Guest Blogger Alex ~ Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964, Italy)

Alex's blog The Korova Theatre, is a new discovery for me. On the blog, Alex writes wonderful, thoughtful and concise reviews and I was delighted when he said he wanted to participate in my Guest Blogger series. He's also a fellow LAMB! Baa! Hope you enjoy his contribution.
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Hello friends, my name is Alex and I’m the curator of THE KOROVA THEATRE, my eclectic electric blog where I write about films that I show in my home theatre. I find that writing helps me to reach a better understanding of the story, both in its subtext and superficial elements. The fun of cinema is in dialogue with others because we each see Art through our own glass darkly; we apply our own subjective experiences and knowledge upon a story and many times have an appreciation that differs from the creator’s intention! When we view a film it becomes our own, subsumed by our own consciousness: we think, we feel, we are. Beautiful. Case in point: Michelangelo Antonioni’s RED DESERT, a complex character study that leads Giuliana down a dark path of depression, lost amid the clacking machinery of modernity; insignificant and lonely. Please, don’t take my perceptions as Rule Of Law but give it a chance and allow yourself to walk beside our heroine…or in her shoes.




Giuliana has become an empty vessel, her internal gyroscope deformed, her soft voice a hollow discordant plea submerged in an ocean of despair, and her emotional affect the metal language of machines. Director Michelangelo Antonioni uses bright vibrant colors to offset the drabness of Giuliana’s inner world; he wraps her in a cold dense fog of desperation and hopelessness. The film is constructed around her vague perceptions and undefined suffering as she spirals deeper into the vortex of an untreated mental illness. She is married to a successful businessman and has a child but this seemingly perfect life is kept afloat by surface tension, this precarious balance of her emotional thermodynamics. Giuliana becomes isolated from the world, detached from others and alone in a crowd, when she speaks it seems reflexive and passive, her physical actions pre-programmed and manufactured. When she has an affair with Zeller, her husband’s colleague, she is victimized because he takes advantage of her weakened emotional state. Antonioni films the tryst without love, using the cold steel bed frame to create stark right angles, the physical act very mechanical. The soundtrack utilizes foreground effects such as a lonely tugboat whistle or the jet-stream explosion of steam from a factory’s vent to contradict long periods of silence. This industrial montage of sounds produces an aural dichotomy that represents Giuliana’s split from reality. The rusting intertwining pipes and hulking steel of the factories and shipyards are painted in bright living colors while she is dressed in dull greens or black, breathing life into this static non-living matter. Antonioni lets his camera linger on polluted pools of sludge and piles of industrial detritus before cutting back to his characters; the whole effect is to subtract from the character’s humanity, to make them seem less important in the very environment that they caused, and have become by-product of their own devices. Antonioni shoots in medium long shots with empty space between characters, separating them from each other with expertly fabricated compositions. Giuliana is ultimately lost; diminishing in the foreground while a giant smokestack vomits yellow poison. (A)

Guest Blogger Jonas ~ Sunset Blvd.: A Semi-Documentary in Disguise

I am so incredibly delighted to have the Talkie King himself Jonas, from the excellent blog All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing!, contribute to this month's Guest Blogger series. Jonas is a premiere expert on the early days of cinema and he's taken this opportunity to write about Sunset Blvd. (1950), a seminal film that bridges two very different eras of film history; the forgotten days of silent film and the Golden Age of Hollywood.

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In 1911, Hollywood was not much more than a big, quite sleepy, orange plantation when the first movie studios settled down on Sunset Blvd, this almost 40 km long winding road that is actually quite far from a classic Parisian boulevard. In the 1920’s with the arrival of the star system big villas were built for the stars along this mighty boulevard, close to the studios. Some of these mansions were incredibly luxurious, almost baroque in style and didn’t leave the spectator indifferent. The rule of thumb was: The bigger the star – the more overblown and grotesque the palace. It was one of these houses that Billy Wilder saw and got fascinated by in the late 1940’s. Wilder had also heard that old forgotten stars from the silent era still lived in some of those houses.

