Showing posts with label Sullivans Travels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sullivans Travels. Show all posts
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Let My People Go
Cecil B. DeMille’s lavish, lusty spectacle of the story of Moses in two versions of “The Ten Commandments” is not the only movie view we may take in remembrance of Passover. Here is another one.
Our friend Citizen K recently posted this clip on his blog, and so, remorselessly I steal it today. It’s from the 1941 comedy “Sullivan’s Travels”, and though there is much to discuss on this film and its stars Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake at another time, this day is for this scene.
Towards the end of the film, Sullivan has found himself a miserable victim of injustice, bound helplessly to a backwater prison chain gang. In a remote rural church, the minister ends his service and prepares the congregation for a treat, an evening’s entertainment where they are to watch movies, starting off with a cartoon, on a sheet.
The prisoners in the chain gang are their invited guests. We hear the minister remind his flock to welcome the prisoners with compassion, and to take care they not display any attitude of superiority over them, so as not to hurt their feelings. We see the ragged clothes of the congregation, the plain, dim church and its rough wooden benches, and we may wonder how such poverty stricken people need to guard against feelings of superiority. Then the prisoners enter, shuffling in their chains, eyes cast downward, bone-tired and suspicious of any kindness.
The congregation saves the best seats for their guests, and led by the majestic voice of their pastor, the indomitably soulful Jess Lee Brooks, welcomes them with a song whose message cries out over the millennia, a song of enslavement, of seeking relief and justice.
Let my people go.
These descendents of African slaves sing an old song, taken from the ancient story of Jewish slaves, re-worked into one of most famous in the canon of Negro spirituals, and given as a gift to this rag-tag bunch of convicts.
The Jews of the Book of Exodus were freed by a miracle and the tenacity of a prophet. The slave forebears of this congregation were freed by a war, and the legislation it engendered. The convicts will taste a little bit of freedom tonight, laughing at a cartoon.
A rollicking slapstick comedy suddenly stops short, and soberly kisses us on the cheek with a reminder of our own humanity, and our innate human dignity, even in the oddest of the places and the lowliest of circumstances.
It is a magical scene, one of the few in Hollywood's heyday where a simple but powerful message truly transcends race or religion.
A blessed Passover then, to all who commemorate the wait, and the hope, and the blessing, and the freedom.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Slapstick to Screwball
Silent film director D. W. Griffith enthusiastically announced of this new art form, “We’ve gone beyond Babel, beyond words. We’ve found a Universal language.”
Some ten years later, Buster Keaton took a pratfall as his car was demolished by an oncoming train.
Griffith is quoted in the autobiography of one of his most famous stars, Lillian Gish, who affirms that he believed “we were taking the first tiny steps in a new glorious medium that had been predicted in The Bible and called the Universal Language. That when it could be brought to its full power, it would bring about the millennium.”
And so it came to pass that Harold Lloyd hid from bullies by crawling up inside laundry hanging from a clothesline.
Charlie Chaplin cooked and ate a boot.
And anybody in the scene took a pie in the face.
The glorious medium that Mr. Griffith had believed was predicted in the Bible and would bring about the millennium reflected almost obsessively on the common lives of common people, but with a little bit of exaggeration. Mr. Griffith specialized in drama, not comedies, and so perhaps his view of the purpose of film was a bit more serious than Mack Sennett’s. Griffith’s hope that silent films would bring about the brotherhood of man fell short of ending warfare for all time. But he was right about the universality of silent film. He was also right about predicting the success of Mack Sennett. Sennett was his protégée.
The universality of silent films was lost when sound pictures came on the scene. Even dubbing into different languages does not have the same effect of universality of meaning. Not everything translates well. Even the titles of films are changed to mean something different.
But pantomime goes beyond mere words, and in comedy films, mere pantomime found embellishment in slapstick. Slapstick evolved into the purest form of film comedy, a gag requiring only a little setup, or sometimes none at all. Afterward, nothing needed to be explained.
There had been physical comedy since the Renaissance, and some early 20th century vaudevillian stage slapstick launched the careers of some famous film comedians, but the slapstick was not so intricate, so carefully plotted, and so technically sophisticated as it became on film. With special effects, physical comedy reached its zenith on film. One could not be witty or acerbic in a silent film. Comedy could be represented successfully only in its broadest terms, and so the Keystone Kops formed a bumbling brigade that raced through the city streets, tumbling off the running boards of the “paddy wagon.”
In yet another ten years, Laurel and Hardy were taking a piano up a flight up stairs, dropping it and being run over by it as they ushered slapstick into sound film. However, sound allowed slapstick to meld into screwball. The dinosaur skeleton model may have tumbled into a heap in “Bringing Up Baby,” (1938) but the film is as much noted for its banter between Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant as for the tear in the back of her dress at the party.
