Tag: film

Not Waiting for Directions (Home)

When you just want to do it yourself but can’t

“Dear Saint Anthony, look around, something’s lost and can’t be found.”

~ Catholic prayer to the patron saint of, among other things, lost objects

“When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’”

~ Bertolt Brecht

“Never start a piece with a quotation.”

~ Nora Ephron

Do you have the feeling that we are all living through a Kafka short story? “The Trial,” perhaps, or “The Refusal,” maybe? When I was home in Virginia the other week, I asked my brother Jeff if he’d ever read Ray Bradbury’s “The Sound of Thunder,” and when I recounted the plot, he realized he once saw a bad movie version; and it came up because, as we caught the latest news out of America, I mentioned that I keep looking for a smashed butterfly on my shoe.

For some reason, I got on a mailing list for Catholic charities and I often receive “free gifts” of amulets and charms and bracelets and necklaces of St. Anthony. Coincidentally, he’s my favorite patron saint.

Like me, in addition to those stories, maybe you are thinking of that Twilight Zone episode, “It’s a Good Life,” where that evil kid keeps wishing everyone who displeases him away to the cornfield, and no one will stop him out of fear, and also love, because his parents choose to save him and let the rest of the world disappear. In the same way, Trump bastardizes the Kennedy Center even as he plans to close or demolish the Museum of African American History, and Musk eyes selling off the National Gallery treasures to “save money.” Wishing all our history away to the cornfield. And, echoing Brecht, there’s no one to stop them.

Or is there? Reading historian Heather Cox Richardson the other day was a tiny balm, as she recounts recent events and sees shifting winds. I’ll take it.

Your Miss O’ has been lying low these past weeks, visiting aged parents, aging brothers, a young nephew and vibrant sister-in-law. Also watching birds, smelling lilac in bloom, watching red azaleas pop, walking around my childhood block in drizzle. In addition to watching classic movies and “Harriet Tubman” on PBS and “Poetry in America” episodes with brother Jeff during the week, I caught A Complete Unknown on my last night, the weekend nephew James visited. James just wouldn’t go to sleep in his designated living room, what with all the excitement generated by middle-aged relatives, so he happily sort of watched the movie with the grownups, not understanding any of it. Fortunately, there’s no nudity and little in the way of bad language, but at the point where Joan Baez gets out of her bed where Bobby Dylan is sleeping, only in her underwear and a tank top, four-year-old James commented, “She forgot to put on her pants.” Uncle Jeff chucked, “He doesn’t miss anything, does he?”

If you haven’t seen that Dylan bio pic, for me the most interesting storyline was the one featuring Pete Seeger, played beautifully by Edward Norton. The movie helped me understand this mystery surrounding the rift that formed between Dylan and his early supporter and champion Seeger. Their link was Woody Guthrie, suffering from Huntington’s chorea at the movie’s opening, the disease never named or explained, as Hollywood does. I won’t belabor the plot, but essentially when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival, Seeger was dismayed and dejected, not because he hated rock, but because it was the end of his dream. For years and years, Seeger saw in Guthrie, and in the work of folk musicologist Alan Lomax and in folk musicians like Joan Baez and Odetta, the opportunity to proclaim a unifying voice in American music. Amidst the turmoil of the civil rights movement and the communist accusations of HUAC, the folk music movement offered the possibility of a true common ground across race and social class and political affiliation, youth and old age. In Dylan, Seeger saw the last piece of his dream, a young, galvanizing voice, filled with unendingly creative songs of love and political revolution, fresh and original but also connected to our American past.

But Bob Dylan was an artist first, an individual all the way, with no interest in marches or politics, not really, and not at all interested in unifying a nation. The rest is history, Highway 61 Revisited, and unending tension and turmoil in America. This is not Bob Dylan’s fault. Pete Seeger meant well, too, but no single person can make us all believe one “us” to be true.

No one, alone, can fix it.

But if something can unify a people, it’s probably music that comes as close as anything. Music and food. Music and food and complaining about noise.

On Thursday morning this week, around 8:30, as I was working when I heard this high-pitched BEEP BEEP BEEP [beat] BEEP BEEP BEEP. Smoke alarm? Tow truck? Work truck backing up? After about 15 minutes of this blaring through my window, I decided to take a walk hoping the cause of the noise would resolve. One 20-minute walk later, I could still hear the beeps from two blocks away. I went on a fact-finding mission. Where I live is like a mixing bowl of sound—finding the source was a confusion to me. I called 311—a wasted half hour of the operator’s frustrated inability to locate where I was on the city map. Feeling crazy at this point, I texted my co-op group, and neighbor Chris took over, agreed with me it was in a trash bag, rummaged, found the culprit—a discarded smoke alarm!—and smashed it. Oh, blessed relief.

