Daily Archives: May 29, 2021

Anthony Mann/Laurence Harvey/Mia Farrow/Steve Brodie/Audrey Long

A DANDY IN ASPIC, directed by Anthony Mann (and Laurence Harvey, uncredited), with Harvey and Mia Farrow (1968, 107 min.) + DESPERATE, directed by Anthony Mann, with Steve Brodie and Audrey Long (1947, 73 min.)

Spurred by some comments from Brad Stevens in the chatgroup “a film by,” I finally catch up with Anthony Mann’s last film, A Dandy in Aspic –– a convoluted spy thriller set in London and Berlin that was completed by its star, Laurence Harvey, after producer-director Mann died in the middle of shooting. It appears that most of the handsomely framed London exteriors are Mann’s work while the excessive use of zooms in the Berlin exteriors and elsewhere are most likely the work of Harvey. Anyway, this is an interesting test-case for auteurists, because, as Stevens notes, there are plenty of thematic as well as stylistic traits here that one can associate with Mann, but at the same time -– dare I say it? -– much of the film strikes me as as being terrible in spite of this. The key problems for me are the lead performances by Harvey and Farrow, both of whom strike me as being so far adrift from recognizable human behavior that one can accept their characters only as theorems and/or abstractions, metaphysical or otherwise. Read more

Barack Obama/The New Yorker

Seeing two kinds of discourse in a head-on collision can sometimes be instructive, and the current flap over the cover of the July 21 issue of The New Yorker offers a good illustration of how divided against itself this country can be. I’ve been thinking lately that America At War With Itself has been such a constant in our national life for so long now—at least since the JFK assassination—that many of us are ready to take it as permanent and unchangeable. One might even argue that if Barack Obama proposes a radical change in the way our political life is conducted—one that transcends the issue of whether or not he’s a “conventional” politician—this transpires in the way that he suggests trying to put an end to that war by looking for common aims and interests. Which means nothing less than a change in the national discourse. This is the real war that he’s trying to end–not the alleged “war” in Iraq that isn’t really a war at all but a military occupation. (The fact that it isn’t really a war starts to become clear as soon as one seriously tries to define either victory or defeat coherently. What could either possibly mean if one doesn’t bother to factor in the will of the Iraqi people–which is precisely what most of the American media have been failing to do? Read more

Pete Kelly’s Blues

Now that Jack Webb’s glorious PETE KELLY’S BLUES has finally become available on DVD, this seems like an appropriate time to exhume my Chicago Reader film blog post about it in 2007, now happily out of date, and update the links:

The market value of a missing movie
February 16th – 9:31 a.m.

Don’t ask me how, but I recently had a chance to resee Jack Webb’s Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955), a terrific, atmospheric, period noir in Cinemascope and WarnerColor about a cornet player (Webb) in a Dixieland band in 1927 Kansas City (after an evocative prologue in 1915 New Orleans and 1919 Jersey City showing us where and how Pete Kelly came by his cornet). It’s got an amazing cast: Edmond O’Brien, Janet Leigh, Peggy Lee, Lee Marvin, Andy Devine (in a rare and very effective noncomic role), Ella Fitzgerald, and even a bit by Jayne Mansfield as a cigarette girl in a speakeasy. The screenplay, which deservedly gets star billing in the opening credits, is by Richard L. Breen, onetime president of the Screen Writers Guild and apparently a key writer on Webb’s Dragnet, and it’s full of wonderful and hilarious hardboiled dialogue and offscreen narration by Webb. Read more