FDR's Hollywood – Part 1: Forgotten men (1932-3)

"They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?"
– 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?' by Yip Harburg, 1930

This new two-part blog was inspired by reading Jean Edward Smith's excellent FDR biography. Before that, my knowledge of the 32nd POTUS had largely been filtered through the prism of cinema, so I thought it'd be fun to write about how FDR and his times were shown on screen as events happened. Part 1 features morphine addiction, a communist binman and a man being shot in the dick.

FDR'S HOLLYWOOD
PART 1: FORGOTTEN MEN (1932-3)



The 1930s was an incomparably fascinating and fertile time in movie-making. A period of upheaval and revelation, of strictures, compromises, and hedonistic last hurrahs, and of brilliant new voices. It was also a time of radical politics, economic collapse and societal rejuvenation, and, perhaps more than at any other time, America had a responsive cinema, in dialogue with its national identity. Sometimes, it even had a campaigning one. And it rarely shied away from depicting social unrest in a way that seems almost unthinkable in today's mainstream cinema.

That national identity was shaped by one man more than any other: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, who on 4 March, 1933 inherited a country on its knees, and lifted it up by the force of his personality, and by a policy programme of unprecedented radicalism.

In this two-part blog, I’ll look at the way the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s New Deal and the president himself were depicted on screen. Won’t that be fun? (Yes.)

1. ‘It is not the object of the producers to take sides’


Joseph Breen, the reactionary, anti-Semitic Hollywood censor. He said of the studio moguls: “Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the earth.”

In 1927 the movies learned to talk, and by 1932 Hollywood had fully mastered the new medium, following a tricky transitional period (to my mind, there were no great ‘talkies’ until King Vidor’s Hallelujah! in 1929, and hardly a deluge after that). Two years later, the Hays Office, led by Nazi sympathiser and joyless prude Joseph Breen, began to properly enforce the ‘Production Code’ censorship restrictions it had drafted in 1930, after unbearable pressure from the Catholic League of Decency (bloody Catholics). That meant, infamously, that showing a “man and woman in bed together” was now forbidden, but it also ripped the teeth out of social justice filmmaking. Though there’s nothing in the rules permitting progressive narratives, aside from a reference to “special care” now having to be shown in dealing with national institutions, scripts had to be passed by Breen before production started, and he was not a liberal man (as I said, he was a Nazi sympathiser).

Before the establishment wrestled back control, though, was an explosive two-and-a-half years of “pre-Code” movies: both a last hurrah for the more sensual(/exploitative) elements of Hollywood, and a white-hot birth for a nascent, doomed movement of vital political cinema, inspired by the hunger and hopelessness of The Great Depression, and alive with the anger of the dispossessed.


Ring Lardner Jr., the communist screenwriter, who later refused to 'name names' to the HUAC during the red scare. "It was a question of choosing to be a 'hero', or a shit," he said memorably.

The lefties didn’t have it all their own way. While many of the most influential writers and directors were liberals, socialists (John Ford, Howard Koch, Lillian Hellman, Donald Ogden Stewart) or communists (John Howard Lawson, Ring Lardner Jr., Dalton Trumbo), the big studios were run by wealthy moguls who were invariably Conservative Republicans (the ‘progressive’ Republican wing did still exist, but not in Hollywood). The powerful producers were on the right too: tubthumping defends of capitalism like Irving Thalberg, the boy genius of MGM, and there was a cabal of leading actors and directors – including Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Adolphe Menjou, Sam Wood, Norman Taurog and Cecil B. DeMille – who later formed the backbone of the red-hunting Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA).

As a result, the overwhelming number of Hollywood movies were extremely safe, either explicitly championing reactionary values, embedding them into a palatable, escapist narrative or simply ignoring the political climate altogether (while Eddie Cantor’s musicals could occasionally engage with the national picture in their framing devices or glib asides, Fred and Ginger’s transcendent trifles were almost entirely oblivious). The exception, as always, was where money could be made.


Irving Thalberg, the literate, brilliant producer who in 1934 pioneered American 'fake news' to swing a gubernatorial election.

In 1932, the novel and play Cabin in the Cotton (October 1932) made it to the big screen. Though it ends with a workers’ co-operative being formed thanks to the oratory of cotton-pickers’ son Richard Barthelmess, it’s one of the cagiest movies you’ll ever see, stoutly arguing the case of Southern planters, immediately qualifying any radical statement, and explicitly saying in its prologue that it wouldn’t be taking sides (that's where the quote in the heading comes from). It took Roosevelt’s election a month later to convince Warner Bros – admittedly the most earthy, socially-conscious and immigrant-friendly of the big studios – that there was a new mood flooding the country, and that by riding that wave they could start raking in big box office receipts. But first, let me take you back to the dog days of 1929.

2. ‘The big parade of tears’: The Great Depression on film



On Tuesday, 29 October, 1929 – ‘Black Tuesday’ – the American stock market crashed, precipitating the sharpest and most ruinous Depression in its history. ‘Hoovervilles’ – temporary encampments of homeless people living in cardboard boxes and makeshift huts – had bred in all major cities, breadlines of starving citizens snaked around blocks outside ad-hoc soup kitchens, and the President had just called out the National Guard to shoot unarmed veterans pleading to receive their WWI bonus ahead of time. A quarter of American adults were out of work, and that atmosphere of hopelessness, of privation, of deprivation and desperation permeated the national consciousness. By 1932, the height of the Great Depression, it had also reached the screen.

The Roaring Twenties (1939), arguably the greatest of the ‘30s gangster classics, has two fantastic montages fusing newsreel and new footage (edited by Jack Killifer), which bring to life the boom and bust of the 1920s – culminating in the crash – like little else. They also include that footage of gangsters throwing two grenades through a shop window that is in every gangster montage of the 1930s. That punchy, dynamic epic summarised the period from 1918 to 1933 with a stunning verve, but did so in retrospect. There are innumerable fascinating and bizarre films that portrayed the Depression as it was happening.



Like the extraordinarily flavourful Union Depot (January 1932), above: a rich, tough tapestry of early '30s America, masquerading as a melodrama, in which down-on-her-luck dancer Joan Blondell is easy prey for a limping, porn-obsessed sexual maniac (George Rosener) until dirty-faced vagrant Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. arrives on the scene. This minor classic boils an entire era down to 66 mesmerising minutes.


"The weather's getting fine/The coffee tastes like wine/You happy hobo, sing/'Hallelujah, I'm a bum again!'"

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (February 1933) is one of the period's great curios: a spectacularly misguided comedy-musical-cum-drama about supertramp Bumper (Al Jolson), who gives up his post as the “Mayor of Central Park” for the love of a good amnesiac (Madge Evans), while tangling with a communist binman called Egghead (played by former silent clown, Harry Langdon). Written by Ben Hecht and S. N. Behrman, with songs and rhyming dialogue by Rodgers and Hart, it was a notorious flop on release, as workers who were being laid off in their millions didn’t equate their homelessness and deprivation with freedom, though seen today it’s joyous, subversive and, ultimately, heartbreaking.



