Cinemonkey

The Music Man [King of Jazz Criterion Collection]

 

Sometimes the extras are better than the movie.

This is no knock on The King of Jazz, a Universal “revue” musical from 1930. The film is remarkably undated. But King is also the inspiration for infectious accolades from a host of writers and musicians, all evidenced on the new Criterion Collection Blu-Ray, which restores the work to its former colorful, infectious glory. Writer Gary Giddins calls the film an “ice cream sundae of a movie. Delicious.”

The King of Jazz is built around the Paul Whiteman orchestra, which contained some of the best musicians of the time. Whiteman was a guy from Denver with daddy issues, who landed in New York City and rose to become one of the most popular acts of the 1920s. Hollywood summoned, and after a year, the band leader and the executives settled on an approach – an old fashioned revue, a series of skits, musical interludes, blackouts, and solos that highlighted the variety of talents in the orchestra, and the burgeoning versatility of movie sound and color (it’s in two-strip Technicolor).

The label “King of Jazz” was dreamed up by a publicist. To his credit, though, once Whitman got the hang of Manhattan, he realized that the real jazz players were the influx of African-Americans from the south and midwest, and he tried to place them in the band. Objections from his managers put the kibosh on that – he wouldn’t be booked in the South, and not even in some Northern hotels. Whitman’s end run was to hire them as arrangers and background musicians. The upshot is that Whiteman went from a traditional band leader with jazz-inflected portions of the act which let improvisation fly, to a groundbreaker and trendsetter. His “signature” was Rhapsody in Blue, which his musicians introduced, though he later had a falling out with George Gershwin, who does not appear in the film to play the piece.

Less an orchestra, really, than a clutch of interlaced individual acts, the band included numerous masters of their trade. Bing Crosby appears here in his first screen appearance as one of the trio The Rhythm Boys. Other notables include Mike Pingitore, the banjo player, Joe Venuti, the violin player who formed part of the band’s sextet, and John Arledge at the keyboard, along with Charlie Greco. Other performers on parade include the Sisters G, The Bronx Sisters, the Russell Markert Girls (later known as the Rockettes), Al “Rubber Legs” Norman, and Jack Fulton. Actors include Walter Brennan, Slim Summerville, and John Boles, later a screen heartthrob. The precious seconds of Pingitore and Venuti may be the only screen footage of the performers. Arguably the most famous sequence is the performance of “Happy Feet.”

The supplements tell the viewer as much as the disc space allows, and those interested can pursue more information in a book about the making of the film by James Layton and David Pierce, who are represented on the disc.

The best place to start is the video introduction by Giddins, who contextualizes Whiteman and isolates some of the joys of the film (16:50). [Update: the second volume of Mr. Giddins's Bing Crosby biography, covering the war years, is to be published in 2019.] Having seen the movie, the next step is to listen to the audio commentary track, with Giddins as the host, and with color commentary by writer Gene Seymour, and bandleader Vince Giordano. One interesting sidelight comes when Giddins mentions the fad for performers pretending to be kids, such as Fanny Brice doing Baby Snookims. He is baffled as to why and how this trope became popular, but he may have inadvertently isolated the source for Jerry Lewis's creation of 'The Kid."

Then there is an abundance of information and background in the video interview with pianist Michael Feinstein (19:14). Layton and Pierce make their presence felt with four small documentaries: a background piece on Universal Studios (about 10 minutes), some of the problems involved in shooting this color film (also 10 minutes), a brief piece about the animated cartoon opening, and a general “making of” documentary (17 minutes).

The rest of the supplements round out the presentation. You can survey pages of the score for one of the numbers. There are no less than three deleted scenes, comedy skits titled after their punchlines: "Pretty Lucky So Far “(1:30), “Look What it Makes Me“ (0:28), and “Horse’s Neck“ (0:26), three surprisingly dirty jokes that show how far pre-Code Hollywood wanted to go. When the film was re-released later in the 1930s it came with alternative opening titles, also offered here (2:05).

