A Short History Of The Musical Genre, Towards Defending As Essential The Arguably Extraneous Dance Sequence At The End Of Singin' In The Rain

The first sound film was a musical film.



It wasn't very good.


In 1929, the first sound film to win the Best Picture Oscar was a musical, The Broadway Melody.



I haven't seen it.

The first great series of musicals started in 1929, with Ernst Lubitsch directing Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald in The Love Parade.



The three of them went on to make three more musicals together: Monte Carlo, One Hour With You and (the best of them) The Merry Widow. Early sound films are notably for their staginess, as recording equipment made camera movements (and/or actor movements) extremely difficult. The song at the end of the scene above is typical: Chevalier and MacDonald standing facing the camera and not looking at each other, being sure to sing clearly into the microphone hidden somewhere between them.

Lubitsch brought a unique comic style to the film's dialogue (fast-paced, full of word-playing puns and double entendres, imported from Broadway plays and comedians like the Marx Brothers), something that would become the dominant mode of comedy in the 1930s, whether in standard romantic or screwball comedies, or in musical comedies like the Astaire-Rogers films.

By the early 1930s, the camera movement limitations had largely been overcome and directors were once again able to experiment as freely as they had done in the late silent period. The most experimental of musical directors was Busby Berkeley, whose obsessions with geometry and women's legs became synonymous with the genre.



The above scene from 1933's Footlight Parade is a typical example of Berkeley's delirious excess. The plots for most of these films (the Gold Diggers films, Dames, 42nd Street) usually involve a group of struggling actors producing a play on Broadway. Unlike in the Lubitsch films, the musical bits are ostensibly from their performances (as opposed to naturalish outgrowths of the characters' dialogue), though no stage ever built could contain a Busby Berkeley musical number, and the film is shot in such a way that no theatre-goer could have the same experience as the film-viewer. This is a radical shift from the presentational, stand-and-sing style of the stagey films of the late 20s toward a type of uniquely cinematic musical.

And he didn't get any saner as time went on. Here's a sequence with Carmen Miranda from 1943's The Gang's All Here:



The Astaire-Rogers films of the mid-30s present a kind of fusion of these two styles, the screwball dialogue, unmotivated singing and straight-ahead, realistic framing of Lubitsch with the Broadway settings and elaborate dance sequences of Busby Berkeley.

The plots usually involve mistaken identities. In Swing Time, Rogers is a dancing instructor and Astaire pretends to need lessons, then he shows her boss what she's taught him:



In Top Hat, Rogers thinks Astaire is married to her best friend:



Astaire's films during the 1930s are very much about what the human body in motion is capable of doing. This is why he insisted that all his dance sequences be framed head-to-toe, such that the entirety of their two bodies were on-screen all the time, with as few edits as possible. The Astaire-Rogers musicals shot for a Bazinian ontology that Berkeley was not the least bit interested in.



The Astaire-Rogers films generally ended with a big production number, just like the Berkeley films. Sometimes it would include a lot of extras ("The Piccolino" in Top Hat), sometimes just Fred and Ginger ("Let's Face The Music And Dance" from Follow The Fleet). The important thing is that by the time of this last dance sequence, pretty much everything has been resolved and the rest of the film is just clearing up any remaining plot points as quickly as possible.

Musicals continued to evolve throughout the 1940s, most notably with the films of Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland (Meet Me In St. Louis, The Pirate). Garland starred in a series of films with Mickey Rooney in the late 30s that were essentially a teen version of the backstage musicals of the early 30s. Instead of putting on a Broadway play, the kids would end up putting on a show in a local barn. Here they are in Busby Berkeley's Babes In Arms:



And here's Garland with Gene Kelly in The Pirate:



The next truly radical shift in what was considered possible in a musical film didn't come until 1948's The Red Shoes (directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger), with its elaborate, hallucinatory ballet sequence.



Minnelli and star Gene Kelly tried to top that with an 18 minute ballet sequence at the end of An American In Paris.



Unlike in The Red Shoes, where the dance sequence is a version of a stage performance, filtered through the artistic delirium of the dancer while she's performing, the An American In Paris ballet is presented as a (day)dream sequence, one in which the main character relives and attempts to come to terms with his romance gone wrong. The sequence comes at the emotional climax of the film and resolves the main characters feelings. All that's left for the movie when it is over is the happy ending.

Which brings us to Singin' In The Rain. The film was conceived by producer Arthur Freed as a way to utilize a bunch of old songs he'd used in musical films in the 1930s. Here's the title song from the end of the first film it appeared in, The Hollywood Revue Of 1929:



As such, screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green conceived the film around the time when the songs were originally written and popular. Singin' In The Rain is structured as a tribute to the 1930s musical, incorporating all the developments the genre had seen in its first 20+years. The musical sequences throughout the movie build on the methods of older films in addition to co-opting their songs. "Beautiful Girls" is totally unrelated to the plot of the film and involves none of the major characters in any significant way, but it would not look out of place sung by William Powell in a Golddiggers film. "Make 'Em Laugh" (a new song for this film, based on Cole Porter's "Be A Clown" from The Pirate) is filmed Astaire-style, in order to show off Donald O'Connor's ridiculous stunts. The "Fit As A Fiddle" montage from early in the film shows Kelly and O'Connor evolving through the different classes of musical vaudeville and theatre. Seen in this light, the "Broadway Melody" sequence near the end of the film makes perfect sense.

