Busby Berkeley and the Coen Brothers

I've been watching Busby Berkeley movies lately and noticed something interesting. The Coen brothers must have been big fans. Take a look at some comparison shots from The Big Lebowski:

The Big Lebowski (1998)

The shot where the Dude floats between the dancers' legs was the subject of a practical joke during filming.

One or two of the dancers got the idea that we should all wear outrageous, over-the-top pubic hair coming out of our panties underneath our skirts, so they approached the hair/wardrobe department who obliged us with black curly wigs, which we tore apart and shoved in our panties, hanging out the sides like a jungle. So, there is Jeff, laying underneath the first girl in the line-up and he starts smiling, thinking to himself. 'Somebody's not taking care of business.' As he rolls past the first few girls and sees that we all weren't 'taking care of business', he is now laughing out loud, and the ladies are trying to stifle our laughter, which also makes it difficult for us to balance in heels with a wide straddle. One of the Coens cuts the take. No one knows what's going on except the dancers and Jeff. So the dancers flash the choreographers and they fall on the floor laughing. But the crew and the Coens still don't know what's going on. So we all turn to them and flash them. The crew laughed, but Joel and Ethan were not amused. One of them said something to the effect of, 'million-dollar-a-day set, people, let's get going.'
                                                                                          ~Dancer Jamie Green

42nd Street (1933)

No one floats between these girls' legs, but they didn't have the equipment to shoot that back in 1933.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

Saddam's shoe tower...

42nd Street (1933)

... had a predecessor in 1933.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

A scene of dancers making patterns in a circle....

Dames (1934)

... has numerous counterparts in Busby Berkeley musicals. This one is from Dames, a film once listed as one of the Coen brother's seven favourite films.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

The Dude makes an entrance...

Gold Diggers of 1935

... much like another made in 1935.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

The young lady being tossed in the air from a circular blanket at a beach party...

Dames (1934)

... has a parallel in this shot in which another young lady appears to fly out of a circle of her peers.

Three women fly up to the camera, followed by a fourth who is carrying... wait for it...

Dames (1934)

... a bowling ball!

Believe it or not.

First posted: 15 December 2013

Screenwriter's Lecture - Scott Frank

In this lecture, Scott Frank (Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Minority Report, The Wolverine) illustrates the importance of opening scenes, the challenges his craft encompasses and how, ultimately, "it's all about the words".

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First posted: 14 December 2013

When to go for a pee during movies

There's an app for that! Oh, yeah. Perfect for old men needing frequent comfort stops. RunPee buzzes in your pocket when a boring bit is coming up in a film, so you can go to the toilet without missing anything.

The following is an extract from The Guardian article: Running times: when to go for a pee during classic movies

Even the corniest summer blockbusters now regularly clock in at two-and-a-half hours. So perhaps it should be no surprise that RunPee, an iPhone app advising film viewers when to step out for a wee, is a runaway success. Start the app when you sit down to watch a film, and it will buzz in your pocket when a boring bit long enough for a loo break is coming up. The app was launched in 2008 by American developer Dan Florio and has attracted positive testimonials from stars including Rashida Jones and Stephen Fry. Hugh Jackman says it was recommended to him by Anne Hathaway.

Updated regularly, RunPee already recommends two wee-appropriate moments each in new releases. Yet even classic movies allow for a quick sprint to the loo and back.

The Godfather
Just after he has helped to whack his former protege Paulie in the car, capo Peter Clemenza cooks for the Corleone family’s made men. If you nip out after the line “Take the cannoli”, the most you will miss is Clemenza’s meatball recipe. To many Godfather fans, this scene is a classic that settles for ever the question of whether to add sugar to tomato sauce. But it was a creation of director (and legendary gourmand) Francis Ford Coppola, and does nothing to advance the plot.