Paul Whiteman and the orchestra are on the periphery of some other supplements. I Know Everybody and Everybody’s Racket, is a short program filler from 1933 with nightlife columnist Walter Winchell playing himself, in a nightclub where the band happens to be playing (21: 07). There are also two Two Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons from 1930, incorporating both music and some animation moments from King of Jazz: My Pal Paul (6:51), and Africa (5:42), with some sad racialist overtones.

Arguably the most interesting of the secondary supplements is All Americans, a sound short from 1929 (19:03). It’s a version of a huge number that was restaged by John Murray Anderson for the inclusive “Melting Pot” number that concludes King of Jazz. Anderson was an innovator and a lot of his work on King of Jazz anticipates choreographer Busby Berkeley, and his camera angles, trick photography (which he supervised but was created by others), and camera movements broke the bonds that films suffered from in the early days of sound. You can see the lasting influence of All Americans and “Melting Pot” in the work of Guy Maddin, who found inspiration from the sequences for his film The Saddest Music in the World, his paean to part-talky and ‘30s musicals.

 

Finally, there is an 22-page insert with cast and crew, transfer information, and an essay by rising film writer and novelist Farran Smith Nehme.

The King of Jazz hits the street Tuesday, 27 March, 2018 ($39.95, Criterion Collection No. 915).

 

 

 

Originally published at All Classical Portland, 25 March 2018

R. Crumb's Genesis at the Art Museum

 

 

Comic book fans, graphic novel intellectuals, line drawing aficionados, surviving hippies, and other area eccentrics have a marvelous opportunity to see the art of R. Crumb, the so-called father of the underground comic, on glorious display at the Portland Art Museum, a touring show that arrives here under the aegis of Bruce Guenther, PAM's chief curator of modern and contemporary art.

In 2005, Crumb signed a contract with W. W. Norton to illustrate the first five chapters of the Bible. Crumb, a lapsed Catholic, explains in the book's introductory matter that though he is not a believer, he is nevertheless fascinated by spirituality and faith, and proclaims in The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book that "I believe in everything ... UFOs, Bigfoot, channeling, ESP ... I believe it all!." As I mention in my review of the The Book of Genesis, there are several other reasons why Crumb may have wanted to tackle the project. One was perhaps the idea of harnessing himself to the restrictions that an adaptation of the Bible would entail. Another motivation might have been to educate readers. The book is also a great technical exercise, and his work may also be a result of his interest in Jewish life. Most of all, though, The Book of Genesis is the end point of a fascination with adaptation that has preoccupied Crumb off and on since the 1980s.

 

 

The Museum puts on display all 207 pages of the comic itself, framed under glass and arranged across a series of rooms subdivided with sometimes diagonal hallways that tend to run left to right. Each area is color-coded with strong "comic book" colors, and the patron is first greeted by a black and white stand up cut out of Crumb in his stoop postured and gap-mouthed cartoon persona. From the very first pages, which are not that much bigger than the printed version, the viewer can see the detail and care that Crumb brought to the project. Nary a panel lacks a trace of Liquid Paper, which Crumb used to fix text or rejigger aspects of the frame. Some of the most amazing panels occur in the fiery death of Gomorrah, and one of the most striking panels occurs at the bottom of page 44, Chapter 15, when Abram has a night of sleepless dread. The ghostly faces hovering over Abram's head baffle the viewer wondering how Crumb achieved that effect, which looks much better in person than in the finished book.

A typical comic book page not only has to have well-composed panels within it, but the panels on the page must all work together cohesively and carry the eye. By putting the pages in reverse order, so to speak, the Museum has defeated the two-page spread effect that Crumb labored at, and emphasizes the lines and coordination of single page of panels. For the full effect, the reader is directed to consult the book, where Crumb's seemingly effortless command of layout is in full flower.

In addition to the original pages, much of Crumb's research material is on display beneath transparent boxes. These objects include frame enlargements from de Mille's The 10 Commandments, collected clippings of people, animals, "slaves," and landscapes for reference, and early educational comic book versions of Bible that Crumb drew upon. A display shows a group of images that were the source for Crumb's version of God, including Charleton Heston as Moses from The 10 Commandments. One of the treats of the exhibition is a black and white alternative cover, found in the final room.

