Cover Art | The Enforcer

Sometimes it’s just good to sit back and admire a good piece of cover art. Here’s a shot of the upcoming Olive Films release, “The Enforcer”. I’m not sure who created it, but it’s a beauty. The film is scheduled for release on blu-ray and DVD on April 30th. I’m always the first to mock horrible cover art (ahem, I’m looking at you Criterion’s “Zazie dans le métro”. Who knew little Catherine Demongeot could be turned into a hideous Barney-Smurf?), so I’ve got to give credit when it works. Criterion’s “Repo Man” cover looks good too. – David D. Robbins Jr.

Classic Film Photos | Still Life

Nothing captured the beauty and glamour of old Hollywood like still photos and publicity shots. My place of employment happens to have a number of them, and is in the middle of a woeful house cleaning. Well, I figured I’d liberate these photos before they hit the trash bin. This is a link to The Fade Out Flickr account, which will be updated with the things I find. (Slideshow.) It’s a work in progress. I’ve scanned so many photos at this point, that it’s almost taxing to keep doing the same actions over and over. It’s quite a chore. (I’ve cleaned up each of the photos, relatively speaking, so that the contrast is more defined, cropped out some scuffs, and in some cases touched up where it was egregious not to. But mostly, they’re as they were.) Initially I’ve decided to post only those photos that feature the stars from the 1930s-50s in solo shots. For example, I have a number of photos with actresses and their many husbands, or say Norma Shearer standing with MGM producer Louis B Mayer or Barbara Stanwyck with Robert Taylor and so forth. For the time being, I’ll post only the beautiful shots, primarily posed. I do not own the copyright to these, and where I can tell, I’ve tried to identify where the photos come from. In some cases, I’ve written the original cutline descriptions that appear on the back of the photo, or at least some variation of them. Enjoy what I have so far. (The above photos are, of course, the lovely noir queen Lizabeth Scott at the top, Shearer, and the lovely Hedy Lamarr. – David D. Robbins Jr.

Tyrannosaur | Religion In the Room

By David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out
Tyrannosaur (2011)

Tyrannosaur is the name widower Joseph (Peter Mullan) gave to his wife, because she was a big woman, who sent ripples across the surface of his morning coffee whenever she walked down the steps of their two-story apartment. But in truth, it’s Joseph who is the real tyrannosaur in the film, and some might wonder about the entire gender of men by association. Director Paddy Considine’s story begins with a drunken, severely unhinged Joseph taking out his frustration on his dog “Bluey”. He’s left a tavern after getting rousted and kicks the dog to death in a back alley. His anger at the world and himself is so deep he can’t control flying off the handle at nearly everything in his path. (In that way, he’s a blue-collar cousin to Johnny in Mike Leigh’s “Naked”.) Next we see Joseph sitting in another pub, stewing as three increasingly loud and obnoxious youths joke with each other while playing pool. The vulgarity of the conversation and the loudness of it irritates Joseph into a biblical anger. He tells them all to shut up. One threatens him with a pool cue, turns his back, and Joseph knocks him out with a punch from behind. Joseph is a man of many contradictions, able to kick to death his own dog in a moment of violent exasperation, and yet he’s angered by the impropriety of some loudmouthed youths. The only real human interactions we initially see from Joseph are when he consoles an old friend who is dying of cancer, and his pleasant banter with a neglected neighborhood child.

Elisabeth Bergner | Screen Queen

Screen capture of Elisabeth Bergner as Catherine in “The Rise of Catherine The Great” (1934).

