Underrated Movie #105: Kind Hearts and Coronets

Title: Kind Hearts and Coronets
Year: 1949
Director: Robert Hamer
Writers: Hamer and John Dighton, based on the novel “Israel Rank” by Roy Horniman
Stars: Dennis Price, Valerie Hobson, Joan Greenwood, Alec Guinness

The Story: In this blackest of black comedies, an heiress marries for love and gets disowned, but she remains obsessed with the idea that her son is 12th in line for a dukedom. After her death, the son decides that there’s nothing to be done but kill off all the family members separating him from his rightful station.

How it Came to be Underrated: Though this isn’t the first time he’s been featured here, Hamer’s name is mostly forgotten today, partially because he died young, so anyone watching all the “great films by the great directors” would never run across this one. It’s actually quite beloved, but still not the household name in this country that it deserves to be.

Why It’s Great:

1. Though he’s fourth-billed, the movie is handily stolen by Guinness, who became an instant star by playing all 8 members of the same family that get killed off by Price. Though you would expect him to camp it up, he instead invests each of these inbred lords and ladies with enough dignity to pull against the satire and give the movie some strong moral tension.
   
2. Stories of Victorian England are all about class, of course, but usually deal with those who try and fail to make their peace with the arbitrary hierarchy that pigeonholes them for life. How refreshing to finally see an ahead-of-his-time protagonist who reacts the same way we would to all this madness: with a fine murderous rage.
3. That said, he does kill an awful lot of people, so how do you keep him sympathetic? I’ve noticed that one thing that many false quest movies have in common, from Psycho to The Godfather to Wall Street, is a misguided attempt to please (sometimes posthumously) a disappointed parent. Apparently audiences will sympathize with any amount of criminality if that is the underlying motive.
   
4. It’s amazing how well this movie works, given that it’s so novelistic. It’s got wall-to-wall narration, it follows the protagonist from cradle to grave, and has multiple plotlines that don’t always intersect. A major subplot involves Price’s love for a faithless coquette played with a delightfully wicked languor by Joan Greenwood, who gets to wear the most wonderfully silly hats in movie history.
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Guinness made a lot of great comedies for the Ealing studio. Two other great ones were The Man in the White Suit and The Lavender Hill Mob.

How Available Is It?: It has an excellent Criterion Collection DVD.

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Best of 2017, #3: I, Tonya

Two thoughts on this movie:

A new tool: The fake-out redemption scene. This movie has a scene in it that’s very similar to a scene in my play, and I think it works well in both places: Like so many stories that seek to redeem a terrible person, this movie features an even-worse parent. I’ve talked about this before with Kind Hearts and Coronets, Downhill Racer, “The Sopranos”, and Trainwreck: Our hero may be bad, but they come by it honestly, and at least they’re better than their terrible parent.

But these scenes can be just as unsatisfying onscreen as they are in real life. We want some human connection between parent and child. We want a breakthrough and maybe some redemption. But you also want to be true to your character, and if your parent is awful enough to justify terrible behavior, then they may be unredeemable. So you can cheat to sneak in such a scene: You can have the parent finally tell the child what they’ve always wanted to hear, and give the kid some emotional catharsis, but only because the parent is manipulating the child.

In the scene in which Tonya Harding’s mom finally tells her what she wants to hear, my first thought was “I don’t really buy this plot turn”, then I realized that Allison Janney was good enough to sell the scene if it were genuine, so if I wasn’t buying it, there was probably a good reason for that. Then I realized, “Hey, this is just like the scene I wrote!” It was a fake-out and I thought it worked well, putting a nice button on their relationship, even if it was fake.

Tricky tone: The big question with this movie is, “Should a movie with this much domestic violence be this fun?” Is it trivializing the violence? Turning it into entertainment? …Worst of all, does it treat this violence as no big deal because the victim is Tonya Harding?

But ultimately, I would say the movie answers all these questions satisfactorily and pulls off its tricky tone, and it all comes down to one moment: That first out-of-nowhere face-punch. Because of the movie’s fun, rock-fueled uptempo tone, I was totally unprepared for the domestic violence to begin, and it hit me in the face as well. I felt the shock, betrayal and fear that comes with that punch all the more because of the tone, and that’s what you want when you tell stories: to make the audience feel the same pain the hero is feeling.

