Swing Time

Swing Time (1936) dir. George Stevens
Starring: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers

***1/2

By Alan Bacchus

The Warner Bros four-pack (The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Swing Time and Shall We Dance) acts like a four part time capsule of one of the legendary eras of the studio system - the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers song and dance team. Three of the pictures were directed by the same man, Mark Sandrich and this fourth one, Swing Time, arguably the most celebrated picture of the bunch, directed by the great George Stevens.

As usual there’s a scheme and a whole lot of disreputable behaviour going on. Lucky Garnett (Astaire) is mostly despicable in his journey, playing a gambler who needs to make $25,000 in order to appease his father in law to be to marry his daughter. After he moves to New York he meets his dance partner Penny (Ginger Rogers) who holds the key to his success as an dancer in the big city, Problem is he falls in love with her thus complicating his desire to make money and his obligation to go back home and marry his girlfriend. And so, there's a whole bunch of scheming, Lucky lying to Penny, his girlfriend, and himself and at the same time gambling his way into debt. Also, his unconditional hatred for Ricky Romero the latino bandleader is slightly racist.

As traditional for these types of movies in the 30's, it's classic screwball plotting taking us through the silly hijinx in between main dance set pieces.

It takes 30mins before we see Astaire and Rogers in action, and when they get going, they are both electric. Astaire's effortless style makes him look like he’s floating on air, gliding across the dance floor with ease and elegance. There’s also a clever smirk on his face, a cocky look and recognition of his immense talent. And Rogers, she's nimble and athletic and doing it all in heels.

These films aren’t really traditional musicals, but dance pictures with the occasional song. In Swing Time we don’t get a song until 25mins in and a second until the very end. But there's four stunning dance set pieces, each one distinct and unique and a classic in the annals of cinema history.

The final ballroom set design is magnificent and the stuff of the great Bubsy Berkeley pictures. Stevens stages the last numbers with great pizazz, dressing the set with a great black staircase and a luscious sparkly walled backdrop. And the reflective floor is perhaps borrowed from Berkeley's trademark design - and who knows maybe even borrowed from another Warner Bros set.

The Bo Jangles number is the best though, deservedly celebrated, Astaire's performance, a stunning solo tap dance backed up by three different shadow versions of himself projected as giants in the background. And we barely even notice that Astaire is in blackface.

"Swing Time" is available on DVD from Warner Bros Home Video via the TCM/Warner Astraire-Rogers Collection

Gunga Din

Gunga Din (1939) dir. George Stevens
Starring: Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Victor McLaglen

**

By Alan Bacchus

Over the past year Turner Classic Movies & Warner Bros Home Video have packaged a number of surprisingly decent movie 4-pks of specific genres as a single DVD purchase. Normally, when I see distributors packaging two or three movies together for a volume discount there’s little value added. But there’s something about these TCM packages that feels like a surprisingly astound programming. For example, their ‘Sci-Fi’ package a few months ago, packaged together a quartet of interesting selections, including Them and The Beast From 10,000 Fathoms. Not all the films were great, but as a program of four films to watch it gave a good broad overview of sci-fi B-movies.

In their ‘War’ package Warner puts together: Battle of the Bulge (1961), The Dawn Patrol (1938), Operation Pacific (1951) and Gunga Din (1939). For me Gunga Din was the main attraction to this package – one of the revered classics from ‘Hollywood’s Greatest Year’ – 1939.
Unfortunately, apologies to old studio enthusiasts and Gunga Din fans, but the film just doesn’t survive too well over the years. The revered action/adventure tale, once one of the inspirations for the Indiana Jones movies, at one time looked like a rousing and exotic escapism entertainment, but with today’s eyes, it’s still a big expensive picture, though now thoroughly dull and limp.

The Indian legend of the Kali warriors gets its first cinematic treatment. This story has been done a little bit better in The Stranglers of Bombay, the 1960 Hammer picture starring Guy Rolfe, and of course Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In this picture, the infamous ‘Thugs’, sadistic killers and bloodthirsty worshippers of the goddess Kali has just attacked a British outpost, thus breaking the line in communication for the occupying colonists. British Colonel Weed dispatches a trio of soldiers to investigate.

There’s Cutter (Cary Grant) a fist-fighting rabble-rouser, the muscle-man sweetheart MacChesney (Victor McLaglen) and the reluctant softy Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) whose recently been engaged but desperately wants to join his buddies on the adventure. Tagging along is their affable Indian guide and wannabe soldier Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe). The team discovers an old Indian cult called the Thugees who worship a goddess named Kali who strangle their victims to death.

