Screenshots for a Fortnight: "THE PARALLAX VIEW" (1974) (07-20 September 2020)

 

The Parallax View (1974).  C: Gordon Willis.  D: Alan J. Pakula.

Questionnaire that opens a mysterious door to the truth in The Parallax View.

One evening in the winter of 1972-1973 I was walking up N. Hudson Avenue from Hollywood Boulevard, headed to my place at the Lido Apartments when I saw a sheet of paper with typewriting on it, lying in the dry gutter. I picked it up and looked at the front of it.  Hey, it's a Scientology questionnaire!  (The Scientology building was only a few blocks away.)  I love questionnaires, I said to myself.  I walked to the next street lamp, at the corner of Yucca Street, across the street from my apartment building, and stood underneath it to read.

I am informed and believe and thereon allege that this questionnaire originally had multiple sheets of paper and comprised a series of about 200 statements.  I had found only one sheet (2 pages) and I don't know how many statements.  I was supposed to agree or disagree with each one.  After a few seemingly innocuous statements, the questionnaire took a dark turn.  The statements became downright creepy.  Before long I realized who or what the Scientologists were looking for.  Anyone who answered these creepy statements a certain way had to be a psychopath.  I stopped reading: the portrait these statements were drawing sent a chill up my spine.  I quickly looked up and down N. Hudson and Yucca and then stared at the Lido Apartments parking lot across the street for several seconds.  I wondered if I was being watched.  I don't know why.  Maybe that statement in the questionnaire had gotten to me.  (Number 58 in the screenshot was on the Scientology questionnaire page I read.  Maybe all of them in the screenshot were.)  I folded up the paper, shoved it in my pocket, and resumed walking until I got home where I threw it away in my own trash can.  I didn't want any part of a scheme to help Scientologists recruit psychopaths.  (They were probably trying to weed out psychopaths.)  Meanwhile, I braced myself for a knock on my door that never came.

🌎🌎🌎

My wife and I saw The Parallax View (1974) on the big screen in 1974.  I thought it was a masterpiece.  I've seen it several times since then on streaming video (currently free with Amazon Prime).  Today, more than 40 years since I first saw it, I have a better knowledge of film and of masterpieces.  Today, I would say The Parallax View, while not a masterpiece, is nevertheless excellent.  At imdb.com, I have rated it 10 out of 10.

It is chock full of intrigue and a fair amount of action.  It has investigative journalism, pathos, suspense, mystery, drama, humor, poignance, blood, political corruption, assassination, and conspiracy, plus Warren Beatty in his smartass prime, Paula Prentiss, and Hume Cronyn.

🌎🌎🌎

Gordon Willis was one of the best cinematographers of the Modern Era.  His inspired camera shots in this film frequently carry the subtext of the story, as when the camera is zoomed out for a long shot to reveal the vast chasm between the blue-ribbon panel's conclusions (and themselves), on the one hand, and the reality we have witnessed on the other.

His credits include Klute (1971), The Godfather (1972), The Paper Chase (1973), The Parallax View (1974), The Godfather, Part II (1974), All the President's Men (1976) and a string of Woody Allen films from Annie Hall (1977) through The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985).

🌎🌎🌎

In the wee hours of June 17, 1972, a burglary occurred at the national Democratic Party headquarters inside the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. It led to a sea change in the way we view government that we're still fleshing out and examining.  That break-in, and the dogged probing by two reporters for the Washington Post, exposed to public light a criminal enterprise operating out of the basement of the White House, an enterprise run day-to-day by the two closest advisors to the President of the United States, Richard Nixon.

"Watergate," as the crime story came to be called, was a puzzle that Americans received in random pieces, one or two at a time.  The events and information the Post reported were published as soon as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein learned of them and received confirmation of the information from two additional sources.  As a result of this piecemeal uncovering of information, it was difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to fit the pieces together even after many of the pieces were in hand.  The full narrative of Watergate, with a synthesis of all the puzzle pieces, would have to await the monumental publication of Woodward's and Bernstein's All the President's Men in 1974, their blockbuster account of what they'd done and what they'd found, a veritable handbook for modern investigative journalism.

