I've always been fascinated by the culture of the early '60s, and this article by Bruce Bawer, "The Other Sixties," gives a great overview of the period, fusing pop-culture, art, and politics into a portrait of an era whose theme was trying to balance tradition with progress. The defining symbol of the era was the Rat Pack, a group of old-school entertainers who gave America a carefully filtered look at what entertainers do for fun. What makes the era so appealing today is the sense that there was a social consensus, an agreed-upon balance between traditionalism and taboo-breaking (I'm not sure whether I really believe this, but it sure feels, in reading about the era, like there was more of a social consensus than there is now). It was a time that was still rooted in the culture of the '50s, but with increasing acceptance of fun, partying, trying new things. Still another defining cultural symbol of the era is the husband who comes home to his house in the suburbs, goes to his fully-stocked bar, and fixes himself a martini -- you can find this symbol in many movies and sitcoms of the era, and it somehow seems very cool, even though we know that it's likely to lead to the ending of Days of Wine and Roses.
Bawer notes that a lot of the cultural heroes of the early '60s didn't last into "The Sixties." The Rat Pack was pretty much doomed after 1963, but the same thing happened to a lot of people. One example I'd give is Allan Sherman. A former TV producer who responded to the failure of his TV career by cutting an album of song parodies, Sherman had three gigantic hit albums: "My Son the Folk Singer" (1962), "My Son the Celebrity," and "My Son the Nut" (both 1963). The albums represented much of what we have come to identify with the culture of the period: a friendly attitude; a sense of what Bawer calls "easy sophistication"; an emphasis on the integration of Jews and Jewishness into the mainstream of American culture; an assumption of cultural consensus in the use of popular and folk songs that the whole audience would be likely to recognize. Sherman did several albums after 1963 but none of them did anywhere near as well as his first three, and most of his later song parodies don't have the qualities that we associate with those three albums -- the easygoing attitude, the unselfconscious ethnic humor. In 1962, someone supposedly wrote an academic essay on the cultural significance of "My Son, the Folk Singer," concluding that it represented the mainstreaming of Jewishness and even "people's subconscious wish to be Jewish." By the late '60s, the defining work of Jewish humor was "Portnoy's Complaint," a novel about the un-mainstreaming of American Jews, the extent to which Jews were different from other people.
Like most post-sixties culture, it was about fragmentation,; the early '60s culture, on the other hand, is the last outpouring of genuine, sincere can't-we-all-just-get-along culture. Maybe that's why we value it so. I mean, it was hardly a great era for popular culture; television was pretty good (Bawer is too hard on The Beverly Hillbillies, which was terrific for its first two years -- and another example of "consensus" culture, where people from Red America live more or less harmoniously in Blue America), but I don't know that there was a lot of great work going on in novels or poetry or plays or musicals or serious music or popular music. American movies were mostly disappointing, over-expensive, chintzy-looking, and slow; the good news was that it was a good time for European movies, and more and more Americans were enjoying foreign movies as an alternative to the declining American cinema (there's an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show where Laura chides Millie for imagining that life is like all the Italian movies she's been seeing). But all in all, I think the '50s and the late '60s/'70s produced more art and pop culture of enduring value; it's not the work of the early '60s that's so appealing to me on the whole, but just the attitude embodied in that work, the cheerful, optimistic, we're-all-in-this-together attitude. Maybe it was fake. But it's fun to revisit it, a sort of lounge-lizard golden age, a Rat Pack Eldorado.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Musical Housewives
I haven't really been following Desperate Housewives, and as a new show it isn't a subject for this blog, but I'm amused to note in the episode guide that most of the episode titles come from old Broadway musical songs, particularly songs by Stephen Sondheim. Previous episodes have included "Who's That Woman?" (Follies) "Ah, But Underneath" (pointless revisal of Follies), "Pretty Little Picture" (A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum). Upcoming episode titles include "Anything You Can Do" (Annie Get Your Gun, Irving Berlin), "Come Back To Me" (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,, Alan Lerner & Burton Lane) and "Every Day a Little Death" (A Little Night Music). Plus there are some non-Broadway song titles in there like "Come In, Stranger." Well, it beats "The One Where..." or that Seinfeld "The [blank]" thing.
Standard Operating Bullshit
Blake Edwards is one director whose movies have benefited a lot from the advent of DVD. Ever since The Pink Panther in 1963, Edwards has made nearly all his movies with the wide Panavision screen, and (as he notes in his rather sparse DVD commentary for Panther), he fills the whole screen with people, using the screen like a proscenium stage. Edwards doesn't use a great deal of camera movement -- observing a complicated 360-degree camera move in Victor/Victoria, he grumbles that he usually hates those gimmicky shots -- and he doesn't cut much; what he does is set up carefully composed shots, with movement by the actors, as opposed to the camera. All this is lost on TV or VHS with their pan n' scan format; on DVD, with widescreen format, it's possible to appreciate just how good Edwards is at composing for that rather awkward screen shape, and what an eye he has for the kind of lighting and design that makes a shot look good. In an era where more and more directors are using the wide screen but hardly any of them actually bother to compose for it (even now, most movies are composed in such a way that they won't lose much when they're Panned and Scanned), Edwards' movies are an object lesson in the art of film composition.
That said, there are a number of Blake Edwards movies that don't have much else to offer besides beautifully-composed shots, and a number of others that mix great moments with terrible ones. You have to wonder, looking at Edwards' career, whether he even knows a good joke from a bad one -- I know it's absurd to think that an experienced, successful writer/director wouldn't know the difference between a good joke and a bad one, but it's also pretty absurd that someone could write and direct Victor/Victoria and Trail of the Pink Panther in the same year. Everyone makes bad movies, but few people with Edwards' ability have chosen to produce and direct movies that were quite as bad as A Fine Mess or Blind Date. Not to mention his famous lack of discrimination where individual jokes are concerned -- any Edwards movie, even a good one, will include some really bad gags. He seems to think that the sight of someone falling down is inherently hilarious (it's not), and that ethnic stereotypes are inherently funny (you don't have to find Mickey Rooney offensive in Breakfast at Tiffany's to find him unfunny).
But what prompted me to write about Edwards was one of his good ones, S.O.B.. The story of this movie is pretty well known; after he was driven out of Hollywood in the early '70s by a series of flops, including the big-budget Darling Lili with his wife Julie Andrews, Edwards wrote the script for this bitter satire of Hollywood. He finally got to make it in 1981, after the new Inspector Clouseau movies and 10 had restored him to box-office favor. The fact that the script was written in the early '70s is evident all through the film, and made it seem a bit passe in 1981; Edwards was clearly hoping to shock people with his denunciation of Hollywood, but the stuff he was denouncing was almost gone by then, to be replaced by new problems.
S.O.B. is basically a story about Hollywood in the early '70s, when old-school professionals, like Edwards, found themselves being forced out of the business. Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) is a producer who suffers a disastrous flop with an old-fashioned musical starring his wife (Julie Andrews); this is a stand-in for the Darling Lili fiasco, though the musical as seen in the opening sequence is so stupid that one wonders if it's Edwards' own comment on Darling Lili (is he saying it deserved to flop?). Noting the then-recent success of movies like Last Tango in Paris, and the degraded, sex-crazed youth culture he sees all around him, Farmer realizes that the way to become a success is to "give 'em sex": he'll turn the film into an R-rated, nudity-filled, pretentious and obscure wallow, and get his wife to go topless as the film's selling point. The plan works, but Farmer is stabbed in the back by the amoral representatives of the New Hollywood, including a youngish studio head (Robert Vaughn) based on the ex-agent types who were sliding into studio management positions in the '70s. Farmer gets the ultimate one-two punch: having sold out to make the kind of movie that the New Hollywood wants, he now finds that the New Hollywood wants to take his movie away from him and get rid of him.
Apart from Felix, the only characters who come off well in the movie are other Old Hollywood types: a lecherous alcoholic director (William Holden), a Dr. Feelgood type (Robert Preston, who is so good in this movie that he makes it worth watching even to people who hate the rest of it), and a publicist (Robert Webber). None of these guys are admirable, but they have the one quality that Edwards identifies with the Old Hollywood: loyalty. They're the only people in the movie who give a damn about Felix when they don't have to.
This is pretty bitter stuff, but it's bitterness vintage 1973; by 1981 Hollywood was changing again, and a lot of the things that S.O.B. is about -- the jettisoning of old pros, the contempt for craftsmanship, the race to make movies sleazier -- had been replaced by new things, such as the rise of the Blockbuster. A movie where the characters talk about Last Tango in Paris when they want to talk about What's New in cinema is not a movie that's exactly in step with the times. The movie would have been stronger if Edwards had just made it a period piece, a snapshot of the way things looked to him in 1973. As it is, it's a Hollywood satire that doesn't have a particular period in Hollywood history to satirize. And made from the vantage point of someone who was by then a re-established success, it seems a little petty.
But viewed as a movie about '70s Hollywood, S.O.B. is pretty interesting as a glimpse of how this era -- now routinely referred to as a Golden Age -- looked to a lot of the old-school professionals who saw their talents rejected as old hat (Dennis Hopper famously snarled to George Cukor: "We're going to bury you!") and their movies re-cut to fit the tastes of the Easy Rider audience. And I think a movie like this goes some way toward answering the question of why Edwards' career has been so uneven: he always comes across as an old-school director who was born too late. His movies are shot through with a nostalgia for the "classical" cinema of the studio-system era, with their stylized dialogue and their carefully composed shots and lighting. Instead Edwards had to make his movies in the collapsing studio system of the '60s, the free-for-all of the '70s, and the corporate '80s; this was a time when it was hard for old-style professionals to know what the studios wanted or what audiences wanted. And that's what I sense in a lot of Edwards' bad jokes and bad movies: a certain contempt for the audience and for the people who are paying for the movie. This even carries over into his better movies; 10 is an aria of contempt for youth and people who are obsessed with youth; the inclusion of nudity comes off as, again, a contemptuous gesture toward audiences that seemed to want that sort of thing. (I don't think it's a complete coincidence that Edwards' personal favorite of his later movies, Victor/Victoria, is scrupulously PG-rated in terms of its content.) S.O.B. is a funny movie, but it does sum up a problem with Edwards' career: it's one thing for a filmmaker to dislike Hollywood, but it's quite another thing for a filmmaker to dislike the people who pay to see movies. And the overall message of S.O.B. seems to be: people want crap, might as well give it to them. It's not a formula for a completely successful movie career.
