In Which We Discover Another Subject Worthy Of Our Attention

Nice Men

by ELEANOR MORROW

Laura
dir. Otto Preminger
88 minutes

The scene in Laura that always gets to me has police detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) sitting in the house of the titular woman who has been murdered. It is late evening, and he gulps down several glasses of Laura's scotch before passing out in front of a portrait of her. He is awoken several hours later by the front door opening. It is Laura (Gene Tierney), alive! He evinces no shock at this, neither does Laura. A man is waiting for a woman when she comes home. He has read her diary and her letters, and knows more about her than she does herself. At first Laura is upset by this, but then she begins to look at the man who violated her privacy with dreamy eyes.

No one wanted to direct Laura. The project had a rough script and the head of Fox, Daryl Zanuck, was himself overly invested in the project. The title character, Zanuck complained in a memo, should "come into the story like a breath of spring, like something out of this world." It would be difficult to feasibly make the weird milieu, the disturbed sexuality at the heart of the piece work realistically. Zanuck told the film's producer, Otto Preminger, to find Laura a director.

Preminger suggested Lewis Milestone, formerly Leib Milstein. Like himself, Milestone was originally an Eastern European Jew, and he had no intention of working closely with Preminger. "Preminger probably knows what to do with the script," Milestone told Zanuck. "He should direct it; I won't." Preminger moved onto an Armenian-American named Rouben Mamoulian, who needed a job badly.

Preminger hired his own actor to play the antagonist, Waldo Lydecker, and Mamoulian quickly had Otto banned from the set. Otto was unhappy to be out of the loop, but Zanuck was even more displeased with Mamoulian's work. He was furious with Preminger for the choice. "You should have stayed in New York or Vienna where you belong," he informed Preminger. The meeting that followed between the three of them featured Preminger performed entire scenes from Laura which he had committed to memory, to explain how the actors should handle them. Zanuck was impressed, and fired Mamoulian the next day.

As the new director, Preminger restarted Laura's production completely. Otto Preminger was more well-known as a Jewish actor who played a terrific Nazi in many films. Bald and severe-looking, he nevertheless held a lot of appeal for the women of the Los Angeles area, much to his wife's chagrin. Preminger famously had a long affair with Gypsy Rose Lee, but he was only kind in his romantic relationships. As a director, he knew what he wanted and anyone who was in the way would be run the fuck over.

instructing an actor how to do a romantic scene

Vincent Price was a bit miffed – he had gotten along well with Mamoulian. But Preminger convinced Price that his approach to the material was better. As Price recalled to Val Robins, "The New York society depicted in the film are all darling, sweet and charming and clever and bright – on the surface. But underneath they're evil. 'Mamoulian is a nice man, isn't he Vincent?' Otto asked me.' And I said, 'Yes, he is a nice man.' Otto said, 'I'm not, and most of my friends are these type of people.'"

These types of people were the three gay actors who Preminger placed around Laura. As Laura's mentor Waldo Lydecker, Clifton Webb was an effete homosexual who could also vacillate between a softness and a deviant masculinity. (Preminger plucked him from the stage, which you can tell by the way he moves.) Vincent Price's vague sexuality is creepy in all his movies, but here he is particularly amusing as Laura's enormous suitor. Judith Anderson portrayed a lesbian who gave Price's character money.

Gene Tierney was Laura, and the role that would help define her career was not appealing on set. She was angered that Preminger's first choice had been the greatly inferior Jennifer Jones. She grew to respect the director, writing that "unlike certain other directors of that period, he had no insecurity and did not feel obligated to attempt the seduction of his leading ladies." Tierney was gorgeous but also somehow incomplete, traits that the character also embodied.

A performer himself, no director could match Preminger's instruction of an acting style that was both dramatic yet subtle enough for the near-sighted scrutiny of film work. Viewing the unlikeability of its characters up close made Laura such a different experience for audiences. Preminger was also a technical virtuoso. He loved to move the camera around to give his scenes further context and meaning, and his command of how production design should add to the atmosphere without drawing attention to itself is sublime.

