Behold the new trailer for Marlowe, a new film directed by Neil Jordan. As the title suggests, the film centers around Philip Marlowe, the gumshoe detective that Raymond Chandler first unveiled in The Big Sleep in 1939. Between then and now, Marlowe has been portrayed in films by Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Elliott Gould, and James Garner. Now, Liam Neeson takes his turn. Here’s how the producers pitch the film:
MARLOWE, a gripping noir crime thriller set in late 1930’s Los Angeles, centers around a street-wise, down on his luck detective; Philip Marlowe, played by Liam Neeson, who is hired to find the ex-lover of a glamorous heiress (Diane Kruger), daughter of a well-known movie star (Jessica Lange). The disappearance unearths a web of lies, and soon Marlowe is involved in a dangerous, deadly investigation where everyone involved has something to hide.
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As we’ve previously noted here on Open Culture, Orson Welles was not given to mincing words about his colleagues. And the older he got, the fewer words he minced, as evidenced by the clip above from a talk he gave at a Paris film school in 1982. During the Q&A, he took a question that quoted Elia Kazan’s remarks on the difficulty of raising money in America for a film about Puerto Ricans. Or rather, he heard part of the question and launched right into his thundering response: “Mademoiselle, you have chosen the wrong metteur en scene, because Elia Kazan is a traitor.”
Welles took a minute to elaborate: “He is a man who sold to McCarthy all his companions at a time when he could continue to work in New York at high salary. And having sold all of his people to McCarthy, he then made a film called On the Waterfront which was a celebration of the informer. And therefore, no question which uses him as an example can be answered by me.” Welles made a habit of publicly demonstrating his principles, both artistic or political. It was the latter that had decades before got his name into the journal Red Channels, one element of the larger American anti-Communist movement personified by Welles’ fellow Wisconsinite, United States Senator Joseph McCarthy.
“When Stalinism was fashionable, movie people became Stalinists,” wrote New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. “They performed propaganda services for the various shifts in Russia’s foreign policy and, as long as the needs of American and Russian policy coincided, this took the form of super-patriotism. When the war was over and the Cold War began, history left them stranded, and McCarthy moved in on them. The shame of McCarthyism was not only ‘the shame of America’ but the shame of a bunch of newly rich people who were eager to advise the world on moral and political matters and who, faced with a test, informed on their friends — and, as Orson Welles put it, not even to save their lives but to save their swimming pools.”
This passage comes from “Raising Kane,” Kael’s well-known essay on Citizen Kane that plays down Welles’ influence on the film and plays up that of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. But whatever ground Welles had to resent Kael, he had more to resent Kazan, who gave testimony as a witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952. That marked the height of the “Hollywood blacklist” that put a temporary hold on, or permanent end to, the careers of suspected Communists or sympathizers in the entertainment industry. Nevertheless, Welles possesses sound enough artistic and political judgment never to let the one interfere with the other, as evidenced by what he said of Kazan after receiving a round of applause from the audience: “I have to add that he is a very good director.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
“Here comes a trailer truck out on the open highway, miles from the nearest town,” says the narrator of the short film above. Suddenly, it becomes “important for someone to get in touch with the drivers of this outfit. How can it be done?” Any modern-day viewer would respond to this question in the same way: you just call the guys. But Mobile Telephones dates from the nineteen-forties, well before the eponymous devices were in wide use — about four decades, in fact, before even the massive Motorola DynaTAC 8000X came on the market. The idea of calling someone not at home or the office, let alone a trucker on the road, would have seemed the stuff of science fiction.
Yet the engineers at Bell had made it possible, using a system that transmits conversations “partway by radio, partway by telephone lines.” This necessitated “a number of transmitting and receiving stations connected to telephone lines,” installed “at intervals along the highway so that one will always be in range of the moving vehicle.”
As dramatized in Mobile Telephones, the process of actually ringing up the driver of a vehicle involves calling a classic forties switchboard operator and asking her to make the connection. But otherwise, the process won’t feel entirely unfamiliar to the mobile phone users today — that is, to the majority of the people in the world.
