15 April 2019

The Rules of Hollywood (and Style) According to David Niven


 
The life story is that of a raconteur, a British, a soldier, a gentleman, an actor. The sense of humour is the best kind of British humour. The name dropping is not callous (would you rather not find out his stories about his friends, Bogie, Errol Flynn, Noël Coward, Tyrone Powell, Sinatra, Ida Lupino, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Cary Grant, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, etc., or his honest, never defamatory, opinion about the big Hollywood studios bosses?). The sense of style ensuing from the storytelling has nothing to do with the sartorial wit (although he had that to spare, too). The honesty is that of a man who counted good luck and good contacts as big part of his path towards a career in the movies. The view on Hollywood stretches from its Golden Age to the radical transformations that arrived with the advent of television and it is well worth the reading. Here are a few take-away words from David Niven’s autobiography, The Moon’s a Balloon.

 

Hollywood

 
“There was an excitement and generosity of spirit in Hollywood – a minimum of jealousy and pettiness, everyone felt they were still pioneering in a wonderful entertainment medium.” (about Hollywood in the 1930s)

“Hollywood has changed completely. The old camaraderie of pioneers in a one-generation business still controlled by the people who created it, was gone. The mystique had evaporated.” (about Hollywood in the 1960s)

“This was the completely honest expression of a completely honest man and a breath of fresh air in a place where the empty promise was the easy way out.” (about Douglas Fairbanks Jr.)

“The word ‘playwright’ is spelled that way for a very good reason. Shipwrights build ships, wheelwrights fashion wheels, and playwrights construct plays. If they construct them badly, they quickly fly apart at the seams.”

“Hollywood is like a bird dog. When things are going badly, it teases and sniffs at you. It scrapes away at the camouflage. It knows.”

“Don’t be like the majority of actors… don’t just stand around waiting your turn to speak – learn to listen.” (talking about Charlie Chaplin’s advice to him)

“Nobody should try to play comedy unless they have a circus going on inside.” (talking about Ernst Lubitsch in one of their conversations)

“Television, in the early fifties, had begun to rear its ugly head. The major film studios, instead of grabbing it and making it their own, decided first to ignore it, then to fight it and wound up, a few years later, being swallowed by it.”
 
 

The Rat Pack

 
Niven was friends with Frank Sinatra, of whom he says, “So much has been written about Sinatra, […] that I can contribute nothing except to say that he is one of the few people in the world I would instinctively think of if I needed help of any sort.” And he gets the record straight about the group that originally formed The Rat Pack, named by Lauren Bacall (‘You look like a Goddamn Rat Pack!’) on a trip to Las Vegas accompanying Frank Sinatra and Nöel Coward, after surveying the outcome of a few days of partying. “The group consisted of Betty and Bogie, Mike and Gloria Romanoff, Ernie Kocacs and his wife, ‘Swifty’ Lazar, Sid Luft and Judy Garland , Angie Dickinson, Hjördis (ed. note: David Niven’s wife) and myself.”
 
 

Marlene Dietrich

 
“Marlene, the most glamorous of all, was also one of the kindest.”
 
 

Humphrey Bogart

 
“It took me a while to realise that he had perfected an elaborated camouflage to cover up one of the kindest and most generous of hearts.”
 
 

Beauty

 
“The beauty came from within because each and every one of them was filled with concern for others, and kindness, and generosity.”
 
 

Teenage hood

 
“Instead of sitting around and looking inward, we rushed about noisily and happily extroverted.”
 
 

Life

 
“The front door of the Montclair was in Lexington Avenue, exactly opposite the back door of the Waldorf-Astoria, so during that miserable cold winter, I made a point to come out each morning from the Montclair, carrying my bag of samples, cross Lexington, climb the long stairs at the rear entrance of the Waldorf, wend my way through the vast gilded lobbies of the most luxurious hotel in New York, descend the steps to the front entrance, pass through the revolving doors and issue on to Fifth Avenue to start my day…
‘Good morning, Mr. Niven,’ said the doorman, saluting deferentially.
‘Good morning, Charles.’
Very good for morale.”
 
 

Posted by classiq in Books, Film | | Comments Off on The Rules of Hollywood (and Style) According to David Niven
11 April 2019

Stepping into the World of Astrid Lindgren

Junibacken | Reproduction of Emil’s woodwork shed from Astrid Lindgren’s “Emil i Lönneberga” | photo: Classiq Journal

 
 
After having recently experienced Junibacken, the entire family has a new favourite book to look forward to reading every evening: Astrid Lindgren’s “Emil i Lönneberga” (“Emil of Lönneberga”). Junibacken, set on Djurgården island in Stockholm, is a magical place, a children’s museum, a children’s cultural centre with books at its heart. The aim is to awaken the desire to read, from the earliest age. “We want to encourage creativity and imagination – and show the way to the magic between the pages.” Is there anything more beautiful and nobler than that?

