Goddesses, Pianos, Princes, and a Book You Should Must Buy

After being on quite the roll there for a minute, I haven't posted in over two weeks, so I may as well pack a lot into this entry. Yesterday was, after all, a High Holy Day: the birthday of my grandfather, but also of the late, impossibly great Katharine Hepburn, who would have turned 101 if she hadn't died five years ago. (Has it really already been five years?) I believe I have already made clear my semi-religious feelings about Katharine Hepburn here. May 12 is always a delicious day for me, but then Nathaniel came along to make it even sweeter, even as I sat languishing in bed with an illness so bad I had to cancel my classes and stay home from work. Telepathically aware that I needed as much restorative bliss as I could get, Nathaniel offered this sterling tribute to Jane Campion's The Piano, and though I still don't understand how or why Nathaniel loves eight movies even more than this one, I of course thrilled to his evocative, beautifully illustrated ode to the film—especially since it sounds as though he might like it even more now than he once did! Nathaniel's subsequent blog posting is about princes, but he is obviously a prince himself to be this publicly and appropriately worshipful of the most important movie in my life, and surely one of the best ever made.

I've shown even less restraint on my own list of the 100 greatest movies (a feature that needs a qualitative as well as a formatting overhaul), where The Piano still reigns at #1. Yes, I grant that its crucial arrival at the absolute, most poignant onset of my movie-loving life has a great deal to do with this unusually robust claim on the film's behalf, and I've never gotten around to writing the public defense of this position that I obviously owe. I'm getting there; I always mean well. Happily, another prince of the blogosphere, Tim R. of MainlyMovies—who keeps even more mum on his blog lately than I do on mine—furnished me with a brilliant occasion to celebrate The Piano in print. That occasion was a book he co-edited called The DVD Stack, now in its 2nd Edition, and not to put too fine a point on it, YOU HAVE TO BUY THIS BOOK. Within, you'll find succinct but searching reviews of over 350 movies that are either masterworks in themselves, or the welcome recipients of brilliant presentations on DVD, or both. The writers are mostly staffers of major British publications like the Daily Telegraph, Time Out London, the Sunday Times, and Sight and Sound, but they found room for me in that august group. I got to wax awestruck about 16 of my favorite movies, from Persona to The Cell to Daughters of the Dust to Singin' in the Rain to Harlan County, U.S.A.. If that small sampler doesn't sufficiently convince you that The DVD Stack breaks significantly from the usual All-Time Best roll call—but without petulantly avoiding some objects of universal and deserved adoration—then you haven't experienced the back-to-back tributes to DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story (a surreally inspired DVD, apparently) and La Dolce vita. I would absolutely buy and treasure this book even if Tim hadn't edited it, and I would absolutely shill it even if I weren't in it. As an appetizer course, and as a reciprocal gesture to Nathaniel's lovely tribute, here's what I have to say about The Piano ... and yes, we are absolutely talking about that spectacular and affordably priced R2/PAL edition that completely wipes the floor with the despicable and un-extra'd U.S. print. I was limited to 400 words (a first time for everything!), but I hope you get the drift:

The film: Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) is a 19th-century Scotswoman who has refused to speak since she was six years old. She arrives in New Zealand as the purchased bride of a taciturn colonist, but neither she nor her fatherless daughter (Anna Paquin) make any easy concessions to domestic custom. Ada's proud resolve is shared by the film, which forges ahead into tense, exotic circumstances and allows us, indeed forces us, to fend for ourselves within its fertile landscape of desire, violence, envy, and enigma. The piano in Jane Campion's magisterial film is an instrument, a voicebox, a prize, a symbol, a concept, a thing-in-itself, a means of communication, and a bulky rampart against it. Campion's ingenuity is to read all the same paradoxes into human personality and sexuality. Her film looks askance at daily life, brimming with unexpected angles and an almost subconscious language of images and tones, and yet it stares forthrightly into extraordinary conflicts: the worst of what people do to each other, and the remarkable, ambiguous ways in which we save each other. None of this, of course, would be possible without the flawless cast, the superb locations, the eccentrically beautiful score, and the utterly persuasive production design.

The DVD: Heretofore available only in an undistinguished and feature-free version, The Piano finally attains a proper showcase, with an impressive gallery of key creative personnel gathered for the occasion. Campion and producer Jan Chapman provide a chummy but detailed commentary track, but even more illuminating are the generous interviews with both women as well as composer Michael Nyman, all furnished on the second disc. Campion speaks for a full, congenial hour about her creative process (including glimpses at her sketchbooks), her casting decisions and varying methods with different actors, her close collaboration with her cinematographer, and her charmingly ambivalent response to the film's Oscar successes. Chapman elucidates with passion the role of an independent film producer, specifically when securing international funds for a risky screenplay, and Nyman, without winning any trophies for modesty, sheds valuable light on how and why the film was tailored to the score, rather than the more customary reverse. A shorter making-of featurette from the time of the film's production expands to include the lead actors' perspectives. Best of all, the print transfer exquisitely captures the rolling waves, the plashy mud, the burnished glow of the interiors, and the eerie, aqueous light of the New Zealand bush.

