Screenshot of the Month: "L.A. Confidential" (1997)

Russell Crowe ("Officer Bud White") dangling Ron Rifkin ("District Attorney Ellis Loew") out an L.A.P.D. upper floor office window.

The time is January 1953.

In 1953 General Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in as President of the United States.  The Korean War ended.  RCA introduced the first color TVs to the market.  "From Here to Eternity" was the big war picture.  Watson and Crick announced their discovery of DNA.  Christine Jorgensen became the first sucessful recipient of gender reassignment surgery.  Gary Cooper received an Oscar for Best Actor as "Marshal Will Kane" in High Noon.  Swanson introduced its first TV dinners.  Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg were executed.  And Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay scaled Mount Everest.

Among the millions of 1953 deaths: Josef Stalin; Hank Williams; Herman Mankiewicz; Sergei Prokofiev; Jim Thorpe; Chief Justice of the U.S. Fred Vinson; Edwin Hubble; Dylan Thomas; and Eugene O'Neill.  Among the millions of births: Benazir Bhutto; Tony Blair; Paul Allen; Mary Steenburgen; Jeb Bush; John Malkovich; Tony Shalhoub; and Ken Burns.

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Both Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce were from Australia and had their actor's not-good-enough self-assessments working against them.  To assist their entry into L.A. culture, director Curtis Hanson moved the two actors to L.A. two months ahead of filming, encouraged them to get to know the city and how people lived, hired dialect coaches, and arranged ride-alongs with L.A.P.D. officers.

Crowe liked his character Bud White but wasn't sure he was right for the part.  Author James Ellroy described White as the biggest man in the department, but Crowe wasn't even six feet tall.  He also worried he couldn't convincingly play tough.  He moved into the smallest L.A. apartment he could find to help make him feel like a "giant" when he went to work.  He took his character's tough-guy persona from Sterling Hayden's performance in "The Killing" for that "beefy manliness that came out of World War II."

Guy Pearce didn't like Ed Exley much, at least at first.  He thought he was too self-righteous.  Fortunately, Pearce's straight-laced ride-along partner offered the actor a useful model, helping him infuse rigid stiffness into the Exley character.

Ironically, the Exley of the novel wasn't so straight-laced. Whereas Pearce's Exley is a legtimate war hero, the novel's Exley passes himself off as a hero, declaring he had singlehandedly wiped out a platoon of Japanese soldiers when in fact he had staged the scene after coming across the soldiers already dead.

To fix the right mood for the movie, Curtis Hanson had his players watch Kiss Me Deadly (1955), In a Lonely Place (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and a few other films noir.

Kim Basinger had to dye her hair many shades blonder than her own.  The result: her natural hair was destroyed, and she had to wear a wig for filming.

Curtis Hanson used 45 different filming locations around the city.

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L.A. Confidential was nominated for five Oscars, winning two—Kim Basinger, Best Supporting Actress, and Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland, Best Adapted Screenplay.

IMDb users currently rank L.A. Confidential at #125 on the Top 250 Movies list.

Screenshot of the Fortnight: "IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT" (1967)

Larry Gates, Rod Steiger, and Sidney Poitier in
In the Heat of the Night.

In the 1960s in the U.S. south, Black people couldn't drink from the same water fountains as Whites.  They couldn't use the same public restrooms, sleep in the same hotels, swim in the same pools, eat in the same restaurants, or attend the same schools.

When any of them violated any racial dos or don'ts, the punishment would not be a jail sentence. It would be terror in the form of violence meted out by the Klan or the local White "citizens' council."

When, for example, a Black youth would get into a Whites-only pool, the pool would be drained and scrubbed before Whites were allowed back in.  Simultaneously, the Black youth would be tracked to his home, and he, his family, and the entire Black community would be sent a message—Black people cannot act like White people or think they are as good as Whites, and breaches of this rule will result in violence.  This message would be delivered by a burning cross on the family's front lawn, or by the family's home being burned with the family inside, or by dragging the father up and down main street, chained to the back of a pickup truck, until he became a bloody pulp.  Looking a White woman in the eye would be considered a capital offense and frequently punished by lynching. 

White "citizen councils" put a public face on Klan activity, and they included men from all walks of life, but mostly local business men and law enforcement.  Citizens' councils enforced White supremacy with terror.  Any White man or woman on the street could begin shouting at a Black man, and that man would soon be surrounded by White men, questioned loudly, accused of an offense, and then whisked away in a vehicle.

The delusional superiority of Whites was so ingrained in them and their culture, so deeply-seated, and so central to their own identities ("If you ain't better than a N_____, who are you better than?") that tens of thousands of illiterate, penniless farmboys clamored to fight against the Union in the Civil War.  These young Whites had no vested economic interest in maintaining slavery.  Their vested interest was personal, emotional, and struck at the core of who they were.  For them, and thus for the fighting itself, the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about the protection and enforcement of southern White supremacy and its unwritten but unmistakable codes of conduct, including total deference and submission to any White person.

White supremacy was the reason for the Ku Klux Klan, which Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest formed after the south's defeat.  The Klan didn't go after the south's vanquisher, the U.S. government or even the north generally, seeking retribution, which it could've done with guerilla attacks on railroads and on remote military outposts.  Instead, it went after southern Blacks, to scare the populace into submission and to punish specific individuals for thinking on some level that they were entitled to the same things, the same everyday privileges, that White people had.

For nearly four hundred years, slavery was a means for slaveowners to lighten their daily physical burden of putting food on the table by "wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces."  But I'm convinced that the motive of maintaining slavery and slave-trading was limited to the owner class.  The masses didn't own slaves, and for them, slavery was about keeping Blacks in the lowest spot in the pecking order. For the mass of Whites, the fight was always about White supremacy.