Junibacken started with Astrid Lindgren, the Swedish author of two of the most beloved children’s book characters in the world, Emil from Lönneberga and Pippi Longstocking. It was meant to create, inspire and stimulate in the spirit of Astrid Lindgren, but it was also crafted as a place where other writers of children’s books and illustrators could be showcased and inspire others. And the best part is that Junibacken is not only for children, but for adults, too. Because we never stop being children, do we? I hope not.
 
 

”I want to write for a readership that can create miracles.
Children create miracles when they read.”
Astrid Lindgren

 
 

Original illustration by Björn Berg for “Emil i Lönneberga” | Emil’s woodshed
Björn’s four year-old son Torbjörn, with his woollen hair and big blue eyes,
was the model after which Emil was shaped.

 
 
“Emil i Lönneberga” was not one of my childhood books, and in part I am glad for that because now I get to discover that world together with my son. And it’s wonderful. But I did have another Swedish character friend, Nils Holgersson, the creation of Selma Lagerlöf. I loved going on adventures with him through Sweden every time I wanted to. “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson” remains one of my favourite children’s books of all time. I still have my childhood copy. It has yellowed pages, the cover has faded colours, it’s a little torn on its edges, but it has some of my childhood dreams still tucked in its pages and it’s one of the most treasured titles in my library – the new editions I see in bookshops have no appeal to me whatsoever. And it’s the copy I will start reading to my son when he grows a little older.

That said, I am quickly taking to Emil’s adventures, too. I like him. He is a little boy who lives with his family in the Lönneberga village of Småland, Sweden. He looks angelic, but he is wild and gets into so much trouble and does so many pranks that he turns his entire community upside down. His mischief doesn’t come from meanness though, but rather from curiosity, innocence and a lack in foresight. He really is a good boy. “That Emil in Lönneberga, he was a real pest of a boy, not at all as nice as you. But his mum loved him all the same,” Astrid Lindgren began her story. She had such a talent in talking about important things in a fun and easy way, in engaging the reader, a talent in teaching in a kind way. And I find it so moving how Emil, when he is sent to the woodwork shed every time after he has misbehaved in order to do some thinking, is getting creative. He is not bitter, he makes the best of his time alone by carving figurines out of wood.
 
 

Junibacken | Setting reproductions from Astrid Lindgren’s stories | photos: Classiq Journal

 
 
That woodshed, one of the details in the story I am mostly fond of, you get to experience it in person at Junibacken. The Storybook Train is a small train that takes you on a ride through some of Astrid’s stories. The settings were created by illustrator Marit Törnqvist in close collaboration with Astrid herself, faithfully reproducing scenes and illustrations from the books. You feel like you are stepping right into Astrid’s world, the narration and music getting you even closer to the stories. It’s a one of a kind experience.

The entire place, seeing all those marvelous creations made for the love of children and storytelling, simply put a smile on my face that lasted all day long despite the harsh Northern weather we endured that day, a smile that returns every tine I recall the experience. There are also exhibitions and theatre performances based on works by the Nordic region’s finest authors of children’s books – they put on over 1,600 performances per year, Junibacken being one of the largest producers of children’s theatre in Sweden. And, naturally, there is a children’s bookshop, another attraction point for any book lover, small or big. It’s all in the spirit of dreaming away, for children and adults alike.
 
 
 

As seen in the photos above:
The first edition of “Emil i Lönneberga”, published in 1963.
One of the few editions in English with original illustrations by Björn Berg
(yes, Emil has to look a certain way and his cap, too): available here.
The Penguin Classics edition of “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson”: available here.

 
 

Posted by classiq in Books | | Comments Off on Stepping into the World of Astrid Lindgren
4 April 2019

Two Writers and An Actor Write about Hollywood

James Baldwin, Zadie Smith and Sidney Poitier write with insight and knowledge about movies.


 
The Devil Finds Work, by James Baldwin

I have been long waited to read James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, a collection of critical essays on cinema that interrogate the racist ideology of landmark American films such as In the Heat of the Night, The Defiant Ones, The Birth of a Nation, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It is a special kind of memoir, one related to the movies the writer watched and influenced his life. It is social commentary that has a starting point the movies and it is all the more poignant as the themes approached here are still, to some extent, current and common in America. Baldwin finds deeper meanings in cinema, and indeed that is what cinema is partly about, and his view will certainly change your perspective on every movie he is writing about to some degree. That’s how incisive and witty James Baldwin’s writing is. His clarity and burst of vision in addressing pop culture, racial and social issues from a very personal vantage point is striking.

