By Jason Apuzzo. The new Ten Commandments Blu-ray comes out this Tuesday, March 29th (see the trailer for the Blu-ray at the bottom of this post). Paramount will be releasing a 2-disc Blu-ray set of the classic film, and also a Limited Edition 6-disc DVD/Blu-ray Combo set, that features both Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 and 1923 versions of the film – and a host of goodies, including a handsome archival booklet that may be worth the price of the set on its own.
The Ten Commandments is a special favorite of mine. Not only is the film one of Hollywood’s greatest epics of the 1950s, the film is also a timeless and enduring ode to human freedom – and one which seems to grow only more timely and urgent as the years go by. The Ten Commandments is a film that will always remain powerful and ‘relevant’ so long as there are souls yearning for freedom – even, as we’ve seen recently, in contemporary Egypt and North Africa where so much of The Ten Commandments was filmed.
We had the pleasure of showing what was then the best existing print of The Ten Commandments at our first Liberty Film Festival in 2004, when we invited cast member Lisa Mitchell to talk about her recollections of Mr. DeMille – and how influential he was in her life. Several years later Govindini and I spent time with Cecilia DeMille Presley, granddaughter of Cecil DeMille and a caretaker of his legacy – who shared some wonderful memories of her grandfather with us. Most special, however, was the opportunity Govindini and I had years ago to meet Charlton Heston himself at The Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, when he introduced a special screening of The Ten Commandments. (We actually sat right behind him during the screening – and watched his reactions to the film, which he still seemed to take great delight in so many years later.) It was an extraordinary thrill to meet him; even late in life, he was still handsome and rugged, with a biting wit – but also a warm and generous spirit. He was the consummate gentleman.
Charlton Heston in "The Ten Commandments."
The Ten Commandments is without a doubt one of the best films Hollywood has ever produced, and a carrier of important ideas about freedom, so I thought we’d take a little look back at it today. It also happens to be a magnificent showpiece for the Blu-ray medium – with the film’s rich, saturated colors, beautiful costumes and production design, endless desert vistas, and iconic visual effects sequences. To put it mildly, The Ten Commandments is not only an emotional spectacle of the heart … it’s also an eyeful.
Interestingly,The Ten Commandments happens to be the fifth highest-grossing film of all time, adjusted for inflation. When the film was released in 1956, theater tickets cost about 50 cents – and the film still grossed over $65 million. What this means is that at today’s ticket prices, The Ten Commandments would have grossed over $1 billion at the domestic box office. In the history of American moviemaking, only Gone With the Wind, Star Wars, The Sound of Music and E.T. have fared better at the box office than did DeMille’s extraordinary film.
I don’t mention The Ten Commandments‘ box office success because that denotes anything in particular about the film’s merits – success at the box office can always be misleading – but to suggest the kind of powerful bond this film has with the public. The Ten Commandments is, as it turns out, a beautifully written, directed, acted, photographed and scored film – a majestic and emotional voyage into one of the primary myths of Western religious life. It’s also the crowning achievement of one of America’s greatest moviemakers. At the same time, The Ten Commandments is something else: it’s a part of American popular mythology, as important to America’s filmic conversation about freedom and individual dignity as Casablanca, Gone With the Wind or On the Waterfront. Continue reading LFM Review: The Ten Commandments (1956) on Blu-ray, Available March 29th
By Jennifer Baldwin. This is about Film Noir, so here’s a flashback …
I went through a bit of a Glenn Ford/Gloria Grahame/THE BIG HEAT phase several years ago. I became obsessed with the movie and those two actors. I was like a junky, watching the movie over and over, memorizing lines, musing over the themes, showing the famous boiling coffee scene to anyone who would watch.
But eventually, no matter how much I loved THE BIG HEAT, it couldn’t withstand the over-obsession. I needed a new drug. I needed something else to give me that Glenn and Gloria fix.
