There do seem to be a few hopeful signs of life in the economy lately. This is despite the recent flurry of talking heads who have had a field day comparing today with the era of 80 years ago.

Maybe it is feeling awfully 1929ish for some of us. Since I’ve already gone through a quiet tailoring of my own expectations, thanks to several rides on our society’s never-ending carousel of economic mobility, I set my cap at a rakish angle and decided to enjoy my personal freedom from the burden of luxury some time ago. Consequently, I am always curious about the alternating airs of despair and elation and hope heard in movies of the 1930s.

No matter what this new world brings, I suspect that many of us will inevitably turn to classic movies to look for some sense of perspective on this experience. So, if you are ready to don that hopeful, brave mask, let’s breeze through a look at a unique movie, Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933) that was made by people who were surfing on the crest of an economic tsunamis–classic Hollywood style.
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I remember one thing I wanted to do is get a shot in darkness illuminated by a single candle. The old way to get a picture of someone walking with a candle was to set up a complicated series of controlled lights, dimmers clicking on, synchronized to the step of the person with the candle. [...] I didn’t want that kind of thing again. So I picked young Bruce Surtees, and said, “You’ve got to do it without dimmers.” If I’d said that to an old-timer, he would have said goodbye. But Bruce would try to find a way to do anything I asked him. For that candle scene, he put a little bulb in the base of the candleholder and we shot. It took guts. We realized we might get nothing, and we knew we would have to intensify it, send it through a special lab. When we saw the film, most of the screen was black except for a circle of light showing the girl’s face. We didn’t care that it was black, that it wouldn’t show up on a television screen when the studio sold the picture to some network in a couple of years. Screw them. We liked it. It was exciting.’ -Don Siegel on The Beguiled [From 'Don Siegel: Director' by Stuart M. Kaminsky, 1974.]

This “young” cinematographer Bruce Surtees turned 72 yesterday, and it’s time to celebrate his remarkable career. He’s been on my mind lately, as for much of the last year I’ve been familiarizing myself with the early directorial efforts of Clint Eastwood.  Surtees was his go-to cinematographer from Play Misty For Me (1971) to Pale Rider (1985, see top image from DVD Beaver), where the Malpaso (Eastwood’s production company) house style was established: location shooting draped in deep chiaroscuro blacks paired with hard, desaturated light (plus lots of back-lighting, and no fill lights). It was during this period he was dubbed “The Prince of Darkness.” [Suzi points out that Gordon Willis had the same nickname, but both are worthy!] He did great work with other directors, with Arthur Penn on Night Moves, Bob Fosse on Lenny (which earned him an Oscar nomination) and Sam Fuller on White Dog, but his Clint work is what he’ll forever be associated with.

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For the past month or so, I have been fact-checking a book called Armchair Reader: Hollywood for a local Chicago publisher, Publications International. Armchair Reader: Hollywood is filled with dozens of articles, tidbits, lists, fun facts, and quizzes on film history and Hollywood lore. I was thrilled to be asked to consult on the book and then serve as the primary fact-checker, though it is a lot of hard work. I have gone to the library more in the past few weeks than I did all of last year. The reward, however, is the fun I am having in learning more about Hollywood and the movies — everything from Hollywood folklore to behind-the-scenes production details on specific movies. I thought I would share a few fun facts, strange stories, and lurid legends.  I am sure many of you may already know some of this information but perhaps there will be some odd fact or detail that you have never heard before, and it will make your day.

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My flight to portland was on a small plane. To walk down the aisle I had to duck my head the entire way. Adding to my claustrophobia was the fact that I was seated next to a woman four times my size. As I’m prone to spells of vertigo, agoraphobia, and a general fear of flying, every flight for me is a possible trip on the Vomit Comet. But once I landed there were plenty of things to calm my nerves along the three mile walk from my hotel to the Bagdad Theater & Pub to see Karl Malden, Natalie Wood and Rosalind Russell show their stuff in Mervyn LeRoy’s Gypsy (1962). READ MORE

Who can resist the exotic notion of the magical genie, emerging smokily from its pent-up quarters (probably a magic lamp) to grudgingly do one’s bidding?  Though Disney’s genie from the animated Aladdin seems to have superceded many other cinematic genies in the minds of the younger generation at least, it’s the old-fashioned kind that appeal to me.  With a colorful background grounded in history and literature and the kind of pizazz that moviemakers couldn’t resist, the genie has made more than a few interesting appearances on movie screens.  One of the most iconic — and scariest — has to be actor Rex Ingram’s starring role as Djinn (another word for genie) in 1940′s elaborate Arabian fantasy The Thief of Bagdad, from the Korda Brothers.

