Monthly Archives: July 2012

Resurrecting Stage Struck

Posted on July 28, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

If a major American studio falls in the forest, does it make a sound?

To the average movie fan in 1956, probably not. For those who got their Hollywood news from Hedda Hopper’s syndicated newspaper column, RKO’s Stage Struck sounded like business as usual, with casting news and production leaks coming at regular intervals. Early chatter had pegged Jean Simmons for the starring role of ingénue actress Eva Lovelace, but Bill Dozier, Joan Fontaine’s ex-husband and producer of high-class fare like Letter from Unknown Woman, now held the reins at the newly restructured RKO and had his sights set on Susan Strasberg. The 18-year-old actress, daughter of legendary acting instructor and Method prophet Lee Strasberg, had already acquitted herself with supporting parts in Picnic and The Cobweb, but her profile had been raised immeasurably by the Broadway success of The Diary of Anne Frank, then in the midst of a run that would exceed 700 performances. Strasberg was signed. Cameras would roll in January 1957 in New York City.

Henry Fonda’s participation was announced in August 1956. That same month, Sidney Lumet was attached as director. This spoke to enormous confidence in the theater- and television-trained Lumet, whose feature debut 12 Angry Men had already been shot but would not be released by United Artists until the following spring. Herbert Marshall was added to the rolls in September and Christopher Plummer in December.

After the shoot began the following month, Walter Winchell fanned whispers that Strasberg had been romancing James MacArthur, her co-star in the upcoming Underdog. (The son of Helen Hayes, MacArthur suggested a parallel, irresistible case of theatrical royalty.) Another syndicated columnist, Leonard Lyons, noted that the Stage Struck crew had briefly rendezvoused with the FBI when the feds paid a visit to photograph the Commies assembling at the Chateau Garden next door. The Washington Post reported on Mrs. Lee Strasberg watching her daughter with “hawklike intentness” every day on the set. “Isn’t she amazing?,” the stage mother asked. “How her grandfather would have adored her. She just IS theater, isn’t she?” Talk about Method.

All conventional stuff.

More informed industry observers saw a very different picture. Stage Struck went into production amidst the ugly and protracted unwinding of RKO, the final blow for a studio that had been mired in one crisis or another almost consistently since its founding a generation before. By the time Stage Struck finally limped to theaters in 1958, RKO itself was gone.

Stage Struck was announced as a remake of Morning Glory, an RKO hit from nearly a quarter-century ago. As Morning Glory and the Zoe Atkins play from which it was adapted were conceived fairly narrowly as vehicles for Katharine Hepburn, tailored carefully to evoke the actress’s own familiar New England-to-Broadway ascent, this was not a natural property for a Technicolor facelift.

The recent success of Warner’s remake of A Star is Born surely helped, but probably not as much as the fact that cash-strapped RKO would have found any pre-existing script appealing in 1956. After a disastrous seven years under the lackadaisical management of Howard Hughes, the studio had recently been sold to the General Tire & Rubber Company. Inheriting a barely functioning studio with massive debt, General initiated a fire sale of corporate assets throughout 1955-’56. Hughes’s regular production shutdowns, cash flow problems, and endless tinkering had left a puny theatrical slate, which the new RKO complemented with an uncommonly high number of reissues—re-releasing not only proven box office hits like King Kong and I Walked with a Zombie but also a half-remembered succès d’estime like Citizen Kane. It’s a measure of RKO’s desperation that they pushed The Lusty Men, scarcely four years old and no exhibitor’s idea of hotly-demanded return engagement, as a reissue attraction.

But theatrical oldies were, at best, a side story for RKO in 1956, which had recently made a decisive step towards disseminating its library assets through TV. General Tire’s television subsidiary, General Teleradio, had already demonstrated tremendous success with its Million Dollar Movie slot on New York’s WOR, which in its earliest incarnation ran the same movie sixteen times (!) over the course of a single week. But quality product was hard to come by, with the major studios extremely reluctant to license their back catalogue to TV. British fare and low-budget independents were the rule, with studios sitting on the sideline. (Remarkably, the studios’ collective reticence to lease their libraries to television at rock-bottom prices was pursued—unsuccessfully—as an anti-trust action by the Justice Department; remember that studios, following the Supreme Court’s 1948 Paramount ruling, were under intense scrutiny on all matters with any appearance of collusion.)

General Teleradio—now merged with RKO into a new entity called RKO Teleradio—saw the immediate potential to unload its assets. Selling the entire 741-feature library outright to cola manufacturer C&C, which in turn licensed the films in perpetuity to stations across the country, RKO had gone whole hog for television.

In 1956, RKO Teleradio circulated a glossy catalogue of its library offerings, RKO’s Finest Fifty-Two, which promised a year’s worth of quality television programming. (Even civil servants with long-standing concerns about the vertically-integrated film industry could never have anticipated this new market efficiency: the hard-cover RKO’s Finest Fifty-Two was bound in Bolta flex, a product of General Tire & Rubber Co.) For a studio with its back against multiple walls, the RKO Teleradio catalogue struck a notably triumphalist tone in describing recent broadcast history:

Network television itself began to change. The hour-and-a-half “spectacular” or one-shot came into being. But the formidable production costs and difficulties of such shows ruled out the possibility of sponsorship on any regular basis. And there was no guarantee that anyone could come up with a hit every time he took a gamble on one of these shows.

What might happen then, some advertisers began to wonder, if a sponsor or group of sponsors could provide a weekly program of feature films of network caliber—finished, polished to Hollywood’s highest gloss, and already proved in the decisive arithmetic of box-office success?

The answer was, nobody could. The major Hollywood studio vaults remained locked to television.

And then General Teleradio unlocked them. And overnight the whole film-on-television picture changed.

