Hello!

We have a book review today, the latest film book by Alain Silver and James Ursini,  authorities on film noir since the earliest days of the movement’s recognition in English-language print. The key reference book Film Noir Encyclopedia is their work, with writers like Elizabeth Ward and Bob Porfirio. Collectors with just a few film noir videodiscs will likely already be familiar with their audio commentaries.

Alain and Jim’s latest film book is now out under the TCM imprint. The title is From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir.  Its focus is that single Hollywood movie made in 1944; their thesis is that Double Indemnity singlehandedly pushed the Production Code office to accept harder, more adult themes, permitting the depiction of subject matter previously restricted to seamy pulp fiction. In doing so it firmly established the basics of the first wave of romantic-expressionist film noir.

It’s like the recent exposé about the making of Chinatown, but set in 1944.More than half of the book is a production history for Double Indemnity, that gets deep into the studio politics and career maneuvers of some high-powered Hollywood talent during the war years. Actors Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray had to be  convinced to accept the roles of cold-blooded murderers. The big stars of those years were more closely associated with the characters they played, and avoided roles that could tarnish their image, and marketability.

The text introduces us to a gallery of fascinating personalities. The novel by James M. Cain had been purchased by Hollywood years before, but the Production Code censors wouldn’t allow the filming of such a salaciously immoral story. Looking for a sensational property for his third movie, ace writer-director Billy Wilder seized on Cain’s novel as a must-make project, despite the censor obstructions. Wilder’s prestigious writing partner Charles Brackett declined to be involved, and when James M. Cain wasn’t available to co-write, Wilder turned to the other hot hardboiled crime novelist of the day, Raymond Chandler. The clash of personal habits, tastes, and lifestyles between these talents makes for excellent reading; Silver and Ursini chart the progress of the film adaptation with an eye to determining each writer’s contribution. Nobody structured stories better than Billy Wilder, but he had learned English as a second language. Raymond Chandler’s skill with snappy American dialogue was unequalled.

The book sources Paramount’s original production records plus interviews and diary entries by the participants. A number of mysteries are investigated: How did Wilder and Paramount get the Censor office to approve content in direct conflict with the Production Code?  How did they slip Barbara Stanwyck’s suggestive dialogue and provocative costumes past the censors, let alone a giant no-no, the open depiction of a flagrantly adulterous relationship?

 

The authors also confirm / debunk some apocryphal legends attached to Double Indemnity. A finale in the San Quentin Gas Chamber was scripted, filmed, edited and possibly previewed, but dropped at the last minute. Did the Gas Chamber scene serve as a kind of censorship insurance policy, to be used if the Code insisted that the guilty murderer be shown to pay for his crime?

The exhaustively researched From the Moment They Met It Was Murder functions as a group biography for several of its participants. The book  begins by recounting the 1920s crime that inspired Cain’s book Double Indemnity, a fascinating case of a husband murdered for an insurance payout. At the time it was considered The Trial of the Century, attended by celebrities and reported by cynical newsmen who would later become Hollywood screenwriters.

Alain Silver is an experienced film producer, and makes the book’s analysis of the production process yield more insights on the filming. A young actress was hired to play the murder victim’s daughter, but was dismissed before filming began because she looked ‘like a 12 year old.’  The movie was noted for its realism, but except for a very few establishing shots, every scene was filmed on indoor sound stages at Paramount.

 

As with Chinatown exactly 30 years later, the phenomenon of Double Indemnity became a major Hollywood talking subject. Wilder’s film was influential in that producers could now depict violence and adult concerns more directly. Silver and Ursini have collected a wealth of editorial and review excerpts addressing the sea change in what could now be filmed for America’s screens.

The final chapters of From the Moment They Met It Was Murder will interest readers more deeply attuned to film noir as a film movement and a style (not a genre), as indicated with the title extension … and the Rise of Film Noir. The authors offer proof that Double Indemnity became the springboard for the noir explosion of ‘dark’ thrillers that flourished in the following decade. The authors chart the filmmakers and the movies, showing Double Indemnity’s continuing influence. Billy Wilder would himself contribute three more titles to the effort, including the masterpieces  Sunset Blvd. and  Ace in the Hole. For rigorous students of film noir, the book’s extensive footnotes and bibiliography are an instant research source.

 

From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir is available variously in softcover and hardbound, at  Barnes & Noble,  Target,  Hachette Book Group and  Amazon.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

An English idea of a ‘good American’ … and a flattering depiction it is.

