Boiling Sand

On December 30th, 2009, the Library of Congress announced the next twenty-five films chosen for preservation in the National Film Registry, merited on their “enduring importance to American culture.”  On the list was the 1975 animated short QUASI AT THE QUACKADERO by Sally Cruikshank.

As the Library of Congress announced:

“Quasi at the Quackadero” has earned the term “unique.” Once described as a “mixture of 1930s Van Beuren cartoons and 1960s R. Crumb comics with a dash of Sam Flax,” and a descendent of the “Depression-era funny animal cartoon,” Sally Cruikshank’s wildly imaginative tale of odd creatures visiting a psychedelic amusement park careens creatively from strange to truly wacky scenes. It became a favorite of the Midnight Movie circuit in the 1970s. Cruikshank later created animation sequences for “Sesame Street,” the 1986 film “Ruthless People” and the “Cartoon Land” sequence in the 1983 film “Twilight Zone: The Movie.”

This was exciting news. I hadn’t heard a reference to the film in a quarter-century.  [One day during a lunch break on a location shoot in the mid-1980s, another crewmember brought up this film; that was my only chance to discuss it.]  Yet when I saw it the film made a great impression:  I came home and wrote down my thoughts about her work after the only time I saw it.  (According to my notes it was September 1, 1981, at the Nuart Theatre in West L.A.)  I had recently graduated from film school and was working at Disney Studios.  It was a time of searching and questioning what I wanted to do with all I had learned.  A lot of this quest included seeing lots of alternative forms of film:  Super8 Festivals, early features by Mark Rappaport, New Wave shorts by Chuck Straten, etc.  An Evening with Sally Cruikshank at the Nuart was part of that search for my idiom.

The evening was a two-part show of her own short films and cartoons that inspired her.  The latter works were mainly pre-Code, black-and-white surreal wonders of pulsating universes with elastic, bouncy beings and anthropomorphized objects:  Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat in FLIM FLAM FILMS (great name for a production company but I’d hate to be the person answering the phone), several Fleischer shorts (Betty Boop in IS MY PALM READ?, the hallucinatory BIMBO’S INITIATION plus the early Popeye short A DREAM WALKING), and a combination live action / animation short from Warner Brothers called YOU OUGHT TO BE IN PICTURES starring Porky, Daffy and Leon Schlesinger.

Cruikshank’s work was ahead of its time:  the color and design are far more like New Wave 1980s than Disco Seventies, as is its cut-and-paste PostModern sensibility.  (No wonder her work was used in major Hollywood feature films during the ‘eighties.)  Yet the tabletop aesthetic of these handcrafted films is very much a product of the pre-Yuppie, pre-Reagan era.  This is one of the most unshakable sensations of her works:  the means of production perfectly situates the artist in her generation and the times she has lived in, yet her creative vision and voice are still pushing concepts of media’s voice thirty-five years after its completion.

To get a taste of QUASI, it can be viewed in low quality at YouTube — or you can go for the Gold and order her complete works on DVD from her website.

Doug / PoMo Joan

Under the leadership of Edward Muhl, the 1950s witnessed Universal Studios’ ascendancy from virtual Poverty Row grindhouse to Top Dawg moneymaker in the movie industry.  While other studios had a restrictive agenda to their films [M-G-M had its family values; Warner Brothers its social conscience; Paramount provided sophistication to the masses], Universal cut and pasted whatever was exciting in culture, framed it in successful genres, and amplified it to gave the audience a thrill:  whether it was a battle to the death between Frankenstein and the Wolf Man, Abbott and Costello mugging through yet another variation on “Who’s on First,” or showing teenage warbler Deanna Durbin getting her first screen kiss.

So when TV became the new cultural storyteller and the financial underpinnings of the studio system were dissolved by a few legal decisions, other studios panicked (e.g., in order to attract crowds, M-G-M killed off the ultimate symbol of their studio — Mrs. Miniver — in 1950’s THE MINIVER STORY*) while Universal raked in the cash by saturating the market with films like CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON in 3-D and Douglas Sirk’s operatic melodrama MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION.

A sharply packaged audience-pleaser such as THE LADY TAKES A FLYER is a perfect example of the satisfying-yet-disposable Universal product of that era.  This project was probably bumped up to a greenlight because a 1957 fire on Universal’s backlot would have made this an easy choice to go into production, since the locations are mainly interiors and airstrips.  (As the title implies, this is an aviation film.) 