I've heard an irritating number of times that that sequence doesn't fit in the film, that it has nothing to do with the plot, is pointless and the movie would be better if it was removed. Of course, these people are philistines, but they are also factually incorrect: the sequence is essential to what the film is really about. Gene Kelly's character in Singin' In The Rain, Don Lockwood, is attempting to salvage his early talkie swashbuckler by turning it into a musical (The Dancing Cavalier). The plot of Singin' In The Rain revolves around the making of The Dancing Cavalier, just as the plot of 42nd Street revolves around putting on a Broadway play. Of course we're going to have to, at some point, see the finished product, it is what the film has been leading up to for ninety minutes.

But what does Kelly show us? Not a period-appropriate musical number, stage-bound with chubby chorus girls and a static camera. Nope, he Berkeley-izes his film, throwing out any semblance of realism and giving his late-20s movie an elaborate extended sequence matched in length and imagination only by Minnelli and Powell & Pressburger.



The sequence ostensibly is the story of a young dancer coming to Broadway and trying to make it big on stage. He falls in love with a girl and is chased off by her gangster boyfriend. The plot of The Dancing Cavalier is apparently that, after landing a role, this dancer gets hit on the head and dreams he's a musketeer or something. The footage left over from The Dueling Cavalier (the pre-musical version of the film) is inserted here as a dream sequence, after which we can speculate that the young dancer wakes from his dream newly emboldened to rescue the girl of his dreams from the gangster (this is my guess at least; Kelly only shows us the opening musical number, not the closing). The fusion of musical and gangster film (another genre that got rolling in the early sound era) presages Fred Astaire and Vincente Minnelli's fusion of musical and film noir in the "Girl Hunt" sequence in The Band Wagon, released a year after Singin' In the Rain and also starring Cyd Charisse.



Because Singin' In The Rain is first and foremost a film about film (and one that has compelling characters as a bonus), the resolution of how Kelly saves his film within the film is a vital part of the story. Because it's also a musical about the making of a musical, it is essential that what we see of that film in its ideal form should be a musical sequence (everything else we've seen of The Dancing Cavalier has been disastrous). And because this is the final sequence of the film, a film made in 1952 after The Red Shoes and An American In Paris, that sequence had better be spectacular. And it is. Once it's over, there's nothing left for the film to do but resolve its plot as quickly as possible. This takes a bit longer than it did in Follow The Fleet, or An American In Paris, but that's one of the things that makes it a great movie: the best part of it ends, but there's still enough there to keep us in our seats for another ten minutes. To reference a musical made 70 years after The Jazz Singer, that sure sounds like Jack Horner's definition of a great film, doesn't it?

A Short History Of The Western Genre, And Why The Wild Bunch Was Ahead Of Its Time

Pre-Classical:

Almost as long as there's been narrative cinema, there have been Westerns. The first is generally agreed to be Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery in 1903, a short film in which bandits, well, rob a train. It's one of the earliest examples of cross-cutting, location shooting and camera movement in film, and features one of the most iconic images in film history, the above shot of a gunfighter firing directly into the camera.

Classical:

Throughout the silent era, Westerns were generally cheap action movies and serials, with stars like Harry Carey, Tom Mix and William S. Hart. Good guys wore white hats and defended weak and innocent townspeople and women from black-hatted outlaws or wild Indians, tropes taken from popular Western fiction novels. Rowdy saloons, gunfights at high noon, wagon trains and stagecoaches under attack were standard. Actual Wild West figures popped up from time to time in Hollywood during the period: Hart was friends with both Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Some of the best films of this period were directed by John Ford and were first released on DVD a couple of years ago. The Iron Horse (1924) is a sprawling epic about the building of the transcontinental railroad starring George O'Brien (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans); it was one of the biggest hits of the decade. 3 Bad Men (1926) is about a group of honorable outlaws who protect a young girl from bad guys during the Dakota land rush.

During the 1930s, as sound was adopted and the studio system solidified, Westerns became a reliable source of B-movie programming. John Wayne, after appearing in Raoul Walsh's experimental widescreen film The Big Trail, starred in dozens of these cheap, formulaic films. Westerns occasionally got the prestige treatment: Cimarron, a melodrama set amidst the Oklahoma land rush (a sequence of which Ron Howard copies in Far And Away) directed by Wesley Ruggles and starring Richard Dix. won the Best Picture Oscar for 1931, it was the first Western to do so - there wouldn't be a second until 1990. Generally speaking though, the genre characteristics that had formed during the silent era were codified, run into the ground and made cliche in hundreds of pretty bad movies in the 1930s.


In 1939, however, John Ford returned to the genre for the first time since 3 Bad Men and made Stagecoach, one of the most perfect films ever made. Ford assembled all the character types familiar from so many other films (drunken doctor, innocent housewife, gold-hearted prostitute, noble outlaw, Southern gambler, etc), shoved them all in one stagecoach and drove them across the magnificent landscapes of Monument Valley, Arizona. There are bandits and thieves and saloons and an Indian attack complete with cavalry charge. Stagecoach is a summarizing film: it takes all the innovations and ideas and formulas a style of filmmaking has developed over a period of years and mixes them all together in a way that defines a genre, one that is new and fresh without adding anything new: it's greater than the some of it's cliches. The film was a big hit, it received five Oscar nominations and it freed John Wayne from B-movie hell and made him a major star with his iconic performance as The Ringo Kid.

