Really Sad is Really Sad

Susan Hayward's portrayal of a woman on death row is based on the true story of Barbara Graham, a young woman who was convicted for murder and put to death in 1955. The 1958 Robert Wise film is the first of the films Susan Hayward made after her suicide attempt I've seen so maybe it's somewhat ironic the movie is called I Want to Live!--the exclamation mark is part of the title. As I said yesterday, Yield to the Night is the better film and it's easy to compare the two because of how much they have in common. Not only subject matter but both are films noir employing Dutch angles and Expressionist cinematography. I Want to Live! is a much more self-conscious film and has an Oscar bait feel to it--and indeed, it's the film Hayward finally won Best Actress for. Though I bring up her suicide attempt mainly as a possible explanation for the fact that her performance isn't as good in this film as examples of her work I've seen from before her attempt at suicide in 1954.

Hayward had a long career in film, her first major role co-starring with Ray Milland and Gary Cooper in Beau Geste. Seeing her in that film, it's hard to believe she had a destiny as an Oscar winner, coming off as another of a bland series of Olivia de Havilland surrogates in the adventure films of the 1930s. But her abilities seemed to increase dramatically throughout the 40s and her roles got more interesting, too. Her first nomination, and the movie she really ought to have won Best Actress for, was for her chaotic portrayal of a maniacal alcoholic based on the life of Bing Crosby's wife, Dixie Lee, in 1947's Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman. Joan Crawford was nominated the same year for Possessed and she also would have been a worthy winner--but, in a fairly typical move for the Academy even to-day, the award went to an utterly unremarkable performance in an absolutely unremarkable film, Loretta Young in The Farmer's Daughter.

Her portrayal as Graham actually reminded me a little of her performance in Beau Geste and I wonder if her suicide attempt left her bereft of the spirit for her art form she cultivated in the 40s and early 50s.

The movie portrays Graham as an innocent woman wrongly convicted--though the reality is more controversial. In contrast to Yield to the Night, I Want to Live! was made in these barbaric United States where the death penalty is practised even to-day. The film may be taken as anti-death penalty or simply as critical of the justice system. Certainly the unenthusiastic counsel, unethical treatment by law enforcement, and smear campaigns by the tabloids, portrayed relatively accurately in the film, all tipped the scales out of Graham's favour to a much greater degree than they otherwise would have been.

The film is based on Barbara Graham's letters to and newspaper articles by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ed Montgomery who was complicit in the making of the film. He led the charge against Graham when she was on trial, giving her the nickname "Bloody Babs" in the headlines but then after the trial was a champion for her innocence. The movie portrays this as Montgomery being swayed by a criminal psychologist who interviewed Graham and becoming convinced of her innocence--it's hard to say whether Montgomery was admirable for being able to admit when he'd made such a horrible mistake or if he was simply willing to go for the most sensational story possible, in whichever direction that might be.

Hayward's introduced in a pretty sensational shot, silhouetted smoking in the darkness apparently in the afterglow of orgasm. We learn she's a pretty wild dame who parties with a variety of criminals and is happy to take the rap for people, even doing time for perjury, something which ultimately helps seal her doom.

But she never kills anybody, which makes this film considerably less challenging than Yield to the Night or even Lars von Trier's fantastically melodramatic Dancer in the Dark. In that film, Bjork gives a brutal performance as a woman who's sentenced to death for murder after she shoots the man trying to rob her of the money she carefully saved up to pay for surgery to cure her young son of blindness. But von Trier wisely realised that a film should be less about making an intellectual argument and more about people. The arguments manifest best and naturally afterwards.

I Want to Live! doesn't really succeed at this, either, though Hayward's performance as as the rough edged Graham is a lot of fun, especially in scenes where she talks just as tough back to cops as they talk to her.

A Narrow Road That Ends

The other thing Diana Dors and Susan Hayward have in common is that they both received the most acclaim of their careers for portraying women on death row for murder. Dors' came first and is the better film, 1956's Yield to the Night. Made in England nine years before the death penalty was effectively abolished in Britain, and a year after the last woman was executed in Britain, the film strongly reflects a political climate already leaning against execution. The makers of the film attempt to at least look like they're presenting as fair an argument as possible--though Dors being a sex symbol was just one of several elements of propaganda in it. Yet, in arguing for the life of a woman who not only committed murder but never feels sorry for it, the movie creates an effective noir portrait of obsessive, focused madness.

