In the Oui Small Hours: SOME CAME RUNNING (1958)

A brilliant but troubling film that gets both better and worse with repeat viewings, SOME CAME RUNNING (1958) is cited by Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), a screenwriter-for-hire in Godard's 1963 CONTEMPT. Paul's in the bathtub but wearing his hat nonetheless, "like Dean Mar-Tan in Sum Cah-eem Ran-Neeng." Dean never takes his hat off either, you see.

One of those small town hypocrisy critiques that were very popular after WW2, it's based on the novel of the same name by the hot bestseller author of the moment, James Jones, who also gave the world such great titles as FROM HERE TO ETERNITY and THE THIN RED LINE. SOME is almost like the sequel to those films (I've not read the books), a 'post-war vet butting heads with his hypocritical small hometown' novel, with a little sex in it. It's hard to imagine now, when American soldiers are expected to be saintly family-style Christians, but after the Second World War those brave boys wanted to get home and get laid, drunk, and...have some pals pour him onto a bus out of town, where he wakes up from a stupor and groggily tries to find his wallet. He mainly wants to drink, sleep for the first time without 40 guys in the room, and, well, get laid and drunk. Depending on where they were from (and where they served) they found provincial small town morals from the post-code 1930s awaiting them at home--curfews, old lady gossip, bars that close at midnight, and they had to get out, stat, and lo, they could because they knew how to build quick easy housing and there were a lot of unemployed guys eager to do so. And lo! The suburbs began, and lo, a plethora of books and movies savaging--with a glee I heartily approve of--the American small town moral hypocrisy that was left behind (PEYTON PLACE, etc.)

But SOME CAME RUNNING has an extra shot of venom as a chaser; a mean hangover hovers over all the actors, dragging things down after a transcendent opening stretch. It begins with Sinatra arriving by bus in the early, early dawn, now fairly hungover, realizing he needs to sending off the floozy (Shirley MacLaine) he picked up back in Chicago or wherever he's coming from, before word or her gets out with the roster of hypocritical small town types he's there to unnerve. The prodigal son come home to rattle the chains binding his upstanding banker brother (Arthur Kennedy), his shrewish country club wife (Leora Dana), a schoolmarm inhibitionist who knows his earlier writing (Martha Hyer), and a sexually precocious millionaire's daughter (Betty Lou Keim) he has little interest in. The irony is, he judges them even more harshly than they in turn judge the sexually active, hard-drinking rififi of their small Indiana town, such as Dean Martin, the coolest cat in the movie except he's a misogynist who calls girls 'pigs.' Between these camps Frank Sinatra's oscillates. But does a finger pointing at a finger pointing make a right? His seething disdain for "the literary crowd" who admire his past novels butts uneasily against his sense of superiority; he'd rather hang with people who either dislike him or he dislikes, so he can stay snide and removed. Personally I don't know any writers who would feel that way and be worth a damn; it smacks of a kind of rude fakeness on pair with Agnes' monotonal nonstop bourgeois country club social calendar babble, brilliantly accented by Kennedy as her lap dog husband.

For this and other reasons, Minelli gives us little reason we should care about this boozehound "writer" played by Sinatra, especially if he needs a Dogville's worth of hypocrites just to look knightly by comparison. His brother may be a henpecked phony, but isn't even that better than just sulking over the fact that the one girl in town trying to hold onto her virginity won't put out on the first date? Frank, why are you hanging out with these people? You don't need that grief. Pick a class and stick with it, or else stop posturing. If your brother wants to marry a rich shrew and put his kid brother in an orphanage, just never return. Coming back never seems to register as a necessity, 

But again, luckily (for the most part) there's Dean Martin, an insouciant gambler who befriends Sinatra since he's good at poker. Even indoors or in the presence of a lady, Dino never takes off his hat, inspiring Michel Piccoli to do the same five years later in the aforementioned CONTEMPT. I don't mention that film just to sound snooty. In fact, it's worth comparing the two films as both are about smarmy writers: Piccoli's character is actually a lot more like Sinatra's bitter brooder than Dino's breezy gambler, but all of them coast along on a river of women whom they disdain, while pursue things they don't actually want: Michel never 'gets' why Bardot suddenly feels contempt for him, but he's felt it for her right along; Frankie never 'gets' why he must snap at anyone who suggests he's a good writer, while at the same time anointing his hotel room with artfully uncracked copies of Steinbeck. And like it or not, MacLaine is his girlfriend, the teacher doesn't even like him, though for Frank that means you're engaged. That's the reality of it. Uncertain men wind up with the girls who grab them and not the ones they hesitantly reach for like a stranger's ringing phone.

