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A Kind Of Simple Glory About It

2012-01-02T21:05:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I wonder what I’m going to do if I can’t do this anymore. And by ‘this’ I’m not talking about blogging, although the concept of getting burnt out has been occurring to me lately. I’m just talking about being able to go to the movies. I suppose it’ll always be around in some form but the increasing changeover to digital projectors in theaters is kind of a bummer—the Arclight Hollywood went all-digital several months ago so while I can kind of accept that this is gradually going to be the new reality from first-run film exhibition that doesn’t mean I have to like it. That’s not even getting into what this could possibly mean for independent film operators who won’t be able to afford the changeover. And I still think some of the flesh tones in THE DESCENDANTS when I saw it screened digitally at the Arclight looked kind of iffy, by the way. But even more than that I worry about the studios completely withdrawing their 35mm prints from any kind of exhibition whatsoever. From what I’ve heard the matter is of greater concern with some studios more than others but rumors still circulate, particularly with events like a theater in Atlanta advertising their screening of THE SHINING as the last in 35mm ever because “Warner Brothers will be retiring all prints”. And before I’ve realized it the world of revivals has changed and I need to check first to see if something is actually being shown on celluloid or if it’s just some kind of digital projection, which generally means that I can just stay home. Even if the quality of digital projection is pristine—which it always isn’t, that should be remembered—I can’t help but sometimes feel like instead of seeing a film I’m watching a giant video transmission. Film projection—35mm, if you want to get specific about it—can be a beautiful thing and I truly believe that the flicker of celluloid projection has a life to it that you just don’t get in the flat, lifeless smooth quality of something projected digitally. And I wonder what this could mean for any revival houses still out there, since it feels like the end game of all this will turn out to be that it will be impossible to see many films the way they were meant to be seen. In the life of this blog I’ve written about numerous films that I’ve seen in screenings at various theaters in this town for the first time and how powerful I sometimes found them, a feeling so enriched by being able to see them projected in those theaters. Some reading this may already know that Julia Marchese of the New Beverly, a theater run by people who care about this sort of thing, has launched her own petition requesting that the studios continue to make archival 35mm prints available. Quixotic? Nostalgia? Foolhardy? I don’t know. I only know that I signed because in the end I agree with it. Because I don’t want this to go away. Does this make me an old man, hanging on to what he’s always known and doesn’t want to lose it or am I trying to defend a technology which even if it is outdated is something I know down to my bones that I prefer?

For me, 2011 was an odd rollercoaster of a year—then again, what year isn’t?—that just happened to have been sort of bookended by the one and only Edgar Wright, programming his own festivals at the New Beverly. That one in January was a blast which I wrote about several times and this recent one in December in which he specifically programmed films he had never seen before had its own high points as well, with everything shown in glorious 35mm—director Allan Arkush being the recipient of a spontaneous standing ovation at the end of his rock comedy GET CRAZY, the pairing of Joe Dante and Leonard Maltin introducing Lubitsch’s TO BE OR NOT TO BE to a receptive crowd but there may have been a particular electricity in the air on the night two westerns were screened. Before the screening of John Ford’s THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, the first of the evening, Peter Bogdanovich appeared to speak at length about his experiences knowing Ford as well as his own personal feelings on this great film, which he first saw when it was released to a ‘meh’ response from the world. Bogdanovich didn’t stick around for the screening but I can imagine he would have been gratified by the response--you could tell how well the film played for the packed house that seemed with it every step of the way, a reminder of what a devastating work it really is and how well it holds up for our world today. The week at the New Beverly was exhausting but it was exhilarating as well, a shot of cinematic adrenaline just as potent as the one injected earlier in the year and a great way to close out this year. I was able to get my friend Abby out for a few of them and she loved the experience which made me enjoy it all the more. You put together the right audience with the right film, scratches in the print and all, and the feeling in the air can be electric.

The VALANCE screening was followed by Sam Peckinpah’s RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, introduced with Wright by SMOKIN’ ACES and THE A-TEAM director Joe Carnahan, a pairing that essentially gave us what is widely considered to be both the last and first great work of each of these directors known primarily for their westerns. Both films were released in the same year, 1962, almost as if one myth of the west was ending while another was beginning and as different as the two films may ultimately be for a variety of reasons they are still each essentially a rumination on mortality and facing what one’s life has been essentially made up of. You could say that RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY presents what are now known as Peckinpah’s thematic preoccupations still in development, emerging from his work both writing and directing television westerns but also in some ways presented here as filtered through the MGM house style during what was the dying days of the old studio system. In an early scene of the film an old cowboy played by Joel McCrea enters a town where he thinks that a crowd of people lining the streets are cheering for him when in fact they’re eagerly awaiting the end of a race involving, of all things, a camel. A cute joke, if a little broad and maybe the beginning of RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY doesn’t seem as if it will be anything unusual in the story of two old gunfighters nearing the end of their days. But there’s something in the film’s very DNA that goes beyond the relative straightforward nature of its story and the overall approach is genuinely powerful in ways that go beyond what it would have been otherwise.

When aging cowboy Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) takes a job to deliver a shipment of gold from a distant mining camp he hires old friend and onetime fellow lawman Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) to come on the job with him. Westrum also brings along the younger Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) but Judd has no idea that the two men are planning on stealing the gold. On their way to the camp they take on Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley) a young woman attempting to flee her overly strict, extremely religious father (R.G. Armstrong) by marrying Billy Hammond (James Drury), a man she knows to be at the camp. Once they get there the marriage is a disaster even before the ceremony ends, with it clear that Billy is going to allow his brothers (including Warren Oates) to have their way with her. As they leave the town, the three men make sure to take Elsa with them but in addition to the Hammond brothers on their tale there’s still the matter of the plan to make off with the gold and whether Westrum will be able to convince his old friend to join in.

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY runs only 94 minutes with a plot that doesn’t seem particularly complex at first glance. It’s a western with any number of the expected tropes that the genre that promises, complete with a climactic shootout between good guys and bad guys—a pretty amazing shoot out, it should be said—yet the overriding effect the film has as it proceeds forward is as if the entire world rests on its shoulders, the weight of everything that matters in the world is packed into every gesture, every glance between these men and the one woman in their world. It’s not a case of a film becoming more than its script (N.B. Stone, Jr. is credited but there were reportedly extensive dialogue rewrites by Peckinpah) but of a story becoming more than the straightforwardness of its idea, turning into something truly profound by the sheer telling of it--the feel of the land as exemplified by composer George Bassman’s noble main theme and even McCrea scolding Starr to pick something he’s just thrown down to the ground (“Pick that up! These mountains don't need your trash.”) And there’s the obvious friendship of these two guys as played by McCrea and Scott which couldn’t be more genuine with their array of in-jokes to each other and particular kind of shorthand as they talk about girls they once knew. There’s such pure economy always evident in both the way the characters are presented as well as the storytelling, like how so much is said in the sight of the fresh-faced Hartley coming out to greet the men in a dress she never gets to wear followed by the way her ultra-strict and religion-fixated father played by Armstrong instantly reacts. Later on his brutal treatment of her is followed by a shot of the man kneeling by his late wife’s grave on his farm in almost desperate prayer and he’s just one of several characters in the film who, despicable as they may be, are completely fleshed-out and the Hammonds, hateful as they are, also feel completely like a family unit that have been bound together for years.

Sam Peckinpah hadn’t quite become the Sam Peckinpah he’s famous for yet and the later pessimism that permeates much of the later work is nowhere to be found but the themes we recognize in his work now are undeniably present, from lawmen tossed aside by the world possibly moving to the other side for their own reward to ongoing family units to the eternally important matter of friendship. And loyalty. And what all that means. It plays as a film made this way because its director needed to express all this once and for all, he felt what it had to be in his bones. Though many recognized even at the time that he had delivered more than the simple programmer it was supposed to be MGM didn’t quite feel that way. Though it’s the rare Peckinpah film that was released in what was essentially his cut even that was more out of disinterest by the studio than anything and the director was even barred from the lot during the final mix. In some ways you can see RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY as a product of the MGM assembly line but almost every scene seems to have something just a little unexpected like that almost shocking close-up of Warren Oates when he’s first introduced or the extended wedding ceremony held in a brothel much of which is seen directly from Elsa's point of view and about which an entire piece could probably be written on these few minutes of screen time. The speech given by the justice of the peace who officiates the wedding as played by Edgar Buchanan initially seems like a digression, one of the few real ones in this tight narrative, but what he has to say about how true glory doesn’t come at the beginning of something but at the end feels absolutely essential for the film. The reward comes from what you actually accomplish. He’s only talking about marriages of course but every bit of it, particularly the wording of the phrase “a kind of a simple glory” sticks with me and it haunts the final half hour as we observe the turns of allegiances that the characters make in the story leading to what they ultimately have to do.

There are many films which pause to take in the glorious scenery with majestic music playing. In RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY the moments feels all the more searing almost as if the very celluloid that the film is shot on is insisting that we pay attention to every vista and take it in, because we might not always be able to pause for such a moment. It’s a thought that stands out for me when I gaze at the final image, a moment which transcends everything and says with me long after ‘The End’ has flashed on the screen. Edgar Wright called the pairing of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG and CHUNGKING EXPRESS from a few nights earlier the perfect double bill and this one wasn’t too far off, even if in a different key. Both from the same year, both wishing to pause and take in what the country was and had become, undeniable for what it reveals of the two directors who were decades apart in age but strangely kindred spirits as if they both felt that if they didn’t make their movie at that point in time then they never would. LIBERTY VALANCE is thought of as a last great work by a master as well as a final statement of all he wanted to say about the west and I suppose America as well. RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY doesn’t feel like it’s meant to have such high aspirations so much as serve as a first shot over a bow which seems to contain everything about the west its director wanted to express at that point but by the time Randolph Scott declares, “My sentiments exactly,” and the two men make that final walk together towards what might be their destiny it manages to become its own grand statement as well.

It’s one of those interesting cases where I’m vaguely aware that the film is trading on the reputations of its two leads and yet it’s not an element I can fully appreciate—unlike Edgar Wright I had seen it before but I doubt very many at the theater that night would have had such associations either. Joel McCrea I already know from several Preston Sturges films as well as a few other things. As for Randolph Scott, much of my prior knowledge probably comes from the joke about him in BLAZING SADDLES. Both men are extremely powerful in their roles, exuding a complete confidence and a relaxed chemistry together that the path their relationship takes as the story unfolds doesn’t even seem like plot structure. It feels totally genuine. Maybe both men realized what the film was representing as they were making it; this was Scott’s last film and McCrea only made a few others several years later, all westerns and none that seem to be remembered. In her first film Mariette Hartley takes what in other hands might be a simple ingénue role and successfully balances the frustrations of her farm life and the unfortunate naiveté for the situation she jumps into without first knowing what’s going on. Percy Helton as the banker who hires McCrea is instantly recognizable from, among other credits, his role as the weasel of a morgue attendant in KISS ME DEADLY while the likes of Warren Oates, R.G. Armstrong and L.Q. Jones make their first appearances for Peckinpah, helping to make if feel like his cinematic worldview is quickly coming into sharp focus.

Continually viewing Sam Peckinpah films is for me, a constantly evolving experience and I feel like it’s only been over the past few years that I’ve even started to get a handle on what they are, what they’re expressing. It’s amazing how young he was when he made RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY because it always feel aware of the very concept of mortality, that there may be no way to keep things from changing but if you stop and stare at just the right vista sometimes the moment can become implanted on your very soul. It’s a feeling that I’ve gotten the cinematic equivalent of any number of times at a place like the New Beverly, including over the past year. This particular double bill seemed fitting because more than anything it makes me wonder just how many chances we’ll be given to see a pairing like this in a theater. It’s easy to imagine this was part of Edgar Wright’s own incentive for this particular festival because maybe it’s becoming that much more important to see a few of these films while we still can. During several of his intros he mentioned this may be the last series he programs for a while (and all the best to him on whatever projects he’ll be working on during 2012) but hopefully he’ll turn up again somewhere down the line with a few more films he still needs to see the way they should be seen.

“I’ll have to find something else to do,” says James Bond to Countess Teresa di Vicenzo in a movie I’ve been fortunate to see projected in 35mm multiple times. I’m getting older. I’m well aware that many things won’t stay the way they are. Film is film. I don’t want that to go away entirely and frankly I don’t believe that anyone knows for certain how long digital files are going to last, so not only should such films continue to be available in 35mm they should also be preserved in 35mm. Hell, as far as I’m concerned, to borrow from Larry Bishop in KILL BILL VOL. 2, digital projection at revival screenings is about as useless to me as an asshole right here (points to elbow). With film, with that texture, with that pulsating motion to the flicker, it feels alive. It has a pulse. Digital feels sterile, lifeless. Plus film just looks better and I’m sorry but you can’t convince me otherwise. There’s a purity to it, just as genuine as that land Joel McCrea doesn’t want littered with some callow young cowboy’s garbage. And it’s still beautiful. Maybe I’ll just wind up sitting in my apartment, watching nothing but TCM, dreaming of a world where movies once existed. But at the same time I think I have to believe it’s going to continue because what other choice is there? What else would I do anyway? Anyway, Happy New Year. Save 35mm. And here’s to all the simple glories yet to come.

Into The History Books

2011-12-29T14:53:00.000-08:00

There was a surprise treat for the New Beverly audience at the recent screening of THE BAD NEWS BEARS during the Wright Stuff III festival. At the very end of the 35mm print, past the credits, past the Paramount logo, past the MPAA card all of a sudden there was a short, silent teaser for what at the time of BEARS’ release was the upcoming remake of KING KONG, simply consisting of a COMING FOR CHRISTMAS tag, a shot of the famous early teaser poster and a crawl including the famous “Dino De Laurentiis presents the most exciting and original creation of all time…” spiel. A definite reminder of how much that film was being pushed back then—looking up the dates, THE BAD NEWS BEARS came a full eight months before KONG’s release—but also how for some people, including myself, that ad campaign may live in the memory more than the actual film.

I’m a few years too young to feel nostalgia for the actual experience of seeing the film at the time but I guess we need to blame my parents on this one for not taking me. I do, however, have vivid memories of that actual poster, the design of which has its own fascinating history, particularly the sight of a giant billboard for it which may have been in Times Square though even that part of it is hazy. You don’t get marketing images like this anymore and the evocativeness of the poster remains slightly haunting for me even now, partly because of the particular location of where Kong is, partly because of how the extravagance of the image doesn’t in any way match up with what occurs in the film but also partly because of the sheer detail in it that means I could easily gaze at the thing for hours. Maybe because of how vivid this image remained in my brain it wasn’t until years later I realized that aside from chunks seen on TV through the years I’d never seen the actual film in full from start to finish. I’ve seen it several times by now—oh, if only to see a 35mm print of it though—and I have a fondness for the movie even though I’m still not sure of just how good it is. It’s one of those offshoots of the 70s as well as a display of the madness of its producer that makes the insistence on what will make everything about it spectacular not just bizarre but endearing. Is this version of KING KONG an embarrassment or just a curiosity? Has the world chosen to divide their KONG allegiances between the other two versions? Would people simply prefer to forget about the associations they have with where the final sequence takes place? It’s safe to say that it’s my second favorite King Kong movie of all time, but I’m well aware that I may be in the minority in this matter. I can only speak for myself.

Petrox Oil exec Fred Wilson (Charles Grodin) sets off from Indonesia on a chartered vessel in search for a mysterious Indian Ocean island where he is convinced no human has ever set foot and he will discover an unlimited supply of oil for his company. But he doesn’t account for stowaway Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges) a paleontologist who believes he knows something about the history of the island and that it contains something else altogether. Matters are made even more difficult by the discovery of a life raft containing aspiring actress Dwan (Jessica Lange), a beautiful blonde who is the sole survivor of a yacht that exploded out on the water. Wilson is insistent that nothing will stop him from finding his oil on this island but when they get there they find something else entirely—a giant wall and a tribe of natives who in fact worship the beast Prescott was referring to…the one and only Kong (um, Rick Baker or, as I suppose I should put it, "WITH SPECIAL CONTRIBUTIONS BY RICK BAKER).

As directed by John Guillerman, the ’76 version of KING KONG comes off as a combination of craftsmanship and showmanship that is at times truly majestic presented in a widescreen, old-school way that doesn’t really exist any more. Guillermin certainly knows how to compose a shot, even if it does feel a little like his actors are left to figure out their characters on their own—unlike the movie star archetypes of THE TOWERING INFERNO which he co-directed this time he has actors who seem willing to disappear into the characters they’re playing and even if part of the reason he was hired was due to the success of that film—“Hey, let’s get the guy who just made something else with a really tall building!”—this time he has a producer in De Laurentiis who seems more interested in making the production value seem as sumptuous as possible, not quite always so soundstage bound. But mixed in with that undeniable epic scope are a number of elements that give the end result an overall effect of at least a partial ha-whaa??? response from anyone watching it. You can feel how much money has gone into this production and the location work always utilizes every inch imaginable of where they were shooting in Hawaii, New York and wherever else. Having said all that there’s the matter of Kong himself, the creation of Carlo Rambaldi and portrayed by Rick Baker in a monkey suit which plays as if the filmmakers wanted to do something much grander but ultimately couldn’t come up with a better idea.

There’s also a giant 40 foot robot portraying Kong, spotted when he’s unveiled for the crowd in New York which apparently was a big part of the ad campaign at the time, but he’s seen so briefly that it just plays as awkward as if the crowds of people are running screaming from, well, a barely mobile giant mechanical gorilla. Whatever the true intentions behind building it were it seems to have just worked for publicity. I’m no Japanese monster movie expert but no matter how slick the photography by Richard H. Kline is—I’m particularly impressed by the scope of some of those fog bank shots—it’s hard not to think that we’ve suddenly stumbled into a film with a much skimpier budget and you could probably say that, no matter what, a guy in a monkey suit is always going to look kind of like a guy in a monkey suit. To be totally fair, the monster isn’t at all without character but when Kong finally enters the frame after his prolonged buildup the effect is so incongruous that it’s almost baffling (apparently Mario Bava, unwilling to travel to American, turned down the effects job which sounds like a potentially fascinating alternate history), making the entire experience that much more unique all by itself.

Combined with the presentation of the title character there’s the odd effect in the screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr. that combines the myth and majesty that the basic KING KONG story is for all of us, that 1933 movie I watch almost in a trance every single Thanksgiving trying to recreate my lost youth, with an odd tone of satire from simply the name Dwan (“like Dawn except that I switched two letters”) to its focus on making the oil crisis of the time such a central plot device to the point that I’m honestly not sure what the overall precise tone is supposed to be. It’s a remake where the jumping off point is a character setting off for the glory of oil as opposed to the glory of picture making, which makes it already more cynical even before the title has come on screen—Fred Wilson is just about the schmuckiest bad guy in the history of movies, unable to go for five seconds after making a proclamation without somebody correcting him or otherwise being proven wrong and a clear representation of all the evils of Nixon-Ford-era capitalism with little patience in the people around him who are actually interested in the facts (Greg Ferrara at Cinema Styles once took an enjoyable look at this element of the film. Based on the banners seen when Kong is about to be unveiled, the film is basically saying that Petrox and the U.S. are one and the same in what they represent, plundering far off lands for the destruction of all that is good in the world. Along with the cynicism there’s the feeling that the film trying to make the story more “realistic” by discarding the dinosaurs of the original so Kong just fights a giant snake this time around but I’m not sure a version of KING KONG that focuses aesthetically believable satire is the wisest way to go. Incidentally, this is the one KONG movie where we actually see him on the boat after being captured on the island, being brought back to the mainland, actually showing us something that maybe didn’t always make complete sense in the 1933 original but it also might be the most forgettable stretch of the film.

Comparisons to the ’33 original don’t need to be dwelled on--the story approach is such that there’s not much in the way of direct hommages aside from a version of the log scene and (I suspect) the abducting of Dwan from that deserted bar she and Jack stop in. But I wonder, when different people think of KING KONG, in their minds do they focus on the part on the island or the New York finale? Maybe because of my own Thanksgiving associations with the original when I was growing up in New York I’ll always flash on that stuff first (I imagine that with Peter Jackson it’s the exact opposite and I never got the idea that the New Zealander was at all interested in the city beyond being able to present his own fanciful version of the place) and when this Kong hits the Big Apple it’s responsible for some of the most memorable sequences in this version as well. There is some awkwardness to the pacing that makes me wonder about scenes that were cut out late in the game to get it down to 134 minutes--after the steady buildup towards introducing Kong it seems to rush through everything on the island with him and Jessica Lange’s Dwan in only a handful of scenes—maybe without any dinosaurs there’s just not as much to do with him there. And when we hit New York it feels like there’s more of a conscious attempt to keep things hurtling towards the climax that everyone knows is coming—I don’t have much of a desire to spend a lot of time observing the inner workings of the New York Mayor’s office but this stuff does feel truncated and reading up on the network TV version which apparently contained an extra 45 minutes there may be some truth to this. Makes sense that they made these cuts and, after all, who would ever want to sit through a three-hour KING KONG? As for the climax at the World Trade Center it’s obviously not what’s seen on that poster but in some ways it’s even more haunting, even with a few close-ups of Kong gazing at Dwan that I think are the least successful in the film.

The implications of everything surrounding this climax are so great that I almost hesitate to say too much about it. We all have our own feelings when we see the World Trade Center, of course. But I can’t help but think about how we have a movie where everything ends up bad in the end without even any “Twas Beauty Killed The Beast” moralizing--the title character is left sprawled on the pavement, one of the leads is never referred to again after he’s killed off, the island has been abandoned with the natives left to become burnt-out drunks as Jack Prescott predicts and the media (not to mention thousands of New York extras) swarms around everywhere at the base of the Twin Towers like the vultures they clearly are. And suddenly this movie that maybe has always been looked at as kind of a joke by people doesn’t seem so goofy after all. “No one cry when Jaws die,” said De Laurentiis to Time about his Christmas present to the world several months before it was released. “But when the monkey die, people gonna cry.” That quote has become somewhat legendary partly due to turning up in a Saturday Night Live sketch around the time featuring John Belushi as the producer. I don’t cry, but when he stands up there at the top of the WTC and pauses to look up at the moon I feel for the guy, remembering that his love for Dwan works out the same as it does for every girl I’ve ever fallen for so I suppose I remain haunted by this KONG in a way unlike any of the others. It’s the ’33 that I’ll continue to watch once a year and any other remake doesn’t really matter to me. This one has a soul. It may be a spectacularly flawed soul but in the dark of night you ultimately respond to what haunts you and what will remain forever swirling around somewhere in a subconscious that you’ll never fully understand.

As for the leads, you can’t say that De Laurentiis wasn’t at least a little original in the casting of his grand epic. Jeff Bridges makes his hippie paleontologist intelligent and likeable, never playing any of this as a goof at all. He sells you in his total belief of this monkey. Charles Grodin may be playing a moron, but an oddly endearing one as well maybe because never once is he allowed to be right about anything. How can we hate him when he’s never much of a threat? He’s not evil, just a massive putz. Maybe this sort of bad guy was only allowed in the seventies. Jessica Lange, playing the one person in the world whose life was saved by DEEP THROAT, is beautiful and totally committed but the performance has a slightly odd effect as if she’s playing an actress who is playing this ditz in a movie being made in a movie. Regardless, it’s pretty clear why Kong falls for her. When she quietly offers a toast to all the sons and daughters of King Kong she’s totally endearing. Backing up this trio, clearly one of the stranger in film history, is a strong supporting cast (hey, remember character actors?), even though by necessity they’re all basically dropped once the film leaves the island. Rene Auberjonois with his pipe and booze is particularly enjoyable as if he’s making up the character for his own amusement and John Randolph has some nice moments as the captain. Ed Lauter, Julius Harris and Jack O’Halloran are in there too. As Kong, Rick Baker is probably the unsung hero of the film and is clearly doing everything he can to sell the effect but one thing that helps him is certainly John Barry’s score which staunchly avoids any archness that might be in the air to concentrate on the adventure of it all, as if all he’s decided to do is focus on the ludicrous majesty seen on that poster and he’s more responsible than anyone for selling the tragedy at the end. Plus I always enjoy listening to “Kong Hits The Big Apple”, the source track on the album for when the ape is introduced to the New York public. It’s pretty cool.

