Summer of my Plastic Soldier: BLOW-UP (1966)

Is Antnioni's breakthrough 1966 English language film BLOW-UP a masterpiece, a dull meditation on artifice, a sober intellectual's wrongheaded attempt to duplicate the confusion of a drug experience, a Marxist critique of the high-end fashion industry, or the most psychedelically brilliant film in the world? Correct, yes, maybe, certainly not, and No... but yeah, baby --its date of release, 1966, tells you all you need to know. BLOW-UP was as iconic and 'scene-launching' as Andy's soup cans, the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. It was 'the' thing to see in theaters if you wanted to be 'hip'. It heralded a slew of films rife with modern/post-modernist deconstructed high fashion pretty person disaffect, art critique, ambiguity, cool music, and--depending on the country and filmmaker--draggy leftist politics. You can chart its blast radius in all genre directions, from romance to western to horror to comedy and--most of all--to artsty posing.

1966 London was, by all the stretches, a fabulous time and place to be young, rich, artistic and pretty. If you had even two of those things going on, all you needed was for some pop-eyed freak to toss you a capsule of LSD or mescaline or pass you the joint and BAM! You were one of the cool kids. No turning back, or need to. The crazy scene reached out to meet you. The whole happening thing was... happening...

Words didn't work on it. Only art. Music. Sights. Images. Tactile shapes. Language was little more than a falling away booster rocket. If you needed to explain, you'd already blown it. 

Nowadays when I go to an art gallery--even in Soho--I'm kind of amazed at all the tourists--even the Europeans--struggling to seem 'overwhelmed' by the bland conceptual installations. It's as if the idea of aesthetic beauty or visible talent has been forgotten, making the need to even show up to the gallery kind of passe. You can just read the description, and if you like it, buy it (the description I mean, as it might be all there is). When I worked at the Cohen Gallery dealing with a lot of Chagall oils and Dubuffet mixed media pieces (the latter clearly just childish magic marker scribble on thin copy paper taped to a canvas - probably he was doing hundreds in one sitting on large pieces of paper, which were then cut up and glued to canvasses by assistants) for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. Usually hung-over, I always wondered what in the hell could people see in these piece of shit canvasses that I didn't. What a lot of rot, I thought. Most of this stuff was done by assistants, the artist maybe showing up to sign them or maybe not. The idea of one-of-a-kind masterpieces was lost in the rush to crank out maximum product with minimum effort.

Then one Tuesday I came back from a very long psychedelic weekend in Vermont and staggered into work where a whole collection of Chagalls were on display, suddenly I got it. Or at any rate, the tiny little lines that made up Chagall's endless drawings of floating chickens and fiddlers on  roofs finally seemed interesting--alive and swirling like a bunch of little spiders weaving wedding gowns. The real (as in ink and clay on canvas) Dubuffets seemed to drip mud and anger and primal gravitas. My eyes, in short, were open--or maybe I was hallucinating. Anything would look good to me, and maybe that was the point. Was the point of the whole art world thing just a means to show off how deep you saw, how druggy all the time your vision was, a kind micro-tripping hallucinational envy? The rest of the world looked at a Rothko or a Twombly and rolled their eyes - "you payed how much for this? I wouldn't even let my five year-old daughter put this on our fridge!?"

Antonioni seems to have been born with such open ever-hallucinating eyes, and so in the newly turned-on 'scene' of 1966 swinging London, he found an audience that had at last caught up with him and his obsessive delight in signifier-dissonance and juxtaposing aesthetics. In Antonioni's hands, the whole emerging pop scene became what Duchamp's "Fountain" had been fifty years earlier --a pot for the whole world to piss in. 

I love Antonioni, but only when I'm strung out on deep art (or whatever else you got). In the wrong mood---the "I'm an American, and I'm here to escape" mood-- I find his work somewhat monotonous. As with watching Kubrick's 2001, what might be a deep spiritual experience one night is a snooze the next. I'm also really attuned to the engagement level of those I'm watching a film with, and BLOW-UP is the sort of film destined to make a lot of guests shift in their seats, sigh, and check their cell phones; and if they do, then I, too, am over it. So I usually watch it alone, late at night, when the Chagalls are squiggling and the air breathes itself in the theater of my enraptured lungs. And if I can't get into the groove after twenty minutes, then I just bail for another time. It ain't going nowhere. It's already gone. 