The movies I've seen Dors in have presented her as a bombshell with platinum hair and sexy clothes. She looks that way in flashbacks in Yield to the Night but most of the movie she looks like this:

I wasn't impressed by her performance in previous films but here her minimalist style subtly conveys the introspective psychic numbness of her character as, trapped between the prison's stone walls under the light the guards never turn off, she runs over the events leading up to her conviction over and over. Here is a woman trapped in Sylvia Plath's bell jar.

Mary Hilton (Dors) is obsessively in unrequited love with Michael (Jin Lancaster) who is, in turn, obsessively in unrequited love with Lucy (Mercia Shaw), an older woman, far wealthier than impoverished Michael and Mary. Mary is married to Fred (Harry Hilton) but the two are separated. Michael sleeps with Mary regularly but invariably becomes cold to her afterwards, clearly to anyone watching abusing Mary's obsession.

When Michael commits suicide and addresses his suicide note to Lucy--who couldn't care less--Mary seeks revenge. And despite the fast approaching execution and visits with the priest and a middle aged society woman who urge her to reconsider, Mary never feels sorry for what she did. But she is afraid to die.

The cards are stacked a little in favour of sympathy for Mary--particularly for any heterosexual men watching who probably wouldn't mind an avenging angel with benefits who looked like Diana Dors. And we never even see Lucy's face, she's essentially always an off-screen presence. But the movie is wholly from Mary's perspective, based on a book by Joan Henry who spent eight months in prison herself and frequently wrote about prison experiences. The film was directed by her husband, J. Lee Thompson, who uses Dutch angles and Expressionist lighting in naturalistic locations to show a world filtered through a sense that the regular world is wrong and horrible somehow.

Yvonne Mitchell costars as a prison guard. She's not the only prison worker who feels sympathy for Mary--they all seem to until the death sentence becomes a certainty. Then, Mary notes in voice over, everyone gets a detached look in their eyes when talking to her--she recognises this look because it reminds her of how she felt when she decided she was going to kill someone. But Mitchell seems to interest Mary more for opening up to her a little about her feelings regarding her mother's recent death and the unlikelihood she will ever marry--Mitchell is the only guard who isn't trying to tell Mary how to feel and she doesn't patronise her. The moment where Mitchell says goodbye to her is tremendously effective. But my favourite scene is in the prison yard where Mary looks at a tree and thinks of and recites in voice-over lines from an A.E. Housman poem.

Loveliest of Trees
by A.E. Housman

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Together In Feet, Immortal In Feet

I've just discovered wikiFeet, a wiki for pictures of celebrity feet, past and present. I wonder if Quentin Tarantino loses whole days browsing this site. There's even a gallery for Susan Hayward, where I found this image.

That's how I found the site, doing an image search for Susan Hayward, one of my favourite actresses. But I was only looking for her because some of her pictures came up when I was googling Diana Dors, not one of my favourite actresses but certainly one with a sort of spectacular personal life.

If you're looking for something short and salacious to read, I recommend reading her Wikipedia entry some time.

Dors regularly held adult parties at her home. There, a number of celebrities, amply supplied with alcohol and drugs, mixed with young starlets, against a background of both soft and hard core porn films. Dors gave all her guests full access to the entire house which, her son Jason Lake later alleged in various media interviews and publications, she had had equipped with 8mm movie cameras. The young starlets were made aware of the arrangements, and were allowed to attend for free in return for making sure that their celebrity partners performed in bed at the right camera angles. Dors would then enjoy watching the films the following morning, keeping an archive of the best performances.

She was born "Diana Mary Fluck". I can just imagine the schoolyard jokes; "You hear about Diana? Oh, she's a Mary Fluck."

Both Hayward and Dors died in their 50s (57 and 52, respectively) of cancer (brain and ovarian, respectively). But Hayward was four times the actress Dors was and I don't think Hayward left a hidden fortune after she died that hasn't been recovered to this day--Dors did, supposedly. The two did have something else in common which I'll probably talk about to-morrow at length.

I woke up to-day with ambitions to get a lot done--homework, laundry, cleaning, comic colouring, but have mostly felt too lazy even to begin. So all I've done is gone to the grocery store and started reading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil again. I stopped at one of the Japanese markets to get some tofu which I think I might try roasting. Though I've been meaning to cut down on my oven use since it's been 100 Fahrenheit lately. Which is probably why all the potatoes in my cupboard were sprouting pretty flowers last night. So I cut off a potato sized hunk of daikon and roasted it instead, precisely as I would have the potatoes.

I coated the pieces in extra virgin olive oil and rosemary. The rosemary sticks to the daikon a lot better than it sticks to potato. But I must say I prefer potato--the daikon has a mild sweetness which is great but potatoes seem more . . . I don't know. Complex.

