Film for Friday 21 March 2008 (the week after next Friday's film)

LOVER COME BACK
For Friday 21 March 2008

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TOO OFTEN film textbooks single out the most dramatic features of composition, lighting, or camera movement: dark shadows in film noir, crane shots in epics, geometric shapes in composition. This is for obvious reasons: they're easy to illustrate.
    Yet the art of cinematography is more than these, just like music is more than a hummable tune. In fact, much of the work of cinematography goes unnoticed, unless it's not done well: consistent lighting across many shots that involve many setups from different angles and, for exteriors, different times of the day) and an active (mobile) camera that involves frequent reframings and often invisible camera movement, because the camera moves on action or dialogue. In the same way, editing can call attention to itself or be (as is more often the case) invisible, because the cuts are made on an action, like cutting as an actor closes a door or crosses from one part of a room to another.
    For 21 March 2008 I have purposely chosen a routine sex comedy, Lover Come Back as the subject of film analysis. Gifted cinematographers usually avoid comedies, because they don't offer much in the way of dramatic lighting, working with shadows, expressive angles, etc. Yet if there is an art to cinema, it must be visible (with effort) throughout a film, even in a less distinguished film; just like the art of literature need not be only in memorable or quotable passages ("government of the people, by the people, and for the people"), but should be visible (with effort) in almost any paragraph of a good novel or narrative.
    Lover Come Back is one of three films Rock Hudson made with Doris Day, all of them sex comedies, with supporting actor, Tony Randall. Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959) was the best of these. Lover Come Back is somewhat labored in its humor and not as cleverly worked out as Pillow Talk.
    But the main focus will be on the mostly functional camera movement in the film (that is, camera movement that has no special beauty but serves mainly to make a scene more lively in film terms). Besides viewing this film on 21 March 2008, a good exercise is to see a movie (any movie) and focus only on moments when the camera moves; by doing this, one will better appreciate the continual contribution of cinematography to the art of a film.

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Comments related to LOVER COME BACK

    1. Art Carney played Ed Norton on The Honeymooners TV show (he later won an Oscar for Best Actor, though his movie career was limited). Tony Randall played the part of Peter Ramsey in Lover Come Back (and also, Jonathan in Pillow Talk). Randall also played in other Rock Hudson and/or Doris Day comedies, but he was mainly a supporting actor. His character in Lover Come Back was basically a reprise of his character in Pillow Talk (millionaires who feel like failures and mainly support the main star).

    2. Any student can see Pillow Talk in the library; there's no need for us to see it as a class. (Click on image, right, to hear the title song and see some clever split-screen cinematography.) Contrary to what one student said in a previous week's commentary, I try for as wide a vareity of film experiences as possible, the only exception being "genre," which of course can only be studied with at least two films. That explains why we have two gangster films scheduled in the next two weeks.

    3. "Sex comedy" does not mean the viewer has to see the sex. The chief difference between a sex comedy and a romantic comedy is that in a romantic comedy the main goal is marriage (or romance in between); in a sex comedy, the main goal is sex. That's the point of a comedy like Pillow Talk or Love Come Back! Otherwise there would be no laughs! Jerry wants to bed as many women as possible. There's no need to show this, since it's assumed; and at the time censorship (or studio self-censorship) would have prevented such sex scenes, or included them at great cost at the box office (it would no longer have been considered a "decent" picture and suffered losses at the box office). And in Hollywood, the Box Office is always King.
   4. As for the fish scene, that was a process shot. In other words, the fish were projected on a screen behind the couple, then timed for the exact moment to match the dialogue.

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