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Today in New York City. JFK to Queens to Central Park West. It was late afternoon and I had just gotten my cab from the airport.
I was hungry. I was bleary-eyed. I told my driver I was famished and couldn't wait to get to my hotel.
As you will see, he really wanted me to eat. So he made a pit stop and I deliriously accepted. I was starving. Actually, I was grateful. It was delicious. He was nice.
And so begins my vacation. As they say, only in New York.
I hitchhiked. Once. I was in the seventh grade -- far too young to be exposing myself to the perilous adventures of road-and-thumb. And yet, young enough to believe that the open road could be thrilling, mind expanding, educational -- the way of, as Jack Kerouac said, the “crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way."
I wasn't as sophisticated as Kerouac. I hadn’t read On the Road yet. But I would have glamorized it as such. There had to be a little glamour. I felt the raw and the real and the dark, sometimes with excitement (sometimes with dread) so it was imperative to sprinkle fairy dust in there, somewhere -- even filthy fairy dust. There were too many dingy light bulbs in the world. One had to compensate.
Staring at a long road, cocking your head just the right way, the dirty and the shiny can attain a certain glow. You’ll run into all kinds of broken, gorgeously cinematic sights -- like glimmering colors of shattered glass, curious looking rocks, abandoned cars, abandoned stuffed animals, or most recently for me, abandoned fun parks. My Torino overheating in the hot desert, I pulled my car next to a mysterious building. Spying a fence with a hole big enough to squeeze through I discovered a derelict go-cart/mini-put put golf course complete with a standing lighthouse, its roof perilously close to sliding off, piles of neglected go-carts, and tiny little houses with broken windmills.
Alas, I never saw such a thing when I hitchhiked as a kid. Just candy, creeps and critical elderly folks -- shaking their heads -- bad, stupid girls. I was camping with a friend’s family, stuck somewhere in nowhere-land, Eastern Oregon and we were sick of roughing it. Her parents had us under tent, roasted hot dog, keep-the-watermelon-in-the-stream lockdown. We were itching for action -- innocent action. When we heard about a mini-mart five miles away, we hatched a plan. Not a terribly detailed plan, but a plan, nonetheless. We would walk.
Walking the distance for two 12- year-olds ain’t nothing we figured. And besides, licorice, candy bars and an ice cold Coca Cola awaited. And more importantly, we could ditch her annoying parents. But how to get back? And at night? “Let’s thumb it,” we said.
So after many suspicious pull-overs, all of which we had foreseen (the creepily nice solo guy, the hootin’ and hollerin’ group of men looking for a party, the couples, who probably weren’t all that bad…but I’d heard of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley…), we did indeed score a truck. A truck with not the quaint elderly couple, but an elderly man. A grumpy old man angered that we were hitchhiking in the first place. We sat in the back, munched our Hershey bars and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and let the wind blow through our hair. And laughed. It was all so hilarious. It was great fun. It was great dumb. We were probably lucky. For dramatic purposes, I'm sorry to say nothing bad happened save for the old guy's condemnation. But we felt like we were in a movie. The good hitchhiking movie. The positive hitchhiking picture.
And one of those good movies was a film I had seen and joked about on our road adventure. Frank Capra’s 1934 screwball It Happened One Night, wherein the sexy hitchhiking tradition of showing a little leg originated with the sassy Claudette Colbert and an amusingly frustrated Clark Gable. I so wanted to show a little leg but a 12-year-old shouldn’t be doing such things. And most certainly when Clark Gable isn’t by your side. Humbert Humbert should not be an option. And Humbert wouldn’t have allowed it either.
But Capra's joyful, sexually charged and whip-smart depression-era movie was on my mind as I stared down the pine-tree lined highway (it should have been Five Easy Pieces). A road movie that’s pure Americana, from the wealthy heiress fleeing her father only to end up on a bus with wise-acre newspaperman Gable, to all the adventures they do and see on the road (charming camping areas, waving to hobos on trains, sleeping on bales of hay and again, hitchhiking) -- this was so beautiful to me. I wanted to crawl into those moments. And I wanted that hitchhiking scene.
