#i say this as a robert altman lover

[cypr1anlatew00d]

sucide is painless vs the shape of things to come for best song written for a movie that's like, okay... hard to pick

[whileiamdying]

Lauren Bacall Dies at 89; in a Bygone Hollywood, She Purred Every Word

By Enid Nemy Aug. 12, 2014

Lauren Bacall, the actress whose provocative glamour elevated her to stardom in Hollywood’s golden age and whose lasting mystique put her on a plateau in American culture that few stars reach, died on Tuesday in New York. She was 89.

Her death was confirmed by her son Stephen Bogart. “Her life speaks for itself,” Mr. Bogart said. “She lived a wonderful life, a magical life.”

With an insinuating pose and a seductive, throaty voice — her simplest remark sounded like a jungle mating call, one critic said — Ms. Bacall shot to fame in 1944 with her first movie, Howard Hawks’s adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel “To Have and Have Not,” playing opposite Humphrey Bogart, who became her lover on the set and later her husband.

It was a smashing debut sealed with a handful of lines now engraved in Hollywood history.

“You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve,” her character says to Bogart’s in the movie’s most memorable scene. “You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”

The film was the first of more than 40 for Ms. Bacall, among them “The Big Sleep” and “Key Largo” with Bogart, “How to Marry a Millionaire” with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, “Designing Woman” with Gregory Peck, the all-star “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974) and, later in her career, Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” (2003) and “Manderlay” (2005) and Robert Altman’s “Prêt-à-Porter” (1994).

But few if any of her movies had the impact of her first — or of that one scene. Indeed, her film career was a story of ups, downs and long periods of inactivity. Though she received an honorary Academy Award in 2009 “in recognition of her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures,” she was not nominated for an Oscar until 1997.

The theater was kinder to her. She won Tonys for her starring roles in two musicals adapted from classic films: “Applause” (1970), based on “All About Eve,” and “Woman of the Year” (1981), based on the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movie of the same name. Earlier she starred on Broadway in the comedies “Goodbye, Charlie” (1959) and “Cactus Flower” (1965).

She also won a National Book Award in 1980 for the first of her two autobiographies, “Lauren Bacall: By Myself.”

Though often called a legend, she did not care for the word. “It’s a title and category I am less than fond of,” she wrote in 1994 in “Now,” her second autobiography. “Aren’t legends dead?”

Forever Tied to Bogart

She also expressed impatience, especially in her later years, with the public’s continuing fascination with her romance with Bogart, even though she frequently said that their 12-year marriage was the happiest period of her life.

“I think I’ve damn well earned the right to be judged on my own,” she said in a 1970 interview with The New York Times. “It’s time I was allowed a life of my own, to be judged and thought of as a person, as me.”

Years later, however, she seemed resigned to being forever tied to Bogart and expressed annoyance that her later marriage to another leading actor, Jason Robards Jr., was often overlooked.

“My obit is going to be full of Bogart, I’m sure,” she told Vanity Fair magazine in a profile of her in March 2011, adding: “I’ll never know if that’s true. If that’s the way, that’s the way it is.”

Ms. Bacall was an 18-year-old model in New York when her face on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar caught the eye of Slim Hawks, Howard Hawks’s wife. Brought to Hollywood and taken under the Hawkses’ wing, she won the role in “To Have and Have Not,” loosely based on the novel of the same name.

She played Marie Browning, known as Slim, an American femme fatale who becomes romantically involved with Bogart’s jaded fishing-boat captain, Harry Morgan, known as Steve, in wartime Martinique. Her deep voice and the seductive way she looked at Bogart in the film attracted attention.

Their on-screen chemistry hadn’t come naturally, however. In one of the first scenes she filmed, she asked if anyone had a match. Bogart threw her a box of matches; she lit her cigarette and then threw the box back to him.

“My hand was shaking, my head was shaking, the cigarette was shaking, I was mortified,” she wrote in “By Myself.” “The harder I tried to stop, the more I shook. ... I realized that one way to hold my trembling head still was to keep it down, chin low, almost to my chest, and eyes up at Bogart. It worked and turned out to be the beginning of The Look.”

Ms. Bacall’s naturally low voice was further deepened in her early months in Hollywood. Hawks wanted her voice to remain low even during emotional scenes and suggested she find some quiet spot and read aloud. She drove to Mulholland Drive and began reading “The Robe,” making her voice lower and louder than usual.

“Who sat on mountaintops in cars reading books aloud to the canyons?” she later wrote. “I did.”

