Hawksism

How's this for a still? Click to enlarge.

ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS plays at Cinema Club Sunday 9/19 at the Ritz with Texas Film Professor Charles Ramirez Berg. Buy tickets and find out more here.

There has never been another American filmmaker whose peculiar style of work has harmonized so well with the popular tastes of so many divergent types of people as Howard Hawks. If the mention of his name calls to mind the tortuous arguments of auteurists and other intellectual contortionists we must also remember that his films were big hits with the public at large. Hawks' films are about people. They are like dioramas where fascinating personalities roam freely, doing their jobs with spectacular competence and honor as they live by a code - the Hawksian code if you will - bred in the bone, a secret democratic chivalry, a communality of the self reliant.

As a statement of Hawksism, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS is pretty tough to top. It's set in a macho world of tough, professional men who live by the code; a woman comes along (the "Hawksian" woman) who proves to be an equal to the leader of the group; she gains the respect of all and the love (ambivalently conveyed) of the top dog. Variations of this theme appeared in several Hawks films, maybe most notably in RIO BRAVO, which bears a number of stylistic similarities to ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS. Both were written with Jules Furthman, one of the many excellent writers Hawks collaborated with on multiple occasions.

In this case the Hawksian woman is the beautiful, talented Jean Arthur. She plays a showgirl who disembarks in a small South American port and finds herself falling in love with the tough-as-nails proprietor of an aviation service, excellently played against type by Cary Grant. The airline specializes in dangerous missions and the whole milieu drips with what would later be called existential dread, but the gallows humor and camaraderie of the men (and woman) make this one of the most humanly engaging of all Hawks' films. Interestingly, Hawks was less than happy with Jean Arthur's performance. He claimed she wouldn't listen to him and didn't understand the character until she saw Lauren Bacall's quintessential Hawksian woman years later in his TO HAVE & HAVE NOT.

Grant seems an odd choice for the tough-as-nails Jeff but it probably takes such great reserves of charm to make his dark qualities palatable. It's the classic Hawks hero role, based on guess-who, that was later enacted so memorably by Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne. If Grant's urbane manner seems at odds with the rustic surroundings, it just helps to accentuate the rootlessness of the fliers.

The supporting cast includes the stunning young Rita Hayworth, whose appearence elicited wolf-whistles from male viewers, Thomas Mitchell (one of the most esteemed actors of his day and you'll see why), and Richard Barthelmess, formerly the golden boy of the silents, here he plays a dark, morally ambivalent Lord Jim who redeems himself in the Hawksian manner.

Pre Code Shockers

US Film censorship began in earnest in 1907, when the Chicago Police force opened up a censor board to examine films and ban those that were controversial. This spurned the creation of a number of censor boards across the country, some on the state level, like New York’s infamous Board of Regents, and some, like Chicago, on the city level. In 1915, the US Supreme Court oversaw a case, known as the Mutual case, and they stated that, “The exhibition of motion pictures is a business, pure and simple.” As a result, they were not given the same free speech rights that other art forms enjoyed, especially the ability to express ideas and images that may be considered obscene.

This brought the Hollywood industry into a frenzy. Now that the US Government declared film censorship a legal possibility, the industry feared that the feds would establish a national censorship board and would too-strictly restrict film content. They banded together and decided to form their own self-censorship organization. This would prove to the Government that federal intervention was unneeded, and it would also create a way to bypass local boards by incorporating all or most regional restrictions into their own board.

In 1922, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) was formed to institute Hollywood censorship. Their charismatic leader, Will Hays, became the poster boy for the new organization, and many people called the organization simply the “Hays Office.” The group had three basic principles: pictures should not lower the morals of those watching; only correct standards of life should be presented; and law, natural or human, should not be ridiculed.

The MPPDA wasn’t very successful in its immediate incarnation, and Hays got to work producing a specific list of forbidden content, finished in 1927 and called the “Don'ts and Be Carefuls.” Again, enforcement of these standards was difficult. He and his organization compiled still another code, and that is what controlled the film industry for decades to come. In 1930, the MPPDA released the Production Code, a well-defined list of numerous subjects to be avoided. Among them, nakedness, sacrilege, drug use, criminal methods, sex perversion, curse words, adultery, miscegenation, “Scenes of Passion,” and excessive and lustful kissing were banned.

