Twilight Time Discussion Thread

[SeanJoyce]

I liken Fleischer more to William A. Wellman and Michael Curtiz...just professionals who knew how to make a movie, could adapt to any material, and were beholden more to the material than any self-serving gimmicks. Love em.

[captveg]

Originally Posted by SeanJoyce

I liken Fleischer more to William A. Wellman and Michael Curtiz...just professionals who knew how to make a movie, could adapt to any material, and were beholden more to the material than any self-serving gimmicks. Love em.

To be fair, Wellman had his fair share of gimmicks, such as hiding faces/eyes/action in his blocking with foreground objects, or the way he experimented with the photography on Track of the Cat. Wellman's gimmicks downplay attention to itself rather than bringing themselves to the forefront, which is where he's fairly unique.

[PeterTHX]

Originally Posted by Rory

No, the studio wasn't "right." The studio, and more exactly, the producer, lost their nerve and should have done the script both the screenwriter and the director wanted to do, and then we'd have a movie titled CHE! from 1969 much more deserving of being remembered than it is. It's an artistic pity what happened to CHE!

The man advocated nuclear war.

Would you feel as passionately about a failed attempt at a "positive" Stalin biofilm?

[Rory]

CHE!, as originally written according to Fleischer, would have showed both his good and bad sides and most probably would have been a much better movie than what we ended up with.

Sounds to me like you don't think there should have ever been a movie about Che (there's been two!).

What did you think of TRUMBO? I liked how it made John Wayne look. The truth is sure interesting.

Originally Posted by PeterTHX

The man advocated nuclear war.

Hey, I just realized. That sounds an awful lot like somebody currently, and incessantly, in the news. Oh, brother!

[Aclea]

Originally Posted by Rory

With so many of Fleischer's pictures, you can't tell they were directed by the same guy. If I didn't know it, and I saw 10 RILLINGTON PLACE and then you told me that was made by the same guy who did DOCTOR DOLITTLE, I'd think you were full of it.

While it's not as noticeable as directors like Wellman (I was going to bring up his hiding faces but Captveg beat me to it), John Farrow or Anthony Mann, who each had distinctive signature shots that they tended to repeat in their films despite disparate subject matter, I do think you can tell if you're admirer of his work. There may be an invisible quality to much of it, but there's enough of a distinction that in a film like Follow Me Quietly you can easily tell that the scene with the dummy was shot by Fleischer and the finale was shot by Anthony Mann - in many ways the difference between the different directors approach is much more noticeable there than that in another film Mann co-directed with another director, He Walked by Night (the finale to that is obviously his but other scenes are harder to pin down).

he often chose to do material that he wasn't quite suited for

Which unfortunately is a problem pretty much every director had to face in the 40s through to the 60s: it was a studio and a producer's medium and you didn't always have the luxury of choosing. Fleischer was only under exclusive contract at one studio, RKO, and it took him years to extricate himself from that, but as an independent there's definitely a tendency (as with other independents) to take work where he could find it and try to forge relationships where he could do the more ambitious projects - for example, the price of getting Fox to do Compulsion was having to do These Thousand Hills and a couple of film's with Darryl F. Zanuck's latest mistress. Returning to Anthony Mann, you'll find similar phases in his career, such as Strategic Air Command being the very odd man out in his films with James Stewart, or his jumping into Cimarron a little too impulsively (and getting replaced by Charles Walters) to prove he could still be trusted with a big picture after being let go from Spartacus. Sometimes good directors had to make bad choices simply to stay in the game.

And certainly hunger played a part in some of Fleischer's choices: even before his five year period of being unemployed and having to sue De Laurentiis and Du Pont to get paid for work he'd done on films they'd cancelled at the last minute (Sacco and Vanzetti and Bronston's Nightrunners of Bengal) he'd seen his father's company bankrupted and taken away from him, and with the days of directors on seven figure salaries a long way away there'd be a real need to keep working (though it is surprising that, unlike so many of his contemporaries, he never did any television work at all in a career spanning five decades).

