Archives for January 2007

I’ve received a fair amount of mail stirred up by the first sentence of my most recent essay
in Commentary: “Hollywood rarely makes artistically serious movies, save by inadvertence.” No need to supply details–you can imagine most of it for yourself–but one reader caught my attention by pointing to this paragraph:

Hollywood has always been a money-making enterprise, and it may well be that our latter-day Age of the Blockbuster is nothing more than a return to the historical norm from which the New Wave of the 70’s was a short-lived aberration. Thus, for all the nostalgia with which American films of the 30’s and 40’s are now recalled, the best of them were unpretentious genre movies–Westerns, musicals, “screwball” comedies, and the bleak, cynical crime stories now known as film noir–turned out by inspired craftsmen who succeeded in transcending the limitations imposed on them by the studios at which they worked. It is these films, and not such nominally “serious” efforts as The Grapes of Wrath (1939) or The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), for which the studio system will be justly remembered.

The reader in question invited to put my money where my mouth was by naming what I thought were the best sound films made in Hollywood prior to the coming of the New Wave. That’s a good question, and an impossible one, but I decided to try to answer it anyway.

Bearing in mind that I could change my mind later today, here are my fifteen picks, one to a director:

– It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934)

– The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, 1938)

– The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)

– Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

– Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1941)

– The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)

– To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1943)

– Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)

– Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)

– All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

– Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)

– The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)

– The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

– Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)

– North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

Art, or not? You decide.

“Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.”

Harry S. Truman (quoted in Merle Miller, Plain Speaking)

I’ve been to Boston and back since you last heard from me. I took the train up from New York on Saturday to see Kate Burton in Nicholas Martin’s production of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. Alas, I didn’t have time to do anything in Boston but see The Cherry Orchard and eat two meals, though I dined exceptionally well at a place called Brasserie Jo, which turns out to have an outpost in Chicago. (Got that, OGIC?) The weather was lousy, so perhaps the brevity of my stay was for the best.

I returned yesterday afternoon to commence a day and a half of nonstop writing. I’ll spend the rest of the week in Washington, D.C., where I’ll be seeing three plays and (I hope) a lot of art. Expect to hear from me with semi-regularity in this space, and from Our Girl on Wednesday.

As I mentioned last week, I went to see the North Carolina Museum of Art’s sold-out Monet retrospective (which closed yesterday) in between performances of Carolina Ballet’s Monet Impressions. It was almost as crowded as the Manet show that Our Girl and I saw three years ago at the Art Institute of Chicago:

I almost never go to blockbuster shows during regular museum hours. As a working critic, I normally attend “press views,” the pre-opening previews which, even when they draw good-sized audiences, are never too crowded. In the past couple of years, I’ve only had to fight crowds at one mega-blockbuster show, the Museum of Modern Art’s “Matisse Picasso” (I reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal, then returned a second time in the company of a friend who had a spare ticket). As a result, I’d forgotten how oppressive it is to try to look at great art in the company of undifferentiated hordes of other viewers, a not-insubstantial percentage of whom are boorishly noisy….

I don’t feel like rehearsing all the old arguments for and against such shows–they’ve been done to death, and nothing I say, here or elsewhere, will change the economic realities that drive museums to put together 100-piece extravaganzas of Impressionism’s Greatest Hits. Nor do I propose to gripe about wall texts or audio tours. In a perfect world, museumgoers would simply look at paintings, then go home, read about them, and come back to see them again. Alas, the world of art is far from perfect: not only do most museumgoers like to read about the paintings they see while they’re seeing them, but more than a few like to hear about them as well. What’s more, I don’t doubt that at least some of them profit from the experience, and far be it from me to decree that they should be deprived of it.

Having said all this, I do want to make a couple of modest proposals:

(1) Once a year, every working art critic should be required to attend a blockbuster show on a weekend or holiday. He should buy a ticket with his own money, line up with the citizenry, fight his way through the crowds, listen to an audio tour–and pay close attention to what his fellow museumgoers are saying and doing. In short, he should be forced to remind himself on a regular basis of how ordinary people experience art, and marvel at the fact that they keep coming back in spite of everything.

