POPCORN KERNELS—Anne Bancroft x 4; John Ford x 2

There are times when I am admittedly overwhelmed by the amount of films I watch in any given week and the responsibility I feel towards each and every one of them; as though films are gifted children requiring parental acknowledgment and encouragement for fear that—lacking same—they will wither, conform and lose what is special and integral. Though fond of critical overviews, it's impossible to provide same for each film I see. Besides, the research can become mind numbing, exhaustive and counterproductive; a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. More accurately, my responses to films range from the contrived and complex to the most innocent and simple, dependent upon a variety of factors, not only my own moods and energy levels, but the moods and the energy levels of the films themselves, mixed and matched against the time of the day (a film with my morning cup of coffee is a completely different experience than the one employed as a sedative against late night insomnia). Sometimes even when I like a film there isn't a whole lot for me to say. So why worry the bone? And yet I'm an old dog and it's hard to teach me new tricks. I can't just watch movies and let them go. I have to gnaw on them even for a little bit before I bury them in the back yard.

Even if not fully fleshed out, fleeting impressions can be important if for nothing else than an entry in time and—as I have mentioned here and there—my approach to film is consciously diaristic. There's something epistolary about films as well; they are like letters to myself about who I am at any given time. I enjoy distinguishing a particular movie in a particular moviehouse with a particular audience at a particular time, in which one image or one phrase stands out, like the unexpected popcorn kernel that hasn't popped; "grannies" we used to call them when I was a kid. Along with the leftover salt, "grannies" would accumulate at the bottom of the bag. With a little more time, perhaps a little more heat, they could have popped open. Sometimes to not crunch away at them seemed like such a waste of good corn. That seems as good a description as any for the nature of some of my cinematic impressions.

I've been enjoying Turner Classic Movies "Summer Under the Stars" where each day an actor's work is profiled through a sampling of a dozen or so films, some performances minor but pleasant, others iconic and unforgettable, an entertaining ratchet between two to five-star movies placed in the appropriate context of a whole. Many of my associates who swirl the formal elements of film around like cigar smoke in a snifter of cognac frequently focus on directorial auteurship and pay less attention to the devoted, grunt work of the actors who labor in front of the camera, investing malleable scripts with a crafted spectrum of luminosity and technique. That's why "Summer Under the Stars" is such a refreshing treat because it's really about the performers and their performances. It really is about the influence of the firmament.

I pick and choose throughout the month of August, usually watching a few movies in a row to get a sense of the performer's range. A few Marie Dresslers. Some Chaplins, some Garbos, shifting from silents to sound. Gregory Peck, Claude Rains, Fred MacMurray, Kim Novak. Often it's pure happenstance on who I settle in to watch on any given day. The flexibility of the calendar has more to do with that than anything; but, I quite consciously set my sights and my calendar to watch TCM's selection of Anne Bancroft films, which aired last Wednesday, August 6, 2008.

Over at The House Next Door, I'm grateful Dan Callahan beat me to the punch in providing an appreciation of Bancroft's career. He did such a masterful job of profiling her work by decades, drawing emphasis to the specific grace of her work in the sixties when audiences experienced her accomplished performances in The Miracle Worker (1962), The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Slender Thread (1965), Seven Women (1966) and The Graduate (1967). In my mid-teens at the time, I saw all but one of those films (Seven Women) and recall distinctly how their sophistication and maturity impressed my questing inexperienced sensibility. Watching these movies was like having experiences, which I was so hungry for by default. I hadn't yet come to terms with Joni Mitchell's admonition that a time would come "when I'd drag my feet just to slow the circles down." I'm caught up in a funny time loop right now where I am re-experiencing the sixties for myself, not only in film, but in the music I listened to and the books I read. Anne Bancroft is clearly part of this nostalgic process, which is really not about wanting something I used to have as much as it is about savoring something twice and more fully.

Since Dan has done the good work, I'm free to pick through the popcorn kernels in the bottom of the bag and offer up some random associations. The first and most important one for me is Bancroft's turn in Jack Clayton's The Pumpkin Eater, in which she co-starred with Peter Finch, James Mason and Maggie Smith in a nearly translucent script by Harold Pinter. Of course, I didn't know Harold Pinter from diddley squat as a kid but I did know who Anne Bancroft was because of her Oscar-winning performance as Annie Sullivan in Arthur Penn's The Miracle Worker two years earlier, which I watched again solely because—along with Bancroft's indelible performance—it is arguably Patty Duke's finest performance as well (though, I confess guiltily, I am partial to her shouting, "Neely, Neely O'Hara!" in the proverbial blind alley). Despite the whole "wah-wah" controversy, to this day I still get completely choked up witnessing the "miracle" of Helen Keller making the cognitive connection between the word Sullivan is spelling into her hand and the water splashing from the pump.

I remember not fully understanding The Pumpkin Eater when I first saw it. How could I? I would have been all of 11 at the time it came out so it's possible I initially only caught whatever clip was chosen for Bancroft's Oscar nomination at the Academy Awards ceremony, and only later watched the film in its entirety on some television broadcast. Yet by 13 my parents were already suffering the death throes of their marriage and I was keenly aware of my mother's suffering and how she felt trapped by the proprieties of a loveless marriage.

Don't ask me why but the nursery rhyme upon which the film's title is based was one of my favorites as a child, memorized early on: "Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife and couldn't keep her. He put her in a pumpkin shell and there he kept her very well." Even as I recite that rhyme, in my memory's eye I can see the illustration that accompanied it of a woman and her children looking forlornly out of a window carved in a giant pumpkin shell while Peter walks away whistling. Leave it to a children's nursery book of rhymes to spell out the hazards of masculine entitlement.

I'm not sure I would agree with Dan's characterization of Bancroft's performance as "impenetrable." I find her performance painfully permeable. I would rely more on a splendid July 2006 address given by David Hare to the American Academy in London on the occasion of a retrospective of films based on Harold Pinter scripts, wherein Hare elucidates: "Pinter offers the stuff actors want and with which they can do magic—surface vitality, of course, but also an undertow of narrative and implied feeling which deepens the simplest remark. In the spare, complicated screenwriting of Pinter, 'yes', 'no' and 'maybe' become words which do a hundred jobs." In other words, he provides actors the opportunity to show us what he means to tell. "In The Pumpkin Eater," Hare continues, "we never see Maggie Smith making love to Peter Finch. We don't need to. Finch tells us about it, more powerfully than any shot of flailing limbs could ever achieve. And even more powerful, because at second hand, in Anne Bancroft's eyes we see a glare of pain and betrayal which tells us more about what went on than any mere showing could hope to show."

All of this is by way of leading to the simple popcorn kernel I'm intending to highlight, and one which I've not seen written about anywhere. After Jo Armitage (Bancroft) discovers her husband Jake (Finch) has repeatedly betrayed their marriage through infidelity, and after an enraged assault where Jo pounds Jake with her fists, she returns to the bed of a former husband for physical solace. The camera leads into this scene by showing the cigarette that Jo is smoking after having had sex with her ex. While their conversation detailing her admitted frustration is moving forward in real time, the smoke is going back into the cigarette. It's a truly wondrous cinematic moment, an inversion redolent of Jean Cocteau that defeats time, the kind that my compatriot Michael Hawley says is what makes movies such wonderful things to watch and—in this instance—I have to wholly agree. My breath caught in my throat. The psychological need for illo tempore, to return to the beginning, has rarely been captured so exquisitely, so painfully. That image alone makes The Pumpkin Eater unforgettable.

