Monthly Archives: December 2010

My Favourite Wife (1940)

That marvellous repository of 20th century photography, If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, posted this fun image from the set of My Favourite Wife. Between takes, the film’s director Garson Kanin is throwing jacks with cast members Cary Grant, Irene Dunne and Granville Bates.

Despite the obvious staging of the shot, I do like stills from this period which aren’t conventional publicity material. Kanin looks like a real laugh riot, doesn’t he….?

My Favourite Wife is a film I’ve spent a lot of time with, it being one of the subjects of my thesis’ third chapter. It was designed to replicate the success of The Awful Truth (1937,  also starring Grant and Dunne), but it misses the verve and intelligence of that film. Perhaps it would have been a different story if Leo McCarey had been able to direct – an automobile accident meant that he was only able to act in the capacity of producer.

There are great things in the film – I particularly like Grant’s reaction on first seeing Dunne, and every scene featuring Randolph Scott – but there’s a flatness and a tiredness about the whole affair. It’s as though the film tries to pay homage to the conventions of the remarriage comedy without really understanding how those conventions operate. And I can’t forgive the film’s cruelty to Gail Patrick’s character.

Over to you, readers. Am I being too hard on My Favourite Wife?

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London, via Bedford Falls

This weekend, Roisin and I travelled down to London. We had a lovely time but the snow scuppered our plans to a large extent. So this is a blog about making do, listening to mother and making the right decisions…

We had planned a few weeks ago that, on our last weekend before going off to our respective families for Christmas, we would travel down to the NFT to see It’s a Wonderful Life on the big screen! As you can imagine, we were both very excited. We’d both seen the film many times before but this seemed like such a nice Christmassy thing to do.

We set off early from Leamington on one of the beautiful Wrexham & Shropshire trains and the snow was already falling quite heavily.

Stepping off the train in Marylebone, we walked through a flurry of snow to Baker Street tube station. As we turned the corner, I looked up towards Regent’s Park and felt a pang of sympathy for the man in Victorian Bobby costume standing in the doorway of the Sherlock Holmes Museum!

We hurried through the busy underground station, but I stopped to take some snaps of the Sherlockian decor. I’ve always loved the decorative tiles at Baker Street, and the illustrative boards which decorate the platforms.

Roisin wanted to visit a clothes shop called Vivian of Holloway (she had a particular dress in mind) but when we got to the Holloway Rd, we found ourselves in the middle of a blizzard. It was difficult to see very far ahead of us, but we struggled down to the shop. Roisin had fun trying on some frocks with petticoats but eventually settled on a polka-dot number that makes her look a bit like Minnie Mouse! You can see some photos of her giving a twirl here!

When we emerged, the snowfall was lighter so we explored a bit further up the Holloway Rd. At this point, we were quite looking forward to a hot drink, so when we found a pub called The Coronet (converted from an old picture palace), we hurried inside! My photos don’t really do it justice but the facade and interior were still very impressive and there were lots of photos of Humphrey Bogart and Fred Astaire inside so I was happy!

We decided to have lunch in Holborn so got on the tube again. After a lovely walk through Bloomsbury Park Gardens, we stopped into an amazing pub called The Princess Louise. Sadly, they weren’t serving food that day but we warmed ourselves at the open fire and admired the building’s fantastic decor, all tiles and mirrors, a real Victorian Gin Palace!

Warming up at The Princess Louise!

We eventually settled on Nandos for lunch (I love their halloumi pittas!) and decided to spend the afternoon looking around the British Museum. While there, we walked by The Museum Tavern, origin of The Alpha Inn in The Blue Carbuncle, and visited Gosh! Comics which furnished me with Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s Snakes and Ladders for £2!

The Museum Tavern

The British Museum was far less crowded than is usual for a Saturday so we had a nice time roaming around. Roisin wanted to visit the medieval Europe section and we had a great time admiring the collection of pocket watches and antique timepieces!

We walked down through Soho to the Thames but the progress was slow-going. It was very treacherous underfoot and our feet were getting very cold! By the time we got to Trafalgar Square we were both eager to get over the river to our cinema seats. We were also promising ourselves a champagne cocktail!

Well, as you can see from the photograph below, we got our drinks! However, when we checked our train times home, we found that the train companies were starting to cancel journeys back to Leamington. We didn’t want to get stranded in London on such a cold night so, with much regret, we left without seeing the film. It was a difficult decision, but it was the right one!

Earlier in the day, I’d been absolutely sure things would go according to plan. Still, we made the best of it and, on the advice of my mum, bought some provisions for the train ride home! It was just such a relief to be sleeping in our own bed that night!

