has been a part of art since Oedipus, and has been hoisted from "The Crucible," until "The Children's Hour." And it became Script #05 in the television writer's bible for dramatic series ever since.

But little Rhoda Penmark's (McCormick) motto is "Actions, Not Words." During the course of the film she kills a school-mate with the metal soles of her tap-dancing shoes and sets the only person who can incriminate her (handyman Henry Jones) on fire. A sociopath in pig-tails, Rhoda may make this Diane Downs' favorite movie. LeRoy basically transformed the Broadway production into a film, with an economical direction that eerily evokes television set-ups of the sort you'd find on "Leave it to Beaver," but with Grand Guignol dialogue in its place. Rhoda is actually an uber-version of creepy Eddie Haskell.

The stage-play (by Maxwell Anderson) ended with the death of the mother in a murder-suicide attempt and Rhoda living on,* but The Production Code would have none of it, so Mom is allowed to live in regret, and Rhoda? Well, the writers let God sort out the mess, the Almighty not stepping in previously to prevent the Evil.**

And then, as if the "creep" factor weren't enough, the film-makers have a bizarre curtain-call in which McCormick is turned over a smiling Nancy Kelly's knee and given a spanking, for some sort of audience catharsis. Gotta give the audience what they want, so they leave the theater with a smile on their face.

Rhoda's not the only one with "issues."

* This may be the reason why, in the airline emergency instructions, they insist the parents put on the oxygen masks first.

** SPOILER ALERT: How Rhoda gets her "comeuppance" is the sleaziest form of lazy writing in the form of a Deus ex Electrica. But, there's a gleeful sadism in "The Bad Seed" that leaves one a bit speechless. I can just see an studio exec with a cigar, advising the script-writer to "fry the bitch."

Olde Review: The Nights of Cabiria

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

"The Nights of Cabiria" (Frederico Fellini, 1956) Both times that I previously saw "The Nights of Cabiria" I was in the projection room showing it, and that is not the best place to try and appreciate any movie, believe me. But even filtered between dirty glass, and the change-overs,* and the re-windings, it was easy to see that it was an exceptionally fine film.

Cabiria, when we first see her, is in the process of being robbed and shoved into the river by her lover of one month, and after going down for the third time and being fished out by some nearby kids, she is pronounced "dead" (albeit by one of the kids) and then revived and indignantly stalks back to her house. "She's got nine lives, like a cat," one of Fellini's nosey neighbors says as she disappears down the road.

That first scene is symbolically representative of the entire film, for it has an episodic structure in which Cabiria, "a well-known night-bird," is continually finding herself putting herself into situations that, for a while, make her think she might improve her current state as a street-walker, only to be "shoved" and "drowned" by having those hopes dashed. She is usually rescued by something else which also provides hope and also explodes in her face, providing more humiliation, Not coincidentally, most of these hopes entail people: an actor who momentarily uses Cabiria, is momentarily charmed by her, and in a moment, drops her; a hypnotist who exposes her fantasies to a cruelly amused audience. By the end of the film, Cabiria has come full circle--she is miles away from her home, which was her only previous certainty of retreat and recovery, she is without money for she has been robbed and betrayed by her fiancee, who only out of sheer cowardice refrained from pushing her off a cliff. When we last see her, she is presumably walking home in the dark, when a group of young people, revelling and celebrating, catch up with her and gradually her spirits are lifted by them. She begins to nod and smile at the revellers, and then, finally she nods at us, as if to say, "Yeah...well, it's alright" and she continues to move on.

I can just hear the feminists in the audience hiss this film** because Cabiria is prey, just asking to be taken advantage of. She smirks and sneers on the outside, but inside, she is quite susceptible to being suckered into anything. How could she constantly take such abuse? Why does she allow herself into such situations? I'm not sure I can put what I feel on that into this review, but I can safely say that that final few feet of film, when she turns to the audience and nods with a slight, battered smile--that final few feet of film is charged with a life-renewing energy, and I see it as a personal challenge, just as surely as I see "The Nights of Cabiria" as Fellini's finest film.

One note: "Nights of Cabiria" is subtitled, so you might want to get in line early, since it's tough to read them from the top row of 130 Kane.

Broadcast on KCMU-FM , Oct. 7th and 8th, 1976

Nothing to add, really. I still love "The Nights of Cabiria," and although Fellini went many marvelous and torturous routes during his film-career, I still think it's his finest film (Although I also have a deep love for "Toby Dammit: Or, Never Bet the Devil Your Head"--which has just been restored, I've heard. Reason to celebrate. And I neglected to mention the performance of Giulietta Masina, putting her in the category of Chaplin as one of the great screen-faces and personas)

Tomorrow: the second half of the double-bill (remember those?): "Diary of a Mad Housewife"

*In college (when this was written), I was a film projectionist showing movies all around the UW campus. There were no DVD's back then, just massive reels of celluloid encased in metal, each feature made up of a few reels. The projectionist's job was to switch from reel to reel (and projector to projector) without missing a beat, and certainly without distracting the viewer's attention. Two film-blips, ten seconds apart at the end of reels was the signal to "switch-over" from one reel to the next. Then the projectionist would rewind the previous reel (for the next projectionist), and set up the next one, and wait for the blips. A nice job, that. And you got to see a lot of movies.

** Yeah, that's a little harsh, but I can certainly see the argument. Cabiria is a victim, led astray by her hope for something better. If that was all she was, if she was accepting of this victim-hood, and gave in to it, she might be warranting some bad attitude. But she's also a fighter, who keeps picking herself up, throwing off self-pity, and accepting the joy that life has to offer. I really love this character. I want her to "make" it.

Who wouldn't?