After that punch, the uptempo and humorous tone continues, despite the violence getting worse, but the friction is maintained. The fun tone kept me thinking, “Surely the violence will end. There will be redemption. This will become a love story again.” And of course, that’s just what Tonya is thinking as she goes back to him over and over. The tricky tone keeps us in her head, keeping the violence continually shocking and painful, specifically because it violates the tone. It thought it was a very effective tool.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1949

The Year: 1949

What the Nominees Were: All the King’s Men, Battleground, The Heiress, A Letter to Three Wives, Twelve O’Clock High
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: In America, The Set-Up and On the Town were very different movies, but both worthy of consideration. Over in England, Kind Hearts and Coronets is great. Further afield than that, in Japan, Akira Kurasawa had his first masterpiece with Stray Dog.

What Did Win: All the King’s Men
How It’s Aged: It’s an excellent film, and well worth watching given what’s going on in America at the time I’m writing this book (a scandal-proof populist demagogue calls for his supporters to storm the capitol, then wins another vote.) It was a worthy winner, but not as good as what should have won…

What Should’ve Won: The Third Man

How Hard Was the Decision: The Third Man is pretty widely recognized as the best movie of 1949, but I did rewatch All the King’s Men to help make the decision and was tempted to let it stand.

Director: Carol Reed
Writer: Graham Greene, adapting his own novella
Stars: Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard

The Story: American pulp western writer Holly Martins arrives to visit his friend Harry Lime in postwar Vienna only to be told that Harry is dead. He then finds out that Harry was a notorious scammer, killing kids with fake penicillin. When he discovers Harry is still alive, he must decide whether to help the cops find him.

Any Nominations or Wins: It lost Director and Editing, but won for Robert Krasner’s bizarre canted cinematography.

Why It Didn’t Win: Despite having both stars of Citizen Kane, this feels more like a European than an American film.  (It was in fact a British-American co-production.)  This is a very cynical look at postwar Europe with a downbeat ending. Of course, All the King’s Men is also tremendously cynical and downbeat, so maybe that doesn’t account for it.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Vienna is divided into four zones, representing different ideas, but there’s also an above-below metaphor here. From atop the city’s famous ferris wheel, Harry has Holly look down at the people below: “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?” but then, when cornered, Harry scurries down below those people to get away in the sewers (and we’ve already determined that the lower you go the more worthless you are.) Once he’s been shot, he tries to make it back up onto the street, but only his fingers make it out of the vent.
   
   
   
2. This movie is beautifully shot on location in the rubble of Vienna, still devastated from the war. They don’t have to tell us that Europe has been ruined (physically and spiritually), we can see it.
   
3. In both this and All the King’s Men, the good guy and the bad guy love the same woman, but she loves the bad guy more, devastating the hero. They’re both heartbreaking to watch, and showed that the world was still in a very dark place, four years after the war.
   
   
   
4. In Greene’s book (which is also well worth reading) the hero is named Rollo Martins. Did Greene change the name to Holly to indicate that the movie would inevitably have more of a Hollywood sensibility?  Greene divided his work sharply into two categories: literary works and “entertainments.” Like many authors who made such distinctions (Ed McBain, Cornell Woolrich) Greene was constantly confounded to see that both audiences and critics found more meaning in his “entertainments” than his “serious” works. Greene considered this an entertainment because it revolves around a police investigation, but according to my definition it should be considered literary: The hero loses by winning.
5. This is very dark material bizarrely scored throughout with sprightly zither music (The movie was promoted with the line “He’ll put you in a dither with his zither”) which gives everything a very European, cynical feeling. Many children are killed, and love is proven to be worthless, but isn’t it all a game, somehow? It makes the movie more pleasant to watch while somehow making it even darker.

