Leslie Caron Triple Feature (****)

The lovely Leslie Caron

Fanny (1961) (***)
Father Goose (1964) (***)
The L-Shaped Room (1962) (*****)

I never knew much about Leslie Caron beyond the obvious - you know, classically trained ballet dancer turned Hollywood star who was discovered at age 19 by Gene Kelly and cast in An American In Paris (1951), leading the way to more fame and acclaim stateside in Lili (1953), Gigi (1958) and Father Goose (1964). Mam'selle Caron had that classic French look, her sunken cheeks and pouty lips suggesting reticence bordering on sadness.

Born in Paris of a French father and an American mother, Caron was spotted in Roland Petit's 1946 Ballet "Orpheus" by Gene Kelly and later came to the USA to partner up with such legendary hoofers as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly before chucking her dancing shoes at age 25 to take on more dramatic roles - and the occasional romantic-comedy like Father Goose. The world was better for Caron deciding to stretch as an actress, as her work her in the early '60s proves. Her craft was exemplified in the three films I watched last night on Turner Classic Movies: Fanny (1961), Father Goose (1964) and The L-Shaped Room (1962).

First up, the best of the batch.

The L-Shaped Room (1962) (*****)
Directed by Bryan Forbes (UK, 126 minutes)
Cast: Leslie Caron, Tom Bell, Brock Peters, Avis Bunnage, Cicely Courtneidge


Why-oh-why is this out-of-print?

Leslie Caron reached her dramatic pinnacle playing Jane Fosset, an unwed pregnant woman who gathers strength from her odd roommates in a seedy Notting Hill tenant house, in Bryan Forbes' The L-Shaped Room (based on a novel by Lynne Reid Banks), for which she received a British Academy Award. (The Brits loved Caron, as she also won BAFTA's Best Foreign Actress award for 1953's Lili.) Like Fanny (the non-musical adaptation of the play based on Marcel Pagnol's Marseilles/Fanny Trilogy) and Lili (despite an Oscar nomination for Best Actress), this film remains criminally out-of-print.

This is a veddy British kitchen sink drama. Particulary striking is its frank depiction of hypocritical attitudes about sex, abortion and class; Jane Fosset is an innocent who is initially blamed for her condition, then blamed for not "taking care of it" in a sensible manner. She briefly considers getting rid of her child, but is so repulsed by the quack she visits (who sees only marriage or termination as options) that she resolves to have the baby alone.

It also boasts a stellar Limey cast. Tom Bell (H.M.S. Defiant, Prime Suspect, The Krays) plays Toby, a struggling writer that falls in love with new tenant Jane Fosset.


Tom Bell

Bell had the classic Angry Young Man look of this era - a thick pompadour of hair and a chiseled face like Tom Courtenay crossed with Laurence Harvey (but without Harvey's posh accent) - which apparently mirrored his real-life Angry Young Man persona as well. Bell famously insulted Prince Philip at an awards event and subsequently found himself virtually blacklisted in films, despite his dashing looks and status as one of England's finest and most promising actors. He would go on to have steady work in British television, however, though I didn't immediately recognize him as the same actor who 30 years later would portray Helen Mirren's backstabbing detective Bill Otley in Prime Suspect (1991). Bell passed away in 2006.

The great American actor Brock Peters, fresh off of his star turn as Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, is next-door-neighbor Johnny, a West Indies jazz trumpet player (not exactly a stretch for Peters, whose parents were from Africa and the West Indies) and good soul who secretly loves Jane. As an actor, Peters had one of the most intense and expressive faces of his time; no one was better at showing angst and inner turmoil.


Brock Peters in "To Kill a Mockingbird"

The quintessentially coarse working-class landlady is Doris, played by veteran character actress Avis Bunnage (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Sparrows Can't Sing, Coronation Street), who routinely got cast in "blousy woman" roles. She's not in a lot of scenes, but when she is on camera, she steals the picture. She's exactly the kind of source material Monty Python would later skewer in their working-class shrew caricatures.

Another standout is Cicely Courtneidge, who plays middle-aged lesbian tenant Mavis - we only learn Mavis' orientation late in the film in a great scene in which Leslie Caron asks about Courtneidge's great love and looks at a framed picture; we never see the picture, just Caron's knowing look and Courtneidge's reply of "It takes all sorts, dear." She also does a wonderful version of "Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty" in British army fatigues that's worth the price of admission. The Smiths opened their 1986 album The Queen Is Dead with a sound bite of Courtneidge's rendition taken from this scene.


