Saturday, June 06, 2009
Two films
People Will Talk
This film was made in 1951, directed and written by the great Joe Mankiewicz and based on a play by Curt Goetz, which I imagine was quite different. Seen now, it's a curious movie - very old fashioned in some respects, very contemporary in others. Perhaps that's not surprising for a work of some quality - it will look ahead and yet be firmly of its own time.
The plot concerns a doctor, played by Cary Grant, who believes that people are healed - if they can be healed - more by the involved, sincere caring of a physician than by pills and procedures. This is the modern aspect of the film. I am sympathetic with this approach to medicine, but it is curious that in the film the main beneficiary of Grant's imaginative approach is a woman who clearly is dying and whom he helps prepare for death. Of course, he also helps a young woman, played by Jeanne Crain, but this is not so believable.
That is the second prong of the plot: the young woman is pregnant, by a man with whom evidently she had only a very brief relationship before he went off to war and (I think) didn't return. She is so distraught at the prospect of being an unwed mother that she tries to kill herself. This is the part of the movie that is painfully dated. Worse, even in the context of the period, it doesn't seem credible. Matters are not helped by the fact that Crain is, in my view, a painfully weak actress.
Of course, and you knew this was coming, she falls in love with Cary Grant. (Grant's character, by the way, is Dr. Praetorius. Presumably this was the character's name in the original play, but it was a strange choice for Mankiewicz to keep it. Dr. Pretorius was also a character in Bride of Frankenstein.) Who wouldn't? Has there ever been a male movie star more appealing than Cary Grant? Or one who looked better in a suit? But I don't mean to trivialize him, not at all. I have always thought he was an excellent film actor, and he's fine here.
The sub-plot involves the machinations of a jealous academic doctor, played by the odious Hume Cronyn - who was better at playing a small man? - who tries to have Praetorius removed from his position at the university for being a "quack". I suspect that this aspect of the plot played a larger role in the original play. Certainly, the climactic scene in which Grant is tried at a hearing before the faculty is very stagy. Of course, Cronyn's plot blows up in his face - and just in time for Grant to conduct the university amateur orchestra and chorus in Brahms's "Academic Festival Overture", the theme of which has been annoyingly used throughout the movie.
I don't wish to leave without mentioning what I thought was an incredible performance by Finlay Currie as Shunderson (again, a German name that seems weird in this setting), a mysterious man who appears to be Dr. Praetorius's manservant. In fact, there is a wonderful story behind Shunderson's devotion to Praetorius, which is revealed during the "trial". Suffice it to say that Currie gives his character a beautiful dignity, and his performance is both amusing and moving.
All in all, this is not Mankiewicz's best work - which, at least as a writer, was already behind him - but it's still an entertaining and interesting movie.
Wendy and Lucy
This movie came out last year. It won the Toronto Film Critics Association Award both for Best Picture and Best Performance, Female, by Michelle Williams. I also read a very favourable review in the New York Review of Books by Jonathan Raban, although Raban was more interested in the short story by Jonathan Raymond on which it's based.
I must say that I thought this was a very good movie, but hardly as good as all that. It's very much a minimalist film - in fact it's about as minimalist as you can get. It shows Wendy, a young woman competently played by Williams, who's on the road to Alaska - from Muncie, Indiana - to find employment in the canneries. At the time the movie begin - and ends, only 80 minutes later - she's in Portland, Oregon. Now let's stop right there. Do they really pay that well to process fish in Alaska that it makes sense to drive all the way there from Indiana? I am prepared to accept that unemployment might be high in Muncie and in Portland - but was there nothing available in between? We're told nothing about Wendy's abilities or education or experience, and presumably all three are limited, but it still didn't make sense to me.
Not that it really matters. The movie is an episode, like a short story, and carries no overt message. It's just about this young woman who's unemployed, and how tough that is. There's nothing exaggerated or melodramatic about it. She gets arrested for shoplifting some dog food; her car breaks down; she gets accosted (but not assaulted) by an emotionally disturbed man while she sleeps in the woods because she has nowhere else to sleep. She meets a security guard who treats her kindly. Most importantly, she loses her dog, Lucy; she finds her again; but ultimately she has to leave her because she doesn't have enough money to look after her. At the end of the movie, she hops a freight car, just like a hobo from a Depression-era movie.
It's sad. Not tragic, just sad. When she's detained by the smug, young, Christian store clerk for shoplifting, he says, "If you can't afford dog food, you shouldn't have a dog." When she tells the security guard the difficulty (is it really an impossibility?) of getting a job without a fixed address, he says, "You can't get an address without an address. You can't get a job without a job. It's all fixed." Maybe they're both right.
As I said, this movie does not have an overt message, and I don't think it even has an implied one. It is what it is, as they say. It's a story, told honestly and persuasively. There's nothing wrong with that.
