Frank Capra: The Strong Man

The USPS has issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next several weeks. In this post LR Simon discusses The Strong Man (1926).

Frank Capra and Harry Langdon had a short but impressive partnership in silent films in which Langdon played a character similar to the Tramp character played by Charlie Chaplin, and achieving similar, though less lasting, fame. The Strong Man was one of the first films Capra and Langdon made together with Capra directing. The film opens on a World War I battlefield, with Paul Bergot (Langdon) reading a letter from his pen-pal, Mary (Priscilla Bonner). His reverie is interrupted by a one-on-one fight in which he is armed with a slingshot and his opponent with guns.

Bergot is taken prisoner by a German soldier and eventually returns with him to the United States. They get separated in New York as Bergot tries to locate Mary. When a woman in New York (Lily, played by Gertrude Astor) stashes some money in Bergot’s pocket to keep the police from finding it on her, she pretends to be Mary in order to get the money back. This impersonation leads to one of the most memorable bits of physical comedy in the entire film.

Later in the film, Bergot meets the real Mary, who had not told him that she was blind. Bergot’s reenactment of the story for Mary uses no dialogue, and the audience follows without difficulty. The skinny Bergot eventually is pressured into taking over a scheduled performance for an unconscious strong man. In the process, he saves Mary’s hometown from being taken over by bootleggers and other criminals. The silly plot serves to provide Langdon opportunities to do the physical comedy that was his forte.

Langdon and Bonner have a genuine connection that provides the film its emotional heart. Even at this early stage of his career, Capra had an affection for his characters that made it easy for the audience to relate to them, even if the storylines were occasionally preposterous.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Capra

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strong_Man

Frank Capra: It Happened One Night

The USPS has issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next several weeks. In this post LR Simon discusses It Happened One Night (1934).

Frank Capra’s screwball comedy It Happened One Night was the first film to win all five of the top Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Lead Actor, Lead Actress, Screenplay), an accomplishment that was not repeated until One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, and then again in 1991 with The Silence of the Lambs.

The film stars Claudette Colbert as Ellie Andrews, an heiress who marries “King” Westley (Jameson Thomas) against her father’s (Walter Connolly) wishes. Exercising his influence, Alexander Andrews has the marriage annulled. After a spat with her father on his yacht, Ellie dives off the boat to try to meet up with her would-be husband. She becomes a news story, and when she boards the same bus as unemployed newspaper reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable), he gets her to agree to let him write her story exclusively.

Ellie soon finds herself penniless and entirely dependent on Peter, who tries to teach her a thing or two about being ordinary. One of the most famous scenes involves Peter trying to show Ellie how to hitchhike; all of his attempts fail even to slow down a passing vehicle. Ellie then hikes up her skirt to show some leg, and immediately the next car stops and picks them up.

Another famous scene takes place at a motel where Peter and Ellie pose as a married couple in order to hide her whereabouts. Peter sets up a clothesline between the twin beds in their room and hangs a blanket on it. He calls it the “wall of Jericho,” not as strong as a stone or brick wall, but sufficient to provide them each some privacy.

Several themes in this film would feature in many of Capra’s later works, especially the mixing of the socioeconomic classes. The differences and similarities of people in different classes and what people can learn from others’ experiences remain the most relevant parts of his films, even as some of the treatment of the sexes and the races remain entrenched in the time in which the films were made. (Capra was a favorite for actresses at the time, as he did feature intelligent female characters who had more intelligence and more business than female characters in other films, and while he rarely featured an African-American actor in a significant role, he relied less on stock stereotypes than some of his contemporaries. Still, some of the humor related to sex and race is dated.)

It Happened One Night may not be the first film people today think of when they hear Frank Capra’s name – they likely think first of It’s a Wonderful Life or perhaps Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – but it’s certainly a must-see for any Capra fan, or any student of film history.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Capra

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Happened_One_Night

http://www.filmsite.org/itha.html

USPS Director Stamps: Frank Capra

The USPS has issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next several weeks. In this post LR Simon discusses the career and influence of Frank Capra.

Like John Ford, Frank Russell Capra started directing films during the silent era. Like Ford, Capra used his experiences in silent film to inform much of what he did after the transition to sound. However, Capra embraced sound, especially dialogue, in ways that Ford did not. In fact, while much of the industry viewed sound as a passing fad, Capra understood that it was the way of the future, a prospect which pleased him as he did not feel comfortable making silent features.