If you want to consider him something closer to an auteur director

I don't, I regard him as a great director (albeit one who made some turkeys) rather than an auteur. I think the tendency to regard being an auteur as the primary deciding factor in which directors are regarded as great, especially in the pre-internet days of print film criticism, journals, books and revival house seasons, is a problem because it's come to be such a restrictive one. To be an auteur in the way the term is most often used there has to be that distinctive style or fairly consistent thematic concerns, while the early definition of it meaning the 'author' of a film, was always very loosely applied when favourite filmmakers were concerned - for example, Ford is regarded as the auteur of My Darling Clementine, yet it's a film he had little interest in, where he worked from a studio assigned script and didn't hang around to finish post-production because to him it was simply a contractual obligation to get out of the way and end his Fox contract so he could make The Fugitive at RKO. That's pretty much the typical image of a journeyman who 'journeyed there,' yet Ford's auteur status on other films gets grafted onto it.

To an extent the auteur definition of greatness precludes the ability to adapt your style to the material and insists of some kind of imposition of signature themes, personality or style. Indeed, for the Cahiers du Cinema crowd, that tradition of invisible quality was one of the things they were violently rejecting when they promoted the theory. That's a valid approach, but it's not the only way of defining what makes a great director - to an extent, even the requirement to regularly make great films can exclude the great work studio contract directors managed to do with less than stellar material. For me, Fleischer's versatility, even though it didn't always come up with a winner, is what makes him a great director.

you'd have to isolate a selection of his movies

As I noted earlier, you can group some of them together like his 'psychological' pictures. But in a way one of the things I find so attractive about his body of work is the element of the unexpected: you always know what to expect from Kubrick regardless of subject matter, but Fleischer could surprise you and take you in different directions.

because he "journeyed there," I still say he was largely a "journeyman director."

Again, as I noted elsewhere, its the connotations of the phrase that I reject in Fleischer's case, particularly the fact that in the classic definition journeyman work by its very nature can never be exceptional. There's certainly genuine journeyman work in his filmography, particularly during the last decade or so of his career (so often the case with even directors with headier reputations), but to let him be defined by that rather than his best work I think is selling him short.

"A Cinematic Renaissance Man" seems a bit too worshipping to me.

I don't think so. Obviously I am a fan of much of his work, but the definition -a person whose expertise spans a significant number of various subject areas, or polymath - is a much better fit than that of journeyman.

Good discussion.

Indeed, and refreshingly free of rancour. It's just a shame that there are so few places left to have this kind of conversation.

[Rory]

Yes, it's nice to be able to argue film and filmmakers without being accused of insulting someone's taste. There are too many younger people on the internet (and especially here) and they've been raised with access to damn near everything in movies and TV and therefore think they know everything. They state something emphatically about a film then react terribly if you dare to disagree.

I can remember what it was like before the internet (I'm 58) and believe me, the net and its social media culture is not making the world a happier place. However, it is nice to be able to watch a movie on TCM and look up facts about it and the people involved immediately on the net. A wonderful resource for reference. Beats searching libraries and dusty used bookstores (remember them?) for books on cinema, even though I do miss those days.

Anyway, I wanted to say I don't really hold with the auteur theory. Filmmaking is too collaborative for that theory to truly hold up. I mean it more in respect to those directors that take a more active role in developing their screenplays, have a recurring theme in most of their movies and have a certain style in how they shoot, block their scenes, move the camera and edit the finished film.

I just took an inventory and I have some sixteen Richard Fleischer movies on either Blu-ray or DVD, many that I bought previously on laserdisc or VHS, and because of this discussion I just ordered his book "Just Tell Me When To Cry" (a used hardcover) on Amazon. I've never wanted to read it before, now I do.

[antennahead]

Originally Posted by Rory

Yes, it's nice to be able to argue film and filmmakers without being accused of insulting someone's taste. There are too many younger people on the internet (and especially here) and they've been raised with access to damn near everything in movies and TV and therefore think they know everything. They state something emphatically about a film then react terribly if you dare to disagree.

I can remember what it was like before the internet (I'm 58) and believe me, the net and its social media culture is not making the world a happier place. However, it is nice to be able to watch a movie on TCM and look up facts about it and the people involved immediately on the net. A wonderful resource for reference. Beats searching libraries and dusty used bookstores (remember them?) for books on cinema, even though I do miss those days.

+1

[Rory]

Hey, antennahead, I live in NC near Asheville. Originally from NY, though.

[PeterTHX]

Originally Posted by Rory

What did you think of TRUMBO? I liked how it made John Wayne look. The truth is sure interesting.

Trumbo (and Wayne for that matter) never murdered anyone.

Hey, I just realized. That sounds an awful lot like somebody currently, and incessantly, in the news. Oh, brother!

Well, 30 years from now I'm sure some ignorant filmmaker will make a biopic glorifying Kim-Jong Un. Until then...


