During the first years of cinema, France, the US and the UK were the leading lights. From France, famously, came the Lumiere brothers as well as Georges Méliès. From America came among others Thomas Edison (sometimes referred to as "the thug") and Edwin S. Porter. But the British pioneers are not as well-known generally as their colleagues on the continent or in New York. So here are some names and some films from Britain.
Just look at this early gem, from 1899:
Around the same time came Mitchell & Keynon, the filmmaking team of Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon. They made films all over the place, both documents of life and more fictional things such as slapstick, as well as dramatisations of actual events. They were re-discovered in the middle of 1990s, and a DVD release is available. (Can be bought here)
An important filmmaker was also James Williamson who did experimental stuff such as this film, called The Big Swallow, in 1900:
And of course, there was the wonderful Rescued By Rover from 1905, directed by Lewin Fitzhamon, for Cecil Milton Hepworth's production company. Hepworth and his company were among the most inventive in early cinema. (The acting by the humans here may not be the best, but the dog is great.)
But I've saved the best for last, also from Cecil Milton Hepworth, here's The Explosion of a Motor Car, from 1900. Enjoy!
Saturday, 27 February 2010
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Some films seen at the Glasgow film festival
There's something to be said about a guy who, at the age of 101, continues to make films, which are not only being made, but are also good. I could only be talking about one man, the Portuguese Manoel de Oliviera. On and off I've come across his films, but never on regular release, only on festivals or cinemateques. A couple of years ago I saw Belle toujours (2006) and, admittedly, I didn't like it. But since then he's made several long and short films, and the latest of these are The Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura 2009) which I liked a lot. Friends of Oliviera will probably feel at home, although newcomers might be put off by the leisurely pace and the feeling of people rather posing than acting. It's under an hour and it's about a guy who falls in love with a blonde girl across the street from his office and what happens to that romance. It's got an interesting structure in that the guy is telling his story to a stranger he meets on a train. He's very upset and he needs to tell someone, and the woman sitting next to him is willing to listen.
It's a story which is sometimes funny, sometimes frustrating and sometimes rather moving. The subject matter might not be all that exciting, but after the film I did feel enriched by it.
The Turkish film Autumn (Sonbahar 2008) is also sometimes funny, sometimes frustrating and sometimes rather moving. Although the frustration has a different cause than in The Eccentricities... Autumn is the kind of film where characters are standing still for what seems like hours, looking at mountains and/or the ocean, whilst smoking. And sometimes they're walking on a beach or perhaps in a forest. In general it's not the kind of thing I particularly like to see in films because it can become a boring cliché, and not nearly as "meaningful" or "heartfelt" or whatever the filmmakers might think. So there was a lot of that going on. But it had also enough of good scenes about friendship and family life, and even a little bit of romance (with a prostitute of course), and in the end I kind of liked it. It told the story about a man in his 30s who's released from prison because he has a lung disease and he travels back home to his old mother. The reason he was put in prison was because he was a communist political activist, but now the old ideals seems to have died, or are dying with him.
There are a lot of films shown at the Glasgow film festival but I think those two will do for now. The festival also has a Cary Grant retrospective, but I won't write about that because I won't be able to stop.
It's a story which is sometimes funny, sometimes frustrating and sometimes rather moving. The subject matter might not be all that exciting, but after the film I did feel enriched by it.
The Turkish film Autumn (Sonbahar 2008) is also sometimes funny, sometimes frustrating and sometimes rather moving. Although the frustration has a different cause than in The Eccentricities... Autumn is the kind of film where characters are standing still for what seems like hours, looking at mountains and/or the ocean, whilst smoking. And sometimes they're walking on a beach or perhaps in a forest. In general it's not the kind of thing I particularly like to see in films because it can become a boring cliché, and not nearly as "meaningful" or "heartfelt" or whatever the filmmakers might think. So there was a lot of that going on. But it had also enough of good scenes about friendship and family life, and even a little bit of romance (with a prostitute of course), and in the end I kind of liked it. It told the story about a man in his 30s who's released from prison because he has a lung disease and he travels back home to his old mother. The reason he was put in prison was because he was a communist political activist, but now the old ideals seems to have died, or are dying with him.
