It is simple enough to understand the difference between the foreground and the background in a novel or a film. “Pride and Prejudice” has a background of small villages and manor houses and smaller homes who at least have a few servants, as well as roads to London and comfortable places there in which people can live, while the foreground, the action of the story, concerns how young people of various stations of life pursue courtship and marriage. That is the adventure or story of the novel, even though by the time Jane Austen does his last and best novel, “Persuasion”, the foreground of the story is about love lost and then regained has also changed its background in that a class situation dominated by property and station is transmuted into social position dominated by wealth. Sometimes, there is a novel or film preoccupied with the background rather than the foreground. Tolstoy shows the social life of upper class Russia in both “War and Peace” and in “Anna Karenina”, the characters appealing enough but not highly distinctive. Pierre, in “War and Peace”, is the type of someone who doesn’t belong, useful as a companion to go with and elucidate battlefields, while Levin, in “Anna Karenina”, is a type of person trying to be progressive by becoming reactionary, he becoming a bit more human when he notices that he is old enough so that his teeth are beginning to rot. (I guess there were few dentists.) The same focus on background also applies to “Gone With the Wind”, a way of life overturned and ended after what was its brief flourish, the author making believe, as it was for historical consciousness, a way of life that had lasted for only a few generations from the time when the plantations were established and the destruction of the South brought about by the war. Enough figures populate the present so that the background is explored. The same is true with much greater effect in James Gould Cozzens’ much underappreciated “Guard of Honor” where a dashing World War II Air Force officer is tested as a leader, the foreground, when the real drama is how his air base, as an organization, measures up to adapt to changing circumstances. The background, not the foreground, is the issue.
Read More"Wings"
I want to praise “Wings'', the silent war movie that was released in 1927 and won the very first Oscar award for best picture, not because the movie offers hidden depths despite what popular culture offers as fluff and evasions, rewarding audiences a faux tragedy when it is really a melodrama, nor because the movie can be “unmasked” so as to reveal how a popular product has been concocted to “fool” its audience so that the audience feels pleased with itself so that it had a few laughs and a few smiles without getting into anything but an illusion of love and war, a way to pass the time while eating the popcorn, “Wings'', all in all, a childish “art”. Rather, “Wings'' is genuine at being what it is: a set of straightforward feelings of sexual attraction, male friendship, the dangers and ironies of war, and a final reconciliation, so that this is the way life is lived however much the rough spots have been smoothed out, and so worth calling “art” even if it is less falutin’ enough to think it more closely akin to vaudeville than to the great tragedians-- except that Shakespeare was, in fact, quite adept at tugging heartstrings and having an audience hiss the villians. “Wings” has scenes and images and plot lines that move the audience and remain with them and make them the better for having done so. The movie accomplishes simplicity, which is no mean feat, given the turgid and muddied plots seen in any number of novels and movies where things take a long time getting started and are left in their lumpiness, as is the case with the Oscar nominees found in this present year, including “Nomadland'', which is about losers glorified by the actors and screenplay, or “Manx”, which tries and fails to be like Orsen Welles.
Read MoreThe Contemplative Edward G. Robinson
Hollywood actors who have long careers are likely to have distinctive personalities and characters that have them play the same person in a number of different settings, just as the audience would like to believe that they too could move from living in a gangster movie to a western or from a comedy to a melodrama. Jack Lemon, for example, was a likeable but timid pushover who managed to be a Parisian policeman in a bordello, an ex-alcoholic, and the apartment ever used by his office boss, Fred MacMurray, to meet assignations. Somehow, Lemon was always appealing. The same is true of Edward G. Robinson, who had a nearly forty year career, and who was readily identified in his early days for the tough gangster and his striking intonation of “See?” that were often mimicked and put in cartoon movies. His personality and character, however, were not all that tough, even at the beginning. To the contrary, what sustained all his roles from “Little Caesar” in 1932 to “Soylent Green” in 1967, was his contemplativeness, as expressed largely in his voice and in a muggish face that nevertheless allowed him to express his secret thoughts, to see him able to change his mind, to observe the world of which he was a part, something all of us cultivate, which is to both be there and to observe what is being noticed at the moment when it is happening. Quite an accomplishment, even greater than Cary Grant’s upper class diction and amused befuddlement that also gave him a very extended run.
Read More"The Third Man"
Nineteen Forty-Nine was a great year for movies, one that earned the ad of a decade later that “movies were better than ever”. Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” won the Best Oscar, the awards trying to believe that the most quality movies were also the most popular, but the year also included the musical “On the Town”, a blockbuster musical by the young people of Comden and Green and Leonard Bernstein, “Pinkie”, a movie about a mulatto girl trying to live in the South that showed some of the sorrows of segregation, “The Treasure of Sierra Madre”, which was a story as tightly drawn as a Chaucer story, and even the awful “My Friend Irma” remarkable only because it introduced Martin and Lewis, who stole the show with Martin’s suave deliveries, including his signature ability to caress the microphone, and Jerry Lewis, who was not so much imitating a cripple as much as imitating a nerd before there was such a term. It seems that the movies had moved on beyond World War II to pick up the new issues of the post-war world, such as suburbanization in “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” which was produced in 1948, and even in the 1949 and wonderfully comic “I Was a Male War Bride”, where the women were seen as independent minded and responsible and sensible. Cary Grant was the comic foil to Ann Southern’s straight man, the opposite of Burns and Allen, a duo from the era of the Thirties, where Allen played the ditzie foil. Movies were into social issues, such as the overdrawn “Gentleman’s Agreement”. The weekly movie goer didn’t need to read the papers. Those who tuned into the dream factory had plenty of real issues to chew on. The major studios were at work with socially significent stuff, not just with film noir detective and crime stories that portrayed dark emotions shot mostly at night, such as “The Postman Rings Twice” or “Sorry, Wrong Number”, the genre seeming profound because the protagonists were quirky as well as bad. (But, then again, “Richard III” would qualify as a film noir piece.)
Read More"Dark Victory"
There is a group portrait of George V lying in his death bed in a gigantic bed and a beautiful quilt surrounded by clergy, doctors, politicians and family waiting for him to expire. Many of the people in the room are identifiable so as to document who were present at the event. All they did was to stand around and wait for the end, one of those in attendance to go up to the King and confirm him as having died. What was also worth noting at the time, which was 1936 and when Great Britain was one of the most advanced of medical science, was that there were no machines to intervene between the patient and the audience, when some fifteen or twenty years later there were oxygen masks and monitors that provided vital signs and beeping noises to accompany a patient who was in the process of dying. A clergyman was there at the earlier moment so as to give a benediction, while the clergyman in “M*A*S*H*” is perfunctory, given aside by the doctors laboring on the wounded and justified by his other services as someone who aid comfort to the stricken for as much time as can be spared from the more important duties. The painting of George V showed the state of the relation between his doctors and his death and how much things had changed by a generation later. I am interested in the nature of the patient at the time and whether the role of the patient has changed since that time to the present. My evidence is drawn from that time, the film “Dark Victory” appearing in 1938, a fiction able to convey what are the facts of social relations regarded as inevitable at the time, just as present day fiction attests to the fact that everyone can hook up on their i-phones while earlier generations had to rely on telephone calls, as in “Sorry, Wrong Number” as a fact that could become a gimmick in a melodrama. What, if anything, changed in being a patient since the Thirties, which are now eighty years away?
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