Being Mr. Obscure
Sometimes family and friends call me “Mr. Obscure,” because my movie-watching habits, besides being obsessive and near total, tend fanatically toward films that aren’t exactly on the New Release wall at Blockbuster. This holds true whether I’m bringing home some damned foreign language thing without stars that all the PC critics have recommended, or trying to tape half a day’s programming off of TCM (you know, Turner Classic Movies) to watch later, after I’ve consumed the latest Netflix arrivals.
In this way, I can avoid getting a life while staying busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. It’s not possible to see everything, but I go through long spells of giving it a good try, interrupted just every now and then by a quasi-Zen determination to be happy with what I’ve seen so far in my life.
But I’m not to that point right now, not with TCM doing their “31 Days of Oscar” marathon (a holdover name from the century when the Academy Awards were in March). Lots of films I haven’t deigned to see yet from the vast Classic Hollywood period, and some of them pretty satisfyingly obscure, too, like Wednesday’s T-Men (1947), which is an early Anthony Mann noir about treasury agents going undercover in the mob to root out counterfeiters.
I’d recently heard it was a good film, and it was only 90 minutes, so what’s not to try? TCM was running it because it had been nominated for Best Sound Recording, their low profile theme of the day, but sometimes those lesser known technical categories yield better films than the ones everyone has an opinion about. T-Men opened pretentiously, with a lot of Classic-era propaganda about federal agents with hearts of gold laying it on the line, but when it got down to business, which 90 minute movies tend to do, it was a tough, no-nonsense thriller that showed plenty of taste for ambiguity, consistently blurring the lines between the so-called good guys and bad guys.
The pick of my week so far, however, has been the 1937 A Star Is Born, in keeping with a sudden inexplicable desire I’ve had to bone up on Frederic March, one of the all-time great American actors.
It started with a hankering to see his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) again, simply because I hadn’t seen it in several years, and I was pleased to be reminded that it’s absolutely electrifying. Not in the contemporary sense of electrifying — don’t hunt it up expecting to be scared witless, it’ll only give you a few shudders at the back of your mind — but there are other reasons for seeking out the chillers of the past.
Never mind that Rouben Mamoulian’s startling subjective camerawork is still genius; this film is a rare instance of an outstanding actor winning an Oscar for some of his best work, and an even rarer example of a major star taking home the Golden Doorstop for portraying a monster (let’s see, there’s March at the dawn of Talkies, and Anthony Hopkins for his initial interpretation of Hannibal Lecter, and that’s it, unless you count some of the semi-villains like Broderick Crawford’s Willie Stark and Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle, guys who are just too obsessed for their own good or anyone else’s).
The transformation scene in the March-Mamoulian Dr. Jekyll is certainly the best of its kind prior to An American Werewolf in London, when Rick Baker’s awesome prosthetics overtook mere nose putty. March’s Mr. Hyde is shockingly witty and frightening at the same time, the human id incarnate, a vaguely simian madman overjoyed to be set free from the cage of Jekyll’s Sunday school consciousness. When he first looks into the mirror, stretching and groaning like a wild animal waking from a post-feeding sleep and ready for more, the hostility radiates right off the TV screen and into the room with you. But March doesn’t overplay the animal nature angle, that’s what makes him scary even yet. Like Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), he suggests the connection, but the predatory instincts of his Mr. Hyde are pure human psychosis: he can’t wait to cause some pain and suffering just for the joy of it, just for the pure and mighty rush of hearing some terrified screams, his sadism remarkably evident in the way his eyes move, just under the makeup.
It’s a kind of acting that isn’t possible anymore, because filmmakers are mostly free to show any perversion without restraint, if they want to. Here, March had to show us what Mr. Hyde was thinking — without actually saying it — and really, it’s far worse than anything we could be shown because it stirs our own vengeful impulses, puts us in touch with our own evil twin. It’s not a comfortable feeling, and from where I sit that seems more artful than just throwing an attractive actress into a literal pool of blood (see The Descent from last year, which is pretty good actually).
A Star Is Born, made six years later, after the Draconian restrictions of the production code had taken effect, is also superb at suggesting a lot more than it was able to show. In it, March creates Norman Maine, a former movie star on a drunken slide to oblivion, his downfall momentarily checked when he falls in love with a waitress at a party. She is, in fact, a talented actress (played by the enchanting, diminutive Janet Gaynor) and after Norman finagles a screen test for her, she turns into an overnight sensation. It’s the original rags-to-riches-and-vice-versa story, one moves up while the other falls down, remade twice since, but in its seminal form a powerful, unsettling drama about the cruelty of show business. Star was co-written by the acerbic Dorothy Parker, one of the great, devastating wits of the era, and the script lets fly with memorable venom from the mouths of cold-hearted press agents and unforgiving producers, while Norman resumes his slide in the wake of his wife’s expanding stardom.
The film itself falls just short of being a masterpiece, but they can’t all be Guernica, where’s the fun in that? For March’s part, he nails Norman Maine’s rage at the phoniness of the Hollywood system, and the irreparable disillusion that makes him drink excessively (the thirties equivalent of drug abuse). More importantly, he gives a multi-dimensional portrait of the self-destructive man, desperate to change his ways but too mired in his own failed idealism to stop lashing out at the world, or accept the new shape that happiness has taken in his life.
The “best” part of TCM’s “31 Days of Oscar” begins today with their Best Picture Marathon, which runs seventy-two hours, from 8pm tonight (Thursday) until 8pm Sunday. With so much airtime to fill, a few of Oscar’s most embarrassing choices are naturally on the schedule, films that didn’t even stand the test of their own time like the reprehensible Gigi (1958) and Cecil B. DeMille’s laughable The Greatest Show on Earth (1952).
But if you’re in the mood to pig-out on classic magic, they’re showing a double feature of delightful Frank Capra screwball comedies on Friday morning, It Happened One Night (1934) and You Can’t Take It with You (1938); Brando’s towering breakthrough of naturalistic film acting, On the Waterfront (1954) on Saturday morning, followed by the astonishing granddaddy of all anti-war dramas All Quiet on the Western Front (1930); and wrapping it all up with Casablanca (1942) for Sunday evening dinner time.
That’s just a sample; also on hand at various times will be the original, entirely gripping Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Billy Wilder’s caustic The Lost Weekend (1945), the melancholy From Here to Eternity (1953), and for those who like a touch of art with their sloth, a Saturday afternoon David Lean marathon of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), from 1pm to 8pm, a Super Bowl of epic cinematography and wartime follies. Not without their own sense of irony, the TCM folks are re-running Frederic March’s unforgettable, drunken crashing of the Oscar party in A Star Is Born, just as the Best Picture marathon ends and this year’s Academy Awards begin on another channel.
Back to my video cocoon. Must…no…Will…see…everything…
