Capsule Reviews: Sullivan's Travels, Christmas in July, Hellzapoppin'

Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges)

After my intensely negative experience with The Lady Eve, a comedy that struck me as caring more for its subtext than its delivery, I was glad to return to Sturges' movie-about-movies, which mocks so many of the traits I found insufferable in his other 1941 picture. A film about Hollywood's inability to make true social commentary, Sullivan's Travels mocks the broader impulse of the rich to understand the poor in a condescending, simplistic manner. As with The Lady Eve, Sturges belabors his point—Joel McCrea's Sullivan constantly trying to trek it like a bum, only to wind up back in Hollywood—and for a film about two-dimensional Hollywood social message films, the conclusion Sturges reaches is almost simpering in its ostensible respect for the working class who would rather be entertained than informed. Nevertheless, Sturges' zingers crackle for me like they never did in Eve, and if I remain unconvinced that the writer-director is not secretly the biggest schmuck to con his way into a legacy, at least I chuckled. Bonus points for the subversive singing of "Let My People Go" in a black church that hosts some prisoners for a picture show, easily the deftest, subtlest piece of social critique in the film. Grade: B

Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940)

A film about a dime-a-dozen hack being mistaken for a whiz? Could this be Sturges' filmic autobiography? No, but seriously, I was so glad that I tuned into this supposedly "minor" Sturges movie after TCM ran Sullivan's Travels. After struggling to connect with his films, Christmas in July finally did the trick. If in the aforementioned film I chiefly chuckled and smiled knowingly, Christmas made me honest-to-God laugh, loud and long. And contrary to the message of Sullivan's, this satire beautifully incorporates its critique of a corporate America (both timely and ahead of its time) into a well-paced and wildly funny piece of entertainment. Sturges uses Dick Powell's stiff unfamiliarity with comedy to great effect, emphasizing what an awkward, overeager git he is but also making him impossible not to love. The best part, though? Raymond Walburn as the business head who hates his own contest so much he just arbitrarily gives away the prize, then explodes when he learns a man won unfairly. His blank-faced response to Powell's earnest explanation of one of his proposed ad slogans—"It's a pun." "It certainly is."—makes this an instant favorite supporting performance. Hallelujah, it would seem I'm not immune to Sturges' charms after all. Grade: A

Hellzapoppin' (H.C. Potter, 1941)

Much as I enjoy Sullivan's Travels, it's this 1941 self-reflexive movie that I will return to most often. I cannot say with any certainty what differs from the original Broadway musical, but Olsen and Johnson's adaptation of their own work adds sight gags and metacinematic touches that could only work on the screen. Hellzapoppin' moves with such blistering speed that that the already loose narrative structure collapses entirely, an anarchic spirit prevailing even the wayward spot of straightforward moments; see the lilting song number interrupted by intertitles urging a member of the audience to go home (eventually, a shadow rises at the bottom of the frame and awkwardly slides out) and the couple painting on the "lens" as the sing. The funniest jokes of all may be when the film belatedly attempts to follow some kind of story, an exercise in futility soon corrected by a total deconstruction. The best, and most thrilling, sequence, though belongs not to Olsen and Johnson but a cast of black performers who appear to tacitly realize that they're in a film so ridiculous and unorthodox they can take center stage, at which point they launch into a dynamic dance number so incredible it belongs with the great movie dance scenes. Grade: A

Charles Chaplin's 11 Features

[The following is an entry in the monthly Favorite Directors Blogathon. A master list of my choices for all 12 filmmakers (with links updated as they are posted) can be found here.]

It is all to easy to undervalue Charles Chaplin, something that can be seen even in some early reviews for this site. His camera style, primitive even by the standards of the silent era, offers few thrills for the aesthetically minded. His infamous sentimentality becomes the focal point of critical distrust and a convenient excuse to attack a sacred cow. And as a comic, he lacks the technical dazzle of Keaton, the epic audacity of Lloyd, often suffering when placed in (meaningless) competition with his peers.

And yet, the Tramp endures. Chaplin may not be, as Shaw once said, the only genius to come out of the movies, but he was certainly the first, and still the greatest. Repeated viewing reveals his basic camerawork as a means of prioritizing his perfectionist set design, which often lends itself both to gags and insights into those who move within it. More importantly, Chaplin cedes attention to the acting which, in contrast to Chaplin's reputation as a shameless manipulator, is among the earliest examples of carefully composed naturalism in cinema. And unlike the other silent clowns (save Laurel and Hardy, whose use of slapstick as a form of silent dialogue somewhat future-proofed them), Chaplin weathered the transition to talkies superbly, however reluctantly and belatedly he made the switch. His sound features also double as clarifications and critiques of his silent Tramp figure, the more forthright political and autobiographical content not an intrusion but merely a more visible display of what was always there. Because of this sustained level of quality, all 11 of Chaplin's features rate a mention, and most of them a place in any canon. As for which are all-time masterpieces and which must settle for the faint praise of "merely" masterful, read on:

Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2012)

I greatly enjoyed Yorgos Lanthimos' breakthrough feature Dogtooth, even if its nastiness was just a bit too much at times. Alps is no less sardonic, but it refines the director's comic edge, reducing the collateral damage and skewering the subject of identity with greater precision. Lanthimos himself has copped to the film being an inversion of Dogtooth, of people escaping into fantasy rather than from it, but they share insights into social integration and the way in which the self is defined, sometimes horribly, by the Other. Featuring beautiful cinematography and bleak humor, Alps is as troubling as it is intoxicating and hilarious. Highly recommended.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Favorite Directors Blogathon