Only 60 years ago the vulgarity and violence of comic books was under attack from psychologists and government agents. Today, the work of one of the form's greatest practitioners is on display in a museum as if it were art, which clearly it is. That comics are now published in hard covers is itself a tremendous advance from the poorly printed pulp pages of the past. The marriage of Crumb and the most sacred book in history is a strange meeting of high and low culture in a unique and powerful blend.

 

 

 

Now I wish two things, that someone will buy the film rights, and that will Crumb come to town and talk about the book and his art.

The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb's Book of Genesis is on display from June 12, 2010 to September 19, 2010, at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97205, 503.226.2811.

 

 

 

Originally printed in the Vancouver Voice, June 2010. 

A Head for Crime [Headhunters]

 

 

 

Fashions in detective Fiction seem to go in waves. There was the long Agatha Christie polite mystery, followed by the overlapping hardboiled school. In recent years there has been the “novelty” detective (dwarf, blind, Russian cop), followed by the grim realism of James Ellroy and Don Winslow, among others, which is the current standard.

In the past 10 years, though, the Scandinavian thriller has come to the fore. The First Scandinavian mysteries popular in English were the 10 “Martin Beck” police procedurals by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, many turned into American adaptations and also a series of homegrown TV shows. The Danish TV series Forbrydelsen is one of the best shows on any television ever, and has been turned into the slow paced American knock off, The Killing. In 1992, Danish author Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (Smilla’s Sense of Snow) was an international best seller (and a dull movie), and while in recent years, the obvious leader is the Dragon Tattoo series, which also drew attention to the work of Henning Mankell, Arnaldur Indriðason, Ann Holt, and numerous others in what is being called Scandinavian noir or when they come to the movies what I like to call film glacée.

 

Scandinavian noir films, such as Insomnia, are notable for usually being procedurals, often with political or social cause backdrops, a wide range of social strata examined (like the hardboiled school), and with troubled or disturbed main characters out of Dostoevsky. As with the Martin Beck books, they offer internal critiques of the “Socialist dream states” of the north, especially the bureaucracy and myopia, and the women have none of the Christian inhibitions of the U. S. or England when it comes to nudity, sexuality, multiple partners, and even crime. The latest recipient of readership loyalty is the Norwegian Jo Nesbø. Yellow Bird, the same company that adapted the Dragon Tattoo novels, has made a film of one of his stand alone novels, Headhunters, though most of his books feature the series character Harry Hole.

 

 

Taking a page from Patricia Highsmith, Headhunters tells of a successful businessman, the unusually named Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie, who has the cadaverous look of Steve Buscemi), who has a sideline in art theft, if only to keep his beautiful wife Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund, who, like Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut, is introduced in all her coltish beauty in a bathroom) in the finery he thinks she demands. Brown is rather on the short and gargoyleïsh side, at least in his view, and he needs all the edge he can to keep his wife interested – when in fact, all she wants is a child. In daily life, Brown is a recruitment executive, a headhunter for major corporations. At his wife’s art gallery, Brown meets one Clas Greve (TV’s Nikolaj Coster- Waldau, from Game of Thrones), who strikes Brown as a likely candidate for a computer company in search of a CEO. Greve seems even more attractive when Brown learns that the man inherited a rare Reubens from a relative. Little does Brown know, at first, that Greve is also a “headhunter” – hence the plural title.

 

More should not be said of this tale that relies on turnabouts and revelations as Brown slips from one predicament to another.[1] The director is Morten Tyldum who is working from a script by frequent collaborator Lars Gudmestad, and the film seems to be loyal to the text. As with other Yellow Bird films, the technical credits are high, but unlike the second two Dragon movies, the pace is lively, with the characters continually rooted in realistic elements, despite the usually heightened events of a thriller. The film in fact requires careful attention to its meticulous structuring. Few causal remarks, such as someone saying that they have a fear of dogs, are needlessly placed, and the theme of “heads” and “hunting” are a common theme, fully woven into the film’s texture.

