His Three Daughters

Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon

I'm kind of on the fence about Azazel Jacobs' His Three Daughters which is currently streaming on Netflix. The film is a high concept chamber piece set almost wholly in the apartment of a dying man in the Bronx. One of the titular daughters, played by Natasha Lyonne, has been living with her father and caring for him for years. Now that the end is nigh, the other two daughters, both living in tonier circumstances, temporarily move in to assist and bear witness to their old man's passing. The film follows a shopworn formula. The differing siblings clash and hash out old grievances, but, ultimately, bond over their shared grief and reach a greater understanding of each other. I found the overall concept hackneyed. In a less than generous moment, I retitled the film The Odd Throuple with Lyonne in the Oscar role, Carrie Coon as the fussy Felix, and Elizabeth Olsen as Mountain Girl. 

Still, despite the predictability of the plot, I was never bored by the film. Mostly this was due to the perfect casting and skill of the three leads. As in his previous features, Jacobs gives enough space to his performers within his unfussy mise-en-scene to let their efforts breathe. I also liked the way Jacobs imbued certain objects in the apartment, a recliner and a New York Jets towel to name two, as totems of their departing owner. The triteness of His Three Daughters prevented me from responding to it emotionally, but I cannot deny that the project was skillfully executed.                

No Man of Her Own

Lyle Bettger, Barbara Stanwyck and John Lund

Mitchell Leisen's No Man of Her Own is a better than average neo-noir from 1950. This film has nothing to do with the other Paramount release with this particular title from 1932 and was based on a Cornell Woolrich novel with a better title, 1948's I Married A Dead Man. The material has been adapted numerous times, the most notable being a 1996 remake, released as Mrs. Winterbourne with Ricki Lake in the role played in 1950 by Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck's character is a pregnant and unmarried woman whose heel of a boyfriend (Lyle Bettger) has spurned her and given her a $5 bill and a train ticket out of town. On the train, she befriends a young couple who are also expecting. After a bathroom scene that beggars belief (in which Stanwyck puts on the wedding ring of her newfound chum), the train derails and Stanwyck wakes in the hospital with the staff telling her that she has given birth to a boy, but has lost her husband. 

Stanwyck's character is put upon and broke, as she often was earlier in her career, thus she eagerly impersonates the dead woman. Luckily her in-laws have never seen a picture of their son's new bride, so Stanwyck moves into their well-appointed manse in small town Illinois. She gets along well with her in-laws and draw the romantic interest of the dead man's brother (John Lund), but her past catches up with her in the form of a blackmailing Bettger. The film's screenwriters, Sally Benson and Catherine Turney, retain the flashback structure of the book in which we first meet Stanwyck and Lund, now wed, waiting in that manse as the police arrive to, we think, arrest one or both of them for murder. This opening device is effectively shot by Leisen who tracks the camera down the all American street and into the protagonists' living room where a pan lovingly caresses the interior. Leisen, best known for his gay comedies, was reaching the end of his tenure at Paramount, but was trying to adapt to changing tastes. The opening strikes an interesting Hitchcockian note of evil lurking in the heart of the homeland. 

Not all of the screenwriter's efforts prove fruitful. Stanwyck is given voiceover monologues expressing her character's anxieties and dilemmas, but they prove cumbersome and redundant. On the plus side, there is a distinct feminist slant to the scenario that is not in the Woolrich original that helps make Stanwyck's character more sympathetic. Certainly, this is one of the earliest American features to feature a Caesarian section. Whoever was responsible for the train wreck and subsequent hospital sequence in which Stanwyck undergoes a C-section to deliver her premature child deserves kudos for boldness at the very least. A mirror in the railcar bathroom explodes into shards, the railcar set rotates, and then we see the hospital from Stanwyck's POV, first from a gurney then from an operating table. This is a similar POV to the one Frank Borzage utilized from the perspective of a wounded Gary Cooper in his version of A Farewell to Arms.

Unfortunately, No Man of Her Own loses some steam after this and becomes a very familiar
 melodrama. The cast is, in general, adequate rather than outstanding. Bettger was always an effective villain, so much so that he became typecast. John Lund's performances always verge on the catatonic, but Leisen got him to produce a faint simulacrum of passion here. Milburn Stone, "Doc" on Gunsmoke, is effective in a bit part. Stanwyck is always nonpareil, but it is Jane Cowl who delivers the most memorable performance as her doomed mother-in-law. Cowl was mostly known as a stage actress, only appearing on film in a few silents and a handful of roles after World War 2. That Cowl was soon to depart this veil herself gives her sensitive performance an added sense of rue that she did not leave us more of her work on film. 