One more thing: has anyone ever noticed the similarities between S.O.B. and Network (which was written after S.O.B. but filmed five years before)? Don't read any further if you don't want the endings spoiled, but:
- Network, written by a guy who rose to prominence in the '50s, is about an old pro (Peter Finch) who has no place in the new, cutthroat business run by amoral opportunists. The old pro fails miserably and goes nuts (and the only character who can communicate with him is his wizened old-pro buddy played by William Holden). But in his dementia, he comes up with something that appeals to the public. The amoral opportunists step in to exploit him. He dies in the end.
- S.O.B., written by a guy who rose to prominence in the '50s, is about an old pro (Richard Mulligan) who has no place in the new, cutthroat business run by amoral opportunists. The old pro fails miserably and goes nuts (and the only character who can communicate with him is his wizened old-pro buddy played by William Holden). But in his dementia, he comes up with something that appeals to the public. The amoral opportunists step in to exploit him. He dies in the end.
That said, there are a number of Blake Edwards movies that don't have much else to offer besides beautifully-composed shots, and a number of others that mix great moments with terrible ones. You have to wonder, looking at Edwards' career, whether he even knows a good joke from a bad one -- I know it's absurd to think that an experienced, successful writer/director wouldn't know the difference between a good joke and a bad one, but it's also pretty absurd that someone could write and direct Victor/Victoria and Trail of the Pink Panther in the same year. Everyone makes bad movies, but few people with Edwards' ability have chosen to produce and direct movies that were quite as bad as A Fine Mess or Blind Date. Not to mention his famous lack of discrimination where individual jokes are concerned -- any Edwards movie, even a good one, will include some really bad gags. He seems to think that the sight of someone falling down is inherently hilarious (it's not), and that ethnic stereotypes are inherently funny (you don't have to find Mickey Rooney offensive in Breakfast at Tiffany's to find him unfunny).
But what prompted me to write about Edwards was one of his good ones, S.O.B.. The story of this movie is pretty well known; after he was driven out of Hollywood in the early '70s by a series of flops, including the big-budget Darling Lili with his wife Julie Andrews, Edwards wrote the script for this bitter satire of Hollywood. He finally got to make it in 1981, after the new Inspector Clouseau movies and 10 had restored him to box-office favor. The fact that the script was written in the early '70s is evident all through the film, and made it seem a bit passe in 1981; Edwards was clearly hoping to shock people with his denunciation of Hollywood, but the stuff he was denouncing was almost gone by then, to be replaced by new problems.
S.O.B. is basically a story about Hollywood in the early '70s, when old-school professionals, like Edwards, found themselves being forced out of the business. Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) is a producer who suffers a disastrous flop with an old-fashioned musical starring his wife (Julie Andrews); this is a stand-in for the Darling Lili fiasco, though the musical as seen in the opening sequence is so stupid that one wonders if it's Edwards' own comment on Darling Lili (is he saying it deserved to flop?). Noting the then-recent success of movies like Last Tango in Paris, and the degraded, sex-crazed youth culture he sees all around him, Farmer realizes that the way to become a success is to "give 'em sex": he'll turn the film into an R-rated, nudity-filled, pretentious and obscure wallow, and get his wife to go topless as the film's selling point. The plan works, but Farmer is stabbed in the back by the amoral representatives of the New Hollywood, including a youngish studio head (Robert Vaughn) based on the ex-agent types who were sliding into studio management positions in the '70s. Farmer gets the ultimate one-two punch: having sold out to make the kind of movie that the New Hollywood wants, he now finds that the New Hollywood wants to take his movie away from him and get rid of him.
Apart from Felix, the only characters who come off well in the movie are other Old Hollywood types: a lecherous alcoholic director (William Holden), a Dr. Feelgood type (Robert Preston, who is so good in this movie that he makes it worth watching even to people who hate the rest of it), and a publicist (Robert Webber). None of these guys are admirable, but they have the one quality that Edwards identifies with the Old Hollywood: loyalty. They're the only people in the movie who give a damn about Felix when they don't have to.
This is pretty bitter stuff, but it's bitterness vintage 1973; by 1981 Hollywood was changing again, and a lot of the things that S.O.B. is about -- the jettisoning of old pros, the contempt for craftsmanship, the race to make movies sleazier -- had been replaced by new things, such as the rise of the Blockbuster. A movie where the characters talk about Last Tango in Paris when they want to talk about What's New in cinema is not a movie that's exactly in step with the times. The movie would have been stronger if Edwards had just made it a period piece, a snapshot of the way things looked to him in 1973. As it is, it's a Hollywood satire that doesn't have a particular period in Hollywood history to satirize. And made from the vantage point of someone who was by then a re-established success, it seems a little petty.
But viewed as a movie about '70s Hollywood, S.O.B. is pretty interesting as a glimpse of how this era -- now routinely referred to as a Golden Age -- looked to a lot of the old-school professionals who saw their talents rejected as old hat (Dennis Hopper famously snarled to George Cukor: "We're going to bury you!") and their movies re-cut to fit the tastes of the Easy Rider audience. And I think a movie like this goes some way toward answering the question of why Edwards' career has been so uneven: he always comes across as an old-school director who was born too late. His movies are shot through with a nostalgia for the "classical" cinema of the studio-system era, with their stylized dialogue and their carefully composed shots and lighting. Instead Edwards had to make his movies in the collapsing studio system of the '60s, the free-for-all of the '70s, and the corporate '80s; this was a time when it was hard for old-style professionals to know what the studios wanted or what audiences wanted. And that's what I sense in a lot of Edwards' bad jokes and bad movies: a certain contempt for the audience and for the people who are paying for the movie. This even carries over into his better movies; 10 is an aria of contempt for youth and people who are obsessed with youth; the inclusion of nudity comes off as, again, a contemptuous gesture toward audiences that seemed to want that sort of thing. (I don't think it's a complete coincidence that Edwards' personal favorite of his later movies, Victor/Victoria, is scrupulously PG-rated in terms of its content.) S.O.B. is a funny movie, but it does sum up a problem with Edwards' career: it's one thing for a filmmaker to dislike Hollywood, but it's quite another thing for a filmmaker to dislike the people who pay to see movies. And the overall message of S.O.B. seems to be: people want crap, might as well give it to them. It's not a formula for a completely successful movie career.
One more thing: has anyone ever noticed the similarities between S.O.B. and Network (which was written after S.O.B. but filmed five years before)? Don't read any further if you don't want the endings spoiled, but:
- Network, written by a guy who rose to prominence in the '50s, is about an old pro (Peter Finch) who has no place in the new, cutthroat business run by amoral opportunists. The old pro fails miserably and goes nuts (and the only character who can communicate with him is his wizened old-pro buddy played by William Holden). But in his dementia, he comes up with something that appeals to the public. The amoral opportunists step in to exploit him. He dies in the end.
- S.O.B., written by a guy who rose to prominence in the '50s, is about an old pro (Richard Mulligan) who has no place in the new, cutthroat business run by amoral opportunists. The old pro fails miserably and goes nuts (and the only character who can communicate with him is his wizened old-pro buddy played by William Holden). But in his dementia, he comes up with something that appeals to the public. The amoral opportunists step in to exploit him. He dies in the end.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
I'm Still Here
Sorry for the hiatus. That would have been a good time for me to turn things over to a guest blogger, but it turns out that 99% of people in the Western Hemisphere already have their own blogs. Eventually the shortage of guest-bloggers will cause bloggers to guest-blog on other people's blogs, and soon everybody will be writing for a blog that isn't technically their own.
I will be back tomorrow. Or if not, I will have a guest-blogger, possibly Stone Cold Steve Austin; the details haven't been finalized yet.
I will be back tomorrow. Or if not, I will have a guest-blogger, possibly Stone Cold Steve Austin; the details haven't been finalized yet.
Friday, November 12, 2004
But I'm Feeling Much Better Now
The first season of Night Court was just announced for February 5. This show was, of NBC's famous '80s Thursday night lineup (Cheers, The Cosby Show, Family Ties, and this one), the most underrated and probably the funniest. The creator, Reinhold Weege, had been a writer-producer on Barney Miller, and Night Court was essentially Barney in a courtroom. Except that where Barney started out loud and brash and got more and more subtle every year -- until by the end the jokes were so low-key that they were barely identifiable as jokes -- Night Court started out fairly sensible and got wackier and wackier with every episode. In its prime, just about every line was a joke and most of them were damned funny; Weege loved working in front of a live audience (an annoying laugh, heard from the audience in every episode, is either Weege or his father), and told his writers to keep adding new jokes all the time right up until the moment the audience went home. One writer, Tom Straw, recalled that when they were doing an episode where Dan (John Larroquette) is rejected as a sperm bank donor, he pitched a new joke literally the moment before the final taping of a particular scene, and it made it in: "Don't be disappointed, Mr. Fielding -- many are called, but few are frozen."
If you don't like jokes like that, you probably won't like Night Court, but the jokes do work, and the combination of broad neo-Vaudevillian humor and character comedy and the socially-conscious attitude of Barney Miller was a pretty entertaining mix. The show remained strong up until Weege left at the end of the sixth season (due to disputes with the network and WB Television), at which point the show did one disastrous season of stupid jokes and bad plots, followed by two only slightly less disastrous seasons with out-of-character jokes and would-be "sophisticated" plots.
