“Kwaidan”: Just My Cup of Tea for Halloween

My passion for things Japanese began early, with my mother’s enthusiasm for the exotic and a high school friendship that continues to this day. When I was accepted for a year’s study in Tokyo, courtesy of the University of California’s Education Abroad Program, an uncle with literary tastes gave me a volume of the writings of Lafcadio Hearn. Hearn was a total original: born in Greece, raised in Ireland, he came to the U.S. as a journalist and spent formative years in New Orleans, happily collecting weird tales and basking in the influence of one of his own favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe. In 1890 he sailed to Japan and never left, taking a Japanese name and a Japanese wife. Collecting ancient Japanese folk tales full of spectral beings and evil spirits, he carefully rendered them in English and sent them out into the world. In 1964, Japanese filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi returned the favor, assembling four Hearn tales into a film he named after one of Hearn’s anthologies, Kwaidan (implying ghost stories).

 Kobayashi, a specialist in jidaigeki (period drama) featuring samurai and epic battle scenes, was hailed by critics and audiences worldwide. Kwaidan won him a Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film. His achievement was to add to Hearn’s bizarre stories a gorgeously stylized visual element, a spine-tingling score by Toru Takemitsu, and (particularly in the third tale) a narrative voice that captures the portentous formality of classical Japanese theatre.

My favorite of the stories may be the very first, “The Black Hair.” It involves a classic folktale situation: a man who abandons his sweet, loyal wife to make a more prosperous marriage elsewhere. While the spurned wife remains behind in their isolated home, he ventures into the world and soon weds a wealthy heiress who turns out to be selfish and cold. Once several years have passed, he realizes that, despite his new affluence, he sorely misses his gentle first wife. That’s when he returns home, to be joyfully greeted by wife #1, who refuses to rebuke him in any way. They spend a tender night together . . . but there’s a dark surprise awaiting him in the morning.

 There are also eerie visual delights in “The Woman of the Snow,” in which a bone-chilling blizzard plays a key role. The strong Japanese connection with the natural world plays out in all the tales, even though we’re keenly aware of the artifice involved in the filming process. “Hoichi the Earless” is perhaps the strangest story of all; Kobayashi chooses to precede this tale of a blind monk who’s a musical master on the biwa by dramatizing the historic sea battle of the Genji and Heike clans in almost Kabuki fashion: I’ll long remember the noble ladies of the defeated side ending their lives by plunging into the sea, their heavy garments billowing around them.

 The final segment, “In a Cup of Tea,” evolved from a fragment Hearn found embedded in another story. It begins with an author of the Meiji Period (basically 19^th century) writing about a an attendant to a local lord in some earlier era. When the attendant pours himself some tea, he sees in the liquid the face of an unknown man. Ultimately he drinks the tea—and all hell breaks loose. The story, which contains a fierce battle between the attendant and some mysterious assailants representing the teacup-man, ends abruptly. The author doesn’t know how to finish it.  But Kobayashi does, and the film ends with one final, very creepy, frisson. 

 

The Dating-Game Killer: “Woman of the Hour”

Sometimes I just don’t get it. I watch a clunky made-for-TV movie on Netflix, then discover that critics have liked it (it was rated 91% “fresh” on aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes), and audiences do too. Maybe the point is that everyone thinks Anna Kendrick is awfully cute. And I agree. I was won over by her headstrong career gal role in 2009’s Up in the Air, for which she nabbed a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. I liked her roles in other films too, and was impressed by her vocal work as Cinderella in the screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods (2014). More recently she brought her girl-next-door charm to a mystery-thriller, A Simple Favor

She’s done well for herself in Hollywood. Which is why I guess she wanted to take the next step and simultaneously become both a star and a director.  

The project she chose was Woman of the Hour, a real-life crime story distributed by Netflix in 2023. The poster for the movie certainly makes its point: it features Kendrick in a pretty 1970s- era floral frock, demurely seated on a big comfy swivel chair. Behind her looms a shadowy male figure. We can’t see his face, but he’s clearly up to no good.  Kendrick stars as Sheryl, a pert graduate of a New York drama school, who’s having a hard time making it in Hollywood. Early on we see her flunk an audition, partly because she refuses to do nudity. Her agent, whose logic doesn’t make much sense to me, persuades her that an appearance on a popular TV show of the era, The Dating Game, may move her career forward.

