SCREENING LOG - 12/24-12/30, 2002

Back to 2002 Index

I'm glad I've decided to do quick and dirty reviews while I'm away from my routine, as living at home with satellite cable is leading to disruptive and incomplete viewing patterns. but I started the week delving through my laserdisc collection to see things I wouldn't otherwise have the chance to see. Most of what I have I can find elsewhere, except for a box set issued by the Library of Congress titled "The Origins of Film," containing rare features from the 1910s and 20s. To wit:

"ORIGINS OF THE GANGSTER FILM"

The Narrow Road (1912, DW Griffith) a prototypical gangster short showing how a man falls prey to his criminal tendencies shortly after leaving prison. Not sure if this is "the" first American gangster movie (the first American crime film of course is THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY) but the hallmarks of the genre are there. A 19-year old Mary Pickford plays the beleagured wife, four years before she would become the highest salaried performer in the world.

Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915, Maurice Tourneur) wow, what a find! the opening bank break-in scene is way ahead of its time, a one-take shot overhead a ceiling-less set that lets you see the crooks sneak their way through a labyrinth of rooms until they reach the vault. The film then settles into reform melodrama with a fairly exciting climax.

"ORIGINS OF THE FANTASY FEATURE"

The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914, J. Farrell MacDonald) WIZARD OF OZ author Frank L. Baum actually produced this feature (he had his own production company and wanted to franchise the Oz series, sort of like the Harry Potter of his day, but folded after making only 3 of his 28 Oz books into films). This one has its fair share of primitive camera tricks and cinematic hocus pocus and moves along quite breezily. Interestingly, a boy character is played by a woman and the patchwork girl of the title is played by a man. Hal Roach has a bit part playing the Cowardly Lion.

A Florida Enchantment (1914, Sidney Drew) A remarkable gender-bending comedy about a demure Southern woman who happens upon magic Indian seeds that change the sex of whoever ingests them. Upon taking them, she suddenly becomes assertive and starts kicking the butt of her philandering fiancee, that is when she's not dressing like a man to take advantage of male social privileges. A very perceptive film in how it looks into the gender-based social standards of its era, and quite funny to boot.

"AMERICA'S FIRST WOMEN FILMMAKERS"

How Men Propose (1913, Lois Weber) This short typifies Weber's persona as a sociologist-turned-filmmaker. Here a woman entertains three male suitors in turn, but purely as a research project to compare their different approaches. Quite striking in how the woman is clearly in the position of power in managing these men.

Matrimony's Speed Limit (1915, Alice Guy-Blanche) In what clearly seems to be an inspiration for Buster Keaton's SEVEN CHANCES, a woman tricks her boyfriend to marry her by forging a telegram that says he must marry by noon in order to receive his dead aunt's inheritance. This leads to a manic Griffithian cross-cutting as the two parties rush to the church, though the man is so frantic that he proposes to a number of women along the way.

A House Divided (1913, Alice Guy-Blanche) An estranged husband and wife arrange through "the family friend" the lawyer to live separately in the same house, but are eventually reconiciled. It seems that both Guy-Blanche and Weber have social commentary as a major preoccupation in their filmmaking; if anything it gives their films lasting value as historical artifact, though their distinctly feminine perspective of events is hard to be found in most films of any era.

Too Wise Wives (1921, Lois Weber) The one feature film of this bunch concerns a rather complex melodrama involving two different women, one who ingratiates her rich husband while the other, less affluent, nags and frets over hers -- it quickly becomes a study of contrasts in how different wives behave, leading to different results with their spouses. To complicate matters, the ingratiating wife is the old flame of the other one's husband, who finds her increasingly attractive the more his own wife nags him. The social observation, burdened with heavy-handed moralizing at the end, is enriched by a great sensitivity to each character's emotional states.

"THE AFRICAN AMERICAN CINEMA"

Within Our Gates (1919, Oscar Micheaux) Micheaux, considered the first major African American filmmaker and the answer to D.W. Griffith, helmed this story of a Southern black woman with a tortured past who journeys north to find sponsorship for a struggling school black children back home. Micheaux matches Griffith's ability to seamlessly choreograph several plot strands simultaneously, and he concludes with brutal racial beating, lynching and rape scenes that is nothing short of a black answer to correlating white supremacist scenes in BIRTH OF A NATION. A powerful and accomplished picture.

The Scar of Shame (1926, Frank Perugini) This film, produced by "The Colored Players Film Corporation" of Philadelphia is startling evidence of a fully-fledged self-sufficient African American independent film community existing outside both Hollywood and the Harlem Renaissance. A well-to-do musician "rescues" a poor, pretty woman from her abusive drunkard father, but is prevented from marrying her by his mother, who insists he marry among "his own set". Shot entirely with an all-black cast, it's an eye-opening look at the complex relations within the black community, particularly the prejudices and mistrust between the upper and lower classes.

Also on laserdisc I watched AS GOOD AS IT GETS for the umpteenth time, but this time with commentary with director James L. Brooks and actors Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt and Greg Kinnear. Very very illuminating, as it becomes apparent how loose and unfinished the film was at every step of production, and how many takes, scenes and versions of scenes were shot so that Brooks could figure out just what he wanted in the test-production and test-screening stages. The first half-hour of commentary is particularly great as Brooks describes how each scene in the opening act is intended to establish a set of expectations with the viewer, from which the story can launch into bigger and bolder movements. For someone who's so unsure of himself, Brooks came off with what I consider one of the masterpieces of the '90s, a film that defies genre and audience expectations and creates an entertainment that is strangely unique and endearing. He appears to be someone who's both a real sweetheart as well as a pain in the ass to work with. Nicholson treats him like an old friend, able to roll with the punches of Brooks' fussy perfectionism and see the forest for the trees. Kinnear sounds both in awe and resentful of Nicholson's commanding presence. Hunt sounds painfully serious and spends a good deal of her comments nitpicking and criticizing herself.

From Blockbuster I rented SUNSHINE STATE (2002, John Sayles) which gives a typically Saylesian panorama of a community, this one being on the central coast of Florida and the various makeshift histories and traditions carried by its disparate residents. Somehow what should be an extremely fascinating topic becomes deadly dull... maybe the centerlessness of the community in question carried over into the script, but the characters hardly ever reached beyond symbolic significance, representing their particular social, ethnic or whatever background. Sayles does an admirable job trying to show the quirky diversity of the community, but he's trying too hard to be meaningful and not trying hard enough to make it feel real.

On satellite throughout the week I saw snippets of such movies as FULL METAL JACKET and A PLACE IN THE SUN. The random second half of FULL METAL JACKET makes a lot more sense to me know, in that the experience of war is presented as chaotic, fragmentary, essentially senseless, and we see how the soldiers respond to this experience in light of all the training they've received to "prepare" them for combat. In this light the film has one-of-a-kind insights to shed on the psychology of combat, and quite riveting on its own terms. A PLACE IN THE SUN looks pretty good, I should revisit it in total sometime. I'm into movies that explore the cost of social climbing, especially with Elizabeth Taylor to make it tasty.

Back to 2002 Index