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It isn't what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts
I slept about four hours last night and they were the wrong hours, but ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
handful_ofdust said I should talk about Humoresque (1946), which derspatchel and I watched last night on TCM. Mostly copied from e-mail:
Humoresque is an odd movie; I don't think it's a failure, and it's certainly an A-picture, but it's one of the kind that feel like two movies layered over one another, intersecting only accidentally at key points. One is the story of a brilliant, ambitious, impatient violinist from a Jewish family on the Lower East Side; that's John Garfield as Paul Boray, a hot-headed virtuoso who's done nothing but study the violin from the time he was ten, encouraged almost worshipfully by his mother and more warily by his father, resented by his siblings who were tramping the streets for work while Paul was let off for "practice," all without quite understanding that a real artist's career requires more than raw talent. It's a great part for Garfield, a Rivington Street Paganini1 with a tough sexual smolder and a desire for music so deeply twined in him, he has trouble even talking about it. We are meant to take him seriously as a genius; his playing is by Isaac Stern. He's not a complacent dreamer. He really has practiced every day, all day, all those years. The scene where he comes offstage from his Carnegie Hall debut and starts instantly identifying all the problems with his performance and wishing he could take the concert over from the top rings true. We're also meant to take seriously the curious naïveté with which he seems to think he can just announce himself and have the classical world fall at his feet. In practice it almost works out like that, but for complicated reasons, which is where the second movie comes in.
The second movie is the one starring Joan Crawford (quite good, even when the plot doesn't quite play fair with her) as Helen Wright, a wealthy socialite on her third loveless marriage with a habit of picking boytoys off the street and grooming them for society until she they bore her; she also has a habit of drinking. Paul interests her because he refuses to be groomed, although he'll accept professional assistance, and because he doesn't treat her drinking like a charming vice, and because it angers him so much when she does things like sleight-of-handing a social call from an old friend—who just happens to be the conductor of the New York Philharmonic2—into an audition for Paul, as though she doesn't trust his music to speak for itself. He doesn't want to be patronized; he wants to be heard. She doesn't know what she wants from him. At first it's the novelty of a fling with a man she can't buy, then it's a life. She's never had anything at the core of herself in the way Paul has his music and she beats herself against the charmed circle of his certainty until she's bruised, taking it as a damning rejection that she'll never come before his art. What makes their relationship a tragedy—and several hankies more of a melodrama than either of us was predicting—is that Paul is not cruel to her. He sees her correctly as a woman who's too intelligent for the shallow self-destruction she's bent on and too convinced of her own worthlessness to try to break the cycle without help; when he falls for her, he falls hard, partly because she does understand what it's like to want desperately out of the world you were born into, even if she hasn't quite managed it. It doesn't hurt that the sexual charge between them plows right over the Production Code. Despite class differences, despite parental disapproval, despite potential blowback to his career, and despite almost certainly incompatible emotional issues, he imagines he'll marry her and they'll be happy, one of those odd couples that everyone looks askance at, but it doesn't matter because they know it works. Of course that doesn't happen. Of course it almost derails Paul. I was just happy that the film didn't end in full-bore Liebestod, considering all the Wagner that was flying around the finale.
Fortunately, we have Oscar Levant throughout as Sid Jeffers, Paul's oldest friend and off-again-on-again accompanist—a lugubrious cynic with a self-deprecating motormouth who is nevertheless the only character in the piece with their head screwed on straight, much good it does him. He's a professional pianist about eight years older than Paul, a jobbing musician rather than a classical superstar; he plays for different radio stations, at parties, with any orchestra that will hire him, and the film is full of Levant's playing, so that we understand how good he is.3 He's the one who gives Paul the straight talk about a debut, about touring, about the schedule that a life as a first-rate solo violinist will demand of him; he knows it's not just a matter of playing when you're inspired or well-rested, but when you've signed a contract to. Talent alone doesn't get people to the top. Even people who get to the top don't always want to stay there, once they find out what it takes. And it's not like the middle isn't hard work, either. Every time the movie threatens to dissolve into a romance of the artistic life, Levant debunks it. And he just wants everyone to come out all right, even when it's not within his power to do much more about it than clown distractingly, offer to buy drinks, and sometimes quietly walk a person home. I can't tell if it was a casualty of the cutting room, but there is a ghostly kind of subplot around the edges with a young woman named Gina Romany, a bass player whom Paul met at the Institute; they have a friendship warming toward romance before he meets Helen, after which she's relegated to background appearances, not quite an alternate love interest—a missed opportunity, maybe. There's no romance between her and Sid, but he is unfailingly kind when he meets her at a bad moment and she recognizes that he can be relied on, much as he would protest the slander. Watching Oscar Levant being three-dimensional in among the mordant bon mots reminded me that Humoresque was directed by Jean Negulesco, who gave Peter Lorre the only romantic lead of his career in Three Strangers (1946). Perhaps by the same token, Humoresque is also the only film in which I've seen Oscar Levant flirt. He appears to do it by insult and fatalism and it's working until Paul interrupts.