Stagecoach was followed closely by several other prestige Westerns: Michael Curtiz and Errol Flynn made Dodge City, Virginia City (1939) and Santa Fe Trail (1940), Raoul Walsh made Dark Command (1940) with Wayne and Claire Trevor, Gene Tierney starred in the terrible Belle Starr: The Bandit Queen (1941), James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich starred in Destry Rides Again (1939), in which Stewart takes a uniquely non-violent, almost Zen-like approach to cleaning up a dusty, outlaw-ridden town. William Wellman directed Henry Fonda in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), an anti-lynching film set in the West, think 12 Angry Men with horses. In 1946, Ford made his second sound Western, My Darling Clementine, with Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in the story of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. The film codifies what was becoming an obsessive Fordian theme, and by extension came to be a fundamental theme of the Western genre: how civilization came to be formed out of the chaos of the Wild West. Ford had already approached this in Stagecoach (what with its civilization in microcosm approach to character types), but it's given its fullest classical expression in Clementine, where the sheriff seems more interested in building a town than avenging the death of his brother and the film spends more time with the town's celebratory dance than the movie's climatic gunfight.


Revisionist:

I'd argue the Revisionist Western period starts soon after, with the first film in Ford's trilogy about the US Cavalry: Fort Apache (1948). If the Pre-Classical period is when the genre's types are created and the Classical when those types are codified, then the Revisionist period is when those types are subverted. With Fort Apache, Ford presents the cavalry as at much, if not more at fault for the ongoing Indian wars as the Indians themselves, subverting one of the genre's key traditions. Henry Fonda plays a Custer-esque Cavalry commander who plunges heedlessly into war with the Apache, a battle he cannot possibly win, against the advice of his experienced second-in-command, John Wayne, who speaks Apache and argues for treating the Indians with honor and justice. After Fonda's disastrous charge, Wayne is interviewed by the newspapers and we see inside the mythmaking process, how the stories we've been told about the West have been used to cover up incompetence and justify imperialism. The later films in the cavalry trilogy back away a bit from the harshness of the critique, but never again did Ford present Indians or the Army, good or evil, in as black and white terms as in Stagecoach.

Also in 1948 was Howard Hawks's first Western, Red River, with Wayne playing against type as a sadistic trail boss on a cattle drive who is overthrown by his adopted son, Montgomery Clift. The film provides an origin story for the capitalist expansion of the late 19th Century (factory workers need beef), and its sublimely disconcerting happy ending fails to overcome what the film has been telling us: that that capitalism was driven by ruthless, murderous men.


In 1950, James Stewart began making a series of Westerns with director Anthony Mann. In each of the movies, Stewart plays against his all-American everyman image as a loner, tortured by his past and relentlessly seeking revenge. Films like The Naked Spur (1953), Bend Of The River (1952), and The Far Country (1954) gave Stewart some of the darkest, and richest roles of his career. Mann had been mostly known as a director of films noirs, and he brought some of that genre's psychological complexity to the Western. Mann also directed Devil's Doorway (1950), one of the most honest and sympathetic films about the Indian experience in the West, told through the eyes of a Shoshone Civil War veteran who is run off his land by an angry mob of white settlers. In 1954, Nicolas Ray directed one of the most twisted of all Westerns, Johnny Guitar, with Mercedes McCambridge as the nice girl in town seeking bloody vengeance on Joan Crawford's bar owner in what appears to be some expression of psychotic sexuality. The film, along with Samuel Fuller's Forty Guns (1957) with Barbara Stanwyck, is unusual in that its main protagonists are women.

Not all Westerns made during this period were, of course, revisionist. George Stevens's Shane (1953) follows the classical formula almost slavishly; while Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952) does as well. That film, wherein Gary Cooper stands alone against a gang of outlaws while all the members of his community abandon him, so incensed Howard Hawks that he made Rio Bravo (1959), his greatest Western, as a counter to it. In Hawks's view, a sheriff's job is to police the community and defend it from outlaws, not run whining to the civilians every time there's a job to do. Hawks respected professionalism above most other virtues, and in his version, Sheriff John Wayne is offered and rejects the help from the community that Gary Cooper was so desperate to get. Hawks liked the story so much, he made it two more times with El Dorado (1966) and his final film, Rio Lobo (1970).


John Ford continued to make Westerns throughout the 1950s. His Wagon Master (1950) is a minor masterpiece of classical filmmaking, with a couple of cowboys helping a Mormon wagon train navigate their way West through bad terrain and murderous outlaws. The Searchers (1956), though, is revisionist through and through: a harrowing look at the racism that pervaded the West, as John Wayne's psychotic hero Ethan Edwards hunts down the Comanche tribe that kidnapped his niece, the film exposes both the nihilism of the Wayne hero (in the end he can never be a part of the community he is necessary to create) and the casual racism of the white settlers as a whole. Two Rode Together, which Ford made five years later with James Stewart and Richard Widmark, is an even blunter examination of this same theme, with the settlers, whipped into a frenzy, actually lynching Indians. Perhaps Ford's most revisionist film, however, and one that summarizes much of his life's work, is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where the role of mythmaking in the perpetuation of lies about the West is laid bare, as John Wayne's gunfighter hero, Tom Doniphon, loses both the girl and the community to James Stewart's future Senator. The ironic tagline: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Also during this period, the influence of the Western genre spread beyond the US. The most famous and successful director to dabble in the genre was Akira Kurosawa, who transposed it to medieval Japan in films like Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo (1961) and The Hidden Fortress (1958). Seven Samurai was then remade by John Sturges in the US as a Western, The Magnificent Seven (1960), while Sergio Leone remade Yojimbo as A Fistful Of Dollars (1964), which made Clint Eastwood a star and launched a cycle of Italian Westerns, set in the US and filmed mostly in Spain with an international cast of actors (Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Eastwood, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Klaus Kinski, among others). These were generally noted for their graphic violence, amoral anti-heroes, Ennio Morricone scores and bad dubbing. Leone and Eastwood made two other films together, For A Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly (1966), each of which pushed the limit of what was acceptable in terms of violence and morality in the genre. As production codes were winding down worldwide, audience's appetite for more realistic gunfighting seemed unquenchable. But still, these films held out some kind of hope for the future. Eastwood's heroes may have been outlaws, but they still retain the kind of code of honor that made civilization possible. Leone's greatest film, Once Upon A Time In The West, is a kind of fusion of the Spaghetti Western's playful violence with the Fordian theme of building civilization out of chaos. In the end, Charles Bronson gets his bloody revenge on Henry Fonda, but more importantly, Claudia Cardinale brings water to the men building the railroad that will ultimately make those gunfighters obsolete.


At the same time, Sam Peckinpah made his first Western, Ride The High Country (1962). It was from a script intended to be directed by Budd Boetcher, who had made a string of very good, low-budget psychological Westerns with Randolph Scott in the 1950s (The Tall T (1957), Seven Men From Now (1956), etc). It's very similar to the kind of film Boetticher made, but Peckinpah was gradually moving in a more visceral direction. With The Wild Bunch (1969), Peckinpah let the violence loose on a scale rarely seen in mainstream film to that point. But not only that, the film is suffused with such a pervading sense of the apocalyptic End Of The West as to eliminate all possibility of future civilization. Where Ford and Leone saw community-building rising from the actions of those who would then be passed by that community, Peckinpah saw only an endless cycle of death and murder. It would be another 20+ years before another director would take this approach to the genre, and then only rarely.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, revisionism reigned as the genre's popularity waned to almost nothing. Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970) presented a sanitized, comical view of the West from an Indian's point of view. George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (1969) pioneered the buddy movie, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford as a pair of charming thieves that don't really want to kill anyone. Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) shows how a frontier community is built on the twin industries of liquor and prostitution, and ultimately taken down by larger, more ruthless capitalists. Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1973) was a darkly comical retelling of Yojimbo, with his gunfighter this time burning the sadistic town to the ground before moving on. Eastwood made his own community-building story with the great The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), as his titular gunfighter can't help but attract a following of helpless people who need defending. In 1985, Lawrence Kasdan made Silverado, a fine film notable for Danny Glover's fine performance as one of the genre's rare major African-American characters. In 1990, Dances With Wolves swept the Oscars with its revisionist telling of the plight of the Sioux Indians. Seen through the eyes of Kevin Costner's white Civil War soldier, the film comes perilously close (some would say goes well over the line) of condescending to the Indians, presenting them as idyllic "noble savages".


Apocalyptic:

In 1992, 23 years after The Wild Bunch, Clint Eastwood made Unforgiven, a brutally violent story of a gunfighter, William Munny who comes out of retirement to hunt down and kill a pair of cowboys who attacked a whore in a hellish town run by a psychotic sheriff (Gene Hackman). This was the first Western to pick up on Peckinpah's thread of the nihilism and endlessness of violence (even his own Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973) was more melancholy than hopeless). It goes about as far as one can go in showing just how horrible a place the pre-civilizing West actually was, and presents little hope about it ever getting any better. Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man takes a trippier approach to just as miserable a world, with Johnny Depp's William Blake shuffled backwards in time and Westwards in space to his final Pacific resting place accompanied only by an Indian named Nobody and Neil Young's haunting score. John Hillcoat's Australian Western The Proposition (2005) continues in this vein, but with even more violence and less hope.

The HBO series Deadwood, however, provides a near-perfect fusion of the muddy violence of these apocalyptic Westerns with the Fordian theme of community building. Creator David Milch fills his fictional town with all the classical character types (saloonkeepers, lawmen, drunk doctors, greedy capitalists, innocent rich women, and so on) and then makes them even darker (the rich woman is actually an opium addict, the sheriff a borderline sociopath, the hotelier a venal toady, etc). Who holds the community together is Al Swearengen, one of the great characters in all of fiction. He begins the series as a scam artist, stealing what money he can from the clueless, organizing the bandits who attack people in the hillsides, stirring up violence against the neighboring Sioux, and not beneath knifing anyone who gets in his way. By the end of the series though, he is the lone force standing in opposition to the greater cruelty of George Hearst's mining operation, a brutal expression of pure capitalism that chews up any community in its path. Deadwood, in a sense, takes Ethan Edwards and William Munny and not only brings them inside the community, but makes them its leading citizen. In this way, he redeems the nihilism that Peckinpah and Eastwood saw in the violent men of the genre by making them merely shades darker than The Man With No Name, Tom Doniphon or The Ringo Kid.

A Short History Of Metro Classics, With Pictures and Possibly Some Extraneous Lists and Additional Annotation Part 3: Spring 2008

In the Spring of 2008, we decided to tackle music and genre with what would prove to be our most successful series to date. The first three weeks were Musicals with scores by George and Ira Gershwin, the next three were Westerns with scores by folk-rock legends and the final three weeks were movies about musicians with colors in the title (AKA Red + Blue = Purple).

We began the day before Valentine's Day with



Shall We Dance (Mark Sandrich, 1937)

-- We kept getting this mixed up with Swing Time, which is Astaire & Rogers with a Jerome Kern score. I think every draft we did of the flier had the wrong title until we finally caught it.

-- This was the seventh pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in a film, and the first musical scored by the Gershwin brothers.

-- The Gershwins were nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar for "They Can't Take That Away From Me" but lost to something called "Sweet Leilani" from something called Waikiki Wedding.

-- I've currently got it ranked as the 5th best film of 1937.


