Posts
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Hideko Takamine
I put up a few words at the MUBI.com Notebook in commemoration of the great actress Hideko Takamine, who died on December 28.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Lamont Johnson, 1922-2010
I tend to avoid commemorative pieces: anything sorrowful one writes about a death seems pale. But Lamont Johnson, one of America's best directors, died a few weeks ago with little fanfare, and I wanted to talk him up a bit.
Johnson started as an actor, and had a large supporting role in Joseph H. Lewis's very good 1952 Korean War film Retreat, Hell!. As a director, he put in a decade or so of hard work on television series and specials before getting a few no-prestige theatrical features in the late 60s. If memory serves, Johnson's theatrical debut, 1967's A Covenant With Death, a cheap-looking suspense film with George Maharis and Red Line 7000's Laura Devon, was surprisingly good against all odds, taking its characters more seriously than the genre required. 1968's Kona Coast wasn't nearly as successful, but 1969 saw Johnson acquit himself well in the emerging TV-movie format with Deadlock, a Leslie Nielsen cop drama. By this point Johnson had arrived at something like his mature style, combining dramatic intensity with fast and informal performances that discharged rather than built up the drama.
1970 was an important year for Johnson, on both the TV and theatrical fronts. The TV movie was carving out its own audience, which gravitated to topical subject matter with prestige actors; and Johnson caught the wave with My Sweet Charlie, a strikingly good drama with a racially charged plot reminiscent of The Defiant Ones, and a star turn from Patty Duke. Emmys went to Duke and to writers Richard Levinson and William Link, who were to become the Aurenche and Bost of 70s TV drama; and Johnson was permanently established as an A-list TV director. A string of successes in that medium followed, including 1972's That Certain Summer and 1974's The Execution of Private Slovik, both written by Levinson/Link. Though Johnson's prestige TV dramas of the 70s are probably his best-known work, most of these efforts are handicapped by the form's ostentatious social relevance.
Like other prestige TV directors, Johnson couldn't get arrested in theatrical features. But, a few months after his TV score with Charlie, Johnson released the POW drama The McKenzie Break, a tense, memorable acting duel between Irish officer Brian Keith and German prisoner Helmut Griem. Cultivating an interest in extreme characters that suited his explosive yet swallowed-up style, Johnson churned out a number of strong films over the next few years: 1971's A Gunfight, with Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash; 1972's The Groundstar Conspiracy, with George Peppard as a charismatic American fascist; and 1973's The Last American Hero, a car-racing film with a potent Jeff Bridges performance. Few paid much attention, but Andrew Sarris put McKenzie, Groundstar, and American Hero on his runners-up lists, and a small, largely auteurist cult coalesced.
Johnson, and other filmmakers of the time who lacked clout, were clearly the beneficiary of the looseness of American film before the Tax Shelter Law of 1976, and as far as I know, he never made another theatrical film to equal McKenzie and American Hero. 1977's One on One with Robby Benson is the best of his later efforts; after 1983, he never tried his hand at theatrical again. TV movies were a different story, and Johnson continued to rack up Emmys and nominations into the 90s. Given an opening, Johnson never lost his ability to find unexpected excitement at the nexus of character and drama: for my money, the unheralded 1982 Dangerous Company with Beau Bridges stands with Charlie as Johnson's best work in the medium.
I lost track of Johnson's career after the effective, award-winning biopic Lincoln in 1988. He isn't the only good filmmaker whose reputation was written on the wind of the TV movie: perhaps someday we'll have the access and the interest to go back to the important TV work of John Korty, Joseph Sargent, Daniel Petrie, William Hale. I'm thinking Johnson may have been at the top of the pile, though.
Johnson started as an actor, and had a large supporting role in Joseph H. Lewis's very good 1952 Korean War film Retreat, Hell!. As a director, he put in a decade or so of hard work on television series and specials before getting a few no-prestige theatrical features in the late 60s. If memory serves, Johnson's theatrical debut, 1967's A Covenant With Death, a cheap-looking suspense film with George Maharis and Red Line 7000's Laura Devon, was surprisingly good against all odds, taking its characters more seriously than the genre required. 1968's Kona Coast wasn't nearly as successful, but 1969 saw Johnson acquit himself well in the emerging TV-movie format with Deadlock, a Leslie Nielsen cop drama. By this point Johnson had arrived at something like his mature style, combining dramatic intensity with fast and informal performances that discharged rather than built up the drama.
