Butler's Cinema Scene

Cary Grant and Carole Lombard

“In Name Only” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, June 21, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14W. 10th St.  Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film series Hollywood’s Greatest Year, featuring movies released in 1939.

Movie studios messed with the Hollywood Production Code at their own peril.

The code – in place from the early 1930s through the early ‘60s — was a guideline of do’s and don’ts that were to be followed by any motion picture released by one of the major studios.

Some of the code’s rules seem absurd today. Like the idea that evil must always be punished before the lights come up. Or that even married couples must sleep in twin beds. Or that movie audiences should never see a – gasp! – toilet.

Long before the cameras rolled the studios submitted their screenplays to be vetted by the Production Code’s staff. Offensive dialogue was eliminated. Certain plot points might have to be tweaked. Occasionally the code folk pronounced an entire film unfit for moral reasons.

Why would the studios handcuff themselves artistically by submitting to such a system?

Well…money. Before the Production Code, hundreds of censorship boards in cities, counties, and states around the U.S. were in the business of watching films and demanding changes. It was a royal pain, since a scene that was OK with the censors in Ohio might be banned by the censors in Alabama. The studios had neither the time nor the inclination to re-edit their movies for different locales.

The Production Code solved that problem by setting standards that would be acceptable everywhere in the U.S. The idea was that a film could play in any city or state, to any sort of moviegoer (old or young, male or female), without causing offense.

And it worked. Once the code was in place, most local censorship boards were shut down. The movies were now a one-size-fits-all proposition.

1939’s “In Name Only” was made under the Production Code, of course. But somehow it managed to bend the usual rules out of shape.

It’s about a husband who falls for another woman – and ends with him happily leaving his wife for his new love.

That plot line should have put “In Name Only” on the code’s naughty list. Marriage was sacrosanct under the code, yet here was a movie that argues that under some circumstances, destroying a marriage is a good thing.

How did they get away with it? Continue Reading »

Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska in “Ida”

“IDA”  My rating: A (Opening June 6 at the Tivoli)

80 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

The simple description of “Ida” is that it’s about two women on a road trip.

Yeah, and “Citizen Kane” is about sledding.

Pawel Pawlikowski‘s film – the first feature he has made in his native Poland, having at age 14 fled the country’s Communist regime for a life in the West — is a low-keyed masterpiece.

“Ida”  succeeds brilliantly as the personal story of two very different but inescapably linked women. But it also provides an examination/indictment of Poland’s troubled past, from the endemic anti-Semetism that found many Poles happily helping out with Hitler’s “final solution” to the drab amorality of the post-war Communist years.

And while it’s doing all that, “Ida” does something even more astounding. It achieves a sort of meditative state, thanks to languid pacing, some of the most beautiful black-and-white cinematography you’ve ever seen, and a performance by newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska that is so saint-like it seems to have been plucked from the canons of Dryer and Bresson.

In 1961 young Anna (Trzebuchowska) is about to take her vows as a Roman Catholic nun when she’s called into the Mother Superior’s office and told that before joining the order she must spend time with her only living relative – an aunt that Anna didn’t know existed.

Wanda (Agata Kulesza) is a fortysomething atheist and alcoholic.  When Anna shows up at her doorstep, Wanda is sucking on a cigarette and waiting for her one-night stand to clear out of her bedroom. This cynic seems to take pleasure in informing Anna that her name is actually Ida Lebenstein.  What’s more, Anna/Ida – an orphan whose entire life has been spent in the convent — is a Jew.

“A Jewish nun,” Wanda snorts.

Continue Reading »