Reviews

Fascinating, to see so starkly one man's talents (Ray McKinnon) and faults on display, like the chipped old rhinestone engagement solitaire my dead granny handed me just before she gave up the ghost beneath that faded quilt she made for her sister Lula Mae when they shipped her off to that place for people teched in the haid, while autumn leaves of red and gold fell to earth outside the shack where she fixed possum and dressin' fer Thanksgivin' back in the holler and winter crawled in like a blind old moonshiner breathin' his last wasted breath.

McKinnon, here, cain't write too good. He can act (his "Snake" is the best and most electrifying thing in the film). He can direct; but so can loads of TV soap opera folks. His cinematographer (Myron Kerstein) is good. His actors do the best they can with this material (except Grace Zabriskie, who's supposed to be comedy relief except when she's supposed to be waxing wise and in any case seems to be channeling Rue McClanahan's Blanche from "Golden Girls," without benefit of that show's polished dialogue).

The script's the problem. One wants to empathize with these people. ANY of them. One waits, and waits, as things get worse and worse and the lines more smarmy and sentimental and unbelievable. But there's no one to care about or root for as the dialogue ricochets between pseudo-hard-boiled hillbilly and pseudo-Tennessee-Williams poetic.

So out of synch with reality are the words and situations that one laughs uncontrollaby and / or shakes one's head at all the wrong moments that keep piling up like Momma's mulch in the compost heap by the outhouse . . . .

Until Chrystal's supposedly moving reveal about her granny telling her, when a girl, that if she listens she can hear the flowers grow and now that she's a far-gone nutty self-pitying self-destructive backwoods drama queen she CAN hear 'em growin'.

Then Billy Bob Thornton shows back up in grizzled Howard-Hughes-near-the-end makeup and a filthy foot-long beard, with a kidnapped infant to replace the child he and Chrystal lost in the clumsily-shot no-budget opening accident sequence, before getting predictably killed by the cops in the squad-car headlights outside and Chrystal (as in Snake's meth? It's that kind of symbolism) marries the widower Good Cop, presumably finds redemption and some common sense, and the cop's little daughter by his dead wife climbs the artistic / symbolic welded sculpture Billy Bob topped off with a tricycle and sits there pedaling toward nowhere fifteen feet off the ground (like this film) and smiles wistfully, trying to jerk some genuine emotion from an audience searching vainly for any shred of meaning or reason-for-being in this pretentious vanity production, and credits roll while we (I could swear, y'all) hear flowers growing under the soundtrack and our tired behinds ache for sweet freedom.

"Magnificent Obsession" is Douglas Sirk's rehearsal for "All That Heaven Allows" and "Imitation of Life." The story (from Lloyd Douglas' novel) is a ludicrous drug-store romance with a smarmy tinge of Woolworth spirituality that DARES you not to take all this seriously.

Through a series of unintentionally tragi-comic coincidences, Rock Hudson gamely goes from rich bad selfish playboy to -- what else? -- selfless neurosurgeon who saves the sight and life of the comatose woman he loves, eight years his senior.

Oh, for the days when doctors and patients offered each other cigarettes in their offices: When even small out-of-the-way hospitals out West were staffed with full orchestras and choirs stationed just outside OR.

The actors are fine. Particularly Wyman and Moorehead, who somehow make their impossible lines sound genuine. Sirk's direction, design and cinematography are, as usual, outstanding. But the script is insurmountable.

One tries and tries to go with the implied emotions of these contrived situations, but succumbs to chuckling disbelief with every ham-handed twist.

Thankfully, all was redeemed just one year later, when the major players returned in the superlative, "All That Heaven Allows." Followed, four years after THAT, by Sirk's incomparable masterpiece of the genre, "Imitation of Life."

That's the only thought that keeps running through one's head while watching this 1934 version of "Imitation of Life": "For its time . . . ."

"For its time," this must have seemed a breakthrough in some ways, mainly its depiction of '30s racism. The same can be said for the 1957 Douglas Sirk version: "For its time . . . ."

Certainly, in terms of film making, writing, directing and acting, the 1934 version is nothing out of the then-ordinary. It's stagy, slow and poorly written.

Seriously: After the supposedly emotionally draining sequence of Louise Beavers' death scene and funeral, with the return of passing-for-white daughter Fredi Washington ("I killed my own mother"), followed by the ludicrously insulting coda of Claudette's utterance of the film's immortal last line, "I want my quack-quack," one can only wonder that this was all received as anything but a cheap joke posing as sloppy sentimentality.

Colbert is terrific, as always. A wonderful actress throughout her long career. Still, knowing she early on insisted the left side of her face was more photogenic than the right, it's fascinating to witness her actor's vanity at work in every scene. But regardless of the quality of her material, Colbert never delivered a false line-reading, on screen or on stage. Even in French (which she spoke fluently).

