These notes on Cruising were written by Chelsea McCracken, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Cruising will screen as a Special Presentation on Friday, April 14 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall.

The production of William Friedkin’s Cruising in 1980 caused an uproar from the gay and lesbian community.  Cruising follows a detective’s investigation of a serial killer who murders members of the gay S/M leather community.  The film was based on a novel that Vito Russo, in his seminal book The Celluloid Closet, called “homophobic in spirit and in fact; it sees all its gay characters as having been ‘recruited,’ condemned to the sad gay life like modern vampires who must create new victims to survive” (236).  The controversy, intense reactions, and protests sparked by the film reflect a vocal section of the gay community’s concern over Hollywood’s representation of gay characters.  Gay rights activists called for a boycott of the film because, as Philip Shehadi of Gay Community News put it, “the systematic pattern of misrepresentation that has always characterized Hollywood's treatment of homosexuality is simply intolerable, and the release of Cruising is an excellent opportunity to make that statement” (“Cruising: How Dangerous?” (23 February 1980): 1).

Cruising’s script was leaked before production began, giving gay advocacy groups ample time to organize.  Activists created pamphlets to call people to arms against the film.  One such pamphlet noted that violence against homosexuals is rooted in “feelings of hatred and fear” towards a group of people, and films like Cruising “not only reinforce and foster these feelings, they exploit them for profit.”  Put even more forcefully, one pamphlet stated that in Cruising, “gay men are presented as one-dimensional sex-crazed lunatics, vulnerable victims of violence and death.  This is not a film about how we live: it is a film about why we should be killed… ‘Cruising’ is a film which will encourage more violence against homosexuals.  In the current climate of backlash against the gay rights movement, this movie is a genocidal act.” 

Cruising was shot in New York City, and by the time filming began, the film had garnered intense criticism and resentment.  Protestors interfered with the production in a number of ways, including crowding shooting locations, unhooking or even cutting cables, and blowing whistles so that shots had to be reshot, all of which cost the production time and money.   The violence of the reaction apparently startled Friedkin, who claimed that the protests went beyond peaceful disagreement and were the result of key, inflammatory articles written about the film, in particular by Arthur Bell of the Village Voice.  Friedkin maintains that the film is not homophobic but rather “just a murder mystery, with the gay leather scene as a backdrop... The vitriol that the film was greeted with still confounds me” (qtd in Alex Simon, “Cruising with Billy.”  Friedkin initially thought he would benefit from the protests and demonstrations, but they ended up working against the film, keeping it from reaching its expected box office potential.  Cruising had a disappointing theatrical run, and some theaters refused to show the film because of the negative press attention.  

Gay and lesbian protests did not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the entire community.  Despite the vocal opposition to the film’s production, more than 1600 gay men participated in the filming of Cruising.  Many of them were members of the leather subculture who welcomed the opportunity to bring attention to a subsection of the gay community that did not get recognition from mainstream gay associations.  Gay liberation political agendas tended to view with embarrassment sexual practices that deviated significantly from normative conventions.  So while some protested the film’s lack of “real images” of gay men, there were others who countered this attack by illustrating that there is no single way to be gay. 

Some sensed at the time of its initial release that Cruising could become a gay cult film, and efforts were made to preserve some of the promotional materials and prints.  The film did undergo re-evaluations as it aged, and Cruising has been reclaimed to some extent as a camp time capsule.  As Nathan Lee of The Village Voice put it, the film is a “heady, horny, flashback to the last gasp of full-blown sexual abandon, and easily the most graphic depiction of gay sex ever in a mainstream movie...  The atmosphere of uninhibited sexual camaraderie—invisible to the protestors and long since vanished from the scene—overpowers the trite homophobic conceits.”

While not uniform in their responses, contemporary viewers were heavily influenced by the press surrounding the film, and Cruising’s lasting legacy is deeply informed by the fractious situation of its production and release.  Cruising became a lightning rod for gay visibility, censorship, and conversations about LGBTQ images in media.  In this moment, what was widely considered to be a negative depiction of the gay community brought the issue of gay representations to the forefront of national discussions.  These actions drew more attention to the filmic medium as a battleground of representation, as well as to LGBTQ populations as a political force.

These notes on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) were written by Zachary Zahos, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Temple of Doom will screen in our Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen series tribute to composer John Williams on March 12 at 2 p.m. at the Chazen Museum of Art. Admission is free!

