Okay. I have to confess that Michael Jackson wasn’t an especially important figure to me, and in that respect it’s theoretically possible that I belong to some cranky minority that isn’t mourning his death around the clock. But even if he were as important to the history of music and art as Charlie Parker or Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra or Igor Stravinsky, I’d still find the sudden cable news blackout of everything currently happening in the world apart from his death a bit excessive and disturbing, and more than just a little infantile. It’s the same thing that happened in TV-Land when Sinatra and Reagan (two other revered entertainers) croaked, and one can sense a rather sickening feeling of happiness and excitement in the airways, uniting CNN, MSNBC, and, yes, even Fox News on the same euphoric wavelength that declares, in effect, and at long last, Iran doesn’t matter, the whole Middle East doesn’t matter, national health care doesn’t matter, Governor Mark Sanford (who had everyone totally obsessed yesterday) doesn’t matter, Sonia Sotomayor doesn’t matter, global warming doesn’t matter, even Farah Fawcett doesn’t matter, because Michael is dead. What a blessed sense of release is to be found in this seeming collective grief, suddenly recognizing that we no longer have to worry or even think about the rest — or so, at least, assume CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News…. [6/25/09]
Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast (1897-1968) made eight films, all between 1927 and 1935, and apparently some of these are lost. (He was fired from the early talkie Raffles — which seems to retain a few d’Arrastian qualities — and replaced by George Fitzmaurice, and reportedly he also did some uncredited work on Wings.) I’ve seen three of his films — the two briefly described below (both for the 2009 catalogue of Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, which starts in a couple of days) and Topaze (1933) — and all of these are pretty remarkable. (The latter is a Pagnol adaptation with one of John Barrymore’s most touching performances.) As far as I know, the only one who ever wrote about this figure in any detail was Herman G. Weinberg in Saint Cinema. According to Pierre Rissient, who knows a lot about d’Arrast (and passionately denies that he was antisemitic — a gossipy accusation I’ve sometimes heard about him, presumably as a partial explanation for why he fought as often as he did with producers), d’Arrast also had a lot to do with the preparation of one of my favorite musicals, Hallelujah, I’m a Bum! (1933), which wound up being directed by Lewis Milestone. —J.R.
A Gentleman of Paris
Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast worked as Parisian advisor on A Woman of Paris and as assistant director on The Gold Rush. So it’s reasonable to place his own films squarely in the School of Chaplin – particularly the Lubitsch branch emanating from A Woman of Paris. Even the title of d’Arrast’s second feature rightly suggests a spinoff. Yet for me, the caustic celebration of the carousing and deceit of a wealthy scoundrel (Adolphe Menjou) and the revenge of his servant (Nicholas Soussanin) also suggests Stroheim, above all in the sly attention to details, even if the deadly games in this case aren’t played for keeps. But maybe the most apt cross-references for d’Arrast are literary: Schnitzler here (though the literal source is a 1904 novel and a 1908 play by Roy Horniman, updated by Herman J. Mankiewicz’s brittle titles), just as the forced gaiety and jaded wealth of the subsequent Laughter evoke F. Scott Fitzgerald by way of Donald Ogden Stewart. (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
Laughter
One of the Algonquin wits who went with Hemingway on his jaunts to Pamplona, Donald Ogden Stewart wrote about the high life of the spoiled rich from the inside (as reflected not only in his cynical, classic short story “The Secret of Success,” but also in his work for McCarey, Lubitsch, and, especially, Cukor). Reportedly he became a radical (and later a blacklisted European exile) only after linking up with Ella Winter, the ex-wife of Lincoln Steffans, in the mid-30s. But the seeds of his discontent are already apparent in his original script for d’Arrast’s first talkie (1930), produced by Herman Mankiewicz — a despairing comedy that flopped commercially even while it had a certain critical success. D’Arrast (1897-1968) — a French-Basque aristocrat who was born in Buenos Aires and died in Monte Carlo — also differed from Chaplin and Lubitsch by being born into privilege. Glenn Anders, who would later play Grisby in The Lady from Shanghai, costars with Nancy Carroll, Fredric March, Frank Morgan, and Diane Ellis (in a part originally planned for Carole Lombard). (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
The most gratifying aspect of Peggy Noonan’s eloquent article last Friday in the Wall Street Journal isn’t merely the belated sign that sane and grown-up conservative thought is finally being heard on the subject of the Middle East, in contrast to the obtuse bellicosity and stupid posturing of John McCain and others. Even more, it’s a sign that some Americans are finally beginning to learn something from American mistakes — above all, from the peculiar conviction that American self-aborption is the only thing urgently needed in the world outside the U.S., and that any sign of tact, calm, and/or reticence automatically translates into weakness. (I hasten to add that Noonan’s voice hasn’t been the only sensible one recently coming from the right; I’m emphasizing it only because it seems the loudest and clearest of these voices.)
I would love to see this dawning wisdom take one crucial further step — the recognition that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 weren’t simply, exclusively, and unproblematically “attacks on America”, whatever that means. They were attacks on people, many of whom weren’t American. Assuming otherwise, as so many chest-beaters did and still do, means playing into the hands of the fanatics who committed these murders and perversely honoring their supposed wisdom and one-dimensional view of the world for the sake of throwing out every other possible reading of what happened. Because the minute you reduce the whole discussion to the level of saying that “they” hate “us,” you damned well better have a clear and comprehensive sense of who “we” are before you even presume to start defining “them”. (Which “us” or “them”, incidentally, was it that armed Saddam Hussein with the capacity to use poisoned gas on Kurds and Iranians? Or that overturned a democratically elected Iranian government in the early 1950s?)
An inability to properly define “them” was of course what filled Abu Ghraib and countless other prisons with so many allies that we insisted on converting into enemies. And an equivalent inability to define this “us” with any precision continues to invalidate a good many of our reflexes. (Trying making a list of all the unthinking exclusions automatically made in that pronoun and you might be getting somewhere.) Obama’s capacity to broaden that definition is perhaps the surest sign of what defines him as a thinking grown-up. [6/23/09]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/19/iran-election-mousavi-ahmadinejad [6/19/09]
As a fan of the directorless Theater Oobleck dating all the way back to its second show in Chicago (David Isaacson’s riotous Three Who Dared: A Play on the Movies, in June 1988), with particularly fond memories of Jeff Dorchen’s The Slow and Painful Death of Sam Shepard (December 1988) and Ugly’s First World (October 1989) as well as Mickle Maher’s When Will the Rats Come to Chew Through Your Anus? (January 1990), I regret having somehow lost touch with their singular repertory of literary and political shotgun marriages in recent years. A recent visit to Dorchen’s brilliantly excessive Strauss at Midnight at the the Chicago DCA Theater (66 E. Randolph), which runs through July 19, reminded me of how much heat and liberating anger and laughter they can generate.
This play has something to do with Saul Bellow (Isaacson), posthumously still tainted by his former association with Allan Bloom (Troy Martin), and, through Bloom, with Leo Strauss (David Shapiro), condemned to a hell in which he has inhabit the same quarters as Neil Simon’s Odd Couple (Brian Nemtusak and H.B. Ward doing fine, surreal spinoffs of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau), not to mention Niccolo Machiavelli (Scott Hermes) and In the Heat of the Night’s Virgil Tibbs (D’wayne Taylor). But the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the premise behind Ray Bradbury’s story “A Sound of Thunder” also get substantial play as well. And the cast is terrific, even without a director. (6/19/09)
