“A woman is beautiful only when she is loved.” This silly aphorism, gospel to Job Skeffington and, when she has lost her looks to diptheria, conceded to by ex-wife Fanny, is something of a barrier to one’s acceptance of this film. If one can get over it, one can enjoy the film. The talents involved make getting over it very easy.
Bette Davis is both brilliantly meticulous and emotionally full-blown as Fanny Trellis, who marries her brother Trippy’s boss, Jewish banker Job Skeffington (Claude Rains, excellent), to keep him from having Trippy prosecuted for embezzlement. Job, meanwhile, is genuinely in love with his schiksa, a socialite and beauty who, even after their marriage, is relentlessly pursued by competing suitors who now, as Job quips, not only desire her but wish to rescue her. Born to poverty from which he has lifted himself up, Job solves the problem of the Trellis financial problems; Trippy has decimated the family fortune that the two orphaned siblings inherited, along with their mansion. It is the loss of their parents and of parental guidance that we assume has made Fanny and Trippy so inordinately close and each, at the same time, selfish and impulsive. Trippy cannot endure the self-sacrifice of marriage to Skeffington that his sister has made for his benefit and is killed in World War I, for which Fanny blames Job. Trippy, the film makes plain, is anti-Semitic; although vain and flirtaciously manipulative, Fanny is not. After their divorce, Job goes to Europe and is broken and blinded in a Nazi concentration camp. When she sees what has become of Job, Fanny no longer fears the mirrors in her mansion; she will be forever beautiful in Job Skeffington’s eyes.
The film, based on a story by Elizabeth von Arnim, is (as we nearly all were) naïve on the score of the Nazi death camps—surely, forgiveably so. The finale is irresistibly moving.
Directing from an exceptionally witty and agile script by the Epstein brothers, and immeasurably assisted by triple Oscar winner Ralph Dawnson’s bravura editing, Vincent Sherman deserves a good deal of credit. His work is crisp, and it takes in stride a brace of shifting times, fashions and moods. And one shot is to die for: the outbreak of the First World War, indicated by commotion that Fanny observes through a clear glass partition in Job’s office.
Whoever is responsible for the rhapsodic Job Skeffington musical theme—the credited Franz Waxman or uncredited Paul Dessau—also rates hosannas.
Archive for November, 2008
MR. SKEFFINGTON (Vincent Sherman, 1944)
November 30, 2008FUNNY GIRL (William Wyler, 1968)
November 29, 2008Funny Girl is based on a Broadway musical whose producer was married to the daughter of its subject, the wonderful singer and comedienne Fanny Brice, famous for popularizing the song “My Man” and (on the radio) the character of Baby Snooks. Of Hungarian-Jewish descent, Brice was born Fania Borach in New York in 1891 and died months shy of her sixtieth birthday. She was one of the stars of the Ziegfeld Follies. Her three failed marriages included ones to gambler and convicted criminal Nick Arnstein, which is portrayed in the film, and show producer/songwriter Billy Rose. The film provides only limited appreciation of the magnitude of Brice’s talent and stardom.
William Wyler directed; there is, surprisingly, an almost complete absence of period “feel.” The film is also ungainly and ridiculously long. But the worst offense, surely, is that the result is so generic that it bears little relation to Fanny Brice.
Barbra Streisand had played the role on stage, but is hampered here by many things, including her congenital coldness, meanness, self-absorption. Above all, she does nothing to adjust her condescending bourgeois manner; Brice’s background was lower-class, and Brice herself was a scrapper. By contrast, Streisand’s Brice is a kvetcher.
It doesn’t help either that the two most shimmeringly lovely songs from the show, “Who Are You Now?” and “The Music That Makes Me Dance,” and the funniest song and number, “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat,” have all been deleted. Strikingly but coldly, the film ends with Streisand against a black backdrop belting out (with laughably fake intensity) “My Man.” Streisand sings heartlessly; Brice sang bravely and with incredible soulfulness and heart. Their styles could not be further apart.
Arnstein is played by the Egyptian star Omar Sharif. Press at the time stressed Sharif’s teaming with a Jewish actress.
