Polls, what are they good for? Absolutely nothing (well, then again…)

I mentioned below the recent announcement of the Sight and Sound poll of “The Greatest Movies of All Time.” Since there are very few “news” stories that involve classic and foreign film — you know, the  sort of intelligent, important filmmaking that never plays at your local cineplex and is harder to acquire from the lazyman’s video rental scheme (Netflix) — I did want to set aside the seemingly unending flow of Deceased Artistes (a bunch of whom I am leapfrogging over) and talk about the poll and its importance. It’s an excuse to discuss the relative merits of classic and timeless cinema for a bit, which is never, ever unwelcome.

You won’t find me discussing at any length any of the other “greatest film” polls, generally because they are voted upon only by folks in one country (usually America), and they mostly contain whatever is thought to be the best at any given moment (thus, the entry of Titanic into the AFI roster after it had become the biggest box-office hit of all time).

The importance of the Sight and Sound poll is four-fold: it includes a better class of movie; it is voted on by a more serious kind of voter than participates in, say, the Oscars, or a survey conducted by a mainstream magazine or website (I still say “magazine” first — I’m old-fashioned); S&S only conducts the poll once every ten years; and the poll’s results rarely include anything that could be deemed “spankin’ new.”

For me, the last consideration is the most important since, as noted, polls of great movies are constantly littered with what the voters saw most recently, or what has made a lot of money, or has been discussed an enormous amount. The main "news story" concerning the 2012 results of the Sight and Sound poll for me wasn’t the topping of Citizen Kane by Vertigo — it was the fact that not one but three silent films (from three different countries) were in the Top Ten.

Instead of Wings or a Griffith classic (too controversial these days, anyway) or Metropolis, the silents in the Ten were three undisputed masterworks: Murnau’s Sunrise, Dreyer’s truly transcendent Passion of Joan of Arc, and, a surprise for me, Dziga-Vertov’s The Man With a Movie Camera.

Sunrise is, along with L’Atalante (also on the list at No. 12), one of the greatest movie love stories ever. Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the most visually beautiful, well-acted, and spiritually transformative films ever. Dziga-Vertov’s classic is a harder-to-categorize mixture of documentary, essay film, travelogue, and “reality transformed” fiction film. All the films in the Top Ten of the poll deserve to be there, but the presence of Man indicated right off the bat that this was indeed a truly serious survey.

As for the Vertigo vs. Kane “furor,” it’s a non-starter. Kane still came in at No. 2, is on any short list of the greatest films ever made, and is an eternal model for filmmakers (plus an astonishing accomplishment for a first-time, 26-year-old director). Vertigo, on the other hand, is a wildly imperfect film, and that is one of its most alluring aspects.

For me, the importance of Vertigo doesn’t have to do with Hitchcock’s visuals, which are exemplary as always, or the eye-grabbing primary color scheme. Vertigo  is one of the few films in which Hitchcock seemed to surrender to the hero’s plight (The Wrong Man is another). Instead of using Jimmy Stewart as a chess piece or a victimized puppet (as he did with Cary Grant, Farley Granger, Ingrid Bergman, and many more, including a procession of icy blondes), Hitch *inhabits* the character and seems to be sharing his dilemmas.

The trumped-up “battle” between Kane and Vertigo was situated in the online press as being a debate over the relative merits of Welles and Hitchcock — which brings us back to the quote from critic Mark Shivas that I used in my tribute to Andrew Sarris: "Welles is concerned with the ordinary feelings of extraordinary people and Hitchcock with the extraordinary feelings of ordinary people."

What this shifting of positions in the poll more accurately represents, though, is the difference between a perfect film (Kane) and an imperfect one (Vertigo). Hitchcock was clearly so bound up in his protagonist’s emotions and moods that he decided to forego the mystery entirely and reduce the moments of suspense to a single, dreamlike situation — falling from a great height — played over and over again.

This is not to negate Hitchcock’s enormous talent, it is to acknowledge that the film that has become one of the best-regarded of his works is one of the few in which he “lost control” and surrendered to emotion. I remember that when I finally saw the film (at an NYU screening, when it was virtually impossible to view in the early Eighties) I was surprised at its depth of emotion, as well its overt fetishism (there is always fetishism in Hitchcock, but it is front and center in Vertigo).

Thus, in my opinion, Kane would still be the film that can best inspire and instruct young filmmakers (since it has what McLuhan called “an inventory of effects”), while Vertigo is an un-duplicatable character study/melodrama (I know, I know, Brian De Palma's countless "homages" in the Seventies and Eighties… I like some of those pictures a lot). It is a one-off that offers far less of a class in film structure, visual composition, and editing than Kane and the other best-known Hitchcock films.

