November Overlook

What are you looking at?

Well, in this case, my monthly round-up of (somewhat) overlooked posts. Actually November was a very good month for this blog; a number of posts spurred interesting discussions - from a variety of readers - and almost all got at least a comment or two. Nonetheless, allow me to highlight a few of my reflections one last time. Feel free to revisit these entries and leave a fresh comment - your thoughts are always appreciated. Here they are, starting with the piece of writing I'm most proud of (while conveniently leaving out the ones I'm least proud of...):

1. The Magnificent Ambersons
"The shots which open Ambersons fire off in a soft volley of delicate yet robust missiles - a hail of half-remembered trinkets and hazy memories, softened at the edges like some 19th century daguerreotype."

2. Free-form Fairy Tales: A Tex Avery Trio
"I've got a few things to say about each, but the cartoons speak loudly and proudly for themselves, so I'll follow my comments with You Tube feeds of each. Ahem...Once upon a time..."

3. The Choice (with an election-night follow-up in my final comment)
"It is, among other things, a tale of two cities. Or at least, that's how it starts."

4. Twin Peaks: Lonely Souls (needless to say, avoid this review like the plague if you've yet to watch "Twin Peaks")
"In this way, Lynch pulls the rug out from under the lurid bloodlust of his audience: you want murder and evil and terror? I'll give you murder and evil and terror. And we get it."

5. The Struggle
"As the mother runs down the street, racing towards her degraded husband's flop house, her daughter's note flapping her hands, and real homeless and poor men and women scowling on the bustling sidewalks behind her, it's an old Griffith 'race to the finish' with a twist, Intolerance by way of De Sica."

The month can be roughly divided into three sections. First, the days leading up to and including November 4, when I culminated my election series (summed up in the Election Overlook). Then came a breather, in which - after a long series of political docs - I watched and reviewed whatever I felt like, including the infectious Disney version of Three Little Pigs, the strange yet charming Dear Brigitte, in which James Stewart and Brigitte Bardot share screentime with a child prodigy, the compelling rough early Kubrick gem The Killing (which sparked lots of great commentary), my first Anthony Mann Western - The Naked Spur, and the fascinating Trip, which sparked an enthusiastic rumination on the sixties. I also found time to delve into my random thoughts on Quantum of Solace (though my own reflections on Bond are scattershot, I linked up to some incredibly cogent and/or provocative writing on the subject - here, here, here, and here). Oh, yes, I also took a shot at the ubiquitous Alphabet Meme and wrote up a few silent movie stars (including Lloyd, Keaton, and a certain ancient Jewish prince).

Finally, the last few weeks were spent finishing up two ongoing series: the Auteurs investigation of D.W. Griffith (including his work with W.C. Fields, his first "modern" movie, and his first talkie) and the continuing episode-by-episode analysis of "Twin Peaks" (from the season two opener to the closing of the Laura Palmer case). Both series await one final entry each in early December - a collection of Griffith You Tube clips & ephemera and a visit to the Black Lodge with Agent Cooper - but in anticipation, feel free to peruse the archives.

Well, I seem to have worked in links to nearly every post I've written, so I'll stop there. Keep on commenting - in the Thanksgiving spirit, your readership is appreciated.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - The Struggle

The Struggle (1931) was D.W. Griffith's last feature film. He was fifty-six years old when it was released and it had only been sixteen years since he stood astride the film world with the breakthrough Birth of a Nation. Griffith would live another seventeen years, occasionally working on the margins of the industry, under pseudonyms, but that proud opening title, "personally directed by D.W. Griffith" was never to be seen again. And by reputation, The Struggle seems an ignominious end to an illustrious career. The film flopped so badly that some newspaper accounts have it disappearing from theaters within a week. Critics savaged it, and the movie was simultaneously decried as too old-fashioned and too "Soviet" (the latter argument, apparently based on the title yet unfathomable given the film's content, only offers further proof that no one went to see it). The Struggle ended Griffith's career not with a bang, but a whimper.