Herbert Hoover famously insisted that jobless men had taken to selling apples on the street because they’d decided it was a good career move, but Damon Runyon and Robert Riskin saw this burgeoning industry for what it was. In Frank Capra’s Lady for a Day (September 1933), written by the pair, May Robson plays Apple Annie (above), a downtrodden old woman who lives in a barely-lit flop house, drinks too much and sells fruit out of a basket to survive – at least until her daughter comes to stay, and she turns to benevolent gangster Warren William to help put up a front.

Capra's torn-from-the-headlines American Madness (August 1932) had been confrontational rather than whimsical, depicting a liberal bank president (Walter Huston, more of whom later!) who stands up for the little guy against corporate greed, only for a robbery – shot in eerie Expressionist style – to force a run on the bank (foreshadowing Capra's It’s a Wonderful Life), and his marriage to head for the rocks. It suffers slightly from a familiar problem with Riskin’s work: he sees himself as a liberal, but views ordinary people as stupid and easily manipulated, but it has a progressive view of both capitalism and convicts, and argues passionately that when financial institutions put profit before people, everything goes wrong.


Top: American Madness; bottom: Gold Diggers of 1933

Two brilliant ensemble dramas, spearheaded by Warren William as a rascally, amoral businessman, warned of the dangers of rapacious and unforgiving capitalism, if having rather too much fun doing it. In both Skyscraper Souls (July 1932) and Employees’ Entrance (January 1933), William relentlessly pursued virgins, lied as easily as breathing, and delighted in destroying his business rivals, as a sort of Jordan Belfort of the Hoover era. Proper radical heroes were a fixture throughout the decade, though: the near-mythic screwball comedy My Man Godfrey (1936) discovered its hero down and out in a Hooverville, before moving into a mansion to put a spoilt family in their place.


The 'urgent populism' of Heroes for Sale.

Heroes for Sale (June 1933), one of the most fiercely politicised films of the era, used its hero as an emblem of the Lost Generation. Tom Morris (Richard Barthelmess) misses out on war hero status, gets hooked on prescription morphine, loses his job to his own invention, is jailed for trying to stop a riot, and then gets tagged as a Red and run out of town. Its treatment of communism is pathetically shallow and trivial, but its sequences of drug addiction were the most harrowing put on screen until The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955, while the scenes of broken-down tramps squatting on parkland, eating anything they can lay their hands on, are as valuable and resonant as any depictions during this era.


Heroes for Sale referenced one of the defining photographs of the day (by WPA photographer John E. Allen) in this gut-punch of a sequence.

A less impressive addiction drama was The Wet Parade (March, 1932), a fundamentally confused treatise on Prohibition, though it works as an insightful picture of the national debate around this crucial issue, which threatened to define Roosevelt's first campaign, if not as a movie.


"This depression is so bad I want to have an affair with a murderous gorilla."

The most vivid depictions of the Depression are in two unlikely films: the groundbreaking monster movie, King Kong (March 1933) – in which penniless orphan Fay Wray is first glimpsed stealing food in a bid to not starve to death on the streets of New York, and agrees to the ill-fated trip out of desperation – and an apparently innocuous Busby Berkeley musical, Gold Diggers of 1933 (May 1933). I’ve written at length about how original, ambitious and jaw-droppingly daring its closing number is, but it’s worth restating. For most of its running time, Gold Diggers of 1933 is a standard crowd-pleaser. Though its first half has numerous wry references to poverty, it is primarily a light-hearted musical about having the chutzpah to ride out the Depression (Warner’s key leading men of the period. – William Powell, Lee Tracy and James Cagney – all played ‘go getters’ using their wiles to stay afloat in this crumbling world). And then:

with the daft plot neatly tied up, Berkeley suddenly drops the big one: a climactic number that runs for almost seven minutes and seems to encapsulate an entire generation's experiences ... Men on a downward spiral that begins at the front and ends at the soup kitchen; an army of heroes deserted by America.

‘Remember My Forgotten Man’ (envisioned as a 'Big parade of tears') borrowed the words of FDR’s great April 1932 speech, who had spoken of the need for America to put its faith in “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid”. Here was a crystallisation of the Depression experience, from parade to patrol to poverty to protest, the number’s finale becoming almost a religious spectacle (though one shot by Eisenstein), as Joan Blondell and the army of the dispossessed – arms to the Heavens – seem to glimpse some higher power coming to deliver them.



3. Visions of a new America



The previous year, Lee Tracy (above) – usually cast as a cynical, motor-mouthed go-getter – had starred in an early prototype for Frank Capra’s great piece of political wish-fulfilment, Mr Smith Goes to Washington. The film, Washington Merry-Go-Round (October 1932), was released a month before FDR's election and found Tracy’s idealistic yet jaundiced young senator pitching up in DC, where he is first suckered and then sickened by the festering corruption he sees all around him (epitomised, obviously, by Walter Connolly as a crooked politico in the pay of bootleggers). There was a transparent hunger for an administration that cared.

The form that administration should take, though, was still up for grabs, at least in some quarters. Gabriel Over the White House (March 1933), an absolutely batshit political fantasy financed by notorious media mogul William Randolph Hearst – the primary inspiration for Citizen Kane – but devised by maverick producer Walter Wanger (who later made a prison reform picture after being sent to jail for shooting a romantic rival in the dick), stated the case for benign dictatorship, or just fascism.

Played by Walter Huston, President Judson Hammond is a journeyman politician (patterned after Herbert Hoover) who has a car accident and awakens from his coma a changed man (thanks apparently to divine intervention), proceeding to purge his cabinet of business interests, nationalise beer production, cut unemployment and, oh yes, invoke martial law, before forging everlasting peace through a process of nuclear brinkmanship. Hearst was a registered Democrat (though he disliked FDR personally), but the film does look suspiciously like totalitarian propaganda.


The answer to a nation's prayers: Walter Huston with superpowers.

A more uplifting alternate vision of America was offered by Turn Back the Clock (August 1933), a virtually-unknown time-travel drama in which tobacconist Lee Tracy is allowed to relive 20 years of his life, rising to political prominence as he confronts the major social issues of the day:



Wild Boys of the Road (September 1933), directed by Heroes for Sale's William Wellman, is one of the last and loudest yells of the Depression era, but also one of the most hopeful. An angry, bristling and uncompromising portrait of teenagers brutalised by the Depression, hopping freight trains only to find yet more privation and suffering, it anticipates Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (and was used itself in an award-winning ‘90s documentary about Depression-era itineracy, Riding the Rails) in its portrayal of desperate people forced to wander aimlessly away from their homes and happiness in search of a living, and takes precisely no prisoners. In one scene, Frankie Darro and his mates engage in a pitched battle with police at a Hooverville. In another, they beat an attempted rapist to death, with the movie’s apparent blessing.