Wilder and fellow writer Charles Bracket started to write a scenario about a young writer who is chosen to help write on a comeback script for Norma Desmond, an old eccentric film star living in a seemingly abandoned mansion located in a remote area of Sunset Blvd. Wilder and Bracket had Montgomery Clift in mind for the role of Joe Gillis, the young writer. But who would agree to play an aging forgotten film star who was to be totally out of touch with reality? Everyone wants to play a winner and look great on screen. The ideal would be to find a real forgotten silent film star, but who would agree to being forgotten and out of circulation? Wilder discussed the idea with Greta Garbo who had deliberately ended her career some years ago. But Garbo wasn’t interested, she wanted to be forgotten. Then Wilder and Bracket approached Mae West who just frowned and told them she was far too young to play a silent film star… Next! Mary Pickford was interested but was rejected when she wanted to change the script from dark and doom to a picture that was nice and lame. Pola Negri was offended by the offer as she was by no means forgotten and had no intention to play someone who was. One day George Cukor showed up and said “Why don’t you try to get Swanson”. Wilder and company was convinced that Swanson would be as impossible to get as landing a man on Mars. But very surprisingly Swanson was indeed interested but refused to do screen tests. Cukor then told her that if Paramount asked her to do ten screen tests she should just do them, otherwise he would shoot her. Swanson then understood how important she was to the film and agreed to the part.

When shooting was about to begin in May 1949 Montgomery Clift got cold feet and checked out. Clift had a private relation with an older woman at the time and was afraid that this was to be used against him in some way. William Holden was thus more or less thrown in at the last minute. With only a third of the script ready when shooting began it is my firm belief that Gloria Swanson was instrumental for the plot and that she agreed to share many details from her real life and career. The fact that so many things, lines and even props seems to come from Gloria herself, at least I believe it does, gives the movie an eerie documentary feel. I am also quite sure that Erich von Stroheim who plays Max, Norma Desmond's butler was chosen because of his earlier relation to Swanson and that it was Swanson herself who came up with his name as some sort of gesture, because she once had fired him from Queen Kelly, effectively ending his career (and her own). It is no coincidence that the movie that is projected in Norma Desmond’s private cinema is the infamously unfinished Queen Kelly from 1929 the only film that Swanson starred in that was directed by Stroheim. I know that the inclusion of the images from it definitely came from Swanson. Every single reel of Queen Kelly was property of Swanson's. The images from it shown in Sunset Boulevard are the first that were ever seen by a large audience in the US since the movie only had been released in a severely shortened European version in 1931. Another interesting detail worth mentioning occurs when we get a good glimpse of Cecil B. DeMille at work at the Paramount lot. He was the director that more or less discovered Swanson and his nickname for her in real life was “Young Fellow”, a nickname he naturally use when he meets Norma Desmond on the set in the movie.

The Bridge game is often mentioned in the reviews of Sunset Blvd. This is natural because the bridge players are the real old silent film stars Anna Q Nilsson (Swedish), Buster Keaton and HB Warner playing themselves. Many reviewers also state that they were forgotten like Norma Desmond was in the picture. This is not entirely true. Those veteran bridge players had done about twice as many movies as Swanson had done at the time. Anna Q. Nilsson made a staggering 200 movies between 1911-57, 39 of which are talkies. HB Warner did 134 movies between 1914-56, 90 of them were talkies. Buster Keaton have almost the same score, something like 145 films made and about 90 of them were talkies or TV work. Anna Q. Nilsson was one of the very first movie stars who became a well used bit player with time. HB Warner was never out of work during his career, he made about three pictures a year almost without skipping a beat. Buster Keaton was far from the star he once was, but his face never disappeared from the screen. He made lots of films during the 1940's. Contrary to other assumptions I have made I think their participation in Sunset Blvd. was planned before Gloria Swanson was considered for the movie because they had very little to do with each other in real life back in the days. In 1923 Gloria made a film called Zaza for Famous Players-Lasky Corporation in which she played against H.B Warner but that's it. H.B Warner and Anna Q. Nilsson did two movies together in the 1920's and were both contract players at First National for a long period of time. Buster Keaton was his own quite early on and never did anything with Swanson apart from Sunset Blvd.

