Categories: Movies

Songwriter Hugh Martin's love affair with the movies

Hugh Martin is best known for his score for the 1944 musical Meet Me In St. Louis.  Judy Garland sang three of his songs, The Trolley Song, The Boy Next Door, and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.  This is what he had to say in City Secrets Movies:

Passion (Madame DuBarry)
Ernst Lubitsch
1919

The Last Flight
William Dieterle
1931

Love Me Tonight
Rouben Mamoulian
1932 

Applause
Rouben Mamoulian
1929

The Clock
Vincente Minnelli and Fred Zinnemann
1945

The Night of the Hunter
Charles Laughton
1955

The Good Fairy
William Wyler
1935

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Elia Kazan
1945

My love affair with movies began early-too early, as it turned out, because my first experience occurred when I was six years old, and it was a disaster. My poor, unsuspecting mother took me to see a silent movie called Passion. Pola Negri played Madame du Barry. When they dragged her to the guillotine she pleaded with the French revolutionaries for her life. "Don't kill me!" the title card screamed. "Life is so sweet!"

Now it was my turn to scream: convinced that I was right there, in the middle of the Place de la Bastille, I was carried out of the theater shrieking at the top of my lungs. Mother rushed me home, put me to bed, and phoned for the doctor, but all to no avail; I hollered for several hours.

Through the years I continued to over-respond. (In fact, I do so to this day.) But I learned to control myself sufficiently so that I didn't have to be removed-that was the last thing I wanted. In spite of my terror attack during Passion, a 1919 German film by director Ernst Lubitsch, I have never found a place more desirable than a movie theater.

Another silent film that made a lasting impression on me was D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919). This was-and is-a film of great richness. It is rich in beauty, as visually lovely as a lotus blossom. It is rich in emotion, too; the performances Griffith brought forth from Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess are more powerful than anything the screen offers today.

Moving into movies with sound, William Dieterle's first American film was The Last Flight (produced by First National in 1931). In an interview in the New York Times, Dieterle stated that regardless of all the awards lavished on him later, The Last Flight was the movie he believed to be his best. I agree wholeheartedly. We find Mr. Barthelmess again in this one, and his leading lady-the ethereally beautiful Helen Chandler-is every bit as sensitive as Ms. Gish. John Monk Saunders, a popular novelist of the 1920s, wrote the screenplay. His style is reminiscent of Hemingway, but I like him better. Hemingway goes for the jugular; Saunders goes for the heart.

The best musical of all time came from Paramount in 1932: Love Me Tonight. Director Rouben Mamoulian gave Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald a luster that sparkles as brightly today as it did then (if you can find a good print). Don't bother searching for better songs than those Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote for Maurice and Jeanette, because there are none. "Lover," "Isn't It Romantic?" and "The Son of a Gun is Nothing But a Tailor"-all of the songs are unsurpassable.

Another fine Mamoulian film is Applause (Paramount, 1929). I became addicted to Helen Morgan when she sang "Bill" in Show Boat, so Mamoulian's hunch that she had the making of a great dramatic actress thrilled and fascinated me. Her performance, under Mamoulian's loving direction, is shattering.

Only Judy Garland came closest to the place in my heart occupied by Helen Morgan. There's nothing esoteric about Judy's movies. Most of them were commercial as well as artistic blockbusters and need no help from me in attracting attention. However, The Clock (MGM, 1945) did become slightly lost in the shuffle. Too bad, because her acting had never been stronger. It was the second time she teamed with Vincente Minnelli, and he found depths of feeling in his wife (they married shortly after making The Clock) that none of her other work has quite matched. And Robert Walker's performance is equally good.

Charles Laughton directed only one movie, The Night of the Hunter (1955). It was received without excitement by critics, and this wounded Mr. Laughton so deeply that he never put on the director's hat again. Our loss, more than his. I find it a breathtakingly original film, with ingenious directorial touches and wonderful performances by Robert Mitchum, two splendid child actors, Shelley Winters, and the inimitable Lillian Gish. Good actresses don't die; they just get better.

