Victor Milner’s gray, faded black-and-white cinematography suits the mood of Theodore Dreiser’s turn-of-the-century urban naturalism in his dense, painstaking Sister Carrie, from whose title Hollywood excised the first word not to confuse audiences into thinking that the heroine was a nun. Carrie Meeber isn’t that, nor as a nervous Paramount studio or “actress” Jennifer Jones would have it is the film’s Carrie much like the novel’s. Rather than Dreiser’s complex figure, she might as well be a nun, given the sanctified treatment she is accorded here.
Indeed, William Wyler’s well-upholstered film has also been stripped of its sociopolitical context (to which, beyond family addressing, the first word of Dreiser’s title refers). Now small-town Carrie’s embarkment for the big city, Chicago, is a plot springboard only; in the book, the myths motivating her move make it a thematic springboard as well. Nor is it now clear that Carrie’s “rise” to theatrical prominence, dueting with her older lover, restaurant manager George Hurstwood’s “fall,” is steeped in embittered irony since, despite the hallowed ground that popular culture occupies in our own day, Carrie’s “success” as actress is, at best, ambivalently received in hers.
I’ve been wrong about something—well, about many things—all my life. Since the release of Carrie, a financial flop, followed the same studio’s money-making release of A Place in the Sun (1951), based on a play based on Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, I presumed that the success of one film emboldened Paramount to make the other. Now I’ve learned that Carrie predated Place but was immediately shelved and doctored to avoid political controversy in the McCarthy era. Therefore, I no longer blame Wyler for the diluted result.
The one reason to see this film is brilliant Laurence Olivier’s elegant Hurstwood, a gripping slide into degradation.
Posts Tagged ‘Laurence Olivier’
CARRIE (William Wyler, 1952)
April 9, 2010THE ENTERTAINER (Tony Richardson, 1960)
April 8, 2010One of the greatest casts ever assembled electrifies The Entertainer, John Osborne’s sturdy play that Osborne and Nigel Kneale adapted and Tony Richardson directed starkly, if crudely and disjointedly. (Richardson would make only one other film even half as good: A Delicate Balance, 1973, from Edward Albee’s play.) Laurence Olivier is staggering re-creating his stage role as debt-drowning, seedy music hall singing comic Archie Rice, a throwback to earlier times; Roger Livesey, deeply affecting, plays Rice’s father, Billy, Joan Plowright Rice’s daughter, Jean, Albert Finney and Alan Bates his sons, Brenda de Banzie his second wife, Phoebe, and Daniel Massey, Shirley Anne Field and Thora Hird in other roles.
The intended metaphor, however well it may have worked onstage, doesn’t (and perhaps cannot) transfer to the screen. Olivier is too agonizingly real, despite the restraint and distance of Richardson’s camera in the vast majority of shots, for the intention to hold; Olivier’s urgent, tremendous performance overwhelms the abstraction of British depression and decline, including the evaporation of Empire. The irony that such a lowly, selfish, dead-eyed sort as Archie represents all this is lost. On the other hand, with that dimension excised, the characters still fascinate as themselves, and in particular the father-son duo of Billy and Archie, one blubberingly sentimental and the other cold and manipulative, both of them desperate, rip the heart out. That Livesey once upon a time was cinema’s Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 1944) causes the film to shimmer with a vestige of Osborne’s larger intent.
There’s no getting around another point of fascination: despite the years between them, the Olivier-Plowright offstage romantic pairing that helped end one of the most widely publicized extramarital affairs and subsequent marriages of the twentieth century.
B(U)Y THE BOOK
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL (Laurence Olivier, 1957)
April 7, 2010“You know, you do need more love in your life.” — Elsie to Charles
The futility of efforts to stave off a devastating world war: this is, ironically, the fairy-tale fantasy lending such poignancy to Laurence Olivier’s lovely, very funny, ultimately sad and moving The Prince and the Showgirl, adapted by Terence Rattigan from his play The Sleeping Prince. Repeating the role he played on stage opposite wife Vivien Leigh, Olivier expertly (if theatrically} plays Grand Duke Charles, the Prince Regent of Carpathia, a fictitious Balkan country, who is residing at the Carpathian Embassy in London for the occasion of the coronation of George V. It is 1911. Charles, who is brutal and authoritarian, currently rules Carpathia while King Nicolas waits on his majority, but the reformist boy is plotting a coup with the help of the Bulgarian army. (Organized riots are already transpiring back home.) Unlike Charles, Nicolas is pro-German.
