YOLANDA AND THE THIEF (1945)

If nothing else, this 1945 musical must be the strangest thing to emerge out of the nearly twenty year-long partnership between its creators, producer Arthur Freed and director Vincente Minnelli. Appointed as head of MGM’s musical unit after helping produce The Wizard of Oz, Freed did as much as anyone to make the ‘40s and ‘50s the peak period for American film musical. Minnelli directed many of the “Freed unit’s” best films, including Meet Me in St. Louis, The Band Wagon and An American in Paris, but few of even the director’s most devoted fans would place Yolanda and the Thief among them. The movie’s basic ingredients, including the paper-thin storyline about rakish conmen and a gullible heiress and the ludicrous faux-Latin American setting, aren’t necessarily the problem; it’s just that Minnelli, Freed and co. fail to whip them up into a suitably frothy confection. Still, even if Yolanda and the Thief can’t be considered among the best musicals of its era, it still bears watching as one of the most visually audacious and experimental (if not successful) efforts of its era, and as a showcase for Technicolor at its most radiant.

Ludwig Bemelmans, the author-illustrator behind the Madeline children’s series, had a hand in the script, which might explain why it begins as a faux-naïve fable, with a Mittel-European schoolteacher lecturing his gaggle of young pupils, against the backdrop of a soundstage sunrise, on the history of “Patria,” their never-never homeland. Like little Madeline, the title character is a daughter of privilege raised by nuns. By the time Yolanda’s ready to leave behind the convent and her young classmates (including four-year old child star Gigi Perreau), however, actress Lucille Bremer looks readier for the Coconut Grove than the von Trapp family. The movie’s campy tone and gaudy visuals look forward to Minnelli’s later The Pirate (1948), in which Gene Kelly's circus acrobat impersonates the title character in order to seduce Judy Garland’s Caribbean debutante. This film takes place further south, on a latitude somewhere between the Pampas and Beverly Hills, but in the same vein of camp exotica, consigning its “dapper rogue” role to Fred Astaire as con-artist Johnny Parkson Riggs, who sets about bilk Yolanda out of her vast family fortune.

There’s something not right about how blithely Bemelmans and Thery’s script reorders the world outside the borders of Hollywood. For all of its aspirations toward weightless fantasy, the script is uncomfortably tethered to the reality of condescension toward the U.S.’s Latin American “good neighbors.” The Pirate has the same attitude, but at least applied it to an unusually multicultural fantasy world for the 1940s. Yolanda and the Thief, however, feels very much like a Yanqui-imperialist act of imagination in its conception of Yolanda’s family business, “Aquaviva,” as a United Fruit-style industrial giant. That said, there’s only so much geopolitical significance that can be imputed to a movie starring Fred Astaire as a con artist named Johnny Parkson Riggs, particularly when the con in question consists of impersonating the mark’s guardian angel, his strategy for exploiting her convent-bred piety.

The creepiness of this meet-cute scenario, more than any faint political overtones, can account for Yolanda and the Thief''s surprisingly sour tone. The 1930s screwball comedies in whose footsteps Yolanda and the Thief followed invariably contained some kind of deception or conflict, but this movie’s conceit is like It Happened One Night by way of David Mamet. Stephen Harvey’s study Directed by Vincente Minnelli points out that Astaire’s performance is “too persuasive for the script’s own good, conveying the doleful avarice of his character so thoroughly that he accentuates how unsavory the plot really is.”

Since this is musical comedy, we can at least rest secure in the knowledge that Riggs will repent of his ploy by the last reel and find true love with his heiress, and the script doesn’t make much effort to keep us in suspense over whether this will happen. Minnelli and his writers seem less interested, however, in the sickly-sweet overtones of religious redemption than in the wicked humor of their heroine discovering her decidedly non-spiritual nature attraction to her supposedly heaven-sent aide. While hardly as subversive as, say, the bourgeoisie-baiting work of Luis Bunuel (Un Chien Andalou, Viridiana), the story is darkly shaded for a 1940s musical and suggests what impelled the creation of the movie’s greatest strength, its luscious and overwrought visuals.

