The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947)

The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, released in 1947, is based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 novel Bel Ami, or, The History of a Scoundrel: A Novel.

It is Paris in 1880. Georges Duroy (George Sanders), an ex-cavalyman now just barely eking out a living in a menial job, is thrown a lifeline by his old army buddy Charles Forestier (John Carradine). Forestier is a successful journalist and is sure he can wangle Georges a job. He could write about his experiences. Georges has no idea how to write but Forestier’s beautiful clever ambitious wife Madeleine (Ann Dvorak) gives him a crash course.

Georges gets the job and is modestly successful but he is aiming much higher. He is ambitious for money and influence but is also driven by resentment about his humble provincial upbringing.

He is introduced to a charming and pretty young widow, Clotilde de Marelle (Angela Lansbury). He takes her to the most notoriously disreputable dive in Paris. Clotilde is delighted. Clotilde is soon madly in love with him. She gives him the name Bel-Ami (from a popular song).

But for Georges women are merely stepping-stones to advancement. As cute as she is marriage to Clotilde will not advance his career.

He has some other marriage options in mind. He’s an effective muck-raking journalist and he is clever and devious in various ways but he knows that marriage is the most effective way to get ahead - there’s no better way to gain riches, influence and respectability. At one point in the story he is stringing four women along simultaneously. It’s just a matter of making the most astute choice. If he sets his sights on a woman and she isn’t interested he is confident he can break down her resistance. He has a lot of charm and no scruples at all.

His only redeeming quality is that at least he knows he is a cad.

Laroche-Mathieu (Warren William) is just as much of a scoundrel but much less honest about it. Georges has plans to make Laroche-Mathieu Foreign Secretary. Laroche-Mathieu is a fool, a hypocrite, a liar, a coward and a swine so he has all the qualities needed to be a Cabinet Minister.

Of course some of the women whom he uses come to hate him. Clotilde just loves him more and more.

Of course Georges is now like a juggler trying to keep a lot of balls in the air all at once so he cannot afford a single mistake.

This is very much a studio picture, shot on sound stages and the backlot with Paris represented by plenty of matte paintings. I love this kind of golden age Hollywood artificiality.

George Sanders is at his caddish best. He’s a delight. 

Warren William and John Carradine are very good. Ann Dvorak is excellent as a woman almost as ambitious and ruthless as Georges himself. Whether she is as clever remains to be seen. Angela Lansbury is terrific. She is a fool where Georges is concerned but the tenacity of her love gives her some dignity.

Of course this was the Production Code era so there’s a lot of stuff that is implied rather than overt. Does Madeleine have a rich older lover? It’s strongly suggested without actually being stated. Does Georges bed the various women he pursues? It’s left ambiguous. There’s an atmosphere of decadence but it’s handled cautiously.

The Private Affairs of Bel Ami is stylish and rather delicious and it’s highly recommended.

Writer-director Albert Lewin only made a handful of films but they included the superb Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951). His final feature film was the horror movie/jungle adventure The Living Idol (1957) which is way better than you might expect.

Lilith (1964)

Lilith, released in 1964 and written, produced and directed by Robert Rossen, is one of those movies that has fallen through the cracks. Despite being extremely interesting it doesn’t attract much attention. That might partly be because it’s difficult to classify. It’s set in a mental hospital but it’s not a Social Problem Movie and it doesn’t have a political axe to grind. It’s not a horror movie and it’s not a psychological thriller. It is a romance, of sorts.

After leaving the army Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty) returns to his home town and gets a job in the Poplar Lodge mental hospital. He is a trainee occupational therapist. Vincent has a reasonable degree of self-awareness. He knows that people attracted to this sort of work often have some personal motivation. In his case it has to do with a family member.

Vincent has a flair for the job and he’s keen. It looks like he’s going to do very well.

This is not a state hospital. This is an exclusive private clinic. The families of the patients pay huge amounts of money to have their loved loved ones cared for there. There are no high walls, no locked wards and there’s almost no security. The patients are high-functioning schizophrenics. They’re crazy but harmless.

The problem for Vincent is Lilith (Jean Seberg). She’s a patient. She’s very high-functioning, or at least she appears to be. She can give the impression of being a perfectly normal bright cheerful vivacious young woman. She is however entirely disconnected from reality. She is also intelligent and manipulative and very pretty. And very crazy.