So imagine my surprise upon discovering the film today. Tacked onto the Abraham Lincoln disc as an addendum (and together, these films were only released two weeks ago), it arrived unheralded and I wasn't expecting much. But The Struggle is not only Griffith's best available film since Way Down East, it's one of his best, period. The movie has its flaws, but is far superior to the more widely acknowledged Abraham Lincoln, which was Griffith's first talkie. Lincoln feels like a silent film with dialogue superimposed, whereas The Struggle is surprisingly modern - in everything from its use of sound to its performances to its photography. This is an astonishing and impressive work of art, all the more so for being unusual in Griffith's canon.

Twin Peaks: Arbitrary Law

SEASON 2, EPISODE 9
-Episode 16 of the series-
("Twin Peaks" reviews start here)

directed by Tim Hunter
written by Mark Frost, Harley Peyton and Robert Engels

"So now the sadness comes. The revelation. There is a depression after an answer is given. It was almost fun not knowing. Yes, now we know. At least we know what we sought in the beginning. But there is still the question, why? And this question will go on and on until the final answer comes. Then the knowing is so full, there is no room for questions."

Since this is effectively the end of "Twin Peaks" as we know it, I've decided to break one of my rules. The above quote is not derived from the show proper, but rather from the Log Lady's introductions, which accompany each episode on the DVD. Usually these intros are so shrouded in obscurity as to be senseless. This one's fairly clear, but the "final answer" it promises doesn't quite arrive. Nonetheless, this is a decent conclusion to a story which has already reached its climax, a relatively satisfying denouement for the characters we've come to know and love. It is definitely flawed - its attempts to tie everything together are forced and a bit too pat, and the style is sometimes too far over-the-top. But it closes the book, and there's only so much it can to do to alleviate the definite truth of the Log Lady's third and fourth sentences.

Twin Peaks: Drive With a Dead Girl

SEASON 2, EPISODE 8
-Episode 15 of the series-
("Twin Peaks" reviews start here)

directed by Caleb Deschanel
written by Scott Frost

"Diane, it's 11:05 pm. I'm in my room at the Great Northern Hotel. There's not a star in the sky tonight. Ben Horne is in custody. The trail narrows, Diane. I'm very close. But the last two steps are always the darkest and most difficult."

Episode 15 finds us roughly where we left off last time - or actually a little earlier. We are outside the Palmer home; it's the middle of the night. Despite the surrounding darkness, the windows are brightly lit - yet we cannot see inside. The foreboding music barely conceals muffled screams, which are extinguished with a loud thud. And then, silence. Something's happened here, but we're on the outside, held back. Of course, anyone who saw the previous episode knows about Maddy's murder - in full, violent detail - but it's telling that this time we're restrained from seeing it all. Episode 15 returns us to the show's more usual air, one of playful allusions to mayhem and murder, all from a tasteful distance and with a sense of humor, when necessary.

Seven Chances

Some of the greatest and most distinctive screen talents were often given rather flimsy material - since their qualities were so strong, a dance team like Astaire and Rogers or comedic geniuses like the Marx Brothers usually didn't require the highest concepts nor the most artful constructions within which to do their thing. Indeed, in vehicles like these the plot's primary purpose is not to get in the stars' way. Yet with Buster Keaton, almost every picture is not only a vehicle for his unique talents, but a clever high concept idea as well (not to mention the usually quite impressive formal qualities). Would anyone remake Top Hat without Fred and Ginger or A Night at the Opera without Groucho, Chico, and Harpo? Yet not so long ago, someone did remake Seven Chances, whose brilliant premise (a bachelor must marry by 7:00 or else lose his inheritance) promises to be a comedic gold mine. Now, I'm not saying it was wise of modern producers and screenwriters to invite comparisons between Chris O'Donnell and Buster Keaton. Nonetheless, it speaks to Buster's taste in ideas that, even without the comedic genius running in front of that army of brides-to-be, the story is worth retelling.

