Conversations with Mervyn LeRoy (1970-71)

Mervyn LeRoy

Everybody has a favourite Mervyn LeRoy film even if one hasn't heard of Mervyn LeRoy. To be more precise, if you like American cinema, you have to have a favourite Mervyn LeRoy film.

Long before Billy Wilder, LeRoy was one of the most successful director-producers in Hollywood, but since his production activities were more "unit production" undertaken for studios such as Warner and Metro, he never enjoyed the recognition that the independent producers of the 1950s did. Yet, his name, both as director and producer, is linked to some of the best remembered films in the history of American cinema, films of enormous popularity, technical brilliance and politically progressive conceptions. His domain of responsibilities in the production of most of his films is so vast (picking the material, casting, producing, framing the shots, doing promotion) that those still adhering to politiques des auteurs should be alerted, taking LeRoy very seriously. I'm not one of them, nevertheless I do take LeRoy seriously.

Some newly digitised tapes, courtesy of Pacific Film Archive, shed new light on a prolific and thrilling career. During an informal conversation worth nearly three hours of Q&As, Albert Johnson poses questions and LeRoy responds, reminiscing his career in chronological order. Conducted between April 16, 1970 and December 2, 1971, it was done with the prospect of a book publication. As far as I know, no book was ever written by Johnson about the cinema of LeRoy. The location for the interviews seems to be LeRoy's house where his wife is occasionally heard offering tea. Sometimes people drop in and evidently a dog is hanging around. The phone goes off quite often.

The first tape starts abruptly but my guess is that the discussion is about Harold Teen (1928). This is first in a series of sudden interruptions, pauses and silences but all and all the tapes have a very decent audio quality and the conversation is engaging for the most part, even if LeRoy acts as another laconic Hollywood veteran using the most economic of languages with answers as brief as "sure" and "you bet!"

The films, people, and subjects discussed include (in the order of the tapes):

Showgirl in Hollywood (1930): all-talking musical with Technicolor sequences

The World Changes (1933): drama starring Paul Muni, Aline MacMahon and Mary Astor

Big City Blues (1932): drama based on the play New York Town by Ward Morehouse with stars Joan Blondell and uncredited appearances by Humphrey Bogart.

Hard to Handle (1933): comedy with James Cagney as a con artist who organizes a Depression-era dance marathon. "Cagney wasn't hard to handle. He was easy to handle," says LeRoy

Gold Diggers of 1933: working with Busby Berkeley & Sol Polito

Marie Dressler; Differences between working for Warner and MGM; Sidney Franklin;

Tugboat Annie (1933): "Beery was a mean man."

Paul Muni; Art directors and sets, "Who's John Wray?", Ralph Ince

Two Seconds (1932)

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932): "We told the truth."

Heat Lightning (1934): based on the play of the same name by Leon Abrams and George Abbott. "I never saw it!" -- "Bette Davis didn't like me."

Happiness Ahead (1934): comedy starring Dick Powell with Josephine Hutchinson

Oil for the Lamps of China (1935): "My favourite picture!" Shot on location near Arizona

Kay Francis ("sad woman")

Three Men on a Horse (1936): based on a funny and successful Broadway play of the same name starring Frank McHugh and Joan Blondell

Anthony Adverse (1936) and working with Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Lana Turner's discovery demystified and LeRoy's subsequent move to Metro; lack of interest in Marx Brothers

They Won't Forget (1937)

On the set of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

Tonight or Never (1931)

Joe E. Brown comedies

Five Star Final (1931) and working with Edward G. Robinson ("Do you think Two Seconds could be made today?" asks LeRoy.)

The World Changes (1933): Child actor and future director Richard Quine is in the film.

Three on a Match (1932) & directing Ann Dvorak

On Bogart: "He thought he was a tough guy but he was sweet. He couldn't lick a fly! In those days they all seem to be geniuses."

Gold Diggers of 1933: talking about the colours of the female costumes in the Shadow Waltz number and the film's junket (city-to-city train journey); in-jokes in the films

[There's jump here. The sound quality and the period they are discussing change so it must be recorded some time later]

Waterloo Bridge (1940)

"Every week I have three or four pictures on television."; Bronisław Kaper; Visiting London's National Film Theatre located right under the Waterloo Bridge; San Francisco Film Festival where in 1965 LeRoy was awarded.

Escape (1940): An American in pre-WWII Nazi Germany tries to free her mother from a concentration camp. (This is the second time I'm hearing Hungarian actor Paul Lokas wasn't a good actor.); Arch Oboler not liking to wash his face!; "I had hand-held camera in my movies... It doesn't mean a damn thing."

