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GOOD MORNING,
MR. ZIP ZIP ZIP:
Movies, Memory, and World War II
By Richard Schickel
Ivan R. Dee $27.50
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Richard Schickel grew up in comfortable, WASPy Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. It was, he writes, a place to be "secure in our prejudices, secure in our good natures, our never quite seeing the contradictions between the two." And, if it weren't for World War II, "we would have continued forever that way."
If "this great, overarching, perilous drama" awakened men and women in Wauwatosa to think beyond their ken, it thrust young Richard into a passionate relationship with the movies. It was a bond that would ultimately inform his life, as Schickel has been reviewing films for almost 40 years. The critic-historian-director — who gave us that treasure of a documentary series, The Men Who Made the Movies (2002) — believes he would have " 'liked' the movies if the war had not happened." But not to the extent that he did "if they had not had the war as their great subject, not enjoyed the unique reciprocity between this overwhelming reality and its heroic, deadly, inspiring representations in this powerful and omnipresent medium."
Schickel, who is the author (or co-author) of more than 30 books, has written his most personal one in Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip. Interweaving autobiography with film criticism, he examines the pictures that made an impact on him as a child and reassesses them with a professional's gimlet eye. The title comes from a World War I wake-up song that Schickel's father used to sing to him as a good-night ditty. (The element of contradiction here seems subtly appropriate: Things are not what they seem in life; life is not what it seems in the movies.)
Readers of Schickel's film reviews for Time will not be surprised to find (in a prologue called "Wartime Lies") that he could have "a certain contempt for false pieties and hypocrisies of our old public culture." He also disdains the current labeling of WWII veterans as "the greatest generation." Part of his resistance — which seems especially valid these days — is that the catch phrase "carries am implied criticism of several postwar generations."
The biggest WWII movie icon that Schickel smashes is William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). He calls the multiple Academy Award winner "the last great wartime lie, a fantasia of good feelings, as eerily out of touch with human reality as, say, Since You Went Away had been two years earlier." Fans might argue against that "fantasia of good feelings," citing how much the film shows sadness, anger, fear, identity crises, disillusionment, and huge senses of loss and betrayal. He states that the "leading characters ... never have an ideological thought or discussion." But their reflections and dialogues with one another and their families don't support this. He writes that "no blacks are visible in the film." But they are — in several scenes — including an early one with a line from a black actor among returning servicemen in the airport waiting room.
Schickel deftly describes the plots and performances of the movies he considers. If only the book provided release dates after film titles or a filmography for looking up directors or casts. Small cavils in light of Schickel's entertaining and valuable contributions to film history here. He boldly refutes the popular notion that blacklisted screenwriters were just "innocent victims of McCarthyism" and "that they wrote nothing that could be construed as Stalinist propaganda." Regarding "Hollywood's continuing silence about the fate of the Jews in Hitler's Europe," Schickel points out that the most forthright films were two low-budget comedies: Charles Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) and Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be (1942).
Schickel praises such films as Howard Hawks' Air Force (1943), Mervyn LeRoy's Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) and Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942). Of the latter he says, "...the writing is so good — smart and pacey, like that of a good screwball comedy, yet capable of embracing deeper emotions."
Not all films presented are about World War II, but were made during its time frame and flavored by it. Henry King's Wilson (1944), Hawks' Sergeant York (1941) and Curtiz's Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) get high ratings as does Raoul Walsh's They Died With Their Boots On (1941), the "deliciously mythic account of George Armstrong Custer's tragic career." Schickel, bless him, gives us Custer/Errol Flynn's parting words to his wife (played by the luminous Olivia de Havilland), which he describes as "one of the loveliest romantic lines in all of movie history: 'Walking with you, ma'am, has been a very gracious thing.' "
Cynical, sensitive, realistic, romantic, inciting, insightful — Schickel's package of war and remembrance couldn't have come at a better time.