 The show’s premise is that Sheryl must choose one of three unseen young men to accompany her on a romantic weekend. Ignoring the suggestions of the smarmy host, she asks questions that are smart and sassy. Bachelor #1 is basically tongue-tied. Bachelor #2 is trying so hard to be sexy that he comes off as obnoxious. Bachelor #3’s responses are clever, but also show a sensitivity to female needs. Unfortunately, no one has figured out that he’s Rodney Alcala, a serial killer who lures his victims with sweet talk, then rapes and murders them. (When a young woman in the studio audience recognizes him as the slayer of her best friend, no one takes her seriously.)

 Because this is a true story, Kendrick and company feel the need to stick to the basic facts. And an important fact is that Sheryl has absolutely nothing to do with the story’s outcome. In the course of a post-taping drink with her chosen bachelor, she becomes uneasy, hands him a fake phone number, and leaves the film. When he’s later apprehended it’s because a gutsy teenage runaway he’s raped in the desert finds a way to escape his clutches and call the cops.

 As a longtime teacher of screenwriting, I know the importance of understanding your project. If Kendrick’s Sheryl is the leading character, we’d like to see her somehow trip up the bad guy. If the end of the story belongs to Autumn Best’s plucky teen, shouldn’t she get more screentime? And what about Daniel Zovatto’s scary Rodney? We know from the start that he’s guilty—shouldn’t we have a better sense of what makes him tick?

 The idea of a serial killer as a contestant on a dating show certainly has potential. Kendrick’s film looks good, and has its colorful moments. But if we’re supposed to care about a movie’s outcome, it’s urgent that we understand whom we’re dealing with, and why. 

 

 

Uncovering “The Shape of Things”

Playwright and film director Neil LaBute is surely not typical of the graduates at Brigham Young University. I know, and like, a number of BYU grads. (We worked together at Osaka’s Expo 70, many moons ago.) The former Mormon missionaries with whom I hung out tended to be trustworthy, smart, and often a lot of fun. But their political and social views were on the conservative side, in keeping with the moral tenets of the church that shaped their lives.

 LaBute, who studied theatre at BYU circa 1980, is something of a different story. His plays, which he has also translated to film, lack the basic optimism that I connect with the Church of Latter Day Saints. La Bute’s style is to zero in on the worst of human behavior and follow where it leads. His first big success, which I saw and admired years ago, was In the Company of Men, a play that became an indie film and picked up several prestigious critics’ awards, It’s a cold-eyed look at misogyny in the workplace, with two corporate types joining forces to bedevil a hapless female co-worker, with grim results. (To my surprise, I’ve just learned that this corrosive work debuted at BYU in 1992, and subsequently won an award from the Association for Mormon Letters. So perhaps not all Mormons are as optimistic about mankind as my former co-workers.) 

 The film I saw last night, 2003’s The Shape of Things, also started out as a LaBute play. It debuted in London with a cast made up of Rachel Weisz, Paul Rudd, Gretchen Mol, and Fred Weller. All four also appear in the film version, which is set on and around a picturesque American  college campus, played by the California State University branch in ocean-adjacent Camarillo, CA. Though on-screen other students and faculty members come and go, only the four main actors have speaking roles: there’s no question that this is essentially a filmed play, one in which the focus is narrow and talk is all-important.

 At first it’s easy for the viewer to get restless while watching a series of mostly two-person dialogue scenes. But the mating-dance aspect of the script is intriguing, and the characters are so wildly assorted that we’re curious to see what comes next. The story’s Queen Bee, played by the always fascinating Weisz, is am art student working on a mysterious graduate thesis project. Convinced that art trumps everything (including morality), she is adamant in her choices, one of them being to bed a nebbishy young man who works—after a fashion—as a guard at the campus art museum. As played by an initially unrecognizable Paul Rudd, he’s all too willing to be molded by this beautiful and outrageous young woman, who helps him find the self-confidence he has lacked. The main cast is completed by Fred Weller, as Rudd’s domineering best friend, and his apparently meek fiancée, the perky blonde Gretchen Moll. There’s a powerful twist ending that I wouldn’t dream of divulging, but suffice it to say that there’s not a lot of happily ever after.