It is probably evident that I am more the audience for the first movie than the second (and always for Oscar Levant), but I'm not at all sorry we watched the entire thing. In hindsight I'd probably recommend it for the performances more than the story, or just as a showcase for a number of classical pieces played extremely well in combination with memorable visuals—it's not Fantasia (1940), but Negulesco and composer-arranger Franz Waxman visibly foreground the music rather than fitting it to the action. Works for me. Rob thinks the title must have confused the hell out of viewers who went in expecting a comedy.
1. The film treads carefully around Paul's ethnicity, but his mother is named Esther and his father has Yiddish inflections all over his lines and his actor was born John Julius Garfinkle, all right? Garfield was a stunner and he looked like a New York Jew. It always makes me happy.
2. Played by Fritz Leiber! The writer's father, not the writer. I always wondered what he looked like.
3. And he really is; he's lovely to watch. Humoresque is, incidentally, the only film I know from its decade where so much screen time is music and, effectively, silent action; its ratio of dialogue to performance is about the same as a musical of the time, but it's all classical and instrumental. There are three songs performed by a piano-bar singer, none heard in full. There is also an amazing montage of New York city life quick-cut to Paul practicing a barn-burning solo over which a clangorous orchestral piece sweeps and recedes, hitting all its marks like bells. Lunch at an Automat has never been so meticulously scored. Many of the dissolves between scenes are similarly striking, poetically overlaid or linked by sound. The internet tells me that Negulesco started in film as a sketch artist in 1934; he had both a great eye and ear.
handful_ofdust said I should talk about Humoresque (1946), which derspatchel and I watched last night on TCM. Mostly copied from e-mail:Humoresque is an odd movie; I don't think it's a failure, and it's certainly an A-picture, but it's one of the kind that feel like two movies layered over one another, intersecting only accidentally at key points. One is the story of a brilliant, ambitious, impatient violinist from a Jewish family on the Lower East Side; that's John Garfield as Paul Boray, a hot-headed virtuoso who's done nothing but study the violin from the time he was ten, encouraged almost worshipfully by his mother and more warily by his father, resented by his siblings who were tramping the streets for work while Paul was let off for "practice," all without quite understanding that a real artist's career requires more than raw talent. It's a great part for Garfield, a Rivington Street Paganini1 with a tough sexual smolder and a desire for music so deeply twined in him, he has trouble even talking about it. We are meant to take him seriously as a genius; his playing is by Isaac Stern. He's not a complacent dreamer. He really has practiced every day, all day, all those years. The scene where he comes offstage from his Carnegie Hall debut and starts instantly identifying all the problems with his performance and wishing he could take the concert over from the top rings true. We're also meant to take seriously the curious naïveté with which he seems to think he can just announce himself and have the classical world fall at his feet. In practice it almost works out like that, but for complicated reasons, which is where the second movie comes in.
The second movie is the one starring Joan Crawford (quite good, even when the plot doesn't quite play fair with her) as Helen Wright, a wealthy socialite on her third loveless marriage with a habit of picking boytoys off the street and grooming them for society until she they bore her; she also has a habit of drinking. Paul interests her because he refuses to be groomed, although he'll accept professional assistance, and because he doesn't treat her drinking like a charming vice, and because it angers him so much when she does things like sleight-of-handing a social call from an old friend—who just happens to be the conductor of the New York Philharmonic2—into an audition for Paul, as though she doesn't trust his music to speak for itself. He doesn't want to be patronized; he wants to be heard. She doesn't know what she wants from him. At first it's the novelty of a fling with a man she can't buy, then it's a life. She's never had anything at the core of herself in the way Paul has his music and she beats herself against the charmed circle of his certainty until she's bruised, taking it as a damning rejection that she'll never come before his art. What makes their relationship a tragedy—and several hankies more of a melodrama than either of us was predicting—is that Paul is not cruel to her. He sees her correctly as a woman who's too intelligent for the shallow self-destruction she's bent on and too convinced of her own worthlessness to try to break the cycle without help; when he falls for her, he falls hard, partly because she does understand what it's like to want desperately out of the world you were born into, even if she hasn't quite managed it. It doesn't hurt that the sexual charge between them plows right over the Production Code. Despite class differences, despite parental disapproval, despite potential blowback to his career, and despite almost certainly incompatible emotional issues, he imagines he'll marry her and they'll be happy, one of those odd couples that everyone looks askance at, but it doesn't matter because they know it works. Of course that doesn't happen. Of course it almost derails Paul. I was just happy that the film didn't end in full-bore Liebestod, considering all the Wagner that was flying around the finale.
