MAEDCHEN IN UNIFORM (1958)

Like the U.S., Germany had a "pre-Code" period of film production. They call it the Weimar Republic, and the repression that followed was considerably more sweeping than what befell America. During Weimar Germany was part of the global vanguard of cinema, and plenty of envelopes were pushed. One of the last milestones of the Weimar era was history's reputed first-ever "lesbian" film, Leontine Sagan and Carl Froelich's Mädchen in Uniform. For screenwriter Christa Winsloe, this was just the latest of many titles for her play, which started life as "Yesterday and Today" and morphed into "Sickness of Love" before acquiring its more familiar fetishistic label. The 1931 film survived Nazi suppression and its name endured enough in memories that there was probably no alternative to using the same title when Geza von Radvanyi remade the story in 1958. The uniforms are school uniforms, of course, but on first hearing the title you might expect something more military, and that impression wouldn't be entirely accidental. We first see the students of the film's girls' school marching in formation, and the faculty emphasizes repeatedly that the girls are being trained to be the wives and mothers of soldiers. That doesn't exactly make them Spartan women but it does impose a perhaps-unnatural discipline on the girls. Whether or not the definitive title implies that the militaristic discipline, not to mention the all-female environment, has something to do with Manuela von Meinhardis's dangerous attraction to her teacher Fraulein von Bernburg is open to question, but the story definitely looks like a critique of Prussian culture in general.

I've never seen the original film, and I can't say whether the remake is toned down the way a 1958 Hollywood film might be toned down from a Pre-Code original. But whatever your expectations might be for a "lesbian" film, the Radvanyi version comes across as little more than an adolescent crush. Manuela (Romy Schneider) is sent to boarding school after the death of her beloved mother. She's looking for another mother figure, and perhaps more, when she encounters von Bernburg (Lilli Palmer). She's not alone in her idolization of the stylish schoolmarm, who endears herself to the students by kissing each one of them on the forehead at bedtime. She feels she's getting special attention, however, when the teacher lends her a shift; Manuela sleeps with her head on top of the thing, while a slightly older student seethes with jealousy.

I've just taken a look at the 1931 movie and in the equivalent scene there Bernburg kisses Manuela on the lips. Not so here. Score one for Pre-Code German cinema.

Whatever Manuela's feeling is channeled in an alarming direction when she's cast as Romeo in the class production of the Shakespeare play. From what we see, the play's not only translated but bowdlerized, since it ends with Romeo and Juliet wed. It's a triumph for Manuela that turns to disaster as, intoxicated by both artistic success and spiked punch, she avows her love for von Bernberg in front of a scandalized faculty before passing out.

The remake creates a sentimental tragic mood from the beginning with Manuela's visit to her mother's grave, while a heartbreaking hymn plays constantly on the school's carillon. The very architecture of the school foreshadow's Manuela's fate. The main hall is dominated by a central staircase that winds up at least four floors. From the moment Manuela first looks over the railing to the floor far below, you anticipate someone taking the short way down. The payoff comes after Manuela is disciplined for her outburst and von Bernburg prepares to leave the school. Radvanyi milks the moment for every drop of suspense. Manuela sits dejected near the bottom of the stairs and looks upward to the top railing. The camera follows her all the way up the stairs as the soundtrack adds a sinister undertone to the carillon theme. Then what?

Not for this film the lethal catharsis of Hollywood's near-contemporary contemplation of lesbian attraction in The Children's Hour. While Manuela apparently takes the dive in Winsloe's original play, the Radvanyi film has a thuddingly anticlimactic wrap-up. Von Bernburg holds Manuela's attention long enough for her classmates to pull her off the railing. As she recovers in hospital, the stern headmistress softens and urges Von Bernburg to stay on, but the teacher refuses, arguing that she would only be an obstacle to Manuela's maturation. She leaves and that's the end. It leaves you wondering what the moral was, or if there is one. Palmer gives a necessarily enigmatic performance, while the 20 year old Schneider, already a star thanks to a series of films about Empress Elizabeth of Austria, is convincingly adolescent and earnest. You believe in her attraction to Palmer, and you could buy the attraction being mutual without that necessarily being the case. As time makes the story seem less daring, this version should at least endure as a colorful, sentimental, twofold period piece -- a reflection of the attitudes of 1910, when the story's set, and 1958, when the film was made.

