Monday, May 15, 2023

remembrance of things past: Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

   L'année dernière a Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad). Cocinor présente; Pierre Courau et Raymond Froment présentent; scénario et dialogues, Alain Robbe-Grillet; réalisation, Alain Resnais. New York, NY: Kino Lorber, c[2019]. Widescreen. Originally released as a motion picture in 1961. Extras: audio commentary; trailers; booklet essay; interview with filmmaker and more. Director of photography, Sacha Vierny; editors, Henri Colpi, Jasmine Chasney; music, Francis Seyrig. Performers: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pioëff.
     Summary: a man is convinced he met an enigmatic woman the previous year at the same location, and they perhaps had a flirtation. A second man, possibly the woman's lover or husband, or psychiatrist, repeatedly intimidates the first man. Their relations unfold through flashback shards that never quite fit into place, their lives a hall of mirrors that never reveal a true self.


      it seems that we have met before ...

      I stumbled upon Last Year at Marienbad purely by accident. Would that I could offer a more edifying account, but truth be told I was perusing one of my favorite tomes on film, DK’s excellent The Movie Book, and being on something of a French movies kick lately I turned to the New Wave section, and there it was, in a full two-page essay. I admit it was the familiar wide-angle photo of the gardens that hooked me and convinced me I had to see this movie. And I’m glad I did. By the way the Kino Lorber DVD looks absolutely smashing and confirms the film’s repute as one of the most beautiful black and white films of all time.
     Marienbad’s story, such as it is, is pitifully thin: in an indeterminate time (probably the early Twentieth Century), at a luxury chateau in central Europe, a man claims he met a woman there, or somewhere, the previous year, while other well-heeled guests lurk zombie-like in the background.
     In many respects Marienbad is a profoundly unsettling film – dreamlike, funny, romantic, absurdist, self-parodic, and frightening. It both challenges and plays tricks on us in the subterranean realms of our conscious and unconscious experience. In other words, it veritably dances with, through, and around, our memory. Now over six decades vintage, Marienbad has inspired hundreds of thousands, probably millions of words, ranging from the damning to the adulatory. And every possible interpretation of its enigmatic structure and content, provided by intellects far keener than mine, has been attempted: feminist, behaviorist, romanticist, Freudian, supernatural, socio-economic, political, literary, and of course purely cinematic takes have spewed forth over time. Thus those of us who have experienced its seductive powers more recently and feel the urge to write something about it are in the embarrassing position of simply belaboring the obvious or repeating what’s already been repeated before. Still, I offer my two cents.
     Beginning at the end, as it were: as I make my way through Kino’s incredibly generous helping of bonus features my favorite is Memories of Last Year at Marienbad [1]. With German narration and done in eminently behind-the-scenes style, this documentary gives us an informal look at the production history of Last Year at Marienbad. Comprised of raw footage from the shooting of the film that was captured on 8mm stock and at just under 50 minutes, Memories is practically a short feature film in itself and almost as compelling and enigmatic as the original. Ranking a close second among the extras is Resnais's short film (21 min.) All the Memory of the World (Toute la mémoire du monde), which looks like a warm-up for Marienbad with its smoothly gliding camera inside a cavernous edifice. After all, what could be a better metaphor for memory than the memories contained in their tangible, albeit fragile form, books? Indeed the Bibliothèque Nationale might well claim to have 'all the memory of the world,' but aren't all libraries really caches of memory?

    
the greatest movie(s) of all time?