The inventiveness of the sets and breathtaking Technicolor cinematography come to take precedent over the music and dance sequences, more than I would expect when the dancing is by Astaire and songs by Freed (a lyricist in the 1930s and author of, among others, "Singin' in the Rain"). The biography Astaire: the Man, the Dancer, by Bill Thomas, reports that when choreographer Eugene Loring first met with Astaire, the star handed over a can of film containing his five hours’ worth of recorded performances and told him, “Look at this first, and then we’ll go to work. I don’t like to repeat myself.” What Loring came up with does not by any means embarrass Astaire, but it serves less to underline his virtuosity as a dancer than it does to support Minnelli’s decision to take the visuals into uncommonly experimental territory.

TCM.com’s page for Yolanda and the Thief contains a production history, by Frank Miller, that details how, under Minnelli’s direction, Loring and costume designer Irene Sharaff incorporated ideas from Dali paintings and Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, pushing the movie’s look into a less genteel realm of the fantastic than that usually favored by MGM. During an extended “dream ballet,” ostensibly showing the hero’s inner conflict, Fred Astaire dances against bare landscapes and mysterious blocky shapes out of a Surrealist painting. Elsewhere he’s confronted by a mysterious, seemingly six-armed man looming out of the darkness like the disembodied arms emerging from the walls of the Beast’s castle in Cocteau. In the later Coffee Time production number, perhaps the film’s high point, Astaire and Bremer twirl across a floor painted with black and white stripes, so that they seem to be ascending up and down a series of marble trenches, a Busby Berkeley image by the way of the carnival funhouse.

Whatever point these delirious visuals are supposed to be making is clearly outstripped by Minnelli and co.’s sheer delight in producing them. The dialogue and story receive comparatively little attention from the filmmakers and doesn’t make much of an impression. The one exception is a bizarre one, a bit of purportedly comic business in which Astaire and his partner-in-crime (played by Frank Morgan, The Wizard of Oz’s man behind the curtain) try to clear an elderly matron out from the hotel lobby where they’ll be working on Yolanda by dropping down on all knees and barking at her. It’s like something David Lynch could have directed more than anything I’ve ever seen in a musical comedy. I can’t imagine why it was ever written, or performed, or kept in the final cut of the movie, except as the result of an escalating series of bets.

Of the cast, Mildred Natwick, an off-and-on member of John Ford’s unofficial stock company, fares best with her enthusiastically camp performance as Yolanda’s “Aunt Amarilla,” but then it’s not difficult for her to steal scenes while playing off Lucille Bremer's brittle hauteur. This quality worked for Bremer's supporting role in Meet Me in St. Louis as Judy Garland’s older sister but here works against her supposedly pious, humble character. Leon Ames, who’d also worked for Minnelli before in Meet Me in St. Louis, and Frank Morgan are appealing in their familiar con-man roles, but with the cast largely limited to the two stars and three supporting actors the movie’s atmosphere tends to feel rather claustrophobic, overly weighed down by the emphasis on production design.

Other Minnelli musicals flirt with dark or at least not unreservedly cheerful shadings; Meet Me in St. Louis has the character of the morbid, melancholy little girl played by Margaret O’Brien, The Pirate features an uncomfortably convincing temper tantrum by Judy Garland, and even a movie as otherwise saccharine as Brigadoon has a late setpiece, of one of the characters trying to escape from the titular village, that’s like The Most Dangerous Game by way of Lerner and Loewe. Yolanda and the Thief, however, doesn’t seem to know whether to treat its darker themes as campy humor or defuse it through the affected, fable-like innocence. The story’s religious aspects don’t appear, to put it lightly, to have struck a very deep chord with Minnelli. He invests greater feeling in The Pirate, an equally silly movie but one closer to his experience of the dreams that cause people to become involved with show business and the “traveling players” spirit that enables them to continue. As a storybook fable, Yolanda and the Thief should have stayed on the page; as a film, everything that works about it comes from what Minnelli managed to put up on the screen.