 LaBute, who shares with David Mamet a facility for language as well as a basic pessimism about human nature, makes vivid the cruelty of the characters toward one another. This particular piece of work also has fun satirizing the art world. LaBute takes on both the prudes of the past (a giant plaster fig-leaf covering the genitalia of an art museum statue is key to the story’s beginning) and the hip art-for-art’s-sake convictions of the present. If you like witty misanthropy, this one’s for you. 

 

“The Great Escape” -- Not Exactly Escapist

 It used to be that all I knew about The Great Escape was Steve McQueen on a motorcycle. I figured this 1963 film was basically a precursor to 1968’s Bullitt (except that it’s set in a war zone instead of in the hills of San Francisco). In other words, I assumed it was intended to be an exercise in rugged machismo, definitely tailored to the males of the species. And so, in a way, it is. I don’t believe there’s a single female in the movie who has so much as a line of dialogue. It’s a men-without-women story all the way.

 But The Great Escape is a great deal more complex, more historically-based, and more emotionally charged than Bullitt. Most of the nearly-three-hour running time is spent in a World War II prison camp designed by the Nazis to make escape impossible. It’s not, as prison camps go, a terrible place to be. But a large contingent of military prisoners (mostly British and American) are quite willing to risk their lives to plan and carry out a mass escape through  cleverly crafted underground tunnels they’ve managed to dig by hand. Part of what makes the film important is that the escape really happened, though in fact many nationalities were involved, and Americans had only a small role in the break-out plans. As in real life, the moments of triumph in the film go hand in hand with tragedy. Yes, there’s a great escape, but—as in the actual historical episode—the upshot is not a good outcome for many who are deeply involved.

 Part of what makes the film fascinating is the way it shows how individuals of various stripes can come together to pursue a common goal. The prisoners hail from a variety of backgrounds, and can boast a variety of useful skills. The McQueen character—the ruggedest individual of the bunch—was in civilian life a student of structural engineering. At first determined to go on the lam solely on his own, he becomes an important cog in the bigger plan. Others have vastly different skills. Richard Attenborough plays a natural leader with foreign language abilities; James Garner is an expert scrounger; James Coburn is featured as an Aussie who is terrific at inventing useful contraptions. Some experienced tailors in the group craft civilian clothing for the guys to wear on the outside; some prisoners with forgery skills turn out counterfeit travel documents that look like the real thing. Of course there are individual crises as the escape plans are finalized. Charles Bronson, using an Eastern European accent like the one he grew up with, plays a former miner, an expert tunnel-digger who happens to be severely claustrophobic. Another of the would-be escapees can’t deny that he is going blind. The film follows many of these men as they taste freedom for the first time in many months. What’s particularly moving is that several of the men put themselves in mortal danger by volunteering to buddy up with more vulnerable prisoners who’ll never survive on their own.

 Making all of this activity coherent is one of Hollywood’s greatest action directors, John Sturges. Starting as an editor, Sturges moved into the director’s chair, always showing a special talent for portraying groups of men in action settings. Prior to The Great Escape, he helmed Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), and The Magnificent Seven (1960). Lots of his films feature tough guys and the serious jeopardy they face, but he liked to end with a modest but genuine sense of triumph.

 

 

 

Mary and the Bear

It was the long, dark days of the pandemic that introduced me to the pleasures of watching television. Desperate for entertainment, I turned to cable-tv for long-running recent series I’d missed, like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, but also for sitcoms that took me back to my early years.

 After giving some love to I Love Lucy, I settled on the pleasures of The Mary Tyler Moore show, which ruled the airwaves from 1970 until 1977. The show may look dated today, with its multi-camera style and laugh-happy studio audience. But back in the 1970s it was known for tackling social issues that were very much in the air. Its star, as Mary Richards, was an unmarried career gal who had the occasional romance but was much more involved with her job as the producer of a local Minneapolis TV news show. In the early seasons, she had colorful interactions with her landlady (Cloris Leachman) and her best buddy (Valerie Harper). But most episodes featured her interactions with the newsroom gang, the curmudgeonly Lou Grant (Edward  Asner), the acerbic Murray Slaughter (Gavin McLeod), and the irresistibly pompous newscaster Ted Baxter (Ted Knight). The cherry on top in later years was the frequent presence of Betty White as a man-hungry TV personality known as the Happy Homemaker.

