Autumn into Winter

TV review: Get Back (The Peter Jackson version)

 

The big thanksgiving TV event this year was Peter Jackson (i.e., Lord of the Rings)'s remaster of all the footage shot in January 1969 of the Beatles recording the songs that would end up on Let it Be.  This footage was shot by Michael Lindsay-Hogg (who may or may not be the bastard son of Orson Welles - he certainly looks the part, and shares a fondness for cigars and self-importance) who features prominently in the footage and has become something of a cartoon villain on Twitter.  Jackson, whose films have nosedived in quality since LotR, had a moment of respectability a year or so ago with They Shall Not Grow Old, which took film footage from World War One and restored it (and colorized it) using artificial intelligence, and he's used the same process here.  It's largely inoffensive, although "Smooth Ringo" - a few stills of uncanny-valley looking Ringo, was briefly a meme.  He also was able to clean up some audio that had not been heard before, most notoriously a conversation that John and Paul had in the canteen, that the odious Lindsay-Hogg bugged with a mike in some flowers on the table, where they're discussing what to do about George, who at that moment in time had quit the group.  This audio was pretty much inaudible back in 1969, and it's only using modern technology that we are able to hear the conversation (and feel a bit dirty about it).  Anyway, apparently there were 60 hours of film (and much more of just audio) that Jackson has turned into about 7 hours worth of footage (with a promised total of 18 hours to leak out eventually).  We watched the 7 hours, spread out over three nights, and I have some notes.

• Lindsay-Hogg.  He really is insufferable.  From the horrible mid-Atlantic accent, to his constant hectoring the Beatles to finish the film by playing a gig in a Roman amphitheater in Libya (watched by candle-holding "Arabs") or even a children's hospital ("not too sick") or orphanage (!), to his insisting to Linda (then Eastman, later McCartney) that he was a bigger Beatles fan than she was, the general consensus is that the lads were saints not to have murdered him.  As it was they constantly tried to get round him bugging their conversations, and he just as constantly tried to find ways to record their most private thoughts.  And of course, his finished product, the original 90 minute film called Get Back was responsible for the long-held view that these sessions were complete misery and essentially the moment the Beatles fell apart.  Not so, as the extended footage reveals.  However, it must also be said that he got some damn good footage.  And pretty much came up with the final idea of the concert on the roof.
  
• Yoko.  She, of course, is supposed to have broken up the Beatles.  The footage pretty much undermines that, as well.  Nobody seems to mind her, and she's not the only hanger-on (a couple of Hare Krishna "friends" of George hang around for a while, creepy and silent, and Linda's daughter is far more intrusive on the day she comes in - albeit a lot cuter).  But God, John and her are annoying.  The couple that has to demonstrate to the world just how deeply and passionately they are in love.  Plus, every time the band is just jamming, usually when one of their number is missing, she's on the mike just shrieking.  I mean, once would've been enough, but it's lots of times.  And it's horrible.  But what do I know of performance art?
• George.  As mentioned, George quits at the end of the first episode, which is the most stressful and ill-tempered one, mainly because it's in a huge drafty hangar in Twickenham that's owned by the film studio (where Ringo will start filming The Magic Christian - also featuring Peter Sellers, who visits briefly, amid a lot of awkward silence - the (absurd) reason why the Beatles have to rush to finish recording in under a month).  It doesn't help that John seems stoned and is certainly unhelpful and quiet for this part of the documentary.  It's here that we see outward bad blood between George and Paul, although I have to say that John has even less respect for George's contributions.  George is famously sitting on a pile of great songs because the other two songwriters only ever allowed him a maximum of two songs per batch-of-14-that-typically-make-up-an-album.  The ones we get to see here include "I Me Mine" (which comes with a charming little story about how he came up with it while watching the BBC the night before), "For You Blue," "Old Brown Shoe," and a few that would later show up on Abbey Road, including an early version of Something, with the lyric "she moves me like a pomegranate".  Towards the end of the third part George essentially says that he's thinking of recording all the songs on his own album, even if he later comes back to the Beatles, to which John murmurs noncommittal noises.  This, of course, was his massive triple album All Things Must Pass.  If the Beatles have a family dynamic where Paul is the mother hen (bossy, but the only reason anything gets done), John is the Cool Dad, George is definitely the sulky teen.  He's also the nattiest dressed (second is Ringo, with John and Paul lagging well behind), and he has a soft spot for Ringo.  (Ringo comes in one morning and is tinkering with the piano and George says "I see you've learned A-minor," and then proceeds to help Ringo work out this new song "Octopus's Garden" he's messing around with.  George also has to help John out on the guitar a fair amount, but despite that is apparently content to let John have the guitar solo on "Get Back".  
• Paul.  Paul is clearly sensitive about accusations that he's always bossing everybody around, but as he points out, since "Mr. Epstein" (bizarrely, nobody calls him Brian) died, they've lacked a parental figure to rebel against, and have been somewhat rudderless, but at the same time either has a really specific vision of how the song must go, and directs everybody else down to the minute detail, or throws his hands up and gives up on the song.  But he's also responsible for the most transcendent scenes in the whole documentary: one where, while waiting for John to roll in (late as usual), he just strums away on a bass and in under a minute, "Get Back" just emerges (while George and Ringo sit listening and yawning), and another where some production designer is running the latest post-amphitheater/pre-rooftop plan for the show to end the sessions by John, while in the background you hear Paul noodling around on the piano and this time "Let it Be" starts to take shape.  Paul also seems totally cool with Yoko, and is very sweet (as mentioned) with Linda's young daughter (whom he would later adopt).  He also gets positively teary-eyed at one point when George is still "out" of the Beatles (famously he leaves and says "see you around the clubs" as he goes) and it looks like John may follow.  "And then there were two," Paul says, with a definite wobbly lip.  
• Allen Klein.  THIS is the REAL reason the Beatles broke up, and we get to see it start to happen.  We never see the man himself (an American who managed to take over (disastrously) the Rolling Stones' affairs and set his sights on the Beatles.  John (who has been hanging out with the Stones) comes in one day and waxes lyrical about Klein.  I mean, he almost literally sings his praises.  "He knows us better than we know us!" he tells George.  Ringo later calls him a con man, but follows it up with "it'll be nice to have one on our side for once".  John is like a religious convert and is absolutely dead set on having Klein take over their money.  Famously, however, Paul talks to his in-laws - the Eastmans, of inventers-of-Kodak fame, and they warn him off, which enrages John and ends up in Paul suing the rest of the Beatles to get their affairs out of Klein's clutches.  One thing we do see is Glyn Johns, the recording engineer (and another clothes horse) who has worked on all the Stones' albums, apparently try gently to warn the Beatles off Klein.  "He's weird, though, isn't he?" "One thing he does is that he'll ask you a question, and then if he doesn't like your answer, he'll just change the subject right in the middle of it.  I didn't like that, to be honest."