Now Playing: MAY 9, 1933

What could possibly compete against King Kong in Milwaukee? One theater tries fighting fire with fire, sort of -- programming Fay Wray against Fay Wray.

I've seen this one: a crisp Columbia programmer with a few special effects of its own and Ralph Bellamy as a gruff, tough hero before he became "Ralph Bellamy," an archetype for a sort of loser male.

Here's one more people today may have seen.

From here, it gets more obscure, but Universal clearly felt they had something.

Who or what is "Kiepura?" I wasn't sure if it was male or female from the advertising, but Jan Kiepura was a Polish tenor who'd become an international star. He filmed German and French language versions of this English production picked up by Universal in the U.S. The copy makes big claims that the picture couldn't back up, or else more of us would know about it now.

And the also-rans...

 

We can't all escape death...

From Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Uploaded to YouTube by jasonargomov.

In memory of Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013)

THE SADISTIC BARON VON KLAUS (La mano de un hombre muerto, 1962)

Once you become a horror man -- an actor typecast as a menace in scary movies, there are certain roles that come your way inevitably. One of those is the red herring. It didn't take Howard Vernon long to get there; he played Max von Klaus for the late Jess Franco in the same year that Franco had directed him in the title role of The Awful Dr. Orloff. It's as if Franco knew he would type the man with the burning gaze. Klaus hinges on the expectation that we'll be spooked by the mere sight of Vernon and suspect him of the worst. Franco uses a nice gimmick to distance the audience from the actor and the character he plays. We first see him as a static image: a snapshot at police headquarters or a painted portrait on the wall of his home. Franco confronts us with the image of Howard Vernon the newly-minted horror star before showing us the man Max Von Klaus. Later, a girl staying at the house is spooked in the middle of the night. She runs through the halls only to stop short, startled, at the site of the painting. Only then does Max himself appear to ask what's the matter.

What's the matter in town is that murder has revived the legend of the accursed Baron von Klaus of 500 years ago, a sadist before the word was coined to describe him. An angry father cursed this Baron for torturing his daughter, and the townsfolk tell that the villain disappeared in the swamps but did not die. Suspicion alights on Max inevitably, although Franco is careful to give us several other suspicious characters.

The problem for Max is that his alibi for the time of one of the murders stinks. As he protests, he'd probably come up with a better alibi had he actually done the crime, but his real problem, we learn, is that he actually does have a secret to keep. Only one person, the one for whose sake he's keeping the secret, can reveal it to free him, perhaps not without cost. All of this makes Max more than a red herring. He actually becomes a sympathetic character, if not quite the hero of the picture. Franco's compassionate handling of the material seems atypical; even his fans might concede that this is a rare Franco film with a heart.

Filmed in a wider aspect ration than Orloff, Klaus is a more classically composed if perhaps slightly less personal film from Franco. There's actually less sadism to it than the English language title suggests, though there is one scene with a topless victim, filmed almost tastefully, chained to the ceiling of a dungeon. Cinematographer Godofredo Pacheco gives the old-time urban and forest locations plenty of expansive, expressionist atmosphere. The story is simple stuff, but the visuals make it worth looking at, and if not one of his best, it may be one of Franco's most likable films.

Two Lovers Against A Prehistoric Ape: NOW PLAYING, MAY 5, 1933

Here's a picture that needs no introduction now. It was a different story eighty years ago, when it was spanking new. Below is a page from the May 4 Milwaukee Sentinel:

Let's get some more detail from the upper right of the page:

Now here's the opening day ad:

And here's more:

 

 

Finally, here's a review from the Milwaukee Journal:

 



On the Big Screen: IRON MAN THREE (2013)

 

Spoiler-free summary: Shane Black's superhero picture is a stand-alone sequel that surprisingly does nothing to begin setting up the next Avengers picture, but that's not really a problem for an entertainingly twisty picture that takes an important step forward in portraying superhero action on film. Iron Man Three (the numeral is spelled out during the end credits) is a self-aware exercise in cliches and sometimes too cute about it for its own good, but it gets by on the charisma of its stars and versatile work by Ben Kingsley. Strangely, the picture at times seems to have more to say about The Dark Knight Rises than it does about The Avengers, but more about that below, with spoilers for the unwary...