There are a lot of films shown at the Glasgow film festival but I think those two will do for now. The festival also has a Cary Grant retrospective, but I won't write about that because I won't be able to stop.
Monday, 15 February 2010
On Authorship - or Auteurship
There are many problems with saying that the director is the author, or auteur, of any given film. I don't mean in the poststructuralist/postmodern sense (about authors not really being relevant or important, as they're simply perpetuating the general discourses) because any human being has his or her own way of negotiating the context in which they work, and so any individual has a unique voice.
A more common argument put against the idea of the auteur is the factory-like condition many films are made in, and the strong production companies in countries such as Britain, Japan, Sweden and in Hollywood. But it doesn't automatically follow that auteurs can't exists in a production company tradition. Someone working on a Tata factory might not be able to put her individual stamp on the many Nanos that are being manufactured, but a film is different from a car, a car must be made identically like the next one, otherwise it would all fall down, but with films it's the opposite. Even from a producer's viewpoint, every film has to be unique in some way, otherwise no one would want to see it. And if you on top of that add the input from all the creative people actually involved in making it, well, it's just not possible for any film not to have a look and feel that is uniquely its. And, in fact, as every car owner knows, each car is also slightly different from the next, and has its individual quirks.
So the real question when it comes to film and authors is the number of people that are involved. There are the directors, but there are also producers, writers, cinematographers, composers, editors, set designers, costume designers, credit title designers and not to mention the actors. Or perhaps even a production company or a special effects company, such as ILM (Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas's company). Various film studios also have different "looks". Compare 30s Warner with 30s Paramount for example. So, when people talk about the Director, with capital D, as the auteur, there are reasons to be a bit sceptical. "Oh really? But how about..." Unless of course, the Director also happens to be the writer, camera man, composer, editor, set designer and star, but that is very seldom the case.
Yet as followers of this blog no doubt have noticed, it has got a rather auteur-ish edge to it, with my research on Bergman and Ekman, my on-going mentioning of Howard Hawks and profiles on the likes of Richard Fleischer. (Although, writing about Fleischer doesn't necessarily mean that I would call him an auteur. I might eventually, but not yet.) By auteur I mean somebody who's personality comes across in a series of films, and where one can see visual and thematic motifs which follows from film to film, and my thinking here is that you have to take a case by case approach. There are directors who are auteurs, and directors who aren't. There are also auteurs who aren't directors. And some films haven't got any auteurs at all, they're just a well-oiled machine assembled almost on its own accord, and not just in Hollywood.
I would argue though that someone like Howard Hawks is the essence of an auteur. In Hawks's films certain recurring characters, scenes, lines of dialogue, stylistic ideas, ethical discussion, ideas about life and love and gender, are to be found, and that's all that has to be said really. (In a future piece on Hawks I will elaborate on these recurrences.) But just because I think that Hawks is an auteur doesn't mean that I think he alone has contributed to his films. It's also worth mentioning the importance Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, Ben Hecht, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Walker, Russell Harlan, Walter Brennan, Cary Grant, John Wayne had, and many others, including his wife. But the strongest input, and the special particularities that separates a film by Hawks from all other films made, comes from the man himself. He's the conductor as well as the composer, and he also plays some of the instruments. That is also the case with filmmakers like Bergman, Fellini, Hitchcock, Denis, Lubitsch, Tarkovsky, Ephron, Sjöström, Ozu, the Dardenne brothers, Spielberg, Fassbinder and others.
But just by looking at a given film by Hawks wouldn't tell us anything about whether or not he was an auteur. Only after seeing most, if not all of them, would we be able to tell, and in addition we would have to see many other films as well, made be other directors, and other films written by the writers Hawks worked with, and other films shot by the cinematographers Hawks worked with, and so on and so forth. And that's the case with all artists, not until you've seen and read most of what is available will you be able with any certainty to say who the proper author is of a particular work of art. And the artwork in themselves are not actually enough either. Interviews, biographies, on-set reporting, history overviews are also essential tools for being able to find the auteur.