According to RKO, its antique wares represented hundreds of millions of dollars in mature investment, each film filled with star power that TV producers could never afford to attain. RKO features had already been audience-tested and audience-approved. (“Movies are better than ever—on television,” said RKO, cheekily tweaking an industry slogan launched to get the audience back in the theater. Did they even care anymore?) Further, RKO features reminded sophisticated viewers of production values they’d come to miss on TV programs, for “Hollywood budgets of time and money permit actual background and locations.” “Never a fluffed line or the sight of a mike boom or stage hand to break the illusion,” RKO chortled.

In truth, RKO was caught up in its own corporate illusions. Despite cracks about unprofessional product, RKO would need to emulate TV methods if it hoped to maintain any standing as a studio. Industry veterans took notice when television vets Morton Fine and David Friedkin adapted tube practices to deliver the 86-minute Capital Offense (re-titled Hot Summer Night for release) to typically bloated M-G-M in a mere nine days. Meanwhile RKO contracted to release The Violators, an independent production shot at New York’s Production Center Inc., a flexible three-sound-stage facility that leased space to television crews between film shoots.

Just before Christmas, 1956, RKO President Daniel O’Shea denied rumors that the company planned to shutter its Hollywood studio, while allowing that RKO was indeed shuffling some personnel to a Culver City office and had already discharged many of its 2,000 staff. (The Culver City office, still known as the old Pathé lot, would soon be rented out as a studio-for-hire, allegedly at a profit.) All four productions planned for early 1957 (including Stage Struck) would be shot on location and the studio itself had thus become superfluous. RKO promised an investment of $10 million for this quartet. Disarray was rampant, with new details trickling out in trade rags like Boxoffice. One big production, Bangkok, was postponed when topline talent proved unwilling or unable to travel to Thailand during the optimal seasonal timeframe of December-January. Around the same time, the studio quietly announced it had sold two pieces of Washington, DC real estate (including its flagship Keith Theatre) for $1.5 million.

As planned, Stage Struck began filming on 14 January 1957. The next week, RKO announced the dissolution of its domestic distribution infrastructure, which resulted in some 800 pink slips at 32 exchange offices throughout the country. Universal-International would handle ongoing theatrical requests on the studio’s 1953-’56 product, slashing mounting red ink for RKO. The studio’s publicity staff was cut to two people. All appearances to the contrary, RKO maintained it was still a going concern. After all, it was making Stage Struck, wasn’t it?

Incidentally, Universal had not contracted to distribute Stage Struck or any of the studio’s other unreleased films. To hear RKO tell it, this move demonstrated the beleaguered studio’s good faith intent to resume full operation after eliminating assorted liabilities. But it begs the question: could Universal even bank on the RKO team finishing Stage Struck?

If Stage Struck was the last gasp of a dying studio, the talent betrayed no sympathy for the style and principles that RKO represented. Shooting in the midst of a Gotham blizzard with ace cameraman Franz Planer, 27-year-old producer Stuart Millar relished the location difficulties. “We don’t want any Hollywood sunlight in this one,” he told the New York Times.

Lumet’s bluster went further in shunting traditional glamour:

The movie audience has been shown over and over again what war was like on D-Day. But do they know the tension, the color, the anticipation and the excitement backstage on opening night? Susie’s nervous. The audience is waiting. Lights are ready, curtains, all the technicians are in touch over the squawk boxes. Then the curtain goes up. When Susie makes her entrance, there’ll be an absolute hush. I want to show what it’s really like. No hoke, no propping, no music with violins backing it. The real thing.

Lumet may as well have been describing the behind-the-scenes anxieties plaguing Stage Struck. By May 1957, while Stage Struck was reportedly in the final stages of post-production (scoring and editing), RKO announced Millar’s voluntary departure from the studio. It was only the second picture of the young producer.

Would Stage Struck be released? The film had most definitely been previewed for industry types by August 1957: Hedda Hopper saw it and pushed fresh-faced Christopher Plummer as M-G-M’s next Judah Ben-Hur. “To me, he outshone them all, and I do mean Susan Strasberg, Henry Fonda and Hebert Marshall — and brother, that’s outshining.”

In October, industry buzz linked Strasberg to a new project, William Dieterle’s The Texas Trail. “She is still to be seen in the unreleased Stage Struck with Henry Fonda in the pictures,” the Los Angeles Times noted dryly. On 15 March 1958, Strasberg appeared with Arthur Knight and Yael Woll in a pilot episode of The Story of Film Techniques for New York’s WRCA-TV. A clip from the forthcoming Stage Struck was to be discussed. The New York Times promised a charity premiere “late next month” to benefit the Actors Fund of America.

Stage Struck finally opened in Los Angeles on 9 April 1958. The New York charity premiere followed on 22 April. At last—a promise kept!

Only it wasn’t RKO presenting Stage Struck at the Normandie. Distribution was overseen by Buena Vista, the Disney subsidiary established in 1954 when the animation studio feared the imminent collapse of its releasing partner of the past two decades—RKO. Exhibitors in sophisticated eastern cities like Boston and New York returned above-average grosses, but the film stalled out west, with Los Angeles, Indianapolis, and Denver reporting mediocre box office.

The reputation of Stage Struck has hardly shifted since 1958. Its cast and crew rarely mentioned it in subsequent interviews and home copies remain scarce. (Does anyone even know who owns it these days? Presumably not InterGlobal Video, the outfit that released it on VHS in 1986.)

In one respect, Stage Struck was crucially and uncharacteristically lucky. Buena Vista saw fit to treat this maligned orphan to release prints in IB Technicolor. Although new 35mm prints of Stage Struck have likely not been made since 1958, original copies still retain their brilliant, garish color. (‘Baghdad-on-the-Hudson,’ the New York Times called its Greenwich Village footage.) This is more than can be said for original prints of M-G-M and 20th Century-Fox productions released with considerably more fanfare in ’58, by which time both studios had foregone the expensive Technicolor dye-transfer process. Stage Struck is more than due for a reevaluation—and thanks to private collectors, it can have one.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening Stage Struck in an original 35mm IB Technicolor print on August 1 at the Portage Theater as part of its Classic Film Series. Print courtesy of the Radio Cinema Film Archive. Please see our current calendar for further information.