I loved it. Gable attempts to teach Colbert the rules of the thumb, while she turns down eating a carrot. Sitting on a split rail fence on the side of a rural road, the classy Colbert allows Gable to pick a piece of hay out of her teeth with a penknife (the raw carrot and hay to penknife always feels so sexy to me), and while he chomps on his carrot, they swap hitchhiking techniques. Gable is full of hitcher braggadocio, even suggesting he intends to write a book entitled: “The Hitchhiker's Hail.” To him there are three ways to hail a car: “It's all in that ol' thumb, see...that ol' thumb never fails. It's all a matter of how you do it, though.” He attempts the varied techniques, but to no success. No one pulls over. “When you get to 100, wake me up,” Colbert quips. After countless cars pass them, she takes charge: “I'll stop a car and I won't use my thumb.”
Out come the gams. Hopping off the fence, she casually walks to the side of the road and oh-so-sexily pulls up her skirt, exposing that famous shapely leg (with garter). Of course, the first approaching car screeches to a halt. While enjoying their ride, away from the dirt and dust, she gloats: “I proved once and for all that the limb is mightier than the thumb.” To which he answers, “Why didn't you take off all your clothes? You could have stopped forty cars.”
My friend and I didn’t stop forty cars. But we stopped more than we should have. And though this wasn’t depression-era Capra land, we loved the short adventure – an adventure that by then had already died out with rotary phones, communes, LSD movies and Charlene Tilton.
I would have hitched with him. But I might not be here to talk about it. After all, as Neal wryly asks: “What kind of dames thumb rides? Sunday school teachers?” No, 12-year-olds. And, maybe, though doubtfully, one day again -- me. As long as Clark Gable’s my Sal Paradise.
I was totin' my pack along the long dusty Winnemucca road...
He was an American. And there will never be another crazy beautiful brilliant American like
him again. Ever.
Too much to say, too sad to write it.
Rest in peace Dennis Hopper. 1936-2010.
Happy Birthday Carroll Baker, fellow Gemini and forever my baby. A return look at Baby Doll.
"There isn't much of you, but what there is is choice. Delectable, I might say... You're fine-fibered. Soft and smooth…You make me think of cotton. No! No fabric or cloth, not even satin or silk cloth, and no kind of fiber, not even cotton fiber has the absolute delicacy of your skin.”
So says a predatory Eli Wallach to an aroused and "hysterical" Carroll Baker in one of the most notoriously erotic mainstream movies ever produced at that time. A movie that's still sexy today, and sexy in that perfectly unhealthy, steamy, creamy and twisted way -- the only way that works -- the movie was Baby Doll, director Elia Kazan’s tragic-comic follow up to his already sizzling masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire, his controversial On the Waterfront and his poignantly powerful East of Eden. Used to a certain amount of censorship and hullabaloo (especially for Streetcar), Kazan was most likely, not prepared for the maelstrom of controversy when Baby Doll, a sultry Southern gothic he intended as a “sleeper” was released in 1956.
Denounced by the Legion of Decency and deemed "Just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited" (yes, yes, yes) by Time Magazine, Baby Doll, though not as “dirty” through time (and I mean in the common, modern comedy way -- our current accessibility to salacious cinema isn't dirty in the right way...) still remains as sexually charged, perversely interesting and psychologically complex as it did then. It’s also incredibly funny, superbly acted and weirdly beautiful. Though somewhat, inexplicably forgotten through time (it finally got a DVD release a few years ago), Baby Doll is one of Kazan’s greatest accomplishments -- a masterpiece that stands on equal footing with Streetcar and Waterfront.
Written by that genius of Southern turbulence, Tennessee Williams (Baby Doll was his first original screenplay -- adapted from parts of two earlier one-act plays), the picture gave the great Carroll Baker her first starring role with an entrance that, in terms of cultish cinema, is about as sexually iconic as Marilyn Monroe’s up-swept dress in The Seven Year Itch. Gorgeous, blonde 19-year old child bride Baby Doll (Baker) lies in an infant’s crib, sucking her thumb while her middle aged husband Archie Lee (a wonderfully frustrated Karl Malden|) leers at her through a peephole. Ah yes, marriage.
But why must he leer at his own wife? As we soon learn, Baby Doll is a virgin -- she married Archie for what she thought would be a cushy life of prosperity and Southern comfort. But at this point Archie’s lost his cotton gin to a Syndicate Plantation and is so in debt that his furniture (or, as she drawls "fornichore" which is how every woman should talk when discussing a sofa) has been removed from the house. An exasperated, angry Baby Doll threatens to leave Archie while he desperately waits out the day -- the eve of her birthday ("buhthdaye") -- for their especially provocative “agreement:” that when she turns 20, he can finally sleep with his wife. No wonder he's nuts.
