The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution

Part 1: Gang of Four

Art writer Waldemar Januszczak explores the revolutionary achievements of the Impressionists. In the first episode, Waldemar delves into the back stories of four of the most influential Impressionists - Pissarro, Monet, Renoir and Bazille - who together laid the foundations of the artistic movement. He finds out what social and cultural influences drove them to their style of painting, how they were united and how ultimately they challenged and changed art forever.

Waldemar journeys from the shores of the West Indies, to the progressive city of Paris to the suburbs of South London, where these four artists drew inspiration from the cities and towns in which they lived. Whether it be the infamous spot on the river Seine - La Grenouillere - where Monet and Renoir beautifully captured animated people, iridescent light and undulating water or the minimalist, non-sensationalised illustrations of Pissarro's coarse countryside paintings, Waldemar discovers how the Impressionists broke conventions by depicting every day encounters within the unpredictable and ever changing sights around them.

Available on BBC iPlayer until 8:59PM Sat, 13 Aug 2011:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b012rvkl/

David Marks revisits Hawthorne, California

The utterly charming former Beach Boy David Marks is your guide on a nostalgic tour of Hawthorne, California, recounting a few stories about the landmarks and his his old friends, Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson and John Maus of the Walker Brothers:

Hugo Williams

Looking dapper at Flowers Gallery...

Saturday Morning

Everyone who made love the night before
was walking around with flashing red lights
on top of their heads-a white-haired old gentlemen,
a red-faced schoolboy, a pregnant woman
who smiled at me from across the street
and gave a little secret shrug,
as if the flashing red light on her head
was a small price to pay for what she knew.

HUGO WILLIAMS

An alternative lifestyle . . .

What?

Ray Milland #4

Inevitably, it’s pretty hard to reduce Ray Milland’s best movies to a mere ten. After all, Martin Scorsese had to name his eleven best horror movies – he couldn’t settle on ten. And I wouldn’t agree with some of his choices, but that’s another post.

Here are five more Milland movies worthy of note.

Skylark (Mark Sandrich, 1941): Claudette Colbert divorces her business-absorbed husband (Milland) and almost marries slick lawyer Brian Aherne. A moment of crisis forces her to re-evaluate and she returns to her husband. All three leads are particularly good in this sophisticated romantic comedy based on Samuel Raphaelson’s play which had been a hit on Broadway a couple of years earlier. This was Colbert and Milland’s second outing as a romantic couple; they had appeared together the previous year in Mitchell Leisen’s Arise My Love, a romantic comedy with an interventionist message and allegedly Colbert’s favourite film.

Beau Geste (William Wellman. 1939): the best-known adaptation of P. C. Wren’s adventure story is virtually a scene for scene remake of Herbert Brenon’s 1926 version. Milland stars with Gary Cooper and Robert Preston as the Geste brothers who, after Beau (Cooper) and Digby (Preston) confess to stealing a jewel their father was going to sell to raise money, join the Foreign Legion where they have to fight off Tuareg tribesmen and deal with the sadistic attentions of their commanding officer, who suspects them of having the jewel with them. At the end, only John Geste (Milland) is alive and a letter Beau had sent to their stepmother reveals that he had stolen the jewel to protect her because he knew it was fake; she had sold the original earlier and he feared she would be punished by her husband.

The River’s Edge (Allan Dwan, 1957): a contemporary Western-noir in which a couple’s (Anthony Quinn and Debra Paget) struggle to survive on a small ranch in New Mexico is violently interrupted by the arrival of the woman’s murderous ex-boyfriend, Nardo Denning (Milland), who forces them to accompany him across the Mexican border with a suitcase packed with stolen money. The situation worsens when the woman develops a fever and her husband’s leg is trapped by a boulder, leaving them at Denning’s mercy. Sounds like a Coen Brothers movie!