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Susan Strasberg, Henry Fonda, and a Floor Lamp —
Ultra-rare Stage Struck in IB Tech 35mm This Wednesday

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Northwest Chicago Film Society

The Portage Theater – 4050 N. Milwaukee Ave – 7:30 – $5.00 per ticket
For the full schedule of classic film screenings at the Portage, please click here.

August 1
STAGE STRUCK
Directed by Sidney Lumet • 1958
Shot entirely on location in New York City, Sidney Lumet’s loose remake of the 1933 Katharine Hepburn vehicle Morning Glory stars a surreally wide eyed Susan Strasberg as a New England hopeful trying to conquer the Broadway stage. Show business dictates that she must choose between a life of stardom and a life of love with stage producer Henry Fonda, which leads to a really beautiful near-final shot of Strasberg, Fonda, and a floor lamp. Slightly dopey but highly affectionate, Strasberg is endearing, Fonda is similarly cute as a button, and Stage Struck is one of the best looking films Lumet ever made, with lush blues and reds and an ultra saturated view of New York. One of the last pictures produced by RKO (the company was bought by Howard Hughes in 1948, sold to the General Tire and Rubber Company in 1955, and dissolved the year of this picture’s release), the film was distributed by Buena Vista, eventually orphaned, and never really got the second look it deserved … here’s its chance. With Christopher Plummer, Herbert Marshall, and a highly explosive Joan Greenwood. (JA)
95 min • RKO • 35mm IB Technicolor from the Radio Cinema Film Archive
Short: “Stage Frights” (Albert Ray, 1935) – 35mm – 22 min

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Who Wants To See Old Movies?

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Last week the Los Angles Times published an unusual op-ed about young peoples’ attitudes towards movies from Neal Gabler, the writer responsible for such insightful social histories as An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.

I call the article unusual not because its topic is especially exotic (more on that in a moment) but because it reads with such befuddled contempt for an entire generation. Withholding any constructive solution to the supposed problem, Gabler seems less interested in fostering film appreciation than in griping about kids these days. In other words, it calls to mind the class of knee-jerk sociology which Empire of Their Own or Gabler’s more recent Walt Disney biography studiously avoid. Here’s a representative paragraph:

Young people, so-called millennials, don’t seem to think of movies as art the way so many boomers did. They think of them as fashion, and like fashion, movies have to be new and cool to warrant attention. Living in a world of the here-and-now, obsessed with whatever is current, kids seem no more interested in seeing their parents’ movies than they are in wearing their parents’ clothes. Indeed, novelty may be the new narcissism. It obliterates the past in the fascination with the present.

Perhaps Gabler speaks of narcissism with more affection than I can ascertain, but the curiously moralizing proposition remains: some inner deficiency prevents kids today from grokking their parents’ favorite movies, passing them over in favor of Twitter or iPads or whatever new widget commands their attention. (This claim is especially suspicious given that Gabler opens his article with a complaint about The Amazing Spider-Man supplanting collective memory of 2002’s Raimi-Maguire Spider-Man—a less urgent or sincere crisis could not be imagined. For an article nominally about marketing imperatives distorting cultural priorities, Spider-Man is one loaded proposition.)

Gabler goes on to pronounce the situation totally different from prior generation gaps, incredibly citing his own baby boomer compatriots as avid consumers of antique media. “[B]oomer audiences didn’t necessarily believe their aesthetics were an advance over those that had preceded them,” Gabler writes, though for every ’60s student who hung a W.C. Fields poster in her dormitory, there were doubtless many others who reflexively distrusted any old John Wayne Western in the wake of The Green Berets. Boomers had their Rolling Stones and their Zappa, but surely they too longed for the way Glenn Miller played just like Archie Bunker, no?

Boomers, Gabler says, followed critics like the late Andrew Sarris, who excavated the movies of the past. (This is the same decidedly non-boomer Sarris who once revised his opinion on 2001: A Space Odyssey “while under the influence of a smoked substance that I was assured by my contact was somewhat stronger and more authentic than oregano on a King Sano base.”) But these days even film students find Citizen Kane and The Godfather boring, insufficient distractions in today’s 24/7 media landscape:

What this points to is that movies may have become a kind of “MacGuffin” — an excuse for communication along with music, social updates, friends’ romantic complications and the other things young people use to stoke interaction and provide proof that they are in the loop. A film’s intrinsic value may matter less than its ability to be talked about. In any case, old movies clearly cannot serve this community-building function as they once did. More, the immediacy of social networking, a system in which one tweet supplants another every millisecond, militates against anything that is 10 minutes old, much less 10 years.

This is a paragraph that swells with strange contradictions. Movies today are, on one hand, mere adjuncts to social experience, just another Facebook update. They’re not autonomous works of art to be studied and revered on their own terms. And yet the classic movies fail to fulfill their ‘community-building function’—something they presumably achieve only by acquiescing to the whims of said community. (Perhaps even on Facebook, where over 2,400 users have linked Gablers’ article?) Somehow, people getting together and talking about movies doesn’t count as people getting together in the first place.

All movies were, of course, once new, and likewise competed for the attention of addled young people against the considerable appeal of the jukebox, the radio, the sock hop, comic books, and endless television programming—or, in another era, the Atari arcade and the disco. Having seen a movie was always just as much a bragging right as an aesthetic privilege. How else would movies foster community other than acting as disposal cultural currency? Likewise, how much consideration did previous generations give individual movies when they automatically saw two or three a week as a cheap and rewarding form of recreation? Are these experiences any less legitimate if moviegoers forgot the details ten minutes after the show ended? Ultimately, it comes down to whether you think films are degraded by being part of a broader cultural flotsam or whether they’re inextricably and productively bound up with those circumstances.