So the Code was in place by 1930. But still, no one was able to enforce it. For the next four years, as the Great Depression was hitting the film industry, producers were desperate to give their films an edge. From 1930-1934 Hollywood movie content reached a high of vulgarity and illicitness, as controversial films like THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931), DRACULA (1931), FREAKS (1932), SCARFACE (1932), BABY FACE (1933), SHE DONE HIM WRONG (1933) and others featured extreme scenes and content. This grace period, before enforcement of the Code was a reality, is known as the Pre Code era.

Unfortunately, in 1934 the Production Code Administration (PCA) was created to enforce the Code. With that, the studios were forced to cooperate. For the next thirty or so years, Hollywood films were restrained by the Code and forced to avoid taboo subjects. What we have to show for this dynamic four-year Pre Code period are the films, a last-hurrah type moment where the Hollywood players encouraged sex, drugs, violence, and everything forbidden. NIGHT NURSE is a prime example of this era, as you shall see tonight.

NIGHT NURSE, Modernity Ward

Yes, it's going to be that kind of party.

NIGHT NURSE, with special guest, film writer Kim Morgan (Sunset Gun) will screen as the next Cinema Club screening at Ritz this Sunday. Cinema Club shows incorporate an audience discussion with the programmers and guest expert. Expect it to be provocative, entertaining and a lot of fun. Go ahead and get those tickets here.

You know that sensation you get from old movies sometimes, that they're winking at you across an expanse of years, sneaking in a private dirty joke here and there? Well, NIGHT NURSE isn't just winking, it's not sneaking; it's kicking down the door and getting wild. It's one of the glories of pre-code cinema. The only real analogue we can think of is the 'nurseploitation' films of the '70s. Those movies were bold for their time, NIGHT NURSE, made 40 years earlier, is downright brazen.

One of the most salacious and entertaining pre-code features. NIGHT NURSE could certainly never have been made under the censorious "production code." It's vulgar, it's rude, it's full of innuendo - in other words - it's great! Barbara Stanwyck, fresh from New York, is at her sexy, gum-chewing best as a young nurse who uncovers a horrifying case of child neglect and murder while working for a wealthy family. She uses her wiles (and her bootlegger boyfriend's shady underworld connections) to set things straight. The sequences in the nursing school, showing Stanwyck's training and indoctrination, tell us more about the lot of poor women during the depression than a dozen history books.

There's a kind of gallows humor in NIGHT NURSE. It whistles a happy tune as it sashays through the graveyard of mortality, corruption, class and gender inequality. Director William "Wild Bill" Wellman, wasn't the type to smooth over the rough edges. They're all there, part of his hard-boiled, blunt but fluid style. And just as James Cagney was Wellman's ideal male hero, Barbara Stanwyck was a female reflection of the little tough guy, the scrapper, the one who never quits. She was a heroine for streetwise shopgirls and rebellious daughters. Stanwyck was game, an aristocrat of nerve, the tough nut who represented the best features of modern American womanhood: strength, insolence, moral intractability and sexual self-determination. To audiences outside the big cosmopolitan cities she must have seemed like a neon beacon pointing the way to new ways of relating to men, other women and themselves.

In NIGHT NURSE the working girls played by Stanwyck and Joan Blondell are much more noble than the Park Avenue lushes they work for. The contrast between the nurses' native wisdom, their decency born of hardship, and the physical and spiritual dissipation of the so-called upper class sophisticates is stark. It illuminates the class conflict simmering away in the pre-Roosevelt '30s, an era pregnant with imminent and maybe not so hopeful change, a time when the horizon crackled with the portent of unrest, deep dissatisfaction with the social order and a lack of trust in authority. As far as anyone knew, the whole thing may have been on the verge of crumbling, as several much older civilizations across the ocean had already.

So the simple common sense and common values that Stanwyck represented must have looked like the cure for what ailed the body politic. Stanwyck herself was a child of the inner-city, an orphan who came up the hard way, dropping out of middle school to help support herself, working as a hoochie-coochie dancer and chorus girl in New York speakeasies and theaters. With her great determination and talent she rose to the legitimate stage and finally films, but even many years later, after decades of success, she could still bite off her words and move with the animal grace of the streets. Here, in her youth, she lacks some of the polish she would later develop but has such vitality and charisma she makes refinement and technique look like empty affectation.