Vincent isn’t stupid. He knows she is trying to seduce him. He knows this is a dangerous situation. But he’s inexperienced. And she’s so cute and adorable. He knows he can fix her. His love can fix her.

He really does believe that he is reaching her. There are warning signs which he ignores.

A complication is Stephen Evshevsky (Peter Fonda). He’s a patient too. He’s very neurotic, understands nothing about women and is hopelessly in love with Lilith.

There’s another female patient who adds another complication to the situation.

We know this is all probably not going to end well but this is not a horror movie or a psychological thriller so if and when disaster strikes it won’t necessarily involve violence and mayhem.

Lilith pleased neither critics nor the public on its release and is now totally forgotten. It’s just not even close to being a typical mainstream Hollywood movie. It’s an eccentric arthouse movie that feels very European. It’s a movie about people who are detached from reality and that’s how the movie feels. There’s no firm reality to grab hold of. It flirts with realism and then veers into full-blown surrealism. And even the moments of realism have a disturbing not-real edge. Lilith thinks that people keep lying to her. She doesn’t trust anything that anyone says to her. Vincent doesn’t trust anything that Lilith says to him. And we can’t trust anything we see in this movie. Which is not a flaw in the movie.

But it is the sort of thing that was always going to alienate mainstream critics and audiences.

And as the story unfolds reality becomes more and more shadowy and unreal.

And while it deals with a woman who is mad it does not approach this subject in a manner that would be approved by feminist orthodoxy. Its lack of interest in ideological axe-grinding is certainly the reason it continues to be ignored.

It’s a movie that is interested in the mechanics of madness - the way reality just keeps slipping away and the ways in which truth gets confused with lies and lies get mistaken for truth. We cannot trust what we see and we cannot trust our emotions.

In this movie there is certainly a link between madness and sex but again this is not handled in a politically correct manner.

And it has the sort of ending guaranteed to further exasperate mainstream viewers.

Seberg considered this to be her best performance. She really is both dazzling and very very unsettling. Warren Beatty is excellent, giving a performance in which his habitual self-confidence is inexorably eroded. It’s a subtle complex performance. I have never liked Peter Fonda as an actor but in this film he’s delightfully neurotic.

It’s amusing that some reviewers complain that the movie is muddled and implausible. It’s a movie about insanity! We are seeing everything from the point of view of characters whose grip on reality is so tenuous as to be virtually non-existent. By the time you get to the ending you understand why nothing you have seen quite adds up.

It’s also incredibly amusing that some reviewers think it’s unrealistic that a metal hospital would be run in such an unprofessional way. These dear sweet innocent children have clearly never had any dealings with actual mental hospitals.

Lilith is a superb movie, daringly out of step with mainstream tastes at the time and still awaiting intelligent re-evaluation. Very highly recommended.

I've also reviewed the source novel, J.R. Salamanca's Lilith.

The Only Game in Town (1970)

The Only Game in Town is a melodrama with some romantic comedy touches released by 20th Century Fox in 1970. It stars Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty.

Fran Walker (Elizabeth Taylor) is a dancer in Vegas. She walks into a piano bar and gets chatted up by the piano player, Joe Grady (Warren Beatty). She’s lonely and they sleep together.

Each of them has a problem. Joe’s problem is gambling. He claims to have it under control. As soon as he has saved five thousand dollars he’s getting out of Vegas. But Joe is a gambler and while he can save money he can’t stop himself from gambling it away. For Joe getting out of Vegas is one of those things that seems like it’s just never going to happen.

Fran’s problem is her boyfriend Tom. He’s married. For five years he’s been promising Fran that he’ll divorce his wife and marry her. She’s given Tom an ultimatum, the latest of many. She hasn’t seen him for three months. For Fran marrying Tom is one of those things that seems like it’s just never going to happen.

Joe moves in with Fran. There’s no commitment. Each of them can just walk out of the relationship at any time. It’s not like it’s a big love affair. And they can’t make a commitment because any day now Joe will have that five grand and he’ll be off to New York, and any day now Tom will walk in and put an engagement ring on Fran’s finger.

Neither of them is going to admit to having fallen in love.

