Happy Birthday, Buster!

The inimitable Buster Keaton was born 117 years ago today.

It’s said by some that there are two kinds of people in the world: Chaplin fans and Keaton fans. If that’s so, then count us decidedly in the latter camp. We were introduced to Keaton by an old flame (thanks, C.D.), and we suspect that our wife fell in love with us in large part because we took her to see a different Keaton picture every Monday for eight weeks (thanks, Film Forum).

To mark the great man’s birthday, we offer you the following short, Cops (1922), that features our favorite single moment from his movies. If you’ve never seen a Keaton picture in a theatre, in the company of an appreciative audience, you must rectify that while you still walk this earth. You don’t have to take our word for it—just ask Ms. Cladrite!

The bit we treasure most comes approximately 15 minutes and 35 seconds into this video, but really, you should watch the whole thing. It’s only 18 minutes long, and we’re talking genius here. But if you absolutely must jump ahead, all you need to know is that Keaton is being chased by dozens of cops (doesn’t really matter why) and it’s the amazing way he escapes them in this gag that is so delightful. Start at the 15:00 mark, at the very least, to work up to the stunt we’re touting.

Five or six years ago, we spent a week with Ms. Cladrite in Los Angeles, and having purchased John Bengtson’s Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood through the Films of Buster Keaton, which includes info about dozens of locations used in Keaton’s pictures, we were able to find the spot where the above scene in Cops was filmed. It was the highlight of that trip for me to stand in that spot while Ms. Cladrite snapped a photograph.

Triple the fun

Broadway poster Goose Woman poster The Man Who Laughs poster

We took in a triple feature the other night at NYC’s Film ForumBroadway (1929), The Goose Woman (1925) and The Man Who Laughs (1928)—with each picture proving worthy in its own way.

But there was another special treat in store: a videotaped episode of This Is Your Life from 1957, featuring Cladrite favorite Buster Keaton. Why was this bonus included that night? Because Louise Dresser, who starred in The Goose Woman, was a longtime friend of Buster’s (she’d known him when he was a child who was featured in his parents’ vaudeville act).

It was the management’s intention to show only the part of the program that included Dresser being brought out to surprise Buster, but the audience reacted so positively that they showed the entire episode, which we’re sharing below with you.

We wish we had a better-quality video for you (the closed captions in this version are a bit distracting), but it’s still worth watching. Anyone with a fondness for Buster Keaton will find their affection for the man heightened by viewing this program. He’s clearly such a gentle soul, and he retained his sense of humor until the end. He’s hilarious on this program, and clearly so warm-hearted and humble.

It’s a delight to experience, even in this fuzzy, captioned form. Enjoy.

A don’t-miss classic from Blighty

A scene from The Life and Death of Colonel BlimpIf you live in NYC or have plans to be here in the next two weeks, you owe it to yourself to pay a visit to Film Forum for a screening of the fully restored Technicolor marvel The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Blimp, which stars Deborah Kerr and Roger Livesey, ranks as one of the best pictures ever turned out by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and given the stellar lineup of movies they were responsible for—The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death, among many others—that’s saying something.

In fact, it’s one of the greatest pictures ever made in Great Britain. Film critic Andrew Sarris wrote of the picture, “When I first saw the badly butchered American release version of Colonel Blimp more than 40 years ago, I never imagined I’d live to see the day when I would have the effrontery to write that I preferred it to Citizen Kane.”

We’d hate to have to choose between Blimp and Kane, but you get the point. Blimp is a must-see.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

The curtain is drawn on a great director

In February 2008, NYC’s Film Forum held a tribute to director Sidney Lumet, who died today at the age of 86. The celebration of Lumet’s life and career took the form of a two-hour Q&A, interspersed with clips from some of his most memorable films. We were lucky enough to be on hand, and we are pleased to offer, as a tribute to a very talented movie maker, our account of the evening.

Lumet shared in the early part of the discussion that his father, Baruch, was an actor in the Yiddish theatre, and Sidney himself got his start there at a very early age.

Lumet went on to appear in a number of Broadway shows, among them a Max Reinhardt production, before slipping behind the camera as a television director in the 1950s.

So it was fitting that the evening opened with a clip from One Third of a Nation (1939), which boasts Lumet’s only film acting appearance. The then-14-year-old director-to-be starred as the nephew of Sylvia Sidney.

The next clip shown was from the first movie he directed, Twelve Angry Men (1957). Asked if he’d made a specific effort to make the film in a cinematic style, so as to prove to the industry bigwigs that he could direct as well for the large screen as for the small, Lumet admitted with a laugh, “I was too arrogant. It never occurred to me that I might need to convince anyone.”

Asked later about working with Henry Fonda, Lumet said Fonda was constitutionally unable to make a false or dishonest move as an actor. “I don’t think he could’ve done it if I’d asked him to,” Lumet said. “He could only play the truth.”

Lumet said that filming on Twelve Angry Men was completed in 19 days. He said he shot the film in a very particular way. There were three levels of lighting in the film—sunlight through the windows, cloudy skies, as a storm approached outside, and with the overhead lighting in the jury room illuminated once the storm is underway.

Lumet shot the film entirely out of sequence, rotating around the room, getting each shot he needed from each actor under that particular lighting. Once he’d shot all of his sunlit shots, Lumet had the set relit to suggest cloudy conditions and slowly worked his way around the room again, going from character to character, getting every shot he needed.

Finally, he had the set relit once last time, with overhead lighting lit, and made the rounds again.

Lumet said he never used storyboards, as Alfred Hitchcock was famous for doing. Instead, he preferred to rehearse his actors for two weeks, as if they were mounting a play, and when he had all the blocking down, then he considered where to place the camera in each scene.
Read More »

Five dazzling divas

Any movie buff in the tri-state area with even the slightest interest in classic Japanese cinema should plan on spending a good deal of time on Houston Street the the next three weeks.

Beginning Friday, April 1, Film Forum will be presenting a don’t-miss opportunity to immerse oneself in pictures made by the greatest Japanese film directors of the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s and starring five of Japan’s most acclaimed actresses: Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu Yamada, Machiko Kyo, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine.

image-Kinuyo Tanaka Image-Isusu Yamada Image-Machiko Kyo Image-Setsuko Hara Image-Hideko Takamine

This quintet of amazing actresses are being feted by Film Forum with a retrospective that features films by such giants as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Mikio Naruse.

The festival’s highlights are too numerous to cite, but we are especially fond of Takamine’s work, and she was best known for her work with the great Naruse, who, along with Kurosawa, ranks as our favorite Japanese director, but honestly, you could make your way to Film Forum on a daily basis throughout the retrospective and experience no regrets.

But if you can make only a few bills, we recommend the Naruse double-bill of Yearning (1964, Takamine) and Repast (1951, Hara) on Tuesday, April 5; Naruse’s Okaasan (Mother, 1952, Tanaka), the double bill on Saturday, April 9, of Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950, Kyo) and Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953, Tanaka); Ozu’s Tokyo Story on Sunday, April 10, and Monday, April 11 (1953, Hara); Naruse’s Flowing (1956, Yamada, Takamine, Tanaka) on Tuesday, April 12; and … well, honestly, it’s a pointless exercise to try to recommend particular highlights. The entire retrospective is worth experiencing.

Clear your schedule, buy a Film Forum membership (you’ll save on admission), and save us a seat on the aisle, please.