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Wet tofu hidden by cherries wrecks cars.
A radio accidentally loved Mars.

The Women Beset by Untimely Winter

Is it just me or does it seem like Scarlett Johansson has been sixteen for the past fifteen years? I saw her yesterday in Black Widow: The Winter Soldier--I mean, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, though Johansson as Natasha "Black Widow" Romanoff easily steals the picture. Well, Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Redford are good, too.

Even though it has the same screenwriters, this movie, unlike the first film, is good. Maybe because it's not the same director, maybe because it takes place in the present instead of being a period piece that so thoroughly misses the proper tone for the 1940s. Though I think my main complaint about the first film was that people frequently made decisions that didn't make sense. There was some of that in the new film--particularly a moment near the end where the villain refrains from killing Black Widow for no apparent reason.

Chris Evans is really muscular. I believe him doing the action stuff. He's good enough, I guess.

The movie returns to the well of Order versus Chaos that seems to be the predominant theme of superhero films--it's hard not to hear Aaron Eckhart saying, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Winter Soldier doesn't come close to The Dark Knight but it's not bad. Using Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and obvious references to U.S. national security policy, the movie risks being trite. It's mainly the actors who carry that bit off, particularly Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury whose desire for institutional secrecy and power stem from personal trust issues. But everything is overshadowed by Scarlett Johansson kicking ass.

I went to see it with Tim who had to leave for the restroom before the end credits finished and got to the now obligatory Marvel movie Easter Egg. So I had the pleasure of telling him he missed the cameo by Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and Tobey Maguire as Spider-man riding a T. Rex from Jurassic Park after Christian Bale's Batman riding the Queen Alien from Aliens while Scarlett Johansson watched completely naked.

Last night, I read the new story from Sirenia Digest, "The Beginning of a Year Without a Summer", a really nice, atmospheric vignette about juxtaposed realities, the futility and the urgency of interpreting symbols. I was reminded of the Oscar Wilde quote, "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril."

A Brief Face

Not much time to-day because they've shut off water in my building yet again for the seemingly never-ending plumbing repairs--for five hours this time, from 9am to 2pm. I made the mistake of starting to watch Funny Face while eating breakfast. Yesterday being Audrey Hepburn's birthday put me in the mood.

Funny Face is a movie with a lot of flaws, mainly in writing, the awkward connecting songs not written by George and Ira Gershwin, and too much time spent with Kay Thompson, despite Thompson's great singing voice. Audrey Hepburn did not have a great singing range--her performance in Funny Face probably the reason her songs were dubbed over in My Fair Lady. Yet she easily outshines Thompson and not because she's younger. For my money, she makes up for lack of range with enthusiasm. With unadulterated Audrey Hepburn-ishness, if you will.

Like Wolves and Hawks

There's a kind of fantasy story not often seen in movies or literature anymore in this age of the superhero blockbuster, the story of the regular little fellow caught up in a grand adventure with larger than life, ethereal archetypes. This is the pattern 1985's Ladyhawke follows. It's clear director Richard Donner and screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz had done some research into what a fantasy story is before making the film but I think they failed to really connect with the heart of fantasy. The resulting film is a product of an understanding of fantasy on an intellectual level, maybe even coming from a genuine appreciation of fantasy film, but is for the most part a sterilised skeleton.

Matthew Broderick plays the "regular little fellow" here, a thief named Philippe "The Mouse" Gaston, who as the movie opens manages to escape a legendarily inescapable dungeon in Aquila. The movie is told from his point of view and he has frequent asides to the camera in which he addresses God, humorously promising future good behaviour in return for divine intervention in whatever doom is impending--and then almost immediately transgressing in precisely the way he promised he wouldn't.

So this sets him up as distinct from the three comrades he falls in with who all make passionate vows the breaking of which always have serious consequences. As our POV character, though, Philippe must investigate his mysterious and taciturn comrades for us before we learn anything about them.

The first one he meets is Rutger Hauer as former captain of the guard Etienne Navarre who rescues Philippe from his former comrades in arms. We eventually learn Etienne is cursed to turn into a wolf at night and the hawk he carries on his arm is by night the woman for whose love the two of them were cursed, Isobeau, played by Michelle Pfeiffer.

Despite the film's title, the story turns much more Etienne who must choose between breaking his vow to murder the Bishop of Aquila, who cursed Etienne and Isobeau out of jealousy by calling on Satan, or heeding the monk played by Leo McKern who says there's a way of breaking the curse but only if he doesn't kill the bishop. The thematic momentum is towards this movie showing how vengeance is inherently bad but Donner clearly has no conviction in this idea.