February 20, 2008



An American In Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951)

-- Winner of six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but it failed to win Best Director for Vincente Minnelli, with George Stevens winning for A Place In The Sun instead. Stevens, of course, directed Swing Time, which we kept mixing-up with Shall We Dance. Minnelli eventually won for another Paris-set, and much inferior, musical, Gigi.

-- Gene Kelly's "Broadway Melody" sequence at the end of Singin' In the Rain was an attempt to top the 18 minute ballet set to Gershwin's "An American In Paris" that concludes the film

-- #9 on the AFI's list of top American Musicals, #39 on their list of Romances and #68 on their list of the Best American Films of All-Time. Currently my #5 film of 1951 (but I probably will move it up to #1 when I get around to it).


February 27, 2008



Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957)

-- The second of three Metro Classics to star Fred Astaire (along with Shall We Dance and The Band Wagon) and the first of two films directed by Stanley Donen and starring Audrey Hepburn (the second being this week's Charade).

-- Co-star Kay Thompson, who plays the fashion magnate who urges people to "Think Pink" with "bazzazz" was most famous as the auther of the Eloise series of children's books, which I never read, but apparently were (are?) popular.

-- Fred Astaire was 58 years old at the time the film was released, Audrey Hepburn was 28. Which is weird.

-- Astaire's character is based on photographer Richard Avedon, who was a consultant on the film and was responsible for many of its images, including the title sequence.

-- #43 on my list of the Greatest Films of All-Time, and my #15 film of the 1950s.


March 5, 2008



McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)

-- The soundtrack includes three songs by Leonard Cohen, who is really old and yet recently had to go on tour because someone stole all his money while he was living in a Buddhist monestary.

-- The film takes place in Washington and was shot outside of Vancouver, BC.

-- Ranked by the AFI as the 8th Best American Western of All-Time; ranked by me as the 66th Greatest Film of All-Time, the 10th best film of the 1970s and the second best film of 1971.


March 12, 2008



Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)

-- The score is by Bob Dylan, who also has a supporting role as a quiet guy who wants to join Billy's gang. One of his most popular songs is from this film: "Knockin' On Heaven's Door".

-- Peckinpah was a notoriously lunatic and contentious director and lost control of this film during the editing stage. Consequently, it survives in several versions. The one we played was the "Director's Cut". I think it's really underrated and a great companion to Peckinpah's other reworkings of the Western genre, Ride The High Country and upcoming Classic The Wild Bunch.

-- The screenplay was by Rudy Wurlitzer (who also wrote Two-Lane Blacktop, which isn't yet a Metro Classic but is great nonetheless). Wurlitzr's unproduced screenplay Zebulon was an inspiration for Dead Man.

-- I have it ranked as the 8th best film of 1973 and the 50th best film of the 1970s.


March 19, 2008



Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)

-- We played this on film for the first show, where we discovered a scratch running through the soundtrack that create an annoying buzzing sound through the entire film. We had to run the second show digitally. This is why repertory on film is dying.

-- The soundtrack is by Neil Young, who improvised the score while watching the film by himself in a studio.

-- This was Robert Mitchum's final film. We need to play more Robert Mitchum movies.

-- Ranked #78 on my list of the Greatest Films of All-Time, I also have it as the 7th best film of the 1990s and the #1 film of 1995.


March 26, 2008



The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948)

-- Our second highest-grossing Metro Classic to date, behind only Casablanca.

-- The long central ballet sequence was extremely influential, inspiring Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli and convincing MGM that those two could get away with including a ballet in their own film, An American In Paris.

-- Nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Motion Picture Story, it won for Best Score and Best Color Art-Direction.

-- #8 on the BFI's list of the 100 Greatest British films; Ranked by me as the 16th Greatest Film of All-Time, the #2 film of the 1940s and the #1 film of 1948.


April 2, 2008



The Blues Brothers (John Landis, 1980)

-- We originally were going to play Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors: Blue in this spot, but for some reason I don't recall we couldn't book it. This worked equally well as a movie about music with the color Blue in the title, though.

-- The film was a big hit on its initial release, ranked by Box Office Mojo as the #10 Post-1974 Musical, and the second highest grossing film based on Saturday Night Live characters (behind Wayne's World).

-- I have it ranked as the 7th best film of 1980.


April 9, 2008



Purple Rain (Albert Magnoli, 1984)

-- To date the only Metro Classic that I hadn't seen before we showed it. Mike assured me that it was great though, and it was.

-- Director Albert Magnoli also directed Tango & Cash, which I still think is hilarious.

-- Won the Academy Award for Best Original Song Score, which is a cool category that didn't last very long.

-- I have it ranked as the 13th best film of 1984. The soundtrack, however, might be the best ever.

A Short History Of Metro Classics, With Pictures and Possibly Some Extraneous Lists and Additional Annotation Part 2: Autumn 2007

Hot off our resounding success with our summer series, we convinced our benevolent overlords to allow us to continue, this time in a more auteurist direction. Our second series focused on three great directors: Werner Herzog, Terrence Malick and Howard Hawks. The choice of Herzog and Malick was inspired by a discussion on the Filmspotting podcast. They had been watching a number of Herzog films a few months after they had seen Malick's The New World and were struck by the wholly opposite views of nature and humanity's relationship to nature that the two directors appeared to evince. Howard Hawks we picked because Howard Hawks is awesome. And we found this great photo of him wearing a tweed jacket.

This series also featured a Metro Classics first: two sets of double features. We paired FW Murnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror with the remake of that film directed by Werner Herzog. We also played a pair of Howard Hawks's screwball comedies (Twentieth Century and His Girl Friday).