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In this landmark film, Philadelphia police detective Virgil Tibbs arrives in a foreign country: Mississippi, a far cry and a century and a half from modern-day Pennsylvania.  White Mississippians haven't moved beyond the antebellum era in their racial attitudes and assumptions.  One White character, looking at Tibbs wearing a nice suit, says "What you doin' wearin' White man's clothes?"  In another scene, Tibbs is dropped off at the home and car-repair business of a Black man.  The man asks Tibbs where he's staying.  Tibbs says he's going to find a hotel room.  The man laughs and turns to his wife and says "We've got company!"

There is a scene in which we see Tibbs trotting up some steps leading from the sidewalk to the entrance of a hotel.  Again he's dressed in a suit.  The scene was filmed in 1966, two years after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination in hotels and other places of public accommodation like restaurants, restrooms, trains, etc.  The scene was shot from across the street and a little ways down the block, and we can see the entire front of the hotel and the area near the hotel entrance.

We see Tibbs briskly mount the steps, passing two White men.  One of them looks toward Tibbs, turns and looks at his friend with incredulity on his face, and then says something to his friend that we can't hear or lipread.  His reaction to Tibbs is so realistic that it must have been real.  Perhaps the man was a local, out and about for the morning, and the production crew used him as a paid extra.  It's possible he might've said, "That was Sidney Poitier, can you believe it!"  But more likely he said something like, "Did you see that N_____  goin' in there all high and mighty like he was a White man!"

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Sidney Poitier had been making movies and paying his dues for twenty years when he starred in In the Heat of the Night.  He landed his first credited role in 1950 as a prison doctor threatened by racist prisoners in No Way Out.  He impressed audiences and critics in 1954 as a troubled but gifted student in The Blackboard Jungle, starring Glenn Ford as one of his teachers.  He outshined his White co-star Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones (1958).  In the film adaptation of Porgy and Bess (1959), Poitier received top billing for the first time. In 1961 he took top billing in the film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's Broadway classic, A Raisin in the Sun.  And he won the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance as a day laborer working for nuns in Lilies of the Field (1963).

Between December 1965 and December 1967, four films were released starring Poitier—A Patch of Blue (1965); To Sir, with Love (1966); In the Heat of the Night (1967); and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).

In the Heat of the Night won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor.  For his work in this film, Rod Steiger was nominated for the Oscar.  Sidney Poitier was not.  Steiger won the golden statuette, but Poitier owned this movie.  He plays the central character, and his performance is riveting.  Virgil Tibbs is the straw that stirs the drink here.  Almost every word in the film is spoken by Tibbs, to Tibbs, or about Tibbs.  Nearly all actions by other characters are reactions to Tibbs.

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The cinematographer for In the Heat of the Night was Haskell Wexler, a two-time Oscar-winner, a true artist behind the camera, and one of the greatest cinematographers of the modern era.

Wexler did fantastic work on many films of inferior quality.  But some of the best include The Best Man (1964); Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) [Oscar]; In the Heat of the Night (1967); The Conversation (1974); One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975); Bound for Glory (1976) [Oscar]; Coming Home (1978); and Matewan (1987).

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In the Heat of the Night was added to the National Film Registry in 2002.  It is part of The Criterion Collection, spine #959.  I have ranked it #12 on my list of 101 Favorite Films.

Screenshot for the Week of 29 March 2021: "WINGS" (1927)

Clara Bow in Wings (1927)

Wings (1927) tells the story of two young men and one young woman.  [SPOILER ALERT!] The two fellas start out adversaries because of the woman, they join the Army when the U.S. enters what would become known as World War One, they become friends, and then they become fighter pilot friends.  Meanwhile, the woman joins the women's auxiliary service and becomes an ambulance driver in France where the two men are stationed.  [END SPOILER ALERT!]  It's a silent film from the year "talkies" made their debuts.  And it was the first film to be awarded an Oscar for "Outstanding Picture," the forerunner of the "Best Picture" award.

Its director, William Wellman, was a standout director at a time in Hollywood when producers controlled all the creative aspects of a movie and the director was just an employee the producer hired to do a job.  Wellman would go on to direct The Public Enemy (1931), Call of the Wild (1935), A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Dead End (1937), Beau Geste (1939), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), Battleground (1949), and The High and the Mighty (1954), among many other films.

Between 1926 and 1930 the biggest and most bankable star at Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation (later, Paramount Pictures) was Clara Bow, the world's top box office draw for three of those five years.  [SPOILER ALERT!]  After she landed the starring role in Wings, she easily got her then-boyfriend a small but impactful role in the movie as a doomed fighter pilot.  Cadet White makes a brief appearance but an unforgettable impression on his fellow pilots and on moviegoers, with the actor almost exploding onto the screen.  Audiences loved the 26-year-old, and his career began to take off.  His name: Gary Cooper. [END SPOILER ALERT!]

Wings tapped into America's hero-worship of the men who turned the tide in the war in 1917 and the women who risked their lives in supporting positions.  It is a touching movie, visually stunning at times, and features realistic aerial dogfights and special effects.

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In 1933, the M.G.M film Bombshell hit the theaters.  Jean Harlow, herself a wildly popular actor, plays Lola Burns, the world's number-one box office draw, living in a palatial Beverly Hills estate with servants waiting on her hand and foot, living an ideal life—well, it might have been ideal except that too many family members were hanging around asking for handouts; her agent was a weasel; and her studio publicity department constantly fed the tabloid press lurid untrue stories.  It was enough to make a star wish that she weren't a star at all.  Welcome to the world of Clara Bow.