But hey -Blow-Up abides. Argento fans love it for it holds a key to his whole aesthetic. You can usually tell whose films were affected by it --as suddenly David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave are in just about every cool movie being made (Hemmings in Deep Red, Redgrave in A Quiet Place in the Country, etc.) And Hemmings' photographer in Blow-Up could well be the pianist in Deep Red. 

Strutting and cocky and brutal with his unstained white pants and ruthless artist's open eye, Hemmings' photographer shags a lot of mod birds, or at least takes pics of them (and what's cool about him is that the latter is more important - he's genuinely driven by his art, the cock follows a distant second, never upsetting the apple cart of his drive for great pictures), and he drives a snazzy pint-sized convertible, the kind you step down to get into, which is clearly the inspiration for the one driven decades later by Austin Powers. It's his happening and it freaks him out, in theory.

But it's not all eye-con-ography and groovy clothes; a snail's paced mid-section finds Hemmings in his dark room "blowing up" part of a shot he took in Hyde Park, a section of bushes under which he thinks might be a hiding a dead body. He blows and blows until the pixels are shilling-size, and Atonioni patiently follows along, hypnotized by the empty white space (and no music) of Hemmings alone in his studio, blowing and blowing. It's enough to drive a snail restless.

With her 'working-class Garbo' hair and 'bantamweight Bankhead' shoulders, Vanessa Redgrave shows up as the desperate bird (trying to get the Hyde negative) and seems to have wandered in from a different movie. For a hot minute the film seems poised to follow her and leave Hemmings behind. The still molten new set of signifier chains rattle with the weary weight of a tourist changing dictionaries at some Blockbuster aisle border --but Hemmings won't have it. It's not like he has an old cop war buddy to call on for help like Jimmy Stewart does in Rear Window. He just want to see.

Alas, to his stunned chagrin, no one in his stoner circle he runs to that night will believe him about the body, so his wannabe thriller never gels. He's conscripted to the hipsters not the detectives, and-- by the end--even mime tennis seems like the most leaden of federal prison chores compared to the murder mystery that's sailed on without him.

Paranoid alien hunters who spend their lunch hours looking for alien artifacts on topographical NASA photos of the moon and Mars will surely relate, both to Hemming's obsession with jumping matrixes, and my personal frustration with Antonioni's oeuvre. Either way, the bird flies off, but Antonioni's still in the dark room. Now the pixels are the size of grapefruits and yeah, there's a body there, all right. Maybe... isn't there? If there is, he'd be a fool to get involved and we begin to feel like the only one who wants to keep watching this colossal waste of cinematic time-space is Francis Coppola so he can then go make The Conversation; De Palma, so he can make Blow-Out; Argento, so he can make Bird with Crystal Plumage (1970); Giulio Questi so he can go make Death Laid an Egg (1968) and Elio Petri so he can make A Quiet Place in the Country (1968 - with Redgrave). The rest of us just want to get on out of that goddamned studio and soak up the sultry London air.... where the birds are, and all those valuable guitar necks just laying in the streets like objets-detritus..

What I 'mean' is that, at a packed rock club that Hemmings visits to find his 'friend who'll know what to do' (about the body), we find the Yardbirds are engaging in a cutting contest between their twin guitar soloists: Jimi Page and Jeff Beck. Page surges to victory as Beck's amp-cord-guitar connection is crackly to connect. This so frustrates poor Jeff  he smashes his guitar and hurls the neck into the crowd (this was a year before Monterey Pop made such acts of catharsis a obligatoire symbole of rebellious youth). Well, now our photographer friend is caught up in the pre-mosh/pre-slam dancing packed frenzy to get that guitar neck and he proves himself adept at the kind of selfish oomph it takes in a situation like that. He grabs it, fights his way out to the empty, indifferent London street with it, and then--seeing no one else is still around to fight over it with-- casts it aside like some old broken chew toy, an objet valuable only in relation to what the suckers, I mean the other dogs, will pay.

Comparing with the old wooden airplane propellor he haggled over with the antique store owner earlier that same afternoon, one wonders: if he saw that same propellor just abandoned in a back alley trash bin, would he have wanted it so badly?  Is it not, like the broken guitar neck, just trash once shorn of its usefulness? Would the propellor cease to be an art object once attached to a plane?