• Clothes.  As mentioned, George and Ringo are the true fashionistas, successively modeling swank suits and amazing shirts, along with (in George's case) some truly outrageous boots.  John and George also seem to favor gigantic fur coats, but under that John seems to go for comfort, dressing more-or-less like a mime, in comfortable-looking form-fitting outfits that show off how scarily skinny he is.  (They all are - George has no arse whatsoever - but John particularly so.)  Paul likes knitwear in various bright colors, but also undershirt-waistcoat combinations that somebody (George Martin, I think) liken to a Victorian miner.  He also has a fave pair of shoes that he wears the whole time with little mirrors in them.  He's wearing them in the concert on the roof.
• Food and drink.  It's sweet how English they are: endless cups of tea (John insists on the non-posh type, and is heard demanding "a whole pot this time"), and endless slices of toast, with (as per George's explicit request) marmalade.  They also have wine and beer thrown in there throughout the day.  And they break for lunch (and seem very keen to do so).  So it's sort of remarkable they keep their figures.  Perhaps the endless stream of "ciggies" have something to do with it.  Just watching this documentary is enough to make your clothes smell.
• Billy Preston.  He comes in once they move to the Savile Row studio, when they realize that they'll need a "man who just plays the piano" (as John puts it - or words to that effect) because they'll be playing the songs live for the first time in years, and not just recording their parts separately and stitching them together in the studio.  He seems practically mute (and perpetually smiling), but they all love him and have known him since their Hamburg days, when they met him playing with Little Richard.  He truly is a wizard on the keys and seems to improvise all the amazing keyboard parts you hear in the songs on the spur of the moment.  Paul doesn't need to give him any directions.
• Mal Evans.  He is their somewhat buffoonish dogsbody, with a very unfortunate pageboy haircut.  (He's the one who has to get marmalade, or an anvil (for "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" -  one of the many Abbey Road songs that they work on - but on the plus side, he gets to play it in the song).  He plays very gamely but somewhat ineptly with Linda's daughter, and is always on hand to note down lyrics in his surprisingly pretty handwriting.  He also shows his worth when he (along with the excellent receptionist) successfully stalls the (admittedly useless) coppers who come to shut down the concert after "at least 30 noise complaints in a few minutes" for what seems like an hour.  He met a sad end in the 70s, after the Beatles split and his multiple-but-minor talents no longer had an outlet.  They should've treated him better, but they do seem to regard him with a mixture of affection and contempt.  He's not like "Shake" in A Hard Day's Night.
• Having their backs to the wall solves a lot.  As Paul says, "we're always best with our backs to the wall," and as the days tick down to their deadline, they get more and more serious and workmanlike (although with multiple lapses into jams of their old tunes in new and silly versions) as the days pass.  The bickering drops away and these songs we know so well all take shape in front of us.  Even the day after the concert on the roof they meet one more time to nail down about 6 more songs to get in the can.  Why didn't the album they were planning get released then and there?  Why did only some of the songs they worked on get used on Abbey Road, and the rest left for Phil Spector to lard-up with strings after they had split up?  This documentary doesn't tell us.  But it's nice to see them all getting along, in a way the original documentary definitely didn't show.  It leaves a good taste in the mouth, even if you know Alan Klein is lurking in the wings...
• The Telly.  This was filmed for the TV, obviously (and there's a debate about whether it could be converted into a feature film - Paul doesn't think you can blow up 16mm film to a feature, but George says you can), but what's also rather charming is how much TV the Beatles watch.  As mentioned, George gets the idea for I, Me, Mine from a TV programme, but John also mentions seeing Fleetwood Mac (the 1969 bluesy version) on the TV and is very impressed (they're better than Canned Heat in his view), and Tony Hancock gets a mention (it must have been a retrospective, because he committed suicide in 1968).  Obviously the lads don't actually spend too much time "down the clubs" any more.
  

