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

Out of the Past: Glasgow Courier, 2 October 2017, Cult of Chucky

 

By D. K. HOLM

FOR THE COURIER

 

 

The major release this week at The Worx (700 ½ 1st Avenue North, 406-228-4474) is Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, an entry that proves that dead franchises won't shut up, as this series becomes as loud and blurred as the Transformers movies.

 

 

Also on hand is the incredibly stupid A Ghost Story whose content is as bland as its title. This is a film in which the ghosts actually are sheets with holes cut out, and it's the kind of highbrow horror film in which the camera is content to simply sit and stare, as a widow (a gaunt Mara sister) sits and eats a pie, or methodically drags a couch out to the side of the street for pickup. Fascinating! The only good thing about this dull enterprise is that being draped, the viewer doesn't have to actually see the dread sexual harasser Casey Affleck (he has settled several cases), though one can still hear that squeaky, rasping, mumbling "voice."

 

 

For the British Heritage freaks there is Churchill, in what seems like the latest of about 17 new Churchill-WWII-Dunkirk films. This one has Brian Cox and Miranda Richardson as Mr. and Mrs. C., and is a hagiographic knee-pad movie, with soaring music – or at least notes … movies don't feature actual melodies anymore – in which Churchill feels veddy veddy bad about all the lads he sent to die, and simple children revive his spirit with V-fingers, while those he berates continue to “love” him. In general the film pretends that the American military leadership were stupid until Churchill came along to sort them all out and save Operation Overlord, when in un-re-written history Churchill was blithe about sending men to die en masse, re: Gallipoli. The movie is bogged down by re-stating the same damn argument every five minutes, between Churchill and Eisenhower, then the King, his wife, Montgomery, Smuts, and on and on, always about his not wanting to send men to their doom. On the other hand, TV’s John Slattery is excellent as a combative Ike.

 

 

Finally, there is Cult of Chucky, the seventh Child’s Play film, and with an eighth poised for an appearance. I imagine that most viewers lost track of the series after the second or third, or at least the one with Jennifer Tilly. She’s back though as the lethal doll’s moll, and the killing ground is an antiseptic mental hospital where a young woman blamed for earlier killings is doing time. Naturally, Chucky shows up thanks to an insensitive shrink, and soon the monster bifurcates a few times to other collectibles dolls and human beings, creating the “cult.” Some of the “kills” are funny, in that paradox of gore films, and Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky has some dandy Bondian quips. Entertainingly grim as Cult is, one does wonder why we as a culture need films in which helpless women are preyed upon by unpunished evil. Clearly a great many men in this society want women but can't get them and so take it out on the gender with fantasies of mass slaughter. Happy times!

 

As usual, no word on what the Valley Cinemas (600 2nd Avenue South 406-228-9239) is showing, though the website http://polsontheatres.com/glasgow-mt/ will know at some point. The theater may hold over The Lego Ninjago Movie, and / or Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the busy, noisy sequel, or it might add anything from among a list that includes Tom Cruise in American Made, a funny, manic real life comedy, or the drama The Glass Castle. Coins will be flipped.

 

Next week I’ll celebrate the release of the Montana-set Certain Women on Criterion DVD.

 

 

 

Two More for the Third Wave

 

Another couple of names to add to the list of Third Wave cinema writers list from a couple of days ago are Peter Stanfield and Tag Gallagher.

 

 

Peter Stanfield is a professor at the University of Kent and author of several books, including The Cool and the Crazy: Fifties Pop Cinema with chapters on Korean War movies, juvenile delinquent pix, offbeat music films, hot rod tales, and others. He has also published 'Unamerican’ Hollywood, about the films of the Blacklist era, a book on Hollywood westerns of the ‘30s, Maximum Movies-Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson, and the recent Hoodlum Movies, about the motorcycle gang cycle of exploitation thrillers. I knew the name but the first thing I’ve read is an essay in Steve Neale’s anthology Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, from 2002. “‘Film Noir Like You’ve Never Seen’: Jim Thompson Adaptations and Cycles of Neo-Noir” focuses on the peculiar occurrence of a bunch of Thompson films that appeared almost all at once in the 1990s. That same cycle inspired my book on Film Soleil, but as usual my title does not appear in the bibliography. Nevertheless, Mr. Stanfield has done thorough research and traces the background that led to the Thompson resurgence, before addressing the “meaning” of them and the similar companion neo-noirs, or films soleils, subsequently released. This is an authoritative essay and demands attention. Now I have to read all of Peter Stanfield’s books.

 

 

 

Tag Gallagher has written two superb biographical-critical studies, on John Ford, and on Roberto Rossellini, as well as a series of highly informative video essays on visual style for a string of Criterion Collection DVDs. I was reminded of him just today while flipping through a random issue of Film Comment, from November-December 1998, 20 years ago. The cover feature is Mr. Gallagher’s essay on Douglas Sirk, "White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk," (I think ... the graphic design of the first page is confusing). It’s a piece in which he tries to save Sirk from his “champions,” in a sort of Orwellian manner. They get him wrong. And Mr. Gallagher is here to set them straight. The crux is that Sirk’s champions define Sirk as an ironist who is subverting the melodrama. But Mr. Gallagher both remembers seeing the movies of the ‘50s at the time and being both aware of the elements of the stories that undercut the world of the Eisenhower years, and also being moved by the uplifting endings, which he asserts that Sirk “meant.” Two films on which he concentrates are Summer Storm and A Scandal in Paris, both starring his close friend George Sanders. Mr. Gallagher also isolates a running theme in the films, the role of savior who intervenes in another’s life, surprisingly taken from Sirk’s own experiences, and usually played by Rock Hudson. He finds thematic and autobiographical material in a pair of little regarded Sirk films, All I Desire and A Time to Love and a Time to Die. This is a definitive essay on Sirk, a must-read, and should be widely anthologized.

Anger Management

Cinema aficionados, both students and scholars, rely on Criterion for exhaustively adorned DVDs with lots of educational extras. Wes Anderson says in an interview somewhere that he learned filmmaking from Criterion. In this regard, the company's new disc set of 12 Angry Men doesn't disappoint.

This short 96-minute film from 1957, in somber black and white and in the 1.66:1 aspect ratio, similar to its roots as a television live drama, comes in a two-disc set with the film on Disc One, along with the original television broadcast, aired in 1955 with a mostly different cast, directed by Frank Schaffner. This hour long version is introduced by Ron Simon, curator at the Paley Center for Media, who gives some insight into the origins of the piece in author Reginald Rose's own experience as a juror, and into the visual style of Schaffner, unusual for live TV. There is also a short video history of the film, and the trailer. On Disc Two, there's old interview footage with the director, the late Sidney Lumet, and an interview with screenwriter Walter Bernstein about Lumet, for whom he was an occasional collaborator. Ron Simon comes back for an interview about the career of  Reginald Rose, and DP John Bailey comes on to talk about esteemed cinematographer Boris Kaufman, whose career ranged from L'Atalante to The World of Henry Orient. Last on the disc, there is Tragedy in a Temporary Town, aired originally in 1956, and written by Rose, with Lumet directing. Finally there is a 24-page booklet, with cast, crew, chapter titles, and transfer information, and a functional essay on the film by law prof Thane Rosenbaum. The art for the box cover and in the booklet seems to be by Sean Phillips, but unearthing that information is harder than it needed to be. I'm also surprised that the booklet doesn't feature Rose's own short afterward to the play, which appeared in his collection Six Television Plays (Simon and Schuster, 1956, pages 155-159).

