This & That: Dick Tracy, Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Taylor

Little White Lies talks to French actor Tahar Rahim (A Prophet, The Eagle)
The Wrap Warren Beatty wins Dick Tracy rights lawsuit. Y'all know I love my Beatty but this decision seems ridiculous to me since the rights were only supposed to stay with Beatty if he was actually using the character but he NEVER WORKS. I would love for him to act again but it is obviously not a top priority for him.
Cinema Blend the absurd Face/Off duo (I like that movie) Nicolas Cage and John Travolta may reunite onscreen. May not. The crystal ball is cloudy.
Basket of Kisses Mad Men rumors continue.

Cinema Blend also reports that Josh Hutcherson auditioned yesterday for that Hunger Games role he wants so badly. If you ask me he's already doomed despite fans of the property thinking he's right for it. He seems so much younger than Jennifer Lawrence, doesn't he? And isn't it a love interest situation? The woman reading older is anathema to Hollywood. They are so weird about needing their women much younger than their men.

Oh and P.S. have you seen his "straight but not narrow" campaign? Cute.

Time Out Chicago Melissa Leo interview on a new project which I shan't name anymore -- I've given it too much free promotion. Must control myself unless I'm invited to things and can weigh in with an informed opinion -- but this bit on the Oscars made me giggle.

TimeOut: I was surprised myself by the backlash. Isn’t the awards season all about self-promotion?
MELISSA LEO: Perhaps that’s very so. [Laughs]

A few more Liz & Tennessee articles
Sunset Gun Strong piece on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
LIFE Magazine published Liz & Monty photos. I've seen some from this shoot before but not these two. I love them together so much.
The Daily Beast has excerpts from an Elizabeth Taylor interview, one bit involving James Dean that she would not allow to go public till she died.
fourfour a Liza Minnelli anecdote on Liz.
Salon the always provocative Camille Paglia on this movie star's pre-feminist power.

and the Oscar Completist has having an Elizabeth Taylor viewing binge and has also written about the rarely discussed TV versions of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer (1993), and the 1984 and 1995 versions of A Streetcar Named Desire.

The Man With the Italian Tattoo

Williams and MagnaniJose here, to continue celebrating the centennial of American playwright and icon Tennessee Williams.

Williams grew up watching movies. He was one of the major playwrights who learned his craft, not through Shakespeare and Moliere but through the works of De Mille and Chaplin. This can easily be seen in the way his works lack the naturalism of "the theater" and their reality is more grounded on high drama, film noir and even slapstick. You can almost picture the young Williams sitting inside a dark movie theater, enthralled by the images projected on the screen (makes a case for why some of his characters are usually described as "larger than life" huh?).

During one of his many movie adventures, Tennessee spotted Anna Magnani. I like to assume it was Rome, Open City, but of course am probably wrong.

He became so obsessed with the Italian diva that he ended up writing an entire play just for her: The Rose Tattoo. When he approached her to play the leading role of Italian widow, Serafina Delle Rose, Magnani declined because she was unsure her limited English skills would do justice to the play. (Maureen Stapleton did the role on Broadway instead, winning the Tony in 1951.)

This didn't stop Tennessee and Anna from starting a friendship that would endure until their deaths. Williams described Magnani, 

 I never saw a more beautiful woman, with such big eyes and skin like Devonshire soap.  

The temperamental Magnani felt at home with Tennessee and when the time came to take The Rose Tattoo to the movies, she obliged. 

She took on the role of Serafina with such intensity and passion that she ended up taking home the Oscar for Best Actress. She didn't attend the ceremony because she thought she would lose, even after she'd won the critics' awards, the Golden Globe and BAFTA for the role.

The film might not be counted as one of the strongest Williams' adaptations (and the play itself is often regarded as a minor work) and in the years that followed, the movie earned a reputation for being full of stereotypes and even for discriminating against Italian immigrants.

Sure, the film is filled with symbols, bare chested lovers (Burt Lancaster mostly), weeping, screaming, gossiping neighbors, Virgin Marys (and nods to virginity), wine, loud laughing fits and thick accents but few back then realized that the film wasn't being touted as a portal into reality. It was an interpretation of the immigrant experience by someone whose knowledge consisted mostly of neorealist films.

More than this, the movie was a tribute to Anna Magnani. Not the Magnani Williams came to know later, but the Magnani who embodied a nation in the aftermath of WWII. The one Williams had met at the movies.

The Rose Tattoo therefore, is less about the characters than about what inspired their creation. The play is filled with nods to Williams' own life and the motifs that would define his work (sex, passion, humid settings, dead men...) The very tattoo in the title can mean much more than the ideas associated with the flower (love for example) since Rose was the name of Tennessee Williams' favorite sister. I'm sure she accompanied him to see Magnani's films on many occassions... 

