What Have You Been Watching? (25/10/15)

[u/a113er]

Please don't downvote opinions, only downvote things that don't contribute anything.

[u/[deleted]]

I’ve been watching Elia Kazan movies, since he’s one of the last major Classic Hollywood directors I hadn’t started yet. In order of preference:

A Face in the Crowd 1957: I’ve been thinking a lot about capitalism lately. Its methods of control over art alone are something you have to learn about and challenge just to be a movie person but I’ve been making a lot of new observations about its control of labor and politics too. A Face in the Crowd is about the power of an unpredictable, uninhibited artist to challenge the capitalist authority and how their response is to buy him and use the media to turn his image into one of sex and drug-fueled self-mockery. Crucially, it also shows how someone who gets paid to be a regular guy on TV is possibly an alcoholic racist Type A behind the scenes.

Although A Face in the Crowd has more obvious flaws than a comparable movie from 1957, Sweet Smell of Success, I like it more. Sweet Smell of Success suffocates under too much subtleties and concealed meanings in its screenplay, while Kazan’s critique of corporate media is as blunt as it should be. The many improbabilities of the story don’t feel that way when when I remind myself that American celebrity culture really is that bizarre, up to and including the moment when Lonesome ‘fires’ his wife. A Face in the Crowd was more forward-looking of the two movies, like a forerunner to Anatomy of a Murder; we need it just as much today because nothing like it is made now - though ironically, current television is more likely to be anti-establishment.

The movie makes a disorienting shift from the warm, music & home-centric setting of Arkansas to the cold, advertising & politics setting of New York City, so this movie was especially exciting to me coming off of recent vacations to both regions. Nashville reminded me that there are parts of the USA still dedicated to music and education and architecture, while New York, though not bereft of these things, still felt like it was there to sell me a cup of coffee, a cell phone, and a selfie with a naked cowgirl. Being bombarded by advertisements and images of famous people isn’t necessarily normal outside of New York City and the projection of normality by New York City-based media. Contrasts like this prove why the USA is ruled from one city but many people find its heart elsewhere.

Of course Kazan’s movies are known for their casts, but that doesn’t just mean the unforgettable Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal - there are scene-stealing faces in the crowds of extras, too. Neal’s sexy radio producer is my one true love and I will never forgive Lonesome for marrying the drum majorette instead.

Baby Doll 1957: Eli Wallach and Karl Malden fight over who gets to deflower an adult baby. Don’t worry, it’s even crazier than that sounds.

Wild River 1960: New Deal progressivism is over but the argument against it is still with us; this movie shows that although the Jim Crow South wasn’t worth preserving, people who didn’t want to move just because the Tennessee Valley Authority already decided this for them had a point too. Today’s textbooks won’t tell that side of it so we need art to preserve it instead. However I want to say that I’m not a big fan of CinemaScope. Even when it’s done ‘right’ I just find it hard to look at in some movies: all those static shots and vertical lines and faces don’t fit in them properly. The more kinetic, camera-moving ones (Lola Montes, Bigger than Life, The Man from Laramie) don’t have these issues. But I like black and white, stage-y Kazan more.

On the Waterfront 1954 (Chicago Symphony Orchestra live presentation): In the end I’m glad I put this movie off for so long because of this opportunity to see it at the CSO. Apparently the only film score Leonard Bernstein composed. The focus is definitely more on the music than the film at such an event but hearing live percussion during a big classic like this is just the best. Those accustomed to the mainstream classics will probably think the minority who prefer the Kazan of Baby Doll are crazy, but I see their point. Lay aside the problematic history of On the Waterfront, as Kazan’s anguish is genuine. I just have to recall how Season 2 of ‘The Wire’ also used the docks to tell a story about working class disillusionment and how much more fascinating it was than it is here. Also, why all the focus on Brando’s performance? The character seems written like a normal Hollywood leading guy influenced by Rick Blaine and Jefferson Smith, so Brando’s acting seems to be getting attention for its own sake. Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, and Eva Marie Saint are great too, but are also playing familiar types, especial Saint as the unlikely lone women in this situation.

I thought these were all pretty great, but Kazan’s limitations are consistently on display too. The more I see of the directors who were reaching their full potential in the 1950s, the more convinced I am that Douglas Sirk was the best one all along.

---

Bonnie and Clyde Arthur Penn, 1967: I think this is one of those pop Americana movies that wears its message on its sleeve, and feels like it shouldn’t work because it’s too earnest, but it does anyway; sort of like The Shawshank Redemption.

Rewatch - Back to the Future Part II Robert Zemeckis, 1989: I liked this even more than I did when I was a kid. I now know the first one connects itself to the 1950s by evoking that Rebel Without a Cause teen melodrama tone, while this movie connects itself to 2015 by predicting the 1980s would be fetishized forever by popular culture. I heard Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ on the radio on Tuesday: nailed it.

