Ball of Fire

Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) It doesn't get much better than this: screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder (from a story by Wilder), produced by Samuel Goldwyn, photographed by Gregg Toland, music by Alfred Newman and directed by Howard Hawks.  Add that it's a swing-era version of "Snow White" stock-piled by anything-but-dwarvish character actors (Henry Travers, Richard Hayden, Oscar Homolka, S.Z.Sakall), some nifty up-and-comers like Dana Andrews and Dan Duryea, and top-lined by Gary Cooper (in pixie-ish Capra mode) and Barbara Stanwyck (who usually runs on all cylinders, but seems turbo-charged in this one) and you have the makings of a great, stylish and culturally-winking comedy, with lots of great musical material, too.*

Years in the making, the Dutton Encyclopedia, written by eight myopic scholars, is hitting the skids just as it's hitting the "S" words.  Professor Bertram Potts (Cooper) has just finished a 26 page treatise on "Slang," when a garbage-man walks in with some fancy (and utterly incomprehensible) patter that puts his research to shame.  Potts determines that he will leave his ivory tower and venture forth into the world to see what all the...what's the word? *flip/flip*..."rhubarb" is about.  He stumbles upon a nightclub (where Gene Krupa happens to be playing) and taking on the lead vocals is "Sugarpuss" O'Shea (Stanwyck, in full "bad-girl" mode), mob-girl to Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews) who's being investigated by the New York cops.  The focus of their investigation is Sugarpuss, who can give them a lot of inside information, so she has to go on the lam, and the professor's invitation to her to be a part of his slang symposium, gives her the perfect hideout, going "to the mattresses" with the eight encyclopediacs, but under the distrusting baleful eye of Miss Bragg, the housekeeper.

Complications arise, with the possibilities of broken and/or ventilated hearts, as it turns into a particularly pointy triangle between Potts, O' Shea and Lilac, with a suddenly energized Greek chorus of academics trying to deal, rather haplessly, with the real world.  "Snow White" is the inspiration, but fans of "The Big Bang Theory" will also see its roots in this and its Grimm ancestor. One also has Ball of Fire to thank for Billy Wilder's directing career, as Hawks let him sit in on the set, auditing during the making of the film, observing, taking notes, prepping for his own directorial turn that year with The Major and the Minor.

This is one of the great unsung Hawks movies, slightly different from his formula, thanks to Brackett and Wilder's script, but it still falls under the category where a team of different skilled people—in this case scholars—come together under circumstance to form a like-minded unit, even if, as here, it happens a little late in the proceedings.  It was Hawks' version of making a film about film-making, but obliquely, showing that any group of gypsies can unite under a common goal despite their differences.  It's part of the charm that makes Hawks one of the most American-minded of film-makers, those films being a reflection of the melting pot of the Great National Experiment.

* One of Hawks' trademarks is a musical number in the proceedings, often by amateurs to show they're bonding in their efforts.   Ball of Fire was re-made eight years later by Hawks in a musical version called A Song is Born (also photographed by Toland, but this time in technicolor) starring Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo.

The Wreck of the Mary Deare

The Wreck of the Mary Deare (Michael Anderson, 1959) It was intended to be an MGM production for Alfred Hitchcock—he'd liked the best-seller and he'd wanted to work with Gary Cooper since Foreign Correspondent in 1940—but screenwriter Ernest Lehman found it pretty dull  with an extended, dry courtroom scene at the end, and Hitchcock decided to "come up with something else"—which turned out to be North By Northwest.

We are all the better for it. 

As it is, The Wreck of the Mary Deare is an odd picture with a great mysterious opening and a dry-as-dust finale, try as scripter Eric Ambler and director Anderson might to make a suitable action closer to it.  In turbulent seas in the English Channel, a tug, captained by John Sands (Charlton Heston), finds a ghost-freighter marooned and adrift, nearly colliding  and destroying his ship.  Pulling alongside, Sands grabs a dangling line and laboriously clambers onto the ship.  The rusting hulk, the Mary Deare, is without power, a large gash in its side that is slowly flooding the engine room, with no sign of life on-board...at least initially.

One man has remained—First Officer Gerald Patch (Cooper), a merchant marine eking out an existence on the ship, recently abandoned, and desperately trying to scuttle it before it sinks.  With the reluctant help of Sands, Patch gets the boiler-room going, the ship under power, and the Captain-by-default's mission accomplished.