Therefore, we understand that the role of Williams in the play is that of the tattoo artist, imprinting precious memories on the skin of his characters and his audience. But above all, imprinting them onto his own creative skin. Some works of art are misunderstood because the are too personal and deciphering their meaning only leads to migraines and shouts of "pretentious".

The Rose Tattoo would be one of these works; so private, so intimate; that we carry them around with us all the time, waiting only for a casual slip of the sleeve, a careless morning after, an accidental movement, to share them with others who might be fascinated, disgusted or even indifferent to their nature. 

Tennessee 100: Night of the Iguana

JA from MNPP here, continuing Tennessee Williams Centennial Week with a look at John Huston's 1963 film The Night of the Iguana. I chose Iguana because it's one of the few adaptations of Williams' work that I hadn't seen already, and because IMDb's summary made it sound torrid in the best Williams way. Defrocked priests and wanton teen girls and sapphic spinsters all flitting about a Mexican beach cut off from civilization? Yes please.

But truth be told, I found the film a little wanting, not wanton. Richard Burton's in full bluster, screaming and sloshing about as the drunken ex-man-of-the-cloth Shannon, Deborah Kerr barely registers as the sexless traveling painter he's too big a mess to end up with, and not a whole lot seems to gel.

 

I was fond of Grayson Hall as the lesbian intent upon Shannon's destruction (she was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to Lila Kedrova in Zorba the Greek), and kind of loved Ava Gardner as Maxine, the owner of the motel where they all end up marooned who keeps a couple of cabana boys for herself...

... but then, she was speaking my language. Bette Davis played the role of Maxine in the original staging of the play for four months before, according to her, her co-stars undercut her and she left the production and was replaced by Shelley Winters. I can picture both of them doing exquisite work in the role, but I really did like Ava Gardner here. (And scanning through Gardner's filmography I realize this is the first time I've ever seen her in anything!)

Iguana was shot in the Fall of 1962, right at epicenter of the tabloid insanity over the affair between Burton and Elizabeth Taylor - they'd just worked (among other things) together on Cleopatra - and Taylor actually accompanied Burton on the shoot in Puerto Vallarta, which led to all kinds of scrutiny upon the set. From Wikipedia comes this fun fact:

"By March 1964, months before the film's release, gossip about the film's production became the subject of a public parody when Huston received an Writers' Guild of America award for advancing "the literature of the motion picture through the years"; at a dinner where the award was presented, Allan Sherman performed a song, to the tune of "Streets of Laredo", with lyrics that included "They were down there to film The Night of the Iguana / With a star-studded cast and a technical crew. / They did things at night midst the flora and fauna / That no self-respecting iguana would do."

As you can tell, the stories surrounding the production are more interesting to me than the movie itself now. Perhaps the mega-quake that was Burton-Taylor was too strong a distraction to gel together an entirely satisfying, coherent film. Still there's some gorgeous black-and-white photography to be had...

And it did walk away with an Oscar for Best Costume Design (B&W), beating Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte and Edith Head for A House is Not a Home, so in summation let's take a look at a couple of those. It's refreshing to see an example of a non-period film winning a prize for its costumes, isn't it?

 

Tennessee 100: "The Fugitive Kind"

Michael C. here from Serious Film to join in the Tennessee Williams festivities. When I picked a film to write about I jumped at The Fugitive Kind because

A) I'm a big Sidney Lumet fan and
B) I was curious how a second Brando/Williams collaboration could fly so far below my radar. I got my answer and then some.

The Fugitive Kind (1960) directed by Sidney Lumet based on Tennessee Williams’ play Orpheus Descending is one of the most fascinating messes I’ve ever seen. There is no getting around the fact that it just doesn’t work, yet I think I’d recommend it more readily than a lot of successful movies I’ve seen. Of all its flaws being dull is not one of them.

Williams writing was as inescapable in the fifties as Jane Austen’s was in the nineties. After burning through his major works Hollywood decided to take one of his rare unsuccessful productions and give it the full feature length treatment. Thus Opheus Descending, the story of a musician named Snakeskin with a questionable past who strikes up a relationship with a trapped middle-aged woman while lying low in a tiny southern town, hit the big screen under the title The Fugitive Kind.

This film represents Brando’s return to Tennessee Williams for the first and only time following his iconic work as Stanley Kowalski, and Anna Magnani’s second Williams project after winning the Best Actress Oscar for the movie of his play The Rose Tattoo. This was Sidney Lumet’s first encounter with Tennessee but his success with the adaptation of Broadway’s 12 Angry Men made him a natural choice. With such a collection of talent it can leave one wondering why so few still talk about The Fugitive Kind.

Brando and Magnani: Tennessee Williams Sophomore Slump

Until one actually watches the movie that is.

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.