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MILK (Gus Van Sant, 2008)
November 29, 2008Whatever else it may be about (for this is a film that exists on many levels), Milk, about Harvey Milk, is about the capacity in America for someone to set the course of one’s own myth. Milk, a gay Jewish New York businessman, was not young but he took Horace Greeley’s advice about going west, not to make a fortune in his case, but to embrace his identity. For him, going west, in his case to San Francisco’s Castro district, meant uncloseting himself; in that odd way that life has of accommodating the most outrageously bald fiction, he did so by opening (with his lover from New York) a camera shop. It thrived in part, the film stresses, because of the area’s gay community, which patronized it. But even in so relatively insular an environment, gays were targets of anti-gay hatred; and a passage in which some blurry figure at night may be pursuing Milk down his own street to beat him or kill him, as much as an elaborately shot confrontation between Milk and a police officer over the body of a murdered gay man, encapsulates the vulnerability of the group to which Milk belongs now that he has located his identity inside it.
Coming out, then, means coming out to incredible danger, but being bolstered by a whole community of vulnerable ones. Milk’s pursuit of elective municipal office totes and enlarges the springboarding paradox. After unsuccessful campaigns, Milk wins his 1977 election to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, providing him with a platform from which he can pursue the cause of gay civil rights, but also giving anti-gay hatred an especially consolidated target. From the start, Milk receives anonymous death threats.
At least two ironies—this is a film of exquisite ironies—attach themselves to Milk’s election in his pursuit of the myth he chooses to make of his life in order to benefit others as much as himself. One is that local politics seems to be directing the hand of fate regarding him; no longer do candidates for supervisor need to court votes city-wide but can concentrate on their own district, and redistricting has further enhanced the likelihood of Milk’s victory. The ultimate irony is this: Milk’s assassination (by former supervisor Dan White) derives from an ambiguous complex of motives to which anti-gay hatred contributes little or possibly nothing at all.
In the brilliant film that Gus Van Sant has wrought from Dustin Lance Black’s interesting script (Black throughout relates American anti-gay hatred to Hitler’s campaign against Jews and gays), a horrible cloud of death follows Milk, seems somehow invested in him. There is the threat of injury and even murder to which all gays are vulnerable; this danger comes even from the police, whose job it should be to protect gays. But Milk’s individual case strikingly includes the instability of his sex life; his lovers include, we learn, three suicides, and a fourth one commits suicide in the course of the film’s action. When Milk breaks down on this last occasion, we understand that he does so under the burden of the four losses and what they may suggest about the bad fortune he inflicts on some of those closest to him. In part, the last suicide reflects Milk’s poor skills at juggling his personal life and political aims and responsibilities. But Van Sant’s poetic sensibility cannot expunge the sense that doom is part of Milk’s DNA. It is an irresolvable task to impute to Milk’s tragic sexual history the exact role played by the general plight of gays in America.
Milk, a long-nurtured dream project for Van Sant, who himself is openly gay, is among his most poetic achievements. He wrings poetry from unlikely quarters, including glimpses of group activism and political strategy sessions, and likelier quarters, including mass demonstrations. By contrast, his deliberate intrusions of the prosaic along two specific lines are telling and intriguing. One of these involves the film’s structuring device: Milk’s talking about himself into a tape recorder. This is framed as a legacy for the gay rights movement in the case of Milk’s own assassination. This much may derive from Black’s script; but here is the eerie part that shows how decisive direction is over script: but for their different “issues,” Milk’s recitation for posterity—to which the film returns again and again—might have been made just as easily by Dan White. Milk, with others, is “switched on” as a personality; he is warm, funny, gregarious. Sitting alone at table and recording this mythmaking history of himself, however, finds him speaking in the repressed mode that elsewhere characterizes White, not him. Throughout, White is characterized and shot in a prosaic manner that likewise (expressively) differs from the poetic style of the rest of the film. Perhaps the springboard for this surreptitious identification of political adversaries White and Milk—White, a former police officer and firefighter represents the “old” Roman Catholic San Francisco—is Milk’s belief that White himself is a repressed homosexual. Unlike his advisors, Milk detects the desperation in White’s eyes that, ironically, will erupt in his—Milk’s—assassination. (White served five years of a seven-year sentence for “manslaughter” for murdering Milk and Mayor George Moscone; eighteen months after his release, White committed suicide.)
