Landfills More Crowded Every Day
How Much Stays Good and For How Long?
How soon are best efforts obscured? Success even … great success. There are those who wrote novels that sold into thousands, a million even, whose names we no longer know. Panels on You Tube speak of authors once celebrated whose names mean less than dust, complaint that these are unjustly obscure, fear present that all will join such ranks. It’s relative same with movies and those who made them, celebrated once, barely if ever since. How oft do we meet someone young or unschooled who never even heard of an artist or personality you thought could not be forgot? Happens enough for me to no longer notice. What determines the survival of any book or film, and should it be for one or group of persons to choose what “dates” or not? I lately watched a now obscure feature adapted from an as obscure novel, East Side, West Side, released by MGM in 1949 and starring Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason, Van Heflin, and Ava Gardner. The source scribe was Marcia Davenport, one who “wrote what she knew,” high life among trend-set New Yorkers, doings amidst café society and rot that underlies marriage between perceived class equals. It all was relevant once, spoke not just to a sophisticated audience but a mass one, book-to-film amended to assure that. Published in 1947, East Side, West Side had pedigree for coming behind Davenport’s The Valley of Decision, a considerable hit for MGM in 1945. Having been so would presell whatever oak came of this author’s acorn.
Other literary names past and beyond reclamation, how does Marcia Davenport differ from these? One way at least --- there were the two popular movies made from her books, and so long as TCM or streaming persists, they will be seen and maybe even enjoyed. Movies' rough equivalent, that is its legion of the now-arcane, might include Paul Muni or Greer Garson, seat-fillers then, unknown or debased since, excepting us fans of course. There are others, plentiful others (virtually all of silent players apart from comics), difference being that with films, there is always someone, plenty of someones, who still care. For authors it is often, and only, family members to hold banners aloft. As told previous, Raintree County creator Ross Lockridge left children who did a webpage and defend still his legacy. Movie offspring tender the same by way of familial tribute … Victoria Mature, daughter of we-know-who, developed a cabaret act where she appears on screen with her father, a neat way of reminding us who Victor Mature was and why he matters still. Difference in books and film is commitment, as in we can watch the one in ninety minutes to two hours but reading the other means three-four hundred pages, and that’s a mighty haul for something with less consensus for its relevance or amusement value. My own bites from such apples proved bittersweet: Son of Fury, Whispering Smith, Little Lord Fauntleroy. Just wanting to like or appreciate a thing will not get it done. So why are we made to feel like philistines for often preferring movies over books they were made from?
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| Louis Bromfield At Work Among His Severest Critics |
Whatever East Side, West Side aspired to as a novel, accomplished even, could translate to movies only in terms of melodrama, which was what Hollywood was expert at and audiences demanded whatever the text source. Warners did The Fountainhead a year before, even hired Ayn Rand (above left with Vidor and Cooper) to pen the screenplay, but what they, she, and we got was heat supplied by director King Vidor and star Gary Cooper, both having fed a same stove since careers began, all and sundry secure that what we read is one thing, but what we watch is entirely something else. This applied to any book studios purchased, best result had from work most like a movie to begin with, a trick popular authors learned as output through 30-40’s looked to screen sales for payoffs greater than even best sellers might yield. Louis Bromfield was one of these, a critic’s pet and public favorite whose reputation would fold within his lifetime. The New York Times in 1927 called him “the most promising of all the young American authors writing today,” though by his death in 1956, Bromfield was thought by many to be a used-up “hack” occupied more with soil conservation at his Ohio farm than focusing on novels. Critic-at-large Edmund Wilson referred to more than one Bromfield book “stretching out its arms to Hollywood,” sure a curtail for any author as Wilson saw it. If being remembered is sought-most object of artists, was a surer bet for immortality literature or film? Let lists be made of writer names familiar from decades referenced above, then compare with movie careers still recalled. Which has the longer list? And yet estimation of film folk still runs distinct second, writing by far the more honored estate, even if it pays way less, but isn’t that mere further evidence of our skewed priorities?
