ill fated

Describes motivation process for creativity with emphasis on intrinsic motivation by Corey K Katir

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I arrived in Hollywood a day before the recent TCM Classic Film Festival, just in timeA to watch theA world premiere of “The Avengers” at the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard from the widow of my roomA at theA Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

Though the LAPD had the crowd well in hand, the huge, excited throngA reminded me a bit of the horrific climax of John Schlesinger’s “The Day of the Locust,” which is set across the street from the El Capitan at Grauman’s Chinese (the main venue for the TCM Fest) during the 1938 premiere of Cecil B. DeMille’s swashbuckling historical epic “The Buccaneer.”

Perhaps the most corrosive look at Tinseltown ever — the sequence begins with Donald Sutherland stomping singularly obnoxious child star Jackie Earle Haley to death, then himself being lynched on the street and builds to a full-fledged riot — Schlesinger’s unsparing adaptation of Nathaniel West’s novel is currently out of print on DVD (though available from resellers on Amazon).

But the film’s owner, Paramount Picture has licensed “The Buccaneer” (one of a handful of its pre-1950 talkies still owned by the studio), as well as its ill-fated remake, to Olive Films as part of a larger deal for catalogue titles. The earlier film is one of DeMille’s best talkies, made at the height of his powers, while the latter is an unfortunate coda to his career that nevertheless looks great in a new Blu-ray transfer from its VIstaVision negative.

The older version wasn’t a Blu-ray candidate without an expensive digital restoration, but the very light vertical scratches that run through much of Olive’s DVD release in no way detract from one of DeMille’s most entertaining films (if one of his least known today, because of very limited TV exposure). Frederic March is in top form (even if his French accent is shaky) in the title role of the French pirate Jean Lafitte, who plundered ships from a base in the bayous south of New Orleans.

The two “Buccaneers” represent fairly rare Hollywood depictions of the War of 1812, whose bicentennial is barely being celebrated in the United States this year (it’s a bigger deal in Canada, which successfully resisted a U.S. military invasion). The 1938 version opens with a brief prologue depicting White House being evacuated (Spring Byington plays Dolly Madison) during the burning of Washington, which is not shown by DeMille.

The sceneA quickly shifts to New Orleans, where the governor (Douglas Dumbrille) orders the arrest of Lafitte, who has coincidentally caught the eye of his daughter (Margot Grahame). But the war and the arrival of Andrew Jackson (obscure character actor Hugh Sothern, who reprised the role a year later in a Warner Bros. Technicolor short, “Old Hickory”) force the governor to give Lafitte a pardon — one of many he received, the opening scroll assures us.

Lafitte volunteers his services to the U.S. as the film vigorously builds toward the Battle of New Orleans. One highlight is Lafitte’s men rowing their way through the Bayous in a green-tinted sequence that shows off Victor Milner’s Oscar-nominated cinematography.

Hungarian singer Francisca Gaal, who returned home after a couple more movies, is prominently billed as the governor’s daughter’s rival for Lafitte, who rescues her from a ship sunk by his rogue colleague Robert Barrat. There are more notable contributions by Russian-born Akim Tamiroff as Lafitte’s top aide and Walter Brennan as Jackson’s rustic aide-de-camp (these two inverterate scene-stealersA share one brief but memorable scene together).

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“The Buccaneer” was such a success that DeMille for years harbored plans to remake it as a musical — so it was excluded from Paramount’s 1956 sale of pre-1950 titles to MCA (now controlled by Universal). DeMille hadA been revisitingA hisA workA since 1918, when he remade hisA very firstA film “The SquawA Man” (co-”picturized”A with Oscar Apfel).A DeMille then turnedA it intoA a talkie in 1930A (the 1914A versionA — considered by many historians the first feature shot in HollywoodA –A and the 1930 edition are available as a double feature from the Warner Archive Collection. Only the final reel of the 1918 remake survives).

Unfortunately, DeMille suffered a heart attack during the making of his biggest hit,A his loose remake ofA “The Ten Commandments” (1956). Failing health forced himA to turn over direction of the “Buccaneer” re-do to his son-in-law Anthony Quinn (who had a supporting role in the ’38 version) and his protege Henry Wilcox as producer.

There’s only one song — delivered by Inger Stevens in Grahame’s old role –A in this versionA madeA “under the personal supervision of” DeMille, who turns up, looking very frail, to deliver a historical lecture by way of a prologue (he died shortly after its release).A The new screenplay, which sometimes plays like a libretto setting up musical numbers that aren’t there — follows the old one reasonably closely, including the crowd-pleasing ending. The major change is that Lafitte’s other woman is now the renegade pirate’s daughter, played by Claire Bloom.