And while Kane still remains one of the most perfect pics ever made, it’s good to see it occasionally moved aside on the list by yet another revered classic. The strength of the Sight and Sound poll is indeed that the “canon” of classic films does stick around on the list, while newer challenging features by other critical favorites join them.

Thus, the list includes the old masters (Ford, Eisenstein, Fellini, Bergman, Dryer, Lang, Murnau, Antonioni), as well as those who learned their art from watching films (Kubrick, Truffaut), those who went to film school (Coppola, Scorsese), and the modern masters (Lynch, Wong Kar-Wai, Kiarostami, Tarr),

Certain filmmakers scored more than one film in the full list of fifty. Tarkovsky scored three, and out of the seven films he made, that’s a cool half of his output — Vigo’s timeless L’Atalante represents one-fourth of his work, but that’s because he died at such a young age.

One of my all-time favorites, Godard, is represented by four films: A bout de soufflé, Le Mepris, Pierrot Le Fou, and Histoire(s) du Cinema, which qualified as the second newest movie in the countdown, since its last installment was released in 1998 (the latest was from 2000 — In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-Wai). Clearly the amount of great films that Godard has made split the vote four ways, so none of his films hit the Top Ten — I’m sure he cares nothing about this accolade, but it’s interesting to consider that his slot may well have been taken by one of his heroes, the man he named his Marxist filmmaking collective after, Dziga-Vertov.

As far as items missing from the fifty films? I’d note that comedy is underrepresented — one Chaplin (City Lights), one Keaton (The General), Playtime by Jacques Tati, and Some Like It Hot by Wilder. No Duck Soup, Annie Hall, The Apartment, or Dr. Strangelove, but then again humor is just as personal as what turns a person on (and there ain’t a single erotic film on the list — unless you want to count the lesbian scene in Mulholland Dr.).

It was interesting to see one musical on the list, Singin’ in the Rain — which is indeed a comedy, but works far better when it’s a musical.

Also missing is any inclusion of a film by the three best-known members of the loosely knit community of filmmakers labeled the “New German Cinema.” I assume that, if Fassbinder was considered, the sheer amount of great films he made once again split the vote. No one would want to go for the most celebrated film, The Marriage of Maria Braun, when he made many better and more challenging works, among them Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Perhaps Wenders is no longer in fashion, but some of his films are among the best road movies and character studies of all time. Herzog remains a major force in world cinema (if also now a show-biz personality whose public persona is better known than his films to many folks). One would think that Aguirre, the Wrath of God would’ve qualified for the list, but perhaps that is “out of fashion” at the moment with critics and academics. I can only think that the German filmmakers of the Seventies will return to this poll in the near future, since several of their films are definitely “for the ages.”

And connecting this all back to my last post, I will note that not only was Chris Marker’s favorite film, Vertigo, voted in at No. 1 on the poll, but his best-known short film — in my opinion another perfect film — La Jetée came in under the wire at No. 50. It would no doubt please Chris that his film was at one end of the poll, and Vertigo — which spawned the tree-trunk scene in La Jetée (see my Marker tribute below) — was at the other.

No. 1: Hitchcock on Vertigo, from the Truffaut interviews (“… she has stripped, but won’t take her knickers off…”):

No. 50: La Jetée with English narration:

Hitchcock features and other goodies hidden among the public domain clips

I'm fascinated by what people upload in the way of classic cinema on YouTube, and am particularly interested by people uploading entire features, particularly ones that are copyrighted and could come tumbling down at any time. Thus, I humbly submit a few links to a person who's uploaded some public domain features, and has also thrown in a classic Roger Corman (featuring the best acting job by William Shatner, pre-Tiberius Kirk), the entire 1962 feature The Intruder aka "Shame."



The same person has put up the entirety of Hitchcock's Stage Fright, which is not primo Hitch, but does contain one of his few attempts to film a musical number (albeit one occurring on a stage) and an admitted "cheat," wherein we see a falsified flashback.

More importantly, he (I know, I know, I keep assuming these posters are men, since I know that guys have infinite patience for fanboy activity) has uploaded all of the much better Shadow of a Doubt, which contains a wonderfully creepy performance by the great Joseph Cotten. The coolest part in the entire movie (which is a classic Hitch construction, filled with doubling and identification with the killer figure) occurs at 3:00-4:30 point of this segment. “Are they?” Joe Cotten kicks ass.



The same poster has put up the only Elia Kazan noir, the "neo-Realist" noir Panic in the Streets, some fan-made music videos for songs by the horror-movie obsessed Texas psych legend Roky Erickson and a Here’s Lucy production number featuring the always sexy-as-anything Ann Margret. Also, this rather lonely and downbeat PSA featuring the young Billy Mumy (I’d swear the voice of the narrator is that of young Dick Cavett). Television is sanctified for kid's protection — that's why he's so depressed!

