Dior J'adore: Reliving Hollywood Glamor

So, I've watched the new Dior ad about five times now and I'm still not sure what to think about it. For those who haven't seen it, Dior's ad for J'adore perfume features not only the actress Charlize Theron, stalking proudly through the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, but the images of Grace Kelly, Marlene Dietrich, and Marilyn Monroe, brought to life through CGI. The living actress kisses Kelly on the cheek, glances over at the tuxedo-ed Dietrich, and, in the ad's most surreal moment, hands Monroe a bottle of perfume, as Marilyn whispers in a breathlessly worshipful tone, "Dior...J'adore." The ad ends on an image of Theron strutting down the catwalk, her sparkling gold figure turning into the Dior bottle.

My first reaction was a full-body shudder of, "Oh God, they're using dead women to hawk their perfume." Somehow, the thought of CGi-ed, reanimated actresses giving their seal of approval to a current product is frightening. The ad even seems to acknowledge this by hitting a "scare chord" at the moment when Grace Kelly first turns around. But I have to admit, there was an element of pleasure to the ad as well, in seeing these iconic legends again. When I showed the ad to my mom, she had fun picking out the actresses and told me afterward, "It's much more respectful than I thought it would be."

And she has a point. Except for the deeply jarring moment when Marilyn speaks (and wasn't she a Chanel woman anyway?), the ad can be taken as a simple homage to old-style Hollywood glamor. Which is a pretty clever choice for an ad campaign and a perfect association for a perfume. Scent evokes memory, after all. A great perfume can do more than attract a mate or match an outfit, it can trigger something deeply personal in our minds. Because of the way the ad is staged, the sense I got from it was not so much "Wear our perfume and be like Marilyn," but "The glamor of the past gives way to the glamor of the future."

 Of course, just because the ad has a good thesis doesn't mean it's a successful one. Charlize Theron is a stunning woman who, on the basis of her looks alone, could go toe to toe with any of these actresses. But in terms of iconic glamor and star power? They leave her completely in the dust. This isn't Theron's fault. I think it would be the same problem whether the ad featured Anne Hathaway, Halle Berry, or Mary-Kate Olsen. The star system is gone and with it, the idea that actresses could be goddesses. This ad doesn't just remind us of classic Hollywood glamor, it reminds us of how completely it's gone extinct.

The ad raises interesting questions for me. How far is it acceptable to go in using these iconic images? Can loving nostalgia co-exist with such an eerie use of our current technology? And why, in an ode to the past, did they choose a song with the lyrics, "If it's already been done, undo it?"

Miscastings in Classic Film

It's time for a list. And today, my chosen topic is:

If I could go back in time and change just one casting choice from one classic movie.

Now I must preface this list by saying that I'm mainly criticizing the casting, not the actors themselves. With perhaps one exception, my feelings for the actors listed below range from indifference to heartfelt love. I just don't believe they were suited for these particular roles. And I chose to go after films I consider true classics. There's little point in going after, say, Victor Mature in Samson and Delilah. And, even though I couldn't resist using the photo of John Wayne as Genghis Khan, I'm not going to go after Hollywood's long history of racial miscastings in this post. Mickey Rooney's portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's may be an epically horrible stain on an enjoyable film, but the character would have been a racist caricature no matter who was playing him. For this list I want to talk about good characters, good movies, good actors and bad casting. So let's begin.

1. Valerie Hobson in Great Expectations

I have to confess a bias here: Estella is one of my favorite Dickens characters. She's that rarity: a Dickens heroine who isn't innocent and wholesome. Instead, Estella is an icy, damaged character, the Catwoman amongst the pigeons. She has humor and honesty and she feels something for Pip, but because of her upbringing, she can't be normal. Maybe she never will be. Because I love Estella, I had high hopes for Valerie Hobson's portrayal. Alas. Hobson is pretty enough but she's so prim and proper. She tries to sound like a heartless femme fatale and ends up sounding pert. Hobson would have made a fine Gwendolyn Fairfax, but as Estella? No. It's a pity because Jean Simmons as the younger Estella is so perfect. If only she could have played both parts.

2. Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina

Bogart's casting, as the harried workaholic Linus Larrabee, isn't so much a disaster as it is a collection of small annoyances. There's his age for one thing, a common problem with Hepburn's costars. There's the fact that he's playing a privileged businessman. Bogart always seemed more comfortable sneering at the upper crust than in playing their games. But the biggest problem, for me, is that he never strikes sparks against Hepburn. Bogart's best leading ladies were as flinty and fearful of surrender as he was, from the high-toned, scheming Mary Astor to the romantically tormented Ingrid Bergman. Hepburn is too elfin, too warm, to play ball with him. For her part, Audrey Hepburn needed leading men who were willing to be charmed, even if it meant letting her steal the light. Bogart was not that man. You can feel his discomfort. This is the itchy wool sweater of romantic comedy performances.

3. Cecil Kellaway in The Postman Always Rings Twice

Cecil Kellaway as the gruff, Greek husband of Lana Turner--I've already ranted about this one at some length. It still makes no sense to me.

4. Nora Gregor in La Règle du jeu

Jean Renoir's masterpiece about the boredoms and manipulations of France's upper class needed a strong leading lady to stand at the center, someone who could be both shallow and seductive. This character, Christine de la Chesnaye, is an aristocrat's wife, mired in the romantic gamesmanship of her class and too weak to break free from it. She is the object of many men's obsessions, but she can't hold on to her husband. She has the chance for escape but it eludes her. There's silliness to her, but tragedy too. For that kind of role, you need a talented and charismatic actress (I'm thinking of Arletty in Les Enfants du Paradis). Instead, we have Nora Gregor, who is just inadequate. She flutters, she pouts, she trembles. She has the mannerisms of a custard pudding. Gregor's Austrian background does allow Renoir to make a clever reference to Marie Antoinette and she gets more tolerable as the movie goes on. But the emotional weight of her character is left up to Renoir. Gregor doesn't spoil the movie but still, I ache for what Danielle Darrieux could have done with this role.

5. James Stewart in Rope

If you put me in front of the firing squad and told me to name my favorite actor, Jimmy Stewart would be it. I very rarely have a problem with Stewart's casting in anything. And Stewart and Hitchcock brought out the best in each other. So it's odd that his portrayal of the sharp-tongued, suspicious, possibly-gay Rupert Cadell in Rope does so little for me. On the surface, it seems like a fine choice. Stewart could spout witticisms about murder without losing audience sympathy and he didn't shy away from darker characters. But Stewart never seems comfortable in the role of this erudite shithead and quickly escapes into playing Rupert the detective. He talks about his own culpability in the murder, but it rings hollow. Properly, this role should have gone to George Sanders or James Mason.

6. Marlene Dietrich in Witness for the Prosecution

It's hard to talk about this one without giving away plot details, but Marlene Dietrich is an awkward fit for the role of Tyrone's Power's devoted wife. Christine Vole. In the original Agatha Christie story, Mrs. Vole was quiet, calm, and mysteriously "foreign," which made her completely unknowable to the stolid British men who dealt with her. Understandably, for the film version, Billy Wilder wanted to expand the character and make her funnier, more exciting. However, Marlene Dietrich is a little too far in the other direction. She's funny, melodramatic and larger than life. There's no mystery about her, everything she does is outsize. Which makes it impossible for her to fool anyone. I can't deny that Dietrich is a lot of fun in the part, though.