All of which is great stuff—the conflicts, the questionable sanity of Patch, Sands' greediness in wanting to claim the salvage on the ship—which would have made a great film if it ended there.  Unfortunately, that's only thirty minutes of it.  It would have been a great short subject, though, but the movie trundles along over the investigation and trial over who owns the boat and the conflicting testimonies between Patch and the eventually-found crew (ring-leadered by Richard Harris, who can't seem to eke out an interesting performance out of the material, try as he might).  Both Cooper and Heston are good, in what seems to be dueling portrayals of earnestness.  But, ultimately, the secrets that Patch is keeping just aren't very interesting, and although some attempt is made to salvage it at the end, the movie is, like its namesake, something of a drifting hulk. 

Love in the Afternoon

Love in the Afternoon (Billy Wilder, 1957) Light Billy Wilder film from the effervescent days when he was directing Audrey Hepburn at the start of her career.

This one had me smiling immediately with Maurice Chevalier's opening narration—"Zis is the city, Paris France"—echoing Jack Webb's "Dragnet" opening.  Chevalier plays a private detective, Claude Chavasse, specializing in "matrimonial work," and lately the case-work has been dominated by one subject, American millionaire Frank Flannagan (Gary Cooper), who is cutting a wide swath through the world's female population, both married and unmarried divisions.  The work has turned Chavasse into a cynic about the paths of love—he's gumshoed too many of them—in marked contrast to his daughter, Ariane (Hepburn), a cello player (hold that image in your head for a moment), still wide-eyed at the prospect of romance, and fascinated with her father's work, something he does his utmost to discourage.

When she gets wind that a cuckolded husband (John McGiver, hyperventilating amusingly in fine comic fashion) plans on breaking in on his wife's tryst to ventilate Flannagan, she steps in from the balcony to insert herself into the situation.  This inevitably (in the movies, at least) to an affair between the elder lothario and the young ingenue, one that she manipulates by trying to talk a competitive game in conquests.  The situation is ripe with comic possibilities, which Wilder exploits every chance he gets, even using Flannagan's moving musical accompaniment (the final assault is preceded by a four piece rendition of "Fascination").

Much has been made of Cooper's age in the film, and it is an issue.   Cary Grant was supposed to be Flannagan (Wilder had been trying to entice Grant into one of his films for years) but when a deal wasn't reached,* Cooper, who at 56 was Grant's senior by three years, was hired.  Cooper is an odd fit, as opposed to younger men like, say, Gregory Peck (as in Roman Holiday) or William Holden (in Sabrina), but Wilder works around it, initially, keeping Coop' in shadow to emphasize his "mystery man" status, and Cooper's early performance is, interestingly, boyish and somewhat immature.

And that's the point.  Flannagan is a man-child, used to getting everything he wants.  And Ariane has her choice between younger men—immature and unsophisticated—and Flannagan—sophisticated but immature.  All it takes for him to grow up is a level of commitment, something he's avoided his whole life by having a train to catch.  Both character arcs feel complete and satisfying, even though it is the "7-10 split" of May-December romances, and one feels a little creepy watching them make out.

And a little guilty, in the same way that it was tough to watch the denouement of Sabrina.  Okay, it's charming that she likes the old guy, but if he really was thinking this through, with all this new-found maturity, wouldn't he be thinking about her, and what she has to look forward to in a life with him (which can be summed up in one word..."short")?

And then, one considers Wilder, and the blithe, darkly cavalier sensibility that he brought to the movies, moral though his stand-point might be.  One can imagine Wilder, the guy who ended Some Like It Hot with "Nobody's perfect," with a similar tag for this movie: "Aren't you concerned about the age difference?"  "If she dies, she dies..."

*  At this point, Grant was getting concerned about his age and being paired with young actresses ("robbing the cradle, again" is how James Stewart summarized the situation late in his career), but his misgivings must have subsided enough to co-star with Hepburn in Charade for Stanley Donen six years later.

The Fountainhead

"The Fountainhead" (King Vidor, 1949) Ayn Rand's ideological tome about the individual's right to see their vision through without compromise is its own worst argument as a movie. Her stance—what we now call "objectivism," a nice oblique term—makes perfect sense for writers and painters, but in collaborative media like, say, architecture—and the movies, despite the auteur theory—it just seems like impractical hooey. And elitist fascist hooey, at that. Elitist because Rand can't have her way without establishing an adversarial relationship with what she churlishly calls "the mob," the very "mob" that is the core of democracy. The anti-communist Rand looks down her nose at the one thing that separated democracy from autocratic rule—the opinion of her "mob." I guess autocracies aren't so bad when you're the autocrat (which sounds suspiciously like a politburo, either way the shallowness of thought is breath-taking).

