Cultural Decay: The Trailer for Peter Rabbit

Longtime readers of The Jade Sphinx know of our longstanding love for children’s literature. Now, Beatrix Potter’s classic tales of Peter Rabbit have been adapted into a new, animated film. Here is the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pa_Weidt08.

Since this simply beggars description, I will simply remain silent.

Bill Cunningham New York, a Film by Richard Press (2011)

Photographer Bill Cunningham (born 1929) loves clothes.  He initially started as a hat maker, a trade he happily plied until he was drafted.  Back in his civvies, he worked as a fashion photographer until he grew unhappy with the demands upon his vision and editorial policies that he saw as unkind to average people who wore designer clothes.  Without regret, he left for different (if not greener) pastures.

Instead, he started taking pictures of New Yorkers as they were on the street – a fascinating record of how Gothamites have dressed and looked since 1978.  His New York Times column, On The Street, is a weekly collection of the trends or looks he noted each week, for which he also does the layout and a brief commentary.

Filmmaker Richard Press created a documentary about this illusive figure in 2011, Bill Cunningham New York.  The film tracked Cunningham breezing through Manhattan on bicycle and living in his tiny apartment in the Carnegie Hall building – an apartment with no closet, kitchen or private bathroom.  The apartment was furnished only with filing cabinets (holding hundreds of thousands of his photographs), a mattress propped up on some books and boxes, and many books.  Cunningham lived there happily until the Carnegie Hall Corporation evicted him in 2010 – an artist, a living New York institution, and a man well into his 80s.  Think of that the next time you want to spend your hard-earned ticket money.

Cunningham, who never married, lives a life of Spartan simplicity.  His home is, for the most part, on the streets of New York.  Cunningham is not interested in celebrities, models or people paid to wear the latest fashions.  His art is akin to stealth warfare – he sneaks onto the teeming streets of New York, gets his shots, and retreats to the Times to do his column.  His has very little life other than this.

Though Press’ film does an admirable job of shedding light on Cunningham and his life, the artist’s natural reticence renders him a somewhat opaque figure – even his closest friends know little of his private life.  In the few instances in the film where Cunningham is asked direct questions, his answers are more evasive than luminous.  In the final analysis, Cunningham comes across as a sad, rather stunted man.  His palpable sense of joy at both photography and clothes is a delight – but other than that sense of freedom and joy, there seems to be little else to him.

Disquieting too is the New York depicted in the documentary.  We are given snippets of commentary from people as diverse as Tom Wolfe (born 1931), Anna Wintour (born 1949),  Patrick McDonald (who strikes us as rather ridiculous), Kenny Kenny (who seems to be some kind of drag performer), and Harold Koda (1950) – and Your Correspondent’s takeaway is that New York is rather a squalid, provincial, intellectually challenged little burgh.  The City of this documentary seems insular, incurious, uninteresting and rather dirty. 

Now, despite its fecundity, New York is a blank canvas – people mostly see what they bring to it, and not how it really is.  I think the problem for me is that this is not my New York and, frankly, the idea of being stuck in this version fills me with something akin to dread.

Still, for people who have a taste for big city street vibes, New York eccentrics, the world of fashion or even the triumph of free spirits, then Bill Cunningham New York is a safe viewing bet.  It’s available at Amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble nationwide.

What I Did For Love: House on Haunted Hill

Writer Toby Roan – master of the 50 Westerns From the Fifties blog – invited various bloggers to write about films made by, or distributed through, Allied Artists.  Most of the films distributed through AA were, to put it politely, junk.  AA distributed hoards of Bowery Boys films, cut-rate Charlie Chan mysteries, Bomba the Jungle Boy flicks (a particular favorite here at The Jade Sphinx), and a seeming endless stream of westerns.

I’m sure Marshall Roan was hoping for a saddlebag full of westerns for his blogathon; and, knowing my love of westerns, it would only make sense that I comply.  So … to be utterly contrary, I decided to look at a horror film instead (!), starring arts-advocate and Renaissance Man Vincent Price (1911-1993).

There are movies that all of us saw in our childhood that we have returned to again and again.  One movie that I have been looking at all of my life is House on Haunted Hill (1959).  I am not blind (nor immune) to the many faults of this picture.  The screenplay makes almost no sense – and even less sense once everything is “explained.”  (It doesn’t even possess much of the internal logic necessary for the suspension of disbelief.)  The pacing is at times dodgy.  The special effects aren’t cheesy as much as they are silly. 

It is … irresistible.  I recently re-viewed this film before writing this piece, and just thinking about it inspires me to fire-up the DVD player once again.

The plot, briefly, is this:  eccentric millionaire Frederick Loren (Price) invites five strangers to a “haunted house” party he is throwing to amuse his fourth wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart).  He promises the survivors (or their heirs) $10,000 if they stay the night – the doors will be locked at midnight, and it would be impossible to get in or out of the house.

The five guests include newspaper columnist Ruth Bridges (Julie Mitchum, who is terrific), test pilot Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), Loren’s employee Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig, who screams fetchingly), and the house’s owner, Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook). 

Of course, there are all kinds of wonderful spook-show shenanigans.  Annabelle hangs herself (or does she?); Nora finds a severed head in her luggage (no TSA in those days); Schroeder is taken out of the action with a blow to the noggin in a dark closet; and Watson slowly gets drunker and drunker while warning everyone that they will die horribly before the night is out.  And did I mention there was a vat of acid in the basement?

House on Haunted Hill was produced and directed by the legendary William Castle (1914-1977).  Castle specialized in budget horror and suspense thrillers; but the real key to his peculiar genius was in marketing his films.  The Tingler (1959), about a lobster-like monster that … sort of tingles you to death, premiered in theaters wired with vibrating chairs.  The process was called Percepto – and Your Correspondent saw a revival of The Tingler at New York’s Film Forum, complete with vibrating chairs.  I still haven’t recovered.  His film 13 Ghosts (1960) included special red and blue glasses to see the ghosts.  Mr. Sardonicus (1961) allowed viewers to vote on the fate of the film’s villain.

House on Haunted Hill had as its gimmick a process called Emergo – where things actually come out of the screen.  At the key moment of the climax when a skeleton menaces one of the protagonists, a cardboard skeleton came out via a clothesline in select theaters.  I saw that at Film Forum as well, where the audience hooted in delirious derision, throwing popcorn and jujubes at the skeleton.  Take that, The Force Awakens.

There is no reason for this stuff to work, but it does.  Part of it is the performances, which are unusually fine.  Ohmart, as Price’s evil, ice-queen bride, is simply fabulous.  Sexy, scheming, clearly intelligent and purring like an over-fed cat, Ohmart delivers work that would not be out of place in a bigger-budget film noir.  Speaking of film noir, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe’s friend Elisha Cook performs with an admirable amount of intense terror – this is a man drinking himself into stupefaction because any other option is too horrifying to contemplate. Cook plays hysteria without ever becoming a cartoon, and it reminds us that he was actually a terrific actor with the right material.  Mitchum adds wonderful support as the sophisticated (but tough) newspaper columnist.  See this film and wonder … why wasn’t this woman a bigger star?

Vincent Price, however, completely owns House on Haunted Hill.  Though he had made horror pictures before (including House of Wax and The Fly), this is the film where Price finally honed his screen persona.  Tongue planted firmly in cheek, this is mischievous villainy; one could say that he served his nastiness on wry.  It’s not that Price delivers a camp performance (and, though that charge has been leveled against him, he never really did); but, rather, Price had a genius for making the audience complicit with him.  Price was a heavy who twinkled, and he carried out his most evil machinations on the balls of his feet.

He uses all of his many gifts to great effect here.  His silken, velvety voice brings the right touch of ironic menace to such lines as, “these miniature coffins were my wife’s idea – she’s so amusing;” or, my favorite, “remember the fun we had the night you poisoned me.”  In addition to his voice, he uses his imposing height, his infallible sense of comedic timing, and his look of blasé sophistication.  It really wasn’t until this film that he fully owned his own screen persona, and watching Vincent Price blossom is the chief delight of House on Haunted Hill.

Somehow, House on Haunted Hill has fallen into the public domain, and can be seen readily online.  Here is a Youtube link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwhfqgzsuVU.  Spend an hour and fifteen minutes at The House on Haunted Hill.  You won’t be disappointed.

The Party (1968)

I had so much fun reading American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny, by Christopher Miller, that I decided to briefly write about some of my favorite comedies.  So it was a double bit of serendipity to learn that the 1968 cult hit The Party recently made its way to Blu-Ray and DVD.  If you have not seen this film – and it’s unlikely that you have – get yourself a copy.  You will not be disappointed.

The Party is the only collaboration between Peter Sellers (1925-1980) and director Blake Edwards (1922-2010) that was not a Pink Panther film.  In fact, after shooting the second Panther film, the hilarious A Shot in the Dark (1964), both men vowed never to work with one-another again.

Edwards then conceived a film that would be a tribute to the great silent clowns of his boyhood.  According to Edwards, his childhood was largely an unhappy one, save for the moments of transcendence afforded by such clowns as Buster Keaton (1895-1966) and Harold Lloyd (1893-1971).  He often allowed this silent-screen era slapstick sensibility to creep into his work (look, for instance, at the epic pie fight in The Great Race), but a strictly silent film was a challenge he wanted to set for himself.

Always contemptuous of the Hollywood scene, Edwards conceived of a silent film about an incompetent and accident-prone actor, blackballed by Hollywood but inadvertently invited to a swanky soiree where he wreaks havoc.  The initial screenplay was little more than 60 pages long, and was mostly the set-up for gags that would be improvised on the set.

But who would star in it?

After much internal debate, Edwards decided to bring the project to Sellers, who instantly fell in love with it.  Edwards encouraged Sellers to create a character – a fish out of water who was basically decent, but inherently accident-prone.  Out of whole cloth, Sellers fashioned Hrundi V. Bakshi, the world’s worst actor.  The Party opens with Sellers as Bakshi starring in desert opus Son of Gunga Din, ruining take-after-take and unexpectedly demolishing the key standing set. 

However, his ends up on a party list rather than a kill-list, and from that simple premise, Edwards and his cast improvised the movie, shooting in sequence to ensure that the story flowed properly.

The Party is a remarkable film for its time, and for ours, as well.  The story is so lose and improvisatory, and the narrative arc, such as it is, so fluid that one could easily mistake it for a French comedy of the era.  That Edwards was able to get away with such a high-cost gamble is quite an achievement, and it seems unlikely that something similar would happen again today (unless it involved ray guns or superheroes). 

In addition, it is, for all intents and purposes, a silent film.  Though there is dialog, very little of it moves the story forward, and most of it would take up some three single-spaced pages of text.  It’s not surprising that so many people have been either confounded or disappointed in The Party; it’s the world’s only all-talking silent movie. 

The root of its genius is that both Edwards and Sellers understood on a deep and profound level physical comedy.  They were able to mine gold from simple set-ups.  Here is perhaps my favorite sequence in the film:  Bakshi desperately needs to relieve himself, and finally finding a lavatory, struggles with his environment:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tByH1uM_fnI.

The film resided in limbo for a while, never really finding its audience.  I was lucky enough to see it on late-night television in my boyhood before it seemed to vanish completely.  Since its release, it has acquired something of a cult following, with many ardents of both Sellers and Edwards championing it as their best film.  We wouldn’t go quite that far, but it is something very special, off-the-beaten-track, and splendidly funny.

Happily, Sellers is surrounded by a talented supporting cast.  Special kudos must go to Steve Franken (1932 – 2012) as the drunken waiter – who nearly steals the film with hardly a word spoken.  Franken was a familiar face in both movies and television, and this film will make you wonder why he was never a bigger star.  His comedic timing is flawless, and one wishes a follow-up movie would be built around his character.  Former screen Tarzan Denny Miller (1934 –2014) is especially fetching as cowboy-western star “Wyoming Bill” Kelso, and J. Edward McKinley (1917 – 2004) as the host deadpans superbly.

Fans of period cinema would find much to savor, as well.  Few films scream a 1960s sensibility more than The Party.  Its Henry Mancini (1924-1994) score will either charm or repel you; in addition, the romantic lead is Claudine Longet (born 1942), who is one of the great mysteries of the 1960s.  Quite popular as a singer and actress, she has evaporated into well-deserved obscurity.  Why was she so popular?

Though not to all tastes, The Party comes highly recommended.

Who Is Your Santa, Part II: Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

For many of us, our first movie experience of Santa Claus is in the holiday classic, Miracle on 34^th Street (1947).  This film has been heralded as a classic for a variety of reasons – its sweet and humane nature, its wonderful performances, and its simple message of faith.  It was written and directed by George Seaton (1911-1979), who also wrote for the Marx Brothers and provided the voice of the radio’s Lone Ranger, and was based on a story by Valentine Davies (1905-1961). 

For those who came in late – Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) comes to New York to see if there are any vestiges of the Christmas Spirit to be found in then-contemporary America.  She gets a job “playing” Santa at Macy’s – where he sends customers to other stores if it is in their best interest.

He also becomes involved with Macy’s employee Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara), a divorcee raising her daughter Susan (Natalie Wood).  Walker is a hard-headed realist; not only doesn’t she believe in Santa Claus, but thinks Susan should not clutter her head with irrelevant intangibles. 

Santa playing himself at Macy’s turns out to be a tremendous coup for the store, and Kris takes a spare room in the apartment of Fred Gailey (John Payne), Walker’s beau.  Before long, people come to doubt Kringle’s sanity, and he is put on trail in Manhattan court.  Gailey comes to his defense, and this leads to a great deal of wrangling over the questions of reality, of sanity and the nature of the Christmas Spirit by the Judge, (Gene Lockhart), the District Attorney (Jerome Cowan) and the Judge’s political advisor (William Frawley).

By any critical yardstick, Miracle on 34^th Street is a magnificent picture.  Gwenn won the Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, and the film captured Oscars for Best Writing/Original Story for Valentine Davies and Best Writing/Screenplay for George Seaton.  Though nominated for best picture, it lost to Gentleman’s Agreement – yet another instance of the good folks at the Academy getting it wrong.

There are many reasons the film works so well on so many levels.  First off, the performances are spot on.  Not just Gwenn (1877-1959), O’Hara (born 1920) and Wood (1938-1981), but the other supporting cast, as well.  Payne (1912-1989) plays the honest lawyer hero as an American Everyman, a type that was recognizable in countless films of the era, but now gone thanks to the corrosive effects of multiculturalism.  His easy charm, sense of decency and commitment to ‘the little guy’ were all tropes of what it meant to be an American Everyman, and it’s a delight to watch him. 

However, for your correspondent, the best performances were from supporting players Lockhart (1891-1957), Cowan (1897-1972) and Frawley (1887-1966).  Lockhart, as a decent judge in an uncomfortable position, is a joy to watch – in fact, he elicits our deepest sympathy.  Cowan, as the hard-bitten DA, is a delight.  This fine actor was in countless movies of the era (for example, as Humphrey Bogart’s partner in The Maltese Falcon), and his breezy playing and city-slicker veneer are superb.  However, acting honors must go to Frawley, as the Judge’s advisor.  An old New York type not seen anymore, Frawley is an operator and wise guy.  Here, for example, is Frawley and Lockhart before a possible ruling on Santa’s sanity:

Frawley: All right, you go back and tell them that the New York State Supreme Court rules there’s no Santa Claus.  It’s all over the papers. The kids read it and they don’t hang up their stockings.  Now what happens to all the toys that are supposed to be in those stockings?  Nobody buys them.  The toy manufacturers are going to like that; so they have to lay off a lot of their employees, union employees.  Now you got the CIO and the AF of L against you and they’re going to adore you for it and they’re going to say it with votes.  Oh, and the department stores are going to love you too and the Christmas card makers and the candy companies. Ho ho. Henry, you’re going to be an awful popular fella.  And what about the Salvation Army?  Why, they got a Santa Claus on every corner, and they’re taking a fortune.  But you go ahead Henry, you do it your way.  You go on back in there and tell them that you rule there is no Santy Claus. Go on. But if you do, remember this: you can count on getting just two votes, your own and that district attorney’s out there.

Lockhart: The District Attorney’s a Republican.

And that, more than anything, I think, is why this film works so wonderfully well.  It’s not just a warm-hearted fantasy, it’s a hard-bitten screwball comedy.  Screwball, in the 1930s and 1940s, was a delicate mixture of the sentimental and the cynical.  One could not overwhelm the other, but both must be present in the brew.  In fact, it’s important to remember that no Christmas miracle rides in to save the day.  Rather, harried New York postal workers (at one time, it seems that they actually did something), send their Santa letters in the dead letter office to Kringle at the courthouse simply to get rid of them, and a grateful Judge finds that sufficient to acquit Kringle while still saving face.  Or, if you would … a cynical miracle.

Even better, Seaton’s screenplay is written in that delicious – and vanished – American idiom of the time.  That patois had a distinct, rat-a-tat-tat rhythm, and anyone listening can catch the cadence in classic screwball comedies.  American English, like American movies and music and radio and fiction of the time, had a distinct voice – breezy, confident, smart-alecky and down-to-earth.  We lost that rhythmic poetry in the 1960s, when we seemed to lose so much of our national identity along with everything else, but it is one of our great contributions to language.  (My favorite line?  This: But maybe he's only a little crazy... like painters or composers... or some of those men in Washington…)

As Alfred, the janitor at Macy’s laments, Yeah, there's a lot of bad 'isms' floatin' around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism.  Make a buck, make a buck. Even in Brooklyn it's the same - don't care what Christmas stands for, just make a buck, make a buck.  What Miracle on 34^th Street says is that even in this jaded, cynical and commercial world in which we find ourselves, intangible mysteries surround us.  And if a bunch of hard-boiled Gothamites believe… so should you.

Tomorrow: The Santa Claus of William Joyce!

Don’t Believe What You Hear: The Lone Ranger is Quite Terrific

So, it’s time to admit something of my age and say that I grew up during the great Nostalgia Craze of the 1970s.  The Marx Brothers were heroes on college campuses around the country, W.C. Fields was cultural touchstone, interest in vintage films and television seemed inexhaustible, and people reconnected with the glories of the Golden Age of Radio.

And not just adults!  No, in the 1970s just as many teenagers could identify Bela Lugosi or Myrna Loy as could hum lyrics from The Rolling Stones or The Bay City Rollers.  This sense that Pop Americana was a smorgasbord from which we could pick the most tasty morsels is all but dead – many of my students would rather be skinned alive than watch a black-and-white film, and the current zeitgeist demands that anything “old” (that is, prior to about 1980) is somehow “camp.”

The one anomaly to this current dismissal of Pop Culture Past is the fetishizing of superheroes – figures that actually pre-date the grandfathers of most contemporary film-goers.  So it is completely understandable that Disney would bankroll a big-budget retelling of one of the grandest myths of the Great American Century, The Lone Ranger.

The Lone Ranger was created by writer Fran Striker (1903-1962), first appearing in 1933 on radio station WXYZ, owned by George W. Trendle (1884-1972).  Trendle later claimed credit for creating the Ranger, which is not surprising considering how successful the program became.  The show was an enormous hit – it was geared towards kids, but more than half of the audience was made up of adults.  The radio show would last until 1954, and moved to television show from 1949 to 1957.  The Lone Ranger was also the subject of two movie serials, three motion pictures, and one execrable TV movie.  He was also fodder for writers and marketing-empire-builders, with eight novels by Striker, countless comic books and Big-Little-Books, and toys and games beyond number. 