Did you happen to see The Good Fairy? If you did, I don't have to tell you what a charmer it is. Preston Sturges wrote the screenplay in 1935 for Universal. He adapted it from a play by Ferenc Molnár, turning it into a vehicle for Margaret Sullavan. Although Sturges wasn't the director, it has many of the earmarks of a Sturges comedy masterpiece: the hilarious dialogue, the sweetness, and the stable of great character actors he loved to assemble (Frank Morgan, Reginald Owen, Alan Hale, Beulah Bondi, and Eric Blore). This is Morgan's best and funniest performance, and Herbert Marshall scores beautifully as the inamorato of Luisa Gingelbusher (Sullavan). William Wyler directed it with his usual skill and taste; Sturges himself couldn't have done it better.

Elia Kazan directed his share of blockbusters, but the film of his that I cherish the most is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). James Dunn, Dorothy McGuire, and Joan Blondell are superb; but it's the portrayal of young Francie by Peggy Ann Garner that knocks me out every time I watch it, year after year. With due respect to Judy Garland, Jackie Cooper, Margaret O'Brien, and Shirley Temple, I believe it to be the best juvenile performance ever.

Hugh Martin
Songwriter

Jim Jarmusch recommends They Caught The Ferry by Carl Theodor Dreyer

They Caught the Ferry
Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1948

It's true that the cinematic language spoken by Danish director Carl Dreyer (1889-1968) is one of the purest and most evocative of the form's history. (He's also one of my all-time hands-down favorite directors-right up there with Ozu, Vigo, Bresson, and Keaton.) But just to get things straight, Dreyer, in fact, does not fit neatly into the "purist aesthete" category where cinema history tries to contain him. Before directing he was a café pianist, a corporate bookkeeper, a tabloid journalist, and a balloon pilot. And let's not forget that his second feature was entitled Leaves from Satan's Book and that his third, The Witch Woman, was in essence a sex film. His next one, Chained (or The Story of the Third Sex), was about a man's internal torment over his homosexual urges (shades of Ed Wood!). Dreyer was also regarded as an obstinate brat and was a well-known pain in the ass to producers and financiers. This, of course, was due to his fanatical insistence on complete aesthetic control over his work.

In any case, by 1948 Dreyer, by then a true master, was having trouble securing financing for his feature projects (and had yet to deliver two of his greatest films-Ordet made in 1955 and Gertrud made in 1964). Auspiciously, the Danish government approached him (or maybe vice versa) to direct, of all things, a traffic-safety film for public-service purposes. Dreyer accepted the offer but decided to use a tragic motorcycle ride as his subject-therein unexpectedly creating what is possibly the very first Euro-biker movie.

Entitled They Caught the Ferry, it's now a rarely seen ten-minute black-and-white masterpiece and is only slightly disguised by its original intention. It's both a perfectly miniaturized youth horror film and the likely precursor to a subgenre of motorcycle flicks (including, among many others, The Wild One, Girl on a Motorcycle, Blonde in Black Leather, The Loners, and maybe even Easy Rider, since the bikers die in the end).

On another level, They Caught the Ferry could also be seen as a kind of thumbnail encapsulation of the tragic criminal-youth-on-the-run love-story genre, with Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night being my personal favorite. Just imagine They Live by Night transposed to a single motorcycle ride-the whole thing reduced to two wheels and minus the entire plot! Talk about cinematic purity.

Dreyer's jewel-like movie begins with a ferryboat docking, then various cars and motorbikes unload into a small city or town. Among the vehicles disembarking is the film's focus: a young couple on a motorcycle-she in the saddle behind, arms encircling him. And, as in all good biker movies, these two characters are "born to be bad" (even if only in a clean, 1948, Scando-trash kind of way). After all, they're on a motorcycle, they're not wearing helmets, and, if nothing else, they just drive way too fast.

The couple exits the town. She holds on even tighter as the bike flies down rural roads past trees and Scandinavian farmland. Daringly, they overtake cars and other motorcycles, barely avoiding farm animals in the process.