Capra’s directing style relied to a great extent on improvisation. He was known for shooting scenes with only a general idea of the content—how the characters knew each other, what was supposed to happen, etc., and leaving the specifics of the performance to the actors; he considered it his job to make sure the cameras captured the action.

Capra moved the camera more than Ford did, but they shared a distaste for gimmicky camera tricks—Capra thought the camera and its movements should not intrude on the audience’s experience.

Capra’s career hit its zenith in the 1930s and 1940s. It Happened One Night (1934) was the first film to sweep the top five Oscars, including Best Picture. Capra went on to direct some of the best-loved pictures of the era: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), and State of the Union (1948).

With the exceptions of It’s a Wonderful Life and State of the Union, Capra’s optimistic post-World War II stories fell out of sync with the public, which seemed more appreciative of the cynicism of film noir. The director was also falling out of sync with the new post-War Hollywood—actors were gaining power that often compromised the director’s vision. Capra blamed his comparatively early retirement on the public’s growing cynicism, the increasing power of stars, and especially on an increased desire among film producers to shock audiences.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Capra

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm001008/

John Huston: The Man Who Would Be King

The USPS has issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next several weeks. In this post LR Simon reviews The Man Who Would Be King (1975).

John Huston wanted to make The Man Who Would Be King in the 1950s with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. After Bogart died in 1957, and Gable in 1960, the two leads went through several possible casting choices before Huston finally settled on Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

Huston adapted the Rudyard Kipling story of two ex-non-commissioned officers of the Indian Army in British India. Peachy Carnehan (Caine) and Danny Dravot (Connery) decide to travel through Afghanistan to Kafiristan, where they plan to become kings. This sounds preposterous at first to Kipling (Christopher Plummer), but he shows them maps of the territory to help them, anyway.

The friendship between Carnehan and Dravot forms the heart of the story; consequently, casting was critical in making the film a success. Connery and Caine seem an unlikely partnership initially, but they perform their characters’ banter exquisitely. Even though their quest feels doomed from the outset, their optimism and cheekiness make the audience want to follow their adventures.

The Man Who Would Be King ended a period in Huston’s career when he was in less demand than he had been after The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The high adventure reminded audiences of how good a relatively simple story in the hands of a master could be. Huston made some changes to the story, and he exposed moral complexity in the source material that might not be obvious on a casual reading. All of the characters have flaws, whether it’s the sense of superiority displayed by the English characters, or the sometimes brutal superstitiousness of the native characters, or the questionable ethics of the two leads.

Although the story is superficially simple, the complexity of the characters give the movie unexpected depth and sophistication.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Huston

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_King_%28film%29

Call It Magic: The Making of The Man Who Would Be King

http://www.salon.com/2000/09/21/man_would_be_king/

John Huston: The Night of the Iguana

The USPS has issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next several weeks. In this post LR Simon reviews The Night of the Iguana (1964).

If there’s a quest in John Huston’s film adaptation of The Night of the Iguana, it’s the Reverend Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon’s attempt to repair his reputation. This quest fails early in the film. The more dominant theme in this adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play is enduring (or overcoming) one’s demons. The main character, Shannon (Richard Burton), opens the film with an initially boring Bible lesson that gradually transforms into a loud and public confession that results in Shannon’s dismissal from ministry. We next see him as an unhappy tour guide, almost out of options.

The Night of the Iguana is a difficult film for a number of reasons, but chief among these is the difficulty in believing that Charlotte (Sue Lyon) would want anything to do with Shannon, which is due mostly to Lyon’s unconvincing performance. While we can believe in her rebelliousness, her attempts to seduce the shamed ex-minister make the young actress look like she's acting, not seducing.

The story centers on aimless characters, and it sometimes feels like Huston doesn’t really know what to do with them. The characters with direction are minor characters who provide obstacles for the major characters, but the major characters don’t drive much of the action, and when they do, it’s usually a reaction to a minor character’s action.

Huston’s relationship with playwright Tennessee Williams was much more harmonious than that with Ray Bradbury. Huston welcomed Williams’ visits to the remote set, even asking for his assistance when there were difficulties on the set.