In the midst of ICE raids in America destroying families, there are still annoyances like that, you know what I mean? It’s the thing I’ve never understood, not since I watched the 6-day war on Walter Cronkite’s 6 o’clock news when I was James’s age: what are human beings thinking when they annihilate other humans? We have enough little daily problems, don’t we?

If noise rage occasionally unifies us, language never seems to be able to, because as poet Nikki Giovanni said, too many people try to speak English rather than speak through it. Saturday morning, I had to go get bloodwork and urine testing done for my physical this week. Earlier in the week, I’d received an email that my neighborhood LabCorp office “has closed.” Full stop. I was so bummed—the next closest one is in Jackson Heights, about five subway stops away. Instead, the email continued in the next paragraph, there will be a new office…wait. It’s the same address, but one floor up. God I hate it when people can’t fucking communicate. What the email should have said is, “The second floor LabCorp office is closing for two days in order to relocate to the third floor.” Do you see the difference? Why is this hard? Because it is.

When I arrived at 7:45 for my scheduled 8:00 AM appointment, I saw a packed waiting room—highly unusual, but the office is “new,” so one makes allowances. One man there had a son, probably eleven or twelve and clearly on the autism spectrum, chasing him around, keeping him out of lab rooms, out of the hallway. I went to self check in kiosk but saw this sign:

So I went to the window to check in, as directed. The nurse behind the glass, short, dyed black hair, officious—clearly overwhelmed (like her male counterpart) by the double duty of being a receptionist and the technician, came out to the kiosk and said, “Give me your ID, I’ll do it,” and I pointed to the sign, saying, “If it works, I can do it…,” but she was clearly focused on finishing the check in. Again, I pointed out the sign directing us to go to the window. Did she take it down? No. She straightened it. (My seat being nearby, I spent the next 45 minutes explaining to everyone who came in, “It works, ignore the sign.”)

Between the lying sign, the autistic child flying around, the woman who was denied a pregnancy blood test because she didn’t have a doctor’s order, the men needing drug tests for their jobs, and the seats all facing forward staring into the abyss, I felt I was in some kind of play. Not really Kafka, but rather, Samuel Beckett. I was in a Beckett play. I love to see plays but it’s not always great to live them.

True to my heart, to cheer myself earlier this week, I went to The Public Theater to see a collection of short plays by one of my favorite playwrights, Caryl Churchill. As only an artist can, she captures me in this time, even in America. I think the titles say it all.

And that’s the latest. How’ve you been?

Love to all, somehow,

Miss O’

Summer Stock in a Heat Wave

First of all, I have come to love this movie. Second of all, whenever Summer Stock, an MGM musical from 1950, appears on TCM the host always notes that 1) it’s Judy Garland’s last MGM musical; 2) this is one of the lesser MGM musicals; 3) Gene Kelly signed on in a less prominent role as a favor to his friend Judy who gave him his start; 4) Judy was obese at the time of filming; and 5) Judy’s iconic “Get Happy” number was filmed after production closed, and she’d “slimmed down.” It really sets you up to watch the film with a “pity” and “I guess I have nothing better to do” mindset, right? The movie deserves so much more of an intro boost, and maybe someday Miss O’ will be famous enough to be a guest who can explain all this to Ben Mankiewicz; in the meantime, I’ll introduce it to you.

Get Happy

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I fell in love with movie musicals that showed up on TV on the weekends, usually on syndicated channels, and spent hours and hours memorizing them. This was a confusing exercise. Interrupted as they were with commercials every three to five minutes, the movie plots were pretty much impossible to follow. For example, the opening song of Summer Stock, “If You Feel Like Singing, Sing,” follows the camera over “Falbury Farm” to Judy in her room to singing in the shower to putting on her farm clothes, and as she makes her bed, she learns from her housekeeper Marjorie Main that “Frank and Zeb” are “dressed in their Sunday clothes,” and…cue commercial for Ginsu knives. The next scene was probably Judy going to the kitchen, saying, “I don’t blame them,” and you think, “Huh?” Years later, watching the film uncut on TCM you realize that the network cut out the scene where Frank and Zeb quit their jobs, and how unsuccessful the farm has been, in order to make room for more commercials while my child head spun.

Another plot point that made the movie impossible for a kid to follow on syndicated Sundays is that Judy’s character, Jane Falbury, changes her mind solidly three times about allowing the show to continue in her barn. It’s totally reasonable that she does this, unless between mind changes a network cuts dialogue to insert commercials for Koons Ford used trucks, Ding Dongs, and Aqua Net.

