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.

🌎🌎🌎

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!"

🌎🌎🌎

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.

🌎🌎🌎

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).

🌎🌎🌎

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.

🌎🌎🌎

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.

🌎 🌎 🌎

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.

🌎  🌎  🌎

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.

🌎 🌎 🌎

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.

🌎 🌎 🌎

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.

🌎 🌎 🌎

Wings was added to the National Film Registry in 1997.

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.

🌎🌎🌎

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.

🌎🌎🌎

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. 

🌎🌎🌎

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.

🌎🌎🌎

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.

🌎🌎🌎

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!"

🌎🌎🌎

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."

🌎🌎🌎

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."

🌎🌎🌎

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!]

🌎🌎🌎

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).

🌎🌎🌎

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.

🌎🌎🌎

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.

🌎🌎🌎

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."

💎 💎 💎

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)

🌎🌎🌎

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.

💎 💎 💎

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?

🌎  🌎  🌎

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.

🌎🌎🌎

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.

🌎🌎🌎

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.

🌎🌎🌎

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.

🌎🌎🌎

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.

🌎🌎🌎

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.