A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, August 19, 2018

Flamingo Road (Michael Curtiz, 1949)

Joan Crawford and Sydney Greenstreet in Flamingo Road 
Lane Bellamy: Joan Crawford
Fielding Carlisle: Zachary Scott
Sheriff Titus Semple: Sydney Greenstreet
Dan Reynolds: David Brian
Lute Mae Sanders: Gladys George
Annabelle Weldon: Virginia Huston
Doc Waterson: Fred Clark
Millie: Gertrude Michael
Boatright: Sam McDaniel
Pete Ladas: Tito Vuolo

Director: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: Robert Wilder
Based on a play by Robert Wilder and Sally Wilder
Cinematography: Ted McCord
Art direction: Leo K. Kuter
Film editing: Folmar Blangsted
Music: Max Steiner

In The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, Andrew Sarris paid grudging tribute to Michael Curtiz: "The director's one enduring masterpiece is, of course, Casablanca, the happiest of happy accidents, and the most decisive exception to the auteur theory." Sarris's point is that Curtiz was one of the most skillful of studio-era directors, able to take almost any project handed to him by the front-office bosses and deliver it with polish and finesse. Certainly Flamingo Road fits that role precisely. As a script, it must have looked like a routine though somewhat overheated melodrama, its sexiness and violence toned down by the Production Code office, with a female lead who setting out on the downslope of a long career and a male lead who not only never quite made it big but also found the film taken away from him midway by a second lead whose career also never took off. At least there was ham to be had in the presence of Sydney Greenstreet, even though he's cast in a role for which he wasn't quite suited. And yet, Flamingo Road works, largely because Curtiz doesn't just grind it out. He treats the material as if it deserved its swift pacing and its occasional injections of humor. He knew enough to let Joan Crawford have her way, which he had done earlier with Mildred Pierce (1945), their finest couple of hours together. There's not much mileage to be got out of either Zachary Scott or David Brian as leading men, but we're not watching them. We're watching Crawford, and Greenstreet (trying to swallow his British accent and play a backwoods political boss), and Gladys George as the proprietor of a "roadhouse" (read: brothel). True, none of the story makes a lot of sense, especially the political intrigues, but there's enough sass and edge in the dialogue to make you forget about the improbabilities.
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