She was born into poverty in Brooklyn, New York, in 1905.  Her mother was in and out of institutions during much of her childhood.  Her father was a violent man.  He raped her when she was 16, and might have continued his incestuous hold over her well into her stardom years.

When she arrived in Hollywood in 1922, full of talent and energy, she began making friends with the right kind of people—studio boss and producer B.P. Schulberg, director Frank Tuttle, newspaper reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons.  They all came to her defense later on when the tabloids began to rip her life apart.

Between her film debut in Beyond the Rainbow (1922), in which she had 14th billing, and her triumph in Wings (1927) with top-billing as a volunteer ambulance driver for the allies in France, she earned notice and praise in film after film, thirty-eight in that stretch of time, playing flapper girls and ingenues and what were then called "tomboys," knocking competitor veteran female actors aside with her talent and growing popularity, building a huge loyal audience and, along with it, Hollywood leverage.

In early 1927, Paramount Famous Lasky released It, with Clara Bow in the role of a young woman on the make blatantly using her sexuality and sex ("it") to get what she wants.  She was so spellbinding in the role that the nickname which word-of-mouth created would follow her till death and beyond: "the It girl."

She lived a private life publicly thanks to the tabloid press who followed her wherever she went.  And what the tabloids couldn't uncover or effectively embellish, they invented.  But she gave them plenty of stories just being herself without any discernible self-restraint. Though she didn't advertise her promiscuity, she made no effort to hide it.  She used colorful street language when talking to anyone but children.

By 1933—between the family parasites she attracted, always with their hands out, and the unrelenting tabloid voyeurism—she couldn't stand it anymore.  She retired from movies at age 28 and settled down as a rancher in Nevada.  She died in 1965.

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The great Edith Head was the costume designer for Wings, winner of the first Best Picture Oscar.  She was also the costume designer for 18 other Best Picture nominees, including Going My Way (1944), Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Blvd. (1950), A Place in the Sun (1951), Shane (1953), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and The Sting (1973), plus other notable movies like Samson and Delilah (1949), Ace in the Hole (1951), White Christmas (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Funny Face (1957), Vertigo (1958), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).  Over her long career with 435 credits, she earned 35 Oscar nominations and won 8 times, the most honored costume designer in film history.

She dressed many of the greatest leading women in Hollywood--Ginger Rogers, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth, Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, and Jane Wyman.

In the 1970s she received the U.S. Coast Guard's Meritorious Public Service Award for designing a woman's uniform for that service.

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Director William Wellman was occasionally a writer.  And he wrote a story that he turned into the screenplay for A Star Is Born (1937), a movie that has been made four times.

In the 1930s, Barbara Stanwyck and her husband Frank Fay were busy and popular entertainers.  When they met, fell in love, and got married, he was the bigger star.  But soon she began to eclipse him in both talent and popularity.  His "drinking problem" got worse with each passing year.  Friends were concerned that his alcoholism would manage to destroy Stanwyck's career, which seemed to have no limits.  But she stood by her husband, year after year, until she couldn't do it anymore.

William Wellman was a friend of both.  He had directed her in Night Nurse (1931), a picture in which she gave a noteworthy performance.  And in the midst of watching what was happening to the couple he wrote a story about a marriage between two stars being destroyed by alcoholism, with one star on the rise and the other on the decline.  The studio never said A Star Is Born was based on a true story.  But Hollywood was still a company town and very much a small town in a big city.  Everyone in Hollywood could see it was a true story.  And everyone in Hollywood could see who the couple were.

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The art direction in Wings is outstanding.  But the viewer must look past the sometimes clumsy, sometimes pedestrian camerawork to see it.  It helps to freeze-frame Wings periodically or, better yet, take selective screenshots of the movie.  The cameraman was occasionally brilliant and light was occasionally shed on this masterful production.

The uncredited art director for Wings was Hans Dreier.  His stellar and long résumé of films, receiving no credit in almost every one of his early ones, includes The Smiling Lieutenant (1931); Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931); Shanghai Express (1932); A Farewell to Arms (1932); Trouble in Paradise (1932); Island of Lost Souls (1932); I'm No Angel (1933); Duck Soup (1933); Design for Living (1933); Anything Goes (1936); The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936) (the first feature-length film shot and shown in color); The Plainsman (1936); Midnight (1939); Union Pacific (1939); Beau Geste (1939); Northwest Mounted Police (1940); The Lady Eve (1941); Sullivan's Travels (1941); This Gun for Hire (1942); Holiday Inn (1942); The Palm Beach Story (1942); I Married a Witch (1942); The Road to Morocco (1942); For Whom the Bell Tolls (1942); and Double Indemnity (1944), among his 549 films over a span of 35 years.

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The original pair of negatives for Wings were lost.  For decades after its release, Wings was considered a "lost" film.  But in 1992 a spare print was found in the archive of Cinémathèque Française in Paris.  It was quickly copied and shown in American theaters.

Then a few years later a spare negative was discovered in a Paramount Studios vault.  It was meticulously restored and released on DVD and Blu-ray in 2012.

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Wings was added to the National Film Registry in 1997.

Screenshot for the Week of 22 March 2021: "MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN" (1936)

Lionel Stander and Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

Gary Cooper plays Longfellow Deeds, a smalltown businessman and gentle soul.  This film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.  Director Frank Capra won the Oscar for Best Director, his second win.  (His first was for It Happened One Night [1934]).

Cooper was Capra's only choice for the role of Longfellow Deeds.  But when filming was scheduled to begin, Cooper was unavailable.  Never veering off his path, Capra waited six months for the actor and incurred a cost overrun of $100,000 ($2.2 milion in 2023).