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I don’t mean the posh 1967 Stanley Donen film with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney but a much more déclassé affair – the 1957 indie feature from Grand Productions (and distributed by United Artists),  5 STEPS TO DANGER, starring Ruth Roman and Sterling Hayden. This too is a road movie, at least for the first two thirds, as well as an espionage thriller, a Cold War time capsule, a screwball romance played straight and, for a brief stretch of the road, a homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. It’s also my idea of the perfect B movie which isn’t the same thing as a perfect film.

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In a delightful starburst of serendipity a few weeks ago, my Morlock brother from another mother R. Emmett Sweeney wrote about lesser-known robots of the silver screen; this is by definition serendipitous because I find myself playing robot a lot lately, with my kids.  I don’t know where Vayda and Victor picked up on the classic robot schtick – the stiff, jointless legs; arms bent at 90 degree angles; the metallic, soulless voice droning “I am a ro-bot… I am a ro-bot…” – but they’ve got it down cold.  They’re not that into science fiction, my children, and I suspect their inspiration may have come from the TV show YO GABBA GABBA, which boasts a regular automaton character named Plex and a recurring featurette titled SUPER MARTIAN ROBOT GIRL.  Truth be told, it’s really Vayda who has the robot jones.  She recently made my wife walk home from the park with her in full-on robot character; it’s not a long walk, maybe a hundred yards or so, but it sure would seem a hundred miles if you couldn’t bend your knees for the duration and instead had to waddle Tobor-style all the way.  But that’s one of the great things about having kids – time and time again, in the sheer barking lunacy of their innocence and exhausting enthusiasm, they bring back the essential stuff from your youth, passions you’ve forgotten and left behind in your mad rush to be sophisticated, up-to-date and cool.  And one of the things my brood has brought me back to late in life is a love, a deep and abiding love, of badly designed, crudely constructed and barely viable robots.  You know the kind of which I speak:  they clatter and clank, looking as if they’ve been put together from spare Edsel parts, Swanson TV dinner trays and AC conduit, as they trudge along in the service of a mad scientist or evil alien emperor.  Why, they’re nearly as old as cinema itself. READ MORE

My eyes were misting over at the sight of Robert Donat, that most “beautiful loser” in the cut-throat world of moviemaking, as I watched the end of The Magic Box (1951) on TCM earlier this month. That actor could break this sap’s heart with a change in the inflection of his voice, but the somewhat romanticized portrayal of cinema pioneer William Friese-Greene in the all star John Boulting-directed film was very well done. Still, it made me think about another pioneer in British movie history, Cecil M. Hepworth (1875-1953).

In Kevin Brownlow and David Gill‘s documentary series on early film pioneers across the pond, Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood (1995), the film historians called their chapter on the British film industry, “Opportunity Lost”. Unlike the flourishing Swedish, Italian and French cinemas of the early years of the 20th century, English movies struggled from inception, with little government protection from foreign filmmakers, and constant copyright violations occurring  among the hardscrabble film companies. This outpost of the British cinema was little more than “a cottage industry”, based in the 8 room house of the of Cecil Hepworth in Walton-on-Thames. Hepworth‘s movies may have had their hand-crafted limitations, but they were also innovative, had charm, and definitely had an off-hand, singular British humor. And their creator was one of the most influential figures in movies internationally–if one of the most obscure today. Since many of this filmmaker’s few existing, brief movies are in the public domain, I hoped it might be interesting to gather many of them together here for readers who might enjoy these, as I have. None of the movies here are any more than a few minutes long.
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If anyone can still afford to go on vacation, it would be worthwhile to pop in the DVD of Around the World with Orson Welles (or stream on Netflix) before the journey. You’ll learn important tips about expatriate American bohemians and the beauties of Basque sports. A seven part documentary series he filmed for British TV in 1955, it takes him to Basque country (2 episodes worth), almshouses in England, bullfights in Spain, and the St. Germain-des-pres section of Paris. Two parts are absent from the disc:  The Third Man in Vienna is sadly missing, and  The Tragedy of Lurs , which considers the case of a convicted murderer of a British tourist family, Gaston Dominici, was never completed. Joseph McBride, in Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?, relates that it was “partially restored for French television in 2000, and released with a new documentary written and directed by Christophe Cognet, The Dominici Affair.” These travel essays, veritable home movies, are an immensely enjoyable tour through eccentric pockets of Europe.

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