I've been away for a bit, but that doesn't mean that movie-related stuff has been far from my mind. Random musings follow.
Notable Passings
The recent deaths of playwright/screenwriter Arthur Laurents (on May 5) and actor Farley Granger (on March 27) make for an interesting coincidence in that the two had been romantically linked in the late 1940s. They met and became lovers while working on Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), a film loosely inspired by the Loeb-Leopold "thrill murder" of the twenties. That movie, for which Laurents received his first Hollywood credit, is not, in my humble view, one of Hitchcock's more successful efforts: among its problems, it never quite transcends its origins as a stage play by Patrick Hamilton, and by its closing moments it veers pretty sharply into heavy-handed sermonizing. However, its use of long takes and disguised cuts to create an illusion of unbroken action certainly makes it an intriguing experiment in framing, camera movement, and spatial/temporal unity; but that, of course, was Hitchcock's doing, not the writer's. Laurents—and, to a lesser extent, Granger—may well have contributed something to the film's homoerotic subtext, though you could also say that element was built into the material.
Laurents remains best known for his work in musical theater, particularly West Side Story and Gypsy, as well as his scripts for the '70s films The Way We Were (dir. Sydney Pollack) and The Turning Point (dir. Herbert Ross), which were both big hits in their day though neither is a favorite of mine. I'm insufficiently familiar with Laurents's other work to offer an informed opinion on his career as a whole, and while what I have seen of it doesn't impress me that much, I'm sure he was a fascinating dinner companion.
As for Granger, he went on to work for Hitchcock again, this time in a much better film, 1951's Strangers on a Train (which also had a strong homoerotic subtext). Unfortunately, his bland performance in the lead role of tennis player Guy Haines paled alongside costar Robert Walker's brilliant portrayal of the villainous psychopath Bruno Anthony. (Hitchcock, never one to spare actors' feelings, told interviewers he would have preferred William Holden in the Guy Haines role.) Regarding Granger's overall career, I again must plead virtual ignorance. He was good, I thought, as a sympathetic Depression-era bank robber in Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1949), but I believe that's the only other Granger performance I've seen. (In fact, Granger didn't make that many movies. Like Laurents, he preferred the stage.)
I can claim more familiarity with the oeuvre of director Sidney Lumet, who died on April 9. From Twelve Angry Men (1957) to Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), he turned out around fifty films in a variety of genres; I've seen about half of them. Lumet was known as the quintessential New York director, and in his best work—Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Prince of the City get my votes—his felt-in-the-bones familiarity with the grittier corners of Manhattan and the outer boroughs resulted in some exemplary social realism. But he also directed a fair number of clunkers (The Wiz, Guilty as Sin), and even some of the films that won him praise, notably The Pawnbroker and Network, struck me as overwrought. Still, I've always admired Lumet's overall seriousness of purpose: he was devoted to film, he was good with actors (even if he wasn't a great visual stylist), and provoking thought remained central among his concerns. With so much trivial junk on today's screens (as in yet another Pirates of the Caribbean installment!), that last attribute is not to be sneezed at.
The Best Movie on DVD I've Seen Recently
That would be Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours (2008). The two slightly kinky thrillers Demonlover and Boarding Gate, the extent of my previous knowledge of Assayas's work, didn't prepare me for this delicate study of the role that a summer house and the precious art and antiques it contains play in the lives of a French family whose ties are dissolving in the face of the mother's impending death and her children's far-flung careers. It's rare that a work dealing with such themes as loss, regret, and dissolution does so without being depressing. Indeed, in its quiet artistry and avoidance of melodrama, Summer Hours is exhilarating.
Obviously, Assayas is a versatile man. He also directed Carlos (2010), a film about the terrorist Carlos the Jackal that topped a lot of recent ten-best lists. Originally conceived as a miniseries for French television, with a shorter theatrical version released on this side of the pond, it's high on my next-to-see list—if only it would come out on DVD.
The Best Book on Film I've Read Recently
I've praised University of Delaware film scholar Thomas Leitch on this blog before; let me now praise him again. His 2007 book Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Johns Hopkins University Press) offers a refreshingly new take on the problems involved in literature-to-film transformation. Leitch doesn't give us the usual close readings of particular adaptations, the approach pioneered by George Bluestone in what Leitch calls the "founding text of adaptation studies," Novels into Film (1957); rather, he ranges widely over a number of broader issues, from the shaky relations between religious inspiration and entertainment value evidenced in adaptations of the gospels (such as, most recently, Mel Gibson's bloody Passion of the Christ), to attempts at "exceptional fidelity" (e.g., Gone with the Wind and Lord of the Rings), in which filmmakers feel particularly obliged to satisfy the expectations of a much-loved literary source's readership.
Especially fascinating to me were the chapters on the countless versions of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Arthur Conan Doyle's venerable sleuth Sherlock Holmes. In the former, Leitch explores the idea that adaptations of A Christmas Carol, whether reconfiguring it as a cartoon, a western, a musical, or a comedy, serve as a kind of beginner's introduction to Dickens and the cultural traditions and moral lessons that the great Victorian novelist and his Yuletide classic embody. In the Holmes chapter, Leitch surveys an array of texts—cinematic and otherwise—that has become so dizzying in number as to prompt this query: "Why should Holmes and not other impossible heroes such as Superman or James Bond or Tarzan or Frankenstein's monster assume an aura of historical actuality that allowed him to survive the death of his author, spin off half a dozen fictional series starring his supporting characters, spawn hundreds of fan clubs in every corner of the globe, and provoke reams of commentary seeking to reconcile apparent factual inconsistencies in his adventures?"
The answers Leitch proposes to that and other questions are never less than provocative. But what impresses me most about this book is the author's command of his sources. My comment earlier about Leitch's Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock—that he writes "with the authority of someone who has seen every film and read everything of relevance"—applies equally to this volume.