The first season is not the show's best, and it's mostly notorious for the number of cast changes: Gail Strickland, who played the public defender in the pilot, was dumped and replaced by Paula Kelly, who left after the first season and was replaced by a rotating string of guest stars in season two (including Markie Post), until they settled on a permanent replacement in Ellen Foley, except she wasn't so permanent because she was replaced by Markie Post in season three. And Karen Austin, as the clerk/love interest in season 1, left the show midway through the season and was replaced by Charles Robinson (as the clerk, not the love interest) in season 2. And I'm not even getting into the infamous "dead female bailiffs" curse, but season 1 and 2 are the only seasons with Selma Diamond, a walking piece of comedy history; she was one of the first female comedy writers in the TV business, most famously writing for Sid Caesar, and she was the model for Sally on The Dick Van Dyke Show. She's the highlight of the first season. That and the famous exchange from the episode "Once In Love With Harry":
If you don't like jokes like that, you probably won't like Night Court, but the jokes do work, and the combination of broad neo-Vaudevillian humor and character comedy and the socially-conscious attitude of Barney Miller was a pretty entertaining mix. The show remained strong up until Weege left at the end of the sixth season (due to disputes with the network and WB Television), at which point the show did one disastrous season of stupid jokes and bad plots, followed by two only slightly less disastrous seasons with out-of-character jokes and would-be "sophisticated" plots.
The first season is not the show's best, and it's mostly notorious for the number of cast changes: Gail Strickland, who played the public defender in the pilot, was dumped and replaced by Paula Kelly, who left after the first season and was replaced by a rotating string of guest stars in season two (including Markie Post), until they settled on a permanent replacement in Ellen Foley, except she wasn't so permanent because she was replaced by Markie Post in season three. And Karen Austin, as the clerk/love interest in season 1, left the show midway through the season and was replaced by Charles Robinson (as the clerk, not the love interest) in season 2. And I'm not even getting into the infamous "dead female bailiffs" curse, but season 1 and 2 are the only seasons with Selma Diamond, a walking piece of comedy history; she was one of the first female comedy writers in the TV business, most famously writing for Sid Caesar, and she was the model for Sally on The Dick Van Dyke Show. She's the highlight of the first season. That and the famous exchange from the episode "Once In Love With Harry":
LANA: I hear you lost the election for city council.
DAN: That's not the depressing part.
LIZ: I heard you lost the election by ten thousand votes.
DAN: That's not the depressing part.
BULL: Hey, didn't your opponent die two weeks ago?
DAN: That's the depressing part.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Mirror, Mirror
I would hope that most people reading this blog would have gotten the new Marx Brothers DVD collection (hardly any extras and the films aren't in great condition, but Universal has done the best they can with some films that were never very well-preserved, and -- contrary to what some gossip columnist reported -- Duck Soup is uncut). Not much to say about their Paramount movies that hasn't already been said, but I will make one observation about the mirror routine in Duck Soup. It seems like every time this routine is imitated, it shows a character who literally thinks he or she is looking in a mirror, or at least is partly convinced of this. That's not what happens with Groucho and Harpo: Groucho signals all through the routine that he knows this isn't a mirror. Every gag involves him trying to trip Harpo up, to stop Harpo from doing exactly what Groucho does. They even walk around and switch places, and it doesn't matter because each guy knows what the other is up to. In most routines like this, the joke is that one character is too dumb to tell the difference between his reflection and another person in a costume. Here it's two guys playing a game with each other. So the gags are crazy, the movie is crazy -- but the behavior of the characters is logical; they're not idiots. That's one of the things that's appealing about the Marx Brothers, that unlike other "crazy" comics whose craziness seems indistinguishable from idiocy, the Brothers are crazy and smart. Okay, well, Xeppo doesn't usually come off onscreen as either crazy or smart. But why spoil such a short post with Zeppo-bashing?
Even Keel
I've been asked why I didn't write anything about Howard Keel. The answer is that I really don't know that much about him -- in fact, until I read his obituaries, I was unaware that he'd ever been on Dallas (I've only seen the first and second seasons of that show). I will say that his film career probably suffered from two misfortunes:
a) At the very moment when he was starting to become a big star, the mid-'50s, the bottom dropped out of movie musicals. Or, rather, the bottom dropped out of solid, medium-budget, quickly-made musicals, the kind that required a guy like Keel who could be a convincing singing hero. Starting in the late '50s, musicals started to become big, ultra-expensive prestige projects, and the kind of musical that Keel had been perfect for -- old-fashioned studio-bound, studio-system projects like Seven Brides For Seven Brothers -- more or less disappeared.
b) Keel's type of legit singing seemed to go out of fashion in movie musicals in the '50s (and even on Broadway, to which Keel repaired for the expensive disappointment Saratoga). Male singers rarely became big stars in movie musicals anyway -- the big male stars of movie musicals tended to be primarily dancers, whereas the big female stars tended to be singers -- but it was even harder to become a star as a singing actor when fewer and fewer musicals were being made that called for his kind of singing.
Pauline Kael has a lot of nice comments about Keel scattered through 5001 Nights at the Movies; she clearly liked him a lot. Alfred Drake the Broadway star whose parts Keel tended to play in the movies (Kiss Me Kate and Kismet were Alfred Drake shows filmed with Keel in the lead), didn't feel that way; his comment on Keel, in the course of explaining why he (Drake) didn't have a movie career, was something to the effect of "The movies had a guy who they thought could play my kind of parts. He wasn't very good." But Alfred Drake would have been pretty damned embarrasing in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, where Keel not only sings well but does a fine job of making us sort of like a character who is -- deliberately -- written to be rather unsympathetic much of the time.
a) At the very moment when he was starting to become a big star, the mid-'50s, the bottom dropped out of movie musicals. Or, rather, the bottom dropped out of solid, medium-budget, quickly-made musicals, the kind that required a guy like Keel who could be a convincing singing hero. Starting in the late '50s, musicals started to become big, ultra-expensive prestige projects, and the kind of musical that Keel had been perfect for -- old-fashioned studio-bound, studio-system projects like Seven Brides For Seven Brothers -- more or less disappeared.
b) Keel's type of legit singing seemed to go out of fashion in movie musicals in the '50s (and even on Broadway, to which Keel repaired for the expensive disappointment Saratoga). Male singers rarely became big stars in movie musicals anyway -- the big male stars of movie musicals tended to be primarily dancers, whereas the big female stars tended to be singers -- but it was even harder to become a star as a singing actor when fewer and fewer musicals were being made that called for his kind of singing.
Pauline Kael has a lot of nice comments about Keel scattered through 5001 Nights at the Movies; she clearly liked him a lot. Alfred Drake the Broadway star whose parts Keel tended to play in the movies (Kiss Me Kate and Kismet were Alfred Drake shows filmed with Keel in the lead), didn't feel that way; his comment on Keel, in the course of explaining why he (Drake) didn't have a movie career, was something to the effect of "The movies had a guy who they thought could play my kind of parts. He wasn't very good." But Alfred Drake would have been pretty damned embarrasing in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, where Keel not only sings well but does a fine job of making us sort of like a character who is -- deliberately -- written to be rather unsympathetic much of the time.
Monday, November 08, 2004
His Horse, Of Course, Is a Baritone Too
Bill James once wrote about a particular baseball team that its lesson was "that you can, in fact, have too much pitching": if a team has too many promising pitchers, what happens is that the manager can't decide which ones to use and the team becomes unstable. Well, I think the lesson of Danny Kaye is that a performer can, in fact, have too much talent. The word "multitalented" -- or is that two words? -- is practically synonymous with Kaye; the guy could do just about anything, including some things that hardly anybody else was doing at the time (super-fast patter singing, for example, a style he sort of borrowed from Gilbert and Sullivan but made his own). Like Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, he went to Hollywood after starring in a hit Broadway show (Let's Face It, music and lyrics by Cole Porter). But unlike Astaire and Kelly, he didn't star in a lot of enduring, great movie musicals; his portfolio consists of one all-time favorite, The Court Jester, plus a lot of other movies that now come off as very uneven.
In part this was because of who Kaye signed with: Samuel Goldwyn, the most successful and overrated independent producer in the business. At the time, Goldwyn's name was a watchword for prestige, but now a lot of his movies look very creaky (especially most of the films made by his star director, William Wyler), characterized by a slow pace and an excess of good taste. In the '30s, Goldwyn's big comedy star was Eddie Cantor. Goldwyn saw in Kaye someone who was comparable to Cantor as a singing comedian, and someone whose range of talents could carry a picture. What Goldwyn did, basically, was to turn Kaye into the new Eddie Cantor; his first movie, Up in Arms, was loosely based on the Cantor vehicle Whoopee. And after that, Kaye usually played the same character Cantor had played in the '30s: a sweet, nebbishy guy who gets menaced by big bad guys. Sometimes, for a change, Goldwyn would skip the neo-Eddie-Cantor stuff and put Kaye in a remake of something else, e.g. A Song is Born, a musical remake of Ball of Fire with Kaye very much miscast in the Gary Cooper role. The writing and direction on most of these movies was not usually of a very high standard; nor were the casts (headed by Goldwyn's leading lady of choice, Virginia Mayo -- who did her best work after she got away from Goldwyn). The movies looked good, what with the high budgets and Gregg Toland's photography, but they were, like Goldwyn's Eddie Cantor films, innocuous, creaky family-friendly projects that seemed to embalm a talented performer rather than showing him off. The ultimate Kaye/Goldwyn movie in this respect is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which takes a good idea for a movie, James Thurber's story, takes out everything that made it a good idea in the first place, and replaces it with a lot of not-so-good ideas.
But some of the trouble with Kaye's movies has to do with Kaye himself. In a sense, it was inevitable that he'd wind up playing characters originated by other actors -- Eddie Cantor, Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier (On the Riviera, made for Fox, is a remake of a Chevalier movie) -- because he really didn't have a character of his own. His fame came from his ability to shift from one character to another, to be everybody at once; his greatest routine, "The Lobby Number," written by his wife/associate Sylvia Fine, features him describing a movie and becoming all the characters in it, from Cowboy Dan to Carmelita Perpita, The Bolivian Bombshell. But an ability to be everybody at once, left unchecked, becomes a tendency to be nobody. And a screen comic, as opposed to someone performing in sketches or nightclubs, needs to have a well-defined personality, because, cliche though it may be, the best film comedy is character comedy, comedy that comes from the reaction of a distinctive character to a distinctive situation.