The series kicked off on October 24, 2007 with



Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)

-- The story of the film's making is arguably better than the film itself. You can see it chronicled in Les Blank's excellent documentary Burden Of Dreams, where Herzog gives this speech:

Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain. It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is - is the dinosaurs here. It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever... goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that God, if he exists has - has created in anger. It's the only land where - where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at - at what's around us there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban... novel... a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication... overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the - the stars up here in the - in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.

-- Winner of the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival; #64 on my list of the Best Films of All-Time and my #6 film of the 1980s.


October 31, 2007




Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror (FW Murnau, 1922) and Nosferatu, The Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1979)

-- Our second Murnau film, making his the first director with two Metro Classics (he was of course tied with Herzog at the end of the night). Also our second Metro Classic Holiday Tie-In, as it played on Halloween.

-- Murnau's film was the first movie adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Because they didn't bother to secure the rights to film it, and the Stoker family threatened to sue, they changed all the names.

-- Herzog has called Murnau's version the greatest of all German films.

-- The making of the Murnau film is itself the basis for the film Shadow Of The Vampire, starring Willem Dafoe and John Malkovich. I haven't seen it, but I hear it's good. The idea is apparently that Max Schrek (who played the count) was actually a vampire that Murnau had discovered in some dark corner of Europe.

-- The Murnau film apparently would have been forever lost had Cinémathèque Française director Henri Langlois not discovered it from among a slate of old movies about to be destroyed. More about Langlois, the greatest of all repertory programmers can be found in the fascinating documentary Phantom of the Cinémathèque.

-- Murnau's version is my #1 film of 1922; Herzog's my #5 film of 1979.


November 7, 2007:



Aguirre: The Wrath Of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)

-- Herzog and star Klaus Kinski had a famously tumultuous relationship. At one point during the filming, Kinski threatened to walk off the set (out of the jungle) and Herzog told him that if he did, he would shoot Kinski and then shoot himself.

-- Speaking of Herzog and shootings, one of Mike's favorite Herzog stories is that while being interviewed for a magazine, Herzog was hit by a stray pellet from a BB gun. When the author offered to halt the interview so he could get medical attention, Herzog said no, that it was "an insignificant bullet."

-- #19 on my list of the Best Films of the 1970s and my #2 film of 1972.


November 14, 2007:



Days Of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

-- Malick reportedly wanted John Travolta to play the role of Bill, but he backed out due to scheduling conflicts with Welcome Back, Kotter. The part went to Richard Gere instead.

-- The film's famously stunning photography was filmed by three accomplished cinematographers. The original DP, Nestor Almendros (The Wild Child, My Night At Maud's) and camera operator John Bailey (DP for Ordinary People and Groundhog Day) had to leave in the midst of shooting and were replaced by Haskell Wexler (Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, In the Heat Of The Night) , who attempted to recreate as best he could Almendros's innovative "magic hour" look.

-- Winner of the Best Director award at the Cannes Film festival, and the Oscar for Best Cinematography; #12 on my list of the Greatest Films of All-Time and my #2 film
of the 1970s.


November 21, 2007:



The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)

-- The most recent film to be Classicized, it was only two years old when we played it the night before Thanksgiving, making it also our third Metro Classic Holiday Tie-In.

-- The film makes frequent use of the prelude from Wagner's opera Das Rheingold, a tune also used by Werner Herzog in his version of Nosferatu.

-- One of many recent films by highly respected directors to star Colin Ferrell. He has also been (and will be) in films by Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Michael Mann, Terry Gilliam, Peter Weir, Oliver Stone and Neil Jordan.

-- #49 on my list of the Greatest Films of All-Time and my #2 film of the 2000s.


November 28, 2007:



The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)

-- Had the misfortune of being released six months after the critical world and the general public had gone crazy over Steven Spielberg's WW2 film Saving Private Ryan, a film it is superior to in every way. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Picture, Director, Cinematography and Adapted Screenplay, but failed to win any of them.

-- The initial cut of the film was five hours long, and many prominent actors saw their parts reduced or eliminated altogether as the film reached its final form. These actors include: George Clooney, John Travolta, Mickey Rourke, Billy Bob Thornton, Lukas Haas, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Martin Sheen and Viggo Mortensen.

-- Star Jim Caviezel is from Bellingham. When the movie was playing at the Varsity Theatre, his parents came buy to see it and bought their tickets from me. They were very nice and excited that I liked their son's work.

-- #80 on my list of the Greatest Films of All-Time and my #11 film of the 1990s.


December 5, 2007:





His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) and Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934)

-- We originally were going to pair His Girl Friday with Hawks's Bringing Up Baby, but apparently the question of who owned the theatrical rights to that film was in dispute at the time so we were unable to book it. Twentieth Century I thought worked as a good replacement (as both are films about previously married couples that worked together, with the ex-husband in both films attempting to win back the woman for professional and romantic reasons), but Mike really didn't care for the film. As a vegan, he found John Barrymore's hamminess off-putting, I guess.

-- His Girl Friday is a remake of a movie version of a stage play (The Front Page). In both of the first two versions of the story, the Hildy character (Rosalind Russell) was a man. The first version of the story I saw, however, was a terrible 80s film set in a TV newsroom and starring Kathleen Turner, Burt Reynolds and Christopher Reeve.

-- Twentieth Century, along with Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (also from 1934) is often credited with creating the prototype of the 1930s screwball comedy. It seems to me that comedy doesn't generally age well (comedies from the 60s often make very little sense to me, and kids today don't seem to love the comedies of the 80s the way I do). I've a theory that screwball comedy is the only comedy era thus far that is timelessly classic no matter when you were born.

-- His Girl Friday was ranked #19 on the AFI's list of the Greatest American Comedies; it's my #26 Best Film of the 1940s.


December 12, 2007:



The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)

-- One of the screenwriters for this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel was William Faulkner. I just recently read my first Faulkner novel (The Sound And The Fury), it was really good.

-- One of the other screenwriters was frequent Howard Hawks collaborator Leigh Brackett, who wrote an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back. I like to think that the reason that film is by far the best written Star Wars film is because of her influence. The relationship between Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford in that film is very Hawksian: lots of snappy dialogue between two strong, intelligent, professional characters.

-- The film was the second collaboration between Hawks, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. After the success of their first film together (To Have And Have Not, which we probably should have run as a double feature with this, instead of the screwball double feature), they re-shot a number of scenes to sexy-up Bacall's character and make her interplay with Bogart more like that of the first movie.

-- The movie doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but if I remember correctly, the book does. The film just couldn't be as explicit about what was going on with the younger daughter for censorship reasons.

-- #36 on my list of the Greatest Films of All-Time and my #7 film of the 1940s.


December 19, 2007:



Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948)

-- Christian Nyby was nominated for the Best Editing Oscar for this film. Nyby went on to direct The Thing from Another World, a film produced by Hawks that is so indistinguishable from the films Hawks directed that it's generally just considered "a Howard Hawks film".

-- After seeing the film, John Ford was reported as saying, in reference to John Wayne's performance, "I never knew the son of a bitch could act!."

-- Prominently featured in the fine documentary The Celluloid Closet, as the interactions between Montgomery Clift and John Ireland (especially when they inspect each other's guns) have a none too subtle gay subtext.

-- Named the #5 American Western by the AFI; my #14 film of the 1940s and #74 on my list of the Greatest Films of All-Time.

A Short History Of Metro Classics, With Pictures and Possibly Some Extraneous Lists (*And Now With Additional Annotation) Part 1: Summer 2007

It's been over two years now since a tweed-wrapped movie geek with an unnatural fondness for lists (right) and a slightly spastic rock n' roll drummer (left) decided to liven up their jobs as movie theatre managers by pestering their bosses for months to let them program their own schedule of repertory movies one night a week. After consulting wikipedia to learn how to write a business plan, they got the OK, and with the help of a great many people at Landmark Theatres (film bookers, publicists, advertisers and one cranky old projectionist (below)) they managed to keep this strange ball a-rolling far longer than anyone had thought possible.


In the six nine-week series we've had since then, we've played 57 different films, ranging in time from 1919's The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari to 2005's The New World. We've played films from the US, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and co-productions between the USSR/Cuba and the US/Taiwan/Hong Kong/China. We've played war movies and musicals and westerns and comedies and dramas. Silent films, Studio-Era Hollywood films, art house films, foreign films, New Hollywood, Neo-Realist, German Expressionist and minimalist indie films. Films everyone has seen and films no one has heard of. Even one film I'd never seen.

Here's a look back at our inaugural series, wherein we played one movie from each decade from the 1920s through the 2000s. It all began on June 27, 2007 with:


Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (FW Murnau, 1927)

-- The first of three Classics directed by FW Murnau, and the first of four silent Classics

-- After the international success of The Last Laugh, Muranu was lured to Hollywood by William Fox and given carte blanche to make this film, much like Orson Welles got a dozen years later at RKO to make Citizen Kane. Similar to Kane and the early sound era, Sunrise represents a summation and culmination of the various filmmaking techniques developed throughout the silent period.

-- Winner of the first Best Actress Oscar (Janet Gaynor) and Best Cinematography as well as a special Best Picture award for Unique and Artistic Production.

-- #7 on the 2002 Sight And Sound Critics Poll of the Greatest Films of All-Time; #82 on the 2007 AFI list of the 100 Greatest American Films; #10 on my 2008 list of the Greatest Films of All-Time.


July 4, 2007:


Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)

-- The last film to feature the Four Marx Brothers, as Zeppo retired from filmmaking afterwards.

-- A relative flop at the time for The Marx brothers, it led to the end of their relationship with Paramount after five films. They went on to make some of their most successful films over the next few years at MGM (A Night At the Opera, A Day At The Races), but those movies aren't nearly as good.

-- The first Metro Classic Holiday Tie-In, this satire of nationalism played on Independence Day. Hail Freedonia!

-- #5 on the AFI's list of Greatest American Comedies, #60 on its list of Greatest American Films; #21 on my list of the Greatest Films of All-Time, #2 on my list of the Best Films of the 1930s.


July 11, 2007:


Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

-- The first of three Metro Classics that star Humphrey Bogart or Claude Rains, the first of two Classics that star both Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains, and the first of two Classics directed by Michael Curtiz.

-- Winner of the Best Picture Oscar, as well as Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay; #3 on the AFI's list of the Greatest American Films and #1 on their list of Greatest American Romantic Films; Voted the Greatest Screenplay Of All-Time by the Writers Guild Of America; #3 on my list of the Best Films of All-Time, and my #1 film of the 1940s.

-- Highest grossing film in Metro Classics history. By 20% or so; it really isn't close.

-- Boston Red Sox General Manager Theo Epstein is the grandson and grandnephew of screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein.

-- The score by celebrated film composer Max Steiner was Oscar-nominated, despite reusing many of the same themes Steiner used when scoring John Ford's 1934 film The Lost Patrol, which was also set in North Africa and for which Steiner was also Oscar-nominated. This bugs me.


July 18, 2007:


The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

--The first of only two John Wayne Classics, and the only Classic directed by John Ford. Which is ridiculous because he's, like, the greatest American director ever.