There is a thing called a “canon” to which books belong or they don’t. If you were once in, then out, chances are you won’t get back in again. Panel people I watch speak of work long since expelled from the club. Names like Joseph Hergesheimer and James Branch Cabell are bandied. They both were big once, lived lush off their writing. Long-gone Richard Blackmore gave us Lorna Doone, which was voted Best Novel Ever Written by Yale students in 1906. We know Lorna from nothing but a punchline in Three Stooge comedies, or cookies on a market shelf. How does output so celebrated go spent, in fact “unreadable,” as one modern scholar referred to the cast-off lot? There is a movie canon too, less and less for things that are old. Who assigns worthies? Film is taught still, but what do instructors teach? Something tells me a lot of my favorites are not and never will be part of any canon. TCM has theirs, based I suspect on popular rather than aesthetic choices. What would be “Best Of” by estimate of modern-day copyright holders? “Classic” is a more fluid term for movies than books. There are those who would call Harry Potter, novels or films based on them, classic. Picking a canon should be personal, for we as individuals are the ones reading and watching … trouble is everyone wants to be “right” in their pick, and if gatekeepers mock me for liking Lorna Doone, which I have not read, there’s comfort at least in the fact Yale students once went for it.
Did you know In This Our Life (1942) was based on a 1941 novel by Ellen Glasgow that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1942? What I recall as overheated Bette Davis v. Olivia De Havilland, barely different from a dozen other such, came of high-regarded literary antecedent that has probably gone unread since before the Korean War, or am I wrong? If people watch In This Our Life, it is likelier for Davis, or maybe the fact John Huston directed. And yet Ellen Glasgow was very important to the film’s prospects when it was new, having written five best-selling novels (d. 1945). Her family home in Richmond is a National Historic Landmark. How do we best know when time comes to stop enjoying a thing? Critic/historian David Thomson in 2008: “Has anybody made a voluntary decision to see Heston’s Ben-Hur in recent years?”, being a question you may answer correctly with Hell No, Are You Kidding? or anything other than Yes. And yet I kind of liked it the last time round, so may not properly know my classics, at least not ones that deserve to be in a canon. There now is fear factored into praise for things cast out, and it doesn’t matter if they once won Academy Awards, as Ben-Hur assuredly did. I recall Gone With The Wind as many people’s notion of the Best Picture Ever Made. Find someone who will say so now. Many are afraid to trust their own judgment for what is good, or at least acceptable. Literature has been the more segregated for over a century, much of old out if not reviled, what’s recent but tentatively in. Geoffrey Tillotson discussed this under heading of “Writers Despise Their Immediate Ancestors,” being attitude he observed from beginnings of the twentieth century, when young writers and thinkers wanted no part of anything generated during the century before.
A scholar lady, Brit-based, says on You Tube that there are two kinds of novels, one called “writerly” that will challenge you, and a “readerly” sort for relaxation, left alone after a single pleasurable pass. Readerly books go on vacation with their buyer but generally do not come back. Seems in long runs we prefer ambiguity, the read that requires work to comprehend, the sort for which we construct our own meaning. The rest is to enjoy and then discard, being too “passive and accessible” to warrant revisit. A classic never finishes saying what it has to say, changing with us as we grow to understand and appreciate what was there but beyond our grasp. There must be truth in all this, for what lighter-than-air book gets twice or more airing? Movies however are a species different. Is there a term called “watcherly”? (spell check just flagged as “not a word,” so never mind). Let’s try “comfort watching.” There are hundreds of those in my kit, many more than of sort I would seek to “challenge” me. Does this mean novels are inherently more intelligent and worthy of focus than film? Are movies so much an art for dumbbells as to not be art at all? Because they appeal so directly to emotion, I say that is why we go back over and again, to see/hear a thing that moved us a first time and more to come. Novels offer much, but we cannot visualize or listen to them outside our imagination. Purists would say that is how it should be, that all films are passive and require nothing of viewership other than to sit and be fed by a spoon that is the screen.