Despite all its success, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom still rankles some, its creators especially. “It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific,” Spielberg said five years after its release. “There’s not an ounce of my own personal feeling in Temple of Doom.” (He was promoting Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, a much more uplifting film, at the time.) Co-writer and executive producer George Lucas has similar misgivings, but contrary to Spielberg, he blames the film’s intensity entirely on their personal states: “I was going through a divorce, and I was in a really bad mood. So I really wanted to do dark. And Steve then broke up with his girlfriend, and so he was sort of into it, too. That’s where we were at that point in time.”

These tensions potentially inform the film’s most disturbing passages, like when the Thuggee cult brainwashes Indy (Harrison Ford) into punching his young sidekick, Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan), and—remember this?—nearly sacrificing Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) to a ceremonial pyre. Outside of what critic Dave Kehr identified as some “blunt Freudian” significance, this darkness seizes our attention for being so extraneous to the plot, which after all harkens back to the light programmers of yore. Critic Filipe Furtado jokingly notes how the film “somehow [doubles] down on the racism and sexism inherent to that [serial] tradition,” which in the end may be Temple of Doom’s most awkward legacy. Curiously, Roshan Seth (who plays the Maharaja’s Prime Minister, Chattar Lal) has since insisted that Spielberg knew the pitfalls and tried to avoid them. With the infamous Pankot Palace banquet scene, for instance, Seth said, “Steven intended it as a joke, the joke being that Indians were so f’ing smart that they knew all Westerners think that Indians eat cockroaches, so they served them what they expected.” “That joke was too subtle for that film,” Seth concluded.

If we accept Temple of Doom, then, as an incongruous and often nasty piece of work, it becomes easier to admire the filmmaking brio on display as well as the audacity with which it clashes genres and remixes film history. A litmus test for this approach comes early on, when Lao Che’s pilot henchmen try to kill our heroes by ditching their airplane: Are you bothered that Spielberg decided to stock this doomed flight with cages full of live, clucking chickens? Or is their presence justified by the cool, snow-like effect their white feathers make as they blow about the cabin? And doesn’t this also work as some frayed riff on Only Angels Have Wings? The more agreeable you find the latter two options, the more fun you will have watching (and especially rewatching) Temple of Doom.

It begins, after all, with perhaps the most jaw-dropping 15 minutes of Spielberg’s career. Apropos of nothing, Temple of Doom introduces itself as a Busby Berkeley-style musical, with high-kicking tap dancers, door-wide hand fans, and Capshaw’s Willie singing the Cole Porter song “Anything Goes” in Mandarin. A lower third title, “Shanghai, 1935,” sets the action, without fanfare, one year before Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indy enters the nightclub (its name, an in-joke, is hard to miss), where he is promptly poisoned by kingpin Lao Che. All hell breaks loose, starting with Indy spearing one of Lao Che’s sons with a flambé shishkebab and then punching a waitress for some reason. Two shiny, kickable items — the antidote vial and a golf ball-size diamond — fly about the dance floor, where Willie grovels beneath panicking diners, falling ice buckets, hundreds of balloons, and cool-headed dancers shaking to “Anything Goes” in cut time. Kung fu, throwing knives, and a tommy gun all besiege Indy before he grabs Willie, ducks behind a rolling gong, jumps out of the window, and falls into a Duesenberg Auburn convertible driven by Short Round. One rear-ended rickshaw and another Wilhelm scream later, the three pull up to an airport where Dan Aykroyd, in a cameo, escorts them to Lao Che’s aircraft while speaking the King’s English.

The opening, which is a nightmare on paper, works flawlessly, and nothing subsequent can quite match it. But plenty of other scenes possess comparable integrity and imagination, like when Indy, Willie, and Short Round set up camp at a forest clearing. Short Round argues with Indy over their card game, accusing him of cheating — Ke Quan improvised this dialogue in auditions and won himself the role. Parallel to this, Willie loses her mind as she encounters a series of large jungle animals: a bat, a baboon, two lizards, an owl, a leopard roaring off-screen. Willie collapses by the fire, where an elephant batters her with its trunk and Indy begins to hit on her. She responds, “I’d rather sleep with a snake.” On cue, a python slithers down her shoulder, and thinking it’s the elephant, she hurls it across the clearing. The sight, of course, stuns Indy to silence, capping the scene with the tables turned.