 Though the series was played for laughs, at times it  ventured boldly onto serious topics, like infidelity, divorce, erectile dysfunction, and even death. (The “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode is a comedy classic, in which Mary struggles to avoid laughing at a death that occurs under bizarre circumstances..) 

 Network television seasons were long back then: 24 episodes of this show aired per year. There was occasional follow-through: in season 4, Lou’s wife walks out on him to find herself. Several seasons later, she’s remarrying, and Lou and Mary reluctantly attend the nuptials. But basically the episodes are self-contained: the contents of one show generally do not carry over to the next. This ends up being particularly weird at the end of the next-to-last season, when Ted and new wife Georgette, despairing of having a baby, adopt a polite seven-year-old boy who charms everyone in the news room. The kicker is that Georgette then discovers that, against all odds, she’s pregnant. When the show resumes the following season, Georgette is in the throes of giving birth during a party at Mary’s apartment. But that cute little adoptee is never mentioned. Did he run away? Did they return him to the agency?

 All this comes to mind because we’ve just finished watching the first season of Hulu’s The Bear. Like The Mary Tyler Moore Show it’s an Emmy winner in the field of comedy, though it lacks anything you might call a joke. Inside of being performed in front of a live audience, this story about the running of a Chicago neighborhood restaurant is shot in cinéma vérité style, with the overlapping dialogue coming thick and fast, and home audience struggling to understand everything that’s said. (The show also consistently relies on expletives that Mary Richards has doubtless never used, or even heard.)

 If The Mary Tyler Moore Show occasionally edges into darker territory, The Bear lives there fulltime. Its characters cope with the aftermath of addiction and a brother’s suicide, and shady hangers-on are always lurking around. Funny? I’m not so sure. (Neither are the Emmy voters who chose a different winner in this category for The Bear’s second season.) But the ongoing story—which doesn’t fully come together until the last episode of season 1--is fascinating, and well worth watching. 

                     

Katharine Hepburn is (and is not) Sylvia Scarlett

I just finished watching an early cinematic romp starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Bringing Up Baby? Nope. The Philadelphia Story? Still nope.  While reading an advance copy of Joseph McBride’s fascinating George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director, I became curious about a vintage film I had only barely heard of. Its name: Sylvia Scarlett. This 1935 flop was Cukor and Hepburn’s quixotic attempt to circumvent the Hollywood standards of the day. It’s the story of a young woman trying to protect her petty-criminal father by disguising herself as a young male as the two go on the lam, Hepburn’s transformation from female to male and back again was not taken well by the audiences of the day, nor by Hepburn’s studio, RKO, which demanded an inept explanatory prologue in which she appears in long braids and speaks in a meek girlish voice.

 The questions about gender and sexuality just beneath the film’s surface have belatedly made Sylvia Scarlett a favorite of feminists and some branches of the gay community. Personally, I consider it something of a mess, though a fascinating one. Various aspects of the plot are inconsistent, or just don’t make sense. Hepburn, though, is a marvel to watch. After that silly prologue, Hepburn in cropped hair and boys’ clothing is wonderfully convincing. The film makes full use of her natural athleticism (we see her jump over fences and climb through windows, and there’s a key instance when she plunges into a turbulent ocean to save someone from drowning). There are also those magical moments when she seems trapped by her disguise, trembling on the brink of declaring that she/he is in love. But when she decides to give in to her undeniable female self, dressing in a filmy frock and picture hat, we don’t believe her at all. Though Hepburn as pretty ingenue seems to enthrall the eligible men around her, it strikes the audience as a grotesque betrayal of her genuine personality.

 It was especially this film that caused Hollywood to label Hepburn “box office poison.” When she regained popularity, it was through roles that allowed her to be spirited and spunky, but also much more conventionally female, and ultimately content to accept a bit of male domination.  See, of course, her later outings with the hyper-male Spencer Tracy, and also her role opposite Cary Grant in Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story, wherein machismo ultimately wins the day. But the Sylvia Scarlett project hints that Hepburn, like the not-so-closeted Cukor, was shaped by a form of sexuality that was out of the ordinary, what we might call a complex mixture of yin and yang.