And although his view on cinema is pessimistic and bleak and he upsets me with some truths, there are certain passages – describing, for example, Sylvia Sidney as “the only American actress who reminded me of a colored girl, or woman-which is to say that she was the only American film actress who reminded me of reality”; or Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones, “and yet, even at that, recognized, in Sidney’s face, at the very end, as he sings Sewing Machine, something noble, true and terrible, something out of which we come…” – which gives you hope in the complexity of cinema, and which I think gave him hope, too, in cinema.

That’s important to me, because I do love movies and I always look for something more in movies than social commentary or universally propagated truths. The creative orchestration, a director’s particular vision, and empathy and emotion rather than information are what first and foremost attract me to the movie world. So after reading The Devil Finds Work, I turned to Sidney Poitier’s memoir, The Measure of a Man, looking for his own perspective on a few of the movies Baldwin criticises and in which Poitier had appeared.
 

Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones”, 1958, directed by Stanley Kramer| Stanley Kramer Productions

 
 
The Measure of a Man, by Sidney Poitier

In one of the chapters in The Measure of a Man, titled “Why Do White Folks Love Sidney Poitier So?” (after an article by the same name published in The New York Times in the 70s), the actor writes about the disdain he caused back in the day for not being more confrontational, in a time when new voices were speaking for African-Americans, in real life, but also in movies, “for playing exemplary human beings”, “for playing roles that were not threatening to white audiences, for playing the ‘noble Negro’ who fulfills white liberal fantasies.” He defends Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, for example, insisting on just how revolutionary it was in the context of its time. He continues to say that there’s a place for people who are angry and defiant, and sometimes they serve a purpose, but that’s never been his role. Social movement doesn’t come all at once. It takes small steps, and I think his movies recorded exactly that. His life as an actor and his roles were unique in Hollywood and they did not reflect the reality of black people in everyday America, and that is exactly why they did their job well: preparing the audiences and the American society step by step for change.

Poitier draws on the huge cultural shift in the ten year period between making The Defiant Ones, in 1958, and making Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night and To Sir, with Love, all three latter films released in 1967. “A filmmaker such as Stanley Kramer was an artistic wedge during that period, but art doesn’t solve social problems. It’s a reminder, it’s an irritant, it clarifies, it focuses, but it doesn’t solve. Potential solutions were ignored until America was forced to confront them.” I think that’s a powerful statement and which does justice to his films. Maybe the film didn’t sit well with some audiences, black or white, and it certainly didn’t sit well with James Baldwin, but that was the director’s vision for the film and Sidney defends both the director and the film, saying that Stanley Kramer’s message in The Defiant Ones was that “all people are fundamentally the same. Our differences are, for the most part, cosmetic.” And he calls the ending of the film a message of tolerance that has stood up pretty well for many decades. I think that too.

During filming In the Heat of the Night, Sidney Poitier recounts a scene that he insisted that the director should change. At one point, his character, a detective from Philadelphia, accidentally pulled into a murder investigation in a small town in the Deep South, goes to question an influential local business man and interrogates him about his whereabouts on the night of the murder. The man slaps detective Tibbs. In the original script, Sidney says that “Tibbs looked at him with great disdain and, wrapped in my strong ideals, walked out. That could have happened with another actor playing that part, but it couldn’t happen with me. I could too easily remember that Miami night with the gun pointed to my forehead.”

He is referring to an incident that had occurred to him when he was sixteen and living in Miami and late one night he was stranded in a white middle-class neighborhood. He was accosted by a police car and they put the gun to his head and the only reason why he got out of there alive was because he put his head down and made to promise that he would go home without ever looking back once. Yes, he was angry, and it was inhuman and unjust what happened, but he knew that he could only stay alive through discipline and toughness of mind. But 24 years later, when In the Heat of the Night was made, he felt the script needed to be changed and he told the director, Norman Jewison, that Tibbs should get to whack the man right back across the face. And that’s how it is in the movie. The times had changed, Sidney Poitier had changed, and mentalities had started to change, too.
 

