By J.J. Murphy
Hamel Family Distinguished Chair in Communication Arts
Director, UW Cinematheque
Favorite Films of 2016:
1. DRUNK aka DRINK (1965, Andy Warhol)
2. MOONLIGHT (Barry Jenkins)
3. AMERICAN HONEY (Andrea Arnold)
4. CERTAIN WOMEN (Kelly Reichardt)
5. TONI ERDMANN (Maren Ade)
6. THE WITNESS (James Solomon)
7. LA LA LAND (Damien Chazelle)
8. MANCHESTER BY THE SEA (Kenneth Lonergan)
9. SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT (1967, Joseph L. Anderson)
10. ACTOR MARTINEZ (Nathan Silver and Mike Ott)
By Ben Reiser
Programmer & Accounts Manager, UW Cinematheque
Festival Coordinator, Wisconsin Film Festival
Movies I’m Really Glad I Saw in 2016:
10 Cloverfield Lane (2016, Dan Trachtenberg)
Arabian Nights (2015, Miguel Gomes)
Arrival (2016, Denis Villeneuve)
The BFG (2016, Steven Spielberg)
The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015, Oz Perkins)
Don’t Breathe (2016, Fede Alvarez)
Finding Dory (2016, Andrew Stanton)
Fireworks Wednesday (2006, Asghar Farhadi)
Frank and the Wondercat (2015, Tony Massil, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa)
Heaven’s Gate (1980, Michael Cimino)
The Heiress (1949, William Wyler)
Hell or High Water (2016, Daved Mackenzie)
Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016, Taika Waikiki)
Hush (2016, Mike Flanagan)
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016, Edward Zwick)
La La Land (2016, Damien Chazelle)
The Lobster (2015, Yorgos Lanthimos)
Manchester by the Sea (2016, Kenneth Lonergan)
Moana (2016, John Musker, Ron Clements)
A Monster with a Thousand Heads (2015, Rodrigo Pia)
Moonlight (2016, Barry Jenkins)
Morris From America (2016, Chad Hartigan)
The Mother and the Whore (1974, Jean Eustache)
The Neon Demon (2016, Nicholas Winding Refn)
The Other Side (2015, Roberto Minervini)
Presenting Princess Shaw (2015, Ido Haar)
The Revenant (2015, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016, Gareth Edwards)
Rules Don’t Apply (2016, Warren Beatty)
Sing (2016, Garth Jennings)
Sing Street (2016, John Carney)
Sunset Song (2015, Terence Davies)
Sweet Charity (1969, Bob Fosse)
Tharlo (2015, Pema Tseden)
To Each His Own (1946, Mitchell Leisen)
Toni Erdmann (2016, Maren Ade)
The Witch (2016, Robert Eggers)
By Matt St. John
Project Assistant, UW Cinematheque
20 favorite new-to-me films of 2016:
1. MOANA (2016, John Musker, Ron Clement
2. MOONLIGHT (2016, Barry Jenkins)
3. IN TRANSIT (2015, Albert Maysles, Lynn True, David Usui, Nelson Walker III, Benjamin Wu)
4. LITTLE SISTER (2016, Zach Clark)
5. THE LOVE WITCH (2016, Anna Biller)
6. AMERICAN HONEY (2016, Andrea Arnold)
7. DIE HARD (1988, John McTiernan)
8. ALL THESE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS (2016, Michal Marczak)
9. NO HOME MOVIE (2015, Chantal Akerman)
10. DON’T BREATHE (2016, Fede Alvarez)
11. CERTAIN WOMEN (2016, Kelly Reichardt)
12. O.J.: MADE IN AMERICA (2016, Ezra Edelman)
13. THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN (2016, Kelly Fremon Craig)
14. ARRIVAL (2016, Denis Villenueve)
15. LITTLE VERA (1988, Vasili Pichul)
16. MANCHESTER BY THE SEA (2016, Kenneth Lonergan)
17. BASIC INSTINCT (1992, Paul Verhoeven)
18. FLOTEL EUROPA (2015, Vladimir Tomic)
19. LA LA LAND (2016, Damien Chazelle)
20. THE OTHER SIDE (2015, Roberto Minervini)
By Mike King
Programmer & Chief Projectionist, UW Cinematheque
Senior Programmer, Wisconsin Film Festival
Top ten films to play Madison in 2016:
ARABIAN NIGHTS (2015, Miguel Gomes)
CERTAIN WOMEN (2016, Kelly Reichardt)
CHEVALIER (2015, Athina Rachel Tsangari)
I AM NOT MADAME BOVARY (2016, Feng Xiaogang)
JACKIE (2016, Pablo Larraín)
LA LA LAND (2016, Damien Chazelle)
THE LOBSTER (2015, Yorgos Lanthimos)
MUSTANG (2015, Deniz Gamze Ergüven)
OUR LITTLE SISTER (2015, Hirokazu Kore-eda)
RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN (2015, Hong Sang-soo)
By Jim Healy, Director of Programming, UW Cinematheque & Wisconsin Film Festival
Between January 1 and December 31 in 2016, I managed to view 634 feature films that I had never seen before. My list of favorites contains recent releases and other movies from throughout cinema history. I encourage you to see as many as you can.