The instant Capra conceived the Deeds character, he pictured Cooper.  The actor became a visual ear worm, first for Capra and then for his screenwriter Robert Riskin.  They became obsessed with him. Riskin began to use  Cooper for his muse.  And then the writer had a breakthrough: Deeds was Cooper, Cooper was Deeds.  It was this breakthrough thought that launched Riskin on his way.

Ernest Hemingway—who went from devoted fan to one of Cooper's closest friends—once said, "If you made up a character like Coop, nobody would believe it.  He's just too good to be true."  Joel McCrea, another close friend said, "Coop never fought, he never got mad, he never told anybody off that I know of; everybody that worked with him liked him."

Among his other close friends were James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, and directors William Wellman, Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, and Fred Zinnemann.

Like Longfellow Deeds, Cooper was a man of few words but when he spoke, those few words spoke volumes.  Unlike Deeds, however, Cooper was a man of the world.  His father was a Montana Supreme Court justice.  Young Cooper was educated at a posh grammar school in England, and when he returned to the U.S. he pursued an art education.  He was conversant on many subjects including art, history, horses and horsemanship, film production, guns, and automobiles, especially sports cars.

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Screenwriter Robert Riskin was one of  the greatest screenwriters of the Golden Age. Among his credits: Platinum Blonde (1931); Lady for a Day (1933); It Happened One Night (1934); Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936);  Lost Horizon (1937); You Can't Take It With You (1938); and Meet John Doe (1941).  He was nominated five times for an Oscar and won once, in 1935, for It Happened One Night.  Among the movies he wrote, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was his favorite.

This is no longer a little-known fact: In his screenplay, Riskin coined the word "doodle" (to draw impromptu circles or squiggles, aimlessly or casually), which entered the English language when this film was released.

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Jean Arthur is one of my two favorite female actors (the other is Barbara Stanwyck), based almost exclusively on her performances in two films—Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).  [SPOILER ALERT!] In both films, Arthur plays the Barbara Stanwyck role—the ambitious, tough-as-nails, streetwise antagonist who falls for the central character.

The sequel to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town—Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington—was set to have Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur reprise their roles.  But a funny thing happened on the way to this sequel: Gary Cooper became unavailable.  This time, Capra didn't wait.  He cast James Stewart in the leading role and renamed the film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). 

Screenshot for a Fortnight: "REAR WINDOW" (1954) (01 March to 14 March 2021)

James Stewart in Rear Window (1954)

[SPOILER ALERT!] A man who makes his living closely observing the world as a photographer finds himself wheelchair-bound in his apartment with nothing better to keep boredom away than voyeurism.  With his windows and blinds open, he trains his eyes and ears on the world of his neighbors—the composer, the couple with the dog, Miss Lonelyhearts, Miss Torso, the salesman and his wife, the artist, and the newlyweds.  What he sees and hears leads him to conclude that one of those neighbors is a murderer. [END SPOILER ALERT]

Grace Kelly

Wendell Corey

Kelly and Stewart

Thelma Ritter and Stewart

 

Rear Window (1954) is based on a story by Cornell Woolrich entitled "It Had to Be Murder," which in turn is based on an H.G. Wells story, "Through a Window."  

Woolrich was a prolific noir fiction writer, publishing dozens of novels and hundreds of stories during his long career.  He garnered early success in his hometown of New York writing and publishing six jazz age novels between 1926 and 1932.  After winning a $10,000 writing contest sponsored by First National Pictures he abruptly took a job at First National in Hollywood writing screenplays, or trying to write them.  Within two years he returned to New York and began to write pulp noir fiction.

Despite accumulating wealth as a writer, he lived with his mother for 25 years in a series of seedy hotels, mingling with prostitutes, thieves, killers, and other lowlifes.  From the time of his mother's death in 1957 until his own death in 1968, however, he lived in more civilized lodgings on the upper west side and mingled with his colleagues and young admirers in the unofficial New York hangouts of the Mystery Writers of America.

Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart formed a partnership in 1953 and bought the rights to "It Had to Be Murder" to make this film.

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John Michael Hayes was Alfred Hitchcock's favorite screenwriter, until he wasn't.  Rear Window was their first film together.

The Woolrich story has no romantic subplot, and Jeff's disability isn't revealed until the last paragraph.  Hayes made these two storylines prominent in his screenplay.

He also took this dialogue from "It Had to Be Murder"—  

Did any of them see her leave, according to your man? …  Then all you've gotten is a second-hand version of an unsupported statement by him.  Not an eyewitness account.

—and turned it into this:

Well, what good's his information?  It's a second-hand version of an unsupported story by the murderer himself—Thorwald.  Now, did anybody actually see the wife get on the train?

He took the insipid character of Sam in Woolrich's story and created a funny and insightful replacement, Stella, the insurance company nurse.  He then split the sounding-board duties between Stella and Jeff's romantic partner played by Grace Kelly.

Hayes continued his successful collaboration with Hitchcock on To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).  But something fell apart between them after Hayes had written The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Hitchcock decided to leave Hayes's name off the credits and give another writer, Angus MacPhail—who had contributed some minor help early on—full credit for the screenplay.  Hayes took Hitchcock to arbitration, won his case, and his name replaced MacPhail's as the sole screenwriter.  Thus Hayes's relationship with Alfred Hitchcock came to a bitter end.

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Rear Window was one of the "Five Lost Hitchcocks," so-called, because after their theatrical releases the director bought back each movie's rights.  For three decades the films were tied up, first by Hitchcockian fiat and then, after his death, by litigation over re-distribution rights.  The other four films were Rope (1948), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958).  They all became available for re-distribution in 1984.