It's always easy for a critic / scholar to say that the idea of auteurs is silly, but to rule it out completely in all cases seems to me to be just wrong. And some critics might say something like, "Oh yes, Antonioni was of course an auteur but Richard Quine was most certainly not". But that's a silly thing to do in the sense that someone is bound to come along who has studied Quine and she will be able to tell you that actually, Quine was a true auteur, perhaps more so than Antonioni, and give many good examples to back this up. (I personally wouldn't be able to do it though.)
When talking about European cinema, now and then, and cinema from non-western countries, even auteur-sceptics talk about the director as the one. But that's often because he doesn't now enough of the circumstances. I've seen 12 films by Mikio Naruse, and I can clearly see similarities between them, but I know next to nothing about how they came about or who else was involved. (With someone like Akira Kurosawa it's different, there I feel more secure in my view of him as an auteur.)
But is it important if there's an auteur, and who that auteur then is? Well, it depends. It's not important in the sense that you're perfectly able to enjoy a film without knowing anything about who made it, and when and where. But if you're an film student / film scholar, it's very interesting and can be very enlightening to know. Albeit time consuming if you want to do it properly. I'd argue that it gives a richer experience of a film if you know something about its background. It's also important in the sense that it might bring new, unknown names into the spotlight. This has happened within feminist film studies, where women filmmakers such as Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino and Joan Harrison have been "discovered" and re-evaluated.
And for the record, here's a collection of names of people, in no particular order, who are not directors (even if some of them did occasionally direct a film or two), but who's contribution to the art of cinema has been greater than many directors, and some of those mentioned might arguably be considered auteurs. Please note that it's not a complete list, just some name that popped into my mind when writing this piece, and that I excluded actors, important as they are.
John Alton
Edith Head
Julius Jaenzon
Arthur Freed
Charles Schnee
Kazuo Miyagawa
Ismail Merchant
Vittorio Storaro
T.E.B. Clarke
Lorens Marmstedt
Virginia Van Upp
Michael Balcon
William Cameron Menzies
John Box
Saul Bass
Walter Wanger
Lucille Ball
Hans Dreier
Anne V. Coates
Alex North
Henri Langlois
Per Hallberg
Pauline Kael
Alma Hitchcock
Steve Jobs
Lowell Ganz / Babaloo Mandel
Philip Yordan
Anita Loos
James Agee
Bernard Herrmann
----------------------------------
2012-03-29 I have amended the post a bit, but only in the phrasing. The ideas and views are the same. Also, see my more recent post On the history of auteurs
A more common argument put against the idea of the auteur is the factory-like condition many films are made in, and the strong production companies in countries such as Britain, Japan, Sweden and in Hollywood. But it doesn't automatically follow that auteurs can't exists in a production company tradition. Someone working on a Tata factory might not be able to put her individual stamp on the many Nanos that are being manufactured, but a film is different from a car, a car must be made identically like the next one, otherwise it would all fall down, but with films it's the opposite. Even from a producer's viewpoint, every film has to be unique in some way, otherwise no one would want to see it. And if you on top of that add the input from all the creative people actually involved in making it, well, it's just not possible for any film not to have a look and feel that is uniquely its. And, in fact, as every car owner knows, each car is also slightly different from the next, and has its individual quirks.
So the real question when it comes to film and authors is the number of people that are involved. There are the directors, but there are also producers, writers, cinematographers, composers, editors, set designers, costume designers, credit title designers and not to mention the actors. Or perhaps even a production company or a special effects company, such as ILM (Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas's company). Various film studios also have different "looks". Compare 30s Warner with 30s Paramount for example. So, when people talk about the Director, with capital D, as the auteur, there are reasons to be a bit sceptical. "Oh really? But how about..." Unless of course, the Director also happens to be the writer, camera man, composer, editor, set designer and star, but that is very seldom the case.