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| Dick Powell as Role Model ... I Use His Odd Goodbye Wave From Time to Time |
Movies rank for most by how many jolts of pleasure they supply. Should one have a dozen, we will come back to it and often. Given a hundred such stimuli, there may be yearly, even monthly, ritual of re-watching, mood elevators more effective than what medicos so recklessly prescribe. Citizen Kane, Sunset Blvd., and The Searchers are settled classics, but I go to them less than The Thing, Cry Danger, or The Tall T, those first listed to admire, while the latter three are to truly collaborate with. Jolts are what more modest ones have. They demand less, but somehow offer more. Jolts come of casual and seemingly ad-libbed conversation that takes place in The Thing, how Dick Powell messes with props in Cry Danger, or the eccentric way he waves goodbye to Rhonda Fleming when he drops her off to work. Jolts. Randolph Scott in The Tall T telling Richard Boone about the ranch he plans to have, despite knowing Boone full intends to kill him. These and others will never forfeit welcome for memory and feeling they call up, isolated moments where it seems real life is being lived, and we’re quiet witness to it. Looking at a face and hearing the timbre of a voice, to know what comes, eager always to see it again. I don’t mind so much being challenged by a film, but once only, please … from there it must sustain on repeated joy it offers, for how much do challenging ones give after you pass their test or not? If “difficult” books, say James Joyce or Tolstoy, reward most for being read again (and again), then here might be where literature essentially parts from film, anything to be admired best done so from afar, at least by me.
posted by John McElwee at 7:59 AM
17 Comments:
John, even if I have no comments to add, I find your blog the most thoughtful and thought-provoking I read daily. Another great topic! I'd add THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and MONSIEUR VERDOUX to the list of Impressive Films I'm Glad I Watched But Have No Desire To See Twice. On the other hand, I have several dozen "comfort movies" I turn to endlessly. Some are acknowledged classics, others wouldn't end up on anyone's list (even mine!), but they're all satisfying in a way that some once-great films aren't. Lastly, regarding BEN-HUR, yes, I did make a conscious decision. Back around 2019, my local AMC ran it as part of the TCM Classics series. I'd never seen it on the big screen (my brother had, during the original run, and has recounted several times how the kids cheered when Heston beat the ever-living daylights out of Boyd). In fact, the chariot race was the first clip I watched, on the back wall outside my home, when I bought a DVD projector. Can a movie ask for more appreciation than that?
One of your finest posts. An interesting subject approached with perception and eloquence - qualities always on display at Greenbriar.
"A classic film never finishes saying what it has to say, changing with us as we grow to appreciate what was there but beyond our grasp"
Not a new idea, but I doubt it's ever been so perfectly expressed.
While reading your recent post on "The Big Clock", I found myself thinking about Ray Milland and how he exemplifies the concept of the once big name who's now all but forgotten by the public at large. I started to think of other very major stars who'd also qualify and the first names that came to me were Greer Garson and Paul Muni. Milland, Garson and Muni were all once bona fide box office attractions - in addition to being Oscar winners. But who has much to say about them now? Seems that Garson and Muni were the first names that came to your mind too. They shone for millions in their day but it seems with a light that later generations responded to less and less.
Stories that survive carry something that speaks to different eras -- or can be made to speak to different eras. Novels and films we now dismiss as old pop culture may have been desperately important and incisive in their times, beyond the obvious points of addressing contemporary war and upheaval.
Shakespeare survived by dealing with eternal ideas, which survive all manner of updates and reinterpretations. "Merchant of Venice" was at various time staged as anti-semitic propaganda and as an attack on anti-semitism; it can be played either way (and note that Shylock is but one of several major characters, arguably not the central one). Critic Walter Kerr once argued that it was originally intended as a comedy -- there are plenty of obvious comic bits -- with Shylock a classic Pantaloon character. A famous production of "Othello" for US military bases costumed it in contemporary uniforms, giving the intrigues between army officers and their civilian betters a fresh clarity and tension.
