A Star is Born (Again)

Why, exactly, do we love movies about the making of movies? Showbiz seems like a glamorous , mysterious world that most of us aspire to enter. Many of us nurse private fantasies about a stardom we know we’ll never achieve, and there’s a perverse comfort in discovering that show business has its seamy side—and its tragic side—as well.  

 Curiously, in the early days of sound movies, most of the showbiz stories on the screen—pictures like Busby Berkeley’s 42^nd Street and Footlight Parade as well as chestnuts like Stage Door—were devoted to the challenge of putting on a theatrical production. It was Broadway that seemed most glamorous back then. Berkeley’s famous musical numbers, like the “By a Waterfall” extravaganza from Golddiggers of 1933, contained elements like scantily-clad chorines swimming in formation, gliding underwater, or sliding down waterfalls into welcoming lagoons. Such moments were often shot from above, and the joke was that they couldn’t possibly work in a Broadway theatre.

 Despite moviedom’s ongoing fascination with success on the Broadway stage, the 1930s also saw two popular flicks that chronicle a newcomer’s overnight rise to Hollywood stardom. In 1932, George Cukor directed Constance Bennett in What Price Hollywood?, the saga of a waitress who’s discovered by a film director with a drinking problem. She quickly achieves fame and fortune, while he spirals downward, with romantic complications galore. It was briefly popular, though no one pretended it was a realistic look at the film industry. A mere five years later, William Wellman directed Janet Gaynor and Frederic March in A Star is Born, which is quite similar to What Price Hollywood ? in its plotting, but adds the complication that Vicki Lester (née Esther Blodgett) loves and marries her champion, fading actor Norman Maine. The lavish production, which some say mirrored the troubled marriage of Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay, was enormously successful.

 Almost twenty years later, in 1954, Cukor took another crack at the material, which was to be his first musical and first Technicolor film. This version of A Star is Born showcases the powerful singing of Judy Garland, who was looking for a career comeback, as well as the dissolute complexity of the ageing thespian played by James Mason. (In his George Cukor’s People, film historian Joseph McBride calls this film, despite its studio butchering, Cukor’s very finest effort.)  The restored version I’ve just finished watching is 178 moments long, and there are some unusual tonal shifts from cheery musical comedy hijinks to downright tragedy, but this is the version to see. And hear: Garland belting “The Man That Got Away” is a moment not to be missed. (It was nominated for a Best Song Oscar, but—unthinkably—lost to the sweet, syrupy “Three Coins in the Fountain”).

 Making Esther into a singer opened the door for two further remakes featuring pop legends of the moment. The 1976 film, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, shifts the familiar story to the world of rock ‘n’ roll, adding onscreen sex, a soupçon of infidelity, and a really memorable poster.  The year 2018 saw Bradley Cooper’s re-imagining of the story, with Lady Gaga garnering raves for her first serious acting role.

 Who knows when the next version will show up? Maybe—why not?—it could involve an older female star and an appealing young male newcomer. After all, there’s nothing that says that the woman can’t be the knowledgeable veteran of Hollywood. But we as audience members wouldn’t easily accept that as anything but grotesque. See, after all, Sunset Boulevard. 

 

Meeting George Cukor’s People

Many decades ago I was thrilled to interview film director George Cukor at his home (some called it a villa) in the hills above the Sunset Strip. He was then 80 years old, with a long string of hits behind him. After four previous nominations he’d finally won an Oscar for his lavish, charming screen adaptation of My Fair Lady. Late in life, he’d discovered the challenges of television, and had just finished directing close friend Katharine Hepburn in The Corn is Green. When we spoke, largely about his views on old Hollywood and its star system, he was unfailingly candid and witty. As he said to end our chat, “Don’t you think we’ve talked an awful lot? I think I’ve done it thin. And I sparkled!”