Yet as followers of this blog no doubt have noticed, it has got a rather auteur-ish edge to it, with my research on Bergman and Ekman, my on-going mentioning of Howard Hawks and profiles on the likes of Richard Fleischer. (Although, writing about Fleischer doesn't necessarily mean that I would call him an auteur. I might eventually, but not yet.) By auteur I mean somebody who's personality comes across in a series of films, and where one can see visual and thematic motifs which follows from film to film, and my thinking here is that you have to take a case by case approach. There are directors who are auteurs, and directors who aren't. There are also auteurs who aren't directors. And some films haven't got any auteurs at all, they're just a well-oiled machine assembled almost on its own accord, and not just in Hollywood.
I would argue though that someone like Howard Hawks is the essence of an auteur. In Hawks's films certain recurring characters, scenes, lines of dialogue, stylistic ideas, ethical discussion, ideas about life and love and gender, are to be found, and that's all that has to be said really. (In a future piece on Hawks I will elaborate on these recurrences.) But just because I think that Hawks is an auteur doesn't mean that I think he alone has contributed to his films. It's also worth mentioning the importance Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, Ben Hecht, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Walker, Russell Harlan, Walter Brennan, Cary Grant, John Wayne had, and many others, including his wife. But the strongest input, and the special particularities that separates a film by Hawks from all other films made, comes from the man himself. He's the conductor as well as the composer, and he also plays some of the instruments. That is also the case with filmmakers like Bergman, Fellini, Hitchcock, Denis, Lubitsch, Tarkovsky, Ephron, Sjöström, Ozu, the Dardenne brothers, Spielberg, Fassbinder and others.
But just by looking at a given film by Hawks wouldn't tell us anything about whether or not he was an auteur. Only after seeing most, if not all of them, would we be able to tell, and in addition we would have to see many other films as well, made be other directors, and other films written by the writers Hawks worked with, and other films shot by the cinematographers Hawks worked with, and so on and so forth. And that's the case with all artists, not until you've seen and read most of what is available will you be able with any certainty to say who the proper author is of a particular work of art. And the artwork in themselves are not actually enough either. Interviews, biographies, on-set reporting, history overviews are also essential tools for being able to find the auteur.
It's always easy for a critic / scholar to say that the idea of auteurs is silly, but to rule it out completely in all cases seems to me to be just wrong. And some critics might say something like, "Oh yes, Antonioni was of course an auteur but Richard Quine was most certainly not". But that's a silly thing to do in the sense that someone is bound to come along who has studied Quine and she will be able to tell you that actually, Quine was a true auteur, perhaps more so than Antonioni, and give many good examples to back this up. (I personally wouldn't be able to do it though.)
When talking about European cinema, now and then, and cinema from non-western countries, even auteur-sceptics talk about the director as the one. But that's often because he doesn't now enough of the circumstances. I've seen 12 films by Mikio Naruse, and I can clearly see similarities between them, but I know next to nothing about how they came about or who else was involved. (With someone like Akira Kurosawa it's different, there I feel more secure in my view of him as an auteur.)
But is it important if there's an auteur, and who that auteur then is? Well, it depends. It's not important in the sense that you're perfectly able to enjoy a film without knowing anything about who made it, and when and where. But if you're an film student / film scholar, it's very interesting and can be very enlightening to know. Albeit time consuming if you want to do it properly. I'd argue that it gives a richer experience of a film if you know something about its background. It's also important in the sense that it might bring new, unknown names into the spotlight. This has happened within feminist film studies, where women filmmakers such as Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino and Joan Harrison have been "discovered" and re-evaluated.
And for the record, here's a collection of names of people, in no particular order, who are not directors (even if some of them did occasionally direct a film or two), but who's contribution to the art of cinema has been greater than many directors, and some of those mentioned might arguably be considered auteurs. Please note that it's not a complete list, just some name that popped into my mind when writing this piece, and that I excluded actors, important as they are.