Though we can imagine him selling the guitar neck in 40 years to the Hard Rock Cafe, that would mean authenticating it, which would be hard, and keeping it safe in storage for decades on the off chance it would one day have value. 

Mendacity A-Go-Go: Liz vs. the Little Monsters

 

I'll never forgive Richard Brooks for the Gaspar Noe-ish ending of LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977, my review here), but his unflinching eye comes in handy when dealing with  the mythic component of Tennessee Williams, and his dispassionate objectification of Paul Newman's unnerving sexuality and Roman statue profile has a unique fetishistic kick perfectly in line with Williams' rough trade tendencies. In CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958) and in the undervalued SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962), Brooks finds in Newman the gay eye candy grand prize of Williams' hard drinking man-children, then lets genius character actors bounce off the bronze.

But the big early scene in ROOF of Maggie chattering away and Brick just drinking and laying around, muttering passive-aggressive things like "Do they, Maggie?" infuriates me, every time, and keeps me from loving the film like I love NIGHT OF THE IGUANA or SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. Newman seems neither drunk nor closeted, and Taylor seems too poised and mannered to be really in heat. By comparison, dig up the old Showtime production with Jessica Lange (above) and Tommy Lee Jones! I haven't seen it since it premiered on cable in the 80s--but I watched it a peck of times back then: a young, pre-celebrity Lange is damn hot in the negligee dress, and Jones mixes it up with Lang and Rip Torn's Big Daddy with a cagey weariness that Newman lacks in Brooks' version.

I know it's sacrilege but Liz and Paul seem to lack connective chemistry; it's strange to me that the long Brick-Maggie bedroom scene is the most famous and recognized part of ROOF (not so strange perhaps considering how hot Liz looks straining at the seams of her white negligee) yet easily the weakest. Maybe I'm off the mark but for me this isn't a boozy romantic drama with closet undertones as much as tale of masculine redemption: Newman and Burl Ives slay me every time in the heavy showdown in the troll king basement that comes towards the end, and the real scene-stealer is Jack Carson who--when he finally lets some tears show in his voice, some realness instead of this 'boomer' good son-facade--levies such a gentle shock to the film it sheds its whole other skin. Carson seems so honestly frail in this one moment, warts and all, that the rest of the film fades around him suddenly in a mendaciously artificial overacting haze.

Fault it as you may for the now family therapy 101 moments of dialogue and symbolism (the crutch and alcohol, stairs, the ice cream, the unending shrillness of Boomer's one-note wife), but it's the kind of film that holds your hand and invites you to peer--without maudlin weepiness--deep into the harrowing void of mortality the way few films have done before or since. And if you have a dad with cancer who you all call 'Big Daddy' who has a bit of a Welles or Ives gravitas then you will, like me, be devastated down in that basement. The upstairs may be artificial and stifling, burdened with half-assed southern accents and shrill bombast, but down in that basement cobwebs and Cooks' Tour souvenirs, we're privy to something truly titanic: the bloody, pugnacious, tenacious process by which father and son help each other shed their stifling masks and genuinely connect. The sudden coherence of Brick, as if he went through ten years of therapy on his way down the stairs, may not be realistic, but Newman has never been realistic, he'd too godlike for that. It works. Why bother with realism down in the troll king basement? No women are there with their brassy monotone drawls, nor screeching kids. 

Thanks to an ingenious piece of art direction which magically takes cobwebs and antiques and weaves a dense stalactite-bedecked underworld for them to stagger in, what could be just a cliche'd rendition of Charles Foster Kane's big ole statue depository becomes truly mythic in all six senses of the word, with Burl Ives as a kind of pot-bellied troll king and Newman down there with a hypodermic torch to beseech some magic exchange. There's moments for Burl and Paul to each smash stuff in a clutching heart attack way as their illusions of immortality and glory are dashed on the altar of passing time, irrelevance, the horror of all existence, and then are redeemed, sweaty and wrecked, by the icky area they fear and recoil from the most --genuine feeling and human love.  And you know that, in the drug-hip universe of Williams, a hypodermic full of morphine resting on a crate isn't just a symbol; it's something to drool over. Even if neither dad nor son ever finally shoots it, the drugs do their magic.
Drugs don't help you escape from reality in a Williams effort, they help you confront it head on.