My very favorites, in alphabetical order:
ALLIED (2016, Robert Zemeckis)
THE BFG (2016, Steven Spielberg)
BLONDE CRAZY (1932, Roy del Ruth)
DON’T BREATHE (2016, Fede Alvarez)
THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN (2016, Kelly Fremon Craig)
ELLE (2016, Paul Verhoeven)
FINDING DORY (2016, Andrew Stanton)
LA HORSE (1970, Pierre Granier-Deferre)
HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE (2016, Taika Waititi)
KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS (2016, Travis Knight)
LA LA LAND (2016, Damien Chazelle)
MOANA (2016, John Musker, Ron Clements)
NORTH WEST FRONTIER (FLAME OVER INDIA, 1959, J. Lee Thompson)
PATTES BLANCHE (1949, Jean Gremillon)
RAWHIDE (1951, Henry Hathaway)
SAMMY GOING SOUTH (1963, Alexander Mackendrick)
SING (2016, Garth Jennings)
THE WELL (1951, Leo Popkin & Russell Rouse)
TO EACH HIS OWN (1946, Mitchell Leisen)
ZOOTOPIA (2016, Rich Moore, Byron Howard)
I also got a lot of pleasure out of the following movies, in alphabetical order:
10 CLOVERFIELD LANE (2016, Dan Trachtenberg)
20,000 YEARS IN SING SING (1932, Michael Curtiz)
A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE (1958, Douglas Sirk)
AFRAID TO TALK (1932, Edward L. Cahn)
ALICE IN THE CITIES (1974, Wim Wenders)
ARRIVAL (2016, Denis Villenueve)
AUTHOR: THE J.T. LEROY STORY (2016, Jeff Feuerzeig)
L'AVENIR/THINGS TO COME (2016, Mia Hansen-Love)
BACHELOR’S AFFAIRS (1932, Alfred Werker)
BACK STREET (1932, John M. Stahl)
BACKGROUND TO DANGER (1943, Raoul Walsh)
BIG CITY BLUES (1931, Mervyn LeRoy)
THE BIG BROADCAST (1932, Frank Tuttle)
THE BIG RACKET (1976, Enzo G. Castellari)
THE BIG SHAKEDOWN (1934, John Francis Dillon)
BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK (2016, Ang Lee)
BITE THE BULLET (1975, Richard Brooks)
BUREAU OF MISSING PERSONS (1933, Roy Del Ruth)
CAN HEIRONYMOUS MERKIN EVER FORGET MERCY HUMPPE AND FIND TRUE HAPPINESS (1969, Anthony Newley)
IL CAPPOTTO (1952, Alberto Lattuada)
CAPTAIN BLOOD (1935, Michael Curtiz)
CAROL (2015, Todd Haynes)
CENTRAL AIRPORT (1933, William A. Wellman)
CHANDU THE MAGICIAN (1932, Marcel Varnel & Wm. Cameron Menzies)
THE CHASE (1946, Arthur Ripley)
THE CINEMA TRAVELERS (2016, Shirley Abraham, Amit Madheshiya)
COLOSSAL (2016, Nacho Vigalondo)
COPS AND ROBBERS (1973, Aram Avakian)
DANTE’S INFERNO (1935, Harry Lachman)
DE PALMA (2015, Noah Baumbach & Jake Paltrow)
DEATH IN SARAJEVO (2016, Danis Tanovic)
DEVIL AND THE DEEP (1932, Marion Gering)
DIARY OF A MADMAN (1963, Reginald Le Borg)
DIE NIBELUNGEN: KRIEMHILD’S REVENGE (1924, Fritz Lang)
DIE NIBELUNGEN: SIEGFRIED (1924, Fritz Lang)
DOGS (2016, Bogdan Mirica)
DOUBLE JEOPARDY (1999, Bruce Beresford)
DRAGON LORD (1982, Jackie Chan)
DRUM (1976, Steve Carver)
THE EAGLE AND THE HAWK (1933, Stuart Walker)
THE FIRST LEGION (1951, Douglas Sirk)
EL NORTE (1983, Gregory Nava)
EUROPE ’51 (1952, Roberto Rossellini)
EVER IN MY HEART (1933, Archie Mayo)
EX-LADY (1933, Robert Florey)
FALBALAS (1945, Jacques Becker)
FENCES (2016, Denzel Washington)
LES FILS DE JOSEPH (2016, Eugene Green)
FIRST GIRL I LOVED (2016, Kerem Sanga)
FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS (2016, Stephen Frears)
FLYING DEUCES (1939, A. Edward Sutherland)
FRONT PAGE WOMAN (1935, Michael Curtiz)
THE GLASS WEB (1954, Jack Arnold)
GOLDSTONE (2016, Ivan Sen)
HACKSAW RIDGE (2016, Mel Gibson)
HAIL, CAESAR! (2016, Joel & Ethan Coen)
HELL OR HIGH WATER (2016, David Mackenzie)
A HEN IN THE WIND (1948, Yasujiro Ozu)
HER MAN (1930, Tay Garnett)
HER SISTER’S SECRET (1946, Edgar G. Ulmer)
HI, NELLIE! (1934, Mervyn LeRoy)
HOTEL DU NORD (1938, Marcel Carné)
A HOUSE DIVIDED (1931, William Wyler)
I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE (2016, Osgood Perkins)
I SELL ANYTHING (1934, Robert Florey)
I, DANIEL BLAKE (2016, Ken Loach)
ILLEGITIM (2016, Adrian Sitaru)
THE INTERN (2015, Nancy Meyers)
