Tag: 1940s

? in ‘Across the Pacific’

On By Ben YagodaIn Movie in theater, Movies in moviesLeave a comment

The Maltese Falcon (1941), Across the Pacific (1942), and Casablanca (a little later in 1942) make up a trio of films that interlock in complicated ways.

All three: star Humphrey Bogart, costar Sidney Greenstreet, released by Warner Brothers.

Falcon and Pacific: directed by John Huston, costar Mary Astor (whom the Bogie character calls “Angel”), Greenstreet character referred to as “the Fat Man.” (He’s even called that in the Across the Pacific newspaper ad, above.)

Falcon and Casablanca: costar Peter Lorre.

Pacific and Casablanca: Bogart character named “Rick,” film is set in the days just before Pearl Harbor.

Across the Pacific is the weakest of the three, but it’s the only one with a movie-in-movie scene, and hence it’s my subject today. Bogart is Rick Leland, who, as the movie opens, has been court-martialed from the U.S. Army for stealing. But things are not as they seem. He’s actually a spy on a top-secret mission, which involves him traveling on a Japanese ship from Nova Scotia to Yokahama. But the ship is held up in Panama, where the denouement takes place.

The whole thing is pretty ludicrous, not to mention racist. Rick at one point actually says, “They all look alike.” (Huston and Warner Brothers must have thought so, too: all the Japanese characters are played by people of Chinese descent. In 1942, of course, Japanese-Americans were otherwise engaged in internment camps.)

But by the time, the movie-in-movie scene comes around, all the plot points have been taken care of and we can get down to action. Rick’s contact has told him to go to a movie house, which turns out to service Panama’s apparently sizeable Japanese community. Rick sits down, and Huston very skillfully builds suspense that suddenly erupts in a climax reminiscent of HItchock’s Saboteur, which had come out just a few months earlier. Note the audio track, with its mix of audience titters, a crying baby, and the movie’s dialogue and soundtrack.

Now, you will have noticed the question mark in the title of this post. The usually reliable IMDB doesn’t name the film being shown, and I haven’t been able to find it in any other source. I happen to have a neighbor and occasional tennis partner named Satoru Saito, who is a professor of Japanese literature and film at Rutgers University. He was kind enough to take a look at the clip and reported:

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out the name of the film. The poster in the lobby (the same one as the outside) is a women’s magazine (Fujin koron) cover. As for what the characters are saying, it’s a bit hard because the woman is definitely not a Japanese speaker, and they are both reading off a script (the movie is likely a silent film, and I don’t know if what is being said accurately reflects the silent movie). The dialogue is something like this:

The man: “I will make sure to use my time only for you.  I won’t go out with Hanako.   For ___ reason, I couldn’t help it.”

Woman: “I am happy to hear that…. Oh my classmates are here.”

Classmates: “They are very touchy.”

Man: “You must be tired; let’s go for some tea.”

Woman: “I don’t think I can today.”

Man: “Don’t say that, let’s go.”

So that’s all I got. If anybody has a clue to what this movie is, I would be delighted to hear it.

‘The Egg and I’ in ‘Brute Force’

On By Ben YagodaIn Movie somewhere else, Movies in moviesLeave a comment

Contrast is almost a prerequisite when it comes to effective movie-in-movies. It would be hard to find one more pronounced than in Jules Dassin’s 1947 prison melodrama from Universal Brute Force. Actually, you’d think that whoever does the cinematic programming at this pen should be fired, as probably the last movie Burt Lancaster and his fellow hardened cons would be expected to enjoy would be The Egg and I. That comedy is also from Universal and was released just a few months before Brute Force. It’s also unlikely that a prison would get its hands on such a recent movie, but chalk that up to poetic license.

The Egg and I is about the wacky misadventures of a couple from the city (Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert) when they decide to go into the chicken-farming business. The inmates have a surprising reaction.


The appreciative chuckles at this fluff either the ultimate poetic license, or the prisoners are so starved for entertainment that they’d lap up anything.

