The Line King: The Al Hirschfeld Story

The Line King: The Al Hirschfeld Story (Susan Warms Dryfoos, 1996) Graphic artists, cartoonists, caricaturists do not make interesting subjects for documentaries. There's only so much you can do with somebody drawing a line—it's not interesting in and of itself because there's always that missing element, which is the magic that goes into it before pencil or pen hit paper. It's the brain at the other end of that pencil that makes it interesting and, if the documentary is doing its job, explains the magic that results in the line.

 

Fortunately, Al Hirschfeld was still alive at the time this was being recorded (he died in 2003, just shy of his 100th birthday). Stationed primarily in New York, he traveled the world in his life and settled back in The Big Apple, where he was a fixture in illustration, primarily for The New York Times art section, but also The New Yorker, Collier's, TV Guide, Rolling Stone, even creating a cover for an Aerosmith album. He did poster illustrations in the silent era, and his art was featured in postage stamps of those same silent comedians. A segment of Disney's Fantasia 2000—the "Rhapsody in Blue" segment—is based on his precise, serpentine, and almost embroidered style. The "genie" in the studio's animated version of Alladin is also based on his work.

Then, of course, there is the puzzle of it. Readers of The Times could count on two brain-teasers every issue—the crossword puzzle and Hirschfeld's drawings. After his signature of every piece would follow a number, that being the number of times he had hidden the name "Nina" (his only child's name) into the filaments of his pieces. It became a part of New York life along with thin pizza, egg creams, and the aggressively walking blind.

At the time of first filming, his second wife—mother of Nina—was still alive. By the time filming was complete, she was dead and Hirschfeld talks about the effect on him. He would dutifully take a pad and paper to a theater before opening night to get a sense of the show, and begin the pain-staking work of getting it ready for publication.

Susan Warms Dryfoos' film is grainy—a lot of it done in low light—with far too many interviews with NY hoi-polloi talking about Hirschfeld on various opening nights before it sinks in that he was an important part of any opening.It times you know they're talking of "the talk around town"—the reputation—than any first-person knowledge, but then, there's gotta be gossip. Those elements are catch-as-catch-can, with celebs and opening night regulars gushing, champagne in hand, about their personal experience with Herschfeld, before they're attention is pulled by some other bright light. The segments with the artist are less hectic, in low-light and lower energy, which is something of a relief. It puts in sharp contrast the hermetic life of a singular artist, even if his subjects are lit by klieg lights.

Those are the parts that are gold, plus the looks at his work semi-contemporary or long past, several of which—of subjects that appear frequently on this site are below:

Three ages of Orson Welles...

Blood Alley

Blood Alley (William Wellman, 1955) This production of John Wayne's independent production company, Batjac Productions, Blood Alley must have felt snake-bit from the word "go." Director William Wellman had done a couple of films for Wayne, and Robert Mitchum had starred in the previous Batjac show directed by Wellman, Track of the Cat, and started filming on this film.

 

But, for whatever reason—Wellman thought it was weed, Bacall thought it was booze—Mitchum and the director did not get along on this one, and after an altercation in which Mitchum attacked one of the crew, Wellman contacted Wayne and delivered an ultimatum: "Either he goes or I go."

 

"Wild Bill" stayed. Mitchum went. 

 

But, the film needed a star to play opposite the already-cast Lauren Bacall. Gregory Peck didn't like the script. Humphrey Bogart wanted too much money. So, with a film in production and money on the line, Wayne interrupted his honeymoon to go on location to save the investment on the movie. Not that he had to go very far; this story about the evacuation of a village population out of Communist China was being filmed just outside of San Rafael in San Francisco Bay.

You know it's a different kind of "Duke" movie when the opening scene has Wayne (as Capt. Tom Wilder) talking to himself. John Wayne characters do not talk to themselves. There may be monologues, and he'll even do a scene talking over a grave with credibility. But, any introspection in Wayne's characters do so quietly, without a lot of fuss. So, it's a bit of a hurdle to jump when Wayne's Wilder starts out as a prisoner in a Chinese cell babbling to an imaginary "lady-in-waiting" he calls "Baby." Lord knows how long he's been in that prison—and Wayne plays it with an almost drunken exhaustion to make you think it's been awhile—but, it just doesn't "play."

Wayne's Wilder makes things difficult for his captors by setting fire to his mattress, which they quickly replace with another—rather accommodating for a Chinese prison, as I don't think a 5-star hotel would replace a mattress that fast—in which is secreted a pistol, a Russian officer's uniform, and a note giving him a rendezvous point. Not only is the prison's housekeeping department efficient, they have a great mail department. Security—not so much. So, Wayne escapes because he's over 6 foot, broad in the beam and wearing a Russian uniform in a Chinese prison and must have just walked out because he "blends." We're not shown this, of course, because we have to save up our credulity for the rest of the movie.