Two random, seemingly unrelated pieces of the puzzle were reported in the first few days of the story in June 1972.  First, one of the Watergate burglars had a personal check for $25,000 made out to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, which was signed by and drawn on the bank account of the midwest fundraising chairman for the Committee.  (Why would a burglar be carrying a check like that?)  And second, the burglars had expensive "bugging" equipment in their possession: they had been trying to install listening devices in the phones of the Democratic headquarters when they were caught.  Instantly, "bugging"—eavesdropping with listening devices—entered the American language and consciousness.  Whatever the burglars were up to, they were in the "bugging" business.

In more of the random bits of reporting, we learned that the White House's criminal operatives had planned to illegally "bug" many of Nixon's perceived enemies, including Democratic politicians, celebrities, news reporters, and ordinary citizens.  And if ordinary citizens were under surveillance, anyone could be "bugged."

The Francis Ford Coppola film The Conversation (1974) tapped into the angst and fear and paranoia beginning to infect the minds of everyday people.  The Conversation is a character study of a professional "surveillance technician" hired by a corporate executive to spend his workdays spying on two ordinary people.  I don't know how young people react to The Conversation today, how they feel when the movie is over.  But back then, when the movie was over and my wife and I walked to our car in the underground parking lot, I could've sworn I heard footsteps following us.

The Parallax View (1974) came on the heels of The Conversation.  Despite the milieux being in the private sector, both movies were aimed at baby boomers who were politically aware citizens,  shellshocked by (1) the combination of a string of assassinations, (2) a conviction that our government was somehow involved, (3) the Vietnam War deceptions, and (4) the Nixon White House criminal enterprise, with a growing sense of paranoia as well as a fear or resignation that the trust we had once placed in our basic institutions, and in the people who ran them, was lost forever.

🌎🌎🌎

Director Alan J. Pakula's next film after The Parallax View was a painstakingly faithful adaptation of the Woodward and Bernstein book, All the President's Men (1976), the third film in what critics dubbed Pakula's "paranoia trilogy," which began with Klute (1971).

🌎🌎🌎

Screenshot for the Week of 31 August 2020: "THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES" (1942)

Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees (1942).  C: Rudolph Maté.  D: Sam Wood.

The Pride of the Yankees (1942) is one of my all-time favorite movies.  Of the estimated 1,500+ movies I've seen, it ranks in my top 100.

It's another of those old movies I saw repeatedly as a kid, and fell in love with, watching local L.A.-area television.  All these movies are movies I love now as much as, if not more than, I did as a kid—The Pride of the Yankees, The Gunfighter (1950), Damn Yankees! (1958), Boy's Town (1938), San Francisco (1936), Little Caesar (1931), Dead End (1937), The Delicate Delinquent (1957), North by Northwest (1959), How Green Was My Valley (1941), King Creole (1958), The Fortune Cookie (1966), The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), Sons of the Desert (1933), just to name a few.

🌎🌎🌎

Rudolph Maté was the cinematographer on this picture.  He was a master at his craft, one of the best cinematographers of the Golden Age.  He might easily have made a career as Rita Hayworth's personal cinematographer.  But he had worked too hard and too long to have settled for that, no offense to Rita Hayworth's other fans besides myself.

To see Maté at his best, watch Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940).  Pay close attention to these scenes: Hitchcock's appearance on screen, walking while reading a newspaper; the crowd gathering at the peace conference in Amsterdam; and the scenes at the windmills, both outside and inside.

His other noteworthy credits include Dodsworth (1936), Stella Dallas (1937), The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938), Love Affair (1939), My Favorite Wife (1940), That Hamilton Woman (1941), To Be or Not to Be (1942), Sahara (1943), and Gilda (1946).