But things take a turn when lumbering, impetuous Archie loses his temper and burns down the Syndicate Plantation and Cotton Gin, managed by the cocky Sicilian Silva Vacarro (Wallach). Wrong man to cross. Seeking sweet revenge, Vacarro finds the one thing that’ll make Archie murderously angry -- the wifey. And not just Archie's wife but, perhaps (not to be revealed here) his wife’s maidenhood as well. That is, if you could call the sassy, sexually curious tease Baby Doll a “maiden.” She’s certainly not as infantile as she looks -- and she will reveal herself to be clever, in her own style -- making her all the more desirable. And yet, sad.
The cat and mouse games and cheap, cheeky tricks played by Baby Doll and Vacarro result in the picture's gleefully demented, yet supremely hot seduction sequence on a porch swing that some viewers found downright pornographic. What were his hands doing? (I know what we're supposed to think) Why is she swooning and breathing and heaving that much? (We all know) This hyper eroticism is heightened by the film’s lovely counterpoint of a blonde, summer dress-wearing Baby Doll to the darkly dapper, swarthy Italian who plucks floating cotton off the bosom of her dress and wields a riding crop, no less (he swats her with that thing while she's literally, weak in the knees). And to further amp things up, in between all of these, well, antics in that shell of a house Baby Doll resides in, Wallach will be seen riding Baby's hobby horse to the rock tune of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Oh my. The beautifully seamy shot of his shadowy rocking suggests a whole helluva lot more is going on here. Yes, a whole lot of s-e-x. Good, bad, dirty southern s-e-x.
But there’s more to the film than just overheated sensuality. Starkly but stunningly shot in black and white, the picture showcases a sad, crumbling South which is perfectly encapsulated via Malden’s distressed and ultimately crazed performance as a cotton farmer being taken over by big business. You feel for poor Malden, as dumb as he is, and the intelligent actor nails sleazy, desperate, sad, cruel and touching all at once. Malden could be a powerful passive aggressive (check A Streetcar Named Desire, in which his "nice" guy ends up being one of the most despicable characters in the picture), and a powerful, noble aggressive aggressive (like his tough priest in On the Waterfront). Here he's just a lost soul who strikes out, but like his relationship with Baby Doll, his fire will ultimately be extinguished. No (for lack of a better word) orgasmic pleasure will come from this. He can't keep anything. Not his gin, not his wife, and not the old Southern way. He can't even be a proper southern gentleman without becoming a leering pervert (after all, in a time when he could have taken her by force without much condemnation, he is honoring her wish to remain a virgin). So as loud-mouth and as stupid as he seems hollering "Baby Doll!" at the top of his lungs, you can see that Williams, Kazan and Malden understand this is a man who has lost all dignity -- and though frequently funny, this is just plain sad.
And really, everyone here, from the stray plantation hands whom Archie sneaks shots of hooch with, to beautifully lush Baby Doll are sad. Vacarro is the future, Baby Doll, with all of her youth and promise, is a ghost. They are all a collection of creeps and rogues and ghosts and sweethearts -- the good-natured Aunt Rose Comfort who steals chocolate from the hospital in particular. And all of them earn our sympathy for each of their dire situations. Baby Doll as the unhappy, cunning though unschooled wife, Archie as the out-moded Southerner and Vacarro as the despised outsider. No one is inherently good, but none of are purely evil either. They are corrupted, vindictive, mean and in the case of Baker -- achingly sexy on top.
And indeed is she achingly sexy. I would, in fact, go so far as to say that Baker’s Baby Doll is one of the sexiest film performances in screen history. Baker's performance is brilliant -- innocent and brazen, stupid and smart, ladylike and lazy -- no one, to quote Archie Lee, makes "slopping around in a slip" so casually erotic. Not even Liz Taylor. And that laugh. That childlike, yet manipulative laugh -- one that simultaneously wraps a very young, and devilishly handsome Rip Torn (look for him) around her finger, while distracting the hell out of her husband. I swear, for Baker's laugh alone the picture should earn greater respect through time. It did somewhat in its DVD release (in conjunction with the Tennessee Williams’ box set which also includes that other underrated depiction of frustrated sexuality and a sizzling Lolita Sue Lyon -- The Night of the Iguana) with an accompanying short documentary. Chronicling the film’s scandal (happily all three spectacular leads are alive to discuss the movie -- god bless you, the late Karl Malden for even making it that far) and appreciating the picture’s placement within Kazan’s esteemed canon of work, it’s a nice addition. But I wanted more. I always want more with Baby Doll. More movie, more respect, more thumb-sucking and more ice cold glasses of lemonade. Or, pardon me, lemon-ayde.