The Freshman & The Kid Brother

These two films, which arrived together on the same DVD, were my first introductions to Harold Lloyd, other than the famous clips I'd seen before (running down the field with the football in The Freshman, and of course hanging from the clock in Safety Last!). In the great debate between Chaplin and Keaton, Lloyd is the also-ran, though in this at least he's doing better than someone like Harry Langdon, who's been more or less forgotten. If nothing else, that shot of Lloyd barely grasping the hand of a giant city clock, hanging perilously above the busy street below, is one of the indelible images of the silent era, ensuring Lloyd's place in screen history. But his persona was unique - not a knock-off of the Tramp or the Deadpan One, it was probably closer to that of your average (slightly dopey) American man, and certainly bares more than a passing resemblance to Woody Allen (at least as he presented himself in the early, funny ones).

Twin Peaks: Lonely Souls

SEASON 2, EPISODE 7
-Episode 14 of the series-
("Twin Peaks" reviews start here)

directed by David Lynch
written by Mark Frost

"We don't know what will happen, or when, but there are owls in the roadhouse."

"It is happening, again. It is happening, again."

The eye of the storm is calm, just as the ground of all being may be the void. Which is another way of saying that as it reaches the apex of its mystery, "Twin Peaks" achieves a discomforting Zen, an almost cold coolness within which violence is enacted and, hence, demystified. Even before we reach the climactic murder, by which the show's violent genesis finds its twin in a new and illuminating killing, there is a quavering depth to the proceedings. Oddly enough, the film version of "Twin Peaks," Fire Walk With Me, is raw with nervy intensity and acute pain, but in episode 14 of the series, as in Blue Velvet, director David Lynch finds a terrifyingly brutal emptiness at his story's center. The romance of the mystery surrounding Laura Palmer's death does not have a correspondence at the source, at least if this episode's follow-up murder is any indication. In this way, Lynch pulls the rug out from under the lurid bloodlust of his audience: you want murder and evil and terror? I'll give you murder and evil and terror. And we get it.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is certainly an interesting film, but unfortunately most of the interest lies in its historical and auteurist connotations rather than in the film itself. It's a curiosity rather than a success. Still, it shows D.W. Griffith grappling with a fundamentally altered medium - this is his first sound film - and if it's often creaky and dated, it's really not all that bad for an early talkie. Actually its problems lie not so much in the technique - though it's a bit stilted, Griffith seems to have taken to sound rather easily - but in structure. Its problems haven't changed much in 80 years: the biopic is still a risky and haphazard genre. By relaying a pile-on of incidents in Lincoln's life and career, this movie (like many which followed in its wake) feels less like a cohesive album than a Greatest Hits collection, and one in which the recordings are often muddy and indistinct. Still, Walter Huston offers one of the best Lincolns ever to grace the screen and Griffith crafts some effective sequences in his penultimate feature.

Twin Peaks: Demons

SEASON 2, EPISODE 6
-Episode 13 of the series-
("Twin Peaks" reviews start here)

directed by Lesli Linka Glatter
written by Harley Peyton & Robert Engels

"He is Bob, eager for fun. He wears a smile, everybody run! Do you understand the parasite? It attaches itself to a life form and feeds. Bob requires a human host. He feeds on fear and the pleasures. They are his children. I am similar to Bob. We once were partners...Oh, but then I saw the face of God and was purified. Took off the arm but remained close to this vessel, inhabiting from time to time for one single purpose...To stop him! This is his true face but few can see it. The gifted...and the DAMNED!"

