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 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.

Screenshot for a Fortnight: "FROM HERE TO ETERNITY" (1953) (30 November-13 December 2020)

Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) and Sergeant Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster) in From Here to Eternity (1953).  DoP: Burnett Guffey.  D: Fred Zinnemann.

From Here to Eternity (1953) is the film adaptation of James Jones's sprawling 950-page novel of the same name.  Set on Oahu, Hawaii, in 1941, it tells the story of Robert E. Lee Prewitt, an Army soldier whose strange blend of individualism, a lofty moral code, and devotion to the Army leads him into one bind after another.  The novel, which I haven't read, is reputed to be borderline pornography, graphically depicting sex and violence while using all the swear words imaginable.  Screenwriter Daniel Taradash had the challenging job of bringing this novel to the screen.  Ironically, From Here to Eternity has been a favorite movie of mine since I was a kid.

The movie was filmed entirely on location on Oahu.

Before director Fred Zinnemann got hold of the project, no one in the film or book industries thought a film version of the novel could be made that would get past the censors.  Libraries around the country had banned the novel.  James Jones himself tried and failed to adapt it.  Because I haven't read the book, I don't know what the movie omitted.  I can testify, however, that I have seen the movie at least fifteen times.  It stands on its own and has no obvious holes in the plot nor in the development of any character.  It is a great movie.  Including Best Picture and Best Director, From Here to Eternity won 8 Oscars, equaling Gone with the Wind (1939) for the most Oscars won by any film up to that time.

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Burnett Guffey was the Director of Photography on this film.  He won one of its 8 Oscars, for Best Cinematography.  Before Guffey became a cinematographer and director of photography he was a long-time camera operator.  Though uncredited, he worked as a camera operator on John Ford's The Informer (1935), Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940), he helped photograph That Hamilton Woman (1941) with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and Cover Girl (1944) with Rita Hayworth, among other films.

As a cinematographer or director of photography his credits include All the King's Men (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), From Here to Eternity (1953), Human Desire (1953), The Harder They Fall (1956), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), for which he won his second Oscar for Best Cinematography.

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Once upon a time there was a great prejudice in Hollywood.  No, I don't mean any of the obvious ones.  They're too obvious and they're still there.  No, I mean prejudices like the prejudice that stage actors had against film-only actors and the one that film actors had against TV actors.  The prejudice at issue here was the one that traditional film and stage actors had against "the method" of the Actors Studio.

Montgomery Clift was a triple threat to Hollywood's leading men who played alongside him.  He was a great actor, already having a reputation for greatness and intensity on the set.  He was rumored to be gay (he was), which, in those bigoted close-minded times, would've freaked out the men he worked with who weren't gay.  And he was a "method" actor.

Burt Lancaster was so intimidated by Clift's reputation and presence on the set that in their first scene together, he was visibly shaking.  Years later, Clift also inadvertently intimidated Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe with his intensity and his acting ability during the filming of The Misfits (1961).  Oscar-winning co-star Donna Reed described Clift's concentration on the set of From Here to Eternity as "positively violent."   For their performances in this film, both Clift and Lancaster earned Oscar nominations for Best Actor.

If you've seen some of Lancaster's movies, you know that intensity is one of the hallmarks of his performances.  But all that intensity is consciously expressed as he pretends to be the character in the script.  In the "method," an actor doesn't pretend to be a character: he becomes the character, as though demonically possessed by it.  At which point, when delivering lines, he isn't pretending: he's being himself.  The transformation of an actor from a guy just doing a job to becoming a completely different person can be jolting.  Clift became so completely Prewitt that months after filming ended he confided in friends he was finding it impossible to let go of Prewitt and he still carried his bugle around and wore Aloha shirts. 

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Lancaster was a traditional actor and a "pro."  In acting-speak "pro" means—at the very least—the actor gets to the set on time, knows his or her lines (and maybe everybody else's), gives something a little different with every take, hits all marks, and is not disruptive in any way.