7. Leslie Howard in Gone with the Wind

This one's been argued to death but it's true. Leslie Howard is the weakest link in Gone with the Wind. Howard himself didn't want to play the milquetoast Ashley Wilkes and complained bitterly about the role ("I look like that sissy doorman at the Beverly Wilshire," "I'm not nearly young or beautiful enough for Ashley").  Actually, Howard's a little harsh; his portrayal of Ashley was dignified and intelligent and he had good chemistry with both his actresses. But it isn't enough to disguise the fact that Howard lacks believability as the personification of Scarlett's white-knight desires. He's too old and stiff, more like Scarlett's schoolmaster than her contemporary. Next to the pitch-perfect performances of Leigh, Gable, and de Havilland, Howard sticks out all the more. 


Well, that's enough negativity for now. Maybe for my next list, I'll tackle the many great against-type casting choices. That'd be fun.

Movie Review: Angel

Angel (1937) 
directed by Ernst Lubitsch, starring Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall, Melvyn Douglas

In the salons of the Grand Duchess Anna Dmitrievna (Laura Hope Crews), two people meet by chance. Diplomat Anthony "Tony" Halton (Melvyn Douglas), who's looking for an attractive escort to show him around Paris, and a beautiful, mysterious woman (Marlene Dietrich), who excites his imagination. Because she refuses to tell him her name, he knows her only as "Angel." After a dreamlike interlude in the park, she runs away from him and while he searches for his elusive Angel, a woman known as Maria returns to her husband, the illustrious British diplomat, Sir Frederick Barker (Herbert Marshall). Frederick and Maria are widely acknowledged as the perfect couple. As they like to joke to each other, they can't even find anything to quarrel about. But their marriage faces its test when Tony Halton discovers that his heart's ideal and Sir Frederick's ideal wife are the same woman.

 
Angel marks an ending point in the careers of both Marlene Dietrich and Ernst Lubitsch. It was Dietrich's last role before Destry Rides Again permanently changed her onscreen image. 1937 was not a happy year for Dietrich's career; both Angel and the Korda epic Knight Without Armor flopped. In 1937, Ernst Lubitsch was nearing the end of his Paramount years and the unenthusiastic reception of Angel and the following year's Bluebeard's Eighth Wife showed that the master's golden touch was looking a little coppery. He would come back and how with Ninotchka in 1939, but Angel shows both he and Dietrich trying fitfully to adjust to the cinematic standards of Post-Code Hollywood.

At first glance, the plot seems like it's heading in the same fun, frothy direction of Lubitsch's Pre-Code classics, Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living. In Trouble in Paradise, the dashing thief Gaston has to choose between his partner in crime and the lovely victim of his con game. He goes for the fellow thief, but the film doesn't make an issue of Gaston's infidelity; he's simply responding to the attractions of both women. Design for Living goes even further by having the love triangle resolve into a happy ménage à trois. Both films suggest that monogamy is pretty much unimportant in the quest for romantic happiness. Angel starts out as yet another variation on the Lubitsch triangle, with Marlene Dietrich navigating what appears to be the beginning of a bedroom farce.

However, Angel has something a little more serious in mind. In other Lubitsch films, infidelity was more of a game. It was also something relegated entirely to bedrooms and parlors and the sophisticated, private worlds of elegant people. Here, there is no question of privacy; Maria Barker's very public role as the perfect wife means that she can't act only to please herself.  Her choice between two lovers is made even more uneasy by the fact that both of them are diplomats and whichever she chooses, she will be subjected to the same scrutiny. This point is hammered home in a scene where her husband's servant natters on about how the Barkers' marriage has been his own romantic ideal. Lubitsch carries the point further in a later moment at a horse race. Just as the servant and his fiance are watching her through binoculars, Maria looks through her own pair and sees the man she met in Paris. There is no possibility of escape for Maria; her public and private worlds are inextricably linked.