The air is charged in Twin Peaks, and you can sense a pent-up energy in everything onscreen, from the opening close-up of a luminous orchid to the closing words of a demonically-possessed one-armed man, reprinted above (their spine-tingling magnificence is greatly enhanced by the rising timbre of Al Strobel's illustrious baritone). You just know something's in the works - it's there in the way Donna and James rekindle their love as Maddy watches, saddened but dignified. Or the involuntary recoiling of Audrey Horne from her father's touch, now that she's back in the safety of the Great Northern with her guardian angel/special agent watching over her. Or in the chords of the "Twin Peaks" theme, rarely heard outside the opening credits, as Maddy tells James she enjoyed being seen as Laura, but now it's time for her to go home. Or even in the supposedly lighter moments, as Bobby and Shelly party with a comatose Leo (they seem more like the kids they really are than at any time since last season), or when the mysteriously waxen Japanese financier Tojamura encounters a drunken Pete and they're weirdly simpatico (even as Tojamura admonishes Pete, "I find adherence to fantasy troubling...and unreasonable."). It's in small gestures, as when Leland Palmer absentmindedly pulls tufts of white fur off the stuffed fox in Benjamin Horne's office, before depositing them in his shirt pocket. It's in David Lynch's cameo as FBI boss Gordon Cole, the weird black-and-white flowing river imagery that appears under the opening credit, and that sharp cut to the Great Northern, looking for all the world like an evil jack-o-lantern, windows lit up, cloaked in the evening mist and, as one-armed Mike has just told us, home to Bob in his present form.

Twin Peaks: The Orchid's Curse

SEASON 2, EPISODE 5
-Episode 12 of the series-
("Twin Peaks" reviews start here)

directed by Graeme Clifford
written by Barry Pullman

"Are you looking for secrets? Is that what this is all about?"

This episode is simple, economical, and ultimately quite satisfying. It begins with an establishing shot of the Great Northern but not the same old same old we usually get (the waterfall, pan up to the hotel, yawn). This time it's dawn and our wide-lensed eagle eye overlooks the parking lot. Then we're inside Cooper's room for the oldest trick in the book: start the film/TV episode with an alarm clock ring. Yet it's strangely satisfying and as Cooper stands up, tape recorder in hand, and begins to recite his reflections to Diane we feel as if we're watching one of the early episodes. I forgot to mention that Cooper (who, as I've established, is bipolar - perky with certain directors, glum with others) seemed constipated in the last episode; this time, he's chipper as can be - we even get to see him whistle through his little wooden flute at one point.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - The Battle of the Sexes

Just this morning I read "Echoes of the Jazz Age," F. Scott Fitzgerald's marvelous elegy for the Roaring Twenties. In it he writes, "Contrary to popular opinion, the movies of the Jazz Age had no effect upon its morals. The social attitude of the producers was timid, behind the times and banal - for example, no picture mirrored even faintly the younger generation until 1923, when magazines had already been started to celebrate it and it had long ceased to be news." The Battle of the Sexes, which appeared in 1928 (five years after the date Fitzgerald set, a year before the Crash) is the first Griffith film I've seen that makes any attempt to capture the zeitgeist. It would be unfair to call it Griffith's first Jazz Age film - there were too many of his 20s films unavailable on Netflix for me to make that judgement, and at least one of them (The Sorrows of Satan) seems to have a contemporary setting. However, it's safe to say this is a departure for Griffith and in some ways a welcome one, though I would not call The Battle of the Sexes a rousing success.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - Sally of the Sawdust

When I looked up this film I was surprised to see who it starred. Oh, I thought, a Griffith movie with W.C. Fields! Not long into viewing, I realized that the reverse was probably true: this was a W.C. Fields movie that happened to be directed by D.W. Griffith. Now I don't really think this is the case - Sally was Fields' debut so it's hard to say there was any such thing as a Fields movie at this point - and I would hardly be the one to determine such a thing. A shameful admission: until now, I'd never seen a W.C. Fields movie. That sordid detail aside, this is not exactly typical Griffith. True, it is sentimental and melodramatic (though also by and large a comedy), with some subpar Victorian plot developments, and what J. Hoberman astutely calls Griffith's "opposition to Americans even more puritanical than he." But its flavor is largely determined by Fields' brusque, buffoonish, yet charming rogue, a carnival con man who has adopted young Sally (Caroline Dempster) and is now taking her to the town where her rich grandparents - whom she's never met - reside.