During her romance with Bogart, she asked him if it mattered to him that she was Jewish. His answer, she later wrote, was “Hell, no — what mattered to him was me, how I thought, how I felt, what kind of person I was, not my religion, he couldn’t care less — why did I even ask?”

An Impulsive Kiss

Ms. Bacall’s love affair with Bogart began with an impulsive kiss. While filming “To Have and Have Not,” he had stopped at her trailer to say good night when he suddenly leaned over, lifted her chin and kissed her. He was 25 years her senior and married at the time to Mayo Methot, his third wife, but to Ms. Bacall, “he was the man who meant everything in the world to me; I couldn’t believe my luck.”

As her fame grew in the ensuing months — she attracted wide publicity in February 1945 when she was photographed on top of a piano, legs draped over the side, with Vice President Harry S. Truman at the keyboard — so did the romance, particularly as she and Bogart filmed “The Big Sleep,” based on a Raymond Chandler whodunit.

But her happiness alternated with despair. Bogart returned to his wife several times before he accepted that the marriage could not be saved. He and Ms. Bacall were married on May 21, 1945, at Malabar Farm in Lucas, Ohio, the home of Bogart’s close friend the writer Louis Bromfield. Bogart was 45; Ms. Bacall was 20.

Returning to work, she soon suffered a setback, when the critics savaged her performance in “Confidential Agent,” a 1945 thriller with Charles Boyer set during the Spanish Civil War. The director was Herman Shumlin, who, unlike Hawks and Bogart on her first two movies, offered her no guidance. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” she recalled. “I was a novice.”

“After ‘Confidential Agent,’ it took me years to prove that I was capable of doing anything at all worthwhile,” she wrote. “I would never reach the ‘To Have and Have Not’ heights again — on film, anyway — and it would take much clawing and scratching to pull myself even halfway back up that damn ladder.”

“Dark Passage,” her third movie with Bogart, came after several years of concentrating on her marriage. Had she not married Bogart, she told The Times in 1996, her career would probably have flourished, but she did not regret the marriage.

“I would not have had a better life, but a better career,” she said. “Howard Hawks was like a Svengali; he was molding me the way he wanted. I was his creation, and I would have had a great career had he been in control of it. But the minute Bogie was around, Hawks knew he couldn’t control me, so he sold my contract to Warner Bros. And that was the end.”

She was eventually suspended 12 times by the studio for rejecting scripts.

‘And We Made a Noise’

In 1947, as the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Americans suspected of Communism, Ms. Bacall and Bogart were among about 80 Hollywood personalities to sign a petition protesting the committee’s actions. Investigating individual political beliefs, the petition said, violated the basic principles of American democracy.

The couple flew to Washington as part of a group known as the Committee for the First Amendment, which also included Danny Kaye, John Garfield, Gene Kelly, John Huston, Ira Gershwin and Jane Wyatt. “I am an outraged and angry citizen who feels that my basic civil liberties are being taken away from me,” Bogart said in a statement.

Three decades later, Ms. Bacall would express doubts about “whether the trip to Washington ultimately helped anyone.” But, she added: “It helped those of us at the time who wanted to fight for what we thought was right and against what we knew was wrong. And we made a noise — in Hollywood, a community which should be courageous but which is surprisingly timid and easily intimidated.”

Nevertheless, bowing to studio pressure, Bogart later said publicly he believed the trip to Washington was “ill advised,” and Ms. Bacall went along with him.

A year after that trip she had what she termed “one of my happiest movie experiences” starring with Bogart, Lionel Barrymore, Edward G. Robinson and Claire Trevor in John Huston’s thriller “Key Largo.” It was Bogart’s and Ms. Bacall’s last film together. “Young Man With a Horn” (1950), with Kirk Douglas and Doris Day, in which she played a student married to a jazz trumpeter, was less successful.

Ms. Bacall’s first son, Stephen H. Bogart (named after Bogart’s character in “To Have and Have Not”), was born in 1949. A daughter, Leslie Bogart (named after the actor Leslie Howard), was born in 1952. In a 1995 memoir, Stephen wrote, “My mother was a lapsed Jew, and my father was a lapsed Episcopalian,” adding that he and his sister, Leslie, were raised Episcopalian “because my mother felt that would make life easier for Leslie and me during those post-World War II years.”

Rat Pack Den Mother

Ms. Bacall, however, wrote that she felt “totally Jewish and always would” and that it was Bogart who thought the children should be christened in an Episcopal church because “with discrimination still rampant in the world, it would give them one less hurdle to jump in life’s Olympics.”