Incidentally, looking into this pairing led me to a funny anecdote told by one of my favorite DJs, Jonathan Schwartz, and recounted by blogger Peter Filichia. It seems that long ago, a TV programmer in the Midwest

“decided one night to show both films — first Brute Force, until the moment where the men go to see the movie, at which point he interpolated The Egg and I in its entirety. Yes, all 104 minutes of it. During commercials, he’d intone, “You are watching Brute Force, starring Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn” — though someone who’d tuned in late would swear that he was watching The Egg and I.

“Finally, after that light comedy finished up, our programmer returned to the scene in Brute Force where the guys are getting up from the table after having watched the movie…. The programmer then continued with the rest of Brute Force, giving viewers a 199-minute orgy of 1947 Hollywood!”

Thanks to Eric Hanson for the suggestion.

Untitled MGM Cartoon in ‘Northwest Hounded Police’

On By Ben YagodaIn Movie in theater, Movies in movies, Not real3 Comments

I confess that until researching this post, I was unfamiliar with Tex Avery’s MGM cartoons. Like many people, I know and love the Warner Brothers stuff by Avery, Fritz Freling, and Chuck Jones — Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Daffy Duck, and that lot. But I’ve learned that in 1941, Avery left Warner’s for MGM, where his greatest creation was the phlegmatic basset hound Droopy.

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Northwest Hounded Police (1946) is like a Road Runner cartoon not so much on steroids as mescaline. A prisoner up in the Yukon, Wolf, escapes and is pursued by a Mountie, Droopy. And I mean pursued. Wolf ventures to the highest mountain peak and the depths of the ocean, and as soon as he arrives, who should he see but the Droop-ster. Wolf does a double and usually a triple take, his eyes bulge out of his head by twenty feet or so, and he hightails it out of there at warp speed.

Both Warner’s and MGM cartoons were larded with self-conscious fourth-wall breaking, and indeed, such a joke was the reason for Avery’s leaving Warner’s. According to Wikipedia, in Avery’s original version of The Hunting Hare (1941)

Bugs and the hunting dog were to fall off a cliff three times, milking the gag to its comic extreme. According to a DVD commentary for the cartoon, the historian and animator Greg Ford explained that the problem [producer Leon] Schlesinger had with the ending was that, just before falling off the third time, Bugs and the dog were to turn to the screen, with Bugs saying “Hold on to your hats, folks, here we go again!”, a punchline to a potentially risqué joke of the day.

In the first scene in his first movie, Dumb-Hounded (1943), Droopy looks at the audience and says, “Hello, all you happy people … you know what? I’m the hero.”

Northwest Hounded Police offers a new level of meta, as Wolf literally runs out of the frame of the film and takes a seat in a movie theater, only to see …

If you’re interested in seven and a half minutes of fun, here’s the whole movie.

https://vimeo.com/230227767

‘Flames of Passion’ in ‘Brief Encounter’

On By Ben YagodaIn Movie in theater, Movies in movies, Not real13 Comments

With this post, I inaugurate a new tag: “Double dip.” It indicates films that have a movie-in-movie scene, and are also watched in a movie-in-movie scene in another film. The only other one I can think of at the moment is The Shining, which has a scene where characters watch Summer of ’42, and which is screening on the doomed drive-in in Twister. Come to think of it, there’s actually a sort of triple dip there: Summer of ’42 has a scene in which characters are watching Now, Voyager. Watch this space for a fuller account.

The topic for today is Brief Encounter, which has been used in more than a dozen films and television shows. The star-crossed, married-to-other people lovers in David Lean’s 1945 classic, Laura (Celia Johnson) and Alec (Trevor Howard), meet once a week for a day in town, and part of their routine is going to the cinema. We see them there twice. One of the films they watch is real but unidentifiable; the other is deeply fanciful.

First we see Laura and Alec watching a preview for the made-up film, Flames of Passion, evidently a sort of King Kong epic, which is everything Brief Encounter is not, starting with the exclamation-pointed self-proclaiming adjectives: Stupendous!, Colossal!! Gigantic!!! Epoch-Making!!! All the stuff that is repressed and suppressed in Lean’s film (made and released during World War II, set in 1938) is right out there in Flames; with its restive natives, stampeding elephants, and passionate kisses, it’s so blatant and on the nose that even the typeface for the title is made out of flames.

 

This movie is definitely fictional, but Flames of Passion has been used as the title of several films, most prominently a 1922 British melodrama and a 1989 gay love story, very loosely based on Brief Encounter.