When Alfred Hitchcock met... James Brown?

An unlikely meeting of immortals, posted on the occasion of Mike Douglas's death. Here's my obit on the old Funhouse blog:

What better way to recover from a cold/fever bug that floored me for the majority of last week than by digging up the most obscure footage I had in the “vault” to celebrate the passing of the great afternoon talk show host of the 1960s and ’70s, Mike Douglas? Mike was one of those people who drifted into the talk-show world by way of the big-band scene, as did Merv Griffin: Mike was a singer for Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge (no word on any feuds between Mike and the greatest-named singer of all time, Ish Kabibble). He kept right on singing as he became the friend to all homemakers during the period from 1961-82 — his “Men in My Little Girl’s Life” ain’t as catchy as “Daddy, Don’t You Walk So Fast,” and he sure seemed square when you stacked him up against the king of maudlin family-tunes of that time, Bobby Goldsboro, but he was a helluva lot more convincing playing the charming dad than Art Linkletter (now, we won’t comment on that simpering voice he did for the daughter in the song — I don’t wanna be snotty, the guy’s dead, fer chrissakes!).

In the mid-90s, select reruns of the Douglas show started being featured on VH-1 in the “Archives” series that also included music-themed episodes of Dick Cavett and David Frost. The Douglas shows were immediately jarring because of the really bizarre juxtapositions of guests. The recent Dick Cavett box sets released on DVD have shown how his bookers also indulged in some very weird pairings (the legendary Janis and Raquel show, or Janis and Gloria Swanson, or how about that Stevie Wonder/Elsa Lanchester/Alain Delon/Tex Ritter colloquy?). Cavett, however, somehow pulled a coherent conversation out of these really insane meetings of people from different disciplines. Mike just, sorta, had ’em, well… sit around and act really serious like they were saying something important. Or joke about how the tough the Business is. Or remark how it’s great to be nice and charity is a good thing. No profound, big-time thoughts on the Douglas show.

The legendary week of John Lennon/Yoko Ono-cohosted programs from ’72 — which got released on VHS, and never have seen the light of day on DVD — showed what happened when you had really timely, important issues being presented on Douglas. Need I refer you to the glorious episode when Bobby Seale presents a very sober-minded and serious discussion of the Panther Party’s good works in bringing food to inner-city children. His segment (featuring extremely rare 8mm footage of the foodbanks the Panthers ran) is followed by an appareance (Mike’s bookers at work here) the Ace Trucking Company, who perform the immortal “Ahhhhhhhh, you doesn’t hasta call me Johnson!!! You can call me Ray, you can call me Jay….” (I can do the whole thing, stop me now, someone.)

Granted, the show was 90 minutes long and on five days a week, so the guests had to be stacked up like cordwood, and very often they had nothing whatsoever in common with the week-long “cohost.” VH1 actually presented two of the more absurd four-way encounters: the first is the appearance of scruffy young Tom Waits, still in the process of refining his world-weary beatjazz nighthawk-at-the-diner character; Tom’s fellow guests were Glenda Jackson (whatever did happen to her? Come back to film, “Stevie”!), a very motherly Marvin Hamlisch, and a properly sprightly Arte Johnson. The second is the clip above, which features a daytime talkshow appearance by the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitch has nominally come on to promote what might be his worst American film Topaz, and gets to shake hands with the three guests who are already on the panel: bestselling poet and songwriter Rod McKuen (“Seasons in the Sun,” Listen to the Warm), Joan Rivers (when she was a mousy housewife comedian you could look at without wincing), and the One and Only James Brown. Yes, the two legends from completely different disciplines were on the same stage, just because the bookers decided that was the best day to get ’em both on the air. (One pairing that made a bit more sense that was shown on VH1 and has since gone into SEVERE limbo — what’s going on with the DVD folks??? — included Muhammed Ali and Sly Stone, who didn’t exactly like each other.)
The VH1 host of “Archives,” John Fugelsang, went on to mock Brown for getting the name of Psycho wrong, and calling it "Homicidal." How many people think that the Godfather of Soul was referring to the Hitchcockian William Castle 1961 chiller of the same name?

My own memories of the Douglas show are comforting ones of checking it out when homework wasn’t an issue, and there was nothing better on the other channels (as a kid, you’re really only attracted by the guest rosters on these afternoon talk shows). The show got none of my youthful enthusiasm, as did the better “4:30 Movie” entries, but for his 21 years of doling out placid, homespun entertainment (and yes, for having oddball moments like the one where Totie Fields outed Gene Simmons as Jewish [available on YouTube]), you hadda love this somewhat overripe “boy singer” with the imposing looking hair.


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