Bookselling in the movies - John Baxter browses past films by Hawks, Linklater, Hitchcock, Donen, Michell, Capra, Polanski, Heller, Dante (Joe), Kurnitz, Ephron and Preminger + a competition with a prize

SOMETHING NASTY ON THE BOOKSHELF.

Barbara Stanwyck puts a couple of tomes to good use.
With Gary Cooper, Ball of Fire

         With the boom in Zoom and Skype telecasts from home, instigated by COVID-19, the private library is once again in vogue as an interview background. But those shelves of well-thumbed classics in full Morocco are gone. Instead, the jumble behind most spokespersons suggests a panic visit to the nearest charity shop. 

They could learn from the cinema, where the owning, collecting and selling of books is fraught with hazards. Charles Boyer, a serious bibliophile (Fallada, Zweig), was amused, playing the High Lama in a remake of Lost Horizon, to find that Shangri-La’s library, supposedly the repository of all earthly wisdom, contained mostly Reader’s Digest Condensed. But classic Hollywood would have regarded even these as highbrow. Barbara Stanwyck as “Sugarpuss” O’Shea in Ball of Fire (pictured above) shrugs off the library of encyclopedist Gary Cooper. Hefting a tome, she says “I’ve got one like this at home – with a radio in it.”  

"...Marlowe and a bottle of rye..."
Dorothy Malone, The Big Sleep

Tucked up an alley, open at irregular hours and staffed by dodderers or curmudgeons, movie bookshops traditionally harbour crime, even treason. In The Big Sleep,Bogart played with the cliché. To sniff out a lending library of high-class porn, he adopts a camp voice, turns up the brim of his hat, looks over the top of his spectacles and enquires after editions of Ben Hur. Chandler’s original confronts him with avendeuse with “the fine-drawn face of an intelligent Jewess,” but Howard Hawks and William Faulkner are more inventive, substituting the most ravishing bookseller imaginable, a young Dorothy Malone. Customers being scarce during an afternoon downpour, she puts up the “Closed” sign, removes her horn-rims and repairs to the back room with Marlowe and a bottle of rye. Ah, if only....

       Movies occasionally smuggle in a real bookstore. Paris’s Shakespeare and Co. – the modern copy, not the original – features in Before Sunrise. Joe Dante used the venerable Cherokee Bookshop for his werewolf film The Howling,and, moreover, gave a cameo to science fiction completist Forrest J. Ackerman. Alfred Hitchcock, after informing the owner of San Francisco’s Argonaut Books “This is the way a bookshop should look,” re-built it, larger and lighter, for Vertigo. Renamed the Argosy, the studio version is totally convincing, even to a front window appearing to reflect traffic on busy Powell Street.

         

Most designers prefer a backlot creation. For the “divinely sinister” Greenwich Village bookstore where fashion photographer Fred Astaire meets Audrey Hepburn (left) in Funny Face, Stanley Donen fabricated Embryo Concepts, specialising in books on philosophy - surely a guarantee of speedy bankruptcy. It shares a quality common to most invented bookstores, an unrealistic amount of space. Actors never browse. They act or dance, and that takes room. Books must also be loosely shelved to allow for that chestnut of a volume removed to reveal an eavesdropper in the next aisle.

Movie book people come in all shapes and sizes, but are uniformly unsuccessful. An inept Hugh Grant is rescued by Julia Roberts from his failing travel bookshop in Notting Hill. Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop shows privilege and prejudice forcing newbie proprietor Emily Mortimer out of an English village. Books in profusion, rather than conveying learning and intelligence, more often suggest a remoteness from reality that is sometimes sinister, and often pathetic. Angel Henry Travers reveals to James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life that Donna Reed, having failed to marry him, became an old maid and -the shame of it! - a librarian.

Very occasionally there’s a star. In Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate. Johnny Depp (pictured above), a real life collector (Beat-iana) who should have known better, plays the world’s least likely scout or “runner”. Typically, these shady individuals sport a three-day beard and have soup stains down their shirt – the seedier the attire, the greater likelihood of bargains - but Depp’s Dean Corso is a fashion plate who banters with concierges at the best Paris hotels, and is able, with equal expertise, to nail both devil worshipper Lena Olin and a first edition Don Quixote. 