Wayne transitions from his cell to walking along a river bank where he comes across "Big Han" and his fishing vessel. Here's another thing about Blood Alley: casting. There are a lot of Chinese actors in the film, mostly background characters, which is all to the good. But, "Big Han" is played by Mike Mazurki, the well-regarded Ukrainian character actor. I only mention he's Ukrainian so as to point out that he is not Chinese. Neither is Paul Fix, who plays a village elder, nor is Berry Kroeger (another elder), and certainly not Anita Ekberg (!!) who plays the very small part of Han's wife, Wei Ling (she has no dialog as she would speak it with a Swedish accent). Look, I'm not so regimental that I think actors can't act parts, or I'd be rejecting Al Pacino in Scarface, or Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, and Paul Muni in...everything. But Paul Fix? Anita Ekberg? Couldn't we get somebody from the same hemisphere? On that one point, though, there is one little piece of casting that gave me great joy. I'll leave that to the end.

The main plot is that the village of Chiku Shan has made plans to abandon mainland China and transport all 180 residents to Taiwan by hijacking a stern-wheeler which makes a regular stop on it's regular route up and down the coast. From there, they'll navigate through the Strait of Formosa, known as "Blood Alley," to get away, hence the springing of Capt. Wheeler, who knows the waters, knows the dangers, and hates the commies. It's all been arranged by the village elders and Cathy Grainger (Bacall), daughter of the village doctor, who has recently been taken by the Communists for medical help.

Wellman keeps it moving, although sometimes the Cinemascope frame stumps him. The locations are nicely picturesque—you could believe it's not San Rafael—and the stern-wheeler is as grubby as the African Queen only with 180 extras (genuinely Chinese) and becomes something of a character itself. Wayne is crusty and gruffly paternalistic towards his passengers—but then he always is—and Bacall tries—tries—to make something out of a scripted romance with Wayne*, but it's not too convincing. They're a bit better being at odds with each other; after all, both actors are especially good in conflict.

And that's interesting. At the time, Wayne was deep in his crusade of ridding Hollywood of Communists, and Bacall was very much present in protesting the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee. They couldn't have been farther apart politically and there were attempts, by some in Hollywood, to persuade Wayne to not use Bacall for the picture because of her "pinko" views. Wayne ignored them. But, when Mitchum left the production and Wayne brought in to replace him, Bacall got worried. Instead of any animus, Bacall (in her autobiography) says she found him "to my surprise, warm, likable and helpful,"** and director Wellman "great! A fascinating man!" 

Later, she'd found out that it was Hedda Hopper who'd suggested she be cut—"Don't tell me how to cast my picture" Wayne reportedly growled—and a couple years later at a Clifton Webb-hosted cocktail party, (again from her autobiography) she confronted Hopper calling her "a bitch to try and keep me from working." Hopper replied that, for such an offense, Bacall had every right to give her a kick. "Whereupon she turned around and I kicked her in the ass - most unladylike but very martini-like. Whereupon everyone laughed out loudly and a truce was declared." I think that's my favorite thing about Blood Alley.

Oh, except for one thing. Watching it recently, I spotted a familiar face, that of a much-beloved character actor, in what was (maybe?) his fourth role on-screen—but not credited—as a Communist soldier who enters a room, says a line and leaves. But, it warmed my heart to see him: James Hong, all of 26 years old, unmistakable, and starting a career which continues today. I guarantee you've seen him in something.  Great actor...for comedy and drama, as he proves time and again.

* There is one line I loved—after going through a particularly rough time during a violent storm, Bacall makes a confession that she might be falling for the Captain and Wayne drawls "I think you got me confused with the storm..."

** Wayne was like that, evidently. Ideologically strict. But, personally, he was a gentleman, almost courtly, to women, and "one of the boys" around men. Did they get along? Bacall says when husband Humphrey Bogart was diagnosed with cancer, the first flowers came from Wayne. And when casting for The Shootist (which would, ultimately, be his last film), he asked for Bacall. In September, 2021, the John Wayne Estate released a note they'd found that she'd written to Wayne in 1979, while he was battling his final fight with cancer. 

 

Dear Duke,

This has been on its way to you for months. You have been so very much in my thoughts.  I never have been able to tell you how much you’re standing up for me in ‘Blood Alley’ days meant to me. I wanted to say it on ‘The Shootist’ — never could somehow. — know how difficult that film was for you. You have the guts of a lion — I do admire you more than I can say.  It was so great to see you Academy Award nite. I’m being inarticulate — I want you to know how terrific you are and how really glad I am to know you. You give more than [you] know — I send you much love — constant thoughts

Betty. 