At the film's climax, they meet a sympathetic judge (Robert Barrat), who – just when the teenagers fear they will be jailed for miscreancy – instead advocates leniency and, pointing to the logo of a blue eagle on his wall, says: “Things are going to be better now... all over the country.” That eagle was the logo of Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, and the symbol of the New Deal.

***

Coming up in Part 2: FDR-on-film, fake news and philosophy.

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Thanks for reading. I wrote about cinematic presentations of Abraham Lincoln here, incidentally. You'll find it a little narrower in focus and a bit more silly, but only a bit.

Why I love FDR, and other stories – Reviews #270

I had a week off, so I read a couple of books, watched a couple of films and went to a castle. I saw Jackson Browne live too (and Kraftwerk, but I was working and I don't know much about them, so my review would be terrible). I haven't managed to crowbar FDR into all of the below, but I've honestly done my best.

BOOKS


I read about the New Deal in Deal, which I continue to insist wasn't intentional.

FDR by Jean Edward Smith (2007) – This immense, one-volume biography of America’s greatest president is weighty in every sense of the word, marshalling a staggering number of facts, characters and insights to evoke and explain the life of FDR – and touching a kilo on the kitchen scales, as it runs to almost 800 pages, including the copious, detailed end notes. Smith, who has previously done a similar job on (18th president) Ulysses S. Grant and military commander Lucius D. Clay, deviates from the general rule of great biographies – which from T. Harry Williams’ groundbreaking Huey Long to Lee Server’s Baby, I Don’t Care draw their life from first-hand interviews – by weaving together a rich, complex and immensely readable narrative from secondary sources and from many memoirs, memos and letters that afford incredible access. He has read every book about FDR, which helps to shape his nuanced and insightful conclusions, but he’s also interested in the real pleasures of historical writing: when Roosevelt sits down with Stalin and Churchill, we feel we're really there.

Roosevelt had a privileged upbringing, his character forged at the independent school Groton, and his ability to ‘read people’ developed during his time at Harvard, where he stayed on to edit the school paper. By the time he entered politics, he was a charming but apparently callow man who didn’t stand for anything, except an outspoken objection to ‘bossism’ (whereby unelected fixers like Tammany Hall’s liberal-minded Charles Murphy wielded great power and patronage). He was changed, according to popular legend, when he contracted polio in 1921, which gave him an understanding of suffering, and also brought him into contact with dirt-poor Georgia farmers – his neighbours at the Warm Springs facility – whose abject poverty caused him to question the economic consensus. Smith, argues, though – and convincingly – that FDR’s doomed extra-marital affair with a gregarious Catholic socialite, Lucy Mercer, did as much to change his outlook: as the experience taught his wife, Eleanor, the complexities of the human heart, so it gave the future president an understanding of love and loss that turned him from a simple man into one with a great capacity for understanding.


The 1933 inauguration.

When FDR ascended to the presidency in 1933, America was in the grips of a calamitous depression in which a quarter of adults were out of work, ‘Hoovervilles’ – temporary encampments of homeless people living in cardboard boxes and makeshift huts – had bred in all major cities, and his predecessor had just called out the National Guard to shoot unarmed veterans pleading to receive their WWI bonus ahead of time. As one of the Bonus Army later put it, after Eleanor Roosevelt visited them: “Hoover sent the army, Roosevelt sent his wife.” Once in the Oval Office, FDR responded to the crisis by enacting the most radical policy programme in American history, introducing the Civil Works Administration as a temporary lifeline, creating the Tennessee Valley Association to reinvigorate Southern farming, finding work for 300,000 people (and 3m in total) through the Civilian Conservation Corps, and pouring money into the Works Progress Administration, which employed 8.5m people across eight years, building hundreds of schools, bridges and parks, and finding work for the likes of Orson Welles as part of its Federal Arts Project. While some of the measures were pragmatic and reactive, resolving the specific problems of early ‘30s America, FDR also introduced social security, unemployment insurance and rural electrification, while his priorities were elucidated by his hard-fought hours-and-wages legislation (1938) and the GI Bill (1944), which after the president’s death in 1945 essentially safeguarded his country, and his draftees, against a repeat of the disastrous fall-out from WWI. Had he lived, America would surely be unrecognisable now from the divided, unequal, poisoned well of democracy that it is. As Michael Moore explained so effectively in his flawed but overpowering polemic, Capitalism: A Love Story, FDR's post-war plan was to implement the Second Bill of Rights detailed in his 1944 State of the Union address, pledging a basic security for all Americans, underpinned by a national living wage and universal healthcare.

For all his vision and virtue, though, Roosevelt did make mistakes, and Smith isn’t afraid to deal with them at length. For a while during 1937-8, everything went wrong, and most of it was FDR’s fault, due to hubris, myopia or vindictiveness. His response to poorly-drafted legislation being overturned by the judiciary was an idiotic attempt at court-packing, he caused the ‘Roosevelt recession’ by cutting federal spending – before acting decisively to reverse the decision and remedy the situation – and his attempts to purge his rivals ahead of the 1938 election was an almost total failure. Later scandals or controversies are notably more complicated, though. Smith rejects out-of-hand the idea that Roosevelt had anything to do with Pearl Harbor (a conspiracy theory that continues to endure), though he does consider whether war could have been avoided (a lot of evidence is missing from the record) and looks at the issue of Japanese-Americans on the California coast being interned – though the decision wasn’t taken by FDR, who trusted his subordinates to make these difficult calls, he did sign off on it, and Smith regards it as one of the “shabbiest” executive orders ever made by a president. He’s more circumspect about Roosevelt’s lack of progressive action on race – the president relied on support from white supremacist Southern Democrats to pass legislation, including especially during WWII – though the GI Bill did cover all African-Americans, and his supposed inaction regarding Jewish refugees. In fact, FDR pushed the question relentlessly, and ultimately saved 150,000 people: a considerable achievement when one looks at how his hands were tied. As regards his stance on black America: you can ask whether it was right, but you can argue that it was realistic.


One of only two known photographs of FDR in a wheelchair, with dog Fala and little Ruthie Bie. The picture was taken by the president's cousin, Margaret Suckley.

Roosevelt emerges from the book as a decent, flawed and often brilliant man: a great communicator, with a gift for a new kind of conversational oratory (and for exploiting the possibilities of radio and television), and a genius for politics. He was loyal, calculating and ruthless, at times too intractable (like when he forced his friend Harry Hopkins, the brilliant socialist administrator, upon the 1940 convention as VP), but able to juggle political friendships and alliances with extraordinary élan. He was not an idealist in the conventional meaning of the word, but he did pursue ideals through pragmatism: offering sops and compromises to the right of his party, to ensure a solid support base that would enable him to force through his more controversial – and usually more important – measures. In the lead-up to World War Two, he shaped the debate and let public opinion run slightly ahead of him every step of the way, displaying integrity, courage and considerable skill, and circumventing the obstructions of opposition, and the small-print of legislation, to offer crucial materiel support to Britain. He also had an extraordinary understanding of political symbolism: prior to his final speech to Congress, he was seen publicly in a wheelchair just twice: firstly when the dean of John Howard University asked him to express solidarity with black students “crippled by race”, and secondly when he visited wounded soldiers who would never walk again.