That's why the best scenes in SCR are the earliest: Frank alone, drinking in the wee hours of the morning in a hotel room, effortless evoking his cool Vegas stature with the bellboy while checking into the nowhere town's shabby Main street hotel as the sun cups up. Minnelli's brilliance shines through in these scenes: Frank alone in a room with a bottle and a window as the sun comes up.  It's a feeling some of us know well. It feels in those precious solitary cracking dawn moments. Suddenly it's like the world is yours, serene and sublime and empty, and you get to fall asleep when everyone else is waking up, which is a joyous thing.

But then, when you wake up, around lunch time, the street below is a bustling and honking and glaring sunshine nightmare.  Frank tries to be a good sport--it's only when he's around the phony country club types his veneer gets sour--but he won't leave them alone, so he's sour all the time.

Dean Martin, by contrast, is a breezy nonchalant rogue with no need for validation or labels like 'writer' (though I abhor his term 'pig' to describe his women). As such he may be an inspiration for both Sinatra's and Piccoli's onscreen characters but neither Martin or Sinatra are French enough to swallow the pill all the way. Sinatra just expects Martin to give up drinking since it's 'doctor's orders' - in real life I don't think either James Jones, Sinatra, or Godard for that matter, would expect Martin to do anything but be true to his bad boozy self, to the unwilling-to-slow-the-momentum Jake Gideon-style end, even if that end is mere weeks away. And Michel's writer in CONTEMPT never seems to realize he can just say no to Palance's egomaniacal American, regardless of the check amount. If he could do that, then Stumpy could take the bottle away. 

Still we stick around, because Martin and Sinatra have laid-back chemistry in their macho backroom poker sessions. It's worth it just for that. Is anything more uniquely poetic and American than Sinatra with his tie loosened, nursing a tumbler of blended whiskey and a cigarette while bluffing a high stakes hand? Or Dean with his morning cup of bourbon to which he gingerly adds a dash coffee? The score by Elmer Bernstein is boozily thunderous and makes ugly Americana into something that still has depth and tear-stained class even as it wallows in overwrought emotions that only Sirk or Almodovar can really make fly. Walking away from this movie you may feel, as I do, frustrated and annoyed. It's the same frustration and annoyance I used to feel every time I went home to Bridgewater, NJ,with nothing to do but drive around and brood and make up excuses to my mom for my boozy, cigarette smells and staying up to the oui oui hours. Packed with that Minnelli eye for detail, it's never the same movie twice, but then again, neither are you.

A Tale of Three Anti-Capitalist Musicals: HALLELUJAH I'M A BUM, BRIGADOON, MARAT/SADE

HALLELUJAH I'M A BUM

1933 -  Dir. Lewis Milestone

****

A pre-code salute to vagrancy, anarchism, and the days when Central Park was a bucolic Arden for the eloquent "books in the babbling brooks" breed of Depression-era homelessness. Milestone's delightful film is crammed with half-spoken Rogers and Hart songs lamenting the amount of work it takes to remain unemployed ("You own the world / when you don't own a thing"). There's enough economic savvy and cool Central Park set design here to make it both Brechtian and bucolic, an AS YOU LIKE IT with Central Park as Arden, Jolson as exiled king (he would not change it), and his men a bouncing band of singing bum types played with refreshing lack of hokey sentiment. Frank Morgan is the real mayor of NYC, the kind of duty-bound consciousness type that wistfully tosses change to Jolson's king tramp like he'd love to trade places - their weird symbiotic friendship creates a very cool core that gives the film bounce when it needs to avoid the snares of its second half's collapse into the usual Jolson-gives-up-the-girl City Lights-style melodramatics. Madge Evans is the girl in question: Morgan's neglected mistress, eh takes a jump off central park bridge into the surprisingly deep river where Jolson rescues her, completing the Shakespearean-Jungian geometry, which Ben Hecht has so cagily drafted (Naturally she comes to with amnesia and no place to sleep). With a cool black turtleneck and the swagger of a Bronx Maurice Chevalier, until he turns all plutocrat and schmaltzy, Jolson shows why he was once a box office draw. Aside from the eventual soup stock pathos, the only bad guy is a thousand dollar bill Jolson finds in the trash --the very rumor of which sends the park's once-happy denizens into violent riot. Oh capitalism, could you not spare this one tree? Imagine the Lubitsch touch on a SCARFACE spittoon and you have of course Warner Brothers. One of its many awesome little joys is hearing Frank "The Wonderful Wizard" Morgan saying "there's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home," six years early!  Capitalism may be the key to getting lovely things--and Evans is lovely, especially when covered in delicious Central Park creek water--but Joson must learn the hard way: sacrifice of happiness for spending power is not admirable! In the end, for all her loveliness, Evans is worse than a dozen thousand dollar bills!

