Warren on Eastwood

Spencer Warren’s review of Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima has been published at the website of the American Conservative Union. It’s a film, he says, that “represents the nadir of moral equivalence.”

Mr. Warren also sends this:

Last night on TCM I watched the 1956 “Eddie Duchin Story,” which I had never seen. His wife died in childbirth and he died of leukemia aged 40. Ironically, the star, Tyrone Power, died aged 44 two years after the film, of a heart attack.

Anyway, the last shot will interest you. Having told his formerly estranged young son, Peter (later a band leader himself) of his fate, they are playing a piano duet of Eddie’s signature tune on two pianos which are facing each other, back to back. The camera pulls back and upward, looking down on Peter from the front, with Eddie seen from behind. As the camera keeps pulling back and up, we see only Peter playing alone, the second piano now unplayed. Fade out, end of film.

This is a typical example of the visual poetry that was standard when Hollywood had standards of professionalism and when our culture held an aesthetic of aspiring to an ideal. The director, George Sidney, was a competent pro. Sidney directed MGM musicals like Anchors Aweigh and Annie Get Your Gun. He brought real brio to two of the best, non-Flynn swashbucklers, the 1948 Three Musketeers and the superb 1952 Scaramouche (which has her most flamboyantly sexy role for Eleanor Parker, one of my two favorite actresses).

Had Eastwood directed this film, it would have ended with the father telling his son his fate, with a close-up of the boy in tears, or something similarly pedestrian and crude.

LA replies:

I agree about Scaramouche, and also about Eleanor Parker in that movie.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 21, 2007 11:41 AM | Send