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The film was shot on an enormous set at Paramount Pictures built specially for Rear Window.  It took fifty workers two months to build it at a cost of $100,000 ($2.2 million in 2023).  It was four stories high and contained thirty-one apartments, including twelve that were fully furnished.  Georgine Darcy—"Miss Torso"—lived in her character's apartment during the filming.

The courtyard was constructed in what had been the studio basement before a crew excavated and prepped it for this movie.  Jeff's second-story apartment was actually on street level in the real world.

The set was a legend in its own time and was the object of an unusually high number of visitors to a Hitchcock set as well as the object of photo spreads in several magazines, including LIFE, while the movie was being shot.  Hitchcock kept his base of operations inside Jeff's apartment throughout the filming, and he communicated with the actors in the other apartments via radio-frequency transmission to earpieces they wore.

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Rear Window was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Director, Screenplay, Cinematography, and Sound.  It ranks at number 48 on the American Film Institute's list of 100 Greatest Films, number 53 on the British Film Institute's 2012 list of the 100 Greatest Films, and number 8 on My 25 Favorite Movies list.  Current imdb fans rank #58/250

Screenshot for the Week of 15 February 2021: "NOTORIOUS" (1946)

Secret agent Devlin (Cary Grant), looking at a hungover Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) as she looks at him from her bed in Notorious (1946).

Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) has a lot to keep your interest—Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, espionage, Nazi villains, suspense, intrigue, romance, plus excellent camerawork.  What's missing from Mr. Hitchcock's usual bag of tricks is humor.  This is not a criticism.  I simply enjoy Hitchcock's sense of humor, and I miss it when it isn't there.

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Pretty-boy actors, like beautiful female actors, have always had the burden of proof.  Do they have acting talent or are they just pretty faces?

Early in his career, Cary Grant wasn't given much to work with.  In most of those roles he was just a pretty face.  From This Is the Night (1932) through The Toast of New York (1937), with one exception, he delivered one mailed-in performance after another.  The exception was Sylvia Scarlet (1935) with Katharine Hepburn, the first of their four pairings.  Under the direction of George Cukor, Grant received excellent reviews for his performance, and he always considered Sylvia Scarlet the breakthrough of his career.

He broadened his comic chops with notable performances in The Awful Truth (1937); Bringing Up Baby (1938), pairing him again with Katharine Hepburn; Holiday (1938), again playing opposite Katharine Hepburn; His Girl Friday (1940); My Favorite Wife (1940); and The Philadelphia Story (1940), yet another pairing with Katharine Hepburn.

It might surprise you to know that after 1934, Cary Grant was a freelancer, not under a long-term contract with any studio, free to make one-picture deals with the highest bidder.  And oh, the bidding was high.  He went from $750 a week to $2,500 a week virtually overnight.  By 1937 he was earning $50,000 per picture plus 10% of the gross.  By The Bishop's Wife (1947), he was earning $500,000 per picture.

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I'm incredulous that Ted Tetzlaff was given the title of Director of Photography on Notorious.  It's incredible because most of Hitchcock's cinematographers got their credits as cinematographers, not DoPs.  On most of his movies, Hitchcock was his own uncredited DoP.  I don't know which of them was responsible for the camera positioning for that screenshot of Cary Grant up there.  

Tetzlaff also shot My Man Godfrey (1936), Road to Zanzibar (1941), and I Married a Witch (1942).  He had been working his craft for twenty years before Notorious, and had gotten the more prestigious title of DoP only 15 times in 114 films.  He was nominated for one Oscar in his 33-year career.

Tetzlaff and Hitch had a hitch of their own when Hitchcock told Tetzlaff to film Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant with a light aimed at the backs of their necks as the motorcycle cop is supposedly pulling them over.  Irritated, Tetzlaff said, "Getting a bit technical, aren't you, Pop?"  Perhaps it was only a coincidence: Tetzlaff retired from camerawork after Notorious and switched to directing.

[SPOILER ALERT!] Hitchcock was the first filmmaker to see the Nazi threat for what it was and to do something about it.  His guerilla war against the Nazis via film was the mainstay of his work from 1935 through 1946.  He went after them in The 39 Steps (1935), well before the start of World War II, although he took great pains not to identify the "enemy."  His war continued with The Lady Vanishes (1938) and arguably Sabotage (1936).  After Germany invaded Poland, and England entered the war, he continued his guerilla attacks with Foreign Correspondent (1940), Saboteur (1942), and Lifeboat (1944).  And now, in 1946, with Hitler dead and Germany defeated and occupied by the allied countries, Hitchcock is chasing the fleeing Nazis to South America.

[SPOILER ALERT!] Ingrid Bergman's native country, Sweden, was famously neutral on the world stage and had been so since the 19th Century.  This policy of neutrality continued through both World War I and World War II and is still its policy.  Between the wars Sweden was a strong supporter of the League of Nations and devoted its energies to preserving the League rather than building its military.  Throughout WWII it provided some assistance to both sides, although to my eyes Sweden seemed to favor the allies.  And in 1942 it quickly began to rebuild its military and armaments to deter a possible Nazi invasion.

[SPOILER ALERT!] I think two things in the Notorious moviegoer's consciousness would have made Ingrid Bergman in the role of Alicia Huberman instantly credible: Bergman's Swedish background in light of her country's legendary neutrality; and the memory of her performance in Casablanca (1942) as Ilsa Lund, a Swede married to the world famous Nazi-fighter Victor Lazslo. [END OF SPOILER ALERT!]

Ingrid Bergman made her Hollywood film debut in 1939 with the remake of a 1936 Swedish film, Intermezzo.  By the time she began work on Notorious, she had already worked with some of the greatest actors in the movies—Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Leslie Howard, Spencer Tracy, and Charles Boyer.