Mavis loans Joan her book of Sapphic poetry

Director Bryan Forbes also uses music very effectively to augment his settings and actors. I loved the beatnik club scenes, where Jane and Toby go to see Johnny perform. Everybody drinks coffee, dances the Twist to beat jazz and makes out in smoky corners. Made me think of Expresso Bongo. Elsewhere in the film, Brahms' First Movement is used to suggest tension - first when a lost Jane desperately explores London's seediest neighborhoods in search of a flat, and later when she anxiously watches the clock in the cafe where she works, waiting for her estranged lover to show up. He doesn't.

This is a sad film about loneliness and making connections with others that offers no simplistic happy ending. In that regard, it's like life itself, in which there are no easy answers, only countless perplexing questions. The ending is subtle and dramatic - and rather open-ended. After having her baby and making plans to return home to France, Jane stops by the flat one last time to pick up her belongings and to return Toby's manuscript about their relationship, which is entitled "The L-Shaped Room." Toby is out of his flat, so Jane leaves a note on his typewriter. The note is filmed in a medium-shot and is very hard to make out, but it's something to the effect of "Your story is lovely, but it has no ending. It would be a marvelous story with an ending. - Jane." Cryptic, yes. Perfectly so.

Fanny (1961) (***)
directed by Joshua Logan (USA, 134 minutes)
Cast: Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Charles Boyer, Horst Bucholtz, Georgette Anys


Why-oh-why is this out-of-print??

Though it boasts a Who's Who cast of French stars in Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Charles Boyer and Georgette Anys, the real star of this old school tearjerker is the port of Marseilles and the cinematography of DP Jack Cardiff, who captures the beauty and romance of this seaside city in a way no one else has since. When I came across this film on TCM, I thought it looked hokey - I mean, a French cast in berets-and-cafes dubbed into English for Hollywood consumption of Gallic cliches, but it was so gorgeous to look at with its breezy blue skies and the characters set against the azure hues of the Mediterranean Sea, I stayed with it. It seemed so different from drab, humid Baltimore with its pollution and weekend heat advisory. Then, when I saw Caron's face against that backdrop, I was hooked.

Here's imdb's summary of the plotline (based on the plays and films of Marcel Pagnol - Marius, Fanny, Cesar), which borders on the mythic in its simplicity: "Almost 19-year-old Marius feels himself in a rut in Marseille, his life planned for him by his cafe'-owning father, and he longs for the sea. The night before he is to leave on a 5-year voyage, Fanny, a girl he grew up with, reveals that she is in love with him, and he discovers that he is in love with her. He must choose between an exciting life at sea, and a boring life with the woman he loves. And Fanny must choose between keeping the man she loves, and letting him live the life he seems to want."

There are really no surprises there, but we continue to watch because the scenery is pretty, Boyer and Chevalier are engaging and Leslie Caron is captivating.

Father Goose (1964) (***)
directed by Ralph Nelson (USA, 118 minutes)
Cast: Leslie Caron, Cary Grant, Trevor Howard


Don't have much to say about this film except that I've always liked it. Cary Grant was nearing the end of his career and only made one more movie, 1966's Walk Don't Run. This was a change of pace for Grant, as he played against type as a gruff and grizzly boozer instead of Mr. Suave. This was about the time Cary protested that he found it silly to be 60 and still doing romantic scenes with women half his age (co-star Leslie Caron was roughly 32 at the time). Caron has a great drunk scene and the film also boasts a nice title song, "Pass Me By," made famous in a Frank Sinatra cover version.

Art Out of Time (****)

Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries 1900-1969
by Dan Nagel
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2006, hardcover, 320 pages

Thanks go to comics geek extraordinaire Dave Cawley for telling me about this great collection of unknown comic strip and comic book artists, which I immediately checked out of the library. I haven't made it all the way through, but though it goes up to 1969, most of the strips are old-timey, offering a fascinating look at a lost time in comics history, before the medium was defined, cleaned up and codified. Just as with the old pre-code Van Beuren Studio and Fleisher Brothers animated cartoon shorts, when a medium is new its possibilities seem limitless.