Thanks, Nathaniel; thanks, Tim; thanks, Jane; thanks, Holly, Harvey, Anna, Sam, Jan, Stuart, Veronika, Michael, Janet, Andrew, Tungia, Kerry, Genevieve...; thanks, Katharine; thanks, Opa; overwork and underpay and all-nighters be damned, all is full of love today on Nick's Flick Picks.

Photos © 1993 Miramax Films/Ciby2000; and © 2007 Canongate Ltd.

Picked Flick #54: Suddenly, Last Summer

Sometimes even the major, personality-shaping fixations in our lives recede for a while, but then forcefully reassert themselves at unexpected moments. Literally, in this one week, I am experiencing a mini-revival of my Tennessee Williams fandom, on three wholly different fronts. Professionally, as my students pass in their senior thesis projects, I have pulled my own undergraduate thesis out of the mothballs: a structurally daffy, theoretically promiscuous, but mercifully unhumiliating argument about Williams' plays as pre-Foucauldian parables of panoptical social regulation, taking Not About Nightingales as the central text. In a public context, Warner Bros. has just released a seven-disc box-set of films adapted from Williams plays: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Baby Doll (which is actually an original Williams screenplay), Sweet Bird of Youth (a slightly neutered version of one of my favorite plays), and two DVDs devoted to A Streetcar Named Desire, which figured further down on this list. Theologically, today is May 19, which was not Katharine Hepburn's birthday, but it was the day she often cited as her birthday—May 19, 1909, rather than May, 12, 1907—in order to shave two years off of her age.

Suddenly, Last Summer features one of Hepburn's best and steeliest performances, and certainly her most gleamingly villainous. She literally enters the movie from a great height, soaring down in a rococo elevator, spouting redolent mythologies about herself and her dead son Sebastian—the ghostly, depraved Rosebud of this particular mystery. Now get ready for this plot: Hepburn's fabulously venal Violet Venable has called one Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) to her eerie palace in order to persuade him to lobotomize her niece Catharine (Elizabeth Taylor), whose first-hand account of Sebastian's outlandish death has landed her straight in the booby-hatch. Catharine's story is quite a whopper, pivoting on details like pedophilia, prostitution, homosexuality, and cannibalism: it would seem that Sebastian has been gobbled by a ravenous band of young Spanish street-hustlers. Being a Williams play, this Guignol tale is, of course, a benchmark of truth. Instead, it is high society and social institutions that are unmasked as killing lies: the deceptive, carnivorous will of old-money aristocracy, embodied by Hepburn's Violet and her garden of Venus flytraps, and the buyable ethics of modern corporate medicine, represented by the endowment-hungry trustees of Monty's hospital. Granted, political content is not the first thing one might look for in Gore Vidal's mad adaptation of Williams' play, itself as purple as a low-hanging cluster of grapes. The script needlessly and distractingly pads the sensational atmosphere with predictably googly-eyed sanatorium scenes. Clift, recklessly sunk into this maelstrom of insanity, crosses his arms and darts his pupils in several scenes as though he is barely, quietly holding himself together, while his famous pal Liz Taylor sallies forth with her lurid monologues without quite adding much to them. Still, Suddenly, Last Summer fascinates almost as much as it entertains, which is tremendously. Director Mankiewicz, having helmed some of the greatest Hollywood movies about dubious, contested tales (All About Eve, A Letter to Three Wives), cleverly whets our appetite for the naked, bleeding truth, even as his direction of the actors and his gamely bold production design make clear that he is most interested in the nervy climate of repression and panic that surrounds the breech-birth of a horrible family secret. When Mercedes McCambridge, the most proudly perverse of 1950s character actresses, shows up as a fluttering flibbertigibbet, the movie's fruity compote gets even more aromatic and flavorful. It simmers enticingly, and sometimes, gloriously, it boils right over.