Is it all right that I like this movie? Maybe I’m still dreaming of what I see when I look at the poster, remembering what it was like to gaze up at that billboard many decades ago. Not that it matters, but I was one of the few people who actually saw KING KONG LIVES in a theater when it opened ten years later—has there ever been a more forgotten sequel? KING KONG, on the other hand, is remembered even if it is as an oddity for any number of reasons, including how it was an attempt at an effects extravaganza just half a year before things really did change with the release of STAR WARS, the success of which no doubt baffled the old world ideals of producers like Dino De Laurentiis. Times were changing and it made this KONG that much more of an instant relic. Since there’s been another version of it since with effects that really were state of the art, it’s even more of one now. But as long as there’s that poster, that John Barry score, the sight of Jessica Lange and every other ludicrous moment that combined makes this movie into the oddball, endearing experience that it is then, at least for me, this particular Kong will always live.

To The Ends Of The Earth

2011-12-22T20:41:00.000-08:00

The world keeps turning. On the day of the recent New Beverly double bill of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG and CHUNGKING EXPRESS it rained, which couldn’t have been more fitting for several reasons. Because of the title of that first movie, yes, which seemed to provide just the right mood in the air but also because at some point that afternoon I remembered that the occasion marked the second anniversary of another series of days when it rained in Los Angeles, when just a few weeks shy of Christmas I was laid off from my job at an unnamed entertainment news TV show and sent off into the wilderness. Someone who I was getting to know around that time helped me out more than anyone did that weekend, to remind me of what else I had in my life, to let me know that it ultimately didn’t matter. I’ve always been grateful to her for that, maybe more than she’s ever known. Now, two years later, I’m employed again but she’s elsewhere in the world and I guess I miss her terribly. And here I was, going to see Jacques Demy’s 1964 French musical THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG which I suppose is one of my favorite movies, one about love and wistfulness and memory and trying to let go of certain memories so you can move on. Demy’s films are about some of those possibilities of what can happen when you walk down the street, of who else might still be around the corner in life. It’s that feeling in the air of knowing that chance you take when you go up to speak to someone for the very first time.

I’ve seen UMBRELLAS numerous times by now, starting from a re-release way back in ’96 at the now recently closed Laemmle Sunset 5 and while I always love it this viewing didn’t significantly alter what the movie has become for me. But as some of the best works of art do I think it’s gaining as the years mercilessly press on, revealing more of what it says about love and happiness—or what those things can mean to us, anyway—and how downright unforgiving the passage of time can really be when it comes to what we perceive as our relationships. The basic story is about as simple as you can get yet the overall effect it gives off is as complicated as real emotions often are. The occasion of the screening at the New Beverly was part of The Wright Stuff III, director Edgar Wright’s latest series at the theater but unlike his first two festivals which were made up of some of his favorites, this time he chose to focus on films that he hadn’t gotten around to seeing yet. He said that he even owned several of the titles being screened on DVD but had been holding off until he had a chance to see them on 35mm in a theater and while he solicited many people for possible titles, this was one film which was solely his idea. The undeniable delirium of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, with colors designed to pop off the screen probably shouldn’t be experienced any other way, certainly not contained by a mere TV screen.

In the small seaport town of Cherbourg, France, seventeen year-old Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) and twenty year-old Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) are madly in love even though Geneviève’s mother (Anne Vernon) who runs the tiny shop known as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is opposed to it because of he lack of status of auto mechanic Guy who lives with his elderly aunt Elise (Mireille Perey) and her caretaker Madeleine (Ellen Farmer), who clearly has feelings for him. Soon enough it doesn’t matter anyway with Guy’s draft notice coming in. He departs, but not before he and Geneviève have spent the night together. With Guy off at war and Geneviève facing the reality of her pregnancy, alone except for the endless pressure coming from her mother she suddenly becomes open to the interest of wealthy jewel salesman Roland Cassard (Marc Michel) who has his own designs on her.

It’s not a complicated story and isn’t meant to be (in discussing it I may be a little liberal with spoilers here, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet please beware). I also wonder how many people at the New Beverly that evening, there to see a film being introduced by Edgar Wright, even knew that this film was not only a musical but actually contains no spoken dialogue at all, with every word in fact sung essentially in the style of an operetta in a cacophony of lyricism which refuses to ever stop—wisely, the movie even pokes some fun at this idea in the very first scene. If you showed somebody only the first third of UMBRELLAS you could understand how they would think this is pure drippy sentiment with candy-coated colors and expressive beats of the two lovers essentially floating down the sidewalk with nothing on their minds but the simplicity, the perfection of their love which they seem to feel operates outside of the world and whatever anyone else has ever experienced. The ecstasy is undeniable as well as unapologetic. The beauty of Catherine Deneuve can’t be ignored.

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is really the only one of Jacques Demy’s films which has been known at all in the annals of pop culture due to its musical uniqueness, two songs (“Watch What Happens” and “I Will Wait For You”) that have been covered numerous times by various vocalists and of course the luminous Catherine Deneuve. I don’t know if it’s my favorite of Demy’s films—in some ways I respond more on a personal level to LOLA and the widescreen sprawl of his Deneuve musical THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT fills me with a sort of joy that is almost impossible for me to describe, messy as I know some of it is. But THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG is the one where everything seems to crystallize, where the intensely stylized universe of Demy seems absolutely right within a narrative that he stays focused on like none of his other films ever do--he receives sole credit for the script but due to the nature of it Michel Legrand seems almost as responsible and credit should also go to cinematographer Jean Rabier who previously photographed the black & white BAY OF ANGELS for Demy. This film was originally photographed on a type of Eastman stock that proved problematic later on which necessitated an extensive restoration but regardless, the colors seep into your subconscious like something out of a dream in a way that feels more otherworldly than simple Technicolor which makes the effect it has that much more unique, displaying the bright colors of youth before it turns into the more realistic acceptance of what follows. Every hair is in place, every piece of clothing seems to go just right with the room a particular character is in, every gesture seems carefully thought out and every moment feels perfectly arranged, even down to the matching cuts of the embracing lovers at a key moment in their story. And as things begin to turn when they’re apart it’s almost a shock. “Absence is a funny thing” as Geneviève sings about Guy, wondering why he’s fading away from her, not even able to fully understand the transitory nature of what she’s feeling (“People only die of love in the movies,” Geneviève’s mother once says to comment on her daughter’s heartbreak). All she ever seemed to know about Guy was that she loved him totally and absolutely which is all she ever seemed to ever say to him. So what else is there when that feeling goes away?

The war separates Geneviève and Guy, life separates them, the passage of time separates them with that Splendor in the Grass of it all. Whose fault is it? Who makes the right choices? Was Guy even able to write to her more than he did? Was Geneviève simply panicking, succumbing to pressure? Has a wedding ever seemed as purely tragic as it does here? Her mother comes off as overbearing but she also isn’t entirely wrong in being protective of her daughter’s naiveté and yet it’s a key to the complexity of the film that she openly regrets parts of her past while still sending Geneviève down the same path. Roland Cassard isn’t exactly a bad guy either but part of that may be colored for me from the first time the character ever appeared. As famous as THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG might be it’s not widely known that the film is essentially a follow-up to Demy’s LOLA, the non-musical black & white film made in 1959 in which Marc Michel first appeared as the character—in that film he also becomes acquainted with a widow who Geneviève’s mother seems undeniably reminiscent of, another indication of the recurring ideas and images that move through his filmic world. Here we meet Cassard several years later, obviously having prospered in whatever shady diamond trade he fell into after the end of that film and he seems to have moved on from the heartbreak of Lola but he’s never forgotten her. Even the recurring musical theme that is a part of much of his dialogue returns from the earlier film which was also scored by Michel Legrand.

Some places, like the film’s Wikipedia page, refer to UMBRELLAS as being the middle part of a trilogy also including LOLA and THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT, although this film and ROCHEFORT actually share no characters. To make it even more complicated, the title character of LOLA actually returns herself much later on in 1969’s MODEL SHOP (that last film even has a reference in dialogue to the lead character in BAY OF ANGELS—the ongoing universe of Demy’s films where characters influence films they don’t even appear in continues to fascinate me). Leaving aside the idea of recurring characters, I’ve sometimes thought that CHERBOURG and ROCHEFORT could be looked at as the first two parts of a trilogy that was never completed. The first film is about loss, the second film is about recovery—even the youthful characters which include Deneuve are older than the young lovers here, a little more used to heartbreak—and I still can’t help but imagine a never-made third musical collaboration between Demy and Legrand, preferably featuring Catherine Deneuve somewhere in the cast, that would have been some sort of final step in that process of life. The characters of CHERBOURG never recurred through Demy’s other films but when in MODEL SHOP Lola looks through a photo album and speaks of her past it still frustrates me that she never comments on the photos of Cassard that are there. His story ends here and there’s a certain subtext to his motivation in courting Geneviève as if it’s nothing more than, “I didn’t get Anouk Aimee? Fine, I’ll take Catherine Deneuve!” He was once a poor schmuck who couldn’t get a girl. Now he essentially helps himself to the most beautiful girl imaginable.

One bonus to Edgar Wright’s week of programming at the New Beverly was bringing in special guests to help introduce the films he had never seen. Before this screening we got MAD MEN creator Matthew Weiner who during his talk remembered some of the countless films he saw at that theater decades earlier and they also mentioned the dialogue reference to the film we were about to see on MAD MEN a few years back. Correctly deeming it “pure cinema”, Weiner also focused some of his talk on how the theme of modernization becomes more prevalent as the film goes on, which for me is as much of an indication of the passage of time as anything, how the world irrevocably changes for the two leads. The gleaming white service station where the film concludes is certainly a switch from the musty old garage where it begins and the umbrella shop itself is seen being converted into an appliance store complete with front loading washing machines. I wasn’t sure how the New Beverly audience would react and I think my own defensiveness of this meant that I wasn’t able to get as swept up in it as I sometimes do at home. And after a small amount of initial laughter from the New Beverly crowd at the beginning, once the movie poked fun at its own self in the early scene where the mechanics talk about how they don’t like the opera because there’s too much singing it felt like they were with it and the applause that rose up at the end felt genuine, not just out of politeness. Even the friend I had met there who really had no idea what she was about to see liked it very much as well, which made me happy. It was also a little surprising how much the film and the world of Wong Kar-wai as viewed in CHUNGKING EXPRESS which followed seemed to go together and the next day on Twitter he called it the perfect double bill and, after all, the sort of uplift provided by these films doesn’t happen every day. “I’m not unhappy,” says one character at a crucial point near the end as she cries, unable to express exactly what she’s feeling after being asked multiple times through the film if she is happy or sad, which probably says as much about the worldview of Demy’s films as anything. Sometimes I start crying at the opening of this damn film. That didn’t happen that night. I think I was just too nervous someone was going to see me.

It’s somewhat unusual to discuss the performances in UMBRELLAS partly due to how everyone in the cast is dubbed, not doing their own singing, but also because the focus obviously goes to one person and with Catherine Deneuve playing one of the heads here, almost impossible to talk about anyone else. She’s so beautiful, so ethereal, so heartbreaking. Matthew Weiner commented on how her face “is the story” which is true but of course it’s only half of the film. Nino Castelnuovo isn’t quite that equal, but he’s no slouch either and he particularly plays things with just the right intensity to sell things later on when the character is drifting to a bad place. Anne Vernon keeps things from being too overbearing while Marc Michel seems like he’s deliberately withholding some of the past uncertainty which remains buried down within Roland Cassard. As for the other woman, Ellen Farner doesn’t have very many screen credits but she couldn’t be more beguiling at certain moments as Madeleine. the way she brushes her hair back from her head when sitting dressed in orange in front of that orange outdoor café is especially fetching and it’s to the film’s credit—it’s essential, actually—that it never feels like Guy is settling by ending up with her.

Jacques Demy’s best films stay with me like few others do, remaining in my thoughts as I drive around this city, haunted by a few of those women who aren’t around anymore, forever thinking of certain places like the cutaways to a few locations Geneviève and Guy walked through at the height of their reverie. Some of Michel Legrand’s music here continues to haunt me as well, not just the lyrical passages but even some of the transitions which always seem to completely speak of the concept of fate, like the slow, calliope style of the main theme when Guy returns in the rain, a carnival that is on the verge of finally dying down, how the turning wheels are moving towards what is pre-destined. It wasn’t until about three or four viewings of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG until I realized one of the keys to its depth actually occurs in the opening scene when Guy is asked to stay a little late at the mechanic’s to look at a car the vehicle in question actually belongs to Roland Cassard who appears in the shot unannounced and at that point not yet introduced. It’s as if everything is fated right form that moment: somehow, even if no one realizes it, Roland Cassard is going to prevent Geneviève and Guy from being together. The film is aware of this, but it can’t do anything more than simply observe, reminding me of that Kubrick quote which states the world isn’t hostile but indifferent. The film is brutal that way, maybe never more than when Guy declines Geneviève’s offer in the final scene to meet the child that is his. Not just for the obvious reasons but how the way the moment plays he not only declines to meet her but in shaking his head he declines to continue the musical phrasing begin in her question. Instead the beat just lingers there, uncompleted and with that any bond that was ever there between them is forever broken. He has his wife and son, she has her daughter, Mercedes and husband who is nowhere to be seen. Make of this what you will. The complicated, unresolved ecstasy of the final shot is not even allowed the luxury of a THE END title card, as if to remind us that there lives are going to go on after the movie ends, forever apart. All that appears, in the U.S. version anyway, is a card at the bottom of the screen, crediting those responsible for the English subtitles. It appears prior to the fade out and even before the final bars reach their crescendo so the way it intrudes feels as invasive as anything like it’s saying, “If you wanted it to end differently, too bad. That’s all there is.” Lovers drift apart. People never see each other again. Life goes on. The world keeps turning.

Getting Into Semantics

2011-12-11T23:38:00.000-08:00

Writing about comedy can sometimes be a challenge because you naturally want to be able to say something more than simply “It was funny” or “It wasn’t funny.” There are films I love where even I haven’t come up with more to say than that so if there’s something extra going on between the laughs it can certainly help but, of course, sometimes a joke is just a joke and not much else—not that there’s anything wrong with that, at least not all of the time—but sometimes even jokes can dig a little deeper. Even better is when it becomes evident that there’s a consistent comedic point of view at work, turning those jokes into more than they seemed at first. When done right the result can be extremely rewarding, taking whatever the film or TV show is beyond just a mindless joke machine and ultimately becoming into a true expression of sensibilities. Is all this just a colossal example of overthinking on my part? Maybe, but that’s just what I do.

With a career that has spanned for decades there’s probably quite a story to be found in the career of Andrew Bergman—director, screenwriter, playwright, novelist, film historian and once dubbed “The Unknown King of Comedy” by New York Magazine. His director credits aren’t that extensive but there are several titles among them which people, including myself, have an ongoing fondness for particularly THE FRESHMAN and HONEYMOON IN VEGAS. He also wrote the story and co-wrote the screenplay of BLAZING SADDLES when he was 27 (oh dear lord, are you serious? What have I done with my life?), was one of the writers on the fondly remembered SOAPDISH as well as being responsible for the screenplay of FLETCH. And of course he wrote the all-holy THE IN-LAWS which I could easily write an entire post on just quoting lines from it (“There are flames on my car!!”) but as some might know I also have a particular fondness for the 1986 comedy BIG TROUBLE, a Falk-Arkin reteaming he also wrote and was the original director on before being replaced by John Cassavetes, ultimately using the W.C. Fields-inspired pseudonym “Warren Bogle” in place of his screenplay credit. I know it’s kind of a mess, but my attachment to that film remains and I choose to believe he’s a big reason for that. But regardless of the film there’s an undeniable combination of satire and spirit found in his work which always manages to turn everything about the end result into something truly unique. More than most other screenwriters who seem known for comedy, Bergman seems to love the sheer use of language, forever getting caught up in the nitpicking of what the flow of certain words can mean a discussion of who “they” is referring to in THE FRESHMAN comes to mind) and through this shining a light on the peculiarities of his characters each of which, even the bit parts, are always allowed their own quirks. This sort of wordplay may be a little out of fashion by now—the Coen Brothers are among the few who ever attempt it, particularly when they’re in BURN AFTER READING territory—but such a display of twisted humor makes Bergman about as close as we’ve gotten in modern times to a Preston Sturges and it’s a combination of dialogue and character in a way that doesn’t really happen anymore. Maybe it’s just not allowed to happen. One of the apparently now hidden titles in Bergman’s career would have to be SO FINE, his directorial debut released in September 1981, which feels slightly forgotten now and only ever got a DVD release through the Warner Archive. Never approaching the hysterical plot complications of THE IN-LAWS, the film is ultimately kind of slight but has enough genuine laughs throughout that the more I watch it the more I feel like overlooking some of its shortcomings. I mean, there is something to be said about a film that makes you laugh. And SO FINE does at the very least have that.

New York dressmaker Jack Fine (Jack Warden) is in big trouble with very large, very intimidating loan shark Mr. Eddie (Richard Kiel), so mean and powerful that he has his own parking space on the street reading “Tow Away Zone Except for Mr. Eddie.” Taking over the business and insisting that capital be raised fast Mr. Eddie forces Jack’s bookish son Bobby (Ryan O’Neal), a literature professor at Chippenango State College (“Learn so ye may know”), to come work for the company even though he has absolutely no experience in the clothing industry whatsoever. But when Bobby meets Mr. Eddie’s Italian wife Lira (Mariangela Melato), a strikingly exotic beauty who tells him “I fuck around” about a minute after they meet the mutual interest is undeniable. Soon enough Lira is throwing herself at Bobby in her town house and when he frantically attempts to flee in her clothes early one morning without getting caught by Mr. Eddie he accidentally invents a new kind of special jeans with something very special in the rear. The success of what they dub “So Fine” sends the Fine business into the stratosphere and puts their money troubles to an end. But there’s still the issue of what will happen if Mr. Eddie finds out about Bobby and Lira which could prove far worse than what he ever threatened to do to his father.

Some films set in New York during the first years of the 80s can be odd to see now since the tone of the decade at that pre-Madonna stage hadn’t fully taken hold yet and it always feels a little like the world is still trying to shake off some kind of Studio 54-induced hangover which definitely feels like the case here. Featuring a sequence set in a disco and storyline designed to skewer whatever was going on in the fashion world at the time, maybe these elements are ultimately kind of incidental to SO FINE, a pretty silly yet spirited movie set among the messiness of what appears to be a cold New York winter with characters who don’t give a moments thought to knocking over perfume bottles while barging through a department store. Bergman’s films present a screwy look at the world often with a lead character just a little more in the dark than everyone else is to what’s going on and who suddenly finds himself in the thick of all the insanity of the world that everyone has already been caught up in. In the case of SO FINE that figure is Ryan O’Neal’s Bobby Fine, wearing glasses as if the actor is still meant to be a Peter Bogdanovich surrogate but not really given much in the way of a character to play to make him into the sort of weakling who needs to overcome fears and insecurities. All he really does is quote literature and even though some of that stands out as if it’s what he’s going to use to save his father’s company but really he just lucks into his good fortune in a way that seems to make about as much sense as the rest of all the madness.

Maybe one thing about 1981 is that it was a brief period where somebody in Hollywood that it was a commercial idea to make an R-rated sex comedy. Well, Blake Edwards’ “10” had happened, so maybe that has something to do with it. SO FINE has a certain European feel, undoubtedly aided by a score by Ennio Morricone of all people and though I only have a vague awareness of sex farces made in France or Italy during the 70s nevertheless it feels a little like that’s what the film, written and directed by Bergman, seems to be going for—just because of the tone if the end credits revealed it to be a flat-out remake of something from Europe I wouldn’t be that surprise. To go along with this feel, gorgeous female lead Mariangela Melato is so enjoyably over the top in how she throws herself at O’Neal that it plays a little as if she’s the sex-crazed secondary role before the ‘normal’ girl shows up for the romance. But normalcy never really enters this film and that very concept seems wrong for Bergman anyway—it strikes me that a regular female love interest never really turned up in one of his films until possibly Sarah Jessica Parker in HONEYMOON IN VEGAS. SO FINE is set in a world of madness from the get go, with even the dull academics at Bobby’s college playing as slightly screwy in their own way. Unlike the unexpected twists which pop up in several of his other screenplays the impression SO FINE gives is that Bergman didn’t want to overcomplicate the plot of what was going to be his directorial debut so things never start twisting around like a pretzel in the way you’d almost expect. Running just over 90 minutes, the movie is so light and airy it almost floats away and any social satire that could be mined out of the success of the jeans during the “You’ve got the Jordache Look” pop culture of the time is almost incidental—even if they do inspire pratfalls by hapless men walking past beautiful women on the street they’re just jeans after all, even if they are designed to look like it’s revealing a girl’s ass, and it only seems to take up about fifteen minutes of the middle of the movie anyway. It does feel like the film could have done a little bit more with certain things, whether the collegial or garment industry settings or and some of the humor is of the time, like a few blatantly homophobic jokes tossed in there. I probably shouldn’t admit how much I laughed out loud at one particular line Jack Warden has when they enter Mr. Eddie’s club but it is something that Jack Warden says, after all. He really did know all about delivery.

But if there’s a list of films that are still pretty funny despite their shortcomings SO FINE would have to be on it and by a certain point the amount of jokes that hit is surprisingly consistent. Maybe getting laughs out of how scary Richard Kiel can be made to seem is hitting the broad side of the barn but regardless—whether we see how he takes out his anger on a pinball machine or how he helps himself to a piece of chocolate cake it all gets me to burst out into laughter just sitting here all by myself. As is sometimes the most hidden and most rewarding parts of any Andrew Bergman film, a few of the best lines also seem to float in from out of nowhere like how as O’Neal’s Bobby wonders if the mobsters shooting at him are students the dotty old poet he’s driving offers, “Must be upperclassman, I would think” or the random beat of O’Neal nervously noting the presence of curtains hanging in the windows in a limo he’s just entered. The way the recurring appearance of a desperate salesman played by Mike Kellin in the Fine offices pays off is nicely done as well and the way Bergman pauses the spiraling plot to have him talk about the multiple wives he’s had that have died is just another example of how the nit-picky nature to his dialogue works so well. Anything having to do with the plot of the wild overnight success of the So Fine jeans, if that part of the movie can even be called a plot, pretty much stops at around the hour mark as Mr. Eddie goes on the hunt for Bobby leading to a prolonged opera climax with a few of the leads assuming roles onstage and a few out-of-period backdrops falling into view—a nod to A NIGHT AT THE OPERA, I assume. Even with running commentary from some of the college professors of the ‘A kind of sudden burst of surrealism!’ sort it never quite builds up the steam it needs—maybe Verdi’s Otello is a little too funereal for the pace of a madcap comedy but it keeps a smile on my face all the way up to the end. When the final scene happens it always makes me wish the movie could go on a little bit longer. It’s not great. Truthfully, I wish it was better. It still makes me laugh. It’s totally cockeyed in all the right ways.