A great screwball comedy hides between the cracks of this movie, and the much-maligned Willie Scott is its star. Her screaming, “I hate the water, and I hate being wet, and I hate you!” while careening down whitewater rapids basically takes Katherine Hepburn from The African Queen and turns it up to 11. Though the screaming can indeed go overboard, especially in the second half, her vanity fits the scenario perfectly and is furthermore matched, coif for coif, by Indy’s. In another great scene rife with puns seen and spoken, Indy slides into Willie’s palace bedroom roleplaying as a scientist in need of some “research,” before she casts the “conceited ape” into the hallway. “I’m not that easy either,” he responds, and thanks to the 1000-situps regimen Ford underwent with personal trainer Jake Steinfeld, he is right.

Lacking the usual inhibitions, Spielberg let his stars in the Temple of Doom be sexy and taunt one another like autonomous adults, which is frankly a rarity for him even to this day. This playful attention to surfaces turns out to be the unexpected flipside to the film’s more prominent Sturm und Drang. While every minute remains a master class in craft, Temple of Doom’s fissures offer rare evidence that an “id film” could possibly exist. That Spielberg and Capshaw got hitched after, and that the same carnality has been largely absent from his films since, further teases at the possibility.

These notes on Sunnyside Up (1929) were written by Casey Long, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Sunnyside Up will screen on Saturday, February 25 at 7 p.m., concluding our series of Fox Studios movies from the archives of the Museum of Modern Art.

The story is familiar; a working girl falls in love with a wealthy man and he eventually learns that he loves her too. However, Sunnyside Up’s boastful tagline points to several aspects of this early sound film which serve to make it unique: “The screen's first original all talking, singing, dancing musical comedy.” Indeed, contemporaneous reviews of the film (and later career decisions made by Janet Gaynor) would indicate that while audiences generally enjoyed the film’s soundtrack, criticism of certain aspects of the two leads’ vocal abilities coupled with— at times— lackluster choreography in various numbers would have lasting effects on the medium and genre in Hollywood.

Susan Doll notes: “Released in 1929, Sunnyside Up reflects that fleeting moment in Hollywood history when the studios were trying to cope with the difficulties of sync-sound technology and deal with the resultant changes in acting styles, genres, and staging. At the same time, stars Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell were hoping to make the transition from silent to sound movies, and this musical comedy proved a successful step in their careers.” A 1929 New York Times review reveals how filmgoers viewed the addition of aural stylistic elements (on a recorded soundtrack, instead of the live musical accompaniment featured during silent films) to what had previously only been visual entertainment: “It is a motion picture that might easily stand on its own feet, but there is no doubt but sound adds considerably to the general effect. The fact that the audience remained seated to the last fade-out proves the worth of this entertainment… nobody left until they could see and hear exactly what happened.”

Both the screenplay and the music were written by a popular songwriting team of the time: Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown and Ray Henderson. The group wrote and published pop songs and Broadway musicals from roughly 1925 to 1930, including the hit Magnolia (1927) and the musical Good News (also 1927). Prior to working within this trio, DeSylva had written songs performed and popularized by Al Jolson and teamed with George Gershwin on the one-act jazz opera Blue Monday. (DeSylva would also later co-found Capitol Records.) Lew Brown, the lyricist for the group, had written for several successful Tin Pan Alley songwriters, including Albert Von Tilzer and Harold Arlen. Rounding out the trio, Ray Henderson, who served as the composer to the group, had also worked in Tin Pan Alley, and was an accompanist to song and dance acts in Vaudeville.

The music in this film would prove to be popular and long lasting. From a Variety review of the time: “Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown and Ray Henderson have turned out an average Cinderella story for Janet Gaynor, and she plays it. And sings it. David Butler in direction does so well by Gaynor that you even believe she has a voice. The ace songsters pile up likeable songs so fast they have to be sung over again in the picture to decide which is the best. And here it’s ‘If I Had a Talking Picture of You’. But for delivery Gaynor’s ‘I’m a Dreamer – Aren’t We All?’ leads.” Sunnyside Up, an iconic example of a quality early sound era musical, would continue to be referenced through the decades. In the 1933 animated short, Hot and Cold (Walter Lantz/Universal), the song “Turn on the Heat” would be prominently featured. The Best Things in Life Are Free (1956) depicts the filming of the "If I Had a Talking Picture of You" production number. It also recreates the premiere of the movie. (The film's title is shown as "Sunny Side Up" rather than as the authentic but misspelled "Sunnyside Up”.) Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You features a vocally-shy Drew Barrymore lip-synching “(I’m a Dreamer) Aren’t We All?” And, finally, Sunnyside Up is the oldest film to be featured in the 1982 comedy documentary, It Came From Hollywood, wherein comedians such as Dan Akroyd, Gilda Radner, and Cheech and Chong narrated and joked about various B movies made between the 20s and the 70s.