The true forgotten stars of Sunset Blvd. are of course von Stroheim and Swanson. Remember that It was Gloria's second film since 1934 and merely her eighth talkie. She had made an unsuccessful attempt at a comeback (or return as Norma Desmond would put it) in 1941 in RKO's Father Takes A Wife but it was no success and made the company lose $100.000.

von Stroheim's history is very speckled. When he got kicked out in the cold from Queen Kelly in 1929, he had directed his last big picture and was from then on degraded to acting only. His talkie career consists almost entirely of strange parts as Germans or bizarre evil characters in movies made all over the world during the 30's and 40's. His best role from those years is without hesitation his brilliant Captain Rauffenstein in Renoir's La Grande Illusion in 1937.

All these details makes Sunset Blvd. a very strange and beautiful Film Noir and with its documentary references it becomes a multi faceted black diamond that will never fall out of fashion. Sunset Blvd. is cynical about everything to do with the movies, the business, fame and the cynicism of William Holden’s hard boiled narration. Everywhere it looks, it sees the damage that stardom can do and how people are willing to exploit each other to get it. That’s probably what makes it one of very few timeless movies, as relevant to the present day film industry as it was in 1950. You can’t leave Sunset Blvd. without mentioning Gloria Swanson’s superb performance. The role as Norma Desmond demands a broad performance, even alone within the walls of her mansion she's over the top. But using big gestures and broad manners and not going past the line where acting descends into unintentional comedy is a delicate balancing act which she pulls off almost effortlessly, especially when you consider that she really hadn’t worked since the early thirties. The role as Norma Desmond is without a doubt Gloria Swanson’s finest achievement, possibly also Billy Wilder's.

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Please make sure you watch Jonas' blog All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing! for a follow up post on Gloria Swanson's Queen Kelly.

Black-Eye Griffin

One of my favorite TV shows is Family Guy. It's fun, raunchy, clever and full of classic film references. Yes, that's right. You read that correctly. Classic film references. Everyone from Mickey Rooney to Ronald Reagan to Barbara Stanwyck to even Karl Malden have been featured/poked fun at on the show. One of my favorite segments is called "Black-Eye Griffin". The patriarch of the family, Peter Griffin, is telling his wife and kids the history of the Griffin family. Black-Eye Griffin was a silent screen star who was a hit in the 1920s but didn't transition well into talkies. Luckily, Hulu.com, one of my favorite new websites, had a clip of it up. Fox has a tight reign on this show, so any YouTube clips will be pulled immediately. So Hulu.com is your best bet for watching and sharing Family Guy clips.

Hope you like this one! If you are outside the US and can't see this clip, let me know as I can direct you to another site that has it.

Guest Blogger Mercurie ~ Ricardo Montalban

The first entry in the June Guest Blogger series hails from Mercurie over at the excellent blog A Shroud of Thoughts. Mercurie is a pop culture expert and his posts are always well-constructed, well-thought out and highly informative. It's with pleasure that I present to you this post from Mercurie on the late great Ricardo Montalban.
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I first encountered Ricardo Montalban on television. I am not sure it if it was his famous appearance as superman Khan Noonian Singh on Star Trek (a role in which he was so impressive that he reprised in The Wrath of the Khan), his guest apperance on Bonanza, or one of his many other guest appearances, but I remember him well from television in the Seventies.

It was only as a I grew older that I learned Ricardo Montalban was a bona fide movie star. He even had a contract with MGM. At a time when Hollywood was content to cast Hispanics in stereotypical roles, Montalban fought to improve the roles available to Latinos. Montalban's activism may well have hurt his movie career, but it helped improve the image of Hispanics in Hollywood.

Ricardo Montalban was born in Mexico City on 25 November, 1920, to parents who had immigrated from Castille in 1906. His older brother Carlos was already an actor in Hollywood when Montalban went to live with him as a teenager. It was not in Los Angeles, however, that Montalban would first be drawn into acting. It was on a trip with his brother in 1940 to New York City that Ricardo Montalban received a small part in the play Her Cardboard Lover and appeared in a Soundie, a short film that was essentially the predecessor of music videos (they played on specially made jukeboxes with small screens). Afterwards he appeared in the plays Our Betters and Private Affair.