🌎🌎🌎

It is a myth that the movie relies on behind-the-scenes fakery to make the right-handed Cooper look left-handed like Gehrig.  There are even sub-myths: for example, that the film was flipped around to present a mirror image, thus allowing him to "play" right-handed and appear to be left-handed while batting, throwing, and running the bases; that there were mirror-image uniforms; and that Cooper ran the bases in reverse, from home plate to 3rd base to 2nd to 1st. None of it was true.

The truth is Cooper worked out every day with former Brooklyn Dodger (then-current Yankees scout) Babe Herman to practice batting and throwing left-handed.  Former Yankee Lefty O'Doul also helped with his batting and batting stance, not only to try to make him look like a ballplayer while standing in the batter's box and swinging the bat but to look like Lou Gehrig when doing it.  Herman and O'Doul struck out—Cooper looks like a guy who never played baseball in his life.  But bless all three of them for their work ethic and dedication.

🌎🌎🌎

Several people who were or had been on the Yankees' payroll contributed to this movie—then-current Yankees catcher Bill Dickey; former Yankees players Babe Ruth, Lefty O'Doul, Bob Meusal, and Mark Koenig; Yankees announcer Bill Stern; Yankees scout Babe Herman; and former Yankees general manager (and then-current Yankees president) Ed Barrow.  All were consultants to the movie.  Dickey, Ruth, Meusal, Koenig, and Stern all had parts in the movie, playing themselves.  Outside of Yankeedom, sports agent Christy Walsh also served as a consultant.

🌎🌎🌎

Teresa Wright is one of my all-time favorite actors, male or female.  She played Eleanor Twitchell Gehrig in the movie.  She is the only actor ever to have been nominated for Oscars in her first three pictures—The Little Foxes (1942), The Pride of the Yankees (1942), and Mrs. Miniver (1942), all in supporting roles.  She won an Oscar for her role in Mrs. Miniver.

The real Eleanor Gehrig was yet another consultant on the movie.  She lent Wright one of her bracelets to wear on film, the one Lou had given her on their 4th wedding anniversary.  It is now on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

Almost one year before the  movie was released, Eleanor Gehrig had seen enough of the film and of Gary Cooper to say this: "Gary and Lou have the same expressions.  They are the same type of man.  Gary studied every picture of Lou's.  He had every one of Lou's mannerisms down to a science, and he is so like my husband in the picture that there were times when I felt I couldn't bear it."

🌎🌎🌎

The screenplay is terrific, full of smart dialogue and crackling humor.  Jo Swirling and Herman J. Mankiewicz co-wrote it.  Their writing credits go back to silent pictures in the early 1920s.  Jo Swirling's screenplays include Platinum Blonde (1931), The Westerner (1940), Blood and Sand (1941), The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Lifeboat (1943), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), and Guys and Dolls (1955).  Mankiewicz's screenplays include the original Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), Dinner at Eight (1933), Citizen Kane (1941) (co-writer), The Pride of the Yankees (1942), and The Pride of St. Louis (1952).

🌎🌎🌎

This photo of Lou Gehrig signing an autograph is undated but was likely taken during his last month in a Yankees uniform, April 1939.  Gehrig made his final appearance in the Yankees lineup on April 30.  The iron man of baseball was just 36 years old, but the disease that now bears his name had already ravaged most of his strength and much of his coordination.  He told manager Joe McCarthy on May 2, while on the road in Detroit, that he was taking himself out of the lineup "for the good of the team."

Gehrig, beloved in New York, had a storied career.  He played in 2,130 consecutive games, a record that stood for 56 years.  He led his Yankees to six World Series titles.  When he left baseball, he was second only to Babe Ruth in career home runs and slugging percentage, and was one of the all-time leaders in on-base-percentage, total bases, doubles, and triples.  He was a career .340 hitter.

In 1937 he batted .351, had a .643 slugging percentage, 366 total bases, and played in 157 games. But in April 1939, he batted just .143, had a .143 slugging percentage and 4 total bases in 8 games.  Sportswriters and fans were split over whether something was wrong with him physically or whether he had simply lost his baseball abilities.