Sidney Pollack's first narrative feature The Slender Thread is another film that I return to again and again despite my awareness—as Elvis Mitchell recently confirmed when we spoke—that Pollack was displeased with the project. Representing again the repression and self-implosion of a failed marriage, in The Slender Thread Bancroft's character Inga gives up on life, takes an overdose of pills, yet calls a suicide hotline for company as she drifts into unconsciousness. Sidney Poitier's character Alan is a collegiate volunteer at the crisis hotline whose task is to keep Inga talking until she can be located and rescued. The telephone line and the connection it affords becomes, in essence, the titular slender thread. Just as one could say that Bancroft was at her prime expressing the particular cultural sophistication of the sixties and the plight of tethered women, so one could say the same about Poitier who brought to that decade a string of remarkable performances that enunciated civil rights concerns of the era: A Raisin in the Sun (1960), Lilies of the Field (1963), A Patch of Blue (1965), To Sir, With Love (1966), In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (both in 1967). The two of them together in the same film is one of the best duets of the sixties.

I also caught two John Ford movies last Wednesday: his last film 7 Women, starring Bancroft, and a revival of The Fugitive (1947) at Pacific Film Archive as part of their ongoing Gabriel Figueroa series. I wasn't wild about either of them, to be honest and for somewhat the same reasons. In both films men are bestial and women unfortunate victims. I'm not saying that's not the truth, or not a truth, but I wasn't fully impressed with how Ford went about gendering his portrayal of that truth. In 7 Women, Anne Bancroft substituted in for Patricia Neal, who had suffered a stroke. The substitution is telling in and of itself (Neal, in fact, had been the first choice for The Pumpkin Eater). If I had more time and were not just picking through popcorn kernels at the bottom of the bag, a systematic comparison between the two actresses would offer some rich insights, I suspect.

I enjoyed 7 Women well enough but found it a bit silly. The strength of these women, particularly Bancroft's character Dr. Cartwright, seemed staged, pedantic, if not precious. I'm sorry, but the "negotiations" between Dr. Cartwright and the marauding Mongol leader Tunga Khan (Mike Mazurki) made no sense to me whatsoever, especially since—before his appearance—Tunga Khan had been described as tearing the arms and legs off women and children and tossing them onto bonfires for sheer sport. That he and his heathen crew didn't immediately rape the women in the mission—especially Sue Lyon of Lolita fame—and were toned down by slaps to the face and some feisty fury made for a gendered broad farce but hardly a believable tract of feminine emancipation. 7 Women is more in the camp (literally) of Joan Crawford's Johnny Guitar. Margaret Leighton's portrayal of a lesbian guising her desires underneath the thin veneer of Christian missionary work (she lusts after Lyon more than the Mongol hordes do) can be retrieved as yet another example of the queers-as-villains stereotype prevalent in Hollywood of the 1950s and 1960s. I choose to recontextualize it as a bit of stereotype kitsch to enjoy it on that level; otherwise—when visibility is such a strategic politic for lesbians—it's fairly unseemly. The scene where Leighton nearly claws the walls because a "real" woman is giving birth borders on the homophobic, tainting whatever psychological complexity Ford was endeavoring.

The Fugitive was also another unbelievable film and—again—borderline racist. Though perhaps some of Figueroa's most sumptuous cinematography, and certainly worth a look on that level alone, its agenda as entertainment for white American audiences is embarrassingly apparent, especially in its depiction of Mexicans as incompetent animals. Ford had the foresight to include some of Mexico's finest artists—Emilio Fernández as producer, Gabriel Figueroa as cinematographer, Pedro Armendaríz and Dolores Del Rio as actors—and then turns around and sticks in Henry Fonda as the protagonist, a Mexican priest on the run from military officials who can't pick him out from a rounded-up crowd of Mexicans like they're pendejos who can't recognize their own kind. J. Carrol Naish as the Judas informer was equally unconvincing and downright annoying. In fact, being clobbered over the head with Christian symbolism—there are more symbolic crosses in this movie than you can shake a stick at—proved downright tiresome. I found myself thinking, "Why is John Ford trying to make an Orson Welles movie?"

HELP ME EROS—The Greencine Interview With Lee Kang-sheng

With this year's Toronto International Film Festival just around the corner, I feel like I've finished up last year's housecleaning with the Greencine publication of my interview with Lee Kang-sheng, secured at last year's TIFF where Help Me Eros touched down on North American soil. As I outline in my intro to the Greencine interview, Lee Kang-sheng's sophomore feature has not fared well with critics and distributors; but, praise needs to go out to Strand Releasing for bravely picking up the film for DVD distribution.

Of related interest is Twitch teammate Ard Vijn's review of Help Me Eros and interview with Lee Kang-sheng conducted earlier this year at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Cross-published on Twitch. Photo courtesy of Curtis Winston.

STREETS OF NO RETURN: SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER—Introductory Remarks by Steve Seid and Pop Culture Essayist Mike White

One of the interesting things about David Goodis's career, Steve Seid mentioned by way of introduction to François Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), is that—even though Goodis's first connection to filmmaking occurred in 1947 with Dark Passage and The Unfaithful—attempts to adapt his work have continued to the present day; Seid recently met someone working with Goodis's 1951 novel Cassidy's Girl. Along the way, going all the way back to 1954-1955, the French have been particularly attracted to Goodis's novels and—of the twelve existing feature adaptations—eight have their roots in French filmmaking.

The earliest was Pierre Chenals' Section des disparus made in Argentina during the mid-50s, continuing on with Henri Verneuil's Le Casse (The Burglars, 1971), René Clement's La Course du Lièvre à Travers Les Champs (And Hope To Die, 1972), Jean-Jacques Beineix's La Lune Dans Le Caniveau (Moon in the Gutter, 1983), and Francis Girod's Descente Aux Enfers (Descent Into Hell, 1986). The French outdid the Americans, picking up and running with Goodis's work, even though Goodis is a Philadelphian and his writing is set in specific American locales. François Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player—the best known of the Goodis films ("and perhaps even the best")—is included among these French adaptations.

Seid credited Detroit author Mike White, who has written extensively on Goodis and who administers Cashiers du Cinemart, as "nearly a counselor" on the PFA series. White generously helped Seid locate certain of the films and agreed to introduce Shoot the Piano Player. His generosity, in fact, has extended to The Evening Class, to whom Mike has offered his written notes on the film. Thanks, Mike!

* * *

Last night in his introduction to Dark Passage, author Barry Gifford talked about how David Goodis's Down There was reprinted by Black Lizard as Shoot the Piano Player. This wasn't anything new. The book was only known as Down There upon its initial 1956 release by Gold Medal. It's been Shoot the Piano Player since 1962. No other Goodis book has been as "influenced" by its film version as this book.