By David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out

Cinephiles of classic cinema relish the old movie myths about long-lost works, finding niche films, or making personal rediscoveries of forgotten actresses like Elisabeth Bergner. Bergner was largely known as a stage actress in the Shakespearean style in the 1920s and 30s, but she also played roles in 13 films, in a career that spanned from 1927 to 1982. She played Ophelia in “Hamlet” on the Zürich stage at the Stadttheater. She even quit a job, through odd circumstances, as the character Anna in the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 1941 classic film, “49th Parallel”. You can still see long-shots of her in the film, but the role was later given to actress Glynis Johns. She played Rosalind in a 1936 film version of “As You Like It”, which starred a young chap named Lawrence Olivier. Bergner even provided the inspiration for the 1950 Joseph L. Mankiewicz film, “All About Eve”, starring Bette Davis. For a time in the 1930s, Bergner was thought of as having no equal in the British theatre, despite being a transplant originally born in 1897 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She had been one of the more popular stage and screen actresses in pre-World War II Germany, before moving to London in 1932 after the rise of Naziism.

A still photograph of actress Elisabeth Bergner.

In an article written by Kathlyn Hayden for the fan magazine Photoplay (“Elisabeth Bergner: Puppet or Genius?”, June 1934), the writer describes the numerous times she tried and failed to get an interview with the presumably shy, self-conscious and reluctant actress. Hayden can’t quite decide the answer to her own question. She describes an actress who disliked speaking in public, who looked at the ground as if she was afraid to make eye contact, and who wasn’t able to work on a film set without the presence of her husband-director Paul Czinner. The piece begins with Hayden being given access to the set of Czinner’s 1934 film, “The Rise of Catherine the Great”, a movie produced by legendary director Alexander Korda. It’s a story set in 1745 Russia, about the diminutive Catherine, who is set to marry the rakish, cruel, and eventually bonkers Grand Duke Peter (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), in the hopes of producing an heir if his aunt, the Empress Elisabeth (played beautifully by Flora Robson) doesn’t make one of her boy-toys a lucky man. The film begins like a romantic screwball comedy. Catherine overhears that Peter has declined the marriage, despite never having met her. She voices her frustration with a new courtly acquaintance, unaware that he is in fact the duke himself. It’s a wonderful meet-cute, and Fairbanks Jr. delivers some well-written self-depreciating lines about the duke being selfish and mean.

Heaven Knows Mr. Allison | That’s My Luck

By David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out
Heaven Knows Mr. Allison (1957)

John Huston thought “Heaven Knows Mr. Allison” (1957) was one of his best pictures. Well, I think that would be overstating it a bit. It’s a trifle, but an entertaining and charming one. Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum look good in CinemaScope, doing a good job of portraying the story of two people stranded on an island in the Pacific Ocean during World War II.  (Heck, Kerr was nominated for an Oscar for her part.) But this isn’t the masterpiece “The African Queen”, the noir classic “The Asphalt Jungle”, or the intriguing oddities, “Under the Volcano” and “Wise Blood”, and I’m not sure its meant to be. One of my favorite scenes in the film is actually within the initial sequences. Mitchum is U.S. Marine Corporal Allison who gets washed up on the beach after his submarine was sunk. He’s deathly exhausted, crawling out of the ocean, and finds what looks to be a little temporary village. But the only person there is a nun, Sister Angela (Kerr). He’s near passing out, climbs atop the porch of a make-shift shelter, and looks up to see her. In a way, it’s the meet-cute of the film. The first bit of dialogue actually begins with an implied innuendo. We assume Allison has struggled for days out in the ocean, and as a rough and tumble “aw-shucks-mam” kinda marine, he’s also feeling a little light in the head. He’s worn out and hungry, and is desirous for more than a plate of warm beans.

Cosmopolis | Accelerating Into the Void

U.K. poster for David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis” (2012), based on Don DeLillo’s novel.

“Today’s violence, the violence produced by our hypermodernity, is terror. A simulacrum of violence, emerging less from passion than from the screen: a violence in that nature of the image … We are dealing, therefore, not with irrational episodes in the life of our society, but instead with something that is completely in accord with that society’s accelerating plunge into the void.”