 The DVD version I watched, part of the Warner Brothers archive collection, has as an extra a short vintage travelogue that should delight every Angeleno. Advertised as A FitzPatrick Travel Talk, this Technicolor short is titled “Los Angeles, Wonder City of the West.” The L.A. about which the narrator enthuses (consistently calling my hometown “Las Angle-Us”) was then the country’s fifth largest city, boasting a population of 2 ¼ million souls. The travelogue begins with the lovely “Spanish” senoritas of Olvera Street, then coasts down “modern” thoroughfares, waxing lyrical about wacky features like the long-gone Brown Derby. Of course there’s a visit to several movie studios, complete with a sighting of Walt Disney himself, bouncing out of his modest headquarters to smile amiably for the camera, as “Whistle While You Work” plays on the soundtrack. We end up at the Hollywood Bowl, as some cuties and muscle-men rehearse a “cultural” dance performance that looks like pure kitsch. Those were the days!   

 

Baseball in Durham is No Bull

Last Wednesday, while my L.A. Dodgers were thrashing the San Diego Padres, trying to inch toward a major league title (fingers crossed!),  I decided to rewatch my all-time favorite baseball movie, 1988’s Bull Durham. To my surprise, it was released the year before Kevin Costner starred as a dreamy Iowa farmer who wills a vintage baseball team into being as a way of reconciling with his dead father in Field of Dreams. The Costner of Field of Dreams was young, fresh-faced, idealistic, and basically innocent. In Bull Durham, though, he seems perhaps a decade older, much smarter and more cynical, someone who has tried and failed to fulfill his early promise.

 Part of Bull Durham’s success comes from the fact that it was written and directed by someone who really knows the sport, knows what happens on the field—and off. Ron Shelton, a former minor league infielder, brings to the film a gritty understanding of how baseball is played, and what games are played in the shadow of America’s National Pastime. This was his first film as a director, and it has led him to score with other sports-related projects, like White Men Can’t Jump (1992, about the world of playground basketball hustlers), and Tin Cup (1996, about professional golf,  once again starring Costner). Wikipedia notes that “in 2022, Shelton's book The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit was published by Vintage Books." It sounds worth reading.

 Although Bull Durham deals with the exploits of a minor-league baseball club, the Durham (North Carolina) Bulls, it is less about a team and more about three individuals who are very much in the team’s orbit. The film’s opening line belongs to Susan Sarandon, who as Annie Savoy starts us out, in voiceover, with her philosophy of life. It begins with “I believe in the church of baseball,” then goes on to philosophize about the game as a sort of earthy substitute for formal religion. The provocative Annie, who during the year teaches literature, dedicates her summers to education of a different sort. Settling on a young, attractive player, she enjoys hot sex while also building his confidence and throwing in some lessons in basic baseball skills. For this particular summer, she chooses the naïve but mega-talented Ebby Calvin Latoosh (Tim Robbins), a pitcher who is as of yet too erratic and too cocky for stardom.

 The third member of this very dynamic triangle is “Crash” Davis (Costner), a worldly-wise catcher who once spent 21 days in the major leagues, doing nothing very spectacular before being sent back down to the minors. With his playing days numbered, he’s been added to the Durham roster to keep Latoosh under control and try to clue him in to the secrets of big league success. Smart but prickly (even though he’s a romantic at heart), Crash captures Annie’s interest when he strongly rejects the idea of auditioning for a role in her menage. Naturally, the sense that he’s his own man, and not one of the adoring “boys” who surround her, piques her curiosity.

 In a sense this is a film about the clash of innocence and experience, as well as about the push-and-pull between talent and wisdom. At the film’s end, Latoosh is headed for the majors (having learned a few life lessons along the way) but who’s to say that Crash won’t be happier in the long run? The irony is that in real life Sarandon and the much younger Robbins ended up together for more than two decades.

 

 

Maggie Smith and Kris Kristofferson: The Lady and the Tramp

Alas, in the past week or so, we’ve lost several of my screen favorites. Dame Maggie Smith (who died September 27 at age 89) can fairly be considered movie royalty. I can’t pretend to have seen all her stage and screen work, but –starting in the late 1950s—she excelled at both comedy and drama, in both new works and well-aged classics. Circa 1970, I was lucky to catch her touring in an arch 18^th century comedy, The Beaux’ Stratagem, opposite her then-husband, Robert Stephens, when it touched down at L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre. But my first encounter with her talents came earlier, when she played an intelligent and sensitive Desdemona in a film version of Shakespeare’s Othello, with none other than Sir Laurence Olivier in the title role. (His blackface performance of the tragic moor was a dramatic tour de force, though today we’d naturally be uneasy seeing a white actor pretend to be a person of color.)

