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.

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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.

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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?

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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).

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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."

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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 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!

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Wednesday, 22 July 2020--Day 7

Welcome to the second Wednesday edition of Bookman's Movie Screenshot Game.  You should notice that the difficulty level has crept up a bit.

Congratulations to catbert for correctly identifying all 10 of yesterday's movies.  pen lady came close.  Here are those movies:

1.

As Good As It gets (1996)

2.

M*A*S*H (1970)

3.

Philadelphia (1993)

4.

The Godfather (1972)

5.

Rio Bravo (1959)

6.

Groundhog Day (1992)

7.

Inherit the Wind (1960)

8.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

9.

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

10.

Viva Zapata! (1952)

All right

Are you ready to play?

Then let's play!

(Buffer Images)

Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor in Camille (1936).  Photo by Clarence Sinclair Bull.

Anna May Wong, 1932.  Photo by Clarence Sinclair Bull.

Good luck and have fun!

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