John Alton
Edith Head
Julius Jaenzon
Arthur Freed
Charles Schnee
Kazuo Miyagawa
Ismail Merchant
Vittorio Storaro
T.E.B. Clarke
Lorens Marmstedt
Virginia Van Upp
Michael Balcon
William Cameron Menzies
John Box
Saul Bass
Walter Wanger
Lucille Ball
Hans Dreier
Anne V. Coates
Alex North
Henri Langlois
Per Hallberg
Pauline Kael
Alma Hitchcock
Steve Jobs
Lowell Ganz / Babaloo Mandel
Philip Yordan
Anita Loos
James Agee
Bernard Herrmann
----------------------------------
2012-03-29 I have amended the post a bit, but only in the phrasing. The ideas and views are the same. Also, see my more recent post On the history of auteurs
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
Stig Järrel
Just wanted to point out that had he been alive today, Stig Järrel would have turned 100 years old.
His most famous role, internationally at least, was in Hets (Torment aka Frenzy 1944), written by Bergman and directed by Alf Sjöberg and shot by Martin Bodin as an expressionistic nightmare. Järrel played Caligula, the feared latin teacher with Nazi tendencies in a brilliant performance.
But he also had a long and, for both, very fruitful working relationship with Hasse Ekman. Järrel was in 20 of the films Ekman directed, starting with Ekman's very first film as writer/director Med dej i mina armar (With You in My Arms 1940) and ending in 1960 with Kärlekens decimaler (The Figures of Love). He played both funny parts and straight parts. Among his most intense was the role as yet another latin teacher, cruel and psychotic, in Ekman's Lågor i dunklet (Flames in the Dark 1942), two years before Hets. He also played a philosophical vagabond in arguably Ekman's best film, Vandring med månen (Wandering With the Moon 1945), against Alf Kjellin and Eva Henning.
Järrel was also a beloved stage actor and comedian, as well as doing a lot of radio, and he made his first film in 1935. In short, he was one of the most gifted of Swedish actors and entertainers of not only his but many generations.
Not many clips available, but here's something. Although only in Swedish I'm afraid.
His most famous role, internationally at least, was in Hets (Torment aka Frenzy 1944), written by Bergman and directed by Alf Sjöberg and shot by Martin Bodin as an expressionistic nightmare. Järrel played Caligula, the feared latin teacher with Nazi tendencies in a brilliant performance.
But he also had a long and, for both, very fruitful working relationship with Hasse Ekman. Järrel was in 20 of the films Ekman directed, starting with Ekman's very first film as writer/director Med dej i mina armar (With You in My Arms 1940) and ending in 1960 with Kärlekens decimaler (The Figures of Love). He played both funny parts and straight parts. Among his most intense was the role as yet another latin teacher, cruel and psychotic, in Ekman's Lågor i dunklet (Flames in the Dark 1942), two years before Hets. He also played a philosophical vagabond in arguably Ekman's best film, Vandring med månen (Wandering With the Moon 1945), against Alf Kjellin and Eva Henning.
Järrel was also a beloved stage actor and comedian, as well as doing a lot of radio, and he made his first film in 1935. In short, he was one of the most gifted of Swedish actors and entertainers of not only his but many generations.
Not many clips available, but here's something. Although only in Swedish I'm afraid.
Sunday, 7 February 2010
Bris - Bergman's soap commercials
That famous directors do commercials is (maybe) surprisingly not that uncommon. Martin Scorsese, John Woo, Ridley Scott, Ang Lee and Roy Andersson are a few that springs to mind. Belonging to that illustrious club is also Ingmar Bergman, who did nine commercials in the early 1950s.
With three families to support, with the Swedish film industry in a lockout, and with his contract with Gothenburg City Theatre not prolonged, Bergman needed money, and they only way to get it seemed to be by signing a contract with Unilever to help them sell their new soap bar, Bris (Breeze). But Bergman wasn’t ashamed. When the head of advertising at Unilever put the question to Bergman, he said yes without hesitating. He was happy to do it, and he got a more or less free hand to do as he pleased on the set, together with his favourite cinematographer Gunnar Fischer.
These commercials are seldom shown and that’s a shame because they are clever and funny and, for Bergman scholars, there’s a lot to explore and discover. And as it happens, Bibi Andersson, star of many later Bergman films, does her first appearances in one of the commercials. Although they all, obviously, have the exact same message, “Buy Bris, the anti-Bacterial soap, free, healthy and fresh”, they all have different settings, and all the different settings are settings dear to Bergman. In fact, these nine commercials constitute a remarkable collection of Bergman’s themes and visual motifs.
