Déjà vu Dalliance

Like a reflective revery, Steven Spielberg looks back at his own life with the 2022 Academy Award nominated (seven selections, including Best Picture) feature film The Fabelmans. Co-written (along with Tony Kushner) and directed by Spielberg, he creates a throwback style picture, something along the lines of the moving I Remember Mama (1948)... a sweeping retrospective of love and death, bullying and forgiveness, familial unity and division, over several decades. The Spielberg name becomes Fabelman, with Sammy replacing the name Steven (Gabriel LaBelle; as a younger child, Mateo Zoryan). We open with his parents, the weak tech genius Burt (Paul Dano) and artsy centre of attention Mitzi (Michelle Williams – in an Oscar nominated role) taking him to his first movie – 1952's The Greatest Show on Earth.

Back in the late 1970s, then first time co-writer/co-director Kathryn Bigelow, along with Monty Montgomery, were fortunate enough to have spotted one Willem Dafoe on the stage – a member of the Wooster Group experimental theater company. Asking him to be a part of their movie, it would also become the actor’s first credited role. That film would eventually be called The Loveless (1981)... prior to that, it was known as US 17 and Breakdown. Set in the 1950s and infused with a post-punk flair, the narrative follows Vance (Dafoe), an enigmatic nihilist with an intoxicating allure. A quiet biker wearing black leather and equally as dark Brylcreem’d back hair, he oozes an indifferent quality of danger and sexuality. Living on the edge of life (or perhaps more accurately, a knife), he’s the type of conundrum that stops to help a lady with a flat tire, only to nab a controversial kiss and then take the money from her wallet for payment as he departs... leaving her all shook up in more ways than one.

It’s intriguing to think how time tends to shrink an actors or directors filmography. . . the passing years seeming to erase movies (be them lesser, unrelatable to present viewpoints, simply lost to time, or so on). For instance, Lionel Barrymore – once one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, a two time Academy Award nominee (and one time winner), is mostly known for his cantankerous and utterly realistic portrayal of villainy as Mr. Potter in the Frank Capra Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. In actuality, he has an impressive 217 acting credits to his name, while many may not even know that he was also a director. . . today’s film his fourteenth and final credited effort – Ten Cents a Dance (1931). A title pulled from a popular 1930 song of the same name (written by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, originally sung by Ruth Etting), the playful, jazzy romp sways over both the opening credits as well as when the screen turns black at the end of the film. A tune lamenting the work of a taxi dancer, that is, a girl hired to shimmy with libidinous men at a happening nightclub for ten cents a dance, poor Barbara O’Neill (Barbara Stanwyck) is our titular character.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned – there is no doubt Pre-Code cinema thrived on this ancient idiom. A prime example is George B. Seitz’s 1931 romance driven drama, Arizona (based on a famous play of the time written by Augustus Thomas). Poor Evelyn Palmer (Laura La Plante) – she’s been in a very secretive romantic tryst with one of the Army’s top up and comers, Lt. Bob Denton (a very early starring role for John Wayne). Charming, debonair, and a supreme athlete (he’s the star full back in the annual Army-Navy football game... they even send him in to kick the extra point to win the game), Evelyn has spent the last two years of her life courting the catch. . . only for him to break it off after his memorable performance (saying he never planned on marrying her after all).

Opening at the 1932 Los Angeles Summer Olympics (an actual newsreel from the event), 1934's Search for Beauty, directed by Erle C. Kenton (Island of Lost Souls; The Ghost of Frankenstein), is a sharply written and unbelievably edgy drama that would not have passed code just a few short months later (once the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, came into effect). A clash between immorality and a sort of athletic purity, two ex-cons, Larry Williams (Robert Armstrong) and Jean Strange (Gertrude Michael), newly released from prison, quickly come up with a new cash friendly scheme. Teaming with their money-man, Dan Healy (James Gleason), they plan on purchasing a ‘Health and Exercise’ magazine (and a ramshackle hotel that comes with it), turning it into a pre-Playboy rag magazine full of sultry stories and lurid photographs.