The studio’s homegrown leading man Jeff Chandler was teamed with recently at-liberty Lana Turner (who had been dropped by MGM after more than 15 years at the studio).  Both amply supplied the screen with eye-candy.  The script had a narrative arc that cycled from “Meet Cute” (boy aviator meets girl aviator) to the ever-present 1950s glandular crossroads of sexuality versus domesticity, to a taught crisis-in-the-skies dramatic finale.  The result is a burstingly sensual yet Modernist look at a mid-American dream life circa 1958.

The MidCentury palette and design sense — when filtered through Universal’s culture machine — created an All American bourgeois Rococo confection; and though I label it as a ‘disposable’ movie (the intention of all films produced before film history appreciation developed in the 1960s), it has enough craft and significance to be enjoyed in multiple viewings.

Lots of its visual richness is due to director Jack Arnold and art director Alexander Golitzen.  Jack Arnold was a master of timing within a screen frame, having perfected balletic celluloid choreography by previously matching up actors and special effects in other Universal films such as TARANTULA and THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN.  He could place and move actors in a shot so the pace never stalled.  Russian refugee Alexander Golitzen (real name: Prince Alexander Alexandrovich Galitzine) received 11 of his 14 Oscar nominations for his work at Universal (from the chichi and splashy Technicolor delirium ARABIAN NIGHTS, to the jukebox neons of THIS ISLAND EARTH, to his Oscar-winning black-and-white work on TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, finishing with the ’seventies disaster film EARTHQUAKE).  His design strategy in THE LADY TAKES A FLYER created a visual theme that resembled nothing less than a MidCentury version of scenes by the 18th Century Rococo master Jean-Honoré Fragonard in its choices of color and textures.

Producer William Alland had collaborated with Jack Arnold on a string of solid sci-fi films including CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, but this change of focus and tone worked just as well.  Alland repeated FLYER’s formula the same year with another good time-filler, RAW WIND IN EDEN, also starring Jeff Chandler and another refugee from M-G-M, Esther Williams.  This time — instead of Arnold directing — he brought in an old friend from his days with Orson Welles:  Richard Wilson.  (In his pre-producer career as an actor, Alland had played “Mr. Thompson,” the always-silhouetted reporter who interviewed the principals in CITIZEN KANE)

The year after THE LADY TAKES A FLYER Universal’s wildly successful double-header of binary-opposite hits, PILLOW TALK and IMITATION OF LIFE, gave Hollywood the brand and character to follow for popcorn cinema in the next decade.  FLYER doesn’t match those criteria, but — as concocted fluff that crystalizes the moment in which it was made — it’s a movie that gives many pleasures.

[*The death of Mrs. Miniver in THE MINIVER STORY is NOT a spoiler; she receives the news of her terminal illness in the first few minutes of the film.]

Doug / PoMo Joan

I was an adolescent — and the day was cold and sunny — when I went to a Saturday matinee of Richard Brooks’ THE HAPPY ENDING.

That day and that movie came back to me as I read that Jean Simmons died.

I haven’t seen it since (the film might not have aged well) but the closing shot of Simmons, articulating the movie’s subject with one silent tilt of the head, has never been erased from my memory.  Those few frames cemented my respect for her and my adoration of her gifts to cinema.

It’s hard to quantify and categorize her place in movie history because her art and career are more divergent than convergent.  An “Actress Whose Talent Exceeded the Parts She Played” was the headline on the obituary page in the NYT.

She followed her Ophelia to Olivier’s Hamlet in 1948 by originating the Brooke Shields role in the first film version of THE BLUE LAGOON in 1949.  Imported to Hollywood Simmons gained an American accent, belted songs even though she couldn’t sing, paraded in togas in numerous Biblical epics, and was manipulated and harassed by Howard Hughes and Otto Preminger in her most perplexing and rule-breaking film:  ANGEL FACE.  Simmons embodied characters created by iconic American authors such as Damon Runyon, Sinclair Lewis and James Agee.  The year after playing the fussbudget Fräulein Rottenmeier in a TV version of HEIDI, she was an alcoholic housewife in mid-meltdown for her husband Richard Brooks’ THE HAPPY ENDING.  But despite this range of characters, her qualities as an artist were distinctly identifiable.

