After years of guest-hosting for Rush and Tucker, this weekend I'm guest-hosting for Kathy Shaidle. Our Saturday movie columnist is taking a night off and yours truly has been pressed into service. To be honest, I'm not sure I'm up for it. Yesterday Governor Chris Sununu (whom I saw down in Bedford for "Fox & Friends" only a few weeks ago) ordered the whole of New Hampshire to shelter in place - and after thirty-six hours or so I'm already stir-crazy. Social distancing, self-isolation, quarantine, house arrest, it's quarter to three, there's no one in the place but ...me.
So I find myself pining for crowd scenes. Thus herewith a Saturday-night movie medley with an ever shrinking cast - for, as the budget-conscious Lew Grade once asked re Jesus of Nazareth, "Do we have to have twelve disciples?"
Crowd-wise, this seems as good a place to start - King Vidor's eponymous masterpiece of 1928, He'd finished The Crowd in 1927, but Louis B Mayer disliked it and so didn't release it for a year - by which time a certain mammy singer had blown up an entire cinematic aesthetic. If he'd put a mammy in the crowd, it might have done better box office. But the opening - with its famous shot up the side of the skyscraper to the army of paper-shuffling clerks within - retains all its power:
One of the recent innovations of news bulletins this last week has quickly become a cliché: the arty shots of formerly perpetually crowded tourist spots - Times Square, the Trevi Fountain, the Champs-Élysées, Piccadilly Circus - now empty and abandoned. These are places that, other than at four in the morning, are meant to be filled. I wanna wake up in a city that resumes waking up. This is Oliver Stone's latterday equivalent to King Vidor, contrasting bleary earthbound New Yorkers with a soundtrack that soars to the stars:
If you're expecting me to drop in a battle scene from The Lord of the Rings or Avengers 37, sorry but no thanks. CGI has made crowd scenes easier, in the sense that, unlike D W Griffith with his massed Klansmen in Birth of a Nation or Stanley Kubrick and his revolting charioteers in Spartacus, a director can call up his cast of thousands with a simple click of the computer - as opposed to having to yell, like Michael Curtiz on Charge of the Light Brigade, "Bring on the empty horses!" To my mind, you can always sorta kinda tell: the crowd lacks the great jostling hurly-burly of actual humanity. But, on the other hand, during the present self-isolation, you can always CGI your own crowd into the living room just to jolly things up.
The great crowd scenes are, of course, essentially urban: the swollen tide of humanity coursing up the skyscrapered canyons of grid-plan cities. In the smaller burgs, to get the citizenry surging through the streets, you usually have to order out the full torches and pitchforks in pursuit of the weird misshapen barely comprehensible stranger who has come among them and is disturbingly different. In Mitteleuropa, that's usually poor old Frankenstein's monster. In my corner of New Hampshire, it's usually me. And round about this time on a Saturday night I could expect to look out the window and see the torch-bearing villagers advancing up the hill to complain that I'm playing my Judy Garland CDs too loud again. But, alas, under the Governor's new directive, even that harmless pleasure is forbidden:
Since we can no longer congregate outdoors, how about an indoors crowd scene? If the world survives the coronapocalypse and this year's Mark Steyn Cruise does indeed set sail, we might try and recreate this moment from A Night at the Opera with Conrad Black, Michele Bachmann et al. Just before the excerpt below, Groucho Marx is asked by the porter if he'd like him to put his trunk in the stateroom. He replies that maybe it would be easier to put the stateroom in the trunk:
That many people - even in a larger venue - is illegal now in much of the world. As I mentioned the other day, in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere gatherings of more than two persons are verboten. And even twosomes are constrained in their movements. What's more, in the age of social distancing, you can never get close to someone you don't already know. So you can no longer hop aboard, say, the Twentieth Century Limited to Chicago, walk into a crowded dining car and find yourself seated opposite Eva Marie Saint:
The man who wrote that coolly smoldering dialogue was Ernest Lehman. Miss Saint was supposed to say "I never make love on an empty stomach", which gives the "You've already eaten"/"But you haven't" exchange a sly visual image. But the studio censor insisted "make love" be modified to "discuss love", which Lehman thought ridiculous. It in no way diminishes the incendiary power of the scene.