Cellphones have become such an integral part of life in the twenty-first century that few of us really feel the need to understand just how they work. But three quarters of a century ago, the idea of taking or making calls on the go was unfamiliar enough that viewers of a film like this would have wanted the mechanics laid out in some detail. Surely that held especially true for the industrial clients of Bell’s early mobile-telephone system, for whom its reliable functionality would translate into greater profits. Taking the longer view, this technological development marks, as the narrator reminds us over swelling music, “one more step toward telephone service for anyone, any time, anywhere”: a once-futuristic vision that now sounds practically mundane.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
We’ve identified another opportunity to show off your creative streak, compliments of All Of It with Alison Stewart, a daily live culture program on WNYC, New York City’s public radio station.
You have until February 13 to write and record an original song inspired by a work in the public domain, and submit it toThe All Of It Public Song Project.
Amateurs are welcome to take a crack at it and any genre is cricket, including rap, spoken word, and instrumentals.
“Billy, you will see a large and ugly gentleman outside the front door. Ask him to come up.”
“If he won’t come, sir?”
“No violence, Billy. Don’t be rough with him. If you tell him that Count Sylvius wants him he will certainly come.”
“What are you going to do now?” asked the Count as Billy disappeared.
“My friend Watson was with me just now. I told him that I had a shark and a gudgeon in my net; now I am drawing the net and up they come together.”
The Count had risen from his chair, and his hand was behind his back. Holmes held something half protruding from the pocket of his dressing-gown.
“You won’t die in your bed, Holmes.”
Okay, we’re being silly, but only because we don’t want to put ideas in your head!
You could even concoct something entirely new — perhaps a ballad from the POV of To the Lighthouse’s young James Ramsay, or a ditty apologizing to Virginia Woolf for reading the Cliffs Notes instead of the actual novel when it was assigned in your college Women’s Literature class.
…we’re doing it again, aren’t we?
All right, we’ll leave you to it, with a reminder that anything outside of your public domain source material must be wholly original — no borrowing a catchy tune from Lennon and McCartney, capisci?
Winners will get a chance to discuss their works on WNYC and all qualifying entries will be posted at contest’s end for the public’s listening pleasure.
Note: With the passing of Jeff Beck, we’re bringing back a vintage post from our archive featuring the early years of the legendary guitarist. You can read his obituary here.
Art film and rock and roll have, since the 60s, been soulmates of a kind, with many an acclaimed director turning to musicians as actors, commissioning rock stars as soundtrack artists, and filming scenes with bands. Before Nicolas Roeg, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and other rock-loving auteurs did all of the above, there was Michelangelo Antonioni, who barreled into the English-language market, under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with a trilogy of films steeped in the sights and sounds of sixties counterculture.
Blowup, the first and by far the best of these, though scored by jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, prominently featured the Yardbirds—with both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. In the memorable scene above, Beck smashes his guitar to bits after his amp goes on the fritz. The Italian director “envisioned a scene similar to that of Pete Townshend’s famous ritual of smashing his guitar on stage,” notes Guitarworld’s Jonathan Graham. “Antonioni had even asked The Who to appear in the film,” but they refused.
In stepped the Yardbirds, during a pivotal moment in their career. The year before, they released mega-hit “For Your Love,” and said goodbye to lead guitarist Eric Clapton. Beck, his replacement, heralded a much wilder, more experimental phase for the band. Jeff Beck, it seemed, could play anything, but what he didn’t do much of onstage is emote. Next to the guitar-smashing Townshend or the fire-setting Hendrix (see both below), he was a pretty reserved performer, though no less thrilling to watch for his virtuosity and style.
But as he tells it, Antonioni wouldn’t let the band do their “most exciting thing,” a cover of “Smokestack Lightning” that “had this incredible buildup in the middle which was just pow!” That moment would have been the natural pretext for a good guitar smashing.
Instead, the set piece with the broken amp gives the introverted Beck a reason to get agitated. As Graham describes it, he also played a guitar specially designated as a prop:
Due to issues over publishing, the Yardbirds classic “Train Kept A‑Rollin’,” was reworked as “Stroll On” for the performance, and as the scene involved the destruction of an instrument, Beck’s usual choice of his iconic Esquire or Les Paul was swapped for a cheap, hollow-body stand-in that he was directed to smash at the song’s conclusion.