Ryan O’Neal doesn’t have much of a character arc (like, say, the comparable character Henry Winkler plays in NIGHT SHIFT) but he seems ideally cast for someone sleep-walking his way through life who gets woken up almost accidentally by being tossed head first into this situation. When Melato’s Lira seductively strips down in front of him and says, “I’m a very unhappy woman,” the way he nervously responds with “You are?” has to be proof of how good a comic actor he can be at the right moments. Jack Warden’s continually energetic performance may not be as legendary as his work in USED CARS from the previous year but not only does it seem impossible for him to reach the end of a scene without getting a laugh the film this is all once again proof that few other actors have ever been able to swear quite like he did. Richard Kiel, whose character presumably has no relation to the Mr. Eddy played by Robert Loggia in LOST HIGHWAY, seems totally game, always willing to do whatever he can to get a laugh as Mr. Eddy no matter how silly he looks in doing it. Mariangela Melato, known over here for starring in multiple films for Lina Wertmüller as well as, yes, FLASH GORDON, is ridiculously gorgeous and very funny as well. She seems totally fearless in her own way, using every bone that she’s aware of to throw herself at Ryan O’Neal with all the abandon possible. Come to think of it, I don’t mind hearing her swear either and when she does it certainly results in one of the biggest laughs in the film. In a smaller role, Fred Gwynne doesn’t have much to do as the stuffy college chairman, but he makes what would be a dullard in most hands somewhat endearing. The familiar-looking faces that turn up throughout (it probably only seemed like Irving Metzman, seen here as the Fine company accountant, was in every movie shot in NY during the 80s) include Tony Sirico of THE SOPRANOS as one of Mr. Eddie’s goons, John Stockwell of CHRISTINE and later a director as a college student and the instantly recognizable Anita Morris as one of the So Fine Dancers during the big montage.

SO FINE is pretty silly stuff. I don’t even really know what else to say about it beyond how silly it is and how, ultimately, I was even a little surprised at how much it still makes me laugh. Maybe some of it is kind of endearing since this sort of satirical look at the past is always going to seem kind of quaint. Besides, when’s the last time you heard the “Look for the union label” jingle in a movie? Hell, when’s the last time Ennio Morricone worked it into his score? Within the screwy nature of the approach and Melato gazing at O’Neal with those huge eyes and Jack Warden trying to give people he talks to a pen, there’s a spirit to it all which feels totally absent from comedies these days. Andrew Bergman seems to have been quiet since directing the 2000 Jacqueline Susann biopic ISN’T SHE GREAT (you don’t need to worry about that one) and that can’t be a good thing. It occurs to me that many comedies these days are either about maintaining the status quo in the end or learning to be a better person than the slacker you were at the start. Bergman’s world, as filtered through his films, feels more adventurous as if it knows enough to acknowledge that once the particular madness has infiltrated the lives of the people it’s thrown into chaos it can never fully leave. Considering how Bobby Fine is falling asleep in the middle of a faculty meeting when we first meet him and where he soon finds himself this can only be a good thing, even if he is desperately running for his life some of the time. “How long have the streets been fucked up like this?” inquires a certain someone when they find themselves in a famous setting during the final scene of SO FINE. It’s one of the biggest laughs of the entire film and it may as well be what Andrew Bergman is asking about the entire world as well. And you can tell that he loves it.

We Are Who We Are

2011-12-05T21:15:00.000-08:00

A film about looking back towards the past and desperately trying to find a way into whatever the future will be, GARBO TALKS doesn’t have much to do with the holiday season but in its own sentimental way it is about family and that combined with how it takes place during a cold New York winter made me want to take another look at it at this time of the year. Maybe I thought it would be a sort of substitution for any of the family members I knew I wouldn’t be seeing and, fitting for a movie that seems to take place in a dusty, worn down world, since it’s never been released on DVD I had to make due with a dusty, worn down used VHS tape purchased at the Rocket Video closing sale. If you just happened to start watching GARBO TALKS without knowing anything about it you could hardly be blamed for thinking that the film, released in October 1984, was helmed by a typical journeyman typical of the Herbert Ross-Arthur Hiller school, presumably hired to bring life to what could very well be thought of as a Neil Simon knockoff script. But you’d be wrong because, somewhat surprisingly, GARBO TALKS was directed by none other than the great Sidney Lumet in what I assume was an attempt at a change of pace for the filmmaker, a gentle story which doesn’t have very much in common with any of his other films beyond its look at family dynamics and a particularly vivid New York portrayal. It’s a mildly sweet, somewhat aimless film about mortality and coming to terms with where one’s life has ultimately ended up, in many cases nowhere near the luxury apartments you may once have dreamed of living that overlook the great city down below. The nostalgia people feel in the film is also something made more bittersweet now considering the amount of people associated with it who are no longer with us--Sidney Lumet of course died earlier this year and both stars of the movie, Anne Bancroft and Ron Silver, tragically succumbed to cancer over the past decade. Of course, the legendary figure referred to in the title died less than six years after this film’s release as well. If there’s somebody out there who hasn’t seen this film since it was released there’s probably only one thing they remember about it which I’ll get to soon enough and I don’t want to make it seem like I’m saying this is one of the most unjustly neglected Sidney Lumet films but at the very least it has been forgotten. So it makes just as much sense to look at it now. Hell, the holidays are coming up. Like I’m going to be tough on this film?

Gilbert Rolfe (Ron Silver) is a Manhattan accountant who spends more time than he would like dealing with the antics of his mother Estelle (Anne Bancroft), stubbornly forever getting into trouble by getting thrown in jail for picketing various causes and she’s also just about the world’s biggest fan of Greta Garbo. The relationship is going along as it always has along while Gilbert deals with various problems in his own life including being given a smaller office at work by his overly officious boss Shepard Plotkin (Richard B. Shull) and his wife Lisa (Carrie Fisher) who would be perfectly happy to movie back to her home in Beverly Hills. But things soon change when Estelle is diagnosed with a brain tumor and only given several months to live. Out of nowhere, she reveals her one desire: to meet Garbo before she dies. Gilbert begins his quest to find the reclusive legend, getting spunky co-worker/aspiring actress Jane Mortimer (Catherine Hicks) to help him, as he desperately tries to locate the famous star and bring her to his mother before it becomes too late.

In spite of its plot GARBO TALKS isn’t about death so much as simple resignation, of an awareness that, yes, we’re all going to the same place in the end but maybe we can find a way to not hate ourselves while we’re getting there. It’s a film set in a New York of forgotten rooms containing neglected black & white photos of long ago on the walls, populated by forgotten people who just seem worn down by life’s missed opportunities--the aging paparazzo played by Howard Da Silva who Gilbert hires to help him doesn’t want to be involved with this messiness anymore, his father Walter (the always great Steven Hill) looks back on his ruined marriage to Estelle with wistful regret and even Harvey Fierstein’s Fire Island denizen isn’t the expected over the top stereotype, just another lonely soul in this world who says he doesn’t care about sex anymore and just wants to find somebody to talk to.

Actually, the whole film seems to be set in a world of people who hate to eat alone, who seem to want nothing more than to just get a sandwich with someone. Anne Bancroft’s Estelle Rolfe desperately dreams of meeting Garbo to bring some sort of focus to everything that occurred during her existence and her son ultimately uses it as a chance to find some focus in his own life, to not get dragged down into that level of resignation in his soul-sucking accounting job where he’s moved to a windowless office without even being asked. Some of this really is a little like wannabe Neil Simon without all the incessant one-liners so early scenes involving Bancroft’s Jewish mother who gets repeatedly thrown into jail, refuses to cross picket lines and thinks nothing of confronting construction workers who are whistling at the girls down below play a little more forced than when the film is able to relax and just go with the emotions. There are also comical stops on this tour of remnants of another time that include a photographer’s agent (Dorothy Loudon, the original Miss Hannigan in the Broadway run of ANNIE) astonished that someone wants to hire one of her clients and a batty old actress played by Hermione Gingold in her final screen appearance, all framed by a blaringly upbeat music score by Cy Coleman that seems a little too insistent on slathering as much charm as possible, with a few pieces that feel like they could have been used during segments of some sort of PM Magazine-type show around the time. A good amount of the plotting in the screenplay by Larry Grusin is a little too rote and when Gilbert begins his search for Garbo he never seems to formulate a precise plan so much as just throwing stuff at the wall to see what will stick and a few stretches do feel a little like the movie treading narrative water such as where he becomes a delivery man to try to get into her building, even if it does add to the ongoing narrative subtext of the upper class forever separated from everyone down below. In fairness, what Gilbert does in his quest feels like a fairly realistic approach to the matter in the pre-internet world but it never feels all that satisfying in how it comes across when the solution to this mystery finally presents itself.

If anything sets GARBO TALKS apart from how it would have played if directed by someone with a completely nondescript style it’s an undeniable level of sensitivity brought to the material by Lumet. There’s a genuine sense of yearning that’s always felt in the characters, whether focusing on Silver’s hangdog expression when he doesn’t get any sleep but also paying attention in his close-ups to moments like Steven Hill’s genuinely affecting regret over what went wrong with his marriage, although it’s not seen to best advantage on this ancient VHS tape, which seems to crop the 1.85 frame—there was a recent TCM airing which I’m guessing looked better but power outages from the recent L.A. winds caused me to miss it. Always better at dealing with absurdity that emerges from a situation within his naturalistic style in films like DOG DAY AFTERNOON or NETWORK it’s clear that the director isn’t really the one to go to if you’re looking for flat-out comedy but when he’s willing to dial things down, like how Catherine Hicks’ Manic Pixie Dream Shiksa is never played too broad, the film achieves a nice, pleasant vibe. And Lumet demonstrates his innate narrative economy, as aimless as the plotting sometimes is, with occasional cutaways back to Bancroft in her hospital room to chart how she’s getting progressively worse. The cold, snowy New York location work is vividly presented along with a brief tour of some New York bookstores around Fifth Avenue that provide some particularly pleasant flashbacks in a Sunday Times Arts & Leisure section sort of way. All this builds to what is sort of the raison d’etre for the whole film (spoilers ahead, if you care) which is Bancroft’s one-take seven minute monologue when she finally meets Garbo in her hospital room, essentially telling her entire life story and how the legend always seemed to play a part--she even references the famous final shot of QUEEN CHRISTINA which ‘went on and on and on’ and what we get to witness is essentially the exact opposite of the frozen visage which ended that film. On one level it overwhelms the smallness of the material and it’s easy to imagine someone arguing that you should simply cut away when Bancroft looks up and sees her—it does feel more than a little like a blatant full court press for an Oscar nomination (didn’t happen, sorry) and maybe is a bit much particularly since by this point in the movie Gilbert really has become the lead character. But at the same time it gives a genuine sense of purpose to all the running around and when Bancroft in the afterglow of meeting her idol tearfully remembers, “She said that we were very much alike,” well, I’ve got a mother. I can’t help it, I kind of tear up. I could spend more time nit-picking about some things but GARBO TALKS is ultimately such a gentle, well-meaning film that there doesn’t seem to be much point and is a nice reminder of a time when people still cared about the long ago movies of classic Hollywood, about that Hollywood that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s minor and, yeah, nobody ever really wants a nice, minor Sidney Lumet film but if he wanted to give it a try in between some of his more serious minded projects there’s no point in criticizing the result too much.

Considering how our mental picture of Ron Silver (RIP) throughout his career may always be as a cocky, well-dressed guy with a beard it’s a nice change to see him clean-shaven playing a total mensch, a completely decent person. His unblinking eyes sell the big speech he has to give late in the film and that one detail is all he needs to provide the moment with all the emotion necessary, setting the performance apart from the rest of his career while also showing just how good an actor he really was. Anne Bancroft (also RIP), while impossible to ever dislike here, has a role that is maybe a little too familiar in its broadness but maybe because of how much emotion comes through in the final stretch that’s maybe all that seems to matter. Catherine Hicks, who I’ve always had an odd fondness for, is downright pixieish in a completely charming and unforced way while Carrie Fisher, much as she seems to be obvious casting as a Beverly Hills Jew, comes off totally flat as Gilbert’s impatient wife with no real variation from one line reading to the next in that zoned-out way I suppose she sometimes affected during the RETURN OF THE JEDI days. It’s not that she plays the role as a selfish bitch, it’s that she doesn’t seem to play it as much of anything and it leaves a small hole in that section of the film. The eternally underrated Steven Hill (all hail Adam Schiff) is extremely affecting as the ex-husband and some of the familiar faces who appear throughout also add a great deal of color particularly the always welcome Richard B. Shull as Gilbert’s smiling cobra boss. Mary McDonnell can be spotted very quickly as a Shakespeare actress if you look fast enough and appearing in cameos as themselves during a MOMA reception are the likes of Adolph Green, George Plimpton, Liz Smith and Michael Musto (Michael Musto in a Sidney Lumet film—that has to be good for some kind of trivia question). Apparently an uncredited Betty Comden appears as…well, if you know what the title is you can probably guess.

In its own humanistic way GARBO TALKS focuses on individuality and how ultimately to get by from day to day some people need to step in line with the rest of the world while others couldn’t do it even if they tried. Some people take life as it comes, some make waves. Both ways of doing things can be valid. “I allowed it to happen,” says Gilbert repeatedly about what was done to him at his job by an eternally smiling prick, a realization he finally comes to. If the last scene says anything, it’s that once you’re willing to take that leap and make a few waves what you’re looking for might appear right in front of you at a moment’s notice. It reminds me of a few things that happened to me at various points in my life. Of course, I probably screwed up every single one of those opportunities but as well all know life isn’t always as simple as it is in the movies. Still, it’s nice to dream.

If You Can't Feel Alive

2011-11-30T20:27:00.000-08:00

One day just a few years ago at the entertainment news program where I was still employed at the time I was walking outside the offices at CBS Radford in conversation with one of the show’s producers about who knows what. I was following along with her but as it turned out she was headed to speak to someone in particular—namely, a well known actress who was there that day to shoot something for the show. Not just any well known actress but one who, in addition to various other credits, had starred in a James Bond film. I stood there quietly while they talked about who knows what, with no one acknowledging my presence in the slightest and afterwards it occurred to me that if the same thing had occurred with just about any Bond Girl other than this one I would probably have been upset not to get an introduction. I mean, really, why haven’t I ever gotten the chance to meet Famke Janssen or Rosamund Pike? Or even one of the other actresses from the particular Bond movie she was in? Not to mention Diana Rigg, but that of course goes without saying. Life is unfair. This time, however, it didn’t really bother me since the actress in question is somewhat infamous as being one of the worst Bond Girls ever (she was appearing on the show for Dancing With The Stars-related reasons, to make it really obvious who I’m talking about) and, besides, there wasn’t exactly any Ian Fleming-type magic swirling through the air at that moment in Studio City. So the occasion of my sort of brushing elbows with her ended without incident—I think I even mentioned my mixed feelings to that producer, not that she seemed to have much of a clue about what I was getting at. This actress really can’t be blamed for all of the problems of this particular James Bond film but that occasion has always seemed like a reminder to me of how the ultimate fantast of these films you obsess over just wind up falling short. Even in real life.

The argument could be made that THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH is actually the high point of Pierce Brosnan’s tenure as James Bond but it’s almost impossible to make a definitive statement to that effect. For one thing, I’m sure plenty of people would disagree. For another thing, I’m not even entirely certain that I feel this way myself—some might argue for GOLDENEYE, but it feels a little too prefab to me now and also has one of the very worst scores in the series. TOMORROW NEVER DIES hasn’t dated all that well and is so action heavy that there’s almost nothing to dramatically dig in to once the noise has died down. DIE ANOTHER DAY contains a story which feels like it had potential at one point but it all gets lost in a sound-and-fury swarm of CGI and Halle Berry. As for THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, Brosnan’s third in his run, it’s also tough for me to state flat-out that it’s his best since that crushing feeling of disappointment when I saw the film on opening night way back in November ’99 still remains vivid in my head. My opinion has admittedly mellowed over time and unlike TOMORROW NEVER DIES, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH does at least have a certain amount of dramatic substance to dig into which has allowed it to hold up pretty well on repeat viewings. As far as screenplay structure goes it’s not exactly CHINATOWN but at least the movie feels like it’s trying to do something more this time out. The greatest irony to all this, as well as being one of the film’s biggest drawbacks, is how with one key exception the expected overblown action scenes are also some of its weakest elements. The way the plot is laid out isn’t without a few problems either and ultimately it feels like a film that continually veers wildly back and forth between elements that work well—a few surprisingly well—and others which feel like the result of endless script notes that no one was ever able to reconcile with the story they were telling. It works better for me than it did on opening night…but enough of it still falls short to make it a forever frustrating experience (Or “Close, but no cigar,” as Bond says to Moneypenny early on). Either way, any Brosnan Bond that’s going to be called his best is never quite going to be good enough, which will always be a shame.

After a money retrieval in Spain goes wrong for James Bond 007 (Pierce Brosnan) he returns the cash to London in order to deliver it to oil magnate Charles King. But when it turns out the money is booby-trapped the resulting explosion causes King’s death and an attempt by Bond to chase down the assassin (Maria Grazia Cucinotta) connected to the act results in his shoulder being seriously injured. His personal investigation in the aftermath leads to being assigned against medical advice to protect King’s daughter Elektra (Sophie Marceau) from further reprisals, but he is also aware of the guilt ‘M’ (Judi Dench) still feels over what transpired years ago when the young heiress was kidnapped by terrorists, an event which Bond believes may be connected and leads him to believe the new King pipeline under construction may be in jeopardy. As he begins to get personally involved with Elektra, Bond’s path leads to notorious terrorist Renard (Robert Carlyle), a madman who feels no pain due to a bullet lodge in his brain and may possibly be after a stash of plutonium for his own nefarious purposes. When Bond, chasing his trail, gets mixed up with nuclear physicist Christmas Jones (Denise Richards) he begins to suspect what the truth of Elektra’s allegiance may actually be and what Renard might really have planned for that weapons-grade plutonium.

Way back when Roger Moore was playing the part it was almost as if Bond was sometimes an observer in his own movie, a stand-in for the audience moving from place to place in a travelogue, sometimes allowing himself to get concerned but if a beautiful woman was killed in front of him more often than not he would exclaim a grave, “Goodbye, Countess,” before moving on to the next plot point and one liner. Somewhere along the way a shift occurred in an attempt to raise the personal stakes for the character, I suppose beginning during the brief Timothy Dalton era, and during the Brosnan run there was always an attempt to shove this sort of thing in there as if to keep the actor happy whether it was really needed in the film or not. In GOLDENEYE it was Bond’s guilt over what he assumed was the death of 006, in TOMORROW NEVER DIES it was his past relationship with Teri Hatcher’s Paris Carver—hey, I didn’t say these were successful attempts, just that this added element seemed to become part of the formula. THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (Screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade, Story by Purvis & Wade and Bruce Feirstein) seemingly attempts to double down on this by not only providing Brosnan with a strong female lead character in Sophie Marceau’s Elektra King but also allowing for more involvement by ‘M’ as played by Judi Dench, then fresh off winning an Oscar for SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE and very clearly a commodity that the producers wanted to capitalize on. As much of an attempt as there seems to have been at putting together a more emotional plotline this time out, something that would do more than just provide connective tissue between the action scenes, as I was writing out the plot summary above it occurred to me how unwieldy some of it plays. It’s as if while the script was being worked on nobody ever bothered to ask, what is this story really about? Which character is being affected by the events of the narrative the most and who should it really be focusing on?

It may not be an unreasonable comment to make that if the high point of a Bond film (or any film, for that matter) is the pre-credit action sequence then something has to be wrong. But in the case of this particular film even that issue feels compounded in how the pre-credit setpiece is allowed to be made somewhat lumpy by having another full sequence set in Bilbao, Spain come first. It’s a nice place to start the film and even a pretty good scene on its own topped off by a particularly cool stunt but it still makes the beginning a little structurally wonky (plus it makes THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH the rare film where the opening credits don’t come until after the first reel) and it feels indicative of how the film doesn’t always compartmentalize its strongest points in the right way. In fairness the opening once we get to London is pretty awesome, building to a phenomenally rousing, hugely exciting chase down the Thames (is this the first major Bond action scene to actually take place in London?). Watching it now the undeniable level of clarity brought to the scene by all involved is almost astonishing compared with many other action scenes nowadays and it could very well be the single best sequence during the Brosnan era. The absolute rush from it all gets things off to a terrific start but unfortunately none of the attempts to top it that follow come anywhere close. With the respected Michael Apted (a long, varied career ranging from GORKY PARK and GORILLAS IN THE MIST to the UP series) directing this time out I imagine that the added focus on the drama was part of the basic intent behind the film, to attempt a story on the level of ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (where the phrase “The World Is Not Enough” originates, not that I need to tell you that) that would, I suppose, shed some new light on the Bond character. Even the occasional one-liners are fairly mild as these things go and the dryness of Brosnan-impersonating-Russian stating, “I don’t know any doctor jokes” is the sort of humor these films don’t go for enough.

But it almost feels like there was a breakdown in communication between the first and second units so whenever the action starts up, somehow playing as lackluster and overblown at once, it seems to always bring any building momentum to a grinding halt, maybe a little bit more each time so when the film hits the third act it just becomes exhausting. Along with this is a ski chase which is not only the dullest of the series (where have you gone, Willy Bogner?) even with the addition of armed paraglider-equipped snowmobiles but also one in which it’s never all that clear why the chase is even occurring. There just never seems to be a decent reason even in terms of action movie logic why the characters are up on this mountaintop even if you want to backtrack after certain plot revelations (Elektra needs to check the survey lines? Huh? Is that really the best she/the movie could come up with?) and for years this would always be the point where I would mentally check out of the film for a long stretch--this time it happened several minutes ahead of time because I was so bummed about what was coming.

An extended list could almost be made about the pros and cons of any given scene, sometimes what happens within the space of a minute’s screen time. Pairing Brosnan up with the elegant Marceau is an excellent idea and their chemistry has a gravity missing from the other actresses he was paired with up to this point but the relationship never carries the emotional impact the film seems to be going for. I enjoy the cool pulp vibe of the casino setting but the ‘high card draw’ that Elektra walks in there quickly to do feels like a case of dumbing things down, as if an actual card game would be too difficult for people to follow. The return of Robbie Coltrane as Valentin Zukovsky in an expanded Karim Bey-type role is a big plus, and it’s nice to see that they’ve figured out what to do with the character this time, but the overblown pre-climactic action sequence at his caviar factory featuring helicopters equipped with massive chainsaws doesn’t add much aside from noise and makes me wish they could have gone with a tense confrontation that could have been more fitting for the movie. Moving MI6 headquarters to Scotland after the terrorist attack allows for an evocative setting but the wishy-washy way of how ‘M’ and her guilt are written weakens the character as well as the credibility of what she has Bond do. There are some well-chosen locations used throughout ranging from Spain to Turkey but when it’s time for the climax things just move to what feels like yet another dull, boring submarine setting. Maybe due to Apted’s approach to the material, too much of the film just feels shot in a listless manner as if unsure which precise tone to take, how serious or fanciful. People are always complaining about how ludicrous Denise Richards is as nuclear physicist Christmas Jones and they’re right but the character doesn’t seem to belong in this movie anyway, just as Pussy Galore or Tiffany Case would have been out of place in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. You get the feeling that it’s a film being directed by somebody who is engaged with working with some of his actors—particularly Brosnan and Marceau—but not particularly interested in the film that’s happening around them. Apted never seems excited by any of the exotic locales and it’s as if he doesn’t wish to be bothered by the gargantuan scale of it all.