– Jean Baudrillard, “The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena” (1990)

By David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out
Cosmopolis (2012)

David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis” is the damnedest journey ever taken to get a haircut. Admittedly, I come at Cronenberg’s film from a different viewpoint than most film-goers. For one, I’ve watched nearly every Cronenberg film (enjoying “Videodrome”, “Crash”, “eXistenZ”, “Naked Lunch”, The Fly”, and “History of Violence”) but I’m more of a Don DeLillo expert, having read every one of the author’s books. It was no surprise to see Cronenberg use DeLillo’s dialogue verbatim. No sense in messing with the writing of a genius, right? “Cosmopolis” isn’t DeLillo’s best work, but it is fascinating, as all of the writer’s work is. And the same could be said of the film. At its root, it’s a story about a 28-year-old billionaire named Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), who seems to have little emotional attachment to anything but numbers, money, and trying to get a haircut all the way across town in a city that resembles New York. That’s the vehicle for the story. As the film begins, Packer stands on the sidewalk and declares in the kingly third-person, “We need a haircut.” He sits at the back of his limousine, in a seat that resembles a throne, with all kinds of screens and gadgetry around him. The movie plays like a string of vignettes.

Juliette Binoche as Didi Fancher, seducing Eric Packer.

We first meet his friend, Shiner (Jay Baruchel), presumably a young business partner who helped him when his enterprise was a dot.com startup. And from there, we’re introduced to characters who at times just seem to appear in his limo without any segue. Sometimes they’re seen outside the limo and they get in, others just appear while the automobile is crawling through city gridlock. We meet Didi Fancher (Juliette Binoche), Packer’s art dealer, a mistress with whom he has sex in the limo amid discussing a Rothko purchase. There’s Jane Melman (Emily Hampshire), his chief financial officer and an avid runner, who gets off as his talks dirty to her while receiving an in-limo prostate exam. We’re introduced to his wife of 22 days, Elise Shifrin (Sarah Gadon), a poet, who is distant, withholding of sex, and who keeps reminding Packer that she can smell the extramarital trysts on him. (“You absolutely reek of sexual discharge.”) There’s Torval (Kevin Durand), his bodyguard, who protects Packer, as the violence around the limo escalates, and protestors burn things, piss on the limo, chuck pop bottles, scribble graffiti across the windows, and toss rats. (The latter of which Packer jokes would make an interesting unit of U.S. currency.) Samantha Morton plays Vija Kinski, Packer’s wordy and erudite chief of theory. It’s a wonderful hodge-podge of characters, all with weighty things to say. The further the limo goes toward its crosstown destination (a barbershop), the wilder and more violent the outside world, much like how Joseph Conrad’s Charles Marlow sees the wilderness around him grow denser as he travels toward Central Station to meet Mr. Kurtz in the novel “Heart of Darkness”.

Wild River | Less Is More In Love

By David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out
Wild River (1960)

Twentieth Century Fox released Elia Kazan’s “Wild River” (1960) on blu-ray this week and it looks fantastic. This post isn’t a review of the film or the measuring of the quality of the disc. And I won’t even give a plot synopsis. Rather, I just wanted to voice a few pointed thoughts I had while watching the film. It’s been awhile since I viewed a film starring Montgomery Clift. I’ve seen “The Heiress” (1949), “A Place In the Sun” (1951), “Indiscretion of an American Wife” (1953), “From Here to Eternity” (1953) and “The Misfits” (1961), to name a few. But I kept watching Clift (as Chuck) in the “Wild River”, admiring his extremely understated way of acting. It reminded me, slightly, of the feeling I used to get watching Gary Cooper. It’s a style that used to irritate me a little. It never turned me away from good films, but I kept wondering when the emotional bomb was going to drop, and it never really does. Clift’s voice is more Marlon Brando than the man that starred in “High Noon”. But his laid-back, purposeful repose in “Wild River” makes him fascinating to watch. Perhaps less is more.

English Patient | The Grace of Adjectives

Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas in Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient” (1996).