The Debussy Film

Vladek Sheybal and Oliver Reed

Ken Russell's The Debussy Film is a black and white television film done for the BBC's Monitor program in 1965. Both Google and Wikipedia list this as a documentary, but I think this is nonsensical. The film starts as a straight ahead documentary using still photographs by Debussy's friend and agent provocateur Pierre Louys, but shifts into reflexively post-modern territory by focusing on a film crew recreating episodes from Debussy's life. Oliver Reed stars as a version of himself playing the French composer. Vladek Sheybal is Russell's stand-in, playing both the director and Louys in the film within the film. Annette Robertson has the lead female role as Gaby, the most put upon of Debussy's many girlfriends. She plays the masochistic female role that Glenda Jackson ended up playing in Russell's ouevre. The many depredations Debussy heaps upon Gaby resound ironically with the knowledge that Russell and Robertson were having a fling during the filming.

Russell had resorted to documentary work for the BBC after the failure of his first feature, French Dressing in 1964. However, he was too restless and rebellious to churn out staid documentary fare. He wanted to utilize actors to recreate the lives of artists with the flamboyance employed by avant-garde and balmier commercial directors. The Debussy Film marks the beginning of a period of promise for Russell before his better instincts gave way to hysteria. Not that there aren't examples of incipient hysteria and, worse, cutesiness in The Debussy Film. There is a nutty section combining footage of mock duels and bumper cars scored to the Ride of the Valkyries. The early days of Debussy and Gaby's romance is rendered in silent slapstick style to equally stupefying effect. You can't say that Russell wasn't consistent in his approach, 1975's Lisztomania has Roger Daltrey mimicking Charlie Chaplin for similarly mystifying reasons.

There are redeeming features to this one, though. Reed, in the first of many collaborations with Russell, is in fine form. Only Russell and David Cronenberg were able to mine Reed's more subtle side. In Reed's later and lesser work, he would often resort to slapdash bombast. Maybe he knew he could rein it in on a Russell set because the director would be bringing the bombast; see especially Reed's relative restraint amidst the madness of The Devils. Russell seems to regard Debussy as a musical genius and a lower class lout with a streak of sadism towards his female admirers and this conception of the role is certainly right in Reed's wheelhouse. He and Robertson have a nicely rancid rapport. Vladek Sheybal, another Russell regular, indulges in a spasmodic performance that points towards a career in which he played a lot of icy Iron Curtain villains.

Oliver Reed

The script for The Debussy Film is by Mervyn Bragg who would go on to concoct the screenplay for The Music Lovers, a much more conventional biopic that signaled the start of Russell's artistic decline. In The Debussy Film, Bragg and Russell chose to use a didactic method of telling Debussy's story that is influenced by documentary narration, but is not encumbered by a straightforward structure or high culture stuffiness. The constant use of voiceover narration points us to Debussy's influences without leading us by the nose. This approach yields many fine moments, particularly Reed's sensitive readings of Debussy's diary. A visual survey of the paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites and Whistler that influenced Debussy's artistic approach is a highlight, though it did make me wish that the BBC had given the Russell the funds to do this film in color. 

The films about composers and artists Russell made in the 1960s represent his high water mark before he lost all sense of restraint. I don't hate Russell's output, I prefer him to, for example, the equally "outrageous" Baz Luhrmann, but it is slim pickings in Russell's ouevre after Women in Love. It is as if in these films made before his brief commercial heyday, Russell could sublimate his titanic ego in the service of honoring the artistic greats. I remember baiting my high school music teacher, the grandiloquent and gentlemanly John Merrill, about his opinion towards Russell in the 1970s. I knew that a man who described, somewhat facetiously, rock music as blasphemy probably didn't grok the director's work. This was true, but he surprised me by admitting that he very much liked Russell's film about Delius, Song of Summer, released on television in 1968. This happened, I would one day discover, to be Russell's favorite amongst all his films. I hope to track it down one day, but Mr. Merrill's opinion greatly impressed upon the young Biff the importance of keeping an open mind, even when regarding an auteur as disreputable as Ken Russell.