         In 1938, screenwriter Harry Kurnitz, as Marco Page (marque-page = French for bookmark) created husband-and-wife runner/sleuths Joel and Garda Sloane for his novel Fast Company. MGM filmed it the same year, hoping to exploit the Thin Man vogue. Fast and Loose and Fast and Furious followed, neither much good, audiences preferring the bibulous to the bibliophile. Such films generally hinge on a manuscript, usually by Shakespeare, a writer of whom some in the audience might actually have heard. It wasn’t until 2018 that movies caught up by celebrating a genuine bibliofraud in Lee Israel, faker of celebrity letters, impersonated with pungent authenticity by Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me? 

Finally, I confess to a soft spot for Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, (left) if only for her chutzpah in recycling Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner.A single scene justifies its overall soupiness. Tom Hanks, proprietor of the chain about to put Meg Ryan out of business, browses her rare book cabinet, and finds the price of one item startling. An assistant enumerates the book’s collectible points, including tipped-in colour plates. 

“Is that why it costs so much?” enquires Hanks.

“That’s why it’sworth so much,” the assistant corrects him. Precisely.

A footnote. The relationship between bookselling and espionage, explored by Graham Greene in The Human Factor and Otto Preminger’s film of the book,isn’t entirely fictitious. In 1961, London booksellers Helen and Peter Kroeger were unmasked as Soviet agents Leontine and Morris Cohen. After Leontine’s death in 1992, she was honored by having her likeness on a stamp (pictured right) – as close as any bookseller has come to immortality. 

Editor's Note: A competition. Who can match John Baxter's erudite exposition that is the question. To test out the answer a prize of a copy of John's latest book FILMSTRUCK: A LIFE IN THE MOVIES is offered to whomever can list the most number of films featuring bookshops. To make it just that bit harder the list must contain the title of at least one Australian film which has scenes in a bookshop. Send entries to filmalert101@gmail.com

John Baxter (left) is a widely published author of autobiographies, fiction, film scripts, travel books and criticism. Among his recent contributions to the Film Alert 101 blog are posts on William A Wellman's THE HATCHET MAN, Mario Bava's LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIO/BLACK SUNDAY,The Netflix series HOLLYWOOD, and Vincente Minnelli's THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL Just click on the title to read the review. John is also the author of a recently published set of memoirs FILMSTRUCK: A LIFE IN THE MOVIES. A copy of the book is our prize or you can read about it and purchase an e-copy if you click here 

On Blu-ray - David Hare revels in WAR OF THE WORLDS (Dir: Byron Haskin, Prod: George Pal, USA, 1953)

Ann Robinson, Gene Barry

Paramount's recent 4K restoration of the 1953 George Pal/Byron Haskin movie of the great H.G Wells' War of the Worlds has just been released for the first time worldwide on Blu-ray in Australia on the newly created label Via Vision through its "Imprint" line. With more Paramount titles in the pipeline, several of them of unknown provenance or image quality, most of them not restored. The Haskin movie may be the best of them technically. In fact, I understand there's a rumor it may be going to Criterion in Region A-ville for last quarter this year. 

"...quite beautiful colour grading..."

I'm very glad to report that Paramount has done nothing at all to botch this superb 4K to Blu-ray transfer in any way. The restorers went back to three strip O-negs with IB Tech prints for reference and the mastering has been executed with lovely fine grain management, super clean optical and lab process work with nary a hint of dupe material, and totally solid texture with quite beautiful color grading. 

This is actually one of the very best three strip O-neg to 4K to Blus I've seen, only perhaps comparable to the superb Film Foundation work on the restored Technicolor Powells, or Warner's most recent work on other 40s and 50s 3 strip titles like (forthcoming) Curtiz' Romance on the High Seas. 

This clearly came from Paramount's A-team, certainly none of the various hands who were responsible for the disaster that is the new over scrubbed, DVNR'ed to death, misframed, waxy and soft botch of To Catch a Thief released last month that looks like somebody's very first and failed mastering project in tech high school. 

I have always been fond of War of the Worlds, if not for aspects of the screenplay which really lays on the god stuff with a trowel at the end, in complete antithesis to Wells' own deeply secularist vision and his relatively subtle treatment which his original novel gives to the clergyman who is in fact apparently benignly demented. 

"...a stunning reverse shot from inside the Martian ship..."