Bob Hope, by most standards less gifted than Kaye, created a character who can get laughs because of the appropriateness of the way he reacts to the problems he faces; we know he's a coward and a braggart, and when he displays these characteristics, it's both funny and appropriate to the story: character and schtick fused into one. But Kaye is always bouncing from one character to another, sometimes literally, since he frequently played two roles or one guy who takes on multiple personalities (as in The Court Jester). It's hard to know whether his schtick is appropriate to his character, because we don't fully know what his character is; when he's not playing another comedian's character (mostly Cantor), he's the hero's nightclub-entertainer brother, or he's a womanizing Frenchman. And so his routines, brilliant though some of them are, distract from the movie, because they're not an opportunity to escape into a different persona: they're yet another switch by a guy who keeps switching personalities, and whose basic persona is never quite defined. When Daffy Duck does a Danny Kaye routine in the cartoon Book Revue (available on the new DVD set), mimicking Kaye's rapid swings from Russian-accented sentimentality to wild scat routines, it's in many ways funnier than the real thing -- not only because Mel Blanc can do this kind of thing almost as well as Kaye did, but because we know who Daffy is; he is a well-defined character (or was before his mid-'50s identity crisis), and in him we see a familiar character going wild, rather than, as with Kaye, a talented performer going wild to distract us from the central unanswered question: who is this guy?
Kaye clearly had some problems with sticking to a character. This was mocked early in his career when he appeared on Jack Benny's radio show; Kaye has been selected to play the lead in The Jack Benny Story (upsetting Jack, who thought that was his part), and when asked to play the young Jack Benny, Kaye goes through a series of silly accents depending on where the scene takes place:
This portrayal of Kaye -- as an incredibly talented guy who can't give up schtick long enough to play a character -- was definitively proven toward the end of his career, when he played Noah on Broadway in Richard Rodgers' Two By Two; he started out playing it more or less straight, but as time went on (and particularly after he suffered a fracture that forced him to play much of the run in a wheelchair) he started turning the whole thing into an excuse for him to ad-lib, try to throw the other actors off, and, one night, scream obscenities at the actor playing one of his sons.
Kaye's best movie is The Court Jester, though it doesn't come all that much closer to solving the problem of "Who is Danny Kaye?" What makes it work, apart from the excellent script and supporting cast, is that the film is basically a genre spoof -- the ancestor of Blazing Saddles and Airplane, though in '50s-style good taste -- and therefore there's not much need for a rounded character in the main part; all that's needed is someone like Robert Hays in Airplane!, a guy who can do jokes and be, generically, the Lead Character. It's odd that a comedy performer as distinctive as Danny Kaye should wind up as a generic comic lead, or a last-minute replacement for another performer (Kaye replaced Donald O'Connor in White Christmas, which is why most of his songs are about dancing). One wonders what kind of movies he'd have made if he'd just stood still long enough to develop a real character for himself. But then, Sam Goldwyn might not have stood for that.
In part this was because of who Kaye signed with: Samuel Goldwyn, the most successful and overrated independent producer in the business. At the time, Goldwyn's name was a watchword for prestige, but now a lot of his movies look very creaky (especially most of the films made by his star director, William Wyler), characterized by a slow pace and an excess of good taste. In the '30s, Goldwyn's big comedy star was Eddie Cantor. Goldwyn saw in Kaye someone who was comparable to Cantor as a singing comedian, and someone whose range of talents could carry a picture. What Goldwyn did, basically, was to turn Kaye into the new Eddie Cantor; his first movie, Up in Arms, was loosely based on the Cantor vehicle Whoopee. And after that, Kaye usually played the same character Cantor had played in the '30s: a sweet, nebbishy guy who gets menaced by big bad guys. Sometimes, for a change, Goldwyn would skip the neo-Eddie-Cantor stuff and put Kaye in a remake of something else, e.g. A Song is Born, a musical remake of Ball of Fire with Kaye very much miscast in the Gary Cooper role. The writing and direction on most of these movies was not usually of a very high standard; nor were the casts (headed by Goldwyn's leading lady of choice, Virginia Mayo -- who did her best work after she got away from Goldwyn). The movies looked good, what with the high budgets and Gregg Toland's photography, but they were, like Goldwyn's Eddie Cantor films, innocuous, creaky family-friendly projects that seemed to embalm a talented performer rather than showing him off. The ultimate Kaye/Goldwyn movie in this respect is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which takes a good idea for a movie, James Thurber's story, takes out everything that made it a good idea in the first place, and replaces it with a lot of not-so-good ideas.
But some of the trouble with Kaye's movies has to do with Kaye himself. In a sense, it was inevitable that he'd wind up playing characters originated by other actors -- Eddie Cantor, Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier (On the Riviera, made for Fox, is a remake of a Chevalier movie) -- because he really didn't have a character of his own. His fame came from his ability to shift from one character to another, to be everybody at once; his greatest routine, "The Lobby Number," written by his wife/associate Sylvia Fine, features him describing a movie and becoming all the characters in it, from Cowboy Dan to Carmelita Perpita, The Bolivian Bombshell. But an ability to be everybody at once, left unchecked, becomes a tendency to be nobody. And a screen comic, as opposed to someone performing in sketches or nightclubs, needs to have a well-defined personality, because, cliche though it may be, the best film comedy is character comedy, comedy that comes from the reaction of a distinctive character to a distinctive situation.
Bob Hope, by most standards less gifted than Kaye, created a character who can get laughs because of the appropriateness of the way he reacts to the problems he faces; we know he's a coward and a braggart, and when he displays these characteristics, it's both funny and appropriate to the story: character and schtick fused into one. But Kaye is always bouncing from one character to another, sometimes literally, since he frequently played two roles or one guy who takes on multiple personalities (as in The Court Jester). It's hard to know whether his schtick is appropriate to his character, because we don't fully know what his character is; when he's not playing another comedian's character (mostly Cantor), he's the hero's nightclub-entertainer brother, or he's a womanizing Frenchman. And so his routines, brilliant though some of them are, distract from the movie, because they're not an opportunity to escape into a different persona: they're yet another switch by a guy who keeps switching personalities, and whose basic persona is never quite defined. When Daffy Duck does a Danny Kaye routine in the cartoon Book Revue (available on the new DVD set), mimicking Kaye's rapid swings from Russian-accented sentimentality to wild scat routines, it's in many ways funnier than the real thing -- not only because Mel Blanc can do this kind of thing almost as well as Kaye did, but because we know who Daffy is; he is a well-defined character (or was before his mid-'50s identity crisis), and in him we see a familiar character going wild, rather than, as with Kaye, a talented performer going wild to distract us from the central unanswered question: who is this guy?
Kaye clearly had some problems with sticking to a character. This was mocked early in his career when he appeared on Jack Benny's radio show; Kaye has been selected to play the lead in The Jack Benny Story (upsetting Jack, who thought that was his part), and when asked to play the young Jack Benny, Kaye goes through a series of silly accents depending on where the scene takes place:
(Thinking it takes place in Russia)
"Papa, can I have fifty roubles for to buying a wiolin?"
(Told that it actually takes place in Illinois
"Hey, pop, can I but the bite on yer fer fifty frogskins t' buy a fiddle?"
This portrayal of Kaye -- as an incredibly talented guy who can't give up schtick long enough to play a character -- was definitively proven toward the end of his career, when he played Noah on Broadway in Richard Rodgers' Two By Two; he started out playing it more or less straight, but as time went on (and particularly after he suffered a fracture that forced him to play much of the run in a wheelchair) he started turning the whole thing into an excuse for him to ad-lib, try to throw the other actors off, and, one night, scream obscenities at the actor playing one of his sons.
Kaye's best movie is The Court Jester, though it doesn't come all that much closer to solving the problem of "Who is Danny Kaye?" What makes it work, apart from the excellent script and supporting cast, is that the film is basically a genre spoof -- the ancestor of Blazing Saddles and Airplane, though in '50s-style good taste -- and therefore there's not much need for a rounded character in the main part; all that's needed is someone like Robert Hays in Airplane!, a guy who can do jokes and be, generically, the Lead Character. It's odd that a comedy performer as distinctive as Danny Kaye should wind up as a generic comic lead, or a last-minute replacement for another performer (Kaye replaced Donald O'Connor in White Christmas, which is why most of his songs are about dancing). One wonders what kind of movies he'd have made if he'd just stood still long enough to develop a real character for himself. But then, Sam Goldwyn might not have stood for that.
Saturday, November 06, 2004
Just a General Interest
Been re-reading the Pulitzer Prize winning play State of the Union, by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Like most of the plays and musicals by this prolific team (Life With Father, The Sound of Music), it's well-structured, efficient, and about as deep as a wading pool. As always, Lindsay and Crouse characterize not so much by personality type as by function: Jim Conover (Minor Watson) is The Political Hack; Grant (Ralph Bellamy) is The Hero Who Must Choose Between Integrity and Political Success; Mary (Ruth Hussey) is The Estranged Wife Outraged By Political Hackery. Every point in the play is condensed into a little fortune-cookie motto, e.g.:
And so on. The politics of the play's lead character are pretty vague, deliberately so; opening right after the end of World War II, it presents its hero as the ideal politician to keep the country united in the postwar era, a guy who throws off the shackles of party affiliation (it's implied at the end that he might run as an independent or else remake the Republican Party in his own image) and special interests to Tell It Like It Is to labor and big business alike. He's given a few political positions -- he's in favor of full employment bills -- but basically he's an early representative of American pop culture's obsession with independents, mavericks, and people who claim to render the categories of "right" and "left" irrelevant. It's not a big surprise that the play was filmed by Frank Capra, whose Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is a great political film about a character with no discernible political affiliation.
But that's the fun of reading a play like this (aside from the fun of some of Lindsay and Crouse's snappy/corny lines, like Mary's explanation of why she broke off her affair with an army officer: "When he was a Major, he was a major interest, but now that he's a General, he's just a general interest"), that it shows how little has changed in stories dealing with politics: the idealistic maverick is always exalted over the guy who plays politics. Whether this makes sense is another question; I think there's a good argument that the demands of political hackery are a welcome brake on the dangers of too much political idealism (remember, the people you disagree with are often idealists too). But I don't think there's been a successful play or movie celebrating a political hack. Maybe that's something worth trying.