Watch the way Stanwyck's energy and personality drive her scenes, she has the fire and pepper of Broadway and the semi-legit stage. At times the other performers seem to be struggling to stay at her level. One of her most appealing qualities is that she's no glamour-puss. At a time when women's pictures were populated with the patrician likes of Norma Shearer and Ruth Chatterton, Stanwyck was the smart girl next door. But while beauty fades, talent doesn't. And if Stanwyck started with less beauty than the others (and that's debatable), she also started with far more talent. She was loved by fans, her directors, costars, seemingly everyone. NIGHT NURSE is Stanwyck's show. Sure, there's a story here, and it's wild and untamed, but ultimately it's a celebration of a new, modern breed of woman, and Stanwyck is it. (Lars Nilsen)

“It's a perfect night for mystery and horror. The air itself is filled with monsters.”

Universal Pictures survived through the most difficult years of the depression by focusing on genre films and low-budget serials. In the early 1930s, the studio was associated with B-grade fare that appealed to audiences but didn’t win any accolades from critics or the cultural elite. Its most profitable genre, and the one for which we remember it today, is the horror film, a mix of the Gothic and science fiction traditions that appealed mostly to date-night viewers and bold youngsters. Films like DRACULA (1931), THE MUMMY (1932), THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933), and THE BLACK CAT (1934) wooed audiences of the period. The most financially successful of the Universal horror films, however, was a tale of a mad scientist who discovered how to create life, and experimented using corpses: loosely adapted from the novel by Mary Shelley, FRANKENSTEIN (1931).

In 1934, Carl Laemmle, Jr., head of production at Universal and son of the founder of the company, set about to make a sequel to the big hit, then slated to be titled “The Return of Frankenstein.” Seven different screenwriters contributed to the developing script before the final plot, a variation on Shelley’s storyline about the creation of a female monster, was decided upon. Stars Colin Clive and Boris Karloff would return to play the Doctor and the Monster. Elsa Lanchester, the respected stage actress and wife of Charles Laughton, was hired to play the girl-ghoul. Director James Whale, who initially didn’t want to make another horror film, ultimately signed on to make a sequel to his immensely successful original. With Whale on board, the film was injected with a screwball sensibility, amending the solely terrifying charm of the original to incorporate a dark comic quality, and causing many contemporary viewers to see a gay/camp element to the film that is consistent with Whale’s homosexuality. The title, THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, was not created until shooting had already begun in early 1935. Released on April 22, 1935, the film was a hit. It is now widely considered to be Whale’s masterpiece.

The film opens brilliantly with a framing sequence that features Elsa Lanchester as author Mary Shelley, accompanied by Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon) and Percy Shelley (Douglas Walton). The violins of Franz Waxman’s beautiful score complement a scene of thunder and lightning viewed by the authors and poets from their sitting-room window. Everything about the scene is wonderfully comic, an over-the-top portrayal of a nineteenth-century night that cannot help but plaster a smile onto the viewer’s face. The cravat-heavy costuming, the stagey vocalizations with constantly rolled “R”s, the shiny make-up, and the stunning close-ups of Lanchester’s devilish smiles all create a scene of transcendent comic potential, contrasting with the gruesome imagery and themes to come.

The scene also serves an ingenious narrative function that continues to be copied in horror films today. Byron teases Shelley, “Frightened of thunder, fearful of the dark, and yet you have written a tale that sent my blood into icy creeps.” This allows him to recapitulate the basic plot elements of the original film, using flashbacks to highlight the key scenes. It also enables Shelley to add, “That wasn’t the end at all. Would you like to hear what happened after that?”

So the film begins, and a fantastic film it is. Whale’s direction, especially in the climactic bride-animation scene, is remarkable and far surpasses the fantasy and gusto of the original; the electrical equipment and scenery look great (even after all these years), and the canted angles, creating striking diagonals in the frame, create a tension and energy that match anything done by Sergei Eisenstein.