Now, writers take their chances and only have themselves to blame if their books don't sell (that is, if you leave out complicating factors like publishers, press-agents, and a good cover designer). But a writer for the collaborative art of film must interact with a lot of artisans (who you'd think also have their right to a vision in their craft) to make it to the screen.*

Not so Ayn Rand. Her contract—a good one—stated that not a word of her screenplay was to be changed, excised, or tampered with. Once she finished her own final draft, it was set in stone.

Of course, a writer's vision is passed through many filters in the movies, the art directors, the cinematographers, the director, the actors, etc. Interpretation of "The Word" is all that's left of movie-making after the writing. It seems a little myopic to make that request as it might apply to the dialogue, but the stage directions, descriptions, everything excepting dialogue is always open to interpretation by "those others."

King Vidor had been an established director, starting his career in silent pictures, and, being there at the beginning, contributed to the "language" of film more than most directors working in 1949. He knew what worked on film and what didn't (or else why had he been working for so long?). And yet, when he tried to shorten Rand's rambling court-room speech, he was shot down. What about his film-maker's vision? Certainly his arguments and expertise in film-making had more credence than Ms. Rand's.**

And so, we have what could have been an interesting film with a compelling take on the world that is ham-strung by the purple prose written by its author, done in a style that recalls the locked-in-concrete work of Leni Riefenstahl. Her philosophy in context is merely pretense and an apologia for shooting one's self in the foot in the practical world of film-making or other collaborative media.

But it's all surface tension, anyway. In "The Fountainhead," her characters have no motivation than what Rand thinks is important, which is her ideology, even though their actions in particular circumstances seem to run counter to their ideals. Look, I'm with her on architecture—if I see one more greco-roman portico on a McMansion, I may go live in a yurt, but it wouldn't compel me to shoot myself in the head over it, or dynamite it...or, for that matter, fly a plane into it.

But, like the bear in the joke said, "This isn't about the hunting, is it?" Rand's arguments bog down in practical real-world terms in architecture, but one senses there are other issues at play here. The film is one big "edifice" complex, with throbbing jack-hammers and impressive erections (including "the biggest one in the world!") That the big clinch between Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal is a rape scene complete with ignoring of resistance or saying "no," and then Neal's character, Dominique, runs off, marries another man, whom she doesn't love (Raymond Massey as a publishing king-pin in a performance that can only be called "animatronic") and then races to do architect Roarke's bidding at the drop of a housing project. It doesn't speak well for the character's self-respect, consistency, or even mental health, qualities that one would expect, all things being egomaniacally equal, in the Rand-world.***

I'm all for keeping what's yours for yourself.

But I wish Ayn Rand had kept her neuroses to herself (by the way, despite being the one who adapted it, she is said to have "disliked the movie from beginning to end." I guess you can't accuse her of having bad taste or being that thing she loathed—a bad critic.)

* Perhaps Rand is the best writer for radio. One of my favorite stories about writers is the one about Rod Serling who was asked which medium he preferred to write for, radio or television. His answer was writerly-complicated: "When I write 'there's a castle on the hill' for television, I turn the script in and if they want to keep the castle on the hill, they work it into the budget and then the Art Director designs the castle on the hill. His designs are given to a drafter who makes up the plans which are given to the carpenters and masons who make the castle on the hill, then it's painted and detailed and set decorators put in the flora for the hill, and when it's all done I've got a castle on the hill. One castle on the hill."

"But, when I write 'There's a castle on the hill' for radio, the announcer reads it and suddenly I've got a million imagined castles on hills. And they're all different."

** Supposedly, though, Jack Warner, a conservative and whose company was paying for "The Fountainhead," trimmed the speech a bit, because he didn't want to lose money. Rand squawked, but apparently didn't blow up Warner Brothers. See, there's the Real World and then there's someone's ideological Fantasy.

*** Things turn so abnormally fraught that the film falls into that sub-genre of drama so histrionic that the wife and I call "Why doesn't everyone get a good night's sleep and start afresh in the morning?"