Filmmakers and spectators both suffer substantially from the sort of critical typecasting fostered by the marketplace and its reliance on advertising shorthand. I once heard Terry Gilliam complain that he was surrounded by people trying to come up with “typical Gilliam touches” when those were just the sort of things he wanted to avoid. And even when I was in grammar school, Cecil B. De Mille, another large-scale director, was one of the few movie auteurs along with Disney, Ford, and Hitchcock whose artistic identity I could readily recognize, even though, as Luc Moullet points out in his 2012 book about DeMille, L’Empereur du mauve (literally, “The Emperor of Purple”), the overblown contrivances and vulgarities of DeMille’s pictures, combined with their popularity, virtually excluded him from art and serious criticism as far as the U.S. was concerned. The DeMille profile that I recognized in the Eisenhower era was basically that of a Republican patriarch who delivered epic adventures and Biblical spectaculars, an impression broadened only slightly by his 1952 circus blockbuster The Greatest Show on Earth. Read more
Conceivably the most neglected of James Whale’s better works, this hilarious period farce (1937, 91 min.) imagines a hoax perpetrated by the Comedie Francaise in order to teach the famous and conceited English actor David Garrick (Brian Aherne) “a lesson in acting.” The only problem is, Garrick is in on the gag from the beginning, leading to a variety of comic complications at a country inn. Boisterous and high-spirited, this sport of a movie helps to justify critic Tom Milne’s claims that Whale was a kind of premodernist Jean-Luc Godard; rarely have the art and pleasure of acting, demonstrated here in countless varieties of ham, been demonstrated with as much self-reflexive energy (with the possible exception of Sylvia Scarlett), and Whale’s enjoyable cast (including Olivia de Havilland, Edward Everett Horton, Melville Cooper, Lionel Atwill, Lana Turner, Marie Wilson, Albert Dekker, Fritz Leiber, and the wonderfully manic Luis Alberni) takes full advantage of the opportunity. Ernest Haller’s cinematography creates an intriguing period film noir atmosphere, and Ernest Vajda’s script gives the players all the chances to cut up that they need. On the same program, Bob Clampett’s Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Cookin’, Doc?Read more
Herman Mankiewicz is undoubtedly the victim of a credit thief, but the thief in question isn’t Orson Welles but director David Fincher, brandishing and “delivering” the screenplay of his late father Jack. All the best lines in this script come from Herman, but Fincher Sr. is allotted the only writing credit because that’s the way money (not writing) is supposed to work in Lotusland. Yet we’re supposed to credit Mank for telling us how Old Hollywood thought about itself (and incidentally about us too–assuming that we must be idiots for buying into all their lies, Louis B. Mayer’s as well as Fincher’s). I got tired very quickly of all the witty lines, by Herman and Jack alike, thinking, “Can’t somebody, just once, speak half-normally? Is cynicism the only spice we’re allowed to taste, Hecht and Company by the bucketful?” Yes, I know (spoiler alert), the white wine came up with the fish, and all I could think about, almost to Mank‘s bitter end, was when Jack would finally work in that climactic line. Finally, climactically, at the bitter end, natch. Give that dead man an Oscar. Read more
On October 23, 2021 Tenement Press will release The Liberated Film Club, a collection of transcripts, texts, etc., related to a screening series of the same name that took place at London’s Close-Up Film Centre 2016–2020.
Screen Slate invited critic Jonathan Rosenbaum to review the book.
I’m a sucker for genre-defying “What is it?” books, and this one is further enhanced as well as complicated by chronicling a London film club that’s no less eccentric and transgressive in its refusal to stand still and behave reasonably or even (on occasion) coherently. This is plainly an anarchist book designed for insiders, and I’m an outsider—or maybe one could say that this is an anarchist book designed for outsiders, and we’re all outsiders interested in redefining what an alleged “inside” might consist of. Read more