My blogging buddy Carson Lund recently told me about a meme started by Loren Rosson that highlights a favorite director each month and ranks his or her best work. Given that I already had a good 10 or so documents on my computer keeping track of rankings for some of my favorite filmmakers, I did not require much incentive to throw my own hat in the ring. Loren (and, I think, Carson) are covering their 12 favorite directors, but I might take a slightly different tack. Many of my top 12 would overlap with both Loren's and Carson's choices, and while it would be fun to compare what floats our particular boats with certain filmmakers, I'd rather spotlight a few other choices I love just as much as, say, Malick or Kubrick. There will still be some shared choices (I think all three of us will cover David Lynch), but this way it won't all just be the same picks.

Anyway, here's my list:


July: Charles Chaplin (The Full 11 Features)

August: Steven Soderbergh (Top 10)

September: Tony Scott (Top 10) [NOTE: I've bumped Roman Polanski to pay tribute to Tony Scott. Polanski list to come later]

October: David Lynch (Top 10), Roman Polanski (Top 10)

November: Martin Scorsese (Top 10)

December: Michael Powell (Top 10)

January: Howard Hawks (Top 10)

February: Abbas Kiarostami (Top 10)

March: Jean-Luc Godard (Top 20, maybe 25)

April: Claire Denis (Top 10)

May: Eric Rohmer (Top 15)

June: Ozu Yasujiro (Top 15)

Passion (Jean-Luc Godard, 1982)

If Sauve qui peut (la vie) represented Godard’s return to cinema, Passion illustrates how frustrated he still was with the artform and its limitations, at least its limitations in fulfilling the director’s lofty goals. “It’s hard to have to record everything,” says his stand-in, a director played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz. The line could work in the context of any filmmaking, but it especially speaks to Godard’s aims as a filmmaker. Aesthetically and politically, Godard has long sought to capture everything, and Sauve Qui Peut’s union of cinema and video techniques hinted at the possibility of a deeper, more inclusive form of filmmaking than Godard, or anyone else, had ever achieved. Yet it is Passion, alternately lifeless and one of the director’s funniest, most self-effacing works, that truly shows how the director might look forward to the next stage of his career. Indeed, as I watched it, I thought often not of Godard’s prior work (though it shares a few traits with previous movies, especially Contempt), but his latest, 2010’s Film socialisme.

In many ways, Passion feels like the groundwork for that film, still tied to the idea of a narrative but chafing under the limiting expectation of traditional filmmaking. In fact, what plot Godard assembles for Passion concerns the absence of one for the film-within-the-film, also titled Passion. On-set, we see tableau vivant recreations of various classical paintings, from Rembrandt to Goya to Delacroix. Actors stand still as the camera glides around them, probing the compositions of the paintings and finding new perspectives with which to analyze these pre-existing works of art. But as the camera moves along the first of these recreations, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, Godard places over the shots the exasperated discussion of the producers as they ask Jerzy what the story is. Judging from their tone, this is not the first time they have asked the director this, and it certainly will not be the last.

The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, 1925)

I adored Chaplin's The Gold Rush the first time I saw it, taking to its deft comic staging and its occasional, well-judged sentimentality. Rewatching it, however, I was struck by its depth of vision, with every gag, no matter how seemingly disconnected, perfectly entwined with the narrative and, more importantly, the psychological development. This is the richest depiction of the Tramp ever filmed, one that encapsulates his buried cynicism, innocent material and romantic desire, and often-thwarted but ultimately fulfilled hope. It's also absolutely hysterical. One of the best films of the silent era, or any era, comic or otherwise.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

¡Que Viva Mexico! (Sergei Eisenstein, 1932/1979)

¡Que Viva Mexico! marks the first time Sergei Eisenstein truly hit a wall during production, though unlike his later hassles with Stalin's censors, the director here fell prey to financial limitations and impatience of leftist Westerners whose excitement to work with the great Soviet propagandist soon dissolved with their discretionary funds. Those Westerners in question were the writer Upton Sinclair (he of The Jungle and Oil! fame) and his wife, American socialists condemned as communists in their own land but, not incorrectly, pegged as capitalists by those who wore the communist badge with pride. Eisenstein, who would soon learn the horrid truths of the system he so fervently championed, first had to put up with the feckless waffling of those who simplistically sympathized with that system from afar.*

In fairness to the Sinclairs, though, it must have been infuriating to receive an endless series of requests for more money from the director, who arrived in Mexico with no idea what he wanted to shoot and continued to greatly revise his vision of a movie well into filming. A travelogue turned into a multi-film epic of Mexico's history before shrinking back down into a one-film condensation of all those intended parts, but by then Eisenstein had 200,000 feet of film and not a drop of goodwill from any of his backers. Unable to secure more money and summoned back to the U.S.S.R. by Stalin, Eisenstein left his half-formed work behind before he even managed to film the final segment, and cut-up chunks of his stacks of reels eventually surfaced as short films. Not until 1979 did Grigori Alexandrov, one of Eisenstein's collaborators and a tag-along in the director's tour of North America, take the original footage and assemble something approaching Eisenstein's wishes. Then again, considering how Eisenstein himself seemed to have no idea what he wanted out of his Mexican travelogue, it's hard to say what his wishes were at all, much less whether they were honored.