Soft Shoes and Hart Hearts
CAVELL, MARCIA
SOFT SHOES AND HARD HEARTS BY MARCIA CAVELL There are two terrific movies around right now. Chinatown, set in the '30s and self-consciously fashioned after the classic private-eye features of the...
...Gittes trails Mulray, who strikes us as a man above sex and secrecy, and manages to photograph him in a damning embrace with a blonde, Spanish-speaking ingenue...
...In one of the film's better lines, the villain says: "I know what few people ever know—that in the right time and the right place, anybody can do anything...
...and Dunaway's mannerisms have meaning in this portrayal—she has always looked to me as if she were trying to hide something, only this time I believed her...
...Yet most of what struck the movie-struck in the '30s and '40s was at those luncheon tables: Judy Garland, Spencer Tracy, Van Heflin, Greer Garson, Katherine Hepburn, Lana Turner, Walter Pidgeon, Erroll Flynn, Clark Gable, and on and on...
...and so it goes till the end...
...In any case, Chinatown is a thoroughly engrossing successor to The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep...
...The conclusion is grim: Absolute power in this movie not only corrupts absolutely, but is absolutely inviolable...
...In addition to the talents on the screen, there were talents behind it: animators to give Kelly a mouse for a partner in Anchors Aweigh (1945) and Astaire a whole corps de ballet of dancing shoes in The Barkleys of Broadway (1949...
...Polanski is no more than moderately gory this time, and never unnecessarily...
...Finally, That's Entertainment...
...Mulray (Faye Dunaway) threatens to sue Gittes for libel, suddenly changes her mind, then tells the police she was his employer...
...an autopsy shows that Mulray's lungs actually were full of sea water...
...For years now, "serious" art has been trying to divorce itself from feeling...
...Most important, of course, were the off-screen individuals who seemed able to write witty lyrics and lyrical songs over their morning coffee...
...Selections such as these confirm That's Entertainment!'% introductory claim that "over the years . . . Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced a series of musical films whose success and artistic merit remain unsurpassed in motion picture history...
...he's right—the hat rack is marvelous...
...Louis (1944...
...The marriage may have dissolved in part because of advances in recording technology...
...Kelly, who is doing the voiceovers at this point, remarks that Astaire could make any partner look good...
...reminds us that first-rate entertainment has faded from the screen, Roman Polanski's Chinatown demonstrates that it isn't totally dead...
...offers a one-minute pan of 25 years ago, taken when the studio invited its entire "family" to lunch for its Silver Anniversary...
...That's Entertainment!, a collection of clips from the heyday of the MGM musical, celebrates what used to be...
...Still, something more profound has occurred, too: The gap between entertainment and art has widened into a gorge, with unfortunate results for each...
...Along with the triumphant long sequences, this tribute to MGM's Golden Anniversary offers a number of delicious moments that succeed in a different way...
...modern authors write books that ignore characters and narrative, leaving us to read for our pleasure the novels that are by some standard "old-fashioned...
...and Fred Astaire dancing with a hat rack from Royal Wedding (1951...
...But director Jack Haley Jr...
...The original screenplay, by Robert Towne, who also wrote The Last Detail, is as good as a Raymond Chandler thriller, and keeps the movie running in your head after the last gunshot...
...whereas Astaire's cane always appears to be an extension of his body, Gable's looks like a weapon for fending off a mad dog...
...Clark Gable does a hilarious soft-shoe in Idiot's Delight (1939...
...has had the wisdom to present several complete sequences...
...The plot is a Chinese puzzle—or Chinatown itself, where leads turn into blind alleys and we have the impression communication is going on though we don't understand the language...
...It's a nice irony, incidentally, to cast the director of The Maltese Falcon in its '74 descendant...
...In the '40s, records of symphonies and musicals had to be lugged home in ponderous five-disc albums that didn't sound very good once you got them there...
...spans the period from Broadway Melody (1929), the first full talking-and-music picture, to Gigi (1958), and provides samplings from nearly 100 productions...
...Mulray, wife of a high official in Los Angeles' Department of Hydraulic Engineering...
...the jemme fatale whose identity as victim or perpetrator remains hidden until it's too late...
...People are both more and less evil than Gittes thinks —usually the wrong people...
...Mrs...
...It seems to me there hasn't been a top-notch stage or original motion picture musical since the '50s...
...every plot device is psychologically right...
...Until LPs and hi-fi, concert halls, theaters and movie houses were the only places music could really be heard...
...Gittes discovers someone is stealing water from the city in the midst of a drought...
...And Joan Crawford is presented in an unintentionally wacky episode from The Hollywood Revue (1929) that proves not everybody can sing and dance...
...Narrated by 11 of the stars whose films are shown, That's Entertainment...
...My Fair Lady, for example, may have come to the screen in 1964, but it opened on Broadway in 1956...
...Indeed, I can't recall any American movie of the '60s that was as tightly constructed and as much fun...
...All the elements of the old genre have been skillfully resurrected—the mystery that becomes more tangled with every unraveling of the plot...
...the same movie's "Make 'em Laugh" number featuring Donald O'Connor...
...Interestingly, the movies represented here were frankly produced to make money...
...were hardly great, their range nevertheless reminds one again of the enormous assortment of talent employed by Hollywood in the past, and of the fact that the studios knew how to use it...
...J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a "matrimonial investigator," is hired by a Mrs...
...John Houston, playing an old man who has lost none of his power or sexual magnetism, is wonderful...
...the real Mrs...
...Nicholson is superb, as usual...
...Currently, many composers are interested in machines that eliminate human expression from the musical process...
...Yet Polanski's film has reverberations and a style distinctly its own...
...She will pay any price to expose her husband's extramarital affair...
...It sends you out of the theater on a hum and a lindy—and when was the last time that happened...
...special effects wizards to help Astaire prance over walls and ceilings in Royal Wedding...
...If some of the movies in That's Entertainment...
...Even the nature of the action is complex: Behind the detective story is a political tale of fascinating dimensions, and meshed into both is a human drama in which the Mulray mystery becomes the tragedy of Gittes, a man whose professional cynicism causes him to betray where he would save...
...Kelly, for instance, continually tried out new and imaginative methods of combining choreography with jazz, or anything else that came along, and MGM apparently encouraged him to take risks...
...conversely, popular culture, having lost its head, has lost its heart as well...
...But if That's Entertainment...
...In fact, the nose injury that Gittes suffers early in the picture is a master stroke: It has us wincing for him whenever he gets into trouble...
...The contradiction is a signal that something is fishy, but the puzzles come too fast for us to worry about it...
...Since Polanski's films never impressed me before, one of us must have changed...
...But above all, Chinatown is about how everything interlocks...
...They wanted to entertain, and they did so splendidly, marrying economic self-interest to energy and ability...
...technicians and the brilliant Busby Berkeley to mingle fire with water for one of the zaniest production numbers in this film, an Esther Williams extravaganza from Million Dollar Mermaid (1952...
...Yet Chinatown is so ex-hilaratingly well made that I came away with the feeling of just having seen Fred Astaire...
...Chinatown, set in the '30s and self-consciously fashioned after the classic private-eye features of the '40s, is the best American film I've seen in years...
...the private detective in for dear life over his head, fighting crime and the city police...
...They include: Judy Garland singing "The Trolley Song," from Meet Me in St...
...Mulray is quickly revealed to be an imposter...
...Directors were not out to disturb our prejudices or create works of art or change our manner of perceiving the world...
...Not all the stars in Hollywood worked for MGM-although this film makes you forget that for a couple of hours—and a few were out of town...
...Mulray is found drowned in a reservoir after his "love-nest" has been spread across the front pages...
...painters talk about "conceptual art," and attempt to manufacture it...
...Events that are incomprehensible when they take place make sense in the end...
...Gene Kelly's renowned love affair with puddles from Singin in the Rain (1952...
Vol. 57 • August 1974 • No. 16