JULIETA (2016, Pedro Almodóvar)
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE AND THE TENNESSEE KIDS (2016, Jonathan Demme)
THE KISS BEFORE THE MIRROR (1933, James Whale)
KUNG FU PANDA 3 (2016, Alessandro Carloni, Jennifer Yuh)
THE LAST CHANCE (1945, Leopoldo Lindtberg)
LAUGHTER IN HELL (1933, Edward L. Cahn)
LILIES OF THE FIELD (1963, Ralph Nelson)
LITTLE MEN (2016, Ira Sachs)
LIVE LIKE A COP, DIE LIKE A MAN (1976, Ruggero Deodato)
LA MAIN AU DIABLE (1943, Maurice Tourneur)
THE LOVE WITCH (2016, Anna Biller)
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (2016, Antoine Fuqua)
MALONE (1987, Harley Cokliss)
MANCHESTER BY THE SEA (2016, Kenneth Lonergan)
MANDY (1952, Alexander Mackendrick)
MARCH OR DIE (1977, Dick Richards)
THE MARK OF ZORRO (1940, Rouben Mamoulian)
MELODIE EN SOUS-SOL (1963, Henri Verneuil)
MELODY TIME (1948, Clyde Geronimi, et al)
MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT (1968, Thomas Gutierrez Alea)
MERCENAIRE (2016, Sacha Wolff)
MESSAGE FROM THE KING (2016, Fabrice Du Welz)
MICHAEL JACKSON’S JOURNEY FROM MOTOWN TO OFF THE WALL (2016, Spike Lee)
MILANO ROVENTE (1973, Umberto Lenzi)
MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN (2016, Tim Burton)
MOONLIGHT (2016, Barry Jenkins)
MORRIS FROM AMERICA (2016, Chad Hartigan)
LA MORTE RISALE A IERI SERA (1970, Duccio Tessari)
MOTHER KÜSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN (1975, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
MR. BILLION (1977, Jonathan Kaplan)
MULTIPLE MANIACS (1970, John Waters)
MUSTANG (2015, Deniz Gamze Urguven)
THE NIGHT HOLDS TERROR (1955, Andrew L. Stone)
NIGHT OF THE JUGGLER (1980, Robert Butler)
NO SAD SONGS FOR ME (1950, Rudolph Mate)
OJ: MADE IN AMERICA (2016, Ezra Edelman)
OLD ACQUAINTANCE (1943, Vincent Sherman)
L’OMBRE DES FEMMES (2015, Philippe Garrel)
PAYMENT ON DEMAND (1951, Curtis Bernhardt)
PEE-WEE’S BIG HOLIDAY (2016, John Lee)
THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1991, Stuart Gordon)
PORK CHOP HILL (1959, Lewis Milestone)
LA PROVINCIALE (1953, Mario Soldati)
QUEEN OF KATWE (2016, Mira Nair)
THE REVENANT (2015, Alejandro G. Iñárritu)
THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US (1932, Alfred E. Green)
RUBY GENTRY (1952, King Vidor)
RULES DON’T APPLY (2016, Warren Beatty)
THE SATAN BUG (1965, John Sturges)
THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL (1934, Harold Young)
SCUM (1979, Alan Clarke)
THE SEA WOLF (1941, Michael Curtiz)
THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS (2016, Chris Renaud)
THE SHALLOWS (2016, Jaume Collet-Serra)
SI MUERO ANTES DE DESPERTAR (1952, C.H. Christensen)
SIGNORE E SIGNORI (1966, Pietro Germi)
SING STREET (2016, John Carney)
SOLO SUNNY (1980, Konrad Wolf)
LES SORCIERES DE SALEM (1957, Raymond Rouleau)
STELLA DALLAS (1925, Henry King)
THE STRANGER'S HAND (1954, Mario Soldati)
THE STUDENT (2016, Kiril Serebrennikov)
SUGAR CANE ALLEY (1983, Euzhan Palcy)
SULLY (2016, Clint Eastwood)
SWEET CHARITY (1969, Bob Fosse)
TICKLED (2016, David Farrier, Dylan Reeve)
TRUE CONFESSION (1937, Wesley Ruggles)
UN CARNET DU BAL (1937, Julien Duvivier)
UNDER THE SHADOW (2016, Babak Anvari)
THE WAYWARD BUS (1957, Victor Vicas)
WEINER (2016, Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg)
WHEN LADIES MEET (1933, Harry Beaumont)
WHEN THE WIND BLOWS (1986, Jimmy Murakami)
WHERE TO INVADE NEXT (2015, Michael Moore)
THE WITNESS (2015, James Solomon)
XMEN: APOCALYPSE (2016, Bryan Singer)
THE YOUNG MASTER (1980, Jackie Chan)
This essay on the 1948 drama The Snake Pit was written by Megan Boyd, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm archival print of The Snake Pit will screen in our Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen series honoring the centennial of Olivia de Havilland on December 4 at 2 p.m. at the Chazen Museum of Art.