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 BRIGADOON

1954-  Dir. Vincente Minnelli

**1/2

If you never thought a magical Scottish hamlet could be boring, you thought wrong. Vincente Minnelli shows he is not Ford, and thus has no grasp of what makes Scottish culture great, i.e. Scotch whiskey. Alcohol here is clearly associated with a crowded Manhattan bar Gene Kelly and sourpuss drunk Van Johnson inhabit before and after their trip to Scotland (to shoot grouse, like they'd know one if they saw one). Scotland is played by various uninspired sets on which Kelly climbs and taps and sings like a `silly monkey.

Minnelli stacks the deck by making everyone at the bar vulgarians and Kelly's fiancee a social climbing materialistic bitch - there's no redeeming value in the city and nothing but redeemable value in the country. But associating booze with big city shallowness does little to allay the dull piety of the mythical town itself, which is stranded in a fundamentalist annex of John Ford chaperone-and-plow malarkey but without Ford's magic touch (the only way, perhaps, to see the magic in the mossy glens is to be lit up from within by Glenfiddich. This ain't the Scottish musical version of THE QUIET MAN, much as it would like to be, and the widescreen formatting--meant for giant Cinemascope stretch screens-- eschews close-ups and fast edits (such things made audiences nauseous and disoriented on such large canvases) in favor of long shots on obvious stage sets, where, for example, everyone's dancing feet are at the bottom of the screen, and their heads at the top, duplicating a Broadway theater experience, perhaps (the screen matching the height and width of the stage), but in failing to explore the magical possibilities of its subject, even on the big screen it's enough to reduce you to napping in all the wrong places.

If you want something magically Scottish, check out I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING or LOCAL HERO. What you get from BRIGADOON is the dry notion that Scottish culture is so inhibited it makes Irish Catholics look like Haight-Ashbury hippies  Considering the awesomeness of the stars--Kelly and my favorite Cyd Charisse--there's some surprisingly awkward dancing amidst the finery, and the super sexy Cyd is barely recognizable: her legs hidden in thick skirts, shapely upper regions sheathed in a highlands sash. She's supposed to look wan and bonny but often just seems sad and hungover.

Meanwhile Van Johnson is the ugly American personified, grousing about how he came to Scotland to shoot grouse and making alcohol look bad as he drawls off his endless flask and shotguns treed locals. Why does Kelly insist on bringing him along? He's like Ronald Coleman's ungrateful brother in LOST HORIZON. Why go to Scotland just to deal with that kind of crap? Just don't hang out with him! On the other hand, does Kelly really want to eat haggis and smell burning peat moss and offal for the rest of time immortal? Why doesn't he just go back to New York and find a different bar? One less crowded and boorish? He's a grass-is-greener type is our Gene, aye, and sure'n the grass is no greener than in a wee place you can never get to except once every hundred years.

MARAT/SADE

1967 Dir. Peter Brook

****

Glenda Jackson stabs a guy named Marat during the French Revolution, while the Marquis de Sade looks on, delighted, and corrects flubbed lines--or are his corrections part of the play within the play? That's so Brechtian! Meanwhile the mental institution director interrupts too, but in rhyme, so is he part of the play or not? What are all these interruptions! Madame et monsieur, in the vein of Brecht et Artaud, I present la Revolution.

Dats real pretty, Glenda

Based on Peter Weiss's play-within-a-play about some drama therapy at the insane asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, the full UK title is "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade." And since now you're watching a video of a movie of a play within a play about the French Revolution, you could add onto the title in your head at the end "and filmed by Peter Brook, screened on TCM and watched by me in the 21st century") there's guillotines, a whole maze of fourth walls, and long twisted half-sung monologues about walking through the bloody streets of Paris back when they were flooded by a river of noble blood, bath steam, and the special way syphilis makes you insane (antibiotics had yet to be invented) and hydrotherapy might help for the moment but there's no cure for the madness of trying to create a government for the people when the people are all corrupt, murderous, uneducated, unwashed and  ridden with brain-corroding STDs!  I used to intern in the creative arts therapy drama department at Bellevue, so I know the score, and this here's real! At least it was... on some level... onstage. Watch out Glenda Jackson doesn't reach right out from the screen and stab you too. In her weird swaying narcoleptic way, she's fucking sexy as hell.