Lancaster never drank alcohol.  On the other hand, Frank Sinatra and Clift frequently went out drinking after work and would've been late to the set most days if Lancaster hadn't taken it upon himself to get those two to the set every morning, on time.  For years afterward, Sinatra—whose performance in this film earned him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor—sent Lancaster an annual Mother's Day card.

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Lancaster had been an acrobat before becoming an actor.  Most of his roles took some advantage of his athleticism, and he did all his own stunts well into his fifties.  He had a rope in his office, suspended straight down to the floor from some kind of steel housing bolted to the ceiling.  Every day, once a day, he would sit on the office floor with the end of the rope in front of him, and while remaining in a seated position pull himself up to the ceiling hand-over-hand and then let himself down to the floor the same way.

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Fred Zinnemann seems to have had two careers as a director, the first as a short film specialist and a second as a feature film director.  He was nominated for an Oscar as Best Director 8 times and won 3, one of them being From Here to Eternity. 

His list of credits, after he switched from shorts to features, is impressive, and includes, The Search (1948) with a young Montgomery Clift making his screen debut; The Men (1950) with a young Marlon Brando making his own screen debut; High Noon (1952) for which he should've won an Oscar; The Member of the Wedding (1952) with Julie Harris; From Here to Eternity, which earned him his first feature-film Oscar; Oklahoma! (1955) with Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones in her first feature film role; A Hatful of Rain (1957) with Eva Marie Saint; The Nun's Story (1959) with Audrey Hepburn; The Sundowners (1960) reuniting himself with Deborah Kerr; A Man for All Seasons (1966) with Paul Scofield and Robert Shaw, for which Zinnemann won a pair of Oscars, one for Best Director and one for Best Picture, which went to him as producer; and his edge-of-your-seat thriller, The Day of the Jackel (1968) with Edward Fox. 

Screenshot for a Fortnight: "IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT" (1934) (26 October-08 November 2020)

 

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in
It Happened One Night (1934).
C: Joseph Walker.  D: Frank Capra.

Joseph Walker was one of the best and luckiest cinematographers in Hollywood history.  His list of credits would have been any cinematographer's dream, and they included Platinum Blonde (1931);  Lady for a Day (1933); It Happened One Night (1934); Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936); Lost Horizon (1937); The Awful Truth (1937); You Can't Take It With You (1938); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); His Girl Friday (1940); Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941); It's a Wonderful Life (1946); The Lady from Shanghai (1947); and Born Yesterday (1950).  He was Frank Capra's favorite cameraman.  They worked together on eighteen films.

It Happened One Night showcases Walker's talent perfectly.  Watch his subtle camerawork in these scenes—at the bus stop on the road when Peter Warne (Clark Gable) chases a thief; Warne carrying Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) over a moving creek; at the haystacks; and at the wedding venue.  It is beautiful work that doesn't scream, "Look at me!  See what I can do with a camera!"

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Clark Gable worked on this movie as a punishment.  He was an up-and-coming matinee idol at MGM when he filmed Dancing Lady with Joan Crawford in 1933.  During filming he developed a life-threatening case of pyorrhea and was rushed to the hospital where he had all his teeth removed.  After surgery, he had to wait two weeks for his dentures to be made.  Instead of laying about Hollywood he took his wife on a two-week Alaskan cruise and did so without getting the approval of studio boss Louis B. Mayer nor of the head of production Irving Thalberg.

Filming of Dancing Lady continued in Gable's absence.  When he showed up on set again, Mayer docked him two weeks' salary.  But that wasn't punishment enough.  It was customary for Mayer to show his displeasure with an actor by lending him out to Columbia Pictures, one of the "poverty row" studios.  Everyone, including Gable, would know why he'd been temporarily demoted to "poverty row."  And everyone, including Gable, would read it as a career insult.  When he arrived on the set of It Happened One Night he said, "Let's get this over with."

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Paramount Pictures didn't lend Claudette Colbert to Columbia for punishment.  She had four weeks free between movies, and she became aware that Capra was making a movie during those weeks.  After a quick negotiation, Capra promised her work would be done in four weeks, and Harry Cohn offered her $50,000 for it, roughly $975,000 in today's money.