In an age of contagion, you can no longer meet a passing stranger in the dining car, and you can no longer cut in on another fellow's dance and change partners. The glowers from Ralph Bellamy at the hovering Astaire are most impressive:
"Change Partners" is the highlight of Irving Berlin's score for Carefree: I always loved (notwithstanding the somewhat lazy repetition of "tell") the line "I'll tell the waiter to tell him he's wanted on the telephone", an ingenious trick but one scuttled by the rise of cellular technology.
So no candlelit dining, no crowded dance floor... How about an evening in an intimate night club with a small floor show? Busby Berkeley conjures one such in this number from Gold Diggers of 1935 - even if, as the only customers, Wini Shaw and Dick Powell seem to be practising social distancing from the massed extras, at least until the tragic dénouement:
If you had to sum up what's been abolished this last fortnight in New York City, that lyric of Al Dubin's will serve: "the hip-hooray and ballyhoo" - all gone.
How about a trip to the club for a backrub? Ah, no. The health spas are all closed - and Sean Connery's three-girl special is now forbidden:
Are swingers' parties in suburban Connecticut still permitted? Possibly - but with only two car keys in the bowl:
Où sont les parties clés d'antan?
Is there anything that doesn't qualify as an illegal crowd gathering under today's confinement? I had a strange urge to visit a ladies' garden club ...until it occurred to me to wonder if, as with everything else, the Chinese Commies wouldn't be running the show:
So no dining, no dancing, no spa treatments or garden clubs... For the moment, one is definitely not a crowd. Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom has stated that tradespersons working alone, such as window cleaners, may continue to play their trade. Most of what I know about British window cleaners comes from the film below, where Robin Askwith is rarely alone for long:
It's all fun and games until the Chinese Commies take over that business like they took over the antibiotics. Here's George Formby with "Mr Wu(han)'s a Window Cleaner Now":
So no thousands of subway-riding commuters... no hundreds of torch-wielding villagers... no dozens of frenzied dancers... no quartets of Marx Brothers... no trios of geishas... In such a world, we must forsake human companionship to rediscover the joys of solitude in nature. If you're in the remote wilderness, take a stroll, discover a waterfall, admire its pristine translucent torrent over time-worn rocks ...and then resign yourself to the fact that it's never going to match a man-made waterfall - or woman-made:
Penultimate thought: When they show you how to social-distance yourself, doesn't it look oddly like the chaps walking down the corridor at the end of this film?
Final thought: I don't know what the precise opposite of social distancing is, but I suspect it looks something like this. We shall not see its like again:
~Mark will be back later this evening for Mark Steyn Club members with the latest episode in his serialization of Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year.
As we always say, membership in The Mark Steyn Club isn't for everybody, but it does support all our content, on everything from civilizational collapse to our Saturday movie dates. What is The Mark Steyn Club? Well, it's a discussion group of lively people on the great questions of our time; it's also an audio Book of the Month Club, and a live music club, and a video poetry circle. More details here.
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Thanks for this crowd pleaser during a time of not-so-splendid isolation. Such gorgeous scenes from The Merry Widow and Footlight Parade!
Most disciplined spontaneous crowd scene - "The Ten Commandments." Yul Brynner's Ramses has just told Chuck Moses to take his people and hit the road. The ensuing crowd of joyous Hebrew brassaros (Tom Lehar's term) assembles for their Long March with everyone making frenzied preparations. It's both chaotic and highly disciplined. One can see C.B. DeMille and Henry Wicoxen giving orders to a legion of assistant directors who, in turn, make sure that every cow, goat, sheep, dog and human being is in place - Genuine spectacle.
1933 Human waterfall , I think this was the beginning of synchronised swimming , heavens to Betsy - amazing
2020 Hunan Waterfall, synchronized virus germs in aerosol form.
Talking about a crowd scene, though a description only, how about W.C. Fields unsheathing his Bowie knife and hacking his way through a wall of human flesh, dragging his canoe behind behind him?
The opening - or the closing - of the Jason Robards 1965 movie "A Thousand Clowns."