Humphrey Bogart went on record as saying “typecasting is what creates stars.”  Simmons the Star was anything but typecast; yet in retrospect her body of work seems unified and distinct.  This totality of experience is because she was a consummate cinema actress — the intonations of her speech patterns sculpted screen time and space; her presence bisected the frame into the direction of her gaze and the side she ignored. 

This is why even her weak films (and there were plenty of them as Aljean Harmetz and Pauline Kael have pointed out) are watchable.  The 1956 CinemaScope drama HILDA CRANE — despite its strong writing, scoring and cinematography credentials — crumbled after the first twenty minutes into a chick-in-a-quandary soap opera, yet whenever Simmons was in frame, you wondered what she was thinking, focused on what she observed, anticipated what physical direction she would take.  With her eyes and body she brought lucidity and definition to every screen moment.  In better material such as Robert Wise’s UNTIL THEY SAIL (a favorite of mine), she had top billing as one of four New Zealand sisters during WW2.  (Simmons was the romantic; Joan Fontaine the spinsterish big sister; Piper Laurie the younger party girl; Sandra Dee the adolescent.)  When not carrying a scene, she could blend and integrate beautifully; yet there would always be an intriguing interiority in her physical presence that film captured best through her gaze.

Those articulate, passionate eyes are closed now.  Forever.  They’ve earned their rest.

Doug / PoMo Joan

When Francis Coppola’s RUMBLE FISH was released in the early 1980s, I read a report that throughout the production the director would repeat, “This is my student film.”

I’m a former film student and ex-professor to film students, so I understand how that phrase crystallizes a unique aesthetic and precious experience in film viewing:  the blend of personal expression, the dignity of assuming an undertaking, and the heady endeavor of experimentation.  Two recent commercial feature films by rookie directors capture these qualities:  A SINGLE MAN and THE LOSS OF A TEARDROP DIAMOND.

Both — like many student films — are adaptations of lesser-known literary works.  Both have an urgency of effort in attempting to visualize long-held, treasured ideas; and both are testaments to filmmakers doing their homework.

There’s never the sour taste of production-by-committee that’s so prevalent in Mall Movies and Popcorn Flicks.  These films are singular in vision and craft.  To view them is like witnessing the first solo effort of a promising athlete or musician.  These films unreel the uncommon qualities of both artistic courage and lacerating intimacy on the screen.

For A SINGLE MAN couturier Tom Ford adapted Christopher Isherwood’s novel with a clear understanding of the interconnective kinetic powers of narrative and design.  (Ford studied everything from drama to architecture in undergraduate school.) 

With the sound off, A SINGLE MAN is definitely in the league with other formalist masterpieces of experimentation such as LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD and FLYING DOWN TO RIO.  Yet unlike those two films the content is terrifyingly deep, and Ford developed visual language to convey the subjective psychologies of grief and connection. 

Yet, as with fashion, there is a playful quality to the film.  Although the story is set in 1962, Ford has fun with the decade by making a Sixties Imaginary that’s a mashup of everything from the decade.  (A highlight of this artistic choice:  Julianne Moore — costumed and made up like Lynn Redgrave in SMASHING TIME — boogalooing to Booker T & the MGs’ 1967 anthem “Hip Hug-Her” in her Lincoln-Center-on-a-budget Beverly Hills crib.)

While Isherwood’s A Single Man has a direct (though highly interior) narrative, the previously unproduced Tennessee Williams screenplay of THE LOSS OF A TEARDROP DIAMOND reads more like one of his more challenging short stories than his venerated three-act plays.  If you can wrap your brain around works by Williams such as Desire and the Black Masseur then TEARDROP will deliver lots of cognitive pleasures.

But it’s much more than brain candy.  Memphis-born actress/director Jodie Markell transformed her actors into solid, accurate Southern archetypes represented in detail down to the body language of barely-viewable extras in the party scenes.  Equally incisive is the graphic language of the film:  before a line is uttered in TEARDROP the camera movement and screen direction give you the lilt and cadence that will be the movie dialog’s delivery. 

The Tennessee Williams screenplay was written in 1957 for Elia Kazan, a perfect director for the material as it deals with his frequent concern of personal resolve in the midst of one’s own awareness of his human frailty.  If it had been produced in 1957, the screenplay would have been castrated and homogenized, a type of end-product which I believe was the expectation of the reviewers and journo-crits who panned the movie.  It deals with the desire to escape and the desire to ground and commit oneself:  a conflicted and unresolved exploration for most of us because we desire them both yet question them too.