The verb "to gaslight" is a term used by psychiatrists and psychologists to describe the actions of a person or entity engaging in an elaborate, insidious, consistent, and relentless campaign of deception and psychological manipulation, usually against one victim, for the purpose of increasing the gaslighter's power over the victim by convincing the victim that his or her vision of reality is 180 degrees off.  Ultimately, this campaign, if unchecked, renders the victim pathologically dependent on the gaslighter and on his thinking and feelings.

When "gaslighting" broke out of its professional moorings and came into vogue a few years ago, it retained its professional definition.  But soon the verb morphed into a second definition which eliminates the pathological components and reduces it to a term that refers to repeated denials accompanied by plausible cover stories.  And because of that, I assume most users have no idea where the term originated.

As most Ingrid Bergman fans would know, even when hearing "gaslighting" for the first time, the term comes from the 1944 gothic suspense classic, Gaslight.  [SPOLIER ALERT!—FOR GASLIGHT (1944)] In it, Charles Boyer, playing the husband, slowly poisons the mind of his wife, Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman, so she can't tell what's real and what isn't.  Throughout the movie he takes advantage of every opportunity to lie and manipulate reality to make Paula think she's going crazy.

He wants her to distrust her own eyes and ears and memory to prevent her from catching on to his longstanding criminal scheme—having murdered her Aunt Alice in her home many years earlier in a thwarted jewel robbery, having set up his encountering Paula for the first time, having maneuvered to marry her, and having maneuvered to move into her aunt's old house, he now rummages in the attic to find the precious jewels for which he had killed so long ago.  Among many other shenanigans, he tells Paula she's imagining the gas lamp dim and re-illuminate by itself—am I crazy? or is the ghost of Aunt Alice doing it?—when in actuality it dims when he turns a gas lamp on in the attic and re-illuminates when he turns it off.  Bergman won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in this film. [END OF GASLIGHT SPOILER ALERT!]

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David O. Selznick was a Hollywood legend, wunderkind, and ogre.  As a wunderkind he produced dozens of films for M.G.M. from 1928 to 1932 and gained the notice and favor of the boss, Louis B. Mayer, as well as the hand in marriage of the boss's daughter, Irene, in 1930.  As a wedding gift, Irene's father paid for the custom-building of a Beverly Hills mansion.  The Selznicks divorced in 1948.  Meanwhile, Selznick's star in the movie business continued to rise.  He moved to Paramount and then R.K.O. where he became head of production and produced King Kong (1933) among many other films.  He then returned to M.G.M. where his father-in-law gave him his own production unit.  With it he produced Dinner at Eight (1933), Manhattan Melodrama (1934), David Copperfield (1935), Anna Karenina (1935), and Reckless (1935).  Finally in 1936 he leased a corner of the Culver Studios backlot and formed Selznick International Pictures.  His meteoric rise and his productions of A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Intermezzo (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), and Rebecca (1940) stand as testaments to his talent and his ambition.

The opening title says Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious is "[b]y arrangement with David O. Selznick."  Selznick had contracted the key components of what would become Notorious—director Alfred Hitchcock, actors Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, and writer Ben Hecht.  He sold the rights to the project to R.K.O. Studios for $800,000 and 50% of the profits so he could fund his own pet project, Duel in the Sun (1946), starring Gregory Peck and the next Mrs. Selznick, the ravishing Jennifer Jones.

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Notorious is part of The Criterion Collection (#137).

Screenshot for the Week of 08 February 2021: "STAGE DOOR" (1937)

Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn in Stage Door

By the time I first saw Stage Door about twenty years ago, I had already seen well over 1,000 movies and I wondered how a movie could've been that good when I'd never heard of it.  It instantly jumped into my top 101 movies, and it has since moved very close to the top 25.

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From the early days of the studio system through its heyday in the '30s and '40s, a film director was not in charge of his own movie. That was because it wasn't his movie; he was just a hired hand doing a job.  The movie—the ideas, the script, all the artistic input, the responsibility for selecting everyone involved, including actors, writers, directors, etc., the money for it all, along with any profits—belonged to the studio.

Studios had their own stables of actors, producers, and directors who were tied to their studios by contract.  For instance, early in their careers, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, William Powell, Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, and the Marx Brothers were under contract with Paramount.  Paul Muni, Humphrey Bogart, Dolores Del Rio, Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Barbara Stanwyck, James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Errol Flynn, and Bette Davis belonged to Warner Bros.  

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the biggest studio, run by Louis B. Mayer and his head of production, "the boy wonder," Irving Thalberg.  Warner Brothers was another big one.  Jack Warner ran it along with Darryl F. Zanuck until the latter moved to the newly-formed 20th Century Fox, which Zanuck then took over.  Paramount Pictures was headed by Adolph Zuckor,  Universal by Carl Laemelle Sr. and Jr., Columbia Pictures by Harry Cohn, and R.K.O. by David Sarnoff and Joseph Kennedy.  Stage Door came from R.K.O.

A studio boss would assign a producer to act in his stead on a particular movie.  The producer would then have total creative control over it, just as directors do today.  Sometimes the studio boss handed the project off with suggestions for the lead players or the director or both; the projects sometimes came with a draft of the script.  But an experienced producer had free rein to choose his own director, choose the lead players, and assign his own writer to come up with a script.  With a working script in hand, producer and director would collaborate to the extent that the producer allowed.  Some producers, like David O. Selznick, were extremely controlling.  Before shooting began, the producer would tell the director what he wanted done, and the director would carry out the plan through his direction of the cast and crew and by being the producer's mouthpiece on the set.

