Archives for 2003

My favorite movie of all time, and I don’t mean maybe, is Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, a painfully poignant look at the moral disintegration of France’s upper middle class (what Whit Stillman calls the “urban haute bourgeoisie”) on the eve of World War II. It’s on absolutely every serious movie critic’s list of the most important films as yet unavailable on DVD, so I was highly interested in the following item from the Criterion Collection Web site, which I heard about by way of DVD Journal:

Jean Renoir’s classic The Rules of the Game had been slated for release at the end of 2003, but that will change thanks to the discovery this week of a film element previously thought to be lost. Criterion’s staff had already spent months on the new high-definition master that was to be at the heart of a two-disc special edition when a French lab finally unearthed the fine-grain master of the reconstructed version, one generation closer to the original than anything previously available. A similar discovery delayed the release of another Renoir classic, Grand Illusion, intended to be Criterion’s first release. Expect The Rules of the Game in early 2004.

For those of you who aren’t cinephiles, this is a BFD (i.e., very big deal). Released in 1939, The Rules of the Game was suppressed after the Nazis moved into France, and had to be reconstructed piecemeal after the war. All existing prints (including the one that made it onto the videocassette linked above) are variously crappy-looking, and the Criterion Collection, whose DVD of Grand Illusion looks almost too good to be true, is famously fussy about picture quality. Hence the delay.

I can’t wait, but I don’t mind waiting, if you know what I mean. Nor should you.

My friend Nancy LaMott, who died of cancer in 1995, was the best cabaret singer I ever heard–period–as well as one of the dearest people I ever knew. She recorded five CDs during her lifetime, and a sixth was released after her death. They’ve been out of print for several years, but are now available again from her old label, Midder Music. To order them, go here.

I wrote a reminiscence of Nancy a few months after she died (it will be included in A Terry Teachout Reader) in which I described her singing as follows:

What I heard…was a warm, husky mezzo-soprano voice that seemed twice as big as the woman in whom it was housed; a vivid yet unaffected way with lyrics; and a quality at once sensuous and achingly idealistic. Later, after I had met Nancy, I would write that her singing sounded “as if the girl next door had snuck out at two a.m. to make a little whoopee with her steady boyfriend,” a description that delighted her no end.

All of Nancy’s records were good, but if you want to try just one, make it Come Rain or Come Shine: The Songs of Johnny Mercer. I have a sentimental attachment to that particular album–it was my own introduction to Nancy’s singing–but I also think it’s the best of her six CDs, if not by much. I can’t see how anyone could possibly hear her performance of “Moon River,” the first track on the album, without falling in love with her singing. I did, and I was also fortunate enough to spend quite a bit of time with her in the year and a half before she died. It’s nice to know that people who never heard her live will now be able to buy her records. If you didn’t, do.

“The Murder Artist,” my latest essay for Commentary, is now posted on the magazine’s Web site. It’s a review-essay about Frederic Spotts’ book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics.

If you didn’t read it in the magazine, click on the link in the “Teachout in Commentary” module of the right-hand column. You can’t miss it.

“The terrible thing about this world is that everybody has his reason.”

Jean Renoir, screenplay for The Rules of the Game

Those of you who admire the one-act plays of David Ives will know exactly what I mean when I tell you I was in a Philadelphia yesterday. (Thank God I didn’t go to any restaurants.) For civilians, I’ll say only that everything that could go wrong did, here and at The Wall Street Journal, for which I spent the morning writing a piece (see below). I’m still not sure how it got published, much less finished. And did I mention that my computer crashed at 10:45 last night, in the process chewing up the entire rough draft of today’s blog? I don’t want to discuss it.

Anyway, I didn’t slit my wrists, so here are today’s topics, from terse to laconic: (1) What I did for my summer vacation. (2) Adventures among the cinephiles and their wee ones. (3) Your weekend entertainment guide, in one easy lesson. (4) The latest almanac entry.