Buried Treasure: WILD RIVER (1960)

Steve Erickson's novel Zeroville imagines its hero, a man named Vikar, as a kind of cinema savant. A modern-day holy fool fixated on old movies, Vikar passes, Zelig-fashion, through the Easy Riders, Raging Bull milieu of 1970s Hollywood while remaining largely oblivious to its historical significance. At the end of his improbable quest, this fictional character is given credit by his creator for the 1981 discovery of a real-life Holy Grail of filmmaking, 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, squirreled away in a Norwegian mental hospital’s broom closet. Director Carl Dreyer’s original cut had been destroyed soon after its release and for the next fifty-three years had been available only in a collection of outtakes. For anyone who loves movies, this is just one of the unnerving reminders of the medium’s vulnerability to all manner of ill-luck, including but not limited to the censor’s knife, the course of time, and, perhaps most terrifyingly, drawn-out litigation. A Jarndyce v. Jarndyce-like lawsuit laid up the 1973 occult classic The Holy Mountain for decades of courtroom wrangling between its director, self-styled shamanistic visionary Alejandro Jodorowsky, and his producer, the Beatles’ high-powered former manager Allen Klein. Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons remains an undiscovered cinematic grail, with its entire third act still unrecovered from whatever RKO editing-room floor it was left on.

At first glance, Wild River, a 1960 drama about FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority program, seems ill-suited to join the ranks of this lost legion of cinema. It stars two actors with devoted followings, Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick, and was directed by the equally celebrated filmmaker Elia Kazan. The film’s shoot in and around Charleston, Tennessee in October and November 195, seems to have gone as smoothly as any major studio production, even unusually so for one dependent on the erratic Clift. The release was botched and didn’t make any money for the studio, Twentieth Century Fox, but then the same could be said for many films that do not, as Wild River did, go largely unseen for fifty years. In short, there’s no good reason for this movie to be unavailable on Region 1 DVD (there’s currently a disc out from an English company, but plenty of more casual classic-film watchers will probably not have the wherewithal to purchase and be able to watch it). Fortunately, the movie’s status seems now to be improving, with more frequent airings on Fox’s cable movie channel and the recent weeklong run of a restored 35mm print at New York’s Film Forum.

One reason that this is a film to be treasured is that it contains some of the best work of those who helped make it. In his film work, Elia Kazan sometimes struggled against habits he had picked up from his background in theater, such as wordiness and self-consciously “big” acting. There was good reason for this approach of course when the project was in fact derived from a stage play, as in his big-screen version of A Streetcar Named Desire, but even extraordinary films like A Face in the Crowd, On the Waterfront and East of Eden can be marred by that nagging sense of a proscenium arch hidden just above the frame. Wild River stands out in this body of work in part because we can sense its director trying more fully to exploit his medium’s visual qualities.

The scenario actually would probably have been well suited to one of Kazan’s stage productions: a conflict between two figures, Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift), an idealistic New Deal bureaucrat clearing the land to be flooded by a new dam, and Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet), the elderly Southern matriarch he’s been assigned to buy off the small island she occupies midstream of the Tennessee River. Though her refusal to do so drives forward the story, the verbal confrontations that ensue between the two carry less weight than the landscape surrounding them. As Kazan told biographer Richard Schickel: “Here in this picture you have a brilliant opportunity to do everything very, very pictorially and very much without words…Just have a succession of meaningful events.”

Wild River’s lack of reliance on speech-making points to its mature attitude toward the story’s larger conflict, that between a rooted folk culture and government-directed liberalism. Kazan could empathize with both sides: he had been a high-minded idealist not unlike his hero in the 1930s, a member of the Communist Party and the New York-based radical Group Theater, but he also felt an affinity, according to Schickel, with the traditional mindset of rural Americans, which he found not unlike his own Anatolian Greek background. He’d originally conceived of the project in 1943, while dealing with Department of Agriculture bureaucrats in putting on the pro-rationing propaganda piece It’s Up to You. By the time camera rolled in 1959, Kazan had spent years working off and on the story. In the process he had come to see his hero as a version of his own younger self, cocksure about his ability to change the world, heedless about the damage he might cause to it. For a man whose youthful political dreams had ended in the very public disillusionment of the HUAC hearings, Wild River would be his chance to express some hard-earned wisdom.