By Megan Boyd
It is not mere coincidence that 20th Century Fox’s unsettling film, The Snake Pit, was released the same year as the monumental Paramount decision. Even before the Paramount decision ordered studios to divest themselves of their theaters, 1940s films like The Snake Pit were rendered possible by shifting production practices and power relations between studios, directors and performers throughout the decade. Directors and performers were able to obtain some influence within the studio system, and the 1940s would be marked by these developments—developments that would allow personnel to explore controversial ‘prestige’ themes and for performers such as Oliva de Havilland to have more control over their projects.
Even before the Paramount decision in 1948, studios like Fox had already been shifting from central producers to a package-unit system that granted certain producers, directors and performers a certain amount of independence during their working process. This encouragement of certain directors and performers, particularly those associated with A pictures, to pursue riskier but more ‘artistic’ projects was partially in response to the lessening of B-level production in the 1940s. Studios now had to compete with one another primarily with A films and thus, there was increased competition to make the A projects distinctive from those of other studios. At Fox, Daryl Zanuck produced a series of ‘social problem’ projects that might have previously been considered box office poison. The Snake Pit’s use of psychoanalysis and Olivia de Havilland’s performance both demonstrate critical shifts in film content engendered by this more permissive atmosphere.
Following the critical acclaim and award onslaught for Zanuck’s Academy Award-winning Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), an indictment of anti-Semitism, Zanuck went on to produce The Snake Pit. The Snake Pit was based on Mary Jane Ward’s semi-autobiographical novel, which described a woman’s mental breakdown and experiences within a mental institution. While The Snake Pit is often examined within the context of Zanuck’s social problem films, the content of the film correlates more directly with a rising interest in psychoanalysis in 1940s American cinema. Like Gentleman’s Agreement, The Snake Pit both benefits and suffers from its 1940s cultural context. By this decade, Sigmund Freud’s notions of psychoanalysis, particularly in regards to social repression and women’s hysteria, had acquired a significant pop cultural cache. Filmmakers frequently explored character psychology, sexual repression and problematic familial relations, seen in films such as King’s Row (1941), Spellbound (1945), The Locket (1946) or Mourning Becomes Electra (1947). As in many of these other film efforts (with the exception of Spellbound), the female mind is presented as a fragile, problematic site to be investigated. While Ward’s novel was much more critical of mental institutions as a whole and openly addressed some of the restrictive elements of marriage that led her to her breakdown, the film adaptation, as with Gentleman’s Agreement and some of Zanuck’s other social problem films, rewrites the institutional problem as an individualized problem—often localizing blame for social injustices on female characters. For instance, many of the dislikable male nurses from the book are removed and replaced with cruel, female nurses, who are given extended sequences in the film where they are shown tying protagonist Virginia in a straight jacket or speaking harshly to other patients. The blame for Virginia’s condition is assigned in flashbacks to the cold, callous nature of her mother, which forced her to become unnaturally fixated on her father. These childhood concerns are attributed as the source of Virginia’s inability to let her husband touch her. This maternal source of Mary’s breakdown differs from the blame placed on marital discord and stifling domesticity present throughout Ward’s autobiography. Finally, while the character Virginia is equally critical of her male doctors in the book, Virginia’s male doctor in the film is portrayed as a sympathetic savior—the only one willing to treat Virginia like a human being. In the book, Virginia critiques, “I do not like thee, Dr. Kik. I think you are rather silly.” This is quite a contrast from Virginia’s reliance on Dr. Kik and male diagnosis in the film, where she instantly accepts his judgment with responses such as, “It’s funny…everything you’ve said makes sense. I feel as though I know it.” The troubles of mental and marital institutions then, are reassigned to ‘nasty’ women—the callousness of the institutions’ nurses, Virginia’s mother and Virginia’s own frigidity.