Jane Austen is always in fashion, and always being filmed. I've been dipping into a book about the various adaptations, and the commentators note how the stories may be faithfully rendered, but subtly reflect modern attitudes at odds with the ones Miss Austen accepted and even endorsed.
For decades Mark Twain has been neutered on film. Adventures of Tom and Huck were old-timey nostalgia, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" portrayed by lovably harmless folk like Will Rogers and Bing Crosby, and Twain himself presented as the uncle who'd say "wicked" things but was really a dear old fellow (an image Twain himself cultivated in later years). In time readers rediscovered and embraced the angry Twain who'd rail against "the whole damned human race", but have we ever gotten a Twain adaptation with any of his venom intact? I sometimes wonder if parents gave their kids "Huckleberry Finn" or "Connecticut Yankee" on the strength of wholesome movie versions, then were treated to lively dinner table discussions of slavery, or Sir Boss's grim last stand.
Recently saw an excellent stage musical of "Ragtime". Harry Houdini would periodically appear, shedding straitjackets and chains. He was an immigrant who escaped not only those bonds but poverty and prejudice, and THAT was the magic his fans responded to. In later, more skeptical years, Houdini would be remembered more for debunking mediums. Now his name, if invoked at all, is a synonym for escape artist largely unburdened by what else he meant to previous generations.
Once had a 16mm print of EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE. Watched it, but today, I can't remember a single thing about it.
But THE THING, CRY DANGER and THE TALL T...now you're talking.
Home run, John! I particularly enjoy your closing comment:
I don’t mind so much being challenged by a film, but once only, please … from there it must sustain on repeated joy it gives, or does not, for how much do challenging ones give after you pass their test or not?
That prompted a memory of seeing The Last Emperor first-run. This was a sumptuous and challenging picture, very deep and dramatic, and I knew as I was watching it that I beheld a rare work of art. But I also knew that I would never revisit it. I thought it too exquisite a canvas to see shrunken to a TV-sized telecast or video, and too heavy to pass some relaxed leisure time.
I am in no way criticizing The Last Emperor as an unworthy picture. It's a magnificent movie. But for me -- in your words, John -- once only, please. I'll go back to my lowbrow comfort movies: Laurel & Hardy, Mexican Spitfire, Andy Clyde, Boston Blackie, and so on.
I remember seeing East Side West Side as a sort of novelty when it was computer colorized. I found it as an unremarkable film, relying on dialogue than anything else and featuring very unnappealing characters. With certain classics like Gone With The Wind and others I got fed up that they were always presented as the big things and I have never had any interest in revisiting again even if TCM (on HBO Max) constantly have them there instead of other titles. Many of these films are no longer the milking cows the copyright owners pretend that they are; in fact, they should go to the free streaming services if they want to keep them accessible because there is a large audience of viewers that don't care about them.