Carole Lombard’s comic prattle in “My Man Godfrey” (1935) begins to overshadow her talents at physical comedy, and all the pratfalls taken in “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941) take a back seat to Preston Sturges’ witty script. Witty could be just as silly as slipping on a banana peel, but it required more understanding. Never again would comedy be so simple, and so universally understood.
If Mr. Griffith was right about silent films being the Universal Language, then pantomime was its grammar. Slapstick was its exclamation point.
This entry is also part of the Film of the Year Slapstick Blog-A-Thon. Please visit this site and the other blogs taking part for more on slapstick comedy.
Some ten years later, Buster Keaton took a pratfall as his car was demolished by an oncoming train.
Griffith is quoted in the autobiography of one of his most famous stars, Lillian Gish, who affirms that he believed “we were taking the first tiny steps in a new glorious medium that had been predicted in The Bible and called the Universal Language. That when it could be brought to its full power, it would bring about the millennium.”
And so it came to pass that Harold Lloyd hid from bullies by crawling up inside laundry hanging from a clothesline.
Charlie Chaplin cooked and ate a boot.
And anybody in the scene took a pie in the face.
The glorious medium that Mr. Griffith had believed was predicted in the Bible and would bring about the millennium reflected almost obsessively on the common lives of common people, but with a little bit of exaggeration. Mr. Griffith specialized in drama, not comedies, and so perhaps his view of the purpose of film was a bit more serious than Mack Sennett’s. Griffith’s hope that silent films would bring about the brotherhood of man fell short of ending warfare for all time. But he was right about the universality of silent film. He was also right about predicting the success of Mack Sennett. Sennett was his protégée.
The universality of silent films was lost when sound pictures came on the scene. Even dubbing into different languages does not have the same effect of universality of meaning. Not everything translates well. Even the titles of films are changed to mean something different.
But pantomime goes beyond mere words, and in comedy films, mere pantomime found embellishment in slapstick. Slapstick evolved into the purest form of film comedy, a gag requiring only a little setup, or sometimes none at all. Afterward, nothing needed to be explained.
There had been physical comedy since the Renaissance, and some early 20th century vaudevillian stage slapstick launched the careers of some famous film comedians, but the slapstick was not so intricate, so carefully plotted, and so technically sophisticated as it became on film. With special effects, physical comedy reached its zenith on film. One could not be witty or acerbic in a silent film. Comedy could be represented successfully only in its broadest terms, and so the Keystone Kops formed a bumbling brigade that raced through the city streets, tumbling off the running boards of the “paddy wagon.”
In yet another ten years, Laurel and Hardy were taking a piano up a flight up stairs, dropping it and being run over by it as they ushered slapstick into sound film. However, sound allowed slapstick to meld into screwball. The dinosaur skeleton model may have tumbled into a heap in “Bringing Up Baby,” (1938) but the film is as much noted for its banter between Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant as for the tear in the back of her dress at the party.
Carole Lombard’s comic prattle in “My Man Godfrey” (1935) begins to overshadow her talents at physical comedy, and all the pratfalls taken in “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941) take a back seat to Preston Sturges’ witty script. Witty could be just as silly as slipping on a banana peel, but it required more understanding. Never again would comedy be so simple, and so universally understood.
If Mr. Griffith was right about silent films being the Universal Language, then pantomime was its grammar. Slapstick was its exclamation point.
This entry is also part of the Film of the Year Slapstick Blog-A-Thon. Please visit this site and the other blogs taking part for more on slapstick comedy.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
All Aboard - Trains in the Movies
The movies began with “The Great Train Robbery,” (1903) a film that lasted all of ten minutes and gave birth to our fascination with the flickers. It also began a relationship that blossomed in Hollywood’s heyday of trains and the movies.
“It’s a taxi!” Audrey Hepburn incredulously remarks to Gregory Peck in “Roman Holiday” (1953), because she has never ridden in one before, to which he sarcastically replies, “It’s not the Super Chief.”
The Chief and the Super Chief brought many actors to Hollywood, and the Super Chief was featured in the film, “Three for Bedroom C” (1952), but many, many films contained a scene or two on the “magic carpet made of steel” about which Arlo Guthrie later sang.
Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake hop a boxcar as pretend hoboes in “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941). Later they get to leap off the moving train. The Three Stooges enjoy slightly better accommodations in “Movie Maniacs” (1935) where their boxcar carries furniture and props bound for Hollywood. They sleep in a large bed, and Curly cooks their breakfast on a working stove. Despite the usual nonsense of the Stooges, Moe gets to say the most sensible thing anybody probably said in the old movies. Curly asks, “How we gonna get in pictures? We know nothing about movies.” To which Moe replies, “There’s a couple thousand people in pictures don’t know nothing about it. Three more won’t make any difference.”
“White Christmas” (1954) includes a famous scene of the four principals, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Danny Kaye, and Vera Ellen in a dinning car traveling from Florida to Vermont as they sing about “Snow.” Director Michael Curtiz transforms a static scene to one of seeming Busby Berkley-like movement as they turn a handkerchief, a napkin, and some parsley into a snow-covered hill, with quick shots on all their faces and we see their booth from several angles. It is the most movement in a musical number you could get with all the actors sitting down.
“Since You Went Away” (1944) (see blog entry April 19, 2007 ) of course has the famous scene of Jennifer Jones chasing after the train as she bids goodbye to her boyfriend, but there is a quieter, more meaningful scene in the film as the mother and daughters travel wearily in an overcrowded train at night. We see several servicemen on board, including an amputee. We see refugees, including a young European girl who describes their destitution living under Nazi occupation, and she shudders as the conductor walks by because he is wearing a uniform.
Here Claudette Colbert and Jennifer Jones talk with the elderly woman who tells them her granddaughter was a nurse at Corregidor. The train gives us a sense of being moved along, without our will, to some unknown destiny, and a claustrophobic sense of camaraderie.
A train provides the plot device of a woman pretending to be 12 so that she won’t be charged the price of an adult fare in “The Major and the Minor” (1942), a solution which Ginger Rogers then has difficulty extricating herself from for much of the film.
When “The Thin Man Goes Home” (1944), he goes home on a train, but their dog Asta is caught protruding from Myrna Loy’s coat and must be sent back to the baggage room.
A train provides the honeymoon to Niagara Falls and a musical number from the upper and lower berths of a sleeping car in “42nd Street” (1933) as we “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.”
Joseph Cotten attempts to kill Teresa Wright in “Shadow of Doubt” (1943) (see blog entry: July 2, 2007) by shoving her off a train, with unexpected results.
Trains had the unusual juxtaposition of both being the everyday workhorses of our society back then, and at the same time, representing glamour and freedom from the everyday.
They could also show us the modern technology of our world at the time, or they could open a window onto the nostalgic past, such as in the number, “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” sung by Judy Garland and cast on the train platform, from “The Harvey Girls” (1946).
Can you think of other train scenes?
That’s all for this week. See you Monday.
“It’s a taxi!” Audrey Hepburn incredulously remarks to Gregory Peck in “Roman Holiday” (1953), because she has never ridden in one before, to which he sarcastically replies, “It’s not the Super Chief.”
The Chief and the Super Chief brought many actors to Hollywood, and the Super Chief was featured in the film, “Three for Bedroom C” (1952), but many, many films contained a scene or two on the “magic carpet made of steel” about which Arlo Guthrie later sang.
Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake hop a boxcar as pretend hoboes in “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941). Later they get to leap off the moving train. The Three Stooges enjoy slightly better accommodations in “Movie Maniacs” (1935) where their boxcar carries furniture and props bound for Hollywood. They sleep in a large bed, and Curly cooks their breakfast on a working stove. Despite the usual nonsense of the Stooges, Moe gets to say the most sensible thing anybody probably said in the old movies. Curly asks, “How we gonna get in pictures? We know nothing about movies.” To which Moe replies, “There’s a couple thousand people in pictures don’t know nothing about it. Three more won’t make any difference.”
“White Christmas” (1954) includes a famous scene of the four principals, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Danny Kaye, and Vera Ellen in a dinning car traveling from Florida to Vermont as they sing about “Snow.” Director Michael Curtiz transforms a static scene to one of seeming Busby Berkley-like movement as they turn a handkerchief, a napkin, and some parsley into a snow-covered hill, with quick shots on all their faces and we see their booth from several angles. It is the most movement in a musical number you could get with all the actors sitting down.
“Since You Went Away” (1944) (see blog entry April 19, 2007 ) of course has the famous scene of Jennifer Jones chasing after the train as she bids goodbye to her boyfriend, but there is a quieter, more meaningful scene in the film as the mother and daughters travel wearily in an overcrowded train at night. We see several servicemen on board, including an amputee. We see refugees, including a young European girl who describes their destitution living under Nazi occupation, and she shudders as the conductor walks by because he is wearing a uniform.
Here Claudette Colbert and Jennifer Jones talk with the elderly woman who tells them her granddaughter was a nurse at Corregidor. The train gives us a sense of being moved along, without our will, to some unknown destiny, and a claustrophobic sense of camaraderie.
A train provides the plot device of a woman pretending to be 12 so that she won’t be charged the price of an adult fare in “The Major and the Minor” (1942), a solution which Ginger Rogers then has difficulty extricating herself from for much of the film.
