Treadmill Desk

In the imaginary European kingdom of Monteblanco, horse-drawn carriages bring the touring company of the Manhattan Follies to a mountaintop royal castle. The mountain, a Hollywood art director’s painting, is much more picturesque than any real mountain. In The Merry Widow, directed by Erich von Stroheim, princes wear sparkling monocles and every image is blissfully artificial, delightfully mannered.

It needs to be. In 1925, when movies were silent, MGM produced this rewritten version of Franz Lehar’s most famous operetta. To compensate for the absence of singing, Irving Thalberg, the studio’s head of production, hired Von Stroheim to create a film that would be as charming, visually, as it would sound if it there had been sound. Von Stroheim made it look gorgeous. He also made it costly, as was his style, turning a simple romance into an extravaganza lasting more than two hours. The public loved it.

I blundered on this delicious 85-year-old éclair au chocolat of a film one morning last week while playing movie roulette, my habit when doing my duty on a treadmill. Unless you’re a gerbil, a treadmill can feel annoyingly pointless. One Oxford definition of “treadmill” is “monotonous routine work.”

It cries out for distraction. There’s said to be an American executive, a virtuoso of multi-tasking, who has attached a treadmill to his boardroom table so that he can keep moving while chairing a meeting. A company called TrekDesk now offers the Treadmill Desk, a small workspace mounted on a treadmill. TrekDesk, a trifle ambitiously, explains that it will increase productivity while reducing weight, stress and anger-management problems. For only $479.

My alternative is my own private film festival, a floating display of historic moments and personal memories that appear, randomly, on TV movie channels. This is a seldom acknowledged luxury of the 21st century, a treat that couldn’t have existed before movie channels proliferated. With the help of my best friend, Turner Movie Classics (TCM), and other outlets, I make my way haphazardly through movie history, a journey of discovery and rediscovery.

A moviemaker might justifiably scorn this impulse and in fact the sudden appearance of a wonderful film makes me feel guilty for not properly respecting the artists who made it. I’m coming in late and likely won’t be staying to the end. (Though the guilt is not strong enough to make me change my ways.) There are other films I know so well that even five minutes is like a familiar conversation with an old buddy. They rush past, history speeded up, isolated bits of reality displayed like the fragments of cultural history that T.S. Eliot pulled together to make his great poem, The Wasteland.

Shown by TCM in a beautifully restored print, The Merry Widow has Mae Murray as Sally O’Hara, American showgirl, attracting the lust of Prince Danilo Petrovich (John Gilbert). Nobles in the royal box watch her performance through opera glasses and Von Stroheim cuts to shots of what they are seeing; each of them concentrates on a different part of heranatomy.

Thalberg believed that Von Stroheim wasted film, shooting far too many feet of just about every scene. He asked why, for instance, there were so many shots of one actress’s feet. Von Stroheim explained that a male character was a foot fetishist. Thalberg said, “And you, sir, have a footage fetish.”

Without TCM and my treadmill I might never have glimpsed The Merry Widow and thereby missed many of Von Stroheim’s touches. I certainly won’t forget the attempt of Prince Danilo (called in one of the intertitles “an unscrupulous despoiler of women”) to seduce Sally. He thoughtfully installs in the bedroom a guitarist and a violinist to provide appropriate background music. They are of course blindfolded, for discretion’s sake.

One of the great pleasures of movie history is following the career of an actor who has somehow become a figure in your own personal history.

When Henry Fonda (1905-1982) popped up one recent morning in The Male Animal (1942), based on James Thurber’s and Elliott Nugent’s Broadway comedy about a campus struggle between football players and liberal intellectuals, he refreshed the pleasure I’ve taken all my life from watching his onscreen character develop.

Early in his career, perhaps when he played the title role in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) or maybe the following year, when he was Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, he began learning how to embody integrity without making a fuss about it. He was an actor who brought a modest gravitas onto every set.

In 1946, playing Wyatt Earp in one of John Ford’s greatest Westerns, My Darling Clementine, he emerged as one of nature’s gentlemen, a character who had somehow acquired excellent manners along with an ability to shoot from the hip. That was an aura of goodness that he deployed nimbly in one western after another, always seeking peace and justice. His way of walking deserves an essay all on its own: Arms hanging at his side, he moved slowly, never varying his pace, placing one foot almost exactly in front of the other, looking with every move utterly unlike everyone else.

He made a specialty of playing famous Americans, from Clarence Darrow to Douglas MacArthur. In Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent (1962), he was Robert A. Leffingwell, candidate for secretary of state, a hero cast in the style of Adlai Stevenson, the unsuccessful but much-loved Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956. In 1964 he was again Stevenson-like, a presidential candidate who gives up his chances for the highest office to save America (and his own integrity) from a Nixon-like candidate in The Best Man. The same year, finally promoted, he was the president, struggling to avert nuclear war with the Soviets in Fail Safe.

In Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) he was an innocent bass player working at the Stork Club, falsely accused of crime. In 12 Angry Men (1957) he was the only voice of reason in the jury room when an innocent boy is being railroaded on a murder case.

This is the sort of thing that comes flooding back across the decades when a movie unexpectedly stirs ancient memories and revives dormant passions. Then the watcher on the treadmill forgets the boredom of exercise and decides to stay on for maybe 15 minutes more.

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