1970 was an important year for Johnson, on both the TV and theatrical fronts. The TV movie was carving out its own audience, which gravitated to topical subject matter with prestige actors; and Johnson caught the wave with My Sweet Charlie, a strikingly good drama with a racially charged plot reminiscent of The Defiant Ones, and a star turn from Patty Duke. Emmys went to Duke and to writers Richard Levinson and William Link, who were to become the Aurenche and Bost of 70s TV drama; and Johnson was permanently established as an A-list TV director. A string of successes in that medium followed, including 1972's That Certain Summer and 1974's The Execution of Private Slovik, both written by Levinson/Link. Though Johnson's prestige TV dramas of the 70s are probably his best-known work, most of these efforts are handicapped by the form's ostentatious social relevance.
Like other prestige TV directors, Johnson couldn't get arrested in theatrical features. But, a few months after his TV score with Charlie, Johnson released the POW drama The McKenzie Break, a tense, memorable acting duel between Irish officer Brian Keith and German prisoner Helmut Griem. Cultivating an interest in extreme characters that suited his explosive yet swallowed-up style, Johnson churned out a number of strong films over the next few years: 1971's A Gunfight, with Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash; 1972's The Groundstar Conspiracy, with George Peppard as a charismatic American fascist; and 1973's The Last American Hero, a car-racing film with a potent Jeff Bridges performance. Few paid much attention, but Andrew Sarris put McKenzie, Groundstar, and American Hero on his runners-up lists, and a small, largely auteurist cult coalesced.
Johnson, and other filmmakers of the time who lacked clout, were clearly the beneficiary of the looseness of American film before the Tax Shelter Law of 1976, and as far as I know, he never made another theatrical film to equal McKenzie and American Hero. 1977's One on One with Robby Benson is the best of his later efforts; after 1983, he never tried his hand at theatrical again. TV movies were a different story, and Johnson continued to rack up Emmys and nominations into the 90s. Given an opening, Johnson never lost his ability to find unexpected excitement at the nexus of character and drama: for my money, the unheralded 1982 Dangerous Company with Beau Bridges stands with Charlie as Johnson's best work in the medium.
I lost track of Johnson's career after the effective, award-winning biopic Lincoln in 1988. He isn't the only good filmmaker whose reputation was written on the wind of the TV movie: perhaps someday we'll have the access and the interest to go back to the important TV work of John Korty, Joseph Sargent, Daniel Petrie, William Hale. I'm thinking Johnson may have been at the top of the pile, though.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Frivolous Lists: Latin America, 2000-2009
Cinema Tropical recently polled 35 experts to create a list of the ten best Latin American films of the decade, and the IFC Center screened the ten winners last week. No one asked me for my list, but:
1. Ana y los otros (Ana and the Others) (Celina Murga, Argentina, 2003)
2. Sangre (Amat Escalante, Mexico, 2005)
3. Japón (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2002)
4. Stellet licht (Silent Light) (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2007)
5. Una semana solos (A Week Alone) (Celina Murga, Argentina, 2008)
6. Cinema, aspirinas e urubus (Cinema, Aspirin and Vultures) (Marcelo Gomes, Brazil, 2005)
7. Mutum (Sandra Kogut, Brazil, 2007)
8. Huacho (Alejandro Fernández Almendras, Chile, 2009)
9. Os Inquilinos (The Tenants) (Sergio Bianchi, Brazil, 2009)
10. 40 dias (40 Days) (Juan Carlos Martín, Mexico, 2008)
Runners-up (in alphabetical order): Amorosa Soledad (Victoria Galardi and Martín Carranza, Argentina, 2008); Aniceto (Leonardo Favio, Argentina, 2008); Cochochi (Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán, Mexico, 2007); El custodio (Rodrigo Moreno, Mexico, 2006); Drama/Mex (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico, 2006); Los guantes mágicos (The Magic Gloves) (Martin Rejtman, Argentina, 2003); Hamaca Paraguaya (Paraguayan Hammock) (Paz Encina, Paraguay, 2006); Jogo de cena (Playing) (Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil, 2007); Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina, 2008); O céu de Suely (Suely in the Sky) (Karim Aïnouz, Brazil, 2006); Parentésis (Time Off) (Pablo Solís and Francisca Schweitzer, Chile, 2005); Voy a explotar (I'm Gonna Explode) (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico, 2008); Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico, 2001).