Casablanca
Casablanca is a mere 102 minutes, but if you still can’t make it through without a pit-stop, then go at minute 59, just after Ilsa and Laszlo have failed to get a pair of exit visas from fez-sporting kingpin Ferrari. You’ll miss a bit of inconsequential business at Rick’s bar, albeit with some world-class repartee between Bogey and a twinkly Claude Rains. Be sure to get back before Laszlo comes looking for Rick’s hidden letters of transit.

The Shawshank Redemption
Andy has just done a spell in solitary. Red has failed to win freedom at his latest parole board hearing. It’s time for a montage. Leave the room when Andy gives Red a harmonica. You will miss Red returning the favour with a Marilyn Monroe poster, followed by a section about Andy securing funding for a prison library and some light banter between the inmates about a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo (another prison break classic) by “Alexandra Dumbass”.

Jean-Pierre Melville

There is an interesting article in The Guardian at the moment about the films of Melville. Here's an extract.

Melville is celebrated as a poet of lowlife crime and a master of style, the creator of a Gallicised American tough-guy aesthetic taken from the 1930s Hollywood gangster movies that he adored. Well into the 50s, 60s and 70s, Melville kept creating criminals and cops in snap-brim hats and trench coats, long after it was realistically plausible to do so, until it became an almost surreal mannerism. It is no accident that one of his most famous on-screen acting appearances is as Parvulesco, the fictional writer being interviewed in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Melville was the epitome of a certain type of style worshipper. He gave you the tough guy with the gun and the girl – the two things that Godard said you needed to make a film.

But it was more than that. Melville’s attitude to lawlessness was crucially created by the second world war. Born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, he had been a teenage fighter in the French resistance; he kept his codename “Melville” (in homage to Herman Melville) in professional life after the war, and never forgot a simple, brutal lesson about his countrymen: it was the rebels, the outlaws, the tough guys and the subversives who were temperamentally suited to be soldiers of the resistance. The instinct of the bourgeois law-abiding citizens – those obedient, nose-clean nine-to-fivers who just wanted a quiet life – was to collaborate with the Nazis. The criminals were the good guys.

Read the full article here: Jean-Pierre Melville: cinematic poet of the lowlife and criminal.

Ron Howard: on Filmmaking

Ron Howard was a child actor (Dennis the Menace, The Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days), who has appeared in almost eighty TV shows and movies. Then his hair fell out, so he made the jump to feature film directing (Grand Theft Auto, Cocoon, Willow, Apollo 13, Cinderella Man, The Da Vinci Code, Frost/Nixon, Rush, etc.).

He was interviewed by BAFTA recently, where he talked about his experiences as a filmmaker.

You know directors, some of them — some of us are sweethearts, some of us are jerks, some of us are talkative, some are very quiet. None of that really matters very much — although, you know, I always think it’s nice to be decent to people, but that’s me. It’s not imperative. The big thing is taste — taste and judgement. That’s what it’s all about.

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First posted: 20 November 2013

David Lean

David Lean (1908-1991) is rated the greatest director of epics of the last century, yet he only directed nineteen films. And what films they are. Spielberg routinely watches Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to glean inspiration before starting on one of his own.

Other great David Lean films include:  Brief Encounter (1945), Great Expectations (1946), Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Ryan's Daughter (1970)

Brief Encounter (1945)

Bridge Over the River Kwai (1957)

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

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The following is a three-part documentary on the filmmaking style of David Lean.

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First posted: 26 November 2013

"The Melville Variations"

Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach, in Paris. He took part in the French Resistance during World War II and adopted, as a nom de guerre, Melville (after Herman Melville, the American author), which he retained as a stage name afterward.

The short film which follows is a meditation on a selection of themes and motifs from Melville films, put together by Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin:

Thirteen variations for thirteen films, accompanied by the musical theme composed by François de Roubaix for Le Samouraï (1967): the cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville condensed into a series of motifs that travel from movie to movie, reiterating and transforming, finding their full meaning only when they are put into relation. A non-exhaustive collection, but filled with recognisable images that clearly obsess this filmmaker.

