Forever Isn't Over Yet

I am a festival widow this week. Until a week from Thursday, M is going to be busy at the International Film Festival, watching movies, schmoozing, schnorring, interviewing, etc. Because we wrote some of the program notes I’ve already seen a few of the films, though I’ll try to get out to see a couple more over the week. Late on Saturday afternoon, after hearing an enthusiastic description from a friend, I met M at The Castro to watch the restored version of Leave Her to Heaven, which is described in the program as “Technicolor Noir.”

Leave Her to Heaven is a perfect Castro film. For one thing, this wonderful restoration really is best appreciated on an epic-sized screen. Yes, Technicolor does look artificial, but it’s in the sense that the colors of a beautiful painting are artificial. The browns and golds are richer, the sky bluer, sunsets deeper and more dramatic. And the melodramatic plot of Leave Her to Heavenn lends itself to the Castro, where audiences tend to participate, faintly hissing the villains, moaning at moments of heartbreak, murmuring uneasily at signs of danger…

We were all fairly restrained for a Castro audience last Saturday, though you could feel everyone shudder every time some skin-crawling hint was delivered early on about what a sick, sick girl Gene Tierney was. The hints in that movie come so thick and fast that by the time she’s maneuvered Cornel Wilde into marrying her it’s hard to maintain much sympathy for him. Who but a complete chowderhead would marry a woman two days after a dinner party that she spent enthusing about how much he looks like her recently deceased father? Any sensible man would have started backing away and invoking a nonexistence fiancée after she’d gathered everyone around a picture of Dad and invited them to comment on the resemblance. And Mom’s resigned expression every time she looks at her daughter, along with the fact that she has an adopted daughter (Jeanne Crain) who was apparently taken on as a badly needed emotional back up should have tipped him off that there was something abnormal about that whole family dynamic.

Gene Tierney had a spectacular overbite, and Cornel Wilde at that age was so doe-eyed he resembled a Keane painting, so the predator vs. deer-in-the-headlights dynamic is believable up to a point. Vincent Price minus his moustache makes an appearance early on in the film as Tierney’s spurned fiancé, and his slithery, blue-blooded, freakishly tall good looks do make him look like a more appropriate mate for her than Wilde. Nobody but Price could make the passionate statement “I will always love you,” sound quite so much like a threat. You can have a pretty good time mulling over what that marriage would have looked like while watching the train-wreck of her union with Wilde unfold in glorious Technicolor.

Or you could just watch the train wreck. Most of the screenplay is so deftly put together that you can see and believe the people around this couple -- like a doctor caring for her invalid brother-in-law, and an old family friend and retainer at the family lake house -- being seriously freaked out by this obvious borderline case well before her besotted husband figures it out. There is a broad daylight murder that’s one of the most harrowing I’ve ever watched, and a death scene that's so creepy that the audience let out a long collective, “eeeeeeew” (and I mean this in a good way.)

Unfortunately, in the last twenty minutes the film devolves into a completely illogical courtroom drama that is plainly intended to set up the unbelievable, tacked-on happy ending. Tierney was no great shakes as an actress, but the nasty woman she plays is the heart of this rather disturbing movie. Once she’s gone, it’s just not as interesting. But she’s only gone for the last fourth of the film, and while she’s there, the term “Technicolor Noir” actually makes sense.

Last Friday M and I got in late, but were still a little too restless to go to bed. We hit the sofa and turned on the TV, and I was delighted to see the opening of the 1960 version of Thirteen Ghosts. This, along with The Tingler, is one of the first horror movies I can remember seeing. I watched it on TV with my dad when I was five or six and was profoundly affected by two things in it. One was the possibility that the sinister housekeeper might actually cut out a little boy’s tongue for calling her a witch. (I’m sure I was disappointed when it didn’t happen.) The other was a close shot of a revenant’s ragged, cobweb-covered feet clumping down the halls at night. These two things and a floating Ouija board planchette were absolutely all I could remember about it, so while M dozed off, and eventually stretched out snoring, his head in my lap, I sat up and watched.

Often, when you revisit fondly remembered movies from your childhood, it’s a disappointment. Not in this case. Sure, the special effects are cheesy and the story riddled with logical loopholes, but there’s a strain of subversion running through this film that I completely missed when I was in kindergarten.