These fueled the daydreams of countless boys.  I came across the Ranger myself when I was 10 or so and the local radio station, WRVR.FM, started a series of weekly radio rebroadcast five nights a week: Gangbusters, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Shadow, The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet.  I loved them all – and was hooked on the Ranger for life.

Though the mythos has often been tweaked over the past 80 years, the basic origin of the Lone Ranger remains the same.  He was one of a band of Texas Rangers who were ambushed in Bryant’s Gap by the notorious Butch Cavendish gang.  All the other rangers died in the attack; their bodies found by an American Indian named Tonto.

Tonto buried all of the rangers, and also made a fake grave for the surviving ranger, so that Butch and other bad men of the West would not seek him out and finish the job.  As Tonto said, “you only ranger left; you Lone Ranger.”

This is – essentially – the story that the new Lone Ranger film sets out to tell.  As my readers probably know by now, the film has been a colossal bomb for Disney, rivaling last year’s disaster that was John Carter (based on the John Carter of Mars novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs).

However, we here at The Jade Sphinx (let me break this gently) absolutely loved John Carter.  It was a thrilling evocation of all that was great about American pulp fiction.  Surely the Disney’s Long Ranger could not be all bad?

In short, it’s not.  It is something of a glorious mess; there is so much going on, and it is a rich and interesting film, asking more questions and demanding more imagination than the average summer junk film.  If anything, it’s a film crammed with too many ideas rather than just bland CGI action effects. It is faithful to the overall ideals of the Lone Ranger mythos, but also effectively transgressive. Though it will not be to everyone’s taste, I recommend it highly, despite its many failings.

Where to begin?  The film opens in 1933 at a carnival, where a child obsessed with the radio Lone Ranger finds the now-ancient Tonto (Johnny Depp, in the most interesting performance of his career) in the sideshow.  Tonto, in his dotage, initially thinks the boy is the Ranger himself, but, once he is set right, tells the boy the story of how he and the Lone Ranger came to be.

However, the story, in the telling, is full of holes and frankly incredible incidents of Native American mysticism.  Is the old Indian lying…?  Or is this how he remembers it?  Or does he simply imagine it all?  The film never fully answers these questions, and the viewer is invited to decide for himself.

In this telling, Cavendish (a vile-looking William Fitchner) is not only an outlaw, he’s in the pay of an unscrupulous railroad executive.  These Big Business interests are supported by the US military, and the whole fetid stew of corporatism, the military and organized crime connive to blame the Indians for various depredations as an excuse for moving them from their land to make way for the railroad.  (As one of the chief tells the Ranger before his group is decimated by a Gatling gun, “we are ghosts already.”)

Before John Reid (Armie Hammer) becomes the Lone Ranger, he is a young district attorney, ready to bring the rule of law to the West.  His brother (a convincing James Badge Dale) is a Texas Ranger on the trail of Cavendish, and the brothers are together during a horrific ambush, leaving all the rangers dead, except for our hero.  In an especially gruesome touch, Cavendish is part cannibal, eating a piece of his victims.  He munches on the heart of the Lone Ranger’s brother before making his escape.

Much of the humor of the film is found in how the Ranger and Tonto learn to work as a team – yes, it is a buddy movie, as well, with all that entails.  Hammer’s Ranger is the ultimate square – like Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he’s a by-the-book law-and-order type, who believes that law and justice are the same things.  He is uncomfortable outside of his frame of reference, and he is all too often incompetent at heroics.  In fact, Tonto thinks that the Ranger’s brother would’ve been much more effective as an avenger, and claims that kemo sabe means “the wrong brother.”  Hammer and Depp work wonderfully well together, but the comedy is too forced, and the jokey banter between the two of them hurts the overall tone of the film.

In fact, tone seems to be the main problem of The Lone Ranger.  By turns The Lone Ranger is a serious revenge picture, buddy comedy, meditation on the corrupt complicity of the military and Big Business, an action spectacle and a damnation of this nation’s treatment of its indigenous peoples.  There are needless plot points (there are two sequences with Helena Bonham Carter as a wooden-legged madam with a gun in her heel that can excised without notice, saving perhaps 20 minutes of running time), and sometimes the sense of overkill boarders on the grotesque.  But there cannot be bounty without excess, and our unreliable narrator somehow makes these disparate parts work as a whole.

The screenplay, by Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio is an intentional funhouse mirror of our cinematic Western tradition.  The movie has echoes of everything from One Upon a Time in the West to The Searchers to Little Big Man to They Died With Their Boots On to The Iron Horse – taking images, ideas and concepts from all of these films and throwing them back at us in a purposely distorted vision.

It is only in the film’s final act, as the Lone Ranger and Tonto hijack a train under the control of railroad magnate Latham Cole (the excellent Tom Wilkinson) to the stirring strains of The William Tell Overture that we have standard Lone Ranger heroics, as the duo ride horses atop the train, dangle from couplings and perform stunts that would do Buster Keaton proud.

Just as science fiction is always about the present and never really about the future, the Western film is always about the modern world and not our mythic past. Each generation gets the Western it deserves, and The Lone Ranger does not paint a pretty picture of America in 2013.  The Ranger comes to learn that the rule of law does not hold for Big Business or the military, and that the lives of the poor or disenfranchised are considered exploitable and expendable by the establishment.  Tonto presses the mask upon the Ranger throughout the film, but it’s only when the Ranger realizes that there is plenty of law but very little justice that he decides to embrace it.  “If this is the law,” he says, “then I guess I’ll be an outlaw.”

The Lone Ranger is a film, I think, that the viewer takes con amore or not at all.  I was hooked in the opening moments – director Gore Verbinski creates images in the carnival (and throughout the film) of remarkable beauty and richness.  Sadly, when I saw the film at New York City’s Ziegfeld Theater, we were two of perhaps 12 patrons for the evening show.  The film is flop of monumental proportions and, if you will, I have a thought on that as well.

It’s not that The Lone Ranger is a bad film – perhaps not a coherent action picture, but it’s an elusive and subtle pastiche that is satisfying on many, many levels.  The real problem, in terms of box office, is simply that people don’t want it.  The West is not part of our increasingly urban zeitgeist, and, to it’s credit, The Lone Ranger even tries to address past political injustices by making Tonto the most important and complex character.  True to his code (and unlike the current Superman), the Ranger never deliberately takes a life, strives for a high standard and believes in the rule of law.  Perhaps, there is just no place for the Lone Ranger in contemporary America.