Ah, 1949: 

Underrated Movie #126: Downhill Racer

Title: Downhill Racer
Year: 1969
Director: Michael Ritchie (Smile)
Writer: James Salter
Stars: Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Camilla Sparv

The Story: A handsome but angry small-town ski-bum gets elevated to the US downhill team, and quickly proves to be the best, even though he’s not a team player. The coach soon realizes that he has little choice other than to let this superstar set the rules.

How it Came to be Underrated: Redford, Hackman and Ritchie were all about to have a great decade in the ‘70s, but this movie was a little ahead of its time. America was just learning to love movies that cast a jaundiced eye on national glory. The studio dumped it, which caused Redford to start thinking about creating a better way to find an audience for anti-Hollywood movies...

Why It’s Great:

1. We’ve all seen movies in which impossibly handsome actors inexplicably play lovelorn everyman underdogs. Redford was never interested in all that. He knew that he looked like a golden god, and he preferred to play characters who knew it too. Since his looks were so appealing, he figured he could be more hard-edged than other actors without losing the audience. From this point on in his career, he stopped asking to be liked (but he didn’t look down on his characters either).
2. Redford had the original idea for the movie, then hired Salter and Ritchie, whose styles matched his vision. He had gotten sick of hearing that it doesn’t matter if you win or lose but only how you play the game. He had seen his whole life that it wasn’t true and he wanted to make a movie that showed the truth about winners.
3. It’s the tragic paradox of all competition: who becomes the best? Those for whom nothing is ever good enough. Of course this means that being the best can’t make them happy either. The only way to get the big brass ring is lose all of your appreciation for it.
4. As with Kind Hearts and Coronets and “The Sopranos” they get us to sympathize with a bad man by giving him an infuriatingly disapproving parent. His father asks “What do you do it for?” Redford responds, “To be a champion”. His father sneers, “The world’s full of them”. Still, given how heartless Redford is, you have to wonder is he’s a jerk because his father hates him or if his father just hates him because he’s a jerk.
5. These days “realism” in movies is a synonym for “dreariness”. But in 1969, after years of bland technicolor epics, it meant the opposite: fast, raw, and thrilling, freed from heavy cameras, heavy make-up, and heavy-handed dramatics. They understood you could be brutally honest and still be fast-paced. Redford’s first descent, shot from his point of view, is absolutely breath-taking.

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Redford and Ritchie reteamed for an equally good follow up about the price of winning, The Candidate. Another great underrated Hackman film from around this time is Scarecrow, if you can find it.

How Available Is It?: There’s an excellent Critierion DVD with long interviews with Redford, Ritchie and Salter.

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Best of 2015, #5: Trainwreck

It's ridiculous, I realize, to rank a movie like this above serious and powerful movies like The Revenant or Spotlight, but I always try to rank high-brow and low-brow together, according to how strongly I responded, and I responded more to this one, for good or ill.

As usual, we’ll talk about rules these movie exemplified, but this first rule is one that never got its own write-up, though it did pop up many times: We’ll accept your heroes’ bad behavior at lot more easily if they had atrocious parents.

As I said in my write-up of Downhill Racer:

• As with Kind Hearts and Coronets and “The Sopranos” they get us to sympathize with a bad man by giving him an infuriatingly disapproving parent. His father asks “What do you do it for?” Redford responds, “To be a champion”. His father sneers, “The world’s full of them”.

Trainwreck is also a great example of this. It’s hard to get us to identify with Amy Schumer’s character: We meet her as an adult with a montage of her contemptuously manipulating and lying to a series of one-night stands, despite the fact that she has a loyal boyfriend. Obviously, this is her flaw, as the title of the film indicates, but it’s hardly a job-interview flaw, and we’re strongly disinclined to care about such characters, not even long enough to root for them to overcome these flaws.

But the wonderful prologue scene takes care of the problem handily (click to enlarge):

 

This smash-cuts to the onscreen title “23 years later” and we’re off to the races. Instantly, Amy’s contempt for love becomes a flaw that we can root for her to overcome, because we see that she came by it honestly. She didn’t wake up one day and choose to be like this, she was programmed to be an engine of destruction. It helps as well that her father’s rant is genuinely funny and superficially well-argued: he’s bad but charming, and you can understand why a little girl would fall for his poisonous message (only to heroically overcome it 23 years later, of course.)