One opens at the court of an 18th century king, and then suddenly it’s revealed that that was just a movie, shown on the wall of the studio making the commercial, and we see the woman doing to voice over for that commercial. There’s one that begins as a silent movie and then turns into a dream and there’s another one that’s a fake 3D movie. Another one involves a puppet theatre, which is a recurring motif in Bergman’s work. (One might say that that's where Bergman begun his artistic career, ever since he was a little child, with his own theatre.) There are also many mirrors and trompe l’œil effects.
Perhaps the most intriguing of the commercials is one that begins at a hospital, which turns out to be a film set, where the next thing to be shot is a commercial for the Bris soap. Here again is also a play with mirrors. In this one and several others Bergman is deconstructing the whole business of filmmaking, using all the tricks of his disposal to trick and treat us.
Another begins like a nightmare from Bergman's later Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries 1957) and then proceeds with weird shots edited together with no apparent logic, until it’s all revealed in the last scene. It could be from Persona (1966), but it’s not, it’s just a commercial, although made by a master craftsman having fun.
Indeed, the operative word here is fun, because what’s most striking with these commercials is how playful they all are. That Bergman had a great sense of humour, and also had the ability to laugh at himself, is not often remembered, even though he made several comedies. Here he’s obviously having a lot of fun, and so has the audience. And since the soap in question is no longer for sale we can look at the short films free from any danger of doing an impulse purchase we might later regret.
With three families to support, with the Swedish film industry in a lockout, and with his contract with Gothenburg City Theatre not prolonged, Bergman needed money, and they only way to get it seemed to be by signing a contract with Unilever to help them sell their new soap bar, Bris (Breeze). But Bergman wasn’t ashamed. When the head of advertising at Unilever put the question to Bergman, he said yes without hesitating. He was happy to do it, and he got a more or less free hand to do as he pleased on the set, together with his favourite cinematographer Gunnar Fischer.
These commercials are seldom shown and that’s a shame because they are clever and funny and, for Bergman scholars, there’s a lot to explore and discover. And as it happens, Bibi Andersson, star of many later Bergman films, does her first appearances in one of the commercials. Although they all, obviously, have the exact same message, “Buy Bris, the anti-Bacterial soap, free, healthy and fresh”, they all have different settings, and all the different settings are settings dear to Bergman. In fact, these nine commercials constitute a remarkable collection of Bergman’s themes and visual motifs.
One opens at the court of an 18th century king, and then suddenly it’s revealed that that was just a movie, shown on the wall of the studio making the commercial, and we see the woman doing to voice over for that commercial. There’s one that begins as a silent movie and then turns into a dream and there’s another one that’s a fake 3D movie. Another one involves a puppet theatre, which is a recurring motif in Bergman’s work. (One might say that that's where Bergman begun his artistic career, ever since he was a little child, with his own theatre.) There are also many mirrors and trompe l’œil effects.
Perhaps the most intriguing of the commercials is one that begins at a hospital, which turns out to be a film set, where the next thing to be shot is a commercial for the Bris soap. Here again is also a play with mirrors. In this one and several others Bergman is deconstructing the whole business of filmmaking, using all the tricks of his disposal to trick and treat us.
Another begins like a nightmare from Bergman's later Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries 1957) and then proceeds with weird shots edited together with no apparent logic, until it’s all revealed in the last scene. It could be from Persona (1966), but it’s not, it’s just a commercial, although made by a master craftsman having fun.
Indeed, the operative word here is fun, because what’s most striking with these commercials is how playful they all are. That Bergman had a great sense of humour, and also had the ability to laugh at himself, is not often remembered, even though he made several comedies. Here he’s obviously having a lot of fun, and so has the audience. And since the soap in question is no longer for sale we can look at the short films free from any danger of doing an impulse purchase we might later regret.