The scene is more a tantrum than the orgiastic onstage freak-out Townshend would probably have delivered. Its chief virtue for Yardbird’s fans lies not in the funny, out-of-character moment (which SF Gate film critic Mick LaSalle calls “one of the weirdest scenes in the movie”). Rather, it was “the chance,” as one fan tells LaSalle, “in the days before MTV and YouTube, to see the Yardbirds, with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.” Antonioni had seized the moment. In addition to firing “the opening salvo of the emerging ‘film generation,’” as Roger Ebert wrote, he gave contemporary fans a reason (in addition to explicit sex and nudity), to go see Blowupagain and again.
We lived in the age of movie theaters, then we lived in the age of home video, and now we live in the age of streaming. Like every period in the history of cinema, ours has its advantages and its disadvantages. The quasi-religiosity of the cinephile viewing experience is, arguably, not as well served by clicking on a Youtube video as it is by attending a screening at a grand revival house. But on the whole, we do have the advantage of access, whenever and wherever we like, to a great many films that most of us may have been wholly unable to see just a couple of decades ago — and often, we can watch them for free.
That said, these are still relatively early days for on-demand viewing, and finding out just where to do it isn’t as easy as it could be. That’s why we’ve rounded up this collection of Youtube channels with free movies, which together constitute one big meta-collection of hundreds of films. Among them are numerous black-and-white classics, of course, but also critically acclaimed pictures by international auteurs, rather less critically acclaimed (but nonetheless enjoyable) cult favorites, documentaries on a wide variety of subjects, and even twenty-first-century Hollywood releases.
Which films you can watch will vary, unfortunately, depending on which part of the world you happen to be watching them in. But no matter your location, you should easily be able to find more than a few worthwhile selections on all these channels. One under-appreciated aspect of our streaming age is that, though the number of choices may sometimes overwhelm, it’s never been easier to give a movie a chance. One click may, after all, transport you into a picture that changes the way you experience cinema itself — and if it doesn’t, well, at least the price was right.
Kino Lorber: Kino Lorber, a leading film distributor, has put 145 films on YouTube. The collection includes 80 documentaries on topics like on M.C. Escher, Stanley Kubrick, Hannah Arendt, and Hilma af Klint.
Korean Classic Films: This channel lets you experience decades of Korean cinema, including but not limited to those of mid-20th-century masters like Kim Ki-young, Im Kwon-taek, and Kim Soo-yong, director of haunting, even brazen pictures of the 1960s and 70s like Mist and Night Journey. Enter the channel here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
It’s safe to say that few, if any, of us alive today were doing any movie-going in 1927. But that shouldn’t stop us from recognizing the importance of that year to cinema itself. It saw the release of, among other pictures, The Lodger, with which the young Alfred Hitchcock first fully assembled his signature mechanics of suspense; Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s still-influential vision of Art Deco dystopia; F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, a lavish romantic drama complete with sound effects; and even the very first feature-length “talkie,” The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson. And don’t even get us started on what a year 1927 was for literature.
Rather, take it from Hyperallergic’s Rhea Nayyar, who highlights Franz Kafka’s posthumously published first novel Amerika, which is now “considered one of his more realistic and humorous works.” Nayyar also mentions Virginia Woolf’s much better-known To the Lighthouse, which, like Amerika as well as all the aforementioned films, has just entered the public domain in the United States in 2023 for anyone to enjoy and use as they please.
So has Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, the final book of stories featuring that iconic detective, Ernest Hemingway’s collection Men Without Women, Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf, and even the very first Hardy Boys novel, The Tower Treasure.
You’ll find many such notable books, movies, and musical compositions — that last group including such immortal tunes as “The Best Things in Life are Free,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “(I Scream You Scream, We All Scream for) Ice Cream” — rounded up here by Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. She also explains why we should care: “1927 was a long time ago. The vast majority of works from 1927 are out of circulation. When they enter the public domain in 2023, anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.” We know that many works created in 1927 have stood the test of time; now to find out what they’ll inspire us to create in 2023.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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