 

Hello!

As forwarded by correspondent-advisor “B”, there’s a good new Variety article by Owen Gleiberman on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.  I can’t say I was talem by other articles, featurettes and even a feature film or two devoted to analyzing hidden meanings perceived in the Stephen King adaptation. Gleiberman’s appraisal won me over by saying what we felt from the beginning — The Shining has plenty of brilliant things going for it, but it never seemed all that scary. The article is

A Documentary Meditation on Stanley Kubrick’s Rooms of Fear.
The article focuses on a short documentary ‘made in cooperation with the Kubrick estate’ about the creation of the sets and the use of locations for the movie. We always found the settings for The Shining to be 1,000% effective, mood-inducing and hypnotic: all those vast rooms with just a couple of people in them are the exact opposite of an ‘Old, Dark House.’

The docu is only 25 minutes long — no Cinema Bloat here — and filled with excellent footage of the filming seen nowhere else. I’m just a causal Kubrick booster, and it grabbed me right away. It’s on YouTube:

Shine On — The Forgotten Shining Location
They have the actual BTS shot for one of the late Shelley Duvall’s crack-up scenes, synchronized with the movie sound track. It’s really impressive.

 

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When Michael McQuarrie said he had a link to a video about the movie  Grand Prix, I thought he was talking about an old MGM promo. No, this is a brand new item, and it’s about a lot more than that one movie …

The Insane Realism of the Film That Invented the Modern Car Movie
It incorporates a lot of footage from car-related pictures, including Charlie Chaplin’s first appearance as The Tramp. The creator is Patrick H. Willems… who has an entire stack of YouTube video shows online.

 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Still a fun stop-motion picture … we hope Jim Danforth is doing well!

 

Hello!

We certainly post too many links circulated by Joe Dante, and have been trying to behave ourselves. But this Mubi  ‘Notebook Festival’ article by Forrest Cardamenis from just a few days ago calls out to be read:

The Necrophile’s Dilemma
The subject is the screening of rare film prints by special groups, archives, museums and collectors, with an eye to the reality that precious ancient film, especially nitrate prints, are fragile and unstable, and that even best projection wears them out and risks their permanent loss.

That’s of course a problem. Movies were meant to be seen, yet screening them puts them at risk. I remember that long ago the County Museum of Art held a D.W. Griffith series, showing a lot of very precious, very old film … some of which surely was nitrate. Was that wise, or appropriate?  I’m not the one to judge. At UCLA in Melnitz Hall in the 1970s, the then-new Film Archive constantly screened the studio library prints on deposit from Fox and Paramount.

The generosity of the donation was likely an illusion — not only did the studios save a fortune in storage fees for the libraries, they probably negotiated a sweet tax break.

Melnitz 1409 was the ideal picture palace — 300 or so seats with better-than-ideal projection. ‘Scope movies looked enormous there, stretching wall-to-wall. We knew were were privileged, to be able to see all of the Marlene Dietrich – Von Sternberg pictures in flawless 35mm nitrate. Audiences were spellbound by  The Scarlet Empress, which looked like a hallucination. The phrase, ‘the silver screen’ took on a real meaning.

On the other hand, the Archive’s perfect 35mm nitrate print of the pre-Code horror  Island of Lost Souls apparently saw a lot of use, being shipped here and there to festivals. Although I think I saw it on TV in the ’60s, it was considered difficult to see. When Island of Lost Souls finally arrived on disc from Criterion, it looked good but not terrific — I have a terrible feeling that that one print may have been the best available source. That’s just a guess, but in 1973, before video and before what we now think of as systematic film preservation and ‘asset management,’ not too many experts had a pure preservation mindset.

The Cardamenis article is an excellent read — he touches on a number of important issues and talks about specific archival screenings in a way that assures me that a film élite somewhere is seeing all the great stuff I’ll never see. Recommended.

 

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We’ll eagerly check out a new disc from Mario Bava any day. To my (faulty) knowledge, no Mario Bava film has been yet released on 4K … Riccardo Freda beat Mario to the punch last year with Vinegar Syndrome’s surprise 4K Ultra HD of  The Horrible Dr. Hichcock.  Does the legion of Bava completists extend to his son Lamberto, also a film director?