...I will agree Fleischer was a very good (if at times misguided) director.

[Rory]

Originally Posted by PeterTHX

Well, 30 years from now I'm sure some ignorant filmmaker will make a biopic glorifying Kim-Jong Un. Until then...

Oh, you're just being silly.

[rip63]

Originally Posted by Aclea

if you want a current example, Scorsese signing up for The Joker

He's a producer on that though and not directing. But yeah, I dig what you mean... I'm a big Fleischer fan and I understand he had quite a bit to do with steering, as he called it, his serial killer trilogy of The Boston Strangler, 10 Rillington Place and Compulsion. Fleischer actually makes me think of another director I really like who also genre-hopped to quite a degree and that was Robert Wise.

[Rory]

I might be wrong -- I'll know better, I hope, after I get his book -- but I believe Compulsion was more producer Richard Zanuck's movie than Fleischer's. It was Zanuck's first movie as a producer and Fleischer was the hired director. Fleischer, of course, made some artistic choices, but I think the movie was largely Zanuck's project. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.

[Aclea]

Originally Posted by Rory

I might be wrong -- I'll know better, I hope, after I get his book -- but I believe Compulsion was more producer Richard Zanuck's movie than Fleischer's. It was Zanuck's first movie as a producer and Fleischer was the hired director. Fleischer, of course, made some artistic choices, but I think the movie was largely Zanuck's project. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.

I believe it was both: Fleischer was hired over Orson Welles, which caused no end of problems during production even with Fleischer's talent for wrangling difficult egos, but Fleischer and Zanuck did a lot of work with the material to reshape it after the badly received Broadway play adaptation, as well as to avoid potential lawsuits. I believe much like 10 Rillington Place it was a case of the producer hiring the director to develop it rather than giving him a script and just telling him to shoot it. By contrast the two subsequent pictures at Fox with Zanuck Sr's mistress du jour, Juliette Greco, were more like straight directing assignments (if I recall, the book has some stories about Zanuck Sr's bizarre behaviour during the shooting of The Big Gamble, which included planting a chair right in front of the camera and sitting down on it to read the paper just before a take).

[antennahead]

Originally Posted by Rory

Hey, antennahead, I live in NC near Asheville. Originally from NY, though.

Asheville's a really nice town, and a lot cooler temp wise in the summer than Charleston. If you've never been here, I highly recommend the downtown area and King Street..... shops, restaurants, bars .... you can walk for miles taking it all in.

[Aclea]

Originally Posted by Rory

There are too many younger people on the internet (and especially here) and they've been raised with access to damn near everything in movies and TV and therefore think they know everything. They state something emphatically about a film then react terribly if you dare to disagree.

Ah yes, the 'if it's not on the internet it never happened' generation...

I can remember what it was like before the internet (I'm 58) and believe me, the net and its social media culture is not making the world a happier place. However, it is nice to be able to watch a movie on TCM and look up facts about it and the people involved immediately on the net. A wonderful resource for reference. Beats searching libraries and dusty used bookstores (remember them?) for books on cinema, even though I do miss those days.

I'm a few years younger (though not, as J.M. Barrie put it, young enough to know everything) but I remember those days very well - when I got my first film (a seven-minute black and white silent Standard 8mm cutdown of Tarzan's Hidden Jungle from Ken films) I remember scouring various reference books and old movie magazine annuals I'd pick up in second hand book shops to try to piece together the credits because in those days there really was no single source. Later it became the Leonard Maltin Movies on TV books and after that the redoubtable Ephraim Katz, but we really had to dig for every nugget in those days.

Years later that tenacity stood me in good stead when I edited a movie magazine and wrote a few books (ah, those golden pre-internet days when people would actually pay you to do that and you had to not only display an at least basic level of knowledge of your subject and back up what you wrote, from primary sources if possible, but also avoid relying on 'common knowledge' to actually get at something like the truth). On one level the internet can be a great resource, but it can also be an unreliable one when there's no-one to push you to do your research properly and you're just left to mark your own homework.

Anyway, I wanted to say I don't really hold with the auteur theory. Filmmaking is too collaborative for that theory to truly hold up. I mean it more in respect to those directors that take a more active role in developing their screenplays, have a recurring theme in most of their movies and have a certain style in how they shoot, block their scenes, move the camera and edit the finished film.