The story of Shoot the Piano Player is one familiar to David Goodis fans; a man rises to the top of his profession only to be cast down, going from the stars to the gutter where he wallows in the muck. He's not an actor; he's acted upon by the big cold world. This is the theme not only of Shoot the Piano Player but also Street of No Return, and Nightfall. This didn't go unnoticed by Truffaut. The director, along with co-screenwriter Marcel Moussy, picked up some dialogue from Nightfall, working it into the opening scene of Piano Player.

The irony is that this oft told tale of the rise and fall from greatness of the artist (painter, singer, pianist) can be related to Goodis's own story; the unknown writer who has a hit with his Saturday Evening Post serialization of Dark Passage. He goes to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter, has a few good things happen to him before his contract is terminated and he goes back to Philadelphia to live with his folks; pounding out book after book with decreasing frequency until passing away in 1967.

I hesitate to use such a trite phrase but Truffaut's second film was truly ahead of its time. The tone shifts from high comedy to heart wrenching sorrow as the film transforms from one genre to another, leaving a lot of critics puzzled to the point of anger upon its initial release. Some claimed it was Truffaut's sophomore slump, a disappointing follow-up to The 400 Blows. He was reaching far beyond his grasp.

Ironically, though critically derided ("maybe they should have shot the piano player, hardy har") this French fare has fared far better than other Goodis adaptations (with the possible exception of Dark Passage). No other movie based on a Goodis book has gotten the "Criterion treatment."

Almost 50 years after its release the drastic changes in tone in Shoot the Piano Player are common place. This movie serves as a precursor to pastiche films like Pulp Fiction. The gangsters, Ernest and Momo, talking about women's undergarments and wearing their sister's panties—that leads directly into Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction talking about foot massages. Just like Jules and Vincent, Ernest and Momo may initially appear comedic but they're fairly effective when need be.

There's a lot more going on than Truffaut mixing genres here. Shoot the Piano Player is a love letter to the American gangster classics as well as a critique of the French Crime cycle that was in vogue during the '50s. Melville and Godard had already used the gangster milieu as sounding boards for more Nouvelle Vague ideas. Truffaut took it one step further.

More than the rise and fall from greatness and its incredible left turns in tone, Shoot the Piano Player is a tapestry of themes that enriches the film experience. Truffaut, the "Gravedigger of French Cinema," had been railing in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema through the fifties. Like his hero, Alfred Hitchcock, Truffaut isn't the kind of filmmaker to rely on "happy accidents," rather you can read the subtexts of his works without worrying about reading something that wasn't intended. And if you happened to read something that he hadn't intended, he'd probably claim responsibility if it was a good interpretation.

Shoot the Piano Player is filled with doubles. The landscape is dotted with mirrors and there's a play between black and white that goes far beyond the film stock. This is exemplified, for me, when the character of Fido—the main character's younger brother who is one of the few major derivations from Goodis's original work—throws a container of milk onto the windscreen of Momo and Ernest. "The opacity of the whiteness contrasts their dark designs." This is echoed later during the film's climax which takes place in lovely fields of snow, once again recalling the last act of Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall. Rather than being mired in the inky shadows, real terror can come in a world of blinding white.

At the heart of the film our main character is himself a double. He's both Edouard Saroyan and Charlie Koller. One is at the top of his game as a concert pianist while the other bangs out the same rote tune in a Parisian club night after night. Yet, Edouard/Charlie aren't as starkly different as the black and white keys on his piano. More than being a diametrical split, his life is a yin and yang circle; an ouroboros—the snake swallowing its own tail. Everything plays out for Edouard/Charlie again and again; he falls for a waitress, there's a tragedy, and all the while the same old song plays on.

Cross-published on Twitch.

TIMELESS SPIRAL—The Buckinghams

"It's always time to die, but these discs with their timeless spiral hold an instant of eternity."—Julio Cortazar, Diary of Andrés Fava (Archipelago Books, New York, 2005:5).

Julio Cortazar was referencing Laurence Olivier's recording of Henry V when he authored that comment, and yet his equation of a record spinning on a turntable as a "timeless spiral" speaks to all recordings over time, extending—albeit somewhat anachronistically—into our modern digital age where the physical record and turntable (though rendered obsolete) still address the human need to capture time in the essence of music, and the human soul via the image of the ever continuous spiral. Late last night, insomniatic, I soothed myself with nostalgia. In my mid-50s, nostalgia has become the drug that I look to score, as I savor days gone by as readily as a late-night cup of hot tea. Between Bedazzled TV and YouTube, I got high on the garage rock of the '60s and for a few moments in the wee hours of the night felt all of 16 again; "an instant of eternity" indeed.

When I was a teenager, one of my favorite groups influenced by the British Invasion was The Buckinghams, out of Chicago. Their romantic pop pulsed through their lead singer Dennis Tufano, on whom I had a not-so-secret crush. Named after Chicago's infamous Buckingham Fountain, both The Buckinghams and Dennis Tufano are still around; the Buckinghams capitalizing on nostalgia and reaching back to the sound of their greatest hits, and Tufano channeling the lounge splashes of Bobby Darin. To initiate a sidebar here on The Evening Class that I'll call "Timeless Spiral", ladies and gentlemen I offer up: The Buckinghams!









At Last.Fm you can listen (for free) to "Susan", "Back In Love Again", "Mercy Mercy Mercy", "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", "I'll Go Crazy", "I Call Your Name", "I've Been Wrong Before", and "Where Did You Come From?"

"The Time Of My Life", "You Make Me Feel So Good", "You Misunderstand Me", and "I Don't Wanna Cry", though YouTube videos, are footage of records spinning, underscoring the essential experience of the timeless spiral, where by listening you'll just have to conjure up your own images, your own memories. Enjoy!

STREETS OF NO RETURN: THE UNFAITHFUL—Introductory Remarks By Steve Seid and Noir Historian Dan Hodges

PFA curator Steve Seid reiterated that David Goodis—in the wake of the 1947 film adaptation of his novel Dark Passage—quickly secured a contract as a studio writer in Hollywood; but, had a rapid downfall and by 1950 moved back to Philadelphia. "The irony is that you can see in a single double-bill the entire output from his time in Los Angeles," Seid quipped. Other filmic adaptations like Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall eventually lead Goodis's work back to Hollywood; but, not the author himself.

Seid then introduced Dan Hodges, a San Franciscan author specializing in film noir, whose work will be included in the forthcoming 4th Edition of Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style. Hodges is also a key figure in the San Franciscan film noir salon The Danger & Despair Knitting Circle.

Hodges remarked on Vincent Sherman's The Unfaithful (1947) by reading prepared notes: "The wind steps through the window and sat next to me. David Goodis didn't write that, but a characteristic of his style was to describe something inanimate behaving as if it were alive. In The Unfaithful there's a splendid example of this in a sentence spoken by Eve Arden.

"Once you see The Unfaithful, I urge you to watch The Letter starring Bette Davis released in 1940, which you can rent on DVD. The Unfaithful shares similarities with The Letter but the contrasts are more striking. For example, I find Ann Sheridan is a more noir character because she's in a more noir situation than Bette Davis, given that Ann Sheridan's plight is more undeserving. Also, in The Letter the society in the South Pacific rubber plantation—as represented through marriages—is very cohesive; but, in The Unfaithful, society—in terms of marriages—is unstable, splintering, and so more noir.

