One of the youngbloods, a relatively new arrival here at the halfway house, is standing by my bunk with a look of desperation. It’s Sunday afternoon and he’s too broke to do anything but languish in here with us old timers. I slide my pile of Brooklyn Public Library DVD’s over for his perusal. After scanning the titles for a moment, he grimaces sadly and says, “I meant good movies.”
“There’s some good movies in there.”
He squinted at one box: “McCabe and Mister Miller? 1971? Man, I was born in 1983. Why would I wanna watch some wild west crazy shit made when I wasn’t even around?”
“The old black and white Casablanca stuff y’all watch… nah, man, thanks, I’ll pass.”
I returned to the portable DVD player on my lap, to Carnival of Souls. I didn’t mean to lie to the young man– movies are newspapers, produced in a frenetic daily grind, stuffed with advertising, distributed in a blitz as far and wide as fiscally possible, then cast aside, forgotten the next day. But I figure asserting the notion of movies as something other than disposable infotainment would give him food for thought.
I’m leaving for Cannes tomorrow, which is, you know, fantastic, but there are things going on in New York over the next week or so that I’m sad to miss. The other night, I went to Lincoln Center to see Jonah Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000(about which I have good things to say, but begrudgingly––I can’t help but suspect that this was the template for that micro-genre of milquetoast Oscar bait, the Remember When We Were Young, Liberal and Semi-Bohemian? ensemble dramedy, which always portends relevance but rarely manages to pull off a whole hell of a lot beyond getting ten people to, eventually, eat dinner together), and that was the first I’d heard of the Film Society’s tribute to Jennifer Jones, which begins Friday (the day I arrive in Cannes) and ends May 24 (the day before I leave).
Drat, and all the more annoying because I’ve been longing for the time to devote to a Jennifer Jones kick lately, ever seeing Ruby Gentry two weeks ago at Anthology. And also, because Dan Callahan’s profile of Jones timed to the series at The House Next Door gives such a great picture of what I’m missing. I’d kill to see Jones in Ernst Lubitsch’s last finished film, Cluny Brown. Jones “turns her own (feigned?) obliviousness into the drollest, most sophisticated of dirty jokes,” Callahan writes. “As low-born Cluny, whose love of plumbing stands in for her incipient sexual possibilities, Jones is an unending delight, finding just the right note of wide-eyed eccentricity for Lubitsch’s satire of English mores.”
Sigh –– I love it when plumbing stands in for incipient sexual possibilities. If you’re in town over through next weekend, check out one or two of these films and let us know what you think. I’ll just have to make do with the above, hauntingly weird “homage” to Cluny Brown, scored to Bjork.
Today would have marked the 100th birthday of Barbara Stanwyck. Perhaps the greatest tough-cookie of an era in which tough-cookies were in no short supply, Stanwyck worked steadily from the 30s through the 60s. She had a rare gift for adopting the expected conventions of any given genre, while maintaining her signature blend of wise-cracking sensuality and drowsy hostility.
Some of Ms. Stanwyck’s must-see performances are screening on Turner Classic Movies today and tonight; though I’d prefer to watch Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, the gem of the program is probably Baby Face, which airs tonight at 8pm EST. Baby Face was the ultimate pre-Code picture, and one of the least morally defensible products of Warner Brother’s early-30s stab at social relevancy. Stanwyck plays Lily, a saloon maid who, perhaps too-loosely interpreting the advice of her Nietzschean mentor, “accidentally” kills her father and, with her handservant/only friend in tow, hightails it to the big city to commence sleeping her way to the top.
The film was so racy in its original incarnation that when it was initially released in the relatively-wild pre-Code era, significant cuts had to be made to appease the censors. The original cut was found and screened at Film Forum in New York last year; as the New York Times‘ Dave Kehr put it at the time, “with its five full minutes of sleaze restored, it has to be seen to be not quite believed.”
For more on our girl Babs, check out these tributes from around the web:
“[I'd] rank Stanwyck\’s abilities above that entire Picturegoer list, even above Garbo, who was an instinctual actress and not the superb technician that Stanwyck was.” — Self-Styled Siren
“She was a great star, and also happened to be a rock-ribbed right-winger and anti-communist
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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