Some directors were so talented they earned the authority to make their own creative decisions.  John Ford, F.W. Murnau, Frank Capra, William Wellman, Raoul Walsh, perhaps one or two others, and eventually William Wyler, were in this group.

But except for the select few, the great movies of the day were made by the producers, and they, not the directors, deserve the lion's share of the credit for these movies' artistic successes—

▶All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) (Carl Laemelle Jr.)

▶Frankenstein (1931) (Carl Laemelle Jr.)

▶Grand Hotel (1932) (Irving Thalberg)

▶42nd Street (1933) (Darrel F. Zanuck)

▶Cleopatra (1934) (Cecil B. DeMille)

▶Top Hat (1935) (Pandro S. Berman)

▶My Man Godfrey (1936) (Charles Rogers)

▶A Star Is Born (1937) (David O. Selznick)

▶Boys Town (1938) (John W. Considine Jr.)

▶Gone with the Wind (1939) (David O. Selznick)

▶The Philadelphia Story (1940) (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

▶Sergeant York (1941) (Hal Wallis and Jesse Laksy [and Howard Hawks, uncredited])

▶Casablanca (1942) (Hal Wallis)

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The producer of Stage Door was Pandro S. Berman and the director was Gregory La Cava.  The two had worked together on a few films before that.

La Cava had been directing films for 21 years, producing for 22, and was just coming off the critical success of My Man Godfrey (1936), which had earned six Oscar nominations and which La Cava both produced and directed.

In his six short years as a producer before Stage Door, Berman had put dozens of movies on the big screen.  (Following the release of this film, he was promoted to Vice President and Production Supervisor at R.K.O.).  In his long career (1931-1970), Berman produced, sometimes with credit and sometimes without, such movies as Of Human Bondage (1934), Swing Time (1936), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), National Velvet (1944), The Three Musketeers (1948), Father of the Bride (1950), Ivanhoe (1952), The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Jailhouse Rock (1957), BUtterfield 8 (1960), and Patch of Blue (1965), among scores of others.

For Berman's and La Cava's collaboration, Stage Door was nominated for 4 Oscars, including Best Picture.

Stage Door was performed as a radio play for Lux Radio Theater on February 20, 1939, with Ginger Rogers and Adolphe Menjou reprising their roles and Rosalind Russell taking over the Katharine Hepburn role.

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All through the production of Stage Door, and even before that, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers were in competition for queen of R.K.O. Hepburn had 2 Oscar nominations and 1 win for Best Actress but also an almost-nonexistent fan base on her side of the ledger.  Rogers had 6 Astaire-Rogers musicals behind her, rising popularity, knockout beauty, and box office success on her side, all of which gave her the advantage.  And originally, Rogers was set to get top billing on Stage Door.  But Hepburn was not happy with her billing or the smallness of her part.  She pled her case to Pandro S. Berman.  As a result, her part was significantly beefed-up, and as a result of that, she received equal billing with Rogers.

As great as Hepburn was in Stage Door, the film was a box-office disappointment.  Hepburn's career continued its nosedive, and the following year an industry magazine labeled her and several other actors "box office poison."

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Morrie Ryskind was a wisecracking specialist and the co-writer of the film.  As a young man he was expelled from Columbia University for an editorial in which he referred to the university president as "Czar Nicholas."  He honed his comedic skills writing the screenplays for The Cocoanuts (1929), Animal Crackers (1930), A Night at the Opera (1935), and My Man Godfrey (1936).  In 1932 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama along with co-writer George S. Kaufman, composer George Gershwin, and lyricist Ira Gershwin for the Broadway musical, Of Thee I Sing!

Ryskind noticed right away that the women on the set of Stage Door had a gift for banter and were not afraid to ad-lib at times.  He told a stenographer to memorize the dialogue in the script, then sit in on the acting sessions, and write down whatever they said that wasn't scripted.  Nearly everything in the stenographer's notes wound up in the film.

Screenshot for the Week of 01 February 2021: "THE GRADUATE" (1967)

The Graduate (1967) is a masterpiece and a landmark in American cinema.  It was, the last I checked, required viewing in film classes across the U.S.  Except, possibly, the music (fine songs, but weak connection to the film; apologies to Simon & Garfunkel fans), every aspect of The Graduate—the camerawork and art direction, the symbolism, the use of light, the script and dialogue, the casting and the performances, the direction—is first rate.

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The Director of Photography on The Graduate was Robert Surtees (b. 1906, d. 1985), a true artist whose outstanding work stretches from the Golden Age to the Modern Era.  Although I consider his work on The Graduate to be his finest, …

 … Surtees is best known for Ben-Hur (1959), for which he won the third of his three Oscars.  (He received fourteen Oscar nominations in his career).

I consider The Graduate to be his pinnacle because both the indoor and outdoor camerawork are outstanding, something that can't be said of Ben-Hur.  His interiors on that film are unremarkable.  In The Graduate, his interiors—which rely more on angles and light and creative thinking—are just as artistic, just as inspired, as the exteriors.

The exterior scenes of Ben-Hur are spectacular, but the venue and epic landscape easily lend themselves to spectacular cinematography.  The exterior scenes of The Graduate didn't get that kind of geographic head start and, frankly, they didn't need it.  Surtees's true talent was demonstrated by making shots of a front-yard shrub and a backyard swimming pool, as well as an airport terminal, a young man's bedroom, a hotel lobby, a drive-in hamburger diner, a church sanctuary, and the backseat of a bus just as mesmerizing as a chariot racetrack.