In mid-June 1939 the Mayo Clinic reached a diagnosis: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a debilitating and ultimately fatal disease.  Two days later the Yankees announced Gehrig's retirement and diagnosis, and the City of New York went into mourning.  Two years later he was dead.

On July 4, 1939, the Yankees held Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day before a sold-out crowd in Yankee Stadium.  They "retired" his uniform number, 4, the first player in MLB history to receive that honor.  He and several Yankees, one-by-one, stood before a microphone at home plate and delivered speeches.  At the end of The Pride of the Yankees we hear a reasonable facsimile of Gehrig's speech, with that memorable line about being "the luckiest man on the face of the earth."

What gets lost in the story is the speech manager Joe McCarthy gave directly before Gehrig's.  McCarthy had loved and treated Gehrig like a son.  He could barely contain his emotions as he ended his speech with: "Lou, what else can I say except that it was a sad day in the life of everyone who knew you when you came into my hotel room that day in Detroit and told me you were quitting as a ballplayer because you felt yourself a hindrance to the team.  My God, man, you were never that."

Screenshot for the Week of 24 August 2020: "RIO BRAVO" (1959)

Dude (Dean Martin) firing his six-gun at the Burdette henchman in the rafters as John T. (John Wayne, in tan leather jacket) and others look on in Rio Bravo (1959)

Ever heard of Russell Harlan?  No?  He was the Director of Photography for this movie.  He was the one who chose this camera position to film Dude (Dean Martin) shooting the man in the rafters.  Another DoP probably would've set the camera up behind the line of Burdette's men, filming Dude from ground level.  Harlan's choice allowed me to take this screenshot.

I'll bet you've seen or at least heard of some of the other movies for which he served as DoP or Cinematographer: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962); Witness for the Prosecution (1957); Red River (1948); The Blackboard Jungle (1955); Run Silent, Run Deep (1958); Hatari! (1962), Pollyanna (1960); Operation Petticoat (1959); Sunrise at Campobello (1960); and Lust for Life (1956), among others.

(By the way, hundreds of movies have been made—from good to great—with brilliant camerawork that gets little or no notice from the audience and none from the Motion Picture Academy.)

Be on the lookout for the following cinematographers from the Golden Age:

• Gregg Toland
• Jack Cardiff
• Karl Struss
• James Wong Howe
• Karl Freund
• Leon Shamroy
• Arthur C. Miller
• Joseph Ruttenburg
• Russell Harlan
• Arthur Edeson
• Robert Burks
• Robert Surtees
• Rudolph Maté
• Sol Polito

Be on the lookout for the following cinematographers from the Modern Era.

• Gordon Willis
• Freddie Young
• Haskell Wexler
• Conrad Hall
• Vittorio Storaro
• Geoffrey Unsworth
• Janusz Kaminiski
• Roger Deakins
• Robert Richardson
• Robert Yeoman
• Darius Khondji
• Emmanuel Lubezki

🌎🌎🌎

It is ironic that John Wayne appeared for Gary Cooper at the 1953 Academy Awards to accept Cooper's Best Actor Oscar for his performance in High Noon (1952).  Wayne hated High Noon.  He hated the character Cooper played, Will Kane.  He probably didn't think much of Cooper either.

Rio Bravo (1959) was Howard Hawks's and John Wayne's reply to High Noon, a movie they both hated. They felt that no self-respecting lawman of the old west would have asked for the townspeople's help under any circumstances, including Kane's.  Wayne called the final scene in High Noon "un-American," erroneously asserting that Kane had stepped on his badge after having thrown it on the ground.  Cooper, in turn, thought Rio Bravo was "so phony, nobody believes in it."

🌎🌎🌎

Howard Hawks has the most eclectic filmography of any director that I'm aware of.  Look at some of the movies he's made besides Rio Bravo: Bringing Up Baby (1938); Sergeant York (1941); Scarface (1932); Ball of Fire (1941); To Have and Have Not (1944); Red River (1948); and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).