This moving, powerful book shows an extraordinary sensitivity for both these personal details and the big topics of the day. Smith breaks off to deal with the complexities of race relations or the atomic bomb in one long section. Ahead of Pearl Harbor, he takes us behind the scenes, where we travel with the Japanese on their fateful mission, and meet the brilliant admiral, Isoroku Yamamoto, and his descriptions of battlefield tactics are the most invigorating, accessible and concisely thrilling I've ever read. He also heartbreakingly and brilliantly evokes FDR's subsequent inability to believe that the Navy he exalted had provided itself so thoroughly incompetent. Smith also foreshadows the future, highlighting the enduring significance of decisions, and showing us the fine margins of history: FDR’s plan for dividing Germany after the war wasn't followed because the state department had been excluded from the summit after Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, blackmailed his homosexual rival, Sumner Welles, into resigning. Those are just two of the brilliant characters in the book’s remarkable, brilliantly-sketched supporting cast, including Louis Howe – the gaunt former newspaper editor who did more than anyone to plot FDR’s route to the White House – feminist labour secretary, Frances Perkins, outspoken pro-business troll Al Smith, Winston Churchill – who is naked for much of the time; there’s also a cameo from the mighty Huey Long, described by Roosevelt as "the second most dangerous man in America", after Douglas MacArthur.


Perkins on the front of Time (August 14, 1933).

Smith is simply a great biographer, his comprehensive research matched by a brilliant gift for evoking mood in his writing: euphoria, pride, awe, anger, suspense, disgust or hilarity, and it is exceptionally funny at times: FDR’s tall tales are always good fun, though it’s Howe’s unbelievably cynical one-liners that are the real treat. He gets a taste of his own medicine from commentator John Gunther, who explained that Howe had no agenda of his own: “If FDR had come out for the Devil, it wouldn’t have mattered much to Louis Howe.” And often he just allows one of the greatest spokesman of the 20th century – accompanied by several of the finest speechwriters – to speak for himself. Often there’ll be an idea I’ve been grasping at but failing to articulate, and I’ll find that Roosevelt nailed it 80 years ago. Here he is essentially debunking the Conservative Party manifesto of 2017:

Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

This extraordinary book does justice to the man, in all his blazing brilliance and human imperfection. It’s an unanswerable corrective to anyone who says that politics doesn’t change anything, that politicians don’t care, and that a person’s politics are – or should be – determined by their upbringing. It is also an indelible blueprint for how you plot, plan, finagle and compromise to force genuine and crucial change. (4)

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See also: I've written a little below, in the Cabin in the Cotton review, about how FDR's election changed the cinematic landscape, but I'd like to talk much more about this, as American cinema has perhaps never been as politically engaged, or as in thrall to its incumbent president, as it was during his tenure. So I'll look at 'FDR's Hollywood' as a stand-alone blogpost some time in the coming months. In the meantime, and simply because I like you, here are a handful of bits from the book that amused me:


An FDR anecdote from his time as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.


Oh dear.


In many great non-fiction books, there's a passage that's a bit of a stretch. Here you go.


Stalin proves to be even worse at paying compliments than me.

***



The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (1948) – A Graham Greene masterwork about Scobie, a rigorously upstanding colonial policeman in an unnamed African state, whose unimpeachable integrity is challenged by his capacity for pity and lust, threatening him with eternal damnation in the eyes of his Catholic god – or at least to Scobie's fevered, depressed mind. It sounds bleak and heavy, and ultimately it is, but The Heart of the Matter is also sensitive, empathetic and very entertaining, vividly evoking the Sierra Leone of Greene's wartime experience, and being lit both by Scobie's mordant wit and a catalogue of memorable supporting characters.

There's the pink, podgy and poetic Wilson – smitten with Scobie's wife – the unhappy Harris, whose naïvete and loneliness leads him to pen a hilariously heartbreaking letter to his alumni magazine, boomingly hopeless cleric Father Rank, loyal servant Ali, and Yusef, the unfailingly polite, needy minor-league criminal who might just be playing Scobie like a fiddle. And then there are the two women in Scobie's life: his wife Louise, whose passive-aggression he meets with false declarations of love, desperate to protect her from harm, and the waif-like Helen, widowed at 19 and made transcendent by suffering.

Greene writes with such elegance, economy and lucidity of both image and idea that it takes the breath away: there are passages here as inspired as anything I've ever read. He crystallised the nature of memory in 56 words:

He couldn’t tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined–the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

the colonial experience in a sentence or two:

For fifteen years he had watched the arrival of a succession of patients … He watched their temperature charts every one–the first outbreak of unreasonable temper, the drink too many, the sudden stand for principle after a year of acquiescence. The black clerks carried their bedside manner like doctors down the corridors; cheerful and respectful they put up with any insult.

and the nature of its protagonist through a description of a room containing nothing of his own, all within the first five pages. Near the end, as the book tumbles into despair, he describes a dead body lying "coiled and unimportant like a broken watchspring under a pile of empty petrol drums", a brilliantly ugly, inglorious, ignominious end. The coup de grâce is the six-page coda, laced with a surprise and irony so bitter you can barely stomach it; the antidote: Greene's Catholic catharsis, unsentimental, clear-eyed, and perfectly-weighted.

Your ability to embrace the book entirely may depend on your interest in the specificities of Catholic faith – I'm Catholic and found its intense, tortured theological relentlessness a little exhausting towards the end – but it's more than just a vehicle for Greene's religious interrogations, it's an insightful character study that engenders empathy, a love story and a colonial policier – the author certainly knew enough from his 'entertainments' not to let his audiences get bored.

For just three pages, The Heart of the Matter is also this gentle, playful thing, as Scobie soothes an ailing child by turning a po-faced missionary memoir, A Bishop Among the Bantus, into a story of murderous pirates being staked out by A. Bishop: Arthur Bishop. Perhaps he's doing it to impress or appeal to Helen, but like the killer in Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing and as FDR says about Al Smith in a crucial peroration, it is when we see how someone is received by a child that we might glimpse their inherent goodness.



That scene is one of the highlights of the superb 1953 film adaptation of The Heart of the Matter, with Trevor Howard perfectly cast as Scobie, and one that's always meant a lot to me. (4)

***

FILMS



The Cabin in the Cotton (Michael Curtiz, 1932) – This could have been a decent movie if it had been made a year later, given a sensible leading man, and had got off the bloody fence. It’s the story of Marvin Blake (Richard Barthelmess), a penniless ‘peckerwood’ (cotton picker) who’s put through school by stereotypical Southern planter Berton Churchill (white suit, white hair, big belly, booming voice), and finds himself caught between his employer and his persecuted people. This being a Hollywood studio film of the 1930s, those two realms are represented by two women: flirtatious peroxided floozy Bette Davis – the boss’s daughter – and good-but-unglamorous girl, Dorothy Jordan.