As Baby Doll express at the end of the picture, “we got nothin' to do but wait for tomorrow and see if we're remembered or forgotten.” Thankfully and respectfully (maybe ironically so) Baby Doll is indeed remembered. Really, how could it have ever been forgotten? Happy birthday Baby Doll.
Note: Miss Baker, whose career took an interesting turn -- from serious actress to something of a sex pot -- was always interesting. Even in The Carpetbaggers, Harlow and Andy Warhol's Bad. But she also made another brilliant movie, the under-seen Something Wild, directed by her then husband Jack Garfein. I programmed the movie for Turner Classic Movies, to be shown later this fall. More on that movie later.
Palm Noir. Low key black and white in the hot yellow high desert. The Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival has ended. The festival broke records this year with audiences soaking in all of that sun and sin, light and vice, early mornings and existential angst. Murder among the palm trees was actually, quite perfect.
Stumbling out of Joseph Losey's revenge-for-father noir, The Big Night (starring a teenage John Drew Barrymore), before 12 noon felt fittingly surreal. By the time the festival closed with a fallen Mickey Rooney offing two crooks on a dark Malibu beach (Richard Quine's Drive A Crooked Road), it all seemed so terribly normal. If, at that point, Gloria Grahame had attempted to steal my coat in a cafeteria (a la The Glass Wall), I would have simply handed it to her.
This was my third year presenting films and interviewing guests on stage, and my favorite year of all. Alongside my mentors, peerless festival organizer, Alan K. Rode (author of "Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy"), the esteemed Foster Hirsch, who penned the first Film Noir book I ever read, "The Dark Side of the Screen" (among other works-- and a person who loves The Bad Seed even more than I do), and my Road House co-commentator/ partner in Lupino/Widmark worship, writer, filmmaker and president of the Film Noir Foundation, Eddie Muller, the team was properly noir obsessed. Guests included June Lockhart, Ann Robinson, Tommy Cook, Don Murray and an almost alarmingly youthful Ernest Borgnine. The man is 93-years old, and had no problems talking Chayefsky and Peckinpah, Holden and Marvin, and, of course, the picture screened, Pay or Die. What a movie. What a title.
And then there was Julie Garfield, acclaimed stage actress, teacher, and daughter of the brilliant John Garfield. Garfield, who tragically died at age 39 shortly after being blacklisted by the shameful House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was a man of honor, a tough kid from Brooklyn and the Bronx, and a patriot, who heroically refused to name names. He was also a genius. The picture I presented was one of his greatest, and his last movie before he passed away -- He Ran All the Way (1951). A movie made by many victims of the blacklist, including director John Berry and co-writers Hugo Butler and Dalton Trumbo (who was jailed as one of the "Hollywood Ten"), the story of a criminal on the lam, a desperate man, a man in a panic who takes a family hostage only to be tortured by his conscience and the cold hands of fate, held extra resonance. There was the power of the film itself, the history and real life tragedy of its star, and then Julie sitting next to me. She had never seen her father's final film on the big screen, and experiencing her taking in daddy so beautifully shot by James Wong Howe, and his tough, vulnerable, wounded, complicated performance was especially moving.
Discussing the movie, her father and his life, from the kindness of New York educator Angelo Patri, who mentored the young, troubled kid Garfield and led him into acting, to the evils of HUAC, Julie (on stage and off) is what I imagine her dad was like. Fiercely intelligent, down to earth, funny, warm, and charming as hell -- a one-of-a-kind. If ever a woman is charismatic enough to play De Niro's wife in Goodfellas (and to make that much of an impression when Ray Liotta's Henry Hill testifies against him in court -- that look she gives!), it is Julie. It's impossible not to fall in love with her. If you think I'm going overboard, I'm not. Whatever it is, whether movies, music, art, books, animals and people -- when I like something this much, I don't mess around with my feelings.