What would Gabler think about Michael King’s account of the audiences at our predecessor, the late LaSalle Bank Cinema, who resolutely refused to revere the holy celluloid:

[T]hey were just movies. More than anything, the Bank was a throwback to an even earlier time, when movie theaters were social hubs for the surrounding community. People don’t show up at the AMC River East hours before every single show to talk with friends that they made there, and then hang around talking afterwards until the last possible minute, when the programmer sends them home. This happened without fail, before and after every Bank show I ever worked, and is ultimately what I’ll miss most about the place: the feeling that the movies were incidental.

But this deeply social idea of film-going—with the community as an end, rather than the films themselves—is unfashionable these days. Perhaps as unfashionable as kids rushing out to see their parents’ movies.

But the fact of the matter is that Gabler’s grim observations are nothing especially new. Almost ten years ago, Ty Burr penned a much more respectful, if equally puzzled, piece in the Boston Globe Magazine surveying the ‘roughneck new canon’ of Pulp Fiction and Run Lola Run. (Burr also interviewed a few hot-shot auteurs for the piece, including David Fincher, who ruled that ‘Casablanca now feels like a stage play. It’s beautifully, classically made, but in terms of the language of cinema, it’s almost irrelevant.’)

As someone who is under 30 and has spent his entire professional life showing films and trying to get other people to see them, let me suggest a semantic distinction with rather far-ranging implications. I’ve never thought to describe any movie as ‘old,’ just as surely as I’ve never promoted one on that basis. Though the vintage of a film may tell us a lot about what to expect with respect to attitude, pacing, and craft, it reveals next to nothing about quality or lasting value. (There’s an endless supply of bad old movies, just as surely as there are an overwhelming number of worthwhile modern ones.)

Instinctively, of course, many people do leap to these judgments at the sight of, say, a black-and-white film on television. For what it’s worth, I’ve found that this antipathy has no significant correlation to the age of the viewer, with some of the oldest folks expressing the most vehement objections. If such a prejudice does exist, why exacerbate it by putting forward ‘old movies’ as a category of cultural patrimony? (Can the government make you buy broccoli?, Antonin Scalia recently mused, fishing for reasons to gut the Affordable Care Act. Perhaps conservative jurists would have prevailed in NFIB v. Sebelius with the equally frightening question, Can the government make you watch old movies?)

In enumerating some sample reasons that millenials may be disenchanted with old movies, Gabler pointedly broaches the possibility of the movies being “politically incorrect,” as if too-sensitive souls reject them out of misplaced offense. But taking note of an older film’s misogyny or racism or homophobia actually represents a critical engagement with the material and acknowledges the film as a legitimate artifact of evolving social mores. Would it be better to simply ignore this content and lionize the movies anyway?

Simply stated, pushing ‘old movies’ misstates the reasons for being excited about them in the first place. Why should anyone watch something for the sole reason that it’s old? This is a sputtering revanchist position guaranteed to provoke backlash. (Gabler draws an analogy to literature, but never promotes the cause of ‘old books,’ much less ‘old plays’ or ‘old music.’ Does anyone?) It’s unrealistic, too, to assume that young people will flock to ‘old movies’ on the basis of the nostalgic sales pitches—the stars, the memories, the magic of the silver screen!—which they often receive these days. How can anyone feel authentic nostalgia toward things that predate one’s own life?

If young people are still going to find old movies relevant in the new century, it stands to reason that a different kind of case needs to be made on their behalf, one that’s less about received opinion and instead acknowledges these films as living, contested, strange, and sometimes dangerous things. Perhaps Citizen Kane and The Godfather are now too familiar to provoke awe and mystery, but perhaps, too, this is a good reason to promote a less static canon. (Anyone up for My Son John, Uptight, The New Centurions, Force of Evil, or One Way Passage?) Shifts in narrative structure, editing rhythm, screenwriting technique, political consciousness, and, yes, fashion, have rendered earlier run-of-the-mill productions baroque and beguiling. The entirety of silent cinema is now unfathomably radical and interactive in its unfinished, natively open-ended form. But only for those who want to be surprised.

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A Popular Front Film That Should Be More Popular
Julien Duvivier’s La belle équipe — This Wednesday

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Northwest Chicago Film Society

The Portage Theater – 4050 N. Milwaukee Ave – 7:30 – $5.00 per ticket
For the full schedule of classic film screenings at the Portage, please click here.

July 25
LA BELLE EQUIPE
Directed by Julien Duvivier • 1936
Five factory stiffs, led by Jean Gabin, win the national lottery and find themselves with 100,000 francs between them. They agree to put all the proceeds towards a workers’ open-air dance hall on the banks of the Marne. Made during the very brief moment when such a gesture sounded both guileless and politically-charged, La belle équipe exemplifies the cinema of the Popular Front, France’s short-lived, pan-leftist solution to mounting fascism. (It’s a tribute to the emotional and social complexity of La belle équipe that it records the optimism of the period while also acknowledging its mundane frailty.) Scripted by Charles Spaak, the French film industry’s most committed scenarist, La belle équipe was briefly eyed as a project by Jean Renoir, whose own collaborations with Spaak include Les bas-fonds and La grande illusion. Prolific director Julien Duvivier, a friend of Renoir’s, proved quite capable of helming the picture. Once a classic of college film societies under the generic and uninvolving title They Were Five, this is exceedingly rare and undervalued these days—a real missing link in ’30s French cinema. In French with English subtitles. (KW)
Co-presented with portoluz–WPA 2.0: A Brand New Deal
101 min. • Ciné-Arys • 16mm Print from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Cartoon: Popeye the Sailor in “We Aim to Please” (Dave Fleischer, 1934) – 16mm – 7 min

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Moving Pictures That Move: House of Bamboo in CinemaScope

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Would some films not exist at all but for their aspect ratios?

Put another way: although we tend now to think of aspect ratios as somewhat perfunctory aesthetic choices made during the preproduction process, the equation was almost exactly reversed at the dawn of the widescreen era. The shape of the screen was the engine that drove everything else and, in some cases, dictated the content before the cameras.