Warner Bros were clearly so worried not to threaten their box office receipts, though, that the film refuses to come out on the side of the workers (or for that matter the bosses), instead getting splinters from all its fence-sitting, as we learn that the planters “take the risk” while the pickers – several of whom are thieves and arsonists – are simply disgusted at Barthelmess for “tryna be somebody”, rather than calling him out for selling out. The eleventh-hour machinations required to stress that Churchill was acting illegally, rather than exploiting the inequalities of capitalism, are also frankly embarrassing. A year later, when voters had come out overwhelmingly for the New Deal, Warner gave the public what it wanted, with left-leaning state-of-the-nation classics like Heroes for Sale (also starring Barthelmess), Wild Boys of the Road and I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. Cabin in the Cotton affords Barthelmess one uncompromising spiel in his character’s climactic summation, but even that is followed by a right of reply.

I’m a fan of Barthelmess, but he is woefully miscast here – he was fresh-faced enough to play the boy next door in Way Down East and Tol’able David, but this is more than a decade later! You can’t play a clean-cut young man trying to find your place in the world when you’re 37. It was partly the star’s desire to keep playing these roles that led to his botched face lift in 1930, a time when the cosmetic industry was in its infancy, rendering his face virtually immobile. Though in time he learnt to use that to his advantage, in films like Four Hours to Kill! and Only Angels Have Wings (his great sound role), here he’s borderline hopeless, his mouth a drab smear, his face an expressionless mask.

Jordan, meanwhile, can’t act her way out of a cotton sack, though Davis is great fun in her breakthrough role, playing it broad, saucy and deceptively complex as a pampered Southern belle. Her character is manipulative and selfish, but there’s a vulnerability and an uncertainty there too, beneath the bluster, that anchors it in the realm of the real. She also gets to say one of the best lines of the decade, so perfectly rendered – and easily lampoonable – that it has transcended the movie: “I’d love to kiss ya, but I just washed ma hair.” Henry B. Walthall (like Barthelmess, a D. W. Griffith alumnus) has a nice bit too as an elder statemen, and I quite like the musicality of the film: Clarence Muse singing slave songs as a blind black picker, a jazz ensemble lighting up a planters’ dance as Barthelmess teaches the moneyed bosses how the proles dance.

The script, though, is too simplistic and hedged by timorousness to really score, and the technical limitations of 1932 make its fusing of exteriors and studio footage a little embarrassing (Tarzan, the Ape Man had similar problems with back projection the same year). Cabin in the Cotton is entertaining enough, and worth it for Bette completists and pre-Code nerds (hello, my people), but it’s not actually that, like, good. (2)

***



The LEGO Batman Movie (Chris McKay, 2017) – The Hellzapoppin' of superhero movies, its anarchic imagination throwing everything from dance numbers to Voldemort to a 'Bruce Wayne is a wanker' gag at us.

The density and hit-rate of its jokes is pretty incredible, as is the conception of Bats (perfectly-voiced by Will Arnett) as a conceited, showboating and commitment-phobic loser whose neuroses prevent him from being very good at his job. It can't quite maintain the momentum of its astonishing opening half-hour ("Yeah, as long as they're best friends"), which even makes the logos funny, but then neither could Hellzapoppin' – and it's just such good fun.

I think LEGO could have made as much money putting out safe, less clever, less original movies. It gives me a bit of faith in the world that they didn't. (3)

See also: I wrote about The LEGO Movie here, which first introduced this ridiculous Batman.

***

LIVE: Jackson Browne at the Royal Albert Hall
Saturday 24 June, 2017



I've listened to Jackson Browne's 1977 live album, Running on Empty hundreds of times over the years – it's one of those records that seems like it's always been there, this monolithic, thrilling thing, full of frailty and pain – so hearing him thundering through its title track, the years falling off him, was one of those privileges of my current life that doesn't feel quite real.

The show gets its character from the good-humoured, silver-haired Browne – weathering a deluge of requests, sticking to his setlist while affably pretending not to – leading a tight, subtly virtuosic band who are each given a chance to shine on expanded versions of numbers from across his five-decade career.

Perhaps only a half-dozen of these songs are truly great – 'The Pretender', its sense of vision withstanding its forced rhyming, delivered with a timely urgency; 'Before the Deluge', another piano-led '70s triumph; 'These Days', which becomes more poignant with each passing year – but the others are often played with conviction, panache and thoughtfulness, the intelligent readings tightly-honed in soundcheck, but with room for inspiration. He does a moving ‘Call It a Loan’, homages four inspirations with well-chosen covers – including Carlos Varela’s ‘Walls and Doors’ and Randy Newman’s ‘A Piece of the Pie’, which namechecks Brown himself – and repeatedly exposes his sensitive side with the likes of ‘In the Shape of a Heart’ and ‘For a Dancer’ (another classic, written for a fallen friend, and performed beautifully at the piano), but he finds time too to rock out: and several of the rock-outs really work live, with fantastic guitar solos from Val McCallum, and fine pedal steel work by Greg Leisz.

The star’s voice is remarkably good, a little huskier and deeper, Browne a little shorter of breath than he used to be, but only a little, and that new sound – allied to his understanding of his talent – lends his more backwards-looking, weary songs a mighty pathos. Now and then he can only plod, trapped by a perfunctory number some way beneath his best, but most of the show is admirably adventurous and accomplished, and when he dips into his finest work, and races into that unmistakable ‘Running on Empty’ riff, it's very special indeed. It's that guy off the record I've always loved. He's still around, he's standing right there, and somehow I'm in the crowd. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Bruce Dern, The Fire Next Time, and Fritz Lang being silly – Reviews #269

A mini-update, with a book and two movies.

BOOK



The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (1962) – This masterly work by James Baldwin, the poet-philosopher of the Civil Rights Movement, may seem superficially dated – written at a time when blacks couldn’t vote – but remains enduringly relevant, articulating the lot of the oppressed black American, but also the white, trapped in a prison of his own making, the shortcomings of his life and society twisted into antipathy against those who have nothing.

Across two letters – one to his nephew and namesake, the other to us – he talks passionately and persuasively of the beauty and strength of the black population, in contrast with the spiritually bankrupt, artistically sexless, self-denying, self-deluding dominant race, drowning in hypocrisy and given its moral authority by a Christianity whose white God has abandoned his black congregation. He rails at the supposed beneficence of RFK – lauded as a civil rights champion – and his ilk, asking why a negro can become President 'in 40 years' time'. Why only one man, exalted above others? Why should they be grateful for this endorsement? And why 40 years? Why not now?



Baldwin rejects, though, Elijah Muhammad’s call for vengeance, demanding instead that blacks and whites re-examine their roles, their relationships and even their lives, in order to forge an understanding, and so an America fit for both. He is writing, really, for a white audience: trying to articulate for them what it means to be black, to have been brought to the country in chains, to still bear the name of those who owned your ancestors, to be without a voice and a vote, feared and loathed and dared to ascend above your allotted station, so they lock you up or beat you down. It’s heartbreaking to read Baldwin’s contention that the state can hardly lock up all African-Americans, and then consider the spiralling prison population documented in the recent film inspired by the author’s work, I Am Not Your Negro.