That’s pretty much the plot. The relationship is interesting and complex. We are told that Fran is three years older than Joe and in fact Taylor at 38 was a few years older than Beatty and that age difference is crucial to the story. Fran is obviously flattered that a good-looking younger man wants to get her into bed. Joe is an irresponsible overgrown boy. Fran finds herself mothering him. Joe is trying to deal with the fact that he’s found a woman he actually cares about.

Fran is desperately afraid of loneliness and she’s at the age where she can’t waste too much time on casual relationships. She’s afraid of losing Joe but she’s afraid of getting hurt if she makes a commitment. They both have some growing up to do.

I like the two central performances a great deal and the two leads have real chemistry. They play off each other amusingly and charmingly. They’re playing characters with very human weaknesses but Taylor and Beatty both make their characters sympathetic and likeable even when they’re doing exasperatingly foolish things.

The Only Game in Town was a spectacular box-office flop and ended the career of George Stevens as a director.

A large part of the problem is that this was 1970. Critics were wildly excited by the New American Cinema and by a new wave of young directors and stars who were going to revolutionise American movies. In the previous year Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy came out. By comparison The Only Game in Town seemed very old-fashioned. George Stevens had been directing movies since 1933. This seemed like a movie that represented the glitz and glamour of 1950s Hollywood, the kind of old school movie that the New American Cinema was going to consign to the trash can.

Even worse, it has a definite 1950s melodrama feel. It has that 1950s major studio production polish. And critics had turned against Elizabeth Taylor. The whole Burton-Taylor celebrity circus thing hurt her career a good deal. In 1970 The Only Game in Town was inevitably going to be savaged by critics and ignored by the public.

Also counting against it was a hugely inflated budget. This should have been a modestly budgeted low-key intimate movie and as such would probably at least have broken even.

But classic movie fans today are less likely to be bothered by this movie’s old-fashioned feel. They’re more likely to see that as a plus. And old-fashioned melodramas have quite a following today.

Had this movie been released in the early 60s, around the time that movies like The World of Suzie Wong and Butterfield 8 were being made and Hollywood was tentatively moving towards grown-up movies about human relationships The Only Game in Town would probably have been hailed by critics as bold and daring. Timing is everything and the timing was wrong for this film in 1970.

It has to be said that Miss Taylor’s costumes are a major disaster and may have contributed to the dismissive attitudes towards the film.

I enjoyed The Only Game in Town. I’m going to recommend it.

Five and Ten (1931)

Five and Ten (later retitled Daughter of Luxury) is a 1931 MGM pre-code romantic melodrama. It was a star vehicle for Marion Davies, with her co-star being Leslie Howard who was not yet a major name in the United States.

The Depression is an important factor in many pre-code movies but it’s ignored completely in this movie which may reflect the fact that it’s based on a novel (by Fannie Hurst) written prior to the Wall Street Crash.

Five and Ten is a story of love but this is also very much a movie about the class struggle. No, not that class struggle. This is is not the capitalists vs the workers, the upper class vs the working class. This is class struggle within the upper classes. This is the old money blue blood American aristocracy vs the rising power of the nouveau riche new upper class. This was a very real class struggle, not just a device invented for the movie.

John Rarick (Richard Bennett) and his family represent the upstart nouveau riche. Rarick owned a chain of five and dime stories in Kansas. Now he owns an immense nationwide chain and he’s fabulously rich. That made him decide to relocate, with his family, to New York City.

His wife Jenny (Irene Rich) and daughter Jennifer (Marion Davies) are at first very excited. They assume that they will be welcomed into high society in New York. But New York is not Kansas City. They are snubbed by New York high society. And for a woman there is no humiliation to compare with being snubbed by society women.

Jenny has consoled herself by taking a lover. He gives the impression of being a gigolo but Jenny doesn’t care.

John Rarick has no idea what is going on and he had no idea how lonely and socially isolated Jenny had started to feel. The truth is that John Rarick has ceased to understand anything other than money.

He is also unaware that daughter Jennifer has been snubbed as well.

Now Jennifer has met Berry Rhodes (Leslie Howard). He’s an architect, or claims to be although he’s really just a dilettante. He spends his time playing polo and going to parties. Berry is perpetually broke but that doesn’t matter. He is a blue blood. His family is Old Money. As far as society in New York is concerned he is very much an insider. He is engaged, in a desultory fashion, to Muriel Preston (Mary Duncan), also very much of Old Money stock.