She complained every day of filming.  She didn't get along well with Gable.  She didn't get along with Capra at all.  After her last day on set  she told a friend, "I just finished making the worst movie I've ever made."

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It Happened One Night marked a major turning point in Hollywood.  It was the first romantic comedy to win the Oscar for Best Picture.  It singlehandedly lifted Columbia Pictures out of "poverty row."  It made major stars out of both Gable and Colbert.  (Gable and Colbert reprised their roles for Lux Radio Theatre in 1939).  And it became the first of only three movies to win all five of the top Oscars at the Academy Awards ceremony—Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay.  (The others were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest [1975] and The Silence of the Lambs [1991].) 

Screenshot for the Week of 19 October 2020: "THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI" (1957)

 

Alec Guinness as Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).  C: Jack Hildyard.  D: David Lean.

[SPOILER ALERT!]  The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) has been a controversial film in the UK since its premiere.  British film critics and war veterans excoriated it for its portrayal of a British officer who collaborates with the enemy under the delusion he's actually advancing the British war effort.  British audiences, however, loved the film, making it the box-office winner in the UK in 1958.

The film was based on a French novel by Pierre Boulle and told a fictional version of the real-life wartime saga of British Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey and the forced construction of the Burma-Siam railway.  Survivors of the brutal project swore that any senior allied officer who behaved as Nicholson behaves in the film would have been "eliminated."  Toosey in fact made it his constant goal to sabotage the project, one way or another, even resorting to planting termites in the bridge stanchions. [END OF SPOLIER ALERT!]

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Jack Hildyard won the Oscar for Best Cinematography for his work on The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).  It was his only Oscar.  He had worked for director David Lean three times before, and I'm curious why the pair never made another movie together.  Lean's next three films won Oscars for his new cinematographer, Freddie Young—Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr. Zhivago (1965), and Ryan's Daughter (1970).

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Alec Guinness was reluctant to make this movie.  There are all sorts of stories out there that other actors had first been offered the role of Colonel Nicholson, including Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, and Orson Welles, all of whom supposedly turned it down before it was offered to Guinness.  But there's another story which I choose to believe, namely, that Guinness was always the first choice for the role of Colonel Nicholson, the role that earned Guinness his only Oscar (Actor in a Leading Role).

And Guinness himself initially turned it down.  He thought the French novel on which the film was based was anti-British, which by all accounts it was.  He also thought no one in their right mind would sit and watch a stiff-upper-lip British officer for 2½ hours.  Producer Sam Spiegel, a born salesman, took Guinness and David Lean to dinner, and by the end of the meal, Guinness was sold.

Even after filming began, however, Guinness continued to have doubts.  Lean invited Guinness and his family to watch some rough cuts of the early footage.  After having watched them, the group stood up and walked out of the screening room without saying a word.  Lean didn't know what to think.  Later, Guinness returned to Lean and told him that he and his family agreed Nicholson was the finest work he had ever done.

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William Holden was brought into the project to give it a solid box-office earning potential and to bring a little sex appeal to the film.  Holden was apparently the only person on the film shoot in Ceylon—cast, crew, extras—who got along with director David Lean.  And by Lean's own account, Holden was the only person there that he liked.

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Sessue Hayakawa was a legendary silent film star and producer, in America and Japan, before William Holden had been born and while Alec Guinness was still in nappies.  In fact he was one of the highest-paid film stars between 1910 and 1920.  In the early 1920s, with the rise of racism in Europe and the U.S., the flow of Hayakawa's career slowed to a trickle.  He went back to Japan for a several years, acting in and producing films and staging Japanese-language productions of Shakespeare's plays.  His career never again reached the heights of the period 1910-1920.

While filming that scene near the beginning of the movie, when Nicholson meets Colonel Saito and Saito strikes him with a pocket-size copy of the Geneva Convention,  Hayakawa did in fact accidentally strike Guinness and draw genuine blood.  Guinness never broke character, the camera kept rolling, and the footage stayed in the film.

