Maria Keil (1914-2012)

Maria Keil was a Portuguese artist, whose most visible works are seen by millions every day although most people don't glance at it twice: from the 1950s to the 1970s she did the original tile decorations for Lisbon's underground network, except for one station, where it still stands today (*). With this work, she helps modernise a traditional art form in Portugal, reinventing it to the 20th Century - something so many others continue to do to this day. She wasn't allowed to use any figures as that was seen as distracting. So she used geometric/abstract patterns.

She also did a lot of more traditional graphic work, particularly book covers and illustrations. The photos below were taken by yours truly - if I had more talent and material adjusted to take photos inside underground stations they would have out come much better. Alas, it should give some idea.

(*) In two stations (Saldanha and São Sebastião) the original tiles got removed for some reason, and in Restauradores, some of it was also lost during renovation works. Everything else is still there, and the new decoration in São Sebastião is also hers (last photo). It seems it was her last work.

Robert B. Sherman (1925-2012)

Robert B. Sherman, one of the Sherman Brothers, died today. The songs he co-wrote with his brother are part of the common reference of pretty much everyone who was ever exposed to a Disney film (i.e. the whole of the Western world and most of the rest): the music of "Mary Poppins", "The Jungle Book", "The Parent Trap", "Bedknobs and Broomsticks", etc. and the extremely catchy "It's a Small world".

There's really one word to say - Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Magnificient, Marvellous Meryl

And at long last, she got her third Oscar, 29 years after the last... An excellent performance in a ok, occasionally mediocre, occasionally good film with too much kindness for its subject matter has finally given her her just reward. She's finally in the pantheon of actors with three or more awards(*) - a fair prize of one of the best living actresses.

Of course I could argue she should have won it before, particularly with "Out of Africa" (too soon after "Sophie's Choice", I know), "The Bridges of Madison County" and "The Hours" (she didn't even get a nomination and she was by far the best thing in the film). As a guilty pleasure, I would even add "The Devil Wears Prada" to that list. Now, can she do a play in London? Please, please, please...
My only regret? That Glenn Close couldn't get the Oscar she long deserves.

As for the rest? Well, I pass...

(*) - just in case you're wondering, they others are: Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Walter Brennan and Jack Nicholson. Hepburn had four, the others three. Brennan was a wonderful actor, but three Oscars in five years was a bit too much.

Beauty and the Boss (1932)

Roy del Ruth’s “Beauty and the Boss” starts off as your usual Warren Williams WB fare: a powerful businessman seduces his secretary – or in this case, he is being seduced by her. And to be honest, that was what I was expecting: another Pre-code seedy office melodrama (nothing against those, as seen here and here). Instead, it suddenly turned lighter, and I was presented with quite a good comedy.

While this may not be Williams’ best performance (I would elect “Employees’ Entrance”), it is one of his best and allows him to show his talent for comedy, something you can also see in the much vilified “Satan met a Lady”. Here he is clearly a star on the ascent: he is the lead despite being third billed, after David Manners, who clearly has a supporting part. Later that year (1932), he would be top billed in “The Match King” and “Skyscraper Souls” and with that unique and still unmatched balance of sleaze and seduction, he would become the ultimate Pre-code leading man.

Also extremely good are the two actresses, Marian Marsh and Mary Doran, as Williams’ current and former secretary (and current something else). I don’t think I ever had come across either of them. Marsh in particular shows some promise that, as far as her filmography allows me to assess, she never delivered – there is only one film she did after this whose title I recognised, "Crime and Punishment" with Peter Lorre.

Finally, I would like to say that this should have belonged in the Forbidden Hollywood collection series (rather than the Warner Archives), possibly in a volume dedicated to Warren Williams along with other Roy del Ruth titles such as “Upperworld”, “Employees’ Entrance” and “The Mind Reader” (the one I haven’t seen and would like to). Or, let’s even be original and add "Blessed Event” and two Cagneys (“Taxi!” and “Blonde Crazy”) and have an del Ruth Collection. A boy can dream, no?