Yul Brenner dons a wig for March’s old role of Lafitte. Andrew Jackson’s part has been beefed up just enough to justify “and also co-starring” billed at the end of the cast list for a heavily made-up Charlton Heston — who reprises the role fromA “The President’s Lady” and mentionsA Jackson’s wife Rachel so often that you almost expect Susan Hayward to showA up in a flashback.A Both are quite good within the film’s limitations.

Quinn, who never directed another film after this expensive box-office failure, lacks DeMille’s showman instincts as a filmmaker, and too much of the film is obviously studio bound.

There are compensations, among them appearances by old-timers like Dumbrille (in a glorified bit part; E.G. Marshall has inherited his role as the governor) and Madame Sul-Te-Wan, as well as a pre-”Bonanza” Lorne Greene as a heavy who tries to organize a lynching of Lafitte until Old Hickory stepsA in.A Still, there areA are some striking widescreen compositions by the main “Ten Commandments”A cinematographer, Loyal Griggs. AndA asA is so often the case,A Technicolor and VistaVision make for a particularlyA handsome-looking Blu-ray.

David Lean’s remarkable directing career began when the future Oscar winner — then England’s best film editor — was recruited by Noel Coward to help with the technical aspects of his own directing debut. Coward, a prolific and acclaimed playwright, composer and actor, had an ambivalent relationship to movies going back to 1918, when as a teenage actor he had an uncredited bit in D.W. Griffith’s “Hearts of the World.” Though many of Coward’s popular plays began to be filmed without his active participation nine years later, he didn’t appear onscreen again until he played the title role in “The Scoundrel,” an eccentric melodrama filmed by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur in Astoria, Queens, in 1935.

Coward finally decided to addA filmmakerA to his accomplishmentsA in the midst of World War II, whenA pal Louis Mountbatten (Prince Philip’s uncle)A shared his experiences of having a destroyer he commanded sunk by a Nazi submarine. The intensely patriotic Coward decided to make “In Which We Serve” — the first of four collaborations in The Criterion Collection’s splendid new “David Lean Directs Noel Coward” Blu-ray set — as a morale booster for blitzed England, playing a character very loosely modeled on Mountbatten in the only story he ever wrote directly for the screen.

By all accounts, Coward confined his direction to the actors, and was so impressed by Lean’s workA (orA so bored with the tedium of filmmaking)A that he turned the entire responsibilityA over to his protege after about three weeks and never directed a film again. Focusing on sailors played by Coward, John Mills and Bernard Miles, this rousing film flashes back (inA a styleA inspired byA “Citizen Kane”)A to their lives with their wives (Cecilia Johnson, Kay Walsh and Joyce Carey) and it poignantly portrays the homefront that was at stake in the war. Transcending its propaganda mission, “In Which We Serve” was named best picture of 1942 by the New York Film Critics Circle, over “Casablanca” (the outcome was reversed when the two films competed for Best Picture at the 1943 Oscars, though Coward received a special award from the academy).

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With Lean, cinematographer Ronald Neame (later an accomplished director himself) and associate producer Anthony Havelock-Allen, Coward formed Cineguild, a production company that then filmed a pair of The Master’s recent plays in Technicolor. “This Happy Breed” (1944) was another beautifully-crafted morale-booster, a less lavish companion piece to Coward’s upper-crust epic “Cavalcade” (a filmed version of that won Oscar’s Best Picture honors for 1933) focusing on a middle-class film in the years between the World Wars. Cecilia Johnson, who had made her feature debut in “In Which We Serve,” is superb in the lead role. Lean talked Coward — the flamboyant actor with the clipped tones barely got away with playing the captain in “In Which We Serve” — out of reprising his stage role in favor of the more appropriately plebian Robert Newton.

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Lean’s strong suit was notA comedy and he was less comfortable at the helm of an adaptation of Coward’s biggest stage success, the farcial “Blithe Spirit” (1945). Coward was not happy with the result, but it’s still a beguiling entertainment because of the sparkling cast — with Rex Harrison at his most delivishly charming as a widower whose new marriage to Constance Cummings is imperiled by the mischevious ghost of his first wife (Kay Hammond) unleased during a seance presided over by a scene-stealing Margaret Rutherford. The vivid colors in this new transfer (all four films were restored by the British Film Institute in 2008 in honor of Lean’s 100th birthday) are spectacular compared to the washed-out prints that have circulated for years. Coward, who created Harrison’s role onstage, reclaimed it for a 1956 NBC production that co-starred Lauren Bacall and Claudette Colbert.