Of course there are a great many contenders that I haven't seen. Of those, I especially wish I had caught Los bastardos (Amat Escalante, Mexico, 2008) and Madame Satã (Karim Aïnouz, Brazil, 2002).
1. Ana y los otros (Ana and the Others) (Celina Murga, Argentina, 2003)
2. Sangre (Amat Escalante, Mexico, 2005)
3. Japón (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2002)
4. Stellet licht (Silent Light) (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2007)
5. Una semana solos (A Week Alone) (Celina Murga, Argentina, 2008)
6. Cinema, aspirinas e urubus (Cinema, Aspirin and Vultures) (Marcelo Gomes, Brazil, 2005)
7. Mutum (Sandra Kogut, Brazil, 2007)
8. Huacho (Alejandro Fernández Almendras, Chile, 2009)
9. Os Inquilinos (The Tenants) (Sergio Bianchi, Brazil, 2009)
10. 40 dias (40 Days) (Juan Carlos Martín, Mexico, 2008)
Runners-up (in alphabetical order): Amorosa Soledad (Victoria Galardi and Martín Carranza, Argentina, 2008); Aniceto (Leonardo Favio, Argentina, 2008); Cochochi (Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán, Mexico, 2007); El custodio (Rodrigo Moreno, Mexico, 2006); Drama/Mex (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico, 2006); Los guantes mágicos (The Magic Gloves) (Martin Rejtman, Argentina, 2003); Hamaca Paraguaya (Paraguayan Hammock) (Paz Encina, Paraguay, 2006); Jogo de cena (Playing) (Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil, 2007); Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina, 2008); O céu de Suely (Suely in the Sky) (Karim Aïnouz, Brazil, 2006); Parentésis (Time Off) (Pablo Solís and Francisca Schweitzer, Chile, 2005); Voy a explotar (I'm Gonna Explode) (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico, 2008); Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico, 2001).
Of course there are a great many contenders that I haven't seen. Of those, I especially wish I had caught Los bastardos (Amat Escalante, Mexico, 2008) and Madame Satã (Karim Aïnouz, Brazil, 2002).
Monday, October 18, 2010
Two scenes from Eric Rohmer
A short piece I wrote on two favorite scenes from Eric Rohmer's Four Seasons cycle is up at the MUBI Notebook.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Hwioribaram (Eighteen): MoMA, September 30, 2010; BAM, October 2, 2010
Jang Kun-jae's debut feature, which took the Dragons and Tigers award at Vancouver 2009, wastes no time announcing its filmmaker's authority: its first image, a city vista that eventually transforms into a vehicular tracking shot, establishes Jang's visual ambition; and the cut that starts the movie proper ("Three months earlier...") is both disorienting and faintly absurdist. As we watch a pair of young lovers, Tae-Hoon (Seo Jun-yeong) and Mi-Jeong (Lee Min-ji), painfully making their way back to Seoul from an ill-considered, unauthorized weekend escapade, Jang lays out his stylistic cards: the passion that motivates the underage couple is concealed behind a convincing behavioral surface of passivity, exhaustion and denial; once established, the dramatic hook of impending confrontation is deferred in favor of a compelling and detailed documentation of each phase of the journey home; when the drama is finally fulfilled, it is filtered through deadpan absurdist humor that highlights the casual ineptitude intrinsic to the childrearing process. In Jang's hands, young love gives us little opportunity for pleasurable identification: the lovers are forced into a continuous stream of lies and petty swindles, and we neither get the emotional cues that would tell us how to interpret their often irresponsible behavior, nor are given reason to regard the couple as anything but normal, red-blooded Korean kids. Jang paints a portrait of late childhood as an extreme and unsustainable condition that nonetheless must be sustained indefinitely: under the pressure of this unbearable contradiction, the film's naturalism gives way at around the two-thirds point, and Jang audaciously allows the narrative to fragment and reconstitute along more abstract, subjective lines. Naturally a difficult object for audiences in search of the bittersweet pleasure that the young-love genre promises, Hwioribaram (Eighteen) is the most exciting debut I've run across in some time. It plays twice more in the New York Korean Film Festival: at MoMA on Thursday, September 30 at 4:30 pm; and at BAM on Saturday, October 2 at 4:30 pm.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
The Rule of Escalating Action
While watching John Flynn's 1980 Defiance recently, I noted a storytelling pattern that has been honored almost without exception by commercial action films since the dawn of cinema. The duration and intensity of action scenes are generally allowed to vary somewhat over the course of a story, but filmmakers are expected to fashion a big action climax according to certain specifications:
1. The duration of the final scene is expected to be substantial. In most genres, a simple confrontation is not enough: the battle generally is segmented into multiple parts, if for no other reason than to achieve great length without tedium.