The real shining element of the film, however, is Colin Clive. Clive plays the Doctor, a tormented soul who is always at the brink of hysterics, and who steals every scene. Usually, it is a supporting actor who has the ability to take the scene away from the lead; it’s especially impressive when a lead actor does it, because his commanding performance draws attention away from everything. Still, it’s even more impressive when that lead is playing against a monster built from cadavers! Clive would be the best thing about the film, except Elsa Lanchester manages to squeeze her way into the last moments. One of the gags about the film is that the Bride doesn’t appear until four minutes before the end. When she does, however, she lights up the already climaxed film, shrieking from the back of her throat and chewing all over the scenery. It is a rare and fabulous moment in a film full of greatness, a fun and frightful picture that created a new world of gods and monsters. (Daniel Metz)

Science, Like Love, Has Her Little Surprises...

Not especially beloved by contemporary audiences, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN has become regarded both as a classic horror movie and a trailblazing, camp black comedy. The whole thing quivers with a sense of the absurd and audacious - outsiders (gay, British, stage-veterans) putting one over on Hollywood.

We know that director James Whale cared little for horror movies at this stage in his career. He had previously made the truly chilling FRANKENSTEIN (1931) and followed it up with the wryly humorous farce THE OLD DARK HOUSE. Next was THE INVISIBLE MAN, not strictly a horror film but with its frightening moments. Whale had entered films as a well-regarded English stage director - he had chosen to direct the first FRANKENSTEIN because the story appealed to him, little sensing that it would become a runaway hit and make Whale's reputation as a horror specialist.He would likely have preferred to continue making adaptations of stage plays with eminent British actors. But Universal, under the Laemmle regime, was becoming known as the horror studio, and Whale was their specialist, so BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN became his.

A number of scripts were commissioned and rejected, and the final script was a sort of franken-script incorporating elements from many writers, but the final product is largely the work of Whale and William Hurlbut. The prologue features Elsa Lanchester as Frankenstein author Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) further embroidering her famous FRANKENSTEIN story for an audience of Byron and Shelley. The meat of the film follows, an illustration of the tale she tells. No realism is attempted, the film looks studio-bound at times even by the standards of the day. It may have been an aesthetic choice, it may have been a budgetary necessity - likely it was a little of both - but it serves to place the framed story in a context of non-reality and fable.

The story picks up where the first one ends: the monster (Boris Karloff, billed here as simply Karloff) is trapped in a mill set alight by torch-wielding villagers. The monster escapes, naturally, and resumes his mayhem. The uproar reaches Castle Frankenstein and it becomes apparent that the Frankensteins' marital bliss will be postponed for some time. Later, their wedding chamber is invaded by the mincing, effeminate Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), who dismisses Elizabeth Frankenstein from the room (apparently she has not yet become the "bride of Frankenstein" considering her husband's severely enervated state - actor Colin Clive specialized in neurosis), and proposes his plan to the doctor that they join together to create life. It's fairly kinky, as you can see, and the film continues to steamroll convention and topple icons (literally, in one case) as it goes along. Dr. Pretorius is a sort of gay proto-hipster figure, unflappable, unshaken in his conviction and quick with a Wilde-style witty rejoinder.

It's a true joy to be in on the joke, even today. But consider the fact that at the time few realized it was a comedy. There are very broad comic performances by Una O'Connor and E.E. Clive in the comic relief tradition of the stage, but most of the humor is played as dry as straight gin, which surely sent much of it over the heads of a large part of the audience. But the film is a great joke, and a great joke must have a great punchline.

Here, the great punchline is the climax of the film, when the monster's mate is created and animated - this sequence, endlessly aped since, is beautifully expressionistic and dynamic. When the monster is unveiled she is played by Elsa Lanchester - the teller of the story has placed herself in this role - Lanchester's performance, for she was a former dancer, is physical perfection. One contemporary commentator wrote that she moves like an electrified bird. Her hair, make-up and facial expressions must have knocked viewers out of their seats. 75 years later, when we might reasonably expect the impact of her appearance to have dulled a bit, it still works. She is the electronic goddess of camp, the product of Pretorius' demi-monde perversion and Frankenstein's industrial age spark. Both characters are components of Whale himself and the Bride is his enduring offspring. (Lars Nilsen)