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
Herbie and me
I grow up in a suburb south of Stockholm, and we had a movie theatre there, called Fanfaren. In the autumn of 1981 a film opened in Sweden called Herbie Goes Bananas (1980), and eventually it found it's way to Fanfaren. And I went to see it. I was very young and it was the first time I ever went to the movies on my own. And even though it's almost 30 years ago I remember it vividly, everything about it. I was thrilled! I remember the film, me sitting there watching it, me walking home afterwards, and then discussing it with my father when I got home. I even remember some of the things he asked me, like if it had been shot with a camera looking out through the front windscreen so the audience would feel like they were driving the car.
It's easy to see the appeal. A young boy and a cute car being manhandled by evil adults, and a lot of slapstick in between, what's not to like?
Very few movie experiences has been in the same league as that one, perhaps none can compete. And it doesn't matter that I saw all the Herbie films again a couple of years ago, not being particularly impressed. When I was seven years old, it was the best thing in the world.
There were four films made about Herbie back then, from 1968 to 1980, and they were created by Gordon Buford. The first two was directed by Robert Stevenson, the last two by Vincent McEveety. Stevenson had a long and eclectic career, doing both noirs in the 1940s and children's films in the late 1960s and 1970s, including the Irish classic Darby O'Gill and the Little People already in 1959 and Mary Poppins in 1964. McEveety on the other hand mostly made TV action series, like Airwolf, Simon & Simon and Magnum P.I. as well as various episodes of Dallas, Murder, She Wrote and The Rockford Files. I was addicted to all of those shows so perhaps McEveety has shaped me more than any other director. Or maybe not. The director wasn't exactly the major force in those TV series.
But to get back to Herbie. I'm delighted to have found that Herbie, the car, has his own page on imdb (click here), and that apparently there are more Swedes who have experienced the Love Bug as young impressionable children.
About four years ago I went to see a new version of Herbie, Herbie Fully Loaded (2005), with a friend of mine and her son Alex. Unlike me, he didn't see it on his own, but even so, I wonder if it would've made as big on impression on him as my first experience did on me. I don't remember what he said about it after. I myself found it moderately entertaining. But it felt rather nice to see it with a young boy, even if it wasn't my own son.
It's easy to see the appeal. A young boy and a cute car being manhandled by evil adults, and a lot of slapstick in between, what's not to like?
Very few movie experiences has been in the same league as that one, perhaps none can compete. And it doesn't matter that I saw all the Herbie films again a couple of years ago, not being particularly impressed. When I was seven years old, it was the best thing in the world.
There were four films made about Herbie back then, from 1968 to 1980, and they were created by Gordon Buford. The first two was directed by Robert Stevenson, the last two by Vincent McEveety. Stevenson had a long and eclectic career, doing both noirs in the 1940s and children's films in the late 1960s and 1970s, including the Irish classic Darby O'Gill and the Little People already in 1959 and Mary Poppins in 1964. McEveety on the other hand mostly made TV action series, like Airwolf, Simon & Simon and Magnum P.I. as well as various episodes of Dallas, Murder, She Wrote and The Rockford Files. I was addicted to all of those shows so perhaps McEveety has shaped me more than any other director. Or maybe not. The director wasn't exactly the major force in those TV series.
But to get back to Herbie. I'm delighted to have found that Herbie, the car, has his own page on imdb (click here), and that apparently there are more Swedes who have experienced the Love Bug as young impressionable children.
About four years ago I went to see a new version of Herbie, Herbie Fully Loaded (2005), with a friend of mine and her son Alex. Unlike me, he didn't see it on his own, but even so, I wonder if it would've made as big on impression on him as my first experience did on me. I don't remember what he said about it after. I myself found it moderately entertaining. But it felt rather nice to see it with a young boy, even if it wasn't my own son.
Why did I suddenly start to think about this? Because of a random remark by Kent Jones, or was it Barry Putterman, on Dave Kehr's blog. It was like a Madeleine cake. And now, when thinking about it, it's with nothing but joy. It was a happy day, a happy time, a happy memory. And I still get a bit misty-eyed when thinking about it all. Maybe I should call my father, or Annie and Alex, and see what they remember.
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