Then I read about HUMAN DESIRE. It was made after THE BIG HEAT, starring Ford and Grahame, another scalding-hot 1950s noir directed by Fritz Lang. As soon as I found out about it, I had to have it. Only problem: it wasn’t on DVD. You couldn’t buy it in the store. It was as good as gone for someone like me out in the Michigan suburbs, with not a repertoire theater in sight.
I went into the shadows. I spent many a midnight hour searching the internet for a copy of the movie. I was bleary-eyed and half crazed with want. And then I found it. One of those online trading post/auction sites. Eight bucks plus shipping and handling and HUMAN DESIRE could be mine. It was someone’s homemade DVD copy, complete with fuzzy picture and bad sound, but buying it made me feel like I was the protagonist in my own film noir, swapping cash with some anonymous stranger on the black market for a “treasure” that was worn out and almost worthless.
But it was worth everything to me. I watched HUMAN DESIRE and loved it more than I had loved THE BIG HEAT. I don’t know if I loved it so much because it took all that effort to finally get a copy, or if I genuinely loved the movie more, but HUMAN DESIRE became one of my secret movie treasures.
Now it’s out on DVD, an official release from Columbia Pictures, with pristine picture and remastered sound, and I still think that it’s tops. I think it’s Gloria Grahame’s masterpiece. I think it’s misunderstood. I think Glenn Ford’s character is the real villain and that far from having a “happy” ending, it has one of the bleakest, most cynical endings in all of noir.
The misinterpretation of the film stems from the assumption that Grahame’s character is a traditional “femme fatale” evil woman type. She’s Gloria Grahame, after all, and she wants Glenn Ford to commit murder for her. But I couldn’t just slot her into the femme fatale role that easily. She might have murder in her heart, but it didn’t come there lightly. Continue reading Classic Cinema Obsession: HUMAN DESIRE (Fritz Lang, 1954)
By Jennifer Baldwin. Before photography (and then Photoshop) took over the movie poster business, illustrators and artists ruled. Billboards, lobby cards, one sheets — these were the domain of the movie art masters, the geniuses who plastered our imaginations with color and drama and a parade of disembodied heads all in various states of emotion. Nowhere, it seems, were the old movie poster artists more unbridled than in their posters for film noir. Violence and sex are everywhere, and the artwork is always fun. Sometimes the posters are lush and romantic, other times chaotic and carnal. But always interesting, always worth looking at. Whether the movies turn out to be good or bad, the posters always manage to sell them.
In fact, sometimes in the case of the old film noirs, the foreign artwork is better than the American. These foreign posters seem to get to the thematic heart of the stories because the artists weren’t as hampered by the studios to make sure a certain actor was featured or a movie star actress looked glamorous. And because foreign artists often had different sensibilities than their American counterparts, some of the best posters have a distinct strangeness to them that make the artwork even more compelling. These are my Top 6 picks for best film noir movie posters from foreign countries:
#6: Belgian poster for Criss Cross (Dir. Robert Siodmak, 1949) Bold, violent, unrelenting — the red crisscross that dominates the center of the poster might be a bit crude and obvious for a movie titled “Criss Cross,” but it fits this nihilistic, underrated classic perfectly. With Yvonne De Carlo’s gorgeous face looming enigmatically above it, the “X” threatens to cross out both Duryea and Lancaster, two men who are both on a road to annihilation thanks to their lust for Yvonne’s intoxicating femme. What’s even more disturbing than those crisscrossed streaks of blood, though, is the look of cool, indifferent “who cares” on De Carlo’s face. That “who cares” look, as blood rains down, is the essence of the film noir “dangerous woman.”
#5: Italian poster for T-Men (Dir. Anthony Mann, 1948)
The artwork for this poster is flawless. One of the great things about old movie poster art is the way it tells a story. It’s not just one thing — one face, one situation, one image. These old posters take us into the story of the film, almost like the sequential art of a comic book, where we move from character to character, situation to situation, image to image. This T-Men poster gives us pieces of the story, while leaving us hungry for more. The death of a beautiful woman; a bag full of money; a brutal interrogation; a shootout at the pier; and at the center of it all, a heroic Dennis O’Keefe, trying to stand up for what’s right, but surrounded by crime on all sides. Film noir is a black and white genre, yet an eye-popping poster like this one reveals all of the intense, explosive emotions roiling beneath the silver-dark black and white sheen.
#4: French poster for F.B.I. Girl (Dir. William Berke, 1951)
I’ve never seen F.B.I. Girl. From what I’ve read on the internet, it doesn’t appear to be a very good movie, despite the presence of one of the all-time noir pros, Audrey Totter. But damn, if this poster isn’t the coolest thing ever! Coolness, of course, is one of the attractions of the genre. In fact, some might even argue that film noir isn’t a real genre at all, just a style. And style is about aesthetics, about the “look” of something. In the case of F.B.I. Girl, the movie itself is irrelevant. This poster — the look, the attitude, the style of it — is all we need. There’s a sexiness, a romantic sensibility, to the artwork that seems appropriate for the French. The pinkish red coloring; the playful elegance of the woman in the foreground; the hint of sexual violence between the man and woman in the background — all of it adds up to a retro modern design that is still absolutely fresh. I would kill to have this poster framed and hanging on my wall.
#3: French poster for Notorious (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)
Symbolic, highly stylized, and unlike anything that would have been done in America, this is Hitchcock’s Notorious as only the French can render it. There’s the romantic passion of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman’s love affair, which dominates the poster and hangs over every frame of the film; the wine cellar key that is at the center of Bergman’s espionage and the symbol for her duplicity; and a very stylized version of Claude Rains within the key itself, uniting Bergman’s two acts of deception and betrayal, the betrayal of her husband’s work and his heart. The blue coloring gives the poster a sad romanticism, like the farewell of lovers on a rainy train platform; while the gold works as both the golden hues of warm sunlight (Bergman’s character wants to live in the light) and as the menacing gold of the cellar key. Interestingly, Rains’ face is half gold, half black, perhaps as a symbol for how his character is an evil yet weak man, not so much a villain to be hated but one to be pitied. More than just an advertisement for a movie, this poster works as a compelling piece of art.
#2: Italian poster for Force of Evil (Dir. Abraham Polonsky, 1948)
This poster just IS noir. One of the few from the era to be almost entirely in black and white, it captures the essential paradox of the genre. The menace of the gun; the threat of violence from a heavy bathed in shadow; the trapped look on the face of illustrated John Garfield — all of the doom and psychological terror of these films, and yet, amidst the crime and despair, there’s a stark beauty to the image. This is the tension at the heart of the noir style: beauty within the darkness. These are dark films, with dark themes. Murder, blackmail, exploitation, cruelty, selfishness, greed. But the artists who create these films, the painters of shadow and light, the directors and cinematographers — they create something beautiful to look at out of stories filled with evil. The illustration for this poster looks like it could be a still photograph from the movie itself. Filled with fear and violence and menace, and gorgeous.
#1: German poster for Double Indemnity (Dir. Billy Wilder, 1944)
This is number one simply because it looks like the face of Barbara Stanwyck is emerging from Hellfire, her seductive wickedness consuming MacMurray and Robinson in an inferno of murder and lies. If that doesn’t sum up Double Indemnity, I don’t know what does. Stanwyck is all heat in this one, a ball of fire of the deadly variety. MacMurray and Robinson, in their monotone hues, look almost like ghosts, like men reduced to mere shadows by the power of Stanwyck’s evilness. The real relationship in the movie is between the two men, of course. When their friendship is destroyed because of Phyllis Dietrichson, it is that destruction that pains us in the end. She is the devil who comes between them, bringing everything to ruin. This illustration, more than any other, captures these themes. And even more than that, it’s just an electrifying visual design. Everything about this poster just makes me want to watch the movie again right now. It gives new life to a movie I’ve seen dozens of times. And that is the mark of great movie poster.
By Jason Apuzzo. The great Tura Satana passed away this past Friday. Our condolences to her family, many friends and fans. She will be greatly missed. (Read the NY Times obit here, and classic film blogger Kimberly Lindbergs’ fine 2007 piece “Tura Satana: An American Icon”).
Govindini and I met Tura about two years ago at an event. I’m a great fan of Russ Meyer’s films, and of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! in particular, so I approached Tura to express my enthusiasm for her work. What I expected to be a brief exchange turned into an hour-long conversation, and I soon found myself snapping pictures of Tura with Govindini (they got on like a house on fire) and with the other Pussycat girls Haji and Lori Williams, and having a fantastic time. I talked with Tura about her incredible life – her hard upbringing, her Japanese family’s stint in the Manzanar internment camp, her romance with Elvis. In particular I remember her telling me how some of Elvis’ signature dance moves were actually lifted from her burlesque act.
She also talked a lot about her love of America, and the opportunities it had given her. Tura was intensely patriotic, and was not shy about expressing it. It was amazing to see that coming from someone who’d had such a difficult upbringing – a young life filled with violence, betrayal and a lot of pain. (More horror stories, more abuse and hard luck than I care to recount here.) Nonetheless, the impression I had of Tura that day was of a survivor with a very tough exterior – who had nonetheless preserved a tender heart, and a robust love of life.
For those of you who may not be familiar with her, Tura delivered what is in my opinion – and in the opinion of many others – the iconic performance of cult cinema, playing Varla in Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. And for some bizarre reason, it’s the only really large role that Tura was ever given. This is a bit like not wanting the young Wilt Chamberlain on your basketball team. I’ve heard many explanations for her disappearance from the film scene after Faster, Pussycat – but none of them has ever made any sense to me. She seems so impossible to ignore.
Images of Tura Satana from "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"
The biggest tragedy of Tura’s career, one which Russ Meyer himself acknowledged, was that he and Tura didn’t continue to make films together. The mind reels to think of what those two could have accomplished, had they kept that partnership going.
In the very least, however, we have Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.
And on that subject, 1965’s Faster, Pussycat is easily the greatest cult film ever made – and the competition is not even close. Certainly one of the major reasons for the film’s success is Tura’s performance as Varla – and how does one describe her in that film? She’s like a force of nature – a category 5 hurricane – something primal, unstoppable, a torrent of violence, lust, desire, and mocking humor rolled into one. Imagine a Japanese Venus of Willendorf with bangs, dressed like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, puffing on a cheroot, bellowing quips into the desert air that seem like something out of a long-forgotten Bogart film. And then come the karate chops, the kicks and knives! Not exactly Bruce Lee stuff, but deadly nonetheless.
Publicity still for "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"
The image of Tura Satana (has there ever been a name like that?) – dressed in black, leaning against her car in the high Mojave desert – has become one of those iconic images that end up on the dorm room walls of young guys in college … and increasingly young girls, as well. It’s a great American image, one of cool independence, not unlike the image that Steve McQueen or Clint Eastwood projected during that same period. It’s an image of what we all want to be, or should want to be – tough, self-reliant, skeptical, at home in the wild.
We don’t do ‘cool’ here in America very well, any more. I’m told by experts that we have a President who’s ‘cool,’ for example, but I don’t quite believe it. Cool people don’t get everything in life handed to them, and nobody handed anything to Tura Satana – except maybe Russ Meyer, who gave her that one role of a lifetime.
Since we still have that film, Tura will still be with us, reminding us of how cool all of us can be.
Somewhere in the afterlife, God and the Devil are probably fighting over credit for creating Tura Satana. God will win that one.
Footnote: Tura was a fan of Libertas Contributor Steve Greaves‘ music. Plus: I’ve embedded below the first 6 minutes of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! There’s never been anything quite like it.
By Jason Apuzzo. •Today is Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday, and those of us here at LFM want to pay our respects today to our 40th President, a man who remains an icon to so many of us – a vibrant symbol of American optimism, and of our better selves.
Since many others today will be talking about Reagan’s legacy as a political figure – a legacy that only seems to grow with time – I wanted to talk a little about Reagan’s career as a movie star. In this context one of the more positive developments in recent years has been the belated recognition by critics and historians that Ronald Reagan was, indeed, a very fine movie star – a versatile and charismatic actor whose only ‘crime,’ so to speak, was that his career never quite reached the levels of other great Warner Brothers contract stars like Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn or James Cagney. Reagan was nonetheless a sparkling and compelling presence on-screen, who radiated a boyish charm as a young man in films like Santa Fe Trail (1940; co-starring Errol Flynn), Desperate Journey (1942; again co-starring Flynn) and the ‘Brass’ Bancroft serials; he was also an actor of brooding intensity and lightning wit in films like King’s Row (1942) and Knute Rockne, All American (1940) – who later made a convincing transition to playing craggy, weather-beaten heroes in films like Law & Order (1953) and Hellcats of the Navy (1957). I also happen to think Reagan’s credentials as a noir actor have been overlooked over the years; more on that subject below.
Reagan in Hollywood.
Two factors recently were vital in my own re-evaluation of Reagan as a star. First of all, Turner Classic Movies several years ago devoted an entire month to Reagan’s films – several of which only recently became available on DVD – and so I finally got the chance to record and watch a lot of them in an organized, sustained fashion. Also: in 2008 author Marc Eliot released a superb account of Reagan’s life and career in Hollywood, called Reagan: The Hollywood Years. Put together, the picture that Eliot’s book and Reagan’s own films create is one of an engaging, sympathetic star whose career – ironically enough – might have reached much greater heights had he not been ‘distracted’ by politics, particularly in the form of Reagan’s involvement in Hollywood’s complex labor disputes in the 1940s. Indeed, one of the many ironies of Reagan’s career in Hollywood is that as an eight-term SAG president Reagan spent an inordinate amount fighting other people’s battles, when he perhaps should’ve instead been fighting Jack Warner in order to get better roles for himself – roles which Reagan manifestly deserved, in my opinion.
Nonetheless, Reagan was a major Hollywood player during his heyday of the early 1940s. How big was he? In 1942, right after the release of King’s Row, Reagan’s agent – the powerful Lew Wasserman – signed him to Hollywood’s first $1 million contract of the 1940s, and Reagan was soon under consideration for the lead in Casablanca. What happened afterward, however, was that America’s ongoing war effort created a cascading series of changes in Reagan’s career that led him, ultimately, to lose professional momentum – right as people like Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne and Gary Cooper were gaining it. Reagan nevertheless forged ahead, and still banged out some fine pictures all throughout the 1940s and early 1950s – even as political battles of the era increasingly consumed his time.
One of Reagan's best.
I’d like to point out a personal favorite of mine from this period: a brooding little noir romance called Night Unto Night (1949), directed by Don Siegel. The film stars Reagan as a terminally ill doctor suffering from epileptic seizures. He travels to the Florida coast to try to find some solace as his condition deteriorates, and there he falls in love with Viveca Lindfors (who was actually married to Siegel at the time) – who’s dealing with her own problems, having just lost her husband during the War, and yet still occasionally hearing her husband’s ghostly voice at night. Complicating matters further his Lindfors’ saucy, vixen sister, played by the strikingly attractive Osa Massen (sci-fi buffs will remember her from Rocketship X-M) who spends most of the film coming-on to Reagan like a cat in heat.
The film takes place mostly in a dark mansion along a storm-swept stretch of Florida’s coast, and has a kind of hypnotic quality to it – a dark romanticism of chiaroscuro lighting, subjective camera angles and sound design – with Reagan bringing a psychological intensity to his role that reminds one of his friend and contemporary William Holden, when Holden was at his peak in the 1950s. Reagan as the doctor is alternately stoic and terrified at his own fate, and deeply ambivalent about dragging Lindfors into his own personal tragedy so soon after she’d suffered one of her own. At the same time, he recognizes his own role in reviving her otherwise moribund spirits, and this makes his predicament all the more poignant.
Reagan’s performance in Night Unto Night is one of the better film noir performances of that period, fully of a piece with work by other noir stars like Glenn Ford or Dennis O’Keefe, and he should get more credit for it. Reagan and Lindfors (and, for that matter, Reagan and Osa Massen) make a genuinely smoldering couple – and I highly recommend this film to anyone still in doubt as to Reagan’s merits as a star.
Reagan in Don Siegel's "The Killers."
And, while we’re at it, I should mention the other film Reagan made with Don Siegel, which would actually be Reagan’s final acting performance – as gangster Jack Browning in 1964’s The Killers, based on the Hemingway short story. The Killers is the film that makes one speculate as to what an incredible career Reagan might’ve had if he’d turned to playing villains, because even in a film featuring stand-out performances by Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes and Clu Gulager, Reagan absolutely steals the show as a ruthless and sardonic mobster out to pull off a major truck heist. In The Killers Reagan shows the side of himself that I liked most as a teenager when he was President: his toughness, his merciless wit, and a certain old-fashioned professionalism. Plus, Reagan somehow became more handsome as he grew older – craggier, his age-lines giving his face a sharper, more pleasing definition. (Someone should’ve thought to cast Reagan as Dick Tracy during this period.) Reagan in The Killers is what a lot of villains in Tarantino movies are trying to be, but never fully are: cool, in command, and macho as hell. It’s another stand-out noir performance from Reagan which, in my opinion, deserves more credit than it’s gotten over the years.
I could go on, but you get the point: Reagan was a fine star, by no means a ‘failed actor’ as some would have it, and the best testimony to his abilities are his films. And, on this point, LFM readers should be aware that Warner Brothers recently released some rare Reagan classics on DVD, and you can read the estimable Lou Lumenick’s reviews of that new set and other Reagan rarities now available from the Warner Archive Collection (such as Night Unto Night) here.
Also, news arrived this week that Robert Forster will soon be playing Reagan in a new one-man stage show and film (see here), and new Reagan documentaries are also popping up everywhere. Make sure, however, not to watch Eugene Jarecki’s documentary on HBO; Jarecki should not be trusted with this material, after the hack job he did on America’s Cold War effort in Why We Fight (a shameless pilfering of the title from Capra’s far better, more honest film). Instead, take some time today if you can to simply watch Reagan in one of his own films – my personal favorites are the ones he made with Errol Flynn. The films are great fun, and are a wonderful testimony to Reagan’s talent – and to what might have been, had his career not turned in a very different direction …
• And now to Clint Eastwood. Clint gave an interesting interview last week to the Wall Street Journal on his forthcoming J. Edgar Hoover biopic, which will star Leonardo DiCaprio – and also, as of recently, Naomi Watts and Ken Howard. In this interview, Clint gives what is arguably the most complete statement of his political worldview in years. I found him to be sober and restrained – but also a bit all-over-the-map, difficult to pin down.
Clint is someone who has traditionally been pegged as a ‘Hollywood conservative,’ a Cold Warrior and lone Republican holdout in a liberal-dominated industry. Actually, though, there’s always been a good deal of what I could call Steinbeck-style, Depression-era liberalism to Clint that seems to have become more pronounced as the years go on.
Eastwood talks politics.
In this recent interview he comes across as relatively cool toward conflicts like the Iraq War and the Korean War, for example, particularly with respect to the burdens these wars put on the average fighting man. I understand that perspective, and it’s one that he brought to Flags of Our Fathers (although very different from what he did in Heartbreak Ridge), but it creates problems when it comes to America’s ongoing need to project force in dangerous parts of the world. Even Obama has come to recognize the necessity of fighting in Afghanistan, for example – an environment that puts extraordinary burdens on our fighting men. Clint seems to have forgotten that our current military is a volunteer force, not the conscripted force he was in while stationed up at Ford Ord in the Army back in the early 50s. And based on re-enlistment rates in the armed forces over the past decade, it seems that our fighting men believe in their current mission.
In any case, you might ask why any of this matters – Clint’s a filmmaker, after all, not (any longer, at least) a politician. Well, it very much does matter because he’s about to make a big-budget biopic of J. Edgar Hoover, a film spanning Hoover’s entire 40+ year career – a career that helped define the domestic profile of the entire Cold War era. And he’s making this film with arguably the biggest male star in the world, and a lot of people who are never going to read about Hoover or the Soviet-era threats he confronted are instead going to watch this movie and assume that what’s being depicted is at least semi-accurate.
So people need to keep a careful eye on this film, and on what its director is saying – even when it’s Eastwood saying it. I unfortunately don’t always have the sense lately that Clint’s minding the store in terms of what his films are saying – or perhaps maybe I’m worrying that he is the minding the store, and is in the process of shifting his worldview quite dramatically from what it was back during the 70s and 80s, before he was the darling of the Hollywood establishment – and people like Sean Penn and Paul Haggis and Tim Robbins became eager to work with him. In any case, I recommend that you read the interview and judge for yourself.
John Barry's album for "Thunderball."
• A lot is suddenly happening on the James Bond front. Rumors are now swirling that Javier Bardem may be signed as the new film’s villain, and Ralph Fiennes may get involved with the film, as well. Everyone is speculating that director Sam Mendes may be pushing the series in a more dramatic direction – which is fine, but I’m also hoping that Mendes understands that Bond movies should also be light on their feet and amusing, something Mendes’ films have never been (being, instead, ponderous and dull-witted). We’ll see. Oh, and Judi Dench has signed back on.
In classic 007 news, the wonderful Bond composer John Barry has passed away, and we wish his family our condolences. Barry was an essential ingredient in the Bond formula for decades, and leaves behind him a rich musical legacy; he will certainly be missed. Also: if you’re in the mood for classic Bond, watch this interesting recent interview with production designer Ken Adam, who did so many of the great sets from the Connery films, as well as the War Room set from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
• This is so incredibly pathetic: Captain America: The First Avenger will apparently only be called The First Avenger in Russia and the Ukraine, as Marvel and Paramount have apparently caved. Way to go, Hollywood! Champions of free speech, as always. If the title Captain America: The First Avenger isn’t mellow enough for the Russians, maybe Paramount could re-title it Captain Redondo Beach: First in the Water. Just sayin’.
Vlad Putin: big movie fan.
Meanwhile, Putin apparently had copies of a new documentary critical of his regime (re: the Khordorkovsky case) actually stolen in Berlin – while he’s simultaneously demanding that the number of movie theaters in Russia be doubled. I guess you can never have enough empty theaters for Burnt by the Sun 2.
• … and speaking of Russia, scribe Steve Zallian (Mission: Impossible, Clear and Present Danger, Schindler’s List, The Falcon and the Snowman) has apparently been tapped to re-draft the Jack Ryan reboot (starring Star Trek‘s Chris Pine), titled Moscow. Good choice. Maybe the young Jack Ryan can steal back the Khordorkovsky documentary.
• Not to miss a publicity opportunity, the ReelzChannel is now marketing the new Kennedys miniseries as featuring the Kennedy family’s “mob associations, the drugs and the women.” Hey! And here I thought this series was just going to show 8 hours of shaky home movies of beach football on Cape Cod! You mean the Kennedys actually had mob ties, and lots of sexy dames with beehive hairdos hanging around? I’m scandalized! How dare they show this on our public airwaves?!
January Jones of "X-Men: First Class."