Superb on every level, some of the songs are almost Fairport Convention-level psych-folkish but most wind their way into a weird madness that seems to slowly build from murmurings of the masses to become the sort of numbers that would send the entire cast of Les Miserables running for their lives to the safety of foreign ports. Enjoy the digital fruits of your capitalist bourgeois internet whilst you might, noble literate.  New Marats are born every day, or am I thinking of mallrats?

Either way, we're doomed.

CABIN IN THE SKY: Ethel Waters, Co-Dependency and The Lord

Preface: Popular African American success stories since the dawn of American pop culture usually involve some strong parent or grandparent with strict ideas about child-rearing (think of Jamie Foxx’s Oscar speech about how his grandma used to beat him to get him to listen and otherwise he'd be just a street kid, etc). Multi-generational and community strength seems to be needed (vs. the more self-contained independence of the nuclear family in white neighborhoods). Again, looking at this just from the movies and my own (white) reading of (white mainstream) portrayal of black culture, i.e. through a thick blur of my unconsciously prejudicial upbringing and liberal arts 80s college education, etc., that's the most glaring thing I find when revisiting Cabin after so many years, on my new spiffy DVD (each front-loaded with racism-apologies as is this post with my own);

An interesting subtextual window into the popular conception of African American temperament can be found in CABIN IN THE SKY (1943), released on DVD last February (and a must). What's set up in the allegorical story is the polarity of opposites between temptation (represented by craps, booze, sex and other "black" vices) and goodness (the church!). Though one can read this largely in terms of musical style (the lascivious dances and shimmies in the club scene climax, the --sadly mostly excised--hell-set number) vs. the church, heaven and Waters' backyard, the subtextual implication is that the African American subject needs more control/discipline than a white one due to a surplus of energy/life force (or what the Lacanians would call “jouissance”) so they have to work twice as hard to be good, or else be twice as bad as whites on account of they're being lazy, shiftless, et al. But if they get the discipline together, then they're formidable, respected and devout enough to make a white preacher seem depraved and weak-minded in comparison.  Placing this dichotomy of good vs. bad in CABIN, we find Petunia (Ethel Waters) regularly dragging her no good shrimp of a man, Joe (Eddie "Rochester" Anderson) off to church, much to the consternation of his gambling cronies. Joe "wants" to do good, but he owes money from throwing dice with a no-account hustler named Domino (“Bubbles” John W. Sublett). When the game goes bad, a gun goes off and Joe is reckoned a goner, until the powerful prayer of his good woman saves him.

There’s a run-in between the factions of good and evil at the crime scene as devils and angels argue over Joe’s soul. They agree to play it as it lays, giving Joe a second chance and each using their abilities to lure him one way or the other. The representatives of good are dressed in solemn military garb with stout, straight backs and strong voices; the devil's minions are playful jazzbos (including Louis Armstrong). The devil's son-in-law (a marvelous Rex Ingram) sets about trying to lure Joe back to the fold via a winning lottery ticket and Lena Horne's gold-digging vamp. Through it all, it's assumed the Joe needs to repent, if for no other reason than Ethel loves him so gosh-dang much.

This "love" is what tips off the whole thing, for a close reading reveals it as nothing more than smothering, all-consuming, co-dependence. Joe is never even asked how he feels about Petunia: all concerned know that she’s a good woman and therefore Joe is one lucky fellow! Case closed! But it's clear she's more enamored with her own powers of endearment rather than she is with said endearment's undeserving object, Joe. In the end of the film, Joe wakes up from his death bed and wants to tell Petunia his dream, but she won’t let him: “That’s not important, let's just talk about how much I love you!" Too bad these two didn't have access to a couple's therapist, or Joe might have learned it was okay that he felt stifled. She's the bad guy here. She can't wait to jump to the wrong conclusion when she comes home from work to find him fighting off the caresses of Lena Horne (who's the first to learn about his lottery ticket - since she and the ticket are both hell-sent). The look in Anderson's eyes as Joe after Petunia flips out is priceless. Unlike the instantly apologetic typical husband in (white-based) movies who takes the guilt on himself for his wife's misjudgments (since on some level he's tempted therefore guilty), Anderson's Joe just seems saddened, worried at seeing this mean shrewish streak in his usually vivacious gal.