The Night of the Iguana is a mixed bag of a movie, and it received mixed reviews when it opened. For all the problems with The Misfits, it at least feels more like a movie and less like a filmed play than The Night of the Iguana.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Huston

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_of_the_Iguana_%28film%29

John Huston: The Misfits

The USPS has issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next several weeks. In this post LR Simon reviews The Misfits (1961).

The Misfits is an oddity among John Huston’s films—it’s more Arthur Miller’s movie than his. Miller wanted a producer for his screenplay whose vision included more than the bottom line. The result was a film with a rich Hollywood pedigree that didn’t feel like a Hollywood film.

Miller wrote The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe in mind for the part of Roslyn. Huston was one of the few directors Monroe trusted, mostly because he saw her as an actress and not merely as a sex goddess. According to Miller, Huston “saw her as some kind of a crazy genius; she liked him because he respected her ability.”

Monroe was unreliable on the set—she didn’t always know her lines, and despite the fact that her then husband wrote Roslyn for her, she was very insecure and not convinced that she could play the role. However, some of the scenes that caused Monroe the most anxiety are among the best of her career. When she dances deliriously without music and ends by embracing a tree, she creates a strong sense of longing while also closing herself off from her new friends. Miller gives her several opportunities to acknowledge the persona that made her famous while dismantling the image in devastating ways.

Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach play the three men vying for her attention. All of the main characters are misfits, so it’s natural that they find each other.

Gable plays Gay, the aging cowboy who hates wage jobs. He’s a bit of a snob about it, really—he tells Clift at one point that he “stinks of wages.” Gay has many admirable qualities, perhaps the best being his “great regard for people,” as Miller put it. Contrast this with his distance from his family—he just isn’t cut out to be a conventional husband or father. Gable was unsettled on this film—it was a Western with none of the usual Western tropes. Miller called it an Eastern Western because the people and their relationships overwhelmed the cowboy action. It was a great role for Gable; his charm was there, but muted compared to It Happened One Night or Gone With the Wind, and Gay was more deeply flawed than Gable’s characters in those two classics.

Huston’s artistic touch makes The Misfits beautiful to watch, even when the subject is unappealing. He had a light touch as a director, but he also knew when he had what he wanted. When Clift finished the first take of his scene in the phone booth, he was surprised that Huston didn’t want a second take. Huston assured Clift that he’d never do it better than the first time.

The Misfits remains a powerful examination of the human condition, with characters yearning to connect with each other but afraid of the consequences. “It could have ended differently,” according to Miller; in fact, it could have ended any number of ways. Nothing that happens seems destined; consequently, when the film ends, the audience can’t assume anything about the future for these characters.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Huston

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Misfits_%28film%29

Making The Misfits

John Huston: Moby Dick

The USPS has issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next several weeks. In this post LR Simon discusses Moby Dick (1956).

John Huston had wanted to film Moby Dick for ten years before he was finally able to start production. He had thought of his father Walter for the role of Ahab, but after the elder Huston died in 1950, the part went to Gregory Peck. Filming took three years on location in Wales and Ireland, the latter then Huston’s residence. While there are some minor changes from the novel (all of which tend to make the story more cinematic), this film version of Moby Dick was the first adaptation to remain true to the novel, and the first to retain the novel’s ending.

Ray Bradbury wrote the screenplay, but he and Huston argued over the script and ultimately, Huston had his name put on the screenwriting credits as well. Bradbury and Huston’s relationship was so tense that Bradbury went on the dramatize it twice, once in the story “Banshee,” which was produced for Ray Bradbury Theater with Peter O’Toole in the Huston-inspired role, and again in the novel Green Shadows, White Whale, which centered specifically on working with Huston on the writing of the Moby Dick screenplay.

Huston’s relationship with Gregory Peck also suffered during the period—Peck didn’t think he was right for the role of Ahab, and when he learned that he was cast primarily to secure funding, he felt he’d been deceived by the director. Later, Huston rebuffed Peck’s attempt to patch things up, saying it was “too late to start over.”

Moby Dick may have been Huston’s white whale—production costs more than doubled, two professional relationships were irreparably damaged, and it was not the artistic success that his previous films had been. While the film has some admirers now, for most film fans, it’s more important for what happened off screen.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Huston

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_Dick_%281956_film%29

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/131267-moby-dick/

Fall 2012 Television: Elementary

By LR Simon

Because Elementary has not used any of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories, there really is no need for the characters to be named Holmes and Watson. The only real connection to the source material beyond the characters’ names is a few pieces of dialogue (e.g., Holmes’s attic theory of the mind). It will be interesting to see if and how they try to use other characters (Moriarty, Irene Adler) or some of the more popular stories.