Dan Mercer considers THE FOUNTAINHEAD:
I saw “The Fountainhead” for the first time at a repertory showing at Wake Forest University when I was going to law school there. There was a good-sized audience and all of them seemed alert to the didactic excesses that richly garlanded the screenplay. They hooted and hollered at every line that struck them as being outrageous or over the top, as most must have seemed to those of a liberal sensibility. As such, we were all very much entertained. It is a movie that is over the top, though, with nothing done other than in a larger-than-life way. The dreams of a Dominque Francon, haunted by the image of Howard Roarke’s sinewy arms pressing a drill against a hard rock wall that must give way, is particularly striking but of a kind with other images and metaphors throughout the film. I understand that Ayn Rand was dissatisfied with this version of her novel, disliking the direction, the acting, and the editing of it. I don’t believe, however, that anyone reading the novel would find the film disappointing. The boldness of the one finds a counterpart in the other; and if the film sometimes verges on the caricature, it finds its model in the novel. None of the characters are real people, after all, but rather the embodiment of ideas and conceptions. In this, they are true to themselves and often all the more fascinating for that. If they are excessive in their actions or not believable, one must look to their creator, for Ayn Rand wrote the screenplay as well as the novel. Possibly she did not think that King Vidor accepted her ideas with the seriousness she intended or maybe a closer acquaintance with Gary Cooper revealed a variance between him and the man she worshiped from afar. Howard Roarke, with his lean, sculpted physique and gaunt face, is the Gary Cooper that a young Ayn Rand might have caught a glimpse of, working for Cecil B. De Mille in Hollywood or considered with greater leisure in a darkened theater. The man she married was of a similar physical type, though also a disappointment in his divergence from the ideal. He was never who she quite wanted him to be. Often the ideal is glimpsed only with the imagination or, more rarely, the opened heart.
Re: The Fountainhead: If it works at all (and I don't think it does), it's only as a parody of itself. Its sensibility and politics are so ludicrously underdone and juvenile that Cooper and Neal's deadly earnest belief in, and playing of, them only makes them that much more ridiculous.
There were only a few actors capable of making a palatable banquet of Hollywood cheese like this (Heston being the most prominent) and Cooper, who can do a lot and acts well in many things (other than the Capra-corn that no one could make work), isn't one of those actors.
The best place I've found to learn about the afterlife of old books is Goodreads. There readers can comment on what they've read, and give the books ratings from 1 to 5 stars. While the latest bestsellers can rack up tens of thousands of comments, books from yesteryear can still raise an opinion or two. As of today, 31 people have given between 3 to 5 stars to "East Side West Side" by Marcia Davenport, and 3 people actually wrote their thoughts about it. Pulitzer Prizes, even ones awarded 80 years ago, still attract some readers, as "In This Our Life" has 980 ratings and 74 reviews, with people posting reviews as late as last month (one lady enthused she was "bowled over" by it, another stating it was "bloated, ponderous and repetitive.") And yes, even now someone out there is reading "Lorna Doone" (over 15,000 ratings and 700 reviews!) It seems people find their way to these titles through their Kindles, "Lorna" and "In This..." are available for one click and 2.99 and 9.99, respectively. "East Side" isn't on Kindle, and hasn't been in print since 1982. More interesting is that so many people in their Goodreads reviews state something like "I was cleaning out my Grandma's bookshelves, came across this title I'd vaguely heard of, and sat down to read it." Nice to know books are getting passed on this way. Most of those seem to have come from the Book of the Month Club, hard to overstate how influential that institution was in its day.
The Fountainhead is the goofiest movie of the 1940s. Utterly ridiculous, particularly the dialogue.
I felt the same way about Last Emperor. Truly great movie, but I knew it would never have the same impact a second time. I'm much happier with a good B-movies from Monogram or PRC.
There's a reason why the only Spielberg movies I willingly watched more than once were Duel and Jaws. Solid, well-made entertainment in under two hours.
"Who is Paul Muni?" "Get me Paul Muni." "Get me a young Paul Muni." "Who is Paul Muni?"