I forgot to remind you yesterday to tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. Pure chagrin, I guess. I don’t feel like doing it today, either. The hell with it. Don’t tell anybody about www.terryteachout.com. Consider it an exclusive club–just you, me, and The Minor Fall, the Major Lift, and he’ll probably decide I’m not cool enough later this week….

I wrote a piece for the Leisure & Arts page of today’s Wall Street Journal about my recent trip to Maine. Here’s the lead:

Six months ago, I bought a Fairfield Porter lithograph. Two weeks ago, I stood at the edge of a rocky cove near the southern tip of a remote island off the coast of Maine, looking at the same scene Porter viewed when he sketched “Isle au Haut.” To get there, I hiked for two sweaty hours along a narrow woodland trail, stepping over snakes and trying not to turn an ankle. What possessed a flabby, chair-bound critic like me to make such a journey? It seemed like a good idea as I sat in the air-conditioned comfort of my home office, but I started having second, third and fourth thoughts as I trudged up the Goat Trail of Isle au Haut….

No link, alas, so if you want to read the rest, go buy a Journal. I wish you would–I’m proud of this one.

The Film Forum held over The Adventures of Robin Hood for a few extra days, so I downed tools and went to see it Monday afternoon. I didn’t expect much of a crowd, but the theater was full of painfully obvious movie buffs, some of whom brought along their kids. It always amazes me when I run across movie buffs who have kids. As I wrote in the Weekly Standard a couple of years ago apropos of a Budd Boetticher festival at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater:

If you long to meet odd people, it’s hard to top Manhattanites who go to movies on weekdays. To be sure, I am among their number, but at least I have an excuse: I write about movies. The viewers I have in mind are the pure-hearted obsessives, overwhelmingly male and uniformly unattractive, who flock to revival houses on sunny spring afternoons to take in the latest week-long tribute to Alexander Dovzhenko, Ida Lupino, or maybe Edgar G. Ulmer–it scarcely matters, since the same folks show up every time, no matter what’s showing.

Anyway, Generation Z was out in force and we all had a terrific time, except for a few dried-up spoilsports who kept turning around in their seats and shushing the fathers who were telling their children all about Robin Hood. Sure, I like a quiet theater, but to expect a dead hush at a Labor Day matinee of The Adventures of Robin Hood is just plain silly. Me, I didn’t mind the background chatter one little bit. The newly restored Technicolor print was delicious-looking (no red is quite so red as Technicolor red), Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s score was more thrilling than ever, and–glory of glories–they even showed a cartoon, Chuck Jones’ “Rabbit Hood,” a Bugs Bunny in which Errol Flynn makes a cameo appearance. I can’t remember the last time I went to a matinee screening of an old-fashioned swashbuckler complete with cartoon. Probably not since I was a kid, and I had at least as much fun last Monday as I used to have watching Saturday-afternoon Audie Murphy double features at the Malone Theater in Sikeston, Missouri. The only thing missing was a newsreel.

Was it art? No. Do I care? No. Man cannot live by art alone. He needs a little popcorn from time to time, and the occasional Bugs Bunny cartoon to go with it. Which is how I spent my Labor Day, thank you very much.

In the general welter of confusion, I almost failed to mention that Bill Charlap, my favorite jazz pianist, is appearing through Sunday at the Jazz Standard, my favorite New York jazz club. For details of the gig, which features the Charlap Trio and a string of guest stars, go here. (Peter Bernstein is on deck tonight, Phil Woods tomorrow.) If you need coaxing, here’s a snippet of a profile of Charlap I wrote a couple of years ago for the New York Times:

Mr. Charlap can swing ferociously hard whenever it suits him, but it is his subtly shaded, quietly inward ballad playing that seems to cut closest to the core of his musical identity. “I love really slow tempos,” he says. “Shirley Horn-type tempos. I love to move around in that kind of open musical space, and not spell everything out. Like Jimmy Rowles said,