The Lubitsch Touch

Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947), the director of NINOTCHKA, is somewhat unknown today as a filmmaker. Many film fans know him only as the dream director that Veronica Lake pines to work with in Preston Sturges' classic SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS. In fact, Lubitsch is one of the most important, and influential, filmmakers of the 20th century. His work in Hollywood set the standard for the sophisticated sex comedy that Cecil B DeMille began in the silent era but did not reach its full potential until Lubitsch’s early sound films in the 1930s and '40s. But his influence spans further back, when he began making silent films in Germany in the 1910s.

Lubitsch was one of the key figures in the Weimar Cinema after World War I in Germany. At that time, he was associated with the lavish epic historical films that Germany was famous for producing during that period. His breakthrough as a filmmaker came in 1919, with the grand MADAME DUBARRY. That film was released in the U.S. by First National in the U.S. as PASSION, and it was the first hugely successful European import in the United States after the Great War; according to film history Anthony Henry Guzman, "PASSION'S success and First National's huge profits single-handedly changed the American film industry attitude towards the European cinema." Along with the much less successful but now better-remembered THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, PASSION proved to American distributors and exhibitors that European films, and especially German films, could produce large box-office receipts. During the 1920s, a new era of European film importation gave rise to the still-held belief that European films were more artistically ambitious and sophisticated than their Hollywood counterparts, creating an "art cinema" designation that persists to this day. It is thus as a result of PASSION'S success that other European films were shown in the United States. Were it not for Lubitsch's film, the U.S. may never have seen films like Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS or M, F.W. Murnau's NOSFERATU or THE LAST LAUGH, and many other European silent and early sound films that are now heavily present in the canon of film classics.

After more success in the historical epic genre with pictures like ANNA BOLEYN (released in the U.S. as DECEPTION) and CARMEN (GYPSY BLOOD), Lubitsch emigrated to Hollywood in 1922. Lubitsch was one of the first in a trend of Europeans moving to Hollywood which influenced other great filmmakers and actors like Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Karl Freund, Peter Lorre, Ingrid Bergman, and Greta Garbo, who is the star of Lubitsch's NINOTCHKA. Once in Hollywood, Lubitsch worked for Warners making silent comedies. At the cusp of the sound era, he left the smaller WB studio and was picked up in a joint agreement with MGM and Paramount. For these companies Lubitsch started making musical comedies, including the masterpieces THE LOVE PARADE and THE SMILING LIEUTENANT, both featuring superstar Maurice Chevalier (also a recent émigré from Europe). These films were wildly successful, earning award nominations and firmly establishing the popular musical genre as something that could be more than the stagnant, recorded theatre that earlier films of that type were.

After his musical phase, Lubitsch began working in the genre that he is best remembered for now, the sex comedy. Films like TROUBLE IN PARADISE, THE MERRY WIDOW, BLUEBEARD'S EIGHTH WIFE, and DESIGN FOR LIVING were daring, sophisticated, and hilarious farces that demonstrated a mastery of mise en scène, social satire, and the art of the double entendre to an extent previously unseen in the cinema. Lubitsch's knack for playing with sex moved his protégé Billy Wilder to famously say that Lubitsch "could do more with a closed door than most directors could do with an open fly." These films are marked with what many critics and scholars have called the "Lubitsch Touch." The Lubitsch Touch is the director's trademark, an intangible quality in his films that forces his audience to add things up for themselves, often to unexpected ends.

Lubitsch's influence as a comic director and writer is often stated most firmly towards Billy Wilder, arguably the greatest and most celebrated comic filmmaker in Hollywood history. Wilder worked as a screenwriter with Lubitsch on BLUEBEARD'S EIGHTH WIFE and NINOTCHKA before breaking out as a director and making some of the great classics of American cinema, including DOUBLE INDEMNITY, SUNSET BLVD., SOME LIKE IT HOT, and THE APARTMENT. Wilder's style is clearly reminiscent of Lubitsch's sense of humor and sophisticated, worldly approach to filmmaking. In fact, Wilder had a sign posted in his office throughout his career that read: "How Would Lubitsch Do It?" Aside from his influence on Wilder, Lubitsch's style can also be seen in the films of Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks, Woody Allen, Otto Preminger, and countless others.

