Before I get down to the business of writing about the scintillating day I enjoyed today at Vizio University, let me just say every day I listen to Jeff Harrison's July 28th Deadish show and its two hours of transcendent Zero tunes. I'd love to be listening to this show with other Zeroites, but since the only ones I know all live elsewhere, I let my mind wander to the WOW Hall and the Hilton Ballroom in Eugene and imagine being with Jeff and Margaret and Patsy and the scores of people at these shows whose names I never knew but who were willing travelers into the Zero stratosphere of bliss. I loved joining them.
1. I buckled down today at Vizio University. I know that my mind simply doesn't hold things the way it used to. (That's why, to help my memory, I often write so much detail in this blog.) Earlier this year, Debbie bought me a soft cover composition notebook and today I christened it my Vizio University Movie Studies notebook and began the process of filling it up.
I replayed the Criterion Now podcast featuring Farran Smith Nehme and paused the podcast multiple times to write down movies she mentioned and other insights. I took special note when she talked about having interviewed Martin Scorsese in support of the Criterion Channel making a collection of his short films, shot when he was in his early twenties, available.
Scorsese's story is captivating. He grew up on in Lower East Side in NYC and eventually went to New York University in Greenwich Village. Growing up, Scorsese hadn't ventured over to Greenwich Village even though, by foot, he lived well within a half an hour of that neighborhood. So, when he started his studies at NYU, it was as if he landed on a different planet. Among the excitements of being at NYU in the early 60s? Movie theaters screening movie after movie from France, Italy, Russia, and other parts of the world where exciting innovations in filmmaking and storytelling were happening.
I am not at all familiar with these movies and I want to change that.
As I work to understand the creative surge in movie making that happened in the USA when Scorsese, Friedkin, DePalma, Coppola, Altman, and others were young filmmakers, I want to understand better, not just by reading about it but by watching the movies, how their imaginative fires were stoked by these international movies.
I've watched some of the Scorsese short films collected on the Criterion Channel and this interview moved me to want to watch the rest.
2. I rested a bit and then resumed my studies by rewatching Imogen Sara Smith's Criterion introduction of John M. Stahl's technicolor noir movie, Leave Her to Heaven. In the course of her analysis of this movie, Smith gave a swift history of film noir in the USA and gave quick summations of several noir movies. I jotted down all of the titles and took notes on what Imogen Sara Smith laid out as recurring components of this genre of movies.
Through these interviews and presentations, I've learned that Eddie Muller is widely respected as a historian and commentator on film noir and that he hosts a program on Turner Classic Movies, Noir Alley. With this information, I stumbled upon Eddie Muller's copious number of YouTube videos, many of them intros and outros he has presented on TCM, each focused on specific noir movies.
I see many hours in my future firing up these videos and listening to Eddie Muller, who, by the way, I wrote about several days ago after I'd watched a Criterion video presentation of him in a most absorbing conversation with Imogen Sara Smith about Double Indemnity.
3. I decided I'd spent enough time today listening to really smart people talk about movies.
It was time to watch one.
In her introduction to Leave Her to Heaven, Imogen Sara Smith extols Gene Tierney's work and I realized that I have heard Gene Tierney's name a lot over the years, but couldn't remember seeing her in any movies.
One classic film noir movie featuring Gene Tierney that has received a lot of mention recently at Vizio University is the 1941 Otto Preminger classic, Laura.
I watched it.
The movie opened with credits superimposed upon a large portrait hanging on a wall. Accompanied by lush orchestral music, it's Laura. With her image fixed in the viewer's mind, the credits end, there's a brief blackout, and then we are in a lush apartment, furnished like a museum with vases, clocks, glassware, gargoyles on the wall, and other pieces of refinement. A narrator begins to tell us his story of Laura.
A detective is in the apartment. The narrator's voice belongs to Waldo Lydecker (played deliciously by Clifton Webb). Lydecker invites the detective (Dana Andrews) into an adjoining room. I felt suddenly thrust into a perverse world.
Waldo Lydecker is a writer and radio show broadcaster and this first time we see him, he is naked, in a bathtub with a moveable writing ledge across it, and he's typing his next newspaper piece.
I'll leave it at that except to say that we are immediately introduced to this movie's brilliant script. It is as if the movie's producer, Otto Preminger, hired a Noel Corward/Oscar Wilde hybrid to give snappy, witty, cynical, and arrogant words to Waldo Lydecker and brought in Raymond Chandler to give the hard-boiled detective, Mark McPherson (played by Dana Andrews), his dialogue. Later, as we meet other characters, it's as if Tennessee Williams had been hired to write up the Vincent Price character, Shelby Carpenter, and this character's paramour, Ann Treadwell, played by Judith Anderson (who would later play Big Mama in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof).
I had no idea where this lush black and white movie, with its affluent characters living in lush interiors crammed with antiques, plush chairs and sofas, drinking top shelf liquor, socializing at posh parties, and eating at only the finest restaurants, was headed, but the movie's tone was set (supported perfectly by the movie's lighting) as was the unusual nature of its characters.
If I say more about the movie, I'd be giving too much away. I was so happy that I knew next to nothing about it as it developed, allowing me to enjoy the story's unfolding and its superb script.
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