Wait, which reality are we talking about? Not the 9-5 family values no-neck monster reality--it helps turn down the volume on that--but the 'holy shit here comes the scythe' mortal coil shuffle reality. In Williams' plays, its the whole mindless reproductive Christian-patriarchal family dynamic that's an escape from the inescapable gravity of death. And if you don't make amends and whatever else you have to do to prepare of it, and do it now, you're fucked. 

And incessant off-key renditions of "Dixie" are not amends. 

I've had those breakthroughs before with my own big daddy, maybe you have too -- the late night boozy moments of truth when you can look at him and suddenly see--instead of a paragon or symbol of authority--a frail, aging human like yourself, not a reflection of you, but a version of the same creature you are --ever trying to escape his lack of future by ignoring his foggy present. And if alcoholism runs in your veins you can bond quite well until the hungover morning when you scarcely remember the progress you made --but hey, you made it. Deep down, behind the veil of mist, you know it happened.  Like many of Williams' plays, it seems made for me, made for a brooding drunk writer by a brooding drunk writer - with booze as the thing that both gives you the brio to stare into that void, and at the same time shorten the distance to the bottom, where the teeth are, in the base of the Sebastian's Venus fly trap garden. Click!

I wonder if the whole first half is intentionally shrill for just this purpose, meant to wear you down with the constant songs sung by the no-neck monsters to welcome Big Daddy home. We identify totally with Brick hiding out in the bedroom, as Taylor's Maggie rants on and on in her flat, mannered drawl. And we identify with Big Daddy when he rejects the ugly brood of Gooper for Maggie's hip convertible, and his irritation with the non-stop dinner songs which his wife makes such a show of enjoying. There's also no accident that the ROOF is in the title, as the different levels of the family estate are packed with meaning, from the elevation of the bedroom and its deceptive luxury (Big Daddy wants a son but momma "hates locks on doors") to the lowest ebb of the basement and the killing floor living room and the convertible quicksand driveway. And when the children go off to bed, and the drama starts in earnest, we above all note the the quietude like a weight removed from our shoulders when their no-neck noise caterwauling ceases at last. It's that 'click' Brick was waiting for. And now we realize we too were waiting for it.

The rejection of messy children is one of the few things I connect with in the Apollonian, as per Camille Paglia, vs. the chthonic. Gayness has been one-note in the media since Williams' day, and thanks to PC indoctrination, homosexuals are now depicted as just the opposite of the fey aesthetes they were in the 1950s; now they're just saintly victims longing to become legally-wed adoptive parents. Either/or but on no level are homosexuals allowed to be properly ambiguous: mercurial, both good and bad, like everything else on this fucked-up planet. A negative portrayal will get you a sack full of angry letters; a positive portrayal a snoozing audience and bizarre Christian right wing protests. Can you win? Williams, even back here in the 50s, wins easily, by giving us complexity.

Few artists today bother to try, to plumb the depths that Camille Paglia writes about in her Sexual Personae, to explore gayness as the rejection of the feminine body, the denial of procreation and all the messy morasses and fairy bower quicksand pits that slow time to a crawl. For me and a very few others, the whole media portrayal in things like TV's American Family and The L Word are deeply offensive because they are a betrayal of all that was good and pure about the Williams' aesthetic. Now everyone's a breeder, queer eye or no, and kids are saints by default, suffocated in round-the-clock hyper-monitoring even as their parents aren't home (they have to work overtime to afford nannies and after-pre-school sewing lessons).

In that sense, it's illuminating that Brick--who may or may not have fooled around with his late pal Skipper-- is the only one to ask "why!?" in relation to Big Daddy's edict to reproduce. He has a point and it's a harrowing one: why bother to procreate just so some idiotic legacy of wealth and possessions can go on? Where's the meaning?

As someone who reacts with  mute horror to the surplus of children in my Park Slope neighborhood, I relate to Brick's question; and as someone who, because he has no kids, I get to stare into the terrifying mortal mirror without the worry being channeled into anxiety about providing for the kids after I'm gone; and as an alcoholic writer aware of the repulsion aspect of sexuality on a visceral level,  I relate to Liz's scheming to keep the no-neck monsters off that nice piece of land. Like her I want to drown them in ice cream, choke them on their own stupid toy guns..

