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Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema | By Gary Giddins | W.W. Norton & Company | 416 pages, $18.95
A genius jazz critic who dares turn film critic risks fisticuffs with cineastes. Stick to your syncopated knitting, Giddins! What, youâre not satisfied with your bestselling Bing Crosby bio, your Grammy, your Peabody, Gleason, NBCC, and six Deems Taylor awards? Go ahead, rub it in our noses that youâve got an eye as well as an ear. Must you muscle in on our turf?
He must. And his first book wholly devoted to movies is the real deal, a deeply reflective work bristling with the kind of scholarship that also feels spontaneous. In these pieces, most reprinted from the New York Sun, Giddinsâs headlong sentences and rapid-fire associations sometimes remind me of Preston Sturges: the apparent chaos is under total control. Well, almost totalâthe author can be one clause too prodigal with insights, and despite nifty leads, transitions, and kickers, his seventy-one brief essays often disdain to prove any visible thesis. Still, Warning Shadows belongs on the short shelf of books that can make you quadruple your Netflix plan, right up there with Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Andrew Sarris, and the more idiosyncratic David Thomson and Manny Farber.
Who else would suggest that if we could vacation in the films of any director, we might well choose Lubitsch, âif only for the clothes?â Giddins oddly but illuminatingly compares Nicholas Roegâs The Man Who Fell to Earth with that other movie about âstrangers in strange lands, messiahs, [and] aliens treated badly by the natives,â William Wylerâs Ben-Hur. As he notes, both films are preoccupied with water, thirst, and portentous shooting stars. But in the case of Wylerâs sword-and-sandals epic, Giddins urges some judicious use of the fast-forward button: âWatching Ben-Hur all at once is like sitting down to a ten-course meal and finding that every course consists of potato dumplings except for the seventh, which is strawberry shortcake. That would be the chariot race.â
This is hardly the authorâs last word on that tasty scene, which was choreographed by the horse-wrangling auteur Yakima Canutt. Elsewhere, he points out that Canutt crafted an even better, tighter chariot race in Anthony Mannâs The Fall of the Roman Empire, which caused me to race out and rent it. Heâs made me no less eager to lay my hands on G.W. Pabstâs Secrets of a Soulâfrom which, we read, Hitchcock filched the knives in Blackmail, the bell-tower climb in Vertigo, and Spellboundâs dream scene. (The latter bit of pilfering should surprise nobody: Secrets of a Soul was the only film Freud actually helped shape, by sending Pabst two dream-interpretation screenwriting advisors.)
Giddins likes noting resemblances. The Reaper in The Seventh Seal, he tells us, is a lookalike for Dwight Eisenhower. Reviewing Houdiniâs performances on film, he compares him to âa more muscular, Hungarian-looking cousin to the mute magician-comedian Teller.â
At least Houdini and Teller were in the same racket. Elsewhere, Giddins casts his net still wider, comparing the avenging papa of the raped daughter in Ingmar Bergmanâs The Virgin Spring to Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence. Heâs compelled to hear echoes. The moment he encounters the opening narration in Orson Wellesâs Mr. Arkadin, Giddins leaps ahead to Ed Woodâs kitsch masterpiece Plan 9 from Outer Space. And sometimes, of course, you wonder whether the echoes arenât in his own head. When Clark Gable gabbles at Claudette Colbert about donuts and hitchhiking tips in It Happened One Night, is it really âdirectly prefiguring Seinfeld in clamping on a word and stretching it into nothingness?â Nothing doing. Still, it refreshes our perception of the scene. His glosses wipe our glasses clean.
Heâs similarly astute when it comes to actorsâespecially iconic figures about whom there is theoretically nothing left to say. Edward G. Robinson, argues the author, was âbest in a medium shot with other actors, listening and reacting, then closing in for the kill.â Robinsonâs face could âshut down in implacable contempt or stall with crafty desperation or pontificate with ingenuous wisdomâŚA homely yet vain peacock of a man who was never allowed to win the girl, he could even play beautifulânot handsome but beatific, inspired, lit from deep inside.â Just so.
Finally, Giddins is a passionate, persuasive close reader of scenes. Iâm sold by his case that Pabstâs Brecht-distorting film actually improved The Threepenny Opera, and that Brecht was a disingenuous jerk to sue him for his services. Another example: listen to Giddins put you in the climactic chase scene of John Brahmâs 1944 expressionistic Jack the Ripper picture The Lodger. Star Laird Cregar, alternately hovering and cowering in bipolar brilliance, is
a hunted killer climbing spider-like through lacy chiaroscuro, his half-moon eyes strangely illuminated, the entire crushing finale shot from his point of view. The ending, which involves a standoff that is silent except for the Ripperâs panting, is masterful. The Lodger was a huge hit, and Zanuck wanted another just like it. What he got was even betterâBrahmâs masterpieceâbut at the cost of Cregarâs life.
Donât you want to see what happens next? Read Giddins. Then youâll really see.
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