Through it all, thought, Joe, the man, works almost as a Hitchcockian mcguffin-- a plain white flag in the capture-the-flag game between forces of good and evil. He exists mainly to be adored by Petunia and to reflect within himself the weakness for vice which is by association subtextually inherent in the African-American character. In the picture above you can sense his passive ambivalence about her: she grins like she's about to devour him whole; he looks up more than a bit afraid, like a mouse gazing up at the smile of a Cheshire cat.

Vincente Minnelli is a brilliant enough director that one is obligated to do this subtextual digging, particularly when his AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951) features such a similarly dysfunctional romance at its heart, between a self-satisfied but financially bereft painter who has little gratitude for his kind if overly gabby 'sponsor' or sugar mama (Nina Foch) he wants to be self-sufficient while doing no work other than painting, which the best he can do is sell on street corners when she could get him gallery shows, like all good sponsors. And when he finds himself attracted to Leslie Caron, he cares not a wit that he's forcibly breaking up her own sugar-daddy connection, forcing her into the same self-inflicted poverty he relishes, regardless of her feelings and the feelings of all those who he owes and abuses. And yet we are somehow expected to root for him, because he himself is so in love with his own big white smile. A similarly uncomfortable implication of narcissism occurs in CABIN: Petunia loves Joe the way Gene “loves” Leslie in PARIS, which is to say, as a possession, as a symbol of their self-righteous "integrity," an integrity that blinds the owner to the collateral damage it creates. Gene wants power, to be the one with the purse strings and have Caron's big gorgeous eyes look up to him in awe; Petunia wants Joe because left to his own devices he'll be gone down the road of sin faster than you can say Jack Russell terrier.

Gene Kelly and Nina Foch, AMERICAN IN PARIS

Seeing CABIN with a modern therapeutic eye it’s plain the only woman in the film who truly understands Joe is the devil’s temptress, Sweet Georgia Brown (Lena Horne). Unlike Ethel’s Petunia, Georgia at least seems to accept Joe as he really is, to see him clearly, rather than as a reflection of her own ideal ego. As Petunia's undeserving love object, Joe may as well be a stuffed animal, but with Georgia he's a man. When Horne and Anderson share a scene there is a sense they are connecting on a personal level as actors, something that never happens with Anderson and Waters (who preaches to everyone as if she's helping them out of a deep pit).

Joe as a man is ultimately so ineffectual, however, that he lets himself get pushed around in his own nightclub (which he buys with his lottery winnings). You would think he could hire a bouncer to take care of the no-account Domino, who crashes the gate to sing "Shine" and do a nifty tap dance (one of the film's big highlights so who's squawkin'?). If he was, say, Ricardo Cortez in a Warner Bros. gangster film, Joe would just snap his fingers and his big thug bodyguards would at least toss Domino out on his ear if not beat him to a pulp in the alley. Instead, Joe is so ineffectual he can only watch as Domino steals his thunder and even pushes him around... in front of his own staff!

Petunia continues to manifest the hypocrisy of the church when her attempt to get Joe back starts a raucous bar fight at film's climax. Refusing to accept any blame or let people work out their own issues, Petunia prays down a tornado, beseeching God to destroy the whole town. Mind, this is all a dream, but it seems rather cavalier of Petunia, a supposed good woman, to order God to destroy a town just because she's getting bored with all the violent attention that she herself created by disguising herself as a no-good vamp.

Naturally, as with AMERICAN IN PARIS, none of this matters particularly, as the songs and dancing is everything. That’s fine, but to me, and any good deconstruction-happy crazy theorist, it's because Minnelli's focus is on the song and dance that these other recurring sinthoms are so telling. One wonders who the woman, mother or past 'sponsor' that left Minnelli feeling so boxed in. For CABIN, while has managed to sidestep a few racial slurs he's blind to where he's fallen smack dab into others, such as those of the infamous grinning minstrel. Every single character in this all-black film seems to keep their mouth peeled back so their big pearly whites can create that nice juxtaposition of white against their black faces. It’s creepy to see characters holding these big toothy smiles through whole scenes while another character talks. I kept looking into their eyes for signs of passive aggression as if they were overdoing it on purpose as a form of protest, but all I saw was weary strain, a determination to do it right lest their boxed-in director demand yet another jaw-aching take.

Still, any racist aspects of the film pales beside its sly indictment of co-dependent romantic obsession and fundamentalist Christian dogma, assuming that's what was intended in the first place. Let's hope one day there will be a movie about African-Americans who can gamble, drink and carouse and still make it to work on time, raise decent children and love each other for who they are. Amen!