One last parting note – readers interested in Western films from the 1950s (and there were two Long Ranger films that decade) could do no better than visiting Toby Roan’s indispensable blog 50 Westerns From the 50s.  You can find it here: http://fiftieswesterns.wordpress.com/.  It’s a treasure trove of information for the Western film buff.

It’s a Turd! It’s a Pain! It’s the Man of Steel!

It sure isn’t Superman…

It was with a mix of elation and trepidation that I realized two iconic Pop Culture figures from the previous American Century would be resurrected this summer: Superman and The Lone Ranger.  Though such figures do not normally fall under the purview of The Jade Sphinx, both have had such a long-lasting and profound impact on the way we view ourselves and our culture that attention must be paid.

But the America of 1933 (the birth of the Lone Ranger) and of 1938 (the debut of Superman) are very different places from that of 2013.  Could both figures survive the transition into what we laughingly refer to as modernity without losing some vital essence, the very things that made these figures what they were?

Well, in the case of Superman, the answer, sadly, is no.  We do not often go to big budget junk pictures, and it is rare that we find them satisfactory.  However, Man of Steel, directed by Zack Snyder, must hit a new low for a genre with a decidedly low bar.  Never have I seen a blockbuster film so cynical in its conception, so ham-fisted in its execution or so bleak in its worldview.  What should have been an exhilarating romp that left one with a sense of wonder instead is a grim and dour computer game, devoid of life, sentiment, wit, intelligence or fun.

This creates an interesting aesthetic conundrum.  For those who know the core of the Superman mythos (and surely he is as mythic to modern America as Theseus was to the Ancients), the story runs thus: on the planet Krypton, scientist-statesman Jor-El realizes that the planet will soon explode.  He unsuccessfully tries to convince the powers that be that doom is imminent, so he builds a rocket to send their infant son, Kal-El, to the distant planet earth.  The ship leaves just before the planet explodes and lands in the cornfields or rural America (usually Kansas, in most tellings).  He is raised by the rustic Kent family, given the name Clark and taught American virtues and a sense of honor and of duty while growing to manhood.  He moves to the big city (literally a Metropolis) and becomes a great protector and savior, a symbol of courage, honesty and purity by which all humanity can aspire.

The aesthetic conundrum at the core of The Man of Steel is simply this: how can Snyder and his producer/writer (Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, respectively) take this same material and fashion out of it a film so grim, so lacking in warmth, so devoid of hope and so ugly to look at?  Every artist brings something of themselves to whatever theme they approach, but surely some themes are, at their core, immutable?  Surely the fundamental message of great myths – be it hope or despair, transcendence or degradation – would shine through?

Apparently not.  Every choice made by Snyder and company was calculated to leech Superman and his mythos from any sense of grandeur, any sense of fun, any sense of transcendence.

First, let’s look at Krypton.  In both the comics and the films, the planet is often presented as a kind of paradise.  The comics showed us a primary-colored super-science wonderland worthy of Flash Gordon.  And the latter Superman films with Christopher Reeve opted for a futuristic Greco-Roman splendor, with a sparse purity often associated with Greek drama.

In Man of Steel, Krypton is as ugly as the nightmares of H. R. Giger.  Its inhabitants wear gray latex drag while moving through what looks like a massive digestive track.  Snyder and company have Jor-El die when he is stabbed in the gut by the film’s villain, General Zod – saving the explosion for Superman’s mother.

We then see the grown Kal-El finding himself while bumming through the US.  Reporter Lois Lane has a run-in with him, and soon investigates the story of the mysterious man with strange powers.  But soon General Zod and his cadre of Krypton survivors come to earth, looking for Kal-El because it seems that Jor-El downloaded all of Krypton’s genetic information into his infant son.  With this information, Zod hopes to recreate Krypton on earth… leaving no place for humanity.

Where to begin?  First off, Snyder shoots the film with a near complete de-saturation of color.  Imagine a black and white film poorly daubed with a waxy crayon and you get the effect.  Worse still, the thudding, repetitive and unpleasant score by Hans Zimmer is more reminiscent of the antics at a stoner’s rock concert than a glorious science-fiction romp. 

As for the special effects – they are not that special.  When Superman and Zod battle at the climax (seemingly forever), it is blurred motion and fast-cutting, more computer flummery than cinema.

The performances are nearly invisible.  Henry Cavill may be the handsomest man to don the blue-and-red suit, but he lacks the charisma of Brandon Routh or Christopher Reeve.  (Or George Reeves!)  His Superman is a cypher.  No one else manages to make any impression at all except for Kevin Costner as Pa Kent – and a film is in trouble when the most energetic player is … Kevin Costner.

But the fundamental problem with the seething mess that is Man of Steel is one of tone and artistic vision.  It seems that Snyder and Nolan wanted to do an “adult” take on Superman, but to them “adult” can only mean gloomy, negative and nihilistic.  I weep for the intellectual and emotional maturity of both men if that is indeed their yardstick of adulthood, because it is both horribly restrictive and blinkered.  Transcendent joy is as much an “adult” aesthetic as the cheapest form of tragedy, but try telling that someone with the emotional sense of a 15 year-old.

The filmmakers nail their own coffins finally with their vision of Superman, himself.  For more than 70 years, Superman was the “good guy;” the man we looked up to, the person we all aspired to be.  This vengeful, glum and, finally, not terribly bright man may be many things, but he will never be … Superman.

Tomorrow, a special Fourth of July message.

Rise of the Guardians Opens Today

It is not often that an animated film is as thematically rich, filled with fully-rounded characters and as frankly moving as Rise of the Guardians, opening today and based on William Joyce’s Guardians of Childhood series.  While many (if not most) animated films at least achieve a level of sentiment through forced or cheaply manipulative means, Rise presents a level of richness and complexity that is seldom found even in today’s adult film fare.  Rise presents issues of love and loss, life and death, the persistence of memory, the power of belief and the measure of identity; for all of its high spirits and freewheeling shenanigans, there is also a surprising vein of melancholy.  It is a film not to be missed, one that can be savored by both children and adults alike, albeit for different reasons.

The Guardians – both the books and film – represent a dramatic change in Joyce’s oeuvre.  Over the past decades the scope of his stories and the emotional weight of his work have increased in heft and urgency.  Joyce’s early work was often pitched in a minor key – problems, when they existed at all, were usually expelled by an afternoon with friends or by dancing the hokey pokey.  However, life and time have left their mark on the artist, and he has become engaged with larger scale questions, such as the nature of sorrow, the pursuit of happiness and their balance in the lives of both children and adults.

If this sounds weighty for a children’s movie, you haven’t been paying attention.  Joyce’s long-term concern has always been the very alchemy of happiness, how it functions and how it survives.  His is a unique contemporary voice in that he is devoid of irony, sweet in his sincerity, delighted by his passions and fueled by its sense of wonder.

Rise of the Guardians is an independent entity from Joyce’s current, ongoing Guardians of Childhood series.  The book chronicles how the great figures of children’s folklore – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, and Sandman, among others – band together under the guidance of the Man in the Moon to protect the children of the Earth.  Rise takes place several hundreds of years after the book series, with the Guardians already in place and working as a (somewhat argumentative) team.

Rise is told from the point of view of a new character, Jack Frost, the spirit of winter, who is recruited by the Guardians to join their number in a renewed battled against Pitch – also known as the Boogeyman.  It can be regarded as the final origin story for the Guardians, and the starting point for a series of animated adventures.  (One hopes.)  The screenplay, by David Lindsay-Abaire, skillfully mixes comedy and pathos, as well as action scenes and intimate moments that linger in the memory. 

Rise boasts a charming score by Alexandre Desplat, and a closing song performed by soprano Renee Fleming.  Already, the filmmakers win points for creating an animated fantasy that does not include jarring (and ugly) rap and hip hop numbers, fart jokes and puerile pop cultural references.  In an era of animated films that date badly scant months after they are released, Rise will be entertaining children for decades to come.

Rise features a host of spectacular voice performances, starting with Alec Baldwin as Santa Claus.  Baldwin plays the jolly old elf with a heavy Russian accent (as described by Joyce in the books), and seems to be having so much fun, one wonders if he paid Dreamworks in order to do it.  In what is perhaps a nod to his role as announcer for the New York Philharmonic on WNYC, he often uses the names of Russian composers instead of expletives – most wonderfully thundering “Rimsky Korsakov!” when falling down. 

Hugh Jackman is an amusing, brawling Easter Bunny – a significant change of the character from Joyce’s books.  Where Joyce presents the Bunny as something of a furry Mr. Spock, Jackman’s Bunny is a smart-talking Australian tough guy in constant competition against Baldwin’s Santa.  Their backbiting rivalry is one of the chief joys of the film.

Isla Fisher gives voice to the Tooth Fairy, a role written as sweeter and less formidable than her book counterpart.  This works wonderfully well in the context of the film, her warm accessibility balances the more antic vocalizations of Baldwin and Jackman.

However, the two finest performances in the film belong to Chris Pine as Jack Frost and Jude Law as Pitch.   Pine plays Frost with both an edgy insouciance and a wounded melancholy.  Frost is the spirit of winter, but has no memory of his past or sense of purpose.  Worse still, unlike other Guardians, people cannot see him.  Because children do not believe in him with the same fever as Santa or the Bunny, he is incorporeal and invisible.  There is a moment about midway through the film when he can be seen by a child for the first time that had your correspondent blubbering into coat sleeve – it’s a fine performance that is beautifully animated.

Law as Pitch comes very close to stealing the film – it is simply the best vocal performance in an animated film since Peter O’Toole in Ratatouille.  Law shows remarkable vocal range – sinister, seductive, anguished and afraid.  The filmmakers also changed the visual conception of Pitch from that of the novels for the better: he is quite baroque in Joyce’s books, and in the film he is long and sleek in a flowing robe.  Horse-faced with tiny, yet evil looking teeth and a passel of evil stallions (literally night-mares), Pitch is a remarkable creation.

Of course, there are quibbles.  Rise is directed with energy by Peter Ramsey, but one cannot help but think that under the baton of someone like Brad Bird, Andrew Stanton or Steven Spielberg, what now glows would actually shimmer. The action is, to an aged viewer like myself, sometimes too frenetic by half, and I wish that the art direction mirrored Joyce’s earlier books (like his masterful Santa Calls), but these are all minor carps.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the film is the Frost-Pitch duality.  Both suffer the same problem: they are largely invisible because fewer and fewer children believe in them.  While Frost is wounded by this, his natural inclination is to meet the situation with a sense of fun; Pitch to terrify children into belief.  What Lindsay-Abaire’s screenplay does so beautifully is realize that the existential pain is nearly the same for both.  In his monologues, Pitch is nearly as sympathetic as he is menacing, and Law manages to milk that emotional current beautifully.

Finally, the film also seems to be an assertion of the fundamental tenant of Joyce’s overarching philosophy: that high spirits, a sense of fun and a touch of panache is enough to keep even the darkest spirits at bay.  Let’s hope he’s right.

Rise of the Guardians is the perfect holiday film and comes highly recommended.

The Moon and Sixpence

Herbert Marshall and George Sanders

in The Moon and Sixpence

After agonizing over Michelangelo’s ecstasy, let’s take a look at one film about art that gets it right.

In 1942, director Albert Lewin (1894-1968) made a film version of William Somerset Maugham’s 1919 masterpiece, The Moon and Sixpence.  An art collector and aesthete, Maugham was fascinated by both art history and the then-contemporary art world.  He had long wanted to write about the painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), but the novelist held sway over the historian, and Maugham wrote a highly fictionalize version.  In Maugham’s novel the painter, called Charles Strickland instead of Gauguin, is a middle-aged English stockbroker who leaves his wife and goes to Paris to become a painter.  He knows nothing of painters or painting, but something inside of him demands an artistic outlet.

After starving in a garret and learning his craft, he is befriended by a Dutch painter, Dirk Stroeve, who is convinced Strickland is a genius.  Stroeve nurses Strickland out of a long and dangerous illness, and is repaid for his kindness when his wife wants to run away with Strickland.  When he later jilts Mrs. Stroeve, she kills herself, another victim of Strickland’s artistic obsession.

Strickland eventually moves to Tahiti, where he lives with a native woman for many years before succumbing to leprosy.  He has painted the walls of his simple home with countless symbolic images, finding his artistic voice through an appreciation of the culture and customs of the primitive people he befriended.  His native wife, respecting his last wish, burns the house to the ground.

Though unnamed, the narrator is Maugham himself, and he becomes involved in the Stickland household through his friendship with the first Mrs. Strickland.  He also meets with Strickland in Paris, and later tracks down the story of Strickland’s fate in Tahiti while traveling the world himself.  