 

Still, Headhunters isn’t probably the best introduction to Scandinavian noir. It’s more of an Elmore Leonard type tale than an examination of northern social problems and congenitally unhappy people – though in one sequence Roger comes home to find Diana watching The Girl Who Played with Fire on TV. Apparently, like the Dragon movies before it, Nesbø’s novel is to be turned into an American movie at some point, so the subtitle-reading-averse will still be able to get the story.

 

1 Though I will add that Headhunters becomes the fourth of only four films I can think of in which a character is submerged in human feces. The others are Seven Beauties, The Shawshank Redemption, and Schindler’s List. Interestingly the other three are all prison films, and two of them are set in concentration camps.

Posted at All Classical on April 28, 2012 by D. K. Holm

CSI on Star Trek

Friday May 7: Star Trek ... Next Day Air Hip hop tale of two thieves who are accidental recipients of a cocaine cache. Friday May 15: Angels and Demons ... Management Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn star in this comedy about unlikely love between a slacker and a high powered professional. Shot in Oregon ... Still Green Yet another tale of high schoolers staging one last blast before hitting college. Friday May 22: Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian Security guard Ben Stiller must sneak into the national museum in order to rescue two of his museum's ghostly residents, shipped there accidentally ... The Girlfriend Experience Steven Soderbergh's new movie is more Bubble than Oceans's 11 as it examines the life and commerce of a high class call girl in New York ... Dance Flick The latest parody of recent films and genres from the Wayans Brothers ... Friday May 29: Drag Me to Hell Stephen King-like tale of a loan officer given a curse by an aged lady she declines. Sam Raimi directs and co-writes... Up Disney animated comedy about a aged balloonitic taken an airborn trip to South America... The Brothers Bloom Two con men ( Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo) attempt to fleece a rich girl (Rachel Weisz ) in this crime comedy from Rian Johnson (Brick).

 

 

A recent episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation posed a satiric homage to Star Trek and its fans. In it, two of the heretofore minor characters, lab rat Hodges (Wallace Langham), who is so minor that chief cop Jim Brass doesn't know who he is when he calls from a crime scene, and biochemist Wendy Simms (Liz Vassey), accidentally meet, and stumble upon a crime scene, at a convention for a show called Astro Quest. There a producer is murdered for taking the long-cancelled Astro Quest and updating it into a messy, dirty, violent Battlestar Galactica-style TV show of despair and pain, to the ire of good old “Questers” (and look for BSG's co-creator along with star Grace Park among the outraged fans; in addition BSG scribe David Weddle co-wrote the episode).

In this in-joke littered episode, Hodges fantasizes being the Captain Kirk equivalent and eyeing Simms in various costumes and settings. By the end, Simms has started equally fantasizing, and after the loving parody the show makes the point that Star Trek and shows and movies like it provided a propitious funnel of feelings for otherwise frustrated people of all stripes. nerd or normal. Trekkers may be the original Incels.

The homage was perfectly timed, as J. J. Abrams reconstitution of the Paramount franchise is set to open on May 5. The new rendition raises once again the mystery over why Star Trek has had such a hold over a generation of viewers. The show wasn't all that popular when it aired originally for three seasons in the mid-'60s, and NBC cancelled it in June 1969. Its life continued in syndicated reruns and an animated version, and eventually the executives at Paramount realized that there might be something in the franchise, especially after the rise of Trek conventions and a letter writing campaign by fans. That resulted in, among other things, a feature film reuniting the show's cast, a tepid stodgy affair directed by Robert Wise in 1979, which made it clear that the old codgers at the studio still didn't understand what they had. Eventually, though, perhaps thanks to the popularity of Star Wars, other movies and new TV series re-captivated the next generation of audiences.