Jennifer has decided that she’s going to marry Berry. It’s impossible of course. There is that yawning class gap between them. But Jennifer is a very determined girl.

Perhaps she is motivated partly by a desire to storm the walls of the fortress of society but she is genuinely besotted by Berry’s aristocratic sophistication and self-confidence and stylish elegance.

And Berry has fallen for Jennifer, although that doesn’t mean he will choose a nouveau riche girl in preference to blue blood Muriel. It’s going to be an epic battle between these two women.

Meanwhile Jennifer’s brother Avery has turned to the bottle.

I adore Marion Davies. She’s funny, she’s lively, she’s charming and she’s sexy. She’s gorgeous and she has those incredible eyes. It’s unfortunate that she is often dismissed due to the vicious hatchet job Orson Welles did on her in Citizen Kane.

Leslie Howard is pretty good here and you can see why he would soon start making an impact in Hollywood.

Is it pre-code? The answer is very definitely yes but to tell you why would involve spoilers.

Five and Ten is an excellent pre-code melodrama and Marion Davies is sensational. And directed by Robert Z. Leonard, maybe not an auteur or a visionary but just a guy who directed a lot of excellent movies. Very highly recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD looks very nice.

Cocktail Hour (1933)

Cocktail Hour is a 1933 Columbia pre-code romance with a touch of crime. It was directed by Victor Schertzinger.

Cynthia Warren (Bebe Daniels) is a successful illustrator who is sure that a woman does not need marriage, she just needs freedom. Men are just amusements.

Prince Philippe de Longville (Barry Norton) follows her around like a lovesick puppy dog. He wants to marry her. He’s a nice boy but he’s just a boy. Cynthia is only interested in men so even if she did not want to get married she wouldn’t marry Philippe.

Randy (Randolph Scott) is a different matter. He’s a man. She’s really attracted to him, but won’t marry him.

Randy knows about women. He pretends that he doesn’t care. That drives her crazy. Even if she doesn’t want to marry him how dare he stop pursuing her!

Cynthia heads off to Europe. On the ship she befriends tempestuous Russian pianist Olga Raimoff (Muriel Kirkland). Olga is really just Tessie Burns from Kansas.

And Cynthia has a shipboard romance with the handsome charming William Lawton (Sidney Blackmer). He sweeps Cynthia off her feet. He quotes poetry to her. No girl can resist that.

The affair sours a bit when the ship docks at Southampton and she is introduced to his wife. She heads for Paris. Philippe is there and he’s still mooning over her and he’s insanely jealous of her shipboard over. Randy is there as well, but Cynthia still won’t marry him.

What really bothers Cynthia is that William’s wife Pat (Marjorie Gateson) knows all about Cynthia and doesn’t care. She doesn’t take Cynthia the slightest bit seriously as a threat. There’s nothing more humiliating to a woman than to be not taken seriously as a romantic rival.

William wants to keep Cynthia as his bit on the side. That doesn’t please Cynthia and obviously it’s not to the liking of either Philippe or Randy. It leads to a moment of violence in a hotel room.

Usually I like Bebe Daniels but Cynthia is a character I couldn’t warm to. Too cold and then she switches to self-pity. Randolph Scott is good but doesn’t get enough to do.

I liked Sidney Blackmer’s restrained performance. He doesn’t overdo the charming seducer thing which makes it more plausible that a girl like Cynthia would fall for him.

Several things make this very much a pre-code movie. It’s obvious that the shipboard romance between Cynthia and William went beyond flirtation - had it been mere flirtation her angry reaction when she discovers he’s married would not have made sense.

Pat Lawton is indifferent to her husband’s love affairs of which he has had many, which is certainly very pre-code. Infidelity is not something that shocks any of the characters.

There’s a “battle of the sexes” element to the relationship between Cynthia and Randy and a conflict between traditional ideas on marriage (represented by Randy) and Cynthia’s ambition to be a career woman.

Cocktail Hour is reasonably enjoyable and I love movies set at least partially on board ships. Recommended.

Sony’s Blu-Ray offers no extras but the movie looks extremely good.

The Key (1934)

The Key (1934) is one of four pre-code movies included in the Warner Archive DVD set William Powell at Warner Bros. The Key was directed by Michael Curtiz. The script (based on a play by by R. Gore Brown and Jocelyn Lee Hardy) is by Laird Doyle.