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (Craig McCall, 2010) I love films about cinematography and there are damned few of them; I tend to come away with a new appreciation of light and vision, and the world looks fresh and new, bright and awash with color. It happens so rarely when I watch films where the world seems different post-movie—the films of Orson Welles or Nicholas Roeg do that to me...and films about cinematography.*

When I saw Cameraman... pop up on the Netflix queue, I jabbed the Play button immediately. The work of Jack Cardiff (the subject of the film) spanned a career of 70 years and the palettes of black and white through to color and technicolor—there's a difference—(and from the silver screen to the painter's canvas, sometimes employing both). A cinematographer for much of his career, he also directed in the 60's and 70's and returned to cinematography later. But he worked with the camera from the era of Things to Come to photographing Rambo: First Blood Part II, and worked with directors as diverse as Michael Powell, Laurence Olivier, Alfred Hitchcock, Henry Hathaway, John Houston, the Boulting Brothers, William Knightley, Richard Fleischer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, King Vidor, Mike Newell, John Irvin and Joshua Logan. Cardiff raised the level of everything he worked on and directors knew he had the eye of a painter and the craftsmanship of an engineer.  He was truly a renaissance man. 

Documentarian Craig McCall shows it all and knows how to get great quotes from the man and anecdotes about the various personalities he worked with, the directors he worked for and the subjects he photographed, literally a man in the middle who knew how to make both sides look their best. Some of the surviving directors give testimony, as well as Martin Scorsese, Powell's editor-wife Thelma Schoonmaker, Lauren Bacall, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas (a rare post-stroke interview), John Mills, as well as Moira Shearer, Kim Hunter and Kathleen Byron.

In showing the history of this one man, it is also a fascinating overview of the entire art and history of the cinema as well, and how the well-composed image is as timeless as beauty itself. This is gorgeous to look at, and very educational and highly, highly recommended.

* One of my favorites is Visions of Light, which was produced with the ASC Union and has a broad spectrum of subject matter and timeline, as does Camerman.  You can't do a film about lighting movies without mentioning Dietrich, and I'll always remember that 45 degree angle trick.

So, there's a link to buy Visions of Light, but YouTube has two versions of it: one in its original format with cut-away's to interviews and some disturbing format transitions, and a remastered meticulously recreated version that gives prominence to the cinematography

Visions of Light [HD Remaster] (1992–2020) from Mulberry St Studios on Vimeo.

Dark Passage

Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947) Soapish film noir with "Bogey and Baby" that manages to have a few interesting things to recommend it, amidst some howler material.

The story isn't much: Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart, eventually), convicted of murdering his wife, escapes from San Quentin, and is able to make his way back to San Francisco with the help of Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall), a rich-girl painter who knows all about Parry's case—because her own father was falsely accused of murdering her mother.

Small damn world.

Irene gives Parry a place to crash, and a change of clothes. Then, making his way to Frisco to meet an old buddy, his cab-driver gives him a line on a disgraced plastic surgeon, who's not adverse to doing last-minute surgeries at 3 a.m. It takes Parry a week to heal, which he does at Irene's—something he didn't want to do, but seeing as his buddy was murdered and all...

Grave-eye view of a post-op Bogart finding his musician-buddy dead.

Wait a minute! If you hadn't said that yet, what kept you? It would appear that San Francisco (nice location work, by the way) is the smallest town in America, as everybody knows everybody else and their business, besides. While convalescing at Irene's, Parry becomes aware that the place is being watched by a couple people, a potential blackmailer (Clifton Young) and Madge (Agnes Moorehead), the buttinsky friend of Irene's who used to go out with Bob (Bruce Bennett), Irene's current beau, but was also old friends with the Parry's back in the day. As Bogart would say, "Everything's starting to look nice and cosy..."

When the bandages come off, we get to see The Man with Bogart's Face, but before then, all we're allowed to see of Parry was his picture in the paper, or his face in shadow. Daves employed a technique not much used in movies—the first-person subjective camera, so we see everything from Parry's point-of-view; there's a lot of people speaking right at us throughout the first part of the movie and answered back by Bogart's disembodied voice. Daves pulls off some miraculous inter-cutting between location-work and studio set-ups (in a moving car, yet!), and it's interesting to see how he gets himself out of jams of timing and transitions. He also employs an interesting angle every now and again, like the vantage point of a murder scene...from below the floor!

There's a lot to quibble about (did I mention the plastic surgery only takes an hour?), but any excuse to see Bogart-Bacall together again, and to see another of Agnes Moorehead's unabashedly demonstrative performances. Those are enough reasons to give Dark Passage a watch.

Here's looking at you looking at me, kid.
Subjective POV of Lauren Bacall in Dark Passage

Olde Review: The Shootist

Written August 11, 1976

The Shootist (Don Siegel, 1976) I was briefing through the movie reviews of various magazines in the grocery store a year or so ago, when I came across Richard Schickel's review of McQ or Brannigan (probably Brannigan), in which he remarked that a proper bicentennial project would be to come up with a decent script for John Wayne.

