Gotham Diary:
Old Movies
13 March 2013
Yesterday, I saw something that I have never seen before. I was looking out at 85th Street from my lunchtime table at the Seahorse Tavern when a young man on the sidewalk pulled off a kippa and stuffed it into his shoulder bag. His appearance gave no other sign of religious observance; perhaps he had been a guest somewhere and forgotten to remove the skullcap. Maybe the story was more interesting than that. It was certainly something to see.
***
For several years now, I have been hiding my library of VHS cassettes behind the living-room curtains. They’re stacked against the wall, and can’t be seen unless you’re on your way out to the balcony, in which case you had better be minding the step. Every now and then, I do a bit of culling. Some movies get tossed. Some get replaced with DVDs. Some I have to hold on to, because they’re not available in any other format, if at all.
The stack is hard to get to at the moment because of the the big pot of ivy that I think I mentioned yesterday. Looking for a film recently, I managed to knock the stack down. It had gotten a bit unstable, what with borrowings here and there that left unfilled holes. The whole thing gave way. I gathered up those tapes that had fallen in front of the curtain, just to tidy up. Then I culled. There was nothing else to do with the things; I have nowhere to put anything anymore.
While tidying the bedroom (and then doing the ironing) on Monday, I watched Caught, Max Ophuls’s 1949 noir-that-isn’t-really-a-noir. All right, it’s literally a noir — I don’t think there are too many movies as darkly lighted as Caught. Almost every scene takes place in a drab interior or at night. This makes blonde Barbara Bel Geddes look increasingly radiant as the movie goes on. It also merges Robert Ryan with the décor: in his dark suits, he seems to be a kinetic branch of the oak paneling in his lugubrious mansion. The lighting also exaggerates James Mason’s moon face. Playing an overworked pediatrician, Mason looks exhausted and distracted through most of the film, and very much not a bad guy, which makes for a change.
Ophuls’s directing is taut and brisk: the film isn’t a minute longer than it needs to be. The pace accelerates right up to the final moment. Indeed, it gets slightly slapdash: two doctors, one of them the pediatrician, almost laugh at the news that an inconvenient fetus has died upon premature birth. Well, that solves that problem! Robert Ryan plays a crazy millionaire who has “attacks” when he doesn’t get what he wants. In his climactic attack, which is heard but not seen, he tangles with a pinball machine in his Addams-Family fun room and is discovered gasping beneath it.
The most interesting part of Caught, from a film-study point of view, is the beginning, where the American dream is seen to be pretty pipey. Two young women share a dank apartment and try to figure out if one of them can afford charm school classes. Charm school is the way to department-store modeling, and department-store modeling is apparently the way to meet rich men. Barbara Bel Geddes plays the ingénue; she’s not naive, but she has standards. Her roommate, Maxine (Ruth Brady), is more cynical, but everything she says rings true. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to get out of a dump like the one they’re living in. And it is a dump. Ordinarily, Hollywood’s dump-dwellers are either immigrants who don’t speak English or people to avoid. Nice girls don’t live in dumps. I suppose that the social realism of this opening scene is one of the reasons for labeling Caught “noir.”
Along comes a ghastly little man who punctuates every sentence with “darling.” It’s Curt Bois, an actor who came out of the same box as Marlene Dietrich, and he sounds just like her. He invites “Leonora,” as Bel Geddes’s character has renamed herself upon becoming a department-store model, to a yacht party, on behalf of a “business partner.” He is in fact pimping for Smith Ohlrig, Ryan’s damaged magnate. Although Leonora agonizes over attending such a dodgy event, she does go, and one thing leads to another. Ohlrig marries her in a fit of pique — because a psychiatrist tells him that he can’t (commitment issues) and shouldn’t anyway. When the marriage sours, as you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to know that it will, you expect Ohlrig to lock up his bride in a genuine prison, but the script has a more clever way of pinning her down.
