As of late I've been out of the scene and enrolled back in school. UCLA's Moving Image Archiving Master's Program - I tell everyone it's like a program to make librarians for the movies. The highlight of the program is UCLA's very own Film & Television Archive where they not only preserve and house the second largest Film & TV archive in the country but they do their own restoration work and host a plethora of screenings year round. I'll not only be doing the prerequisite grad school reading and writing but I'll also be watching a lot of great movies. Some rare and some restored favorites along with my usual diet of multiplex openings and special events. Back in my undergrad film school days I had a brilliant professor who encouraged all his students to keep a Film Journal. We basically made a list of all the movies we would see with a couple paragraphs on not only it's critical significance to whatever we were studying but wrote about the personal experience as well. A lot of times I wish I had my old notebooks at my fingertips. As any film student can attest, we watch so many films day in and day out one can easily lose track. So as I embark on archiving some of cinema's lost treasures I'll try not to lose my own notes.




Film: Take A Letter, Darling (1942)
Date: 9/29/07
Place: Billy Wilder Theater

Part of the Screwball Comedy screening series hosted by the UCLA Film & TV Archives. The farce is Rosalind Russel plays a powerful advertising executive and Fred McMurray is her secretary. She constantly flaunts her sex and her by-any-means-necessary approach to nabbing the big clients. McMurry is an ex-football star/out of work artist who's god-given chauvinist charm gets put the test with every new assignment. The set design is so gorgeously stylized. McMurray hovels in a bohemian paradise then puts on full tails for nights on the town with Russel and their clients in restaurants each more opulent than the next.

I've been hooked on AMC's "Mad Men" all summer and this film is a perfect politically incorrect companion from the period not afraid to laugh at itself as long as you laughed with style. I've never seen McMurray look more handsome and Russel as supremely confident in the role of a fabulously clever and gorgeous executive. Of course they fall in love. Their romance gets complicated when (of course) she choses business over pleasure but longs for him to melt her heart and then further complicated when a wealthy tobacco family comes into the picture to marry off these two singletons. It's a formulaic 1940s "will they or won't they" but the cynical delivery keeps all the dialog so fresh and funny. Even though the strict studio code won't ever flat out address issues of sex the implications are everywhere and the screwball side comes out when every supporting character gets to assume McMurray is a gigolo when really he just aims to make the best of his position. Because why on earth would a male secretary make so much money? And why on earth would a man stand the demoralization by a female boss if he wasn't making good money? I don't see the theme as so far off from any other office romance comedy Hollywood's released in the last 60 years. Social implications aside, I keep remembering the sets. All staged interiors with detail but without the ornate fuss one's used to seeing in golden age hollywood films. Russel's cabin retreat is especially fun, where she steals McMurray away for a weekend of uninterrupted work. It's a two story modern playground for the camera decorated with a masculine fireplace and even a stuffed bobcat. A nod to the cougar stereotype not missed but today's or yesterday's audiences.

Labels: film journal