And, clearly on my end, the same goes for my feelings toward the fantastic Mr. Garfield. As I have asked before, why isn't he supremely famous? A household name? Why isn't he better recognized? For reasons I cannot decipher, this brilliant, brooding, gorgeous actor, the innovator of the Method, though well respected by those who know better, isn't the legend a la Bogart, Clift, Brando or Dean. This massive talent with genuine bad-boy street cred (he was born Julius Garfinkle -- but everyone called him Julie) was a huge star in his day, so much so that his 1952 funeral was attended by more folks than Rudolph Valentino's ceremony. Where's his damn box set?
And again, as I've written so many times, if you've never seen a John Garfield performance, you have been (in a supreme understatement) missing out. If you've only watched one or two, you're sorely behind. If you need to catch up, check (among many other pictures) his intense, oftentimes roughly romantic and edgy performances in movies such as Gentlemen's Agreement, They Made Me a Criminal, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Body and Soul, Force of Evil, The Breaking Point (the superior version of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not), Nobody Lives Forever, Humoresque, Flowing Gold, Between Two Worlds, We Were Strangers and (of course) He Ran All the Way.
So, au revoir Palm Springs. Until next year. And thank you Julie Garfield for being so open and passionate not only about your father and his work, but about life in general. And an extra special thanks for telling the audience about one of your dad's early jobs -- as a door-to-door diaphragm salesman. That's correct. John Garfield knocked on
doors and sold contraceptives to women. Now that is just too much. As I said on stage, I'm sure his sales
were very, very good.
Note: As a guest programmer for Turner Classic Movies, I picked He Ran All the Way as one of my choices. It was never released on VHS or DVD and is, sadly, rarely seen. So make sure to watch it. I'll let you know when the movie and discussion with Robert Osborne airs, sometime this fall.
Leslie Cheung yearns for his mother.
Like some New-Wave Proust, Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai has managed, over a 20-year career, to make the concept of time almost tangible. "Almost" because in all his films, memory is both garishly lucid and seductively elusive -- a combination as maddening as it is voluptuous. Just like the romance and heartbreak so minutely observed in all of Wong’s movies, the obsession with time (his, ours and the characters’) always goes unrequited. Memories overtake you, please or even teach you, but with reverie come the depressing reminders that time marches on.
You will lose that era, you will lose that youth, and you will lose that boy. Or that girl. You will lose them.
This is the cinematic power of Wong Kar-Wai, a director who is able to make you tear up over a single glance or a stolen moment. And, forgive the mention of Proust again, but like that madeleine unleashing a flood of reminiscences, Wong works the elements of his aesthetic -- music, beautiful people and emotion -- into a mood that so overtakes you it’s nearly impossible to emerge from his pictures without feeling slightly drunk.
Wong turns me dipsomaniacal with his 1991 Days of Being Wild, a period piece set in 1960 that not only toys with time and memories, but causes the viewer to do the very same. It has been over a decade, after all, since the picture first played, briefly, on a few U.S. screens, and Wong’s actors -- Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Andy Lau and Carina Lau -- are older now. One, even is dead. Pop star Leslie Cheung committed suicide in April 2003. Not surprisingly, his death gives the picture an extra twinge of transitory poignancy. Why, dammit?
It’s stirring to see Leslie Cheung so handsome, so alive, so cinematic, as the rootless bad boy and philanderer Yuddy, adopted in his infancy by a powdered and spangled courtesan (Tita Muñoz), searching for both the freedom of flight and the stability he hopes will come after finding his real mother. His cynical attitude toward amour will, over the course of the movie, leave two women brokenhearted. One of them, Su Lizhen, a shy cashier at a sports-stadium snack bar (Maggie Cheung), at first resists Yuddy’s advances, but inevitably falls for him after he proclaims that she will see him that night in her dreams. When she informs him the next day, "I didn’t see you in my dreams last night," his cocksure reply is "Of course not. You didn’t sleep."