The setting is Ireland in 1920. Ireland is a dangerous place. Tensions are high between the Sinn Fein separatists and the British troops. British soldiers are constantly being shot by snipers.

Captain Andrew Andy Kerr (Colin Clive) is a British intelligence officer and the stresses are starting to get to him. His wife Norah (Edna Best) worries about him.

Then Captain Bill Tennant (William Powell) arrives on the scene. He has just been posted to Dublin. He had a colourful career, full of brave deeds and scandals. The scandals invariably involve women.

Bill and Andy are old friends.

Things could get awkward, since Bill Tennant and Norah have a shared past - a passionate love affair before she met Andy Kerr. That’s all over now. At least that’s what Bill and Norah thought.

Dublin is more and more unsettled. It’s more or less open guerrilla warfare.

Andy’s task is to track down Sinn Fein leader Peadar Conlan (Donald Crisp). A very dangerous task indeed.

Bill and Norah soon discover that they’re still madly in love. Breaking this news to Andy is not going to be easy.

Obviously this could all end very badly, with plenty of emotional turmoil and the constant background threat of sudden death.

William Powell gets a rather nuanced role here. Bill has been a hell-raiser but now he’s thinking that he should have married Norah when he had the chance. Bill is a man who finds that he will to re-evaluate his life. Powell manages to make him sympathetic even while he’s stealing another man’s wife.

Edna Best is good. In this same year she landed her best-known role, the lead in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.

As so often Colin Clive is the weak link. He’s as pompous and stuff as ever which is a problem because the audience needs to sympathise with him as the wronged husband.

Andy is a brave man but a man obsessed by duty. Bill has some sense of duty but given a choice between duty and love he will choose love every time. And given a choice between duty and friendship he will choose friendship every time.

The most pre-code element is that it’s made very obvious that while Andy was out hunting Sinn Fein leaders Bill and Norah spent the night together.

Although it was shot in Hollywood this film has a mostly English cast. The casting of William Powell as a British officer is neatly explained when we’re told he is a Canadian.

The subject matter was potentially dicey. The movies tries not to pick sides but since the two male leads play British officers we inevitably get more of the British viewpoint. It tries to be both a thriller and a romantic intrigue and does so fairly successfully.

William Powell is the reason to watch this one. It’s reasonably enjoyable. Recommended.

The Key gets a very good DVD transfer. I’ve reviewed other movies in this set - The Road to Singapore, Private Detective 62 and the excellent High Pressure.

Street of Women (1932)

Street of Women is a 1932 Warner Brothers pre-code melodrama directed by the prolific Archie Mayo.

The subject is marital infidelity and of course the great thing about pre-code movies is that you never know just how stories like this will play out.

Larry Baldwin (Alan Dinehart) is a tycoon who is building the world’s tallest building. In the past three years he has suddenly become immensely successful. They do say that behind every great man there’s a great woman. That’s true here. Except that the woman in this case is not Larry’s wife but his mistress.

His marriage to Lois (Marjorie Gateson) is an empty shell and has been for years.

His mistress is successful dress designer Natalie Upton (Kay Francis). She is his inspiration. They are madly in love. They have been having an affair for three years and this being a pre-code movie it leaves no doubt that they have been sleeping together.

Natalie’s kid brother Clarke (Allen Vincent) has been studying in Paris for three years. Now he’s back and that’s going to lead to a domestic cataclysm. Clarke is very very conventional. He is shocked and enraged at his sister’s illicit relationship.

There’s another complication. Clarke wants to marry Larry’s daughter Doris (Gloria Stuart ).

Larry thinks Doris will understand. She has always claimed to be a modern girl who does not believe in all that stuffy old-fashioned traditional morality stuff.

Unfortunately it turns out that Doris and Clarke are actually fanatical believers in the rigid enforcement of traditional morality.

Things are going to get messy.

Despite wishful thinking on the part of many modern critics and cinephiles pre-code movies by and large did not reject traditional morality. They were not trying to subvert that morality. They were not trying to subvert anything. What you do find in pre-code movies is the suggestion that maybe traditional morality doesn’t need to be rigidly and mercilessly enforced and that maybe moral lapses can be forgiven. That’s what differentiates pre-code movies from post-code movies. Once the Production Code started to be enforced there could be no suggestion that moral lapses could be forgiven. Such lapses had to be ruthlessly punished.