With Fleischer you tend to find he's both kind of directors: on films like Barabbas, the unmade Sacco and Vanzetti and others he spent an enormous amount of time developing the script (two years on S&V) and involving himself in every aspect of production, but on films like The Last Run or those Dino De Laurentiis payday jobs he did in the 80s with Arnie he's clearly just a hired gun after other directors have departed. It's a bit like Clint Eastwood's one for the studio and one for me approach to filmmaking, just a lot more inconsistent. Fleischer's career is a mixture of films he's obviously passionate about and deeply involved in and ones where he's a professional hired to do a job to pay the rent. And I'm sure that inconsistency is another strike against him with many critics, though curiously the just as, if not more inconsistent Don Siegel tends to get a free pass on that.

I just ordered his book "Just Tell Me When To Cry" (a used hardcover) on Amazon. I've never wanted to read it before, now I do.

It's a good read with some great stories - the chapters on His Kind of Women and the jaw dropping one on Akira Kurosawa's astonishingly wasteful and outrageous behaviour on Tora! Tora! Tora! in particular (it turns out from other sources that if anything Fleischer downplays Kurosawa's paranoia and dictatorial behaviour). But it's not a straight biography even though it does run chronologically, and you'll be surprised at some of the films he doesn't mention - often ones he was very proud of like 10 Rillington Place and Mandingo - so I think it may well be one where the price of admission was whether there was a good/funny story rather than just hard and meticulous work to discuss. I interviewed him when he was promoting the book and I went out of my way to discuss many of the films the book overlooked for that very reason. Maybe he was saving them for another volume?

[The Great Owl]

Originally Posted by Rory

I can remember what it was like before the internet (I'm 58) and believe me, the net and its social media culture is not making the world a happier place. However, it is nice to be able to watch a movie on TCM and look up facts about it and the people involved immediately on the net. A wonderful resource for reference. Beats searching libraries and dusty used bookstores (remember them?) for books on cinema, even though I do miss those days.

I'm 45 years old, and I remember those days.

In my eyes, the internet has had a far more detrimental effect on music than it has on cinema.

I remember my middle school days in the mid-1980s, when my friends and I would discuss rock music for hours on end, wondering about silly things like what "Stairway to Heaven" was really about, whether or not Keith Richards had actually received blood transfusions, and such. Later on, during high school in the late 1980s, I became fascinated with bands like New Order, R.E.M., The Smiths, and such, and I was constantly searching bookstore shelves for any piece of information about R.E.M.'s cryptic lyrics, New Order's band info (since they never had any information in their record sleeves), and all of that.
In fact, I was a fan of New Order for a couple of years before finding out, through a rock music encyclopedia book, that they had formerly existed as Joy Division.

These days, kids can simply look up a band biography on Allmusic.com, or search for a band's lyrics online at the drop of a hat, but then they have no mystery to hold their interest, and they can move on to something else.

The internet has ruined the mystique of rock music, and that mystique was an element that captivated my interest in the bands that have since become my all-time favorites.

Back then, when I bought music on cassette tape during my teenage years, I would often "train" myself to like certain songs on an album if I didn't warm up to them at first listen, because I figured that, if I were spending well-earned money on the tapes, then I at least needed to get my money's worth. Some of the greatest bands and artists in history are the ones who challenged me. There were several songs by David Bowie, U2, The Smiths, and such that I would glaze over during my first listen, but that I grew to appreciate and treasure over subsequent days, weeks, months, and years.

These days, new music is available to me instantly and for free by way of Spotify, YouTube, and such, but I've admittedly fallen into bad habits when it comes to discovering the music. If I listen to a new song online, and it doesn't blow me away during the first 30 seconds, then I tend to move on to something else, and forget about that song altogether. I never would have become a huge fan of David Bowie, U2, R.E.M., The Smiths, and such had I employed this same impatience back in the day.
I'm not blaming the internet, per se, for my inability to discover new music in the same way these days, but the instant gratification that the internet enables contributes to my current attitude.

I mean, it's a double-edged sword, and I love the fact that some 12 year-old in Middle-of-Nowhere, Mississippi can discover music from obscure British post-punk bands in this day and age if he or she so desires, but the mystique is simply not there anymore.


(I apologize that my rant has jack to do with Twilight Time movies, but the above-quoted post got me on a roll.)