Dan Mercer speaks of more re-visit favorites:
There are films that I come back to over the years. As often as I’ve seen them, I look forward to seeing them again. A few are recognized masterpieces but most aren’t. There are Ford’s “The Searchers,” Ulmer’s “The Black Cat,” with its marvelous pairing of Karloff and Lugosi, Dreyer’s “Vampyr” and “Ordet,” the Ranown westerns that Randolph Scott made with Bud Boetticher, Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country” with its hail and farewell to Scott and Joel McCrea, and Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which plumbs my heart as no other film has. Most of them, however, I might not be able to name at any particular time, save for the sudden recognition when I see a listing or chance upon it. Since I’ve seen them so often, there is not that thrill of discovery, at least not of the same kind as when I first watched them. Rather, they are like a journey that I’ve taken before and look forward to taking again. There is a certain anticipation, for the known pleasures, but also a growing realization, that I will never see them just as I have. Something about them will always seem new, with mysteries revealing themselves but never entirely. The films themselves, of course, do not change, except perhaps for better prints or restorations bringing a film back to something approximating what it was when first shown. I am changing, though. Each time I watch one of these films, it is with new eyes. What I look forward to seeing remains but the reason I do so is affected subtlety by the experiences and challenges of living a life. A certain yearning also remains. More than anything, this is the nexus between a film and my continuing interest in it. I do not think that it will be fully realized in this world.
I watch THE GODFATHER and THE GODFATHER PART II twice a year. Rembrandt paintings that speak and move.
Watched the new 4K releases this week.
A large part of the removing of once respected works from the canon is more than anything else probably revisionist history in the classroom.
A young fellow who asked if he could live with me took the film course at one of Canada's major universities. I asked him not to. I told him, "If you take that course you will lose your love of film." He said, "I will find that out for myself." Find it out he did. At the end of the year he told his instructors what I had told him would happen. Those instructors now say publicly, "If you take our course you will lose your love of film." That does not stop the young from taking the courses. I learned from him that all the universities in Canada and America use the same texts. He left his texts here. I read them.
"School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary,"--Ivan Illich.
"We get three educations. The first is from our parents; the second is from our schoolmasters. The third is from life. The last makes liars of the first two."--Montesquieu.
"I had wonderful teachers in the first and second grades who taught me everything I know. After that, I'm afraid, the teachers were nice, but they were dopes...I have a lack of ideology, and not because I have an animus against any particular ideology; it's just that they don't make sense to me...they get in the way of thinking. I don't see what use they are...University and uniformity, as ideals, have subtly influenced how people thought about education, politics, economics, government, everything...We are misled by universities and other intellectual institutions to believe that there are separate fields of knowledge. But it's clear there are no separate fields of knowledge. It is a seamless web."-Jane Jacobs
I have both the Eureka and Criterion Blu-rays of VAMPYR (1932). Both are from the German version. Footage in the French version that was censored out of the German version is included in the EUREKA edition as an extra. Wish someone would restore the English, French and Danish versions. Dreyer deserves that.
Emo Philips sent me a postcard on which he wrote, "I honestly believe you are the greatest teacher I know...for confirmation of everything you've been saying all along read David Mamet's TRUE AND FALSE. I did. Mamet writes, "Invent nothing. Deny nothing. Stand up. Speak up. Stay out of school."
People won't, of course.
This discussion reminds me of the story put into a peasants' mouth by Tolstoy in his novel 'War and Peace' ( or was it put there by the screenwriter of the movie version of that novel I recently watched? - not that that matters any) - that the world is like a cabbage, and each of our lives are like a little cabbage worm, and no matter how much we try to eat of it, nor how quickly we eat at it, no single worm will never ever be able to eat the whole cabbage. It's simply not possible.
So it is with each of us in our individual relationship to the vast existing corpus of literature, recorded music, and film - the sheer size of our libraries of these things compared to the time any of us has to examine them makes a comprehensive knowledge of ALL of it impossible to achieve no matter how much time or effort one puts into the attempt to do so.
That doesn't mean that what you do find won't be nutritious and tasty enough to satisfy, or that there aren't tastier and more nutritious parts of the "cabbage" than the part you've been gnawing at. But it does mean that there will always be something you've not read, heard or seen. It also guarantees that there will be differences between individuals in what is read, heard or seen, let alone in their individual reactions to what they are reading, listening to, or watching.
It also means that guides as to what's interesting or worthwhile to read, listen to and watch will always have a place in helping those without the time to wander the libraries randomly, hoping to find something of interest. That's one reason why I visit excellent media-related websites like GPS.
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