Pre-code movies are unpredictable and exciting because you just don’t know which way they will jump. A story such as this could end happily for Larry and Natalie or it could end in disaster for them. It could end in disaster for everyone.

All the performances are solid but Kay Francis is of course the standout performer. She was one of the great pre-code stars and this role is right in her wheelhouse.

Director Archie Mayo made some notable pre-code movies including the superb Svengali (1931). Under Eighteen and Illicit are also very much worth seeing. It was one those reliable journeyman directors for whom I have a lot of respect.

The characters have some depth and there’s plenty of moral complexity. Natalie and Larry realise that the revelation of their affair has hurt Doris and Clarke and they feel bad about that but at the same time they do not believe they have done anything wrong. All they did was to fall in love. Doris and Clarke are savagely judgmental but at the same time we can make allowances for them because they are very young. They’re not capable of understanding that Natalie and Larry need each other desperately.

This is a good romantic melodrama and it’s very pre-code and it’s highly recommended especially if you’re a Kay Francis fan.

The Warner Archive DVD looks very good.

One from the Heart (1981)

One from the Heart is Francis Ford Coppola’s insane wildly inventive romantic musical that gleefully breaks every single rule of filmmaking. It doesn’t just reject the concept of cinematic realism - it knocks it to the ground, puts the boot into it and stomps on its head. Lots of filmmakers have been hailed as crazed visionary geniuses. Coppola really is a crazed visionary genius. He’s the real deal.

While all movie-lovers are aware of the way the making of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now became an epic of chaos and madness it’s One from the Heart that is Coppola’s great cinematic folly. It was one of the most spectacular box-office flops of all time. It’s also his greatest film and one of the greatest Hollywood movies of the past fifty years.

It’s easy to see why it flopped and why critics were mystified and enraged. This is not the way you make a movie. It bears no resemblance to any Hollywood movie of its era. Coppola didn’t care. He went ahead and did it anyway.

One of the things Coppola trying to do was to recapture the magic of the classic studio era, and particularly the magic of musicals like An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain. It’s no coincidence that many of the musical sequences in One from the Heart were in fact partly conceived by - Gene Kelly.

The setting is Vegas, but this is the Vegas of the imagination, created entirely on a sound stage. The entire movie was shot on a sound stage.

The plot is very simple and straightforward, and deliberately so. It’s not the story that matters, it’s the way it’s told. Frannie (Teri Garr) and Hank (Frederic Forrest) have been living together for five years and their relationship is slowly falling apart. The magic has gone. They have a big fight. Frannie has an affair with an exotic romantic singer/piano player named Ray (Raul Julia). He’s actually a waiter but he gets an occasional gig as a performer. Like the other characters he lives in a kind of fantasy world.

Hank has an affair with a circus girl, Leila (Nastassja Kinski). She’s like his dream girl. Maybe she is a dream girl. It’s that kind of movie.

Eventually Frannie and Hank will have to decide whether they should find happiness with each other or with their new lovers. That’s all that the plot consists of.

If there’s one major weakness it’s the fact that while Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest are likeable they don’t have the necessary star power. They are totally overshadowed by the charisma overload of Raul Julia and Kinski.

Nastassja Kinski is magnificent. She exudes so much star power that it’s terrifying. As far as the performances are concerned this movie belongs to her.

While there’s no other movie quite like One from the Heart if I had to pick a couple of movies with a slightly similar feel I’d probably have to go for Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981) and Luc Besson’s Subway (1985). I think Coppola’s film does have that slight affinity with the French cinéma du look movement. You’ll probably think I’m really crazy now but I’d also throw Xanadu into the mix. These are all movies which seem to me to represent an 80s rejection of 70s mainstream cinema aesthetics.

One from the Heart might also perhaps have been an influence on David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.

Coppola was also influenced by Hitchcock’s Rope. Coppola’s dream was to shoot the movie live. It’s much more bold and experimental than Rope. There are ten-minute takes shot on multiple sets. Coppola used double sets - one set built behind another separated by a screen so that the action could move from one set to another without a cut. He was trying to be totally theatrical and totally cinematic at the same time. And he succeeded. The technique was however too unconventional for audiences and critics. They were bewildered by it.