The genius of Maugham’s structure is that The Moon and Sixpence is really about two artists, Strickland and the narrator.  Both are creators and each has an individual aesthetic vision.  The major difference is that the narrator is passive – he watches life unfold around him and draws his art from it.  He may sometimes take a part in an event, but often from behind a mask, or a remove of indifference.  Strickland, on the other hand, is the protagonist of his own life – affecting lives around him for good and evil through a rapacious self-involvement.  Though the tale never becomes a confrontation between the two artists – either of talents or of temperament – the disparity between the two of them is instructive.

It would be impossible to think of a more appropriate writer and director for the film version than Albert Lewin, who was head MGM’s script development department under the legendary Irving Thalberg.  Moon is Lewin’s first film as a director; he would only direct five more.  He wrote all of them, producing several himself.  As a filmmaker, Lewin was also an aesthete – his films are all remarkably literary and subtle, filled with delicate grace notes and a sense of refinement. 

Moon and Sixpence the film remains very faithful to its source material, and is further bolstered by two remarkable performances.  Herbert Marshall (1890-1966) here named Geoffrey Wolfe, the Maugham stand-in, is superb.  Marshall started his career as a suave leading man, and graduated into playing benign uncles, sympathetic older men and writers.  (He would play Maugham again in The Razor’s Edge in 1946.)  Marshall had a gentle affect mixed with a sense of refined distance – a wonderful choice for Maugham/Wolfe.  It is obvious that anyone would confide in him, but his essential aloofness would keep him the perpetual voyeur. 

Strickland is played by the magnificent George Sanders (1906-1972), in what would be one of his first starring roles in a big-budget A film. Sanders would become Lewin’s secret weapon, starring in three of his six films (the others being The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Private Affairs of Bel Ami in 1945 and 1947, respectively).  Sanders is one of the most fascinating leading men from Hollywood’s Golden Era: he was not classically handsome, nor athletic, nor even particularly likeable.  However, he had a remarkable voice, by turns honeyed and sardonic.  Cynicism and sardonic irony often were his cinematic calling cards, and he spent many years as Hollywood’s favorite cad.  Strickland is something of a change for Sanders – there is a brutal, overbearing quality to the part, which Sanders, with his large physicality, captures wonderfully, but it provides little opportunity for his signature brand of silken villainy.  He would kill himself in Barcelona, Spain, in his 65^th year.  His suicide note said that he was bored.

Steven Gerey (1904-1973) is quite marvelous as the mousey painter Stroeve, and Albert Bassermann (1867-1952), immortal thanks to his work with Hichcock and his role in The Red Shoes (1948), provides strong support as the doctor who treats Stickland at the end of his life.

The Moon and Sixpence is a difficult film for cineastes.  It is readily available on DVD, but the end sequence, where the camera lingers lovingly on the wall paintings of Strickland’s jungle home, were shot in Technicolor, and most prints are in murky, washed-out black and white.  However, George Eastman House struck a restored print complete with the Technicolor sequences which later aired on the indispensable Turner Classic Movies.

The Moon and Sixpence is one of the essential movies about artists – a subject that we’ll address again in the future.  If you ever have the opportunity, by all means catch it – even if it means seeking out the inferior DVD print.

So why does the film version of The Moon and Sixpence “get it right?”  Because the search for art is always the search for something transcendent, and more beautiful within us.  Often this search leaves devastation and ruin in its wake, as is the case with Strickland, or to an emotional and social detachment, as it does with Wolfe.  No quest is without its price, and The Moon and Sixpence shows that sometimes the coin comes very dear.

The title?  Maugham had written both that if you look at the ground for a sixpence, you miss the moon, and that if you looked only at the moon, you missed the sixpence at your feet.  As with much art – your personal point of view will drive your interpretation.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Make that mostly Agony….

If, at this late date, we come to the inescapable conclusion that movie-making is not only an art, but an art of considerable alchemy and artistry, we must also come to the conclusion that most filmmakers can not use that art to make movies about art.  Nearly every film about our significant painters, composers, sculptors and actors are sad affairs – either pompous with a feigned “significance,” or so self-consciously “arty” as to become ridiculous.

One of the most egregious offenders is Carol Reed’s 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy, about the sparring between Renaissance master Michelangelo and Pope Julius II during the painting of the Sistine Ceiling – one of the most significant achievements in the history of art.

It is precisely because of that significance that Reed, usually a deft and gifted filmmaker, failed so miserably.  Because here was a story of importance and significance, by gum, and nearly everyone involved was so busy posing with importance and significance that they all forgot to make a movie that was human, moving and alive.

The problems start with the source material.  Michelangelo would be a magnificent subject for a film if movie-makers were not cowed by his lofty reputation and wanted to say something significant about this brilliant, difficult, conflicted man.  But screenwriters Reed and Philip Dunne (1908-1992) decided instead to adapt Irving Stone’s (1903-1989) utterly puerile and unreadable book of the same name instead.  To their credit, they jettison much of Stone’s material and try to craft an original screenplay, but the rot had already set in.

Add to that calamity the casting of Charlton Heston (1923-2008) as Michelangelo.  Perhaps the finest looking and sounding bad actor in the history of cinema, a role like Michelangelo demanded subtleties that were beyond Heston.  He sure looked fine in a beard and artist’s rags, but once he opened his mouth to emote, the effect was ruined.  A dull pall of earnestness squeezes his performance of any juice it might have had, and one longs for just that touch of ham Heston exhibited in less demanding roles.

Heston is not helped at all by the film’s conception of Michelangelo.  After making a decorous claim that our hero is not homosexual (“no, not that,” he says, nodding at one of his drawings of a male nude), they also render him strangely neuter by saddling him with a sexless romance with Diane Cilento (1933-2011) – as the Contessina de Medici, yet!   So, poor Heston is forced to mope around the wonderful Sistine Chapel sets, or look at the fresco recreations by painter Niccolo d’Ardia Caracciolo and mummer banalities about the hand of God and whatnot. 

What Heston does have going for him, aside from a classically handsome look and a fine voice, is that remarkable ability to be acceptable as a figure from the past.  His most significant roles – Michelangelo, Moses, Ben-Hur, General Gordon – were all figures of a dim and romantic past; it would be inconceivable to cast one of his contemporaries, say Paul Newman, and get away with it.

Other supporting players do not help.  Adolfo Celi (1922-1986) is a reptilian Giovanni de Medici, but the most egregious turn is Harry Andrews (1911-1989) as the great architect Bramante (1444-1514), playing with all the subtlety of an Agatha Christie red herring in a provincial rep company.  I couldn’t help thinking that if Michelangelo ended up with a knife in his back, Harry Andrews did it.