🌎🌎🌎

Sight & Sound magazine in the UK has published a poll ranking the "Greatest Films of All-Time" once a decade for eight decades (1952-2022 so far).  The magazine polls a worldwide array of hundreds of film professionals—critics, directors, producers, distributors.  Film professionals, as do we all, come and go the way of all flesh, and so the mix of specific people is different each time.  But Roger Ebert said this poll is "by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies—the only one most serious movie people take seriously."

So why would I write this under a screenshot from Rio Bravo?  Because Rio Bravo made the list. Sight & Sound publishes a list of the top 250 vote-getters, and Rio Bravo made that list at number 63.  It tied with Sunset Blvd. (1950) and Modern Times (1936).  Casablanca (1942) came in at number 84.  Lawrence of Arabia (1962), number 81.  Chinatown (1974), number 78.  The Third Man (1949), Grand Illusion (1937), and Nashville (1975), tied at 73.  Go figure.

U.S. movies don't translate well into foreign languages and cultures if they are dialogue-heavy.  I think that explains most of the apparent discrepancies in the list.  Not that Rio Bravo doesn't deserve its day in the sun or that it didn't deserve to make the 2012 and 2022 lists.  It is worth noting, however, that Dr. Strangelove (1964) and The Conversation (1974) didn't make the list.  Neither did Network (1976), Shane (1953), High Noon (1952), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Graduate (1967), Pulp Fiction (1994), Schindler's List (1993), On the Waterfront (1954), and The Shawshank Redemption (1994).

DoP: Russell Harlan. D: Howard Hawks.

 

Screenshot for the Week of 17 August 2020: "TO CATCH A THIEF" (1955)

Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief (1955)

Alfred Hitchcock had his "A" team on this movie—his favorite actor, Cary Grant; favorite actress, Grace Kelly; favorite assistant director/second-unit director, Herb Coleman; favorite screenwriter, John Michael Hayes; favorite cinematographer, Robert Burks; favorite film editor, George Tomasini; favorite costume designer, Edith Head; plus the best process photographer in the business, Farciot Edouart, shooting French Riviera rear-projection film for Grace Kelly's driving scenes.  So why is To Catch a Thief only a so-so movie?

Why?  Because unlike Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much, nothing has been added to the plot of To Catch a Thief to make resolution of the mystery urgent.  And so the movie is in no hurry.

[SPOILER ALERT] In Rear Window, Jeff and his deputies Lisa and Stella have to investigate and solve the crime before Thorwald flees the city, which could happen at any time.  There's a real sense of urgency.  And in The Man Who Knew Too Much, what could be more urgent than stopping the assassination of a prime minister and rescuing a kidnapped child? [End SPOILER ALERT]

💎💎💎

(More to come.)

C: Robert Burks.  D: Alfred Hitchcock.

Screenshot for the Week of 10 August 2020: "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" (1939)

 

Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Cathy in Wuthering Heights (1939).  C: Gregg Toland.  D: William Wyler.

I have said that when I'm lucky and I capture a great screenshot, it is a collaboration between myself and the cinematographer.  I neglected to add that great cinematography is a collaboration between the cinematographer and everyone else.  You're looking at not only Oscar-winning cinematography, but great acting, direction, art direction, and visual effects (matte painting).

Gregg Toland was one of the greatest cinematographers of all-time.  He won an Oscar for Wuthering Heights (1939).  He might easily have won five more Oscars.  I think he did his best work on Citizen Kane (1941).  In addition to using unique, often distorted camera angles in that film, he invented a cinematography technique that became known as "deep focus"—when the depth of field is so enlarged that the foreground, subject, and background are all in focus.  It has been used routinely by cinematographers ever since.

Here are some of the best films showcasing the talents of Gregg Toland, with the directors he worked for:

• The Wedding Night (1935) [King Vidor]
• Les Misérables (1935) [Richard Boleslawski]
• Dead End (1937) [William Wyler]
• Intermezzo (1939) [George Ratoff]
• Wuthering Heights (1939) [William Wyler]
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939) [John Ford]
• The Westerner (1940) [William Wyler]
• The Long Voyage Home (1940) [John Ford]
• Citizen Kane (1941) [Orson Welles]
• The Little Foxes (1941) [William Wyler]
• Ball of Fire (1941) [Howard Hawks]
• The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) [William Wyler]
• The Bishop's Wife (1947) [Henry Koster]

Toland was subject to bouts of deep depression, which he medicated with alcohol.  Biographers credit his alcohol intake with contributing to the fatal heart attack that cut his brilliant career short at age 44.