2. Whether or not any other action scene in the film has contained much suspense, the final scene generally should drag out a few moments in which the hero is on the brink of extinction, even though the audience usually cannot be expected to doubt a favorable outcome.
3. If at all possible, the final confrontation should come down to a hand-to-hand battle between the chief hero and the chief villain, no matter how military or large-scale the offensive.
A week prior to watching the Flynn film, I noted the same three elements in the climax of Hugo Fregonese's 1953 Blowing Wild, a considerably better film than Defiance. I also recall mentioning this pattern in a review of William Friedkin's 2003 The Hunted, a strong film made from an unambitious script. I name these few examples off the top of my head; I trust that the reader will acknowledge the dominance of this template, which I will call "the rule of escalating action."
The problems with the rule of escalating action are obvious. One can perhaps argue that it enforces a modicum of good dramatic practice; but too often the items on this laundry list are in conflict with the needs of the movie or with common sense. And, of course, any narrative structure that becomes a rule, however sound, is an obstacle to surprise and invention. Nonetheless, the pattern is going strong after a century, and probably precedes cinema in some form. I don't believe that it is merely a habit that has been retained out of commercial superstition: it's too old and too powerful to be an unmotivated sign.
There's an underlying principle that sheds light on this phenomenon. Fiction can always be considered on two levels: internally, according to the needs of the world being depicted and of the people who inhabit it; and externally, in terms of the audience's reactions, which are crafted according to laws of drama. With many issues of fiction - not just the rule of escalating action - we can observe that the prevailing approach, followed slavishly by conventional works and substantially even by most adventurous works, involves harmonizing the internal level of the fiction, by force if necessary, with a known and desired pattern on external level.
The implication of this convention is that a well-made film would be designed so that internal and external logic are worked out at the same time with the same gestures to generate the standard action climax in an organic fashion: no mean feat, but a valid goal. And the rule of escalating action, which becomes bothersome when this perfect structure cannot be achieved, is the result of a kind of automatism, a need to impose a default dramatic shape regardless of where the internal needs of the film universe might take the story.
(For another issue of fiction that involves subordinating the internal level to the external, look in the middle of this 1984 article I wrote for the L.A. Reader, where I discuss the rules governing audience mourning for the death of characters with different levels of billing.)
Obviously the rule of escalating action is a matter of statistics: some people are irked when a well-known, conventionally fleshed-out dramatic shape trumps internal logic; but the paradigm has enough support to flourish over the long haul. It's not surprising that hand-to-hand conflict should have an appealing symbolic clarity, nor that we should enjoy the same dramatic flow in a movie that we like in a sports event. And it would be too hasty to conclude that the internal existence of the film universe carries little weight: audiences are notorious for docking films when they perceive internal conflicts, even minor ones. It's easy to imagine many viewers finding the climactic Tommy Lee Jones-Benicio del Toro knife fight in The Hunted silly, and at the same time not really wishing for a more plausible but unconventional ending.
I'm willing to speculate only that there seems to be great comfort for many viewers in this kind of canonical dramatic structure - a comfort that is increased by, but is not entirely due to, its historical repetition and familiarity.
1. The duration of the final scene is expected to be substantial. In most genres, a simple confrontation is not enough: the battle generally is segmented into multiple parts, if for no other reason than to achieve great length without tedium.
2. Whether or not any other action scene in the film has contained much suspense, the final scene generally should drag out a few moments in which the hero is on the brink of extinction, even though the audience usually cannot be expected to doubt a favorable outcome.
3. If at all possible, the final confrontation should come down to a hand-to-hand battle between the chief hero and the chief villain, no matter how military or large-scale the offensive.