A favorite, I played the part of Murray in a little theater production, where I met my beloved wife. It will always have an immense sentimental significance for me, for that reason as well as many others.
HubHububmumbubmmhub
If your lonely, feeling low, just sample that murmur and loop it.
May I insert the (original) Star Trek episode "The Mark of Gideon"? A severely overcrowded planet seeks a solution by introducing a lethal virus to bring the population into control.
Not trying to push conspiracy theories to the max,but the viral "attack" on the world couldn't be better if planned if a foreign power used its large population as a buffer , sending out an infected but asymptomatic subset around the world. Is the Middle Kingdom now internalized enough to pull down the world around them just enough to tip the balance? Even if a "mistake", it does potentially have positive outcomes for the ChiComs.
China's name, written in Chinese characters, is CENTER Kingdom, the axis of the world, not "Middle Kingdom", implying mediocrity. The official name of the government is NOT "Peoples Republic of China" (PRC, the abbreviation the US government mistakenly uses), but "Chinese People's Socialist Republic," asserting that it is sovereign over ALL people worldwide who are Chinese, including in Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Canada. The true names of the nation and its government announce egotism and hegemonic ambitions, themes that have guided China and its rulers for two millennia. More Americans need to study China, its history, language and culture.
Always read as "MIddle" but now up to speed. (In part did this error come JRT's Middle Earth?) I can see why Islam and CPSR are at loggerheads over the WHOLE world.
At least it is safe to designate California as the PDRK... a nice little twist of letters (but not final intent) from the DPRK.
I did enjoy that.
Thank you. The Chinese have been experiencing their own body snatchers, alive or dead.
Urban hipsters are going to wish they were Far From The Madding Crowd (I apologize, Mark - you decided to skip that one as too obvious) when the unwaged, unhoused, unbanked, undocumented, unlawful, undrugged and unwashed start getting antsy.
Given the circumstances the crowd scenes in George Lucas's classic THX 1138 comes to mind.
So who will give us the green light? Some doctor or government official? What if some other doctor or government official disagrees?
Lately, on the news tickers, items about some celebrity or sports figure testing positive have been replaced by items about the same celebrities or sports figures coming out of self-quarantine feeling fine and never having had much in the way of symptoms. And this is why we're destroying the nation?
I know that, from the point of view of microbiology, covid is not a flu. But in its effects on people, how is it different from the seasonal flu? Its symptomology is the same; precautions against its spread are the same; the vulnerable and non-vulnerable populations are the same. And the recent US government estimate of its mortality rate is down now to 1%. This is, of course, still a deliberate over-estimate to stoke the panic, just like the early 5% to 7% estimates. The true figure is bound to go much lower and end up being no different from - the flu. From the point of view of policy, it should have been dealt with essentially like the seasonal flu. Extra precautions for the elderly and ill, common sense for the rest of the population, some temporary international travel restrictions.
But don't worry. The economy will snap right back -- by 2023 - assuming no other hysteria grips us between now and then. If you've lost your livelihood and life savings in the meantime, it might take a little longer for you.
Why bother re-opening society? The real damage has been done not by covid, but by the panic and it's largely irreparable.
You might as well be whistling in the wind King. Only perhaps a half dozen of us immediately saw where this insane reaction would lead. I wasn't that surprised that we drew so much scorn on this supposedly enlightened web-site. The wreckage of our economy is the least of our problems down the road. The fiscal catastrophe that awaits will be far worse and no one sees that one coming either. This one is mathematical in nature - simply put -
a runaway progression that cannot continue indefinitely ...won't. I'm pretty sure you understand what I'm talking about.
Very true, but the worst of this will be the power we've ceded to the nascent police state in the name of something that will likely end like S. Korea, where the numbers are fairly solid, at a worst case 1.5%, meaning a 98.5% survivability. Note that the latter concept virtually never appears in news reports. All we ever see is absolute numbers of the dead apart from any overall population stats, or general death rates on a year to year basis, or any other statistic that would provide a realistic assessment of impact. Yes I know, I'm a heartless scum to actually look at the statistics. I'm also a 66 year old male, which puts me in the vulnerable population. Can I please have my Constitution back, since so many of you are clearly not using it? The power being taken by every petty politician, slathering like Pavlov's dogs at the thought of the dictatorship they can now shove down everyone's throat in order to address the Red Death (version 1.5%), will not be yielded up by them gracefully. Nor will a population made risk averse by a progressive epic that has deliberately undermined all things masculine, including simple courage, be likely to demand it back.