The Fire Next Time is obligatory reading not just because of its prescience, but due to its far-reaching implications. Its thoughts on the legitimacy of experience, the ‘innocence’ of malignant privilege and the damage that we do by taking refuge in – and taking our cues from – a toxic status quo are messages not just for the far-right, who won’t read them, but for those well-intentioned people who speak when they should be listening (I count myself among them).

Interestingly – and crucially – though, the book isn’t purely polemical. It’s also personal, its conclusions elucidated through memoir: passages recalling Baldwin’s early years caught between the streets and the church, and addressing his relationship with his younger brother – an extraordinarily touching passage alighting upon universal experience. Man can Baldwin write. But more than that, he can think. (4)

***

FILMS



*MINOR SPOILERS*
CINEMA: The Driver (Walter Hill, 1978) – This chilly, existential ‘70s car film was the inspiration for Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, being the story of a nameless, impassive getaway driver (Ryan O’Neal), whose style, arrogance and motoring chutzpah make him a Person of Interest to both criminals and cops. You can see the influence of Melville’s sleek, sad Le Samourai, of Bullitt – which had ignited America’s interest in car chases (though it isn’t actually very good) – and of Hollywood’s new model crime film: violent, ironic and lacking in conventional heroes, from Charley Varrick to The Silent Partner.

The supporting cast here are wooden and O’Neal himself wasn’t much of an actor (his first line, following a long, wordless opening, serves to instantly puncture the impression), but he brings a certain sad-eyed weariness to a role where an absence of expression is a virtue, and Bruce Dern is excellent as the sardonic, garrulous detective who hates O’Neal’s guts – though when wasn’t he? Not all of its script lands, but it mixes terse philosophy with cynicism and black comedy quite effectively, and Walter Hill’s handling is first-rate. I speculated at first that it had traded fatalism for twists, and wondered whether that was a good thing. On reflection, I think you get the best of both worlds: the unpredictability and entertainment value of a script whose destination is unknown, but also an ending that's far deeper than it first appears: its storyline as circular and eternal as a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.



It’s particularly great to see this on the big screen (as part of Edgar Wright’s season of car pictures at the BFI), which throws you into the breathless, exhilarating, squealing car chases that are its raison d’être. A few years ago, I’d have said that nothing would bore me more, but after Fury Road and – curiously – realising during Tabu just what a difference screen size and environment makes to seeing a motorbike ride, I’m coming around. (3)



See also: Dern is an actor I like more and more. I first came across him in Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, in which he poured delightful levels of scorn upon the idea that Jack Nicholson was becoming a movie star. Then I saw Silent Running (above) as part of the first live Mayo and Kermode show, at Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds. Later I tracked down Posse, an ingenious revisionist Western, and saw how his countercultural leanings, and his representation of the promise of the '60s – gone to seed – helped to shape the New Hollywood. He's still immense today, in the likes of Nebraska and The Hateful Eight. Seeing The Driver got me thinking about when Dern wasn't excellent: after all, I'd asked the question. Well, he's cut adrift – hackneyed and toothily irrelevant –in Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot, and conspicuously dreadful in Joe Dante's The 'burbs. I wouldn't advise starting there.

***



CINEMA: Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921) – This Fritz Lang silent, based on an old German folk song and recently fully restored by the Murnau Foundation, is certainly an experience. The first 20 minutes is unbelievably boring and stilted, as two young lovers encounter Death (Bernhard Goetzke) – who's just stuck a massive wall up around his domain, like a less objectionable Donald Trump – and we encounter primitive direction, bad acting and dozens of wordy intertitles. If you thought talkies were talky, you should try silents.

Then Lang remembers he's a film director, jarring us out of our stupor by turning a beer glass into an hour-glass, before – from nowhere and nothing – creating one of the most moving moments of his whole career, as grieving fiancée Lil Dagover tries to clutch the spirit of her lost love (Walter Janssen), only for it to pass right through her. Having failed, she next turns to poison, hoping to join him in the afterlife. Instead, the gate opens, she ascends the steps and she meets the reaper, who amidst the burning candles that are human lives, offers her three chances to save her lover's life – all she must do is outwit Death once. The film is in six chapters (Lang clearly ripping off Tarantino, like everyone does), and these fantasy sequences form 3-5, with Dagover trying each time to save Janssen from death. Or should that be 'Death'?



The first, in Egypt, is a sort of Arabian Nights pastiche (but must be set more recently, as Janssen has a gun) – and it's lively enough, with some suitably grand sets. The second, set in Italy around the masked balls of carnival (prefiguring >Black Orpheus, which relocated the Orpheus myth to the Rio Carnival), is a little melodramatic and predictable, but easily the best of the three: compellingly told, with Lang's visual imagination augmenting the story. The third and final episode is just absolute shit, unless you're a fan of trick photography and offensive Japanese stereotypes, as our heroes try to evade a waddling racist caricature who looks like a fat, anthropomorphic mole.



Thankfully that's not the end of it, as Lang drags it back for the final chapter, adroitly and intelligently articulating the film's powerful, humanist message – facilitated by a respectful, even humane Death – while serving up an action climax with more than a hint of Griffith and DeMille (it's tinted red too, as was a similar scene at the end of that classic Kong-for-kids movie, Mighty Joe Young). At their best, both Dagover and Goetze are very persuasive, complicit in a sort of unstoppable melancholy, his weary and hers frenetic. The story is complemented, too, by a fine new score that builds impressively and helps the film to attain an overall coherence, while mirroring its various worlds.

I'm not quite sure how to judge a film that takes so long to spark into life, only to do so with a vivid verve, anticipates The Seventh Seal before tossing away our goodwill with interminable low comedy about the Japanese and their funny ways, and encompasses some of the worst of silent film, then turns out to be uncommonly profound: particularly about mortality, though also about love.

Two-and-a-half stars, I suppose. (That is a joke. But also what I'm giving it.) (2.5)

See also: 'Arabian Nights,' you say? Why yes, I have written about Doug Fairbanks' The Thief of Bagdad (I'd forgotten that it begins with the line "Put a shirt on, man", for which I would like to congratulate myself.

***

Thanks for reading.

Thandie Newton, Russian Revolution, and an evening with Elmer Bernstein – Reviews #268

Revel in my balanced lifestyle, as I review a film, a TV series, a novel, an exhibition and a gig.

