Cabin in the Sky - this week at Cinematheque

This week at the Chauvel Cinematheque, see Vincente Minnelli's Cabin in the Sky, screening Saturday the 30th of August at 12noon and Monday the 1st of September at 6:30pm.

Cabin in the Sky USA/1943/B&W/88mins/16mm
Dir: Vincente Minnelli.
Cast: Ethel Waters, Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, Rex Ingram, Kenneth Spencer, Duke Ellington and his orchestra.

After being seriously injured in a barroom brawl, an idle gambling husband is reformed by a dream of his own death, with God and Satan battling for his soul. Minnelli's directorial debut, based on a Broadway musical, featured an all African-American cast. Although it falls prey to the stereotyping typical of the representation of black characters in popular culture at the time, Minnelli's sensitivity towards the material and the combined talent of the cast redeems the film. Despite its limited potential for distribution (few Southern theatres of 1943 would touch it), MGM still applied its A-plus production values to the film turning out sumptuous dreamlike sets and production numbers.


Screens with:

Oreos with Attitude USA/1990/Colour/27mins/16mm
Dir: Larry Carty.
Cast: Jackie Roberts, Keith Smith, Larry Maxwell.
This satire of racial stereotyping, produced by uber-indie producer Christine Vachon and director Todd Haynes, follows Janet and Richard, a black yuppie couple living in New York. After calculating that the risk of producing a dark-skinned baby is too great they decide to adopt a white child 'to promote racial harmony'. But it seems that little Jimmy has other ideas.

Gashlight - Pia Santaklaus on Gaslight

Last week I watched GASLIGHT (1944) and though I arrived at the Chauvel a few minutes late, I don’t think I missed much of the start and had a very engrossing movie experience. I should like to offer a few comments.

GASLIGHT, despite its ‘happy’ ending, provided a melange of classic gothic story elements including Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Bronte, Robert Louis Stevenson and also shades of the Jack The Ripper legend.

In GASLIGHT, a beautiful newlywed woman Paula (played by Ingrid Bergman) fears she is going mad as strange occurances happen in her manor-home. She is unawares that her own husband is deliberately causing the strange happenings in order to drive her mad.

Charles Boyer plays her two-faced pianist husband Gregory Anton. He is ultimately caught out by a friendly, noble investigator with Scotland Yard connections (played by Joseph Cotton). Angela Lansbury plays Nancy the servant of the manor.

GASLIGHT was perhaps inspired by some of the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe used themes of physical and emotional decomposition and premature burial… In GASLIGHT, Paula becomes paler and sicker and feels trapped within her house.

POE often said that one of the most tragic themes was that of a dying beautiful young female; a device he used over and over again as might be seen in such works as The Raven, Annabel Lee, Ligeia, Berenice, Morella and The Fall Of The House Of Usher.

Poe also drew parallels between the souls of buildings and their occupants. One’s house reflected one’s disposition... A sick house could only carry a sick body, a sick soul.

In GASLIGHT, the house itself, already a place of terror (the site of an earlier murder) becomes very much Paula’s crypt. She was in a sense buried alive as the husband would not let her leave the building. Her many-roomed ‘coffin’ makes for a very grim ‘life’.

The male protagonist is a dark romantic figure. To the outside world, husband Gregory Anton portrays the dashing gentleman but we also see another darker side to him. He displays a Jekyll and Hyde split personality.

The STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE (1886) was written by Robert Louis Stevenson. The story set in London is about a lawyer investigating strange happenings between his friend Dr Henry Jekyll and horrible Edward Hyde. GASLIGHT has a very similar theme in that an investigator (Joseph Cotten) exposes someone with a psychopathological bent.

The way in which Gregory Anton slips out of the house each night to do his dark deeds is vampiric in a sense, but moreso, another aspect of GASLIGHT seems to reflect the JACK THE RIPPER story.
The unidentified London serial killer JACK THE RIPPER (around 1888) victimised women. With his non-English accent, Gregory Anton may represent one of the many immigrants pouring into England during the mid 1800s. This influx of humanity led to overcrowding, massive poverty and crime from a very low class. The infamous Jack The Ripper may have been a product of the social upheaval. The case was followed and unsuccessfully investigated by Scotland Yard. (Scotland Yard also featuring in GASLIGHT, was founded in 1829 and was the headquarters of the service which policed much of London )

A further influence on GASLIGHT may have been JANE EYRE. JANE EYRE (1847) by Charlotte Bronte is one of the most influential English novels of all time.

JANE EYRE was orphaned as a baby. In GASLIGHT, Paula was ‘orphaned’ after her aunt/guardian/opera singer (Alice Alquist) was strangled to death in their London home at No. 9 Thornton Square.

Paula’s husband Gregory has a romantic Byronic aura like Edward Rochester in JANE EYRE, but he also gradually reveals a cold, cruel, self-serving disposition like Mr Brocklehurst, a neglectful, dishonest man in JANE EYRE.

Like Rochester (in JANE EYRE), Gregory seems quite taken with Paula and repeatedly keeps her in his controlling presence.

JANE EYRE includes shallow socialites also featuring in GASLIGHT.

In JANE EYRE, Rochester blames a servant for various strange occurences. It perplexes and amazes Jane, but for love’s sake she ignores the issue. A very similar situation arises in GASLIGHT.

In JANE EYRE one character (Adèle) is the illegitimate daughter of a French opera singer. In GASLIGHT, Paula’s guardian was an opera singer.

JANE EYRE features a strange old gypsy woman who insists on telling everyone's fortunes, roughly echoed in GASLIGHT in the character of the eccentric old nosey neighbour who insists on finding the truth.

The idea of being locked up in a house features heavily in JANE EYRE. The young Jane was locked up in an unused red chamber room, in which she panics thinking she saw a ghost and she remained in there till she got ill and passed out.

In JANE EYRE Jane hears eerie laughter coming from inside the manor house. In GASLIGHT, Paula hears strange noises coming from the house as well.

In JANE EYRE, Rochester cannot marry Jane because it is revealed that he is already married to another woman. Rochester bitterly explains that his wife is a violent madwoman whom he keeps imprisoned in the attic, where a servant (Grace Poole) looks after her. In GASLIGHT Paula gradually becomes like a madwoman imprisoned upstairs and relying on servants.

In JANE EYRE, the manorhouse ‘Thornfield’ ultimately lies blackened and in ruins. Jane learns that Rochester's mad wife set fire to the house and committed suicide by jumping from the roof. Though this is not the grim end in GASLIGHT, the movie is powerful as one might imagine something like this happening if Paula isn’t rescued in time by her male friend (played by Joseph Cotten).

GASLIGHT is a cleverly woven tale of innocence versus experience, naivety versus ruthlessness. The power of suggestion in this movie leaves a hypnotic effect.

Great choice Brett. Thanks

Pia Santaklaus

I have a question: Was Jack the Ripper ‘Jumping Jack Flash’? Like the song says “It’s a GAS GAS GAS”

The Spiral Staircase - this week at cinematheque

SAT. 23/8/8 & MON. 25/8/8 HOLLYWOOD GOTHIC:

THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE

USA/1945/B&W/84mins/16mm/NFVLS Dir: Robert Siodmak. Cast: Dorothy McGuire, George Brent, Ethel Barrymore, Ken Smith, Rhonda Fleming.

A gothic melodrama set in a New England town in 1906 where a psychopathic killer is murdering young women he sees as "defectives". His next victim is to be Helen, a mute. According to Siodmak, the intention was to create "a sort of surrealist film which put the audience into a trance." Dorothy McGuire's playing as Helen was conceived as "a sort of ballet recovering some of the elements of silent cinema".