The Letter (1940)

More than any other, "The Letter" is the quintessential Bette Davis film. It is one of the best examples of the studio system's star vehicles, where an actor carried the weight of a film. Davis is (nearly) the whole film from the audience's point of view, and without her the whole thing would collapse. Of course, the play on which it was based was in itself a star vehicle (Maugham wrote it for Gladys Cooper, if I recall correctly) so the whole thing is already centred in the leading lady. Having seen it on stage a few years back, however, I recall it as a much more balanced affair.

In a plantation in Malaysia, Leslie (Davis) shoots a man outside her house. The man, was one of her neighbours, and when the police comes, she tells them that she killed him after he tried to rape her. All seems pretty clear until a letter surfaces. I have to be admit, this is one of my favourite Bette Davis' performances. She's perfectly glacial, composed and her eyes, often about to explode, are a focus point for the audience (I think William Wyler, the director, knew this). As I once said to a friend, you can't take your eyes off her. Her character's obsession with detail and self-imposed discipline, her efforts never to give away anything away, so cleverly represented by the lace, appeals to me to no end. However, having recently seen the film recently for the umpteenth time, some of the flaws are becoming more and more evident.

The first, and most obvious, is the most unfortunate casting of Herbert Marshall. In one sense, he is perfectly pathetic, and therefore should have been perfect as the husband. The problem is that he can't act. And this is a film where all the action occurs in the amazing opening sequence, so it would have helped to have an actor who could actually act.

The second fault is the opening-up of the source material. Maugham based his play on a short story (also by him). It is of the nature of theatre that all action is moved forward by words. In cinema, that is a disaster, so often writers open the play up, show different locations, add characters, etc., to make it feel less closed. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I'm starting to think it doesn't always work here. By breaking the long scenes of the play into tiny bits, you also loose the effect. You loose tension and structure and adding or extending things like the sequence in Chinatown serve no purpose other than make the film longer. Although it also leads us to the next point: the portrait of the Asian characters, either as greasy, devious, over-polite plotters or as greasy, devious, opium addicts. Played for laughs and the security of the White audience of the period, they are a hindrance to modern audiences, add nothing, and to be frank, are quite distracting.

Finally, there's the ending (and yes, spoiler alert). The original, bitter ending of the play, with Leslie not only admitting that she still loves the man she killed, but also that she will have to live a long, boring life concious of it is gone. This, I am sure is what attracted Maugham. So why does it have to go? Well, the Hays Code. As a murderess, Leslie must be punished. But this empties the film of its impact. So, to be fair, every time I watch it, I pretend the last few minutes aren't really there - the film ends when she utters the infamous line, "with all my heart I still love the man I killed".

Having spent so much denigrating what is one of my favourite films, and clearly not expressing how big is my emotional reaction to this film, I will try to get back on track and focus on three of my favourite things. The first, is obviously Davis (yeah, sorry, couldn't help it). The scene in the prison is still my favourite of all her performances: trying unsuccessfully to keep cool as her perfectly composed starts crumbling and you can feel her trying (and failing) to hold on. She got an Oscar nomination, and I probably would have given it to her, had I had a chance... Another highlight are the final scenes, when safe and sound, all is revealed. I have mentioned above that you can't take your eyes off her. I really believe this. The second highlight is the underrated James Stephenson as the lawyer, a character actor who would die the following year, just as his career seemed to take a more promising turn (he got an Oscar nomination for this film). Here he is a fallen angel, truly broken down by his actions to protect the wife of a good friend (the stage production I saw suggested that his actions might be motivated by something more than friendship towards Leslie's husband). It's really a pity that they didn't keep the dynamics of the play, as he could have been an even better match to Davis. Finally, the gorgeous, at times almost noir-ish Oscar nominated cinematography by Tony Gaudio: Bette Davis never looked as beautiful as all covered in Orry-Kelly's virginal white lace.

A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929)

A prisoner escapes from Dartmoor prison. The guards look for him. They go to a cottage near by, where they believe he is headed to. Then, in one of the great transitions to a flashback, using intertitles as both a cut and spoken words, we are told what has happened. And what we are told is one of the swansongs of (British) silent cinema, one that keeps you hooked, and certainly one of my favourites.