The plot is simple. A Los Angeles family learns that they’ve inherited a dilapidated mansion haunted by at least a dozen ghosts. It seems a wealthy, almost forgotten uncle had traveled through Europe collecting phantoms and bringing them home, kind of like William Randolph Hearst’s famous raid on Old World antiquities. Uncle Plato has died under mysterious circumstances and left the house to the family, stipulating in his will that they must live there or the property reverts to the state. In addition to the ghosts, the place comes with a hatchet-faced, broom-wielding housekeeper played by Margaret Hamilton, who I guess was having a little fun before the Maxwell House Coffee people got in touch with her.

All this seems fairly straightforward and generic down to the cardboard sets and that pale early-sixties black and white -- until you sit down and actually watch the movie.

( Read more. (SPOILERS) )

“Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destroying slowly but without pity that which yesterday was young. Alone our memories resist this disintegration and grow more lovely with the passing years. Heh! That's hard to say with false teeth!” The Wienie King, from THE PALM BEACH STORY

Last night I saw THE PALM BEACH STORY. Oh yes, it’s a movie of its time (1942) Racial stereotypes abound, and the entire plot hinges on the premise that Claudette Colbert’s character is a ditz. But you have Robert Dudley as the amazing Wienie King (“I'm the Wienie King! Invented the Texas Wienie! Lay off 'em, you'll live longer.”) a wizened, strategically deaf, and opinionated old man who first disrupts, then attempts to repair a young couple’s marriage with infusions of cash. You have that 1920s era pop star and sex-symbol Rudy Vallee as the ridiculously straight arrow millionaire, John D. Hackensacker, (“Tipping is un-American.”) and Mary Astor as his man-eating sister. And you have Joel McCrea politely stepping aside and playing straight man/exasperated pursuer to Colbert’s funny naïf of a flirt.

This movie has endured because it is sexually astute, something director/writer Preston Sturges got away with by making the lovers, Colbert and McCrea, a married couple instead of a man and woman on their way to the altar. As frivolous as the plot seems – Colbert’s character, Gerry, decides the only way she can help her struggling architect husband Tom, is by getting a quickie Palm Beach divorce, marrying someone rich, and steering business his way – it's actually surprisingly frank. One of the first things you learn about this couple, for instance, is their sexual foreplay.

While running away from her marriage, the penniless Gerry succeeds in finageling her way onto train to Palm Beach using her sex-appeal, but in the famous sequence with the gun-toting Quail and Ale Club, you can see her beginning to figure out that batting your eyes and showing a little leg is a damned hard way of making a dollar. Joel McCrea appears to be playing Ricky to her wacky Lucy, but his dream of designing an airport located in the middle of a city where the planes would land on the airport’s wire mesh roof is as harebrained as anything his wife has dreamed up. (The scene where Tom is earnestly explaining it to an understandably skeptical investor is more understated but no less comic than the pratfalls.) Rudy Vallee delivers some of the funniest lines as the buff, unbearably repressed Hackensacker, constantly removing puffing on, wiping off and replacing his endless supply of pince nez and naively confessing to Gerry, after she apologizes for planting her bare foot squarely on his face while climbing into an upper berth, “That’s quite all right. I rather liked it.”

Best of all, Preston Sturges shows in this film a deep skepticism about happy endings. The final scene is as ambiguous and funny a closing shot as I've ever seen.

Pam Bob says, check it out.

You don’t see the seasons here so much as sense them in a thousand little details. I believe that if someone had shown me an unlabeled color photograph of Market Street as I left the library yesterday at six, I would be able to identify it on sight as a shot from early spring. It’s something about the shadows of buildings falling against buildings, the top stories still in sunlight, and above them the sky the color soft gray silk with a touch of pink. ..

Live somewhere for a couple of decades and every stroll is fraught with context. South of Market used to be my neighborhood, and the landmarks I pass are always silently, half-consciously ticked off as I go by. I marvel at the longevity of Zain’s Liquor on one side of Third (never been in it, just seen it since 1988) salute Dave’s on the other (Brown little dive. Tim Maroney sitting on a barstool one night telling me about the eternal expansion of the universe…) note Rochester Big and Tall, (Driving Charlie Brown there shortly after moving to the Bay Area and going to work for Locus. The feel of the steering wheel beneath my hands as I waited for him in the car, parked illegally) and then I feel that slight lift of spirits I always get when I see the row of frothy fountains that border the park.

