High Time

Blake Edwards' High Time is a simple minded Bing Crosby vehicle that Edwards transforms into a pop tone poem of color and music. The story of the film is oft repeated dreck: a successful middle-aged businessman enrolls in college to see what he missed by not getting his sheepskin. This is a tale that has been told many a time in the cinema, the Rodney Dangerfield starrer Back to School has virtually the same plot. Garson Kanin is credited with the story and the Waldman brothers (The Party, The Return of the Pink Panther) the screenplay. The project was first pitched as a Gary Cooper vehicle, but then tailored for Der Bingle. He plays Harvey Howard, owner of a chain of "smokehouse" restaurants. We first see him being let off at college by his disapproving twenty something children. However, Harvey instantly bonds with his dorm mates, played by Fabian, Richard Beymer, and Patrick Adiarte.

The trio along with the always welcome Tuesday Weld are twisting away to Harvey's le jazz hot records when they meet. Edwards shoots the interiors theatrically. Transition sequences are titled cartoons with student extras performing like stagehands. The colors are bright and geometric patterns are repeated as a motif. Static scenes of singing and dialogue are alternated with spasms of choreographed action that verges on dance. Bing, Fabian, and the gang warbling "It Come Upon a Midnight Clear" in front of a white Christmas tree is juxtaposed with an antic snowball fight. The morning routine of the dorm mates is fast cranked like a silent comedy. Edwards treats the thin plot as a revue, a series of skits to be enlivened and united by color, movement, and music. There is no effort to move Bing into the age of rock and roll. He and the kids are listening to Henry Mancini's version of big band jazz not Elvis and Bo Diddley. There is no attempt at realism in this mild fantasy, which ends with Crosby "flying" over his graduation, and that is why Mancini's vivid score does more than any element of this piece of pop ephemera to hold it together.

Tuesday Weld and Bing Crosby

The cartoon like approach that Edwards employs, similar to Frank Tashlin, is not only appropriate to the featherweight nature of High Time, but also to the demands of making a Technicolor picture in Cinemascope. As in a lot of 'scope pictures, characterization takes second place to spectacle: in this case, sporting events, bonfires, hay rides, separate dormitories, and phone booth stuffing (look it up, kids). Bing is the same as ever, contentedly coasting along. Beymer is more spritely than usual: an Edwards effect. Weld's part is a boy crazy cliche, she even flirts with Bing, but she is always peaches and cream to me. Fabian is hopeless, but I think he was a better actor than Rick Nelson. As a crooner, he was pretty lousy, maybe the worst pin-up singer ever except for the terminally flat Bobby Sherman. Fabian sings a few bars of "Foggy Dew", a tip of the hat to the burgeoning folk movement I guess, but the number is thankfully truncated. Fabian is especially unconvincing as a basketball point guard, but I watched his ineptitude wistfully. Soon, he and the other payola assisted teen idols, like Frankie Avalon and James Darren, who were manufactured to be the new Elvis after the King was drafted, were to be swept away by the rising tide of Beatlemania.

Nicole Maurey plays Bing's romantic interest, a divorced French professor. Maurey had a wide ranging career (from Diary of a Country Priest to The Day of the Triffids) and had teamed with Crosby for Little Boy Lost, but the sexual chemistry between the two is zilch in High Time. The relationship and the hit tune Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen concocted to celebrate it ("The Second Time Around") seems tailor made to burnish Crosby's image after he had recently remarried. Though he had been a romantic idol in the 1930s, by 1960 the torch had been passed to Fabian and his ilk and Crosby was better off playing a priest. There are other aspects of the film that have dated badly. At one point, Crosby has to attend a faux antebellum ball, in drag, to satisfy a requirement of his fraternity initiation. The ball seems a remnant of the pernicious romanticism of the noble lost cause view of the Confederacy. Crosby is game, but this farcical transvestism would seem better suited to a clown like Danny Kaye or Jerry Lewis.