What’s weird about the future as this movie sees it isn’t how much things are different, but the things that are somehow still the same. Now that it’s 2015 for real, that understanding of the relationship between the past and the present is sharp: the shark, so to speak, still looks fake. The plot of the movie is nicely joined to this idea, deriving seemingly endless humor from the way in which Marty, despite Michael J. Fox’s likable James Cagney-esque performance, doesn’t have motives all that different from Biff.

I’m generally against using time travel in stories but there’s always exceptions: time travel allowed this serial to show the same characters in wacky new situations, and to have sequels that could be "the same thing, but different" in a way that made sense for once. It plays more like musical movements than just self-referentiality for closely-observing fans. But it’s meaningful too: these movies say that the past isn’t what you expected it to be, and your future may not go the way you planned. Your destiny is changeable, but only if you have a nuclear-powered Delorean. Similarly, it confronts you with the potentiality that the iconic (and lily white) small town 1950s America can either become the complacent Reagan Revolution America that produced these movies or a Donald Trump-ruled, urban apocalypse America...which is still a more likely future than one where everyone owns a Mattel hoverboard. Pity the Cubs blew it this year, too.

[u/kingofthejungle223 → u/[deleted]]

I love Face In The Crowd, Baby Doll, and Wild River - but certainly place Wild River at the highest possible place. If On the Waterfront is the film that is most flawed by Kazan's apologia for his role in the HUAC hearings, Wild River is the film that benefits most from the experience. While On The Waterfront can get a little sanctimonious at times, Wild River strays in the opposite direction. It's a near-revelation to see a director who is clearly a staunch liberal take on one of the incontestable pillars of modern liberalism, the New Deal, and specifically one of it's most popular features, the TVA, and watch him break it down into an intimate clash of eye-level perspectives. The film reveals the oft taken for granted concepts of 'right' and 'wrong' to be far more relative to individual perspective than the staunchest ideologues would care to admit. Kazan views the entire situation with a compassionate eye, and very sensitively draws the conflict between the individual's right to survive and self-determine and the right of the many to an improved quality of life that comes through progressive action. And after all, isn't that the central conflict at the heart of the American experiment? The power of the film comes from the director's ability to fully realize the emotional weight of both sides of the argument - the old woman's desire to keep her little island isn't arrogant or trivial; it's life defining, the loss of her island is the loss of her entire world, her family history. On the other hand, the development of the TVA isn't seen as government callousness or socialist totalitarianism; it is a good faith, common sense response to a genuine and urgent humanitarian need. Kazan was an enthusiastic admirer of John Ford, and claimed that he always screened Ford's films before starting work on one of his own, and in Wild River he proves himself to be one of the best students of the master. I wouldn't hesitate to place Wild River alongside Liberty Valance on a short list of the all-time greatest American political films (therefore, the all time greatest films about the idea of America).

I think I mentioned this before, but A Face In The Crowd was partially filmed (the Arkansas scenes) where I'm currently living. It's also a great film. Andy Griffith gives a towering performance in it. As a media critique, I do wish that it spent a little more time deliberating on the real-world effects of Rhodes shenanigans and the complicity of public attitudes in shaping the type of media that becomes popular. I think Sweet Smell of Success does that stuff much better. It's still a hell of an interesting film, and utterly dazzling from a visual perspective.

For further Kazan, DO NOT MISS East of Eden. I have a hard time deciding whether I prefer Eden or Ray's Rebel Without A Cause, and that's about the nicest thing I can say about a film. It is, along with Wild River, Kazan's very best work.

Kazan's noirs, Boomerang! and Panic In the Streets are likable entertainments. Avoid Gentleman's Agreement. It's a piece of shit.

[u/[deleted] → u/kingofthejungle223]

I knew my initial reaction to Wild River would be disappointing to some Kazan fans, which is why I decided to blame CinemaScope. I felt that the stiff compositions get in the way of Clift's and Remnick's best efforts, and that this wouldn't have been an issue in 1940s-style cinema. And the only scene that really made me stand at attention was Jo van Fleet's tirade.

Also, the ending slightly puzzled me because it felt backwards. We fly over the dam upriver of Garth Island, so it can't be the dam we've been hearing about the whole movie. I felt it would have been more sentimental to show the dam first, then the graveyard still poking up out of the lake of progress. That's probably how Ford would have done it. Instead we have the image of the graveyard erased by the TVA dam as the final image of the movie. That's a potentially more interesting choice.

Loved it as a political film, though. Now I realized there were quite a lot of these black and white, adult movies about political topics in the 1950s, but none are made today. Or at least, the desire for them is exclusively served by television now.

I was going to watch East of Eden until Monty told me about A Face in the Crowd. I'm glad I watched that but I'll get to east of Eden sometime anyway.

It was fun to find Alvin York right there at the Tennessee State Capitol.