From Publishers Weekly:

There are lots of anthologies of the work of the past century's famous cartoonists, but Nadel has done a real service in putting together this collection of 29 marvelous nearly unknown comic strip and comic book artists. Many are reprinted from yellowing newsprint—in a few cases, like Walter Quermann's late-'30s newspaper strip Hickory Hollow Folks, from the only copies of their work still extant. Only a few, like Ogden Whitney's poker-faced '60s comic book Herbie, have ever been reprinted before. Nadel's five categories, "Exercises in Exploration," "Slapstick," "Acts of Drawing," "Words in Pictures" and "Form and Style," sometimes seem arbitrary; the biographical notes at the back are informative but all too brief. Still, it's hard to argue with the comics themselves. Charles Forbell's 1913 newspaper strip Naughty Pete looks like it had a huge influence on Chris Ware; Gustave Verbeek's bonkers formal experiment The Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, from 1904, is still hilarious and sui generis; Rory Hayes's crude but meticulous horror stories from 1969's Bogeyman Comics, the most recent pieces here, were decades ahead of their time. Contemporary cartoonists—and their fans—have a lot to learn from the freewheeling, witty, try-anything-twice artistic attitude of the pieces Nadel's assembled.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (***)

Ieri, oggi, domani (Italy, 1963, 119 minutes)
Director: Vittorio De Sica
Cast: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni

Every Baby Boomer male knows the iconic picture of Sophia Loren above, but few have actually seen the movie from which its taken, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, which is most famous for this Sophia Loren striptease scene:



True Confessions: I was always more drawn to the gamine Audrey Hepburn-type screen divas as an adolescent, but as a developing lad even I could not ignore the zaftig sexuality on display from Italy's reigning spaghetti-slurpin' sex siren. I was particulary susceptible to stockings and garters and, well, this was a "leg show" that stuck with me for years.

Luckily, I came across this on TCM while channel surfing last night. De Sica's film won 1964's Best Foreign Film Oscar and deservedly so, as it's quintessentially Italian and offers an acting worksohop for Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni (who was nominated for a BAFTA Best Actor award). It's told in an amusing three-part vignette format, each named after a different woman and Italian city ("Adelina" of Napoli, "Anna" of Milan, and "Mara" of Roma), which gives De Sica the opportunity to riff humorously on regional and class differences (I love how Northern Italians dismissively snort, "Oh, they were Sicilians," as if synonymous with being a hillbilly or thug!).

The "Adelina" story is the longest and, arguably, the best, with its obvious criticism of the Catholic Church's birth control policies (and the even more obvious conclusion that overpopulation, poverty and apathy go hand-in-hand in a never-ending cycle). It tells the story of working-class Napoli housewife Adelina (Loren) supporting her out-of-work husband Carmine(Mastroianni) by selling Black Market cigarettes. Due to a loophole in the Italian legal system, she can't be jailed for her transgressions as long as she's pregnant or nursing newborns, so she beats the system by continually getting knocked up by her willing husband. Unfortunately, as the head count of little ones increases, Carmine's desire decreases, as he succumbs to fatigue from stud duty and headaches from the constant pitter-patter of tiny feet. When Carmine starts shooting blanks, Adelina finally goes to prison. But her case becomes a national sensation and, following a pardon, she returns to a fully-rested Carmine to start the cycle all over again.

The short "Anna" vignette takes place in Milan and, naturally (this being the affluent industrialized home of Fiat and rich football clubs like A.C. Milan and Inter Milan) deals with class and privilege issues. Loren's Anna is a rich northern industrialist's trophy wife who has grown bored with her life of luxury - or has she? She hooks up with Renzo (Mastroianni), a writer (i.e., poor/artistic type) that she thinks can offer her passion and excitement. But she freaks out when he crashes her Rolls Royce, and when a well-to-do motorist stops to help, Anna the Material Girl takes off with him in his spiffy sportscar.

In the famous finale, in which Sophia does her striptease, she plays an upscale Roman hooker named Mara, who has caught the eye of her young seminary student neighbor, Umberto (Gianni Ridolfi). In fact, Umberto is ready to chuck his starched collar for a date with Mara - until his grannie pleads with Mara to help her save the lad's soul. In order to do so, Mara vows to give up her work for one week if the saints will reclaim Umberto's soul and make him a man of the cloth again. The loser - as in all the other storylines in De Sica's film - is Mastroianni as Mara's regular customer, the sex-starved Augusto Rusconi. Poor Marcello!

The Story of Film (****)

by Mark Cousins
Da Capo Press, 2006, 512 pages

Saw this at Daedalus Books & Music and had to pick it up. Yeah, I know, there's a zillion books on the history of film (God knows I have most of them!), but this one is really slick, with great photos and great reviews. Mark Cousins is the host of BBC's Scene by Scene, as well as an author and director of documentaries.