That's a lot of info packed into a set, and some might wonder if all this labor is an exegesis of a gnat turd. Released in 1957, 12 Angry Men fared poorly at the box office, possibly because it was yet another grim kitchen sink tale premised with a good gimmick but used as a platform to broadcast obvious social problem issues, with Henry Fonda as the unnamed dissenting juror in a room of guillotine pullers who scores some easy liberal wins off the straw man racists and executioners all around him. The music, by Kenyon Hopkins, who did other films for Lumet, is that popular "arty" kind of mournful fanfare music of the time with lots of wind instruments that Alex North made famous.

But in an era of dumb movies, or at least dumbed down movies, 12 Angry Men now seems to grow in stature.  At least it is about something besides itself, or snappy editing, or a rock score. International filmmakers seem to agree. 12 Angry Men became something of a proto-The Office, with different nations doing their own version or variations. In 1963 there was an adaptation for German television, Die zwölf Geschworenen, followed by a 1982 TV adaptation called Tolv edsvorne menn and then an adaptation for television in India in 1986 (Ek Ruka Hua Faisla). America finally got back in the act with a little known HBO adaptation directed by William Friedkin in 1997, with Jack Lemmon in the Fonda role.  There was even a Russian variation in 2007, called 12, and directed by Nikita Mikhalkov (Burnt by the Sun), and the most recent was for French TV in 2010 (Douze hommes en colère). The play version even makes a cameo appearance in Stephen King's new novel, 11/22/63, retitled The Jury so that a high school teacher could cast girls in the production. Though far from the original, the recent British mini-series, The Jury, shows roots in the Rose play. These wide ranging adaptations may speak to the cleverness and flexibility of Rose's original premise, but at the same time they bespeak an interest in a work that addresses fundamental issues of truth and justice.

12 Angry Men begins at the tail end of a trial of a young Hispanic man accused of stabbing his father to death in their tenement apartment, with the jurors, all male, walking out after hearing their instructions. The foreman is Martin Balsam, subtly brilliant as usual, as he was in Psycho, so wonderfully naturalistic. Lee J. Cobb, one of the great "anger actors," is No. 3. Beside him, E. G. Marshall  is No. 4, a prissy accountant type, while TV's Jack Klugman is No. 5, an easy going fellow. Jack Warden is No. 7, a guy who wants to wrap things up quick so he can make a baseball game, Henry Fonda is No. 8, and next to him is retiree Joseph Sweeney, carried over from the TV broadcast as No. 9. Ed Begley is a racist with father-son issues as Juror No. 10, and Robert Webber is ad exec "mad men" Juror No. 12.

After the first vote, all the jurors but one are for conviction, which carries a death sentence. Fonda then gets his chance to talk out his reservations about the case, and gradually wins over two more skeptics. As tempers flare in the hot room on a late summer afternoon, the jurors reveal a great deal about themselves, and some of them express noble beliefs about the system while others serve as warnings about how the process can go awry.

Fonda is great as the dissenter, but skeptical viewers may see through his piety to the manipulator underneath. He begins by claiming that he just wants to give the boy on trial his due, and sending him to the chair without at least talking about it strikes him as wrong. But it is clear that he is voicing questions that he has been ruminating all along, especially when he suddenly produces a knife exactly like the kid's, undermining one of the prosecution's points. Like a Machiavelli, Juror No. 8 manipulates his fellow citizens to effect the outcome that he wants. He may be right, but there is something about the film that undermines his stature.

The TV version ended with some uncertainty, or alleged uncertainty, imposed on the text by Schaffner. The original script makes it clear that the men go back to the court with a "not guilty" verdict, as does the movie. At root, the film is about reasonable doubt, and like another brilliant courtroom drama from a few years later, Anatomy of a Murder, also to be released by Criterion, it explores the profound ambiguity at the heart of the criminal justice system, which by necessity must deal with surfaces, and not motivations, or true, existential guilt.

12 Angry Men, Criterion No. 591,  hit the streets on Tuesday, 22 November, 2011, in both reg and Blu-Ray, and retails for $29.95 to $39.95, or is available at a video store near you.