She was, she said, happy being a wife and mother. She was also “den mother” to the so-called Hollywood Rat Pack, whose members included Bogart, Frank Sinatra, David Niven, Judy Garland and others. (It would evolve into the better-known Rat Pack whose members included Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.)

In 1952 she campaigned for Adlai E. Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for president, and persuaded Bogart, who had originally supported the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, to join her. The two accompanied Stevenson on motorcades and flew east to help in the final lap of his campaign in New York and Chicago.

Her film career at this point appeared to be going nowhere, but she had no intention of allowing Lauren Bacall the actress to slide into oblivion. In 1953 her fortunes revived with what she called “the best part I’d had in years,” in “How to Marry a Millionaire,” playing alongside Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable as New York models with sights set on finding rich husbands.

In the early 1950s the Bogarts dabbled in radio and the growing medium of television. They starred in the radio adventure series “Bold Venture” and, with Henry Fonda, in a live television version of “The Petrified Forest,” the 1936 film that starred Bogart, Bette Davis and Leslie Howard. In 1956 Ms. Bacall appeared in a television production of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” in which Coward himself also starred. She would occasionally return to the small screen for the rest of her career, making guest appearances on shows like “The Rockford Files” and “Chicago Hope” and starring in TV movies.

Bogart was found to have cancer of the esophagus in 1956. Although an operation was successful — his esophagus and two lymph nodes were removed — after some months the cancer returned. He died in January 1957 at the age of 57.

Romance With Sinatra

Shortly after Bogart’s death, Ms. Bacall, by then 32, had a widely publicized but brief romance with Sinatra, who had been a close friend of the Bogarts. She moved to New York in 1958 and, three years later, married Mr. Robards, settling in a spacious apartment in the Dakota, on Central Park West, where she continued to live until her death. They had a son, the actor Sam Robards, and were divorced in 1969. She is survived by her sons, Stephen Bogart and Sam Robards; her daughter, Leslie Bogart; and six grandchildren.

Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske in the Bronx on Sept. 16, 1924, the daughter of William and Natalie Perske, Jewish immigrants from Poland and Romania. Her parents were divorced when she was 6 years old, and her mother moved to Manhattan and adopted the second half of her maiden name, Weinstein-Bacal.

“I didn’t really have any love in my growing-up life, except for my mother and grandmother,” Ms. Bacall said in the Vanity Fair interview. Her father, she said, “did not treat my mother well.”

From then until her move to Hollywood, Ms. Bacall was known as Betty Bacal; she added an “l” to her name because, she said, the single “l” caused “too much irregularity of pronunciation.” The name Lauren was given her by Howard Hawks before the release of her first film, but family and old friends called her Betty throughout her life, and to Bogart she was always Baby.

Although finances were a problem as she was growing up — “Nothing came easy, everything was worked for” — her mother’s family was close-knit, and through an uncle’s generosity she attended the Highland Manor school for girls in Tarrytown, N.Y., where she graduated from grade school at 11. She went on to Julia Richman High School in Manhattan and also studied acting at the New York School of the Theater and ballet with Mikhail Mordkin, who had on occasion been Pavlova’s partner.

After graduation in 1940, Ms. Bacall became a full-time student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts but left after the first year; her family could no longer subsidize her, and the academy at the time did not offer scholarships to women.

So she turned to modeling, and in 1941, at 16, she landed jobs with David Crystal, a Seventh Avenue dress manufacturer, and Sam Friedlander, who made evening gowns. During lunch hours she would stand outside Sardi’s selling copies of Actor’s Cue, a casting tip sheet, hoping to catch the attention of producers. She also became an usher at Broadway theaters and a hostess at the newly opened Stage Door Canteen.

Her first theater role was a walk-on in a Broadway play called “Johnny 2 x 4.” It paid $15 a week and closed in eight weeks, but she looked back on the experience as “magical.” Another stab at modeling, with the Walter Thornton agency, proved disappointing, but her morale soared in July 1942, with a sentence by George Jean Nathan in Esquire: “The prettiest theater usher — the tall slender blonde in the St. James Theater right aisle, during the Gilbert & Sullivan engagement — by general rapt agreement among the critics, but the bums are too dignified to admit it.”

Watching ‘Casablanca’

Later that year she was cast by the producer Max Gordon in “Franklin Street,” a comedy directed by George S. Kaufman, which closed out of town. It was her last time onstage for 17 years.