Despite the troubling nature of the film’s recasting of institutional problems, the film presents Olivia de Havilland in a memorable performance. De Havilland’s treatment by film scholars often seems to reflect her treatment by characters in her films; she is never a source of fascination or fixation, but rather, acknowledged as dependable and competent. Yet de Havilland’s double Academy Award-winning career, particularly in the 1940s, was nothing short of remarkable. Though de Havilland began her career in sweet, ingénue roles, such as Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) or Maid Marian in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), she transformed her career (partially thanks to a lawsuit against Warner Brothers that encouraged more freedom of choice in actors’ selection of screen roles) by specializing in plain or somewhat unsympathetic characters that are underestimated by those around them. These were the crowing achievements of her career—not the seductive or glamorous roles embodied by many of the 1940s female stars, from Rita Hayworth to Betty Grable.
De Havilland’s performance as Melanie in Gone with the Wind (1939) provided a blueprint for many of her memorable 1940s screen performances, including The Snake Pit. De Havilland performs Melanie largely as a sweet, liltingly voiced character, almost too gentle for this world—until she begins to create key vocal shifts in moments of surprising grit. The audience is almost taken aback when, having gotten used to the contrast between Melanie’s sweetness and Scarlett’s spirit, Scarlett has shot a Northern soldier and Melanie emerges from her room to pronounce in a low, husky voice (while holding a sword), “Scarlett, you killed him. Good. I’m glad you killed him.” This ability to shift abruptly from lilting to harsh vocal tones remained a key staple throughout de Havilland’s most acclaimed performances. De Havilland incorporates this in The Snake Pit as we see the contrast between early moments of happiness between Virginia and her husband and Virginia’s later jarring screeches and cynical, dry narration in the mental institution. The performance contrasts are perhaps most effectively employed in de Havilland’s Academy Award-winning appearance the following year in The Heiress (1949), in which the audience watches de Havilland’s plain, naïve protagonist gradually shift to a bitter, stronger woman determined to teach her former, fortune-hunting suitor a lesson. That de Havilland could remain such a star in the 1940s, when her Academy Award nominated performances contain such a lack of romance—even bordering on the grotesque—is particularly worthy of note in a decade not often seen as opportunity-laden for female film performers.
Please enjoy The Snake Pit, both for its place within a radically shifting 1940s film industry and for Olivia de Havilland’s unusual position amongst Hollywood screen heroines.
"Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else's life for a while. I can walk in somebody' else's shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.
This is a liberalizing influence on me. It gives me a broader mind. It helps me to join my family of men and women on this planet. It helps me to identify with them, so I'm not just stuck being myself, day after day.
The great movies enlarge us, they civilize us, they make us more decent people."
Roger Ebert
As we approach the end of 2016, we hope you can reflect on how the UW Cinematheque has enriched your life this year.
This year, the Cinematheque has presented nearly 150 screenings and programs, all for free, in our regular venues at 4070 Vilas Hall, the Chazen Museum of Art, and the Marquee Theater at Union South. Our selections have included series devoted to 1960s musicals, new restorations from UCLA, new cinema from Mexico, Italian restorations, French tough guy actors, one-shot directors, and heroines of anime. Plus, retrospectives that paid homage to acclaimed international directors like Wim Wenders, Ingmar Bergman, and Brian De Palma, as well as centennial celebrations for the great movie stars Kirk Douglas and Olivia de Havilland. We welcomed speakers and artists like writer/director Andrew Bergman, UW Professor and author David Bordwell, filmmakers Peter Flynn and Ted Nakamura, and Robert Ryan biographer J.R. Jones. We brought you the first and, in some cases, only area theatrical screenings of such acclaimed new movies as Hitchcock-Truffaut;Miguel Gomes' epic Arabian Nights; Chantal Akerman's final work, No Home Movie; Brady Corbet's The Childhood of a Leader; Roberto Minervini's The Other Side; and coming up in December, Lewis Klahr's mesmerizing Sixty Six.
The equipment in our projection booth at the Cinematheque's main venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, allows us to maintain the highest standards of digital and 35mm film exhibition. Our venues remain a rarefied regular exhibitor of films shown in their beautiful, original 35mm format.
Our upcoming January-May calendar will begin with an exciting four-day series of programs in 3-D, presented with temporarily installed special equipment. Other early 2016 series will focus on Fox film restorations from the New York's Museum of Modern Art collection; the music of John Williams; and the avant-garde masterworks of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. You can also look forward to a healthy offering of new international cinema in our Premiere Showcase selections and other series!
Cinematheque screenings will continue to be free and open to the public, but we still rely on donations from our audiences to keep our technical facilities up-to-date. Please help us in providing the Cinematheque with the most exciting film programming in the region by clicking here and making a donation today to the Cinematheque's Friends of Film fund.
See you at the Cinematheque!
Jim Healy, Director of Programming
This essay on Dave Thomas' & Rick Moranis' Strange Brew (1983) was written be Leo Rubinkowski, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Strange Brew will screen at the Chazen Museum of Art on Thursday, November 17 at 6 p.m.. The screening is one of two adaptations of Shakespeare's Hamlet presented in conjunction with the Chazen's presentation of the First Shakespeare Folio through December 11.