I'll follow up on my own reference, and nominate the "final party" in the Vincent Price version of E.A. Poe's, "The Masque of the Red Death".
A selection of tweets by Donald J Trump in the last 48 hrs:
- "General Motors MUST immediately open their stupidly abandoned Lordstown plant in Ohio, or some other plant, and START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!!!!!! FORD, GET GOING ON VENTILATORS, FAST!!!!!!"
- "Today #USNSMercy arrived @PortofLA to serve as a referral hospital for patients not infected with #COVID19 - handling overflow of acute trauma cases & other urgent needs allowing shore-based hospitals to focus medical care resources on the treatment of #coronavirus patients."
- "So proud of the @USACEHQ, @FEMA and the Federal Government for the 2,900 bed hospital they built in 4 days (way ahead of schedule) in the Javits Center for NY."
- "Hope the FDA can approve Mask Sterilization equipment ASAP. As per Governor @MikeDeWine there is a company in Ohio, @Battelle, which has equipment that can sterilize masks quickly."
King, I agree that the economic consequences are catastrophic and will be long-lasting. (Importantly, they were avoidable.) Perhaps you could you shed light on why the President of the United States is taking such a destructive course when "[from] the point of view of policy, it should have been dealt with essentially like the seasonal flu"?
Dead on Richard. Walt Trimmer in response to one of my entries covered the the destruction of our constitution better than I could. As he stated we have passed the point of no return. Your also a member of our team. I'd nominate Diane as president. The vitriol thrown at her from this site when she said the only sane approach in facing this virus was to let it play out as we always have focusing on protecting those at high risk truly shocked me.
How about the stampede in the Lion King original?
And the stampede by millions of television viewers in the past 25 years, away from the Oscars.
I guess it's just me, but when I think of crowd scenes, I think of cattle drives. And they don't come any more crowded than Howard Hawks's "Red River" (1948). AOC would swoon at the sight!
How about the bison stampede scene in How the West Was Won?
I also remember some cool crowd scenes in Zulu, including dancing, fighting and even some cattle!
Yes, that scene in "Zulu" is brilliantly made, set in the kraal of King Cetshwayo, played by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, with Jack Hawkins and Ulla Jacobsson as Swedish missionary Otto Witt and his daughter, Margareta. As with quite a lot else in "Zulu," the casting of those two roles was historically dubious, since they were both far too old for their respective roles, but they were perfect in dramatic context (I happen to think Jack Hawkins could have played just about any part, in any production, and somehow managed to do it flawlessly).
The genius of the kraal scene, for me, lies in the contrast between the spectacular ceremony and the introspective reaction of Margareta Witt, the newcomer to Africa: "It's splendid, I know, but it's quite horrible, too, isn't it?" Hawkins is the interpreter between the Swedish Jacobsson and the seemingly incomprehensible African culture engulfing her, but he, too, is struggling to understand what is going on, as you see when the news arrives from Isandlwana.
"Oh, Lord in Heaven."
"What is it,... father?"
"A thousand British soldiers have been massacred. While I stood here, talking peace, a war has started."
Not always very accurate history, but slams-you-into-the-back-of-the-seat cinema. Two actors who were taken from us very early.
You write of Zulu without mentioning Stanley Baker and Michael Caine?
What a great opening scene to set up character and plot development. "Zulu" can leave one precariously balancing between supporting the small garrison at Rorke's Drift while recognizing the pyrhic victory the Zulus won against the invading (and peace breaking) contingent of Lord Chelmsford. The balance for the movie can be shifted as Cetshwayo's orders were not followed as he had instructed that none of his impis should cross the Buffalo river into British territory were Rorke's Drift was. The one huge absent fact that was missed in both "Zulu" and "Zulu Dawn" was the solar eclipse that further doomed the British column at Isandlwana as the Zulus closed in midst the black gun powder smoke of the battlefield. As with the Boers, the might of the Empire (particularly the Gattling Gun against the Zulu's and concentration camps for the Boer's) finally prevailed. If you do not have "Zulu", the Blu-ray version is a must...now if only 4K....