His credits also include Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), King Solomon's Mines (1950) [Oscar], Quo Vadis (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) [Oscar], Mogambo (1953), Oklahoma! (1956), Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), PT-109 (1963), The Collector (1965), The Hallelujah Trail (1965), Doctor Doolittle (1967), Summer of '42 (1971), The Last Picture Show (1971), The Cowboys (1972), and The Sting (1973).

Robert Surtees is the only cinematographer to have received two Oscar nominations in the same year—The Last Picture Show and Summer of '42, both for 1971.

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No American leading man has portrayed as many disparate characters as Dustin Hoffman—Benjamin Braddock (The Graduate); Ratso Rizzo (Midnight Cowboy); Jack Crabb (Little Big Man); Louis Dega (Papillon); Lenny Bruce (Lenny); Carl Bernstein (All the President's Men); Ted Kramer (Kramer vs. Kramer); Michael Dorsey and Dorothy Michaels (Tootsie); Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman); Raymond Babbitt (Rain Man); Mumbles (Dick Tracy); Stanley Motts (Wag the Dog); Bernie Focker (Meet the Fockers)—and no two of these characters are alike.

Hoffman refused to be a part of the Hollywood scene early in his career.  He didn't attend awards shows, he didn't grant interviews, and when a reporter would shove a microphone in front of his face he usually said something surly.  I suspect the aftermath of the premiere of The Graduate weighed heavily on him.

Hoffman was a shy man.  He was new to movies, and yet he had to carry the film as the central character, appearing in every scene, the success of the film seemingly riding on his back.  And then, from the premiere of The Graduate—instantly becoming a smash hit—it quickly became a cultural touchtone for a generation of middle class youths who felt alienated by the materialistic and soulless world of their parents.  The Graduate was The Catcher in the Rye on film, and Benjamin Braddock was Holden Caulfield.  Young people related to Benjamin and found Benjamin in Hoffman.  All of a sudden, Hoffman went from a nobody to someone who couldn't go anywhere without being recognized, from someone few people called to someone whose phone rang off the hook every single day for months. It all literally overwhelmed him.

He wasn't ready to handle the attention and the instant mass recognition on the street, in restaurants, and in shops.  He wasn't ready to lose his anonymity for the rest of his life.  And at the same time he knew that he hadn't paid his dues as an actor.  He was suffocating under the onslaught of fans and feeling resentful of it and at the same time feeling unworthy of it.

Over the years he more than paid his dues.  He adjusted to his celebrity and to Hollywood's expectations, and he came to embrace all of them.

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Mike Nichols (b. 1931, d. 2014) was one of our greatest directors.  When someone famous in the film industry dies, the news always touches me and sometimes it even pains me.  But the day Mike Nichols died, a pall fell across our house.  It was identical to the pall cast over our house when Roger Ebert died the year before. (Ironically, Ebert had a completly different take on this film from mine. In his view, Mrs. Robinson is the only worthwhile character,  and Benjamin is a fool for dumping her in favor of Elaine. Ebert also disliked the ''arty" cinematography.)

From 1955 to 1958, Mike Nichols was one of the members of an improv troupe in Chicago, Compass Players.  It included Shelley Berman and Ed Asner, and it used as its performance starter a set of theatre games taught at improv classes. In 1959, Compass Players broke up and some of them formed what became a world famous comedy launching pad, Second City.  Meanwhile, Nichols had left the troupe in 1958 to go to New York with his new improv partner, Elaine May, whom he met in a chance encounter at a train station.  "Nichols and May" performed in the club circuit for only three years, from 1958 to 1961, but they earned a reputation as the hippest comedy act in the country.

Nichols holds the record for most Tony Awards for directing—six.  His Broadway credits include The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park, Plaza Suite, Prisoner of Second Avenue, Uncle Vanya, Streamers, The Gin Game, and Monty Python's Spamalot.

His film credits include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Graduate, Catch-22 (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), Silkwood (1983), Working Girl (1987), Biloxi Blues (1988), Postcards from the Edge (1990), The Birdcage (1996), and Primary Colors (1998).

At the age of 56, he married TV newswoman Diane Sawyer.  They quickly became one of the A-list couples in New York's social circuit.

Mike Nichols won an Oscar for his work on this movie, the only Oscar The Graduate earned.  His direction of it also won a BAFTA and a Golden Globe.  In addition, the Directors Guild of America and the New York Film Critics Circle both named him Best Director of 1967. 

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Buck Henry played the hotel clerk in the movie.  But he also co-wrote the screenplay.  When my wife and I first saw The Graduate I recognized his name from the zany prime-time TV show he and Mel Brooks wrote, one of my favorite shows as a kid, Get Smart, with Don Adams as Secret Agent 86, Barbara Feldon as 99, and Ed Platt as the Chief.  I later came to know him from his many appearances on TV shows and in other movies.

We saw The Graduate at the Sherman Theatre on Ventura Blvd. in Sherman Oaks.  Early in the movie, Bejamin's mother, played by Elizabeth Wilson, tries to convince him to attend his own party with: "The Carlsons are here.  They came all the way from Tarzana!"  We were sitting about four miles from Tarzana when she said it, and that line got one of the biggest laughs of the night.  It was helped by Wilson's delivery, as if driving to the Braddocks' Pasadena home "all the way from Tarzana" had been a major ordeal.  Pasadena is only 20 miles from Tarzana and connected by the Ventura Freeway, then with moderate 55 mph (maximum speed nationwide) traffic on weekends.  But Wilson inflected it as if the Carlsons were coming all the way from behind the Iron Curtain.

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The Graduate was the highest-grossing movie of 1967 and is available on disc from The Criterion Collection (#800).  It was named to the National Film Registry in 1996.  It ranks number 17 on the American Film Institute's Top 100 films.