They arrive at a fork in the road and make a quick wrong decision, then have to turn around and accelerate back up to their previous breakneck speed. In the process, Dreyer employs a beautifully balanced variety of camera positions: shots from the bike, blurred POVs of the passing landscape, inserts of the vibrating needle on the speedometer, shots of their ecstatic faces intercut with the bike's spoked wheels spinning above the surface of the road . . . Breathtaking.

Then, eventually, their ecstasy hits a snag. The motorcycle catches up to a slow-moving, black, boxlike hearse-complete with an ominous skeleton painted on its rear doors. The bike makes several attempts to overtake the sinister hearse, but each time it is blocked. Dreyer carefully picks his moment to reveal the driver of the hearse-an emaciated ghoul clad in black, grinning maniacally from behind the wheel! Dr. D. the Reaper.

Accelerating wildly, they make yet another attempt to pass, but again the hearse swerves, intentionally forcing the motorcycle off the road. The bike catapults across a ditch, then slams head-on into a tree. Fade to black.

Fade up from black: the final shot of the film mimics its opening. This time, though, the ferryboat is preparing to depart. Two coffins have been loaded on. They contain the corpses of our young riders, making the return trip. Dead. They caught the ferry.

Jim Jarmusch
Director

Note: The original version has no accompanying music, instead effectively relying on variations of the motorcycle's engine to provide a "score" for the film. However, Tom Verlaine (guitarist extraordinaire and former leader of the legendary New York rock band Television) created a new score for They Caught the Ferry in 2000, which unfortunately I have not yet heard.

Editor's Note: The Danish band, Phonovectra, procured permission to use footage from They Caught the Ferry in their music video, "Too Young to Die." The video (which uses 3:26 minutes of the 11-minute short) can be viewed on YouTube under the title "Phonovectra-Too Young To Die."

Kenneth Turan recommends Taxi! by Roy Del Ruth

James Cagney speaks Yiddish in this wonderful movie recommended by LA Times and NPR film critic, Kenneth Turan.

Taxi!

Roy Del Ruth, 1932

Film historians call them simply "pre-Code." They're the unexpected movies made in Hollywood in the too-brief period between 1930 and 1934, between the birth of sound and the introduction of the suffocatingly moral Production Code. "More unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards," writes Thomas Doherty in his book Pre-Code Hollywood. "They look like Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from a parallel universe." It's an upside-down world where, as shown in 1932's Taxi!, tough Irish street kid James Cagney speaks excellent Yiddish.

Cagney knew the language because it was the lingua franca of the streets he grew up on in the Yorkville neighborhood of  Manhattan. Cagney told biographer John McCabe that he especially liked Yiddish because "it's the one great language of vituperation . . . We Irish and German and other ethnic kids always envied our Jewish buddies their ability to insult." Cagney, playing cabdriver Matt Nolan, used Yiddish in conversations with Jack Warner and, according to McCabe, enjoyed referring to the studio head, in a particularly choice epithet, as a schvontz.

Knowing of the actor's gift for Yiddish, screenwriter John Bright crafted a scene in which Nolan, ordinarily feisty enough to start a fight, takes a few minutes off to help a desperate Jewish man who needs directions to Ellis Island so that he can meet his arriving wife. Cagney asks him, in excellent Yiddish, where he wants to go. When the astonished man asks if he is in fact Jewish, Cagney responds with a playful affirmative, "Vu den, a shaygetz?" ("What else, a Gentile?"). All done in the kind of fluent Yiddish even Jewish actors of today would have trouble matching.

Kenneth Turan
Film critic, Los Angeles Times

Anjelica Huston recommends Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch

Considered by some to be the ultimate post-modern western, this movie has an incredible cast, a score by Neil Young and plenty of references to the poet William Blake to boot.

Dead Man
Jim Jarmusch
1995

A sadly overlooked film, stunningly photographed by Robby Müller, Dead Man is an inspired take on the Western tradition. With brilliant performances by Johnny Depp, Billy Bob Thornton, and Mili Avital.