That one’s easy. This one’s harder:

(2) Every “civilian” who goes to a given museum at least six times a year should be allowed to attend a press or private view of a major exhibition. The experience of seeing a blockbuster show under such conditions is eye-opening in every sense of the word. If more ordinary museumgoers were to have such experiences, it might change their feelings about the ways in which museums present such exhibitions

I thought of those proposals as I fought my way through “Monet in Normandy” last Thursday. I can’t honestly say I enjoyed the experience. Great art isn’t meant to be seen in a crowd, even a well-mannered crowd of friendly, earnest North Carolinians. On the other hand, seeing it under less than ideal circumstances is better than not seeing it at all, and the fact that I had to line up to see certain of the paintings actually forced me to spend more time looking at them than I might have spent had I been attending a press view.

I got stuck, for instance, in front of Wisteria (Glycines), a 1920 canvas owned by the Allen Memorial Art Museum, and realized after a few minutes of unintended scrutiny that Joan Mitchell must have seen the same painting at some point in her life and been influenced by it. Would I have made that connection had I been strolling briskly through a half-empty gallery? Probably not.

I also had time to reflect on the insufficiently appreciated fact that Monet’s late paintings, which once were thought difficult to the point of obscurity, have in recent years become so popular that people who know little or nothing about art will line up to see them. How is it possible that Monet and Debussy, who in their own time were truly radical artists, are now beloved by the public at large?

I’m sorry to say that overfamiliarity long ago caused me to start taking both men for granted. Going to Raleigh to see “Monet in Normandy” and Monet Impressions has had the unexpected and welcome effect of renewing my long-dormant appreciation of their extreme originality. They were giants–and they still are. I can think of worse ways to be reminded of that fact than paying a visit to a crowded museum.

“I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.”

Raymond Chandler, letter, Mar. 21, 1949

I’m in today’s Wall Street Journal, not with a “Sightings” column (that’s next week) but as the guest contributor of the Journal‘s “Five Best” books feature, whose participants are invited to name five favorite books in a category of their choosing. I chose theatrical biographies, and these were my picks:

– Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life

– Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw (the one-volume abridgment)

– Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu

– Moss Hart, Act One

– John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton

The Journal has posted a free link to this piece. To read it, go here.

It’s another off-Broadway week for this Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I review Verse Theater Manhattan’s The Germans in Paris and Second Stage’s The Scene:

The success of Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia” continues to bemuse me. How could a trilogy of plays about a group of 19th-century Russian intellectuals have become the talk of the town? If such miracles are possible, then perhaps “The Germans in Paris,” Jonathan Leaf’s thought-provoking comedy about the private lives of Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx and Richard Wagner, will become the sleeper hit of the Off-Off Broadway season. I wouldn’t bet on it, but stranger things have happened.

Mr. Leaf first came to my notice with “The Caterers,” a flawed but promising play about Islamic terrorism. “The Germans in Paris,” which is being revived by Verse Theater Manhattan after a brief run two years ago at 59E59 Theatres, is a very different piece of work, a historical extravaganza spun out of a real-life coincidence: Heine, Marx and Wagner all spent time in Paris, where they became swept up in the same revolutionary crosscurrents described in “The Coast of Utopia.” So far as I know, Marx and Wagner never met, but they could have, and Heine knew both men well. Upon this “Travesties”-like foundation of fact, Mr. Leaf has erected an elaborate superstructure of speculation whose premise suggests a joke told by an egghead: Did you hear the one about the poet, the philosopher and the composer?…

Mr. Leaf has woven his web of fact and fiction with enviable skill, and the result is a sharp-witted comedy of manners that modulates neatly into high seriousness….

According to theatrical legend, anybody can write a good first act. I can’t, but I’ve definitely seen a lot of plays that were good until intermission and bad afterward. “The Water’s Edge,” Theresa Rebeck’s last play, was like that, and so is “The Scene,” a black comedy about an out-of-work actor of a certain age (Tony Shalhoub) who trashes his marriage to an ultra-competent TV producer (Patricia Heaton) by sleeping with an amoral young bimbo (Anna Camp). The first act is fast, funny and more than clever enough, and when the lights came back up I was sure I’d be filing a rave, but no sooner did the cast return to the stage than the plot ran out of steam….

No free link, so do the obvious–buy the damn paper–or, less obviously but more productively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to my review, plus the rest of the Journal‘s weekend arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

“I like Raleigh,” I told the limo driver who picked me up at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. He laughed. “All you New Yorkers come down here and talk about how much you like Raleigh,” he said, “but I don’t notice any of you moving here.” That silenced me. It also set me to wondering: would it be possible for me to live happily in a medium-sized city?

Raleigh, to be sure, has much to offer the culture-conscious