💎 💎 💎

I first saw Merle Oberon on Channel 11 as a kid in Los Angeles, back in the 1960s, in one of the hundreds of old movies that were shown on local TV there.  Her face was arresting and exotic.  If I'd seen it only once I'd still remember it.

By the way, Channel 2, the CBS-owned station in L.A., showed one movie a week at 11:35 P.M. on Friday night in a program called "The Late Show." It showed the best movies, but I couldn't stay up that late until I was a teenager, well into my movie buff years.  Channel 9's "Million Dollar Movie" showed the best movies in my viewing time periods.  Channel 11 was a distant third place, but still pretty good.  Between Channels 5, 9, 11, and 13, I could see a couple of different movies every day seven days a week.

The Merle Oberon movie in question was The Cowboy and the Lady (1938), co-starring Gary Cooper and William Demarest.  Over the years of my youth I watched it several times, as I did all the old movies I liked.  Since those years I've seen other Oberon films, most notably The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) with Leslie Howard, one of my all-time favorite movies.  And I still like The Cowboy and the Lady.

💎 💎 💎

William Wyler should be a household name.  His credits as a director are impressive.  Any movie buff worth the label has seen several of his movies even though he or she might be unaware of the Wyler connection.  Here are some of his better films:

• Dodsworth (1936) with Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, and Mary Astor.  Oscar for Best Art Direction.
• Dead End (1937) with Joel McCrea, the "Dead End Kids," Claire Trevor, and Humphrey Bogart.
• Jezebel (1938) with Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, and Faye Bainter.  Oscars for Davis (Best Actress) and Bainter (Supporting Actress).
• Wuthering Heights (1939) with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon.  Oscar for Cinematography (Gregg Toland).
• The Westerner (1940) with Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan.  Oscar for Brennan (Supporting Actor).
• The Little Foxes (1941) with Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, and Teresa Wright.
• Mrs. Miniver (1942) with Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, and Teresa Wright.  Oscars for Garson (Best Actress), Wright (Supporting Actress), Wyler (Director), plus Best Picture, Screenplay, Cinematography (Joseph Ruttenberg), and Music Score.
• The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) with Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, and disbaled Navy veteran Harold Russell.  Oscars for March (Best Actor), Russell (Supporting Actor), Wyler (Director), plus Best Picture, Screenplay, Editing, and Musical Score.
• The Heiress (1949) with Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift.  Best Actress Oscar for de Havilland.
• Detective Story (1951) with Kirk Douglas, Eleanor Parker, and William Bendix.
• Roman Holiday (1953) with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck.  Oscars for Hepburn (Best Actress), Screenplay, and Costume Design.
• Friendly Persuasion (1956) with Gary Cooper, Dorothy McGuire, and Anthony Perkins.
• The Big Country (1958) with Gregory Peck, Charles Bickford, Jean Simmons, Carrol Baker, Charlton Heston, Burl Ives, and Chuck Connors.  Oscar for Ives (Supporting Actor).
• Ben-Hur (1959) with Charlton Heston.  Won 11 Oscars including Heston (Best Actor), Wyler (Director), Cinematography (Robert Surtees), and Best Picture.
• The Children's Hour (1962) with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine.
• Funny Girl (1968) with Barbara Streisand and Omar Sharif.  Oscar for Streisand (Best Actress co-winner with Katharine Hepburn).

How many of these have you seen?

💎 💎 💎

According to Ben Mankiewicz of Turner Classic Movies, Charlton Heston actively sought a role in The Big Country (1958), just for the chance to work with the great William Wyler.  To do so, he swallowed his pride and took on the supporting role of Steve Leech.  Their working relationship was so good, Wyler picked Heston to star in his next picture, Ben-Hur (1959).