As a result, Summer Stock was lost on me on my first viewing, whereas musicals like The Wizard of Oz, Anchors Aweigh, and Singin’ in the Rain, though no more complicated in their plots, had more understandable and entertaining musical numbers for a kid like me.

What led to me write about this little musical gem (because it is) has to do with summer boredom during a heatwave her in New York City. Right now my job is really slow, and I’m not ungrateful for that, but it’s hard to concentrate on anything with little in the way of deadlines attached while still being tethered to my laptop. To give myself some company, I look for movies to run on a loop when I can’t find procedurals like Law and Order in reruns, and Summer Stock came up On Demand. Over a dozen viewings later, I have this mature, wonderfully acted movie memorized, and more than that, I watched it with different lenses trained on it that might be interesting to, I don’t know, someone. Here we go.

Judy Garland’s Body

Here are a couple of photo stills from the film to help you understand how fat Judy was during filming:

If, like me, you are squinting to see a woman whose body is listing toward morbid obesity, welcome to seeing a normal woman like a normal person. Since The Wizard of Oz, during the filming of which MGM Studios put their young star on a diet of amphetamines, it’s the first movie where Judy’s body is what I’d call womanly. Healthy, even. In her many films, from The Harvey Girls to Meet Me in St. Louis, from The Pirate to Easter Parade to The Good Old Summertime, I see a Judy who is thin, and it’s a little unnerving how thin when you see her body is also covered in layers of period garb. In fact, not really since For Me and My Gal, her first picture playing an “adult” woman character (opposite Gene Kelly, whom she’d seen on Broadway in Pal Joey and championed to be her leading man in that film, thus starting his career), could I recall seeing Judy Garland in modern dress. Summer Stock is also the first movie in years with Judy in short hair—a hint of the hair she will style in more elegant ways in the 1960s. In Summer Stock, the body type works since Judy plays a farmer and a sort of old maid, and after filming completed and her contract was up, Judy’s career came to standstill, morbidly obese by studio standards and washed up at age 27.

The MGM Circle Game

Judy started out her career proper has Andy Hardy’s love interest in the Mickey Rooney franchise of movies in the 1930s, most famously Babes in Arms, where the kids entered the realm of movie legend when they found a barn and put on a spectacular show despite the town’s disapproval and the doubt of their families. I don’t know if it was deliberate that Judy Garland ended her MGM career on a farm set, hearkening back to where she found stardom in The Wizard of Oz, and inside a plot with a “let’s get ourselves a barn and put on a show” where she got her start, but it’s really kinda nice.

In Summer Stock, Judy Garland is no longer a sidekick ingenue in search of a show, or a waif who dreams of a world beyond the rainbow over Kansas. This Judy plays Jane Falbury, and she owns the farm (in a small community in what appears to be Upstate New York or Connecticut). Early on, we learn that the farm has been unsuccessful, Jane is engaged to Orville (son of the farm supply store owner Mr. Wingait), and her younger sister Abigail is due back from New York City that afternoon. And what do you know, Abigail surprises her sister with Joe Ross (Gene Kelly), the director of a new Broadway show looking for an out-of-town place to play, along with all his cast, crew, and sets. In the process of figuring out whether the show folk will get to make this happen, Jane’s housekeeper Ess (Marjorie Main) reveals that Jane and Abigail had dance lessons all their young lives, and Gene sees Judy do a little dance in the kitchen. Fireworks ensue!

Why Watch It?

Sure, there’s a predictable plot, tempers flare, people burst into song, love ensues, and a star is born, but the emotional world of this musical is more mature than in other movies, a maturity that resonates with the Miss O’ who still loves musicals a grown-up. This movie opens to reveal a woman who is comfortable in her body, who loves to sing and sings great, who without question runs a farm, and who genuinely loves her life. She is independent in the important ways and wants no rescue, no change. But you get the feeling that despite her four-year engagement to childhood friend Eddie Bracken, Judy/Jane has never known love. Orphaned young at some point, her entire life has been devoted to raising her sister and keeping the farm going. She doesn’t resent it. And she doesn’t realize that she’s been missing a thing until that devilish smile in the form of Gene Kelly arrives to shake her up. Gene and Judy are emotional equals. They spar, they compromise, they fall in love, sure.