I chose the word “tenderness” in the title of this post because it’s a quality that can only be given through compassion, awareness and control.  It’s those qualities that these novice filmmakers use when handling the miraculous medium of film.

Doug / PoMo Joan

On a snowy, slushy day in Chicago, gazing out the plate glass window of a Starbucks, I’m thinking of the New Jersey native who embodied all things sunny and casual:  Sandra Dee.

“Ms. Dee defined a new kind of natural, sun-soaked innocence that America, and much of the rest of the world, quickly embraced as the radiantly healthy, outdoorsy essence of Southern California living,” as Dave Kehr wrote in her New York Times obituary.  And it’s those Seratonin-type endorphins — like the ones the body generates in reaction to full-spectrum sunlight — that Sandra’s screen presence multiplies in the deepest recesses of my psyche. 

Due to her 1959 creation of the role “Gidget,” it’s easy to freeze her persona eternally as a pre-sexual adolescent.  (An image perpetuated by lame cultural references to her in the musical GREASE.)  Yet, the majority of her work contained deeply sexual references.  The knee-jerk, punchline humor of “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee” from that aforementioned musical was not inspired so much by Dee the Actress’ conflicting and naive issues around sexual exploration.  Instead it says a lot about mid-century Hollywood’s own confusion in its handling of emerging sexual topics.  It’s this push/pull morality injected into her work — and projected onto her cinema and private persona — that causes unintentional humor in contemporary viewings.  (To put it in perspective — Dee, according to her son’s memoir, had been both the family breadwinner and her stepfather’s sex toy while still in elementary school.)

Dee’s acting career began when the U.S. entertainment industry was in its own adolescent-like sexual exploration.  Sandra grew up in front of the camera, which captured that sense of discovery, of dawning emotion, of first tender emergence that was infused in her craft, palpable within each line-reading.  She had a good start in developing her dramatic talents due to her first half-dozen films being guided by masterful, legendary directors:  Robert Wise, Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk and the masterful (yet unknown in America) Trümmerfilme director Helmut Käutner. 

The risible aspects of her work is due more to the ways in which the dialog-crafters of the ‘fifties and early ’sixties broached previously taboo subjects, couching them in ‘polite’ phrases:  when underaged Sandra used the stilted phrase “house of ill-repute” in front of her mom in A SUMMER PLACE, it sounded less like a punchline and more like an obscenity to the audiences of 1959.  As Lillian Gish personified fragile beauty in physical peril in earlier times, Sandra Dee was the youth on the brink:  at risk of being over her head in the adult world of sex and liquor.  (This pre-adult innocence — so different from her private life — was the sphere where her screen persona flourished; her least credible scenes on film were situations where she was called upon to be wizened and cynical, such as her famous IMITATION OF LIFE line “Oh, Mother, stop acting!!”)

Both American morality and the film industry were in a sea change during the ’sixties.  Sandra Dee’s career was a mirror to both.  Her 1960 movie COME SEPTEMBER (costarring Rock Hudson, Gina Lollobrigida and future husband Bobby Darin) was the first film screened during an airline fight.  When Universal dropped her contract at the end of 1965, Associated Press reporter Bob Thomas noted she had been the last remaining big-name movie star under contract to any movie studio.  In another sign of the changes in Hollywood, her Industry walk out (an action which according to her son, shot her career in the foot) was when Universal execs reneged on a verbal promise that she would not be cast in that second-rate medium of the ’sixties and ’seventies:  a made-for-TV movie.

More culturally significant than the references to her in GREASE is Dee’s potent scene in Delmer Daves’ A SUMMER PLACE in which her cine-mom Constance Ford pushes Sandra into a Christmas tree, inspiring John Waters to appropriate and re-invent the scene in FEMALE TROUBLE where Divine slams her mom into the same holiday icon. 

(Sandra’s tumble into the tree can be seen in the film’s trailer HERE.)

In her last years Sandra Dee came out about her battles with depression and addiction, fueled no doubt by layers of familial and industry abuse in her early life.  Yet despite these associations, her name and her face still connote that “healthy, outdoorsy essence” I yearn to experience on a cold, grey day.  Like all great stars, she was more an embodiment than an artist.  And walking over and ordering another latté right now would just be a sorry substitute for what my brain truly desires:  just one minute of her image framed on a screen.

Doug / PoMo Joan