Louise Beavers is good, "For its time . . . ," but hardly gives a "breakthrough" performance, for 1934 or any other year. ESPECIALLY compared to Juanita Moore's amazing performance in this role 23 years later (with a better, but not THAT much better, script).

Fredi Washington seems good, but it's hard to tell, since she was given so little screen time. Was her part so small because of the racism of the time? Probably. But it's unfair to compare Fredi Washington's bit role here to the electrifying Susan Kohner in Sirk's version.

Note too that sound films of the early '30s were still not yet comfortable with "scoring" except for titles and end-credits. Incidental music had to come from an apparent on screen "source" like a radio or orchestra (the party sequence, here), it was thought.

So, when a low off-screen Stephen Foster dirge underscores Louise Beavers' death scene, Colbert's daughter has to open the bedroom door to reveal a trio of heretofore unseen black household servants singing it outside in the hallway like some black-face "coon" trio, as they were called, suddenly dropped in from vaudeville's yesteryear Keith-Orpheum circuit.

Even "for its time," there's no excuse for the sappy last line, meant to hearken back to the "innocent" days when the film began with Mommy bathing her two year old. Bad enough the line has to be said once, much less TWICE. But there it is.

"I want my quack-quack."

Sure, Douglas Sirk's version has 23 years of film making experience on this one. But SOME films from the early '30s still shimmer and shine even today, nearly 80 years later.

This one doesn't. Except as a curious relic whose only value is as an archive "for its time." Sirk's version is the definitive one, say what you will about its over-the-top "camp" elements. Yes, it too is "for its time." But it still packs a powerful emotional wallop and always will, as one of the best-produced, best-realized film melodramas of all time.

To watch Alfred Hitchcock discuss "montage," which is to say cutting and editing of filmed pieces, is to be let in on the secrets of one of cinema's great masters.

Above all else, I think, Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" is a film about film making -- voyeurism, detachment, observation, lighting, camera placement, focal length, color, set design, acting, pretending, cutting, slicing and dicing -- to produce strong emotions in audiences through projecting a montage of sequential shadows on a giant screen.

HERE IS THE SPOILER: You see absolutely NOTHING in any given frame that a child could not safely see without adverse effect. Yet, so controversial was it, this film "wrecked" Powell's career.

In fact, in one scene, a young girl familiarly enters a corner store to buy some candy -- happily and innocently oblivious to the soft-core "girlie" and lingerie magazines prominently displayed among the newspapers, soft drinks and cigarettes.

WE know, though the girl doesn't and couldn't care less, that these scantily clad women are photographed in a shabby room upstairs by a shy psychopath who works at a movie studio as a focus puller by day, and moonlights at night as a mentally tortured stalker and murderer of women, documenting their last moments of fear and death with his Bell & Howell and deadly tripod.

That corner drug store scene juxtaposes a dirty old man negotiating with the proprietor for under-the-counter porn; the disturbed psychopathic killer waiting in the store to go upstairs and murder a half-naked soft-core model; and their interruption by an innocent young girl buying candy. The scene as a whole is unbelievably perverse and tense.

But LOOK at it. As actually staged and shot by Michael Powell, the actress playing the girl is exposed to NOTHING that we "think" she is while she's in the store. The actress sees no "dirty" pictures anywhere because there are just innocent pin-ups of the day on the set.

They're "dirty" in our mind's eye and our overall impression of the scene because of Powell's brilliant montage and cutting. So it's incredibly disturbing and "wrong," when in the actual shooting it was quite innocent and harmless.

Same with the infamous black-and-white shots of the killer as a boy being purposefully terrified and filmed by his sadistic scientist / psychologist father for "research." The boy was Michael Powell's own son.

Shot by shot, frame by frame, there is NOTHING in the least disturbing about these sequences. The boy's in bed "asleep" (fairly obviously an amateur actor pretending). A light shines on him. He "wakes up" when his offscreen father drops a salamander on his bed. There's a CU shot of the salamander on the blanket, crawling toward the camera (us) that would have been impossible for the "father" to get in the context of the scene. It's complete artifice. Then shots of the boy "crying" and wiping his eyes (again, unconvincingly, per an amateur actor performing to Daddy's instructions).

But the way these quick snippets are cut together doesn't give us time to consciously realize this is an amateur actor who isn't really crying (no tears) or that the CU salamander shot would have been impossible. The montage makes the sequence appear absolutely horrifying and cruel and almost unwatchable.

More than meets the eye.

Powell's technique of showing us nothing in "Peeping Tom," but evoking revulsion and horror and pity and fear by making us think we're seeing "everything," is to me superior even to Hitchcock's "Psycho." Not that Powell was a "better" director. But he sustains the art of cinema montage, in "Peeping Tom", from opening sequence to the last stunning suicide of the lead character, better and more consistently than Hitchcock (with his notorious penchant for humorous breaks and sequences to "relieve" audience tension) ever did.