When “The Thin Man Goes Home” (1944), he goes home on a train, but their dog Asta is caught protruding from Myrna Loy’s coat and must be sent back to the baggage room.
A train provides the honeymoon to Niagara Falls and a musical number from the upper and lower berths of a sleeping car in “42nd Street” (1933) as we “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.”
Joseph Cotten attempts to kill Teresa Wright in “Shadow of Doubt” (1943) (see blog entry: July 2, 2007) by shoving her off a train, with unexpected results.
Trains had the unusual juxtaposition of both being the everyday workhorses of our society back then, and at the same time, representing glamour and freedom from the everyday.
They could also show us the modern technology of our world at the time, or they could open a window onto the nostalgic past, such as in the number, “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” sung by Judy Garland and cast on the train platform, from “The Harvey Girls” (1946).
Can you think of other train scenes?
That’s all for this week. See you Monday.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Five Films from 1941
Five films from 1941, and I think the top five are, in no special order:
“Citizen Kane”
“The Little Foxes”
“The Maltese Falcon”
“Meet John Doe”
“Sullivan’s Travels”
Some of them were nominated for Best Picture, some had acting and best supporting acting nominations (“The Little Foxes” leads in nominations) but interestingly, none took home any Academy Awards, save for Best Original Screenplay for “Citizen Kane.”
Shuffling the hand allows us to examine them a bit as individuals and groups. “Citizen Kane” stands out, as it always has for film historians, as being a maverick in innovation of cinema technique. However, only star Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten get to do any real acting, and most of that is aging.
“The Little Foxes” and “The Maltese Falcon” give us the acting. “The Little Foxes," taken from Lillian Hellman’s smash Broadway play gives us a literate view of a nasty family stabbing each other in the back, and “The Maltese Falcon” gives us a less than literate view of a collection of low-lifes also stabbing each other in the back. Unlike the technical tricks of “Citizen Kane,” these films show that if you throw a bunch of great actors together in a room, there’s not much else for them to do but act. And stab each other in the back.
“Meet John Doe” and “Sullivan’s Travels” can likewise be lumped together as road pictures, featuring social commentary on the common man and what the common man does best: be optimistic as possible while being as downtrodden as 90 minutes of screen time allows.
Welles, Wyler, Huston, Capra and Sturges, five of the best directors of their day, give us these films. “The Maltese Falcon” introduces us to film noir, and “Sullivan’s Travels” can be called the Last Movie of the Great Depression. Though World War II had been going on without the US for a couple of years, none of these films brings America to the battlefield. We’re clearly not quite ready for that yet. The past, as in “The Little Foxes” and “Citizen Kane” have too strong a hold on us, and the present, as represented in the other films, is engrossing. The war was our future, and we knew it, and it evidently must have been unimaginable.
(This post is also found on the Top 5 writing project of www.problogger.net.)
“Citizen Kane”
“The Little Foxes”
“The Maltese Falcon”
“Meet John Doe”
“Sullivan’s Travels”
Some of them were nominated for Best Picture, some had acting and best supporting acting nominations (“The Little Foxes” leads in nominations) but interestingly, none took home any Academy Awards, save for Best Original Screenplay for “Citizen Kane.”
Shuffling the hand allows us to examine them a bit as individuals and groups. “Citizen Kane” stands out, as it always has for film historians, as being a maverick in innovation of cinema technique. However, only star Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten get to do any real acting, and most of that is aging.
“The Little Foxes” and “The Maltese Falcon” give us the acting. “The Little Foxes," taken from Lillian Hellman’s smash Broadway play gives us a literate view of a nasty family stabbing each other in the back, and “The Maltese Falcon” gives us a less than literate view of a collection of low-lifes also stabbing each other in the back. Unlike the technical tricks of “Citizen Kane,” these films show that if you throw a bunch of great actors together in a room, there’s not much else for them to do but act. And stab each other in the back.
“Meet John Doe” and “Sullivan’s Travels” can likewise be lumped together as road pictures, featuring social commentary on the common man and what the common man does best: be optimistic as possible while being as downtrodden as 90 minutes of screen time allows.
Welles, Wyler, Huston, Capra and Sturges, five of the best directors of their day, give us these films. “The Maltese Falcon” introduces us to film noir, and “Sullivan’s Travels” can be called the Last Movie of the Great Depression. Though World War II had been going on without the US for a couple of years, none of these films brings America to the battlefield. We’re clearly not quite ready for that yet. The past, as in “The Little Foxes” and “Citizen Kane” have too strong a hold on us, and the present, as represented in the other films, is engrossing. The war was our future, and we knew it, and it evidently must have been unimaginable.
(This post is also found on the Top 5 writing project of www.problogger.net.)
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