Made it! Top of the World!

Oscar Noir: Week Fifteen

White Heat

Monday, August 30, 2010

Well, here we are.  Week Fifteen.  I made it!  I had perfect attendance for the series!  Yay, me!  Unfortunately, Liz was unable to attend due to a family issue, but Linda was able to join me for a movie that she loves.  We were given surveys to complete, and no, I was not snarky like I am here.  I very genuinely heaped praise on the series, and hoped that they would offer series passes again next year.  I did not mention the crazy, mean, or fascist people.  I joined with others in giving Randy a nice standing ovation when he got to the stage.  He did put together quite a nice series.  Thank you, Randy.

Short:  "Dedication of Academy Headquarters Footage, Dec. 8, 1975"

It's always fun to look at the fashion of yesteryear.  The footage didn't have any sound, so Randy pointed out celebrities, and so did some of the audience, including Linda.  We laughed about the hors d'oeuvres: remember cocktail weenies were just the tops?  Nowadays, we'd expect much, much more than that at an Academy celebration.

Cartoon:  "Golden Yeggs"

Daffy's back!  I'm telling you, there's something about the ducks and the Noir.  Someone in Porky Pig's hen house laid a golden egg, and the culprit, knowing that there'd be trouble, pointed to Daffy as the egg-layer.  Gangsters offered Porky a deal that he couldn't refuse, and they took Daffy and demanded that he lay an egg for them.  Dudes, Daffy's a BOY DUCK.  Dummies.  But, you know, the real egg-layer kinda looked like a boy duck to me, too.  I asked Linda why Daffy didn't just fly away from the gangster's place.  She said that it was because we were watching a cartoon.  Whatevs.

Feature: "White Heat" (1949), screenplay by Ben Roberts, story by Virginia Kellogg, directed by Raoul Walsh, music by Max Steiner, and starring James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, and Edmond O'Brien.

• The film was introduced by Paul Thomas Anderson, screenwriter for "There Will Be Blood", "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights".  Academy President Tom Sherak introduced Anderson by telling the story of pitching a family-friendly script to Anderson, involving a grandfather and a grandson.  He said that he knew that Anderson was influenced by Film Noir by Anderson's only reaction at the end of the pitch, saying, "OK, but in the third act, the grandson kills the grandfather."  
• Anderson advised us to keep an eye on the extras in the jail scene when they are all eating their meals.  Cody receives news and reacts to it.  The extras were not told what Cody was going to find out or what he was going to do, so their reaction to Cody was a first-take. 
• Cagney is a genius.  His portrayal of Cody Jarrett was spot on, and I loved every moment that he was on screen.
• This is the third film in this series in which Edmond O'Brien plays a role,and this is the biggest one.  He wins in the Oscar Noir series.  I mean, listen.  He's the one that Cagney calls " A Copper!"  How awesome is that?!
• Ma Jarrett, I'm so glad you weren't my mother, or I'd be leading a life of crime.
• "You couldn't get me out of here if I was pardoned."  
• I loved the whole police chase, based on their using a radio signal to triangulate the whereabouts of Cody and his gang.  So old-fashioned for us now, yet so new for them at the time.  The best part of the chase for me, though, was that they were showing a map of Los Angeles County and naming real-life intersections.
• Virginia Mayo sure did have a lot of fur, even though, as Jarrett told her, "You'd look good in a shower curtain."
• "It's always 'somebody tipped them'.  Never 'the cops are smart'."
• The special guests for the evening were Pauline Wagner, who worked with Cagney in "LadyKiller", and a writer working on the biography of Raoul Walsh.
• Ms. Wagner, who had just turned 100 years old on August 18, was a bundle of funny anecdotes.  The audience giggled so much that at one point, Randy stated that he felt like he was on the wrong show.  She said that during an audition for Cecil B. DeMille, he yelled at her because she couldn't sing.  When she told him that it was he who asked her to screen test, and not her asking to be tested, he laughed and kept her as a credit on every show, no matter if she worked on it or not.  

I've really enjoyed this series, and learned a lot about the Film Noir genre.  Many thanks to the Academy for this great series, which I treated as sort of a film class by making sure that I attended every week and wrote up a little review on my blog.  Although I didn't always stay for the guest commentary, I still hope that my report card says that I passed, with flying black-and-white.