"In The Unfaithful—and here, too, it's different than The Letter—Ann Sheridan is a woman in distress who is unique in film noir. She is not threatened with losing her sanity like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, nor with losing her life like Bergman in Notorious. Instead, she may lose her husband. Her marriage may fail like everyone else's. Both The Unfaithful and The Letter are notable examples of the kind of film noir that challenges standard academic as well as popular descriptions of film noir. For decades the terms and concepts that have been most frequently used to define film noir have not, in fact, been applicable to many many movies that are included in the various film noir encyclopedias, which contain The Letter, Gaslight, Notorious and The Unfaithful.

"The film noirs that have gotten short shrift are women's pictures, which are likely to take place in a home and deal with a romantic crisis; the so-called tear jerkers or hankies or weepies. However, during the classic years of film noir, especially in the 1940s, less so in the 1950s, many women's pictures are crime pictures that have the characteristics of noir visual style, although they aren't represented at all in the books that describe film noir….

"Women's noirs have been ignored because the mass media and academic descriptions of film noir only deal with the hardboiled. As a result, film noir is reduced to these kinds of essentials: the protagonist is male (an investigator, a criminal, a victim of circumstance); the literary source is hardboiled fiction; there is brutal violence like fists and guns; the time and place is a contemporary U.S. city, not—say—Victorian London or a family's home. This standard view of film noir ignores the published stories, novels and plays that primarily address the female audience and were adapted into film noirs. The Letter, for example, is based on a novel by W. Someset Maughm….

"By my count, these published sources of women's noirs nearly equal all published works aimed at a male audience; but, not all men's noirs are based on hardboiled short stories or hardboiled novels. Despite the focus of hardboiled literature, there are more women's noirs based on published works aimed at women than men's noirs based on hardboiled published sources. Furthermore, of course, there are original screenplays written for women's noirs such as the screenplay for The Unfaithful.

"The standard view of film noir lavishes attention on the femme fatale and ignores the woman in distress. There is no book about the woman in distress in film noir. There is no chapter about the woman in distress in books that have chapters not only on the femme fatale but on the private detective, even though there are precious few film noirs with the private eye. The term 'woman in distress' or 'woman in jeopardy' isn't even mentioned in books, much less articles. However, by my count, more film noirs feature a woman in distress than a femme fatale.

"It is critical to assess the full range of film noirs that were released between 1940 and 1959 if we wish to understand the full range of political and social issues that film noir addresses; take, for example, women's sexuality. With the femme fatale we talk about the threat to the man right then and there in the story and we relate that to men returning from WWII who are confronted with women who have become more economically independent through their jobs during the war and more sexually, say, independent, even aggressive. But women's noirs also raise issues about women's sexuality that are at least as interesting as those related to femme fatales and their male victims in men's noirs. For example, the plot in The Unfaithful has a lot more to do with the tension inbetween sexes in the post-war years because of issues of sex than just about any hardboiled film noir.

"Finally, until women's film noirs are properly recognized, a comprehensive history and a balanced analysis of film noir will be, by definition, impossible."

* * *

Dan Hodges's earnest plea for gender parity in a definitional appreciation of film noir is well-taken. I note that at IMdb there is not a single external critical review listed for The Unfaithful, though there are several appreciative user comments. There's a brief blurb at Wikipedia. Turner Classic Movies rallies at their database with a more substantive synopsis and an aggregate of news items, particularly interesting for their assessment of MPAA standards at the time: "On January 24, 1947, Los Angeles Daily News reported that although Ann Sheridan plays an adultress who is not punished, as the Production Code demands, the MPAA agreed to allow this if the film clearly conveyed the message that divorce is undesirable."

I found The Unfaithful surprisingly absorbing and thoroughly entertaining, largely due to Ann Sheridan's sultry duplicity, and because Eve Arden is one of my favorite character actresses, firing sharp bon mots right and left in this script, all as perfectly timed as a quick slap to the face. Steven Garay as an obsequeious blackmailing antiques dealer likewise offers a fine supporting turn. Zachary Scott, as Sheridan's husband, flaunts his masculine entitlements sufficiently enough, though he comes off more bitchy than betrayed in the film's final confrontations. During the film's trial sequence, Lew Ayres as counsel Larry Hannaford delivers a compassionate closing argument that—as Hodges pointed out—intriguingly indicts the social expectations placed on women left alone on the homefront during WWII.

Cross-published on Twitch.

STREETS OF NO RETURN: DARK PASSAGE—Introductory Remarks By Curator Steve Seid and Author Barry Gifford

Kicking off the "Streets of No Return" series with a screening of Delmer Daves's Dark Passage (1947), PFA curator Steve Seid outlined in his introductory remarks that hopefully—along with the series' objective of spotlighting the work of a lesser-known pulp writer like David Goodis—would be an attempt to gain a sense (over the length of the series) of the concept of filmic adaptation of literary works; to finesse what's left behind when novels are adapted, or what is included to make them screenworthy; and to determine if justice has been done to the writings of David Goodis.

Succinctly profiling that Goodis began writing in the late '30s, with a brief irreconcilable stint in Hollywood in the late '40s, Goodis parted ways with Hollywood to return to "a decrepit life" in his hometown Philadelphia until his death in the '60s. Even while he was alive, however, non-Hollywood film directors began adapting his books and Seid boasted that all but three of those adaptations would be included in the series.

Detailing the "fate" of the omitted three in passing mention, Seid admitted that Rue Barbare (1984)—aka Barbarous Street or Street of the Damned, adapted from the Goodis novel Street of the Lost (1952)—was admittedly not included because Seid didn't particularly like the film and it was too much bother to secure. But he had wanted to get the two other films: Sam Fuller's last project Street of No Return(1989) and Pierre Chenal's Section des disparus (1956).

As Seid mentioned earlier in his preview for The Evening Class, Street of No Return was in the hands of some "questionable" people in France and research into the making of that film revealed Fuller's troublesome interaction with the film's "producers/crooks." As for the third film, Section des disparus based on the Goodis novel Of Missing Persons (1950), it's nearly impossible to locate due to its rarity. Filmed in Argentina by Pierre Chenal in 1954-1955, Section des disparus survives possibly only in 16mm prints, none of which Seid was able to track down. He has seen the film and found it to be a "quite nice" economical noir, representing a historical trend in the mid-50s when French filmmakers filmed cheaply in Argentina.

What is included in the series are nine feature films beginning with Dark Passage and continuing through to Moon in the Gutter (1983), which in some ways Seid opined is the "kindest and smarmiest" adaptation of any of the Goodis novels. "But smarmy in just the right way" he qualified, explaining that after a good read of a Goodis novel, "you feel a little dirty." Some of the films—notably Moon in the Gutter—successfully capture that feeling.

At the same time that Goodis's novels were being adapted into film, his short stories were being worked up for television on such programs as Sure As Fate (1950), the Lux Video Theatre (1956), Bourbon Street Beat (1960) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1963). In the 1990s, two cable networks launched mystery series and, coincidentally, adapted the same Goodis short story "The Professional Man", which PFA will screen together with one of the writer-directors, Nicholas Kazan, in person to introduce the pair, affording a glimpse into how Goodis held up on television.

