My comments on Peary’s reviews in Guide for the Film Fanatic (Simon & Schuster, 1986).
“Don’t worry; everything’s all right. Don’t you trust me?”
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Response to Peary’s Review: Note: Another contributor on IMDb notes that she’s shown this film to her high school students for years as an archetypical example of Victorian melodrama — which makes complete sense. Redeeming Qualities and Moments:
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“In ten years, I’m going to be one of the richest men in this state! You wait and see.”
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Response to Peary’s Review: With that said, it’s a fine movie in many other respects as well. While it is a bit of a “conventional soaper” at times, the fact that it “becomes uncomfortable to watch in the second half [once] Arnold comes across as a ‘dirty old man'” simply adds to its authenticity. Indeed, the screenplay refreshingly never shirks away from dealing head-on with its somewhat disturbing premise, as married Arnold repeatedly fails to see exactly how creepy and inappropriate his advances towards young Lotta are. Clearly not a conventional leading man, Arnold (giving a “strong performance”) was an inspired choice to play the lead character here, with his bullish demeanor making it easy to sympathize with young Lotta’s dread. While I’m not particularly enamored by Walter Brennan’s Oscar-winning portrayal as Arnold’s best friend Swan (his broad Swedish accent comes across as a bit too heavy-handed at times), there are several fine supporting performances throughout — most notably Mady Christians as Lotta Bostrom’s concerned cousin, and Andrea Leeds as Arnold’s grown daughter (they have a particularly touching scene together). Watch for Brooke Shields’s grandfather, Frank Shields, in a bit role as Arnold’s daughter’s beau. Note: This film was co-directed by Howard Hawks and William Wyler (with the latter taking over towards the end, and contributing far less). Redeeming Qualities and Moments:
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“Marriage with Max is not exactly a bed of roses, is it?”
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Response to Peary’s Review: If Rebecca isn’t “great Hitchcock” (it doesn’t stand among his very best work), it’s still fine entertainment. The performances throughout are uniformly excellent, with Olivier appropriately haunted and restrained as Fontaine’s brooding husband, and Fontaine perfectly portraying the brew of conflicted emotions felt by her character, who remains both nervously submissive and incredulous about her position until a pivotal shift in the plot later on (a point at which Peary argues the film “loses its power”, but I disagree). The supporting cast is fine as well, with Anderson delivering the performance of her lifetime as disturbed Mrs. Danvers (Peary refers to her portrayal as “chilling” and “soulless”); George Sanders briefly stealing the scenery in a characteristically smarmy role later in the film; and Florence Bates nicely capturing the essence of an overbearing society woman who borders on caricature but just manages to avoid this fate (listen to her conflicted reaction upon hearing about her assistant’s sudden engagement to Mr. DeWinter). A combination of appropriately spooky sets (Manderlay is a truly haunted house), George Barnes’ Oscar-winning “atmospheric cinematography”, “Franz Waxman’s moody score”, and “the clever way Hitchcock uses space so that Fontaine seems dominated by her surroundings” contribute to the film’s “amazing tension”, and turn it into a suspenseful mystery we’re eager to keep watching. Redeeming Qualities and Moments:
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“Johnnie, I’m just beginning to understand you.”
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Response to Peary’s Review: It’s relatively easy to accept Fontaine’s whirlwind marriage to Johnnie as the consequence of an overly sheltered young woman fearing spinsterhood (certainly plenty of naive, desperate women in real life have married cads or outright psychopaths out of similar motivations) — but once she learns about his lies and financial indiscretions, there’s no excuse for her hesitation in getting out. We’re meant to believe that she simply can’t help herself (she’s too in love with Johnnie), but I don’t buy it. (Interestingly, she’s never given reason to worry about him cheating on her with another woman — which indicates that perhaps women will put up with a lot of nonsense in a marriage as long as they don’t believe their primacy as “woman number one” is being threatened.) Meanwhile, other elements of the screenplay are clumsy as well: how convenient is it, for instance, that Johnnie and Lina happen to be friends with a mystery novelist (Auriol Lee) who’s exploring various methods for untraceable murder? The origins of this friendship are never explained, so it comes across as simply a plot contrivance. With that said, Fontaine’s Oscar-winning performance — in a decidedly imperfectly written role — is fine, and film fanatics will likely be curious to see the movie for this reason alone. Redeeming Qualities and Moments:
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“The Yellow Man watched Lucy often. The beauty which all Limehouse missed smote him to his heart.”