The best thing about going to the Metreon is walking through the park. I like the fountains. I like that big glassy half-hull of a boat sticking out of the ground, which I guess is meant to represent all those buried ships holding up the Embarcadero. I like the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the expanse of grass across from it. At sunset only a few people are left. Last night I saw a guy through the curtains of water of the MLK fountain, reading King’s words on the wall in various languages. A young couple was kissing on the patio that fronts the Metreon.

As for the Metreon itself -- too brightly lit, too shiny, too many electronic toys. There may be a bookstore somewhere in there, but it’s apparently camouflaged to blend in with all the high end gaming, jelly-bean, and tsostchke shops. I kept my eyes front and hurried to the escalators up to the theater, where I was waved into the screening by a very cheerful hipster with a soul-patch and a clipboard. In the theater I saw M high up, far back and center in the stadium seating, a small figure in a sparse crowd. He was watching me, his face grave, one arm extended over his head and waving stiffly, with great dignity, from side to side like a metronome as he talked on his cell phone.

“So are you going to get someone to help with your bags when you down the stairs to the taxi?” I heard as I edged into the seat next to him. “Okay, be a shtarker…” He was talking to his mother. After carefully going over with her the logistics of getting downstairs with luggage and assuring her that I’d arrived at last, safe and sound, he signed off and we put our heads together and quietly went over how our respective days went.

A friend on deadline with technical issues came by to use our email. M’s class went well. He showed a film I’d said I wanted to see, the one about those photographers in Chile, remember? How many reservations for tomorrow? Hardly any. Maybe too many people have already seen the movie. Oh well… Our words trailed off as the lights went down. This wasn’t one of those screenings where DJs show up to whip the crowd into a frenzy, which was a good sign. They just lowered the lights, no trailers, no ads, no fuss, and began.

The film was MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY, a romantic comedy starring Frances McDormand as a dowdy Englishwoman adrift in London in 1939. The writing is crisp and witty, the cinematography and acting quite good. On our way home after the film, we talked about why it worked. There are two things that lift this film above the common run of romantic comedies. One is the fact that the real love story, the ADULT love story as opposed to the two pretty young things who inevitably get together at the end, is told in a way that makes you understand why these two people fall in love. You know enough about Miss Pettigrew and the man played by Ciaran Hinds to see what these two wise, slightly battered middle-aged people find appealing about each other.

At the risk of giving entirely the wrong impression about a lively, funny movie that has more than a touch of PG Wodehouse running through it, (Guenivere Pettigrew is plainly a blood relative of Reginald Jeeves) I’ll describe the second thing that truly makes MISS PETTIGREW worthwhile. History.

There’s a moment when, at a party, the sound of fighter planes passing overhead signals the beginning of war. Almost everyone runs out to the balcony to sip drinks and watch and cheer. Miss Pettigrew and one other person stay inside. “They don’t remember the last time, do they?” she observes sadly. The backdrop of this comedy is a world on the brink of changing forever, and the filmmaker understood that conveying this effectively requires a great deal of attention to detail. The soundtrack perfectly reflects the era and what’s unfolding before you, beginning with “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” as Miss Pettigrew walks, bereft and jobless, through depression era London, and “Anything Goes” as she navigates with surprising assurance the world of fashion and show business. Every face in a crowd, every extra is interesting, whether it’s a dark-skinned woman among wealthy bohemian party-goers, or a grim-faced, bespectacled jazz musician stubbing out a cigarette before beginning another set. Every individual prompts speculation about where that person will be a few years from now. Or if they will be.

It’s not something that the filmmaker insisted upon. There are no moments in which what lies ahead for every one of these people is clubbed over the audience’s head. You can, if you’re in the mood, just watch this movie and enjoy the jokes and root for Miss Pettigrew. But there is something else hidden among all that art deco for anyone who cares to notice it. That’s the best kind of story-telling.