Montalban returned to Mexico in 1941 when his mother fell ill. This was not the end of his acting career, as he made twelve movies in Mexico and became a star there. Because of his success MGM took notice of him and offered him a contract. He returned to Los Angeles to appear in the musical Fiesta with Esther Williams in 1947. For much of his early career Montalan was typecast as a "Latin Lover." With rugged good looks and a natural charm, Montalban excelled in such roles. In fact, he even became the first Hispanic actor to ever appear on the cover of Life in 1949.

While Ricardo Montalban had carved out a fairly lucrative niche for himself in Hollywood playing Latin Lovers, he also sought out better and more interesting roles. Among these was his first starring role, in the movie Border Incident (1949). There Montalban played Pablo Rodriguez, an agent of the Policia Judicial Federal working undercover to capture a band of smugglers. Rodriguez was a far cry from the sterotypical Mexican banditos which often appeared in Westerns, an intelligent, hard working officer of the law. It was very much a groundbreaking part, not only for Ricardo Montalban, but in terms of the way Hispanics were portrayed on the big screen.


Arguably, Montalban's movie career was at its peak in the years 1949 and 1950. He followed up his role in Border Incident with a role as Roderigues in the war movie Battleground (1950). Roderigues was a Latino from Los Angeles who was both respected and treated as an equal by his fellow soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division. Montalban followed this role with what might be his most impressive part aside from his role in Border Incident and his role as Khan in Star Trek. In John Sturges' Mystery Street (1950). Montalban's character, Lieutenant Peter Morales, is techincally Portugese American rather than Hispanic, but it still demonstrated his range and was one of those roles that helped open new doors for Latino actors. Lieutenant Morales was a police detective who had spent much of his career handling minor crimes when he is finally handed a major case. Morales is intelligent and street smart, and dedicated to his job. In many respects it was another groundbreaking role for Montalban.

For much of the Fifties Montalban continued to appear in films playing parts that were atypical for Hispanic actors at that time. He played a prizefighter who is worried his career might be coming to an end in Right Cross (1950). In My Man and I he played a Mexican farm laborer (1953). In Life in the Balance he played a man wrongfully accused of a series of murders. He would still appear as a Latin Lover, most notably in the film Latin Lovers (1953). Unfortunately, like so many actors who were not of Northern European descent, Montalban was often cast as other ethnicities. He played a Japanese man in Sayonara (1957), an Italian in The Saracen Blade (1954), and an Arab in Los amantes del desierto (1957). Montalban played Native Americans several times, starting with the role of Iron Shirt in Across the Wide Missouri (1951). Today it would be considered exceedingly politically incorrect for someone of purely Spanish descent, as Ricardo Montalban was, to play a Native American or an Arab. The reality of the time, however, was that Hollywood believed that anyone with a tan could play any ethnicity that was not Northern European. And it must be noted that Montalban always treated such roles with dignity and respect, never turning them into mere sterotypes.

Unfortunately MGM dropped Montalban in 1953 and film roles started to dry up for him by the late Fifties. It was in the late Fifties that he made his first appearances on Broadway, in Seventh Heaven (1955) and Jamaica (1957). It was also at this time that Ricardo Montalban first appeared on television. Throughout the years Montalban guest starred on such series as Climax, The Loretta Young Show (Loretta Young was Montalban's sister in law), Bonanza, The Untouchables, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Star Trek, and Police Story. He would be a regular on the night time soap operas Executive Suite and The Colbys. From 1977 to 1984 he played Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island.

That is not to say Ricardo Montalban ceased acting in movies. He played memorable roles in Cheyenee Autumn and The Train Robbers. And, of course, he reprised his role as Khan in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. More recently, he played the grandfather in the Spy Kids films.

Throughout his career, Ricardo Montalban worked to improve the image of Latinos in Hollywood and put an end to stereotyping. In 1970 he founded Nostros to improve the image of Hispanics on film. In 1999 the Ricardo Montalban Foundation was founded to stage Hispanic productions.

Ricardo Montalban was very much a pioneer in the film industry. His insistence on playing Hispanic characters with dignity and respect and speaking out against stereotyping may well have cost him roles. Although handsome, debonaire, and charming, he never became a Hollywood leading man. Regardless, in his fight to improve the image of Latinos in Hollywood, Ricardo Montalban was very much a trailblazer. His hard work paved the way for such Hispanic stars today as Salma Hayek, Benicio del Toro, and Andy Garcia.