Anjelica Huston
Actress

Mark Strand recommends In A Lonely Place directed by Nicholas Ray

My dear friend Mark Strand (former Poet Laureate of the United States, Pulitzer Prize winner, MacArthur "Genius Prize" recipient and too many other accolades to mention) recommends this dark and beautiful movie.

In a Lonely Place
Nicholas Ray
1950

It has been a long while since I saw In a Lonely Place, directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, but I do remember thinking that it was Bogart's best performance. He plays a paranoid screenwriter given to violent outbursts of appalling intensity. Grahame, meanwhile, brings a sexiness to her role as the estranged lover of a real estate developer that-so far as I know-has never been surpassed and, come to think of it, probably never has been equaled. Film noir at its gloomy best.

Mark Strand
Poet

A Hollywood Primer by Bruce Feirstein

A Hollywood Primer
by Bruce Feirstein

If you spend any time working inthe movie business, sooner or later you learn there's a subtle game ofone-upmanship that goes on. It's a sophisticated game that one plays in orderto be perceived as an insider-and not at all dissimilar from the manner inwhich otherwise socialized packs of vicious jackals rip into one another's throatson the African veldt in order to establish dominance.

The object in Hollywood,however, is to establish your "cinematic bona fides" and stake out your position on the food chain (or car-valet returnline). And as an added benefit--if that's how one terms "collateral damage"--youget to not only crush someone's ego but render their life, connections, andaccomplishments utterly worthless. All of this, of course, is merely an adjunctto the old Hollywood ethos that "it's not enough for me to succeed; my friendsmust fail," but let's not get into that right now.

The ritual I'm describing hereis often witnessed during meetings or at film-festival panels where the goal isalways to reference the single most obscure Swedish, French, Japanese, orSpanish film possible. Better still if the film was never dubbed into English.Or, best of all, never even released. And if this doesn't work, simply invokethe "Buñuel." Almost no one I know in modern Hollywood has actually ever seen afilm directed by Luis Buñuel, but it's always a conversation stopper. "Iunderstand what Michael Bay is trying to accomplish, but Buñuel did it first."

On a more practical level,however, this game is played on a far more convivial and social setting-sort oflike a steel-cage death match on a Bel Air tennis court-with hand grenades. Towit: if someone says they went to a movie premiere, you must immediatelycounter, "I saw a rough cut." (Note: Again, almost no one in Hollywood actuallyknows what a "rough cut" is, save, perhaps, Harvey Weinstein. But he's nottelling.) If they claim to have seen a rough cut, you were on the set. If theywere on the set, you read the first draft. And if they read-or wrote-the firstdraft, you had the idea fifteen years ago but passed on it because it wasn't commercial.Game, set, match.

We can now move on to the secondinviolate rule-and ritual-in Hollywood: taking credit. In Hollywood, the basicsocial contract is that "I'll believe you're an actress if you believe I'm aproducer." And this is followed closely by the notion that perception is reality: You're only as respected asthe reputation you've managed to promote. Put another way: Failure is anorphan, but success has twenty-six coproducers. (Actually, success hastwenty-six producers, eleven executive producers, twenty-two coproducers, oneline-producer, four uncredited writers, the director, the leading man'smanager, one extremely disgruntled original screenwriter who would have beenmuch happier if they'd stuck to his original script . . . plus six Germanfinancial entities, each of whom has a single-card animated logo at thebeginning of the film.)

So what does all this mean, on apractical level? Simple: nobody knows for certain anyway. So if it ain't naileddown, take credit for it. No matter how specious or completely tangential youraffiliation may have been with a film--"I once dated the director's mother'spodiatrist's car detailer"--it is your moral right and social imperative to takecredit for all of it. In my own career, I first learned about this back when Iwas working on the lot at Metro, in 1938. I'd just finished doing a two-weekpunch-up on Oz (my contribution: TinMan-needs a heart) when David Selznick called in a panic. He had Rhett, he hadScarlett, he had the Civil War, but he didn't have an ending.

"What am I going to do?" hepleaded.

"Two words," I told him.

"What, what?" he cried.

"Atlanta burns."