     But now a digression for some editorial comment: in vain I looked for Marienbad to be listed, if not in the top ten, then certainly the top twenty, of the most recent (2022) incarnation of BFI’s/Sight and Sound’s much vaunted poll of the greatest movies of all time. I’ll try to avoid the throwaway lines that any compilation, be it made by an individual, or committee (however august) of ‘greatest movies’ is intensely subjective and more or less useless, but nonetheless always grist for lively controversy. Moreover, it’s fun and satisfying to see one’s pet favorites turn up among the listees. Anyhow as you might suspect I was intensely disappointed to discover that Marienbad didn’t even crack the top 100, and it’s cold comfort to see it listed as tied for 169th place in the critics' poll, which must qualify as a respectable honorable mention. Kudos to those seventeen critics and seven directors (from the 1,639 critics and 480 directors who participated) who voted for it [2]. Some further research yielded that Marienbad tied for 26th in the 1962 poll, which in this writer’s humble opinion is much closer to its actual artistic worth, though still underrated. By the way the films it was tied with in 1962 were: Tokyo Story, Intolerance, Pickpocket, Wild Strawberries, Night and Fog, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Limelight. Some pretty fast company indeed [3]. That it could have slid so far in the intervening six decades is a bit of a mystery – great films are supposed to gain in stature over time. But the explanation may be that, in the intervening sixty years, thousands of feature films have been released and there’s simply more competition for the top spots, also that a larger mix of critics gives us different results. It must also be admitted that some prominent critical luminaries famously panned the film upon its initial release, and some still do, so best to simply place it all in the to-each-his-own-taste file – however questionable that taste may be.
     In any event, and getting back to the film itself: inasmuch as Marienbad’s influence has been discussed, at length, in the critical and scholarly literature, less attention has been paid to its antecedents, i.e. the films that anticipated its lush, dreamlike glory. The poetic aspects and surreal visuals recall Cocteau’s Orphée and La Belle et La Bête, and the visual poetry even brings to mind Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. Marienbad also mirrors Dames’ comedy-of-manners tone in which the well-turned supporting characters float, trance-like, around the principals. Moreover, the relationship between the hero and heroine in Marienbad has parallels to the relationship between Paul Bernard and Élina Labourdette in Les Dames and that of Jean Marais and Josette Day in La Bête. The sumptuous, baroque design qualities have an obvious precedent in L'Herbier’s L'Inhumaine. And here and there we even see traces of, of all films, Metropolis. The symbolic game of cards and matchsticks recalls the chess duel in The Seventh Seal, and indeed it’s not so much of a reach to see Marienbad as a Bergmanesque film. Other precursors might include Kurosawa’s Rashomon and of course Citizen Kane [4], each film being, among other things, a meditation on the shifting perception of memory, recollection and indeed reality itself. And the references to Hitchcock's Vertigo (which appeared only a couple years prior) are almost too obvious that I don't have to mention them - but I will. Or does Marienbad's pedigree go back even further, much further? Some see Marienbad as a rerun of the Orphic legend from Greek mythology.


     The floating, somnambulist vibe of the characters (both major and minor), the relentlessly prowling camera, and the general disjointedness of the narrative recall the experimental fantasies of Maya Deren from the 1940s. Similarly, there’s a whiff of John Parker‘s noirish nightmare of a film, Dementia/Daughter of Horror, which likewise plays tricks with recall, repression and the nature of reality [5]. Echoes of Marienbad’s dreamlike, surreal ambience even find their way into American television shows of the era like One Step Beyond and The Twilight Zone (especially the 'After Hours' episode). But for me the two films that are conjured up when I watch Marienbad bookend it a year apart in either direction: La Dolce Vita and Carnival of Souls [6], the latter right down to the creepy organ music backdrop.
     But ultimately the film must be accepted on its own terms and stand on its own merits, which are considerable if far from universally accepted. Some complain that Last Year at Marienbad is all surface and no substance, and this opinion isn’t too far off the mark, and maybe that’s exactly the point: that the most pleasurable way to experience Marienbad is simply to marvel at the incredible visual (and aural) beauty of the film, the smoothly gliding camera work, Chanel’s scrumptious wardrobe for Delphine Seyrig, and the other innumerable, purely stylistic, felicities, and leave the cosmic insights to someone else.
     That the film is a masterpiece is excruciatingly, even dismayingly, self-evident. Nonetheless, it would be terribly elitist and condescending to say that those who dismiss, ridicule or outright hate the movie simply don’t understand it, so I won’t say it. But herein is the great irony: there’s not that much to understand about the film. Permanently frozen in a (probably) 1930s gestalt that’s at once modern, timely and timeless, Last Year at Marienbad is at heart a very simple movie.