Next: A different type of wreck!

Hero Personality Profiles, Part 4: Sensitive Types

Group C: Sensitive Types. These are some of the hardest characters to make sympathetic. Americans are hard-wired to hate losers. Of course, if you think about it, that’s somewhat weird… If I were to ask you, “who’s more sympathetic, a homeless guy or a CEO?”, most people would say the homeless guy. The problem, I think, is that moviegoers aren’t looking at snapshots, we’re living with someone. We’re not being asked to judge them, we’re being asked to identify with them, to share their lives, and if you asked people which of those two they’d rather share their lives with, you’d probably get a different answer.

Subtype #1: Sensitive failure, surrounded by insensitive winners: It takes a filmmaker of extraordinary sensitivity and generosity to make us sympathize with unsuccessful people, but it can certainly be done, and I wish more filmmakers would try.

• Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, Modern Times, and most everything else.
• Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life (again, only partially: but Potter, Sam Wainwright, even his brother all qualify)
• The Rabbit in Salesman
• Albert Brooks in Lost in America and Defending Your Life
• Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross
• Michael Scott on “The Office” is an interesting case: Careerwise, he’s an insensitive winner surrounded by sensitive strugglers, but in terms of social skills he’s certainly a sensitive failure, surrounded by insensitive winners.

Subtype #2: Sensitive poor, surrounded by insensitive rich: Price and Hopkins use their class resentment to justify horrible actions. Redford, Clements and Aniston merely use it as an excuse to hold back and judge, although they come to realize they’re only hurting themselves.

• Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets
• Robert Redford in Downhill Racer
• Edward Clements in Metropolitan
• Anthony Hopkins in Nixon
• Jennifer Aniston in Friends with Money

Tomorrow: the fifth and final group!

Underrated Movie #115: Victim

Title: Victim
Year: 1961
Director: Basil Dearden
Writers: Janet Green and John McCormick
Stars: Dick Borgarde, Sylvia Syms, Dennis Price, Nigel Stock

The Story: A young London construction worker has an affair with a closeted barrister, then becomes the target of blackmailers (homosexuality was still a serious crime in England). After he ends up dead, the married barrister decides that he must investigate on his own and break the back of the blackmail ring, even if he has to out himself in the process.

How it Came to be Underrated: This movie is well-remembered for its “importance” but it’s not as well known that it’s a great little thriller in its own rite.

Why It’s Great:

1. I had assumed that this would be a well-meaning but leaden melodrama. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it’s actually a brisk and clever crime movie, intercutting the police’s blind pursuit of the blackmailers (frustrated by an understandable lack of support from the victims) with Borgarde’s own vigilante investigation from within the hidden gay community. The twists and turns of the conspiracy pay off very satisfyingly in the end.
   
2. I had heard that this movie was remarkably ahead of its time, but I nevertheless found it hard to believe any movie on this subject from ’61 could actually be entirely inoffensive. Even as I watched, I kept thinking “so far, this is amazing, but at any point it’s going to go very wrong.” I kept waiting for a giggling gay psychopath to appear, or for a likable character to equate gay men with pedophiles, or for the married hero to kill himself in shame. But none of these things happen. This movie could have been written today!—Actually it’s even more impressive than that—This movie couldn’t have been written today!
   
3. Many of the members of the wonderful ensemble cast also appeared on my favorite TV series, “Secret Agent”. Like this movie, that show never forgot that if you scratch a crime in London you’ll always find a complex arrangement of class resentments festering underneath.
4. It’s also great to see Dennis Price from Kind Hearts and Coronets show back up briefly on Borgarde’s comprehensive tour of the many strata of London’s closeted community, as a West End stage star who’s another target of the blackmailers.
   

If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: This movie was singled out for praise in The Celluloid Closet, a powerful documentary on the history of gay images (positive and negative) in the movies. Borgarde was also great in John Schlesinger’s Darling, which is now on Watch Instantly.

How Available Is It?: It’s got a beautiful DVD with a fun, breezy interview with Borgarde.

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