Of course, being responsible forthe success of Gone with the Wind isbut one of the very small contributions I've made to the film business. (Noteclosely: false humility. Let the person you're trying to impress stand thereslack-jawed in awe.)

I remember when I first got intothe film business, through Charlie Chaplin. He was a real son of a bitch.Always complaining about one thing or another. And the day I showed up on theset-to serve him a subpoena, if I remember correctly, on some morals charge, Ithink-he was grousing about the caterer. "Yo, Charlie," I told him, "stop yourwhining. Dance with the dinner rolls if you have to. Eat your goddamned shoe."

In 1940, I told Jack Warner:"No. Ilse gets on the plane."

Orson Welles: "Why don't you trydoing something with the sled?"

W. C. Fields: "You can't dance,you can't sing. Work the drink."

And when Billy Wilder and I. A.L. Diamond came down with a case of writer's block, I was always there forthem. Sunset Boulevard? "Do it inflashback." Some Like It Hot? "Put'em in drag." "No. Not The Brownstone.The Apartment."

Needless to say, I could go on.So I will:

When Hitch shot too muchfootage, I told him: "The shower scene? Use a lot of cuts."

Simpson and Bruckheimer? "Pummelthe audience into submission with sound."

Woody Allen and MarshallBrickman? "Lobsters. Play the scene twice."

Spielberg? "Make it a shark."

Scorsese: "Shoot what you know."

Peckinpah: "Slow motion."

Of course, I wasn't alwaysright. And in retrospect, I'm still not entirely convinced, but I suppose I cansee where Jim Cameron was probably better off not doing the Andrea Doria.

The point I'm trying to makehere-and I forget who said it originally, so I'll take full credit-is thatmovies are moments. Glimpses and scenes-Groucho and the boys in the stateroom,Bogie and Raines on the tarmac-are what linger in our memories.

For me, the real test of a filmis when I say I'm going to watch five minutes-and two hours later, I'm stillsitting there as the end credits roll:

Bridge Over the River Kwai. His Lady Eve. The Apartment.Pat and Mike. Thunderball, Dr. Strangelove,The Verdict, Notorious, The Professionals,The Sting. Annie Hall, Animal House,Heaven Can Wait, The African Queen. Rififi,Chinatown. The Man Who Would Be King. AllAbout Eve, The Hustler. To Kill a Mockingbird.

And virtually anything with FredMacMurray, Sean Connery, Spencer Tracy, Robert Mitchum, Jimmy Stewart, BurtLancaster, or William Holden.

As I think back on my years inthe film business, I suppose my greatest days were in the late '60s. I wasworking on the lot at Paramount. And one Friday, I stumbled back from lunch atMusso's to find a script on my desk from this new young director Coppola. (I'dbeen at lunch with Bill Goldman. He was having problems with an "oater"-a horsepicture, as we used to call 'em. I told him: "Billy boy, you've got ashoot-'em-up. A cowboy picture. Nobody's buying 'em these days. But have youthought about doing it as a comedy?" Funny thing is, I never heard from Goldmanagain. No gift, no flowers, no fruit basket. And nothing-not so much as aword-from Redford or Newman. Not even a case of salad dressing at Christmas.Let me tell you: It's a tough business.)    

It seems that young Francis washaving trouble with a picture. It just wasn't coming together. He asked if I'dtake a look. So I read the script over the weekend and called him Mondaymorning.

"Francis," I said, "It's genius.The script is amazing. A saga. You, this Puzo guy, and Bob Towne--if he goes forcredit: Statues at the show."

I heard him gasp. "But--"

"No, Francis," I interrupted."Listen to me. You've got a chance to make one of the most beloved Americanmovies of all time. A chance to imbue the American culture with characters anddialogue that will live forever.      

"You've got the horse's head inthe bed, the brother-in-law kicking out the windshield, the old man dying inthe tomato patch. The wedding, the assassination of the police captain, themurder at the tollbooth."

"It's almost perfect," I toldhim.

"I know," he said quietly. "Buthow do I fix it?"