 Back in 1978, I’d seen many Cukor films in theatres and on television, but DVDs and streaming services did not yet exist. So I went into my quickly-arranged interview without an in-depth knowledge of Cukor’s career as a whole. Happily, I now possess a fascinating new book, George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director, which puts Cukor’s fifty years in Hollywood into perspective. Its author is Joseph McBride, whose credentials make him the perfect choice to see Cukor whole. Joe has been, in the course of his own long career, a film journalist and a screenwriter. (Like me, he has a Roger Corman connection, and is credited with writing Rock n’ Roll High School.) He was also a novice but dedicated actor in Orson Welles’ last film, The Other Side of the Wind. He has taught film studies at San Francisco State for decades, and his twenty-plus books include much-admired studies of Hollywood directors John Ford, Frank Capra, and Billy Wilder. I haven’t read each and every McBride book, but I’m convinced George Cukor’s People is one of his very best.

 McBride avoided writing about  Cukor for many years, because he wasn’t sure how to approach the career of a man whose films covered such a wide range of styles and subjects. Recognizing that Cukor’s close work with actors was the key to his success, McBride has now chosen to zero in on the way he handled his stars, drawing out brilliant performances from luminaries ranging from John Barrymore (in Dinner at Eight) to Greta Garbo (in Camille) to Maggie Smith (Travels with My Aunt). He also identifies Cukor’s favorite subjects: dreamers, outsiders, the legend of Pygmalion creating (and then falling in love with) Galatea, and life as a performance.

 Of the book’s 28 chapters, I was perhaps most taken with McBride’s sensitive analysis of Cukor’s contributions in Gone With the Wind before he was fired by David O. Selznick, and with his appreciation for the brilliant Technicolor work in 1954’s A Star is Born, despite the film’s mangling by studio execs. His close analysis of Ingrid Bergman’s Oscar-winning performance in Gaslight  (he told her to visit a mental institution and study the patients) is memorable as well. And he ends with a tender paean to a TV film I too love: the teaming of a late-in-life  Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier in 1975’s scintillating but sweet Love Among the Ruins.

 What makes McBride’s work so memorable is that he combines the erudition of a scholar and the savvy of an insider with the soul of a poet who loves movies. Here’s his take on Love Among the Ruins: it “serves as one of the purest expressions of Cukor’s career-long dedication to the transcendent power of the dreamer and the role of the theatre in heightening and improving upon reality.”  Beautifully said. 

 

Roger Corman Goes to High School

 Each year, as April 5 approaches, I find myself musing about my former boss, B-movie maven Roger Corman. Remarkably, this April 5 Roger will turn 97 years old. Hardly the rocking chair type, he’s still involved in grinding out low-budget movies, with the help of wife Julie and a small staff. You won’t find my name on his Wikipedia page (in the wake of my Corman biography he’s had staffers purge me from the site). But I’d like to think that my Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking and its updated version, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, have helped put into context Roger’s significant contributions to Hollywood. I also hope it reveals, despite it all, the affection and admiration I feel toward the man who inducted me into the film industry.

 This year, my thoughts about Roger’s accomplishments are blended with my response to a non-Corman film I finally got around to seeing. The Jack Black vehicle, School of Rock, was released in 2003. Black plays a slacker who finagles his way into a substitute teaching gig at a tony local prep school. With zero ability to instruct his charges in academic subjects, he manages to form the little nerds and kiss-ups who populate his classroom into a rock band good enough to score in a local competition. It’s all charmingly amiable: even the stuffy principal (Joan Cusack), who frets a great deal about threats to the school’s academic reputation, is eventually on board.

This feel-good flick, in which the status quo is attacked with no permanent harm done, immediately reminded me of a Corman-produced gem from 1979, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. This too is a lively film about students resisting the rules of a conventional educational institution. The leading characters are teenagers, led by the irrepressibly bouncy Riff Randell (P.J. Soles), who considers herself the #1 fan of the punk group known as The Ramones. Once again the students rebel against a behind-the-times faculty, here led by the tyrannical, unbendable principal Evelyn Togar (Mary Woronov) and some arrogant classroom types who will stop at nothing to ban rock ‘n’ roll from the campus. In this world, there are no cool grown-ups of the Jack Black variety. And the ending is hardly one that shows friendly reconciliation of the opposing points of view. Instead, we watch the students actually blow up their school. It’s a triumph of a very different sort than that of School of Rock. Though Rock ‘N’ Roll High School has the exuberance of a Fifties teen film, its ending promotes  a jubilant anarchy.