As if to signal his own very personal take on this nonsense, Haskin does something quite unexpected and extremely moving at the end of the picture. Just as Gene Barry and the cowering mob come out of the church to meet their fate, they witness the first death of one of the creatures. Haskin tracks onto the creatures' arm, doing a death probe with operatic slowness, and then cuts to a stunning reverse shot from inside the Martian ship with the mere humans now in the distance out of focus in a clearly sympathetic POV to the creatures who had decided humanity was unworthy of continuing to live.

"...Haskin tracks onto the creatures' arm, doing a
death probe with operatic slowness...

That sentiment, along with Haskins' extremely violent scenes of looting (white) mobs and vile nihilistic savagery by rioting humans in the last act takes moral authority way over and above the final ecclesiastical waffle enunciated by Dame Cedric Hardwicke in a turgid VO over the final credits. 

Haskins' vision, like Wells is far more incisive.

Plague Times Diary (36) - Peter Hourigan explores internet offerings - THE BRIDGES OF SARAJEVO, an opera of AUTUMN SONATA, O PIONEERS, DARAYA: UNDER THE BOMBS A LIBRARY and the Mark Rappaport retrospective

LOCKDOWN REPORT May-June

         

Jessica Lange, O Pioneers

 Enjoyment of a film is often not a singular thing – our special pleasure with a film can be increased by lots of other factors – a place we’ve visited, a book we’ve read, a person we’ve known. Or what we know about related films – same director, subject, themes.  This lockdown (or locked-in) time is at least good for following up links and connections that often get bypassed at other times. I’ve had some very rewarding times in the last couple of weeks, chasing such connections. 

            Several books have been the initial impetus. Willa Cather’s 1913 book O Pioneers! came to me a few weeks back almost by accident. But what a wonderful book permeated with the broad landscapes and weather and smells of the Great Plains of Nebraska, as they would have impacted on the many Scandinavian pioneers who settled this area, so inhospitable to Scandinavians coming to the New World. I loved the book, and Googling around afterwards, I discovered it had been filmed, in 1992 and you can see it if you click here on the Internet Archive 

              This is a site that’s really worth spending some time exploring. Not only does it have feature films there are sound archives, home-movie collections, out-of-print books and more.  As well as the film version of O Pioneers (Glenn Jordan, USA, 1992).  Though it is not a great film - actually it’s a TV movie made for the CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame. And it’s as lifeless as those prestige BBC literary adaptations – absolutely faithful to the novel’s events, but with none of the power or the spirit that makes it a great book. A strong cast – Jessica Lange and David Strathairn are the leads.  It’s also hamstrung by being made for TV and the old letterbox 4:3 ratio. The landscapes are all the time just straining to spread broadly to the horizon.  But I was very glad to have found it.  

               There was another site that was a good source for rare material – Rarefilm. A few weeks back I discovered a wonderful coy of Widerberg’s Raven End.  But when I went there again last week I was greeted with a card saying that all titles had been removed because of claims supposedly from the copyright owners of every single title.

                 

Daraya: Under the Bombs a Library

Vimeo is another site that has some interesting material. I was taken there again by another book I’d been reading. The Syrian town Daraya was under siege for years from troops of current dictator.  A group of young men rescued many books from homes destroyed by bombardments, and set up a library in the basement of one of the many bombed out buildings.  It’s an inspiring story of people tackling a much more severe lock-down situation than we’ve been going through.  I read this story in Syria’s Secret Library by British Journalist, Mike Thomson. Curiosity for more information led me to a documentary that had been made with the same focus, Daraya: Under the Bombs a Library (Delphine Minoui, France, 2018) accessible on Vimeo via purchase at $1.69  It was an interesting extension of the book, because it centres on a different group of participants.