If one function the film serves is as Elia Kazan’s personal testament, another is to record one of Montgomery Clift’s last, best performances, just six years before his death at the age of 46. When the actor came to the set, he could not turn in the performance Kazan had originally hoped for, that of an arrogant, “Best and the Brightest”-style technocrat. Clift was too fragile and damaged from years of battling depression and anxiety and feeding addictions to alcohol and drugs. The vulnerability his performances had always been known for came instead to shape the character, who is not a zealot but a man unwilling to defend his own philosophy to the point of disregarding other people. It also makes the contrast with Jo Van Fleet’s performance as Ella Garth, in all her unyielding obstinancy, all the greater.

Only in her fifties when she took on the role, Van Fleet flawlessly inhabits the skin and the speech of a woman who’s spend most of her eighty-some years on the same small patch of land in Tennessee. We don’t really like Ella Garth, especially when we see her lording it over the African-American sharecroppers who live on the island in conditions even more destitute than hers, but Van Fleet shows the strength and fortitude inside her prickly, unpleasant character. Compared to such a detailed, convincing performance, Clift never quite convinces as anyone other than “Montgomery Clift.” His tremulous, twitchy manner occasionally overwhelms the content of his scenes. Despite these waverings, his performance is impossible to look away from, and hard to imagine the film without.

In this sense, the real test of Clift and the film comes not when he’s butting heads with Jo Van Fleet, but in his love scenes with Lee Remick, as Ella’s granddaughter Carol. This dimension of the story is potentially its most hackneyed, since it threatens the familiar Hollywood ploy of reducing thorny political quandaries to the problems of two beautiful people in love. Remick’s piercing blue eyes leave no doubt why Clift, or anyone else, might fall in love with her, but her performance reminds us of the real gaps, in experience and class, that lie between their characters. The two have real- to use a lazy word- “chemistry” in their scenes together, though Clift’s fragile state at the time of shooting meant that playing a Kennedy-era-style dominating male was not an option. In his autobiography, A Life, Kazan relates “In one scene Monty, at the instant of arousal, slumped to the floor. I cursed him under my breath as a limp lover, but then I decided to play the scene as it happened…” For her part, Remick commented that “his character had been written as a far more obviously masculine man, he was incapable of being the dominant partner in a male-female relationship.” The result may not have been what audiences expected to see in 1960, but it carries its own, very present erotic charge, as in the scene that Clift and Remick share in the front of her car, her two small children sleeping in the back seat. It’s an extraordinary “sex” scene, with nary an explicit detail.

Kazan’s ability to get superlative performances out of Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick and Jo Van Fleet is laudable but not surprising for a man who had ushered Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller plays into the world; what was new was the quiet assurance with which he sketched in the environment around his actors. As much as their performances, what an audience takes away from Wild River is a sense of the Southern small-town world it creates, expressed in small careful details like the raft with which Chuck gets himself across to Ella’s island. Kazan and cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks evoke a sense that this world will soon vanish with autumnal colors, in Remick’s auburn hair and in the amber-fringed surrounding woods.

Films like A Face in the Crowd, East of Eden, and On the Waterfront sometimes channel a sense of hysteria, of overheated emotions bursting from the characters’ repressed psyches or of uncontrollable forces surging to the forefront of American public life. Wild River almost but doesn’t quite go in the same direction with a subplot about Chuck standing up to bigots in the town over his use of a racially integrated workforce. It seems to be turning into a liberal suspense film along the lines of Bad Day in Black Rock, pitting a lone progressive hero against a reactionary mob, but then defuses any sense of melodrama in a siege sequence that turns from terror to absurd comedy (it doesn’t hurt to have Bruce Dern, in his first onscreen role, as one of the racist bullies). In the same vein, Kazan allows Carol’s defiance of Chuck to fade out, rather than blow up, suggesting that his characters are experiencing more than enacting the changes around them. The occasional staginess of Kazan’s direction, which turns On the Waterfront’s Hoboken dockworkers into Soviet agitprop friezes, fits this story’s sense of people stuck in place, waiting for history to happen to them. Like countless movies before and after it, Wild River suggests that the modern world inevitably triumphs over the old; unlike most of them, it doesn’t pick sides.