Zanuck blanched at the first cut of Preminger's masterpiece, suggesting that they insert a sequence suggesting the third act was all a dream. "What they came up with was just unbelievable," Preminger later said. He was not afraid to challenge his boss, and as time went on Zanuck would depend on Preminger to step in for his directors if a project was not on time or over budget. After a positive response to the cut from critic Walter Winchell, Zanuck seemed to realize he was out of his depth and allowed Preminger to restore the original ending, which explained that Lydecker was the killer.

Watching Laura a second time, I myself began to question whether this is completely true. Detective McPherson is told the long tale of Laura's ascent in the advertising world by Waldo Lydecker. On Tuesdays and Fridays, says, they would stay in, cook, and he would read his newspaper newspaper columns while Laura sat on his lap. This background information, presented as straight truth, is actually unreliable narration. We do not question what we are told since people in general rarely disbelieve bad things they hear about others from their own mouths.

The problem and virtue of flattery is that it is expected to be returned in kind.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which Dan Stevens Is Your Rumpled Warden For Now

Attack by Wolves

by ELEANOR MORROW

Beauty and the Beast
dir. Bill Condon
118 minutes

Beast (Dan Stevens) looks like a vaguely unkempt man, the sort who sleeps on a couch. He is starved for female company, or any company at all to be completely honest. His bestial qualities are not many, basically he doesn't use utensils or say please. In this reenactment of the 1991 film, the fantastic songs of Alan Mencken and Howard Ashman are supplemented by new music that adds about as much as Emma Watson does to the role of Belle.

Now 26, Watson's girlish charm evaporated quickly. She is now a woman in middle age. "They think I'm strange in the village," Belle informs Dan Stevens, who is looking at her like, is it really kind to compare our two situations? The only odd thing about Belle is that she always wears the same dress. Belle does not seem to understand the reason she is stared at is because of a man: specifically her father (Kevin Kline).

Kline's role is rather thankless. The fact of his poor parenting makes substantially more sense in the Bill Condon version, since while an animated character pissing away her day reading books seems fine and dandy, Emma Watson doing the same is a less enviable life goal. Belle doesn't want to marry Gaston (Luke Evans), which makes sense, since in this version Gaston is a decade her senior and Evans' face implies he has had a hard life.

None of these actors can sing worth a shit outside of the specific ones that Condon has recruited for the purpose. Whoever is doing Watson's vocals is particularly inept, making some of the numbers sound like the sea chantys you might hear from actual reenacters at a local seaport. The visual look of the film also suffers from this pseudo-realist aesthetic. Instead of giving us these characters reimagined in an actual society, the environments look staged and reduced from their original versions.

Stevens is a fine Beast to the extent that he makes voice acting into a character beneath the effects. Watson is particularly awful as Belle – perhaps because she has never actually been anguished or agonized in life, her method of showing any displeasure comes to simply pursing her lips as if she is suffering a mild ulcer. She never really touches Beast or invades his personal space at all. During the sequence where Beast is recovering from an attack by wolves she seems vaguely uncaring towards him, like the main method by which any human being relates to her is one of inconvenience.

Using magic, Beast takes her to Paris, where the power of imagination allows Watson to whine about her mother dying in the city. Thus she does not ever want to return to society. Instead of forcing her to change and adapt to the world, as the lyrics of the film's signature song suggest Beast does, it adapts to her. In Beast's immense library, he tells Belle that she can have it if she wants. What isn't given to her? Given that theme, maybe the choice of Ms. Watson for the role does not seem so strange.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which Kem Nunn Did Not Get Along With His Shrink

Four People

by ELEANOR MORROW

Chance
creators Kem Nunn and Alexandra Cunningham
Hulu

"God is an American," it must have occurred to Hugh Laurie at some point. He has spent much of the second half of his career with the best American accent he can muster. There were American men who talked the way that Hugh Laurie does to his wife and she to him; in the 18th century, they lived in mansions in Virginia and were at home in the country. While he filmed House he spent most of the year away from his wife and kids, and of course on the show, where he portrayed a perpetually cranky doctor, he did not have either.