It was not cause for confidence to learn that the Iron Man franchise had been handed over -- former director Jon Favreau remains in front of the camera as Tony Stark's henchman Happy Hogan -- to the writer of Last Action Hero, but in the "what have you done for us lately" department Shane Black is better known these days, at least in movie circles, as the auteur of the 2005 film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I haven't seen that picture but it's well regarded by many and a milestone in the comeback of Robert Downey Jr. A real or presumed affinity between actor and auteur got Black the Iron Man gig, and at a bare minimum he's improved on Favreau's second picture. Iron Man 2 was really little more than half a movie, and nearly worthless after the fight scene at the Monte Carlo Grand Prix. It suffered from lackluster villains, though Mickey Rourke started strong and projected a novel sort of menace in the race track scene. Its failure of imagination came at the end, when someone decided that Rourke couldn't remain a credible threat unless he got into a suit of armor. There were too many interchangeable armored entities flying about to no real effect, and the new film had me worried when toward the end Tony Stark summons all his old suits by remote control to form a flying army of armor. The Iron Man series would be a dead end if it couldn't be about anything but armor; it'd be missing one of the key elements of superhero comics, something that was there in the Grand Prix fight. The frisson of that sequence came from the image of a shirtless burly man holding his own with Iron Man because he'd made himself superhuman. Shane Black and the Marvel Studio team must have realized this, because they dispelled my doubt by actually climaxing the new film with a fight between Iron Man with a shirtless, albeit more buff antagonist more superhuman than Mickey Rourke -- yet more human than the Incredible Hulk. This is a leap forward: enemies whose powers don't come from weapons or magic. We see that in comic books all the time, but it seems as if movie writers have had a hard time indulging in this most primal fantasy. Iron Man Three lets it rip, and that's all to the good.

The movie is something different from what's been advertised, but that doesn't become apparent until late. Yes, America is under siege from terrorists led by a bizarre individual called the Mandarin, whose logo seems to tie him to the Ten Rings organization that kidnapped Tony Stark in the first film, though no one seems to notice the symbolism. This Mandarin (Kingsley) cuts an unlikely figure: garbed like an ancient Chinese warrior but obviously not Oriental, with a drawling voice "like a Baptist preacher." He hijacks all TV networks to take credit for the attacks and rant about the evils of America and the current President (William Sadler) in particular. Kingsley's performance is deliberately preposterous and in head-slapping retrospect you wonder why anyone took this menace seriously -- you wonder why you did. The answer is: this is a superhero movie and you're supposed to suspend disbelief no matter how preposterous the villains look or sound. In this case that proves a mistake, but when you realize that the joke's on you it actually makes the film more likable, and Kingsley has a lot to do with that by boldly making his character even more preposterous. But if these developments disappoint anyone, there are plenty more menaces and potential menaces to think about, most prominently the disgruntled nerd turned super-entrepreneur Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), whose Advanced Idea Mechanics (AIM) is a long-established evil entity in the Marvel Universe. More immediately, there are people running around burning with malignant energy. Some of them can channel it into dangerous power or raw strength; others just blow up, taking innocent people with them. Who's pulling their strings: the Mandarin, Killian, or scientist Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), who nurses her own grudge against Stark after a one-night stand on New Year's Eve 1999?

It becomes personal for Tony Stark after one of these human bombs nearly blows up Happy Hogan at Grauman's Chinese Theater. As usual, Stark has issues above and beyond his irreducible arrogance, but the film is least convincing when it claims that Tony is suffering from anxiety attacks following his ordeal in The Avengers. There's little point to these beyond the implication that Tony needs to take a break. But since he somehow can't (or won't) call on SHIELD or any of his Avengers buddies to take care of things he keeps driving himself, as always endangering his relationship with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), not to mention her life more than once. In the comics, Pepper illustrates the tendency toward excluding "normal" people from heroes' intimate circles. She has become an armored superhero in her own right and the new movie lurches the character in that direction while implying that her episode of power is only temporary. We will see, but with or without powers Paltrow remains a welcome presence in these pictures and arguably the best romantic-interest performer in superhero movies to date. Less welcome was the subplot that sends Tony to Tennessee to bond with a cutely precocious little boy (Ty Simpkins) while playing detective and repairing his armor. There's a smug snarkiness to the scenes Downey shares with Simpkins, which seem meant to mock the "fathers and sons" preoccupations of so many movies. Those preoccupations certainly deserve mockery but do you want to introduce a kid as an important character just to do this? It doesn't really hurt the picture, but you do wonder whether it was worth doing.