There clearly was a goal to give Brosnan much more to do with the character this time out which is a good thing but while it feels like there was an attempt to play against some of the expectations of the formula they hesitated to mess with things too much so the movie tries to have it both ways, combined with plot gaps where things just get confused--when ‘M’ is kidnapped the logistics are so odd it’s as if the movie is trying to cover it up (Fun with script structure: screenwriters Purvis & Wade seem to have taken one bit of plot business here involving wordplay and used it again in the 2003 remake of THE ITALIAN JOB). Frankly, and I’ll try to avoid spoilers, some of what occurs near the end doesn’t really have all that much of an impact, whatever sort of Mickey Spillane frisson they’re trying to bring to it. Placing Bond into a garroting torture device works well but the relationship in question hasn’t meant as much as the movie seems to think it has, one of several areas where the film hasn’t lived up to its potential. The gimmick of Renard not being able to feel pain because of a bullet in his brain never really matters much at all (I once asked my brain surgeon brother-in-law what sort of basis in reality this has. Apparently not very much) and if they were trying to set up a parallel between his lack of pain and Bond’s injured shoulder, that doesn’t really matter either. When Renard is finally introduced it’s as if the movie decided it may as well get that taken care of before the hour mark but as those who’ve seen the film know, he isn’t exactly the major villain he’s been set up as anyway--as the submarine climax plays out (not as long as the stealth boat showdown in TOMORROW NEVER DIES but I still spaced out for a few minutes during this climax anyway—maybe it’s setting all this stuff in water) it still behaves as if he is. When Bond does a swan dive towards the submarine at the hour fifty mark the real drama of the movie is pretty much over anyway, even if there is the matter of saving Christmas Jones and disposing of the plutonium. By that point, the bombast is all pretty much clinical. It’s not that I don’t want lots of action going on, but it just helps when a James Bond film knows how to correctly mix the two. The final scene does have a nice echo of the past as M exclaims “007!” upon realizing what he’s up to which is one of a number of signs that THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH has good intentions that it doesn’t quite pull that off. There is something to be said for a film that has an opening that’s as good as it is here, as well as at least the potential chemistry that can be found in Brosnan and Marceau’s best scenes together but it needs more. Maybe it really is Brosnan’s best in the series but, of course, it’s a pretty weak curve.

The script and direction may be uncertain but Pierce Brosnan exudes more confidence as Bond in this film than ever before. It might very well be his best work in the part as he glides through scenes owning whichever set he’s in and knowing exactly how to take command. Sophie Marceau exudes the right sort of 60s glamour as Elektra King that these films don’t always provide anymore and she knows just how to play off Brosnan in their scenes together. She may not be the revelation that Eva Green later was in CASINO ROYALE, but it is an honorable attempt and she’s the best female lead that the series had in a long time at this point. Denise Richards, as I mentioned already, isn’t very good at all but I don’t really know what to say to add to all the ‘Worst Bond Girl’ lists that she’s been put on—it’s just a case of the wrong actress in the wrong movie. Of course, she seems to have such little idea of how to play this part that I’m not sure what the right movie would be. A few of her most relaxed moments almost feel like Apted just let the camera run until she wasn’t even trying to act and he used those takes. Hey, she clearly had to get really wet under treacherous conditions while shooting the climax so I’ll leave her alone.

Robert Carlyle, now doing excellent work on ABC's ONCE UPON A TIME, seems engaged and willing to be imposing as Renard, the script just doesn’t provide him with many opportunities to live up to that intensity. Robbie Coltrane is terrifically enjoyable as Zukovsky but I honestly wonder if this is Judi Dench’s weakest performance as ‘M’ to date, as if they didn’t know how to add extra shadings to the character involving her guilt over Elektra and she was uncertain how to play this material. The ridiculously gorgeous Maria Grazia Cucinotta smolders through her few lines as the deadly ‘Cigar Girl’ and her intensity is yet another plus to that opening chase. Desmond Llewlyn, who killed in a car crash several weeks after the film opened, makes his final appearance as ‘Q’ in what was clearly meant to be a swan song introducing his protégé played by John Cleese. The impressively tall Serena Scott Thomas is Dr. Molly Warmflash (oy) while the likes of Samantha Bond as Miss Moneypenny, Colin Salmon as Charles Robinson and Michael Kitchen as Bill Tanner make return appearances (“Well, at least Bill Tanner was in the movie,” went the message one longtime Fleming fan I know left on my answering machine the night it opened). The feel of a growing ensemble backing up Brosnan each time out makes it seem kind of too bad that the powers that be decided to toss all this camaraderie after just one more movie, as much of a fan as I am of Daniel Craig and particularly CASINO ROYALE but I guess that’s the way it goes. The score by David Arnold, with title song by Garbage, is terrific and builds on his TOMORROW NEVER DIES work adding techno overlays to the expected Bondian clusters of trumpets. The Thames Chase, “Come in 007, Your Time Is Up” on the album, may be Arnold’s best work in the series to date as well and he provides a similar level excitement for much of what follows, although I wonder if a more uptempo approach to that damn ski chase would have helped. But in his score he gets the action, the intrigue, the elegance, he knows when to include a wink and he knows when is the right time for the music to blare “THIS IS JAMES BOND”. It may not be John Barry but it still feels right for what a Bond film needs.

Even if the directors of James Bond films are strictly for hire, respected British filmmakers at a point in their careers where they might be open to making some money on such a potential box-office hit, the final results often reveal something of what really interests them in the character. Lewis Gilbert, based on THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and MOONRAKER, seemed to be attracted to making jokey, larger-than-life epics focusing on the spectacle. John Glen, the director-of record during the 80s, was clearly attracted to continuing the traditions of the character’s origins laid down decades before and I think Martin Campbell responded to those elements in his own way particularly considering how strongly CASINO ROYALE turned out. Roger Spotiswoode clearly saw it as a chance to make an action movie, which is what TOMORROW NEVER DIES really is. Michael Apted…well, I’m really not sure what to say about his overall approach so the film sort of stays stranded in some middle world between a thriller on the order of his own GORKY PARK and what maybe he thinks is the sort of film he’s supposed to be making. If it had a filmmaker with a stronger opinion about it all, somebody who was excited they were actually making a James Bond movie, maybe that would only have made the film stronger as well. And maybe I would have felt passionate enough about it to say something to that actress that day at CBS Radford. Even if she still wasn’t all that good in it. But hey, I love James Bond movies and regardless of all that I’ve said this is still one of those so when I think about Pierce Brosnan chasing Maria Grazia Cucinotta in that rigged up speedboat down the Thames, adjusting his tie as he briefly goes underwater, it reminds me that the film does have the occasional rush that’s going to make me want to see it again. Still, as is said in both the film’s dialogue and title song, there’s no point in living if you can’t feel alive. It’s an appropriate Bondian sentiment. I guess I just wish that THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH itself believed that as well.

If You Hang On To The Past

2011-11-24T16:56:00.000-08:00

Martin Scorsese’s CAPE FEAR is now twenty years old. My memory of its release in November 1991 is that after a pretty dry fall season at the box office when this film hit the scene it was like a shot of adrenaline, capitalizing on the excitement everyone had felt about GOODFELLAS just a year before with not only critical raves for the most part but a public response that resulted in the biggest commercial success its director had achieved to date. As sometimes happens even with box office hits the film seems to have been slightly forgotten in recent years, maybe lumped in with other such thrillers of that post-FATAL ATTRACTION era and maybe even something like CASINO, which received more of a mixed response just four Thanksgivings later, feels like it’s had considerably stronger staying power when Scorsese films are talked about. I don’t want to say that Martin Scorsese looked at CAPE FEAR as just a lark or something he made solely for commercial reasons, not at all, although reading up on how he came to direct the film it feels like that may have been at least a partial factor. But maybe more than anything else he had made up to that point it really does play as a movie about movies, serving not only as an examination of the original CAPE FEAR through his own eyes but what every hyperactive zoom and crashing musical cue he’d ever seen in countless films had meant to him and what he thought he could bring to the table if he tried doing some of that himself. There’s more to the film than that of course, but I’m not sure if any of those other elements matter quite as much in the end. I’m also not sure if I really care.

In this remake of the 1962 classic directed by J. Lee Thompson, Robert De Niro of course is Max Cady, recently released from prison after a fourteen year stretch and with one goal in mind—to find his former defense attorney Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), recent arrival to the sleepy town of New Essex, North Carolina with wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) and sixteen year-old daughter Danielle (Juliette Lewis). Once a public defender, Bowden represented Cady on a rape charge in Atlanta but when he uncovered evidence that the girl in question had been promiscuous he buried it, letting his client go to prison for the crime. When Cady tracks him down it soon becomes clear that he managed to learn about this in the intervening years and has a goal in mind to make his the lawyer “learn about loss” in a way that only he can provide. After being harassed by him a few times Bowden gets the law involved but they can’t help because, after all, the man hasn’t done anything, a situation exacerbated when Cady goes after Lori (Illeana Douglas) a young associate at Sam’s firm who he had been having a flirtation with and brutally rapes her but even she refuses to press charges out of her own shame. Desperate to protect his family and aware that there’s nothing the police can do, Bowden hires private detective Claude Kersek (Joe Don Baker) to stay on top of Cady but even that doesn’t mean anything when the ex-convict gets in it mind to go after the teenage Danielle.

CAPE FEAR was the first film that Martin Scorsese directed in the full 2.35 Scope format and, unless I’m mistaken, it remains the only one that he’s shot in actual anamorphic Panavision. It was photographed by Freddie Francis, famed for directing numerous horror films back in the 60s and 70s (some very good, particularly THE SKULL) but better known in film lore as a cinematographer extraordinaire on such films as David Lynch’s THE ELEPHANT MAN and, maybe most important, Jack Clayton’s THE INNOCENTS which I was recently lucky to see a 35mm print of--I have little problem saying that it may very well be one of the most extraordinarily photographed films that I’ve ever seen. The look of CAPE FEAR isn’t quite on that level but seemingly designed to be played on the largest screen possible with a sound system that would blow out the speakers it’s always a rich-looking film continually intent on soaking in as much of its atmosphere as possible, fireworks endlessly crashing overhead, at times playing as an ultra-violent take on the sort of juicy, sweat-infused melodrama Vincente Minnelli might have made at MGM in the late 50s. Scorsese doesn’t even seem to shy away from the limitations of the anamorphic lens which can affect the visible depth of field and there is always a conscious effort to make the fullest use possible of his wide frame—even the close-ups have an undeniable sense of bigness to them and when characters are placed in the dead center of a shot by themselves, separate from the other characters, it always feels very much a part of the visual design.

The presence of old school Hollywood craftsmen behind the scenes adds immeasurably to this feel—in addition to Francis the legendary Henry Bumstead served as production designer in addition to an opening credit sequence by Elaine & Bass that aren’t just similar to SECONDS, they actually contain unused footage Bass had shot for the 1966 John Frankenheimer film. Combining these elements with the use of traditional matte effects for the rumbling clouds overhead and extensive model work used for the riverboat climax makes it feel almost as if Scorsese wanted to will this production into being the last true film of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the era in which he grew up watching movies decades earlier, and make one final version of it all while he still could for posterity. Watching the way these scenes are staged, thrusting his actors into all the sound and fury imaginable I honestly wonder if the making the movie in this style would have had the same attraction for him just a few years later when CGI began to come into play. Most tellingly and famously, it has composer Elmer Bernstein adapting Bernard Herrmann’s powerful score from the original which adds an unavoidable Hitchcockian flair to things even if that director had nothing to do with CAPE FEAR and it heightens the movie-movie nature of the entire project up to the stratosphere, infusing that feeling even further during the climax where Bernstein places the famous rejected Herrmann music from Hitchcock’s TORN CURTAIN into the action (not something I was aware of at the time, but I’m not perfect) which sounds so ideal it’s as if the famous composer whose final score was of course for Scorsese’s TAXI DRIVER had really meant it to go here all along. Even the casting of Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck and Martin Balsam from the original film in cameos seems more than just providing them with token bits—that Mitchum, the former Max Cady, gets the one part which could be called an actual supporting role seems to make sense.

As much use as the film gets out of its extensive location work in Florida subbing for North Carolina and with all the talk Joe Don Baker’s private detective makes about the South having a strong tradition of fear, I never get the feeling it was something that Scorsese was all that interested in, at least to the extent of other elements. The continuous religious phrasings flowing from the lips of Max Cady and tattooed all over him to underscore his madness feel a little too constructed as part of the script although it does provide the odd effect of making the film in some ways a De Niro-infused remake of the Mitchum character in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER filtered into the plot of CAPE FEAR. But even Gregory Peck’s cameo as a hypocritical fire and brimstone attorney which feels like several in-jokes in a single scene is an element that feels overly written more than just about anything in the film, as fun as Peck is in the cameo, and maybe is an example of how the movie is slightly tone-deaf when it comes to portraying this world—then again, Sam Bowden reading USA Today as his morning paper and taking his family to see PROBLEM CHILD, of all films (well, it is Universal—and I shouldn’t bring up this scene without mentioning just how awesome it is), could very well be looked at as an indication of the outside world encroaching on these peaceful southern towns with their long-standing traditions. For Scorsese it’s combining this tribute to old Hollywood craftsmanship with his own preoccupations of these characters that ultimately seems to matter, placing the strength of their conflict in such a setting of storm clouds and screeching Bernard Hermann music. CAPE FEAR is a MOVIE in all the capital letters that can blare, as much of an examination of genre as NEW YORK, NEW YORK was of the 40s-50s musical but maybe more of a direct tribute to its type of film than that earlier film was in its muddied way. And since he may have been consciously attempting to go for making this a flat-out hit this time Scorsese seems to have been more open to making it more of an example of that genre than a true dissection of it—good or bad, extremely violent or not, there’s not much which can be said to go against the grain of what an audience might expect from such a thriller, beyond spending more time on the complications of relationships than most films usually would particularly in how it portrays this marriage still dealing with whatever presumed past indiscretion that is just barely alluded to. The screenplay which at an early stage was possibly going to be directed by Steven Spielberg is credited to Wesley Strick (based on James R. Webb’s screenplay for the ’62 film from the novel “The Executioners” by John D. MacDonald) who also was one of the writers on the Phil Joanou thriller FINAL ANALYSIS which came out several months later—it would be interesting to compare the two since the glossy ANALYSIS has little in it which might be considered plausible human behavior whereas CAPE FEAR which is filtered through the Scorsese prism, as utterly superhuman as Max Cady seems to become at a certain point, is all about the process of fully examining characters who in other hands might come off as simple plot constructions.

One thing that doesn’t get commented on very much in relation to his films is how Scorsese seems to sometimes like stopping his momentum dead in the middle of a movie for a key scene, the point where everything turns—De Niro asking Joe Pesci certain questions as they try to fix a TV in RAGING BULL comes to mind, as well as his brief meeting with L.Q. Jones in CASINO. The equivalent sequence in CAPE FEAR does just that but it also becomes a showstopper in all the best ways, taking the slow burn of Lewis’ skittish, off-kilter screen presence and odd sexuality and in an encounter with De Niro’s Max Cady, pushing it to a level beyond what we’d expect the movie to actually do. The film seems to linger on the potential of having her encounter Cady, carefully building to the point of isolating them and then…they just talk, with him carefully poking into her brain, finding out which are the right buttons to push, separated by the frames that Scorsese is keeping them isolated in during this long discussion until he finally closes in on her. Max Cady, representation of the past Sam Bowden must confront as well as the man he never quite became, the true man his wife Leigh seems to feel that he’s never been with her own vision of their marriage seen in negative form at the point of their lovemaking and, maybe most important, the frighteningly sexualized world that his daughter is just beginning to become aware of. Even the protracted climax seems to correctly balance the conflict between each of the characters with the over the top furor of the family houseboat caught in the treacherous storm. One thing which always occurred to me about bad guys is that as colorful as they may be presented at a certain point they have to receive their comeuppance. Here, it never seems quite that easy with Cady keeping his gaze on Bowden until the very end. He’s not admitting defeat. He’s just gone as far as he knows he can, at least in this world.

Scorsese even takes the expected beat of a final scare and turns it into, not a joke, but into a necessary step in Sam Bowden cleansing himself of all his sins before he can rejoin his family for the final frame. When you hang on to the past you die, says Danielle in summing up the experience for her homework assignment at the end, an acknowledgment of the innocence the character knows she will never fully get back. CAPE FEAR is Martin Scorsese hanging onto the past, the past of what all these films mean to him, while figuring a way to still reconcile that with his new take on the material. And, in doing so, he lives. It occurs to me that in the end credits once the music fades away it’s replaced by the sounds of the swamp, presumably of Cape Fear itself, which were originally heard at the film’s beginning over the Universal logo and is reminiscent of city street noises faintly heard under the end titles of RAGING BULL. Here, those sounds continue even past when the credits end—in the DVD it goes to black but my recollection is that in 35mm prints the old “When in Hollywood Visit Universal Studios” tag appeared here at a point when we even hear the faint sound of what could be people screaming on a rollercoaster—the nightmare of where the climax takes place replaced by the theme park ride nature of it all. This isn’t usually the sort of thing he did, but maybe this once he wanted to have some fun without sacrificing the filmmaker that deep down he always has to be.

In addition to the overwhelming visualness what got people so excited at the time was Robert De Niro in full blown De Niro mode, physically massive from all his bulking up, tattoos covering his body, chomping on his cigar the size of a lead pipe and doing everything he can to correctly push the buttons of who he’s talking to with the danger of what might really happen always hanging between them. It may be over the top but it’s intentionally over the top, totally committed to his madness, sometimes terrifying, always riveting and there’s not a moment of it that is predictable. Even all these years later after countless parodies and other De Niro performances that seem meant to capitalize its memory, it remains one of his most effective characterizations. That Nick Nolte and Jessica Lange manage to stick in the memory at all placed up against him feels like a feat in itself but they’re each extremely strong—great to see Nolte as Sam Bowden fumbling in his discussions with Cady always seeming to have a reasonable answer for any desperate bargaining that Sam Bowden is trying to make and Lange’s strength insures that she never just comes off as ‘the wife’. The private arguments involving Nolte and Lange come off as their best moments but it’s almost shocking to revisit Juliette Lewis’ Oscar nominated performance here and realize just how astonishing she is, how raw, how absolutely There she is in every moment and, considering how many more actresses of that age seem to be in the spotlight now, I can’t imagine anyone who could come close to what she does with her scenes opposite De Niro particularly mesmerizing. Clearly engaged by her, they’re some of his best moments in the film as well. No one ever seems to mention the strength of a few of the other supporting performances—the legendary Robert Mitchum doesn’t have a false moment in his cameo/minor role as a police lieutenant who is in no way suggesting that Bowden go outside the law while Joe Don Baker, mixing his mixing his Jim Beam with Pepto Bismol is particularly good as Kersak, nailing the wrongheaded cockiness when going up against Max Cady, not quite as imposing as he thinks he is. Illeana Douglas also nails her own awkward attractiveness to full effect and it almost feels like an entire movie could be made of just her drunkenly flirting with De Niro or, well, anybody which I suppose makes the graphically horrible end to her night all the more shocking when it finally happens.

Since I mentioned NIGHT OF THE HUNTER in relation to this film I may as well mention that the pairing was actually the very first double bill I ever saw at the New Beverly many, many years ago which is of interest to no one but me, but still and it only adds to my own personal recollection of this movie that, ultimately, is about a memory. The framing device of Juliette Lewis’ Danielle Bowden using her recollections as a homework assignment feels a little like a key part of earlier drafts that got progressively bled out of the material as time went on but it still makes sense as part of what the film ultimately is. Douglas Sirk’s ALL THE HEAVEN ALLOWS is seen playing on the Bowden’s TV late at night at one point (well, it makes more sense than PROBLEM CHILD) and ultimately CAPE FEAR is itself a movie designed to play on some mythical late show that doesn’t really exist anymore, echoing in the background as we fall asleep to our own dreams. In its own way it’s just as much of a tribute to the history of cinema as Scorsese’s new film HUGO is. But even if CAPE FEAR isn’t anything more than a Ghost of Movies Past sent from the back chambers of a great director’s mind, it’s nice to imagine that somebody will discover it that way many years from now and allow that sense of history to infect their own dreams as well.

Positively The Same Dame

2011-11-19T22:02:00.000-08:00

It was late. I’m not sure how late it was by that point. Hell, even when she called it was already ridiculously late and, sure, I didn’t need to pick up the phone but I just wanted to. Maybe I was a little drunk. So we launched into another one of our endless talks. And then suddenly out of nowhere she asked me who my favorite screwball actress was. Somehow the conversation had gotten to this point and I wasn’t even sure how. I’m still not sure how but there probably is no reason that would make any sense. Jean Arthur and Claudette Colbert were surely mentioned by both of us and I’m positive that I brought up Carole Lombard who I sort of worship because of TO BE OR NOT TO BE but to be honest the first one that came to mind for me was, of course, Barbara Stanwyck. And mainly because of one particular movie. Now, I love Barbara Stanwyck, for all sorts of reasons. Watching as she climbs the social ladder in BABY FACE, how mind-bogglingly sexy she is with that Drum Boogie Killer Diller in BALL OF FIRE, the hauntingly beautiful Christmas-set REMEMBER THE NIGHT, the neat late period noir CRIME OF PASSION and of course DOUBLE INDEMNITY which is just about the most perfect film ever made. But maybe when put up against all of these Preston Sturges’ THE LADY EVE seems just about right. Oddly, it’s a case of a film that I absolutely love but for no particular reason I haven’t actually seen it that many times, not as much as a few others by Sturges and certainly nothing compared to the countless films I’ve watched on an eternal loop over the years. Maybe it’s just such a jewel that I don’t need to overexpose myself to it, that it’s all right to simply remember the special feeling it gives me that few others do, making me think for a few minutes that everything might be right in the world. I think it’s possible that if somebody asked me to recommend a classic film they had never seen I might make it THE LADY EVE. But I’ll go even further than that—if I was told that I was going to die in a few hours and there was time for just one more film I think my choice might be THE LADY EVE. What else would allow me to depart this world with such a feeling of joy and happiness?

The first time I ever saw the film was all by myself way back in college somewhere in the school’s AV facility, with maybe little knowledge of who Preston Sturges was beyond the name ‘Preston Sturges’. By ten minutes in I was totally in love. In love with this film, with this plotting, with this dialogue, in love with all that black & white, with the way Henry Fonda had no idea how to respond to Barbara Stanwyck as “Isn’t It Romantic” drifts through the background, in love with Barbara Stanwyck. From then on there was no turning back from seeing every film of his I could, learning about Preston Sturges’ life and films, all the other names reading about him would lead to. The timing was also particularly fortunate that it led me to attend some of a truly awe-inspiring complete Sturges retrospective held at the Film Forum in New York the following year, the sort that I imagine wouldn’t be possible to do today (if only I could find the schedule online, but we are talking about 1990 here, after all). Was there any way to possibly explain all this to the particular woman I was talking to on the phone at three in the morning? Probably not. When it comes to the lady eves who I’ve known in the real world rarely do I ever have the sparkle of all that Sturges dialogue on the tip of my tongue and they all seem to vanish way too often. That’s just the way it goes.

Snake expert Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), heir to the Pike’s Pale (“The Ale That Won for Yale”) family fortune is returning via cruise ship from a year up the Amazon. Sitting in his chair at dinner with his nose buried in the book “Are Snakes Necessary?”, Charles ignores all the women who are trying to get his attention but little does he know that con artist and card shark Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck), traveling with her father the Colonel (Charles Coburn), already has her eye on Charles and wastes no time getting him to fall for her. But it doesn’t take long for Jean to fall for Charles as well, insisting to her companions that they’re not going to play him for a sucker. Their romance progresses and she decides to come clean but before she can Charles’ trusty and overly suspicious valet Muggsy (William Demearest) learns the truth about the Harringtons. Her cover blown, Pike heartbroken, when they’re back on the mainland Jean who “needs him like the axe needs the turkey” comes up with a plan to get back at him the only way she knows how involving a new identity known as The Lady Eve.