A week prior to watching the Flynn film, I noted the same three elements in the climax of Hugo Fregonese's 1953 Blowing Wild, a considerably better film than Defiance. I also recall mentioning this pattern in a review of William Friedkin's 2003 The Hunted, a strong film made from an unambitious script. I name these few examples off the top of my head; I trust that the reader will acknowledge the dominance of this template, which I will call "the rule of escalating action."
The problems with the rule of escalating action are obvious. One can perhaps argue that it enforces a modicum of good dramatic practice; but too often the items on this laundry list are in conflict with the needs of the movie or with common sense. And, of course, any narrative structure that becomes a rule, however sound, is an obstacle to surprise and invention. Nonetheless, the pattern is going strong after a century, and probably precedes cinema in some form. I don't believe that it is merely a habit that has been retained out of commercial superstition: it's too old and too powerful to be an unmotivated sign.
There's an underlying principle that sheds light on this phenomenon. Fiction can always be considered on two levels: internally, according to the needs of the world being depicted and of the people who inhabit it; and externally, in terms of the audience's reactions, which are crafted according to laws of drama. With many issues of fiction - not just the rule of escalating action - we can observe that the prevailing approach, followed slavishly by conventional works and substantially even by most adventurous works, involves harmonizing the internal level of the fiction, by force if necessary, with a known and desired pattern on external level.
The implication of this convention is that a well-made film would be designed so that internal and external logic are worked out at the same time with the same gestures to generate the standard action climax in an organic fashion: no mean feat, but a valid goal. And the rule of escalating action, which becomes bothersome when this perfect structure cannot be achieved, is the result of a kind of automatism, a need to impose a default dramatic shape regardless of where the internal needs of the film universe might take the story.
(For another issue of fiction that involves subordinating the internal level to the external, look in the middle of this 1984 article I wrote for the L.A. Reader, where I discuss the rules governing audience mourning for the death of characters with different levels of billing.)
Obviously the rule of escalating action is a matter of statistics: some people are irked when a well-known, conventionally fleshed-out dramatic shape trumps internal logic; but the paradigm has enough support to flourish over the long haul. It's not surprising that hand-to-hand conflict should have an appealing symbolic clarity, nor that we should enjoy the same dramatic flow in a movie that we like in a sports event. And it would be too hasty to conclude that the internal existence of the film universe carries little weight: audiences are notorious for docking films when they perceive internal conflicts, even minor ones. It's easy to imagine many viewers finding the climactic Tommy Lee Jones-Benicio del Toro knife fight in The Hunted silly, and at the same time not really wishing for a more plausible but unconventional ending.
I'm willing to speculate only that there seems to be great comfort for many viewers in this kind of canonical dramatic structure - a comfort that is increased by, but is not entirely due to, its historical repetition and familiarity.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Hawks fans have always been divided on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: some rate it high, others have trouble seeing much of Hawks' personality in it. It's difficult to find a similar film for purposes of comparison, which is the first hint that Hawks didn't simply fill out a genre form. The closest I can come is the Mansfield-Tashlin collaborations The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957): films in which a new-to-market sex symbol plays a sex symbol, presumably a studio strategy to enhance the value of a brand name. All three films share an awareness that they are not only deriving comedy from the subject of the women's extreme effect on those around them, but also presenting the women for the audience's delectation.
Tastefulness is hardly an option here, but Hawks manages to combine audacity with analytical intelligence. The film's amazing opening shot sets the bar high: with no opening credits, Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) and Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell), in bright red sequined gowns, emerge from behind a blue curtain and begin their first song before a second of screen time has elapsed. Any story that follows must be subordinated to this startling abstract manifestation of hypertrophied femininity and clashing primary colors. As the women maneuver their way through a world of staring, wolf-whistling men, Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer (who apparently inherited little plot from the revue-like 1949 Fields/Loos Broadway play) take advantage of the project's parodistic tone to dodge or deflect the moral issue of gold digging, and preserve an amoral perspective right up to the outrageous ending, which scores Lorelei and Dorothy's double wedding with the gold-digging anthem "Two Girls from Little Rock."
The intrinsic exaggeration of Monroe's acting style makes it difficult to perceive that Hawks has engineered yet another of his comedies in which a powerful solipsist (Lorelei) is juxtaposed with an exasperated representative of the reality principle (Dorothy). This time the pair are allies instead of opponents (as opposed to, for instance, the teamings in Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday), but Dorothy's function is primarily to establish a realistic baseline from which Lorelei's departures from normality can be measured. Not that nearly everyone else in the film doesn't help build this baseline by butting his or her head against Lorelei's serene obliviousness - but Hawks likes to keep a character around the set that he would enjoy hanging out with.