[mja345]

Music's one of those things where a lot of people stop seeking out new, current artists at a certain age, usually in your mid 20s, and just fall back on the stuff you grew up listening to. Unless your job is to review music professionally or something of that ilk, it's hard to keep up with current music. Hence why everyone says, "Music was better X amount of years ago." I'm 30 right now and give zero f**ks about current artists and just fall back on the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s stuff I grew up listening to. I don't really find that's the case with film, books, art, or other creative mediums as much as it is with music.

[The Great Owl]

Originally Posted by mja345

Music's one of those things where a lot of people stop seeking out new, current artists at a certain age, usually in your mid 20s, and just fall back on the stuff you grew up listening to. Unless your job is to review music professionally or something of that ilk, it's hard to keep up with current music. Hence why everyone says, "Music was better X amount of years ago." I'm 30 right now and give zero f**ks about current artists and just fall back on the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s stuff I grew up listening to. I don't really find that's the case with film, books, art, or other creative mediums as much as it is with music.

I'll admittedly agree with this, and it could be another contributor to my disinterest in a lot of newer bands, although I'll maintain that the lack of mystique in rock music due to the web is a big factor.

I read an article once that discussed how the music that we love when we are 17 years old is the type of music that stays with us for the rest of our lives. There's a lot of truth to this idea in my case.

I do listen to a lot of new artists, and I'd like to think that I'm pretty good about branching out, but I can also hear new bands and think, "Gee...this band sounds a lot like Joy Division.", or "Gee...this band sounds a lot like The Replacements.", whereas a younger listener would think that these new bands had a mind-blowingly new vibe going for them.

It's the same with movies, I guess. As I become more knowledgeable I become about older cinema and music, the newer releases do not seem quite as original.


Incidentally, a friend gave me a free ticket to the Imagine Dragons concert here in Atlanta tonight as a way of thanking me for my friendship and for motivating her in our running group.
In all honesty, I think that Imagine Dragons are almost as interesting as the Microsoft PowerPoint slides about my employer's available 2018 health insurance plans, but I'm going to the show anyway because it'll mean a lot to my friend. I'll probably dig it, of course, because I tend to like big stadium shows with lights, effects, and all just on general principle.

[mja345]

I can keep up with current movies pretty easily. I don't like the vast majority of them, but I still keep up. I try to keep up with current writers, as my educational background is in writing. And my mom is a painter, so she kind of keeps me updated on current artists. I've just lost that passion for keeping up with current music, although I still maintain a strong interest in checking out stuff from artists I grew up listening to and still check out concerts of artists I grew up listening to.

Between my love of film, work, keeping up with current events, and then just life in general, I guess finding new musicians who I really dig has kind of gone by the wayside. I actually have had this discussion with a lot of people and it's amazing how common it is to just fall back on the music you listened to when you were young. My dad is in his 60s and his knowledge of music just ends with artists like Zeppelin, Dylan, Leonard Cohen, etc., but he still listens to that era rabidly.

[RCRochester]

Originally Posted by mja345

I can keep up with current movies pretty easily. I don't like the vast majority of them, but I still keep up. I try to keep up with current writers, as my educational background is in writing. And my mom is a painter, so she kind of keeps me updated on current artists. I've just lost that passion for keeping up with current music, although I still maintain a strong interest in checking out stuff from artists I grew up listening to and still check out concerts of artists I grew up listening to.

Between my love of film, work, keeping up with current events, and then just life in general, I guess finding new musicians who I really dig has kind of gone by the wayside. I actually have had this discussion with a lot of people and it's amazing how common it is to just fall back on the music you listened to when you were young. My dad is in his 60s and his knowledge of music just ends with artists like Zeppelin, Dylan, Leonard Cohen, etc., but he still listens to that era rabidly.

I'm in my forties too.

I find that the benefits of the internet far outweigh the negatives. It's thanks to the internet that I've been able to buy and / or watch so many classic movies that I would have never been able to track down when I was a kid first getting into film. And thanks to places like IMDB before it got nuked and now here, I've been able to discuss movies with like-minded individuals. Sure, there are goofy people with their goofy opinions but I think they've always been out there, it's just now their voice is equal to everyone else's.

As for music, we have an Apple Music family membership which is a great way to listen to music you like, test drive new stuff you haven't listened to and generally broaden your horizons. Or if you prefer, it gives you suggestions on things you might like based on what you already listen to. I also have a tweenage daughter who listens to a lot of modern day pop so that keeps me up to date, and some of that stuff like Ariana Grande or Katy Perry is actually good to have on when you're having a cardio workout.