Blossoms in the Dust (1941): working with Greer Garson. "My first film in color?"; "The only problem I had was with that son-of-a-bitch Walter Pidgeon!" LeRoy used dancing dolly for the first time since Pidgeon couldn't dance.

Lana Turner

The Negro Soldier (Stuart Heisler, 1944)

An African American artist in The Negro Soldier

This film is considered a “watershed in the use of film to promote racial tolerance”, and Heisler had previously handled the subject with surprisingly fine results in his 1940 The Biscuit Eater. Hollywood showed little interest in the subject of race, apart from work by those communist writers such as Lester Cole (None Shall Escape) and John Howard Lawson (Sahara) who gave African Americans a voice as agents of democracy in the fight against fascism. However, The Negro Soldier was perhaps the only film in that vein written by an African American, Carlton Moss. Films about the black experience were either ‘churchy’ or ‘bluesy’ (a rare exception, King Vidor’s 1929 Hallelujah! was both). The Negro Soldier is churchy (even if it does include a fleeting shot of the father of the blues, W.C. Handy), adopting the form of a sermon, in which the history of African Americans’ involvement in the making of America is recounted to an entirely black audience. But when the familiar image of the church minister at the pulpit arrives, it delivers a twofold punch: it is Moss himself – and the book in his hands is Mein Kampf, from which he reads Hitler’s perspective on the black race. The church form finds new urgency, as the film’s writer merges roles with that of the minister. Heisler makes his point visually, to avoid preaching: at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the German and Japanese athletes fail and an African American wins; a black conductor leads a mixed orchestra through Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. 

André Breton on Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl

Sadegh Hedayat

Nasturtiums Purple

Of Sadegh Hedayat, who committed suicide in Paris on April 9th, 1951, reached us, in the beautiful translation of Roger Lescot, The Blind Owl, a hopeless sign in the night. Never more such a dramatic apprehension of the human condition has aroused such an examination  of our shell, nor such a knowledge of  timeless struggle in a maze of mirrors, with the attributes that are our common lot ... The acuity of the sensations and the violence of the impulses which like  Wölfli, make a confounding use of certain stereotyped images, gasping from one end to the other, those that Hedayat excludes from the world of the "scoundrel". A Masterpiece if any! A book that must find its place near the Aurelia of Nerval, the Gradiva of Jensen, the Mysteries of Hamsun, which takes part in the phosphorescence of Berkeley Square and the prisons of Nosferatu. (Jose Corti Library). A. B. [André Breton]

Albert Maltz on This Gun for Hire

This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942) [Photo: LIFE Magazine]

Interviewed by Joel Gardner between 1975 and 1979 for an oral history series by the University of California. As a part of Guns for Hire: Frank Tuttle vs. Stuart Heisler retrospective, This Gun for Hire will be playing at Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, August 26, 9:15 AM, Cine Jolly.

***

The financial squeeze that I [was in] became too great in the spring of 1941. My friends Michael Blankfort and George Sklar had gotten work in Hollywood, and we made the decision that I would try also. And as soon as teaching was over, I went out to Las Vegas, New Mexico, because my mother-in-law was ill and my wife had taken our son out there earlier. And then after a few days I went overnight by bus to Los Angeles. And I, for about ten days, slept on a couch in the tiny cottage that the Sklars had. Although he was working, they had not yet accumulated enough money to move into anything better than the very simple little quarters that they had. 

By luck I got a job very quickly. The film director Frank Tuttle had a piece of material--had a novel, actually, by Graham Greene called This Gun for Hire which had been owned by Paramount, and he had worked out a way in which the story might be done which was acceptable. He wanted a  writer just at the time that I came into town and heard about me and knew my work, and I got the job at $300 a week.

Imogen Sara Smith on Among the Living (Stuart Heisler, 1941)

Click to enlarge

Playing at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020, August 28, 11.45 Cinema Jolly | 35mm

Within a running time of just over an hour, Among the Living samples an array of genres: Southern gothic horror, evil-twin thriller, Freudian melodrama, comedy, and politically charged satire. In the opening scene, unemployed mill-workers crowd around the gates of a dilapidated mansion, heckling the funeral of the hated mill-owner – surely voicing the views of Lester Cole, who co-wrote the story and screenplay. The son of a union organiser for the garment industry, Cole was one of the most unapologetic communists among the Hollywood Ten. Six years before the congressional hearings that would send him to jail and onto the blacklist, he seems to forecast the mood of the McCarthy era in a climactic scene where a small town’s citizens turn into a frenzied mob, rabidly pursuing a cash reward for the capture of a killer and trying an innocent man before a kangaroo court.

