A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies

I saw most of this documentary years ago when it ran on TCM, but I finally picked up the dvd last week and watched it over the weekend. This is a British Film Institute production cowritten and codirected by Martin Scorsese (I forget the other gentlemen's name), and Scorsese hosts it. It's a history of film up to the late '60s (at that point Scorsese was a filmmaker himself and uncomfortable commenting on his peers and friends, though there is a scene from Unforgiven and a quote from Eastwood), as seen through the lens of Scorsese's own influences, the films that mean something to him, not necessarily the most acclaimed movies of that time. The spine of the dvd puts this under "The Century of Cinema," and perhaps it was used as part of a documentary series, I don't know. This doesn't cover a century, though.

After a History of Cinema, wherein Scorsese talks about D.W. Griffith essentially creating the grammar of film, and Cecil B. DeMille telling personal morality tales within huge spectacles unachievable by the same means (i.e. without computers) now, Scorsese discussed The Director's Dilemma: how to make Art that's commercial enough to sustain a career, a problem he has always had himself as a director, then there's The Director as Storyteller, followed by chapters on those uniquely American film genres, The Western, The Gangster Film, and The Musical. What's great is that the viewer doesn't get just the expected film clips but some pretty rare or obscure ones, too, just because they were important to Scorsese and illustrated his points. For instance, the Western section had clips from a Budd Boetticher Western with Randolph Scott that was really great, and a good one from Samuel Fuller's Forty Guns, which may be his only Western, I think. And while I was never a Musical fan before, I have to say I really was impressed with the clips from Busby Berkeley films like Gold Diggers of 1933 and a later one, The Bandwagon, which has Fred Astaire and (I think) Cyd Charisse spoofing a Mike Hammer type story in a very cool dance number.

Part Two and Part Three of the documentary account for about the same length together as Part One, which is a little bit of a shame, as they're really interesting subjects. The Director as Illusionist looks at directors creating their own worlds on film, sometimes inexpensively, while The Director as Smuggler looks at how directors, particularly in the '50s, encoded messages attacking societal conventions, or promoting Communism or homosexuality, within mainstream films. The latter has been dealt with extensively in its own documentary, The Celluloid Closet, and Scorsese seems more interesting in the films attacking society here, even lavish productions like Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. I had always heard Sirk was worth seeing, even though the cast, and the plot, revolving around Wyman giving up her younger lover Hudson because of the social stigma, seemed like something corny and dated. It's not, though--the scene they showed had a real sting to it.

The Director as Iconoclast ends things, looking at directors so popular or unyielding that they put their controversial messages and themes upfront, such as Stanley Kubrick with Lolita, and Billy Wilder's bitter comedy One, Two, Three, Wilder being a director who definitely did not mellow with age.

Scorsese's voice is really like music to me. I can listen to him talk for hours about movies. His insights and enthusiasm are always enjoyable and inspiring--I ordered four films noir last night, based on the documentary: Leave Her to Heaven, Laura, T-Men and Raw Deal. It's a great documentary to get you to understand more what directors go through, and to find out some of the great directors who aren't mentioned that much now, from Wild Bill Wellman to Raoul Walsh to Fritz Lang to Sam Fuller to Andre de Toth, and on and on.