GREAT DISRUPTIONS, GREAT MOVIES

GREAT DISRUPTIONS, GREAT MOVIES #4: CASABLANCA (1942, dir Michael Curtiz) This week, we take a look at four amazing movies made during or just after periods of tremendous disruption. As we all look to the new year and the next phase of cinema after COVID, it might be instructive to see what moviemakers before us did with the seeming earth-shaking challenges handed them. First up is CASABLANCA, still one of Hollywood's pinnacles. Jaded American Rick (Humphrey Bogart in career best mode) runs the most happening club in Casablanca, Morocco. He wants nothing to do with the Nazis or the World War happening all around him. Then Elsa (the luminous Ingrid Bergman), a vital life-affirming woman who abandoned Rick in Paris without explanation, walks into his club. . .married to Victor Laszlo, a hunted freedom fighter. The wife and husband desperately want the two passports out of occupation that Rick just so happens to have. CASABLANCA is one of those miracles of moviemaking that highlights how critical artistic collaboration is. The cast-including a never better Claude Reins, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Dooley Wilson, Conrad Veidt, Marcel Dalio- is a powerhouse of Hollywood stars and recently immigrated European exiles. This gives the film an authenticity as many of the actors feel like they're directly pleading with the American audience to help fight fascism. Michael Curtiz directs (you can see why Steven Spielberg is so influenced by the Curtiz style of muscular camera movement, editing, shadows, without overly calling attention to itself). A battery of brilliant playwrights and screenwriters-Julius & Philip Epstein, Howard Koch, Casey Robinson-delivers a script chock full of classic lines (every line feels quotable). For a movie entirely shot in Burbank, California, it's one of the most atmospheric movies ever made. Hell, the movie even has one of the all-time great hit movie songs "As Time Goes By" (written by Hubert Hupfield in 1931 but made famous here by singer Dooley Wilson). One key ingredient of the secret sauce is how everyone involved understands with urgency (since World War II was thrust on everyone whether they wanted it or not) the importance of sacrifice for a greater cause. If folks didn't ally and sacrifice immediately in 1942, it could be too late. CASABLANCA has to be the most beloved romantic picture ever made where the ending is anything but happy and neat and simple. What CASABLANCA clearly is, is about the importance of dedicating your life to something bigger than yourself. How selfishness, no matter how logically motivated, is a prison. How selfless acts for the good of the community and the world done with no expectation of fame or glory or recognition can bring one back to life after spiritual death or disappointment. It's hard to do justice to this topic in a post. But somehow CASABLANCA, better than almost any other movie (maybe because it's so damn entertaining), devotes itself to one of the most germane topics of existence.

GREAT DISRUPTIONS, GREAT MOVIES #3: GOLDDIGGERS OF 1933 (dir by Mervyn Leroy & Busby Berkeley [musical sequences]) Broadway choreographers make amazing movie directors. The films of director/choreographers like Busby Berkeley, Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse account for some of the greatest movies ever made (42nd Street, Singing in the Rain, Charade, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, All That Jazz to name just a few). Maybe it's the Broadway choreographer's bloodhound's nose for finding that perfect featherpoint between razzle/dazzle, entertainment, and biting social critique. Maybe music and dance just help the medicine go down. If you've never seen the movies of Busby Berkeley, drop everything, cancel the New Year's Eve plans, and watch as many as you can stat! Berkeley was charged with the musical numbers for a string of Warner Brothers' vehicles in the 1930's including 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, and the Golddiggers series (1933, 1935, 1937, In Paris, etc. . .) While the plots of these pictures are often (intentionally) very frothy and lightweight, the musical numbers are always showstoppers. Berkeley has often been imitated because of his inventive use of dozens or hundreds of dancers mixed with inventive camera angles to create surreal kaleidoscopic effects of human limbs, movement (the Coen Brothers pay particularly mischievous homage in THE BIG LEBOWSKI). But even more daring than the pure cinema approach was Berkeley's ability to smuggle in pointed dance numbers about social ills like Great Depression stresses which lead to increases in spousal abuse, murder, infidelity, returning homeless Vets. Just take the "Brother Can You Spare a Dime/Forgotten Man" dance number from Golddiggers of 1933. It literally creates a dance out of World War I, PTSD, the government's failure to take care of its returning vets, and the Great Depression. Everybody was hurting in 1933 so folks probably didn't want lectures when they plopped down their nickel to leave their troubles in the sunlight and bathe their soul in the waters of imagination. But they sure were open to re-considering the plight of the forgotten if Busby Berkeley set it to music and dance. One of the great lessons for cinema's sly smugglers.