It’s easy to dream when you watch these movies. Easy to imagine being on the Paramount version of a luxury liner circa 1941 with the most wonderful food and drink at your disposal imaginable (if you don’t count running out of Pike’s Pale, The Ale That Won For Yale), “accidentally” tripped by the likes of Barbara Stanwyck and sent into a whirlwind romance. The movie seems to say that spending eternity in the sort of Eden that this luxury liner represents doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, a few snakes and con artists notwithstanding and it seems telling that when the story moves back to the real world the relationship between the two is never allowed to be as genuine as the falsehoods on the ship. I watch Henry Fonda’s Charles “Hopsie” Pike stammering during his early scenes with Stanwyck’s Jean, practically the first woman he’s spoken to in a year and I think, yeah, that’s me every time I talk to a girl. But I’m never as smooth as Fonda is. Hell, even his clumsiness has an undeniable elegance to it. What is it about THE LADY EVE? I mean, besides Stanwyck and Fonda. There’s the forever quotable Sturges dialogue, moving at such a fast pace commonly associated with the writer-director but there’s also the elegance of how it all flows, the back and forth quality that comes from placing a man and woman in the middle of the ocean away from the rest of the world in some odd combination of being exactly who they are and someone else entirely. Can I ever try working “Beeswax, my boy, beeswax” as Charles Coburn casually says at one point into conversation? How about if I offer a toast with “Dewey and Manila”?

“You have the darndest way of bumping a fella down and bouncing him up again.” Pike says that during one of his initial scenes with Jean, continually flustered by this woman throwing herself at him, a male lead completely obsessed with his snakes, not quite up on the lingo that everyone else in the world seems to know. He finds himself in this shell game of men and women, one of several male leads in Sturges who finds himself a few steps behind the girl in question without realizing the race has already started. In this case he only has the upper hand when it involves the truth. The woman has the upper hand with everything else which ultimately means considerably more. Of course, Sturges himself could have been writing from experience but I can’t say that I blame him. Likewise, Jean is given the key thought about women in this world offering, “The best ones aren’t as good as you probably think they are and the bad ones aren’t as bad. Not nearly as bad”. Neither person seems to fully hear these thoughts when they’re stated and in the world of Sturges people are sometimes on the same wavelength even when they don’t realize it. Sometimes when it’s just the two of you talking you’re the only ones who need to get what’s being said. And sometimes there’s no way to make that happen. “He doesn’t understand,” Charles says of a waiter with the misfortune to interrupt a conversation between him and Jean but of course Charles doesn’t get it either. I guess the film is saying that you never really do until you find yourself on a furious train ride that won’t stop until you end up in mud. In the end he seems to find himself willing to believe in the lie which, in a crazy Sturges kind of way, is where the real truth is.

For Preston Sturges THE LADY EVE came third out of eight in the legendary streak of films he both wrote and directed for Paramount in the early forties. THE GREAT McGINTY and CHRISTMAS IN JULY came first and both are very good—hell, McGINTY gave him his Oscar—but THE LADY EVE is the one where things really begin to click, leading into the likes of SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS and THE PALM BEACH STORY. It’s where an exquisitely put together arrangement becomes a glorious sonata with more highs than one can count from the dialogue to the interplay between the characters to just the way every single moment is paced with even the smallest parts of the Sturges ensemble given a chance to toss some of the wordplay into their scenes. To this day I watch the two leads when they’re alone in her cabin near the beginning and I’m shot right back to the feeling I had way back then and I wonder, has there ever been a better seduction scene? It’s not even a real seduction, of course, but this is a movie about an illusion after all. THE LADY EVE is just as much of an illusion which is fitting. The plotting. The mood. The actors. The Dialogue. The cutaway to a sign that says “PULL IN YOUR HEAD WE’RE COMING TO A TUNNEL” at a crucial point. How much it still makes me laugh, no matter what my mood. That silvery look I associate with Paramount films from this period courtesy of Director of Photography Victor Milner along with Sturges’ growing awareness of how to use his camera to show the actors in the frame through long takes and that dead-on dissolve into the close-up of Fonda when he learns a certain piece of news. The uplift of the final moments, leading to the closing line from William Demarest. I guess what I’m trying to say in a nutshell, when it comes to this film, what makes it so special is…everything. And now that I’ve been writing about it I find myself wondering what I really have to say about THE LADY EVE beyond the exquisite jewel that it truly is.

As much as the beloved Sturges stock company is always focused on when his films are written about it strikes me that on this occasion, maybe more than any of the others, they never overshadow the two leads who are playing parts they couldn’t be more ideal for, displaying exquisite chemistry all the way through. Henry Fonda with his balance of someone most comfortable with his nose in that book and casual charm whenever he’s able to get over being stunned by this beauty, Barbara Stanwyck with all the vivacity imaginable that always makes you wonder what she’s going to say next. Placed up against them the ensemble of familiar faces is impeccable all the way through…but this may be one Sturges film where I’m perfectly happy to just stay with the two leads and not interrupt them with all those characters actors fighting in crowd scenes to make their way into the frame. Aside from wonderful roles particularly for Demarest, Eugene Pallette as Pike’s father and Eric Blore as “Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith” one regular who stands out is familiar face Torben Meyer as the ship’s purser who in just two small scenes gets several unexpected laughs through nice interplay with Demarest and is also allowed a moment where he expresses genuine concern for what is really going on. Dialogue. Character. Elegance. It all goes together and makes the movie sing.

As I wonder about a few of the different wavelengths we were on during our various late-night phone calls, hashing out our own feelings about various films, me often feeling like I wasn’t smart enough to keep up with her, I just think that it would have been nice if I could have said some of this to that particular woman late that night. I’d tell her some of it now if I could but, well, that’s the way it goes. I’m still a little amazed that I knew her at all. Sometimes I wonder if knowing her has been entirely in my mind. Maybe I think that about every woman I know, about all the lady eves that have stuck their foot out and sent me crashing to the ground in one way or another. Some of them are even oddly connected in a way that would sound like out of a bad nighttime soap. But that’s the way it goes. Positively the same dame, says Muggsy with no one around to hear. Story of my life.

In Order To Study Them

2011-11-08T22:15:00.000-08:00

At the time he made RAISING CAIN Brian De Palma had just come off the now-legendary flop of THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITITES, a huge disaster both critically and commercially of the sort that some director’s careers don’t always recover from. Over two decades later that film’s reputation hasn’t improved very much and as for me the only reason I keep putting off writing about it is because the prospect of doing that seems kind of depressing. I bring up its relationship to RAISING CAIN not because it feels like there are any direct thematic links between the two films but because getting essentially nailed to the cross for his adaptation of the Tom Wolfe novel could have maybe caused Brian De Palma to view the world as maybe a little more insane than he had ever done before. Even now, the film feels like a case of somebody throwing up their hands and saying, “Don’t try to figure anything out. It’s all fucking crazy anyway.” As the movie begins it seems like it’s going to be well, normal, following an opening credit sequence of what appears to be a father tucking in his baby girl with what seems at first is just a normal scene with two normal people having a normal conversation. That’s the way it seems…for maybe about ninety seconds, if that, after which the movie goes immediately off the deep end, never to return. And at that point you need to make the choice to either go along for the ride or not. RAISING CAIN opened on August 7, 1992 (same day as UNFORGIVEN, for those interested in such things) and it was also the day where I think my life was forever changed in a chaos theory-sort of way that probably still affects me somewhat even now. I don’t want to get into the details. I’m not going to say her name. But now that I go over the events of that particular day in my head it’s entirely possible that this film even plays a small role in all that. Does that make any sense? Absolutely not. But it does remind me of how few things in this life ever really do. There may not even be any way to adequately write about RAISING CAIN in a rational way. Guess I’ll still try.

A plot? You want a plot? Sheesh. Dr. Carter Nix (John Lithgow) who has chosen to put his practice on hold in order to focus all his attention on raising his baby daughter Amy. Wife Jenny (Lolita Davidovich), a doctor who is continuing to work, is becoming unnerved by how much attention he’s placing on Amy’s early development but finds her attention soon turning to the sudden return of Jack Dante (Steven Bauer), the husband of a woman who died while under Jenny’s care and who she also had an affair with. When Carter discovers what Jenny and Jack are up to he goes mad…not too far a trip of course since unbeknownst to Jenny he’s already in cahoots with brother Cain (also Lithgow) and his elderly father (yes, also Lithgow), a renowned child psychologist believed to be dead but is attempting to continue his work by having Carter kidnap small children for his own nefarious means. But is Carter’s father really alive or just part of his madness? Is all this, in fact, only going on in Carter’s mind? Why am I asking you?

When I wrote about the plot of FEMME FATALE earlier this year I thought that merely trying to summarize it was going to be extremely difficult but in fact the way that film seems to deliberately lay out its narrative in separate blocks made it surprisingly easy. RAISING CAIN, on the other hand, feels like kaleidoscopic madness almost from the word go with only small concessions to straightforward narrative, little attention of any sort paid to rationale and maybe a vague sense at best of who the film’s lead character might actually be—the argument could even be made that this is a film where the protagonist essentially disappears from the story over twenty minutes before the end. There are oodles of thematic layers to read into it from the passing down of madness from one generation to the next (shades of PEEPING TOM), the willful emasculation of men who have allowed themselves to be overshadowed by the women in their lives (PSYCHO, obviously) along with the guilt and paranoia brought on by adultery within the deadening air of suburbia. Such elements are all over the place and yet the film never seems to settle down enough to explore any of these concepts on a serious basis in a way that could be considered definitive subtext. By jumping into the film seemingly after the narrative has begun almost seems to take it all as a given, a world where everything has already gone mad and no attempt to understand where that comes from can do anything to prevent the insanity from overtaking it all.

The production does feel relatively small-scale but you can feel De Palma (who also has sole screenplay credit) working through the frenzy of its various sections with his camera swirling everywhere whether it’s flashbacks in dreams, flashbacks out of dreams or his careful framing of all this madness. He even eschews the expected split-screen twin effects as Lithgow plays scenes with himself in a way that only adds to the mystery of what is real and what isn’t, with sly touches I can’t imagine coming from any other director such as a bit when the camera pans over to someone who isn’t really there so naturally all we see is…nothing. And the dream logic that occurs seems absolutely right during the appropriate section of the film—what other possible reason would there be for someone to go out in the dead of night? De Palma also seems to take pleasure out of how much he can play with expectations such as an extra twist on the old PSYCHO bit of a car that may not make it all the way down into the swamp or the Simon Oakland-level multiple scenes of massive exposition that finally come near the halfway point, first from someone we’ve never met and never will again (the character in question is still given a detailed backstory) then coming courtesy of the excellent Frances Sternhagen as a doctor who arrives to inform the police of everything they need to know in an absurdly long Steadicam shot following the characters involved down multiple flights (love the tilting as they walk down those stairs), all the way into an elevator and out again. It’s turned into even more of a joke by how cops Gregg Henry and Tom Bower are trying to get the woman to follow along with them, where the camera is supposed to be going, with it all building to an equally absurd jolt at the end of the shot. The single take lasts over four minutes and it feels almost impossible to ever stop watching it.

Information is tossed out and plot points that have been carefully built up over multiple scenes, like Carter trying to frame Steven Bauer’s character for the crimes, lead to nothing with the tension getting diffused even before we realize it. Even the murder scenes are pretty much glossed over as if De Palma is admitting he doesn’t have any new ideas of how to stage these things so he just leaps forward to the next section of delirium instead. Interestingly for this director there’s no sign of any Nancy Allen equivalent in panties and garters—even with an adultery storyline and female lead who at this point was maybe best known for playing stripper Blaze Starr in a previous film this excursion into suburbia and allegedly ‘normal’ life is actually one of the more sexless films that De Palma has ever made, maybe another example of how he’s going against expectations—just about the closest it ever gets to something happening between two consenting adults is interrupted by the screaming of a child and it almost feels like Davidovich is being driven batty by all that beige clothing she’s wearing and baby strollers she’s surrounded with, her long legs underneath notwithstanding. When she’s earnestly told by a friend (played by Mel Harris of THIRTYSOMETHING which itself feels like an odd joke although it seems strange to imagine De Palma ever watching that show) that she’s married to the ‘perfect man’ it seems like the comment is more about his qualifications as a father and stay-at-home husband than anything. The passion has been drained out of this world, along with any sort of reason. It’s never even all that clear what anyone sees in Lithgow’s Carter to ever think of him as perfect (even the hairpiece worn by the star adds to his strangeness) but of course there’s little to gain from pointing out how the movie isn’t paying much attention to realism.

The climax set in the parking lot of a motel features a truck precariously containing a sundial that takes an eternity to back its way out (“You’re gonna kill somebody with that sundial!” an offscreen voice yells), a certain bewigged individual in an elevator out of DRESSED TO KILL and, for no real reason, a couple of drunken yahoos across the way shouting at what’s going on because…I’m really not sure. Are they meant to represent the audience, wondering what the fuck is going on over the course of this film’s 91 minutes? Is anything about the plot really resolved in the end? Except for the natural ticking clock brought on by the potential fate of a few missing children was there even much of an actual plot anyway? As has been noticed by others before now the famous final shot replicates a certain trick that can be traced to Argento, particularly the end of TENEBRAE, and De Palma himself has repeated it on several other occasions by now. More to the point it’s an intriguing mirror of the moment early on when Lolita Davidovich’s Jenny is introduced. I suppose it’s on a thematic level it’s a comment on the male half finally being forever subsumed by the maternal instincts within or maybe an acknowledgment that all this madness is an eternal cycle and no studies or scheduled quality time are going to be able to do anything about those small children endlessly crying out for their mommy. On a narrative level, it’s essentially the equivalent of Brian De Palma saying, “Fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling.” Which I suppose is what you need to do sometimes, whether in filmmaking or just life itself. I’ve written before of how some of the director’s later thrillers play as attempts to move beyond the cynicism and slaughtered lambs of his earlier work but RAISING CAIN feels like it came at a point before he was able to come up with those solutions. Or maybe at that point he just thought that finding such answers wasn’t going to be possible in a world where a director gets vilified for trying to make a movie. RAISING CAIN is an attempt to get back to what he maybe does best after BONFIRE, yes, but in doing it he’s also looking for a slightly different path back towards being the filmmaker he is. Maybe doesn’t arrive there in that final shot but it does show him on the way. I guess that I sort of love every second of RAISING CAIN’s lunacy even if it’s tough to rank the film alongside his best work—after all, it’s an experiment, a goof, although not in the sense that it feels like De Palma is just trying to toss this one off. Clearly he means every second of every shot he’s setting up and he doesn’t know any other way to do it.

As much as part of the film seems designed around John Lithgow’s facial ticks when he’s placed in the dead center of the frame, maybe because of the inherent archness of the material this is an odd case where an actor is essentially playing five characters in a film yet it doesn’t all seem centered around him. De Palma’s the star, not Lithgow (hey, the poster did blare “De Mented. De Ranged. De Ceptive. De Palma.” after all), but there’s never a point where I don’t hugely enjoy watching the gears shift in his performance as he moves from one persona to another. The earnestness of Lolita Davidovich’s sexual yearning is undeniably odd and at times it’s tough to tell exactly how to read her combined with the character’s actions—she’s either underplaying the part or overplaying it. Maybe both, which would make as much sense as anything. Of course, there’s not a gesture an actor makes in RAISING CAIN which doesn’t seem a part of what De Palma wants it to be. Even Bauer, playing essentially a colorless stiff seems totally right for what he’s supposed to bring to it in the true John-Gavin-as-Sam-Loomis spirit. Frances Sternhagen is just terrific as the bewigged Dr. Waldheim who thinks she looks like a transvestite, and very funny as well, digging into each piece of the puzzle she endlessly reels off with just the right pop to the words while the unforgettable pairing of Gregg Henry and Tom Bower as the investigating cops are so entertaining, particularly with all those gestures they each make during the Steadicam shot, that I wish De Palma had used them in these parts again in another movie. It’s always clear that the actors (Gabrielle Carteris, then of BEVERLY HILLS 90210, turns up in a small role) are pitched at exactly as he wants them to be with an undeniable intensity adding to the dreamlike feel. It even struck me after watching the opening scene involving John Lithgow and Teri Austin multiple times that rarely have I ever seen an actor who has been directed to behave as if they’re really driving as Austin seems to, with the actress playing the scene by simultaneously focusing her eyes on the road and silently registering just how crazy what Lithgow’s saying is. It adds undeniably to the immediate odd hold the movie is able to achieve, a sort of intensity that never quite goes away the whole way through.

Unlike a few of De Palma’s other films I’m not sure I was totally onboard with all this on that opening day long ago but after watching it countless times over the years the total insanity it projects is infectious. Maybe the film shouldn’t be thought of as anything but Brian De Palma displaying his tools for an hour and a half regardless, working on his audience the way only he knows how and staying with me in ways that I’m still surprised by. I’m even tempted to say that the music by Pino Donaggio is the least distinctive of any of his De Palma scores—which maybe it is—and yet the way the main theme recurs, also used as the song heard on a certain alarm clock is something that I find impossible to get out of my head after every time I see the film yet again. The madness lingers and I suppose that’s the way it should be. If it’s impossible to look at the film with rational eyes, I suppose I could say that about my vivid memories of that day long ago as well since that madness seems so connected to it. And maybe every day since.

How The Other Half Lives

2011-10-31T23:31:00.001-07:00

Coming a full twenty years after his last directorial excursion in zomebiedom with DAY OF THE DEAD and just over one year after the Zack Snyder helmed redo of his 1978 classic DAWN OF THE DEAD, George A. Romero’s LAND OF THE DEAD was released at the end of June 2005, a film clearly inspired by the post-9/11 world that was then still taking shape. Just a few months after its release the events of Katrina seemed to give the film added potency and now over six years later the film has acquired yet another extra level of meaning with the events surrounding the Occupy Wall Street protests taking place. Watching this film at the time of Halloween 2011 in which both the living and the undead are seen to be existing under the thumb of those living high up in a glass tower led by Dennis Hopper (RIP) it was almost hard to think of anything else. A nice thought and one that certainly adds resonance to how it plays now but it still makes me wish that there was more to dig into the film to help support such a reading. It’s a shame that Romero’s career seemed to stall as much as it did during the 90s but as time goes on I wonder if his creative voice seemed most at home in the late 60s-70s anyway with the ever-popular CREEPSHOW (intentionally aping a comic style from an earlier era which in a way helped to make the movie timeless) the obvious exception. I recently saw KNIGHTRIDERS for the first time and was struck, almost moved, by how that film almost plays now as a defiant resistance towards moving on into the next decade when an unstoppable change to society was going to come for that film’s characters, a more drastic journey off into the void than wherever Ken Foree and Gaylen Ross are headed in that helicopter at the end of DAWN OF THE DEAD. In some ways, DAWN really is the ultimate Romero statement on zombies and the world they stagger through so any followup, whether 1985’s DAY OF THE DEAD (which I like, but haven’t seen recently) or this film or any other spinoff could almost be seen as superfluous going over material that has already been covered thoroughly. Considering how long it took to happen LAND OF THE DEAD could be considered a sort of GODFATHER III or PHANTOM MENACE of the horror game but it didn’t have a pressing narrative to continue so what was really at stake was what it was going to say about how Romero looks at the world now. Overall, the film is a nice way to spend 90-plus minutes and though I think it gets better as it goes on my feelings about it aren’t that strong. I don’t know if it’s that crucial Romero made this film, or either of his other subsequent zombie films for that matter, but it’s nice that it’s there. Plus it has Asia Argento, always a big plus for me.

Some years after the rise of the walking dead many of the remaining humans are living in an encampment in Pittsburgh, protected on all sides by the rivers and electrified fences. Some of the wealthy live in a high rise known as Fiddler’s Green, which is run by the powerful Mr. Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) who is in charge of everything, including the life down below where the rest of the people are left to live in squalor. One of his employees Riley Denbo (Simon Baker) is also the designer of the Dead Reckoning a huge armored vehicle that can move through zombie-infested areas with ease so what remains in the outer world can still be looted and the residents of Fiddler’s Green can continue their high-toned lifestyles. Riley, along with buddy Charlie (Robert Joy) stays on Kaufman’s good side but also spends time dealing with those down below. Cholo (John Leguizamo), one of Riley’s men, has higher aspirations that his hard work will get him a spot in Fiddler’s Green but when Kaufman immediately spurns such an idea Cholo hijacks Dead Reckoning holding it for ransom, threatening to destroy the encampment. Kaufman enlists a reluctant Riley, who just wants to get out and get away, to get the vehicle back. Riley sets out with Charlie and Slack (Asia Argento) a woman he rescued from being torn apart by zombies in one of Kaufman’s pleasure palaces, but meanwhile a zombie known only as Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) is somehow finding a way to learn about what’s going on around him and is finding a way to mobilize his fellow zombies which soon enough leads them to the river surrounding Pittsburgh getting ever closer to the sanctuary that is Fiddler’s Green as Riley begins to put his own plan for escape into effect.

There are so many favorable things I could say about LAND OF THE DEAD from the punchy vividness of the characterizations to its display of Romero’s own thematic goals in its views of homelessness, post-9/11 fears and even comments on the U.S. inserting itself into other territories via shock & awe actions. And, it’s probably important to say, there’s some pretty decent zombie action and gore all through the film with a fair amount of disarming humor—like a brief shot of Spam being prepared seems like a nice callback to a certain dialogue exchange way back in DAWN and some particularly good dialogue throughout, especially Hopper’s “In a world where the dead are returning to life the word ‘trouble’ loses much of its meaning.” Which makes me wish all the more that the film, on which Romero has sole screenplay credit, had a stronger story—I guess Dead Reckoning is a cool vehicle but does so much of the movie have to be about it? The degree that the actual plot feels minor is one way that LAND OF THE DEAD feels like only one chapter in an ongoing story and I’m not even specifically referring to the other Romero films in the series but it still feels like it could use more resonance, more things happening that could really focus on the characters as they deal with the continued threat. The post-zombie apocalypse world presented is intriguing but the way so much of is set out in some kind of wasteland in the dead of night isn’t all that visually interesting with maybe too much of an emphasis on a ROAD WARRIOR-heavy metal feel in Kaufman’s slums. Fiddler’s Green is never really established as much as it should be to become a character itself and not much is ever done to display Kaufman’s power over the place and its surroundings—Hopper isn’t even introduced until around the half-hour mark and much of his screentime is spent up in his luxury suite anyway.

LAND OF THE DEAD is compact in its plotting and no complaints about that—there’s no federal law that says a Romero zombie film has to be an epic the length of DAWN—but unfortunately that leaves no time to really get to know the characters and that alone makes it feel like kind of a comedown after what’s come before. And set during such a tight timeframe—it’s almost easy for me to forget that it doesn’t all take place over one night—it really doesn’t allow for much in the way of fleshed-out characterizations anyway. Fitting for a film which begins with an old-school Universal logo, LAND OF THE DEAD feels like the most traditional ‘Hollywood’ film that Romero has ever made with its ragtag group that we follow feeling more a product of the Howard Hawks school than he’s ever done before. The effect is enjoyable but it still feels like something is missing, maybe how Romero was truly able to do something unique with the unknowns in Pittsburgh he was directing once up on a time. Here, as enjoyable as they might be at times, they seem like actors in a movie.

Much of the film is certainly put together in an efficient fashion with a frame that is always active—I believe it’s the only time Romero has ever shot in Scope which in itself seems unlike him since he’s always come off as a director more interested in the process of montage than in paying attention to such precise framing that Scope brings to the table. In comparison this film contains several scenes that seem to start and end abruptly which makes the pacing problematic so the over all effect at times is maybe a little too colorless with a certain feel of disengagement evident. As would be expected for him, Romero seems genuinely interested in observing the characters working together which makes me wonder how much the scale of all this didn’t interest him as much as he thought it might, what with it requiring all sorts of coverage of action, close-up inserts of things like hands shifting gears and maybe more gunplay than I wish it had. It is slick, yes (I’m not sure how you can make a movie in today’s world and not have it be slick to some extent), but I’m not sure anyone ever was attracted to Romero’s films because of how slick they were. On a storytelling level it feels a little lopsided, spending maybe more time than necessary on its opening sequence out in the real world with the team being sent off on what’s basically the mission of the movie at approximately the halfway mark of a ninety-odd minute running time so it plays more than a little like a movie that starts, moves almost immediately to the climax and then it ends. (Note: I saw the film on opening night but the version on DVD I’ve known since is the unrated cut which adds some gore, has one full additional sequence involving Leguizamo’s character and makes some minor editorial changes as well. There’s a listed difference of four minutes in the running time but the two versions can’t be said to be drastically different from one another.)