The following week, they go back to see Flames of Passion, but first, a Donald Duck short. (IMDB identifies it as the 1938, “Donald’s Better Self,” but there’s no way to know for sure, as all we hear are some Donaldian quacks.)

 

Everybody laughs uproariously at the low comedy, which appears to offer not only relief but a sort of release from the world’s burdens — a familiar motif from Sullivan’s Travels, Sabotage, and Hail, Caesar!. What’s not familiar is the elevated level of Laura and Alec’s analysis, at least to those of us used to in-theater comments on the order of “Don’t go in there, you idiot!” (The screenplay, I should have noted earlier, is by Noel Coward.)

Alec: “The stars can change in their courses, the universe go up in flames, and the world crash around us, but there’ll always be Donald Duck.”

Laura: “I do love him so … his dreadful energy, and his blind, frustrated rages.”

Then the music starts and Alec says, “It’s the big picture now. Here we go. No more laughter. Prepare for tears.”

We see the opening title:

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A lot to parse there. First, the Roman numerals affirm the year as 1938. The apparent 180-degree transformation of Gentle Summer to Flames of Passion is presumably a sardonic commentary on Hollywood’s tendency to bastardize source material. And (the fictional) “Alice Porter Stoughey” refers to the then prominence of three-named, six-syllabled American female authors, such as Alice Duer Miller, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and especially Olive Higgins Prouty, whose 1941 novel Now, Voyager became the aforementioned hit Bette Davis melodrama the following year. (Prouty was an interesting figure, in part because of her subsequent close relationship with the much younger Sylvia Plath. Wikipedia tells us that she “supported Plath financially in the wake of Plath’s unsuccessful 1953 suicide attempt: Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, would later refer in Birthday Letters to how ‘Prouty was there, tender and buoyant moon.’ Many, including Plath’s mother Aurelia, have held the view that Plath employed her memories of Prouty as the basis of the character of ‘Philomena Guinea in her 1963 novel, The Bell Jar.“)

Lean and Coward’s final comment on Hollywood is that the next thing we see is Alec and Laura leaving the theater. She says in voiceover narration: “It was a terribly bad picture. We crept out before the end, rather furtively, as though we were committing a crime.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Maresi’ (?) in ‘The Third Man’

On By Ben YagodaIn Actual, Movie in theater, Movies in movies1 Comment

In writing the previous post, on the use of Brief Encounter in numerous films, I learned that the British Film Institute once chose The Third Man (1949) as the greatest British film of all time. I was therefore happy to have a chance to see Carol Reed’s noir classic recently, on the big screen of the Prytania Theatre in New Orleans, in magnificent black and white.

And what do you know, there is a movie-in-movie scene. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), an American just arrived in post-war Vienna, finds himself investigating some shady doings. In this scene, accompanied by actress Anna Schmidt (Allida Valli), he is about to question the porter of an apartment building. However, it turns out that the porter is dead, and his little son points to Holly as being the killer. There ensues an almost comically low-speed chase, accompanied by the movie’s defining zither music, with the little kid somehow being the fastest pursuer.

Holly and Anna duck in to a movie theater, which inspired me to add a new tag to the blog: “On the run.”

 

 

As you’ve observed, we don’t see the movie, only hear it. That makes it hard to identify, even more so when (like me) you don’t understand German. A clue is the title on the marquee of the theater:

MovieTheater1_Porzellangasse19

IMDB reveals that Maresi was indeed an Austrian film, released in 1948, and starring Maria Schell. The indefatigable Ben Zimmer has unearthed a plot summary (translated from the German by Google Translate): “An aging nobleman shoots his favorite horse, Maresi, who has sunk to the cab of a hawk, to spare him a dignified age – at least to him.”

Of course, movie continuity follows its own rules: the interior scenes might have been shot in a different theater or a sound stage, and the audio might have been from a different film.

So I appeal to speakers of German and/or scholars of Austrian film? What can you tell me about the movie that’s playing while Holly and Anna plot their next move?

Update: Hari List, who runs Bruttofilmlandsprodukt.net, a blog and podcast dedicated to Austrian film and TV, responded to my request for information on Twitter, where his handle is @HariLi. He reported that he was unable to find out anything about the soundtrack we hear when Holly and Anna are in the cinema.