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Response to Peary’s Review: The film’s terribly antiquated, casually racist subtitle will likely turn many modern film fanatics off; but once they make tentative peace with both this and the (then standard) casting of white men in both central Asian roles, they’ll likely be pleasantly surprised to find that Griffith — the infamous director of America’s most egregiously racist classic film, Birth of a Nation (1915) — seems to at least be trying to portray the film’s Chinese-American protagonist (Cheng) in a reasonably respectful light. Indeed, it’s gratifying to know that Griffith “considered the main theme of his film to be that Americans wrongly consider themselves superior to foreigners, including the Chinese, who have a noble, peace-loving philosophy”. Cheng is shown at the beginning of the film to be a noble-minded Buddhist missionary hoping to convert European heathens to more peaceful ways — and thus his quick descent into opium addiction after arriving on the sordid shores of London is given a bit of context and justification, rather than simply perpetuating the trope of drug-addled Asians. (Actually, as I think about it, this piece of the narrative could easily have been expanded upon: I’d love to have seen more of Cheng’s travails upon arrival in London.) At any rate, Cheng’s poetically romantic yearnings towards Lucy could be (and are) explained away as merely a platonic desire to love and assist that which is most pure and good in the world — though, again, it would have been much more fulfilling to see this most unusual cinematic couple actually moving towards something “real” together. This would have required a more substantial storyline in general, but at least would have given a shred of credence to the fantastical poster (shown above). In terms of the lead performances, Peary accurately argues that “Crisp overacts”, “Barthelmess under-acts (as if he believed one change of expression would let us know that he isn’t really Oriental after all)” — but Gish “acts up an exciting storm”. He notes that “from her timid talking, stooped, crooked posture, and terrified eyes, Gish immediately gets us to understand that her beatings are a daily thing for her”, and she is “totally convincing” in the role. Her character’s ability to “smile only if she lifts the sides of her mouth her fingers” was apparently thought up by Gish herself, and remains one of the film’s most indelible (recurring) images. * TCM’s article lists Gish as 23-years-old when the film was made, but this doesn’t make mathematical sense, given that IMDb cites 1893 as her birth year. Redeeming Qualities and Moments:
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“He didn’t get that nose from playing ping-pong.”
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transpires in a fantastical alter-universe: Fields is traveling with his niece, Gloria Jean, on an airplane, when suddenly he “leaps… to retrieve his whiskey bottle and falls thousands of feet before landing safely on Margaret Dumont’s mountaintop estate, where she lives with her pretty young daughter:
… a gorilla:
… and [a] Great Dane with fangs”:
… and later arrives at a Russian village in Mexico (!). Truly, the preposterous scenario proposed by Fields — which Pangborn, naturally, rejects as “impossible, incomprehensible, inconceivable; and besides that, it’s no good” — seems to be the loopy product of both Fields’s accumulated years of experience on wackily hybrid studio sets (viz. the film’s opening sequences), and his constant inebriation, which is referenced continually throughout both the meta-narrative and the fantasy film. In one classic scene, for instance, Fields enters “an ice-cream parlor, where, before blowing the head off his ice-cream soda, he turns to us to reveal that censors wouldn’t let him stage the scene in a saloon”. Within the fantasy film, numerous laughs are milked (sorry) when Fields shares a stiff drink of goat’s milk (!) with an engineer (Emmett Vogan):
Fields would find intoxicating substances under a rock if necessary, it seems. At any rate, your enjoyment of this film will ultimately depend upon how much you’re willing to forgo straightforward narrative in favor of something much more — dare I say, post-modern? Rewatching it again last night, after viewing and posting on numerous “pure” Fields films, I find myself enjoying it perhaps most of all, simply for its perversely illogical and “messy” status. Knowing in hindsight that this was to be Fields’s final starring role, it could be viewed as an especially apt “sayonara” — i.e., Fields’s attempt to throw everything plus the kitchen sink into his grand finale. At the same time, as Dave Kehr notes, the film “has an appealingly inward, mournful quality, as if it were a swan song that only its singer could hear. Unconcerned with reaching the audience, Fields seems to be muttering to himself through much of the movie, his barely audible remarks often achieving a strange poetry: ‘The chickens lay eggs in Kansas. The chickens have pretty legs in Kansas.'” Note: My single favorite moment (over in an instant): Franklin Pangborn, agitatedly trying to help Gloria Jean rehearse, is momentarily caught up in a male chorus line dancing through the studio.
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“Professor Kelp’s just the kind of guy who might fool you.”
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He refers to the film in general as “wildly inventive”, calling out Lewis’s “innovative direction and… witty screenplay” (co-written with Bill Richmond), which is full of countless hilarious moments — including inventive sight gags (such as the surreal consequence of Kelp trying to lift weights in a gym):
… remarkably effective use of sound effects for humor (as when Kelp enters his class with a raging hangover, and over-reacts to every noise made by his students):
… and plenty of darkly humorous sequences with Buddy Love (which indicate that this film could in some ways be more accurately described as a “black comedy” than a straight “comedy”).
Indeed, Peary writes that “If The Nutty Professor is Lewis’s best film, and I believe it is, it is not so much because it is his funniest as because it is his most daring… in the sense that Lewis, who begs for love in all his other films, knew he was making a picture to which his greatest fans, children, would probably react negatively.” Love is a truly provocative character — someone so outrageously, obnoxiously arrogant (and cruel!) that one hesitates to laugh at him. (An exception is during the one Love scene played strictly for laughs: the truly chuckle-worthy sequence in which Love “gets into the… good graces of the dean [an excellent Del Moore] by complimenting him on his suit and flattering his acting ability, coaxing him into reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy while standing on top of a table and wearing the weird attire that Buddy hands him every time he tries to begin.”)