CinemaScope: Scope, Size, and Physical Action
Though today’s conversion to digital cinema has yielded inevitable upheavals in the structure of distribution and exhibition, the transition has proved fairly orderly and run according to plan. Compare this to 1953, when four-strip Cinerama, polarized dual-strip 3-D, and single-strip widescreen projection all sought to revolutionize the industry, to the considerable consternation and uncertainty of exhibitors, producers, union craftsmen, and everyone else involved. Fox hosted industry previews of The Robe in CinemaScope several months before its theatrical premiere, spurring all the rival studios to announce some kind of widescreen answer to Fox’s system before the bow of the Biblical epic. By mid-1954, 3-D would be phased out, Cinerama would remain confined to a few exclusive-run houses, and widescreen exhibition became predominant everywhere—all in less than eighteen months with nary a warning shot.

Conversion to CinemaScope, while cheap compared to Cinerama, still entailed a considerable outlay: new lenses and aperture plates to achieve full-width anamorphic projection, new sprocket wheels to accommodate Fox’s slightly smaller perforations, penthouse attachments to play back the four-channel magnetic soundtracks, and a curved Miracle Mirror screen to simulate the pronounced depth of Cinerama. Such a wholesale overhaul of projection equipment (which had remained more or less unchanged for two decades since the conversion to sound) required a tremendous degree of confidence on the part of exhibitors that Cinemascope product would be steady and permanent.

In February 1953, Fox announced that all new features would be shot and released in CinemaScope. So much was riding on this gamble that the studio need not just provide CinemaScope product, but assure that its subsequent releases showed the system to its best advantage. The exhibitors would need proof of the wisdom of their investment and size itself wasn’t enough. The next month, production chief Darryl F. Zanuck sent a memo to the studio’s producers and executives:

Effective now we will abandon further work on any new treatment or screenplay that does not take full advantage of the new dimension of CinemaScope. It is our conviction that almost any story can be told more effectively in Cinemascope than in any other medium but it is also our conviction that every picture that goes into production in CinemaScope should contain subject matter which utilizes to the fullest extent the full possibilities of this medium.

This does not mean that every picture should have so-called epic proportions but it does mean that at least for the first 18 months of CinemaScope production that we select subjects that contain elements which enable us to take full advantage of scope, size, and physical action….

For the time being intimate comedies or small scale, domestic stories should be put aside and no further monies expended on their development. The day will undoubtedly come when all pictures in this category will probably be made in CinemaScope. But in the present market we want to show the things on CinemaScope that we cannot show nearly as effectively on standard 35mm film. We have a new entertainment medium and we want to exploit it for all it is worth.

Zanuck’s memo provided the final thrust of an unspoken industry-wide reaction to the declining audiences of the post-War era. Double bills were on the wane and studios were weary of the tiered production system that brought forth many pictures of diverse length, budget, and audience appeal. Everything cost more money and the marginal returns on smaller films were increasingly unattractive. The blockbuster mentality truly begins here.

CinemaScope made this transition literal. Henceforth, every Fox production would be in color, widescreen, and stereophonic sound—a ‘Class A’ spectacle no matter what. Lumpen subjects were out, or contorted into the highest entertainment. Famously, Zanuck pulled the plug on Waterfront, a grimy Elia Kazan-Budd Schulberg production, because it was too ‘intimate’ for Fox’s new system. As On the Waterfront, the 1.85:1 black-and-white production won eight Academy Awards and provided staggering box office returns for distributor Columbia Pictures.

(Not every CinemaScope release hewed to Zanuck’s edict. The mogul himself hosted a turgid 1954 short subject, “The CinemaScope Parade,” which purported to preview future attractions in the new system. With many upcoming properties still tied down in production and not ready for public consumption, this parade consisted almost entirely of dust jackets of books recently optioned by the studio.)

What would 1955’s House of Bamboo look like if not for the advent of CinemaScope? Probably a lot like Fox’s 1948 noir The Street with No Name, of which it’s an all-but-official remake and Oriental transposition. (Harry Kleiner, who wrote the earlier picture, received sole screenplay credit on House of Bamboo, though Samuel Fuller updated and rewrote the entire script, which amounted to ‘additional dialogue’ for studio purposes.)

Conversely, had House of Bamboo been made in 1958, its budget would likely have been much lower, as the imperative to protect and regulate the CinemaScope brand had eased up considerably. By then, Fox had long retreated on its stereo policy, providing prints with standard monaural optical tracks in addition to magnetic playback. Too, M-G-M had released The Power and the Prize, the first monochromatic ‘Scope feature—a middling exercise that would nevertheless pave the way for such masterpieces of the form as The Tarnished Angels, The Apartment, and Last Year at Marienbad. CinemaScope had become a simple shape, not a package deal or an assurance of tony content.

In other words, it’s a pleasant historical accident that House of Bamboo takes the form that it does—a slice of masochistic B-picture pulp briefly inflated to respectable proportions, kind of like a fidgety eight-year-old forced into a suit and tie for an important adult occasion. It’s a film that struggles visibly with ill-judged responsibility.

Fuller in Action
The early auteurists made much of director-writer-producer Samuel Fuller as a downbeat primitive, an uncivilized brute turning out folk art on the margins of Hollywood. Fuller’s cock-eyed patriotism, his resistance to allegory, his affinity for violence and sprightly camera movement—all elements that marked him as the true sophisticate’s celluloid cudgel against middle-brow sensibility. “Fuller’s scripts,” Manny Farber wrote in 1969, “are grotesque jobs that might have been written by the bus driver of The Honeymooners.”