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in “In the Heat of the Night”, 1967, directed by Norman Jewison | The Mirisch Corporation

 
 
Changing My Mind, by Zadie Smith

Another collection of essays, Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind is split into five sections: Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling and Remembering. She writes about books and movies, about family and philosophy, about British comedians and Hollywood icons. I love Zadie Smith’s writing. I like the intelligence, the humour, the vibrancy, but, most importantly, I like the comprehensibility of her essays. That’s why I am usually sensitive to film criticism. I often feel that film critics do not love movies. A pretencious stylist must not be mistaken for a connoisseur. I stormed through Zadie’s essays on cinema. They are so personal and passionate. Because you don’t experience a film just for the duration of its 90-minute running time. You experience it in relation to your entire life and being. And there is another thing: Zadie has an open mind towards cinema. It’s clear that she starts watching a film with an open mind. It’s natural that she doesn’t like every film she watches. And I like that she still writes about it in a sympathetic way. Again, it’s the behaviour of a film lover who understands film, not of a film critic.

About Katharine Hepburn, she writes: “The kind of woman she played, the kind of woman she was, is still the kind of woman I should like to be, and an incidental line of hers, from the aforementioned The Philadelphia Story, remains my lodestar every time I pick up a pen to write anything all: ‘The time to make up your mind up about people is never!’”

And in her essay on Visconti’s Bellissima and Anna Magnani, Smith writes: “Bellissima is that rare thing in Italian cinema: a film in which the woman is not a question posed to a man. Even more rare: she is not in question to herself. She finds herself perfectly satisfactory, or at least, her flaws cause her no more than the normal amount of discomfort. A less common trait in a female movie star can hardly be imagined.”

Incidently, James Baldwin, Zadie Smith and Sidney Poitier all talk about Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and each one’s view, one negative, the other ones positive, is different. A movie is different for each one of us. That’s the beauty of cinema.
 

John Howard, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart in “The Philadelphia Story”, 1940, directed by George Cukor| MGM

 

Posted by classiq in Books, Film | | Comments Off on Two Writers and An Actor Write about Hollywood
1 April 2019

Opinion: What About Our Boys?


 
I write for both women and men. It always comes as a shock to me how so many online publications run by women write only for women. Why do we have to push things to the extreme? You don’t have to be a feminist in order to be an independent woman, with her own voice, and who loves men and who, in turn, is loved and respected by men. I take great pride in the fact that Classiq can be at all times be read by my husband, my brother, my father or father-in-law and any other male readers. Culture is universal. Let’s treat it as such. I am interested in everything men do and like, just as the men in my life are interested in everything that I do and like. I am inspired by a photograph, by a film, by a book, by a song, by an illustration, by a life’s work, without ever considering the gender of the author. I like to leave the male or female attribute out of the conversation. It is what it is. It’s about what it is, not about who makes it. Gender should not dictate one’s intake of culture.

In the latest issue of The Rake, Julianne Moore says something that channels my own thoughts and which makes me more aware than ever that we have to take special care of our sons, in our world today more than ever before. “So, in essence, I really would like to bring men into this conversation, too. I really want to avoid feeling combative. And I think people get scared and I want to make sure that, you know, that we move forward together. And it’s interesting, too, because a lot of people were asking me as a parent what I want for my daughter – I want just the same things for my son, don’t leave him out of it! Just because I’m female don’t ask me only about my female child; I care equally about my male child. I want to make sure that they both have the same opportunities and advantages and education, and I want that for all of us.”
 

 
I have an almost four-year-old boy and he is the best. He is funny. He is beautiful. He is joyful. He is very smart. He is kind. He is curious. He is loving. He is silly. He is observant. He is warm. He is personable. He is perseverent. He is strong-headed (he takes it after me). He is competitive. He is imaginative. He is quick-tempered (me again). He is forgiving. He is emotional. He wears his hair long. He feels the music and has the dance moves (he takes it after his father) (and shouts David Bowie after his dad whenever he leaves the house). He rocks.

I want the best for him, as every mother does for her child. Every night before going to bed, I ask myself: is there something I could have done better today, was it a better way I could have handled that situation? Sometimes a piece of advice (from outside the family) would help. But I feel that every article I come across, on-line and off, is about raising daughters, not sons. About how we can raise girls to be strong, self-sufficient, self-reliant, competent, feisty. The boys are left out. As Julianne says in the interview, don’t leave our boys out of the conversation! I want to raise my son with strong values, I want to raise him to be a good human being, to be confident, authentic, fearless, responsible, to treat everybody equally, to not be afraid to speak his mind, to know that he can do anything he puts his mind to, to tell his own story his own way, to be himself. I want to raise him well for his own benefit. And I am sure the whole world will benefit from that. Because, boys and girls, men and women, we are in this together, let’s work towards what’s right together.