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1. Jef Costello’s second murder in Le Samouraï, Maite’s devastating death at the end of Army of Shadows (1969), the shooting of Mattei and Vogel in Le cercle rouge (1970) or—the most paradigmatic example of all—of Maurice, Silien and Kern in Le doulos (1962). It is the matter of a rule with few exceptions, a pattern that is rarely broken: whenever Melville’s characters are not holding an empty gun, they almost always shoot twice. The second shot seems like a tragic echo of the first; when we put these scenes in series, they form a strange, musical choreography, a dance of death. 

2. In the metaphoric title of his first feature film, it is evoked in its silence; in When You Read This Letter (1953), it is presented in gorgeous black and white, like a set whose wild bountifulness competes with the agitated passions of the characters, and even robs the foreground from them; in Army of Shadows, it amounts to a nocturnal, Allied raft that swallows and spits out a phantom submarine; in the opening of Un flic (1972), it is a clear, diluted blueness, a swirl of wind, rain and waves that fiercely crash against a dike, prefiguring the tormented destiny of the characters … The sea is a powerful presence in Melville’s cinema, and the director revels in cataloguing its chameleonic transformations, showing it in all its diverse states. 

3. “Any other man stops and talks / But the walking man walks” (James Taylor). Melville’s heroes walk, always alone, in a determined, pensive, unbroken, but never hurried or troubled way, keeping their inner thoughts to themselves. They measure out their destined itinerary in the steps they take, and Melville plots his mise en scène likewise. He respectfully and patiently films this action in many ways: from a static position, in a panning shot, backwards tracking, lateral tracking. The action exists, too, to reveal the carefully chosen fragments of urban space: by a bridge, along a tunnel, back streets, main streets.

4. Shoes—like gloves and overalls—constitute the work uniform of Melville’s men; they are not part of the same style/image code as the hats and coats. The shoes, moreover, have a specific purpose: they are for robbing places (bank, house, casino, train), not for making a kill-hit. So they are designed, and used, to ensure absolute silence on the job: a ballet of noiseless steps. Where hats, hairstyles, cigarettes and other indices differentiate Melville’s men, these on-the-job shoes—always the same kind—blend them, indistinguishably and interchangeably, into a perfect working unit.

5. In his famous interview book, Rui Nogueira asks Melville about the white gloves that Jef uses when he is about to fulfil a murder contract. The director declares: “They are editor’s gloves”. This affirmation—in the guise of a playful but categorical mise en abyme—immediately suggests the self-conscious dimension of his cinema, as well as the fine, ironic sense of this creator obsessed with the thematic of destiny and tragedy. Melville’s response is that of a grand conjurer, displacing the magic proper to cinema into the world of the fiction. Because, in fact, when the heroes of Le doulos, Le samuraï or Le circle rouge slip into their white gloves, they too are playing with the linear chain of events, erasing characters from the frame, altering the arrangement of the pieces, and splicing fragments together without leaving a trace.

6. After the car, the train is the most important means of transportation in Melville’s cinema. In Le cercle rouge there is the scene of the spectacular escape from a guarded prison, and in Un flic an elaborate heist that takes up one-third of the film. In Les enfants terribles (1950), a train carries the siblings off on their one and only adventure outside the house where they are usually secluded; and in When You Read This Letter, a train functions as a death machine, secretly guided by the protagonist’s desire. In these two films, united by their central roles for women, both heroines are found in a surprisingly similar gesture: they wipe their hand across a train window, as if it were a windshield, in order to demist the glass.

 

7. A truly Melvillian image: a shot filmed from outside a car, with its front or side window acting as a reframing device. Sometimes, when the car stops, the camera remains static, and tension builds through waiting. At other times, the image is transformed into a paean to the artificiality created by those rear projections, old-fashioned but always lovely, that allow us to observe the illusion of movement and the unreal telescoping of different layers. In some of the films (Le samouraï, Le doulos), it is a purely poetic image—the characters trapped within, as the raindrops slide down the window’s exterior—that emanates something at once indifferent yet claustrophobic, beautiful yet cold. 