GREAT DISRUPTIONS, GREAT MOVIES #2: THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957, dir by David Lean) The greatest threat to movies in the 1950's was the television. And TV's growing dominance in households across America lead to Hollywood switching almost completely to color and increasing widescreen productions. The reasoning went since TV was black and white and a 1.33 or square aspect ratio, cinema could bring audiences in with technicolor epics that were 2.35 or essentially really long rectangular frames. Like many innovations, the initial results were more gimmicky or obsessed with showing off the technology. But by the late 50's, movies as disparate as William Wyler's BEN HUR, Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO, and David Lean's THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI showed master moviemakers finding ways to make the changes idiosynchratic. Lean's KWAI was a game changer in terms of the cinema epic. Dark, moody, obsessive, strange with a deeply deeply ironic ending, it's essentially a movie about how war destroys everyone involved with it. The story focuses on an allied POW camp run by the Japanese during World War II. US Soldier William Holden escapes but British Officer Alec Guinness remains, fights with the Japanese Commandant, but eventually goes a bit crazy. When the Japanese put the British POWs to work building a bridge, Guinness wants to build the best bridge ever to prove British superiority, not putting together that it will help the enemy. Holden then gets tasked with returning to blow up the bridge. What's fascinating about this movie and Lean's even greater epic LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is how Lean uses the tools of cinema to tell a very idiosynchratic story of characters. And Lean's editor instincts (he started as a cutter) lead him to be more focused on whether the material cuts together in contrasts and rhythms (it most certainly does) rather than to solely obsess over pretty pictures. And of course the performances in the movie, specifically Guinesses's, are the pistons that drive the engine. Prior to KWAI, most of the 3 hour movie epics centered around safe biblical or family oriented themes. KWAI would break all that and be the unsettling trumpet blast that would lead directly to disturbing epics like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, 2001, THE WILD BUNCH, THE GODFATHER, APOCALYPSE NOW

GREAT DISRUPTIONS, GREAT MOVIES #1: THE CELEBRATION (1998, dir Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark) Happy New Year, Secret Movie Clubbers! We end this series with a look at FESTEN/CELEBRATION, the late 1990's Danish movie that heralded cinema's digital age. FESTEN was shot on the cheapest possible video cameras at the time (HI-8 cameras for anyone who remembers those) and followed the Dogme 95 rules (https://www.indiewire.com/2015/04/watch-lars-von-trier-explains-the-rules-of-dogme-95-187806/) which had recently been set up by Lars Von Trier and others to shake moviemakers out of laziness. Among these rules were a prohibition on artificial movie lights, all music must be source, movies should be shot on location, etc. Basically Dogme '95 challenged the moviemaker to find new creative ways to make "cinema" with almost none of the accepted tools upon which filmmakers had come to rely. FESTEN/CELEBRATION follows a well off family who gather for the Father's birthday at the hotel the family owns. Christian, one of the sons, shocks the guests when he reveals in his toast that the Father molested him and his twin sister, leading to the sister's suicide. From there chaos ensues of the most absurd kind as guests discover they can't leave (allies of Christian have stolen all car keys) and the party descends into factions-those who back the Father and those who back the Son. While everyone at the time focused on the video cameras-this was the movie that launched a thousand imitations-what really drives the success of the movie is the brilliance of its concept, dialogue, performance, and storytelling. The fundamentals. CELEBRATION took head on the blistering taboo themes of incest, denial, suicide, tragedy. Even more surprising, the movie is hilariously funny and even has an incredibly edited scene of a potential ghost visitation. What movies like CELEBRATION and later TANGERINE (shot completely on an iphone) teach us in this digital age of cinema is that cinema always re-asserts itself in the disruptions or introduction of new tools by those who understand foundational storytelling. If we master the basics-namely the ability to tell a gripping story with great characters-we can always figure out how to use the new tools or uncertain times to best advantage. For all moviemakers out there feeling that 2021 has to be the year they make their feature, watch FESTEN/CELEBRATION.

Written by Craig Hammill. Secret Movie Club Founder.Programmer.