By David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out
The English Patient (1996)
Blu-ray (Miramax Lionsgate /2012)

Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient” (1996) is worthy of high praise for a number of reasons. It expanded the beauty of Michael Ondaatje’s novel in just the right ways. Minghella clearly made use of the knowledge gleaned from the desert films that came before it, like Zoltan Korda’s “The Four Feathers” (1939) and David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962). The gorgeously fractured plot is masterly pieced together like a complex mosaic. The cinematography in the air and below is majestic. But it’s also the film’s subtle understanding of the grace of adjectives and words that should floor film-goers. Of course, the first and most obvious adjective is the erroneous nationality given to the dying patient, played by Ralph Fiennes, who is not English, but rather a Hungarian aristocrat named László Almásy. It is that adjective that determines the fate of the two main characters. As the patient’s nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche) says, “It’s a war. Where you come from becomes important.”

The Skin Storm | Sex In Film

By David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out

Has any film in the last 44 years, since the dissipation of the Production Code, truly taken on the singular topic of sex and made it transcendent? Is there a film that encompasses the erotic, the rich tapestry of thought, the complexity and introspective nature of it all? There’s been an endless number of films, old and new, that appear to come close. There are other films too that get sexuality right, but in truth can’t really be called sexual film, because the sex is only tangential to the main plot. Clearly, it’s a brave new world in cinema. Audiences are the beneficiaries of filmmakers being able to take risks, some good and some disastrous, to discover a way to depict sexuality as the awing and reverential Gordian Knot that it is. But that doesn’t necessarily mean films have reached the core of sexuality just yet, whether it’s a movie made in 1968 or 2012. But perhaps we’re on the verge.

In the generally well-received Steve McQueen film, “Shame” (2012), Michael Fassbinder plays Brandon Sullivan, a sex addict and a chronic porn-watcher, a living and breathing Dali’s “The Great Masturbator”, hellbent on increasing his titillation in the isolation of his apartment. He’s impotent in real ‘relationship sex’, and has a manic suicidal sister named Sissy who tries to cuddle with him when he’s fast asleep in bed. Brandon can only get it up when sex is combined with an act he believes is a kind of deviance, so he pays for prostitutes, participates in live online-sex chats, snatches a girl from his best friend, and shamefully hides a mountainous pile of sex mags from ‘Asian Babes’ to ‘Zoo Weekly’. It’s an intriguing look at the suffering of a sex-addict, whose life is spiraling as those around him inch closer to his personal obsession.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s | The Diamond’s Flaw

Movie poster for Blake Edwards' film "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961), adapted from Truman Capote's novel.

By David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” directed by Blake Edwards
Paramount’s 50th Anniversary Ed. Blu-Ray (2011)

Most viewers remember “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” with the golden glow of nostalgia. It’s a film about a girl, Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), hiding desperation as she tries to find herself in New York. But it’s hard to watch this film, without being taken away from its beauty because of the stereotyped Asian role of Mr. Yunioshi (Mickey Rooney), one of Golightly’s fellow upstairs tenants. The film is largely remembered as a vehicle of taste, class, and its quaint love story ending with a romantic chase and a momentarily wet and unhappy no-name cat. As easy as it is to fall into the charm of Golightly’s inevitable love story with Paul Varjak (George Peppard), there’s a serious flaw in this minor diamond. It keeps rearing its ugly head with each faux-Asian cackle.

Nothing Sacred | The Sweetest Frauds

The Kino cover to the only blu-ray edition of William Wellman's "Nothing Sacred" (1937).

David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out
Nothing Sacred (1937), directed by William Wellman
KINO edition (BD) 2011

“The hand of God reaching down into the mire couldn’t elevate one of ‘em to the depths of degradation.”
– A small-town doctor about the worth of newspaper reporters in “Nothing Sacred”.

Certainly, William Wellman’s “Nothing Sacred” (1937) is one of his best films, and one of the better screwball comedies of the era. It’s not as good as films like Howard Hawks’ sublimely zany “Bringing Up Baby” (1938) with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, or “His Girl Friday” (1940), Ernst Lubitch’s “Trouble In Paradise” (1932), “My Man Godfrey” (1936) or “Twentieth Century” (1934) — but it is quality, largely because of a witty script and the personalities of its leading actors, Fredric March and the underrated Carole Lombard.