A Year with Kate: The Sea of Grass (1947)

Episode 23 of 52: In which Tracy and Hepburn make a Western because why not?

A lone figure looks out over a vast, unending prairie. A wagon traverses rocky desert trails. Virgin land, a justice-seeking posse, a citified lawyer who brings civilization riding on his pinstriped coat tails. The Western dominated American film for over half a century with images like these. It stands to reason that two American stars and a director on his way to becoming a (controversial) American legend himself would take aim at the genre. The Sea of Grass, the resulting collaboration between Elia Kazan and the Tracy/Hepburn team, is an epic story covering multiple generations in the New Mexico Territory. It’s a Western, but not struck from the same heroic mould that John Ford was making them in Monument Valley. The Sea of Grass is meaner, more melodramatic, and ultimately a maverick mess of a movie.

The Sea of Grass comes so close to being a great film.  Spencer Tracy plays Col. Jim Brewton, a rancher who’s spent his life herding cattle on the millions of acres of untouched prairie that spread across New Mexico. He marries a St. Louis girl named Lutie (Kate Hepburn), who loves him but can’t love his untamed wildlands (not a euphemism). She tries to bring the people to the prairie, or her husband home to bed, but she can’t tame nature or the Colonel. These are familiar archetypes to anyone who’s watched more than two Westerns: the Lone Hero and the Prairie Wife. He is the champion of the settlers, she is his pure-hearted moral compass. Right? Well sure, up until the part where Jim causes the death of a few farmers, and Lutie runs away to sleep with the Judge (Melvyn Douglas) and bear his illegitimate son. And that’s just in the first hour. Suffice it to say, John Ford would not approve.

Cowboys and cynics after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Tennessee 100: Baby Doll

Andreas from Pussy Goes Grrr here, with a last-minute postscript to Tennessee Williams Week.

Sweaty, conflicted sexuality? Check. A seedy, decaying southern setting? Check. Characters who alternate wildly between decadent hedonism and harrowing descents into madness? Yes, we're in pure Tennessee Williams country with Elia Kazan's Baby Doll, starring Carroll Baker as the titular 19-year-old minx. She's married to Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden), the hot-tempered owner of a local cotton gin, and together they live in a rural mansion called Tiger Tail that, like their respective families, has seen better days.

This creaky house, considered haunted by the locals, plays a role similar to that of the cramped tenement in Kazan's adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. It helps define the film visually with its labyrinthine corridors, piled high with the detritus of the past, and it's the perfect setting for the psychosexual slapstick antics of Baby Doll and her would-be seducer, Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach). Vacarro—a Sicilian interloper who's new to the area—suspects Archie Lee of burning down his cotton gin, and he's willing to resort to some hanky-panky in order to secure proof.

So begins an absurd, twisted battle of the wills, in which the line between economic and sexual success gets blurred to the point of invisibility. Read the full post.

Click to read more ...

Best Shot: "A Streetcar Named Desire"

Hit Me With Your Best Shot continues with A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). This week's film was chosen in light of the Tennessee Williams Centennial, the great writer's 100th anniversary is this weekend. If this is your first "best shot," partipicants are asked to watch a film, and select its best shot (or their favorite, natch) and post it, with or without an accompanying essay.

Stanley: Yknow there are some men that are took in by this Hollywood glamour stuff and some men that just aren't.
Blanche: I'm sure you belong in the second category.
Stanley: That's right.
Blanche: I cannot imagine any witch of a woman casting a spell over you.
Stanley: That's right.

Elia Kazan's masterful adaptation of Tennessee Williams happens to be, by a significant margin, the best film version of any of his work. It moves more elegantly around Hollywood's censorship of then risque material than the other biggies that followed (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Birth of Youth) and it's managed to be more definitive than any film version of the other play vying for most immortal Tennesse Williams Creation (The Glass Menagerie). The 1951 film will forever be revered, and justifiably so, for providing an irreducibly perfect 'moment in time' look at the shifting of Hollywood acting; the friction between pre-50s artifice in Vivien Leigh and Blanche DuBois and post-50s "realness" in Brando's "Method" Stanley is still absolutely sensational 60 years on. As are both approaches to acting, I might add as a fine point (provided the actor is a skilled one). Too often we view all sweeping artistic shifts as progress when they are more often than not, merely lateral aesthetic shifts, opening up new pleasures but not truly replacing the old ones. Time marches on; we explore new things.

In the understandably immortal hoopla surrounding two of the greatest screen performances of all time, we often lose sight of other pleasures. A Streetcar Named Desire has many of them from Tennessee William's indestructable poetry to Elia Kazan's assured guiding hand to the Oscar-winning art direction and the expressive shadowy lighting from Harry Stradling Sr. Stradling manages effects that are both harsh and ethereal, both ugly and beautiful, but not always in the combinations you'd expect them to be and sometimes both at ones. His camera and lights perfectly bridge all of the performances, moods and characters.

But the way he lights Stella (an inspired Kim Hunter) has always fascinated me. In her scenes with Blanche, the shadows often obscure one or the other of her faces and in those scenes which highlight the mad desire for Stanley her eyes are often obscured, with only tiny sparks of light flashing and reflecting from them.

Stella: Isn't he wonderful looking?

Blanche: What you're talking about is desire, just brutal Desire. The name of that rattletrap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another.
Stella: Haven't you ever ridden on that streetcar?

Stella seems unknowable, feral, as dangerous in her own singlemindedness as Blanche is in her self-deception and Stanley is in his brutality. Her eyes have an animalistic defiant glint but it's not just her irises; this is one of the horniest performances ever captured on film.