The other thing about State of the Union is that because it came out just before the Cold War (tm) really got started, it still has vestigal traces of the Popular Front attitude of pre-WWII plays; it has this in common with another hit of the same season, Born Yesterday, which is full of dire warnings about incipient fascism and more or less equates an uncouth businessman with Hitler. Most embarrassing moment in State of the Union, when Grant has just been meeting with some John Birch-ish group:
Yeah, that'll show 'em.
CONOVER: The people have damn little to say about the nomination. You two have lived in this country all your lives. Haven't you got that through your heads yet? You're not nominated by the people -- you're nominated by the politicians! Why? Because the voters are too damned lazy to vote in the primaries! Well, politicians are not lazy!
SPIKE: These educated apes who are coming here -- Grant can't be nominated without their support, and in the election they can deliver a lot of votes.
MARY (scornfully): How can you deliver the votes of a free people?
SPIKE: Mary, lazy people and ignorant people and prejudiced people are not free.
MARY: Everybody here tonight was thinking of the next election. Well, it's time somebody began thinking of the next generation!
And so on. The politics of the play's lead character are pretty vague, deliberately so; opening right after the end of World War II, it presents its hero as the ideal politician to keep the country united in the postwar era, a guy who throws off the shackles of party affiliation (it's implied at the end that he might run as an independent or else remake the Republican Party in his own image) and special interests to Tell It Like It Is to labor and big business alike. He's given a few political positions -- he's in favor of full employment bills -- but basically he's an early representative of American pop culture's obsession with independents, mavericks, and people who claim to render the categories of "right" and "left" irrelevant. It's not a big surprise that the play was filmed by Frank Capra, whose Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is a great political film about a character with no discernible political affiliation.
But that's the fun of reading a play like this (aside from the fun of some of Lindsay and Crouse's snappy/corny lines, like Mary's explanation of why she broke off her affair with an army officer: "When he was a Major, he was a major interest, but now that he's a General, he's just a general interest"), that it shows how little has changed in stories dealing with politics: the idealistic maverick is always exalted over the guy who plays politics. Whether this makes sense is another question; I think there's a good argument that the demands of political hackery are a welcome brake on the dangers of too much political idealism (remember, the people you disagree with are often idealists too). But I don't think there's been a successful play or movie celebrating a political hack. Maybe that's something worth trying.
The other thing about State of the Union is that because it came out just before the Cold War (tm) really got started, it still has vestigal traces of the Popular Front attitude of pre-WWII plays; it has this in common with another hit of the same season, Born Yesterday, which is full of dire warnings about incipient fascism and more or less equates an uncouth businessman with Hitler. Most embarrassing moment in State of the Union, when Grant has just been meeting with some John Birch-ish group:
MARY: Oh, that crowd! Against war -- but we may have to fight the Russians!
GRANT: Exactly! I wound up making a campaign speech for Stalin.
Yeah, that'll show 'em.
No, Not Courtney
Here's a pretty good fansite for the novelist Thorne Smith, the leading writer in what might be called "fantasitcom" -- situation comedies with a strong fantasy element. A lot of his books, like Topper, wound up as movies, though without the risque note he often struck; Turnabout, the first "body-switching" novel (a man and a woman magically switch places, leading to funny complications but also, unfortunately, to 18 Again and Like Father, Like Son), features a rather casual attitude toward adultery and "free love" in general. His stuff is a bit dated, but fun to read, and I've always loved the basic setup of having fantasy and magic intrude into otherwise mundane everyday settings. So much better than the Harry Potter type of fantasy novel, which takes the infinite possibilities of magic and puts them in a straitjacket by making them all part of some dull English public-school scene -- in other words, making magic as routine and mundane as everyday life, rather than letting magic shake up our everyday world a little.
Friday, November 05, 2004
Love and... Barriage?
Just to show you how music licensing is putting a continual crimp in the TV-on-DVD business: according to TV Shows On DVD, the release of the complete third season of Married With Children has been held up because the owners of the theme song, "Love and Marriage," decided that they wanted more money for it. (That is, after licensing the song out for the first two sets, they suddenly jacked up the price.) So Columbia has finally decided to release the third season with the theme song replaced, but with a label on the box mentioning that the music has been changed.
Music licensing for TV shows on DVD is incredibly tricky because even if the songs were licensed for syndication, they have to be licensed all over again for DVD release. A music-heavy show like WKRP in Cincinnati is effectively impossible to release, but as you can see from this debacle, even a single song can screw up a season release if the owners of the song demand an exorbitant price. It's pretty sad to think of Married With Children without the Sinatra recording of "Love and Marriage," which perfectly summed up the attitude of the show (it helps that the recording itself takes kind of an ironic attitude to the song, which was written for a TV musical version of Our Town and which is semi-spoofed by Nelson Riddle's arrangement). But I don't see what choice an Al Bundy fan has, short of paying $60 for a three-disc set, which would sell so poorly that the other seasons wouldn't come out.
Music licensing for TV shows on DVD is incredibly tricky because even if the songs were licensed for syndication, they have to be licensed all over again for DVD release. A music-heavy show like WKRP in Cincinnati is effectively impossible to release, but as you can see from this debacle, even a single song can screw up a season release if the owners of the song demand an exorbitant price. It's pretty sad to think of Married With Children without the Sinatra recording of "Love and Marriage," which perfectly summed up the attitude of the show (it helps that the recording itself takes kind of an ironic attitude to the song, which was written for a TV musical version of Our Town and which is semi-spoofed by Nelson Riddle's arrangement). But I don't see what choice an Al Bundy fan has, short of paying $60 for a three-disc set, which would sell so poorly that the other seasons wouldn't come out.
Thursday, November 04, 2004
We Are DVDs, If You Please
I apologize for not blogging much recently (the problem with blogging entirely about old stuff is that the impetus to blog usually comes from something new happening -- and when your blog is about "nothing new," well, bang goes your motivation). Will get some essays n' stuff up soon.
Meanwhile, here are some random points about upcoming DVDs of old stuff:
- The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection, due this Tuesday, doesn't appear to be much of a box set in comparison to the products that other studios are putting out (like WB's set of the later Marx movies, which made a great product out of an overall less good group of films). According to people who have seen the set, the only bonus features are about 15 minutes' worth of interviews from the Today show -- which, absurdly, get a whole disc to themselves -- and none of the missing footage in Animal Crackers and Horse Feathers has been rediscovered. (Animal Crackers suffered cuts when it was reissued after the implementation of the Hays Code; Horse Feathers also lost a scene to the Hays Code, and frames were lost in another scene for unknown reasons.) However, contrary to a bizarre newspaper item that said that "insensitive" material would be cut from Duck Soup, people who have seen the set report that that movie is uncut. Basically it's a set that preserves the movies as seen on VHS and TV, with the picture slightly but not spectacularly improved. Buy it for the movies and watch the special features on the WB set.
- If you're wondering why I've said that I think Boy Meets World was a good show, the second season gives some idea of what I mean: it switched the location from junior high to high school and made the kids grow up rather quickly (one of the few shows that ever made kids age faster, rather than slower), and solidified the characters, as well as its ability to build episodes around themes without coming off as preachy. I'm not saying it's an all-time classic, but it's excellent sitcom writing: well-structured stories, interesting characters, and above all laughs that don't come from obvious "jokes" but from character-specific lines and actions. If you find a place that rents TV shows, it might be worth a look. One I particularly like is "The Beard," where Cory is asked to play Cyrano for a school bully with a poetic streak; the A and B stories are intertwined and connected by the theme of men learning that women need to feel appreciated, and almost every laugh comes from something unexpected, rather than cookie-cutter sitcom lines.
- WB has announced a collection of their classic gangster movies, along with the usual commentaries, featurettes, and bonus cartoons and shorts from the year the film was made. Nothing bad can be said about this, particularly since The Public Enemy will be the original version, not the cut version issued after the Hays Code was implemented.
- Finally, coming in distant February, a disc of what might possibly be the funniest movie ever made (I'm not saying it is, just that it's a candidate), Preston Sturges' The Palm Beach Story. It's one of those "oldies" that seems to appeal very strongly to people who don't normally go in for old movies -- perhaps because it seems to fit in with postmodern, age-of-irony sensibilities in the way it simultaneously parodies the conventions of movie comedies (like the ridiculous tacked-on twists that provide a happy ending for everyone) while accepting them. Plus it's got the "Ale and Quail Club," which everybody seems to love.
Meanwhile, here are some random points about upcoming DVDs of old stuff:
- The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection, due this Tuesday, doesn't appear to be much of a box set in comparison to the products that other studios are putting out (like WB's set of the later Marx movies, which made a great product out of an overall less good group of films). According to people who have seen the set, the only bonus features are about 15 minutes' worth of interviews from the Today show -- which, absurdly, get a whole disc to themselves -- and none of the missing footage in Animal Crackers and Horse Feathers has been rediscovered. (Animal Crackers suffered cuts when it was reissued after the implementation of the Hays Code; Horse Feathers also lost a scene to the Hays Code, and frames were lost in another scene for unknown reasons.) However, contrary to a bizarre newspaper item that said that "insensitive" material would be cut from Duck Soup, people who have seen the set report that that movie is uncut. Basically it's a set that preserves the movies as seen on VHS and TV, with the picture slightly but not spectacularly improved. Buy it for the movies and watch the special features on the WB set.
- If you're wondering why I've said that I think Boy Meets World was a good show, the second season gives some idea of what I mean: it switched the location from junior high to high school and made the kids grow up rather quickly (one of the few shows that ever made kids age faster, rather than slower), and solidified the characters, as well as its ability to build episodes around themes without coming off as preachy. I'm not saying it's an all-time classic, but it's excellent sitcom writing: well-structured stories, interesting characters, and above all laughs that don't come from obvious "jokes" but from character-specific lines and actions. If you find a place that rents TV shows, it might be worth a look. One I particularly like is "The Beard," where Cory is asked to play Cyrano for a school bully with a poetic streak; the A and B stories are intertwined and connected by the theme of men learning that women need to feel appreciated, and almost every laugh comes from something unexpected, rather than cookie-cutter sitcom lines.