   [1] In this rough-around-the-edges, gauzy, cloudy home movie version of Marienbad, putting the word ‘memories’ at the beginning of the title is supremely apt, because the film Last Year at Marienbad is about, more than anything else, memory and the elusive, unreliable nature of memories. Memories of Last Year at Marienbad’s fuzzy, flickering images are a perfect metaphor for Marienbad’s uncertain, always shifting center of gravity.
   [2] Interesting bit of trivia: in the 2012 poll a nearly exact same number (sixteen critics and seven directors) voted for Marienbad. Does this imply a solidifying of its (still undervalued) reputation by those in the know?
   [3] Fast company is right, well, maybe. It’s a mixed verdict of how these once-formidable movies have fared in critical esteem in the six subsequent decades. In the 2022 critics’ poll, the films cited from 1962 placed, respectively: Tokyo Story 4 (ranks #4 in the directors’ poll as well); Intolerance, tied 225; Pickpocket, tied 136; Wild Strawberries, tied 108; Night and Fog, not ranked [among the top 250]; The Passion of Joan of Arc, tied 21; Limelight, not ranked.
      Asie: there'a certain ironic justice in that Delphine Seyrig, who plays Last Year at Marienbad's mystery woman, is the lead in the (at least for the time being) officially anointed 'greatest movie of all time,'
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (2022 BFI/S&S critics' poll).
   [4] It’s probably not too much of an exaggeration to cite Orson Welles as the great unseen presence on so many black and white films (including French New Wave) from the classic era of roughly 1940-1965.
   [5] A novel, if not unique, interpretation of the film is that Marienbad is more or less a ghost story in which the characters are ghosts who wander about in a purgatorial netherworld, though whether they know they are ghosts or not, and exactly where they’re all headed is a bit , quite a bit actually, unclear. The ghost story meme is reinforced by the mortuarial organ music which the film shares with the above-referenced American horror cult classic Carnival of Souls, which appeared at almost the same time and similarly has a spectral incognizance subtext.
    My own rather idiosyncratic but probably not totally original take is that the film is basically visualized poetry: our narrator’s sing-song delivery and the vague, poetic nature of the words he speaks suggest this. In this regard we may see his narrative as poetry disguised as prose and the film itself as poetic imagery disguised as narrative film. Some might see it as a filmic representation of a dream, but aren’t all movies to some extent?
[6] Such seemingly unlikely choices are, on further reflection, eminently (if arguably) apropos in the context of comparison with a film that's itself about hazily recalled confluences and connections.

Sunday, May 7, 2023

the best film noir femmes fatales



    I hate these kinds of lists, much of the time anyway. But since I’m on a bit of a list binge these days, insofar as compiling them, I thought I’d share a few thoughts and, more to the point, create my own, highly subjective, ergo highly arguable, list of the best femmes fatales in noir history.

    Hitchcock once famously said that a thriller is only as good as its villain, and likewise it’s not too much of a stretch to say that a film noir is only as good as its femme fatale. Aside: I’ve noticed that the phenomenon of the femme fatale in the classic noir era [1] peaked in the late Forties and dropped off around 1950. Though indeed there are exceptions, I’m hard pressed to name a lot of classic femmes fatales that appeared after 1950. Even the greatest noirs of that era – Touch of Evil, Night and the City, Kiss Me Deadly, Sweet Smell of Success – to cite just some of the best known exemplars, lack a true femme fatale [2] (there’s at least one notable mid-1950s exception, see below).

    The fatal woman isn’t really new, much less a creation of mid Twentieth Century male fantasies (and fears). You could say she’s been around as long as human history and storytelling has been around [3]. The femme fatale runs rampant in opera, for example, but the best-known incarnation is surely Carmen. Indeed she more or less set the mold for the modern femme fatale, if we define ‘modern’ as beginning in the late Nineteenth Century. Be that as it may, for better or worse, in the popular imagination the image of the femme fatale is pretty much cemented definitively in mid- and late 1940s crime and thriller movies.
    The noir literature then is voluminous and there’s almost as much written on the femme fatale as that of film noir itself (aren’t the two really the same thing? Well, maybe, and maybe not). In any case, aside from purely cinematic takes, feminist, behaviorist, romanticist, Freudian, supernatural, socio-economic, political, and literary analyses have surged forth.