"Francis, that's simple," Isaid.

"Make them Italian." 

Bruce Feirstein

Bruce Feirstein is a longtime columnist at The New York Observer, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and the best-selling author of Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. His screenwriting credits include the James Bond films GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, and The World Is Not Enough. He is responsible for the female "M" (Dame Judi Dench) calling Bond a "sexist misogynist dinosaur" and for the Robert Maxwell-inspired character Elliot Carver (portrayed by Jonathan Pryce) declaiming, "The distance between sanity and genius is only measured by success."

Charles Marsden-Smedley recommends The Servant by Joseph Losey

Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963), with a script by Harold Pinter, will captivate you from beginning to end. Dirk Bogarde plays a vengeful, cruel servant who ruins his master’s life and turns the British class system on it’s head.

The Servant
Joseph Losey
1963

If the mark of a great film is that it sticks in your mind forevermore, that you can watch it countless times without being bored by it, and that even the minor characters give memorable performances, then this 1963 Joseph Losey drama fits the bill. Set in a townhouse in Chelsea, just off the mecca of the decade, the King's Road, The Servant brilliantly depicts a master/servant relationship. The servant, Hugo (Dirk Bogarde), is manipulative and mysterious. His master, Tony (James Fox), is upper-class, weak, and naive. The film charts Tony's descent from a model of social acceptability into decadence. He is engaged to Susan (Wendy Craig), a nice girl from the country, but by the film's end, she has left to go back home and Tony's house is full of prostitutes-a decline into debauchery wholly engineered by his scheming servant, Hugo.

The film includes one of the most erotic moments ever filmed. Hugo convinces Tony that he needs more help in the house and finds a young girl, Vera (Sarah Miles), to be a maid. The first time Tony sets eyes on her, she is in the kitchen. He gets no farther than the door. Vera is a '60s cutie: big hair, huge eyes, striped jumper accentuating her ample curves. Their eyes meet. Nothing is said for a while. It's summer. She's not wearing shoes. She shuffles her weight nervously from one hip to the other. "It's hot in here," she says. The erotic tension is palpable-the silence broken only by a faucet dripping in the kitchen sink.

Two days before writing this piece, I was staying with some friends and mentioned that I had chosen to write about this scene. They asked me if I remembered who had played the maid. When I told them Sarah Miles, they exclaimed, "She's our next door neighbor, and she's coming to dinner!" Over dinner we talked about the film and Sarah remembered her parents visiting London shortly after the film's release. They only said two things: "You have sullied the family name" and  "The servants will leave." Hugo would have enjoyed that.

Charles Marsden-Smedley
Museum and exhibition designer based in London.

Milos Forman recommends Miracle in Milan

I had never heard about Miracle in Milan before Milos Forman recommended it in City Secrets Movies. He writes: " . . . today, after almost fifty years, I still remember the faces of the extras in this film more vividly than the faces of many leading performers in the hundreds of films I have seen since." Something to remember when you watch the film

Miracle in Milan (Miracolo a Milano)
Vittorio De Sica
1951

In the '50s, when I was a film student at the university in Prague, the only Western films the Communist government approved for viewing by the general public were the Italian neorealist films. To be clear, they were welcomed because they were critical of capitalist society and this served the Communist propaganda machines well. One day, in the screening room of my school, I saw a new film: Vittorio De Sica's Miracle in Milan. After that day, whenever the film was shown at school, I was there. More than twenty times.

The film is a tragicomedy, a bittersweet fairy tale for adults about Milan's homeless, portrayed with such gusto and understanding of human nature that it took my breath away. Touching and funny, disturbing and soothing . . . there are so many gripping observations of human peculiarities, and such brilliant characterizations of personalities that today, after almost fifty years, I still remember the faces of the extras in this film more vividly than the faces of many leading performers in the hundreds of films I have seen since.

A little tragicomic history: despite the film's strong socialist sentiments, the Czech government still refused to allow Miracle in Milan to be shown to the general public. Their reason: at the end of the film, the homeless people, defeated, seize the brooms of Milan's street sweepers and fly off, flying higher and higher, toward a place where life is more just. The censors concluded from the position of Milan's Cathedral that they were heading toward the West-reason enough to ban the film.