- WB has announced a collection of their classic gangster movies, along with the usual commentaries, featurettes, and bonus cartoons and shorts from the year the film was made. Nothing bad can be said about this, particularly since The Public Enemy will be the original version, not the cut version issued after the Hays Code was implemented.
- Finally, coming in distant February, a disc of what might possibly be the funniest movie ever made (I'm not saying it is, just that it's a candidate), Preston Sturges' The Palm Beach Story. It's one of those "oldies" that seems to appeal very strongly to people who don't normally go in for old movies -- perhaps because it seems to fit in with postmodern, age-of-irony sensibilities in the way it simultaneously parodies the conventions of movie comedies (like the ridiculous tacked-on twists that provide a happy ending for everyone) while accepting them. Plus it's got the "Ale and Quail Club," which everybody seems to love.
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Election Infection
Like everyone else, I'm depressed (not even so much to do with the results, just the deja vu element). Random thoughts that are somewhat related to this blog:
1. There's a song from the musical Fiorello!, written by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, called "The Bum Won" (sung by some New York political types after a surprise victory by the title character), which is always appropriate after every election, no matter who wins. The most quotable and always-relevant line:
2. Asked to explain the Ohio results, all I could do was point to Family Ties, which was set in Columbus, Ohio. Therefore, the Ohio results went like this:
Stephen: Democrats
Elyse: Democrats
Alex: Republicans
Mallory: Didn't want to vote, but she decided to go to the polls to meet a cute guy, and while she was there, she voted Republican because they were promising to lift restrictions on imports of foreign makeup
Jennifer: Democrats
Andrew (who would by now be old enough to vote): Republicans
That makes it a 3-3 split. Who cast the tiebreaking vote? NICK. He went Republican at the last minute because Laura Bush said something nice about his art. When Stephen finds out, he chases Nick around the state with a baseball bat with a nail in it.
And Skippy? Skippy's vote wasn't counted. As if you had any doubt.
1. There's a song from the musical Fiorello!, written by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, called "The Bum Won" (sung by some New York political types after a surprise victory by the title character), which is always appropriate after every election, no matter who wins. The most quotable and always-relevant line:
Who would have guessed that the people would go to the polls and elect a fanatic?
People can do what they want to, but I got a feeling it ain't democratic.
2. Asked to explain the Ohio results, all I could do was point to Family Ties, which was set in Columbus, Ohio. Therefore, the Ohio results went like this:
Stephen: Democrats
Elyse: Democrats
Alex: Republicans
Mallory: Didn't want to vote, but she decided to go to the polls to meet a cute guy, and while she was there, she voted Republican because they were promising to lift restrictions on imports of foreign makeup
Jennifer: Democrats
Andrew (who would by now be old enough to vote): Republicans
That makes it a 3-3 split. Who cast the tiebreaking vote? NICK. He went Republican at the last minute because Laura Bush said something nice about his art. When Stephen finds out, he chases Nick around the state with a baseball bat with a nail in it.
And Skippy? Skippy's vote wasn't counted. As if you had any doubt.
Monday, November 01, 2004
The Return of Herb Tarlek
Hope this is better than The New WKRP in Cincinnati.
I think that of all the great characters on WKRP, Herb Tarlek may have become the most iconic -- him or Les Nessman. I've heard Herb Tarlek invoked as the ultimate example of the sleazy salesman by lawyers, teachers, businessmen, and, of course, salesmen.
Herb was originally supposed to be younger and possessed of a certain slimy charm -- Gob on Arrested Development would probably be a good approximation of the way Herb was conceived -- but, as so often, the actor who proved the best choice was a different physical type, and the character changed to fit the actor.
I think that of all the great characters on WKRP, Herb Tarlek may have become the most iconic -- him or Les Nessman. I've heard Herb Tarlek invoked as the ultimate example of the sleazy salesman by lawyers, teachers, businessmen, and, of course, salesmen.
Herb was originally supposed to be younger and possessed of a certain slimy charm -- Gob on Arrested Development would probably be a good approximation of the way Herb was conceived -- but, as so often, the actor who proved the best choice was a different physical type, and the character changed to fit the actor.
Sunday, October 31, 2004
Continuity Terrors
Here's a funny essay on continuity in TV shows and the perils of trying to maintain continuity when shows cross over with each other; using the guide to TV crossovers as a resource, it demonstrates that almost any show can be connected to St. Elsewhere in some way, meaning that almost every show is part of the dream of that kid in the last episode.
What that essay got me wondering is when, exactly, episode-to-episode continuity became part of television shows. I'm not talking about big stuff, like the fact that if Lucy has a baby one season she's going to have it next season (though, starting the tradition that would be continued by Murphy Brown and others, we didn't see the kid very much after he was born); I mean the idea of letting the events of one episode influence, or restrict, later events on the show: we can't do a flashback to our hero's bar-mitzvah, because last year he said he was raised Catholic. (Another writer suggests: "Let's make him a Jewish Catholic. Problem solved.) As I've said elsewhere, TV shows with continuing characters used to aspire to the status and style of anthology shows -- which were considered, since the Playhouse 90 days, to be the best TV had to offer -- and so making every episode totally self-contained was not just convenient, but a mark of pride: we're creating self-contained stories here, not some soap opera. To have inter-episode continuity in, say, Star Trek would have been regarded as an unacceptable descent into soapiness.
That's why, as I've also said elsewhere -- I'm recycling a lot of my pop-culture talking points today, it seems -- the idea of continuity and "story arcs" often started on shows that didn't have particularly high aspirations, like Dallas. And the first show to have a lot of "continuity" in the sense that the above essay talks about -- that is, having characters remember what happened last week and letting that influence their actions -- may have been the gleefully lowbrow The Beverly Hillbillies. Paul Henning wrote or co-wrote every episode, and often he didn't really bother to create an ending for the episode; instead he'd just let the story peter out, and pick things up in the next episode. The upshot was that The Beverly Hillbillies, especially in the first couple of seasons, may have been the first true "arc" show. And, in general, there used to be more continuity on sitcoms than there was on dramas. Pre-Dallas dramas tended to stick to the idea of being anthology shows that happened to have continuing characters; but sitcoms in the '60s and '70s were more inclined to establish connections between the episodes. One of the writers of WKRP in Cincinnati kept a notebook in which he'd write down every point that was mentioned about a character -- what kind of car he or she drove, where he or she came from, etc. -- and he'd then refer to these points at story meetings, in order to keep them straight. He even wrote an entire episode to explain away various continuity discrepancies regarding one of the characters (Venus, who at various times was said to be a schoolteacher, a successful DJ, and a fugitive from justice). As dramas got more continuity-heavy, it seems, sitcoms got less so.
As to what I think of "continuity," I have to say that I am not turned off when a show makes a dreaded Continuity Error (tm). These things are always going to happen. Still, it is fun when a show tries to keep a character's background consistent, or incorporates references to earlier episodes, because it does increase the sense that you're watching people who could be real, and who do what real people do -- in this case, talk about things that previously happened to them.
What that essay got me wondering is when, exactly, episode-to-episode continuity became part of television shows. I'm not talking about big stuff, like the fact that if Lucy has a baby one season she's going to have it next season (though, starting the tradition that would be continued by Murphy Brown and others, we didn't see the kid very much after he was born); I mean the idea of letting the events of one episode influence, or restrict, later events on the show: we can't do a flashback to our hero's bar-mitzvah, because last year he said he was raised Catholic. (Another writer suggests: "Let's make him a Jewish Catholic. Problem solved.) As I've said elsewhere, TV shows with continuing characters used to aspire to the status and style of anthology shows -- which were considered, since the Playhouse 90 days, to be the best TV had to offer -- and so making every episode totally self-contained was not just convenient, but a mark of pride: we're creating self-contained stories here, not some soap opera. To have inter-episode continuity in, say, Star Trek would have been regarded as an unacceptable descent into soapiness.
That's why, as I've also said elsewhere -- I'm recycling a lot of my pop-culture talking points today, it seems -- the idea of continuity and "story arcs" often started on shows that didn't have particularly high aspirations, like Dallas. And the first show to have a lot of "continuity" in the sense that the above essay talks about -- that is, having characters remember what happened last week and letting that influence their actions -- may have been the gleefully lowbrow The Beverly Hillbillies. Paul Henning wrote or co-wrote every episode, and often he didn't really bother to create an ending for the episode; instead he'd just let the story peter out, and pick things up in the next episode. The upshot was that The Beverly Hillbillies, especially in the first couple of seasons, may have been the first true "arc" show. And, in general, there used to be more continuity on sitcoms than there was on dramas. Pre-Dallas dramas tended to stick to the idea of being anthology shows that happened to have continuing characters; but sitcoms in the '60s and '70s were more inclined to establish connections between the episodes. One of the writers of WKRP in Cincinnati kept a notebook in which he'd write down every point that was mentioned about a character -- what kind of car he or she drove, where he or she came from, etc. -- and he'd then refer to these points at story meetings, in order to keep them straight. He even wrote an entire episode to explain away various continuity discrepancies regarding one of the characters (Venus, who at various times was said to be a schoolteacher, a successful DJ, and a fugitive from justice). As dramas got more continuity-heavy, it seems, sitcoms got less so.
As to what I think of "continuity," I have to say that I am not turned off when a show makes a dreaded Continuity Error (tm). These things are always going to happen. Still, it is fun when a show tries to keep a character's background consistent, or incorporates references to earlier episodes, because it does increase the sense that you're watching people who could be real, and who do what real people do -- in this case, talk about things that previously happened to them.