In short, if it's camp you want, it's camp you'll get, as when Monty gives a blond male nurse a visible once-over, or when Liz starts struggling with a locked door in the wrong place at the wrong time, triply imprisoned by an iron-barred causeway, an expressionist camera angle, and a triangulated bra. The movie makes it so easy for conservative culture vultures to tear away at it, like the flesh-eating birds that feast on baby sea turtles in one of Hepburn's centerpiece monologues. Tear they did: Suddenly, Last Summer sparked a bonfire of disgusted protest in 1959, but the movie, even more than the play, belongs in that beastly menagerie with Faulkner's Sanctuary, Pasolini's Salò, and Mary Harron's film of American Psycho, aggressively vulgar works in which a hard, proud skeleton of social critique and complex implication is nonetheless palpable, even to viewers as green as I was at age 15, when I first saw the movie. Floating between its scenes of family terrorism, pulsing beneath the shiny enamel of Williams' lyrical prose ("Most people's lives—what are they but long trails of debris, with nothing to clean it up but, finally, death"), triumphing over the drag-revue flourishes like Hepburn's emu-feather hat and Liz's perpetually breathy delivery ("We! pro! cured! for! him!"), there is something remarkably formidable about Suddenly, Last Summer. It makes you chuckle, sometimes against its own interests, but it also lingers like few "better" films ever do, and in that way at least, it's a better Williams film than those bashfully catered affairs that Richard Brooks whipped up out of Cat and Sweet Bird. Just you try flossing it from your mind. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1959 Columbia Pictures.

Picked Flick #76: The Lion in Winter

I am tempted to say that The Lion in Winter works better than it should. Its dual lineage in royal history and soap operatics doesn't seem like the recipe for anything but a feathered fish, remote to popular audiences and unrecognizable to more studious ones. The apoplectic performance style of Peter O'Toole whenever he's sprung from the Arabian desert seems like an odd match with Katharine Hepburn's Connecticut vowels and her dry-gin flirts with the camera. For purposes of drama, but also for those of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine themsleves, there are too many sons running about. As in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, released the same year, the sets and costumes are pretty but also too...clean. The palace is aspoil with mongrels, hens, and fugitive vegetables, but not a thing has streaked Hepburn's ivory caftan or O'Toole's clabber-colored face, still as white as empire beneath that well-tended beard. Past the edge of every frame, around every palatial corner, you can sense the playhouse audience so clearly intended by these barbs and bon mots.

The Lion in Winter shouldn't work, but then, adding up all of its giddy affronts to seriousness and proper concert, the movie shouldn't do anything but work, and that's exactly my experience of the movie: it works and keeps on working, so succulent that it's no longer absurd, pumping so much pure voltage into its bickery version of history made at night that there's no means of resisting, and no reason to. The Lion in Winter practically reels with its own sense of fun, even as John Barry's timpani and trumpets keep fastening the movie to some form of gravitas, even as Douglas Slocombe's photography, much more interesting than I remembered, casts a fine, sooty dust over these transparently modern personalities. James Goldman's adaptation of his own play is a robust and roustabout chronicle, Holinshed in the age of Peyton Place. Better, having devised this unique blend of annal and sitcom, dotted here and there with unsheathed daggers, he keeps it going ingeniously. I've never been much sold on the work of his more famous brothers. Oldest brother Bo farmed thin conceits in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Melvin and Howard, winning Oscars for both that were more rightly due the directors who placed so much trust in them. Superstar screenwriter and raconteur William, well-seasoned with experience but annoyingly arch all the same, has even more overrated titles to his credit, like the thin wisp of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the preening whimsy of The Princess Bride. The Lion in Winter has what none of these films have—though, giving credit where it's due, William's ace distillation of All the President's Men has it, too: a braced and solid structure, a gallery of finely etched characters, a huckster's gift for streamlining and popularizing the arcane, a beating heart of popcorn appeal that still allows the film to go about its business, aggressively selling its strengths but never just shilling them.

Certainly I've never liked O'Toole nearly so much in his other films as I do here. His Henry is livelier as well as more serious than his counterpart performance in Becket, though it helps that Anthony Harvey is a much better judge of camera distance and emotional beats than Becket's Peter Glenville was. Katharine Hepburn bursts forth with by far the best performance of her life after Spence. The standard meme in biographies, including her own, is that she tore into the role with the admittedly displaced energy of massive grief, but it's worth noting that it's as sexy a turn as the one in The Philadelphia Story. Hepburn writhes on her bed, tinders an incestuous spark in the eyes of all her boys, contemplates her own image in a mirror shaped like a dragon's tear, and lures a leading man 25 years her junior into a vivacious, erotic battle of wills that goes off like a charm. Maybe she was just turned on by all those great lines she gets to recite and react to. "She smiled to excess but she chewed with real distinction," Eleanor offers in perfect dismissal of a rival who, let's not forget, is already long dead.

"I marvel at you after all these years," mutters her nonplussed husband, "still like a democratic drawbridge going down for everybody."