There is one number in the film that especially stands out to critics both past and present due to its larger-scale, more complex design. From Variety again: “‘Turn on the Heat’ is a cooch by 36 gals. And what a cooch! As the hot dance proceeds, the snow melts, trees and palms grow, and all of this while 36 coochers go the limit. There’s a bit of hinted color in this scene.” Indeed, this sequence, as it existed in the original print, was shot in a color-tinting process dubbed "Multicolor," adding a sense of spectacle to the production, but reportedly no prints exist today with that effect.

Performers’ voices, at this early stage in the sound era, were closely scrutinized and critiqued. Producers, directors and actors, plus audiences and critics, sought to define and understand what type of vocal performance suited the medium—what worked and what did not. One major early concern was whether certain actors’ voices were simply not suited to the demands of the new microphone technology and recording devices. Morduant Hall had quite a bit to say about Gaynor and Farrell’s speech-style and singing abilities in his review of the film’s premiere at the Gaiety Theatre in New York City, noting: “Miss Gaynor's voice may not be especially clear, but the sincerity with which she renders at least two of her songs is most appealing.” And, “Her talking voice seems a little husky, or is it that the microphone has been unkind to her? This may be possible, for in several passages her tones are much clearer than in others.” Lastly, of Gaynor’s co-star, Hall states, “Mr. Farrell's singing is possibly just what one might expect from the average young man taking a chance on singing a song at a private entertainment. His presence is, however, ingratiating and his acting and talking are natural. He may not strike one as an experienced stage actor, but one is gazing upon a motion picture comedy in which the people are not on a stage, but walking through real roads and into houses that look real and sometimes are real. So his speech and even his singing suits the part.”

Indeed, while critics and audiences warmly praised Gaynor’s charming manner when acting and speaking (particularly noting her ease, naturalism, ‘sassy sparkle’ or ‘sweet flirtatiousness’), her singing was another matter entirely. From Doll: “Gaynor must have realized her shortcomings as a musical comedy performer. After appearing with Farrell in the musicals Happy Days (1929) and High Society Blues (1930), she sailed to Hawaii where she remained until Fox agreed to make several changes in her contract. Near the top of her list of demands was that she never be required to star in another musical comedy.”

Aside from the film’s soundtrack, Sunnyside Up’s photography is notable as well.  Director David Butler and cinematographer Ernest Palmer make a clear attempt to include some complex and virtuosic camera movement into the picture— something that, with the introduction of sound, would have been more difficult to integrate initially. Many reviewers note the four-minute-long crane shot that reveals life on the Lower East Side (Molly’s milieu), which is followed soon after by another long tracking shot through Jack Cromwell’s mansion. From the New York Times review, again, “David Butler, the director, has done extraordinarily good work on his scenes, the opening glimpse being of a few of O. Henry's four millions who are enjoying a shower bath on the east side.” Lastly, there is at least one instance of some early special effects work, wherein a still photograph of Molly is replaced by her moving image as Jack sings to her, giving the appearance of a picture come to life.

These notes on Raoul Walsh's Wild Girl were written by Casey Long, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Wild Girl from the Museum of Modern Art will screen in our Fox Restorations from MoMA series on Saturday, February 18 at 7 p.m., followed at 8:30 p.m. by a 35mm print of Walsh's The Yellow Ticket (1931).

By Casey Long

Director and actor Peter Bogdanovich kept a movie card-file from 1952 through 1970 in which he preserved notes and impressions on the films he viewed. When reviewing his screening notes for an article entitled ‘The Golden Age of American Talkies: 1932’, he discovered his 1966 card for Wild Girl. It read: “Beautifully photographed and robustly directed adventure set in the West, centering around a backwoods girl, delightfully played by Joan Bennett, and her dealings with several men: a good-hearted gambler, a hypocritical, lecherous politician, a two-faced rancher, and a young stranger who fought with [Gen. Robert E.] Lee and has come to kill the politician because he wronged his sister. The location shooting much improves the film, and Walsh’s unpretentious handling, speedy pace and sense of humor—as shown in the amusing stage-driver Eugene Pallette scenes—keeps things going even when the script bogs down in plots and sub-plots.”