While the film does features a number of big sprawling action scenes, the forward movement of the journey and thus the intensity of the action is stifled at every turn with its rather silly comedic side plotting. Sure some decent banter between Cary Grant and Victor McLaglen, but the amount of running time devoted to these scenes diffuses the excitement of the adventure. Specifically Ballantine troubles with his fiancé is given much too much attention, and feels like a romantic comedy dynamic shoehorned into a disposable b-movie cliff hanger serial.

Hopefully the other entries in this set will be more exciting than the dated Gunga Din.

Gunga Din is available in the TCM 'War' 4pk from Warner Home Video

The Diary of Anne Frank

The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) dir. George Stevens
Starring: Millie Perkins, Joseph Schildkraut, Richard Beymer, Shelley Winters, Ed Winn, Gusti Huber

***1/2

George Stevens’ version of the Anne Frank, adapted from the stage play “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl”, tells the story of the many months of hiding by the Dutch 13-year old and her family from the Nazis during WWII. The Hollywood touch is certainly applied to this story, mostly for the better than worse, but without sacrifice to an inspired directorial stamp of authorship from a great director.

Most of us know the story of Anne Frank by now, perhaps not so much in 1959. In a flashforward we see Otto Frank returning to his hiding place in Amsterdam after the War – the only survivor of his family and friends who lived there during Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. Flashing back we see group taken in by the courageous Khaler family to live hidden away in the attic of their spice factory. There’s father and mother, Otto and Edith, daughters Anne and Margot, and four members of the Van Daan family and their cat. Later old curmudgeon Mr. Dussell would join the group.

The group must adhere to strict rules in order not to be seen or heard by the workers below – during the working day, shoes must be off and words spoken only whispers. In the evening there are free to talk, sing, listen to the radio etc. But never, ever can they leave the attic. A romance develops between young Anne and Van Daan’s son Peter much to the dismay of Anne’s older sister Margot. As the years go by the tight space causes much conflict between the two families testing their perseverance.

At three hours, it’s an intimidating film to approach, yet Stevens’ sets a surprisingly brisk pace with barely a lull. A number of suburb set pieces elevate the picture to auteur-worthy cinematic art, specifically, the impeccably-crafted Nazi-search sequence. In the middle of the night, after a thief breaks into the factory office below and leaves the door wide open, the Nazi street patrol suspects some foul play. As they search the building and come within a foot of discovering the hiding spot Stevens’ intercuts to the family frozen like mannequins maintaining their silence as well as their adventurous cat which threatens to expose them all. It’s a scene as tense and stylistically assured as anything by Hitchcock.

Though by 1959 there had been films set in concentration camps and the Holocaust, Hollywood was still bound to the limitations of the production code and its studio aesthetic. By 2009, we’ve seen numerous dramatic films and documentares either about the Holocaust or set during the Holocaust told with various ranges of dramatic realism and remembrance.

Thus with today’s eyes “The Diary of Anne Frank” might appear to be a softened, Hollywoodized version of the story. Specifically the casting of newbie, Millie Perkins (aged 20) as a 13-year old and her romance with Richard Beymer’s Peter Van Daan character drastically threatens the realism and integrity of the film. As well Stevens' decision not to show the horror’s of the concentration camp. It’s a choice not made out of fear of the subject matter, but in storytelling terms, Frank’s diary is a complete and separate story than her life in the camps.

William Mellor’s stark, high contrast B&W cinematography in bold widescreen cinemascope won him an Oscar. According to Stevens’ son who also served as Associate Producer and second unit director, the widescreen process was not preferred by the director for this picture. Stevens lobbied for a then more traditional full frame aspect ratio to compliment the claustrophobic interior of the hideout. Since the wideangle scope puts much more of the set in frame, it becomes difficult to cut together shots in small spaces. Though the demands of the studio won out Stevens' blocking and visual design are stunning and his ability to maintain editorial control between his shots is miraculous.

“The Diary of Anne Frank” would be Stevens’ last great film – depending on your opinion of ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’. On the new Blu-Ray look for the treasured 16mm color footage shot by Stevens during WWII. His dedication to documenting and preserving on film the war and the aftermath of the Holocaust clearly fed into his passion for making the Anne Frank story an important film.

“The Diary of Anne Frank: 50th Anniversary” is available on Blu-Ray from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment