new orleans on film

My Forbidden Past: (1951. dir: Robert Stevenson) New Orleans comes to life in lush and gorgeous black and white, back in the heady days of proud Creole families with skeletons jangling in the closets. You'd be hard pressed to find a more sensuous opening scene: Ava Gardner at her loveliest in slow close-up as she smiles up at Robert Mitchum and is drawn into his silent embrace. (The only one I can think of to beat it for opening-scene sensuousness is John Ford's the Long Voyage Home.) It's melodrama, and the plot bogs down by the end, but Melvyn Douglas is sufficiently roguish in his bad-guy charm to keep things interesting, and Gardner is a masterpiece of fire and ice as the woman scorned and on the lookout for payback. Mitchum doesn't have enough to do, but nobody plays the stalwart outsider better: in this case, a yankee boffin at Tulane.

It's possible that New Orleans never looked so beautiful (and that's saying something) as on All Soul's Eve when Gardner visits a City of the Dead to tryst with her ex and light a candle at the crypt of her scandalous grandmother.

Toys in the Attic: (1963. dir: George Roy Hill) I suppose it's the stuck-outside-of-time quality which makes New Orleans so irresistible in black & white. It invokes that same idea you get sometimes when you're there, if you can ever escape the teeming masses long enough, that if you close your eyes then open them very fast you might find yourself suddenly among ladies in crinoline and gentlemen in shirt-sleeves duelling beneath oak trees and plantation overseers driving wagons filled with bags of cotton to mill. Or that if you stand very still near a boneyard at night (everyone will tell you that going inside at night is utter folly and you'll end up never emerging) you might hear the voices of the city's old gods, still alive and practicing danger and mischief after all these centuries. (When I told my friend Sam I always imagined Venice would be a little like New Orleans, he considered it then said, "The difference is that Venice's gods are asleep.")

This is from a late Lillian Hellman play. As a young girl she lived in New Orleans, and in the time-honored tradition of American playwrights, -- O'Neill, Miller, Inge, ad nauseam,-- although societal influences come to bear, the truest, most stifling danger tends to rise up from the bosom of one's familial unit. To hear these folks tell it, the lucky few who escape its suffocation are so bent and twisted by the time they do it's a wonder that any decent living ever gets done at all.

The play, I'm guessing, sports a seven-character cast, and the movie is slightly opened up, but just a little. We get glimpses of the town: the Cafe du Monde, Jackson Square, the Cathedral, the Preservation Hall. The strip joints and sfumato-painted alleyways at night. Mostly we stay in the sprawling but somehow too-close, much-hated family mansion, probably situated somewhere in the Garden District, where Hellman lived. A pair of spinster sisters (Wendy Hiller and Geraldine Page, both spot-on fabulous) have shelved their own dreams to devote their lives and hard-earned savings to supporting their often absent, well-meaning but wastrel brother (Dean Martin, if not at his best, certainly near to it). When he returns with a kittenish bride (Yvette Mimieux) and a mysterious new fortune, jealousies and fear of change rise up into a mass of destructive force. Hellman is great at this kind of thing. To her credit, she brings the one sister's sublimated lust right out into the open where it can take its true, malevolent dragon-shape, whereas most playwrights would have let it seethe, unspoken, and politely hinted at but unaddressed.

The movie both suffers and triumphs from staying close to the original stage play: there are the first, slightly awkward expositionary scenes, well enough written and acted that we can swallow 'em and move on, but when Hellman gets cooking with fire, she's a fearsome thing to behold, and the build-up to the betrayal is stunning and although you want to look away, it's like a trainwreck coming, and you can't turn your head. There's also a lovely subplot with a rich woman (Gene Tierney, wonderfully underplaying) and her "nigra chauffeur" long-time lover (Frank Silvera).