No, but they aren't in that scene. There is an excellent book, called "Rorke's Drift," about the battle, by Adrian Greaves. I expect you know it, but I'm putting the details out there, for those who don't. Greaves went to great effort to find out what happened to the British survivors of the battle. Not many of them lasted all that long. Lieutenant Bromhead (Michael Caine) lived to forty-five. John Chard (played by Stanley Baker) made it all the way to forty-nine. Neither witnessed the turn of the century.
By another tragic irony, the part of Colour-Sergeant Frank Bourne was played in "Zulu" by Nigel Green, who also died unhappily early. Frank Bourne was the youngest Colour-Sergeant in the British army in 1879 and ended his military days as a Lieutenant-Colonel. I believe he accepted a commission in lieu of a Victoria Cross. Really, he should have had both. Lieutenant-Colonel Bourne lived to VE-Day and may have been the last British survivor of the Battle of Rorke's Drift..
In reality... it was Bourne who was the bulwark of the defense of the Drift. Neither commanding officer was fully up to snuff for the engagement. If that sounds familiar to service types... it's SOP. This was Caine's breakthrough movie and Stanley's triumphant high watermark... soon to be cut short by cancer. The movie features the 450/500 Boxer Short Henry-Martini rifle (which became hugely sought after (think Quigley)) yet in the movie the "extras" are (on Blu-ray easily seen) filled in with not yet created SMLEs! But then the assegai spears are Pattern 1964!
How cheesy, to present it as an "either/or," when as you say, the promotion to an officer's AND the VC should have been combined. Such low behavior.
When "The Avengers" still meant Patrick Macnee and one of Honor Blackman, Diana Rigg, or Linda Thorson, the episodes were made on the kind of budget which even "the budget-conscious Lew Grade" could turn up down the back of his settee ** , so they used to creep into locations as soon as it got light, do the filming with as few people as possible and then clear off, which led to curiously atmospheric scenes, far more pragmatic by design than enigmatic, even though the latter was how they ended up looking. Now, of course, John Steed and his companion du jour would be pushing the limits of crowd control all by themselves. The cameraman and the person with the fluffy microphone who could never remember to keep it out of the shot would be liable to get their collars felt by the rozzers. I wonder how many members of the constabulary are allowed to congregate in one place to make an arrest and what their rules are on social distancing. Come to think of it, what rules, if any, apply to the FBI?
** Back when it was still legal to drive into London, I used to have a car with seats positioned in such a way that my front-door key, my change and anything else in my trouser pockets ended up on the floor. Once, when I needed to stump up a fairly eye-watering sum to satisfy a parking meter for all of thirty minutes, I found in the footwell what would probably have been enough cash to finance "The Avengers" for several episodes, in the Sixties.
Mark replies:
That's a very accurate observation, Owen. The streets around Steed's London mews house, etc, are always deserted, as if anticipating by half a century Boris's lockdown. Is there anyone on the planet who ever got paid to be an Avengers "extra"?
Budgetary constraints were probably real, but at least according to script editor Dennis Spooner- "'Can't you afford extras?' they'd ask. Well, it wasn't like that. It's just that Steed had to be alone to be accepted. Put him in a crowd and he sticks out like a sore thumb. Let's face it, with normal people, he's weird. The trick to making him acceptable is never to show him in a normal world, just fighting villains who are odder than he is."
When I picture him on a crowded London train platform in the swingin' '60's, and I can see their point.
"When I picture him on a crowded London train platform in the swingin' '60's, and I can see their point."
Heroes stand out. That's sort-of what helps to make them heroic. There's a reason why tragic heroes end up in tragedies. Homer's heroes are all epically strange. So are the Norse ones who end up in Valhalla - a place which is so odd that it is actually packed with heroes, like a Disney CGI-fest on steroids.