 

  
Lubitsch does some beautiful visual work in this film. I love the way his camera sweeps leisurely through each room of the Grand Duchess' salons and the way it slides smoothly down the length of a musician's violin to the lovers he is serenading, connecting them both in one serenely romantic moment. The grace of his Paris sequences is sharply contrasted with his introduction to Marshall in one brusque pan across the windows of a moving train, Marshall's back to the camera as a furiously upbeat march pounds away in the background.  Whenever Marshall makes an appearance in the film, the editing turns staccato, highlighting his character's busy, distracted nature. There are also some moments of great visual shorthand; Maria's anxiety is masterfully sketched out in a brief shot of a maid carrying away an overflowing ashtray in the early hours of the morning.

It's hard to admit, with all the intelligence and craft put into this picture that, "Well, it just isn't much fun." For one thing, the pace lags, which is not a typical problem for a Lubitsch film. After two grand introductions to Marlene's character, first as the reluctant lover and then as the gentle wife, we are treated to scene after scene of the Barkers' stifling marriage. These scenes don't build on each other but rather seem to sleepwalk. The couple make polite chitchat, Dietrich looks uncomfortable, Marshall oblivious, and then back to square one. After a while it all becomes a snooze, especially when both actors are obviously not at their best. 

Marlene Dietrich is fine in her early scenes, flirting with Melvyn Douglas, but when she has to start playing the trophy wife, it becomes clear that she has absolutely no clue how to play demure. You can almost gauge her uncertainty by how much she bats her eyelashes per scene. The more stilted her acting, the more she butterflies those lashes. As for Herbert Marshall, it pains me to say this, since I've loved him in other roles, but he is completely colorless here. In order for the story to work, there has to be some sense that Marshall's workaholic diplomat is capable of the same ardent passion as his rival. But there isn't and during Marshall's scenes, my mind wandered to more interesting concerns, like wondering if this film's thesis was that European diplomats in the 1930s were spending way too much time on their work.
  
Melvyn Douglas (one of my favorites) is polished in an underwritten role. His role here can be considered a dry run for Ninotchka: the suave, callow gentleman that reacts with happy bewilderment to the screen goddess who's wandered into his path. In Angel, however, Douglas doesn't have a crackling Brackett and Wilder script to buoy him up. His tendency to underplay, combined with an uneasy Dietrich and somnolent Marshall, makes the love triangle feel less important than it needs to be. And considering the film's reluctance to implicate Dietrich in any adultery, his character's lovelorn obsession feels pretty one-sided.  That's post-Code romance for you; one kiss on a moonlit park bench is enough to turn a man into a transcontinental stalker.

And that ultimately is Angel's problem: the demands of the Code. The film feels like an uneasy transition from the giddy Paramount comedies of the early 30s into Post-Code morality, where marriage is sacrosanct. Angel is too sober, too cautious, too coy about the realities of sex or marriage and as a result, it doesn't manage to say much about anything. There are touches of wit here and there (for example, Douglas and Marshall bonding over their shared memories of the same French prostitute), but the film is ultimately more interesting as a way station in the careers of Dietrich and Lubitsch than it is as a story. It's most worthwhile for the beauty of its visuals, for the elegance of its camera work. The final shot is a lovely, wordless moment of reconciliation that feels exactly right. Or would, if Angel had earned it. 

Favorite Quote: 

"I don't want to know your name. Whatever it is, it wouldn't suit you."

Favorite Scene:

Maria's recounting of an erotic dream to her bemused husband Sir Frederick. First, she describes her arrival at the League of Nations, dressed to the nines, while her husband drones on and on. The dream-Maria escapes, goes to Egypt, Arabia, circling the globe, only to come back and find her husband still talking. So she drags him away and they return home. "The next thing I remember, we were here at home and you were beating me...I'm afraid to tell you, I liked it. Then you started to kiss me." Frederick responds to this epic confession of Maria's desires with a slight smile and asks, "Did you like that, too?" Maria smiles back. "Better than ever before. And then you carried me upstairs." The dream ends there, but Dietrich's flirtatious delivery of this speech will certainly linger in my memory.

Final Six Words:

Elegant, unhappy story of love lost