A Shady Dame Sings a Song

Because I am spending this weekend doing everything possible to avoid thinking about politics in any way, shape or form, here's a rich little gem from Peggy Lee, going Latin with a vengeance.

Party Like It's 1954

Sixty years ago tonight, Life magazine, as was its wont, went to a party.

Cover Girl

Her name may ring only the faintest of bells today, but 86 years ago today, the tempestuous Spanish star Raquel Meller rated the cover of Time.

She was, in her day, an international sensation, and while her vogue was fairly short (little better than a dozen years or so), she covered a lot of ground, both professionally (she sang, danced the tango, and made a string of well-received European silents) and geographically (performing everywhere from Paris to Uruguay, with a starry U.S. tour right around the time of this cover).

The coming of sound shouldn't have fazed a polymath like her, but she never clicked in sound pictures (which if nothing else made it significantly harder to sustain a multi-lingual career), and she seems to have married well and more or less left the limelight by the mid-30s.  She did have one great lost opportunity - Chaplin wanted her for City Lights; she would have deprived Virginia Cherrill of her little moment of immortality, so perhaps it's all for the best.

And how can you not admire a lady who can with such aplomb carry off a mantilla larger than her head?

Trailer Trash: Doña Zarah

While we're in a '30s mood (not all that uncommon a phenomenon hereabouts, I know), let's stop for a moment and consider that Fab Fräulein, the lady who put the "Fasc[ism]" into Fascinating, the Prima Donna Assoluta of the Axis Screen, Swedish thrush Zarah Leander.  Z-Lo, as I've taken to thinking of her, may have been from Stockholm, but she made a string of pictures in Berlin right through '43, becoming in the process Goebbels's de facto replacement for the One That Got Away, Dietrich. 

This little epic, La Habanera, is from early in her UFA contract, but it's still very much a Nazi picture:  Nordic girl falls for shady Latin; repents in a Tropical Hell (and a helluva mantilla); Latin engineers epidemic, dies; Nordic girl skedaddles back home with heroic German doc's help, reassuringly blond son in tow.

It's all pretty incoherent actually, not least because it's set in Puerto Rico but filmed in the Canaries at the height of the Spanish Civil War, features not even a trace of a Spanish accent, and is graced with costumes the silliness of which would make Marion Davies blush.  Truth to tell, I've not seen the whole thing, but from the above, I think you could engineer a drinking game involving every time Zarah finds a new way to wear spit curls.

After the War, Leander spent the rest of her long career calling herself a "political idiot" who had had no idea what was going on while she filmed and filmed and filmed (and the Deutsche Marks, conveniently deposited directly into her Swedish account, kept rolling in).  Now where have we heard that kind of thing before?  One wonders what, as the years went by, she thought about, for example, the songwriter on this movie who would shortly disappear into the camps, or whether she ever cared that the little boy who Dickie Moored his way through Habanera playing her son died at 17 on the outskirts of Berlin, killed defending the capital that she fled only a year or so earlier (and, apparently, only because her villa got flattened - how inconvenient...).

Zarah's co-stars - Ferdinand Marian, Karl Martell, Julia Serda - may not be terribly familiar today, but one name that flashes by here certainly is.  That spielleitung may be credited to Detlef Sierck, but within a few years young Detlef transformed himself into Douglas Sirk, who applied the lessons he learned from Zarah into his direction of Hollywood ladies for the next thirty years or so, culminating in that greatest of all soap operas, Imitation of Life.  Which, come to think of it, could just as easily been the title for La Habanera...

Can't Help It

I finally got around this week to watching a Christmas gift - the 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.

The film is far more than the story of Hitler's favorite filmmaker, the woman whose rollercoaster career took her from silent stardom in the now unwatchable genre of German Mountain Epics to scubadiving at 90+ in the Indian Ocean - heights and depths, indeed. What it really is, I think, is an almost continually frustrated attempt to answer one question: "What was she thinking?"