FILM



The Mouthpiece (Elliott Nugent and James Flood, 1932) – I have such a soft spot for pre-Code movies, and especially the pungent, abrasive, censor-baiting comedies starring the likes of Lee Tracy (Blessed Event, The Nuisance, Call All Wires!), William Powell (Jewel Robbery, High Pressure) and Warren William (Beauty and the Boss). Though not uniformly, these had a tendency to be extremely funny and cynical, before discovering a latent tenderness that at its best was knitted into the fabric of the film, and at its worst saw the piece unravel into soapy melodramatics. Few, though, were ever as sweet and affecting as this one, in which William’s noble prosecutor reacts to tragedy by reinventing himself as an amoral shyster for the underworld (with a moustache, naturally), only to be changed back by the guileless southern office waif (Sidney Fox) he’s been trying to shag. It’s a little clumsy in places, and mistakes audacity for humour, but it’s saved by the performances.

Fox, a short-lived punchline remembered if at all for her sexual affairs with Universal execs, is hesitant and naïve in a way that might not all be intentional, but works its magic upon you, her innate ethereality, uncompromising morality and unexpected sexual potency convincing us unfailingly that a rich, powerful, overbearing and unapologetically unyielding lawyer would be desperate to sleep with, protect and be forgiven by her. As the lawyer, William dominates as he has to: he’s witty, assured and prepossessing, while allowing self-debasement and self-disgust to bleed into his performance, and he’s supported by the great Aline MacMahon, characteristically brilliant as she turns the somewhat familiar role of the lovelorn, patient secretary into something indelible. In these studio films, MacMahon often gave the impression of having just wandered in from real life: she could have the lightest touch with comedy, and spit out Warner Bros’ snappy zingers, but she was at her best when playing something heavy and truthful and whacked out.

Warren William didn’t star in as many – or as good – tailor-made comic vehicles as Tracy and Powell: his greatest roles were topping the bill in ensemble, state-of-the-nation films like Employees’ Entrance, which bristled with energy, anger and social comment, even if his megalomaniac sex pests powered these movies, and are what you remember of them (indeed, he returned to unrepentantly terrorising virgins in Skyscraper Souls later in 1932). The Mouthpiece is a leaner, slighter and simpler film, which zeroes in on the star, shows him through the eyes of two good women, and allows him an emotional sensitivity that was usually off limits for the pre-Code William. It’s not perfect, but it holds a special place in this cycle of films, and it has several beautiful moments, infused with a sweetness that’s tantalisingly bereft of saccharine or soap.

See also: I read the only existing Warren William biography a couple of years back. He really didn't have a terribly interesting life. For what's it's worth, Powell made a similar film to The Mouthpiece the same year, 1932, the stolid Lawyer Man, which gets a shot in the arm from Joan Blondell's sensitive, erotic performance, but is hampered by for some reason omitting any scenes that take place in a courtroom.

***

TV



"I'm interested in one thing, and only thing only: bent coppers."
Line of Duty: Series 4 (2017) – I wonder if this is the series to which we’ll look back and see that Line of Duty was beginning to go awry*, when a show that traded on an insider feel jettisoned any genuine concessions to realism, and became too daft and melodramatic and big and yet somewhat unconvincingly inter-connected. That’s its overall impact, but this season is packed with memorable characters, so stuffed with incident that it’s jawdropping in the moment, and yet still quietly dominated by Thandie Newton’s performance.

Newton is Roz Huntley, an arrogant, assertive DCI still scrambling to catch up after taking years off to start a family. When she gets the chance to close a serial killing case, she takes it, arresting Michael Farmer (Scott Reid), a learning-disabled loner incapable of riding out the interrogation (as Series 3 dealt with both Operation Yewtree and the Mark Kennedy affair, so this plot-thread appears inspired by another topical case, that of Making a Murderer’s damaged, eager-to-please, patently innocent Brendan Dassey). Enter AC-12, who have a few concerns about the strength of the evidence.

Line of Duty’s central triumvirate – Steve (Martin Compston), Kate (Vicky McClure) and Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) – are fantastic characters, but here they mostly just plod along. Earlier seasons perhaps saddled them with overly soapy subplots, but this time there’s very little character development, beyond the manufacturing of some unconvincing competition between the two junior officers. Things happen to them, but they don’t change.

Despite that, both Compson and Dunbar are excellent, with Hastings’ broiling sense of rectitude cleverly cast into doubt, and Steve’s somewhat squat stoicism – coupled to an impressively realised impetuosity – once more the defining flavour of the series. A mention too for Paul Higgins, memorable as the vituperatively violent Jamie in The Thick of It, whose patronising faux-earnestness pours out in overbearing, over-familiar line readings that might just be brilliant. Certainly his voice becomes a central part of the programme’s atmosphere, its feel and its identity.

Newton is given an exceptionally tricky role, so much of it internalised, so much of her character’s appearance being for the benefit of others, the actress variously asked to mask, contort, unshackle or abruptly unveil her feelings. Sometimes she’s barely allowed to give a performance at all, being asked to keep the audience in a permanent limbo, dropping clues or red herrings instead of inhabiting a role. And yet when it matters, as in that climactic interrogation, in which she suddenly becomes recognisably ‘feminine’ for the first time, she shows why she was an indie darling, Hollywood star and a stellar coup for Jeb Mercurio and co. That level of acting is rare, even in a show as lauded as Line of Duty (and especially compared to fellow guest star Jason Watkins, who has won a BAFTA and an Olivier, but is desperately unpersuasive here).

Series 4 feels like a bit of a dip after three compelling seasons: there are too many scrawny or barely-tied plot threads, its perhaps noble attempts to look at race and sexism come off more like window-dressing – a concession to ‘serious’ television, rather than state-of-the-nation polemicising – and its culprits are obvious in a way that they haven’t been before. But while its total impact is muted by these shortcomings and its sojourn into the incredible, it’s still cracking, addictive TV. Fella. (3)

*like Sherlock's third series, which was great in itself, but had sown within it the seeds of its own destruction

See also: I talked about the first three series here. My statistical survey on BAME characters in Line of Duty being mostly cowards, informers or bent coppers will have to wait, as I've realised that also describes the majority of the white characters.

***

BOOK



Often when the Spectator says something is brilliant, like the free market or Toby Young's new column, they're wrong. They're not wrong here.

A Long Way from Verona from Jane Gardam (1971) – This is such a special book: like Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel (one of my discoveries of this year), its heroine is a brutally honest teenage writer in a vanished England: and an outsider because she isn’t like anyone else. Like Angel, too, it has an innate, fierce unpredictability and a rapturously distinctive voice (ideally utilised in a first person narrative) which, by definition, make it nothing like Angel. Its wartime Yorkshire setting is intrinsic – the story set against the mercilessness and the brutal lottery of war, even on the Home Front – and it crashes into the narrative, but it isn’t a book about war. It’s a book about Jessica Vye and the world she inhabits, ridicules, abhors and attempts to negotiate, with uncertainty and arrogance and perseverance, and a conviction that never shakes, but does latch onto passing whims, and falls prey to her explosive temper. It is fascinating and funny and spectacularly unsentimental, as well as uncategorisable in the best possible way. (4)

***

EXHIBITION


Lenin's lovely manners

Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths (British Library) – I studied Russian history at GCSE, A-level and university (my undergraduate dissertation was on Stalin’s show trials), so I was very excited about the British Library’s exhibition, 100 years on from the revolution. They didn't let me down.