By Leo Rubinkowski
Here’s the short version:
Last week, Hamlet (1948): “Good night, sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”
This week, Strange Brew (1983): “Take off, you hoser!”
If you don’t like it, take off, eh!
Here’s the long version:
From their first appearance in 1980 as hosts of SCTV’s fictional talk-show segment “Great White North,” the McKenzies were defined by genial irreverence. At the time, SCTV’s half-hour broadcasts to Canadian audiences included two extra minutes of programming compared to the broadcasts syndicated for NBC affiliates in the United States. Seeing an opportunity for cultural outreach, the Canadian Broadcasting Company required that SCTV devote the time to uniquely “Canadian content.” Seeing an opportunity for mischief, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas complied by inventing Bob and Doug, respectively, avatars of the Canadian spirit who spent their time frying back-bacon, drinking beer, eating jelly donuts, and discussing issues of national significance (like how to fit a mouse into a beer bottle).
The McKenzie sketches were bare-bones—two actors improvising two-minute bits back-to-back-to-back for an hour with a single cameraman after the rest of SCTV’s crew had left for the night—but they proved wildly popular, both at home and south of the border. (When SCTV occasionally ran short, network affiliates in the US made up the difference by running the longer Canadian version with the McKenzie bits.) In 1981, Moranis and Thomas released a comedy album as their alter-egos titled “The Great White North,” which charted in the US and Canada and earned the duo a Grammy nomination for Best Comedy Album in 1983. A feature film seemed like a reasonable next step.
(Enter Shakespeare.)
At a glance, Strange Brew is very obviously based on Hamlet. (Why else would we have paired the two for a Cinematheque series?) In place of the Danish royal family’s estate, Elsinore, we get Elsinore Brewery. Rather than King Hamlet’s murder by his brother Claudius, who usurps his throne and steals his wife, Uncle Claude takes over the family brewery as a lackey of Brewmeister Smith, who murdered John Elsinore (Claude’s brother) to keep him from exposing a plan to take over the world through tainted beer. Instead of Hamlet and Ophelia, who both end up very dead, Pam Elsinore and one-time hockey great Jean LeRose save the day while very much alive. Finally, the comic relief: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the original, and the McKenzies here. (Is there a Hosehead-Laertes connection I’ve missed? Oh! I forgot the play-within-the play, which is reproduced in minute detail as The Mutants of 2051 AD.)
If the correspondences look cursory, and if any perceived homages feel indelicate, that’s because they are. Taking Dave Thomas at his word, he and Rick Moranis faced a pair of problems in developing the McKenzies for the big screen, and Shakespeare solved both problems. First, their executive producer at SCTV had threatened to sue the pair for breach of contract if they wrote a movie using their “Great White North” characters, so they handed off the initial script-writing duties to Steve De Jarnatt. Second, Bob and Doug were products of improvisation; neither Moranis nor Thomas was fully prepared to develop a 90-minute script for two characters who spent their lives on a couch. Rather than leave De Jarnatt with nothing, though, they offered him Hamlet, saying “Why don’t you play with that structure. That’s at least a story that works.”
And that’s about as far as Shakespeare influenced Strange Brew (at least as far as I can tell).
(Exit Shakespeare.)
With a script in hand, Moranis and Thomas had no trouble securing a distribution deal with MGM. At the same time, the two actually rewrote a good deal of the script, because they felt that their improvisational style hadn’t been adequately reproduced in the first draft. What could they add to Shakespeare? Basically anything that entertains despite (or because of) its cartoonish absurdity. Some portions of the script toward the end were re-worked (apparently, Hosehead couldn’t fly in the first go-around), but Dave Thomas points primarily to the first half of the film, when he said: "…the opening of the movie, if you look at it texturally, is quite different than the back half. The back half really locks into the story of the evil Brewmeister trying to take over the world, whereas [in] the beginning of the movie Bob and Doug present a little sci-fi with Rick as Charlton Heston at the end of the world…picking up a miniature Statue of Liberty and…then we’re in a movie theater watching our own movie and we release moths, cause a riot, and end up having to run out of our own movie premiere. The script was far more bizarre and conceptual in the beginning than it ended up being at the end. If we had been able to rewrite the whole thing, we would have made the whole thing like that probably, but we weren’t sure how far we could go with the studio."
When Strange Brew hit North American screens in late August 1983, Janet Maslin of the New York Times called it “a movie that’s barely there,” assuring her readers that the cost of admission “could buy enough beer for an experience at least as memorable as this one.” With all due respect to Maslin, she must not have been watching in the preferred 3-B. While allowing that the plot isn’t exactly air-tight (“Tunnel to the brewery? Take off! How convenient!”) and acknowledging that it lacks the emotional and psychological force of, say, The Merchant of Venice, viewers should also keep in mind that this isn’t Shakespeare. A better point of comparison, in fact, is offered right in the film: cartoons. In MGM’s Tom & Jerry shorts (to say nothing of the Merry Melodies and Looney Tunes libraries owned by Warner Bros.), basic rules of logic don’t apply. The same goes for the universe inhabited by Bob and Doug; critical comparisons to the real world (or to basic standards of dramatic narrative) just get in the way. It’s easier to suspend expectations and be perpetually surprised at the antics of these two lovable goofballs and at the inarguable novelty of their adventures.