Fortunately, we have Oscar Levant throughout as Sid Jeffers, Paul's oldest friend and off-again-on-again accompanist—a lugubrious cynic with a self-deprecating motormouth who is nevertheless the only character in the piece with their head screwed on straight, much good it does him. He's a professional pianist about eight years older than Paul, a jobbing musician rather than a classical superstar; he plays for different radio stations, at parties, with any orchestra that will hire him, and the film is full of Levant's playing, so that we understand how good he is.3 He's the one who gives Paul the straight talk about a debut, about touring, about the schedule that a life as a first-rate solo violinist will demand of him; he knows it's not just a matter of playing when you're inspired or well-rested, but when you've signed a contract to. Talent alone doesn't get people to the top. Even people who get to the top don't always want to stay there, once they find out what it takes. And it's not like the middle isn't hard work, either. Every time the movie threatens to dissolve into a romance of the artistic life, Levant debunks it. And he just wants everyone to come out all right, even when it's not within his power to do much more about it than clown distractingly, offer to buy drinks, and sometimes quietly walk a person home. I can't tell if it was a casualty of the cutting room, but there is a ghostly kind of subplot around the edges with a young woman named Gina Romany, a bass player whom Paul met at the Institute; they have a friendship warming toward romance before he meets Helen, after which she's relegated to background appearances, not quite an alternate love interest—a missed opportunity, maybe. There's no romance between her and Sid, but he is unfailingly kind when he meets her at a bad moment and she recognizes that he can be relied on, much as he would protest the slander. Watching Oscar Levant being three-dimensional in among the mordant bon mots reminded me that Humoresque was directed by Jean Negulesco, who gave Peter Lorre the only romantic lead of his career in Three Strangers (1946). Perhaps by the same token, Humoresque is also the only film in which I've seen Oscar Levant flirt. He appears to do it by insult and fatalism and it's working until Paul interrupts.
It is probably evident that I am more the audience for the first movie than the second (and always for Oscar Levant), but I'm not at all sorry we watched the entire thing. In hindsight I'd probably recommend it for the performances more than the story, or just as a showcase for a number of classical pieces played extremely well in combination with memorable visuals—it's not Fantasia (1940), but Negulesco and composer-arranger Franz Waxman visibly foreground the music rather than fitting it to the action. Works for me. Rob thinks the title must have confused the hell out of viewers who went in expecting a comedy.
1. The film treads carefully around Paul's ethnicity, but his mother is named Esther and his father has Yiddish inflections all over his lines and his actor was born John Julius Garfinkle, all right? Garfield was a stunner and he looked like a New York Jew. It always makes me happy.
2. Played by Fritz Leiber! The writer's father, not the writer. I always wondered what he looked like.
3. And he really is; he's lovely to watch. Humoresque is, incidentally, the only film I know from its decade where so much screen time is music and, effectively, silent action; its ratio of dialogue to performance is about the same as a musical of the time, but it's all classical and instrumental. There are three songs performed by a piano-bar singer, none heard in full. There is also an amazing montage of New York city life quick-cut to Paul practicing a barn-burning solo over which a clangorous orchestral piece sweeps and recedes, hitting all its marks like bells. Lunch at an Automat has never been so meticulously scored. Many of the dissolves between scenes are similarly striking, poetically overlaid or linked by sound. The internet tells me that Negulesco started in film as a sketch artist in 1934; he had both a great eye and ear.
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The backstage parts of Humoresque are definitely worth it. You can always hum Gershwin through the soapier bits.
(Should I recommend other movies of this type or assume you've seen most of them?)
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I'm at least familiar with the 'let's put on a show' genre in that era of musical theater, though I haven't seen a lot of them; even the ones with actors that I like, like all of the Judy Garland ones that she did with Mickey Rooney. I'd watch whatever happened to be on but never got around to tracking down things in particular just because I don't track down movies that often. I'm even less likely to have seen the ones that aren't musicals.