His unique perspective and wit helped to define what the Hollywood comedy would be during Hollywood's Golden age of the 1930s-1950s. Ernst Lubitsch, and the Lubitsch Touch, pervades our most basic understanding of what American movies are, whether we know it or not. His career was wildly successful both in crafting U.S. expectation of European film as well as in defining the Hollywood comedy. NINOTCHKA, one of his best loved films, demonstrates all of Lubitsch's greatness and, most importantly, will make you laugh.

Garbo's '68 Comeback

The devastator. Clip and save.

NINOTCHKA will encore as a Cinema Club brunch on Saturday 2/6 with Alamo programmer Lars Nilsen and associate programmer Daniel Metz leading a discussion and providing illuminating information and background.

We can talk a lot (and we probably will) about the subject of NINOTCHKA. I suppose we could say all kinds about totalitarianism and freedom and love and romance, and we'll probably do that too.

But make no mistake, the subject of NINOTCHKA is Garbo. The settings, the story, the supporting players - are all there to best display Garbo - powerful, brilliant, an endlessly fascinating screen subject. Everyone involved, especially Ernst Lubitsch, is fully engaged in the effort - and what an effortless-looking effort it is - to show these new and different facets of Garbo, whom audiences of the time had known for the better part of two decades by the time NINOTCHKA appeared. She was indisputably the greatest female star in the golden age of actresses, at MGM, the studio known for it's superior star wattage. She was the queen and prototype of movie stars.

In a way, Garbo is to movie stars as Elvis is to rock stars. Both appeared in the relative infancy of their art, both achieved the finality of perfection in their fields. Sure, after Elvis we still have rock stars, but they can't be as good. And even though he floundered around in terrible pop arrangements most of the time, he was always Elvis and, in his way, always great. Garbo was as beloved by the public in her time as Elvis was in his. Many of her films, though well made, slumped a bit towards kitsch, but like Elvis singing the otherwise pedestrian "Suspicious Minds", she always elevated her material. And if the material happened to be of a high level, as NINOTCHKA certainly is, she sent it into orbit.

My advice to viewers of NINOTCHKA is to watch Garbo, as simple as that. Not that you could do otherwise. As an actress she is an artist of genius. She plays with a subtlety that's a little larger than you're expecting. It's star-acting of the highest caliber.

Star-acting is different from acting-acting. A star displays her facets for the audience, as a model displays a dress to its best advantage. The great star knows exactly what she looks like from every angle, she knows all too well what every lifted eyebrow or moistened lip will do to the darkened masses. She's in control of it all. In most cases she drags the movie along with her. But when a great star meets a great director - as in NINOTCHKA - he is able to guide and channel her power (maybe the other way around too) - and we get the kind of movie that's still on screen long after everyone who made it has died.

This film was effectively Garbo's swan song. She made one more film, TWO FACED WOMAN, that was not up to her standards and faded out legendarily. Her performance here is a defining stroke of genius and the fact that she played comedy so brilliantly is a further grace note on a career synonymous with grace.

As an object lesson in skilled star-acting and support-playing, watch the scene in the workingman's bistro, where Melvyn Douglas tries desperately to make Garbo laugh, finally succeeding. It's no stretch to call this art. Note that Garbo had never played comedy before. That bears repeating.

And for a rare and priceless example of the collision of two kinds of star-acting, peerlessly executed by both performers, watch Garbo's nightclub encounter with Ina Claire, an exceptional stage actress (an entirely different craft from movie acting, the contrast in their styles has its own dramatic resonance in the context of the story). The antipathy of the two is more than just the icy dagger-wielding of rival divas. In real life, Claire had married Garbo's star-crossed true love John Gilbert a decade earlier. One suspects that Ernst Lubitsch was aware of this when he cast the role. Their face-off resembles a vicious rumble between two flamingos over mating privileges.

The pleasures of NINOTCHKA are so numerous and rich that attempting to capture them here in words is impossible. Garbo's eyebrows are far more eloquent. Enjoy this film, and savor it. (Lars)