    Comment: in the films cited below, most of them anyway, it’s the role the actress is best remembered for. Seldom, if ever, did the respective actresses shine so well as they did in their essays on the dark woman. Stanwyck and Gardner are a couple of exceptions who had substantial careers and other roles just as memorable. Second comment: as opined in my post on ‘greatest movies’ elsewhere on this blog, at the top level – in the case of femmes fatales, the best twenty or so – the standings are pretty much interchangeable, and as such one shouldn’t make too much out of the specific rankings. Still, without further ado here then are my choices for the best femmes fatales in noir history [4].


“You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man”

    1) Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner). Body Heat. Turner's Matty Walker is ensconced in the noir pantheon as one of the deadliest of the deadly, and perhaps the most remorseless – and relentless – of them all. Turner’s wondrous performance can be appreciated for its many layers and subtle touches, all the more miraculous considering Body Heat was her first starring role in a major film.

    2) Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer). Out of the past. As Out of the Past’s reputation has grown over the years to where it vies with Double Indemnity as the consensus quintessential noir, so has Jane Greer’s essay as the incredibly manipulative Kathie, sometimes kept woman, sometimes wayward waif, always very sexy, and very dangerous. Miss Greer had a fairly solid career as an actress but never reached these heights again.

    3
) Vera (Ann Savage). Detour. Vera isn’t evil so much as repellent, both physically and morally, and utterly opportunistic, so her lofty rank may be a little generous. Still, she’s a one-of-a-kind villain and a force to be reckoned with. That fingernails on the blackboard voice is cringeworthy just thinking about it, but her tubercular cough engenders at least some sympathy.

   4
) Lulu (Louise Brooks). Pandora’s Box.  Brooks’ Lulu is a decade or so outside the classic noir era but she merits a place simply because she set the template for all the cinematic femmes fatales that were to follow, though Theda Bara’s ‘vamp’ of a decade earlier might merit a mention as a precursor.  
  
 5
) Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). Double Indemnity. For a long time Stanwyck’s proletarian schemer was the default choice for the best noir femme fatale, but changing tastes and greater visibility of other films have caused her to slip a rung or two, but she’s still pretty competitive for a spot in the top ten.

   6
) Sherry Peatty (Marie Windsor). The Killing. No compilation of noir fatale femmes would be complete without at least one Marie Windsor character, and this one’s a doozie. In the noirverse Marie Windsor is probably best known for her essays in Narrow Margin and The Killing, but for sheer mean-spiritedness and nastiness it’s no contest. She’s simply unforgettable as Elijah Cook Jr.’s trophy wife from Hell. Her duplicitousness, greed, and do-whatever-it-takes attitude causes all sorts of problems and leads directly to the film’s violent denouement.

   7
) Paula Craig (Janis Carter). Framed.  It was pretty much a toss-up between Miss Carter’s deadly turns in Framed and Night Editor. She more or less plays the same character in both films but I went with Framed for Paula Craig’s utter ruthlessness and callousness: she’s willing to sacrifice two, maybe three, men to satisfy her lust for money. Janis Carter is one of the true unsung (anti)-heroines in the noir hall of infamy, and she remains to be rediscovered. Confined to B movie purgatory for most of her career, she disappeared from the movies entirely in the early 1950s. Look for her also as the temptress in The Woman on Pier 13
    See also Leslie Brooks' Claire Hanneman in Blonde Ice. Her murderous female is almost a carbon copy of the two Carter roles mentioned above. Both women specialized in B movies, and moreover, Leslie Brooks even bears a vague physical resemblance to Janis Carter, and likewise remains an under-the-radar noir vixen.