The next morning, we had a little Christmas celebration, exchanging our presents before parting. I got some lovely things: the complete Laurel & Hardy DVD Collection, the Douglas Wilmer Sherlock Holmes DVDs, some wonderful 1940s issues of Picturegoer magazine and a brilliant Roger Delgado T-shirt!

I AM THE MASTER AND YOU WILL OBEY ME!

So, despite the disappointment of not visiting Bedford Falls, we had a great time anyway! And I hope you all have a lovely holiday – Merry Christmas!

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Dead as Dillinger

“They [MGM] put me right to work in Manhattan Melodrama, which precipitated the demise of John Dillinger, Public Enemy No. 1. FBI agents shot him down outside the Biograph Theatre, in Chicago, after he’d seen the film. Supposedly a Myrna Loy fan, he broke cover to see me. Personally, I suspect the theme of the picture rather than my fatal charms attracted him, but I’ve always felt a bit guilty about it, anyway. They filled him full of holes, poor soul.”

- Being and Becoming (1987), Myrna Loy & James Kotsilibas-Davis, p. 87.

[photograph via If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger]

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Chico and Rita

A lush, vibrant film about Cuban musicians struggling to maintain love as their careers pull them apart, Chico and Rita hits two buttons for me. Firstly, I love the animation style, which employs simple broad lines to describe human motion. The eloquence of line is one of this film’s great successes, not just in depicting its characters but also in rendering dazzling cityscapes of Havana, New York, Hollywood, Paris and Las Vegas. Secondly, it’s a film about jazz that speaks not just to the history of the music, but also to the way it has been portrayed previously onscreen.

Havana, 1946

The plot is very familiar. A feckless jazz musician falls in love with a talented singer. Their romance is fuelled by a fulfilling stage partnership. However, personal and professional jealousies tear them apart. The jazz musician languishes self-pityingly, as his ex-lover’s star rises. After many years, they meet once more. The film ends on a bittersweet note, the happiness of their reunion tempered by the loss of youthful passion. I could be describing Scorsese’s New York New York.

The film sometimes fails to play interesting changes on this old familiar song. I found myself struggling through the opening sequences, where the first attraction between Chico and Rita was written so broadly that it was hard to care what was happening. Luckily, things really pick up in the middle section, when the action moves to New York.

In jazz films, NY is often the Bad Place, where pushers get you high and cops beat on you (see ‘Round Midnight and Bird). It’s nice, then, that Chico and Rita is eager to convey the excitement of the city, and the buzz felt by our Cuban protagonists as they explore the emergent bebop scene. There are some lovely “cameos” from Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Ben Webster and Thelonious Monk (and, elsewhere in the film, Chucho Valdes, Tito Puente, Chano Pozo, Nat King Cole and Marlon Brando). These appearances by famous men are brief, and all the better for that. There’s none of the hand-wringing reverence that mars Bird.

I loved the sequences set in Paris. Seeing Diz and Chico play Caveau de la Huchette was a thrill, as it’s a joint that Dolly Clackett and I have danced in. And there’s a nice touch as Chico queues at the cinema, a poster for Vertigo reminding us of the Hitchcocko-Hawksians cinephiles of the Left Bank.

The movie comes apart a little towards the end, as it shifts focus from Rita to Chico’s Buena Vista Social Club-style rediscovery. By privileging one protagonist over the other in this way, there’s a sense of over-balancing. The admirable delicacy of emotion maintained so far gives way to coarse sentimentality, at its worse in an extraneous final montage.

These problems of narrative aside, Chico and Rita is one of the most interesting and successful of jazz films. The music itself is gorgeous, beautifully integrated into the action, gently leading us through the lives of its players. There’s even a dream ballet featuring Fred Astaire and Humphrey Bogart (!), reminiscent of Gene Kelly’s choreographed interludes in Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris. The love and craft that has gone into this film radiates, staying with you long after the lights have gone up.

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Magic lanterns

Illustration by James Harringman

A little while ago, the nice folks at Silkworms Ink asked me to write a series of short essays on film. It was a really enjoyable exercise, allowing me to make a few intuitive leaps that I wouldn’t normally allow myself in my academic writing. And where else would I get the chance to discuss the Lumiere Brothers, Wyatt Earp, Tony Curtis, John Ford, Laurel and Hardy, Hitchcock and Sex and the City 2?

While maintaining a variety of subject, I also wanted to keep each piece within 500 words. Perhaps some of them could have used a bit more space to breathe, but I wanted these essays to be a stimulus to thought rather than a complete argument. Evocative rather than prescriptive.

Many thanks to Silkworms’ editor James Harringman for giving me the opportunity, and for illustrating the posts so beautifully. Here are the links:

Introduction

1. The Frontier

2. The City

3. The Automobile

4. The Bedroom

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