The State of Cinema in Iran, 1933

Only 6 cinemas in Iran could show sound films in 1933

From The 1934 Film Daily Year Book, a report on the state of cinema in Persia AKA Iran.



Agitation: None.

Censorship: Active and strict censorship of all films to be shown in Persia is maintained by the Amusement Section of the Imperial Police. All films are shown before a board of Police Officers at whose discretion the entire film or parts of it may be rejected. The following scenes are usually barred from films to be shown in Persia:
(a) Any scenes reflecting directly or indirectly on Shah.
(b) Scenes containing political propaganda.
(c) Scenes depicting the horrors of war, suggesting pacifism, or inciting to revolution.
(d) Scenes thought to be detrimental to public morals.

Ten Key Actresses of Iranian Cinema [by Nima Hasani-Nasab]

Originally commissioned by me and published in the Underline, the Iranian film critic Nima Hasani-Nasab has written about ten actresses who, in his view, helped shaping Iranian cinema before and after the revolution. — EK


Apart from sheer acting talent and the entertainment they have given to different generations of Iranians, every one of the actresses profiled here is also a representative of her gender, and of a particular acting style. They range from much loved popular stars to those appreciated by a small and discerning minority of film devotees; some have taken on a variety of screen roles, while others have gladly reprised a favourite part many times. Some hold records for film credits; others have appeared in only a handful of films.

Every one has put her own individual stamp on the world of cinema. To leave any one of them out would make any account of the key female performances in Iranian film incomplete. Still, it being necessary to include actresses from both before and after the 1979 Revolution, a number of prominent personalities who might otherwise have been included have had to be left out.

This overview is dedicated to the memory of Ruhangiz Saminezhad, the first actress in the history of Iranian cinema, who paid for her performance in The Lor Girl with bitterness and curses; misfortune and loneliness – all so that Iranian women could take their rightful place on the cinema screen, take over from men in women’s clothing.

The Houses They Lived In#1: George Cukor

https://cinearchitecture.tumblr.com/post/620816330619273216/george-cukors-house-in-cordell-drive-los

 

Time Remembered: Chris Marker Picks His Favourite Bill Evans Recordings

Chris Marker in Telluride, 1987. Courtesy of Tom Luddy.

On the art of lyrical compilation, from one medium to another

“Until midnight music is a job, until four o’clock it’s a pleasure, and after that it’s a rite.” – Chris Marker

There are only indirect hints as to what Chris Marker liked and did beyond his films. In studying the world of this elusive director, every sign invites us to scrutinize it carefully. Marker appears in small details, such as the mix CD which one day arrived on my doorstep. If the address on the parcel hadn’t confirmed the sender as Tom Luddy, co-director of Telluride Film Festival and a close friend of Marker’s, I could have taken it to be Marker’s personal gift from the beyond.

The CD cover gave little away: Sandwiching a photo of pianist Bill Evans was his name and the words "joue pour Guillaume" [plays for Guillaume], along with an illustrated image of the Markerian animal familiar Guillaume, a wise if mischievous-looking cat, holding sheet music. A lyrical filmmaker, who could also compose and play the piano, had compiled his favorite tunes performed by the lyrical jazz pianist and composer Evans (1929-80). The fascination with compilation is also evident in the films. Marker would often juxtapose material from various sources—news footage, computer games, photographs and songs—to remarkable effect.

Tom Luddy recalls conversations about jazz with the filmmaker, who used to tune in to KJAZ whenever he was in the Bay Area. One of his favorite satellite TV channels was Mezzo, playing classical and jazz around the clock. While the genre didn't feature much in his films, one could argue that jazz for Marker, like cinema, was something both personal and political. His jazz-related writings for Esprit (“Du Jazz considere comme une prophetie”) and Le Journal des Allumés du Jazz seem to bear this out. Marker even made a small contribution to jazz literature by writing the narration for a documentary about Django Reinhardt directed by Paul Paviot, who'd previously produced Marker’s Sunday in Peking.

Willow and Wind, an Overlooked Gem Scripted by Abbas Kiarostami

Willow and Wind

Willow trees bend easily in the slightest breeze, but even the wildest wind cannot uproot them. That is, more or less, the story of children in Mohammad Ali Talebi’s cinema; they are affected by every turn, every event, each nuance of the adult world, but they never fall down or stop fighting.

Willow and Wind is Talebi’s greatest cinematic achievement, both in terms of narrative and visual style. It tells an amazingly simple, sometimes absurd story. Like a Persian miniature, it is expressed through fine details. It depicts the efforts of a young boy to carry a large piece of glass some distance across country, to reach the school where he has broken a window during a football match. He’s not allowed back into class until he mends it.