 Her Desdemona earned Maggie Smith her first Oscar nomination. In all she was nominated six times, winning the golden statuette for her fierce dramatic role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and for her supporting part in a Neil Simon comedy, California Suite (1978). Her two final supporting actress noms were for “corset” roles in A Room with a View (1985, as a prim chaperone) and Gosford Park (2001, as an ageing aristocrat). A whole new generation fell in love with her as the tart-tongued Violet Crawley in a period drama made for television, Downton Abbey (2010-2015). Playing an aristocrat raised in an earlier age, she was totally oblivious of more modern conventions, like weekends, and we adored her for that. But kids also fell under her spell when she played to perfection the sensible (though magical) Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films.

 Maggie Smith did not always play aristocrats and intellectuals. She was capable, as well, of portraying women of the lower classes. In 2011’s charming The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, she is a retired housekeeper worried about finances, one who only slowly adapts to the charms of India. As the title character in Alan Bennett’s semi-autobiographical The Lady in the Van, she’s an eccentric who makes her home for 15 years in Bennett’s driveway, dominating his daily life in ways both aggravating and fascinating. But whatever the roots of the characters Smith played, she always displayed a certain dignity, what you might call a ladylike manner. Yes, there was something proper and British about her, no matter the role.

 By contrast, Kris Kristofferson (who passed away on September 28 at age 88) was as American as April in Arizona. This despite the fact that his upbringing was highly out of the ordinary. An army brat, he was born in Texas, was an honor student (as well as a rugby star) at California’s Pomona College, and traveled to England as a Rhodes Scholar to study literature at Oxford.  Following a stint as a military officer, he angered his family by choosing to  move to Nashville, in search of success as a writer of country music. Eventually such songs as “Me and Bobby McGee” made him successful, and his rugged good looks helped him move into acting, in major films that cast him as outcasts, drifters, and close-to-the-earth types. (See, for instance, Martin Scorsese’s 1974 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and John Sayles’ 1996 Texas border saga, Lone Star). His schmaltziest role was as Barbra Streisand’s rock-‘n’-roller husband in the 1976 iteration of A Star is Born.    

 Both will be sorely missed. 

 

Some Came Running, Some Stayed Away

In 1951, World War II veteran James Jones published a blockbuster novel about the lives and loves of American troops stationed in Honolulu at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. When From Here to Eternity became a film two years later, it took Hollywood by storm. Its 13 Oscar nominations resulted in eight wins, including Best Picture, Best Director, and a statuette for Frank Sinatra, bringing his own bitterness and pugnacious spirit to the role of Maggio, as the year’s Best Supporting Actor.

 It seemed the combination of James Jones’ writing and Sinatra’s acting chops was a potent one. That’s why, when in 1957 Jones published a second novel—this time dealing with a returning soldier during the post-war period—Hollywood again came calling, ready to star Sinatra as a tough-but-tender protagonist in another James Jones adaptation.  But Jones’ new novel, Some Came Running, had a few problems. The New Yorker’s critic colorfully called it “twelve hundred and sixty-six pages of flawlessly sustained tedium.”

 This was the shoot on which Sinatra, always an impatient actor, apparently ripped twenty pages out of the script in order to keep the film’s length close to the two-hour mark. Director Vincente Minnelli, looking for a change of pace from his own sparkling Gigi (also from 1958), had the challenge of corralling Sinatra and co-star Dean Martin, while also staying true to his own artistic vision. It culminated in a brilliantly florid climax, set at night amid the gaudy neon lights of a small-town carnival. The film earned five Oscar noms, mostly in acting categories, but not a single win. (Gigi and the actors from Separate Tables were the year’s big awards recipients.)

 I’ve heard film scholars praise the aesthetics of Some Came Running, as well as Minnelli’s blunt treatment of the hypocrisies of Midwest life. And I can’t deny that there are some strong performances, notably that of Shirley MacLaine (nominated for her first Oscar for this, her all-time favorite role). She plays Ginny, a slightly tawdry but good-hearted waif whose love for Dave leads at last to tragedy. (The film’s tweak of the novel’s original ending definitely increases its poignance.) There’s also good work by Sinatra and by his pal, Dean Martin, as a hard-drinking gambler who’s lovable but on a path to self-destruction.