Seid then introduced novelist Barry Gifford. "There's a lot you can say about Barry Gifford," he stated, "you can talk about the many many novels he's written, including the great Sailor and Lula series. We could talk about the books of film noir criticism [such as Out of the Past]. We could talk about his screenplays, Wild at Heart (1990) and Perdita Durango (1997). But really what places him here in a really important fashion is that he created Black Lizard in the early '80s where he revived noirish and pulpish writers—the most famous one being Jim Thompson—but also Charles Willeford, Peter Rabe, and the great Harry Whittington. Black Lizard not only launched a new interest in Jim Thompson but really brought David Goodis back. David Goodis had been forgotten. In many ways, because David Goodis wrote so much paperback stuff, it doesn't even exist in the libraries for the most part. They would either buy them and then toss them or simply not buy them because a lot of the libraries had a prejudice about paperbacks. So, there's no one who could launch the series with more right and esteem than Barry Gifford."

Gifford then took the microphone and expressed his thanks to Susan Oxtoby and Steve Seid to be invited back to PFA since it had been a while. Listening to Steve's introduction, he realized that one thing that Jack Kerouac and David Goodis had in common was that they were both victims of "momism"; they both lived with their mothers. They were always going back to their mothers, had strong attachments, and never had successful relationships with other women. "Even their relationships with their mothers weren't successful." Though it's been some time since he's reviewed Goodis's work, Gifford recalled the frequent presence of an overriding mother or a wife who's like a mother figure, always making life miserable for Goodis's male protagonists. "He wants to kill her, but he can't really kill her, so he kills other people or he kills himself."

Gifford modestly apologized for not really being a Goodis expert. He remembered trying to get David Lynch to read some of the Goodis novels by giving him a couple from the Black Lizard series when they were writing Lost Highway together and when he followed up and asked how Lynch had liked them, Lynch responded, "Those were terrible books." Gifford said, "You mean you think they were badly written?" "No," Lynch answered, "they're frightening." His introduction to Goodis came when he first saw François Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), which was loosely based on Goodis's 1956 novel Down There. When he reprinted the novel at Black Lizard, he decided to use Truffaut's title, "purely for commercial reasons." He hoped that maybe someone would recognize the film title and perhaps buy the book. Little did he know that the Black Lizard series would be so successful and—though he always intended to restore the novel's original title when the Black Lizard edition was reprinted—it never worked out that way.

In fact, the true Goodis expert, Gifford advised, is a French journalist Philippe Garnier, who writes for Libération in Paris, and who has written the only biography on Goodis that Gifford is aware of: Goodis, La Vie en Noir et Blanc (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984). Garnier visited Gifford in the mid-'80s just when he launched Black Lizard to conduct a couple of interviews for Libération, and they subsequently became friends. Garnier was on his way to visit Aldo Ray who was living nearby in Crockett, California. Ray had starred in Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall (1957), adapted from David Goodis's 1947 novel.

Gifford also credits the expertise of Geoff O'Brien who wrote the introduction that appeared in all of the Black Lizard editions of the David Goodis novels. O'Brien is now the head of the Library of America. Cribbing from that introduction, Gifford quoted: "[Goodis's 1946 novel] Dark Passage made a considerable splash. It remains one of his best-known books; the only one, in fact, that really made it into the mainstream. Today its appeal derives less from its none-too-believable plot—it was one of the early new-face-through-plastic-surgery stories—than from the author's obvious identification with the persecuted hero and from the jazz-like pulse of the prose. Hero and heroine are drawn together in part by their taste for Count Basie. With the sale of serial rights to the Saturday Evening Post, and the movie rights to Warner Brothers, Goodis had arrived. Dark Passage became a Bogart/Bacall vehicle and Goodis went on the Warners payroll as a staff writer. He was not yet 30 and his career had already peaked."

The one novel of Goodis's that Gifford would recommend wholeheartedly is Nightfall (1947); his favorite. Again from O'Brien: "During the Hollywood years, Goodis lived in the L.A. home of a lawyer friend … renting not a room but a tiny uncomfortable sofa for $4 a week. At a time when, as a movie writer, he could have lived well, Goodis apparently refused to spend money on anything. Not out of miserliness but from a sheer perversity, which also led him to drive the same dented Chrysler convertible virtually his whole adult life; a car so miserable that his friends refused to be seen in it. His clothing, as his [lawyer friend] recounts was equally grotesque: 'He wore my old suits and—when they were worn out—he had them dyed blue. Apparently, his whole wardrobe was blue. One day he invited me to eat at the Warner commissary, Dan Duryea was there, and Dave was wearing one of my white suits, which was all yellowed and stained. Duryea asked him where he had dug up the suit and David replied coldly that he had bought it at Gordon's, one of the best tailors in Philadelphia. When Duryea remarked that the suit wasn't even ironed, David gave him a pitying glance and explained that that was how it was meant to be worn. He also had an old bathrobe of mine. He went out at night in it. When he wore it, he pretended to be a white Russian, an exiled prince of the blood.' Goodis would borrow labels from his friend's finest clothes and laboriously sew them into his own wretched hand-me-downs, all for the peculiar pleasure of stopping people short when they criticized his clothing."

Gifford admitted pleasure in re-reading Geoffrey O'Brien's introduction because it clearly essayed that Goodis was nuts. There's no question that he was absolutely crazy. Continuing to crib from O'Brien's intro: "A central law of Goodis's fiction is that happiness is forbidden, all true love remains unconsummated, all petty criminals—a breed with whom the author identifies—are caught ignominiously, all proud old men are humiliated, all virgins are molested."

In contrast to Steve Seid's enthusiasm for Moon in the Gutter, Gifford countered the movie was so terrible that true cinephiles like Seid find it wonderful. Gifford worked with the film's lead actor Gérard Depardieu on City of Ghosts, which Matt Dillon directed, and asked him at the time about Moon in the Gutter. Depardieu had just undergone a quintuple bypass surgery, arrived in Cambodia to film City of Ghosts and—when Gifford asked him about Moon in the Gutter—Depardieu clutched his heart and said, "Please! Don't ask me about that; I'll have another heart attack!" Gifford refrained from saying anything further on the film because he didn't want to disabuse Seid of his opinions and didn't want to cost him his job at PFA.

Gifford finished up his intro with one final quote from O'Brien: "That such testaments of deprivation and anxiety could sustain the career of a paperback novelist is today cause for wonderment. Nothing so downbeat, so wedded to reiterations of personal and social failure could be likely to find a mass market publisher at present. The absolutely personal voice of David Goodis seems almost to have escaped by accident. It emanated from the heart of an efficient entertainment industry, startlingly, like the wailing of an outcast."

Cross-published on Twitch.

TCM'S "SUMMER UNDER THE STARS": MARIE DRESSLER—The Evening Class Interview With Matthew Kennedy

It's August, and—as they've done for the past five years—Turner Classic Movies ("TCM") is devoting the entire month to their "Summer Under the Stars" programming, featuring 24-hour showcases for a different Hollywood legend each day in August. To navigate these luminous skies, this year TCM is offering an interactive website featuring original animated environments for each star. The site is a vibrant, multi-layered environment with a traveling carnival theme. Each of the film festival's 31 stars is given his/her own section, complete with trivia, video clips and rare archival photos. Plus there's a chance to enter a sweepstakes co-sponsored by Women & Wine™.