What did those original viewers like about the show? Was a love of camp the motivation, or was it sci-fi nerd kids who had dreamed of having their interests finally represented on TV rejoicing in even a pallid reflection of their desires? The sets were cheesy and the acting bombastic, and like science fiction of the '50s and '60s each episode was really a social protest moral statement about matters of the time such as over population and nuclear escalation. The multi-ethnic cast promoted a form of easy liberal universalism.

J. J. Abrams has become something of a franchise savior. Though his own program Alias had a cult it struggled, but his vision for Lost took off when he was commissioned to take it over. He went on to reify Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible series, and now turns his guns on Star Trek, which, like other recent sequels such as the James Bond series, goes back to the beginning and starts over. The film has all the familiar names, but in larval form and with new faces: James T. Kirk (teen movie star Chris Pine), Spock (TV's Zachary Quinto), Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy (Karl Urban), Scotty (British comedian Simon Pegg), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Sulu (John Cho) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin). Winona Ryder also stars, and the bombastic villain is an unrecognizable Eric Bana as the destructive Nero.

Expect the movie to include typical Abrams narrative touches such a fixation on parental figures and romances rife with secrets. Abrams, a stated non-Trek fan, will probably not include in-jokes or homages to the original show. The emphasis will be on action and suspense, "facing your fears" Baywatch-style psychology, and less on ideas and social protest. But will Abrams show the kind of affection that the CSI episode unveiled? Probably not. It will be interesting to see what hardcore Trek fans make of the exercise.

And speaking of cults such as Star Trek, one of the most interesting and the most long lived is the affection for the icy, imperious Sherlock Holmes. The character is so beloved that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 60-some stories with the consulting detective weren't enough and over the last 100 years writers who felt they could do just as good a job have created pastiches with similarly named sleuths or with Holmes and Watson themselves once again at center stage. One of the most clever pastiches, however, is David Pirie's approach. The British novelist and horror film historian went back to the roots of the character and created a series based on Doyle himself, and his Watson-like apprenticeship to Dr. Joseph Bell, the real life model for Holmes.

In a series of novels, and in two TV movies based on them, Pirie explored the foundation of the Holmes myth in the real life circumstances of Doyle's life. Now two of the films are out on DVD, with the late Ian Richardson (who played Sherlock Holmes in two TV adaptations in the 1980s) as Dr. Joseph Bell and Robin Laing as the young Scottish medical student Doyle.

Murder Rooms imagines how Doyle met Bell and became his fascinated acolyte as Bell makes himself available to the local constabulary as a consultant on difficult cases. One episode gives some background on a difficult case that confounds both men and leads to romantic disillusionment on Doyle's part and a first interest in spiritualism.

It's clear what attracts readers and viewers to Holmes. It's familiar. It was cozily familiar back in the late 1800s when the stories first began to appear, and remained familiar through renditions by Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett and countless others.

Originally published in the Vancouver Voice April 2009.

Rolling Presses and Filofax

 

 

At the end of State of Play as the credits roll, the main characters wearily but with a certain sense of satisfaction walk off into the shadows, but the movie, like a cheapjack version of Antonioni's La Notte, chooses to follow the path of the story they have just completed as it makes its way from preparation to paper, and we watch as huge rolls are tuned into individual folded newspapers that make their way across the press room like so many atavars in a game of Chutes and Ladders.

As I watched this elegiac exercise, as I watched the huge, cumbersome, slow, wasteful machinery of the modern newspaper grind into action, I pondered the movies lament for the passing of the old ways and it was difficult for me to suppress the feeling, "Good riddance!"

Remember the Filofax? That was the glorified wallet that contained a yuppie's whole life, a kind of file folder and address book in one. They were expensive, and once you had one, you were required to purchase equally expensive annual updates. There was even a Jim comedy based on the horror of losing one's Filofax, called Filofax for a time, before a name changed to Taking Care of Business (1990). Within a decade or less, the Filofax was superseded by the personal computer and all many of subsequent portable digital storage spaces. Whenever I think of the Filofax, I think of the scene in Other People's Money in which Danny DeVito brandishes a buggy whip before a group of stockholders as an example of well-crafted but left behind technology.

 

Originally published in the Vancouver Voice, February 2010