Milos Forman

Czechoslovakian director Milos Forman directed his first English-language film, Taking Off (1971), winning a number of awards, including a Special Jury Prize at Cannes. Following this triumph, Forman directed the decathlon sequences of the multi-national Olympic documentary Visions of Eight (1973), then moved on to what many consider his masterpiece, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), which one Oscars in all five major categories, including Best Director.  He won the Oscar again for his direction of Amadeus, a liberal retelling of the life of Mozart (as seen through the eyes of Antonio Salieri).  Forman served as director of Columbia University's film division, and directed such critically acclaimed films as Hair (1979), The People vs. Larry Flint (1996), and Man on the Moon (1999).

 

Filmmaker Henry Griffin recommends Hellzapoppin'

This may well be one of the wackiest movies ever made.

Hellzapoppin'
H. C. Potter
1941

"Any similarity between Hellzapoppin' and a motion picture is purely coincidental."-Disclaimer at the opening of Hellzapoppin'

Hellzapoppin' is easily the strangest musical Hollywood ever produced, a self-conscious meta-movie lost on the road between Tristram Shandy and Schizopolis. For one thing, it opens in the projection booth, with the movie about to begin. Then the "real" picture opens with a musical number set in hell, where we meet Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, the stage comedians whose eponymous, plotless Broadway revue inspired the movie. After a few gags, they storm through the brimstone onto the soundstage of their movie, Hellzapoppin'. They quarrel with the director and writer, who ultimately sell Olsen and Johnson on the idea that their picture, like all pictures, needs a love story. Then we're in a Long Island mansion, for the love story we've just been pitched. Olsen and Johnson wander through the hijinks like a pair of lost Marx brothers, periodically interacting with the filmmakers (conceiving the movie) and the projectionist (exhibiting and manipulating the completed results). If none of this makes any sense, you're starting to get it. But let me tell you about the best part. Slim Gaillard (the jive-talking guitarist famous for "The Flat Foot Floogie") and his partner, bassist Slam Stewart, dressed as deliverymen, stumble upon a cache of musical instruments. Slim plays the piano with the back of his fingers (one of his old vaudeville tricks; he could also play the guitar and tap-dance simultaneously), attracting jazz musicians from around the mansion, who pick up the other instruments and jam. They strike up a number that attracts the Harlem Congeroo Dancers (dressed like the help), who exploit the Lindy Hop for all it's worth. Suffice to say, it's the most breathtaking, gravity-defying musical number I've ever seen. I'd take it over Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, over the Nicholas Brothers in Stormy Weather, you name it. Hands down.

Henry Griffin

Henry Griffin is a screenwriter and filmmaker in New Orleans. His films include Mutiny, Tortured by Joy, Flip Mavens, and The Flavor of Plaid. He is currently artist-in-residence at the University of New Orleans.

Sidney Lumet recommends Dodsworth directed by William Wyler

Sidney Lumet recommends the magnificant Dodsworth directed by William Wyler. How did we ever miss this one?

Dodsworth
William Wyler
1936

Despite an over-the-top performance by Ruth Chatterton, I've always felt that Dodsworth was one of the finest American movies. William Wyler's simplicity, Sidney Howard's language, and, above all, Walter Huston's and Mary Astor's performances result in one of the most mature and powerful movies in my memory. The glory and debasement that love can bring into one's life have never been explored so tellingly. In fact, because of our sentimentality about love, rarely do we consider its destructive power. Dodsworth plunges into this world unhesitatingly with art and power and subtlety. In my view, a great film.

Sidney Lumet
Sidney Lumet has directed more than forty films, including 12 Angry Men (1957), The Pawnbroker (1964), Network (1976), The Wiz (1978), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), The Prince of the City (1981), and The Verdict (1982).  In 2007, he directed the critically acclaimed film Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007). Lumet has garnered more than fifty award nominations, including an honorary Academy Award in 2005 and the Directors Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993.