This film was made in 1951, directed and written by the great Joe Mankiewicz and based on a play by Curt Goetz, which I imagine was quite different. Seen now, it's a curious movie - very old fashioned in some respects, very contemporary in others. Perhaps that's not surprising for a work of some quality - it will look ahead and yet be firmly of its own time.
The plot concerns a doctor, played by Cary Grant, who believes that people are healed - if they can be healed - more by the involved, sincere caring of a physician than by pills and procedures. This is the modern aspect of the film. I am sympathetic with this approach to medicine, but it is curious that in the film the main beneficiary of Grant's imaginative approach is a woman who clearly is dying and whom he helps prepare for death. Of course, he also helps a young woman, played by Jeanne Crain, but this is not so believable.
That is the second prong of the plot: the young woman is pregnant, by a man with whom evidently she had only a very brief relationship before he went off to war and (I think) didn't return. She is so distraught at the prospect of being an unwed mother that she tries to kill herself. This is the part of the movie that is painfully dated. Worse, even in the context of the period, it doesn't seem credible. Matters are not helped by the fact that Crain is, in my view, a painfully weak actress.
Of course, and you knew this was coming, she falls in love with Cary Grant. (Grant's character, by the way, is Dr. Praetorius. Presumably this was the character's name in the original play, but it was a strange choice for Mankiewicz to keep it. Dr. Pretorius was also a character in Bride of Frankenstein.) Who wouldn't? Has there ever been a male movie star more appealing than Cary Grant? Or one who looked better in a suit? But I don't mean to trivialize him, not at all. I have always thought he was an excellent film actor, and he's fine here.
The sub-plot involves the machinations of a jealous academic doctor, played by the odious Hume Cronyn - who was better at playing a small man? - who tries to have Praetorius removed from his position at the university for being a "quack". I suspect that this aspect of the plot played a larger role in the original play. Certainly, the climactic scene in which Grant is tried at a hearing before the faculty is very stagy. Of course, Cronyn's plot blows up in his face - and just in time for Grant to conduct the university amateur orchestra and chorus in Brahms's "Academic Festival Overture", the theme of which has been annoyingly used throughout the movie.
I don't wish to leave without mentioning what I thought was an incredible performance by Finlay Currie as Shunderson (again, a German name that seems weird in this setting), a mysterious man who appears to be Dr. Praetorius's manservant. In fact, there is a wonderful story behind Shunderson's devotion to Praetorius, which is revealed during the "trial". Suffice it to say that Currie gives his character a beautiful dignity, and his performance is both amusing and moving.
All in all, this is not Mankiewicz's best work - which, at least as a writer, was already behind him - but it's still an entertaining and interesting movie.
Wendy and Lucy
This movie came out last year. It won the Toronto Film Critics Association Award both for Best Picture and Best Performance, Female, by Michelle Williams. I also read a very favourable review in the New York Review of Books by Jonathan Raban, although Raban was more interested in the short story by Jonathan Raymond on which it's based.
I must say that I thought this was a very good movie, but hardly as good as all that. It's very much a minimalist film - in fact it's about as minimalist as you can get. It shows Wendy, a young woman competently played by Williams, who's on the road to Alaska - from Muncie, Indiana - to find employment in the canneries. At the time the movie begin - and ends, only 80 minutes later - she's in Portland, Oregon. Now let's stop right there. Do they really pay that well to process fish in Alaska that it makes sense to drive all the way there from Indiana? I am prepared to accept that unemployment might be high in Muncie and in Portland - but was there nothing available in between? We're told nothing about Wendy's abilities or education or experience, and presumably all three are limited, but it still didn't make sense to me.
Not that it really matters. The movie is an episode, like a short story, and carries no overt message. It's just about this young woman who's unemployed, and how tough that is. There's nothing exaggerated or melodramatic about it. She gets arrested for shoplifting some dog food; her car breaks down; she gets accosted (but not assaulted) by an emotionally disturbed man while she sleeps in the woods because she has nowhere else to sleep. She meets a security guard who treats her kindly. Most importantly, she loses her dog, Lucy; she finds her again; but ultimately she has to leave her because she doesn't have enough money to look after her. At the end of the movie, she hops a freight car, just like a hobo from a Depression-era movie.
It's sad. Not tragic, just sad. When she's detained by the smug, young, Christian store clerk for shoplifting, he says, "If you can't afford dog food, you shouldn't have a dog." When she tells the security guard the difficulty (is it really an impossibility?) of getting a job without a fixed address, he says, "You can't get an address without an address. You can't get a job without a job. It's all fixed." Maybe they're both right.
As I said, this movie does not have an overt message, and I don't think it even has an implied one. It is what it is, as they say. It's a story, told honestly and persuasively. There's nothing wrong with that.
# posted by Stephen @ 1:08 a.m. 