How could Reed, who made such wonderful films as Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), and The Third Man (1949), been responsible for such a flaccid mess? 

Well, the good news is that the film is not a complete mess.  Sharing nearly equal screen time with Heston is the divine Rex Harrison (1908-1990) as Pope Julius.  Harrison was simply the finest light comic actor of his (or any other) generation, and his casting as the Pope is a stroke of genius.  Though a straight, dramatic role, Harrison infuses the Pope with all of his customary charm and Shavian wit.  Indeed, the first scene pitting the Pope against the Artist is all weighted in God’s favor simply by the delight we have watching Harrison twinkle from behind his designer robes.  Harrison dances throughout the entire film on the balls of his feet, and if a contemporary Pope had that much devilish esprit, it would be enough to interest me in religion.

The Agony and the Ecstasy opens with a brief voice-over narration talking about Michelangelo and his works:  surely something more necessary today than in 1965.  The film was also lavishly shot in Cinemascope and Todd-AO; it was a wonderful picture to look at, if not watch.   Somehow it was nominated for five Academy Awards.  It won none.

Shakespeare in Jail

During a lifetime of hearing fatuous editors say fatuous things, perhaps the single most ridiculous comment came from the Asst. Editor of a now-defunct magazine: “Shakespeare?  Do we need another adaption of a Shakespeare play?  He’s been done to death.  Does he really say anything to us?”

Sigh.

At any rate, it seems that William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is too political an artist in some of the world’s hot spots.  As I write these words, the Thai government has banned a new film adaptation of Macbeth because the film “has content that causes divisiveness among the people of the nation.”

Thailand has some of the most stringent laws in the world banning criticism of the monarchy.  Offenses could carry as much as 15 years in prison.  So it’s not surprising that Shakespeare’s famous tale of regicide might ruffle more than a few royal feathers, and Shakespeare Must Die, as the film is called there, seems to hit too close to home.  The film incorporates images of violence and unrest redolent of Thailand’s recent past.  The country has been the scene of street protests since 2005, and many see Macbeth himself as a cognate for former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.  Also in the film is a red-draped figure that censors thought too mindful of the red-shirt demonstrators who filled Bangkok’s streets in 2010, when protests turned violent and nearly 100 demonstrators were killed.

The film’s director, Samanrat Kanjanavanit, has asked The Christian Science Monitor, "Why do they [the censors] find a 400-year-dead poet so threatening?”  She added, “We don't want to look at ourselves, we want to forget about painful events in our history."

Shakespeare is as relevant now as he was 400 years ago.  New productions seek to find a nexus between the text and current events, and often do so with deft insight.  The Orson Welles production of Julius Caesar in 1937 reflected the stark realities of Mussolini and growing fascism in Europe.  The recent film version of Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, has disturbing parallels to recent Eastern European history.  And one of the most harrowing theatrical experiences of my life was seeing Titus Andronicus in Central Park, watching the horrific aftermath of the rape of Lavinia, knowing I was a scant few feet away from where Trisha Meili was brutally raped by a gang of Harlem youths.

As Kanjanavanit said, "We made a Shakespearean film because we are living through Shakespearean times. People find the truth in fictional form threatening."

Perhaps it’s best (as is usual) for the Bard to have the final word.  As he writes in Julius Caesar, “There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats, for I am armed so strong in honesty that they pass me as an idle wind, which I respect not!”

Brad Bird’s Iron Giant

Just as some gifts keep on giving, some wars are still fought long after the cease fire.  A dramatic case in point is the Cold War, where the more fanatical fringes of our Right Wing continue to harp on the Red Menace and lionize sad pathological cases like Senator Joe McCarthy.  At times, it seems as if bunches of our population are happily marching towards Bedlam.

But it was fascinating to your correspondent to find the debate still raging in an animated cartoon marketed to children.  The Iron Giant, directed by Brad Bird (born 1957), was released in 1999 to universal applause and empty theaters.  I believe that Warner Brothers only looked at the text of the story – boy is befriended by giant robot – and slept through the subtext.  It was one of the most adult movies of the decade, and an indication that Bird, if given half the chance, would have a brilliant career before him.  (And he did – later directing such marvelous animated films as Incredibles [2004] and Ratatouille [2007]).

The storyline of The Iron Giant is deceptively simple.  In Rockwell, Maine, 1957, young Hogarth Hughes discovers a gigantic, metal-eating robot in the woods outside of his home.  Of course he keeps it a secret, telling only his beatnik friend (Harry Connick, Jr.).  However, a rapacious agent of the US government has tracked down the robot, wanting to take it to Washington to better serve the Pentagon.

I cannot help but wonder how Warner Brothers missed such a bet with The Iron Giant.  The film opens with shots of Sputnik circling the globe, and also imaginatively recreates 1950s Superman comics, science fiction movies, duck-and-cover drills and Red Scare paranoia.  In an age where most 20 year-olds are a little vague on the identity of Clint Eastwood, perhaps a film that so slavishly recreates, and then comments upon, 1950s tropes should be marketed to older adults.

There is a long and honorable tradition of adults savoring cartoons.  The surrealist Popeye, Betty Boop and Felix the Cat cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s were considered adult fare (and often “intellectual” to boot).  It’s only after television completely homogenized cartoons, and played them in the daily mid-afternoon “kiddie ghetto,” that cartoons themselves were viewed as strictly kiddie concerns.  Bird, with his films for Pixar, and films such as Up (2009), have all worked to return animated films to their original, adult base.

The Iron Giant is wonderfully animated, beautifully played and crammed with both wit and meaning.  As an entertainment product, it was miles ahead of anything that Disney was doing at that time, and avoided Disney’s trap of smarmy, self-congratulatory narcissism.  The focus was on plot, exposition and character – a rarity in live action films of the decade, let alone animated features.

The Iron Giant is based upon the children’s book of the same name by English poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998); the screenplay by Ted McCanlies (born 1953) jettisoned all but the barest outline to craft an original story.  Hughes, however, praised the final script, thinking it in many ways an improvement on his original novel.

In many ways The Iron Giant was a victim of its own excellence – when people wanted a disposable cartoon about funny giant robots, they got instead a mediation on the Cold War, the American gun culture, free will, conservatism vs liberalism and how we educate our children based on the toys and myths common in the playground.  It could never play in Peoria….

If you think you are too adult for animated films, then by all means rent The Iron Giant.  It is a particularly successful example of the heights to which this particularly American art form can soar.