If Fuller was the anti-Stanley Kramer, he was also, it must be remembered, a long-striving Hollywood veteran with a brief period of enormous success and respectability in the early 1950s. His low-budget sleeper The Steel Helmet prompted a contract with Fox and the immediate directive to duplicate his Lippert Korean War adventure for the studio. Fixed Bayonets! would be released by year’s end. Fuller’s Fox follow-up, Pickup on South Street, garnered an Academy Award nomination for Thelma Ritter. (There’s a termite performance if ever there was one.) If no one but teenagers and derelicts were following Fuller’s output, as his cultists fantasized, then how did J. Edgar Hoover take notice of Pickup’s allegedly anti-American content?

House of Bamboo finds Fuller enjoying the height of Fox and Zanuck’s confidence and backing. Sent to Japan to make the first major studio effort there since the War (RKO had released the low-budget policier backwash Tokyo File 212 four years earlier), Fuller returned with a demented and florid thriller with half-progressive, half-offensive notions of cultural exchange. (Fuller reports in his autobiography that he cast his American stars almost exclusively on the basis of height, wanting tall players to contrast with petite Japanese.)

As a CinemaScope picture, House of Bamboo shows Fuller fielding creative solutions to persistent problems. On the basis of I Shot Jesse James and Pickup on South Street, Fuller might fairly be typed as a close-up man, pushing the camera uncomfortably close to his actors’ faces with a single-minded drive towards big-screen truth. But Zanuck frowned upon close-ups in CinemaScope. Writing to his How to Marry a Millionaire crew in 1953, Zanuck observed:

CinemaScope gives you a certain freedom of movement. Practically everything is lost if two people are huddled together in the center of the screen with nothing but wide open space on each end of the screen.

If the people are spread out filling the screen then we are putting on film an effect that we cannot get on the old 35mm….

CinemaScope didn’t just guide content, but also the whole system of codes and cutting that had developed over the preceding decades. It was an oppressive, corporately-mandated style and one doesn’t strain too badly to understand Fritz Lang’s famous quip about it being best suited to photograph snakes and funerals. (As such, it’s quite miraculous that such relatively early CinemaScope attractions as Track of the Cat, River of No Return, and The Egyptian wound up so expressively coherent and whole.)

Fuller obliges and fills many frames of House of Bamboo with characters end-to-end, but he also plays with depth, conceiving the shots as an ongoing action topography rather than just a dramatic clothesline. (It should be noted, too, that early CinemaScope films play rather differently at home, even in letterboxed copies, with many characters looking puny and distant. The full impact can really only be experienced on the big screen.) There’s also a sense of danger about the film—as if kinky crimes are being imposed at the edges of the picture-postcard documentary reality. The slower editing tempo, rather than burying the action, serves to emphasize it. When Robert Ryan bursts into a bathhouse late in the picture and discharges six bullets in seconds, we never cut away, we never flinch. We’re bound to the proscenium. It has no ready parallels in Fuller’s work or crime thrillers generally.

When declaring Fox’s CinemaScope policy in 1953, Zanuck delivered a great line that really only came to fruition with House of Bamboo: “If CinemaScope does nothing else it will force us back into the moving picture business—I mean moving pictures that move.”

A Note on the Short
Before House of Bamboo’s 1955 release, American audiences very rarely saw anything authentically Japanese on screen; Japanese films like Gate of Hell and Seven Samurai were just beginning to circulate in the West. (Fuller was a major fan of the former.) The War had made Japanese culture anathema to American society—not only on the level of individual, private taste, but as a matter of official government policy.

The short we’re showing before House of Bamboo is perhaps the definitive example of that. “My Japan,” produced by the Office of War Information, is the kind of film that demands an introduction. This propaganda film purports to show one Japanese man’s view of his home country. Suffice it to say, the U.S. Army didn’t send a film crew to Tokyo or ask a real Japanese man his opinion—they plundered shots from Japanese newsreels they had confiscated. They added narration and an introduction that strikes us today, correctly, as racist. The white man in yellow face slurs his speech and makes other half-assed attempts to appear Japanese. He offers a tour of Japan that demonstrates the country’s beauty and its vulnerabilities. His belligerent tone is supposed to incite young American recruits to kill the Japs.

Suffice it to say, we live in a different society today and we’re not trying to incite anyone to firebomb Tokyo. So why show “My Japan” at all? For one thing, it’s an essential preamble to a film like House of Bamboo—it may well have been the only thing about Japan that the average American had seen on screen hitherto. The friction between these cherry-blossom fantasies and Japan as a real, living society is central to House of Bamboo and “My Japan” is a major cinematic source of those racially-tinged, preconceived notions. It’s also the kind of film that would have informed a GI’s idea of Japan—perhaps Robert Stack’s character in House of Bamboo saw it at his induction center before being shipped off during the War.

Finally, “My Japan” is not the work of a private bigot or a studio hoping to cash in on broad caricatures; it’s a film that was made with American tax dollars. It’s the uncomfortable expression of official government policy and, as such, it’s something that we suppress at our own peril. We like showing movies, but, as our mission says, we like showing them in context. Sometimes that context is ugly, but we think it makes the achievement of House of Bamboo all the more impressive.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening “My Japan” and House of Bamboo at the Portage Theater on Wednesday, July 18 as part of its Classic Film Series. Please see our current calendar for more information. House of Bamboo is a brand-new and utterly gorgeous 35mm print from Criterion Pictures USA. Special thanks to Brian Block. “My Japan” is showing in a vintage 16mm from a private collection.

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A Fistful of Tokyo: Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo
In 35mm Cinemascope This Wednesday at the Portage!

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Northwest Chicago Film Society

The Portage Theater – 4050 N. Milwaukee Ave – 7:30 – $5.00 per ticket
For the full schedule of classic film screenings at the Portage, please click here.