• I wasn’t aware of exactly how 60s-Cold War inflected the new X-Men: First Class film was going to be. Here’s how the film’s director, Matthew Vaughn, describes it:
Calling it “X-Men meets Bond, with a little bit of Thirteen Days thrown in for good measure”, the film will follow the burgeoning relationship between a young Charles (Professor X) and Erik (Magneto) from 1942-1962, and it will all be done without flashbacks.
“In the beginning of the film, no one knows that mutants exist, and all the mutants don’t know that each other exist. They’re all in hiding. Kevin Bacon plays a very megalomaniac mutant [Sebastian Shaw] who decides that he can take over the world and that mutants are the future. Erik and Charles then meet each other and hook up with the CIA to try and prevent World War III. You find out everything about what went on between Erik and Charles” says Vaughn. So it appears the CIA are the ones who develop the X-Men’s technology.
Vaughn calls Michael Fassbender’s turn as Magneto very reminiscent of old school James Bond – “I basically molded a young Magneto on a young Sean Connery. He’s the ultimate spy — imagine Bond, but with superpowers. For me, Magneto is the good guy in the film, but he’s a sort of a good bad guy. He literally kicks off the movie, and Xavier goes along on the ride trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and trying to persuade Erik that you don’t have to kill everyone.”
So in the spirit of such retro-Cold War/60s nostalgia, X-Men: First Class‘ January Jones will be today’s pin-up. Isn’t this a great picture? Here’s the key to this picture, aside from the nicely plunging neckline: she’s not smiling, and she looks like a hard-case, sort of like what I imagine Dagny Taggart would look like. Women smile too much nowadays, and it makes them less sexy. Toughen up, ladies.
And that’s how we close out this Extended Cold War Update! in honor of America’s Greatest Cold Warrior, and a very fine movie star: Ronald Reagan.
By David Ross. Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) is a marvel: a ninety-six-minute movie consisting of a single unbroken tracking shot. With a sensual fluidity unmatched except perhaps by Ophuls’ La Ronde, the camera follows two ghosts – one Russian, the other European, one earnest, the other ironic – as they stroll through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
The centuries swirl gracefully about them, the twentieth century suddenly giving way to the nineteenth, the eighteenth suddenly giving way to the twenty-first, as if time itself were a gently shifting breeze. The film is pregnant with a wonderful faith that time is not an erosion, but an accretion, that some great memory catches the falling drop of the individual moment, that all is somehow gathered to the breast. As they make their tour, the ghosts maintain a patter of wry commentary and affectionate observation, humanists mingling in the parade of humanity. They have no urgent message to deliver and nothing to teach, thankfully; their pleasure is the film’s essential communication, though there is also a clouding of elegy. Meanwhile the camera makes a tour of its own, lingering on the splendid details of the palace: molding, gilding, ironwork, marble-work, drapery, china, crystal. The camera provides an implicit object lesson in the tradition of disciplined form that has made the beauty of the West, and this aspect of the film can only seem a terrible if inadvertent reproach. In comparison to the door handle or to the lace of a tablecloth, calmly wrought for the eye of God, whose discernment is infinite, our contemporary masterpieces – a Jackson Pollack, say, or the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao – flail hysterically, as if the soul itself were abandoned and drowning.
To promote and honor the film – one of the greatest ever in my opinion – I have fully transcribed the dialogue and annotated some of the artistic and architectural detail. This task required perhaps fifteen hours of truly tedious labor. I drew upon and sometimes cribbed directly from Paintings in the Hermitage by Colin Eisler and The Hermitage Collections (2 vols.) by Oleg Yakovlevich Neverov, Dmitry Pavlovich Alexinsky, Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky (who possibly figures in the film; see here and here).
It is sometimes difficult to identify who speaks what words, and I can’t vouch for the accuracy of my transcription in every instance. I look forward to receiving corrections and additional annotations from our conscientious and knowledgeable readers. Please consider the script below a first attempt to map the fluid, elusive drama of the film. Hopefully somebody will find it useful in its present, rough form.