Please, let’s stop stigmatising men. Yes, there are many with bad character (just as there are women), but there are so many more incredible men. I am fortunate to be surrounded by so many fantastic men. And I know I am not the only one. Let’s see beyond the derogatory and general comments made about men these days. Women can battle sexism, condescension and hostility without shutting men out of their lives. Let’s not discriminate our sons for the sake of our daughters. And, please, do we really need gender specific books for children? That’s one of the most terrifying things I have come across lately. That, and the fact that for a while now I have had trouble buying my son trousers that are not slim fit. Where is all this going?

Now let me tell you one more thing why we must pay extra attention to our sons. In my own experience, throughout my life since as long as I can remember, the boys have so much more often had more emotional problems than girls, they have struggled more to give voice to their concerns, to their feelings, to their ideas than girls, they have been more sensitive and conflicted than girls, they have needed more guidance, encouragement and affection than girls. It’s something I have again recently noticed at my child’s kindergarten. So, yes, I want to make sure that my son has a strong sense of self-worth. I don’t want him to be pushed around by girls and later by women. I want him to respect girls and women just as much as I want them to respect him. Period. No gender is worthier or in more need of attention, support and love than the other. We, as parents of either boys or girls, must encourage and voice this belief. Boys are just as complicated as girls. It’s about time we brought them back into discussion. We are better together.
 

Posted by classiq in Opinion | Comments Off on Opinion: What About Our Boys?
28 March 2019

Les Diaboliques: Stripes and Polka Dots

Véra Clouzot and Simone Signoret in “Les diaboliques” (1955) | Filmsonor, Véra Films

 
After re-watching Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1955 Les diaboliques recently (and realising how even to this day it works on the intended level up to the very end), I have kept returning to one of Raymond Gid’s film poster versions. To one element, to be more exact, the standing silhouette. I wouldn’t like to reveal essential details from the story for those of you who haven’t watched the film, so I will just say that it’s incredible how poster art, and, by that, I mean illustration, can capture the essence of a film. And if you have seen the movie, you will certainly note how it sums up much of it.

The story is set in a French provincial town, at a boy’s boarding school. Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse) is the domineering headmaster, Christina (Véra Clouzot) is his weak-heart wife and the owner of the school, and Nicole (Simone Signoret) is a teacher and his mistress. Delassalle appearantly starts to mistreat his mistress, too, so the two women plot a revenge. Clouzot used unprecedented twists of the plot and the element of suspense and even pure horror to harrowing visual effect. But it is the way the director depicts the decaying qualities of his characters and the capacity for evil of all human beings, on the background of terrifying images, that makes Les diaboliques a truly great noir, one of those great dark tales of a crime gone awry.
 

Véra Clouzot and Simone Signoret in “Les diaboliques” (1955) | Filmsonor, Véra Films

 
Raymond Gid’s poster captures so wholly the steely mistress and the dainty wife and yet another visual element that stood out for me. The costumes. Hardly ever have I seen such interplay of stripes, polka dots and gingham patterns on screen. At any given time Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot are on screen, a black and white piece of clothing in some kind of geometric design appears, too. Their dressing style however couldn’t be more different. Nicole’s costumes are very clean-cut and masculine inspired (classic trench coat, cinched shirt-dress, pencil skirt and cardigan, men’s pajama), while Christina’s are ultra-feminine (a trench coat with more ornate details, pleated gingham dress, a delicate white blouse and long black skirt, a knitted wrap, a night gown).

They are very different and yet not exactly rivals. It is a very powerful reversal of traditional male and female noir characters. Beautiful and immoral and with a blonde short-cut, Simone Signoret recalls the classic noir femme fatale, but in her relationship to the frail, slender and long-haired Christina, she, resolute, imposing and physically strong, occupies the traditional position of the man, a position that is very visible by simply observing the body language of the two protagonists (just look at the images in this article and it becomes very obvious).

Clouzot doesn’t intend to draw on the bad girl/good girl opposition though. Because Christina’s own morality is questioned when she starts plotting with Nicole against her husband. And the black and white costumes are used to enhance the ambiguity and to blur that line even further. The good and evil are rendered not as two separate entities, but as the duality of the human nature. Everyone is mutable, everyone has a dark side, anyone can be compromised, seems to say Clouzot, who shows a somber view of humanity – that’s what makes Les diaboliques a quintessential film noir.
 

Véra Clouzot and Simone Signoret in “Les diaboliques” (1955) | Filmsonor, Véra Films

 

Posted by classiq in Film, Film costume | | Comments Off on Les Diaboliques: Stripes and Polka Dots