July 18
HOUSE OF BAMBOO
Directed by Samuel Fuller • 1955
Part Oriental travelogue, part gangster noir, totally Sam Fuller. A respectable idea (the first images of Japan in color and Cinemascope, courtesy 20th Century-Fox) receives totally gonzo treatment from Fuller, whose idea of cultural exchange is an empire of Pachinko graft overseen by sullen ex-GI Robert Ryan and a murder with a Mount Fuji backdrop. Counterespionage stiff Robert Stack infiltrates the Americanized yakuza ring and pursues Shirley Yamaguchi in a surprisingly progressive cross-cultural romance. Working with the biggest budget of his career, Fuller upped the ante of Fox’s docu-crime aesthetic by staging panoramic mayhem on the tourist-friendly streets of Tokyo. A dense pulp delicacy that demands to be seen on the big screen, especially in this brand new print. (KW)
102 min • 20th Century-Fox • 35mm from Criterion Pictures USA
Short: “My Japan” (US Office of War Information, 1945) – 16mm – 20 min

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Who Needs Christmas When You Have Christmas in July?
This Wednesday at the Portage in 35mm!

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Northwest Chicago Film Society

The Portage Theater – 4050 N. Milwaukee Ave – 7:30 – $5.00 per ticket
For the full schedule of classic film screenings at the Portage, please click here.

July 11
CHRISTMAS IN JULY
Directed by Preston Sturges • 1940
Dick Powell enters a contest to create a new slogan for the Maxford House Coffee Company with hopes of winning $25,000 for himself and his girlfriend Ellen Drew (his entry: “If you can’t sleep at night, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the bunk”). A cruel trick courtesy of Powell’s co-workers convinces the young hopeful that he’s really won the prize, and we learn (or perhaps are reminded of) what it’s like when the difference between success and failure is being able to afford a new couch for your mother’s apartment. Based on the script for an unproduced stage play Sturges wrote in 1931, Christmas in July feels more like Paramount’s pre-Code output than the bulk of Sturges’s own work in the ’40s (which makes sense considering Universal simultaneously picked up and dropped the script in 1934). Running a brief 67 minutes, the film finds a perfect balance between Sturges’s obsessive orchestration of details and his effortless understanding of human interaction, and feels the closest to his heart. (JA)
Co-presented with portoluz–WPA 2.0: A Brand New Deal
67 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Universal
Short: Laurel & Hardy in “Thicker Than Water” (James W. Horne, 1935) – 16mm – 21 min

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Invasion of the Aspect Ratios

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

This week’s feature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, has long been regarded as a political hot potato. Like High Noon, it’s either a preachment for vigilance in the face of a Communistic menace or a cautionary allegory of a conformist overreaction to that selfsame menace. But for a certain kind of cinephile, the aspect ratio of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is just as contested as its ideological underpinnings. Moviegoers shouldn’t be passive pods for received wisdom, so we thought it would be edifying to discuss the context of theatrical exhibitions in the 1950s and beyond. – Eds. 

The shape and configuration of theatrical film has been basically unchanged since the earliest days of the twentieth century—35mm in width, four uniform perforations per frame. The relative apportionment of image and sound within that frame has changed tremendously, however, and projectionists have long been expected to extract images of all shapes and sizes from the same old film strip. Through a combination of specialized lenses, lens attachments, aperture plates, and screen masking, they present a range of rectangular images known in industry parlance as aspect ratios.

These shapes are expressed in numeric terms, as a ratio of image width to image height. The common aspect ratio 1.37:1, for example, means that the image on screen is 1.37 times wider than it is high. Counterintuitively, many of the wider aspect ratios like 1.85:1 achieve this apparent horizontal superiority simply by artificially constricting the height of the frame; since we’re talking in ratios rather than absolutes, cropping the top and bottom from the frame does yield a wider image, albeit with some loss of clarity when blown up on an enormous theater screen. The ultra-wide Cinemascope—2.39:1—uses a two-piece lens to anamorphically stretch a heavily compressed image on a conventional film strip.

Did scholars and fans talk about these things in any detail before the internet? Film history textbook discussions of aspect ratios were often limited to perfunctory descriptions of Hollywood’s competition with television in the early 1950s, with the enduring Cinemascope ratio treated in the same paragraph as the relatively short-lived ‘gimmicks’ like Cinerama and 3-D.

Things have changed, but not necessarily for the better. These days, aspect ratio debates tend to provoke passion and bad manners in equal measure. Fan fervor was immediately evident a decade ago when Warner Brothers decided to release a clutch of Stanley Kubrick films in 1.37:1 on DVD, on the controversial principle that the director favored open-matte presentations over letterboxing. (Ironically, there was almost equal consternation when the same studio later released the same films in 1.78:1 transfers on Blu-ray.) Debates raged over Criterion’s 2:1 rendering of Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession and Universal’s 1.85:1 cropping of Touch of Evil. The exception that proves the rule: not to be undone, the British imprint Masters of Cinema recently and hysterically released a two-disc Blu-ray edition with the Welles picture in five possible configurations, ranging from an open-matte, 1.37:1 rendering of the original theatrical release version to a 1.85:1 transfer of the 1998 reconstruction that approximated the cut outlined by Welles in a 58-page memorandum. (The Masters of Cinema team wanted to include a sixth iteration, but found the transfer supplied to be inadequate.)

In some sense, it’s only natural that home video releases stir such feelings. DVD and Blu-ray versions tend to fix a film in time and space; the image is immune from the scratching and cinching that occasionally afflict film prints, but it’s also removed from the realm of interpretation and manipulation available to the projectionist or archivist. There’s no adjusting the focus or framing after a studio QC tech has ruled the matter closed. Magnificent Obsession is either 1.37:1 or 2:1, but not both. (The recent vogue for 16:9 HDTV sets, which approximate fairly closely the 1.85:1 theatrical ratio, often dictates the ultimate answer, just as decades of 4:3 sets once assured a very different outcome, with the left and right edges panned-and-scanned away for cropped consumption.) For asset managers and telecine operators alike, the question of the proper aspect ratio can yield but one valid answer.