So Evil My Love (Lewis Allen, 1948): Victorian London-set psychological thriller, filmed in noir style by the director of The Uninvited. Olivia Harwood (Ann Todd) is infatuated with art thief and forger Mark Bellis (Milland) and allows herself to be manipulated into blackmailing an old friend, Susan, and her wealthy husband, Henry (who, in turn, is plotting to have his wife committed to a sanatorium because she cannot produce the heir he wants), not realising Bellis is romancing another woman, Kitty (Moira Lister), behind her back. The plan goes awry thanks to the work of a private detective (Leo G. Carroll) and Olivia hits Henry when she confronts her with evidence of Mark’s past crimes (which include murder). He collapses with a heart attack and she becomes more complicit when she convinces Susan to give him some medicine which she has laced with poison. Bellis wants to take Olivia to start a new life in America, but the private detective sends Kitty to see her and she sees a locket around the latter’s neck that she had given to him. When she confronts him, he admits he had been using her but tells her he is now genuinely in love, but she stabs him and heads for the police station.

Alias Nick Beal (John Farrow, 1949): a reworking of the Faust story with Milland in outstanding form as Nick Beal, a smartly-attired habitué of the China Coast wharfside café, who summons Judge Foster (Thomas Mitchell) when the latter exclaims that he would sell his soul to the devil if he could put a city crime boss, Hansen, behind bars. Beal provides the evidence in the form of Hansen’s account books and Foster is nominated for governor, accepting $25,000 for his campaign from his mysterious benefactor. He begins to change from an incorruptible judge into a vain, selfish politician and is persuaded by Beal to enter into a pact with a criminal to get elected. His old allies and even his wife desert him; the only person who stands by him is his old friend Reverend Garfield (George MacReady), who explains his suspicions that Beal is actually the devil! Foster tries to get out of the pact, but Beal implicates him in the murder of Hansen’s book-keeper. When he wins the election but immediately resigns and hold a press conference to admit to fraud. Although he has expiated his sins, Beal still wants his soul and drives him the wharf, where he is confronted by Reverend Garfield…

Full moon on a Friday night, the fifteenth of July

Paul Buchanan - Easter Parade

Harold Von Schmidt

Father of blues singer/guitarist and artist Eric Von Schmidt.

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York: -

Falling
World To Know (debut)*
Another Song For You (debut)*
Comes A Time
Sugar Mountain

* from the album Falling

A few beers washed down with a nice Macallan finished off the night in style.

Ray Milland #3

Here are the remaining five films from the ten Milland you ought to see - of course, in true top ten style, there'll certainly be an eleven and maybe even a twelve...

The Premature Burial (Roger Corman, 1962): gripping Roger Corman adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale (and the first Corman Poe not to star Vincent Price), that features Milland as a man tormented by the fear that his father died buried alive after a cataleptic attack. He designs a crypt rigged with escape devices – then he suffers his own attack of catalepsy, which a doctor misdiagnoses as a fatal coronary.

A Man Alone (Ray Milland, 1955): a gunfighter, Wes Steele (Milland), alone in the wilderness discovers the aftermath of a stage robbery, in which all the passengers were killed. He rides to town on one of the loose horses and reports what he has seen but finds himself not only accused of the crime, but also of the murder of a local banker. He hides in the basement of a house where the sheriff lives with his daughter. This tightly scripted little film, a paranoid Western-noir, highlights small-town corruption and the mentality of the mob and was Milland’s directorial debut.

The Big Clock (John Farrow, 1948): a snappily-paced film noir told in flashback. Crime magazine publisher Earl; Janoth (Charles Laughton) murders his wife after wrongly assuming she is having an affair; he decides to frame her ‘lover’ and sets his editor-in-chief George Stroud(Milland) on the case – not knowing that he is the man he had seen her with!

Earl Janoth: [talking on intercom to Steve Hagen] On the fourth floor - in the broom closet - a bulb has been burning for several days. Find the man responsible, dock his pay.