💎 💎 💎

For the 1940 Academy Awards (film year 1939), Laurence Olivier and his wife Vivian Leigh were nominated for acting Oscars—Best Actress for Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind) and Best Actor for Olivier (Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights).  Leigh won.  Olivier didn't.  He did win a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in the title role of the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1948, Hamlet.

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!"

🌎🌎🌎

Current imdb fans rank: #47/250

C: Arthur Edeson.  D: Michael Curtiz.

Screenshot for the Week of 27 July 2020: "EAST OF EDEN" (1955)

Julie Harris and James Dean in East of Eden (1955).  C: Ted McCord.  D: Elia Kazan.

In 1954, before James Dean was cast in the film, and at the behest of director Elia Kazan, John Steinbeck met Dean and took an instant dislike to him that never went away.  He did, however, agree with Kazan: whether or not Dean could act, he was Cal Trask.

There's some irony here.  Whether or not the people of Steinbeck's home town of Salinas (where the film and the novel are set) respected his writing ability, which I doubt, they loathed Steinbeck as a person.

Steinbeck was a democratic socialist.  This world view affected his novel-writing, of course, and the people of Salinas—or, at least, the movers and shakers—disowned their native son and actually burned him in effigy periodically. Steinbeck's death in 1968 did not soften his image much in Salinas.

More irony.  About fifteen years ago, my wife and I went to the John Steinbeck Museum in Salinas.  It had opened in 1998. Signs all over town directed us there, so it was easy to find.  We paid our entrance fees and were each handed a little sticker to put on the left upper front of our shirts.  We spent about an hour and a half in the exhibits area and in the bookstore.  I bought my copy of East of Eden there.  I removed my sticker and placed it inside the book on the title page.

We decided to find Steinbeck's grave.  He was buried somewhere in town.  While my wife started looking it up in our tour book (we did not own smartphones), I started driving, not knowing where to head.  But soon I saw a sign with a little arrow underneath the words, "John Steinbeck's Grave."  I followed the sign to another sign at a turn, then another sign and a turn, then sign after sign in the cemetery, leading right up to his gravesite, which we could see from the car.  Of course we got out to get a closer look.

In death, John Steinbeck had become a one-man tourist attraction, a boon to local hotels, restaurants, and other businesses.  The entrepreneurs of Salinas were cashing in on a socialist.

Answers: DAY 8 (7.24.2020)

These two weeks have flown by.  I hope you enjoyed yesterday's game and all the others.

Congratulations to pen lady, Fred, and catbert for correctly identifying all 10 of yesterday's movies.  That was a tough lineup.

And here are those movies:

1.

The Parent Trap (1961)

2.

National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)

3.

Vertigo (1958)

4.

The Money Pit (1986)

5.

Apollo 13 (1995)

6.

The Natural (1984)

7.

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

8.

Barefoot in the Park (1967)

9.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

10.

The Endless Summer (1965)

Bookman's Movie Screenshot Game will return in September.  Until then, I'll see you around the forums.

Thursday, 23 July 2020—Day 8

Welcome to the second Thursday edition of Bookman's Movie Screenshot Game.  I hope you have enjoyed these two weeks as much as I did.  And if you didn't start your day loaded with energy, today's lineup aims to get the blood flowing.

Meanwhile, here are the correct movie titles from yesterday:

1.

Misery (1990)

2.

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

3.

The Usual Suspects (1995)

4.

Million Dollar Baby (2004)

5.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

6.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

7.

Bridesmaids (2011)

8.

The Stranger (1946)

9.

Meet John Doe (1941)

10.

Mississippi Burning (1988)

Congratulations to catbert and Fred for correctly identifying all 10 of yesterday's movies.  Great job.

All right, everyone.

Are you ready to play?

Then let's play!

(Buffer images)

Leslie Howard, 1931.  Photo by Edward Steichen.

Paul Robeson in costume for The Emperor Jones(1932).  Photo by Edward Steichen.

Good luck and have fun!

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.