It was about this time that she saw Bogart in “Casablanca.” She later recalled that she could not understand the reaction of a friend who was “mad” about him. “So much for my judgment at that time,” she said.

In 1942, she met Nicolas de Gunzburg, an editor at Harper’s Bazaar, who took her to meet Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor. After a thorough inspection, Vreeland asked her to return the next day to meet the photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Test shots were taken, and a few days later she was called.

A full-page color picture of her standing in front of a window with the words “American Red Cross Blood Donor Service” on it led to inquiries from David O. Selznick, Howard Hughes and Howard Hawks, among others. The Hawks offer was accepted, and Betty Bacall, 18 years old, left for the West Coast by train with her mother. She returned to New York less than two years later as Lauren Bacall, star.

In her 70s, Ms. Bacall began lending her distinctive voice to television commercials and cartoons, and her movie career again picked up steam. Between 1995 and 2012 she was featured in more than a dozen pictures, most notably “The Mirror Has Two Faces” (1996), in which she played Barbra Streisand’s monstrous, vain mother.

The role brought her an Academy Award nomination as best supporting actress; the smart money was on her to win. But the Oscar went to Juliette Binoche for her part in “The English Patient,” to the astonishment of almost everyone, including Ms. Binoche.

Ms. Bacall — who received a consolation prize of sorts when she was named a Kennedy Center Honors winner a few months later — was perhaps prepared for the Oscar rebuff. Shortly before the Academy Awards ceremony, she told an interviewer that she hadn’t been happy for years. “Contented, yes; pleased and proud, yes. But happy, no.”

Still, she said, she had been lucky: “I had one great marriage, I have three great children and four grandchildren. I am still alive. I still can function. I still can work.”

As she said in 1996: “You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with. I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you’re a New Yorker? The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing.”

A correction was made on

Aug. 15, 2014

: 

An obituary on Wednesday about the actress Lauren Bacall misidentified the borough in New York in which she was born. It is the Bronx, not Brooklyn.

A correction was made on

Aug. 21, 2014: An obituary on Aug. 13 about the actress Lauren Bacall referred incorrectly to a 1947 petition signed by Ms. Bacall and her husband, Humphrey Bogart, protesting the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was signed by about 80 Hollywood personalities, not 500, and it did not contain the words “to smear the motion picture industry.” (Those words are from a telegram sent earlier that year by members of the movie industry in support of colleagues who had been subpoenaed by the committee.)

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com. Learn more

Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.

See more on: Lauren Bacall

[old-wild-child]

okay actually I need to know about The Friends of Mrs. Ann Braunstein!

Oooh. Ok !! It’s kind of a long story so bare with me.

The gravesite felt like a foreign piece of land that Howard was forbidden to pass grounds on. The mere thought of visiting Dad was trespassing. Then again, at least he can visit the gravesite of loved ones. Who knows if Virginia even had gravesites to visit.

“Your daughter-in-law is performing Neil Simon in New York. Isn’t that something? I always knew she had it in her, but it’s even better seeing her on stage. You’d like Sally. She’s really sweet and theatrical. Did you kill yourself? I’m not disappointed in you. In fact I don’t blame you. I understand how you feel. I’ve been through it. Sally's been through it. Did Mother ignore your help too?”

“The Friends of Mrs. Anne Braunstein” (going to change it to Anne because Ann feels naked) is an original story of mine, which is about a bunch of random people who meet for the first time at the funeral of a mutual friend, Mrs. Anne Braunstein. Some of them become brief lovers, some become lifelong friends, and some get married. But it’s about how all these friends met Anne, how they were influenced by her, and how she continues to impact them all.

“The Friends of Mrs. Anne Braunstein” takes place in San Francisco in the early to mid 1970s, inspired by the era of New Wave Hollywood (late 1960s-early 1980s). This era of filmmaking is a big inspiration to me, which some of my biggest inspirations/favorite directors and/or screenwriters being Colin Higgins, Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude is a HUGE influence on me and one of my favorite movies thanks to the earlier two), Mike Nichols, Elaine May, (unfortunately) Woody Allen, Robert Altman, and Peter Bogdanovich. And I took a lot of inspiration from writers of the same era such as Jacqueline Susann and Joan Didion.