This is a film that makes zero concessions to realism. It looks, deliberately, like theatre but it also looks like a dream or a fantasy. The use of colour is breathtakingly bold.

Coppola’s decision to shoot in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio was totally correct. It really is the best ratio for a musical (as he points out you have to be able to see the dancers’ feet in a dance number) and in fact it’s the best ratio for all movies except perhaps westerns.

Tom Waits did the music. I don’t like his music ordinarily but it does add to the odd feel. And it was a smart move to avoid having overtly contemporary music. That would have dated the movie quickly. Waits’ bluesy music does give it a timeless feel.

This is a stunningly inventive movie that really does totally reinvent the musical. And it shatters the conventional mould of Hollywood filmmaking.

I could easily become obsessed with One from the Heart. Very highly recommended.

The Studiocanal Blu-Ray releases includes the original cut and Coppola’s much later “Reprise” recut plus a host of extras. Coppola’s audio commentary is fascinating. And wile I don’t think of myself as a Baz Luhrmann fan his extended interview on the revolutionary effect of One from the Heart on the movie musical is actually very worthwhile.

Under Eighteen (1931)

Under Eighteen (or Under 18) is a 1931 Warner Brothers romantic melodrama and it’s very much a Depression melodrama.

It begins in 1928 in the optimism and confidence of the Jazz Age. In New York the Evans family is prosperous.

Sophie Evans (Anita Page) has just married Alf (Norman Foster). He’s rather feckless but considers himself something of an entrepreneur. He owns a pool hall. In these pre-Stock Market Crash days business is booming and he looks forward to the day he will own a chain of pool halls.

Sophie’s sister Margie (Marian Marsh) is filled with romantic dreams.

Then comes the Depression. The Evans family is now broke. Alf has lost his pool hall and can’t find a job (partly because he still can’t adjust to the reality of no longer being a big shot and no longer being able to be his own boss).

Margie is expecting to marry Jimmy (Regis Toomey). He’s a delivery man. It’s not glamorous but at least it’s a job. Margie sees her future as an endless struggle against poverty. She’s dissatisfied and reckless. She’s jealous of Elsie (Dorothy Appleby). Elsie is a prostitute but she drives around in a limo and has beautiful clothes and jewellery and never has to worry where her next meal is coming from.

Margie still loves Jimmy, but she’s having doubts about marriage.

The marriage between Sophie and Alf is falling apart, Sophie needs money to pay for a divorce and the money cannot be found.

Margie is working at the fashion house of François (Paul Porcasi) but now she’s landed her big break - a modelling job. This is due to the interest taken in her by François’ biggest client, Raymond Harding (Warren William). Harding is fabulous rich, a notorious womaniser who has kept a string of mistresses and he’s just generally regarded as a very wicked man. He might be wicked, but Margie is now thinking that being nice to Harding might be her best option.

The cast is very strong. Regis Toomey and Norman Foster are very good. Anita Page is good as the increasingly desperate Sophie.

Warren Williams is in top form. Playing rich powerful men who are charming and sinister is what he did better than anyone.

Marian Marsh is excellent. She’s convincingly torn between her ingrained belief in respectability and the temptations of wickedness and she’s cute and likeable.

There’s no shortage of pre-code content. We have no doubt what any arrangement offered by Harding will entail. And there’s some amusing pre-code dialogue. When Margie arrives at Harding’s penthouse where a party is in full swing around the rooftop pool he says to her, “Why don’t you take your clothes off and stay awhile?”

A thing I like about pre-code movies is that this was the very beginning of the sound era and genre conventions for sound films had not yet solidified. As a result you’re always sure which way the plots will jump. In this case Under Eighteen could be heading for a tragic ending but could just as easily be heading for a feelgood happy ending. In fact the ending of this movie might seem dubious unless you remember that the movie doesn’t quite fit neatly into genre formulas that were established by the end of the decade. Not everyone will like the ending to this film but it works for me.

You also can’t predict which way the characters will go. All the characters here could be headed for disaster, but not necessarily. And they could turn out to less sympathetic, or more sympathetic, than they initially appeared to be. This is a movie that doesn’t rush to make moral judgments on the characters.

I thoroughly enjoyed Under Eighteen. Highly recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD looks very good.

