Day 63: "Good Night, and Good Luck"

Director: George Clooney 2005
I really wanted to like this movie. I'd heard many good things from critics and friends, plus I'd lately found myself a prisoner of some strange phantom zone of bad 1930's films. I needed a good movie. But "Good Night, and Good Luck" was a major disappointment. I've always admired Edward R. Murrow (obviously I missed his live radio broadcasts from war-ravaged London, and I was too young for his "See It Now" programs, although I have a vague memory of his lighter "Person to Person" shows, and I am old enough to remember his classic report on migrant workers, "Harvest of Shame"). My parents held Murrow in awe, and with good reason: he was a reporter of great eloquence and integrity. But he was also a human being, something this film never addresses. "Good Night, and Good Luck" simply never comes alive, so embalmed is it on its own somberness and sense of nobility. David Strathairn's performance is fine (as are all the actors), but I never got away from the feeling that he was doing anything more than an excellent impersonation. Compare that with Philip Seymour Hoffman's Truman Capote, a performance of great sublety that always seems real and alive.
A friend told me he thought the movie--with all its black-and-white close-ups (obviously dictated by budget)--seemed like an episode of "The Twilight Zone." He's right. At any moment, I could see Rod Serling walking through all that cigarette smoke and talking in a voice almost as distinctive as Murrow's.
If you want to learn more about Murrow, get a copy of A.M. Sperber's "Murrow: His Life and Times" (1986).

Day 62: "Remember Last Night"

Director: James Whale 1935
This movie is so obscure that the IMDB doesn't have an image for it--and there's a good reason for its obscurity: it's unbelievably awful. I seem to be trapped in some kind of 1930s black hole of stinko pictures (see the two immediate entries below). I TiVo'ed this on TCM (best network on TV) because Whale was the director, and he did great things with "Frankenstein" and "Bride of Frankenstein." But whatever magic he had is sadly absent in this comic-murder mystery. It's as if someone at Universal took a look at the deserved popularity of the Thin Man pictures and decided to make a movie in that dry-martini vein. What you get are Robert Young and Constance Cummings as drunken, dithering Long Island aristos who are caught up in a couple of murders. The dialogue is so arch, the delivery so bone-headed that you realize what gifted actors Myrna Loy and William Powell were. There also is one of the most racist scenes I've ever seen in a film outside of "Birth of a Nation." Even for an movie freak like me (meaning I'll give almost anything any old film a try), this was painful.

Day 61: "The Women"

Director: George Cukor 1939
The famous movie based on the famous play by Clare Boothe Luce. I suppose today it can be viewed as a camp classic, what with all the bitchiness and cat-fighting--not to mention a fashion show segment, during which the black-and-white film turns to color, that has to be seen to be believed. There is not a man in sight, yet the film is all about how these divorced women want their rich, cheating mates back--or a new mate if the old one is uncooperatrive. There are some good performances, notably the wonderful and sexy Paulette Goddard, and it's fun to see MGM's female stars--Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell and others--strut their nasty stuff, often while wearing the oddest hats to be seen since the futuristic vision of 1936's "Things to Come." But Cukor's direction is off in places (perhaps because Clark Gable has just had him fired from "Gone With the Wind"), and there are some truly cringe-provoking moments (Shearer's daughter talking to herself about her parents' impending divorce, and Shearers's final climb up a long staircase where her ex-hubby awaits). If there's some early feminist subtext in all this nonsense, it escapes me.

Day 60: "Gabriel Over the White House"

Director: Gregory La Cava 1933
Truly a goofball movie that weirdly resonates today. Walter Huston plays a party hack elected president who plans to do as little as possible. After a car accident (the president himself is driving over 90 mph!), Huston's character wakes from a coma a new man, thanks to divine--or at least archangelic--intervention. No longer a do-nothing pol, President Hammond adjourns Congress and basically assumes the powers of a dictator. As such, he leans to the left (he creates a work force for America's unemployed--this before FDR's WPA), but he also leans to the right (he suspends habeas corpus (sound familiar?), at least for racketeers, who are court-martialed (that's right, court-martialed), then executed before firing squads in sight of the Statue of Liberty!). Nutty enough? Finally, he meets with representatives from all the world's nations (at least the ones who owe us money from World War l) and threatens to call in America's I.O.U.s unless the world agrees to destroy all munitions and work for peace. As he signs this treaty, he collapses and dies. What a movie!
There are references to Lincoln throughout (a bust in the Oval Office, Lincoln's quill-pen on the president's desk)--and Huston had actually played Lincoln just three years before in a bio-pic directed by D.W. Griffith. "Gabriel" was produced by William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Pictures in 1932, but not distributed (by M-G-M, no less) until after the presidential election to avoid any possibility of influencing voters (Hearst was no friend of FDR's). Watching this today makes you realize how desperate Americans were during the early years of the Depression. Although his heart is in the right place, President Hammond clearly straddles the line of Fascism. The more you think about this seemingly silly movie, the scarier its premise becomes.

Day 59: "The Bad and the Beautiful" "Two Weeks in Another Town"

Director: Vincente Minnelli 1952, 1962
"The Bad and the Beautiful" is a wonderfully entertaining movie about Hollywood, directed by Minnelli, produced by John Houseman, written by Vincent Schnee, scored by David Raksin, headlined by Kirk Douglas. The screenplay disguises real Hollywood characters and their stories (David O. Selznick, Diana Barrymore, Val Lewton, a little William Faulkner), jazzes them up, connects them where maybe there are no connections--and somehow creates a witty, nasty, fast-paced coctktail that dazzles more than half a century later. Added bonuses: Gloria Grahame as a not-so-innocent Southern belle, and Raksin's great music. Even Lana Turner manages a good performance.
Ten years later, the same principals--Minnelli, Houseman, Schnee, Raksin and Douglas--reunited to take another swipe at a movie about film-making. Lightning doesn't strike twice, but "Two Weeks in Another Town" has enough interesting moments to make it worth watching--if, like me, you're curious to see how creative people improve--or don't.
Despite its pedigree, "Town" is not a sequel to "Bad." Here, Douglas is a washed-up actor, summoned to Rome, where a washed-up director (Edward G. Robinson) in making some sort of costume melodrama. Robinson and his wife (Claire Trevor, who played Robinson's moll in "Key Largo" in 1948) are nasty, desperate people. Douglas' character is barely holding on to his sanity. His ex-wife (a wooden Cyd Charisse) is a nymphomaniac. There are complications everywhere. There also are some fine Minnelli touches. Yet as a whole, the film's just not that interesting. But it does move. At one point, Robinson screens "The Bad and the Beautiful." The fiction here is that Robinson's character directed it, and Douglas' character starred in it. When Douglas tells Robinson he's a great director, Robinson says, "I was great once." It's as if Minnelli is talking about himself.
Based on the novel by Irwin Shaw (and someday I'll tell the story of the night my wife and I drank way too much whiskey with Shaw, who was one of the most charming people we've ever met).

Day 58: "A Murder of Quality"

Director: Gavin Millar 1991
George Smiley, the brilliant spymaster created by John LeCarre, has been played by four actors over the years, most famously by Alec Guinness in the superb mini-series "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (1979) and "Smiley's People" (1982). Before Guinness, James Mason portrayed Smiley in 1966's "The Deadly Affair," based on LeCarre's first novel, "A Call for the Dead" (Mason's character was called Charles Dobbs). The year before, Rupert Davies briefly appeared as Smiley in "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold." Then Guinness stamped his genius on the role.
"A Murder of Quality" is close to a classic British mystery, set in the mid-1950s at a boarding school where a teacher's wife has been savagely killed. An old friend askes Smiley to investigate, which he does in his customary cerebral way. Denholm Elliott is terrrific as Smiley, bringing his own gifts to the role. The usual great supporting cast of Brit actors is present: Glenda Jackson, Joss Ackland and a teenaged Christian Bale. The film, made for British TV, feels like many of the imported productions seen on PBS's "Mystery." I'm not sure why it was never seen over here (as far as I know). It's new to DVD--well worth renting.