 I’ve had long conversations about Rock ‘n’ Roll High School with both director Allan Arkush and original screenwriter Joseph McBride. Joe praises Allan, a passionate pop music fan, for spearheading this film, back in the days when Roger encouraged young talents to take the lead on upcoming projects. He confirms the report that Roger sought to score the film to a different beat and call it Disco High,, but that Allan would not be swayed.. He also told me that the  building that dramatically exploded was Mt. Carmel High School in Watts, a Catholic school that had been condemned because of earthquake safety issues. Corman’s minions rented the building for $1000 from the local priest, not telling him of their plans to blow it up. “This was typical Roger.,” said Joe. At first Allan assumed they’d use a miniature. “And Roger said, ‘Are you kidding? That’s too expensive to build the miniature. You’re going to have to blow up a real school.’”

 Happy birthday, Roger. Here’s to many more things that go boom!  

 

The Ballad of Joel and Ethan Coen

 

The indefatigable film historian Joseph McBride has now tackled the work of my favorite filmmaking duo, Joel and Ethan Coen. Having written his share of huge door-stop biographies (Frank Capra, John Ford, Billy Wilder, et al), Joe is now devoting  himself to critical assessments of some of Hollywood’s then-and-now greats. The new book is a slim volume called The Whole Durn Human Comedy: Life According to the Coen Brothers.

 I turned back to McBride’s book recently after having watched one of several films that the Coens wrote but did not direct. A British TV movie called Gambit (2012), dealing with high-stakes shenanigans in the London art world, seems to contain the brothers’ trademark blend of suspense and black humor. Starring a stellar  cast from both sides of the pond—Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, Stanley Tucci, Cameron Diaz—it promised to be an enticing romp, along the lines of their Intolerable Cruelty. Unfortunately, without Joel and Ethan’s deft directorial touch, the film seems less buoyant than leaden. The plot (as overseen by director Michael Hoffman) twists and turns, but to little avail. McBride is right when he generalizes that “Coen scripts directed by others tend to go disastrously awry.”

 When the Coens are in charge of their own turf, though, odd and wonderful things happen: like Fargo, and Blood Simple, and Barton Fink, and Inside Llewyn Davis and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (The last of these is a clear nod to a key influence on the Coens, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, which argues the importance of comedy in chronicling the often-dark human condition.) But there are many—both moviegoers and critics—who consider Joel and Ethan taciturn and cynical, and it is they whom McBride is addressing in this book. He begins each chapter with a common complaint about the brothers’ films, then artfully proceeds to debunk it. Are they, for instance, the heartless cynics whom their detractors decry? Are they too fond of caricature, especially ethnic caricature, as seen in the satiric portrayals of Jewish Midwesterners in A Serious Man? Discussing that film as well as The Big Lebowski and the Southern caricatures that abound in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, McBride labels the Coens “equal-opportunity mockers.” Are they lacking in empathy for their characters? Or overly fond of a bleak nihilism that reveals their contempt for any sort of belief system? McBride’s in-depth discussions of Fargo and No Country for Old Men help disprove these claims.

 McBride ends his book with an unexpected chapter called “’Magic*Mirth*Mystery” in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” I enjoyed the 2018 film, an anthology-style collection of 6 Western tales,  but never stopped to think of it as a compendium of the brothers’ previous concerns. But McBride insists that “like such films as John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud, and Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, Buster Scruggs is a distillation of the Coens’ work, an eccentric, allegorical, and often nakedly emotional presentation of the filmmakers’ deepest thoughts and feelings.”