I’ve always despised it when bigots say “Back in my day... *insert something incredibly homophobic or transphobic* or “No one was autistic back in my day”. Because of this, I try to write period pieces that have plenty of representation and diverse characters (I’m more prone to LGBTQ+, women empowerment, mental illness, and neurodivergent rep because I’m a part of all those groups so naturally I can write that better vs. a marginalized group that I am not a part of such as being a person of color, having a disability, and/or being an immigrant. (But of course I do my research as much as possible !!))

So far my characters are Howard (the only straight white male in the book, but he’s a trans man so that's his self discovery journey), Sonny (Howard's partner who’s bisexual and has loads of parental issues and she should really be placed with a psychologist), Neil (Sonny's close friend and ex-husband, who married each other for benefits), and Caroline (Sonny's ex-girlfriend who was probably her worst breakup ever). I still have loads of ideas which haven’t been written down or figured out yet.

[hauntedinternetmagazine]

They Live By Night (1948) Nicholas Ray 

Swoon! <3 

They Live by Night was based off a book called Thieves Like Us. Another version of this film was made by Robert Altman in the 1970′s with Shelley Duval. That film was called Thieves Like Us.  They films are very different but they manage to both embrace this slow and melancholic noir sensibility. They Live by Night deviates from the hardboiled noir plots and asthetics that were mainstream for the 1940′s and the Golden Age of Cinema  The film priotizies the romance over the drama of the crime/criminality. I’d go as far as to say this film is even a little pro-abolitionist. It feels silly to write that because I am not sure if Ray was explicitly an abolitionist. However, one of the protagonist’s, Bowie, is a character who spends 7 years in jail for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He was also “unable to afford a good lawyer.” As Bowie and Keechie fall in love, they strive for normalcy; they cosplay domesticity while Bowie is “on the lam.” The characters literally discuss the idea that if Bowie stays out of trouble long enough, then maybe he will be pardoned for his crimes and he can re-enter society. Obviously, through Ray’s ominous framing and the confines of Hollywood code, we know this isn’t a possibility for our two lovers but maybe in some distant abolitionist future. 

[jasonfry]

More classic movies everyone’s seen but me!

They Live By Night (1948)

Bowie and Keechie are doomed young lovers in Nicholas Ray’s debut as a director. A lot of the tropes will be familiar to film noir fans -- you know Bowie and Keechie will never achieve the normal lives they want, and the movie’s ending feels as fixed and inevitable as Shakespearean tragedy, with avenues of escape closing off one by one. But a few elements set it apart. For one thing, there’s the Depression setting, which offers shabby cabins and dusty plains instead of L.A. clubs and streetscapes, and makes “economic anxiety” a real thing -- Bowie and Keechie’s wedding in particular is a tragicomic masterpiece, with the crooked justice of the peace subtracting elements based on the couple’s budget. The movies also draws power from the chemistry between Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, which feels natural in a very stylized film, sometimes to the point of feeling intimate bordering on uncomfortable. (Howard Da Silva is terrific in a supporting role as the terrifying hood Chicamaw.)

Ray was given free rein as director, and They Live By Night has an experimental air that would prove highly influential, from the tricky opening helicopter shot to an inside-the-car sequence whose legacy you can see in Gun Crazy. Then there’s its rather odd unveiling: The movie was shelved for two years after it was shot, but circulated through private showings in Hollywood and became a favorite, with Granger tapped by Alfred Hitchcock for Rope and Humphrey Bogart offering Ray a lifeline as a director. They Live By Night isn’t a great entry point for film noir newbies, but will be interesting for fans of the genre.

Robert Altman remade this movie as Thieves Like Us, returning to the title of the novel that Ray adapted; that version is also on my list. 

Under the Volcano (1984)

John Huston enjoyed tackling supposedly unfilmable projects late in life, following his adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood with this take on a 1947 novel by Malcolm Lowery. Albert Finney is wonderful as a drunken, self-destructive British diplomat, and there’s an undeniable pull to the movie -- I saw it a couple of weeks ago and can’t quite shake its suffocating mood of mild delirium. But it’s so, so bleak -- before you try it, make sure you’re up for two hours of unease and dread.

Silverado (1985)

I saw Silverado as a teenager, but came back to it recently because as a kid I’d barely seen any westerns and so had no idea what the movie was celebrating or looking to revisit. Seen through more experienced eyes, Silverado is most interesting because it isn’t revisionist at all -- with the exception of a couple of modern tweaks to racial attitudes, it could have been made in the same period as the movies writer/director Lawrence Kasdan is saluting.