X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (Roger Corman, 1963): an ambitious science-fiction film in which Milland plays Dr Xavier, a scientist carries out experiments with X-Ray vision that go horribly wrong. His visual capacity begins to increase but his ability to control it decreases and he can no longer see the world in human terms, just in forms of lights and textures that his brain cannot completely comprehend. Eventually, he claims he can see things at the edges of the universe and an "eye that sees us all.” A pastor tells him that this is "sin and the devil," adding: "If thine eye offends thee... pluck it out!" and Xavier blinds himself rather than see anything more.

Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954): hugely underrated thriller adapted from Frederick Knott’s successful stage play, somewhat in the Gaslight vein. Former tennis pro Tony Wendice (Milland) discovers his wife (Grace Kelly) is having an affair with an American crime writer (Robert Cummings) and decides to have her murdered, but she kills the hired assassin and is sentenced to death until Wendice makes one key mistake…

“Do you really believe in the perfect murder?”

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #115

Ray Milland #2

Ten Ray Milland movies you really ought to see - in no particular order, as usual, and over two posts for a change...

The Major and the Minor (Billy Wilder, 1942): a strange, complicated screwball comedy where former scalp masseuse Susan Applegate (Ginger Rogers) manages to pass herself off as both a precocious 12 year-old and her own mother before eventually wedding Major Philip Kirby (Milland), who had initially taken her for a frightened child who needed his help after she had boarded a train with only a child’s ticket and had been caught smoking! Wilder had been in Hollywood for nine years and made a name fro himself as a screenwriter, working with Charles Brackett (who co-scripted this film too), but this was the first movie he directed. Initially, he and Brackett had Cary Grant in mind for the role of Philip Kirby, which wouldn’t be the only time Milland took a role intended for him: twelve years later, Grant wanted to take the role of the husband in Dial M for Murder, but the studio thought audiences would not accept him as someone who arranges for the murder of his wife. Supposedly, Rogers, coming off an Oscar-winning performance in Kitty Foyle, chose both the director and Milland.

“Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?"

The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1947):a romantic gothic tale with a pervasive sense of genuine menace - in the Rebecca mould, but with real ghosts. One of the best filmed ghost stories and one which, thankfully, isn’t over-reliant on special effects. Superbly photographed by Charles Lang, who won the Oscar for Best Black and White Cinematography.

"They call them the haunted shores, these stretches of Devonshire and Cornwall and Ireland which rear up against the westward ocean. Mists gather here, and sea fog, and eerie stories. That’s not because there are more ghosts here than in other places, mind you. It’s just that people who live hereabouts are strangely aware of them."

Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944): a Hitchcockian-style, tense ‘spy-noir’ based on a novel by Graham Greene, set in London during World War Two, in which our hero is on the lam from Nazis and finds himself accused of murder because of a strange string of events kicked off by winning a cake at a village fete.

The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945): Milland stars as a New York writer battling alcoholism in this sharp social drama. Allegedly, Wilder wanted to direct this after having worked with the alcoholic Raymond Chandler on Double Indemnity (1944). Although he had played serious roles, the public's view was that Milland was generally a light comedy actor, but Wilder clearly saw more in him and his Oscar-winning performance marked something of a watershed in his career because it changed the movie industry’s perception of his ability and range.

“And out there in that great big concrete jungle, I wonder how many others that are like me. Poor bedeviled guys on fire with thirst. Such comical figures to the rest of the world as they stagger blindly towards another binge, another bender, another spree.”

Panic in the Year Zero! (Ray Milland, 1962): a post-apocalyptic science-fiction movie exploiting the cold war anxieties of the era. After a nuclear attack destroys Los Angeles, Harry Baldwin (Milland) and his family head for the hills to wait for a return to some kind of order, but mob rule takes over and Baldwin must fight force with force to survive, though the film stresses the idea that there must be no end: only a beginning.

Michael Atkinson, of The Village Voice, wrote admiringly: "This forgotten, saber-toothed 1962 AIP cheapie might be the most expressive on-the-ground nightmare of the Cold War era, providing a template not only for countless social-breakdown genre flicks (most particularly, Michael Haneke's Time of the Wolf) but also for authentic crisis—shades of New Orleans haunt its margins...the movie is nevertheless an anxious, detail-rich essay on moral collapse.”