     8
) Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie). Decoy. One of the most irredeemable bad girls in the canon is Margot Shelby. The near forgotten Jean Gillie does a brilliant job of projecting the woman’s malevolence, obscured by a veneer of affluence and civility. Once we’ve heard her maniacal laugh when she finds the loot, can we ever forget it?

     9) Katharine ‘Kitty’ March (Joan Bennett). Scarlet Street. A bit of a sleeper, this one. Like Claire Trevor, Joan Bennet is under-appreciated as a noir actress, and this is her definitive role. Kitty March is as manipulative as they come and Bennett’s interpretation almost makes her a sympathetic character.

     10) Helen Grayle (Claire Trevor). Murder, My Sweet.  Among noir’s dangerous women Claire Trevor has never really gotten her due as she tends to be overshadowed by other actresses of the era, of both a noir and other persuasion. Thus her femmes fatales don’t quite have the high profile of the likes of Kathie Moffat, Matty Walker, or Kitty Collins. But her noir credentials are right up there with the best, having appeared in such classics as Born to Kill, Raw Deal, Key Largo, Crack-Up and of course Murder My Sweet, as well as the quasi-noir Borderline. But it’s the Helen/Velma character that takes pride of place for spitefulness and evil. Hers is perhaps the greater evil simply because she’s more or less sane, or at least more sane than her counterpart in Born to Kill.
   Trivia: Trevor nabbed an Oscar for her turn as the alcoholic floozy in Key Largo. It’s one of the few instances in which a noir won an Academy Award in a major category.

     11
) Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner) The Killers. Along with Rita Hayworth in Gilda *, Ava Gardner’s Kitty is my choice as the best visual incarnation of the femme fatale when she wears that slinky black dress. This was her first major role and she hits it out of the park. She even gets to sing a tune, using her own voice!

  
* However, for conniving and evil I prefer Hayworth’s blondized Elsa Bannister in Lady From Shanghai.

     12
) Jacqueline Gibson (Jean Brooks). The Seventh Victim. Jacqueline Gibson is a most unusual entry in this compilation in that her cinematic pedigree is supernatural horror and not the crime thriller. Some might even argue that Victim isn’t film noir at all. So be it. Then again, it has most of the noir tropes. But make no mistake, there’s a fatale quality about Jacqueline: several dead bodies along the way prove it. Then there’s her goth, vampire chic look: Cleopatra flapper wig, dark fur coat, somnambulist visage.**

   ** Brooks reprised the Jacqueline character, sort of, with her her black drenched garb, lugubrious persona, and ambiguous sexuality, in the (post)WW2 exploitation thriller Women in the Night (1948), in which she plays the exotic Maya. Women in the Night, by the way, was Brooks' last film.

  13
) The Princess (María Casares). Orphée. Much like the previously cited Seventh Victim, Orphée is not a true film noir but rather a supernatural fantasy with a few noirish touches, not least of them the character of The Princess, who is no less than the Angel of Death herself. The role is played to icy perfection by the great María Casares, and her all black look makes her a natural for the femme fatale hall of fame. Indeed the messenger of death is about as fatale a character as can be. See also Gloria Holden’s lesbian vampire in the creepy 1936 film Dracula’s Daughter

     14
) Lily MacBeth (Ruth Roman). Joe MacBeth. Yes, I'm getting quite a bit over my usual top ten limit, but I just caught Joe MacBeth again and simply can't leave out Ruth Roman's brittle take as Lady MacBeth. In fact I can't imagine a better choice to play the overly ambitious femme in Twentieth Century packaging. The film just gets better upon repeated viewings, and Roman's performance is a treasure. She remains a much under-appreciated actress, and even considering she was in her share of noirs, this may well be her darkest, and most evil, character. 

[1] The consensus bookend years are 1941-1958, though I’m quite a bit more restrictive myself as I’d put the classic era as roughly 1944-1952.

[2] In the case of Kiss Me Deadly the psychotic Lily/Gabrielle might fit the mold, if we interpret the definition liberally. On the other hand, she’s not classic fatale material in that she lacks the uptown glamour and style we usually associate with the character. By the way, when I opine above that “ … I’m hard pressed to name a lot of classic femme fatales that appeared after 1950,” I’m talking in the context of the generally accepted classic era that ran until about 1959. This is not necessarily my classic era, see above. On the other hand, the films of neo-noir, or post-noir, or postmodern noir, take your pick, are considered for this exercise (perfectly clear?). Ergo the explanation for Matty Walker’s inclusion and lofty ranking.

[3] The first usage of the term in the English language is rather vague, but sources tend to go with the 1880s or 1890s, though some opt for the early Twentieth Century – in either case exact references are difficult to come by.
    Aside: The mid-Twentieth Century film version of the fatale femme can be seen as a more modern variant of the enchantress, sorceress or witch, characters which have been around it seems since time immemorial. Some of the better known examples from antiquity are Circe and Medea.
 
[4] But what about Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falson, you might ask? As brought to life in Mary Astor’s brilliant performance, Brigid fits most of the tropes, but as hinted above, my rather arbitrary definition of the noir chronology begins around 1944, and Falcon dates from 1941. And besides, though it has the requisite private detective, urban milieu, and much the look of noir, I don’t really consider Falcon to be film noir at all, but rather a tough, very well told detective story. 


Further reading: Mark Jancovich, “Female monsters: Horror, the ‘Femme Fatale’ and World War II,” European Journal of American Culture, v27 n2 (July 2008), pp133-149; Samantha Jane Lindop,  Femmes, filles, and hommes: postfeminism and the fatal(e) figure in contemporary American film noir. PhD Thesis, School of English, Media Studies and Art History, The University of Queensland, 2014.

Tuesday, May 2, 2023

high gloss trash, and a second ten


     Myra Breckinridge. Beverly Hills, California: Twentieth Century-Fox Home Entertainment, [2018]. DVD. Screenplay by Michael Sarne and David Giler; produced by Robert Fryer; director of photography, Richard Moore; film editor, Danford B. Greene; music, Lionel Newman. Directed by Michael Sarne; produced and released by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. Originally produced as a motion picture in 1970. Based on the novel by Gore Vidal.
    Summary: after going to Europe to have a sex change operation, Myron Breckinridge is transformed into Myra, who claims to be Myron's widow. Performers: Raquel Welch, Mae West, John Huston, Rex Reed, Farrah Fawcett, Roger Herren, Calvin Lockhart, Jim Backus, John Carradine, William Hopper.


    I’m usually all in for bad movie classics, just out of pure curiosity. Besides, guilty pleasures or no, some provide considerable entertainment value. Anyhow it was a little out of character that I waited so long to catch Myra Breckinridge. But since there’s a DVD copy at my local library I decided, what the heck, I’ll give it a whirl and see what happens. I was happily surprised. Contrary to its reputation as one of the worst movies of all time, Myra Breckinridge is actually pretty good, in a Valley of the Dolls sort of way [1]. Say what you will about Myra Breckinridge, it’s seldom dull, and from a purely technical standpoint, rather skillfully put together. Approached in a certain frame of mind, MB can be immensely entertaining. And maybe there’s a certain ironic justice at work in that, for all its supposedly chaotic production disasters and the subsequent critical savaging it received, the creators of Myra may well have gotten in the last word after all. Today it’s considered a bona fide cult classic and has a devoted, if small, following, and as a result its reputation steadily increases with the passage of time.

    The film’s legendary haphazard production history actually gives us some, perhaps unintended, aesthetic benefits as the bumpy narrative plays with our expectations, then frustrates them. To wit, as Myra in most leisurely fashion gives our stud Rusty his physical exam, we suspect it will culminate in a more or less conventional sexual encounter, and thus her wild ride-the-bronc scene is all the more effective because it’s so unexpected (and, it must be admitted, shockingly over-the-top in its bad taste). Another element of unexpectedness is that the scene also reverses (is that the word?) the usual woman-on-top configuration. Other felicitous results are the Golden Age film clips interspersed, albeit somewhat jarringly, throughout. There’s also the Myra/Mary Ann quasi-lesbian encounter, which teases us with affectionate moments, but never goes all the way to the Sapphic heart of the matter (it seems that Mary Ann was just too reluctant, probably because she was straight). For all that the scene is sensitively and beautifully done, it’s a pale shadow of the Cynthia Myers/Erica Gavin steamy encounters in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which are far superior in their titillating depiction and resultant emotional impact.