"Peeping Tom" never lets up. Does it achieve the spectacular electrifying tensions of Hitchcockian montage sequences in "North by Northwest" or "Psycho" or "Notorious"? No.

Powell's accomplishment in "Peeping Tom" is far subtler and ultimately more disturbing because it's sustained from first voyeuristic montage sequence (we watch the killer stalk and kill a hooker through his camera's viewfinder) to the last grueling and brilliantly unnerving climax.

That climax is like a symphony: a mad orgy of self-destruction accompanied by the cries of terrified children on multi-track tapes, the killer / lead character rushing across his darkened studio to ram his throat onto his razor-sharp extended tripod-blade, triggering an array of pre-planned rapid-fire flashes to photograph his own jaw-dropping demise and staring finally at his own frightened face in the circular mirror around the camera's lens -- "I'm frightened! I'm GLAD I'm frightened!" --

Then calm, as he collapses to the floor, dying, hearing Daddy's voice: "Don't be a silly boy."

Bravura!

The actors, thanks to Michael Powell's direction, are uniformly brilliant and underplay everything with total believability and sympathy.

Everything (on purpose) looks cheap and oversaturated and tawdry, like a Piccadilly carnival or Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors.

"Peeping Tom" still has the power to disturb, thanks to Powell's mastery of montage.

Because, frame for frame, in reality, it's visually as innocent as "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm." People look scared in close-ups, a bewildered salamander inspects the lens, the sound track of unseen crying children (because of the montage and context) is unsettling, and the minimalist script and superb acting make the whole enterprise feel almost like a subversively-filmed documentary (like the one the killer is shooting).

But in the end, all the twisted perversity takes place in our minds. More shockingly, really, than even Hitchcock, (this film effectively ended Powell's career, so successfully did he achieve what he set out to do), Michael Powell makes us the ultimate voyeurs, ultimate psychopaths, and manipulates our emotions through the transporting power of cinema's supreme technique, of all the arts: montage.

Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine have delivered consistently impressive performances throughout their careers (Miss MacLaine, still active, still does).

In 1961, the year Miss Hepburn made "The Children's Hour," she was nominated for an Academy Award for "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Talk about acting versatility! (Sophia Loren won for "Two Women.") It's enlightening, on so many levels, to revisit "The Children's Hour" from today's perspective, fifty years later.

Lillian Hellman's play was written 30 years before THAT: or EIGHTY years ago, from today.

Obviously, attitudes about same-sex love have changed in a century, thanks to greater knowledge and human understanding. Yet the self-loathing depicted in "The Children's Hour" -- and yes, the suicide -- are honest for their time. And still today, sadly, in many locales.

The script borders on soap-opera cliché and melodrama at times. But eighty years ago these WEREN'T clichés or melodrama. Lesbianism and the murderous prejudice against it (and same-sex love in general) had never been this directly addressed on Broadway before.

The "revelation" is in the performances of trite lines that would fall flat and earn snickers in any other actors' hands but these, even in 1961, or under another director / producer than William Wyler. (And note the careful scenic compositions with his cinematographer, Franz Planer.)

But it's the acting that packs a wallop. Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, Fay Bainter and Karen Balkin as the girl. (Bainter was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.) These really are some amazing performances -- even in light of these actors' OTHER amazing performances. (Except for Karen Balkin, a terrific actress who never became a star.)

James Garner is fine. He's not quite on a par with any of the lead women, simply because he can't quite fully inhabit these overwrought lines and situations. His acting chops aren't on the other three leads' level -- not a criticism; just an observation.

Though MacLaine and Hepburn can tear your heart out with hackneyed lines like, "I feel so GUILTY (for loving you like that horrid little brat said), and "You're guilty of NOTHING!" . . . James Garner's not so convincing when the script requires him to break down in vulnerable sobs on the mantle in front of stoic Audrey. James Garner, actor, don't cry or do vulnerable so good.

But that's fine because he's on the money in every other scene of his. And he always has been.

Karen Belkin is wonderful. She goes a little obvious and broad (directed that way?) when she's in the midst of a lie (often), but she's frighteningly threatening in scheming malicious mode (again, often).

Miriam Hopkins? Well, she never did quite drop her southern accent birthright completely, despite overlays of theatrical pseudo-British soft-r's. "Have a seat in that chay-ah." What a ham. Still, always watchable.

Hepburn, MacLaine and Bainter in particular are consummate screen actors who understand the face, the camera, and underplaying. And, of course, so did Wyler.

There are a lot of silences here. A lot of long motionless moments.

What these old pros (then young) accomplish here is genuinely heartbreaking, devastating and breathtaking as much for their almost overwhelming acting technique as for the maudlin, dated words and situations they're required to portray.

If you've forgotten how brilliant these performers were, and are, "The Children's Hour" is a revelation.