Anyway, Kevin Kline and Linda Hunt are wonderful leads, as is Brian Dennehy as the sheriff who’s put his conscience aside, and virtually everybody you remember from mid-80s movies shows up at one point or another. It’s a lot of fun, at least until the movie runs out of steam in the second half and turns into a series of paint-by-numbers gunfights. The final running battle particularly annoyed me: Kasdan has had ample time to show us the layout of the town of Silverado, which would let us think alongside the heroes as they stalk and are stalked through its handful of streets, but his ending is random gags and shootouts, with no sense of place. Stuff just happens until we’re out of stuff.

Compare that with, say, Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers. Peter Jackson takes his time establishing everything from the geography of the fortress to the plan to defend it, and as a result we always know where we are during the battle and what each new development means for the heroes. That kind of planning might have made Silverado a modern classic instead of just a fun diversion. 

My Brilliant Career (1979)

Judy Davis stars (opposite an impossibly young Sam Neill) as Sybylla Melvyn, a young Australian woman determined to resist not just her family’s efforts to marry her off but also the inclinations of her own heart. Sybylla is a wonderful character, a luminous, frizzy-haired bull in a china shop of convention, and she’s riveting in every scene. (Neill’s job is to look alternately hapless and patient, which he does well enough -- a fate that’s perfectly fair given the generations upon generations of actresses who have been stuck with the same role.) Extra points for Gillian Armstrong’s direction, which consistently delivers establishing shots you want to linger on without being too showy about them, and for sticking with an ending that, Sybylla-style, bucks movie expectations.

(This is an adaptation of Miles Franklin’s 1901 autobiographical novel, which I now want to read. Franklin also wrote a book called All That Swagger, which is such a great title that I’m happy just thinking about it.)

Red River (1948)

A friend recommended this movie -- the first collaboration between Howard Hawks and John Wayne -- after reading my take on Rio Bravo. And I’m glad he did: Wayne is terrific as Tom Dunson, a hard-driving rancher whose cattle drive to Missouri becomes an obsession that leads him into madness, and he’s evenly matched with Montgomery Clift, who’s his son in all but name. 

Dunson begins as the movie’s hero and gradually morphs into its villain, with Wayne letting us see his doubts and regrets and also his inability to acknowledge them and so steer himself back to reality. Clift, making his debut as Matt Garth, is solid in a more conventional role (he looks eerily like Tom Cruise), and Walter Brennan happily chews scenery as Wayne’s sidekick and nagging conscience.

And there’s a lot of scenery to chew -- it’s wonderful to watch the herd in motion, particularly in a shot from over Brennan’s shoulder as the cattle cross a river -- and Hawks brings a palpable sense of dread to the nighttime scenes as things start to go wrong.

I would have liked Red River more if I hadn’t already seen Rio Bravo, though. Brennan plays the exact same role in that movie as he does here, Clift’s character is very similar to Ricky Nelson’s, and Hawks even nicked a melody from Red River to reuse 11 years later. (Hawks was a serial recycler -- he essentially remade Rio Bravo twice.)

A more fundamental problem is that Red River falls apart when Hawks jams Tess Millay into the story. We’re introduced to Tess, played by Joanne Dru, when Clift intervenes to save a wagon train besieged by Apaches, and her nattering at Clift during a gunfight is so annoying that I was hoping an arrow would find its mark and silence her. (She is hit by an arrow, but it only makes her talk more.)

Tess then falls for Clift, who seems mostly befuddled by her interest but blandly acquiesces. This is funny for a number of reasons: Beyond some really dopey staging, Clift’s love interest is pretty clearly a cowboy played by John Ireland and given the unlikely name of Cherry Valance. Their relationship is a bit of gay subtext that wouldn’t need much of a nudge to become text. Tess goes on to annoy Wayne in an endless scene that exists to forklift in a klutzy parallel with the movie’s beginning, and then shows up at the end to derail the climax in an eye-rolling fashion that leaves everyone involved looking mildly embarrassed. (Dru does the best she can; none of this is her fault.) 

I was left wondering what on earth had happened, so I read up and discovered that -- a la Suspicion -- the ending was changed, destroying a logical and satisfying outcome penned by Borden Chase. Tess is a hand-wave to bring about that different ending, a bad idea executed so poorly that it wrecks the movie. Give me a few weeks and I’ll happily remember all the things Red River does right, from those soaring vistas to Wayne’s seething march through Abilene. But I’ll also remember how the last reel took an ax to everything that had been built with such care.