It sounds “old”, as in bad speakers or gramophone. The dialogue is pretty basic, borderline nonsensical. It could be from an old movie that has been badly dubbed, but the dialogue stops when Holly and Anna talk and then resumes. Has to be a nondiegetic track, probably recorded just for that, which makes sense from the filmmakers standpoint. [“Diegetic music in a film or TV programme is part of the action and can be heard by the characters.”–Cambridge English Dictionary.] Also the audience smirks don’t fit, because nothing funny or in anyway emotional was said.  Lastly, the movies listed out front: Irrtum im Jenseits is Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death, Feuervogel is part one of the two-part cinema cut of the western series Miracle Rider (1936) with — as  seen — Tom Mix. On top it probably says Glück muß man haben (You have to be lucky) …which is a German film from 1945, that premiered 1950 – so again some timeline issues but it says “our next movies”, so it’s an announcement. Vier Humoresken was probably an individual comedy shorts program. Btw the cinema still exists, but is a stage theater now.”

 

‘Task Force’ in ‘White Heat’

On By Ben YagodaIn Actual, Movies in movies2 Comments

cody
Verna, Ma, and Cody at the drive-in

The heyday of the American gangster movie lasted eighteen years. It started in 1931 with Little Caesar, starring Edward G. Robinson, and The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney, and ended in 1949 with Cagney’s White Heat, directed by Raoul Walsh. (All three are Warner Brothers productions and are on the American Film Institute’s list of the top ten gangster movies of all time. Chronologically, the one after White Heat is Bonnie and Clyde, released in 1967, also by Warners.)

White Heat pointed the way forward in a number of ways. It had the kind of gritty semi-documentary style scene in crime films of the late ’40s and ’50s like Naked City, The Asphalt Jungle, and The Killing. It had the dark psychological themes of the emerging film noir genre, especially in the portrait of Cagney’s character, sadistic gangster Cody Jarrett. Cody suffers debilitating headaches, comforted only by the Oedipal ministrations of his Ma (Margaret Wycherly), who massages his neck and invites him to sit in her lap.

And it had a modern movie-in-movie scene. It occurs early on, when Cody, Ma, and his girlfriend, Verna (Virginia Mayo), are being chased by the cops. Needless to say, Ma is sitting next to Cody, Verna riding shotgun. He pulls in to the San Val Drive In theater in Burbank (the country’s second drive-in, opened in 1938), as the police cars speed past, sirens blaring. Taking his money, the ticket-taker says, “It happens every night. Ruins the movie.”

The movie is Warner Brothers Task Force, which was still a few weeks from release at the time of White Heat‘s premiere. (And therein lies a goof. A sharp-eyed poster to a website about movie theaters points out that the marquee announces two different 1949 movies, the western South of St. Louis and the exotic fantasy Siren of Atlantis.) I haven’t seen Task Force, but according to the IMDB description, it’s apparently a history of aircraft carriers seen through the eyes of a fictional admiral played by Gary Cooper. In any case, all the explosions and mayhem are too much for Cody, possibly because he feels a headache coming on. After an attendant puts a speaker inside the car (I just barely remember that technology), he orders Verna, “Kill that.”

 

After Verna’s sarcastic comment about the second feature, Cody outlines his plans for escape. Just before he bolts the car, he kisses both ladies goodbye–lingering just a little more on Ma than on Verna.

 

Untitled Melodrama in ‘Saboteur’

On By Ben YagodaIn Movies in movies, Not real3 Comments

In 1942, six years after Sabotage, Alfred Hitchcock made the similarly titled Saboteur. But so much had changed. Hitchcock was now based in America, and Saboteur–an earlier-day North By Northwest, in a number of ways–was his first film to exploit the landmarks of what would become his adopted country, including Boulder Dam, the Statue of Liberty, and, in the movie-in-movie scene, Radio City Music Hall.

The main character, competently played by Robert Cummings, works in a munitions plant in Los Angeles (which in the movie is always pronounced “Los Angle-ese,” the way I remember the baseball announcers of my youth saying it). Falsely accused of setting a fire, he goes on the lam and eventually crosses the country, along the way finding the real Fifth Columnists.