C: Jack Hildyard   D: David Lean

Screenshot for the Week of 03 August 2020: "CASABLANCA " (1942)

Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo and Humphrey Bogart
as Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1942)

 

Look at those two pairs of eyes.  In Rick Blaine's eyes there is a mixture of wistfulness and trepidation.  Something has just been set in motion, and in Blaine's mind and spirit the ramifications have sunk in quickly.  In Victor Laszlo's eyes there is absolute defiance.  And in the next scene he will risk his life, openly defying the personifications of evil.

In two of my favorite movies there is a moment that never fails to bring a lump to my throat.  One is when Atticus Finch walks out of the courtroom following Tom Robinson's trial in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).  The other is in the scene immediately following the one depicted in the screenshot above.  Both moments are extraordinarily powerful, though each strikes a different chord.

Or do they?  Both involve the rare individuals who put their lives on the line, looking evil in the eye with defiance and honor.  Lazslo says, "If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die."  And Atticus Finch says—referring to why he volunteered to defend a Black man, accused of raping a white woman, at a trial conducted by and for white racists: "If I didn't, I couldn't hold my head up in this town."

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If you want to discern what style dominates a director's ouevre, find out what he or she did before becoming a director.  Hitchcock, for instance, was a graphic artist working for film set designers and art directors.  That makes sense, doesn't it?  Billy Wilder had been a screenwriter.  His movies are plot-, character-, and dialogue-driven.

What about cinematographers?  Does the same formula hold true?  Many of the best ones started as movie camera operators or their assistants.  But it shouldn't surprise anyone that many others began as still photographers.

Arthur Edeson was one of these.  He was the cinematographer on Casablanca.  I believe that experienced still photographers look through motion picture camera viewfinders in a different way from those who only train on movie cameras.  Just a hunch.

Edeson was one of the founders in 1919 of the American Society of Cinematographers.  (Watch for "A.S.C." in cinematographers' credits.)  At William Fox studios he filmed the first widescreen movie ever made, The Big Trail (1930), starring a very young John Wayne.  The widescreen process was a technology that had to be scrapped shortly afterward: the Great Depression made the construction of new theaters with wider screens (or even retrofitting old theaters) impossible to accomplish.  Meanwhile, Edeson worked for many of the great directors of the Golden Age.  And many of his movies are classics:

• All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
• Waterloo Bridge (1931)
• Frankenstein (1931)
• The Invisible Man (1933)
• Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
• Each Dawn I Die (1939)
• They Drive by Night (1940)
• The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• Across the Pacific (1942)
• Casablanca (1942)

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Of the fourteen credited roles in Casablanca, only three were played by people born in the U.S.—Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine; Dooley Wilson as Sam; and Joy Page as Annina Brandel, the Bulgarian newlywed held hostage by Captain Renault's sexual appetite.  European-born actors, especially those from eastern Europe, desperately wanted to participate in this film.  And dozens did.

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Casablanca might be the most patriotic movie I've ever seen.  It's also my all-time favorite movie.  (You can find my 25 Favorite Movies at the Internet Movie Database, listed in ranked order, along with my 101 Favorite Movies, listed alphabetically.)

Casablanca is my all-time favorite movie despite its containing more than a whiff of hypocrisy.  Though the characters repeatedly assail Germany for trying to take over the world, the narrator of the opening sequence matter-of-factly says the city of Casablanca is located in "French Morocco" while a map showing the African continent in the background contains the words "French West Africa," "French Equatorial Africa," and "Belgian Congo."  The Belgians, by the way, committed the most savage and cruel atrocities imaginable against the native peoples they used for slave labor in Congo, atrocities detailed in Adam Hochschild's history of the Belgian rapaciousness, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

The signature exchange in this movie might be the following:

RICK

"How can you close me up?  On what grounds?"

RENAULT

"I'm shocked!  SHOCKED! to find that gambling is going on in here!"