It’s vividly staged – in the space where I saw the Gothicism exhibition in 2014 – with digital screens and photographic lightboxes, all framed in vivid scarlet, enticing you in and guiding you through the story, beginning in a Tsarist Russia of unbelievable inequality, charting the mounting division and discontent, and then exploding into revolution, and the five years of bloodletting that were the Civil War (an oft-overlooked part of the story, dealt with in due detail here). Crucially, Russian Revolution does a formidable job of being a paper-led British Library exhibition without just showing you a lot of books.


The Whites' propaganda was largely rubs. Here's an exception.

There are books, papers and some irresistibly arresting posters, but also dozens of other artefacts – a Red Army cap; a peasant’s cheap, woven shoes; a wooden gun so alarmingly primitive it induces panic; a free gift given away at the Khodynka Field tragedy, the cheap tankard juxtaposed with one of Tsar Nicholas’s own immaculate regal glasses – listening posts, a giant digital map showing the marauding Red Army’s progress during the Civil War, and a climactic screening room, with Shostakovich on the PA and classic propaganda films by Eisenstein (October) and the Vasilievs (Chapaev, Stalin’s favourite on the big screen).


The greatest excuse of all time.

Now and then the exhibition text is a little drab or clunky, or begins discussing events or institutions before defining what they are, but the wealth of material is astonishing, and I got a particular visceral thrill from seeing the handwritten notes by Trotsky and Lenin – the latter applying under a pseudonym, extremely politely, to be a BL reader in 1902 – as well as those propaganda posters in the constructivist style, much homaged or parodied, but still bracingly and instinctively powerful. Like this one:



That constructivism I bum off so much

My main take-aways:

a) my uncontroversial view that the ‘communist’ experiment in Russia was essentially just a disaster (and one which continues to plague socialist causes) doesn’t look like being challenged any time soon

b) the reviled Tsar Nicholas II, later executed for his crimes against the workers, visited the wounded a day after a tragedy... *whistles*

(4)

***

LIVE



The Best of Elmer Bernstein (aka The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and more!)
at the Royal Albert Hall, Sun 18 Jun, 2017

This was such a fantastic show, and it’s been a pleasure to work on too, allowing me the chance to luxuriate in the movie music of the incomparable Elmer Bernstein, who has been a favourite since my teens (I often work to his music, particularly The Man with the Golden Arm, a hypnotic, unrelenting jazz offering that simply changed the way movies were scored), and to chat to the great comedy director, John Landis, who worked with Bernstein on 12 films, and was one of the co-hosts of this concert. The other was Peter Bernstein, Elmer’s son and John’s schoolmate, who shared funny, moving stories about his bold, brilliant, blacklisted father, as well as conducting the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra. With Peter on the podium, Landis shamblingly shuffling papers and regaling us with big, well-trodden showbiz tales, and a setlist showcasing Elmer’s pioneering work in everything from epics to comedies, Westerns to romances, and nature documentaries to sweaty, cynical, claustrophobic fag-end noirs, it was cosy, conversational and emotionally overwhelming in turn.

Some of the music was merely pretty and well-played, the show kicking off with a trio of pieces that have no real resonance to me – the theme from the Nat Geo TV show, a suite from The Ten Commandments, and the main title music from the bloated disaster movie, Hawaii, but everything that happened after that was wonderful in one way or another. Bernstein’s rhapsodic homage to/pastiche of classic Hollywood music – evoking the very history of Hollywood and composed for a ‘60s TV show called Hollywood and the Stars – was a revelation, captivating me with its sweeping, Steiner-esque beauty, and was followed by three cast-iron classics. The Man with the Golden Arm rapped and stuttered, its snares and cymbals mirroring the stabbing pain and breathless desperation of addiction (the film’s theme). To Kill a Mockingbird showed Elmer’s innate understanding of cinema, the composer isolating that the story’s raison d’etre is to deal with adult themes from a child’s perspective: the suite, then, for all its tension and frantic menace, is dominated by the music-box cues and elegiac simplicity of his main theme. And The Magnificent Seven, which closed the first half, was an explosion of exuberance: the piece seeming fresh and new all these years, as if heard for the first time. In this setting, one could appreciate not only Bernstein’s instinctive genius, but also his intelligence and craft: the violins leaping up for the final go-round, as the seven ride to the rescue.


I took this picture of the orchestra. It's not very good, is it?

The second half, once more peppered with Peter and Landis’s reminiscences, observations and easy badinage, was a similarly eclectic mixture of unassailable classics and genuine curios. The sleazy but rousing jazz of Walk on the Wild Side was followed by From the Terrace – intended to showcase the ‘romantic’ Bernstein, but a little dull (I know of the film only as an unapologetic Myrna Loy completest) – before a spirited take on the End Title music from ¡Three Amigos!, Landis’s favourite Bernstein score written for him, being that very post-modern thing: a gentle spoof of Elmer Bernstein’s Western scores. After that, we got the director’s favourite Bernstein score of all, a glorious new arrangement of Bernstein’s music for Scorsese’s period drama, The Age of Innocence, followed by a previously unheard – and unused – piece of music written for the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London (“I used Sam Cooke instead – it took a couple of years, but Elmer forgave me,” as Landis remembered), its pained, violent and discordant death-throes wrapped up in the eerie soundscapes we already know and love. And then it finishes as it must, with an exuberant Great Escape suite, rich in delayed gratification, as we hang on and on for that famous "Dah dah, dah dah dah-la-dah" only to find it fully reclaimed from the dire dirge of an England defeat, and reborn as the triumphant, playful, rousing anthem it once was.

That gets the biggest reception of the night, and so Peter steps back on stage to conduct one more: the scintillatingly sordid Sweet Smell of Success, Bernstein's other great jazz score of the '50s. It's a fitting climax to this celebration of a great artist, which gives us everything we could want, aside from Far From Heaven (my absolute favourite Bernstein score), and salutes his creativity without sugar-coating his personality. Elmer is painted as a man who fought endlessly against pigeon-holing, evaded easy categorisation, and was only able to forge the path he did by taking chances, erecting a wall around himself, and coating his brilliance in an impermeable level of arrogant authority. Bernstein wasn't needlessly abrasive like his predecessor and admirer, Bernard Herrmann (Peter recalls his dad once ringing Herrmann to say thank you for recommending him for a commission, to which the older composer said something along the lines of: "If I didn't think you could do it, I wouldn't have said you could. Now go away"), but from Landis's stories he emerges as a necessarily tough cookie, insulated from creative interference by his crusty self-confidence. I sat there thinking that I'm glad he was, because the cinematic landscape would be a much blander, duller place without him.

Then Landis came back on stage to shout "Go home", so we did. (3.5)

See also: I wrote about my favourite Bernstein piece for the Royal Albert Hall blog here.

***

Thanks for reading.