In spite of the large cast of humans it still feels like Romero is most interested in Big Daddy as he leads his ever-growing throngs across the River towards Fiddler’s Green, rising from the water in CARNIVAL OF SOULS style in some of the film’s most powerful imagery and when they crashing through the windows of the glass tower as Kaufman screams, “You have no right!” the moment means something now more than ever. It’s clear that’s where the director’s sympathies lie even more than the good guys and it is a potent array of imagery of these walking corpses joining forces and gathering weapons while the guys in suits way up high pick their noses but the actual setting of Fiddler’s Green isn’t established much one way or another beyond a vague awareness that these people are still dining in a lifestyle of luxury while the world smolders in the ashes around them. It makes sense—all Kaufman cares about is the profits, not bothering to consider what an antiquated concept this is and presumably he’ll be in power as long as that still means something. Those not let into the Green are counted on to simply spend their money to keep this meager shred of capitalism going and the ‘stenches’ are just ignored as a nuisance. Either way, the strategy is just to keep them outside. Fuck ‘em. Who cares. Which all makes sense. There just needs to be more.

But like I said, the film does improve as it goes along—the pacing is tight even if I sometimes wish that the focus could be on other things and while the ultimate statement the film makes about its individuals and their relationship to the zombies is nowhere near as willfully incendiary on the subject as Joe Dante’s “Homecoming” episode for the MASTERS OF HORROR series the argument could be made that’s not the film Romero is trying to make anyway. It’s an efficiently told genre piece with a political and personal bent that is undeniably admirable but I wish it had a few of those odd touches which would make it into more than it is, the guy at the beginning of DAWN awkwardly declaring “Our responsibility is finished,” or the eternal argument from NIGHT over whether they should stay upstairs and fight or lock themselves down in the basement. I like it, but maybe those touches which are such a large part of why those movies have in a way become such acclaimed classics and maybe that’s what LAND OF THE DEAD is missing more than anything. One other thing that sticks out now is the desire of some of the characters to make their way up north to Canada away to get away from all this madness. (“There’s nothing up north.” “That’s the idea.”). It’s a little odd considering the film was actually shot in Canada, not Pittsburgh where it’s set and where Romero had become famous for making these movies. It manages to become part of the subtext, of Romero by necessity abandoning the world where he was king in favor of something else in order to keep going, to finally make another film after so many years out of the game. The end sort of makes sense that way, as expressing the belief of a filmmaker who, much as his characters are, is still looking for a place to go, for movies that he hopefully can still make. As they drive off in Dead Reckoning the characters have some kind of hope and it feels like that optimism has been earned.

Part of my fondness for the film admittedly has to do with seeing Dennis Hopper in the audience at the Arclight on opening night. His presence carries a definite weight with it from various points of his iconic status—while doing press for the film he was fully aware how both NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and EASY RIDER were key films of the late-60s zeitgeist and his latter day political leanings affect how it plays as well, with his portrayal of Kaufman apparently modeled on Donald Rumsfeld. He deliberately seems to underplay things until his last moments (and, really, everything about his final sequence works great) and his very presence carries a great deal of weight to it, just from him quietly smiling at a few points although I still wish he wasn’t locked up in his suite most of the time. Simon Baker seems engaged with the material and he does come off as likable but still feels too clean cut to be this guy in this world. John Leguizamo’s wiry energy fits in somewhat better and he’s just more fun to watch, making me imagine a massive rewrite combining the two male leads to make Cholo the focus. Baker does work well with his costars including Asia Argento who is pretty great in a role that seems designed to just be along for the ride and not much else. She may be The Girl but she brings her undeniable presence to the part all the way through and besides, isn't Asia Argento supposed to be in this movie anyway? Her acting style adds to all the shorthand so the unspoken chemistry she shares with Baker plays right from when they first look at each other and seem to know immediately they’re going to be a couple, a Hawksian beat which is all we need to be told about their relationship. I could write several more paragraphs on what I think about her but I’ve probably done that before anyway. The underrated Robert Joy also plays well off both of them as Charlie, bringing a needed likable quality to much of the film and selling his unstable confidence when he insists on what guns are the ones he needs. Eugene Clark is extremely imposing during both loud and quiet moments as Big Daddy. As zombie characterizations go I’m not sure how it could work better although I still think his makeup looks a little too much like obvious zombie makeup. Actually, a number of the bit actors and zombie extras are given small moments here and there to make an impression—also in there are Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright who cameo as zombies as does Tom Savini turning up quickly as his biker from DAWN OF THE DEAD, in surprisingly good condition after all this time.

The writer-director credit for Romero over the three zombies still defiantly playing instruments in a town square gazebo may be an indication that he’s fully aware of how long he’s been doing this sort of thing, but maybe also that it’s become such a part of who he is as a filmmaker that there’s nothing he can do to change that. He doesn’t seem to mind it either. The two films he’s made since, DIARY OF THE DEAD and SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, are more obviously a stab at going back to the low budget roots he came from and that doesn’t necessarily make them automatically better but it does seem like that approach is something he’s more comfortable with. Regardless, I still like LAND OF THE DEAD, even if some of its problems are still there even when I try to will them away, but enough of the movie has a power of the sort that only Romero still knows how to do, continuing the ongoing narrative of humans going up against the walking dead that has now lasted for decades. Plus it has Asia Argento. Which will always be a plus for me. I sat down to write about LAND OF THE DEAD because it’s Halloween but I also knew that some of what was drawing me to it had to do with other things going on out there in the real world. So maybe I wound up focusing on parts of it that didn’t simply have to do with being just a horror film, no matter how impressive some of those gore effects as the zombies rip people apart might be. Of course, focusing on some of those other things is one of the reasons why we have horror films anyway.

From That Devastation

2011-10-28T23:39:00.001-07:00

There’s no way I could do an accurate count but it feels like I’ve seen Richard Donner’s THE OMEN about a hundred times. Its follow-up, 1978’s DAMIEN: OMEN II directed by Don Taylor I’ve seen exactly once, years ago, and about all I remember about it is William Holden’s anguish as someone is pulled under the ice at a lake. I even made it a point to see the superfluous remake of THE OMEN on the day it was released, 6/6/06, because, well, I just couldn’t resist. However, until now I’ve seen the third film in the original series, THE FINAL CONFLICT (the most recent DVD release referring to it on the packaging as OMEN III: THE FINAL CONFLICT) exactly zero times. I cannot explain this. There is no reason. But Halloween was coming up, the desire to see more horror films than usual was in the air, so it made sense to finally take care of this one. In spite of never actually seeing it I’ve been curious about THE FINAL CONFLICT for a long time and now that the deed is taken care of I guess I’m still a little curious, partly because the movie really doesn’t leave much of an impression. It’s as if Twentieth Century-Fox decided they needed to make another sequel but didn’t feel like putting that much money into it and nobody had a really good idea for what the story should be but they just decided to make it anyway. There is some dialogue about the state of the planet which could just as easily be speaking about the way things are now but that right there makes the film sound more interesting than it is. The whole thing is just kind of a void, with too much about what’s happening left vague, as if in search of an idea for this movie. Or maybe my attention just kept wandering. There wasn’t all that much to focus on anyway.

Antichrist Damien Thorn (Sam Neill), who was adopted by Gregory Peck’s Robert Thorn in THE OMEN and raised as a teenager by William Holden’s brother Richard in the follow-up, is now the 32 year-old head of Thorn Industries, the numbers 6-6-6 still hidden under the hair on his head with him in charge of much of the world supply of food (for those who care—the film ignores how the first two films were contemporary to when they were released and just retcons it to date them as happening decades before). Fully aware of his true identity and presumably biding his time until he can make his secret known to the world he discovers in the Book of Hebron that a particular alignment of the stars indicates that the Second Coming is at hand. Meanwhile, he convinces the President to appoint him as Ambassador to Great Britain after the current one conveniently arranges to have his own head blown off in front of the press. Once in England, Damien shows an interest in television journalist Kate Reynolds (Lisa Harrow) and her pre-teen son. As he settles a group of priests led by Father DeCarlo (Rossano Brazzi) who are also aware of the celestial activity have acquired the seven daggers of Megiddo, the only ancient holy weapons that can harm the Antichrist, intent on destroying him. Meanwhile, in a desperate attempt to prevent what has been prophesized Damien has his own disciples track down every male child born on a certain day so he can destroy any chance of the second coming occurring and presumably, take full control of all the world once and for all. I guess.

One element about THE FINAL CONFLICT which has long intrigued me was Roger Ebert’s review written when the film opened which discusses in great detail the opening section, in which we follow the precise path leading to exactly how the seven daggers of Maggido find their way into the right hands about which he says “The first ten minutes of THE FINAL CONFLICT are such a masterful job of storytelling that I dared to hope that the OMEN trilogy had pulled itself out of the bag.” In truth, the sequence is just under four minutes (as we all know, Roger has sometimes been a little inexact about these things) and maybe shouldn’t be considered anything more than a compactly told sequence of events designed to play under the opening credits. I’m not sure it shouldn’t be considered masterful as much as simply a well-executed montage told in an appropriately cinematic manner, something you’d think should be a prerequisite when we go to the movies but maybe it was just the context of things that surprised Roger. It might not exactly be a sudden display of filmic genius, but it is a nice scene. And, as it turns out, just about the high point of the entire film.

It feels like something was lost along the way while making THE FINAL CONFLICT, as if the budget got reduced or some sort of key element to the script (written by Andrew Birkin, based on characters created by David Seltzer) got lost in rewrites. There’s no real continuity of character to make this feel like the conclusion of a trilogy and one of the key selling points of the first two films then and now—respected actors being knocked off in increasingly gruesome, painful ways—feels done away with not to mention how few of the costars of lead Sam Neill seem up to matching him. Even the casting of familiar face Mason Adams “as the President” feels off as if the actor doesn’t have the physical stature to be a plausible commander in chief. Interestingly, two directors of photography are credited—Phil Meheux and Robert Paynter—which seems like a possible indication of strife during production but while it does manage to be a rich-looking film with striking Scope compositions throughout it’s all very flatly directed by Graham Baker (ALIEN NATION) who never seems interested in much that happens beyond placing emphasis on the twitching of a few bodies that have recently been brutally killed. The strange thing is that THE FINAL CONFLICT is a film which in the first fifteen minutes we see someone’s head get blown off with a shotgun in full graphic detail and yet the film couldn’t be more humdrum about how this is all portrayed with even an assassination attempt on Damien that goes awry shot in such a way that doesn’t seen to notice that a pretty impressive stunt would be noticed by the cameras if only they could get a decent angle on it. Even when Damien and Lisa have a serious discussion about the state of the world how true evil is as pure in its way as innocence it’s staged in such a faraway shot it’s as if it all just bores him.

You could feel free to consider the overall approach of the OMEN series as garbage or hackwork but there is a certain showmanship at other points in the series which is undeniable—you know, David Warner meeting up with a certain sheet of glass, that sort of thing. In comparison, THE FINAL CONFLICT just sort of lies there, no real energy to it, zero flair even when it’s well-photographed which it often is. It does have a certain multinational feel that I associate with certain films of this era which is actually kind of comforting but it’s really not enough. I’m no real expert on the cycle of devil-related horror that was around in the 70s but while watching this I couldn’t help but wonder if the whole thing was kind of played out by 1981. Whether it was or not, THE FINAL CONFLICT certainly doesn’t help. It’s an 80s horror sequel with no particular cult following which seems like an impossibility but I suppose it’s also stranded between the two eras—the devil/disaster cycle combo and the slasher cycle which hadn’t taken full shape just yet. Plus it’s not at all scary. Or even particularly unnerving. Or entertaining.

Too much of what happens is just humdrum. Damien skulks around plotting. The priests skulk around plotting. Damien shows interest in Kate Reynolds but any implied romance comes off as half-baked beyond the two of them ending up in bed together in a scene that is at least a little odd, implying that some kind of violation takes place but is too oblique to ever be offensive, just another ‘so what’ event that occurs. Damien takes her son on as a disciple but that feels half-baked as well, as if he’s only doing it because he thinks the kid kind of looks like him. Damien knows who he is and is never conflicted about any of it, so there’s no suspense on that angle. Don Gordon (Steve McQueen’s partner in BULLITT, so he’s a-ok in my book) is his right hand man and seems to be fully aware of it who his boss is as well but it’s never clear if he’s a Satanist or a loyal employee or what—he certainly doesn’t seem all that committed to the cause when he needs to be. It’s a film without a hero or at the least anyone to maintain a rooting interest in so the experience of watching it becomes too detached. The few characters who could have had such a role are either too thinly drawn or not focused on enough such as Rossano Brazzi’s priest who is second billed but he could almost have a ‘special appearance by’ credit considering how much screen time he has. There’s a long foxhunt scene which isn’t bad (you don’t get many foxhunts in movies. The only other ones I can think of offhand are MARNIE and THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER) although having someone attacked by relatively benign looking dogs is a nice spin on the beasts who attacked Gregory Peck and David Warner in THE OMEN it doesn’t quite feel like a bullseye. Maybe because they still look like nice dogs.

The film also seems to misunderstand what I assume people have always responded to in the other films in the series, which mainly focused on the brutal deaths of people (some of them played by big stars) with the hint of the power of Satan hanging over it all, as well as the subtext of parents’ fears of their own child in the first film. The events that took place may have been patently absurd but they also managed to be strangely unnerving, walking the line between odd accidents and something else unexplainable going on—as improbable as many things were they weren’t impossible, keeping away from supernatural elements or even simple stalk-and-murder scenes, even arguably the death of Lee Remick. THE FINAL CONFLICT seems to drop much of the mystery found in this ambiguity in favor of boring astrological details, people having dull conversations in rooms and Sam Neill brooding, occasionally giving long speeches (one scene where he speaks to an enormous gathering of disciples is strikingly shot, I’ll give it that much) and building to the ultimate plan to prevent the second coming. None of this is ever as scary as Billie Whitelaw as Mrs. Baylock merely staring at someone and much of it is shot so discreetly it’s almost as if the film is embarrassed that it has a plot about killing babies. Hey, I think that sounds kind of unpleasant too, but if that’s the case why are you even bothering making this movie? There’s also the feeling that it wants to suddenly develop this entire mythology around Damien so the trilogy can be paid off but did anybody ever really care about that angle? The film feels underpopulated. Underwritten. And under-thought out. A key showdown between two characters late in the film involving a hot iron for example should have some impact but since there’s been so little reason to care about them, outside of not wanting to see their baby get killed, there really isn’t any. I’d heard long ago that the ending is lame beyond belief and, well, it is, feeling rushed, incomplete and anticlimactic as if they just ran out of shooting time. Or money. Or ideas. I can’t tell. Instead the film just gives us glorious music and biblical quotes shoved onscreen as if to try to disguise the fact that not very much happened followed by the quick appearance of the end credits. Thank you and goodnight. Is THE FINAL CONFLICT the dullest Satanic horror film ever made? I’m probably not the person to answer that. The late Hammer entry TO THE DEVIL-A DAUGHTER was also somewhat unfulfilling in this regard with a similarly undernourished conclusion but it still probably works better. Either way, there can’t be very many other such entries out there that feel quite so lackluster, so uninterested in what the film is supposedly about.

Sam Neill is a very good actor who is clearly trying to make this all work in his first American lead role with a very nice slipperiness to his voice at times but there still isn’t much he can do with this script. He does at least have presence (we also get to hear him say the word ‘Nazarene’ about two-hundred times) and that a few weeks ago Salman Rushdie of all people made a reference to him playing this part on Real Time With Bill Maher a few weeks ago has to say something about what kind of impression he makes. But aside from the way his hair is styled which seems queasily appropriate for the visage of Damien Thorn he still feels left a little on his own, as if the film is missing an elder statesman role as a follow-up to Peck and Holden for him to play off of so it places a kind of void at the center of the film. Brazzi barely has any screentime with him and while it’s interesting to see how Neill works with Don Gordon (whose huge glasses are almost as much of a character as he is) it’s not really enough. Shouldn’t this be one of those films that have the stars in boxes at the bottom of the poster? Lisa Harrow actually began a lengthy relationship with Neill from this film and they had a child together but she never seems strong enough either. Few other actors who appear make much of an impression although Hazel Court, star of Roger Corman’s THE RAVEN and MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, can be quickly seen at the start of the fox hunt in her final film appearance. Jerry Goldsmith, one of the few names in the credits who carry over through the entire trilogy, provides much of the power that the film does have with all the spectacular bombast of his score and while its effectiveness never rises to the heights of the first film—the one which gave him his only Oscar, of course—what he had to work with probably wasn’t all that inspiring.

After watching THE FINAL CONFLICT via Netflix I was curious to look at OMEN II againt for reference to see how it matched up and oddly Amoeba had zero copies of that film but had about a dozen of this one. What’s up with that? Did everyone who got a box set decide there was no reason to keep this one? And why did I even bother seeing it anyway? I do have a vague recollection of it playing at a theater while getting pizza one night nearby with my family so maybe deep down I have a strange desire to see every film I vaguely remember playing when I was a kid but was too young for. There’s probably a reason for that buried deep down within my psyche but I don’t need to figure it out just now. So it goes without saying that I’m not at all sorry I finally saw THE FINAL CONFLICT but I’m also not that surprised the experience turned out to be not much of anything either. I could believe that if there had been something mildly interesting to it maybe I would have heard something by now but there’s nothing wrong with keeping an open mind. It can be fun to do that with these things, particularly horror sequels that you’ve wondered about for over thirty years. There’s always the hope that one of those will offer you something completely unexpected which makes it all the more unfortunate when what it gives you isn’t much of anything at all. And when that happens, you just have to move on to the next one.

I've Seen That Face Before

2011-10-26T22:20:00.000-07:00

One thing’s for sure, if the power goes out unexpectedly that really does put a crimp in your plans. It’s happened in my neighborhood twice recently, within a few days of each other, once on Sunday and then again on Wednesday, lasting well into the evening on a night that I had planned to just stay home and not do much of anything. It was hot. There was little point in sitting there in the dark and I had no idea how long it was going to be. So I drove off from the neighborhood, grabbed an In-n-Out Burger in Hollywood and then cruised around in the night for a little while with the TRON: LEGACY score playing. I stopped off at the Grove for a few minutes to look around, Julia Roberts walked by me at one point, I did a double take when I realized it was Julia Roberts, then I headed down the street from there to the New Beverly to see Roman Polanski’s 1988 thriller FRANTIC. I’d seen it before. Actually, I’d seen it many times before including on a cold opening night in February at Yonkers Movieland way back in those dark ages. The New Bev was showing it as second on the bill after the recent French action movie POINT BLANK (no relation to the Boorman--when it comes on DVD check it out, you’ll like it) and though it had crossed my mind to go simply to see FRANTIC again it was honestly low on the priority list. So it’s fortunate that the power went. The reaction I had to the film couldn’t have thrilled me more.

I remember loving FRANTIC when I first saw it all those years ago—even then there was something about how the film just laid out its thriller plotline in a perfectly logical fashion that I responded to even though I had yet to fully discover Polanski at that point. As time went on I began to make those discoveries and pay more attention to films like REPULSION and CHINATOWN which made me curious to revisit FRANTIC after a number of years away from it. So there I was at the New Beverly seeing it again in a theater after all these years in a print that probably dated from ’88 with noticeable scratches near the reel changes and I was absolutely knocked out by how it reminded me, in all seriousness, that I actually kind of love this film. There was something about it that reminded me of the undeniable charge of true cinema that I felt in Yonkers all those years ago. You can grow, you can change, you can see films that expand your boundaries of what films you might be interested in but ultimately you are what you are. It may not be top tier Polanski—considering what it’s up against, I’m not sure it could be—but I’d gladly call it one of his most underrated. Because of its box office failure at the time and maybe due to being lumped in with every other ‘Harrison Ford’s family gets kidnapped’ movie that’s been made since it’s become more than a little forgotten, which is a shame. This is Polanski, damn it. And you can feel what the director is bringing to the movie in every frame, in every tiny gesture that characters make. It’s funny how I’m saying it’s underrated because since this screening I’ve spoken to several people including a few who where also there and when I tried to describe my reaction each one of them have replied, “Yeah, I know. It’s great.” Maybe I just know the right people. Maybe I just know the only people who would agree with me. I say it’s that good.

Dr. Richard Walker (Harrison Ford) arrives in Paris in the early morning hours with wife Sondra (Betty Buckley) to attend a medical convention. The arrive at their hotel exhausted from their long flight, looking forward to a few hours of alone time before Richard has to prepare his speech when Sondra realizes that she accidentally took the wrong bag at the airport. Richard makes a call to deal with this and all seems normal but just a short time later after he’s dozed off Sondra, last seen going down to the lobby, has disappeared. Richard isn’t sure what has happened but with the management of the hotel, the Paris police and even the American Embassy only able to do so much, he follows what few leads he can trace beginning with that mysterious suitcase collected by mistake. He starts to believe that it must have something to do with his wife’s disappearance and the trail soon leads him to the beautiful and mysterious Michelle (Emmanuelle Seigner) who has recently been involved in smuggling and may be the only person who can help him find out what happened to Sondra.

The argument could be made that on the surface FRANTIC, written by Polanski & longtime collaborator Gerard Brach with uncredited work by Robert Towne, is almost too simplistic of a concept for Polanski, one without the twisty views of reality which can sometimes be found in his best work. And while the basic setup seems like it could play as much more normal than it actually does (some of the DNA can certainly be found in this year’s Liam Neeson vehicle UNKNOWN but let’s not make any comparisons beyond that) from the first frame FRANTIC feels totally like Polanski, playing out as much of a pure examination of behavior as anything. It’s not all that much of a stretch to look at some of this film, with a lead character from the Bay Area who I assume has a 60s-lefty background but is now politically apathetic, as the director expressing some of his own feelings about America, a place he had purposefully removed himself from a decade earlier due to his infamous legal troubles (and that’s all I’ll say about that here) with a certain an arch, yet undeniably yearning, quality to the way a certain Statue of Liberty souvenir figures into the plot, in addition to the views of the famous replica on the river Seine first seen upside down in a point of view shot. In some ways you could even call the film a very dry comedy—no one has ever made drier comedy than Roman Polanski, after all—as it observes a man desperately fighting sleep in a city where almost no one speaks his language and even the ones who do never seem to listen to him.

“Do you know where you are?” Richard Walker’s wife Sondra asks him as they’re driving in from the airport to Paris. “No, it’s changed too much,” he replies, in reference to the last time they visited the city on their honeymoon some twenty-odd years before. Settling in after the provocative sounds of Ennio Morricone’s off-kilter score combining synths and horns with a deliberate French feel to its main title theme I found myself locked in with FRANTIC immediately, while at the same time being somewhat astonished on this revisit by the sheer quiet of its opening scenes. Very little happens at all for the first ten minutes or so beyond the Walkers checking into their hotel and discussing how their day is going to go. Everything is laid out with a methodical deliberateness, from the flat tire their first taxi gets to the procedure to taking their passports out as they check in to simply ordering some breakfast. Polanski pays more attention to this behavior than few other directors do, I suspect than few other directors ever could. It would never happen this way today—hell, it could never happen this way today, no studio would allow it—but it feels absolutely essential for the film to take effect to somehow find yourself in Richard Walker’s shoes, uncertain what to do, who to talk to or what to possibly do next since for all the reasons having to do with the realities of their own lives they react to him with simple officiousness if not outright dismissal, with every single thing happening paid attention to so we’re constantly on guard, in some ways turning the film into a depiction of the basic indifference of the world. The point of view remains strict—we know something when he knows it so for a time we’re about as clueless about what’s going on as Walker, who for a while has to deal with people who pretty much believe that this is a simple case of marital strife. And what else can they do anyway?