Apart, apparently, from Dennis Spooner (who missed the crucial memo, I assume), the creators of "The Avengers" went to great, but not expensive, lengths to make their hero and heroines timeless. Nobody dressed like Steed in 1965. That was the point. Nobody dressed like Emma Peel, either. That car that Patrick Macnee drove seemed to belong to another age, as did Diana Rigg's Lotus: his old, hers futuristic. Compare "The Avengers" to other series from the same era, which tried desperately hard to seem contemporary and succeeded woefully. It's the competitors which look hopelessly dated, because "The Avengers" managed to be in a world of its own from the start.
Macnee helped, by refusing to have anything to do with pyrotechnics. He had fought in WWII and, as with all those who have experienced war, he had demons to contend with. Guns, for him, were not part of entertainment (I've an idea that he was overruled when "The New Avengers" came out). Again, that set "The Avengers" apart, also in its favour. The hero and heroine had to think their way out of that week's predicament, rather than shooting a path to the exit.
I agree that there is more to the distinctiveness of "The Avengers" than its very low budget, but I strongly believe that that financial straitjacket strangely contributed to the popularity of the enterprise.
Dennis Spooner had a very impressive list of credits and accomplishments, as I imagine you know. Your dismissal of him as a guy who missed the memo (didn't understand the show) seems odd.
It think you misconstrued the point of Spooner's remark. The lack of extras was done so as to not make Steed look bizarre in '60's London. That is all he said. This makes total sense to me (a fan of the show). The comment had nothing at all to do with *why* Steed was dressed as he was, or drove the car he did, nothing at all about Emma Peel, what she drove, wore or said. Nor was it in any way a criticism or diminution of any of those aspects of the show. It had to do with why they didn't fill up the scenes with extras as a practical mater. And only that.
Spooner's work on "The Avengers" came mainly during Linda Thorson's time, when the character of the show was already well established, and then during the entirely regrettable "New Avengers" period, when that character was completely wrecked. You have a touching loyalty to the man, but his "explanation" of the absence of extras is hardly persuasive.
Eva Marie Saint. Now THERE was a classy dame... Thanks for the memory.
She is still an "is."
Mark replies:
Very much so.
Good to know.
Mark, I feel your socially distant pain. As a sailor, social distancing is not a bug of the Kung Flu type...it's a feature. Especially now that we are confined on board, even in port.
Ahh, Footlight Parade! A chance for James Cagney to show off his tap skills after becoming a star in Warner's gangster films. And, it is Pre-Code, too, so there is some risqué dialogue, too.
Well done Mark! You chose a good theme and worked it well - especially the video clips.
Haven't finished this excellent movie montage on crowds yet, but couldn't help thinking of Escape from New York (when the Wall Street clip ran). Can't see those twin towers without having a bit of a gut twist. But, Escape from New York, and Snake Pliskin,..that is an "un-crowd" scene, or an "unseen crowd". And I wonder how close we are to that in the Big City.
Great job doing Saturday night movie guest hosting Mark.
How long the Granite State on lock down? Stay safe all.
Can't help thinking of Charleston Heston in the sci fi movie Omega Man who watches for the umpteenth time in a deserted cinema the film Woodstock because he is do lonely.
When I see Veronica Cartwright in Body Snatchers, my first thought is there she goes crying again. She was a great hysterical crier: this, Alien, The Birds...
I live in a wilderness preserve where, if I'm lucky, I see one person and perhaps a half dozen deer walking down the boulevard on any given day. Fortunately, our postman is allowed to touch the mailbox in my 'high risk' neighborhood to deliver our letters but Fedex is no longer permitted to ring the doorbell or require our signature.
Ok folks; life has officially become insane.
The robins are our regular customers and I don't card a single one of them. They all drink for free!
So do my chatty blue jays, :)
I wish Kathy well and hope she can return soon. For "cast of thousands" spectacle, I was always was fond of the Exodus from Egypt sequence in The Ten Commandments. For sheer scale, I don't think anyone could compete with the battle of Borodino scenes in the Soviet version of War and Peace. I think a good portion of the Red Army were in the shot (minus the good old members of the Detroit Red Wings).
As for a dance scene with lots of people, I was always fond of the Broadway Melody sequence in Singin' in the Rain. YMMV.