A short time later, and just as suddenly (Su Lizhen has started making noises about wanting to get married...not for him), the union dissolves, and Yuddy impulsively takes up with the more outspoken, though just as susceptible and possessive, cooch dancer Leung Fung-Ying (Carina Lau). But as Yuddy stated to Su Lizhen, there will be many women in his life -- how can he settle for just one? Don't stay with Yuddy. As he tells both women, you’ll only ruin your life. And yet, while Yuddy is no typical romantic, he's certainly quixotic. He wants his mother. And his search for her suggests that he is, in fact, looking for love -- the love of one woman.
The first film to be shot for Wong by ace Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Days of Being Wild is a mélange of vibrant colors set against deep, noirish shadows and claustrophobic locales. Told achronologically, the story flashes back through lush jungles, small, humid apartments, rain-soaked streets and unoccupied telephone booths. As in Wong’s peerless 2000 film In the Mood for Love (a picture that, along with Wong’s 2046, works as a companion piece to Days), its ’60s setting is nostalgic, but not in conventional terms. Though Wong denotes a sentimental longing for the past, his films are almost fetishistic in their fixation on time. Days feels exciting, in part, because you are watching an auteur lay the groundwork -- with an assortment of clocks, watches and meticulously detailed moments -- for ideas and moods he will obsessively follow in later films.
At one point, Yuddy tells Su Lizhen that they will become "60-second friends," and those 60 seconds remind us of how we can feel most alive in the moment, when the time is now, and we are living out our youth and love with a kind of urgency. The Wild characters move like the gorgeous, haunting Django Reinhardt music piping through the celluloid, beautifully but mournfully, and with ghostlike delicacy. With Wong’s creations, as with anything truly precious (time passing, love passing), comes the fear of evaporation.
You can hang on to the "maybe" (maybe it will last) or, as in Nat King Cole’s plaintive musical refrain to In the Mood for Love, a more fragile "Quizas, Quizas, Quizas." Perhaps.
Night Nurse. Stanwyck, Blondell and Gable. Drugs, slugs and murder. Evil doctors, evil chauffeurs, kindly bootleggers and...starving children. This is one provocative pre-code peach.
So, if you happen to be in Austin Texas, please watch, tonight, this Sunday May 2nd at 7 PM. I will be introducing the Alamo Cinema Club's presentation of the 1931 pre-code classic, directed by William "Wild Bill" Wellman and presiding over the Q&A with the Alamo's Lars Nilsen.
JM: The period between the dawn of the talkies and the Hays Office's enforcement of production code produced a lot of great films, many of which were much grittier, racier, and more realistic than the ones that followed. What do you find most compelling about pre-code cinema?
JM: What surprises does the film hold for modern audiences?
JM: Barbara Stanwyck is one of the great icons of Hollywood's Golden Age, but is somewhat under-appreciated for someone who had such a great career. What is it about her that you most admire?
KM: Stanwyck could do it all. Noir, melodrama, western, comedy. She was a brilliant dramatic actress and, as a comedienne, her timing was impeccable. The Lady Eve, The Mad Miss Manton and of course one of my all time favorites, Ball of Fire, where she fully conjugates “Scram,” it just doesn’t get any better than that. And she could make you cry (I challenge you to watch Stella Dallas and not be a wreck by film end). She was also incredibly sexy, but not in an overt way that interrupted who she was, her character, her acting. She was tough, smart, vulnerable, crafty and lovable. Really, she was the perfect woman/actress. I don’t know why she was not on the level of Davis or Crawford (though she was nominated for many of her roles). I think she’s certainly appreciated more now. How can you get through Double Indemnity, a movie she made mid-career when her beauty could have been fading, and not appreciate/be turned on by Stanwyck? She was even terrific on "The Big Valley."
JM: What led to your interest in classic film?
KM: Where do I start on that? The very first classic film I saw as a kid (at least the one I remember that made an enormous impression on me) was Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra on TV. Bogart and Lupino. I was seven-years-old and I promptly became obsessed with that movie, and then any classic movie I could see. I would go to revival screenings any chance I could get, and poured over books and picture books and searched for old movie magazines – everything – at a very young age. And I still revere Walsh and High Sierra. One of my all time favorite Bogart performances. In a Lonely Place is first, but High Sierra also showed his depth and sadness underneath the criminal he portrayed. I have also loved photography for as long as I can remember, and older cinema just looks better. There were master craftsmen at the lens – even in B movies. When you see a Val Lewton produced picture and think that was a B-movie, and look at what would be considered a B movie today, the difference is remarkable.Read the entire interview here. And see the picture!
