In the past month or so, I have watched (or re-watched) a lot of films that someone or other has called a classic, and while I don’t have it in me to review each in much detail, I will take the opportunity to pop off on my opinion of whether each film is indeed classic.
We’ll start with an easy one, a film that practically defines the meaning of the word “classic,” and lives up to its billing every time. Casablanca (1942) is the fruit of the Hollywood studio system at the end of its golden age, plucked at its peak of ripeness. It seems almost too familiar, without having been seen in ages, and hovered deep in my Netflix queue for a decade. But one night I happened to flip on TCM just as the opening credits began to roll -- I couldn’t resist, and was transported all over again. It was indeed an amazing moment of movie perfection, with every element conspiring as Michael Curtiz rushed the film to completion to take advantage of the marketing bonanza of FDR’s Casablanca conference. As a star of magnetic magnitude, Ingrid Bergman in gauzy close-up is all that, but what startled me was the subtlety and range of Humphrey Bogart’s role-playing, and of course Claude Rains gives one of the great supporting performances, amid a string of pleasingly evocative faces. It’s a little magic box of a movie.
White Heat (1949) explosively completes the cycle of gangster films at just the point where it blends with film noir. Cagney returns to complete his classic trilogy of energetically crazy bad guys with family issues, here an Oedipal relationship gone wild, with Ma the only real person in his life. Raoul Walsh returns with his hurtling direction. The story mingles the old and the new, the high and the low, characters from Greek tragedy and a big robbery based on the Trojan horse, newfangled police technology like tracking by radio transmitter, and a big ending that is totally metaphoric in a realistic modern setting. And yet the film is like the last big blow-up of a genre, baroque to the point of unbelievability. Well done in every particular, it still seems essentially divorced from reality into artifice. It would take The Godfather to revive the form and infuse it with a convincing new reality.
The Big Clock (1947) is not a classic in my book, but an interesting variant on film noir. Ray Milland is editor of a true crime magazine in the publishing empire of Charles Laughton, obviously premised on Henry Luce and Time-Life. Laughton offers an amusingly mannered portrait of a business tyrant, who drives Milland out of his job and into association with the tycoon’s disenchanted mistress. Skullduggery ensues. The title references the signature element of the company’s highly stylized building, and indeed set design is one of the strengths of the film. So is the acting in its own overwrought way, but John Farrow’s direction is nothing special and the story is full of holes. Perhaps toddler Mia was on the set with her father and her mother Maureen O’Sullivan, who plays Milland’s wife. Anyway, this film is child’s play, however dark.
Susan Slept Here (1954) is child’s play of a different candy-colored sort, with director Frank Tashlin on his way from cartoons to Jerry Lewis. This would not have caught my attention if not for a recent boxed feature in the New Yorker film listings, but when it turned up on TCM I recorded it. I rather enjoyed revisiting the Technicolor world of Fifties romantic comedy, but classic this is not, though it is a stylish take on the “bachelor and bobbysoxer” theme, which has a lot of fun with sexual innuendo between a middle-aged man and a teenage girl, in this case Dick Powell closing out his career and Debbie Reynolds near the start of hers.
For two slots in a film series that I’ll offer at the Clark next summer, called “PraiseSong: African-American Music in the Movies,” I watched and decided between two pairs of would-be classics. Cabin in the Sky (1943) was the first all-black musical on screen, brought from the stage by Vincente Minnelli in his first film directing job. Stereotypes abound, starting with “Rochester” as the male lead, but some authentic spirit is maintained, with Ethel Waters as the devoted wife for whom “Happiness is a Thing Called Joe,” and Lena Horne as the sultry songstress who leads Joe astray with “Honey in the Honeycomb,” while emissaries from heaven and hell strive for his soul. There are also walk-ons by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, so the film certainly represents its period. Carmen Jones (1954) I ruled out, despite its widescreen Technicolor direction by Otto Preminger, and a magnetic performance by Dorothy Dandridge, because it was too much an operatic construct by Oscar Hammerstein. The transposition of Bizet’s opera to the African-American South works well enough, but why star Dandridge and Harry Belafonte and not let them sing in their own voices, as Pearl Bailey does get to do?
It was a much closer call between Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight (1986) and Clint Eastwood’s Bird (1988), each of which does justice to the bebop jazz saxophonist at its center, centered on exceptional performances by Dexter Gordon as a fictional amalgam of Lester Young and Bud Powell, and Forest Whittaker as Charlie Parker. Both films totally respect the music and deserve to be considered classic, if not without flaw. Bird was darker, both psychologically and visually, and very long, but more homegrown, without the Parisian setting that is a bit of a distraction from my theme.
After watching Five Easy Pieces with the film club, I had the inclination to watch another bit of vintage Jack Nicholson, in The Last Detail (1973), which proved less satisfying. Hal Ashby’s direction is slipshod in my estimation, but Jack as petty officer “Bad Ass” Buddusky, and Randy Quaid as the young railroaded sailor being escorted from Newport to prison in New Hampshire, carry the film through its stops along the road, in Washington, New York and Boston, whether in Aquarian enclave or whorehouse. There’s some sense of the period, but little of timeless significance.
Getting down to the bottom of the barrel, I’ve always confused Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) with Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant – which really is a classic -- as Aussie war films, but it turns out I’d never seen this one, which left me rather cold, though it was startling to see Mel Gibson so young. This seemed too obvious an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Chariots of Fire, and wandered to its preordained battlefield conclusion, which ought to have been horrific but seemed aestheticized.
Another early Jack Nicholson, Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) was, however, the absolute pits. I might have thought that it was merely my inattentiveness that made it seem so bad, but my two viewing companions shared my befuddled exasperation with this portentous nonsense. So later, for laughs, I had to read them the proclamation by David Thomson (whom I generally find illuminating) that this is “one of the greatest films ever made.” Not by me, it isn’t. I’ve never been an Antonioni acolyte, and even less as the years go by, so this one was completely lost on me.
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