            

Becoming Anita Ekberg

Still on Vimeo, and this time completely free, I’ve been revelling in the Mark Rappaport retrospective screening courtesy of the Munich Fimmmuseum.  He is a film-essayist in love with Hollywood, its Golden Era and its stars. And he knows his subject well.  His subjects have included Rock Hudson (and the gay sub-text of so many of his ‘straight’ movies), Max (Ophuls) and James (Mason) and Danielle (Darrieux) , Jean Sebereg, Anita Ekberg and more. His observations are insightful, and the films are a real pleasure.  Be quick, because each program is available only for three or four days – but they continue until the middle of July

              Another piece of cross-textual viewing was Autumn Sonata– not the Bergman film, but an opera first performed in 2017 by the Finnish National Opera.  I’ve watched this twice – there’s a short Film Alert post  already there with my first reactions a couple of years back It is back on-line until July 7, accessible either on YouTube or direct from the Operavision site

         And travel can also enrich a viewing experience. It is exactly one year since I was in Sarajevo. Ahead of visiting, I knew I’d reminisce there about the events of 1914 and the assassination of the Austrian Archduke. But I’d forgotten Sarajevo’s much more recent trauma when it was under siege by Serbian forces during the conflict of the 1990s. Living memory!   If we want to complain about being locked down at home, think of this experience. If you ventured out of your home, even for absolute necessities like food, or water, you might not return. The city is beautifully laid out for snipers.

        

 The current We Are One festival on YouTube included a film from 2014, Bridges of Sarajevo. This is an anthology film, something of a mixed bag as usual in such films. But for me, with my memories of Sarajevo so fresh, it was a deeply moving experience.  The first of the 13 segments explore some aspect of the 1914 assassination. The rest reflected the 1993-4 siege and its ramifications. As films, some are ordinary, others are very thoughtful. Two ‘name’ directors stand out.  Cristi Puiu (Der Spektrum Europas) is nothing but a conversation in bed between a husband and wife. But in its two shots, as one critic wrote, this “says more about the pernicious persistence of nationalism.” 

         Serge Loznitsa’s Reflections superimposes images of Bosnian fighters taken in 1992 over panoramic shots of Sarajevo today. No commentary, just the space for the audience to reflect on then and now.  Jean-Luc Godard’s The Bridge of Sighs, however, did not do much for me, seeming more an indulgent pastiche of slogans and texts and (admittedly beautiful) images racing too fast to encourage much reflection or understanding. 

J Arthur Rank and MAGA - Making the ABC great again. Bring back FIRST A GIRL, HELL DRIVERS, NOWHERE TO GO, THE SPIDER AND THE FLY and TO THE PUBLIC DANGER for starters

A  short time ago Ben Cho lamented the disappearance from TV screens of the endless rotation of the complete J Arthur Rank film library. It was bought by the ABC when it first went to 24 hour programming and often screened several films during the course of the evening from midnight to dawn. It was understood that the ABC had bought the rights in perpetuity.  But, notwithstanding that the ABC owns the rights and once again has  a station which closes down in the evening, the Rank film library has long remained unseen. So, in a gesture of encouragement cinephiles are suggesting some titles that might be revived. For starters, after Ben’s piece linked above you can read the thoughts of Sydney’s supercinephile Barrie Pattison if you click here.  

Many years ago I started to write some notes on the Rank titles I was watching but my enthusiasm ran out. Maybe it was when there was a run of Carry On films and I wilted. But there would be some fine entertainment on offer even if it was always hard to discover any sense of ‘curation’ as the modern phrase for film programming would have it. The library included titles that Rank acquired from other production houses, most notably Gainsborough Pictures. As well Rank invested in, supported or acquired the output of many production companies including Cineguild, which produced a number of David Lean’s films, Two Cities Films and Independent Artists. 

Below are five of the notes that I wrote, all of them movies I would happily watch again. I haven’t made any changes to the text from years ago and readers may note a heavy reliance on The Time Out Film Guide and David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema

Jessie Mathews (r)

First A Girl (Victor Saville, UK, 1935, 94 minutes)

When Blake Edwards made Victor/Victoria he took as his source an obscure 30s German musical with a score provided by the great Frederick Hollander. Edwards may or may not have taken much notice of this version of the film, the last of a series of British remakes of German originals. The Brit version has the virtue of the presence of the wondrous Jessie Mathews, a star of the first dimension who could sing and dance with the best of them. Nowadays she’s so far under the radar that David Thomson doesn’t even devote an entry to her in his Biographical Dictionary while such alleged luminaries as Madonna and Demi Moore (after only consulting the letter “M”) are included. The market demands it I suppose but that’s a pity. Mathews is mentioned in the entry on the film’s director, Victor Saville who is credited with bringing out her “light prettiness”. Not much of a compliment. First a Girl is indeed light but it’s also quite brilliant, not the least for Mathews in the role of the singer who can only get a job by pretending she’s a female impersonator. The narrative contains all the complications you may expect, or indeed be aware of, but nevertheless it’s a still a very heady piece of nonsense which you can watch over and over again in continuing delight.