[fionamccall]

My top ten films with a historical setting - II - 20th century

Last time I produced my top ten films with a historical setting before the 20th century - although actually having re-watched Fanny and Alexander, the setting is in the Edwardian period.  There is a much greater choice of historical films set in the more recent past, and these are just some I’ve enjoyed.   Most films which have any sort of literary origin will go in a future category of ‘Literary Adaptions set in the past’. In chronological order by historical setting.  

Seven Days’ Leave (1930), Richard Wallace

I’m starting off with a very obscure one here, which I discovered as part of my lock-down obsession with the films of Gary Cooper.  Many of his early films have not survived, but this one, thankfully, has, although you may need some resourcefulness to get access to a copy.  It’s based on a 1918 play, The Old Lady Shows her Medals, by J.M. Barrie so strictly speaking its a literary adaption, but as it was written at the time of its setting doesn’t count as ‘historical’ in that sense.  An old cleaner pretends she has a son in the army, who turns out to be Gary Cooper, looking great as a Canadian ‘lady from hell’ in tartan. Brilliant Beryl Mercer melts the tough exterior of her fake son. Made by the performances of Mercer and Cooper and typically Scottish in being sentimental, sweet and sad.

Gosford Park (2001), Robert Altman

A devastating deconstruction of the English class system of the 1930s country house in which almost no-one is happy, and nearly everyone destroyed by it. Unexpectedly popular when first released: I had to watch it with difficulty in the only seats available in the front row of the cinema, but it was still worth it. Much more black and acerbic than Julian Fellowes’s later efforts in Downton Abbey as you might expect from director Robert Altman and all his expertise with handling a top-notch ensemble cast.

Burnt by the Sun (1994), Nikita Mikalkhov

Betrayal set in Stalin’s Russia starring amazing rubber-faced, impenetrable-eyed Russian actor Oleg Menshikov as a White Russian turned NKVD officer come to arrest the Russian Colonel who is the husband of his former lover. Won the Academy Award for best foreign film.  Don’t bother with the two sequels – they’re rubbish.

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Victor Erice

It is extraordinary that this film was made while Franco was still alive and in power. A very young girl living on her father’s ancient estate in 1940′s Castile believes that the ‘spirit’ living in a remote sheepfold is a monster but actually he is a wounded and hiding republican soldier, and her mother’s lover.  All powerfully visual, and seen through the incompletely understanding eyes of the young girl.  Erice made very few films - I’ve tried El Sur twice, but found it rather more boring an unresolved - this is his best.

Inglorious Bastards (2009), Quentin Tarantino

If you are going to get your history wrong, don’t piddle about but go for it unashamedly.  A glorious piece of counterfactual WWII history, as a group of Jewish commandos seek revenge against the Nazis. 

Pan’s Labrinth (2006),  Guillermo del Toro

A dark fairy story set at the end of the Spanish Civil War, this really captures the horror of civil war, and the deep violence and misogyny behind the Spanish one, and really shows how works of the imagination can sometimes say so much more about the past than a straight recounting of events.

Adelheid (1970), František Vláčil

Back to Vláčil again, this time set after WWII, as a returning Czech officer has to decide what to do with a manor house formerly used by a Nazi to commit atrocities. He employs as a cleaning lady the Nazi’s daughter, who is being held in a prisoner of war camp, and starts a relationship with her.  At the heart of the story is how the girl has been affected by everything she has witnessed, whether she or the Czech officer are the victims or the perpetrators of evil.

Povrovsky Gates (1982),  Mikhail Kozakov

Back to Menshikov again, with one of his earliest films. This is really an indulgence on my part as it captures in a light-hearted, and probably none too realistic way, the experience of living in a communal flat in Moscow in the 1950s.  Really a nostalgia piece for a life that was passing, but you get the Russian fondness for culture, sport, music, comedy, and a fair amount of everyday sexism.

The Lives of Others (2006),  Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

I remember watching this with my ex-husband and both of us just hypnotised by the drama of it.  Gives a real sense of the oppressiveness of East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall as a Stasi officer develops empathy for the playwright and his girlfriend he spies upon.

Roma (2018), Alfonso Cuarón

Set in an upper-class Mexico City house in the early 1970s, with mesmerising black and white cinematography; what makes this great is the way Cuarón reaches back into the visual details of his childhood memories (like the yard the dogs shit in and the maids have to clean up) while exploring the changing relationship between the mother and children of the family and their indigenous housekeeper.  Quiet personal tragedy occurs in the midst of the medley of family life and national political events. 