Nicole Maurey, Bing, and Tuesday

However, when viewed within the context of Blake Edwards' career, the transvestism in High Time can be seen as a consistent leitmotif that was explored most fully in Victor/Victoria. Likewise the choreographed physical schtick that is the highlight of High Time led to the hijinks of the Pink Panther films, The Great Race, and The Party. The contributions of editor Robert Simpson and choreographer Miriam Nelson helps ensure that High Time is a motion picture that really moves. Fans of vintage television will enjoy seeing the contributions of Gavin Macleod and Yvonne Craig. 

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Andy Lau

Tsui Hark's Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (henceforth Detective Dee 1) is a relatively diverting martial-arts spectacle from 2010. A major figure in Hong Kong cinema since the 1980s, Mr. Hark has amassed over fifty directorial credits and even more as a producer. Most of what I've seen of his work is gaseous and over blown with little characterization or thematic impact. Detective Dee 1 is greatly helped by the efforts of the director of its action sequences, Sammo Kam-Bo Hung, who started as a stunt man in 1969 and who gives Detective Dee the palpable thump it needs. The efforts of action sequence directors in martial arts films is akin to that of the choreographers, like Jack Cole, who staged the song and dance numbers in Hollywood musicals; often without credit.

The scenario for Detective Dee 1 is a jumbled tale of intrigue set during a fancifully depicted Tang dynasty. An advisor to the Empress (Carina Lau) spontaneously combusts and, soon, other characters suffer the same fate. Detective Dee (Andy Lau), who has been languishing in jail after a trumped up treason charge, is given the task of finding the culprits behind these mysterious deaths. Amidst a background warring clans, Dee learns the truism of every half-assed mystery: no one is to be trusted. So, the plot is hooey, but the numerous action sequences are propulsive. A film like Detective Dee 1 is designed to appeal to the eight year old in all of us. How else can you explain a flick in which a character is named Donkey Wang with Scabies? Judged purely as a popcorn picture, Detective Dee 1 is better crafted and more exhilarating than, say, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.             

Mata-Hari

            

George Fitzmaurice's Mata Hari, from 1931, is one of the more turgid of MGM's vehicles for Greta Garbo. Garbo stars as the titular spy, but no effort was made to be historically accurate; which is a pity because it is quite a story. Four (listed) screenwriters concocted a hoary yarn with unmemorable dialogue. The espionage angle of the film is its weakest aspect, pure codswallop. What's left is your typical Garbo triangle with an older lover (Lionel Barrymore) and a younger one (Roman Novarro). Barrymore is pretty good as a wheezing donkey of male impotence. Novarro, born in Durango, is supposed to be playing a Russian flyer, but wisely doesn't attempt an accent. Though ridiculous in his role, he is good at shining his puppy love eyes at la Garbo. Garbo is great, natch, but I was disconcerted by her pronouncing the country, "Rush-ee-ah." Lewis Stone and Karen Morley are also good, but under utilized.

Classic Hollywood was often an echo chamber and Mata-Hari is a good example of this. It seems a response to Paramount's success with the exoticism of the Dietrich and Sternberg, nicking the cabaret sections from Morocco and the fatalistic spy shenanigans of Dishonored.

Mata-Hari, like Dishonored, ends with its heroine facing a firing squad. However, Fitzmaurice's static visual style is like flat beer compared to the bubbly champagne of Josef von Sternberg's play of light and shadow. This despite the striking work of cinematographer William Daniels whose credits include The Shop Around the Corner and many Garbo features. I did enjoy the wigged out costumes and Orientalist set designs, but their appeal is mainly to a camp sensibility. Garbo provokes more mystery when she turns her face into a mask, as during the finale of Queen Christina, than when she does a bump and grind around a pagan idol in a sheer outfit. Less is sometimes more. 

Nearly all copies of this film, including the Warners Archive disc I viewed, contain a truncated version of the film released after the institution of the Production code. A complete version has been found in Brussels with about three more minutes, mostly of Garbo shimmying lasciviously and seducing Novarro in a see-through negligee. Sounds great, but I don't think these sequences would ultimately redeem Mata-Hari. 

A mugshot of the real Mata-Hari