Marie Dressler is included in this year's schedule this coming Monday, August 4, 2008. Though I missed it, I hear the closing night film at this year's San Francisco Silent Film Festival—The Patsy—brought down the Castro Theatre when a piece of flying celery landed in Dressler's ample bosom.

Film historian and author Matthew Kennedy and I recently spoke about his biography Marie Dressler (McFarland & Company, Inc., 1999; paperback 2006); but, I invited him back to discuss the 15 Dressler films TCM is screening this year as part of their "Summer Under the Stars" series and to recommend the five that must not be missed!

* * *

Michael Guillén: Marie Dressler had an accomplished stage career, which you've outlined in your biography; but, I'm going to set that aside to focus on her film career. In a nutshell, at the height of her popular success in film, what was it that Marie Dressler offered the moviegoing public?

Matthew Kennedy: That's a very good question. Her film career started with the birth of feature films in 1914 with Tillie's Punctured Romance, which is considered the first feature length comedy; but, her enduring influence or legacy is in the early talkies, which was also at the end of her life. Between The Hollywood Revue (1929) and her last film Christopher Bean (1933), she made several films, almost all at MGM. As glamour—or as you mentioned earlier "luminosity"—was being defined in the early talkies and the studio system, she epitomized the reverse of that, the anti-glamour, the face of your maiden aunt or grandmother. The hard times that had befallen her in her life seemed to inform her performances and so you have this fantastic confluence of a star with enormous charisma, training, discipline and the ability to give these indelible performances with this haggard, matronly face that's very lived-in. She was not the typical movie star beauty by a long shot. She was older and her audiences were fairly acquainted with the hard times she'd had in her own life with economic reversals, problems with men and the law and so forth. She put this all together and became a towering symbol of Depression-era survival and fortitude. This was all brought out very shrewdly by her handlers at MGM—Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer and screenwriter Frances Marion—who concocted for her these fantastic little movies that capitalized on these qualities.

Guillén: I have some objection to your characterizing her as "anti-glamour", though I certainly understand what you're saying. For me she represents a different style of luminosity.

Kennedy: Yes! I love the way you use the word luminosity and I would not begrudge Dressler one lumen of luminosity.

Guillén: Dressler's sense of humor is a form of luminosity, of star power, that her audiences related to.

Kennedy: Absolutely. When I use the word "glamour", I'm using it in the context of the typical, traditional approach of, "You're young, you're beautiful, we're going to make you perfect."

Guillén: Which is precisely why the scene between Dressler and Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight (1933) is so iconic. It's two different types of star power in repartee.

Kennedy: Right. With this extraordinary sense of balance of luminosities, of charisma, of that innate "something" that makes somebody a star; but, for two radically different reasons. Yet they become this perfect yin and yang. Which was actually addressed in the scenes that Dressler shared with Greta Garbo in Anna Christie (1930). In fact, one reviewer wrote quite shrewdly—and I'm paraphrasing—"perfect beauty meets perfect humanity."

Guillén: In the introduction to your biography you write: "Comediennes and farceurs such as Beatrice Lillie, Hermione Gingold, Fanny Brice, Imogene Coca, Kaye Ballard, Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Moms Mabley, and Totie Fields are indebted to Dressler because she was the first woman to make movie audiences laugh for more than 20 minutes. Without an obvious lineage, she remains distinct…." (1999:2).

Kennedy: I don't know if that legacy can be easily traced. I don't think Dressler is that well-known today. I don't know how many comics today would say, "Oh, I take my inspiration from Marie Dressler"; but, there's some kind of vaguely-defined legacy, although she was one of the kind and—when she died—they broke the mold. You had Margaret Dumont somewhat taking over that role—though not as well—in the Marx Brothers movies. You had the matronly types that were such wonderful characters in the comedies of the '30s and '40s. Marie died in 1934. She's right there at the beginning and didn't live to see that kind of direct legacy. I wonder if I shouldn't retract some of what I've said in that regard because I feel as though—even people today who are in the position to occupy something similar in popular entertainment to what Marie did—are choosing not to. Even people who are not conventionally beautiful still go for the glamour routine today in ways that deny them their chance to be another Marie Dressler, to be the epitomization of humanity rather than the epitomization of a current notion of beauty.

Guillén: Horror stories to that effect would include Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller, who both purposely started out making fun of their looks and then succumbed to the allure of the blade.

Kennedy: Now they're both making jokes about plastic surgery instead of making jokes about, "This is the face God gave me; the body God gave me."

Guillén: Exactly. All that being said, I want to stress Marie Dressler's unique luminosity, that she is a star in the firmament, and appropriately included in TCM's "Summer Under the Stars", with Monday night's upcoming selection of films. In case viewers don't have time to watch all the films and have to make a choice, I've asked you to take a look at that selection and, first of all, cull out those projects, which—though we're glad they're being included—aren't definitive vehicles for Marie Dressler.

Kennedy: There are four that I've isolated in the schedule where Marie's presence is literally 5-10 minutes. Now, of course, what she does with those 5-10 minutes is greater than what most actors do with two hours; but, they are not really showcases for her. She makes a maximum impact but has very little screen time. Those four are: The Hollywood Revue (1929)—where she has this fantastic production number called "I am the Queen", which is a travesty of regal pomposity and her first actual footage in sound—but, that's a two-hour variety movie and she's on very briefly. The other is The Divine Lady (1929), which is a silent film and a vehicle for Corrine Griffith, where she plays Lady Hamilton and Marie plays her mother in a minor, passing role. The Girl Said No (1930) is a Leila Hyams/William Haines college comedy and Marie has one hysterically funny scene in which she gets very very drunk very quickly. In terms of the build-up or technique, it comes on rather suddenly; but, she's hysterical. But again, it's a brief role. The last is That's Entertainment! III (1994), which is the third compilation of movies that MGM put out. I don't even remember what clip of her's is in there. It's probably the last moments of Dinner At Eight; but, that's literally what you're going to see of her; a clip of something that's going to be on earlier that day. You don't really watch That's Entertainment! III to see Marie Dressler.

Guillén: Ignoring That's Entertainment! III, then, and focusing on those three earlier films, can you speak to how they reflect efforts on the part of her friends to lure Marie to Hollywood after she was nearly undone by the failure of her stage career, bad marriage, economic hardship, and suicidal ideation? Despite her having only bit parts in these films, aren't they in fact testimonials to the efforts of her friends to keep her going and help her regain her footing?

Kennedy: It's a testament of her friends and their loyalty as well as Marie's qualities as a loyal and generous friend. It speaks very well to all of them and the affection they had for each other. Marie was so well-tended. You're right. The extraordinary success she had in the latter part of her career in the early '30s was, no doubt, because of her talent and her timing and so forth, but also because of the careful ministration of friends in the right places.

Guillén: Which film was the turning point in Marie Dressler's film career?