One of Van Sant’s inspirations for this achingly moving film is Rob Epstein’s documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (1984); Milk even quotes the earlier film. Indeed, one of Van Sant’s most extraordinary accomplishments with Milk is his employment and blending of fictional, quasi-documentary and documentary materials. Van Sant creates from these a fluent river of visual expression.
Sean Penn plays Harvey Milk. This film is his redemption. Penn is utterly convincing with every aspect of Milk’s complex personality—and bracingly so with Milk’s political ruthlessness. James Franco is excellent as Scott Smith, a lover of Milk’s who leaves Milk. A haunting postscript reveals that Smith died of AIDS-related illness in the 1980s.
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LIFE THE WAY IT IS (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1978)
November 27, 2008Brilliantly written and directed by Eric Rohmer protégé Jean-Claude Brisseau, La vie comme ça revolves around Agnès Tessier, who takes an office job in a chemical factory. She and best friend Florence move into a place in a low-cost apartment building in an unsavory neighborhood. It is Florence’s father, who is smitten with Agnès, who has arranged for this place for her and his daughter.
The tragicomedy divides its time between apartment building and workplace, with an intimate outing in the country between Agnès and Florence’s father. At home, Agnès befriends the gay concierge, who is as tender-hearted as she and a target of bullies. Indeed, violence attaches itself to the housing project. When Agnès and Florence first move in, an apparent suicide from the seventh floor has bloodied the courtyard, and an elderly resident is later butchered for her monthly pension allotment.
But it is at the workplace that the film most fascinates. Muriel (played by Bulle Ogier’s ill-fated daughter, Pascale Ogier) is groped by a higher-up, whom she slaps while fighting back, and is summarily fired; without success, Agnès takes up the cause of getting Muriel her job back. This inspires Agnès to run for the office of union representative, and she wins. As a result she is demoted and becomes the target of a vicious campaign of harassment the aim of which is to pressure her to quit.
Home and workplace now become one. False rumors circulate that Florence and Agnès are lesbian lovers. Florence thus angrily moves out and forces a break in Agnès’s relationship with her father. There is a greater tragedy awaiting Agnès that brings the film to a stunning conclusion—this, after female solidarity at the workplace tips the balance of justice in Agnès’s favor.
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THE FORBIDDEN CHRIST (Curzio Malaparte, 1950)
November 30, 2008Stark, turbulent, poetic, Il Cristo proibito asks, “Why must the innocent always pay for the others?” In so doing it not only delivers a powerful blow to tyranny and the madness of war but also radically reinforces the tenets of Christian myth. The author of the script, filmmaker and composer of the score, Italian journalist, dramatist, novelist Curzio Malaparte—born Kurt Erich Suckert, but adopting early on a penname that, playing with Bonaparte, associated him with “a bad place”—had himself been a Fascist; but attacking both Mussolini and Hitler in the early 1930s, he was sent into exile. After the war, he became a Communist.
Il Cristo proibito—originally released in the U.S. as Strange Deception—centers on Bruno Baldi, who has just returned to his impoverished village, Siena, in Tuscany, after being released from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp following the Second World War. Bruno is dead-set on discovering the identity of whoever betrayed his younger brother, Giulio, a partisan who was fifteen or sixteen when the occupying Germans killed him. But no one, including his caring mother, is willing to disclose the villager’s identity.
This is a searing, heartrending film. Bruno’s friend Antonio arranges for a clandestine meeting between himself and Bruno; he “confesses” that it was he who betrayed Giulio. Upon hearing this, Bruno dispatches his knife into his dear friend’s heart. Dying, Antonio truly confesses. No, of course it was not he; but now when Bruno discovers the actual identity of the traitor he will no longer be motivated to kill the person. Antonio declares Bruno innocent and dies.
Antonio, earlier: “Only in sacrifice is there Justice. . . . To suffer for others and to pay for others.”
When Bruno confronts the traitor, his soul—and postwar Italy’s—hangs in the balance.
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