Looking at the film in relation to Williams' other works we see a running theme of the grabby, uncouth, poor relations who breed willy nilly and are a pox upon the land. Against this grain, this unceasing flow of children into the future, stand a few 'whole' souls, beautiful people, like Maggie and Brick, Blanche Dubois, Mrs. Stone, Violet Venable, Rev. T.L. Shannon, and a boozy actress named Alexandra Del Lago.
 

God bless this old era,when Tennessee Williams was as hot onscreen and stage as pocket edition Freud was in the bookstores. A time when cigarettes, the Kinsey Report, whiskey highballs, and contract bridge made a nation more alive to the truth and ambivalent about the blind procreative drive.  Maybe one day we will once again have another Tennessee Williams to steer us into some actual dialogue with our own tragic genetic imperatives, to embrace the terrifying gaze of the Apollonian eye instead of just aping the most banal of suburban values. Until then, mendacity will remain so common as to be unnoticed, and sexual risk takers will die, whether by AIDS, psychopathic hustlers, or terminal big daddy cancer. Won't someone not think of the children, just for a couple hours, and smoke a goddamned cigarette, or stoke that morphine shot Big Daddy doesn't seem to want, so we can talk like high adults?

Last Year at Marienbad - the Easter Party Game

Nothing spells meta like having a Last Year at Marienbad party for Easter. When San Moritz is beckoning and all you can afford is a rental of one of the most pretentious and bourgeois art movies ever made, and maybe the best, or worst, and both, certainly... maybe. Where were we? Touches like a voiceover that slowly fades underneath booming organ tones as it speaks of wandering through an "edifice of a bygone era," with carpets thick and ornate mirrors and windows that reflect "galleries, side corridors that in turn lead to an empty room... a silent room where one's footsteps are absorbed by carpets so thick and heavy that they reach no one's ear. Repeat.

Watching it now, in the 21st century, it's hard to know if stark black-and-white perfume and jewelry ads with sad-eyed women lounging by long obelisk-shaped pools, or beds (or were they shrubs?), surrounded by wealth... if MARIENBAD launched them all. In case you haven't seen it, I don't want to spoil it for you, but it's from 1961 and directed by Alain Resnais and written by S/M intellectual Alain Robbe-Grillet. It is about a girl in a gorgeous black feather dress (ala Dietrich in Shanghai Express) who may or may not have had an affair or been sexually assaulted the year before by some sleazy, dead-in-the-eyes lothario at a similar hotel in Marienbad. This creep never stops lingering over her with sick, dead smile. He makes Boris Karloff look like Clark Gable. This scenario is played out over and over again, with the same cryptic narration about the hotel, shadows that switch sides and disappear in the lovely garden, and a bunch of people either sitting or standing by a row of chairs.

Oh and there's a memory of a snowbound chalet, which may or may not be just the painting hanging in the girl's hotel room, or the girl might be hanging in the snowbound chalet, with a picture of Marienbad on the wall. If the setting of the film is in Marienbad or meant to be just a memory, who can say. According to Wiki it was filmed in several different chateaus to "produce a disorienting effect." And Coco Chanel made Seyrig's gowns! They're sleek, but shot cold as a diamond in a freezer.

I concocted the following idea while trying to watch the film several times and realizing it worked best watching random chapters over a period of a week. In 15 minute intervals, at random, it's a masterwork. For more than 15 minutes, it's infuriating and worst of all, pretentious. The actors don't mesmerize, and when narrative is this thoroughly deconstructed, they must. Once constant narrative frustration gets on your nerves in Godard, you can just stare into the celestial beauty of a female face, but as pretty as Delphine Seyrig is, as lovely as her Dietrich-ish gowns are, she really doesn't project the same goddess magnitude of, say, Monica Vitti or Bibbi Anderson, or Anna Karina. Imagine how dull L'AVENTURA, RED DESERT, PERSONA or MY LIFE TO LIVE would be without the beauty and emotional spontaneity and realness in the starlet's faces. They're there for a reason. We don't have anything else to hold us to the screen.

It's not Seyrig's fault that she doesn't connect and seems trapped in a kind of cold bourgeois first class duty free French Vogue hell, one of fine gowns, suffocating over-ornamentation, endless shots of ornate hallways, figures frozen in cocktail repose, a reptilian suitor and cadaver-like husband, an auteur and writer who are so rigorously intellectual and formal they pin Seyrig like an etherized butterfly to the deathly vacant space. Empty past gestures are discussed over and over as if they one day will have meaning. And the organ music grates like a list of grievances on a loop... and every head of hair is slicked back to the point of cruelty. Empty corridors as far as the eye can see will eventually bore even the most hardened European intellectual (my Argentine ex-wife, a leftist-intellectual film maker who introduced me to Bunuel and Godard, called MARIENBAD the most pretentious piece of shit ever made.)