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Nine
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Several thumbs up seconding Cradle Will Rock (1999), which I have not seen since it was in theaters. It's a very lightly* fictionalized account of the production and performance of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock (1937) in context of the political 1930's; side plots follow the lives of the cast and crew, including investigations by the Committee on Un-American Activities, and Diego Rivera as he paints Man at the Crossroads for Nelson Rockefeller. It's an incredible ensemble cast. My grandfather saw, in real life, the events that are the climax of the film.
* And in one case mystifyingly: John Turturro as the actor who originates the part of Larry Foreman in The Cradle Will Rock is effectively playing Howard da Silva, but he's the Italian-American "Aldo Silvano" instead. Almost everyone else in the cast is historical and properly named. Bill Murray is an invented character, but he's such a good one.
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So if you haven't seen Slings & Arrows (2003–2006), set aside fourteen hours of your life and watch it immediately. I've been told it's the best television series about theater that exists and I believe it. It's certainly some of the best television I've ever seen. Geoffrey Tennant last set foot at the prestigious
StratfordNew Burbage Festival when he had a breakdown halfway through a legendary Hamlet and kicked around a psychiatric hospital for a while before devoting his life to fringe theatre; now he's just been appointed the festival's temporary artistic director, following the untimely death of his predecessor Oliver Welles at the wheels of a pig truck, and what he's supposed to direct is a production of Hamlet starring an American action hero who's never done Shakespeare before. For bonus awkwardness, his Gertrude is his former lover Ellen Fanshaw, once his ill-fated, amazing Ophelia. Oh, and Oliver's haunting him, or possibly he's just losing his mind again. Everything proceeds quite reasonably from there. I wrote about the show a little here, although mostly about Oliver. I'm very fond of him. But the whole thing is wonderful.I wrote about The Dresser (1983) when I saw it in 2011; it is also wonderful, although much more genuinely tragic. A tattered repertory company during the Blitz, pulling together a performance of Lear in the provinces as their aging king wanders somewhere in the blasted heath of his mind and his faithful dresser plays the Fool, trying to hold him together for just one more night. Albert Finney is very good as the fast-fraying "Sir," but Norman the dresser is the reason I will always love Tom Courtenay, aside from the fact that he originated "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter."
Topsy-Turvy (1999) dramatizes the creation, rehearsal, and first peformance of The Mikado in 1885. It was my introduction to Mike Leigh and a number of character actors I follow to this day, including Andy Serkis. Martin Savage as George Grossmith, like a good patter baritone, steals all the scenes he's in. The only thing wrong with it is that its cast didn't get together and record a complete version of the operetta, because they are incredibly talented. Louise Gold is probably my definitive Katisha by now.
The Red Shoes (1948) is a gorgeously faithful translation of the Andersen fairytale to a contemporary ballet company. It's not my favorite film by Powell and Pressburger, but it probably is their most well-known. It was the first movie to showcase ballet rather than other forms of dance; it's supposed to be the reason Gene Kelly was able to convince MGM to film An American in Paris (1951). I've written about it several times.
Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005) is a lighter, more diffuse film than it could have been, but it's a fun version of the story of London's Windmill Theatre, whose famous nude revues allowed them to claim, after the Blitz, "We never clothed." I enjoy Bob Hoskins very much in it, not least because he's willing to be seen with only his socks on. It's remarkable for its re-creations of musical numbers of the time by singers who actually have the voices for it, including a crooner I was really impressed with who turned out to be the inaugural winner of Pop Idol. Be warned that "Babies of the Blitz" is a ridiculous earworm.
You have probably seen A Star Is Born (1954) with Judy Garland and James Mason, but it deserves its reputation. I watched it a few years ago and never wrote about it, despite being tremendously impressed. I should fix that.
If you can find Der Purimshpiler (1937), it's one of the few films I've seen deal with itinerant Yiddish theater.
I have almost exceeded comment limits, so how's that for a start?
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So I know this isn't supposed to be my takeaway from the episode, but Eugene Fodor is really good.
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Tonight I watched Pulp Fiction yet again, and wondered if Mia Wallace was the 1990s version of Helen Wright, in that she fits the archetype (is it common enough to be an archetype?) of the woman who is really too thoughtful for the life she is leading.
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I haven't seen Pulp Fiction since college, but I certainly think it's an archetype. Feathers in von Sternberg's Underworld (1927) is like this, too; not as damaged as Helen, but definitely knowing she needs more from the world and resigned to not getting it. (I wrote about the film in 2008. Don't hold the style against me.)
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It's definitely worth its two hours, if you have the time. I've pretty much liked John Garfield in everything I've seen him in.
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He was an excellent portrayal of a really good friend! I wasn't expecting him and I have no complaints. He's quotable, too. I'm pretty sure Levant improvised many of his own lines.