 All this should make it clear that the film’s plot is an intensely melodramatic one, with far too many characters and lots of lurid small-town misbehavior. When Sinatra’s character, in military uniform, gets off the bus in his old hometown, it’s clear he’s a bit disgusted by the locals, but even more unimpressed with himself. Though he’s published several novels and has something of a literary reputation (like, of course, James Jones), he seems unable to move forward with his writing career. He’s also got a serious grudge against the well-heeled brother (Arthur Kennedy) who’s now one of the town’s leading citizens but chafes at his wife’s snootiness, to the point where he strays with an attractive employee.

 Oddly, it’s through his brother that Sinatra’s Dave comes to know a local professor and his schoolmarm-daughter, both of whom highly respect him as a man of letters. We’re supposed to believe that the prim schoolteacher (Martha Hyer) is Dave’s true love, though—aside from a rare moment when he literally takes her hair down—she seems incapable of passion of any sort.  Her scenes with Sinatra come across as stodgy, as she lectures him on literature and life. Under the circumstances, a gauche, umgrammatical Ginny would seem like an improvement, especially given MacLaine’s wistful charm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Close-Up of War Photographer Lee Miller

Regarding the new film, Lee, Kate Winslet can’t be accused of attaching herself to a vanity project designed to make her look good.  True, she served this biopic of World War II photojournalist Lee Miller as producer as well as star, reportedly laboring for five years to help it come to fruition. Now this sober but fascinating new work, a first directorial outing by veteran cinematographer Ellen Kuras, is in theatres, giving all of us a chance to focus on Winslet’s dedication to her subject. Her Lee is attractive enough to be a former model (as well as the muse and lover of avant-garde artist Man Ray, among others), and she lives her life as a expat in Europe with a kind of wild gaiety. (At a co-ed picnic on the grass in the south of France, she’s casually topless). But following the rise of Hitler, she leaves her partner behind in London to work as a photojournalist, first in occupied Paris and then behind the front lines in Germany as the War in Europe grinds to a close. This is a woman who can’t take no for an answer, who’s determined, at all costs, to exercise her talents and exorcize her demons.

 Lee may speak fluent French, but she’s  American-born, and she talks with a kind of raspy croak that perhaps hints at her future death from lung cancer. (She lights up so frequently during the film that I perversely feared moviegoers might have their lungs damaged by second-hand smoke wafting from the screen.) Never one to fuss with her appearance, she stalks through military camps and the streets of war-torn cities looking disheveled and ready to take on anyone who gets in her way. Curiously, she’s on assignment for the British edition of Vogue, a magazine much more associated with fashion trends than with war coverage. Yes, partly because the top military brass try hard to keep her away from the blood and guts of battle, she turns in her share of war photos from a woman’s perspective, like snaps of the intimate laundry of female personnel hanging from a military tent’s makeshift clothesline. But she also sees—and documents—what women go through in wartime, always showing sympathy to those (even on the enemy side) who have made the mistake of  trusting male lies.

 The film’s climax is Lee’s visit to the newly discovered concentration camps and railroad boxcars in which millions of Jews, dissidents, and others breathed their last. These horrific places answer for her the question of what happened to her missing French friends as well as others who were not considered acceptable by the Nazi regime. Her close-up photos of piles of rotting corpses, although at first rejected by Vogue as overly disturbing to its potential readers, are today considered invaluable documentation of what the Nazis did to hapless civilians. In the face of those atrocities, it’s hard to blame her for a slightly morbid jest: inside Hitler’s cushy former home, she cheerily photographs herself in the buff, soaking in his private bathtub.

 But all was not fun and games within Lee’s personal and professional life. We’re reminded of this in the cutaways to an aged and much-diminished Lee (still feisty, still smoking) being interviewed in her farmhouse by a dapper young reporter. The last of these interview scenes reveals several things about Lee we had not expected, contributing to our sense of her as complicated indeed. It’s worth noting that family members—determined to preserve Lee’s legacy—were deeply involved the making of this film, about a woman we should all know better.