For decades she maintained one obdurate story: she was an apolitical artist, one who got caught up, all unawares, in the frenzy surrounding the rise of Nazism and who just happened to create its most enduring visual records. She was, in fact, a victim - of Goebbels, who repeatedly frustrated her perfectionist vision; of her postwar critics, who saw in Triumph of the Will the potent danger of a genuinely gifted eye meeting a poisonous message; and even of later writers, like Susan Sontag, who looked at Riefenstahl's '60s work photographing African tribesmen and saw a continuation of her Nazi-era celebration of what we know think of as body Fascism.

In the movie, she hews to this line, a nonagenarian vision of raddled UFA glamour as she tells her well-worn tales, dimpling guilelessly at the camera like the old pro she truly was. She compares herself, repeatedly, to Dietrich, whom she admires, it seems, not for her boldly anti-Hitler stance, but simply for having escaped and endured. She notes that she needed the same kind of lighting Marlene required - a high single spot to create the legendary shadows - and makes the dubious claim that she had been in the running to be Von Sternberg's Lola Lola in The Blue Angel.

Only once does the mask drop. Reunited in the stadium of the 1936 Olympics with two of the cameramen she had schooled to realize her almost demented glorification of athletic perfection in Olympia, she sits, during a break, chatting with them, apparently unaware her mic is live. Suddenly, briefly, her days as the toast of Berlin come to life. The three dispassionately move from talking about apertures and exposures to chitchat about the more routine assignments of who filmed who - "Ah, ja, you went to Moscow with Ribbentrop, no?" and for just that moment, you realize what an abyss she is, a vacancy, not apolitical but amoral, genuinely unable to fathom the bizarre experiences she has been through.

At the end of the film, she tries one last justification, another repetition of her tropes - I was not a party member, I never said anything anti-semitic, people lie so terribly about me, I was (looking very much intact) "shattered" to learn of all the atrocities, what could I have done ... and it occurred to me. Leni, in the end, really is a Lola Lola, a woman who, for film as the original was for sex, is so wholly self-absorbed, "von Kopf bis Fuß " made for nothing else, that she just ... can't help it.

For Marlene, Lola was just a role, the one that finally set her on the road to real stardom and out of the black orbit of National Socialism. Leni, though, was the real deal, Dietrich's dark shadow. It's a paradox, then, that she enjoyed a long, vigorous old age and, finally, a measure of renown apart from her vilification, even as her braver, more clear-eyed coeval languished in a geriatric haze of liquor and self-pity in Paris. Good choices don't always make for happy endings, but even so, while both women may have had "wonderful, horrible" lives, I have to think Dietrich's was the better path.

There's a Hex on Our House!

The first time I saw this amazing cartoon - Sally Cruikshank's Face Like a Frog - probably not long after it came out in 1987, and very probably, if memory serves, at some midnight movie, I was severely stoned.

In many ways, life has never been quite the same - but that, I think, is all for the best. For years we repeated various lines from the cartoon, and I can still get a laugh out of Miss Rheba by going all Gabor with the line "My name's Galooey!"

Everybody Have Fun Tonight

Three A-list ladies show that it's possible, in fact, to enjoy yourself at even the most elaborate of Hollywood costume parties. It's a magic moment in their lives, and I like to think completely genuine:

Marion oblivious of the double chins and passing years, hoping, perhaps, that Norma being at her party meant, finally, an end to all that gossip...

...Norma, carefully composing her face in one of the six trademarked expressions that successfully hid her "difficult" eyes...

...and Merle, with that tight shopgirl's smile, incongruous as always on her perfect face, that betrayed a certain painful nastiness of character (and, in this case, the knowledge that her mantilla overshadowed even that of the boss's widow).

Do you suppose that in sixty years anyone will find as much interest in deconstructing a party snap of Anne Hathaway, Kirsten Dunst, and Jessica Biel, to grab three random names from today's casting lists? Given that I can hardly stay awake thinking of them now, I have my doubts...