Scorsese Toasts Masters
This past Saturday afternoon, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's estimable co-programmer Kent Jones hosted the latest installment of "The Next Generation of Film," an ongoing series of onstage conversations conducted with contemporary filmmakers. This most recent edition might better have been described as "Two Previous Generations of Film," as the movies discussed were made by William Perlberg and George Seaton, a Hollywood producer and director team whose collaboration peaked in the late 1950s. On hand to contextualize and unpack Perlberg and Seaton's mostly uncelebrated movie legacy was film history's devout latter-day saint, director Martin Scorsese.
Perlberg (190068) and Seaton (191179) share credits in various combinations on 33 films between 1940 and 1965. With the exception of 1954's "The "Bridges at Toko-Ri" (produced by Perlberg and Seaton but directed by RKO cutting-room graduate Mark Robson), each of the three films excerpted and most of the films mentioned during Saturday's program were directed and written by Seaton and produced by Perlberg.
After a brief introduction, Mr. Scorsese, dressed head to toe in black, joined Mr. Jones on the stage of the Walter Reade Theater accompanied by enthusiastic applause and a fusillade of digital camera flashes that continued throughout the program, even when the theater lights went dark to show film excerpts.
Once seated, Messrs. Jones and Scorsese exchanged facts, insights, and drolleries about Perlberg and Seaton's pictures and occasionally about Mr. Scorsese's own features with infectious ease. Having worked together on archival projects and documentary films under the auspices of Mr. Scorsese's Cappa Productions, the two men share a collaborative history of their own. Their affectionate rapport was instantly apparent and remained highly entertaining for the entire afternoon.
In an aside while describing Seaton's evolution from radio actor (he was the original broadcast voice of the Lone Ranger) to Marx brothers gag man, and eventually director, Mr. Scorsese name-checked Paramount's "Road To " series starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. He also confessed that the paradigmatic pairing of Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro in his endlessly imitated feature breakthrough "Mean Streets" was inspired in part by Hope and Crosby's chemistry, albeit with "a slightly nastier edge."
Before getting to actual film clips, Messrs. Jones and Scorsese singled out such Perlberg-Seaton films as 1947's "Miracle On 34th Street" for the fact that they were shot on location rather than on studio sets, as was the Hollywood production office wisdom of the time. "Realistic," the director said, "I hate to use the term. "Nevertheless, he and Mr. Jones agreed, it is that physical realism, similar to the postwar films made on location in Italy, Japan, and elsewhere that is one of unique qualities of Seaton's work.
After a series of clips from "The Bridges at Toko-Ri," the conversation turned to actor William Holden, star of all three excerpted films. "The sense of violence" and "the sense of mental anguish, the fear, and the dread," Mr. Scorsese said of the combat-light Korean War drama in "Bridges," "is carried by the actor." Holden's character spends the bulk of the film "trying to compose himself for his own death," Mr. Jones said.
"They do terrible, terrible things to each other," Mr. Scorsese said when the lights came up after a series of strikingly unromantic seduction scenes from "The Proud and the Profane," a 1956 military melodrama featuring Holden and Deborah Kerr. "Consistently," Mr. Jones deadpanned. The program concluded with clips from 1962's "The Counterfeit Traitor," one of the first postwar American films to depict Nazi iconography and "the frighteningly seductive pageantry of fascism [in color]" as Mr. Scorsese said.
Mr. Scorsese described the Perlberg-Seaton movies and other "straight Hollywood fare," of his 1950s and early '60s youth as a kind of stylistic cradle in which his own filmmaking sensibility was formed one that he continues to revisit with repeated viewings of a canon of favorite films.
After a little more than 90 minutes, Mr. Scorsese excused himself, and this informal and fascinating master class pitched at a conversational level ended in the same hail of flashes and extravagant applause with which it began.