Ohlrig lets her go, and Leonora finds a job as a receptionist to two overworked doctors with offices alongside an elevated subway in New York City. She doesn’t work very hard, at first, and Dr Quinada (Mason) soon guesses that she’s slumming. Ohlrig, who has had her tailed, convinces her to give him a second chance, but this lasts precisely one night, as Leonora sees that he hasn’t changed at all. But one night, of course, is all it takes. Some time later, back on the job with the doctors, this time a marvel of dedication and efficiency, Leonora discovers that she’s pregnant. The rest is denouement, brief but exciting, because you can’t be sure how things are going to work out.
I’m not entirely certain, but Caught may have been James Mason’s first American movie. Robert Ryan was that era’s version of an action heavy, very handsome but kind of scary. Bel Geddes, who would work mostly in television, and whose great movie role would be the sensible Midge in Vertigo, was still a beginner in 1949, but she holds us in thrall as she tries to reconcile her character’s kind, loving nature with her profound self-respect. I believe the word for such heroines is “winning.”
Caught is definitely a keeper. It’s not available on DVD here at the moment, but I think it can be had in Britain.
***
Yesterday, I watched the DVD of MGM’s 1936 Born to Dance. The DVD had just arrived from Amazon, permitting me to dump the tape. Born to Dance is not a beloved old movie. Cole Porter, who wrote all the songs, claimed later to regret the big finale, which is embarrassing in several ways but most unforgivably for ripping off black swing in general and Cab Calloway in particular without a single African-American dancer in the chorus, much less in a dramatic role. I discovered Born to Dance in the mid-Eighties, when my new VCR began making it possible to get to know movies by playing them over and over on demand. Born to Dance, overall, is a very corny movie, and much too tactful and chaste for sophisticated banter; it also puts Virginia Bruce in the bad girl’s part, and I hate how satisfying it is to see her meet her comeuppance. So I’ve watched the movie, all the way through, three times at most. Four as of yesterday. What fascinated me about Born to Dance was that spectacular finale. I don’t care how incorrect it is — all right, I didn’t care 25 years ago — but I find it the most fun of all the dancing crowd wind-ups. It begins with Frances Langford singing, continues with Buddy Ebsen slipping and sliding, and finishes with Eleanor Powell kicking and cartwheeling. BOOM! go the battleship’s cannons. Eleanor Powell was not a gifted actress, and she wasn’t even much of an entertainer, but she was as born to dance as anyone has ever been, and she could flash a terrific smile while hoofing. But Broadway Melody of 1940 shows her off much, much better. Why would anyone want to watch Born to Dance?
I’d forgotten another favorite scene, the model-home display in the department store that Powell visits with James Stewart (they’re about to be an item). The house is explained to them by a floorwalker in a cutaway played by Barnett Parker (1886-1941) as a fruit fallen off of Carmen Miranda’s turban. I mean, really! He holds up a swathe of living-room curtain and sighs heavily. “Breathtaking!” There is simply nothing covert about this homosexual display, which is both silly and serious at the same time. MGM’s cloud of unknowing would dissipate soon enough, but in 1936, it seems, no one in Culver City seems to have feared being corrupted by gay influence.
That’s what was so shocking about Born to Dance when I discovered it: there had been a time, not a permissive or tolerant time, but a moment when “effeminacy” could parade across the screen, unclothed by arch dialogue and unbowed by dramatic humiliation. At the same time, it is not camp. Born to Dance is much too ingenuously joyous to raise an eyebrow. It’s as though director Roy del Ruth were filming a certain fantasy of happiness that, let’s just say, would never be entertained by the likes of Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable. Elenaor Powell makes the perfect centerpiece because she’s both womanly and asexual — a mom who can tap.
I couldn’t help noticing that that the female stars weren’t dressed like the girls in the chorus, or rather vice versa: the girls in the background were dolled up in ways that already looked dated, as though they had just awakened from naps commenced in 1933. The stars, in contrast, were pushing up against 1937 and beyond. Why would this be? Because the producers liked the trixie look; that’s my guess. You could argue that the filmmakers wanted to make the actors upstage more pungently fashionable, and I’m sure that they did. But that doesn’t explain the dated coiffures of the pretty chorines. Producers are a conservative bunch.