 The film opens with a segment in which the Coens exercise their fondness for parody and meta filmmaking. Here is a lampoon of the singing-cowboy trope, calling in every cliché of classic Westerns, including the gunfight in the main street of a sad prairie town. But as the film moves forward, it enters much darker territory, focusing on human cruelty and violent death. Its final chapter, which  hints at the Afterlife, circles back mordantly to the film’s opening, with its mock-elegiac Western ballad, “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings.” Brilliantly macabre fun!

 

 

“A Foreign Affair”: Billy Wilder 's Bittersweet Take on Post-War Germany

My Billy Wilder journey continues, as I work my way through Joe McBride's comprehensive Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge. This week I saw one of Wilder’s more unheralded triumphs, the 1948 A Foreign Affair. This dark romantic comedy stands out partly because of where it was filmed: in the rubble of Berlin, following the end of World War II. (At the close of his wartime service in the U.S. Army, Wilder was promised government assistance if he shot a movie in occupied Deutschland, thus giving a boost to the ruined German economy as well as to the revival of the German film industry.) A Foreign Affair deals, sometimes sardonically, with the Allies’ efforts to rebuild the devastated German capital. But its primary subject is, as always with Wilder, the vagaries of the human heart. Though Nazis, and their collaborators, are hardly looked on with favor in the course of the film, the occupying American army does not escape unscathed. And a visiting American congressional delegation on a fact-finding tour is treated with all the satirical thrust that Wilder can muster.

Jean Arthur came out of retirement to play Phoebe Frost, a strait-laced Iowa congresswoman bent on improving the morale of the occupying U.S. troops. When she strays from the official tour, she’s alarmed to find that young American servicemen, mistaking her for a blonde fraulein, are eager to canoodle. She’s also appalled when she observes that locals (especially attractive young women) are more than happy to bestow their favors on Americans who can provide them with chocolate bars and nylon stockings. Pretending to be a giggly German maedchen, she goes along with two G.I. Joes to a seedy local club. That’s where she frowns with disapproval on a nightclub singer, Erika von Schlütow, played by Marlene Dietrich with her usual potent mix of glamour and irony.

Though Dietrich herself was known for her unrelenting opposition to Hitler and his thugs, her character in this film represents the German citizens who will do whatever it takes to get by. That’s why, although she’s embroiled in a powerful (and possibly sado-masochistic) relationship with an American officer, John Lund’s Captain Pringle, there’s also a Nazi higher-up lurking in her past. The film’s most striking moments involve her encounters with Congresswoman Frost, who in an ironic turnabout must look to Erika to save her from public humiliation, not to mention  legal jeopardy. Connecting the two women is Captain Pringle, who is not above taking on romance as part of his military duties.

 Looking back on Wilder’s life, as McBride does so effectively, it’s rather startling to see him focusing on the post-war neediness of the German populace. Wilder, a Jewish man who grew up in Vienna and began his filmmaking career in Berlin, was never able to save his own mother and other relatives from the Nazi death camps. Needless to say, he had no great love for the German hierarchy that led the country into war. And his life in the United States, from 1933 onward, paved the way for fame and fortune in his adopted land. Still, unlike Congresswoman Phoebe Frost, he cannot view the German people as undeserving of sympathy.  Scrounging for food and small luxury items (as well as the occasional moment of fun) in their bombed-out city, they awaken his compassion. And it’s in keeping with his mordant temperament that he resists simple delineations of right and wrong. So A Foreign Affair offers up not (as per its poster) hilarious comedy, but rather food for thought, which is far more nourishing than a chocolate bar.

 Joe McBride, the man himself, adds to this post with some important info for cinéastes:"Did you know I did the audio commentary on the recent Kino Lorber Blu-ray edition?For a long time the film was MIA in home video." He adds the all-important Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Foreign-Affair-Blu-ray-Jean-Arthur/dp/B07SNNNMQ7