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AMONG THE MANSIONS OF EDEN —
Tales of Love, Lust, and Land in Beverly Hills
By David Weddle
Published by William Morrow
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Subdivided into parcels, a bit like Beverly Hills itself, David Weddle's study of a place, a concept, an idea, a dream; languidly unfolds, enveloping the reader in a gauzy, gaudy, seductive, sweet-scented cascade of words, images, designer clothes, brand-name products, household names and weaving, twisting geography. The hills, the flats, the canyons, the drives; all intersecting, crisscrossing, coexisting, functioning (somehow), in an area of West Los Angeles, famous, fabulous, and wealthy beyond (you would think), anyone's wildest dreams. Beginning with the question "How did it happen?" — Weddle's tour takes us on a dizzying trip through local history, and charts the course of a city's destiny — a city that was literally created to be what it ended up being — a playground for the world's demigods, a haven for the super rich — a state, a principality, an island, a country all its own. We are introduced to a bizarre gallery of fantastic characters; the city's inventors, and the contemporary realtors who stalk its perimeters with ruthless ambition; the vendors, hawkers and sellers; the con men, cheats, and personal security gonzos; the stars and directors, entrepreneurs and magnates who fill its cultivated streets and shop at its customized boutiques. About the only things missing are the halt, the lame, the sick and the poor, as they are basically prohibited from crossing the city line. In the earliest days of its existence, some of the well-heeled residents suggested a wall be built around its circumference — although whether that was intended to keep folks in or keep them out remains unclear.
Weddle, whose previous book If They Move ... Kill 'Em was on the iconoclastic director Sam Peckinpah, is a terrific writer and keeps the reader solidly entertained as he casts an acerbic eye across the lush lawns, cocking a quizzical brow at the quirky, pretentious, idiosyncratic behavior on display. He has an evident love for the land, the terrain, the area, and how it was hewn from parched bean fields and a low mountain range by long-departed visionaries; dreamers from the east who saw a fantastic opportunity. The very name itself — "Beverly Hills" — was coined by Lillian Green, wife of Burton Green who was in charge of building Southern California's "first planned community" on behalf of Rodeo Land and Water in 1906. Lillian replaced "Beverly Farms" with "Hills," subtly suggesting a rolling landscape of verdant bloom — the ideal environment for displaced millionaires, either for extended vacations or full-time lifestyle redeployment. Weddle concludes that the true inheritors of this Garden of Eden are the realtors, and he bookends his fascinating tale with their excesses. As peddlers of both the dream and the land itself, they trawl every square inch, pricing, gauging, and assessing value. Essentially they think of a number and quadruple it, before unloading their hand-tailored palatial jumble sales on the next seeker who can come up with the required bankroll. Across a century of development, history is made and demolished, personal palaces razed and destroyed, empires won and lost. The cultural polyglot is described by Weddle in crisp, non-judgmental detail. His tone and attitude changes from section to section, as if he realizes the city can't be delineated entirely as satire. He is sympathetic to the first-generation movie stars; Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, who artfully constructed their works of artifice both on and off the screen — he describes how Buster Keaton's legacy was saved after James Mason had purchased the comedian's house, and discovered prints of his greatest movies (long thought lost) in a forgotten vault. The influx of the vaudevillians and the creation of the Friar's Club, the mass immigration of Persian exiles, the state of the community and its impact on the regions around it are dutifully essayed, along with the cartoon antics of Hugh Hefner and his wannabes; Norm Zadeh, (hedge fund wizard turned "Perfect 10" girlie magazine owner), Bernie Cornfeld, who went broke aping Hef's proclivities, Bijan Pakzad and the Rodeo Drive shopping wars, Mike Romanoff's dazzling exploitation of the restaurant business, Mark Hughes' Herbalife emporium, Gavin De Becker's rise to power as the man who would protect the assets of the wealthy in the post-Manson climate, and the assorted potpourri of catastrophically enclined human detritus who have crashed the party seeking to carve a chunk of the good life for themselves. Weddle's elegantly assembled wordage flows like a dramatic narrative; it's the nonfiction equivalent of The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West.
In the end, the author leaves us as he finds us, with characters presiding over yet another humongous land sale high atop the canyons where the red-tailed raptors circle lazily in the sky. Looking down on the fabled "billionaire's horseshoe," the brokers can't wait to perpetrate another architectural atrocity on "the last mountaintop." Earlier on in the book, grubby speculators ponder how much longer producer Robert Evans may have left to live before they can get their hands on his much-coveted house, "Woodland." The buzzards are settling on the carrion of bad taste and Weddle sums it up thusly: "They were here first and will endure as long as there's a shred of blue sky to weave into the dream. They build no monuments of their own; there are no 'Maps to the Beverly Hills Realtor's Homes.' This — the entire city sprawled out below them — is their bid for immortality. A smoke-and-mirrors trick that has an everlasting hold on the American imagination." –
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