Herbert Lom, Stanley Baker

Hell Drivers (Cy Endfield, UK, 1957, 91 minutes)

Cy Enfield had an interesting career indeed. In America he directed The Sound of Fury, a brilliant film about a lynch mob, and then, after a Tarzan picture, bolted for England as the McCarthyites closed in. There he made some quite remarkable films and a few lesser works. I watched the DVD of The Limping Man which has quite a bit of narrative oomph for its first 70 or so minutes. (Then it all turns out to be some dream, a shaggy dog story and everyone marches off happily to their anointed lovers. Gimme a break.) But Hell Drivers is the real thing, Endfield’s best British film and as a taut and gripping a narrative as you’ll find. David Thomson summarises perfectly when he calls it an “unexpectedly raw look into the lives of English lorry drivers with much of the flavour and violence of an American thriller.” Following the J. Arthur Rank logo you get the words “A British Film” above the title and yet Endfield’s movie is rather more like an action packed American flick and a primer for today’s industrial relations. Stanley Baker, fresh out of prison for some crime or other which doesn’t get explained, gets work driving a truck. He takes it after being told the terms and conditions by the manager. Those terms are in brief,  dog eat dog. If you cant keep up you don’t get your bonus. Don’t worry about helping out the other guy, maintain your truck in your own time and you pay for any breakdowns. Its frighteningly up to date and the workers are told to obey the law only if they must. What they have to do to survive is compete against their fellow workers and bugger solidarity. No union stuff here, no strikes for better conditions. And the boss and the foreman are ripping off the staff bonuses as well! Endfield doesn’t dress this up into any real tirade against the employing class or any clarion call for workers rights.. There are  hardly any speeches at all and no threats to take the boys out. The boys actually turn nasty against Baker when he wont join in a free for all at a local dance. They start a campaign of bullying and victimization which is settled sort of in a fist fight. Very raw and unideological despite Endfield’s confessed leftist sympathies which led to his departure from the US during the McCarthy years. Patrick McGoohan makes a very nasty Irish villain/foreman. The Time Out Film Guide makes an interesting point in noting how Endfield and Joseph Losey, both political exiles, did their best work in films featuring Stanley Baker. Quite a fascinating piece of work. 

Maggie Smith, George Nader

Nowhere to Go (Seth Holt, UK, 1958, 97 minutes)

Just at the time when the so-called British new wave was emerging, and kitchen sink dramas became the rage, one young director, aged 35 made one of the smartest little thrillers of its time. He died at the age of 48 from, according to David Thomson, heart disease and exhaustion. Nowhere to Go was Seth Holt’s first film. He scripted it with Kenneth Tynan and it was produced by Michael Balcon. Tynan was the critic who did much to put Osborne, Pinter, Wesker and others on the map. The American second-rater George Nader was wheeled in to play the lead but the casting triumph was that of Maggie Smith, in her film debut, as the taxi driver who succumbs to his story. It’s a gripping entertainment. Holt only made five films. Thomson is an enthusiast for his blighted career and he says: “Despite the fact that Holt seemed unable to escape flawed, unfinished work, the creator of marvellous sequences within melodramas, he was the most gifted British director working in Britain.” Holt’s five films were made over thirteen years and fashion passed him by. Still somebody, someday, will dig up Station Six Saharaand we’ll again see what made us all more than a little sad at his passing. 

Eric Portman (l), Guy Rolfe, Nadia Gray

The Spider and the Fly (Robert Hamer, UK, 1949, 95 minutes)