-- #11 on the 2002 Sight And Sound Critics poll of the Greatest Films of All-Time, though it was #5 on the 1992 poll; #12 on the AFI's list of the Greatest American Films of All-Time and #1 on the AFI's list of the Greatest American Westerns; My #9 film of all-time, and my #4 film of the 1950s.

-- The first Metro Classic to be shown on film.

-- The first of five Metro Classics that feature racism as a major theme, along with Do The Right Thing, The New World, Dead Man, Black Narcissus and I Am Cuba.

-- The first of seven westerns to be Classicized.


July 25, 2007


Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

-- The first of two Classics directed by Antonioni, it was shown five days before his death at age 94.

-- Loosely remade by Francis Ford Coppola as The Conversation, and by Brian DePalma as Blow Out. While the Coppola film is very good (and features and excellent performance by Gene Hackman), neither film is better than the original.

-- The first of two Classics starring David Hemmings. The other one seems like it should be very different, but really, it isn't.

-- The band playing in the nightclub scene is The Yardbirds, featuring Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. Antonioni had considered using both The Who and The Velvet Underground, but doesn't seem to have been able to afford either of them.

-- Oscar nominee for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay; #24 on my list of the Best Films of the 1960s.

-- A last-minute replacement film after we were unable to get Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou, it nonetheless did excellent business.


August 1, 2007.


Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

-- Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader both claim this is a loose remake of John Ford'sThe Searchers, though I don't really see it beyond a few incidental details.

-- Winner of the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival; received four Oscar nominations, including Picture, Actor (Robert DeNiro), Supporting Actress (Jodie Foster) and Original Score (Bernard Hermann), losing Best Picture to the surprisingly similar Rocky (both films arguably enact the wish-fulfillment fantasies of crazed loners); #92 on my list of the Best Films of All-Time, #13 on my list of the Best Films of the 1970s.

-- One of five Classics with political assassination as a plot point, along with Casablanca, I Am Cuba, Rome Open City and The Manchurian Candidate.


August 8, 2007:


Do The Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)

-- The first Classic I wasn't able to watch as I had to manage the theatre instead. I think Mike was out of town this week as well.

-- #96 on the AFI's list of the Greatest American Films of All-Time; #25 on my Best Films of All-Time list and my #1 film of the 1980s; Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actor (Danny Aiello) and Best Original Screenplay but not Best Picture, which was won by a film with a very different approach to the subject of race-relations: Driving Miss Daisy.

-- The film makes frequent use of Public Enemy's song "Fight The Power" and on the film's DVD commentary, each individual speaker is introduced by Chuck D, which is awesome.

-- Much like The Searchers, the film is often misinterpreted as it refuses to simplify the issue of racism. The repeated motif of the film, that of the need for balance between Love and Hate (an allusion to Charles Laughton's Classic-worthy film Night Of The Hunter) tended to get ignored at the time in favor of the film's more incendiary moments. The film is about the struggle and seeming inability to do the right thing, and Mookie's return to help repair the pizza parlor is just as significant as his decision to incite its destruction.


August 15, 2007:


Miller's Crossing (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1990)

-- Far ahead of its time, this is the first Classic that has yet to appear on an AFI list or get any Oscar nominations. It is, however, #29 on my list of the Greatest Films of All-Time and my #3 film of the 1990s.

-- The first of only three films noirs we've Classicized. We should play more of them.

-- Mostly inspired by Dashiell Hammett's novel The Glass Key and its 1942 film adaptation starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake), the film also contains elements of Hammett's Red Harvest, which was the main source of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which was itself remade by Sergio Leone as the Classic A Fistful Of Dollars.


August 22, 2007:


Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)

-- We had four banners for this film hanging in the lobby of the Metro for almost nine years until Mike took them down (without my knowledge) in order to put up a display for Up.

-- The highest-grossing foreign language film in US history, it received 10 Oscar nominations and won four, including Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score and Best Art Direction. It lost Best Picture to Gladiator, which still makes me angry.

-- Cheng Pei-pei, who plays Zhang Ziyi's villainous master/maid starred in King Hu's ground-breaking 1966 kung fu film Come Drink With Me, one of the first films in the genre to focus on a strong female protagonist. Ang Lee conceived this film as a tribute to Hu's films, especially his 1971 masterpiece A Touch Of Zen.

-- #73 on my list of the Greatest Films of All-Time, #6 on my list of the Best Films of the 2000s.

-- As much as I love the film, and I've seen it many times, I still have no idea what to make of the ending.

On This Day In Metro Classics History

Two years ago today, in honor of our nation's independence, we screened the Marx Brothers' manic masterpiece, Duck Soup.  It was the second film Metro Classics ever ran and was our first talkie (Murnau's Sunrise was our inaugural title).  It was also the only time we have run a film three times in one evening, although that 10:00 show ended up being largely superfluous since everyone was elsewhere watching the fireworks.  Mike wore Harpo's hat, nobody got any work done and a great time was had by all.

Some little known facts regarding this comedy classic:

Sean (seen here at last year's freestyle rap championship in NYC) hails Duck Soup as the second best film of the 1930s.

Mike places it at the very top of the greatest comedies ever created, followed by This Is Spinal Tap and the Big Lebowski.

Former Classics projectionist Pete (pictured below with Mike on the mezzanine of the Metro) considers Duck Soup simply the greatest film of all time. 

For those of you who wonder how a film that's eighty years old can achieve so many prestigious accolades I usher you to NPR's website where they posted a very timely assessment of the film's worth on the onset of this recession.

Hail Freedonia and have a happy 4th of July!