The Way We Wrote Then
Having said mean things about Anthony Trollope in two previous posts, I may have given the impression that I don't like his work. But actually, I do. The Way We Live Now, which I only recently finished reading (it's a long damn thing), is a terrific novel, and it benefits, oddly, from the fact that there are almost no "good guys" in the book (the character who was supposed to be the chief Good Guy, the stolidly honest country squire Roger Carbury, wound up getting relegated to the status of a minor character) is a plus, because the portrayal of flawed or corrupt characters shows off Trollope's greatest strength: the ability to understand characters on their own terms, and to convey the way people see themselves. Almost every character in The Way We Live Now gets one of those extended passages where the narrator tells us what they're thinking and how they view the situation they're in. Melmotte is a scoundrel and a crook, and Trollope doesn't hesitate to tell us so repeatedly, but he also gives Melmotte something of an inner life, feelings, regrets; Trollope isn't non-judgmental, but he doesn't deny the humanity of his characters. Dickens wouldn't do this for his own proto-Ken-Lay characters, for Merdle or Veneering. And even today, authors are more accustomed to portray the thoughts of a character, rather than organizing or analyzing them; after Satan invented the Interior Monologue, it became possible to portray the inner life of a character in a more ambiguous way: here's what my character thinks, make of it what you will. Trollope is more of an analyst, writing a mini-essay on the feelings and thoughts of a character.
The other thing worth mentioning about The Way We Live Now is that it wound up almost completely different from the story Trollope set out to write; his main characters were supposed to be Lady Carbury, the middle-aged coquette, and the previously-mentioned Roger, who loves Lady Carbury's daughter Hetta (who loves Roger's friend Paul). By the midpoint of the novel, Lady Carbury has all but disappeared, as has Hetta, and Roger doesn't have much to do but grumble about the behavior of various other characters. The real stars of the book became Melmotte and his daughter Marie, and the ostensible main story -- the Roger/Hetta/Paul triangle, which Trollope admitted was the worst thing in the novel -- doesn't really come into focus until after Melmotte dies. But what this change in focus means is that after Melmotte is gone, there's over a hundred pages left in which very little of interest happens: most of what remains consists of just wrapping up all the stories, including the ones that the author more or less abandoned when he realized that Melmotte's story was more interesting.
This brings up something I've noticed in a lot of big 19th century novels, and particularly English novels: the part that we now tend to consider the most important part of the story, the ending, is probably the least important part of a novel of this era. The last installment of a Dickens or Trollope novel -- the "double number" that was half again as long as a regular installment -- often has no story interest to speak of, boiling down instead to a series of vignettes wrapping up each story with a marriage or a death or some character's decision to go abroad. In a time when there wasn't a broad range of acceptable ways to end a character's story (as the old saying goes, the only real endings to a story are marriage and death), there wasn't much point in trying to surprise the reader, or to inject artificial excitement into this wrapping-up operation. I suppose I find this interesting because we're now so used to thinking of the ending as the part that makes or breaks the story; hence all the fights over the endings of movies, the obsessive testing and changing of endings, the complaints about stories that end too happily or too sadly. For a writer like Trollope, the ending isn't that important; it's something that has to be written up, but it's not necessarily supposed to answer all the questions raised in the story, or to be the last word on what the novel is saying.
The other, related thing about The Way We Live Now and Victorian novels in general (and this is one of the last of the old-style Victorian novels: loosely-structured, published in monthly installments, etc.) is that they prove that you can have an effective novel where the hero and heroine are of little or no interest. I guess this started with the pre-Victorian Sir Walter Scott, but the English novels of the 19th century are notorious for revolving around heroes and heroines who aren't very interesting and don't even necessarily appear that much. In The Way We Live Now the "heroine" is presumably supposed to be Hetta Carbury, a character so dull that even Trollope can't give her any interesting thoughts, and the "hero" is either Roger (a stick) or Paul (another of Trollope's well-meaning ex-playboys who's too weak-willed to disentangle himself from an old relationship). Trollope, as I said, pretty much abandons these Good Guys for long stretches of the novel -- yet the novel doesn't fall apart. The odd thing, though, is that in a modern novel, Roger, with his hints of religious doubt (originally supposed to be a major plot thread, but abandoned by Trollope), and Paul, a guy trying to dump an old flame without hurting her feelings, would work very well as lead characters. A modern novelist would focus more on showing events from a single character's point of view, and a character like Paul might take on more importance accordingly.
The other thing worth mentioning about The Way We Live Now is that it wound up almost completely different from the story Trollope set out to write; his main characters were supposed to be Lady Carbury, the middle-aged coquette, and the previously-mentioned Roger, who loves Lady Carbury's daughter Hetta (who loves Roger's friend Paul). By the midpoint of the novel, Lady Carbury has all but disappeared, as has Hetta, and Roger doesn't have much to do but grumble about the behavior of various other characters. The real stars of the book became Melmotte and his daughter Marie, and the ostensible main story -- the Roger/Hetta/Paul triangle, which Trollope admitted was the worst thing in the novel -- doesn't really come into focus until after Melmotte dies. But what this change in focus means is that after Melmotte is gone, there's over a hundred pages left in which very little of interest happens: most of what remains consists of just wrapping up all the stories, including the ones that the author more or less abandoned when he realized that Melmotte's story was more interesting.
This brings up something I've noticed in a lot of big 19th century novels, and particularly English novels: the part that we now tend to consider the most important part of the story, the ending, is probably the least important part of a novel of this era. The last installment of a Dickens or Trollope novel -- the "double number" that was half again as long as a regular installment -- often has no story interest to speak of, boiling down instead to a series of vignettes wrapping up each story with a marriage or a death or some character's decision to go abroad. In a time when there wasn't a broad range of acceptable ways to end a character's story (as the old saying goes, the only real endings to a story are marriage and death), there wasn't much point in trying to surprise the reader, or to inject artificial excitement into this wrapping-up operation. I suppose I find this interesting because we're now so used to thinking of the ending as the part that makes or breaks the story; hence all the fights over the endings of movies, the obsessive testing and changing of endings, the complaints about stories that end too happily or too sadly. For a writer like Trollope, the ending isn't that important; it's something that has to be written up, but it's not necessarily supposed to answer all the questions raised in the story, or to be the last word on what the novel is saying.
The other, related thing about The Way We Live Now and Victorian novels in general (and this is one of the last of the old-style Victorian novels: loosely-structured, published in monthly installments, etc.) is that they prove that you can have an effective novel where the hero and heroine are of little or no interest. I guess this started with the pre-Victorian Sir Walter Scott, but the English novels of the 19th century are notorious for revolving around heroes and heroines who aren't very interesting and don't even necessarily appear that much. In The Way We Live Now the "heroine" is presumably supposed to be Hetta Carbury, a character so dull that even Trollope can't give her any interesting thoughts, and the "hero" is either Roger (a stick) or Paul (another of Trollope's well-meaning ex-playboys who's too weak-willed to disentangle himself from an old relationship). Trollope, as I said, pretty much abandons these Good Guys for long stretches of the novel -- yet the novel doesn't fall apart. The odd thing, though, is that in a modern novel, Roger, with his hints of religious doubt (originally supposed to be a major plot thread, but abandoned by Trollope), and Paul, a guy trying to dump an old flame without hurting her feelings, would work very well as lead characters. A modern novelist would focus more on showing events from a single character's point of view, and a character like Paul might take on more importance accordingly.
Friday, October 29, 2004
The French Touch is Much Too Much
I've been watching the new DVD of Berlioz's Les Troyens (The Trojans), from a Paris production conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. It's a good performance; Berlioz's music works extremely well on period instruments (given his interest in new and unusual orchestral sonorities, it helps to have the instruments he was writing for), the cast is good. The production is of the type that compensates for apparent budget and stage-space limitations with various minimalistic gimmicks: mirrors, lighting tricks, costumes from unspecified periods. But it's a good, involving production with blessedly few moments of outright Eurotrashiness. (One such moment comes at the end of act 2, where the murderous, rapine Greek soldiers burst in... dressed in combat fatigues and carrying machine guns. See, the rampaging, treacherous despoiling Greeks are really -- Americans! get it?) I'd prefer to see an outright spectacular grand-opera production in the style of 19th century Grand Opera, but this is a very worthwhile DVD, probably more satisfying overall than most of the audio recordings of this opera.
While The Trojans was written, as I said, in the form of a 19th century French Grand opera, with all the things that entails -- five acts; spectacular moments like the mass suicide of the Trojan women and the Royal Hunt and Storm; ballets; extensive use of the chorus; a heroic tenor role -- it wasn't actually performed as such in Berlioz's lifetime. The most common approach to the work, in the 19th century up to the late 20th century when it finally started to get into the repertoire, was to split it up and perform it as separate works: the first two acts as a self-contained work about the fall of Troy, and the last three acts as an opera about Dido and Aeneas. I actually see the point of this, and wonder if it might be a good approach to take even today; the work is very long, but more than that, there's a stylistic disconnect between the two halves. The first part, focusing on Cassandra, is almost unrelievedly gloomy and grim; it fits the subject, but it doesn't put the audience in a frame of mind to stay the full five hours or whatever. The Carthage section has more variety; this is where the Shakespearean influences start to become apparent in Berlioz's libretto, resulting in great moments like the duet for two of Aeneas's men, who scoff at all this business about destiny and leaving a nice place like Carthage just to go to Italy. Performing those three acts as a self-contained work makes a certain amount of sense, though obviously there are connections, thematic and musical, between the two halves of the work (the ultimate irony of the piece is that, in fulfilling his destiny to go to Rome and revive the destroyed culture of Troy, Aeneas has helped to destroy the culture of Carthage, converting its people from a civilized, cultured people into bloodthirsty, vengeful warmongers like the Greeks in the Troy sequence). And the whole work is bound together by the strangely "neoclassical" approach that Berlioz takes; the model, dramatic and musical, is 18th century French opera, and in particular the solemn, serious-minded mythological operas of Gluck, like Ipheginie en Tauride.