Robert Hamer is nearly forgotten these days yet for a while it seemed he may have been carrying the hopes of the British cinema on his back. He was not yet forty by the time he had made the best episode in Dead of Night, Pink String and Sealing Wax, It Always Rains on Sunday, Kind Hearts and Coronetsand The Spider and the Fly. With the exception of Kind Hearts, no doubt because of its bit of Alec Guinness  eight role bravura, the other films are largely, and undeservedly forgotten.  In this one, Guy Rolfe plays a gentleman thief and one of my favorite Brit actors Eric Portman plays the dogged police inspector. It’s one of those stories where the fascination lies in the mutual respect built between the two protagonists, a sort of a ‘civilised’ duel.  Their relationship is complicated after both have formed a relationship with Rolfe’s mistress. In the note on the film in The Time Out Film Guide, Tom Milne is glowing when he mentions ‘the look of the film, bleak and penumbral with sets, camerawork and beautifully chosen locations, conspiring to recapture the poetic quality of Feuillade’s Paris, makes it rank with Hamer’s best work. A director ripe for full scale rather than piecemeal rediscovery, especially as TCM has recently unearthed Hamer’s extremely odd later film The Scapegoatin which Alec Guinness plays two roles as a dull Englishman and a ne’er do well Frenchman whom no one, except the Frenchman’s mistress, can tell apart

To the Public Danger (Terence Fisher, UK, 1948, 58 minutes)

Terence Fisher made his name as perhaps the best of the regular Hammer Studios directors. His career from the late 50s to the early 70s is littered with any number of Frankenstein, Dracula and other assorted monster titles. At his best his work was regarded as rather superior stuff.  Its limitations were that after awhile you’d seen it all and the variations just didn’t have a wallop. Hammer degenerated into soft core sex and so-called thrillers with titles like Maniac. Of course it was sometimes hard to know for sure just how good or bad things were because for quite some time the Australian censors routinely banned them.  To the Public Danger was Fisher’s second film and it’s quite something. Two upper (upper-middle maybe) class smarties turn up at a country pub. One is drunk already the other is a smoothie who sets his sights on the only woman in the room, an attractive if shallow young thing from the local chocolate factory who’s there with her dull and somewhat impoverished boyfriend (also from the factory). The girl complains of boredom because the Americans have gone home, the smoothie has a complete contempt for authority. She’s immediately impressed and they drink and drink and drink before all four head off somewhere in his car and trouble ensues. Violence escalates. The class distinctions are a provocative underlying element in driving the male enmity. Very short and very taut, it’s a model of smart, tense film-making and it’s in no way divorced from the circumstances of England at the time. 

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Reviving the Classics - John Baxter remembers Cecil B DeMille's CLEOPATRA (USA, 1934)

A SHOW OF HANDS. 

Cecil B DeMille (r) rehearses Henry Wilcoxon and
Claudette Colbert, Cleopatra

Gore Vidal said the first question he was asked on signing up for Ben Hur was “When a Roman sits down, what does he loosen?”  Advice on such challenges is not found in manuals of film acting.  One can only sympathise with Warren William and Henry Wilcoxon, who played Caesar and Marc Antony respectively in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 Cleopatra, since both wore those unfortunate Roman mini-skirts that expose the naked backside to unprotected contact with icy marble. 

It was unlike DeMille to ignore the matter, since, according to his sometime screenwriter Jesse Lasky Jnr, he placed more importance on the actions that accompanied a conversation than on anything said. Jesse Jnr worked on Reap the Wild Wind, The Ten Commandments and a number of other films for DeMille, and did a good imitation of CB’s oratorical whine. “I don’t give a good goddam what they say. Any fool can write dialogue. What I want to know is -what do they do with their hands?”

         To hear Lasky tell it, inventing bits of business took up most of his time. For one film, he gave the villain a shark’s tooth which he wore around his neck and periodically stabbed into the table to signify frustration. He had another dunk his cigar in whisky, permitting him to smoke and drink at the same time. 

Warren William as Caesar, Cleopatra

Other than that, his role in the DeMille entourage appears to have been less scenarist than whipping boy. The old tyrant found a special satisfaction in having the son of his one-time partner at his beck and call. To paraphrase de Rochefoucald, It is not enough to succeed: your best friend must fail, and Jesse Snr. failed spectacularly, first losing his money in the 1929 Crash, then being ousted in 1932 from the company he co-founded. 

Jesse Jnr. was too young to work on Cleopatra,but DeMille’s preoccupation with what characters do with their hands is already evident. How else to explain Marc Antony appearing with two Great Danes on a leash? For his part, Caesar plays with scale models of the latest in Roman high tech, pitching balls at recalcitrant Egyptians or implying their fate by touching a lever that thrusts a miniature spear-headed ram suggestively in their direction. 

So what did they do with their hands on those chilly marble seats? In their place, I’d sit on them.

 Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra wastes no time with toys. For Antony’s seduction, she literally pushes out the boat, luring him onto a barge the size of a liner for a glimpse of what he can expect if he leaves the Great Danes at home. DeMille isn’t as explicit as a recent London production of Antony and Cleopatra on which the curtain rose to reveal Antony on his knees, attending to the Imperial pudenda. But Colbert’s budget is considerably larger, allowing her to offer Wilcoxon a parade of production numbers worthy of Ziegfeld. 

It commences with a troupe of catwomen leading live leopards (left), followed by a hopefully well-sedated bull, on the back of which a rubber-jointed dancer performs a routine not described in the Stock Breeder’s Almanac. Agnes, DeMille’s niece, had this role first, but ankled, as they say in Variety, because of “creative differences” – whether with her uncle or the bull isn’t clear. There is no credit for her replacement, but I thought I recognised the agile and delightfully named Joyzelle Joyner, seen two years earlier in The Sign of the Cross, pitching deviant woo to Elissa Landi (below). 

The Sign of the Cross has, of course, Colbert again, playing the famously dissolute Poppaea, bathing in a swimming pool of milk. This being a DeMille film, the milk was genuine. After a full day’s shooting under hot lights, Colbert complained “Excuse me, but my bath is turning to cheese.” Later, some exhibitors being shown around the studio mistook the solidified milk for marble, with catastrophic results. (That story is rivalled by one about Noel Coward appearing in In Which We Serve. After three days bobbing in a studio tank as the captain of a torpedoed ship, he faced the rancid water on the last morning, made a perfect dive, and surfacing, trilled encouragingly “There’s dysentery on every rrripple!”) Aware of Claudette’s taste for an occasional lesbian adventure, CB enlivened the milk bath scene by having her invite a confidante to “take off your clothes, get in and tell me all about it.” And what they  did with their hands, we can only imagine.

Editor's Note (1): To watch a trailer featuring Cecil B DeMille himself  Just click here 

Editor's Note (2): John Baxter is a widely published author of autobiographies, fiction, film scripts, travel books and criticism. Among his recent contributions to the Film Alert 101 blog are posts on William A Wellman's THE HATCHET MAN, Mario Bava's LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIO/BLACK SUNDAY,The Netflix series HOLLYWOOD, and Vincente Minnelli's THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL Just click on the title to read the review. John is also the author of a recently self-published set of memoirs FILMSTRUCK: A LIFE IN THE MOVIES. You can read about it and purchase an e-copy if you click here

Plague Times Diary (35) - Jake Wilson spreads the word about the breadth on the streaming services

Re Ben Cho's  recently posted defence of Prime Video   

I keep tabs on new additions for my weekly streaming column published by The Age.   

Some Film Alert readers might be interested to know that a whole clutch of interesting Italian films showed up on Amazon Prime just recently, including Carmelo Bene’s first feature, Our Lady of the Turks (left). 

There are all sorts of other things on there too that don’t fall anywhere near the “trash” category: Boetticher’s tremendous A Time For Dying, for instance, in a much better copy than the one on YouTube. 

On the other hand, the version they just added of The Southerner is so poor I had to switch it off. Still, riches abound, if you’re prepared to dig.

Editor's Note: Jake's Most recent column pointed cinephiles at these films: The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1938, Amazon Prime), Montparnasse 19 (Jacques Becker, France, 1958, MUBI), Melo (Alain Resnais, France, 1986, MUBI), Casino (Martin Scorsese, USA, 1995, Netflix), The Producers (Mel Brooks, USA, 1967, MUBI)

Screening at the Online Sydney Film Festival - The extraordinary story of WOMEN OF STEEL and its director Robynne Murphy

Robynne Murphy at work

When career steelworker Robynne Murphy picked up her home video camera to record the stories of the remarkable Jobs for Women campaign she’d been involved in forty years previously, little did she know what she was getting into. But, in fact, Robynne had faced a similarly uncertain situation in 1980 when as a young activist she tried to get a job at BHP’s Port Kembla steelworks. Little had she known then that this step would embroil her in a relentless 14 year anti-discrimination campaign that would ultimately change Australian law. 


As the campaign grew, hundreds of other women joined, going from unemployment to direct action at the factory gates, unemployment again, and finally to the High Court of Australia. In the end, they won a landmark victory for women’s equality -- but it was often tough going, as the film shows so movingly.