Long-time fans often dispute this answer. They recall television broadcasts or 16mm prints seen in decades-old campus film society screenings and the widescreen versions simply contradict the emotional and aesthetic unity they found in these open-matte prints.  Trade papers and studio records may dictate a wide aspect ratio for a given film, but the fan holds onto details at the far reaches of the frame that look artistically indisputable. In some sense, this is the ultimate form of auteurism: the director intended things that the entire motion picture industry, from mogul on down to projectionist, conspired to cover-up. The great auteurs defiantly went about their business anyway. (Incidentally: if you ever do watch Touch of Evil in 1.37:1, notice, for example, the way the shadows seem to dance on the ceiling in some shots, a baroque extension of Welles’s and DP Russell Metty’s claustrophobic design.)

What’s the right answer? We can argue about intent all day, but whose intent matters here in the first place? Is it what the studio dictated in their press book or what the lab printed in the leader? Is it what the director wanted on screen or what the cinematographer saw in the viewfinder? And what if that intent is deliberately confused or clouded? Famously, Paramount produced Shane in 1.37:1, but released it with a suggested ratio of 1.66:1 at the dawn of the widescreen era, fearful that its backlog product would look antiquated in wider pastures.

Rather than jockey for the ‘correct’ aspect ratio for a given film, we should respect the multiplicity of possible answers suggested by material circumstances of the exhibition sector. During the transition to widescreen and again today in the waning days of the multiplex, the intended ratio (whether conjectured, intuited, or proven on paper) often ran up against the constraints imposed upon (and often by) the exhibitor. In the tumultuous year of 1953, studios weighed and hedged against various technological innovations (widescreen, 3-D, curved screens, magnetic sound, etc.) and announced new in-house aspect ratios before the autumn unveiling of Fox’s The Robe in Cinemascope and high-fidelity, four-track surround sound. (For more about this period, see John Belton’s detailed account in the long out-of-print Widescreen Cinema.)

Until the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers standarized non-anamorphic American productions to 1.85:1, the studios released product in a variety of ratios. RKO and Paramount preferred 1.66:1. Disney and United Artists suggested 1.75:1. Columbia and Warner Brothers put out 1.85:1 product. Universal-International released 2:1. These prints often looked identical to the naked eye, with the different ratios being entirely dependent on the proper lens and aperture plates for the projector. Surely these ratios prevailed at studio screening rooms but were these dictates respected anywhere else? Cinemascope was itself an expensive proposition, with many showmen balking at the high cost of equipping a theater for magnetic sound, as Jack Theakston has discussed. Did exhibitors, historically disinclined to spend a cent more than necessary to get an image on screen, invest in equipment for all these variant ratios, especially when the anamorphic Cinemascope was the only one that carried any name recognition with the public? (Paramount allowed its VistaVision prints to be shown at a number of different ratios, as the conceit of the brand had more to do with high-quality origination on an enlarged camera negative than with the final shape on screen. Anyone who’s seen an original 35mm IB Technicolor print from VistaVision elements will likely agree with Paramount’s reasoning.)

Aside from the investment in lenses, plates, and masking controls for these competing widescreen ratios, what of the inherent limitations of theater architecture? Whether working in former legitimate houses or purpose-built cinemas, the exact ratio on screen was often determined by relatively pedestrian factors like the throw distance between the projectors and the screen, the focal lengths of available lenses, the shape of the proscenium, the constraint of the curtain, and the pictorial sensibility (or lack thereof) on the part of the management. In other words, 1.66:1 was never quite 1.66:1 anyway. And cinematographers expected this fluctuation, exposing a camera negative that could yield a satisfactory print at a variety of almost-there ratios.

In the multiplexes of the 1980s and 1990s, built in shopping malls with no real connection to the material history of film exhibition, the projection booth was often only equipped with two lenses: 1.85:1 and 2.39:1. Exhibiting films from the first half-century of cinema was a simple impossibility, unless one opted to crop away a substantial portion of the 1.37:1 frame. When studios released re-issues, they either ignored this issue entirely or optically reduced the original frame to fit within the narrow height of its latter-day relative. As with the imagined auteurs of the past, some filmmakers like Gus van Sant and Kelly Reichardt released films for 1.37:1 projection, modern exhibition practices be damned. Jean-Luc Godard made 1.37:1 films that he himself disclaimed as such.

In other cases, the availability of a film in its correct aspect ratio is unduly influenced by the vagaries of survival and preservation. Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers was photographed in a standard, open-matte version, with the probable assumption that it would be screened theatrically in 1.85:1. Between production and release, however, Allied Artists decided to modify the film for SuperScope release. The SuperScope system boasted a 2:1 aspect ratio but, confusingly, achieved this shape in a manner very differently than Universal had. The flat negative was optically adjusted in the lab to produce cropped intermediate elements and release prints with a prominent squeeze. The image would be stretched out again in projection with a Scope-like lens. (Strictly speaking, the whole idea behind SuperScope involved producing a Cinemascopesque image without paying any royalties to Fox.) What resulted was a moderately wider image with substantially reduced quality owing to the optical adjustments in the pre-print stage.

The original, unstretched camera negative for Invasion of the Body Snatchers is lost and any attempt to produce a quality 35mm print or digital version must make do with the Superscoped elements that have come down to us.  The only way to get a glimpse of the original is to look at vintage 16mm prints produced from the flat negative before its disappearance or destruction. (To approximate Siegel and DP Ellsworth Fredericks’s intended compositions from the open-matte 16mm print, one would need a specially-cut small gauge 1.85:1 aperture plate—but what hardcore collector and basement showman doesn’t already have one?) Either iteration is surely more pleasing than the early video transfers, which sliced the already-cropped Superscope frame to miniscule, incomprehensible proportions.

It’s fitting that one of the great, volatile classics of American cinema cannot be wholly contained or represented in a single print. We would be better off celebrating this abundance of expression and meaning rather than arguing about it.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening a restored 35mm Superscope print of Invasion of the Body Snatchers this Thursday at the Portage Theater. Please see our current calendar for more information. Special thanks to Judy Nicaud at Paramount Classics.

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