Kennedy: In the talkies, it was Anna Christie. She had had a number of small roles from 1927 to 1930 when she shot Anna Christie, and she was revitalizing her reputation as a reliable, funny character actress; but, it wasn't until Anna Christie that audiences went, "Holy mackerel! We have, in our midst, this force of nature—if you will—this cinematic redwood. She should be honored with roles that do her justice." More importantly, that fact fell upon Mayer and Thalberg and they began fashioning vehicles for her exclusively. Anna Christie, of course, was a Garbo vehicle; but, Marie—in her few minutes on screen—manages to very efficiently walk away with the film.

Guillén: This leads to the five you recommend should not be missed in the TCM line-up.

Kennedy: And I would like to state for the record, that it was very difficult to choose five. Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914) I chose not because it's among her five best movies—because I'm not sure that it is—but, it's such an irresistible piece of history. You have the one and only time that Marie appeared on screen with Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand in a Mack Sennett comedy. For anybody who cares a lick about film history, this silent movie is not to be missed. It's widely considered to be the first feature-length comedy ever made. What I pointed out in my book, and what I had such a fun time researching, was the uncertainty the Sennett Company had in a single narrative that lasted barely over an hour. They worried whether audiences would stay in their seats that long, whether or not comedy could be maintained that long, the uncertainty of something we take so much for granted now where you have comedies that are two hours long and are not thought of twice. Certain fundamental approaches were being experimented with. It was a huge risk because it was very expensive. Marie was a huge vaudeville star at the time. To get her cost a great deal of money. It was completely speculative. Comedies had only been one or two reelers before then. Dressler and Chaplin make a fantastic pair. As types they're polar opposites. Chaplin was this rather slight, svelte, nimble man and she's this big lumbering thing and they play off those physical differences very well.

Guillén: Have you any insight into how Chaplin considered Dressler's later success?

Kennedy: I looked high and low for some quotes from Chaplin on his thoughts of working with Marie and only came across one brief mention in his autobiography in which he said that he basically had a good time working with her; but, there was no elaboration unfortunately. Tillie's Punctured Romance is not a great movie. The comedy towards the end gets a little forced, it's very primitive, but there's an undeniable pleasure seeing those two together and Mabel Normand is delightful, of course.

Guillén: Specifically, as a piece of film history it's indispensable?

Kennedy: Yes. The second film I would highly recommend is Prosperity (1932). It was the last movie that Marie made with fellow comedienne Polly Moran. The two of them made several movies together at MGM. They were matched as these two matronly types that played off each other very well. Thalberg and company believed that they were a peerless comedy team. There were a lot of male comedy teams at the time; but, Thalberg wanted to promote a female comedy team. They were put through fairly low budget crank-them-out-fast comedies, of which Prosperity is the best one. The three that are being highlighted on Monday—Reducing (1931), Politics (1931) and Prosperity—are being shown back to back and I like them all for different reasons; but, they're modest films. If you take them at that level, they can be enjoyable. The reason I would give the slight edge to Prosperity is because it's topical. It deals with bank runs and the Depression. Marie—and I mention this in my book—almost feels like the mouthpiece of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in which she's talking about ingenious ways to survive this hard time. "If we don't have any cash, we'll just trade services. You mow my lawn and I'll cut your hair." That kind of thing. But it's all done with a great deal of humor. There's some drama in it but it ultimately has a comedic happy ending and showcases her and the chemistry she had with Polly Moran.

Dinner At Eight (1933) is Dressler 101. It's studio filmmaking at its best 101. It's George Cukor 101. It's Jean Harlow 101. It's the basic movie that shows MGM at its best and a type of movie at which MGM was starting to excel. One year before Dinner At Eight you had Grand Hotel (1932), which was this amazing experiment where MGM decided to bring together five of its top stars for an ensemble.

Guillén: Which you detail masterfully in Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory.

Kennedy: Thank you. That was a fun chapter to research and write. Grand Hotel was a grand experiment and was considered inefficient because—with all these high-paid stars—why would you put five of them in one movie? As opposed to the conventional pairing of one male star, one female star, which was the formula for casting big stars in the early studio age? But Thalberg got this great idea to do an ensemble and Grand Hotel was an off-the-charts hit. Dinner At Eight was basically their follow-up to that concept, that structure. They assembled more of the great stars at MGM, including Dressler, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Billie Burke, John and Lionel Barrymore, Lee Tracy, all of these top-of-the-line stars. But, ultimately, I think Dinner At Eight is better than Grand Hotel as surviving entertainment. It's extraordinarily witty in terms of the mores, customs and culture of the New York upper crust during the Depression. In fact, the upper crust was feeling the Depression in the movie and the plot developments pertain to losing fortunes.

Guillén: And I will always be beholden to Dinner At Eight because it is my understanding that, upon his third viewing when he caught it at the Crest Theatre in Sacramento, it inspired a certain young man to write his first book on Marie Dressler.

Kennedy: It's true! I love that movie. Thank you, Michael. Aw shucks. I've told you this: we left the theater gaga over this magnificent tower of stardom Marie Dressler bemoaning the fact that we haven't seen anything the likes of her since; but, what was she? Who was she? That started this idea that I wanted to write her biography. She plays this stage star who's long retired but whose fortunes are ebbing. She has so much wisdom in her performance. There's so much winking humor about, "I know what love's about. I know about good times and bum times." Actually, she was born too soon. She could have done Sondheim's Follies.

Guillén: And actually, for me, the film harkens back to an era of sociality. These days, I hardly know anyone who gives dinner parties.

Kennedy: Formal dinner parties where the guest list and where they sat was absolutely critically important, yeah.

Guillén: Exactly. I love it for that.

Kennedy: I do too, actually. It's a lesson, perhaps, in bygone customs but still very witty and still relevant, because it's about social climbing and prestige. Those themes are ageless. Jean Harlow says, "I'm going to be a lady if it kills me." That line is so fabulously incongruent. The last lines of that movie—the dialogue between Dressler and Harlow—are among the most famous in film history. I see clips of that scene all the time.

Guillén: Astronomically, their exchange would be a perfect example of a binary star system.

Kennedy: Exactly. Thank you. That's why it works. There's an equal amount of wattage going on….

Guillén: …And a distinct gravitational field going on.

Kennedy: …with these two women who, on the surface, could not appear to be more dissimilar and that's part of the success of that moment.

Guillén: Absolutely.

Kennedy: We next have Min and Bill (1930), which is perhaps Marie's second most famous movie after Dinner At Eight. It won her the Academy Award. It was the fourth Best Actress award ever given and it was a vehicle specifically fashioned for her by her dear friend Frances Marion. It's a short comedy drama about a woman who lives on the wharf who has informally adopted a young girl and is protecting her from her returning wicked mother. It was also—nominally at least—considered a movie that was part of the famous Marie Dressler-Wallace Beery screen team. Bill was played by Wallace Beery. But if you look at the movie in that perspective, you realize that it's really her movie; Beery's performance is very much supportive. But when they are on together, you see similarly a great chemistry there as these two grizzled wharf rats in this long term relationship. They're not married but we can assume they are boyfriend and girlfriend—a pre-Code element going on there—but, they have this wonderful chemistry; a knowing, long-term, comfortable relationship—"I can say anything to you and you can say anything to me"—although they also have a brawl in this movie where Marie decks Beery and throws him across the room in a fit of pique that's pretty amazing. You see this and think, "I wouldn't want to be on her wrong side." When she was angry, the earth shook.