As some of the pieces begin to come together for Walker with the vision that is Seigner’s Michelle joining up for her own reasons the expected Hitchcockian tropes begin to emerge along with the McGuffin he’s been looking for (which, incidentally, may have more meaning in the real world now than it did then). Even the grey suit Harrison Ford wears could be another Hitchcock nod what with its resemblance to the one Cary Grant forever has on in NORTH BY NORTHWEST and it feels just as much a part of his identity. But the point could very well be made that there isn’t any one great setpiece in the Hitchcock style, it’s more a case of the various elements steadily accumulating piece by piece, forever building to a fever pitch (the great editor Sam O’Steen no doubt deserves as much credit as Polanski and the other writers do) and even if Richard Walker is never seen to be behaving in a manner that could be, well, frantic, the tension ratchets up so tight that I don’t really care. So much of it works, whether it’s the way certain shots are held for prolonged periods of time, how moments that seem like they might be important get diffused or just the false leads that turn up, particularly a scene in a nightclub which features a small touch of drug use by a certain movie star that I doubt would be allowed today. The rhythm to all this feels masterful aided by the sheer logic behind the plotting combined with the veritable daze the character finds himself in, making a treacherous and unwise excursion out on to Michelle’s roof to gain access to her apartment without thinking about what he’s doing. When he almost loses his grip the ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ look on Ford’s face seems absolutely perfect in the moment.

And there’s a certain nightclub scene involving Walker and Michelle, a place where he believes will lead them to the next step towards finding Sondra. Michelle puts Grace Jones singing “I’ve Seen That Face Before” on, the umpteenth time we’ve heard the song in the film, she leads him out onto the dance floor and basically slinks all over him in full view of everyone else there. Walker in his jetlag daze doesn’t seem to know how to respond to this vision, this substitute for his wife who is falling all over him and it becomes hypnotic how the film just stops dead for the moment. In his review Roger Ebert weirdly referred to it as “…a dance sequence in a nightclub that continues until it is inexplicable.” Come on, Roger! Hell, isn’t this scene one of the reasons that movies were invented to begin with? Of course, just staring at Seigner fall all over him on that dance floor is enough of a reason for it to continue as anything. But since we’re on this subject, I’m still a little hazy on the angle of all this playing as a sort of idealized vision of an American middle-aged man going off to Paris from a life that’s become staid, like that bracelet of Sondra’s that doesn’t close very well anymore, trading his wife in for a younger model who attaches herself to him almost immediately, one red dress for another, forever in search of what he’s lost. With the sound of Grace Jones continually warbling “I’ve Seen That Face Before” heard through scenes it all seems like a noir-tinged view of the world anyway and maybe FRANTIC is about the things you encounter in life being forgotten by everyone else while you’re left there, alone with your memories of what haunts you. Polanski has certainly learned of how indifferent the world can be to horrible things that happen. But life goes on, just like the circularity accentuated in the haunting Ennio Morricone score. Business still has to be transacted. Beautiful women are killed. Trash gets picked up. The Eiffel Tower still stands.

Just a few years after WITNESS and still somewhat adventurous in the projects he was choosing, this remains one of Harrison Ford’s best performances and his work here is just as underappreciated as the film itself is. Some of the tics we’ve all gotten used to are there, present an accounted for (The Finger does make an appearance), but there’s an energy to it, he feels totally engaged with a palpable intensity down to how his hand shakes as he tries to fast forward on that tape message he’s having the concierge translate. When he asks, “Where’s my wife?” to someone on the phone at a key moment the desperation couldn’t feel more honest and it feels as if he’s working with his director more than usual to achieve the proper effect along with some surprising bursts of humor from his personality as well. Considering how glum his screen persona would become only a few short years later this film and his supporting role in Mike Nichols’ WORKING GIRL later this year are just about the last glimpse of the Han Solo-early Indiana Jones we know and love. In some ways, FRANTIC is the ideal fusion of the screen presence he developed in the early part of his career (even Richard Walker coming from San Francisco feels like a connection to his early Lucas/Coppola days) with an obvious look ahead to the “My family’s been kidnapped!” joke of the latter part of his career. FRANTIC was not a box office hit but while it isn’t really any sort of career turning point—Pakula’s PRESUMED INNOCENT, which did just fine two years later, isn’t as interesting but it’s not at all bad—it maybe could be seen as a rare case of a director trying to push him beyond his comfort zone and the actor totally willing to go along with the challenge.

Always looking up to Ford with those big eyes and maintaining the right balance of innocence and determination, Seigner’s work here may very well be a product of direction by somebody infatuated with her (I’m not sure I could blame him—she and Polanski have been married since 1989) but nevertheless she’s fascinating to watch with all of her unspoken glances at Harrison Ford—when she’s hanging from a rooftop, legs dangling straight down she doesn’t even seem all that concerned as if she knows that this American doctor who’s suddenly entered her life would never drop her. The likes of Betty Buckley and John Mahoney as an embassy official don’t have much screen time but the work of everyone down to the smallest roles is strong and adds to the tension—the now familiar Dominique Pinon is a wino with a key piece of information and particularly good is Gerald Klein as a sympathetic hotel concierge.

The power had long since been turned back on by the time that I arrived home late that night but all I could think about was the giddy cinematic high I was on, the kind I wish happened more often. FRANTIC remains an underappreciated film. There was never even a decent release on DVD, just a full-frame job from Warner which doesn’t do Polanski’s intricate compositional sense any favors and the Blu-ray, presumably an improvement, shares its disc with PRESUMED INNOCENT. Makes sense, I suppose, but still a shame that it has to be thought of as ‘just’ another Harrison Ford thriller and compared with the versions of this sort of thing that get made today (well, I did mention UNKNOWN earlier) it’s practically an art film in comparison. No, it doesn’t rank as high as certain other Polanski films but how many films really do, anyway? I may never fully understand why I responded to it the way I did way back then, but I don’t really care. All I know is that I was reminded of what that felt like in a way that was completely unexpected. Maybe seeing FRANTIC when I was younger was a step towards my understanding why films like this directed by somebody like Roman Polanski were ultimately going to mean something to me and what that was going to do for my love of film. And maybe I love it all the more now because of that.

People Who Are Never Alone

2011-10-24T22:18:00.000-07:00

It’s possible that I’ve mentioned it in the past, but over the past year or so I’ve developed an odd attachment to the Open All Night bumper on TCM, the one shown before one of their late movies, and it’s gotten to the point where my evening doesn’t feel entirely complete if I haven’t seen it shortly before going to sleep. Consisting of a series of mostly black & white shots depicting downtown life during the late hours, a few of which are recognizable from certain films, it sometimes make me want to leave my apartment, in search of my own personal noir experience as I sit at the counter of a diner drinking coffee in an attempt to somehow fight off sleep. I’m not sure if Fred 62 or House of Pies would really be appropriate for what that vibe demands but I guess those places are there if I ever need them at that hour. But instead of doing that I usually just lie there with TCM staying on, wondering about what I’m not doing in life and just watch what’s on, letting whatever decades-old movie that’s playing take its effect. I prefer it when the film is something even slightly resembling a noir. It just seems right for the hour. On one particular evening recently I was lying there, in bed earlier than usual, feeling like I was on the verge of soon being half-asleep but not quite there yet. Nicholas Ray’s 1952 film ON DANGEROUS GROUND came on, one that I’d seen before. But then it started and I wondered, wait, have I seen this film? And if I haven’t, what movie am I thinking of? And what am I watching, anyway? Is it a noir? Is it a straight drama? A love story? Is it something else altogether? At 82 minutes, is it the shortest epic about a man’s true nature ever made? Is it the longest short film about an event in a man’s life, one which reveals who he really is? I’m not even sure where the film is supposed to be set, where this world Robert Ryan occupies and is sent away from is supposed to be. It looks like New York, I’d imagine it’s supposed to be New York, but when he’s sent ‘upstate’ as it’s referred to in dialogue, the wide open vistas don’t resemble any part of upstate New York I ever knew (apparently location work was done in Colorado, which sounds unusual for the time—I was guessing they shot it up in the Sierra Nevadas). Maybe it’s not supposed to be anywhere specific…it’s just the ‘upstate’ that can be found when you drive away from any of those nameless big cities which exist only in black & white that films like ON DANGEROUS GROUND are set in. The ones which are playing continuously in my head as I sleep, dreaming of that Open All Night bumper on TCM.

Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is a cop, part of a squad who are being pressed by their captain to find the culprits in a gas station robbery that resulted in a fellow officer being killed. He goes about his business while displaying all the ruthlessness he has bubbling up inside him as he continues his investigation but when one beat down that he gives out goes a little too far, to get him out of the way for a bit his boss sends him to the quieter reaches of upstate (“Siberia” as Jim calls it) where help has been requested after a murdered girl was found. But after encountering the murdered girl’s enraged father (Ward Bond) and chasing down a possible culprit the path they take leads them to the remote cabin of a blind woman named Mary Malden (Ida Lupino) who herself has more secrets and revelations than Jim could have possibly realized.

“I don’t like being alone,” are just about the first lines of dialogue heard in ON DANGEROUS GROUND, spoken by somebody we never even see again. Not much happens in the way of plot for a very long stretch at the beginning, or at least not the sort of plot which might be expected. We follow around Robert Ryan’s Jim Wilson as he does his job, looking for these cop killers. He ignores a good-looking floozy (Nita Talbot, quite stunning) in a bar who’s almost certainly underage and gets the bartender to throw her out. He roughs up an innocent guy on the street who matches a description. He responds to the friendly interest a girl who works at a soda fountain shows in him with good spirits but doesn’t pay much attention to her. He pummels a possible informant repeatedly, but not before chillingly taunting him by asking, “Why do you make me do it? Why do you make me do it? You know you’re gonna talk. I’m gonna make you talk. I always make you punks talk, why do you do it? WHY? WHY?” Shortly after we witness this, he shares a friendly moment with a paperboy in front of his building when he finally arrives home at the end of the night. Alone in his tiny apartment he pauses to glance at his Best All-Round Athlete trophy, no doubt from long ago, then he tries scrubbing his hands clean, as if he desperately wants to wash away the filth of what he knows he just did, fully aware that he’s not going to succeed. He’s under the command of a captain played with the expected bluster by Ed Begley who seems as interested in the food he’s being served at a restaurant for lunch as much as anything. With all this swirling around him Jim Wilson doesn’t seem to know anymore what point there is to what he’s doing. He’s alone. “What kind of a job is this anyway? Garbage, that’s all we handle, garbage!” he cries to someone who doesn’t care what he has to say. And with no one to strap his gun holster in for him at the start of the night he doesn’t have anything else other than that garbage.

Jim Wilson is probably in an even worse mental place than Bogart's Dixon Steele in Ray’s IN A LONELY PLACE. This is a man who’s going to explode, no doubt about it. Everyone around him knows this. When he’s sent off to deal with this case in the middle of nowhere it feels like a jolt to the film as if the plot (Screenplay by A.I. Bezzerides based on an adaption by Bezzerides and Ray of the novel ‘Mad With Much Heart’ by Gerald Butler) which has been building gradually suddenly gets hijacked for an unexpected detour. After some time running around in the snowy wilderness with Ward Bond as the enraged father of the murdered girl (for a few minutes it feels as if the conflict between the two of them might actually be the focus) we stumble into something else altogether involving the introduction of Ida Lupino’s character (a surprisingly late entrance for one of the leads of such a short film) and Wilson seems as taken aback by her as we might be. Who is this woman? What movie is this, anyway? ON DANGEROUS GROUND feels dreamlike and strangely, hauntingly real at the same time, aided by a stunning score by Bernard Herrmann, some of which clearly looks forward to his work on NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Even some of the early section set in the city, obviously done on the backlot, feels somewhat different with a few points-of-view shots taken from a car that feel unusual for the time, allowing for camerawork that is surprisingly adventurous. The fatalistic tone is such that even if the time spent in the city doesn’t take place entirely at night it still feels like it does—a night that I suspect never ends for Jim Wilson while he’s there, contrasted with the wide open feel of the second half. Suddenly we’re in an environment that is beautiful yet cold, harsh and unwelcoming yet what winds up happening couldn’t be more the opposite of that, with every single moment involving the almost otherworldly vibe given off by Ida Lupino in her cottage being almost unspeakably beautiful.

It’s almost impossible to imagine this woman existing anywhere else than that cottage. And even if she’s not entirely forthcoming at first with more than a few of her own secrets that she doesn’t want to discuss, it’s as if she’s the beacon of all that is pure in the universe. “Sometimes people who are never alone are the loneliest. Don’t you think so?” she asks Wilson. “I don’t know, I’ve never thought it out,” is his reply and it’s hard to believe he ever would have but I just love that piece of phrasing which seems to indicate she’s hitting him in a soft spot and he’s not sure how to respond to it, how to act with this woman who’s got his number, not hearing any pity in his voice as he’s forced for once to be a professional against the fury of Ward Bond’s enraged father seeking vengeance. She’s blind but it’s as if he desperately wants her to see him and, in a way, she can although she seems to have shut herself off from the world as much as he has, instead choosing to live through the brother she’s desperately trying to hide from these men. “You don’t have to be afraid,” he tells her at one point which could almost be what they’re saying to each other in every sentence, finding their way towards what it’s like to not be alone. The desolation doesn’t feel like any other movie from this period and this section is so moving in its dreamlike qualities that I almost don’t know what to say about it. The sheer weight of emotion that is felt doesn’t really resemble any other movie either. Even the pain clearly shown by a briefly seen young girl over her murdered friend is palpable. Isn’t this supposed to be just a B noir? Not according to Nicholas Ray, I suppose.

With the brief running time it’s hard to avoid the feeling that some of the film does seem truncated (apparently due to tinkering involving Howard Hughes, then in charge of RKO) and the manhunt plot is wrapped up earlier than might be expected. But it’s the aftermath to that manhunt which really turns out to matter, lingering on certain moments involving the haunting image of the two stars in frame together doing nothing but walking, which leads to an ending that feels necessary yet I’m still not completely sure how I feel about it--some reports have reshoots being directed by Lupino and whether this is true or not I do wonder if the final moments could have maybe had a slightly more tentative feel to them. But the emotion holds—even the Ward Bond’s brute is allowed to display a certain amount of compassion in the end in how he regards Ryan. “I don’t like being alone,” went that line spoken at the beginning. Sometimes it’s a difficult thing to say to another person. Sometimes it might be the most important thing to admit of all.

I’m almost tempted to say that this might be my favorite Robert Ryan performance—when a few others like ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW come to mind it’s not such an easy choice to make but regardless there’s an intensity to what he does here that is much more palpable, that lets you feel the bitterness and the quiver in his voice while still letting the inherently decent person that’s deep down there somewhere show through somehow. Ida Lupino is remarkable as well—a figure of mystery who maybe because of how disarming she is reveals more than is apparent at first and her determination visible in her presence draws you to her every time she’s in frame, doing more with those eyes than I can almost believe. There are moments throughout from some of the other actors that work very well--Ward Bond’s fury, Ed Begley asking for more peas in that restaurant, Joan Taylor as Hazel, the friendly girl behind the soda counter. But it’s Ryan and Lupino in the frame together which makes the film, which matters most of all.

TCM has been running various films directed by Nicholas Ray in celebration of the centennial of his birth and one thing that ON DANGEROUS GROUND makes clear, even if there were changes made along the way, is the undeniable feel of emotion that comes through. There's something to the level of spirituality in this man rediscovering who he is, of why he is, making this film more than I can imagine it would have been in anyone else’s hands. “What difference does it make?” someone asks late in the film about how long something might have taken. And really, what difference does it ever make? What does it matter how alone we are? That late night response I had to ON DANGEROUS GROUND feels personal. I’m not even sure if I ever want to watch it with someone else, let alone among people in a crowded theater. You never know when they’re going to start laughing. And maybe it should only be watched late at night, via TCM or otherwise. It should be watched alone. And never lonely.

Between A Rock And A Hard Place

2011-10-16T23:36:00.000-07:00

The distant sounds of seagulls chirping and waves breaking on the shore over the Universal logo may seem an odd way to begin a screwball comedy about divorce which never goes anywhere near the beach but as I was watching the beginning of this particular film from the Coen Brothers once again I flashed on the legendary final scene of their own BARTON FINK and where that film’s title character ends up, then suddenly it all made sense. Maybe the best way to deal with INTOLERABLE CRUELTY is to look at it as the Coens finally figuring out a way to make a movie (maybe even a wrestling movie, so to speak) for the Jack Lipnicks of the movie world who even they sometimes have to deal with, to finally at least try to make something that will please everyone. The very first onscreen credits don’t even mention them but rather producer Brian Grazer (or the way he always had to be referred as on the entertainment news show where I once worked, “Academy Award Winning Producer Brian Grazer”) and it also occurs to me that the film they made right before this was THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE, probably the least commercial project they’ve ever made, so maybe they simply decided to go the complete opposite route with this one and see if making such a movie could work for them. Presuming they got over the writer’s block and figuring out what was in that box Barton was carrying around, of course. That part of it was important.

The thing is, though, it’s the ones that don’t quite make it that sometimes hurt the most. The films that are bad, where you can tell they’re bad from the very first moment, can be easier to shake off. But it hurts when so much about a particular film works and maybe it hurts even more than that when it’s the Coen Brothers. I always want to love their films. I desperately want to get even a sliver of the rush that their best work can give me, like when eons ago I emerged from the Coronet Theater on the Upper East Side after seeing BARTON FINK on opening night shattered to my very core or when gladly returning to BURN AFTER READING multiple times on opening weekend just for the sheer pleasure of the experience or when I saw TRUE GRIT on opening day knowing full well that I would return several days later on Christmas. And I did. Loved it even more the second time. But things don’t always work out the way I’d want it to. Released in October 2003, INTOLERABLE CRUELTY already seems to be kind of forgotten, pushed to the side for other more acclaimed films they’ve made since as well as a few George Clooney vehicles that have also gotten better reception from the world. It’s probably thought of as one of their weaker efforts by now—one hell of a curve to be grading on, that’s for sure—and I wish I could feel differently. It’s almost baffling for me to have this response considering that on the surface it seems like a movie that was made specifically for my own tastes and how some of it works extremely well, with more laughs packed into just the first third than some alleged comedies can manage in ninety minutes. But maybe thinking it was made for me is part of the problem—I still want it to be the sophisticated satire that I wish it was. Of course, if anyone is ever unsure just what the tone is supposed to be the preponderance of cartoony alliterate and rhyming names (“Ramona Barcelona” and “Bonnie Donaly” among others) alone should make it clear—the film clearly wants to be an update of the sort of manic flavor Preston Sturges specialized in and every beat of the plot feels mapped out with clockwork precision in a way that I can’t help but admire. But, and as I write this I’m still figuring out how to put it into words, something about the result just feels off as if a few key scenes were lost along the way or something in the stylization just didn’t translate correctly. Even down to the feel and look of the film it’s as if there was some kind of overall miscalculation of what the approach needed to be. Or maybe the ruthlessly dark comic method of the Coens which was later expertly placed into something like BURN AFTER READING was an imperfect fit for this rewrite job, their comedic approach not fully gelling with what was clearly meant to be a big-budget commercial comedy. Still, it’s not often these days that a film contains what is essentially a full-fledged Abbott & Costello routine which takes place as the trial sequence begins (“Have you sat before her before?” “No, the judge sits first, then we sit.”), so at least the film provides that much to the world. Smiles happen for me and more than a few times some sizable laughs as well but I still find myself sitting through a good amount of the running time wondering just what seems to have gone amiss.

When Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones) learns from the private detective she has hired that husband Rex Rexroth (Edward Herrmann) is in fact cheating on her she immediately initiates divorce proceedings but little does she know that Rex has retained that great Miles Massey (George Clooney), famed for the legendary Massey pre-nup, for his side of the case. Once the two meet during preliminary arguments Miles becomes instantly fascinated by her while at the same time being fully aware of her game plan to marry rich men followed by a speedy divorce. During the trial Miles does indeed prove his brilliance by proving without a doubt that was Marylin’s plan all along when marrying Rex, leaving her with nothing, but she soon reappears at Miles door with a new fiancée in the person of oil magnate Howard Doyle (Billy Bob Thornton) and it soon becomes clear that she’s not going to be out of Miles’ life for long as his fascination with her only increases.

No movie that opens with a pony-tailed Geoffrey Rush in a convertible speeding through Beverly Hills as he sings along with “The Boxer” a beat ahead of the lyrics can be a total loss but in the case of INTOLERABLE CRUELTY the blitheness of this moment actually feels like an unfortunate Trojan horse, a bit of business that makes me feel like I’m in good hands but soon turns out to be almost a high point. For much of the first 40 minutes of the film things feel like aces, the plot clicking along as it builds to the hysterically funny boiling point of the divorce trial between the Rexroths leading to the appearance of Heinz, The Baron Krauss von Espy to blow the lid off her plan. But once that section ends something just seems to go wrong, almost as if there’s a reel missing at this point or something in the way the plot got mapped out was shuffled wrong somehow (Official screen credits: Story by Robert Ramsey & Matthew Stone and John Romano, Screenplay by Robert Ramsey & Matthew Stone and Ethan Coen & Joel Coen. For the record, this appears to be the last time where Joel is the only director credited, with Ethan still among the producers). The way things move feel a little like the story is leaping forward to the next step in the plot too quickly and maybe doesn’t allow for enough variation in how the characters interact with each other. One problem may be that there’s no grounding to things, no emotional center to bring any of this down to earth—I’m trying to come up with a better way to put it than saying that there’s no one to care about or ‘like’, but it feels true and winds up making the entire film feel kind of hollow. Miles Massey is presented as a snazzy, confident Master of the Universe type willing to do anything to win but at the same time he’s totally at sea in life, fearful of his own mortality and his comical ennui never feels all that genuine. Marylin Rexroth is a dragon lady without any qualms of what she’s doing, barely a single sign of a momentary hesitation that would justify any interest in her.

As for the supporting characters up against the leads, it’s not at all a stretch to imagine a swath of actors from the Sturges stock company taking on roles here if that director had made this film back in the 40s (I can actually remember somebody somewhere on the internet doing exactly this at the time the film came out and I wish it had been me) but the formula gets screwy in the case of Clooney and Zeta-Jones who are both directed to behave as larger than life as anybody else so any of the momentary hesitation that the likes of Henry Fonda or Barbara Stanwyck would display in the middle of all the screwball madness in the likes of THE LADY EVE never gets a chance to ring true here—their behavior is entirely made up of madcap behavior like the rest of what goes on around them. Some of it is genuinely funny madcap behavior, yes, with plenty of dialogue that deserves to be bottled but too much of it stays at one level, no variation of tone. Those first 40 minutes feel like they need to build to something between the two leads but the script instead plays games with them leading to a surprising twist as well as actions begun by both that make the fade out unsatisfying while also feeling like it’s attached to the wrong movie. And there’s never a genuine moment between the two of them where they drop all pretenses and become actual people. Yes, the film is doing a riff on Sturges but there’s no attempt to emulate the undeniable elegance of those films, Barbara Stanwyck trying to seduce Henry Fonda in his stateroom with him barely knowing what to do about it. I believe the Coens know how to pull off that sort of thing. They have at other times. Here it doesn’t seem to be part of their M.O. and it feels like there’s a hole at the center of the film as a result. Maybe there’s a certain structural oddity as well—the first act feels impeccable in how things are laid out, the second act feels slightly choppier building up to the revelation of the and then the rushed third feels crammed into about fifteen minutes so even though none of what happens is meant to be serious in the slightest it still feels malnourished. It connects together plotwise and the pacing is there—there really isn’t a scene which could be called superfluous and in some ways this tightness feels like it goes past the bone which is maybe why it seems like something is missing. Plus I wish that it were funnier. Or at least I wish it had a different tone that made it feel like the jokes, which I’ve hopefully indicated sometimes work very well, weren’t being pushed quite so hard. It all makes me feel like I’m being a grouch. Am I being a grouch? I can’t tell.