Marilyn Monroe, whose production company financed the elegantly photographed film (Jack Cardiff is the color cinematographer), plays Elsie Marina, a patriotic American showgirl whom Charles invites to the Embassy for dinner and (clumsy!) seduction. The tables turn, however, and Elsie becomes the aggressor. Learning about Nicolas’s political intentions, she even aims to reconcile Nicolas and Charles.
Monroe delights, such as when Elsie breaks into an impromptu dance alone and in secret—until Nicolas interrupts. This follows one of Olivier’s most heartfelt shots, on the morning of Coronation Day: Elsie at an Embassy window, the camera at her back (Monroe’s neck adds to the beauty of the shot), as she watches a straggly procession of British citizens passing by—seemingly carefree and excited over the current occasion although, symbolically, heading into a terrible future.
It is unfortunate that Monroe, ambitious beyond her considerable charms, made Olivier miserable on-set. Onscreen, however, they both come magically through.
B(U)Y THE BOOK
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
SPARTACUS (Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Mann, 1960)
November 12, 2009Dispensing with the Rashomon-like flashbacks of Howard Fast’s novel, each attuned to a different character’s view of Spartacus, executive producer Kirk Douglas’s film is a blunt, thin “big movie,” a collection of boring, silly, gory scenes that puts the best possible face on the Roman obliteration of the actual Spartacus’s slave rebellion in the first century B.C. This is a terrible movie—although the early parts, directed by Anthony Mann before bully Douglas fired him, are certainly more adept than the nonsense that follows. Stanley Kubrick, hired by Douglas as a replacement for Mann, wasn’t permitted to bring any of his own perspective to the material; as a result, he disowned the film, left the country permanently and never again made a Hollywood film, and refused to discuss the film for the rest of his life. The original author of the script, Dalton Trumbo, also more or less repudiated the released version, whose bevy of authorial hands after his left that script in the dust, obscuring especially Trumbo’s political intentions. Spartacus is the proverbial movie-by-committee watching which is a waste of time. (The waste of a lot of time: 198 minutes.)
Oh, a set or two are nifty, as is Alex North’s score; however intellectually and emotionally bereft, the thing is rich in production values. The acting is variable: Peter Ustinov’s Oscar-winning Batiatus chews up the scenery; Laurence Olivier is elegant and incisive as contumelious Crassus; Tony Curtis is ridiculous as the curly-topped slave whom Crassus keeps a cultivated eye on. Douglas’s exaggerated Spartacus is without nuance or insight.
Spartacus is fancifully given a wife and baby just so all three can participate in a grotesque farewell where the crucified Spartacus is invited to see in his son, vicariously, below, a future of freedom.
OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR (Richard Attenborough, 1969)
April 26, 2012This elephantine, star-studded production, based on Joan Littlewood’s theatrical series of satirical antiwar sketches, was actor Richard Attenborough’s official directorial debut. Despite its best film Golden Globe, Oh! What a Lovely War is sufficiently shallow and obtuse that Littlewood had her name removed from the credits. It is a soulless, insufferable, bloated thing.
A lavish, decorative period piece, it is set during the outbreak and the course of the First World War, but actually takes aim at the Vietnam War, in which Britain was currently involved. The governing metaphor is war as a gigantic game at an amusement park, which Everyfamily—the Smiths—journeys through. Throughout, (now) nostalgic songs arise, culminating in a wide-angle shot of a vast Christian graveyard accompanied by an unseen immemorial chorus: “ . . . and when they ask us how wonderful it was,/ they’ll never believe us,/ they’ll never believe us . . .”
There is no reason why such material should not have yielded an admirable result; but Attenborough’s infantile compulsion to inflate everything squeezes out all trace of feeling except the bogus affect of sentimentality. Attenborough was Spielberg before Spielberg was Spielberg.
The British Academy awarded a gratifying prize to Gerry Turpin for his limpid, lovely color cinematography—and a perplexing one to Laurence Olivier for a cameo he might have been tossing off in his sleep. Perhaps Vanessa Redgrave comes off best, fleetingly, as a spirited feminist.
Tags:Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave
Posted in Informal Capsule Film Comments | Leave a Comment »