One of the traitors is played by Norman Lloyd, whose career has stretched from his debut on the New York stage in 1933 to a role in 2015’s Trainwreck (and included a memorable turn as Dr. Auschlander in the 1980s medical drama St. Elsewhere). The cops are on to him and track him down in Radio City, filled with folks watching a melodrama.

 

It’s a great set piece but a strange one. The audience is tittering, then laughing uproariously, at the film on the big screen (which isn’t a real movie but a scene shot by Hitchcock with B-list actors), even after jealous-husband Henry pulls out a gun and threatens to use it. At that very moment, the Lloyd character, cornered by the cops and hiding behind the movie screen, shoots through it with terrible consequences. Henry starts shooting, but the audience incongruously keeps  roaring with laughter–until a woman screams. Lloyd moves in front of the screen and darts across it, creating a riveting image that may have been Hitchcock’s most self-conscious commentary on reality and artifice and terror, and how mixed up they can become.

Screen Shot 2017-12-16 at 5.22.48 PM

 

“Playful Pluto” in “Sullivan’s Travels”

On By Ben YagodaIn Actual, Movies in movies8 Comments

Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941) is one of the most meta movies that came out of Hollywood, at least before post-modernism reared its self-conscious head. It opens with an action scene–a fistfight on top of a train, with both protagonists falling to a watery grave. But then, the words “The End” appear in the water–it was only a movie. Three men get up from their screening-room seats, and one of them, director John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), argues to two studio execs that what they and we have just seen is just the sort of socially conscious document Depression American needs.

Sullivan (aka Sully) is ashamed of the escapist fare that has made him rich–trifles like Ants in Your Plants of 1939, Hey Hey in the Hayloft, and So Long Sarong. (Either the last is an amazing coincidence or Sturges knew that Pardon My Sarong, starring Abbott and Costello, was in production and would be released the following year.) He wants to make a film called O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Sullivan: I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions. Stark realism. The problems that confront the average man!

Exec: But with a little sex in it.

Sullivan: A little, but I don’t want to stress it. I want this picture to be a document. I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity! A true canvas of the suffering of humanity!

Exec: But with a little sex in it.

Sullivan: [reluctantly] With a little sex in it.

Unfortunately, Sullivan, a product of boarding school, has no experience with the suffering of humanity, and therefore resolves to put on hobo clothes, go out on the road, and obtain some. Complications ensue, notably involving Veronica Lake, identified in the credits only as The Girl. “How does the girl fit into the picture?” a cop asks Sully. He says, “There’s always a girl in the picture. What’s the matter, don’t you go to the movies?”

There’s lots of other self-referential lines, including knowing mentions of Sturges’ colleagues Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch. At one point, Sully, in trouble yet again, breaks the fourth wall, remarking, “If ever a plot needed a twist, this one does.”

The movie can be said to be structured around three movie-watching scenes. The first is the fight sequence that opens things up. The second comes when Sully is taken in, and taken to a picture show, by two maiden ladies. Here the camera stays on the audience and all we get from the movie is some lachrymose music–the dialogue is drowned out by the sounds of kids sniffling and people munching on snacks, all combining to give the sense of a pretty miserable cinematic experience. As Sully and his companions leave, we see from a lobby card that a triple bill is playing: Beyond these Tears, The Valley of the Shadow, and The Buzzard of Berlin.

The third movie-within-the-movie is the climactic scene of Sullivan’s Travels, and the only one that’s an actual movie. Through plot machinations, Sullivan has found himself a prisoner on a chain gang, subject to miserable conditions. For a rare respite, the prisoners are brought to a rural African-American church, where a movie is projected on a white sheet that serves as a makeshift screen. The selection of the day is a 1934 slapstick (rather Warner Brothers-y, in fact) Disney short, “Playful Pluto.” As Sully watches, he begins to have a revelation.

 

Through more plot machinations, he is released. News of his adventures have created a nationwide sensation, and the studio execs are now eager to make O Brother, Where Art Thou?  One of them says, “It will put Shakespeare back with the shipping news!”

But Sully will have none of it. He wants to make a comedy. He says, as the picture comes to and end, “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”