If you find the film's repetitious nonlinear, fractal-like structure is frustrating over a long haul... may I suggest the MARIENBAD the party game? Here is what you need:

* At least two other people to watch the movie with, ideally if you're in a love triangle with them (invite the pretty person you like, and the less attractive one who likes you, and who will definitely come and pretend to like the film as long as you say it's great).
* 3-7 chairs, ideally straight-backed dining room table style, arranged in a semi-circle in front of the TV screen.
* One large framed painting or picture of a winter landscape, ideally with a small house in it.
* A book of kitchen matches and a coffee table (or card table)

There is a lot of mirroring and refracting in the film, and the idea for the game is to represent a mirror to the action onscreen, but an 'off' surrealist mirror. So when all the men are standing you sit and unfreeze when they freeze and mimic their movements when they look in the mirror. Let's say Daphne hangs up the winter landscape painting on her wall in the movie, you would then take the painting out of the room. When she takes it off the wall and hides it, you would bring it out and hang yours up, evoking the meta idea she's passing the painting through the mirror/screen to you. When the men play that weird match game, you play too, and when the chairs are empty onscreen, you sit in them, and vice versa.

When that gets old, watch the film; when the film gets old, play the game. Once you get in the habit, you should find yourself naturally going with the flow of the action, going to the bathroom as a character enters the screen, and vice versa, and you can get that post-modern affect high, and avoid being too bored by the film itself. If you leave to go to the bathroom or kitchen for god's sake don't pause it. You can be certain whatever you missed will be refracted and repeated. 

If that gets dull you can start in the middle, or pick a random chapter, or watch the same chapter ten times instead of the whole film once. Keep the game going and you just may find yourself in San Moritz, or Marienbad, as the hellish simulacrum comes crashing down and Christ rises like a star of the real in your heaven.

Great performances, dubious haircuts

1. Laurence Olivier as 
HAMLET (1948)

The 'style of the time' is no reason for the short bangs and clipped wings on Sir Lawrence in this otherwise lovely production. Since director Olivier grants himself so many close-ups, you're forced time and again to reckon with how much he looks like Sting. Truly, the undiscover'd country from which no traveler returns seems like a much more viable option than usual.

2. Fred Ward as Henry Miller in

HENRY AND JUNE (1990)

Nothing's more upsetting than having to consider various 30's bi-curious women having sex with this alleged Romeo. Bald except for a black strip of hair tape around the lower half of his head, he looks painfully square, and dares to act as confident as an Elvis. Nothing at all against the bald, or those with hair around the sides. A bald man can be quite virile-- I love Telly Savalas and Cool Yul--but Ward looks like he's wearing a bald wig with a strip of felt, and the overall effect once you add his his wolfish nostril breathing is quite lewd.

3. Jeff Goldblum as Ed Okin in
INTO THE NIGHT (1985)

Time has not been kind to Goldblum's pouffy 80's 'do. To the point where I couldn't even get past the opening scenes with his unfaithful wife in a recent revisit, and I saw this film dozens of times as a youth... and Goldblum's awesome in everything. He should take a clue from his statuette in above photo. 

4. Cary Grant as Capt. Henry Rochard in 

I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE (1948)

Hard to believe it now in my golden years, but as a Hawks-loving teenager I held this movie in my esteem far above BRINGING UP BABY. Cary Grant as an allegedly sophisto French officer must have been deranged to want to marry someone so dour in appearance, smoker's baritone, and butch demeanor as Ann Sheridan is in this film. And his impromptu war bride wig is both harmful to animals (how is that horse going to keep flies away from his hindquarters?) and, as far as beauty, it's like he's not even trying.

5. Frederic March as Count Vronsky

in ANNA KARENINA (1935) 

It may have been the style of the future's military schools, but the flat fade they give March in this glossy MGM adaptation is--even across the silver veils of time and space--rough on the senses: you can smell his acrid hair tonic and the gunpowder in his ears. It looked right on Wallace Beery's seething, self-righteous German industrialist in GRAND HOTEL (1933) but not on a dashing count.