[Fredslist] What to Stream: Classics for Comfort

[Corey Bearak]

From the New Yorker.
I did not include the usual link because it would be selling something….if you want the link either google it or email me.
Enjoy.

What to Stream: Classics for Comfort
Richard Brody <safari-reader://www.newyorker.com/contributors/richard-brody>March 18, 2020
“Happiness isn’t cheerful,” goes the last line of one of the greatest of movies, Max Ophüls’s “Le Plaisir,” and so it is with comfort movies. They take paradoxical forms: I don’t know many people who are hunkering down with giddy comedies and blithe musicals, however exhilarating and imaginative those might be. Rather, I’m picking up on a search for substance, for movies that have the settled and solid quality of classics (despite the narrow assumptions on which such classicism is based)—movies serious enough for the mood, compelling enough to provide ready distraction, and confident enough to look beyond the troubles that they evoke. Here are some of the movies that I’ve been grateful to watch in the past few stressful days.

The first is all too timely: Allan Dwan’s drama “Driftwood,” from 1947, a recent major rediscovery and restoration under the artistic aegis of Martin Scorsese. It’s the story of a small town in Colorado that’s facing an epidemic of a tick-borne disease—amid a population that refuses to be vaccinated, and under the irresponsible watch of a vain and demagogic mayor who diverts money from a hospital to a park. (The mayor’s son, by the way, is a schoolyard bully.) The nine-year-old Natalie Wood plays an orphan rescued from the wilderness by a young doctor and scientist (Dean Jagger), who’s desperately attempting to overcome local resistance and protect the town from the disease along with a local teacher (Ruth Warrick), whom he loves. Religion plays a major role in the film, too, and it wouldn’t be Hollywood if its role weren’t sentimental; ultimately, science and faith join forces to save the day. It’s a good time to dream optimistically.

Stream “Driftwood” on Amazon <https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B01A379622/ref=atv_dl_rdr>.

“American Hot Wax,” from 1978, is a tale of the cultural upheavals of the nineteen-fifties. It’s a narrow-span bio-pic on a huge canvas with a teeming cast, the story (rearranged and sanitized) of the vast achievement and rapid fall of Alan Freed, a famous d.j. and impresario who pushed rock and roll further into the forefront of the mainstream than the mainstream was yet ready to bear—and of the efforts of the authorities to shut down Freed, stop his concerts, and suppress the music. Tim McIntyre gives an astonishingly centered, swinging performance as Freed, imbuing him with a restraint that vibrates with focussed insight, passion, and energy. Freed is surrounded by musicians who fill the movie with onscreen performance, as well as by composers (notably one played by Laraine Newman) and producers who shape it in real time, hustlers looking to exploit the music, and people in the city whose lives the music is changing. It’s a behind-the-scenes story of creating music and creating its historical moment; it’s also a story of the ambient bigotry, racism, sexism, and narrow moralism that dominated public life at the time—the climactic scene involves the police finding pretexts for shutting down a concert featuring Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, both of whom deliver exhilarating performances as themselves. The movie is directed by Floyd Mutrux, one of the hidden heroes of the American cinema of the seventies (his films “Dusty and Sweets McGee <https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/dusty-and-sweets-mcgee>” and “Aloha, Bobby and Rose <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/movie-of-the-week-aloha-bobby-and-rose>” are also streaming <https://www.amazon.com/s?k=floyd+mutrux&i=instant-video&ref=nb_sb_noss_2>); his connection to rock music is at the very core of his work.

Stream “American Hot Wax” on YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_viO-iTa2v4>.