Min and Bill is also stylistically a movie we're not used to today. It freely plays with comedy and drama in a way I don't think you see today. Certainly there are comedy dramas today.

Guillén: How do you mean? Is it the pacing? The rhythm?

Kennedy: There's some fairly quick lurching between what appears to be slapstick to what appears to be heavy drama involving harsh violence and death, accomplished in a muted way.

Guillén: Were those conscious transitions on the part of the filmmakers or something we're perceiving in retrospect?

Kennedy: It's conscious; but, what I think I'm trying to say is it's not as explicit as what you'd see today. We have dark comedies or dramedies today but they're a little bit more self-conscious in how that comedy and drama is being interplayed. Here, it almost feels like a potluck. "We're going to have some slapstick, but in five minutes the gun is going to fire and somebody's going to be dead." In that way, I'm not sure it's entirely successful because it doesn't always feel like there's a maximum emotional potential that's being reached here, in terms of the effect. That's somewhat true of Dinner At Eight, which is remembered as a sparkling social comedy, but there's some dark undertones involving disease and death. The dramatic elements are so tamped down for fear of—I don't know—offending people? In a more modern treatment the dramatic elements would be thrust forward alongside the comedy. It's an interesting relationship between the drama and the comedy. You just have to see it. The formula has changed. The equilibrium has changed.

Guillén: As if the masks are half-on, half-off, with not as distinct a transition between the two?

Kennedy. Yes. But Marie's performance has that tough and tender quality. I can see why she won the Academy Award. I'm not sure it would be my choice in her career as is often the case with the Academy Awards.

Emma (1932) is my last recommendation. A lot of people I've read or talked to who have a peripheral interest in Marie or are interested in some other aspect of this movie beside Marie—Frances Marion or the fact that Myrna Loy's in it or that it's an MGM picture—a lot of people speak disparagingly of this movie as being overly sentimental and a little bit unbelievable. Certainly it's unbelievable. But I disagree with their disparagement. It is absolutely a sentimental wallow. It is also a 70-minute celebration of Marie Dressler. You've never seen a movie that is so clearly a thorough vehicle for somebody and it was written with great love and care by Frances Marion with the idea that it would exploit as much of Marie's humanistic qualities as possible. She's given drama, she's given comedy, and they're more artfully integrated, perhaps, than they are in Min and Bill, which was also written by Frances Marion by the way. But Emma is her's alone. There's no Wallace Beery. Everybody else in the movie is there to be a support to her. She plays a housekeeper who's been in this home for a long time, the kids have grown, and there's not a lot of need for her in the home as there used to be but she enters into a romantic relationship with her employer, played by Jean Hersholt. There are some sweet scenes between the two of them as senior citizens finding love with each other.

As I mentioned, Myrna Loy has a role as one of the children. It's interesting to see her before she was really Myrna Loy, y'know? Straddling the exotic era of her career and her great success with The Thin Man era, which would come up in a few years.

Guillén: Before we leave your recommended five—which are not necessarily your favorite five—can you speak a bit about the relationship between Frances Marion and Marie Dressler? Clearly, there's a substance to that friendship that determined so much of Dressler's filmic success.

Kennedy: Let me say that the story of friendship between Marie Dressler and Frances Marion would make a great screenplay—"Call me!" [laughs]—but the two of them met way back in 1911 when Frances Marion was a cub reporter for The San Francisco Examiner. She was a native San Franciscan and was asked to interview Dressler as she came through San Francisco with her very successful vaudeville show Tillie's Nightmare, which of course was the source for Tillie's Punctured Romance. It's very well-remembered in Frances Marion's memoirs and Marie's, and I've incorporated that into the biography, but they moreorless hit it off immediately. They stayed in and out of touch through the subsequent years. They met up again in the 1920s when Marie was quite destitute. Keep in mind also that Frances Marion was much younger, about 30 years younger, and Marie at one point said she started to see Frances as the daughter she never had because of her love-ability and the maternal instincts Marie could usher upon her because she was much more experienced in the ways of show business. Frances Marion had several different types of writing careers. She went from being a newspaper reporter to being a screenwriter and was extraordinary writing screenplays for Mary Pickford and a host of other stars. Her story alone is fascinating. But the two of them as friends really benefited Marie in the late '20s when Frances Marion noted that her friend was quite destitute. She had lost all her money caring for her invalid husband—who actually wasn't her husband—and so on and so forth. What Frances Marion did as a screenwriter at a very young MGM was to approach Thalberg and said, "I'd like to do a movie with Marie Dressler and Polly Moran"—this was still in the silent era—and Thalberg said, "Marie Dressler is a has-been, she's washed up, why would you want to do this?" But basically he was eventually persuaded and they did a movie called The Callahans and The Murphys (1927), which is a fascinating story in itself because the movie is no longer available; Mayer had it destroyed. No copies have ever surfaced. If it ever did, it would be a glorious day in film history.

Guillén: But there's enough published Irish dissent to the movie that we basically have a sense of what it was about?

Kennedy: Right. The Irish were mightily offended and used the Church to pressure MGM to basically withdraw all copies and then I guess it was Mayer who ordered them incinerated. No copies have been seen since. There's another fascinating subplot in this whole thing. Frances was heartsick that this comeback vehicle she'd written for Marie was aborted and could only make good on that offer three years later when Anna Christie was being adapted for the screen. At that point Frances lobbied that Marie would be perfect for the role of Marthy, the sodden denizen of the bar that's run by Anna's father.

So the friendship between Marie Dressler and Frances Marion intersected in their lives in critical ways throughout the years, from 1911 to Marie's death in 1934. There are ways in which Marie benefited Frances a great deal, in terms of taking her in and being present when her husband was sick and dying, and protecting Frances early in her career from William Randolph Hearst, among others. This friendship is just extraordinary.

Guillén: I admire how you highlight their friendship in your biography of Dressler because it's a reminder of the enduring value of friendship at any time in any career.

Kennedy: Their friendship is the emotional through line for at least half of the book. It's tremendously moving. Emma was written by Frances Marion. Min and Bill was written by Frances Marion. Dinner At Eight was adapted by Frances Marion. Of the five I'm recommending, three of them have Marion's name on them.

Guillén: The final thing I'd like to point out is that at least four of the films you've recommended—Prosperity, Dinner At Eight, Min and Bill, and Emma—have been scheduled back-to-back by TCM so they're all easily captured if you're popping a 6-hour video cassette into the VCR. Thank you, Matthew.

Kennedy: Thank you, Michael. A pleasure as always.

* * *

TCM's "Summer Under the Stars" schedule for Marie Dressler on Monday, August 4, runs as follows (PST):

3:00AM The Hollywood Revue (1929)
5:00AM Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914)
6:30AM The Divine Lady (1929)
8:15AM The Vagabond Lover (1929)
9:30AM The Girl Said No (1930)
11:15AM Let Us Be Gay (1930)
12:45PM Reducing (1931)
2:15PM Politics (1931)
3:30PM Prosperity (1932)
5:00PM Dinner at Eight (1933)
7:00PM Min and Bill (1930)
8:15PM Emma (1932)
9:30PM Anna Christie (1930)
11:15PM Tugboat Annie (1933)
12:45AM That's Entertainment! III (1994)