I was hoping Rooster Cogburn might be it, but that was a waste..of time...and talent. And besides, as much as I like "Rooster" Cogburn as a character, the acceptance of Wayne's acting that suddenly sprang up smacked a bit too much of "Well, we'll like him as long as the old galoot knows he's a joke." Well, there were times in True Grit when Wayne—the Wayne as the screen force—came through. I didn't want to see Wayne made fun of or exploited. I wanted to see him triumph, as of old, in his now twilight years, and as John Wayne, the very fine actor.

So, I am delighted at The Shootist and delighted with it. It is about Wayne, as about Books (instant cliché time). Why else would Siegel in his opening use shots of old Wayne movies (and mostly Howard Hawks Wayne films, where Wayne played a character built out of his own persona, rather than playing "honest-to-God" characters ala John Ford) and with young boys—in Red River and Rio Bravo—as Wayne the mentor, as he is, in an odd way, in this film. Siegel is still a little obvious in his handling of things, but the ideas are so good, who cares? He literally numbers Wayne's days. And what a nice idea for a living legend and soon-to-be-immortal legend to have his birthday and the day of his death on the same day, on a gravestone that doesn't mark its day.

Death hangs over this film, in conversation, in song, in thought, in way of life. But this is nothing new. Death has walked with Wayne through many a picture. For a long time. Both were winners in the end, and, as in real life, Death must have his due.

Update in the present: The Shootist is the film John Wayne went out on, and as a summation of his career, and as the last ring of the bell, it's nearly perfect, even though the film is a bit flawed. Still, director Siegel did a masterful job of keeping all of the many stars corralled (there was a lot of people wrangling to be in it) and Wayne healthy, although there were times when he was too weak to be on-set (although he was, at that time, cancer-free). And even though star Wayne and director Siegel got on like a house-afire (the two couldn't have been more different, politically) there were still dust-up's about the way Siegel, the most economical—in that he never shot "coverage"—and least fancy of directors, would line up shots. Lauren Bacall, who was no doubt reliving her own time of dealing with cancer with husband Humphrey Bogart, braved up through the movie, and provided a steely shoulder for Wayne to lean on. Stewart signed on for a cameo, comprising the most jarring scene; it's Stewart who provides the cancer diagnosis and there's just enough edge in it to recall his furious characters in his 50's Westerns directed by Anthony Mann. And Richard Boone, John Carradine, Harry Morgan, and Hugh O'Brian did the same out of respect and love for their old co-star, and Ron Howard, whose eyes were now set on a directing career instead of acting, still pursued the juvenile lead one last time. The budget was tiny, but top-heavy with stars...and history.

All those guest stars work against the film and make it lose focus a bit. You get the feeling that Siegel might not have gotten all the coverage he might have wanted--sequences seem stretched a might' thin in places. But, overall, the film works well.

With time, perspective...and maybe a slight blurring of facts...one can look at The Shootist as the death of the Western—a sturdy movie genre for decades. The 60's had slowed it down, made them seem irrelevant, but one could still count on a number of Westerns being shot every year...until John Wayne died. And then...nothing.

A few things crop up here and there. Tombstone and its cousin Wyatt Earp, Eastwood's classic (and Oscar-winning) Unforgiven, and Silverado, which reminded how good a time an intelligent Western could be. The television series "Deadwood" is a wickedly nifty updating of the "Gunsmoke" stories of a frontier town, and 3:10 to Yuma briefly revived interest in the Old West and its ways. But a case can be made that without Wayne in the saddle, green-lighting a Western has become a difficult proposition.

Why bother? Wayne kept the genre alive for so long, but with his passing, they became less viable.

They might still come back. Turner will do a period piece, a Zane Grey adaptation, once in awhile, "Lonesome Dove" certainly proved popular, and even Brokeback Mountain made a contribution. But that 3:10 to Yuma popularity was certainly encouraging. Ed Harris likes to make Westerns...and good ones.

Then there's the curious phenomenon of the Western morphing into another genre--Science Fiction, precisely. The "Back to the Future" series capped off with an Old West yarn, and it was easy to see the gun-slinger in Han Solo in Star Wars, the fight in the bar, etc. and, Joss Whedon created a future Western in the "Firefly" series, and its movie-spin-off, Serenity. The new version of "Westworld" confuses the issue even more. It's funny. Just as the western was a broad enough genre to encompass all sorts of morality plays that would reflect today's society, so, too does the Science Fiction story. The two overlap, and share much the same elasticity, that frequently it turns into a case of "You got Science Fiction in my Western/You got Western in my Science Fiction."

Maybe the Western hasn't rode into the sunset just yet.

Maybe it's just waiting for a new dawn.

Or a new star to guide her.