Thanksgiving

What with our various dietary restrictions, it's hard to come up with a good Thanksgiving meal for all. But I demand pumpkin pie, and for that I have to make my own grain-free, vegan pie-lets. Voila:

After the first course (including mashed potatoes and my own mushroom/onion gravy) it's time for a quick constitutional with Frederick to clear some room for the pie-lets. A bit dreary. Solid November weather.

Home for the pies! Aren't they adorable?

And here's the wreckage of the first course that we'll gradually work our way through in the coming days.

Thomas paid a flying visit but wasn't feeling very well. Joanne came for both courses and a little bit of "Meet Me in St. Louis" before I took her back and wrestled (vainly) with her cable and (more enjoyably) with her lovely little cat Annie.

Film review: The More The Merrier (1943)

I wrote about Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison that it was a rom com without much of either.  Well this one rectifies that by being both very funny (including at least two pratfalls that had Jami busting a gut) and swooningly romantic.  It re-pairs Jean Arthur (an acquired taste that we have certainly acquired, who gets to model amazing 40's haircuts and some surprising midriff-baring outfits) with the reliably great Charles Coburn (last seen together in The Devil and Miss Jones) and adds hunk-o-manhood Joel McRea.  It's set in wartime (because it actually was wartime) Washington DC, where, as the visiting Benjamin Dingle (Coburn) is often heard to remark, there are eight women to every man. This is illustrated in the tongue-in-cheek opening, which also reveals how ridiculously overcrowded it was at the time, something that led to a call for patriotic apartment-owners to sublet any spare rooms.  Jean Arthur's Connie Milligan has taken this on board and placed an ad, something that Dingle responds to because he is two days early for the hotel room that some senator (Dingle is a rich bigwig who has been brought in to help fix the housing crisis) rented for him.  He gets there early, but still finds a huge crowd of people waiting outside.  Taking on board the slogan he has seen on some local statuary (another thing that he repeats ad nauseam) he damns the torpedoes and goes full speed ahead, which in this case involves pretending to be the landlord and informing everybody else that the apartment has been rented.  When Connie shows up (packed in with three other young women in a very natty little roadster) 

she is alarmed to find that the person who insists he is taking her room is a man.  But Dingle is used to and adept at getting his way and bulldozes her (at least temporarily).  She does, however, insist on a very rigid breakfasting schedule, that involves an intricate back-and-forth between bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen and front door (to get the milk) and is timed to the minute.  Dingle tries gamely but cannot manage it, at least the first day.  

However, while he is convincing her to let him stay the night before, he also berates her for not being married, something that makes her bridle and retort (despite the fact that, we later find, she has been engaged for 26 months) that perhaps she doesn't want to get married.  Well, as Dingle is leaving the house the next morning, he spots a man carrying what appears to be an aeroplane propeller wrapped in brown paper towards the place.  This is, of course, Joel McCrea, who is a soldier called Joe Carter, but whom Dingle keeps calling Bill, because he once knew a soldier call Bill Carter.  At any rate, Dingle has quickly sized him up and decided that this is a man well suited for Connie, and contrives to bring them together by the means of sub-subletting his room to him.  Of course he knows that Connie would never go for it, and there is a hilarious sequence where he manages to keep each from seeing the other (Carter thinks Dingle is the only other inhabitant of the apartment) when everyone comes home and Connie and Joe each take turns in the bathroom, 

each thinking each time they are replacing Dingle in there.  Finally they do cross paths, and Connie (who at this point has a face covered with cold cream) attempts to eject both men, 

but is blocked from doing so because she can't reimburse Dingle's rent, having spent it on a hat, and he can't reimburse Joe's, having spent it on telegrams.  So we witness another morning's routine, this time even more complicated.  However, they quickly settle in, 

and in fact we get to see all three sunning themselves up on the roof, along with half of DC, it would seem.  The boys' jibes drive Connie down (she tires of them acting out the Dick Tracy cartoons from the paper) but she leaves her diary behind.  Despite Joe's warnings, Dingle reads it, and is caught doing so, which is the final straw: this time they really are ejected.  Or at least Dingle is: Joe is still packing when Connie comes home, and on hearing he's going to be posted to Africa in just two days, she relents and lets him stay.  This leads to a very fast thaw, to the extent that both are hoping that Connie's fiance (Charles J. Pendergast, owner of a truly terrible toupee, and workmate and sparring partner of Dingle in his housing role) will work late and not call at eight to take her out to dinner, so that Joe can.  It looks like they've made it and are heading out the door, when a troublesome kid neighbor of Connie's insists on buttonholing her about his quandary about whether or not to be a scout.  While talking to him, she surreptitiously removes the phone from its cradle so Charles can't call, something Joe sees with pleasure, but the annoying kid spots it, replaces it, and Charles calls.  What's more, the obnoxious brat spots Joe watching them leave out the window with his binoculars, and accuses him on spying, to which he, irritated, responds that he's a Jap and chases the kid out.  However, it turns out that the place that Dingle has invited him out to dinner is also the place that Charles and Connie are at, and Dingle takes Charles away to work to clear the path for Joe to romance Connie.  And so he does, in ways that, while chaste enough, are hot enough, one would have thought, to tiptoe to the very edge of the Hayes' Code.  