Oh! Beauty!
This essay on the 1935 Warner Bros. adaptation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written by Erica Moulton, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of A Midsummer Night's Dream will screen in our Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen retrospective honoring the centennial of Olivia de Havilland on Sunday, November 13 at 2 p.m. at the Chazen Museum of Art. Shakespeare's First Folio will be on display at the Chazen through December 11.
By Erica Moulton
Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s 1935 film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream tests the elasticity of Shakespeare’s comedies and how effectively they can be translated into the Hollywood mold. The film was made with the best of artistic intentions, with the accomplished theatre director Reinhardt coming to work for Warner Brothers after fleeing Germany. His vision of Midsummer was set in an entirely fantastical, supernatural landscape, an Athenian forest lit by thousands of twinkling fairy lights, illuminating the mirth and mayhem that unfolds. The film succeeds on a number of fronts, being both an opulent spectacle and a lively recreation of Shakespeare’s play. However, it also paradigmatic of the dubious relationship between Hollywood and Shakespeare.
The story of the play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (originally performed in the 1590s) comprises three separate stories woven together in a common setting. The lovers, the fairies, and the rude mechanicals (actors) all frolic through the forest the night before King Theseus will wed his beloved Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. The lovers’ story plays out as a typical youthful romance with a supernatural twist. Helena (Jean Muir) loves Demetrius. Demetrius (Ross Alexander) wants to marry Hermia (Olivia De Havilland). Hermia loves Lysander (Dick Powell). When Oberon, king of the fairies, and his mischievous sprite Puck intervene with an enchanted flower, the lovers’ affections comically shift from scene to scene, until Puck sets them right. Meanwhile, the rude mechanicals rehearse for their upcoming performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” at Theseus’ wedding. The pompous self-appointed leading man of the acting troupe, Bottom (James Cagney), clashes with the beleaguered manager Peter Quince, before the actors also become embroiled in the supernatural plot when Bottom is cursed with a donkey’s head by Puck. Bottom is taken in by Titania, Oberon’s estranged fairy wife, who is under the spell of Puck’s love potion. Eventually, all is set right by the supernaturals and the play ends with the performance of the mechanicals’ hilariously awful play.
The chaotic energy Midsummer elicits on the stage, with the frequent shifts between the action of the three groups, and Puck running through them all, commenting to the audience, make it an awkward fit for the screen. Moreover, Reinhardt changes little in adaptation, mostly due to his background in theatre, and because the 1935 film started out as a stage production that he mounted at the Hollywood Bowl the previous year. Reinhardt brought from the stage production his obsession with foliage, and he attempted to fill every last film frame with as many trees as he could until his cinematographer, Hal Mohr, intervened, pointing out that the excess of trees were making it impossible for him to light properly. A compromise was reached when Mohr discovered he could spray paint the leaves in the forest silver to achieve the sparking, eye-catching effect Reinhardt desired. For the filmed version, Reinhardt brought in famed choreographer and ballerina Bronislava Njinska to arrange the elaborate fairy ballets. For the music, Erich Wolfgang Korngold was hired by Reinhardt to arrange the music of Felix Mendelssohn for the film, which would prove to be the beginning of Korngold’s compositional career at Warner Brothers.
Despite the artistic effort being deployed by Reinhardt and his company, the executives at Warner Brothers were considerably nervous at the prospect of a Shakespeare movie, after the disastrous box-office failure of Taming of the Shrew in 1929. In the end, A Midsummer Night’s Dream did little to quell the studios’ fears of the Bard. The film was received mildly by both audiences and critics, and after another underwhelming Shakespeare adaptation in 1937 with Romeo and Juliet, Hollywood largely avoided Shakespeare’s plays for the next decade.
In reality, the film’s tepid response might have less to do with Shakespeare, and more to do with the general mismatch of stage comedy and screen comedy. Midsummer on stage thrives in moments of messiness and the unexpected or spontaneous. The closest Reinhardt and Dieterle’s film comes to recreating that is in the mechanicals’ rehearsal scenes, which allow Cagney and comic actors like Hugh Herbert and Joe E. Brown to shine. However, even the way the film was marketed betrays the discomfort of Warner Brothers with Reinhardt’s approach towards adaptation. The original trailer for the production shows the actors first in their modern, 1930s clothes, and then transformed in their Midsummer costumes. This self-referential touch is out of step with Reinhardt’s opulent all-consuming vision of the play. He is going for a high romantic, even operatic interpretation, especially in the scenes with the fairies. The film’s marketing also emphasizes the high cultural value of the film, calling it a “screen masterpiece” and saying the story’s romance has “inspired lovers for 300 years”. Yet, Shakespeare’s name is not mentioned once.