[mash-notes]

(*DISPATCH*) MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors

Hi, yay, welcome to my first post officially chronicling the MASH institution. As mentioned, I’m going to spend this month mostly discussing what came *before* the TV series debuted in 1972. It is only proper that we begin here.

Richard Hooker was a surgeon in the Korean War. His hilarious 1968 novel is often compared to Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and indeed the subject matter is the same: decent young people (men, specifically) driven temporarily insane by the senselessness of combat. As a lover of Catch-22, I must say MASH is not as earth-shattering in its presentation. The narrative is laid out very cleanly, with spare prose and short chapters, unlike Heller’s expansive, experimental book. I’d say the film adaptation directed by Robert Altman, which would arrive just two years later, hews to Catch-22’s chaotic spirit more closely. (More on the film soon, soon!) I can’t think of any specific literary work that compares to MASH style-wise, but it does have a totally engrossing style, sort of Hemingway meets James Thurber. With wryness and dryness, it reveals piece after piece of info that’s totally bonkers—drinking binges, whorehouses, trysts, attempted suicide. Quiet moments, too, are written to elicit a laugh. Here’s an early passage:

Hawkeye and Duke knocked on the door of Colonel Blake’s tent and were told to enter. After they had made themselves comfortable, Hawkeye opened the conversation.

“How are you today, Colonel?” he said.

“That’s not what you two came to ask,” the Colonel said, eyeing them.

“Well, Henry,” Hawkeye said, “we don’t wish to cause any trouble, but we strongly suspect that something that might embarrass this excellent organization could occur if you don’t get that sky pilot out of our tent.”

“YOUR tent?” Henry started to say, and then he thought better of it. He sat there in silence for almost a minute, while the surge and counter-surge of his emotions played across his face in iridescent waves.

The events of the novel—really almost all of them—make it into the movie or the TV show or both. What will change are some of the characters—their personalities, their backstory, or their existence. For instance, here the Swampmen get two separate people kicked out of the MASH: Frank Burns, removed after being teased about his relationship with Margaret Houlihan and blowing up; and Hobson, the abovementioned “sky pilot” whose religious devotion annoys the men. In the film these two are melded into one character, Robert Duvall’s Bible-thumping Burns, who then survives into the TV series slightly altered.

Two of the three doctors in the book’s title, Hawkeye and Duke, have families back home, totally unlike the freewheeling Hawk of the series. (The fact that they don’t exactly display BJ Hunnicutt levels of fidelity doesn’t make it any better; Alda’s Hawkeye might pay for sex if he were married, but more likely he just wouldn’t get married in the first place.) Trapper, on the other hand, enters the TV series married but has no wife to speak of in the novel.

Blake, beleaguered and tolerant, is similar to what he eventually becomes, though without McLean Stevenson’s charm. Houlihan is slight, other than being established as (1.) overly impressed with rules and regulations (2.) “a femme fatale… a nice-looking, forty-year-old female.” In just a couple of scenes, however, we get a good approximation of what will be her huffy mien, the exasperation she feels upon seeing her idea of order fall to pieces. It’s actually incredible how well realized many of these characters are, in a short book with terse descriptions.

The one that remains most stable through all versions of this story is Radar O’Reilly. Appropriate, insofar as he is the heart and soul of MASH (note that I believe this to be true). Hooker’s novel opens with him excitedly enlisting in the army, eager, wide-eyed, and a little bizarre. We recognize him immediately. He isn’t named Walter yet, and until the TV show airs will have a nickname only. But Radar’s naïve faithfulness, as well as his keen senses that border on clairvoyance, are intact. They’re all we need.

Reading this, knowing what it launched, one has no trouble understanding why the entertainment world pounced on it. The milieu of a MASH—a small, self-contained unit full of weird people that can’t leave, seems tailor-made for TV. Also, it would create amazing roles for talented actors. I can imagine a casting agent reading about these young, rebellious surgeons and foaming at the mouth. There’s a fair amount of medicine in it, no small feat in humorous writing, so you learn something. Lastly, published during Vietnam, it was historically relevant, politically relevant, morally relevant. While still being funny! Its distance from current events was just great enough that you could, if you wanted to, pretend it wasn’t about what was currently happening—but in your heart you’d know.

TL;DR, this book is a good, true piece of fiction. Hooker, whose real name was Hornberger, may not have met anyone exactly like Trapper John when he was a doctor in Korea himself. But much of his work’s beauty is in its authenticity nonetheless. In other words, you can tell he really was a rebellious doctor. He was really there.