Monroe's girly persona, which we enjoy associating with stupidity, is here inflected to accommodate Lorelei's mastery of every situation. As splashlessly competent as a Hawks action hero, she is only the more effective for being ignorant of, or unconcerned with, society's moral codes. From the early scene in which she uses Sherlock Holmes-like logic to suss out the gift she is about to receive from her beau Gus (Tommy Noonan), Lorelei is on top of every situation, whether exploiting a maître d's exploitation of her shipboard popularity, or planning a multi-pronged assault on the detective Malone (Elliott Reid) who is hired to get the goods on her. In the end she bests Gus's disapproving father (Taylor Holmes) in an old-fashioned intellectual debate on the gold-digging ethic, after laying out the case in admirably extreme terms: "I don't want to marry him for his money - I want to marry him for your money." Playing up the usual style gap between Monroe's acting and everyone else's, and playing down her often-cited vulnerability, Hawks oversees a remarkable comic performance, with terrific line readings like beat poetry ("Sometimes Mr. Esmond finds it very difficult to say no to me") and bits of business that hint at a bizarre inner life (confronted for the first time with a diamond tiara, Lorelei can barely restrain her hands from pouncing inappropriately; after the tiara's departure, she happily improvises a scenario of future possession, using a napkin ring encircled by a necklace as a stand-in).
Hawks claimed to have had no interest in directing the film's two big musical numbers, "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" and "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," and apparently was not even on the set when Jack Cole shot them. (Presumably he had something to do with conceiving the numbers; and "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" was written for the movie by Hawks' friend Hoagy Carmichael, along with Harold Adamson.) But all the smaller numbers - "Two Girls from Little Rock," "Bye Bye Baby," "When Love Goes Wrong," and the courtroom reprise of "Diamonds" - are executed on the pleasingly intimate scale that Hawks uses for any group recreation. All four of these songs feature spectators clapping to lay down a back beat for the performer; the players provide verbal cues and gesture to each other to signal musical transitions, creating a mood of real-time collaboration, much as in the "Drum Boogie" number from Ball of Fire or the Bacall-Carmichael piano rehearsals from To Have and Have Not. In "Bye Bye Baby," Hawks uses an economical fast pan to pass from the Olympic girlfriends' four-part harmony verse to Russell's solo verse; when Lorelei and Gus sneak away to another room and take the tempo down to romantic ballad, Dorothy and the athletes spot her from the doorway, signal each other to prepare an intervention, then pound out a beat on the door frame to swing the song again. The film's musical highlight, "When Love Goes Wrong" (another Carmichael/Adamson composition), is a digressive mini-story in itself, with the women's dejected mood dissipating gradually during the song and dance, and a circle of friendly Parisians bonding so effectively with Lorelei and Dorothy that the last verse slows and quiets down for a melancholy farewell as the women's taxi pulls away.
A few unexciting scenes crop up as the film marks time between the big "Diamonds" number and the finale. Still, Gentlemen is too good to be relegated to the margins of Hawks' career. Our difficulty in coming to terms with Monroe's distinctive comic talent (odd that we are tempted to regard such a stylized performer as an authentic sexpot struggling with the rudiments of craft) impedes us from regarding Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as we do other Hawks films, where genre material and performances are purified, pushed to extremes, and mixed liberally with the director's distinctive ideas about what should and shouldn't be called entertainment. Coming as early in her starring career as it does, Gentlemen is generally regarded as a defining film for Monroe; if it is less rarely recognized as her finest moment - well, that's more or less par for the course for Hawks-directed performances.
Tastefulness is hardly an option here, but Hawks manages to combine audacity with analytical intelligence. The film's amazing opening shot sets the bar high: with no opening credits, Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) and Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell), in bright red sequined gowns, emerge from behind a blue curtain and begin their first song before a second of screen time has elapsed. Any story that follows must be subordinated to this startling abstract manifestation of hypertrophied femininity and clashing primary colors. As the women maneuver their way through a world of staring, wolf-whistling men, Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer (who apparently inherited little plot from the revue-like 1949 Fields/Loos Broadway play) take advantage of the project's parodistic tone to dodge or deflect the moral issue of gold digging, and preserve an amoral perspective right up to the outrageous ending, which scores Lorelei and Dorothy's double wedding with the gold-digging anthem "Two Girls from Little Rock."