But what strikes me most in this movie is that leading man Gene Kelly is a supporting player. The film is totally Judy’s. And the result is an uncharacteristically light and lovely Gene Kelly. Not that he isn’t wonderful in his films. But here he is not wildly aggressive or ego-driven, he has nothing to prove, and he doesn’t have to carry the picture. He’s not a ham. The dances are staged by Nick Castle, though Gene probably choreographed his solo routines, so he’s not carrying that load, either. His role as the show’s director Joe Ross is totally believable, and Gene plays his rages and fibs and falling in love with a master’s touch of humanity. He’s totally equal to Judy on screen, but it’s Judy’s movie, and his performance is the better for it. I think it’s one of his best.

In addition, it seems to me that however “lesser” this musical is in the canon, this is an important film in Gene Kelly’s development as a choreographer. In some of the dance numbers you can see the seeds of even more iconic numbers to come. For example, the staging of “You Wonderful You” with Judy presages “Our Love Is Here to Stay” with Leslie Caron in An American in Paris (1951) and “You Were Meant for Me” with Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Other dances in the film show classic Kelly moves he will use even more imaginatively in those later films, like the matador move, the airplane move. It’s fun when you realize this because of the order the movies come in. And you are a total movie musical nerd recalling these notes from memory.

Judy’s range as Jane is something she usually doesn’t get to display in other films—fully human, grown up, shifting from joy to concern to rage to apology to thoughtfulness to bargaining, with ease. And what makes Judy such a superb actress is that she is fully present in every scene, with every actor, no matter the roll. Her emotions are both raw and in control, and as a woman in late middle age, I connected with this character as I don’t generally get to do in musicals. Twelve-year-old me would never have enjoyed the vulnerable and tender moments between Judy and Gene, especially in “You Wonderful You” and “Friendly Star.”

The supporting cast is a Who’s Who of some of the finest character actors ever on screen: Ray Collins, Eddie Bracken, Phil Silvers, Marjorie Main, and Hans Conreid, as well as up-and-comers Gloria De Haven and Carleton Carpenter, and an ensemble of wonderful dancers. (One of those key dancers is Jeanne Coyne, married then to Stanley Donen (who will go on to co-direct Singin’ in the Rain with Kelly two years later), who was one of Gene Kelly’s dance assistants. Both people divorced by the late 1950s, Kelly and Coyne married in 1960. I think that’s sweet.)

Still, there are curious things in the filming that make me realize Summer Stock was not a top priority in the MGM perfection department. Charles Walters’s fine direction notwithstanding, there are couple of clumsy edits, unusually sloppy for MGM, both featuring Judy. In addition, as I mentioned, “Get Happy” was added in a re-edit of the film post-production, and great as that number is—possibly her best on screen—it doesn’t quite jibe with the rest of the proceedings. Also, after several viewings I finally paid attention to the final credits, where a noticed an actress named Nita Bieber “as Sarah Higgins.” And I’m like, who? So I deduced in subsequent viewings that this was the dancer who wears glasses and is always reading and has one featured dance moment; and I inferred there was probably a story for her that ended up on the cutting room floor, surely for the best. Her screen card may have remained for contractual reasons, or possibly out of laziness.

And when critics all point out that Garland is “obviously” thinner in the added number (and I noticed that the scenic background at least is in an earlier part of the film), I have to say I don’t see it. “Get Happy” is the only number where we see Judy’s legs, and on a 4’11” frame even five pounds would be a lot, as if it matters. And throughout the film, Judy dances like a dream, and dances a lot, and is clearly in great physical shape. I don’t know why critics feel compelled to talk about her weight. I really hate that. Judy Garland is simply great.

You might think Judy deserved a better or more glamorous movie send-off as her contract expired. The studio, which her talent literally helped make great, got her hooked on pills and then got mad when their work horse wasn’t able to perform and had no-show days on films such as The Barkleys of Broadway, where she was replaced by Ginger Rogers (in her last appearance, and only one in color, with Fred Astaire), and Annie Get Your Gun, where she was replaced by Betty Hutton. (Hutton told TCM host Robert Osborne that the crew of that film resented her terribly for taking Judy’s part, which is unfair, of course; by all accounts I’ve read, the crew at MGM loved Judy Garland.)

But I’d like to say that I think this lovely, mature, sweet, goofy musical treat, a kind of retrospective of all the films of Judy’s great MGM career, is a perfect movie for the middle aged, for the summer. If you need something to take your mind off the unutterable evils swirling nonstop around us, you might try the pretty, tender, talented world of Summer Stock (commercial-free on TCM). In the meantime, you might take a look at the duet arrangement Judy made of her iconic “Get Happy” with Barbra Streisand’s “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The number that keeps on giving.

Love to all.