Because it features the Conan Doyle characters in a modern setting, Elementary invites comparison to the superior BBC show Sherlock. Sherlock has advantages—90 minutes of screen time per episode, four weeks to shoot an episode, three episodes per series; Elementary has less than 45 minutes of screen time per episode, a little over a week to shoot an episode, and it looks like 22 episodes per season.

Still, it is an above average CBS procedural. Jonny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu, and Aiden Quinn are good in their roles and work well together; Miller in particular has had some nice scenes, especially in the 10/25 episode when Sherlock talks to Gregson (Quinn) about his past and the truth of his relationship with Watson. It looks like this series is going to spend a fair amount of time developing characters and relationships, giving the actors more to do than just solve crimes.

Look for our upcoming series on film and television portrayals of Holmes and Watson, with special emphasis on The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Fall 2012 Television: Mockingbird Lane

By LR Simon

I decided to keep an open mind about Mockingbird Lane in order to make as fair an assessment of it as I could. Then I learned that Eddie Izzard plays Grampa Munster. It’s possible that I may have opened my mind just enough to let part of my brain fall out. Izzard perfectly balances humor and menace, and his scenes are the best in the show.

The characters look like they’re inspired more by post-Munsters monsters than the original Munsters did. The original Herman Munster was modeled after the Boris Karloff Frankenstein creature; here, Jerry O’Connell looks like he’d be more at home in a Tim Burton animated feature (think Sally in The Nightmare Before Christmas). Izzard’s Grampa looks more reminiscent of Gary Oldman’s Dracula than Bela Lugosi’s. Portia deRossi’s Lily looks like any number of hot vampire brides—Yvonne de Carlo’s Vampyra-inspired long black hair with the white streak is long gone. The decision not to follow the original series too closely was wise, and paid off.

The show is still campy, and the actors are obviously enjoying themselves, though there are a few more chills and scares than in the original. The Munsters was sheer silly fun—much of the show’s humor derived from the family’s delusion that the more monstrous of the clan were normal and Marilyn was the scary one. In the reboot, the family is aware of its differences from normal society, with the exception of Eddie, who does not know at the start that he is a werewolf.

All in all, Mockingbird Lane is entertaining without being particularly thought-provoking, exactly what it sets out to be. We'll see if NBC orders any more episodes. The network seems unsure about its potential (understandably), but its ratings last week helped Grimm.

John Huston: The African Queen

The USPS has issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It Happened One Night), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next several weeks. In this post LR Simon reviews The African Queen (1951).

The African Queen began production during turbulent times in Hollywood—the studio system was beginning to break up and the House Un-American Activities Committee was driving talent out of the United States. The film’s producer, Sam Spiegel, signed director John Huston and stars Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn before he secured the money to finance the production.

Hepburn’s and Bogart’s characters were a study in contrasts: she played a prim, church-lady type (Rose) who represented “civilization,” while he played a coarse, secular pragmatist who represented “nature.” When the war reaches the isolated village where she was doing missionary work with her brother (who is killed by invading Germans), she wants to join the fight out of duty, while Charlie would rather ride the war out away from the fighting. Rose has a plan to turn The African Queen into a torpedo boat in order to destroy a German gunboat. (Bogart’s character, Charlie Allnut, was re-written to be Canadian because he could not handle the Cockney accent of the character as originally written in the source material. Bogart won his only Oscar for this film.)

Because much of the film takes place on the boat, filming presented technical challenges beyond tight quarters. Sets included several pontoons with parts of the African Queen; another pontoon carried the Technicolor equipment, and Hepburn’s contract called for her to have a private loo, which was transported on another pontoon.

Huston had already established a preference for shooting on location rather than sets, so The African Queen was shot mostly on location in Uganda and the Congo. Sets were used for sequences that were considered too dangerous, such as the rapid scenes.

While not a perfect film (changes to the ending to please the studio strain credulity), The African Queen endures for the performances and charm of its leads and the stunning cinematography.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Huston

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_African_Queen_(film)

Embracing Chaos: Making The African Queen