"OK, boys. Get your resumes out"
   Which brings us to the movie I always associate with MB, and that’s the aforementioned Beyond the Valley of the Dolls [2], henceforth simply referred to as Dolls. Both were released in the same year, by the same studio. Both employ the same garish color palette, and both go gangbusters in satirizing the film industry, California counterculture, gender roles, superficiality of American materialism, and anything else they could think of. And both reap the benefits of, shall we say, hindsight. Yes, time has been kind to Myra and Dolls, especially Dolls. MB, for all its good qualities, somehow lacks Dolls’ warmth, optimism and innocence, even with the latter’s greater nudity and more overt sexual situations. Moreover, Dolls is straight up the far more polished product, in a word, just a better film, even if it lacks Mae West [3].

    Speaking of Mae West, I’ve never been much of a fan. To me there was always a one-note quality to her saucy persona. But here, as the man-eating agent Leticia Van Allen, she’s just right. She seems to be having a great time essaying what’s basically a parody of herself. What’s more she just looks great: actually I think she’s sexier in MB than in her glory days in the early Thirties.

    One unexpected pleasure was a cameo by the usually virtuous William Hopper of Perry Mason fame. In MB he’s cast against type as a far right (and eminently hypocritical, corrupted and corruptible) judge. Quite the send-up of the ultra-conservative political views of his mother, the infamous gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Whatever the context, the joy of seeing Hopper is tinged with a certain sadness as he died in 1970 at the age of fifty-four, just a few months before MB’s release. It was his last film and as such a somewhat inglorious end to a solid if under-appreciated career.

    The real revelation of Myra Breckinridge is Raquel Welch. In the title role she delivers the performance of a career, and we get a glimpse of just how good an actress she was. It serves as a bittersweet reminder of the career that might have been had she been taken seriously as an actress and not always typecast as a sex bomb [4].

    As for my somewhat superfluous ‘best movies of all time’ second ten, what can be said? I seem to be on a best/most kick these days, and I thought another list wouldn’t hurt. It might have been out of a sense of frustration that, in compiling my original top ten, indeed I had to limit the list to ten titles. Ergo a second ten. Actually numbers eleven to twenty might be a more accurate description. Readers will note that I’ve fudged a bit and included ties this time around. So be it. Anyhow drumroll please, here they are, more or less in chronological order:

tie: Metropolis, M
Olympia
The Seventh Victim
Les Enfants du Paradis
Meshes of the Afternoon
The Red Shoes
tie: The Seventh Seal, L’Avventura
The Naked Kiss
tie: Death in Venice, Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Blade Runner


[1] The original Valley of the Dolls, that is, not the ‘Beyond’ version. More on that film in the post above. By the way both Valley of the Dolls and Beyond the Valley are discussed elsewhere in these pages.
[2] Indeed it seems I’m not alone in conflating the two camp/trash classics, as over the years it’s not been uncommon for theaters to screen Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as a double feature.
 [3] Part of the explanation may be that Dolls was helmed by Russ Meyer, who was probably just a better director than Michael Sarne. Another possibility is that Meyer may have been given a freer hand by the studio.
[4] In a case of MB paralleling Dolls again, Hollywood also missed the boat on Cynthia Myers, not as good an actress as Raquel Welch by a long shot but her equal in sex appeal and screen charisma. Another instance of a career that might have been.