CROUPIER

(to RENAULT in a soft voice): "Your winnings, sir." (Hands RENAULT a wad of French Francs)

RENAULT

(to CROUPIER in a soft voice) "Thank you very much.  (Shouting) Everybody out at once!"

C: Arthur Edeson.  D: Michael Curtiz.

Screenshot for the Week of 1 June 2020: "WEST SIDE STORY" (1961)

Tony Mordente, George Chakiris, and an unknown dancer in West Side Story (1961)

A gang of white New York street thugs think they're entitled to "own" a few square blocks in their west side neighborhood. But a Puerto Rican gang of street thugs has moved in.

What could go wrong?  It doesn't take long for them to break into song.  Why can't we all get along?

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West Side Story has taken its knocks over the past twenty years.  Everyone already knew that Natalie Wood hadn't done her own singing, that Marni Nixon had dubbed her singing voice.  But many fans of the movie were disappointed and somewhat shocked by the news (revealed in background features on the 2003 DVD release) that all the of leading actors' singing voices had been dubbed.  Tony?  Not Tony!  Yes, Tony too.  Not Riff!  He sounds just like Riff!  Yeah, Riff too.

Also, the movie has been called to account for using white actors to play the Puerto Rican roles.  This criticism is especially relevant now because a new version of West Side Story, directed by Steven Spielberg, to be released this Christmas, will feature Puerto Ricans in the Puerto Rican roles.

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West Side Story was the first serious movie I saw at the theater.  It was the film that most influenced me as a moviegoer as I was growing up.  Yet even in January 1962 when I saw it at the age of 7, I was not comfortable with white actors wearing heavy brown makeup and using phony accents to play Puerto Ricans.  I must admit, however, that I only spotted a few of these phonies back then.

I'm glad I saw West Side Story with my sisters and before I learned I wasn't supposed to like musicals.  Thanks to this movie and The Wizard of Oz (1939), I unwittingly paved my way to enjoying The Sound of Music (1965), Damn Yankees! (1958), Fiddler on the Roof (1971), My Fair Lady (1964), the Astaire-Rogers dance musicals, La La Land (2016), the Broadway show Les Misèrables, and many others.

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Most Hollywood musicals were produced before the advent of the widescreen movie in 1953.  They can be fully enjoyed at home even on a smallish TV monitor (e.g., 42" diagonal).  However, West Side Story—shot on location in New York City in 70mm with a cut 2.35:1 aspect ratio—can be fully appreciated only on the big screen in a movie theater.  I don't want to talk you out of watching the movie at home.  By any means necessary see this film, please see it.  However, though not shot in 3D, West Side Story is very nearly 3-dimensional during the dance sequences.  The dance numbers take up a lot of 3rd-dimension space on those New York City streets, the rooftop, and the playground.  Oddly enough, this depth of field is visually enhanced by the big screen.  If you ever get the chance to see it on the big screen, take it.

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Most of the players in West Side Story were professional dancers.  Many had worked with choreographer Jerome Robbins in the Broadway production of the musical, which Robbins had staged.  For the film he would direct the dancing and singing scenes for which he earned the credit of co-Director.  Producer and co-Director Robert Wise would direct the drama scenes.

Robbins worked his dancers rigorously during rehearsals, but his choreography was so exacting and thrilling that he garnered a lifetime's worth of respect and allegiance from those dancers.

The intense rehearsals paid off.  Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise developed "creative differences" during the filming, and Wise, as producer, fired Robbins.  The leading dancer then took over supervision of Robbins's choreography for the rest of the filming.  As of the 2011 release of the restored version of the movie on Blu-ray and DVD, the dancers and the leading actors as well still had hard feelings over Robbins's dismissal.

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West Side Story was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won ten of them.  Best Director Oscars went to Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins.  This was the first time two Oscars were given for Outstanding Direction.

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The movie played for 249 consecutive weeks in Paris, the longest theatrical movie run in French history.

C: Daniel Fapp.  D: Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise.