Movies - March 2011

March has been busy, but a week at the beach with a stack of DVDs helped me get caught up on a few things I had been meaning to watch. The article I wrote about Rango ended up drawing a lot of traffic over on Examiner, and it's now closing in on 2000 hits. I hope it will overtake the Leslie Nielsen obit soon because I feel terrible making money (even just a little) off of someone's death. It seems ghoulish that people only want to read about classic movie stars when they die. Anyway, here's the March movie viewing log.

River of No Return (1954) - Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe make a pretty good Western
The Wizard of Oz (1939) - showed this one to my LearningQUEST group for part of our series of musicals
The Phantom of the Opera (1925) - seen it before, but enjoyed watching it again.
Rango (2011) - the whole family really loved this smart take on the spaghetti Western. Can't wait for the DVD to come out so we can analyze it more minutely.
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) - The kid picked this one, and I didn't care for it. The book is much better.
The Scar (1948) - Almost unwatchably dull. Poor Paul Henreid! Also known as Hollow Triumph.
Vertigo (1958) - Having been to San Francisco a few times since I last saw this film, I appreciated it a lot more! It's like a twisted love letter to that gorgeous city.
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) - Kid picked this one, but we all loved it. I'm a sucker for the campy charms of 50s sci-fi horror.
Young Frankenstein (1974) - Another kid pick. She has been quoting it ever since. Like Frederick Frankenstein, I might have created a monster.
On Dangerous Ground (1952) - Gorgeous melodramatic noir, with even more gorgeous Ida Lupino.
They Drive by Night (1940) - Bogart and George Raft drive trucks, with more Ida Lupino (I have a thing for her right now).
Gunga Din (1939) - Boy, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom makes WAY more sense to me now! Cary Grant is cheeky fun, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. is unbearably handsome.
The Philadelphia Story (1940) - One of my favorites; showed it to the kid for the first time, and she loved it, too. Hepburn, Grant, and Stewart are a tough combo to beat!
Woman of the Year (1942) - Hepburn and Tracy in their first pairing. I liked it while I watched and then was bothered more and more by the implications after it ended.
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938) - A kid pick; she does love Shirley Temple. This time Gary Cooper and Gloria Stuart join the team.
La Strada (1954) - I mean to watch more foreign cinema. Good thing there's a lot of it on Netflix Instant right now. Really found this Fellini picture engaging, but was amused that film historian David Thomson has such disdain for it.
The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941) - Apparently Davis didn't like this team-up with Cagney, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. Funny, she LOOKS like she's having a good time, except for when she falls on the cacti.

More LEGO lighting for noir and horror

Our LEGO club met today, and I gave a short talk about LEGO photography, a hobby which conveniently rolls several of my passions into a single activity. A friend of mine who has a nicer camera than I do came over afterwards, and we played around with lighting and different exposure lengths and lenses to take these shots.

My obsession with The Third Man (1949) continues unabated, so we tried some different shots inspired by stills from that film. The first one shows Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli menaced by the shadow of Orson Welles as the mysterious Harry Lime. I like the way the original shot highlights Harry's role as a "third man" in the romance between the two protagonists. The second shot recalls the first time that we see Harry Lime in the picture, suddenly illuminated in a shadowy doorway and smiling enigmatically at Cotten's confused hero. My friend, Le, used a very long exposure to get this one lit up, and I enhanced its shadows and highlights in Picasa afterwards.

Once we realized that we could shoot great closeup images using the long exposures, we decided to try it with a few other minifigures. I had seen someone else do some gorgeously spooky shots of the mummy fig, and I do think ours turned out well, too. Just for fun, we took one of a Ghostbuster being stalked by a ghost. I got the Ghostbuster decals and equipment from Brick Forge, and they really look great. One day we'll have to do a whole series of photos from that film (if I can get enough decals for the whole team!).

February 2011 film log

February was busy! I am still behind trying to write about several of the movies, and I didn't get to watch as many as I would have liked. Here's the count, with links for the ones I managed to review over at the Examiner column.

Footlight Parade (1933) - Cagney sings and dances with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler

Top Hat (1935) - Fred and Ginger up to their usual tricks

Swing Time (1936) - More Fred and Ginger; I actually like this one better than Top Hat, partly because their characters are called "Lucky" and "Penny"

The Lodger (1944) - Part of my ongoing obsession with Laird Cregar, this time playing Jack the Ripper
Hangover Square (1945) - More Cregar, and the best ever use of Guy Fawkes Day in a movie

Monkey Business (1952) - Cute comedy with Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers, plus a smart chimp and a ditzy Marilyn Monroe

Shock (1946) - Psychological thriller with Vincent Price, sadly not as good as it should have been

The Card (1952) - Delightful minor film with Alec Guinness and Glynis Johns, typical small budget English picture with smart dialogue and wry humor

I Wake Up Screaming (1941) - Betty Grable and Victor Mature do noir to the tune of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" - not a great film, but it does have Laird Cregar!

Libeled Lady (1936) - William Powell and Myrna Loy steal the movie from Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow, but they all seem happy at the end - a fun one for Powell & Loy fans

Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) - A Laura reunion for Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney; he's a rotten cop with a thing for punching suspects, and she's a nice girl with lousy taste in men

The Illusionist (2010) - Sylvain Chomet animated picture from France; a beautiful elegy for Jacques Tati, Vaudeville age performers, and traditional animation

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) - James Whale directs Karloff and Clive again, this time with Elsa Lanchester's eye-popping bride added to the mix

LEGO Noir: The Third Man (1949)

I'm a huge fan of Carol Reed's post-war noir classic, The Third Man (1949), which means that I naturally wanted to recreate images from the film in LEGO. I'm not entirely satisfied with these, but I'm going to keep working on a definitive LEGO version of some image from the film. A friend with a wide angle lens has offered to come over and see if we can make the tunnel seem deeper. Hopefully that will help!

In the film, Joseph Cotten arrives in the still-smoking wreck of post-war Vienna looking for an old friend who has promised him a job. Cotten's character is a writer, which of course means that he's broke, so he needs the work. Unfortunately, he gets there just in time for the friend's funeral. The mysterious and supposedly deceased friend is a guy named Harry Lime, played by an astonishingly handsome Orson Welles. Harry is thought to be dead for the first part of the movie and then presents himself as a thoroughly enigmatic figure in the second half, so it's appropriate that most of the publicity stills for the film show him in shadow or shoot him so that his face remains unseen.

The movie ends with a brilliant chase sequence through the dark tunnels beneath Vienna. Many of the publicity stills feature this shadowy underworld, and so I have represented it here. The LEGO tunnel is built using a technique that allows for a curved shape, but it can only be bent so far, which means that my tunnel is not as narrow as I would like. I do like the shot in which Harry is trying to escape up a ladder out of the tunnels; my minifig actor certainly has the right expression of panic.

LEGO Noir: Double Indemnity (1944)

I'm still playing with shadows and camera angles for my LEGO shoots. This time it's scenes from Double Indemnity (1944), with Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson. I wanted to do something with a good femme fatale, and it's hard to beat Stanwyck as scheming Phyllis Dietrichson. One of the best scenes of the film involves Stanwyck hiding behind a door while MacMurray tries to get rid of Edward G. Robinson. The LEGO version recreates the basic set-up, although there's no good way to replicate the shadow that Robinson throws against the hallway wall, and the size and shape of minifigures require some allowances to be made for positioning.

The femme fatale is an especially fun character to photograph because the use of lighting and angles can make her seem like a helpless kitten one minute and a man-eating tigress the next. Double Indemnity does this to great effect; the camera shows us which side of her personality Phyllis is revealing at any given moment. Again, the hallway shots are famous for their depiction of her barely repressed menace. Hidden behind the door, Phyllis is partly in shadow and partly illuminated, reflecting her dual nature and suggesting how little we (and MacMurray's Walter Neff) really know about her. We see this half-shadow/half-light image a lot in noir because all noir characters have hidden aspects and secrets. You never really know the other people who come into your life as well as you think, and sometimes that ignorance - and your assumption that you have any real knowledge - comes back to bite you. It certainly hits home for Walter Neff, who doesn't get the money or the woman, although he does get a bullet and a couple of corpses thanks to his fascination with Phyllis.

Of course, Walter's equally to blame for following her down the primrose - or, in this case, honeysuckle - path to destruction. Another angle of the famous door shot shows how Phyllis and Walter are linked, like two sides of a bad penny, the yin and the yang of damned desire. Divided by the door (as they are divided by their murder of Phyllis' husband and by their distrust of each other), they are nonetheless inextricably connected. As Robinson's character, Barton Keyes, says, they've got to ride that trolley car together all the way to the end of the line, whether they like it or not, and the last stop is the cemetery.

LEGO noir: The Maltese Falcon

Even LEGO people love film noir. Here's Sam Spade to prove it! I'm trying to learn how to take photos of my LEGO vignettes using noir lighting and shadows. These are inspired by publicity stills of Humphrey Bogart for The Maltese Falcon (1941). I wish I had time to build elaborate sets for my photo shoots, but right now I am focusing on close-up shots that can be put together and taken down pretty quickly. I'm mostly interested in recreating the lighting, shadows, and general mood. Sadly, it's hard to get a good Bogie hairline on a minifigure, and they definitely need to make a better selection of men's hats for the little guys. Still, I think the pictures came out rather well.

Femmes Fatales, Film Noir, and Freshmen

The following post is adapted from a conference paper I presented at the Popular Culture Association in the South meeting in 2008. I'm posting it this week as part of the film noir blogathon, For the Love of Film (Noir), which is raising funds to help the Film Noir Foundation.

Dark City (1998)

With the release of blockbuster films like Sin City and the revival of cultural interest in characters like Batman, film noir has enjoyed something of a resurgence in the last few years. College age film goers and cultural consumers love dark violence and tortured protagonists, but they rarely recognize those elements as the territory of noir. Generally speaking, they have no idea what noir even is, much less where modern cultural productions are coming from when they draw on its conventions and traditions. This interesting combination of cultural currency and generational ignorance makes noir an especially productive choice for teaching film in lower level courses. I began to recognize noir’s potential for the classroom when I started teaching Alex Proyas’ 1998 film, Dark City, in Introduction to Literature courses some years ago. I quickly realized that my students liked the film but had no contextual knowledge on which to build a more sophisticated understanding of what they saw. Eventually the unit on film evolved into a fully-fledged engagement of film noir and its themes, and student evaluations of the course have proven it to be the biggest hit of the semester, far outstripping the units on poetry, short fiction and drama, and even surpassing a popular novel unit on Treasure Island in terms of student enthusiasm and response.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

For those who might be less familiar with the term, “film noir” refers to a cinematic style first popular in American film in the 1940s and 50s, with the classic period of noir spanning from the 1941 release of The Maltese Falcon to the 1958 release of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. The term “film noir,” which suggests the darkness and fatalism typical of these films, was first coined by French critics watching American films in the years following World War II. Early noir films were often produced as “B” movies that were quickly filmed for as little money as possible, and they flew somewhat under the radar of the censors, whose attention to such matters was not as keen during the all-consuming war years. Taking their cues from hard-boiled crime fiction of the period and German expressionist film of the 1930s, noir films presented World War II era audiences with a gritty alternative to the bourgeois optimism and increasing social homogeneity that transformed American culture in the years following the war. Noir touched on themes that spoke to the barely suppressed fears of its original audiences, from paranoia and disillusionment to betrayal and the grinding inescapability of personal fate. The hard-boiled private detective and the seductive femme fatale would emerge as the quintessential icons of noir, with actors like Bogart and Stanwyck personifying the grim cool of the true noir soul. Later generations have alternately rejected and embraced the dark charms of noir, with the early “neo-noir” movement epitomized by Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) later evolving into postmodern noir and the sci-fi hybrid of “tech-noir” characterized by films like Blade Runner (1982). More recently, films like Memento, Brick, Sin City, A History of Violence, and, arguably, Batman Begins, have brought noir style back into the cinemas and into DVD viewers’ homes, along with television series like Veronica Mars and The Dresden Files.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

In the classroom, of course, our discussion of noir has to begin with a similar definition, since most of my students are unfamiliar with the term and few have seen enough older films to grasp the idea very quickly. They have a vague idea about the identity of Humphrey Bogart, thanks primarily to the lionization and commercialization of Casablanca, but they have never heard of noir’s other stalwarts, including the likes of Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark, Barbara Stanwyck, and Dana Andrews. They are utterly unfamiliar with classic Hollywood’s plethora of important directors. We cover elements like cinematography, lighting, and editing in a very basic way, using props and examples from popular modern films to illustrate the ideas. We discuss the main character types of noir, including the detective, the damaged man, the good girl, and, of course, the femme fatale. At this point I ask the class how many of them have seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), and a light bulb appears almost visibly over most of their heads. We watch the scene where Jessica Rabbit first enters the film and performs the number “Why Don’t You Do Right?” to a bewitched, bothered, and bewildered Bob Hoskins as detective Eddie Valiant. The basic information gives the students some tools to apply to the films they’ll be studying, and Roger Rabbit primes the enthusiasm pump. At this point, they’re ready for a movie.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

 I allow my students to vote on the noir film that we will actually watch in class, but I make them choose a classic film, an old school, black and white, traditional noir. Generally, I offer them The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), Out of the Past (1947), and Sunset Boulevard (1950). I give a brief description of each film and show trailers if time allows. They have generally chosen either The Maltese Falcon or Sunset Boulevard, and Boulevard goes over particularly well. Certainly, it’s hard to beat a maniacal Gloria Swanson, a talking dead man, and a monkey funeral for sheer spectacle value to get the attention of a group of restless freshmen. I force the class to choose a classic film because the basic themes and images of noir are being worked out in those texts, and those films will be the foundations on which later noir depends. I also know that, given the choice, they will instinctively choose a newer, more familiar, more comfortable color film. The entire class will watch this one film together, but their assignment allows them to watch additional films on their own and write about those for the required essay. Once students see and like one classic noir film, they are much more likely to choose other classic films as well as newer ones for these additional encounters.

Tension (1949)

One very important element of this assignment is the library of noir DVDs that I maintain for students to borrow as we make our way through the unit. I keep a collection of films, especially the older and harder to find ones, for student use. The lending library encourages the students to watch more films and to engage the idea of noir in more interesting and personal ways, and it leads to a more diverse set of essays. I also provide students with a long list of other noir films, including neo-noir and tech-noir pictures that they can watch as part of the unit and write about for their essays. Popular choices include Sin City, of course, as well as Blade Runner, Memento and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The sleeper hit of the lending library is the 1949 Richard Basehart/Audrey Totter film Tension, which has only recently become available on DVD thanks to the noir resurgence and a Warner Brothers box set. While not a well-known example of noir, it might just be the perfect film for freshmen, with a nasty femme fatale, a sympathetic hero, and a tight 95 minutes of gripping entertainment. Students typically laugh at the introductory scene with the police detective, but a character like Audrey Totter’s Claire Quimby magnetically draws their attention and presents the femme fatale as a strikingly physical, even vulgar female monster.

Talking about what movies students can watch while studying noir brings up one of the chief difficulties and chief delights of using it as the basis for a film unit. Nobody can quite agree about what noir IS. Some critics, like Foster Hirsch, argue that noir is a fully-fledged genre, while others refer to it as a “cycle,” a “movement,” or a “style.” Noir is certainly more difficult to identify than, say, a Western or a gangster film, and some Westerns and some gangster films might even simultaneously be noir films, as well. Explaining the contested identity of noir to freshmen can be challenging, but it also invites them to have an opinion about the debate, and it gives them a clear argument that they can take a stake in, especially as that argument relates to specific films. Is Dark City, for example, really a noir film? What about other modern films? Do they have that certain je ne sais quoi that makes a film noir or not? Sometimes students suffer a kind of “medical students’ syndrome” where they begin to think that every movie they see must be noir, and we have to address their perception of the film and talk about what kind of classification is really defensible. However, as problems with students go, over-engagement is certainly one of the nicest problems one could have.

One way to head off some of this confusion is to lay good groundwork for the noir unit earlier in the term. In order to help students have a better sense of the elements of noir, I make a conscious effort to connect our film unit with the other material that we cover over the course of the semester. In our poetry unit, for example, we read texts like Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and introduce the idea of the femme fatale and the traditional virgin/whore dichotomy. Then, when students see Norma Desmond or Brigid O’Shaughnessy or Tension’s Claire Quimby for the first time, they know exactly what they are looking at. We study short stories and poems that deal with the themes of murder and death, and we talk about how the texts shape our perceptions of criminals or of fate. For an introduction to literature course, this multi-genre connection of themes and ideas helps to justify devoting a whole segment of the class to film studies because it presents film to students as a place to analyze and engage literary concepts. Students end up with a broader and more sophisticated picture of the literary themes that dominate the course, and they discover that the literary concepts we have studied apply to many different kinds of texts.

As I mentioned earlier, the noir unit consistently ranks as students’ favorite part of the entire course. Why do students respond to noir so enthusiastically? Partly they just like to watch movies more than they like to read, but that’s a generational trend that reflects an increasingly visual culture, and I incorporate visual and multi-media elements into every unit in the course. It isn’t that watching is “easier” than reading, though, because noir is a tough cinematic nut to crack, with a problematic identity and a lot of sophisticated themes. What students tell me about studying noir is that it teaches them to watch differently from the way they watched movies before and makes them think more about what they watch. It opens up classic films for them as interesting and even provocative. It casts new light and new shadows on the culture that they are already familiar with in films, television, video games, music and comic books. They appreciate Veronica Mars more, think a little harder about the themes of Sin City, play Max Payne with a greater understanding of its context, and read or watch Batman with a fuller sense of the Dark Knight’s darkness.  Students have even asked to borrow more films to watch after the course ended, and one student went on to develop an entire independent project for his art major around the creation of photographic images inspired by the look and style of noir. These are freshmen at a public university, majoring mostly in engineering, nursing and business. They are not the already intellectually engaged, privileged denizens of a liberal arts college. In spite of that, noir gets them, and most of them, ultimately, seem to “get” noir. They leave the classroom as better and more sophisticated readers of the culture in which they live. In short, noir inspires them to think and to learn more than anything else we study. For this teacher, at least, to paraphrase Sam Spade, that’s the stuff that dreams are made of.

If freshmen can learn to love it, then film noir must be worth saving! You can help the Film Noir Foundation preserve and restore classic noir films by donating during the Film Noir Blogathon, February 14-21, 2011.