The intrinsic exaggeration of Monroe's acting style makes it difficult to perceive that Hawks has engineered yet another of his comedies in which a powerful solipsist (Lorelei) is juxtaposed with an exasperated representative of the reality principle (Dorothy). This time the pair are allies instead of opponents (as opposed to, for instance, the teamings in Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday), but Dorothy's function is primarily to establish a realistic baseline from which Lorelei's departures from normality can be measured. Not that nearly everyone else in the film doesn't help build this baseline by butting his or her head against Lorelei's serene obliviousness - but Hawks likes to keep a character around the set that he would enjoy hanging out with.
Monroe's girly persona, which we enjoy associating with stupidity, is here inflected to accommodate Lorelei's mastery of every situation. As splashlessly competent as a Hawks action hero, she is only the more effective for being ignorant of, or unconcerned with, society's moral codes. From the early scene in which she uses Sherlock Holmes-like logic to suss out the gift she is about to receive from her beau Gus (Tommy Noonan), Lorelei is on top of every situation, whether exploiting a maître d's exploitation of her shipboard popularity, or planning a multi-pronged assault on the detective Malone (Elliott Reid) who is hired to get the goods on her. In the end she bests Gus's disapproving father (Taylor Holmes) in an old-fashioned intellectual debate on the gold-digging ethic, after laying out the case in admirably extreme terms: "I don't want to marry him for his money - I want to marry him for your money." Playing up the usual style gap between Monroe's acting and everyone else's, and playing down her often-cited vulnerability, Hawks oversees a remarkable comic performance, with terrific line readings like beat poetry ("Sometimes Mr. Esmond finds it very difficult to say no to me") and bits of business that hint at a bizarre inner life (confronted for the first time with a diamond tiara, Lorelei can barely restrain her hands from pouncing inappropriately; after the tiara's departure, she happily improvises a scenario of future possession, using a napkin ring encircled by a necklace as a stand-in).
Hawks claimed to have had no interest in directing the film's two big musical numbers, "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" and "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," and apparently was not even on the set when Jack Cole shot them. (Presumably he had something to do with conceiving the numbers; and "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" was written for the movie by Hawks' friend Hoagy Carmichael, along with Harold Adamson.) But all the smaller numbers - "Two Girls from Little Rock," "Bye Bye Baby," "When Love Goes Wrong," and the courtroom reprise of "Diamonds" - are executed on the pleasingly intimate scale that Hawks uses for any group recreation. All four of these songs feature spectators clapping to lay down a back beat for the performer; the players provide verbal cues and gesture to each other to signal musical transitions, creating a mood of real-time collaboration, much as in the "Drum Boogie" number from Ball of Fire or the Bacall-Carmichael piano rehearsals from To Have and Have Not. In "Bye Bye Baby," Hawks uses an economical fast pan to pass from the Olympic girlfriends' four-part harmony verse to Russell's solo verse; when Lorelei and Gus sneak away to another room and take the tempo down to romantic ballad, Dorothy and the athletes spot her from the doorway, signal each other to prepare an intervention, then pound out a beat on the door frame to swing the song again. The film's musical highlight, "When Love Goes Wrong" (another Carmichael/Adamson composition), is a digressive mini-story in itself, with the women's dejected mood dissipating gradually during the song and dance, and a circle of friendly Parisians bonding so effectively with Lorelei and Dorothy that the last verse slows and quiets down for a melancholy farewell as the women's taxi pulls away.
A few unexciting scenes crop up as the film marks time between the big "Diamonds" number and the finale. Still, Gentlemen is too good to be relegated to the margins of Hawks' career. Our difficulty in coming to terms with Monroe's distinctive comic talent (odd that we are tempted to regard such a stylized performer as an authentic sexpot struggling with the rudiments of craft) impedes us from regarding Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as we do other Hawks films, where genre material and performances are purified, pushed to extremes, and mixed liberally with the director's distinctive ideas about what should and shouldn't be called entertainment. Coming as early in her starring career as it does, Gentlemen is generally regarded as a defining film for Monroe; if it is less rarely recognized as her finest moment - well, that's more or less par for the course for Hawks-directed performances.
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