Here's the editorial blurb from Amazon:

The Story of Film presents the history of the movies in a way never told before. Weaving personalities, technology, and production with engaging descriptions of groundbreaking scenes, Mark Cousins uses his experience as film historian, producer, and director to capture the shifting trends of movie history without recourse to jargon. We learn how filmmakers influenced each other; how contemporary events influenced them; how they challenged established techniques and developed new technologies to enhance their medium. Striking images reinforce the reader's understanding of cinematic innovation both stylistic and technical. Presenting three epochs — Silent (1885–1928); Sound (1928–1990) and Digital (1990–Present) — The Story of Film spans the birth of the moving image; the establishment of Hollywood; the European avant-garde movements; personal filmmaking; world cinema and recent phenomena such as Computer Generated Imagery and the ever-more "real" realizations of the wildest of imaginations. Here are mainstream entertainment films and maverick talents, breathtaking moments and technical revolutions, blockbuster movies and art-house gems, icons of the screen and the hard workers behind the scenes. It is a powerful story of the world's most popular artistic medium.

I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! (***)

The Comic Art of Fletcher Hanks
Edited and with an afterword by Paul Karasik
Fantagraphics Books, 2007, 122 pages

“The recovery from oblivion of these treasures is in itself a work of art.”-Kurt Vonnegut

Just discovered this at work today. Fantagraphics describes it as "the work of a comics genius so obscure that many serious collectors were unaware of Fletcher Hanks...until now."

His work is everything that you want a comic book to be but so rarely is: weird, violent, stupid, fun and breathtakingly beautiful all at once. It's like a memory of a comic book story you read as a kid but are now not certain whether it really existed or not because nothing else has ever lived up to that particular type of thrill. It really existed, alright. And it was written and drawn by a guy you never heard of: Fletcher Hanks. Welcome home. - Fantagraphics Books

"No one knows a thing about Fletcher Hanks," writes editor Paul Krasalik. "This stuff is impossible to find. Nobody saved them 'cause Hanks worked on second-rate characters for third-rate publishers." But he represents an interesting time in a budding industry. "He was there at the ground floor of the comic books industry. Hanks was a true original"

But a few things are known, thanks to this collection. Hanks wrote a number of strips under a number of different names. He wrote "The Super Wizard Stardust" ("The most remarkable man who ever lived and master of interplanetary science") as Fletcher Hanks, "Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle" ("The most remarkable woman that ever lived," who "devotes her phenomenal powers to protecting the jungle born") as Barclay Flagg and the Flash Gordon-inspired "Buzz Crandall of the Space Patrol" (the "top crime buster of the universe" who lives on the "highly civilized planet of Venus and is in charge of the interplanetary secret service for both Venus and Earth") as Bob Jordan.

A brief Hanks bio and one Stardust strip are included in author Dan Nagel's book Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969. Nagel writes that "Hanks drew some of the strangest tales in comic books from the late 1930s to the early 1940s" and observes that his strips "work better as pop art brut than narrative, but are utterly immersive." The dominant theme is always cosmic disaster, with "the apocalypse just a minute away, only to be prevented by Stardust's brutal justice." In an interview with The Comics Reporter, Nagel added, "Some people might call him a primitive, but what's so great about [Hanks] is that he took this idea of superheroes as gods literally, even before anyone articulated the idea."



Included in the 128 page, full-color book are 15 of Fletcher Hanks’ finest stories as well as a comics afterword by editor Paul Karasik called “Whatever Happened To Fletcher Hanks?” This "afterword" is really interesting because Karasik tracks down his son, Fletcher Hanks, Jr. (nicknamed, like his dad, "Christy" - for baseball hurler Christy Matthews), who tells him that his father was, in real life, an alcoholic deadbeat dad who abused his family and abandoned them when Junior was 10. Though a number of artists have championed his work (among them R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Kurt Vonnegut and Gary Panter), Christy Jr. recounts how his father stole his son's allowance and broke his mother face and swears he would have killed him if given half a chance.


Merciless justice, Stardust-style

I guess we can see Fletcher Hanks' real-life violent nature reflected in his art. That's what's so bizarre about these pre-Comics Code strips. Villains (with names like De Structo, The Fifth Columnists, Slant-Eye - who is Asian, natch - Gyp Clip, Skullface, Wolf Eye, The Demon, and Org) are not just killed, they're tortured, frozen alive, even turned into rats!



One of the ironies of Hanks' mysterious life is that when died (sometime around 1970), his frozen body was found by police on a park bench in New York City. In one of his comics, Stardust imprisons villain "Gyp" Clipp in a ice chamber with the words, "In your frozen condition, you'll live forever - to think about your crimes."

