CineMontage

Fall 2016

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102 CINEMONTAGE / Q4 2016 Heart (1984), citing her "Touch of the Poet." With Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's collaborator for 35 years, the film analyzed is of course Raging Bull (1980), which members of the Editors Guild voted as the Best Edited Motion Picture of all time in the issue of CineMontage that celebrated the Guild's 75th anniversary in 2012. Schoonmaker, who won an Oscar for editing the film, at first turned down the picture, because she was not a member of the Guild, but she became one, and history was made. Meuel exemplifies Bauchens' work with Cleopatra (1934), for which she was nominated for an Oscar in the first year that editing awards were given. Bauchens began a 40-year, 39-film partnership with Cecil DeMille in 1917 when she was already 30 years old, along the way earning the nickname "Trojan Annie" for her legendary stamina. She cut, with DeMille at her side, every one of the films he made between the late teens and the late 1950s. She was also usually on set and, because of the huge scope of a DeMille epic, they regularly worked 16 to 18 hours at a stretch in the 1920s, cutting back to 10-to-14-hour days in the 1950s when they were both in their 70s. Making The Ten Commandments (1956), DeMille sometimes used as many as 12 cameras in a scene and shot over 100,000 feet in a picture that also required exact matching with special effects matte shots. The longevity, varied experiences, aesthetic contributions and, in some cases, sheer Hollywood power held by the women Meuel profiles make their relative obscurity a serious oversight in American film history. This book is a step in remedying that problem. It is an easy read, one that both film professionals and the public can enjoy. Many of the facts are footnoted and a generous bibliography demonstrates Meuel's attention to detail, although he repeats some stories that may be more Hollywood legend than truth. For example, was Welles' original cut of the mirrors scene in The Lady From Shanghai actually 20 minutes long as opposed to Lawrence's two minutes? We may never know, since Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn ordered much of Welles' footage destroyed. The difference between legend and fact can be impossible to distinguish, especially since often these editors were longtime loyal employees who never sought attention outside their studio gates, nor beyond the realm of the male directors with whom they worked. Women Film Editors is to be applauded as an admirable contribution on its own, and as an invitation to others to continue investigation into an intriguing subject. f CUT/PRINT begin and build careers in this environment is notable, and Meuel clearly proclaims his admiration as he examines the reasons for their successes. For his nine main subjects, the author provides a chronological account of their beginnings and major films, both successful and mediocre. He follows with a closer reading of one film that he considers exemplary in each one's oeuvre. For Lawrence, this is what many consider the masterpiece collaboration among director Nicholas Ray, writer Andrew Solt and actors Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame: In a Lonely Place (1950). As he does with every editor, Meuel credits the chief creative impulse to the director, and acknowledges the contribution of everyone involved, while emphasizing the unique artistry that the editor brings. In this case, that is Lawrence's handling of the many close-ups and two-shots of Bogart and Grahame. Meuel points out that as Bogart and Grahame's affair begins to unravel, the close-ups of the couple "become more frequent, more complicated, more revealing. Often, they betray the words the two lovers are sharing with each other." Such sequences prove Lawrence's statement, "To me, the eyes are everything." For contemporary subject Littleton, an Oscar nominee for her work on Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the author chooses to highlight Robert Benton's Places in the CONTINUED FROM PAGE 93 Barbara McLean editing Sing, Baby, Sing at 20th Century-Fox in 1936. Bison Archives

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