A gleaming black-and-white Blu-ray upgrade also does wonders for the undisputed masterpiece in the set, a longtime repertory staple for Janus Films and for the Criterion Collection on DVD. “Brief Encounter” (1945), the last Cineguild production was adapted (reportedly by Lean, Neame and Havelock-Allen, none of them credited) from “Still Life,” one of nine one-act plays by Coward that were performed in repertory as “Tonight at 8:30” (three others turned up in a 1952 British film of that name, while a decade earlier one of them had been turned into a Norma Shearer vehicle, “We Were Dancing,” in Hollywood).

This flawless classic tearjerker — with a piano-heavy Rachmaninoff score that might invite snickers in any other context — stars the great Celia Johnson as a suburban matron who embarks on on an affair with a handsome younger doctor (Trevor Howard), though both are married to others. It’s a doomed liasion that would be unbearably sad if many of their encounters didn’t take place at a railway station peopled by affectionate working-class comicstereotypes expertly played by Stanley Holloway and Joyce Carey. The film received Oscar nominations for Lean, Johnson and the screenplay, which was adapted as a wonderful stage musical that I’ve seen performed in both England and the United States.

Lean, of course, went on to direct the winners of two Best Picture Oscars — “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Coward (who with a single exception appeared only in movie cameo roles after “In Which We Serve”) passed on the role that won Alec Guinness the Oscar for the latter.

“David Lean Directs Noel Coward” boasts one of Criterion’s best extras packages, including a revealing interview with Neame, conducted shortly before his death in 2010 (at age 99!). There’s also an excellent BFI audio interview with Coward conducted in 1969 by Richard Attenborough, who makes his screen debut in a small but important role in “In Which We Serve,” as well as a 1971 television documentary on Lean’s career.

Coward scholar Barry Day provides informative introductions for all four films, and there are featurettes on “In Which We Serve” and “Brief Encounter” from their 2000 UK DVD releases, among other things. A booklet that rounds out the set includes essays by Ian Christie, Terrence Rafferty, Geoffrey O’Brien, Kevin Brownlow — and my colleague Farran Smith Nehme, who holds forth eloquently on the most underrated of the Lean-Coward collaborations, “This Happy Breed.”

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Criterion also issued a Blu-ray upgrade for Roy Ward Baker’s “A Night to Remember” (1959) to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic last month.

This adaptation of Walter Lord’s book is still considered to be the definitive account of the sinking. even if it’s less fun and in some ways less dramatically satisfying than James Cameron’s Oscar-winning 1997 film, which arrives on Blu-ray Sept. 15. It’s certainly the most sober.

Made in the UK, this was the fourth feature-length Titanic movie. The first was E.A. Dupont’s “Atlantic” (1929), a Anglo-German early talkie based on a play that had to rename the ill-fated liner because of legal threats from the White Star Line. The acting — the cast includes future Hollywood stars Madeleine Carroll and John Loder — can be crude, but the effects are surprisingly good. This curiosity has circulated for decades on public domain videos, often under the title “Titanic.”

David O. Selznick planned a Titanic epic as the first project for Alfred Hitchcock when the Master of Suspense came to the United States in 1939. But this got scrapped because they rightly reckoned that it would be difficult to make such a film that wouldn’t reflect poorly on the British as World War II loomed.

This is precisely why wartime Germany decided to make its own “Titanic” film in 1944, as anti-British propaganda. This fascinating version — issued on DVD by Kino in 2004 — invents a brave German second officer who lectures White Star Line president Bruce Ismay for trying to break the spread record to drive up the line’s stock price. The film also emphasizes the proportionally greater loss of life in steerage, a theme that returned in Cameron’s epic. Ironically, Josef Gobbels banned the 1944 version because the very realistic scenes of panic were hardly reassuring to German moviegoers facing Allied bombing raids.

“Titanic” (1953), the first Hollywood, rendition of the tragedy, sidestepped politics by focusing on a single American family headed by Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb. Originally announced for r/Blu-ray release on April 4, it’s now expected to come out around the same time as the Cameron version (Farran Smith Nehme compares three versions in this blog post ).