This shot in particular is just fascinating, pulling the central triangular drama into sharp (deep) focus.

My pick for best shot.

The sisters have been having a serious chat. The previous night's tumult involving poker, flirtations, drunken messiness, abuse, "Stelllllaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!" and an obvious offscreen fuck-a-thon between Mr & Mrs Kowalski have disrupted their bond. If they're not quite seeing eye to eye the sisters are beginning to really listen to each other until they hear Stanley's return. We see his shadow first on the left side as then his body as the women immediately stop talking.  For the next agonizing few seconds, they seem absolutely frozen with indecision, though there's a curious sapphic charge to Blanche's silenced pawing pleas. There's another "Stella", Stanley's foolproof siren call, from the background and then Stella, ever so slightly turns his way, catching the light, his light if you want to get figurative though not literal.

She's lost to Blanche and herself again. Though Stella ends the movie an hour and some minutes later swearing Stanley off forever, our guess is she hops right back on that rattletrap streetcar named Desire once the credits roll. She's up one old narrow street and down another with Stanley as her violent conductor.

The Kindness of Strangers
Enjoy these participating posts at other fine movie-loving blogs.

• Film Actually ~ Blanche DuBois as a delusional "orchard in spring."
• Encore's World ~ emerges from the fog to find a Tale of Two Sisters
• Serious Film ~ Experiencing "Bleed Through": Meet Scarlett DuBois. Or is it Blanche O'Hara?
• Victim of the Time ~Barebones, a Streetcar Named Desolate Desire.
• Cinephilia & Sass ~ The Haunting of Blanche and the cameras relationship to her in general.
• Movies Kick Ass ~ Takes a personal trip to illusion in New Orleans.
• Pussy Goes Grrr ~ Peers voyeuristically at 'The Curiousity of Strangers'
• Against the Hype ~ Must Blanche fend for herself in the grim mise-en-scène. Another wonderfully provocative piece from Against the Hype.
• Okinawa Assault ~ "the frills and frenetics" of a silent movie!
• Dial P For Popcorn ~ examines the triangle and Stella as mediator.
• Musicinephiles ~ on Blanche & booze. So much for the one drink limit.
• Luisergho ~ hands us a series of image and shouts along with Brando
• The Owls Are Not What They Seem ~ Blanche splintered, defeated.

Next Wednesday
Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO (1960) in celebration of the release of a stunning debut novel "What You See In The Dark" by Manuel Muñoz which brushes up against this movie in interesting ways. Coming soon: an interview with the author and a book giveaway. But about BEST SHOT: It's impossible that everyone will love the shower scene best, right? Why don't you join us and try to pinpoint your favorite image? Next Wednesday at 10 PM right here... and at your place if you participate.

Curio: Warren Beatty, Young Lover

Alexa here. When Annette Bening gave a shout-out to husband Warren Beatty's 1962 Golden Globe win in her acceptance speech, I was reminded of this 1962 Movieland magazine of mine.  The issue means to cover Hollywood's "hot new crop of young lovers," and features Beatty, fresh off his Globe win and still under Elia Kazan's tutelage, on its cover.  (A must-read is this recent New Yorker piece on Kazan, but I digress.) The issue also covers Troy Donahue, Dick Beymer, Gardner McKay, Horst Buchholz and George Maharis, so clearly Beatty was the right choice for the cover. The section devoted to him, excerpted below, is hilarious in its critique of his acting and its predictions for his future.  

The handsomest of Today's YOUNG LOVERS and the one who's garnering most of the critical acclaim and column mentions: Warren Beatty. Many of those admirers have likened Beatty to James Dean. But apart from a few minor mannerisms (burying his hands in his pockets, peering intently through his glasses, standing stoop-shouldered) that lots of young men exhibit, the comparison is unjustified. A better parallel, for some remarkable coincidences, is Marlon Brando.

After a few roles on television and a little summer stock, Warren Beatty appeared in the short-lived New York play, "A Loss of Roses." But the experience was no loss to him: He got fine notices and the play's author, William Inge, was much impressed with him.  Inge, who had written a screenplay called "Splendor in the Grass," introduced the young actor to the man who was to direct the film, Elia Kazan.  And here's the first Brando link: Acting Style.

Will they still be around ten, twenty, thirty years from now?

As everyone has known, lo! these many years, Brando's first big click was in the theater, in the play, " A Streetcar Named Desire" - directed by, of course, Elia Kazan. At that time, Kazan was still very involved with the Actor's Studio as a director; so was Brando, as star student. In those days, Kazan was young Brando's mentor and the same influence is apparent in Beatty now. Which brings up my only criticism of him: A product of Northwestern's School of Speech, and Stella Adler's acting school in New York, he is closer to being that which he vehemently denies being - a "method" actor.

Warren Beatty is a good actor. But he will be finer when he re-fines some of his "methodisms." Such as the too-studied movements - just rising from a chair, he spills "soul" all over. And the too-deliberate reactions - his slow smile comes muscle by muscle by muscle. Beatty is under personal contract to Kazan for four more films so his method acting may get stronger before it gets better. Yet better it will get - anyone who comes under the remarkable power of Kazan cannot help but grow into a remarkable performer.

Finally, like Brando, the first of the method actors to light up the flicks, Beatty has that which elicits sighs from ladies in the audience: A pure, unadulterated animal magnetism. Translated, that means sex appeal. (Side comment: I asked a junior staff member on MOVIELAND and TV TIME for her reaction to W.B. Her succinct reply was, "Wow!"). Again, like Brando, Beatty's effect from all reports is just as magnetic off-screen. Which is the true test of every great on-screen lover.