Camille (1936)

The 1936 Camille was the second Hollywood adaptation of the 1848 novel The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux Camélias) by Alexandre Dumas fils.

The movie is set in Paris in the 1840s. It is of course the story of a love affair between celebrated Parisian courtesan Marguerite Gautier and a young man, Armand Duval (Robert Taylor), whose problem is that he is not rich enough to afford her and not rich enough to defy his family by marrying her. He would like to marry her because he fears that her wild lifestyle is having a disastrous effect on her very precarious health.

There is going to be trouble with Armand’s family. His father (played by Lionel Barrymore) doesn’t mind if Armand wants to consort with courtesans but he wants him to be discreet and he certainly isn’t going to agree to a marriage. Had Armand belonged to an aristocratic family there would have been no problem. The aristocracy could treat conventional morality with contempt. But Armand’s bourgeois father is obsessed with respectability and dreads scandal.

A lot of the great actresses of the pre-code era had their careers blighted by the introduction of the Production Code in 1934. They just couldn’t flourish in the new squeaky-clean Code era. Jean Harlow being an obvious example. This was the case to some extent with Greta Garbo. She had some major hits after 1934 but some of the magic was gone.

Camille presented a challenge for MGM in 1936. The Dumas novel was based on the real-life story of one of the most famous prostitutes of the 19th century, Marie Duplessis. The heroine of the novel, like Marie Duplessis, is a courtesan but no matter how expensive she might be a courtesan is after all a prostitute. And if it’s not made clear that the heroine is a prostitute the story makes no sense at all.

The problem was that the Production Code had outlawed bad girls. Even if they suffered horrific punishment at the end it was incredibly difficult to make a movie about a bad girl.

That started to change in the early 40s as the Production Code was (in practice if not in theory) loosened a little, which made film noir possible. But in 1936 movies had to tread very very carefully indeed. And this is not just the story of a prostitute - it’s a very sympathetic story of a prostitute.

This movie solves the problem quite skilfully. It makes it very obvious that the heroine, Marguerite Gautier (Garbo), is a courtesan without ever coming right out and saying it. It relies on hints and on little exchanges that might be interpreted in an innocent way but are in fact clear indications of the way in which she makes her living. She is obviously being kept by the rich Baron de Varville (Henry Daniell). We even see an exchange of money. At one point the Baron gives her a very large sum of money, to spend on whatever takes her fancy. It is impossible to imagine a respectable woman accepting such a large cash gift. The only plausible explanation is that he is paying her for her services.

Marguerite exists in the demi-monde, the half-world of very expensive whores. She mixes with very rich men of the highest social class but her friends are clearly not the least bit respectable.

Armand is not a child. He is not at all concerned about Marguerite’s profession. All he knows is that he loves her.

Garbo is in fine form as a woman constantly veering between exaggerated gaiety and despair, between sincerity and frivolity, a woman who is reluctant to admit that she has fallen in love. Perhaps she is attracted by the prospect of emotional security but she is equally attracted by the frenetic pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure allows her to stop worrying about her health. Perhaps she would like to be respectable, but she doesn’t have a great deal of fondness for respectable people. It’s a complex role which Garbo carries off with ease.

Robert Taylor in the 1930s was generally dismissed as a mere pretty boy. As his matinee idol looks became more weather-beaten in the late 1940s his acting ability really began to blossom. He’s quite solid in Camille but he’s obviously still a bit tentative.

I have never liked Lionel Barrymore as an actor and I’m afraid I don’t like him here. Of course the character he’s playing is a loathsome self-righteous prig and that was something that Barrymore could do.

Henry Daniell as the Baron de Varville is superb. He gives the characters some depth. The Baron is selfish and arrogant and cynical but is able to regard himself, and life in general, with a certain amusement. He’s a rogue but we can’t help liking him for his lack of moralism and hypocrisy.

Marguerite and Armand are fated to misunderstand each. Marguerite does tell lies. That’s part of her profession. A whore is used to telling men what they want to hear. But when Marguerite does tell the truth Armand doesn’t believe her. They don’t really understand how much they love each other, and there is always the money problem. Armand does not have enough money to flout the social conventions. It’s an insanely romantic tale. Highly recommended.

I also highly recommend the visually stunning 1921 silent version, as well as the novel.