Screens with Suicide Squeeze USA/1986/B&W and Color/27mins/16mm/NFVLS Dir: Brady Lewis. A wry journey through the world of filmmaking, narrative and American culture. A private eye relates his tale over optically printed and staged scenes in the noir style, sequences of manipulated imagery including animation and high speed cinematography, a saxophone player and a class watching a film.

The Spiral Staircase Trailer

Screens this week at Cinematheque

Rich Machine Live at Chauvel Cinematheque

Gaslight Trailer

Catch Gaslight this week at the the Chauvel Cinematheque.

Introduction to Susan Slept Here by Jimmy Vargas

Tonight Cinematheque presents two laugh-a-rama classics from nineteen fifties Hollywood director FRANK TASHLIN. An auteur who conquered the double realms of cinema: the cartoon and the celluloid feature.

His metier was the creation of animated icons as near human archetypes and weapons of social satire, while reducing his flesh and bone actors to whorling tornados of thirty five mille gel cut-outs. TASHLIN'S style technique can be best described as Cinematicus Lycanthropis, as so perfectly exemplified in tonight's feature.

SUSAN SLEPT HERE..(1954)

A RKO RADIO PICTURES RELEASE.

Directed By FRANK TASHLIN.

Starring DICK POWELL & DEBBIE REYNOLDS.

THE PLOT

On Christmas Eve, Oscar-winning screenwriter MARK CHRISTOPHER (Dick Powell), lauded author of high-brow dramas, is frustratedly working on a script about juvenile delinquency. His pal, a LAPD flatfoot SAM HANLON (Herb Vigran) deposits teenage waif / juvenile delinquent, SUSAN LANDIS (Debbie Reynolds) on Mark's doorstep.

MARK on learning that the only option left to SUSAN is spending Christmas week in jail, on account of an pending assault charge after she decked a sailor, and also the fact of her being penniless means she will inevitably be charged with vagrancy, he makes like the swingin' samaritan and lets the runaway crash in his bachelor pad.

As a result of his viagratic verbal assignation with the milk-shake mademoiselle, MARK finds new purpose and zest-a-rama to his jaded Hollywood existence, but various denouements and dilemnas erupt when his fiancee, the marriage desperate Pasadena socialite ISABELLE ALEXANDER (Anne Francis), finds out about the tomboy runaway staying in his apartment.

SUSAN SLEPT HERE was directed by a FRANK TASHLIN, whose cinematic apprenticeship was originally served as a gagster for CHARLIE CHAPLIN, LAUREL AND HARDY among others at the HAL ROACH studios in the twenties and thirties, but he was more renowned to the American theatre going public as an innovative cartoon director of PORKY PIG Loony Toon loops for Warner Bros / Vitaphone, working under the Leon Schlesinger banner. In SUSAN SLEPT HERE he simply supplants the animated for human visceral, but still leaves the voice-track and plot distractions intact from a Merrie melodies reeler. Known for breaking down the theatrical fourth wall in his Warner's cartoons, with characters like Porky Pig giving witty asides to the camera audience, TASHLIN utilises the same device in SUSAN SLEPT HERE, with an Oscar statue opening the proceedings as narrator.

From a jaundiced post modern eye SUSAN SLEPT HERE could be dismissed as a dizzy drawing room soap opera. A standard 'meet cute' build-up so reminiscent of the standardized 30's and 40's screw-ball comedies.

It is mostly definitely not.

SSH is a social morality tale of fifties America, as whose subject matter that Francois Truffaut of the 'Cahiers du Cinema' would gleefully describe as the triumph of “Vulgar Moderne Americaine”. And it's this brazen bawdy epistle that TASHLIN would continue to pitch and pummel onto the American public, as director of "THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT", "ARTISTS & MODELS" “WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER and eight of JERRY LEWIS' subsequent solo pictures from the mid fifties into the sixties.

SUSAN SLEPT HERE burlesques romantic ideal, marriage as career move, the bartering of American female virtue for the sanctic attainment of a Westinghouse deep freeze Jello security, as well as taking the shovel to Hollywood's self obsession, psychiatry and fame.

The only thing that TASHLIN left out in the movie was a couple of reels of DICK POWELL crooning "You make me feel so Jung" to the bug eyed DEBBIE. Said footage is rumored to have actually existed.

SUSAN SLEPT HERE was a seminal cinematic foray itself leading the charge on social satire and the dismantling of sex taboos in the fifties. Other movies in its wake that glided through on its breezy wings, was SEVEN YEAR ITCH (1955), THE MOON is BLUE (1957), and that desolate paean to the bartering and whoring of innocence LOLITA. (1962).

From the start of SUSAN SLEPT HERE it is not only the battle of virtue that the two are combating. With POWELL playing the roue Hollywood screenwriter, while the apparent surface style REYNOLDS alternatively pixies it up with a perky punky virgin / brazen career bride from okie sticks-ville, their mutual seduction / stand-off can be read to be more a representation of the continual class and moral warfare between Middle America's God, Little League and white bread values, as identified by REYNOLDS and their distrust of the Los Angeles' fast and loose 'my wife is your wife 'Sunday swap-a-rama' sensibility so typified by POWELL's caste.

REYNOLDS personas are many however. She may well be so regarded as a schizoids love child. In SSH she also can be viewed as the poster girl for the new fifties. A razor lipped minx, barbarically storming Hollywood at the fall of the old studio system of DICK POWELL, who with her bland blonde ambition was out to get fame and a limitless charge card, either in front of the camera, or as mogul's wife, peddling her virtue as the ticket, usually always claiming victory, and inevitably cold-decking and cuckolding her benefactor before he could claim his rewards.
Think "12 year old card shark with the googoo voice" as her rival in love, socialite ANNE FRANCIS most aptly pins her. REYNOLDS great skill, however in not over tipping her hand in this direction, keeping empathy with both her audience and her besotted older suitor.

With that set up intact, castration gags inevitably run a plenty. Most memorable is when REYNOLDS uses POWELL'S 'Oscar' as a nutcracker for some peanuts she's attempting to shell.
A joust to his phallic vulnerability, a precursor of female castration via marriage, not overlooking the 'nouvelle vague ' slattitude to Hollywood totems and traditions. Their bedroom negotiation card game too, is a sly saucy vignette in which would be best best described as, a reverse seduction.

TASHLIN also raids other cultural elitisims, going for the jugular of Jung and psycho analysis. Best exploited in Susans Dream Sequence. Using Freudian / Daliesque psycho furniture of vaginal tear mirrors, gilded bird cages as subliminal chastity belts, they serve as emblems of American 50's pentecostal repressed sexuality and addiction to it's own image. The Dream Sequence has TASHLIN de-constructing MGM fantasia, and transports, super-glueing it with ACME adhesive onto a Loony Toon sound-stage.

Visually, the vignette sparkles, glazing with a glorious gaudiness, and over saturated sacharina, that could well bring the viewer an unexpected diabetic attack. In this pivotal scene ,TASHLIN pillages Hollywood memory, cribbing scenes from American in Paris / Singin' in the Rain / The Bandwagon and Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, recasting Gene Kelly as a benign sailor suited Sylvester the Cat ( in the guise of POWELL) and Cyd Charisse is given a schizophrene benzedrined make-over as a Tweetie Pyed DEBBIE REYNOLDS in a gilded cage with her nemesis ANNE FRANCIS, vamp pa-powin' it as a Marvel Comic inspired Spider Lady / Circe.

All this carried out on the wah-wah-wah-wah mistral of bawdy grind-house blues.

A little known insider story going around the hipper bars of Hollywood in the early fifties was that ALEX GOTTLIEB the writer of SUSAN SLEPT HERE had based his story on mogul HOWARD HUGHES and his peccadilloes with underage runaways (a polite term in the 40s and 50s for jail bait). Hughes' pimps Johnny Meyer and private cops would literally pick up suitable quails and bug eyed starlets from the Greyhound station on Los Angeles and Sixth, or the swanky cocktail bars of Hollywood Boulevard in the forties and fifties, to be canary caged, in various love shacks around Hollywood, until bidden to service his royal HH, in one night of gratuitous sexual homage. DICK POWELL of course played the HH role, his employment status in the movie declassed from producer to mere scriptwriter.

The DEBBIE REYNOLDS character was based on ingenue starlet TERRI MOORE and the plot twist centred around HUGHES and MOORES rumoured marriage in 1949 off the coast of Mexico. MISS MOORE was only nineteen years of age. HUGHES was forty four at the time. MISS MOORE received the rumored sum of 30 million dollars as a payoff hush-hush money from the Hughes estate in 1984.

HOWARD HUGHES' own studio RKO was the conglomerate that financed and released SUSAN SLEPT HERE in 1954. HUGHES himself never suspected that his coin was financing the slander and the cinematic mutiny happening on RKO sound stage 2 in late 1953. ALEX GOTTLIEB, the scriptwriter won the coveted WGAW the Writers Guild of America award, for best written American Comedy of 1954.

(C) JIMMY VARGAS 1947 / 2008

Lady of BurlIves, Label of Burlesque by Pia Santaklaus

I really enjoyed and appreciated tonight’s Cinemateque screening. Thanks for the fine choices.

TAKE OFF (1972) the 10 minute film about a stripper who takes it all off, then literally ‘takes off’ like a rocket. Actually, to be more precise, she spins herself into the form of a space rock... perhaps this unintentionally symbolizes the meteoric rise of the feminine force as her cosmic connections surpass even her sexual powers.

Once everything came off; her clothes, panties, stockings, shoes, hair, legs, face, head, arms, torso and all, the voyeur is left with something universal.

One mustn’t forget that it was only about a decade earlier that the pill contributed to the female’s newfound strength as she could increasingly and more aggressively revisit and play the roles of the ancient Goddess. Here, woman becomes the rock again. Free at last!

THE STRIPPER (1960): This 1 minute long film may have inspired TAKE OFF. Certainly there is an overlap with the idea that the stripper can keep ‘taking off’ well-after all her clothes have been removed, as her various body parts are strewn across the floor in a pile along with her lingerie.

LADY OF BURLESQUE (1943) with Barbara Stanwyck is set in the 1930s, centering around some backstage murders in a burlesque theatre. Stanwyck plays ‘Dixie’ a portrait of the real-life, beautiful and intelligent fan- dancer, actress and writer ‘Gypsy Rose Lee’.

Burlesque was a louche and often sleazy male entertainment that was all the rage in the 1930s. The immoral skin performances had been gradually building up after WWI as many men had been to war leaving many women independent and poor. The women did what they could to survive; many found and enjoyed new freedoms; their ‘selfishness’ and happiness grew away from male controls. As the First World War closed, burlesque boomed.

With the approach of WWII, the burlesque fad began to fade considerably and so perhaps to create alternative income, the popular burlesque dancer of the 30s (Gypsy Rose Lee), wrote (co-wrote?) a murder mystery called ‘The G-String Murders’ (1941) on which LADY OF BURLESQUE is based.

This movie, made during the dark apocalyptic days of WWII, seems to be a kind of nostalgic trip back to a recent time when outrageous characters were spilling over each other in an overpopulated world where each hustled for a piece of the action, struggling to make an existence.

During the 1920s and 1930s, New York was a hotbed for Jewish (and other immigrants) gangsters heavily involved in racketeering, drug dealing, pimping, gambling and loan sharking. It was a period of rampant anti-Semitism in America which saw the rise of American Nazism.

It is said that over 2 million Jews were living in New York in the 1930s, making them the most populous group in the city. The force of such vast numbers created desperately-crowded ethnic neighbourhoods where competitive conditions drove criminal behaviour as individuals and gangs tried to ‘make good’. The vice market boomed during Prohibition as Jew, Irish, Italian and other immigrants benefited from bans on alcohol, gambling, prostitution and narcotics. Gangster culture flourished with pulps, movies and books often painting the gangsters as thugs (sometimes heroes) committed to acts of evil (sometimes righteousness) during crazy times of economic boom and crisis.

One can imagine the innocents, victims and outsiders crying and praying for help and release from the rampant violence. This no doubt led to the rise of the hero-messiah who might be called upon to clean up the wicked streets.

The Jewish experience in America was very mixed; for some, America was the land of golden opportunity, for many it was the opposite. Watching a movie like LADY OF BURLESQUE, one gets some idea of the raw energy, drive and struggle of the era. The crowded conditions were a fact of daily existence whether it was backstage, on the streets or in the home; privacy was a very scarce commodity. It seemed that everyone’s business was known. Gossip thrived. The popular Cole Porter song ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ (originally written in the 1930s) gives a sneak peak at the American human psyche of the times. The importance of having room to move was even acknowledged and appreciated in the stories of many fictional, new, super-beings, including Superman (1932 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster), Doc Savage (1933 by Lester Dent) and Gladiator (1930 by Philip Wylie); each of these heroes had their own private retreat to go to when they needed escape from the packed city…even Batman (1939 by Bill Finger and Bob Kane) had a Bat Cave to run off to. Once the heroes entered their ‘Fortress of Solitude’, they could find the privacy they needed in order to discover themselves again.

(Note: Superheroes were first found mostly in pulp magazine and comic books of the 1930s. These characters often had two sides, the lost, mild, downtrodden public persona that tried to assimilate into society, and of course the powerful, private and hidden hero within that none should penetrate).

The language and dialogue in LADY OF BURLESQUE was fast, furious and funny; the in-jokes were sometimes hard to grasp; the sexy stage performances were entertaining, though I imagine 1940s audiences would have found them quite risqué; some of the costumes outrageous; one of the dancers presented a splendid cliché cute dumb blonde (I wonder if Marilyn Monroe had seen this performance when she later created her own blonde persona). Good entertainment.

Jimmy Vargas gave an extremely theatrical and appropriate introduction to the movie. He is a great talker; perhaps one of the most fascinating and enthusiastic people I’ve met in years. He made an immediate impression upon me. Jimmy’s voice, words, poise, dress and name ooze by-gone-American energy. His specific interests (1920s-1950s?) importantly cover a time and place that is gradually and sadly being forgotten and yet whilst conversing with him, I also discovered a very idiosyncratic thinker with some brave ideas, some of which I myself have often pondered. I see him carrying on traditions from a grittier time. He’d make a welcome spokesman and role-model for those seeking a glimpse into something revived and different.

My knowledge of that historical period has been mostly-undernourished thus-far, but my recent studies have coincidentally led me in that direction and pricked my attention to various details of that period.

I imagine Jimmy Vargas is an authority on many aspects of that era. I’m looking forward to checking out his website and learning a thing or two.

Cheers

Pia Santaklaus

Susan Slept Here - this week at cinematheque

This week at Cinematheque catch the 1954 Frank Tashlin comedy Susan Slept Here starring Dick Powell, Debbie Reynolds and Anne Francis.

A disillusioned Hollywood scriptwriter has a juvenile delinquent foisted upon him only to find himself reinvigorated and hustled into marriage. The sentimental aspects of the comedy are given some edge by Reynold's sexually emancipated tomboy, the often wryly Freudian dialogue, and the eroticism of the danced dream sequences.

Also on the program is Tashlin's 1943 Porky Pig's Feat. Porky Pig and Daffy Duck try to avoid paying their bill at 'The Broken Arms Hotel'. The manager has other ideas and is expressionistically transformed into a villain. Bugs Bunny makes an early appearance in one of the last black and white Looney Tunes.