Without this, all we're left with is a story about how true love is really, really important except, although Broderick is funny acting as go-between for the two lovers who can never meet in human form, the very premise of the film prevents any chemistry from developing between the lovers. Which is too bad--Rutger Hauer is rather badass in the film. He has some nice action scenes and there's a cool moment in the beginning where he bats away a sword with his hand. Michelle Pfeiffer is pretty but she functions pretty much as baggage, not having really anything to do.

And maybe one could argue that's the place of a female character in this kind of movie. Yet one of my fondest examples of this Little Flawed POV Character with Big Heroic Archetype Companions style story is Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress where the Princess Yuki's initiative drives many of the story's events. That film and The Hobbit as well as Lord of the Rings demonstrate by contrast another flaw in Ladyhawke which is that those stories featured genuinely flawed point of view characters whose sometimes selfish or unwise motives could have very serious consequences. Philippe, for being the every man, is very quickly and lazily turned into a saint whose actions and motives are always the most improbably virtuous of any character in the film.

The movie does have some gorgeous cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, on location in Italy, with beautiful castles and mist shrouded forests. The film's costumes are a bit bland, looking generally too clean. And the music, produced by Alan Parsons, has been justifiably called one of the worst soundtracks in history, ill suited for subject matter both in tone and style. A beautiful shot of guards galloping in pursuit of Philippe is accompanied by incongruously funky keyboard and bass guitar bringing to mind a low budget pornographic film.

Twitter Sonnet #622

Blue water colour tabard blends the leg.
Chocolate hares turn at the dry grass sound.
Burning Punch has broke a wet oaken keg.
May's daughter was hid by the claymore mound.
The solicitous mammal recalls bread.
Eocene sentiments reduce the fur.
Doppler effects pitch what wooden bats said.
Reddened yarn stitches become a pink blur.
Recombined citrus heads grin from the cup.
Horseless gallops knock over the coin purse.
Telephone hills pull frantic echoes up.
Eyebrow lobsters wire a new gum curse.
Blind hawks wait outside the bad luncheon's church.
Snowcapped sorcery was willed to a birch.

Orson Welles and Roses by Any Other Names Smell Sweeter Than This Movie

It's usually bad science fiction films that teach us we can put aside our petty differences for racial hatred we can all agree on but in 1950 The Black Rose brought the message that it doesn't matter what kind of human you are so long as you're white. Unless you're Orson Welles. The movie somewhat confusingly tells us a Mongol warlord Orson Welles who slaughters children isn't so bad. But the movie stars Tyrone Power--it's a mediaeval adventure film where for some reason Tyrone Power never gets in a sword fight. The story makes little sense, the characters are cardboard and everything's very poorly thought out. The only good things in this movie are Orson Welles and Jack Cardiff's cinematography. And Jack Hawkins as a Saxon bowman isn't bad, though he looks eerily like Steven Moffat.

Based on a 1945 novel, the film begins in England, two centuries after the Norman conquest, but there's still tensions between Norman and Saxon which seem like the writers got more from studying the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood than from actual historical accounts--though Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone in that film were capable of murdering and raping Saxons while the conflict at the beginning of The Black Rose involves Saxons sapping guards with the pommels of their swords after which the unnamed Norman king furrows his brow and lets everyone go.

The pommel sap and a couple swings of a ridiculously oversized mantel sword are all the swordplay we get from Power who, despite being truly one of the best swordsmen to star in a Hollywood film to this day, seemed to have some absurd preoccupation with being typecast. Which somehow manifests in him starring in this swashbuckler in which he does no swashbuckling.

There's a good film noir Power starred in a couple years earlier called Nightmare Alley though his typically tin-eared, unvarying performance actually worked for the naive con artist he played in that film. In The Black Rose, particularly next to Orson Welles, Power is substantial as a pile of feathers. But he still outshines the female lead, Cecile Aubry as a blonde half-Mongol, half Englishwoman Power and Hawkins meet after they've joined Welles' army in its conquest of China--unable to fight the Normans in England, the two Saxons seek their fortunes abroad where most of the movie takes place.

A lot of it was shot in Morocco and there are some really impressive location shots. The movie looks very, very expensive--the scenes in England use real castles, scenes in China use enormous, gorgeously decorated sets. All of this, I suspect, was part of a trend towards realism, influenced maybe by Italian films but probably more directly by the all-location shot cop film The Naked City. The adaptation of King Solomon's Mines that came out the same year as The Black Rose will give you the authentic location adventure film somewhat lighter on the racism, though.