8. The trademark of Melville’s much-remarked Americanism is his love of ritzy nightclub settings—usually built in and around his own home/film studio. Their titles take the American rather than the French possessive form—Martey’s, not Chez Martey—and they each have their special showgirl choreography inside. Almost all these places—with the exception of The Cotton Club—blares the name of their owner (Santi, Ricci, Simon …); and that owner is either associated with criminals, or a criminal himself. Melville, a master at making so many Parisian street locations seem interchangeable and almost dull backdrops to the intensely focused action, reserves his showbiz fanfare for character’s entrances, and the lit-up entranceways, into his proudly invented clubs.

9. We find, especially in Bob le flambeur (1956) but also in Les enfants terribles, Leon Morin, Priest (1961), Le doulos and Army of Shadows, the black and white squares of a chess board, transformed into a scenic pattern for the design of floors, walls and other elements of the décor. A graphic model that might be incidental, or could have arisen purely because of a particular period’s fashions—but which can hardly go unremarked, since it anticipates, almost subliminally, “some of the constants accumulated by Melville’s cinema: symmetrical trajectories, opposed characters, and strategic mobility.

10. In the recent Companion to François Truffaut, Arnaud Desplechin observes that the hardest thing to incorporate in a movie is a newspaper: if it’s too real, too specific, too politically partial or slanted, it risks throwing the story (and the spectator) off-course. Inserts of newspaper items are central to Melville’s cinema, and are completely integrated into his universe: brutally factual announcements of crimes and deaths (‘fatal accident’, ‘bloody hold-up’, ‘sensational jewel theft’), comprising headlines, text and an occasional mugshot—the identity of the newspaper itself rarely matters, or figures. Plot intrigue, at these moments, is flattened out to the indifferent, ephemeral level of daily news reporting—while also marking, in this long-gone, pre-digital media sphere, one of the few ways in which information travels, to criminals and law enforcers alike.
 

11. “If to direct is a glance, to edit is a beating of the heart.” Godard said it well (in 1956), but every director gives the immortal shot/reverse shot exchange of glances their own, powerful inflection. The exchange of looks in Melville captures the two, stark poles of the intersubjective logic that structures his entire cinematic universe. There is the cold, blank look (of Alain Delon, especially): the look that can be returned, but never penetrated, and that provokes a short-circuiting of desire (Le cercle rouge). Then there is the look that signals an abysmal turning-point, the complete suction of power out of one character and into the other: such is the crucial moment in Le samouraï, when Jef glimpses the woman who now holds the key to his tragic destiny; or also the charged ending of The Silence of the Sea (1949), where the heroine’s look marks almost a surrender to the German officer, putting an end to their war. Then there is a bonus: the strange, permutational, vertiginous free-play of looks between  a threesome of characters in Un flic: this is an uncontrollable histrionics of the look, which seems to mime suspicion and doubt, when in fact everyone involved has always known more than they appear to know.
 

12. Characters seeing their image in mirrors form dramatic instants of pause, of punctuation, in Melville. On one level, their meaning is conventional: they signal moments in which characters truly see—or have a chance to grasp—themselves. But the pictorial insistence of this motif, plus Melville’s mania for tracing frames within frames for such portraits of stillness, suggests something graver and more secretive: a gesture in which his characters are both monumentalised and immortalised, even if only fleetingly, and in the perfectly domestic, banal prop of a piece of glass above a sink.

13. Synecdoche, Melville: a man is his hat. His heroes are normally never apart from their hats (which they wear so perfectly, so elegantly); if they ever do part, whether through the heroes losing them, leaving them behind, or somehow being separated from them, it is a certain sign of approaching death. In Le samouraï, the moment that Jef leaves his hat but does not take his check number signals that he will never be coming back for it; likewise, in Le doulos, the unlucky number of 13 placed into the ribbon of a headless hat spells doom for its former wearer. In the end, there is only ever the hat: mute, static, frozen, inhuman.




First posted: 15 November 2013