Director Anthony Asquith's reputation has been defined by his sound films, seen too often as film versions of well-made plays, in particular those of Terence Rattigan. This is unfair for two reasons: the first is that the films themselves are sometimes quite good ("Pygmalion", "The Importance of Being Earnest", "The Browning Version"); and the second is that it neglects his four silent features. Recently, both "A Cottage on Dartmoor" and "Underground" have been restored by the BFI, made available on DVD (or will soon) and reassessed for the wonderful works that they are. Of course, “A Cottage on Dartmoor” is a dreadful title, which probably hasn't helped – suggesting too much an idyllic England and very little going on the screen. And what goes on the screen feels, to modern audiences anyway, more like Hitchcock than theatre. Asquith's use of effects, camera angles and photography, borrowing a bit from German expressionism, is both confident and original.

The film is full of wonderful little moments - the suggestion to see a talkie (oh, the irony...); the sequence at the cinema; the lost card that was supposed to come with the flowers; and above all the reality and regrets of relationships, in one of cinema's most honest moments - for once, we get to see what really goes on after the "happily ever after". Asquith's direction is certain but it also benefits from a great script and an astonishing trio of leads (one Swede, one British, one German), in particular Uno Henning (as the barber). I definitely think I'll try to see more of his work.

To finish, I should mention something about the actual screening (well, actually two things). One is that I saw this a few months ago, and the post is based on notes I did at the time: reality has been biting and time to blog has not been much. So if I don't make full justice to the film, is because I saw it over three months ago. The second thing, is that, like most silent film screenings, this one had a live piano accompaniment, this one by Stephen Horne, who provided one of the best accompaniments of a silent film I have had the chance to listen to and certainly enhanced my experience of the film.

Man's Castle (1933)

Frank Borzage's "Man's Castle" is, like a few of his other films, the story of two misfits (in this case, Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young) whose love brings a hitherto unknown depth to their lives. Yes, this sounds incredibly pretentious, but the films are usually better than they sound. And "Man's Castle" really has a lot of fans out there, some who consider it one of the director's best film, if not the best. Borzage is a director that can as easily engage me as well as leave completely cold. In the first category are the Margaret Sullavan MGMs, "Mannequin", "Desire" and the first 70 minutes of "7th Heaven"; in the second, the rest of "7th Heaven", "The Spanish Main" and "Strange Cargo" (which I really, really, really hated, but that's another story). "Man's Castle" lies somewhere in the middle. With so much praise going around, I really wanted to like it. Alas, its gender politics and misplaced over-romantism really got on my nerves.

Borzage had a tendency to idealise the world in his films, his characters inhabiting something slightly nobler than the world that surrounds them. In "7th Heaven" he pulls it off, creating a self-contained world, where two almost magical beings live (Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, both possessing an ethereal quality, also shared by Margaret Sullavan in the MGM films) and a medium (silent film) that help it all work. "Man's Castle" on the other hand, belongs to the hard world of the Depression: poverty, shanty towns, unemployment, hunger, alcoholism, crime, are all here. Not a place where for ethereal characters, clearly not helped by the casting of Spencer Tracy, one of the most earth-bound actors ever. But it was Loretta Young's character "look at me, I'm making a home now" that lost me entirely. She spends most of the film washing, cooking or taking care of the house for a man that is hardly ever there and when he is, is not exactly the most engaging of partners, wishing clearly he was somewhere else. This idea that all a woman wants is a man that might leave her at any moment and a stove is something that sent several shivers down my spine - when she said she'd give up her baby if that would make him happy, I cringed.

There are some positives as well - the opening sequences are quite good (perhaps Young is too clean and composed for someone with nowhere to live, but I put that down to 1930s Hollywood) and got my attention. Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young do a wonderful job of what is, in my opinion, a very flawed script, Tracy in particular. The supporting cast, lead by Glenda Farrell and Walter Connolly are excellent, although Arthur Hohl overdoes the sliminess from time to time. Finally, as a Pre-code title, there's plenty of sexual innuendo as expected (mostly cortesy of Ms Farrell, while trying to seduce Tracy) and an out-of-wedlock baby.