As I wrote on top, Iron Man Three does nothing, not even in the now-traditional post-credits bit, to start the ball rolling toward Avengers 2. I now suspect that we won't see any real buildup until next year's Guardians of the Galaxy movie, while the Thor and Captain America franchises attend to their own concerns. As I expected, we do get a welcome appearance by another Avengers cast member in the post-credit, along with a punch-line to the narcissistic narration with which Downey has punctuated the picture. If you didn't stay for that, however, you might get the impression that you had seen the last Iron Man movie. At the very least, it looks like Tony is going to take that break, but in doing so there are echoes of Christopher Nolan's Batman movies that don't seem coincidental. It's so blatant -- or remarkably coincidental -- that Tony even has a "Clean Slate" protocol that he activates to signal a break from his past, though what actually happens is more reminiscent of the self-destruction of Bruce Wayne's super-surveillance network from The Dark Knight. You might shrug it off on the assumption that superhero stories are inevitably derivative and repetitive, but when the film closes with Tony chucking his arc reactor into the ocean and driving away for parts unknown, yet affirming once more that "I am Iron Man," you might join me in perceiving an implicit critique of Nolan's presumption that he can make Bruce Wayne stop being Batman. It certainly is an odd note on which to end the first of Marvel's "second wave" of movies, but it's also a good thing that each individual movie franchise can retain a degree of thematic autonomy. Tony Stark may be tired, but the Iron Man series isn't, just yet.

Deanna Durbin

She appears at approximately the 1:37 mark in this clip from the M-G-M short subject Every Sunday. At around 2:47 she takes her place alongside Judy Garland for the film's climactic sing-off. That's the historical context: Durbin, whose death was announced yesterday, was Garland's peer and rival, both of them teenage singers looking for the big break in 1930s Hollywood. Allan Fisch uploaded this clip to YouTube.


Thanks to the harvesting of archives of film for the DVD market, Durbin was probably less forgotten at the time of her death than she was a generation ago, when her films were rarely shown on TV. The story of her life you can read today is that she was one of the rare movie stars who made a clean break at an early age, quitting Hollywood for married life at the age of 28. Her silence wasn't absolute but may as well have been; somehow her work ceased to matter once work ceased to matter for her. It was as if, once you decided not to be a star anymore, you really never were one. So you want to be forgotten? So be it. A loyal cohort of fans kept their candles lit all along, of course, but there was no longer a market for her. We should presume that this prospect didn't bother her; otherwise, why quit?

The real story, as far as film history is concerned, is that Durbin remained Garland's rival for her entire career. Their paths diverged after Every Sunday, Garland remaining at Metro, Durbin going to Universal. She was credited with single-handedly rescuing a studio that was in bad shape after the departure of the founding Laemmle family. Her musicals gave Universal a boost before the monster revival and the arrival of Abbott and Costello. As she grew older she tired of the formulaic mediocrity of her assignments, but fell in love with one of her directors. And that was that.

The film historian Jeanine Basinger relates a telling anecdote

Judy Garland said she had once run into Durbin in Paris, and that she was obviously happy. Garland, on the other hand, had confessed her woes to her former colleague. Laughing, Garland said Durbin told her, 'Why don't you get out of that business, you dumbbell?'

Garland's senior by approximately six months, Durbin lived nearly twice as long.

I can't call myself a Durbin fan. In fact, I've only seen one of her movies, and it's probably her most atypical vehicle: Robert Siodmak's film noir musical Christmas Holiday, extra noteworthy for its casting of Gene Kelly as her murderous husband. I can't say honestly that Durbin made a lasting impression on me, but the film as a whole is memorably dark; don't judge this book by its festive cover. Otherwise, Durbin's films aren't the sort I'd normally seek out. But given her place in Hollywood history -- not just her stardom but the unmatched discrepancy, at least during the sound era, between the peak of her fame and the trough of her chosen obscurity, her passing is worth noting here.