McCrea and Arthur have genuine chemistry, despite the characters they play being rather ill-suited to each other.  In what remains we manage to cram in a visit from the FBI (thanks, annoying neighbor kid) and a lighting trip to South Carolina, courtesy of Dingle, and some apartment modifications performed by same while the couple is away.  Some critics decry that the film lapses into sentimentality at the end, but I don't think that's fair.  It certainly accents the romance towards the end, but you never lose sight of the comedy, and Coburn is always a steadying presence.  Overall, an absolute corker.  Well done George Stevens, who also directed Shane, Giant and The Greatest Story Every Told!

Film review: Nightmare Alley (1947)

Another, very different, Joan Blondell film.  Only 6 years separate them, but she's gone from the best buddy of a 21-year-old to a washed up middle-aged carny.  And, atypically for her, there's not an iota of humor in her role.  But the film really belongs to Tyrone Power, whom I only really know from this particular Simpson's reference: Mr. Burns is running for Governor and comes to dinner with the Simpsons as a  sign that he has the common touch.  They get made up for the camera and, and Homer, on seeing the result

says "Hello handsome!" but the director says "Get that stuff off his face - We're here to have dinner with the common man, not Tyrone Power!"

Anyway, this was supposed to be a very atypical film for him, as well as shocking for its time.  The Criterion Channel describes it as "one of the most haunting and perverse film noirs of the 1940s," and it certainly has a certain sleazy grip that it exerts as it goes on.  It helps that it begins at a carny, with a very "Freaks" like atmosphere, although technically there's only a Geek, 

a pitiful alcoholic creature who is seen being fed live chickens as the film opens; in a rather heavy-handed foreshadowing, Powers' Stanton (at first just "Stan") Carlisle comments incredulously how low you would have to sink to end up like that. Stan is a fairly new arrival and a general dogsbody, in particular to Blondell's Zeena 

and her alcoholic husband/partner in her mentalism act, but Stan just loves it.  He gives a little speech to Zeena, his eyes almost glowing, that is a bit reminiscent of Uncle Charlie's "silly wives" speech at the dinner table in Shadow of a Doubt, and that reveals borderline psychopathy.  You can see Zeena realizing this, but at the same time, he's Tyrone Power (as one reviewer said of his performance, "Power uses his almost irritating handsomeness as a subversive tool"), and he's awful sweet to her.  We have by this point already seen Zeena's act, that involves Stan going into the audience and collecting written questions that Zeena supposedly burns but then reads "from the ether," but in fact, from a chalkboard written by the alcoholic husband under her floor.  But the act used to be better (before her previous infidelities (he said of her that she had a heart like an artichoke, a petal for everyone) drove him away and to the bottle, until she reformed and they reconciled) - she would be blindfold and he would ask her questions from the crowd that she would magically answer.  They did this through a secret code that would be built into the questions, and this code is such an effective act (they worked much fancier places before the separation) that it's their "nest egg" that Zeena wants to use to send hubby to rehab.  But alas it is never to be: in something that looks like it's on purpose, but is really an accident, Stan accidentally gives him a bottle of woodgrain alcohol and it kills him.  He is guilt-ridden (so he's not a total psychopath) but still gets Zeena to teach him the code.  However, he also has the beautiful young Molly 

(whom the hulking strongman Bruno regards as his girl) sit in, so that she learns the code, too.  And after those two are caught out having sex (it's not that blatant, this being 1947, but it's pretty obvious) and forced to get married (apparently carny folk have a code), Stan takes his new bride and the new act on the road.  Thus begins the true rise of the great Stanton.

We next see him blindfold in a swanky Chicago club, performing the act to great acclaim.  But not total acclaim: one beautiful woman is unimpressed, and has worked out that it's a code, and the strange stresses that Molly puts on her words are the key.  (Adding to the general atmosphere of dread around the film, the woman is played by Helen Walker, last spotted in a more lighthearted role in 1946's Cluny Brown, but who can certainly pull off the femme fatale.  Between that film and this, however, was the tragic accident that essentially drove her out of the business, and if you know that's hanging over her - that she's about to be a pariah - it injects a certain frisson.)  She is psychoanalyst Dr. Lilith Ritter, and after Stanton blocks her attempt to show him up (she asks something like "how old is my mother" and he guesses rightly that she is dead), she is suitably impressed and asks him to come up and see her.  