Despite some of the film’s awkwardness, there is beauty to behold in Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummer. In the spangled forest, the magic of film allows the fairies to be fully realized ethereal beings, dancing like supernatural chorus girls. Olivia de Havilland is charming as Hermia, a woman first beloved, then spurned by two suitors. And Mickey Rooney’s performance as Puck, which can be polarizing for his manic energy and unusual line deliveries, is at least fascinating in the sense that Rooney’s youth makes him of similar age to the boy performers that would have played Puck in the 1590s production. Warner Brothers and the other studios may have shunned Shakespeare for years after, but A Midsummer Night’s Dream proves that they were at least willing to take risks, even if they didn’t always pay off.
This essay on Laurence Olivier's movie of William Shakespeare's Hamlet was written by Erica Moulton, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Hamlet will screen at the Chazen Museum of Art on Thursday, November 10 at 6 p.m.. The screening is one of two adaptations of Hamlet presented in conjunction with the Chazen's presentation of the First Shakespeare Folio through December 11. A screening of Warner Bros' 1935 adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream will screen as part of our Olivia de Havilland retrospective on Sunday, November 13.
By Erica Moulton
“This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.”
Laurence Olivier opens his 1948 film adaptation of Hamlet with these words, the only ones heard in the film that do not belong to William Shakespeare’s play text. Despite the simplicity of this statement, upon closer inspection, it proves to be more question than axiom. The “man” at the center of the statement, the young prince Hamlet, has posed many problems for critics, theatre directors, filmmakers, and actors since he first appeared on the page and stage around 1600.
Since then, he has been the favorite son of the literary and theatrical set, with every critic worth their muster penning an essay or book on Hamlet, and every actor waiting for their chance to cut their teeth on the role. In the 1910s, D.H. Lawrence said of the character: “I have always felt a strong aversion from Hamlet: a creeping unclean thing he seems….[the] character is repulsive in its conception, based on a self-dislike and spirit of disintegration.” Lawrence’s attitude towards Hamlet is extreme, but in describing a poster-boy for self-loathing and neuroses, Lawrence is not far removed from the 20th century project of aligning Shakespeare’s plays, particularly Hamlet, with the work of Sigmund Freud.
Freud’s influence on Olivier’s Hamlet is well-documented and highly evident to viewers even casually familiar with Freud’s writing. When Olivier stages a climactic argument between Hamlet and his mother Gertrude, with the two writhing and struggling on her bed, he isn’t insinuating anything. Psychoanalysis had edged its way into popular consciousness by the middle of the 20th century, with filmmakers like Hitchcock directing his ode to head-shrinking, Spellbound, in 1945. Olivier was certainly interested in laying the subconscious of Shakespeare’s characters bare in the film, but it is the way that he does this, how he shoots and frames the action, that ultimately makes this Hamlet both satisfying and occasionally frustrating.
While Freud gets referenced often in discussions of this film, of equal importance is Hollywood cinematographer Gregg Toland, whose collaborations with directors like John Ford, Orson Welles, and William Wyler in The Long Voyage Home, Citizen Kane, and The Best Years of Our Lives greatly impacted Olivier and his cinematographer Desmond Dickinson. Olivier is adept at using deep space to stage the conflicts both external and internal between Hamlet and the members of the court at Elsinore. When Hamlet is introduced, he sits at the end of a long table, foregrounded, with his uncle (now step-father) Claudius gazing imperiously at him from a throne in the background. Hamlet has become a stranger in his own home, and after receiving a shocking revelation from the ghost of his dead father, the old King Hamlet, he sets out on his journey of revenge. The camera roves, meanders, peeks around corners, eavesdrops on private conversations, and leads its audience through the labyrinthine castle Elsinore.
The cast of Hamlet are also subjects of scrutiny as they move through the dark and cavernous halls and winding stairwells. Felix Aylmer and a very young Jean Simmons are standouts in the cast, as the grizzled royal advisor Polonius and his daughter Ophelia, who is caught between her duty to her father and her love for prince Hamlet. This family drama mirrors that between the royal family, and loyalties between fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters are tested. Olivier chose to pare down his text to only include the family intrigue, jettisoning the larger political themes of the play, as well as multiple characters. What is left is an intense psychological drama, a cat and mouse game that, like the title of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, traps the characters, each brought down by a fatal flaw.
One question that Olivier grapples with is—whose flaw is it? Is it, as the opening declaration suggests, Hamlet’s inability to make up his mind that brings about the downfall of his family, and consequently, the entire nation of Denmark? Or is it the “stamp of one defect” each man (and woman) is cursed to bear that causes this unraveling of humanity? Olivier offers no easy answers, but the film, like the play, is a puzzle to get lost in again and again. It is not a tragedy—it’s the tragedy.