One notable thing about French Grand Opera is that the three 19th century grand operas that are generally regarded as the greatest, Rossini's William Tell, Verdi's Don Carlos, and Berlioz's The Trojans, were all failures to varying degrees. Tell came the closest to being a hit, but it was considered too big, too serious, too ambitious, and not spectacular enough to be a hit with the audience, as opposed to the critics. (The story goes that the Opera house started performing only the second act of Tell; when told about this, Rossini replied "What, the whole second act?") And even now, none of those three operas can claim to be among the most popular of all time, not compared to non-French operas that are influenced by French Grand Opera without fully being part of that form, operas like Aida and Tannhauser. Among the true Grand Operas that were big hits in their time, Halevy's La Juive and Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots get revived sometimes, and there are still diehard fans of the form, like Tom Kaufman. But if this is the spot for me to say that Grand Opera deserves a re-evaluation, I don't really think I can do it; I love a lot of French opera -- Massenet, Bizet, Offenbach, Gounod -- but the big, blockbuster grand operas tend to leave me cold, even when written by a composer I like (I love Massenet's small-scale works, but his attempts at grand opera, like Herodias and The Cid, just have too many dead spots and bombastic musical gimmicks).
But then, it's unfair to evaluate a lot of Grand Opera by the music alone, or even the music and the text alone. Composers like Meyerbeer and librettists like Eugene Scribe always calculated their work in terms of the effect it would make not only in the theatre in general, but in the context of a specific production at a specific opera house (the Paris Opera). The Trojans was something Berlioz wrote and then tried to get produced; William Tell is a work of pure musical integrity, almost separate from the circumstances of production; but Meyerbeer's The Huguenots or Robert the Devil hardly exist apart from the way they were produced. As Ethan Mordden puts it in The Splendid Art of Opera:
But that description touches on the facet of French Grand Opera that is at once its great strength and weakness: the Grand Opera was the true Gesamkunstwerk, a total work of art in which every aspect of the production -- music, text, direction, sets, choreography, lighting -- works toward the same end and contributes to its overall effect. Wagner invented the term Gesamkunstwerk to describe his own operas, and he certainly claimed that he was working toward a total theatre experience. But in practice, he was writing operas without any real reference to what could be done in the theatre; he wasn't able to have Rheinmaidens who could convincingly sing and "swim" at the same time, nor a dragon that looked genuinely scary. Wagner didn't even write the vocal parts with any particular reference to what could be done by real-world performers, with the result that he wrote tenor parts that no tenor in his time (and no one ever, perhaps, except Lauritz Melchior) could sing all the way through without burning out his voice by the third act. Wagner talked aboout total theatre, but really the totality of what he envisioned existed only in his mind, not in the theatre.
It was in Paris that opera was truly a full-fledged theatre experience where all the elements worked together to the same end. It was an end that Wagner scorned -- cheap sensationalism and bourgeois morality wrapped up in a package of hummable tunes -- but, like a Hollywood blockbuster of the present day, a Meyerbeer/Scribe opera used all the best available theatrical devices, including cutting-edge special effects, to make the finished product something more than just music and singing. Like a '30s musical comedy, the result doesn't necessarily look like much once you take away the original production and the original performers, but then, it wasn't meant to. And to give Robert the Devil his due, what Meyerbeer had is what Berlioz never had: a sense of exactly how his music would work in a theatrical context and how to hook an audience so completely that they'll stay with you for five hours. That's why Meyerbeer's operas were hits in a way that The Trojans never really has been -- and in a truly great production with great singers and special effects, I suspect many operagoers would enjoy those operas more than Les Troyens, even while acknowledging that Les Troyens is the greater work of art.
While The Trojans was written, as I said, in the form of a 19th century French Grand opera, with all the things that entails -- five acts; spectacular moments like the mass suicide of the Trojan women and the Royal Hunt and Storm; ballets; extensive use of the chorus; a heroic tenor role -- it wasn't actually performed as such in Berlioz's lifetime. The most common approach to the work, in the 19th century up to the late 20th century when it finally started to get into the repertoire, was to split it up and perform it as separate works: the first two acts as a self-contained work about the fall of Troy, and the last three acts as an opera about Dido and Aeneas. I actually see the point of this, and wonder if it might be a good approach to take even today; the work is very long, but more than that, there's a stylistic disconnect between the two halves. The first part, focusing on Cassandra, is almost unrelievedly gloomy and grim; it fits the subject, but it doesn't put the audience in a frame of mind to stay the full five hours or whatever. The Carthage section has more variety; this is where the Shakespearean influences start to become apparent in Berlioz's libretto, resulting in great moments like the duet for two of Aeneas's men, who scoff at all this business about destiny and leaving a nice place like Carthage just to go to Italy. Performing those three acts as a self-contained work makes a certain amount of sense, though obviously there are connections, thematic and musical, between the two halves of the work (the ultimate irony of the piece is that, in fulfilling his destiny to go to Rome and revive the destroyed culture of Troy, Aeneas has helped to destroy the culture of Carthage, converting its people from a civilized, cultured people into bloodthirsty, vengeful warmongers like the Greeks in the Troy sequence). And the whole work is bound together by the strangely "neoclassical" approach that Berlioz takes; the model, dramatic and musical, is 18th century French opera, and in particular the solemn, serious-minded mythological operas of Gluck, like Ipheginie en Tauride.
One notable thing about French Grand Opera is that the three 19th century grand operas that are generally regarded as the greatest, Rossini's William Tell, Verdi's Don Carlos, and Berlioz's The Trojans, were all failures to varying degrees. Tell came the closest to being a hit, but it was considered too big, too serious, too ambitious, and not spectacular enough to be a hit with the audience, as opposed to the critics. (The story goes that the Opera house started performing only the second act of Tell; when told about this, Rossini replied "What, the whole second act?") And even now, none of those three operas can claim to be among the most popular of all time, not compared to non-French operas that are influenced by French Grand Opera without fully being part of that form, operas like Aida and Tannhauser. Among the true Grand Operas that were big hits in their time, Halevy's La Juive and Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots get revived sometimes, and there are still diehard fans of the form, like Tom Kaufman. But if this is the spot for me to say that Grand Opera deserves a re-evaluation, I don't really think I can do it; I love a lot of French opera -- Massenet, Bizet, Offenbach, Gounod -- but the big, blockbuster grand operas tend to leave me cold, even when written by a composer I like (I love Massenet's small-scale works, but his attempts at grand opera, like Herodias and The Cid, just have too many dead spots and bombastic musical gimmicks).
But then, it's unfair to evaluate a lot of Grand Opera by the music alone, or even the music and the text alone. Composers like Meyerbeer and librettists like Eugene Scribe always calculated their work in terms of the effect it would make not only in the theatre in general, but in the context of a specific production at a specific opera house (the Paris Opera). The Trojans was something Berlioz wrote and then tried to get produced; William Tell is a work of pure musical integrity, almost separate from the circumstances of production; but Meyerbeer's The Huguenots or Robert the Devil hardly exist apart from the way they were produced. As Ethan Mordden puts it in The Splendid Art of Opera:
Compared to Rossini's masterpiece [William Tell], Robert does look overblown and nugatory, a two-ton frisbee. Meyerbeer's was an eclectic's touch. The Opera has installed an organ? Let's have a church scene. The technical staff has found another way to deploy gas light to create a mist in the air? We can use that in the ruined cloister scene. There's a tournament in the second act? We can slip another ballet in there, as a kind of appetizer for the big one in the third act -- and there, as chief defrocked nun, let's get the formidable Marie Taglioni. The tone of that act is a little too macabre, though -- let's make the second tenor a comic character, so he can sing a funny duet with the demon; that'll be sure to go over.
But that description touches on the facet of French Grand Opera that is at once its great strength and weakness: the Grand Opera was the true Gesamkunstwerk, a total work of art in which every aspect of the production -- music, text, direction, sets, choreography, lighting -- works toward the same end and contributes to its overall effect. Wagner invented the term Gesamkunstwerk to describe his own operas, and he certainly claimed that he was working toward a total theatre experience. But in practice, he was writing operas without any real reference to what could be done in the theatre; he wasn't able to have Rheinmaidens who could convincingly sing and "swim" at the same time, nor a dragon that looked genuinely scary. Wagner didn't even write the vocal parts with any particular reference to what could be done by real-world performers, with the result that he wrote tenor parts that no tenor in his time (and no one ever, perhaps, except Lauritz Melchior) could sing all the way through without burning out his voice by the third act. Wagner talked aboout total theatre, but really the totality of what he envisioned existed only in his mind, not in the theatre.
It was in Paris that opera was truly a full-fledged theatre experience where all the elements worked together to the same end. It was an end that Wagner scorned -- cheap sensationalism and bourgeois morality wrapped up in a package of hummable tunes -- but, like a Hollywood blockbuster of the present day, a Meyerbeer/Scribe opera used all the best available theatrical devices, including cutting-edge special effects, to make the finished product something more than just music and singing. Like a '30s musical comedy, the result doesn't necessarily look like much once you take away the original production and the original performers, but then, it wasn't meant to. And to give Robert the Devil his due, what Meyerbeer had is what Berlioz never had: a sense of exactly how his music would work in a theatrical context and how to hook an audience so completely that they'll stay with you for five hours. That's why Meyerbeer's operas were hits in a way that The Trojans never really has been -- and in a truly great production with great singers and special effects, I suspect many operagoers would enjoy those operas more than Les Troyens, even while acknowledging that Les Troyens is the greater work of art.
Thursday, October 28, 2004
I Lied
Another thing you can get away with on a blog is saying that something will happen, which does not subsequently happen. This could never happen in print journalism.
I still haven't had time to write anything new for this blog. I'll try to get a full-fledged post up by tomorrow.
I still haven't had time to write anything new for this blog. I'll try to get a full-fledged post up by tomorrow.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Sorry...
...For the lack of new posts; sometimes the site wasn't operational, and sometimes I wasn't operational. New stuff (about old stuff, that is) tomorrow.
Monday, October 25, 2004
More Movies, More!
Robert Harris, the movie restoration expert, has a new interview with George Feltenstein of Warner Home Video, which now owns approximately 99% of all movies ever made. Feltenstein, who has helped turn WB into probably the best studio for classic movies on DVD, has a lot of interesting things to say about restoring and releasing older movies. And on page 2 he finally gets around to the big question, namely, what's coming next year. Fortunately he mentions A Face in the Crowd as a title that's in the works, so he's cool.
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