In making WOMEN OF STEEL, so long after her last short film, Bellbrook(SFF 1974), Robynne had to face different but similarly difficult circumstances. By now living further down the South Coast, she had to regularly commute, a trip of over two hours, to Wollongong to find material and gather local participation in the project. She also needed to raise the budget for the history documentary’s costly archival footage without having the track record necessary to attract investment. 

Gaining support

Using the same approach to the film as she had to the Jobs for Women campaign, Robynne gradually recruited a local production team. She reached out for donations and assistance from individuals and organisations who understood the historical importance of the film.  And over time the support did come -- from nearly 500 individuals and organisations. They ranged from Sally McManus secretary of the ACTU to “Unemployed Seafarer” ($20), women young and old, filmmakers who understood, David Donaldson inaugural director of the 1954 Sydney Film Festival, former local MP/ACTU president Jennie George, historians and archivists, local people who remembered, trade unions and their members and, significantly, the South Coast Labor Council, local TV channel WIN 4 and the Illawarra Mercury newspaper. Women of Steel is, after all, that rarity in Australia — a genuine regional documentary.

Still, it was tough going. Robynne started filming by herself in 2008 and over the years as she gathered additional local helpers, they necessarily worked as volunteers or for “solidarity wages” whilst also attending to projects of their own. 

Researcher Graham Shirley, Robynne’s former colleague at the Australian Film & Television school – yes, she had once been one of the country’s first film students – helped find old television coverage of the campaign. But unearthing more personal material and memories required Robynne to track down the now scattered women from the campaign and follow the trail of old photographs and home movies. What a way to make a film! The completion date for Women of Steel kept receding into the future. 

Tragedy strikes

Then on November 26^th, 2019 tragedy struck the NSW South Coast. Robynne had been an environmental activist for many years, a founder of Wollongong’s Green Connect; she had even helped run a program at BHP to plant 100,000 trees in the then desolate surrounds of the steelworks. So, of course, when she moved to the banks of the Clyde River near Bateman’s Bay, she naturally joined her local Rural Fire Service. And in the Nelligen RFS she was tasked with driving the big truck – one of the few members with the necessary licence. 

All through the hot dry summer, as Robynne and the rest of the film team were trying to finish the film, they had also been watching the land dry out, saying nothing, trying not to alarm each other. But when inevitably the big fires did hit, Robynne was thrown onto the fire ground, constantly on coll out and facing traumatic conditions. She moved her film material and documents out of her house as it came under repeated threat but so dangerous were the catastrophic fires around her that work on the film went right out the window. 

It took nearly three months for sufficient rain to ease conditions and for Robynne to eventually manage to return to the film – albeit (as with most members of the RFS) greatly affected by what she had gone through. Not long after her return, with the final post-production work scheduled for completion in Tasmania, Covid-19 and its travel bans arrived…. 

As the film’s consulting producer, Martha Ansara, has observed, “The main quality required for making a film is stamina and as Robynne had proven her stamina with the Jobs for Women campaign and was producing a historically significant personal documentary, I thought I’d lend a hand. But to end up with a film in the Sydney Film Festival – this has been beyond expectations! When you’re in the midst of making a film, just as with making history itself, you’re always too close to truly grasp its significance.”

Director Robynne Murphy's Statement

When I left the steelworks after thirty years as a steelworker, I picked up my home video camera and began recording the stories of the migrant/working-class women with whom I had campaigned and worked. At that time, I had little understanding of the potential impact of these informal conversations. I soon realized that the natural strength and humour of these women were made for a documentary and that such a film would be one of th best ways of bringing our little-known campaign alive and ensuring that it takes its place within Australian history. 
Progressively, the more I worked on the film with our editor, the better I understood that bringing the collective voices and experiences of those involved in the campaign to viewers in a direct way — without preaching — could also reveal the strategies which led to our victory. In this way, WOMEN OF STEEL might inspire others who face some of the big problems which confront us today. 
The Women of Steel 'stars' are not politicians nor celebrities nor figureheads of any kind - but working-class women who, through tireless grassroots struggle and by gathering support and building alliances, stood up to a seemingly unbeatable foe, BHP (Broken Hill Pty Ltd.).

Editor's Note: I am one of more than 500 investors who provided funds to make the film. The film will be online day and night June 10-21 and anyone in Australia can buy a ticket:if you just click here