Ray Milland #1

Occasionally dismissed as exuding the impression of a cut-rate Cary Grant, but lacking his more obvious good looks and comedic touch and having a career that was nowhere near as consistent, Welsh-born Hollywood actor Ray Milland was a hugely underrated actor and director.

Born Alfred Reginald Jones in Neath, Wales, on 3 Januray 1907, he took his stage name from the Millands area of his home town of Neath. Joining the Household Cavalry as a young man, he became an expert shot and a member of his company's rifle team, winning many prestigious competitions. After his four-year duty service was over, he tried his hand at acting and made several films in the UK.

He appeared as an extra in Picadilly (1929), using the name Spike Milland, but his first proper role was in Castleton Knight’s thriller, The Flying Scotsman (also 1929), which was one of the earliest sound films. Like Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), it was originally intended to be a silent movie and the decision to include diegetic sound was made during production, with the result that there is dialogue only twards the end of the film, the rest of the story being accompanied with title cards and music,. There is a question as to whether the film was originally released without sound; some historians think its use of sound predtaed Blackmail, but the BFI database currently indicates that sound was added for a re-release in 1930.

Milland relocated to Hollywood after a talent scout spotted him on the stage in London. He initially featured in supporting roles for at various studios such as films like The Bachelor Father and Just a Gigolo, both made in 1931 at MGM; The Man Who Played God and Blonde Crazy, both 1931 at Warner Brothers; The Glass Key (1935) at Paramount; Next Time We Love (1936) at Universal. He gradually made his way up the cast list and signed a contract with Paramount in the late 1930s.

During the prodiction of Cecil B. DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind (1941), Milland was forced to have wavy hair and he later claimed the curling tongs caused his hair to fall out and as a result, he received fewer male leads. However, all his better roles date from that time, not before it.

A cursory glance at his filmography shows his career was rich and varied, working with a number of major directors and taking in a vaiety of genres and styles and in roles that encompassed the heroic, the romantic, the sympathetic amd the macchiavellian; for example, there were Westerns: John Farrow’s Copper Canyon (1950) and Allan Dwan’s The River’s Edge (1957); horror movies like Lewis Allen’s The Uninvited (1944) and Roger Corman’s The Premature Burial (1962); film noir: Farrow’s The Big Clock (1948); spy films like Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear (1944); thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954) and Allen’s So Evil, My Love (1948); romantic screwball comedies like Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor (1942); science-fiction: Corman’s X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963); social drama such as Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945), for which he won the best actor Oscar, and George Stevens’ Something to Live For (1952); action adventure: DeMille’s Reap the Wild Wind (1941); in 1952, he even starred in the experimental thriller with no dialogue, Russell Rouse’s The Thief.

While still starring in films, in the 1950s, Milland began to act and direct on televsion ansd was the star of two shows. Meet Mr McNulty (also known as The Ray Milland Show) (1953-55), was a sitcom about an English professor at a girls’ college. From 1959-1960, he starred in Markham, as the eponymous private detective and attorney.

After leaving Paramount, he also turned his hand to directing some of the films in which he starred: the taut Western, A Man Alone, and the spy thriller, Lisbon (both 1955); a British crime drama, The Safecracker (1958); his chilling vision of a dog-eat-dog apocalyptic America, Panic in the Year Zero (1961. His final work behind the camera was a British-made courtroom drama based on a play he had starred in on Broadway, Hostile Witness (1968).

In later life, the quality of most of Milland’s film work dipped considerably with some dire horror fare like Frogs and the bizarre social drama, The Thing with Two Heads (both 1972). In the latter, he plays the wealthy racist Dr. Maxwell Kirshner, who, when he discovers he is dying, demands his head be transplanted onto a healthy body and it is - onto that of a black death row prisoner. He still occasionally appeared in a quality film like Jack Gold’s Aces High and Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (both 1976); however, easily his mosty succesful film from this period was Arthur Hiller’s Love Story (1970), in which he played the Ryan O’Neal character’s father.