One of the staples of Depression-era Hollywood was the glossily aristocratic romantic comedy set in the pleasure domes of Europe. “The Bride Wore Red,” from 1937, directed by Dorothy Arzner, turns the genre inside-out with acrid insight and theatrical flair. In Trieste, a cynical aristocrat (George Zucco) gives a dive-bar singer and taxi dancer (and, as far as Hollywood at the time could hint, a prostitute) named Anni Pavlovitch (Joan Crawford) a two-week interlude impersonating an aristocratic woman at a swank resort in the Alpine village of Terrano. There, the glamorous and bewitching newly christened Anni Vivaldi, decked out in finery on her benefactor’s expense account, turns the heads of many men—especially the whimsical local postman (the impulsively imaginative Franchot Tone, then Crawford’s real-life husband) and another aristocrat (Robert Young) who’s currently engaged to a woman from his own set (Lynne Carver). After her first taste of wealth—for that matter, her first taste of knowing where her next meal is coming from—Anni has no intention of giving it up, and plots and schemes to marry rich in a big hurry. Arzner—working with a raft of screenwriters (credited and not), including the novelist Tess Slesinger, who adapted a play by Ferenc Molnár—looks with enormous empathy at Anni’s furious desperation, which Crawford embodies with her custom blend of ferocity and yearning. The movie whirls ahead with a wild panoply of twists and wily intrigue; even as Hollywood coincidences and Hollywood sentiment put the recklessly unstable tale on solid ground, the enduring impression is of a sham society that dispenses its rewards to the unworthy.

Stream “The Bride Wore Red” on Amazon <https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00YU39ZYU/ref=atv_dl_rdr> and iTunes <https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-bride-wore-red/id988206699>.

A thought for Italy: Pier Paolo Pasolini, a poet who, in the early sixties, nearing forty, had just begun his movie career, made a documentary that premièred in 1964, “Love Meetings,” in which he travels through Italy and—appearing on camera, microphone in hand, interviews his compatriots about sex. His approach is wide-ranging, frank, insistent, hearty, and wry. He interviews boys about the birds and the bees, talks with girls about whether they have the same freedom as boys, asks beachgoers and soldiers, bourgeois intellectuals and factory workers and businessmen about homosexuality, prostitution, pornography, promiscuity, marriage, divorce, and the sediment of unchallenged traditions. One of the most remarkable sequences features men and women alike, in Sicily, discussing the virtual impossibility of women there participating at all in public life. (A remarkable follow-up to that sequence is Kim Longinotto’s 2019 documentary “Shooting the Mafia <https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/shooting-the-mafia>,” which isn’t streaming yet—I’ll keep an eye out.) Pasolini’s interspersed discussions with such writers as Alberto Moravia and Oriana Fallaci are both sincere and ironic: their perspectives suggest that the work being done by Pasolini is filling a vast void in Italian cultural life. It’s labor that he takes on joyfully.

Stream “Love Meetings” on Amazon <https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B01G11GBKO/ref=atv_dl_rdr> and YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6foBjG-vXM>.

In 1920, less than two years after the first wave of the influenza pandemic wrought havoc, John Ford made his first movie for the producer William Fox, “Just Pals,” a comedic drama of love for American society’s despised outsiders and of contempt for its snooty moralists. (Ford is here credited as “Jack Ford,” which catches the movie’s breezy manner and vigorous amiability.) It’s not a Western, per se; it’s set in its own time, in a town on the border of Nebraska and Wyoming, where Bim (Buck Jones), the local layabout (he says he gets exhausted from watching others work), rescues a boy named Bill (Georgie Stone) who’s thrown off a freight train for hoboing. In school, Bill is taunted and bullied for his poverty and his association with Bim, his improvised guardian. Bim loves a schoolteacher, Miss Bruce (Helen Ferguson), but she has been going around with a local banker. There are some high-wire melodramatic turns, involving reward money, white-collar crime, gangland conspiracies, and wild horsemanship; Ford leavens the action with sardonic satire of supposedly respectable society, its displays of hypocritical virtue under calls for law and order, and the vital energy and steadfast moral—and civic—conscience of those whom it casts aside.

Stream “Just Pals” on Amazon <https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B074TZP7DS/ref=atv_dl_rdr>, YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqAuo0ElIF0>, and other services.

Corey B. Bearak, Esq.
Government & Public Affairs Counsel
Networker of the Year-2012| co-chair, GOtham GREEN® | Gotham Towers | LI Legal | Gotham Power Breakfast Chair | Gotham Sponsorships Chair |  Gotham Sundays Blogger | Moderator, Fredslist & Gotham Promos
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