Laurie is deeply acquainted with the subject of depression as well. Despite the fact that he is a semi-capable neuropsychiatrist, whatever that is, Dr. Eldon Chance is suffering from this familiar phenomenon. It began shortly before the divorce with his wife, Carla, initiated when she began fucking her personal trainer. Carla (the hard-to-look-at Diane Farr) has one main complaint about her soon-to-be ex-husband. He is not decisive enough – he doesn't make things happen, he simply receives them when they do.

Chance seems to take this characterization as a personal challenge. Novelist Kem Nunn (Tapping the Source) used Chance to fold a book-length indictment of the institution of psychiatry into a noirish murder mystery. Nunn never says so directly, but he hates shrinks. He finds them lacking from every conceivable angle, and the man he loathes the most in the genre is Dr. Freud. The only thing he believes Freud is any good at is writing – identifying psychiatric treatment with what he does, bullshit, is the most backhanded compliment Nunn can pay to this troubled profession.

Dr. Chance does not really treat patients often. His position in the medical firmament is that of a diagnostician, and the reason he seeks this role is because he is frequently alarmed by the intensity of the empathy he feels for others. This experience scares him again and again, giving him insight into himself. We thus see therapy as an act that exists mainly for the person perpetrating the dialogue. In addition, it is key for the economic sustenance of therapist, and thus this arrangement can never be wholly positive no matter how genuine the concern on the part of the practitioner. There is always poison in the drink.

Chance refers Jaclyn Blackstone (Gretchen Mol) to a psychiatrist better equipped to deal with her multiple-personality disorder, Dr. Suzanne Silver (LisaGay Hamilton). The two discuss their patient in extensive scenes which allow Nunn to display how self-involved and ill-equipped they are to treat this woman. Therapy, Nunn argues, is like groping around in the dark for another person and finding only a mirror when you flick the light on. Dr. Silver is most upset about how long she had to wait for her lunch.

Once he begins fucking his patient, Dr. Chance is still referring to the literature, caught up in his shifting view of a person about whom he never really cares enough to get to know. "Freud had famously said that he had come to regard any sexual act as one involving at least four people," Nunn has Dr. Chance think in the novel. "Chance had no idea how many of them were there in the room, coming and going at all hours of day and night, but between the two of them it was how it had been with the madman among the tombs, that their number was legion." The analysis itself is the only guide a lost soul has available to him.

Despite its San Francisco setting, the environments that surround Dr. Chance never really play a huge part in the novel. Nunn's collaborator Alexandra Cunningham and director Lenny Abrahamson (Room) have made a point of indicting San Francisco as well. The separation between the haves and have not could not be more apparent. Chance uses a homosexual black man (Clarke Peters) to sell his furniture, and befriends the man's in-house carpenter, Darius (the brilliant Ethan Suplee). Like any tourist who stays too long, he does not know anything about such types, and endeavors to learn.

In the character of Darius, Nunn manifests his most appealing creation – a self-proclaimed veteran capable of inflicting violence on everyone but Chance himself. Laurie makes a point of not appearing too physically frail, in contrast to his most famous role, but he struggles to compete with Darius and the litany of more present people that fill the rest of the narrative: his troubled patient (a harried-looking Mol), her mysterious husband (Paul Adelstein), and his troubled daughter (Stefania Owen).

Like much of Nunn's work, Chance seems to operate with its own set of moral strictures and bears little resemblance to the contemporary world or current events. This gives the series a certain timeless feeling, and many times it channels the never-ending atmosphere of another noir, Vertigo, with which it shares a city and many themes. If we really believe what we are seeing, we risk incriminating ourselves. Thus it is only possible to watch Chance in a detached way, to hope that we are not as these people are.

There is no cinematic mood more difficult to sustain than menace. At times Chance seems to thrive on this not-knowing, fearful state, but it is much more achievable in the short running time of a feature. Stretching out this sensation into multiple seasons is just that: a stretch. We cannot possibly identify with a group of people who only see themselves as victims or perpetrators, and the uneasy feeling never coalesces into an understanding that could make either side any kind of a victor.

By the end of Chance we have not found anyone we really like. As Nunn puts it, there are feeders and receivers, and the world is full of the latter, perhaps completely full. This meaningless binary is even sadder if it might, in some respects, be true.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.