Despite mentioning people in the Middle East have reason not to love Christians after the first crusades, the movie still takes great pains to tell us how fundamentally noble Englishmen are compared to everyone else. Aubry's English father, we're told, only impregnated her Mongolian mother under duress. Now, I don't expect racial sensitivity from a movie made in 1950, but something halfway plausible would be nice in this case.

Aubry comes off as the product of several generations of inbreeding or maybe simply like a ten year-old. Either way, her romance with Power is incredibly shallow and a little creepy. She refuses to wear the boy disguise that keeps her from death in the Mongol camp because she wants Power to see she's beautiful. She believes Power is the man from a sort of fairy tale prophecy her father told her because he's white and handsome. She actually spends a lot more time with Hawkins and seems to agree with him on not liking how Welles slaughters women and children but she prefers Power because, as she plainly says, he's prettier.

The whole movie is enormously stacked against anyone who's not white but then seems rather amusingly to be utterly beguiled by Welles' performance as the Khan. Welles so disarmingly describes the practicality of wholesale murder the film doesn't seem to blame Power for wanting to stick with him and at the end of the film the Khan gets a sentimental coda.

I loved that Welles and Power play a legitimate chess game at one point in the film--though by anachronistic rules--both move their pawns out two spaces in the beginning centuries before this became part of the game.

Gods, but this movie's beautiful, though. The influence of Rembrandt on Cardiff is really clear.

Hot Day for a Dragon

I met this very easy going, very large squirrel outside the zoo to-day. He made some noise to get my attention then climbed up on a fence to be level with my chest and we looked at each other for a minute. I'm guessing he must have been expecting something from the human walking on the path where he's probably used to seeing a steady stream of tourists. Gods know what they've been feeding him.

I got out of class over an hour early to-day. The teacher wasn't feeling well. So, since I now have a four month zoo pass, I decided I'd drop in. I'd been wanting to see the gorillas again. And I did see one, sleeping in the shade, right against the glass:

Too much glare for the picture to come out properly.

The gorilla may have been put out by the 99 Fahrenheit weather to-day. The Komodo dragon seemed a little more lively, also right against the glass:

I had the dragon to myself for a few minutes--the zoo was pretty lightly crowded. We blinked at each other.

And it was feeding time for the giant tortoises:

This picture already has turtles and a crocodile:

But look at another shot of the same thing at a different exposure:

Another crocodile was there all along.

All the reptiles were energetic. The little turtles in the nearby aquariums were quite busy:

I asked if they had any message they wanted me to convey on my blog and one said, "Yeah--'Fuck Michael Bay.'"

There was a big, open air turtle enclosure nearby but for some reason the only animal I saw in it was this snake:

I have a Tumblr now. You can find it here. I'm not quite sure yet what its purpose will be yet. I may just use it to post doodles or random screenshots from movies.

The Intelligible Music

I dreamt last night a technique was developed to find printed on eyeballs visions of what the owner of the eyes had seen. I saw a vision in someone's eyes of a Who concert in which for some reason Roger Daltrey was singing no words, just going "Oooouuu" to the tune of the song lyrics. He was in the middle of "ooouu"ing through "Love is Coming Down" when a young man in an olive green coat climbed on stage and started "oooouu"ing into the microphone too. Daltrey started playing along, trading verses with the guy, until the guy sang mockingly, "When are you going to sing some lyrics, Roger?"

Daltrey walked angrily off-stage and was replaced by Cindy Lauper who was bottomless, only wearing a small pink jacket. The band, still The Who line-up, started to play an extra long intro to Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" while Lauper sat down and started tying a series of orange leather straps and ribbons to her left leg and one orange ribbon to her right thigh. When the crowd started booing, Lauper got up and screamed into the microphone, "Are you in third grade? You know this song you fucking twats!" The crowd cheered and Lauper said, gently and sort of sadly, "I'm just glad I could be honest with you," at which the cheering waned slightly in confusion.

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The spine makes love to foramen magnum.
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The red oven timers start for signum.
The city school taught waltz to Matilda.
Frozen tentacle tiaras roast gems.
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At length home came to Hideko's Carmen.
The burnt potato egg hatched a fried fish.
Shoelace tendrils bring life to the lizard.
A green pepper makes a vinegar wish.
Red spirals parade on the closed vizard.
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Dark paper clips convey notes to the brass.