The meeting (at her office) doesn't go particularly well: he is not as impressed by her as she perhaps wants, and is more impressed with her gadget that records all her sessions on an LP, seeing the value in the information she has on the bigwigs of this town, and she sends him on his way just as a patient of hers calls in with an emergency appointment.  However, he only pretends to leave and sneaks back into the outer office and overhears the patient, an old lady, discussing her dreams about the daughter whom she has lost.  Despite appearing morally revolted by Stanton's plans to exploit the knowledge on her LPs, she is soon collaborating, and we see the old lady patient show up at one of his shows and ask a question about her daughter.  At this point, Stanton makes a bold leap into the next phase of his planned ascent: spiritualism.  He appears to go into a trance, claiming to see a spirit version of her daughter (reciting things about her that only someone with access to the mother's dreams would know) and then collapses in a swoon.  This naturally enthralls the mother, and soon she is showering Stanton with money.  But again, this is just a stepping-stone: one of the city's true bigwigs suspects Stanton of fraud, and comes to confront him, but he too is a patient of Lilith's and almost immediately becomes Stanton's new sugar daddy.  He gives him $150K to start his new "tabernacle," but even this is peanuts.  He promises to set him up with a radio station if he can cause the girl whom as a young man he intended to marry to manifest herself.  Stanton goes to work on the pure Molly, who is disgusted by the whole affair and wants to leave him and go back to the Carny, and Zeena and Bruno (who visited a bit earlier and spooked Stanton with a repeat of the Tarot reading 

that predicted the death of Zeena's husband, only this time with Stanton as the "hanged man" - Stanton blusters that this is just flim flam for the suckers, but you can see it gets under his skin).  At this point Stanton gives a speech that smells a bit of the studio attempting to play it safe, where he insists he never insults or uses God or religion (even though he has earlier made it quite clear what he thinks of religion in recounting his treatment by the pious in the orphanage he was raised in), and somehow manages to persuade her to play along.  However, it all falls apart when the city bigwig is so obviously deeply affected that he breaks down and prays and she rushes forward and breaks the spell.  (Never mind that in the process he essentially reveals that he has done over untold people in his path to the top.)  The rest of the film is the descent of Stanton, who, despite everything (this is no Brighton Rock) loves his Molly (and, in an acknowledged piece of studio interference that echoes Zeena's attempted rescue of her husband, is (potentially) finally redeemed by her).  The most chilling part of this is when Dr. Lilith (hey - is this where Frasier got the name?), whose advances Stanton had earlier rebuffed (on the sensible grounds that they couldn't be seen together, given that he was using her LPs illegally), reveals her true colors.  (This would make a good companion piece to Blind Alley, where the protagonist uses psychoanalysis as a weapon against the villain.) We plummet towards two bookends.  One has Stanton, surrounded by winos, repeating the stock demonstration of mindreading that Zeena's husband performed on him on the night he gave him the fatal alcohol.  ("I see green hills - I see a boy running with his dog...") with one addition (the husband didn't mention a mother waiting, because it wouldn't have worked on the orphan Stanton), followed by the callback to the Geek at the start.  But then Molly reappears...

Is this a true noir?  Well, it certainly has the hallmarks of Fate crushing us all in her grasp, and ill befalling all those who try to get ahead by cheating the system.  And add to that a cynicism about just about every sacred cow of mid-century America that is almost breathtaking, and you can see why this was not a huge popular success at its release, and equally why it has become a revered cult movie.  It is indeed, unforgettable.  Beautifully shot on a lot that had real circus performers, in the stark expressionistic lighting that typified noirs, and with a mesmerizing (no pun intended) central performance, surrounded by excellent support acts.  Yes, it's a bit pulpy, but so was the tawdry bestseller on which it was based, and which this film is widely regarded to transcend.  See it now before Guillermo Del Toro releases his remake!