Indeed, 1932 was a notable (or, “golden”) year for the industry. Many directors who would later become established contributors to the classical Hollywood canon made—not one—but several great films in that short time. Ernst Lubitsch did Trouble in Paradise and One Hour With You; Howard Hawks made Scarface, Tiger Shark, and The Crowd Roars; Josef von Sternberg filmed Blonde Venus and Shanghai Express; Frank Borzage made A Farewell to Arms and After Tomorrow; and the list goes on, including films by George Cukor, Allan Dwan, John Ford, Leo McCarey, Cecil B. DeMille, and King Vidor. Among the prolific filmmakers of 1932 was Raoul Walsh, who made two significant works in that year: the Joan Bennett/Spencer Tracy rom-com, Me and My Gal, and its near-immediate predecessor, Wild Girl, which paired Walsh with Bennett again and replaced Tracy with Charles Farrell as the romantic lead. Walsh, previously an actor himself, came to exclusively direct after a car crash led to the loss of his right eye during the 1928 filming of Sadie Thompson. His career rose to new heights after moving to Warner Bros. in the late 1930s, where he would direct such films as The Roaring Twenties (1939), They Drive By Night (1940), The Strawberry Blonde (1941) and White Heat (1949). Often regarded as a filmmaker’s filmmaker, Walsh’s films are known to move quickly from start to finish, without a dull moment. When asked what he considered to be the three greatest virtues of a film, he famously replied: “Action, action, and then action.”

As Bogdanovich also notes, the film was primarily shot on location— in California’s Sequoia National Park. Several reviewers have pointed to the picturesque landscapes and naturalistic setting as a highpoint of the film— imagery that would be nearly impossible for cinematographers and set designers to recreate on the studio lot. It is really no wonder that so many have noted the beauty of Wild Girl— the cinematographer, Norbert Brodine, began his career as a WWI photographer and would later acquire a reputation as an ‘outdoor cameraman,’ praised for his black-and-white location shooting on films such as the film noir, Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1949). Of course, location shooting can have its downsides as well. Sally Gainsborough, a correspondent for Picturegoer magazine, was present for filming in August of 1932 and recounted the difficulties of shooting on location in the ‘High Sierras’: “one of the electricians [on set] described how a bear got into a garbage can during the night and scared him and his fellows almost to death!” And, later during filming: “…rangers soon have their hands full stopping all cars. It looks as if everyone in Central California has come to the park to-day… Suddenly in the middle of a love scene a distant car squeaks its horn. ‘Cut!’ The whole scene has to be done over again.”

The wilderness setting lends certain scenes with what one reviewer deems a “fairy-tale feel,” and also provides a loose motivation for Joan Bennett to perform in a nude lake swimming scene. This was, after all, pre-code Hollywood! Such arguably risqué behavior in American cinema would come to a swift halt only after the establishment of the Production Code Administration, which began censoring films released on or after July 1, 1934. Prior to this date, the flouting of the production code’s suggested ‘principles and applications’ was a well-known secret in the industry, since initial oversight (by Jason Joy and, later, James Wingate) was ineffective and the concurrent slump in ticket sales called for more scandalous content to boost attendance.

The source material for the film certainly does seem ideal for prodding or even mocking the pre-code censors. The lead character, Salomy Jane, is a non-conforming tomboy and the narrative’s major inciting incident is a Purity League member (and mayoral candidate) making a pass at her in a stagecoach. The screenplay was based on the short story "Salomy Jane's Kiss" by Bret Harte included in Stories of Light and Shadow (1898), his novel Salomy Jane (1910) and the play of the same name by Paul Armstrong (1907). From the AFI catalogue: “A [Hollywood Reporter] news item indicates that a working title for this film was Salomy Jane. Other films based on the Bret Harte story include the 1914 independent film Salomy Jane, starring Beatriz Michelena and House Peters; the 1923 Famous Players-Lasky Corp. film, also entitled Salomy Jane, directed by George Melford and starring Jacqueline Logan and George Fawcett; and the 1938 Twentieth Century-Fox film Arizona Wildcat.”