The author of 100 short stories, he completed his entertaining autobiography, Wide-Eyed in Babylon, in 1974. One of the tales he recounted recalled his time in the Household cavalry when, after a night of drinking, he was unable to control his horse during a pocession in front of the King of Afghanistan and it bolted:

“I went right through the mounted band, who were helpless because their reins are fastened to their stirrups. The drum horse, who was at least nineteen years old, ended up in the memorial fountain, and I finished up in Buckingham Palace courtyard, alone and without a friend in the world.”

His last movie was the straight-to-video The Gold Key (1974), but he continued working in televsion, mostly in guest star roles, but he won an Emmy for his work in Rich Man, Poor Man in 1976. His last televison role was as the Home Secretary in Roy Ward Baker’s Sherlock Holmes television film, The Masks of Death (with Peter Cushing as Holmes and John Mills as Watson) in 1984.

Milland died of lung cancer in Torrance, California in 1986, aged 79.

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/57315

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_milland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Milland_filmography

http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.com/2009/02/x-man-with-x-ray-eyes.html

Loudo Sings Pirate Songs

Donald Fagen remembers Phoebe Snow

PHOEBE SNOW 1950 - 2011

Last week, the extraordinary singer Phoebe Snow died from complications of a severe stroke she had last year. Phoebe and I were pals ever since my wife persuaded her to come along on a New York Rock and Soul Revue tour in 1991. We had a number of things in common. We were close in age; we both had an early passion for African-American music, i.e., jazz and R& B; and we were both of the genus North Jersey Jewish Hippie. Species: Neurotic. Also, we each had a sense of humor that was way over on the dark side.

I really liked to make Phoebe laugh because she was my best audience. Many people respond to my humor with incomprehension, if not actual abhorrence. With Phoebe, though, it was as if she was a long lost cousin who shared the same family history and the same inside jokes.

Born into an artistic family, Phoebe was exposed to music as a child, everything from tin pan alley to Delta blues. By her teen years, she had become expert at folk and blues guitar. Gifted with a phenomenal voice, perfect pitch and a four-octave range, she developed a completely original style, soulful and austere. She's probably best known for her early compositions including the1974 hit Poetry Man. The following year, when her daughter Valerie was born with serious brain damage, she famously elected to let the career slide and devote herself to her care. She gradually started performing and recording again and, when Valerie died in 2007, she attacked her grief by throwing herself back into working life.

In the 90s, when she began to study operatic technique, she started to use the full power of her voice to subvert her earlier style by indulging in a kind of willful excess: she channeled the force of her uncontained emotion into an array of screeches and squeals. At the end of a ballad, she knew she could secure a standing ovation with one of her wild, extended improvised cadenzas. She loved playing for the crowd.

Like a lot of ultra-talented singers, Phoebe was subject to bewildering mood swings. She had a rocky childhood, and the fact that she could wipe out everyone else on the stage with one number didn't make her any less insecure. She was the most energetic hypochondriac I've ever come across, searching out alternative doctors and gurus, traveling to Mexico to receive sheep embryo injections, all that stuff. Certainly, she had to deal with some bona fide ailments. But her frequent disquisitions on her medical condition left no doubt that she felt herself to be a prisoner inside her own body, a predicament she usually bore (in public, anyway) with cheerful stoicism. Some years ago, she was staying at our house in the country where we had to rehearse something or other. One morning, she came down the stairs, smiled, pulled up her shirt to expose her abdomen and announced in her knife-edged contralto, "Mold Spores" ! For her, that was fun.

That said, when Phoebe bopped in the door, her authenticity and sweet nature always made the room feel just a bit cozier, and anyone who ever saw her perform knows what I'm talking about. She was a mighty spoonful of soul, and I'll miss her.

DF 6/17/2011

http://donaldfagen.com/writing_items.php?itemID=135

Robert Weaver