Zou Zou / Princess Tam Tam

Two fascinating relics of the French cinema in the mid-30s, both semimusicals starring the great black dancer Josephine Baker in all her glory, and both very interesting for the racial attitudes they reveal. In each feature Baker is paired with a white male star–Jean Gabin as a brother-by-adoption and sailor-turned-electrician in Marc Allegret’s Zou Zou (1934), and Albert Prejean as an aristocratic novelist in Edmond Greville’s Princess Tam Tam (1935)–who is set up as a potential lover, but who eventually passes her up for a white woman. (Even with these supposed safeguards, these movies were deemed virtually unexportable to the U.S. at the time, when big-budget movies starring blacks were unheard of; Princess Tam Tam, the more racist of the two, had a brief American run during the 40s, but only in a highly censored version.) In Zou Zou, which has the somewhat more plausible plot of the two (and was one of the biggest French box-office hits of its year), Baker and Gabin grow up together in the circus and wind up working at the same Paris music hall; in Princess Tam Tam she’s a Tunisian native–almost a Rousseau-like noble savage–discovered by Prejean, a Parisian abroad who uses her as the raw material for his novel, in which he imagines her taking Paris by storm (as Baker herself did in the 20s) and making his wife jealous. Read more

See You in the Morning

Jeff Bridges gives one of his best performances to date in an absorbing romantic comedy-drama written and directed by Alan J. Pakula about the emotional confusions and adjustments that take place when a divorced psychiatrist (Bridges) and a widow/photographer (Alice Krige), both of whom have two children from their previous spouses, decide to get married. The New York setting and the economic bracket and well-educated veneer of the characters (as well as the effective use of familiar songs) suggest the world of Woody Allen, but this is incomparably better in its insights and density than any of Allen’s efforts; the characters steadily grow in interest and complexity as the plot unfolds, and although the two-hour movie may be slightly longer than it has to be, it does a surprisingly deft job of acquainting us with about a dozen major characters, not one of whom is a stock figure. With Farrah Fawcett (as the psychiatrist’s former wife), Drew Barrymore, Lukas Haas, David Dukes, Frances Sternhagen, George Hearn, Theodore Bikel, and Linda Lavin. All these actors are very fine, but the always able Bridges surpasses himself–his performance is a series of inventive and unexpected grace notes throughout. (Ford City East, Edens, McClurg Court, Orland Square, Woodfield, Forest Park, Burnham Plaza, Oakbrook, Golf Mill, Lincoln Village, Evanston, Norridge, Webster Place) Read more