Shooting back at Henry's autumnal dreams of having more and different children, Eleanor asks, "What kind of spindly, rickety, milky, wizened, dim-eyed, gammy-handed, limpy line of things will you beget? And when you die, which is regrettable but necessary, what will happen to fair Alais and her pruny prince?" Give Katharine Hepburn that many consonants to bite down on, sit back, and luxuriate. That Eleanor of Aquitaine can hardly be entertained to have said any such thing hardly matters; that Pauline Kael spat vituperatively on the whole ship matters just as little. A slim skiff, maybe. Its last act is utterly at sixes and sevens, and the actual finale slips right off the screen. But it's a proud pageant up to that point, punchy and uproarious, a royal flag unfurled for the cause of popular delight. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #92: Alice Adams

Among Katharine Hepburn's most famous and auspicious screen collaborators—including, in my own order of preference, George Cukor, Cary Grant, and Spencer Tracy—director George Stevens is the least fêted member, but his achievements with Hepburn should not be undervalued. Once an established star, she never looked more radiant than she did in 1942's Woman of the Year, where Stevens' generous showcasing of her look and her performance beautifully counteracts the script's rather mean imbalance against her. (Well, maybe until that cooking scene, anyway.) Earlier than that, Stevens gamely ushered her through a spritely and underseen J.M. Barrie adaptation called Quality Street (1937), where Hepburn's comic dual-performance paves the way as none of her previous roles had done for the screwball delights of Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938) and the aristocratic wit of Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1940). But moving back still earlier, it's not clear that any of Hepburn's once and future heights would have been reached without the pretext of her first truly great performance in Alice Adams, which finds her amidst a glorious, once-in-a-lifetime metamorphosis from the queer, coltish ingénue of 1933 (Little Women, Morning Glory, Christopher Strong) into the rounded sophistication of her later work, somehow softer and more confident all at the same time. Alice Adams is the moment where Hepburn becomes a star, and also the moment where she becomes truly lovable.

Adapted from a novel by Booth Tarkington—the writer, too, of The Magnificent Ambersons—Alice Adams tells the story of a lower-middle-class girl, not far past her schooling years, who positively quivers with longing to join the coterie of her more fashionable peers and to find the kind of domestic bliss that presumably once united her parents (the excellent Fred Stone and Ann Shoemaker), whose tacit bond of affection is now sorely tested by illness, monetary need, and other trials of late middle-age. Alice Adams is the kind of girl who would adore Pride and Prejudice, even though in real life she might well have settled for Mr. Collins. One of the major ambitions of the screenplay and, I'm guessing, the novel is to keep Alice so dotingly loyal to her family even as she dreams of something bigger or other than what they have, which often compels a shame of her circumstances and a coy dishonesty about who she is and who they are. That the emblematically patrician Hepburn is so convincing within both this cast and this caste is a complete revelation, even more so in hindsight than it must have been in 1935, but her empathetic connection to this girl's gossamer aspirations couldn't be clearer. Her body and voice are much more relaxed than we're used to seeing and hearing them, and even though she takes center stage in a way she wouldn't truly do again until David Lean's Summertime in 1955, she holds the movie, as she does the character, with graceful, unpugnacious care, as though cupping her hand around the spores of a dandelion, keeping them from blowing away.

Stevens, so intuitive and judicious in realizing his best films, cuts to Hepburn at unexpected moments, lingering on her face longer than other directors would—possibly because, as in Woman of the Year, he's found the right angles and lighting concepts to make Hepburn's proudly intellectual face stay remarkably open and emotive. But more than that, his gift falls in knowing when to cut to Alice, when to understand the debates and dramatic actions surrounding her as essentially her story, rather than that of the bumptious family unit or the town at large. The two centerpiece sequences of the movie, when the guileless and ill-dressed but optimistic Alice takes her Cagneyish brother Walter to a local-society ball, and later when suitor Fred MacMurray arrives chez Adams for an uncomfortably hot and subtly humiliating evening of dinner and conversation, rank among the greatest passages of narrative filmmaking in the American cinema of that decade. The style is elegant and holistic, even as it magically embraces such different elements—MacMurray's somewhat lumpen appeal, the adroit conveyance of stifling temperature, the wholly unexpected elegance of Walter's dancing, a tart cameo from Hattie McDaniel, a romantic proclivity for fades and dissolves on Alice when her spirits flag, and the almost neo-realist shot where she kicks her wilting, homemade bouquet of hand-picked violets under a chair. There is also, of course, the justly famous and encapsulating shot of Hepburn weeping in her bedroom after the ball, filmed through the rivulets of rain running down her window. Moment by moment by moment, Alice Adams reverberates with humble but sure-handed technique and a credible reverence for modesty as a virtue. The last line of the movie is "Gee whiz!", and as dramatically precipitous as it is—the one major miscalculation in the script, I think—the sentiment is fully shared by the audience. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)