The rest of the time, however, one simply squirms uncomfortably at the notion that a half-rate, oily slickster like Love could genuinely charm an entire population of college students, and Stella Stevens in particular.
With that said, Stevens’ attraction to Love is decidedly complex: while Stevens (Peary argues this is her “best role in a comedy”) spends a bit too much time simply staring at Love or Kelp with either puzzled sympathy or annoyance, it’s clear that she’s genuinely trying to tease out the nature of her attraction to both men. She’s turned on by Kelp’s intelligence, but simultaneously drawn in — as if by hypnotic spell — to the web of Love’s allure, despite clearly recognizing the folly of her conflicted desire. Love himself has traditionally (and most facilely) been viewed as representing “Lewis’s ex-partner, the cocky, romantic-singing, and boozing Dean Martin” — but Peary (and others) note that Buddy is perhaps more accurately the “alter-ego of Jerry Lewis, the Lewis we see each year on the telethon: that conceited, sanctimonious, singing, angry older fellow who tries unsuccessfully at times to keep the funny-voiced ‘Kid’ bottled up inside him”. Check out Lewis’s 1969 interview with Dick Cavett (available on YouTube) for a classic representation of just this dynamic. Redeeming Qualities and Moments:
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“This is a story of long, long ago — when the world was just beginning.”
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… whose poster from this film adorned the walls of teenage boys worldwide back in 1966″ (and earned revived notoriety when it played an essential role in The Shawshank Redemption). It’s also enjoyed by fans of the great Ray Harryhausen, whose stop-motion animation of several different dinosaurs — including a scene in which Welch is “carried off by a pterodactyl” — remains the film’s primary legitimate selling point (though it unfortunately [?] simply adds to the film’s ridiculous ahistoricity).
It’s astonishing to contemplate the fact that producer Michael Carreras rewrote a script that was “conceived by three writers”, given that there’s no dialogue (other than characters occasionally grunting each other’s names) — what could they possibly have been working on??
Despite its many shortcomings, however, at least this campy remake isn’t quite as deathly dull as its predecessor — though that’s really not meant as an endorsement of any kind. Redeeming Qualities and Moments:
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“There’s an awful lot of kooks in this hotel.”
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Meanwhile, Lewis pokes some good fun at his own celebrity by appearing in cameo in one of the film’s most genuinely amusing vignettes, as an entourage of assistants clamors around “real” Lewis like a horde of rabid groupies, laughing hysterically each time he opens his mouth to say a word.
(Clearly, Lewis was a tad sensitive about being expected to be “be funny” at all times; this is evident as well in the lengthy and revealing interview he gave with Dick Cavett in 1969 — check YouTube to see this in chunks). What works about so many of the gags here, I think, is how random and/or surreal they are — and, thankfully, how Lewis rarely lingers too long before moving on. In one of many throwaway scenes, for instance, Stanley is busy sorting keys into guests’ mailboxes, and apparently has been doing such a slow job of it that he’s still not done after an hour. He’s yelled at to finish, and hastily throws the remaining keys willy-nilly into the boxes.
The next shot immediately shows a hallway full of guests wrangling simultaneously with their doors, none having been given the correct key. It’s amusing simply because it defies all rationality — that is, the guests would never all be trying at the same time to open their doors.
Interestingly, in his review, Peary complains about this very fact, noting that “in subsequent films Lewis would learn that his character works best in an otherwise orderly world; here the world he inhabits would be wacky without him”. I disagree. It’s the very “wackiness” of the Fontainebleau Hotel and its inhabitants, I feel, that works in this film’s favor. Just check out the reaction of the entire crew of bellboys when a convention of models walks into the hotel, and you’ll see exactly what I mean… Stanley is not alone.
Note: Be sure to read TCM’s article on the film to learn more about its interesting production, and Lewis’s ground-breaking technique of videotaping alongside his primary camera to get immediate feedback on his work. Redeeming Qualities and Moments:
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“Help me find my sister — I will do anything you say.”
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Response to Peary’s Review: While I don’t find the film quite as personally moving as Peary, I’ll agree with him that it’s a masterful picture which, unlike the vast majority of silent films, stands up remarkably well today — thanks to the critical conflux of ingredients noted above, in addition to fine historical sets and snippets of surprisingly effective realism (see stills below). Lillian (as Henriette) is memorably nuanced in the lead role, and her relationship with her adopted sister thankfully comes across as genuinely touching rather than cloying. Indeed, their sororal bond remains the glue that holds this admittedly dense narrative brew together, as countless characters and subplots compete for space — including Henriette’s cross-class romance with kind Chevalier de Vaudrey (Joseph Schildkraut); the Countess de Liniere (Katharine Emmet)’s recognition that Louise is her abandoned foundling daughter; Louise’s mistreatment at the hands of evil “Mother” Frochard (Lucielle La Verne, hilariously hideous with her faux mustache); and Henriette’s encounters with various historical figures, including Danton (Monte Blue) and Robespierre (Sidney Herbert). It’s a lot to keep track of — but if you’re in the mood for just this kind of melodrama, you surely won’t be disappointed. Redeeming Qualities and Moments:
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