Monday, May 1, 2023

a life well lived

    Florczak, Robert. Errol Flynn: the illustrated life chronology. Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2022. Summary: "Though there have been myriad books on Errol Flynn - scores of biographies, film studies, analyses, etc. - there has never been one that unfurls his dashing life day-by-day, predominantly through photos, letters, news clippings, and documents. This book does so: from Flynn's birth in Hobart, Australia in 1909 through to his death in Vancouver, Canada in 1959. Culled from over 11,000 images in the author's personal collection (many rarely or never before published), from the author's own travels around the world to photograph locations key to Flynn's life, and with text gathered from four years research in the Warner Bros. Archives, the USC Cinematic Arts Library, and the Margaret Herrick Library. Flynn's colorful life was lived out on the world stage and a better candidate for a book of this style would be hard to find." [provided by the publisher].


    With the possible exception of Marilyn Monroe, more books have been written about Errol Flynn than any other film actor. Alas, biographers have not always been generous or forgiving. Indeed, in the first four decades or so after his death most of the Flynn literature focused on the more sensationalist aspects of his life and career, tarring him with a broad brushstroke: lecher, alcoholic, deadbeat, drug addict, Nazi sympathizer, connoisseur of underage girls, and all around out-of-control hedonist. Few public figures have had such a checkered afterlife. Lost in all the lurid, and largely unsubstantiated, haze was anything meaningful about Flynn the actor, or the writer [1].
    But around the year 2000 things began to change, and it’s probably no coincidence that about this time new forms of technology, principally the DVD and the Internet, were just beginning to hit their stride. In the meantime a few pro-Flynn books appeared, including the first scholarly biography [2]. Another factor was the Flynn centenary of 2009, which helped keep the momentum going, and a few years later there was the generally sympathetic portrayal in the film The Last of Robin Hood. Today there are numerous blogs and fan pages, and perhaps more important, DVDs that have been issued which represent a huge swath of the Flynn oeuvre, all of which give us a more rounded portrait of the man and artist.
    Packed full of letters, telegrams, notes, diary entries, receipts, cables, memos, images and various other memorabilia, The Illustrated Life Chronology is more a huge scrapbook, lovingly collected and organized, than a coffee table book or conventional biography. Author Florczak is to be commended for yeoman service in what was obviously a labor of love. While the book is vaguely pro-Flynn, Florczak doesn’t play the role of apologist or vilifier, rather he lets the material speak for itself, and likewise lets the man literally speak for himself. Especially welcome are the images, which include posters of all the films. Also of note are the many informal photos of Flynn and friends, associates and family, which capture Flynn in more candid moments. The rich detail provides aspects of Flynn's life that aren't so well covered: to wit, it struck me how often he was ill and thus the work on a film had to be shut down while he recuperated. This is surprising in view of his athletic, energetic screen image.
    It would be misleading to say that with the present book the long overdue rehabilitation of Errol Flynn is complete. No such thing; he was a man of many shadings and complexities, and it's just too tempting for biographers and commentators to focus on the lurid and scandalous aspects of his life and career. Then again, all the huffing and puffing may be to some extent moot. As  author
Florczak points out, for all the fame in his lifetime and the more recent comeback, if you will, he remains a marginal figure in comparison to his better known contemporaries. Perhaps the explanation is Flynn's (in his later years) dissolute public persona, or that he was never taken seriously as an actor, or that the heroic swashbuckler film has gone out of fashion (when a swashbuckler movie does get made these days, it tends to be parody). Whatever the case, the present volume is in its modest way a corrective, and as such allows us to better appreciate as a human being and artist the phenomenon that was Errol Flynn. In short Errol Flynn: the Illustrated Life Chronology is catnip for Flynn fans and will appeal to anyone interested in golden age Hollywood.

    1 An exception to this rather tawdry history was, ironically enough, Flynn’s own autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways, published only a few months after his death. Admittedly of dubious accuracy in many of the details, nonetheless the book has a spiritual truth and honesty as it captures the voice and panache of the man himself. And it isn’t totally self-serving: Flynn recalls with relish, sometimes a little too much relish, the more rascally side of his personality. Still, Wicked Ways remains the most exuberant and entertaining biography of a film actor to date, perhaps of any Hollywood personality.  
    2 Thomas McNulty, Errol Flynn: the Life and Career, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004.