More on Fletcher Hanks:
www.fletcherhanks.com
Wikipedia
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! (Amazon)

loudQUIETloud (***)

loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies
Directed by Steven Cantor and Matthew Galkin, 2006, 82 minutes

I watched this for free Sunday night on Comcast On Demand. I never knew much about the Pixies, but people whose tastes I respected (Dave Cawley, Ray Cruitt) always raved about them. Plus Kurt Cobain famously said Nirvana was his attempt to rip off The Pixies. But the best description of this documentary, which covers their 2004 reunion tour (after having been together 1986-1992), may well be New York Times critic Nathan Lee: "Boring people who made extraordinary music, the Pixies are inexplicable. In attempting to demystify them, the directors Steven Cantor and Matthew Galkin achieve the opposite."

I liked that the film wasn't overly ambotious, documenting one aspect of the band's career: the post fall-out, post-Kim Deal-rehab, reunion tour. And I loved the mundane, non-musical parts that answered the question, "What do rock stars do when they're not being idolized onstage?" They drink lots of coffee, smoke ciggies, listen to music, pursue their hobbies, have relationships and have kids, that's what!

Head Pixie Charles "Black Francis" Thompson reminded me a lot of Baltimore's dearly departed songwriting genius Mark "Harpo" Linthicum, though a lot more dour than Harpo. Kim Deal struck me as an obvious addictive personality. Though now "clean and sober," she constantly has societally-approved drugs at her side - she's always sipping a Starbucks latte, non-alcoholic brew or chain-smoking one butt after the other. Drummer David Lovering seemed nice but weak and directionless. He starts abusing substances like wine and Valium midway through the tour (perhaps understandably - he lost his father to cancer near the end of the tour) and gets lectured by the band. When Kim Deal tells him how hard it is to kick Valium dependency, David cracks wise at her, "Maybe I should just do heroin in that case." Touche!

But I think my fave Pixie is now lead guitarist Joey Santiago, not just because he's a gifted guitar player or comes across as the most even-keeled of the band's disparate personalities. But because I noticed he digs soccer. He wears the national team jersey of Italy's Azzuri in one scene, and a Brazil knit cap in another. (I subsequently read that he scored a soccer documentary for Nike called Blood, Sweat and Tears: Football in the Rough.) Plus he's a dead ringer for my former co-worker and all-around-cool-guy, Carlton Jackson. My man!

Monkees at the Movies (***)

Monkees At The Movies
Original Airdate - 04/17/67
Writers: Gerald Gardner & Dee Caruso
Director: Russell Mayberry

I really don't watch more than five of the 500+ channels I get with Comcast digital cable (MSNBC for Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Turner Classic Movies, G4 for Ninja Warrior and Unbeatable Bazuke, Fox Soccer Channel and The Tennis Channel). Sunday night there was nothing much on besides French Open coverage on the Tennis Channel - and I soon became bored watching the slaughters being shown (Rafael Nadal humbling fellow Spaniard Fernando Verdasco 6-1, 6-0, 6-2 and Ana Ivanovic humiliating cutey-honey Petra Cetkovska 6-0, 6-0), so I switched over to Comcast's On Demand channel. I had no idea how much fun, free stuff was available there. Not only did I watch three original British Office episodes and the Pixies 2004 reunion tour documentary loudQUIETloud, but I also discovered The Monkees TV shows there as well.

I selected Monkees at the Movies at random and it proved a good one with the Monkees spoofing the AIP/Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach movies. The "plot" involves the Fab(ricated) Four getting hired as extras for a beach movie starring "Frankie Catalina" (guest star Bobby Sherman in a ridiculous Fabianesque blonde wig, who would go to pursue TV stardom in 1968's Here Comes the Brides).



Frankie "can't sing, can't surf and is afraid of girls," but still has a very large ego. After his attitude pisses off the Monkees, they sabotage his performance, leading Frankie to exit stage right and Davy Jones to replace him. But Davy's ego goes Titanic and the other three likewise bring him to down to Earth. Of course, all Monkees narrative is just a time-killer between the songs, and the ones on display here are great - "Valleri" (with its purloined "Jumping Jack Flash" guitar riff), "Last Train To Clarksville," "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You." Davy also sings a snippet of "I Love You Really," while Bobby Sherman trots out "New Girl In School." "When Love Comes Knockin'" appears in credits but never used in episode.

At the end of the episode there's an interesting interview with the boys about not playing their instruments.