“A Night to Remember” actually recycles a few shots from the often technically superior 1944 German version, one of which also turns up in the disappointingly brief Titanic sequence of the 1964 musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”

The greed of Ismay (played by Frank Lawton, the adult lead in George Cukor’s 1935 “David Copperfield”) and British incompetence is barely hinted at in this version, which focuses on the heroics of Second Officer Charles Lightoller (very well played by forgotten British leading man Kenneth More) and downplays class distinctions on the boat. Baker, who had directed several films in Hollywood (including “Don’t Bother to Knock”) does a great job with the sinking, but he simply doesn’t have the massive resources and special-effects wizardry that would be available Cameron four decades later.

Still, “A Night to Remember” remains a high-water mark in the history of British filmmaking. Lord, incidentally, was an American advertising man. His book had previously been adapted as a live 60-minute 1956 episode of NBC’s “Kraft Theatre” written and directed by George Roy Hill.

The superb-looking new Criterion transfer (also available on DVD) ports over an excellent one-hour 1993 making-of documentary from the previous DVD, as well as adding a 2006 BBC documentary on the sinking and archival interviews with survivors. There’s also a written essay on the film by critic Michael Sragow.

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Today’s Warner Archive Collection releases include Stephen Roberts’ “Star of Midnight” (1935), a mystery with William Powell and Ginger Rogers; Edwin L. Marin’s “Hullabaloo” (1940), a comic vehicle for Frank Morgan with Billie Burke; Robert Wise’s “This Could Be the Night” (1959), a gangster comedy with Jean Simmons, Paul Douglas and Tony Franciosa; Etiene Perier’s “Bridge to the Sun” (1961), starring Carroll Baker as the bride of a diplomat (James Shigeta) in Japan as World War II erupts; and James Neilson’s “Flareup,” a 1969 thriller with Raquel Welch as a go-go dancer.

WAC has also added J. Walter Ruben’s “Phantom of Crestwood” (1932) with Karen Morley and Ricardo Cortez to the David O. Selznick-produced pre-orders available for May 22 release.A Listed for June 15 pre-ordersA are King Vidor’s “Show People” (1928) with Marion Davies and William Haines and lots of silent star cameos, including Charlie Chaplin; Lewis Seiler’s “Flight Angels” (1940) starring Virginia Bruce, Jane Wyman and Dennis Morgan; Alexander Korda’s “Vacation From Marriage” (1945) with Robert Donat and Deborah Kerr; and Robert Hamer’s “The Scapegoat” (1959) with Alec Guinness and Bette Davis. Anatole Litvak’s “The Journey” (1959) starring Kerr and Yul Brenner is listed for June 6 release.A

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This week’s releases from the Sony Pictures Choice Collection — a MOD program whose releases generally go up on the WAC website on the first Thursday of the month — include a pair of Boston Blackie mysteries with Chester Morris: Budd Boetticher’s “One Mysterious Night” (1944) with Janis Carter and Lew Lander’s “A Close Call For Boston Blackie” (1946) with Lynn Merrick. Also premiering on DVD is Alfred E. Green’s “Strange Affair” (1944), Columbia’s second and final attempt to launch Allyn Joslyn and Evelyn Keyes as a programmer versionA ofA Nick and Nora Charles. The always watchable Joslyn plays a crime-solving comic-book artist in this one.

Olive Films’ first Blu-ray releases licensed from Paramount’s Republic Pictures holdings, both on July 17, are Fred Zinneman’s “High Noon” (1952) and Don Siegel’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), both previously issued on DVD by former rights holders Lionsgate and Artisan Entertainment. The cover of “High Noon” contains a new “produced by Stanley Kramer” credit, which does not actually appear on the film, billed as “a Stanley Kramer Production,” which is not the same thing. By some accounts “High Noon,’ was actually produced by screenwriter Carl Foreman, who was denied a credit by his former partner Kramer because he was about to be blacklisted.

Ovie Mughelli’s contributions to the Falcons were outweighed by his salary. (Curtis Compton/AJC)

It didn’t figure that Mughelli would see the final year of his contract. The …

Given the high number of people that will be on the roads after midnight tonight and the high likelihood that many of them will be operating under the influence of some form of intoxicant, it is very likely that tonight will be among the most dangerous, if not the most dangerous, nights to take to the roadways. This blog has discussed repeatedly the dangers of driving under the influence, and how such conduct is presumed negligent in Tennessee. The unfortunate truth is that many people look forward to this night all year as a night to let loose and enjoy their drink or drug of choice. Even more unfortunate is that many of these individuals have to travel to their party destinations and then make the ill-fated decision to drive back home or to their next destination, thus endangering the lives of anyone else trying to use the roads.

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