In August, Synapse will test that question with Lamberto Bava’s horror shows  Demons and  Demons 2 in 4K Ultra HD. Coming from the ‘gore splatter’ era of Euro-horror, these are pretty much after my time, but their fans are legion. The advertising stresses the rock music soundtracks. Whattaya going to do with fans of ’80s horror, anyway?

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Westwood’s famed ’30s picture palaces have closed their doors … although the Village may persist.

Hello!       An ode to changing Hollywood…

Whoa, talk about personal history being erased. As the era of photochemical film passed years ago, I’m just coming to accept that every place I ever worked in ‘Hollywood’ is drastically altered, if not expunged. Giant labs are now storage facilities and a hundred small businesses catering to film production have vanished, from little sound companies that specialized in temp mixes, to storefront labs that developed ‘dirty dupe’ B&W copies from which we edited TV spots and trailers. I’d visit editor friend Steven Nielson in little cutting rooms all over town, wherever cheap rent could be found, running into freelance special effects wizards and actors-turned producers like James Hong.

But I didn’t expect all the movie palaces to go away. I never really got to see the cathedral-like downtown theaters in operation, as most of them folded in the 1960s. But in the ’70s we still had Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Westwood, which was THE place to see new movies, the place for celebs to be seen, AND the happy haunt of 30,000 UCLA students. Those of us without cars could walk down for a bite, snoop around several big bookstores, and take in the very latest first-run movie, at the then-steep ticket price of Three Dollars. The first Westwood show I personally saw was  Catch-22, the summer before I started school.

I had student jobs in Westwood, first on a parking lot (what a bunch of crooks!) and then at Westwood’s brand-new National Theater, where I thoroughly abused the free movie tickets perk. I got to take my out-of-town girlfriend (bless her) to hot-title attractions like  The Godfather and  Deliverance, not to mention FILMEX at the Grauman’s Chinese, to see a miraculous Technicolor print of  Vertigo on an enormous screen.

The papers have reported that the ‘flagship’ theaters The Village and The Bruin have shuttered.  (Top Image) ↑  They were considered top venues. I don’t remember too many terrific memories at The Bruin, the theater Sharon Tate visits in Tarantino’s  Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I do remember seeing Days of Heaven there, in 70mm, I believe. But The Westwood, the one with the tall tower, is packed with memories — a preview of the De Laurentiis  King Kong with Rocco Gioffre (ugh), Wilder’s  Avanti! with Steve Sharon, watching Jon Davison pace the lobby during a preview screening of  Starship Troopers, and a wonderfully memorable screening of  The Thin Red Line with my teenaged son. Great stuff all around.

They say that a consortium of film directors will try to keep The Village going, but the question is, can any single-screen theater stay open without a good flow of exclusive product people are willing to Go Out to see brand new, without waiting?  I was once a theater rat, running from museums to school to The Vagabond and The Encore. At my present age I now have an excuse to stick closer to home. But the rest of the culture now has so many other interests and entertainments to pursue. Movies are no longer the universal Thing To Do that everybody keeps up with. Who knows what will be?

Westwood and The Village Theater in 1933… a mostly undeveloped landscape. (from This eye-opening web page.) 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

I wish these mop-tops were more Wyndham-menacing, and less like pacifist martyrs.  It takes a Village, I guess.

 

Hello!

I hope you aren’t sitting in an airport somewhere, still trying to get home from a ‘minor’ computer melt-down that crippled a big chunk of civilization last Friday. We had a minor hangup in Atlanta with Delta just three days before, and thought we had bad luck. Good grief.

↑  First up today at CineSavant is a handsome bit of stop-motion fun from StopmoNick. It was posted a year ago but has been floating around the web for week; if you’re as disconnected as I am, maybe it’ll be news.

And it’s very brief, too:

Orlock 

The talented animator-craftsman offers additional ingenious stop-motion treats, on his YouTube page, just titled  ‘StopmoNick.

 

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And congratulations to Laura of the movie review blog  Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings, which has just marked its 18th year. Laura’s posts can always be depended upon for sane, sensible & thoughtful insights. I envy her ability to so consistently ‘muse’ with such finesse. She sees things in movies that flit by my dim perception.

I almost don’t want to think about how long I’ve been doing this online writing … I’m convinced that people I meet must think,  “What…?”  and  “Don’t you know that hard media is dead?”  and  “Why?”   Well, having been able to exchange occasional notes with people like Laura is a reward in itself.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

It’s a relationship movie… Lulu and Countess Geshwitz could have lived happily ever after. (And coming on Blu-ray.)