It’s a strange case, this film I find myself fighting with, because I could easily make a list of the things about it that I like or maybe even love—the Geoffrey Rush bit I already mentioned. Stacey Travis’ obviously unkempt hair that isn’t noticeable at first. The detailed speech as George Clooney’s Miles Massey comes up with a brilliant game plan for a client off the top of his head. The almost silent performance by the unbilled Royce D. Applegate as a client. Cedric the Entertainer slyly suggesting, “You want tact, call a tactician.” Clooney’s spit-take upon hearing Richard Jenkins’ first offer. The legendary line, “Fine! We’ll eat the pastry!” as the perfect button to that scene which gets a laugh out of me every single time. A sort of gulp/spit take made by Kiersten Warren as a friend of Marylin’s (maybe I just like spit takes). Edward Herrmann’s look of total bafflement at the end of the Abbott & Costello routine. Paul Adelstein’s hysterical “Why are we eating here?” during a stop at a crummy diner. Richard Jenkins coming back with, “Is this a legal argument, what’s good for the gander?” The judge in the Rexroth trial played by Isabel Monk O’Connor repeating, “I’m going to allow it” over and over until its payoff. The ultimate fate of Wheezy Joe. Come to think of it, all of those things I mentioned take place in the first forty minutes except for the final one (which is actually kind of similar to something Clooney also witnesses in OUT OF SIGHT, so maybe it’s a running theme for him) and maybe a few things like Cedric’s “Nail your ass!” catchphrase just aren’t as wildly funny as the movie seems to think they are. Visits to the inner chamber of the old man who runs the law firm, designed to provide all the terrors of mortality for Miles fall right in with the Coen Brothers approach but here it just feels out of place--even Rex Rexroth’s obsession with trains, which plays like something out of a thirties comedy just feels a little too silly. I don’t dislike INTOLERABLE CRUELTY, not at all. I’m really trying to find the good in it like few other films but maybe in some ways I wish the Coens had tossed everything in the script after page 40 and started over.

That one-two punch in ’03 & ’04 of the Coens making this and THE LADYKILLERS with Tom Hanks back to back always felt like an odd aberration as if they were testing things to see what it would really be like to attempt making no-holds-barred commercial comedies in the studio trenches—I suspect the odd credit in this film’s end crawl reading, “Adios SENOR GRAZER. Hello MISTER HAND.” refers to this. Neither film is among their best, let alone their most popular (how THE LADYKILLERS holds up, I have no idea since I haven’t seen it since opening day) and whether by coincidence or inspiration due to how they turned out when the duo reappeared in ’07 with NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN it began what is inarguably one of their strongest periods. For that matter, it’s as if with BURN AFTER READING, another darkly comic look at divorce and disillusionment which also tosses a few dead bodies into the mix as well as George Clooney, they figured out how all of the farcical developments and tonal variations here were meant to go together. And with certain characters like the lovelorn gym manager in that film, played once again by Richard Jenkins, that film did manage to ground things amid the insanity. But here the result just plays as clinical, an experiment to make an old-fashioned screwball comedy with a modern day twist but even the aesthetics seem off—I keep thinking this should all look ultra-glossy with a very direct hard-light appearance when instead it’s shot in what look like burnt ember earth tones (Great, I think I just said something to criticize the great cinematographer Roger Deakins. Please forgive me).

And there’s just not much of a reason to care what happens—the movie starts and ends with a certain character who except for one brief moment is not seen at all for the rest of the running time and while there is a symmetry to how it all works out it also gives a feeling of a film where nothing that happened mattered, no change took place beyond a few good-looking people sparring with each other over things that never really matter. It’s a movie about a cynical person (or cynical people, or cynical world for that matter) trying to find something genuine in his life only to find out that the cynicism is really the only thing that makes sense and only when he’s honest about that cynicism can he find something genuine. That’s my guess, anyway. The existentialism of all this is a concept which feels ideal for the Coen Brothers but maybe this was the wrong movie to do that with so the end result just winds up being one of those films stranded in the middle somewhere, neither one thing or the other. I’m not sure they believe their particular brand of cynicism this time around and maybe they’re more comfortable when they don’t have to wrap things up in the expected way with a happy ending, like how they dispatch their characters at the end of something like BURN AFTER READING into a void, forced to finally deal with what they’ve done offscreen.

The performances feel like what they’re being directed to do as opposed to what the actors are probably capable of. George Clooney of course knows how to sell the confidence so he works much better during the first third just like the film as a man who pays so much attention to his teeth, appropriate for his profession. Points to him for also never being afraid to look like an idiot but I wonder if maybe one really great cartoonishly hysterical look by him would work better than twenty. Catherine Zeta-Jones, looking great, never seems human and she’s perfect casting for that, making just saying “Hello dahlings,” come off as genuine but she also doesn’t get much in the way of variation and the few looks of guilt or hesitation she gives late in the game just aren’t enough. Since it makes sense for the supporting characters to be broader, some of them work better although I wish there was maybe half as much of Paul Adelstein’s squirming Wrigley who loudly shrieks a few times too many. But Edward Herrmann, Geoffrey Rush, Richard Jenkins, Julia Duffy and Cedric the Entertainer all have their moments, plus Stacey Travis has a particularly good confused eyeball roll during one scene. Even a few of the bit players get to add small touches that add to the momentum like Wendle Josepher as Miles’ secretary and the memorable Irwin Keyes is Wheezy Joe. Playing her next husband Howard D. Doyle, Billy Bob Thornton doesn’t make as much of an impression, almost as if he was just showing up for a few days to do the Coens a favor but he does appear briefly alongside an unbilled Bruce Campbell, one of several cameos he’s made for the Coens.

It was a few years after THE LADYKILLERS until the Coens returned with the triumph of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and the start of one of the best streaks of their career. It’s a shame that 2011 is going to be Coen-less but if they need to hunker down in their office back in New York to produce more great material then they can take their time. Plus considering the box office heights of something like TRUE GRIT they’ve proven they can achieve they might not need to undertake this sort of experiment again. But even if I find some of INTOLERABLE CRUELTY lacking I can’t help but think that there are few out there who can twist the fabric of structure the way they do here, with a pre-credit sequence seemingly detached from the main plot which winds up tying right into everything at the very end (fun discovery for hardcore Coenphiles—the name ‘Gopnik’ turns up six years before A SERIOUS MAN). Everybody has off-days, maybe this was just one of theirs, or maybe it was just an attempt at something which didn’t quite pan out. There are worse things to say about a film. In the end, I guess we’re still not sure if it was beneath Barton or not to even try writing that wrestling movie but maybe they didn’t need to find out for themselves. Barton, as we all know, never quite knew if that box was even his. I’m still not sure if the Coen Brothers ever decided if INTOLERABLE CRUELTY was theirs either. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I will eat some of the pastry. They’ve been going begging.

To Do Anything About It

2011-10-10T23:42:00.000-07:00

“I know how this one ends,” says David Clennon’s Palmer as he switches out one game show tape for another, a bit of business which looking at it now seems a little like a comment on multiple THING movies, maybe all the more as we approach the opening date of the prequel to the John Carpenter version of THE THING which is named, well, THE THING. I haven’t seen this new film yet (what I’ve heard from those who have, I won’t mention here) but I don’t have very high hopes for it. Maybe you don’t either. I’m not sure how others out there feel. It does occur to me that the Carpenter film is now almost as old as 1951’s THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (directed by Christian Nyby with producer Howard Hawks obviously keeping a close eye on things) was when it was released. It makes me stop and wonder if those who might conceivably complain about the new version now find themselves in a similar position to the people bitching about all the gore in Carpenter’s film when it first came out. Will there be a similar dividing line between people finding the new version to be a genuine offense to what Carpenter (or Hawks) and his collaborators achieved versus those who don’t see what the big deal is, those who think all that CGI was just what the story needed? Not long ago Jeremy Smith, Mr. Beaks of Ain’t it Cool News posted on his Twitter page the review written by New York Times critic Vincent Canby on opening day in 1982 of Carpenter’s THE THING. It’s a piece of writing which uses phrases like "a foolish, depressing, overproduced horror movie", "sometimes it looks as if it aspired to be the quintessential moron movie of the 80s" and saying that it "qualifies only as instant junk." Reading this causes me to remember that Canby was the critic my dad always read back then. If he were here right now I’d want to have a talk with him about this. I can understand the generational divide and the reasons why critics of the Leonard Maltin generation would prefer the 1951 film but, really, what Canby wrote comes off as truly embarrassing almost 30 years later. This is THE THING we’re talking about, John Carpenter’s motherfucking THE THING which as far as I’m concerned, and many others out there seem to agree, is an absolute masterpiece. This much needs to be said. Maybe I need to put down a few of my own thoughts on it before another movie forever alters what the perception might be, for better or for worse.

I was too young at the time so I didn’t see it that summer when it opened (same day as BLADE RUNNER and, more famously, two weeks after E.T.) All these years later I’m not even certain what I thought of the film during my first viewings on cable but thinking back on it now my recollection is that for some time my own response to it was somewhat muted, as if the story played as blank for me as the expressions on all those faces when MacReady makes his “I know I’m human…” speech. Maybe I just need to grow into what the film really was and I remember a particular theatrical screening at some point in the early 90s when the whole thing clicked for me and I thought, “Hang on, this is brilliant. What the hell was I missing until now? What the hell was the world missing then?” As passionate as I sometimes am when it comes to Carpenter’s films, THE THING stands apart from the rest of them as if everything clicked together this one time through his essential filmmaking DNA in a way it never did again and while on occasion he has sometimes seemed to be consciously attempting a ‘John Carpenter’ sort of approach (which I love, don’t get me wrong) here those elements feel totally natural, fresh and never at all self-conscious. I’ve found myself keeping it on a lot lately. I’m sitting here watching it as I write this. I think I need to have it on.

To briefly mention the plot, even though I can’t imagine somebody reading this hasn’t seen it fifty times already, the John Carpenter-directed version of THE THING is set at an isolated U.S. science station in Anarctica, where the calm is instantly broken by the appearance of a Norweigan helicopter shooting at a dog for reasons unknown. Upon investigating the camp where the Norweigans came from the group, with helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell) eventually becoming a reluctant leader, discover evidence indicating that team found something in the ice, something which woke up, something which now may very well have already infiltrated one or more people in their own camp and look exactly like one of them. And it doesn’t take MacReady long to realize that what happens to them may be a minor concern if the threat that the thing is ever finds its way through all that snow to civilization. Going along with Palmer’s tape switch, it occurs to me now that THE THING ‘82 plays very much as the maverick cover version of the more traditional version of this story, the one which had at that time been playing on the late show for years. A remake that most likely grew out of an attempt to capitalize on the massive success of ALIEN and use the growing success of director Carpenter, the two films so different in most ways (the few noticeable examples of homage are brief and unobtrusive) that we are now getting a film which is apparently a prequel strikes me as an act of cultural regression. There’s nothing new here, no reason for it to exist and in some ways the 1982 films has itself been infiltrated by its own Thing. So does John Carpenter’s THE THING still matter? Will it still matter? And what does it mean to me?

There’s no avoiding just how strong Kurt Russell is as MacReady, one of the very best performances of his career, but it also strikes me how consciously (and admirably) the character is never presented as a ‘hero’ in the Snake Plissken mode, instead taking command when he has no other choice in the matter. The narrative is continually trying to keep things off kilter and ellipse certain events, like the odd section where MacReady and Childs go up to the shack in a sequence that we never see, and successfully placing doubt in the viewer’s mind even if for just a few minutes as to what might be going on. Obviously, whenever Russell is onscreen we believe in every ounce of conviction he presents when he insists he’s still human and if this were a more action oriented film I could believe MacReady would be able to pilot his chopper out under treacherous conditions. But I’m glad the movie never forces him to do that and besides, he’s a protagonist with only one thing in mind when the movie begins. “I’m tired, I want to go to my shack and get drunk,” MacReady tells Fuchs who has some important information to discuss, soon before the shit really starts to hit the fan. I sometimes find myself feeling that way myself, hiding out watching my DVDs of COMMUNITY but I get the feeling MacReady just stares into darkness, still obsessed over whatever unspoken events have occurred in his past that we never know about and you can feel whatever bitterness that led him to the ends of the earth without him ever having to say why. The first thing we see him doing, in addition to pouring what clearly isn’t his first glass of J&B, is playing one last round of computer chess before making sure he never has to listen to that female voice (Adrienne Barbeau, actually) cheating him again. Just with that one action he’s not only resigned himself to drinking as much as possible, he’s cut himself off with the last version of a woman I suspect he had any contact with in the world. Actually, each of these guys seem to have their own private narratives going on—MacReady’s clearly not the only one relying on booze, particularly with that prominent bottle of Smirnoff next to Wilford Brimley’s Blair as he reads the bad news off that computer, news that is clearly causing him to make good use of it.

I’m never entirely clear on what exactly the functions of each of these guys at the US Outpost No. 31 are (beyond just knowing that none of them would be eligible for the glory a nobel prize would bring) but they’re each portrayed in such a vivid fashion and the way each of them behave I can believe that they chose to be here at the ends of the earth for a reason so they never come across as mere types—the antagonistic one, the funny one, the hysterical one. It really does feel as if Carpenter had each of these guys live among each other isolated from the world remaining in character for a week or so then showed up and started shooting the movie. Locked in with them is this mood which seems unending and holds right from that very first wide, low angle shot of the Antarctic as that helicopter comes into frame with the Ennio Morricone music rumbling underneath—we feel the cold, the isolation. And the pacing courtesy of editor Todd Ramsay isn’t just good, it feels perfectly achieved without an ounce of fat yet knowing that at times to keep the dread building it needs to hold on certain moments, finding that metronome rhythm I always associate with Carpenter, yet never pulled off as well as it is here. It all steadily builds through continually sharp dialogue in the screenplay credited to Bill Lancaster (based on “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr.) which combines the unknowability of what this creature is--“Because it’s different than is, see?” says MacReady in a way that is as much we can ever understand--with the matter of fact way these guys ultimately have to deal with it. And it’s the moments that stand out amid the rising dread—Joel Polis’ Fuchs telling MacReady they should each prepare their own foods, Richard Dysart’s Copper swathed in darkness as he approaches the camera in the Norweigan camp, building up to the fever of the final hour with those blood tests.

During one famously horrific moment on the audio commentary he shares with Kurt Russell director Carpenter speculates, “If this was happening in front of me, I’d probably think, well…I guess that’s about it,” and I know that there are times when I find something in that moment via Rob Bottin’s effects that feel about as extreme as imaginable (“You gotta be fucking kidding me…”), the visceral quality of this nightmare coming to total fruition. And as much as Carpenter’s own style is discussed in relation to the great Howard Hawks, particularly with his recurring use of the ‘group under siege in a single location’ storyline this can’t be said to be a similarly Hawksian portrayal of camaraderie like, say, PRINCE OF DARKNESS might be—some seem to be friends but for the most part the way they keep to themselves makes it a perfect setup for men who can no longer trust each other or be sure who anyone really is. And with no women in the film it means there’s no temptation to fall back on some of Carpenter’s Hawks-chick type portrayals along the lines of Laurie Zimmer in ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 or Adrienne Barbeau in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK which, great as they are, always feel like a certain type of stylization this film never attempts. There’s complete naturalism from the ensemble--Wilford Brimley, David Clennon, Keith David, Richard Dysart (and his nose ring), Richard Masur, Charles Hallahan, Joel Polis, T.K. Carter, Thomas Waites, Peter Maloney and Donald Moffat tied to that fucking couch. The characters make sense even if they’re not always explained--it feels like there’s a reason why Fuchs goes to MacReady with his information beyond Kurt Russell being the star of the movie, as if Polis’s character knows who would actually listen to him. None of them are ciphers. None of them feel like they’re just waiting to be killed.

Along with that is a narrative stripped down, resisting explaining too much beyond some information offered by Wilford Brimley. By a certain point it doesn’t matter anyway and some of the key exposition is never really heard because it’s when Brimley is screaming at them anyway. In some ways that lack of blatantly spelling things out is part of what makes the movie so eminently rewatchable as if trying to decode certain moments or piece together exactly what happened with a few of the characters whose fates (or, at the least, exact circumstances of their deaths) remain a mystery. The approach avoids certain cheap scares for a surprisingly long time in favor of what feels like ever-encroaching moments of dread, such as a single shot observing MacReady from behind before a fade out. Almost radically so, there can’t even be said to be a definitive version of The Thing to remember it as—even the final stage seen during the climax feels like it could easily merge into something else at any time. The Scope compositions courtesy of D.P. Dean Cundey add immeasurably to that feel of cold and doom (as an aside--at a PSYCHO II midnight screening a few months back at the New Beverly Cundey was actually asked about the new film and surprisingly answered that he would have been very interested in revisiting the material but was told the director was ‘intimidated’ by him. So there you go) while the Ennio Morricone score never stops fascinating me, seeming to be laid out across the film as opposed to covering specific actions along with what I suspect are some John Carpenter-Alan Howarth additions and it makes it all the more a case of it seeming like a living part of the film. It’s funny how much in my mind the music is connected to every scene yet there are surprisingly long stretches with no score at all. I guess in my mind when I think about this film the music is always there whether it is or not. And that feels appropriate for THE THING. It always feels alive, always changing, never settling down into one thing in my mind. There are few films like it.

Several years after it died at the box office with a total gross of $19.6 million THE THING was being talked about as something of an early comment on AIDS but all these decades later the threat it portrays could be read as any number of things, the encroaching shadow of Reaganism on the world or whatever but there are times when for me the straight-ahead nature of the narrative manages to transcend any simple assignations to its meaning. These guys are out there in the cold, they seem like men who really don’t give a shit about anything anymore until they have no choice but to do otherwise. Maybe in the end THE THING is about wanting to do nothing but go to your shack to get drunk and the choices you make when you’re dragged away from that. You may not want to do anything about it, but you are what you are. You’re human. And maybe THE THING ’82, possibly the one true masterpiece of John Carpenter’s career, is also about to be assimilated, becoming something different, maybe losing its own individuality in the process. But almost thirty years after it was made, John Carpenter’s THE THING seems like it’s a part of the world that rejected it at first so maybe there isn’t much to worry about. After all, I know how good it is, how human, as tangible and as present as those Rob Bottin effects which I certainly know will never be equaled. And I’ll just have to keep absorbing this film myself as the closing tub-thumps of the Morricone score (track title “Humanity (Part 2)” on the album) continue to linger in my head. And it will. For now, I guess I should just…wait here for a little while. See what happens.

Daydreams And Traffic

2011-09-30T23:11:00.001-07:00

Over the years of going to video stores there have always been those films which I kept putting off renting, always going with another choice and thinking that I’d get around to that other choice eventually. Of course, with a few of these titles I put it off for so long that over the past several years those video stores suddenly closed and I realized I’d missed my chance, particularly with a few of the ones that I knew would never come out on DVD. One of those was certainly Alan Rudolph’s 1977 mood piece WELCOME TO L.A. which always looked like something I would be interested in. So why did I keep putting it off? Beats me, but it was one of those I would sometimes keep an eye out for in VHS racks, until out of nowhere the American Cinematheque ran it in the spring of 2010 and I gladly drove across town to the Aero in Santa Monica to finally take care of this nagging itch. What I got was a film which was certainly evocative in ways I expected from a late 70s film produced by Robert Altman while still containing numerous elements that made it frustrating as well, combining the misty romanticism I associate with Alan Rudolph, very much present and accounted for in his directorial debut (not counting the 1972 horror film PREMONITION which I’ve never seen) with a misanthropic feel that doesn’t always quite come together. At the very least it feels true to itself but what Rudolph’s approach was going to ultimately become still feels it’s being developed so as a result I find myself appreciating the film more than I actually like it. I may even prefer thinking about it to actually watching it.

There isn’t exactly a storyline to synopsize but suffice it to say it involves several people in L.A. drifting in and out of each other’s lives as well as each other’s beds. Much of it focuses on songwriter Caroll Barber (Keith Carradine with soul patch, making his second appearance in a film on this blog) coming home for the first time in several years to visit his wealthy father Carl Barber (Denver Pyle). There’s ambitious and strait-laced Ken Hood (Harvey Keitel) who works for Carl, his wife Karen (Geraldine Chaplin) who seems to like spending much of her time riding around in taxis, needy real estate agent Ann Goode (Sally Kellerman), the young maid Linda (Sissy Spacek) who Ann hires to clean the Echo Park apartment she’s rented for Carroll, photographer Nona Bruce (Lauren Hutton) who has been having an affair with Carl, effervescent agent Susan Moore (Viveca Lindfors) who clings to Carroll as much as she can and finally famous singer Eric Wood (Richard Baskin) who Carl has hired to put some of Carroll’s songs down on tape.

WELCOME TO L.A. seems like a film only to be watched alone during a late, possibly drunken night, which would maybe be ideal for such a film about lonely souls in the city during the zoned out 70s. It draws you in but it also feels a little too half-sketched as if instead of scenes it’s more interested in the moments it drifts through, the whole dreamy gestalt of the oddness and the staring and the drinking and Viveca Lindfors gesticulating wildly. The actors seem keyed in to the approach but there doesn’t seem to be enough for them to get engaged with as would sometimes be the case in Rudoph’s later, thematically similar films (not to mention a few Altman directed himself, particularly SHORT CUTS) as if he wasn’t experienced enough yet to shape things into the hoped-for improvs which might have helped, with a few of the characters drifting out of things for too much of the running time. Much of the dialogue comes off as blatant statements of themes, in some ways indicating how these people are disconnected from each other but it doesn’t always help them to become distinctive characters.

I like Rudolph’s work at times (after all, I wrote a favorable piece about MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE recently and REMEMBER MY NAME which immediately followed WELCOME is particularly good as well—it’s been a while, but I imagine I’d also have good things to say about the likes of TROUBLE IN MIND, LOVE AT LARGE and AFTERGLOW. And let’s not forget his cameo in THE PLAYER) but at this stage still very much a disciple of the Altman approach it feels like he wasn’t as in control of his surroundings as he was later on, even in a few of his films that also didn’t quite work. The confidence doesn’t seem to be there yet in WELCOME TO L.A., the overall result is just a shade too thin as much as there are times when I can poke through the mist of what the characters are saying to each other and get hypnotized by the late 70s ennui, with the gazing, the brooding, as they wonder why they’re unloved, sometimes while lying right next to the person they love. It just doesn’t always hold--it’s not a problem that it can be tough to track some of the relationships and their statuses whether at the beginning, middle or end but it is a problem that it feels a little like Rudolph never bothered to explain his overall concept to anyone else. I would say that certain plot threads are left hanging like Carrol’s relationship with his father since Pyle seems to drop out of the movie about an hour in, giving up on his son in favor of employee Keitel, but that would imply that the plot is what it’s meant to be. The dreamy nature is sometimes broken by Chaplin’s deliberately unpleasant sounding cough which she takes on for a stretch in the middle, something that seems indicative of the film overall. Some of it is just too vague, too harsh, as hypnotic as it sometimes is. I don’t particularly like the experience of watching it but at the same time I feel a little haunted by it. Maybe I understand it, even if I can’t explain it. I’m writing this on a Friday night, so what do you expect? Maybe this is what L.A. is anyway.

The film is also noteworthy for spotlighting the talents of Richard Baskin, music supervisor of the NASHVILLE soundtrack—that night at the Aero was actually a tribute to Baskin, with both films being shown. He appears in NASHVILLE as Frog being berated by Henry Gibson during the opening section and in WELCOME TO L.A. he and his songs are a recurring presence throughout, with Baskin himself playing a famous singer everyone seems to know, hired on to perform the songs allegedly written by Carradine’s character and the ballads are so prevalent that there’s no way for this music, at home in no decade other than the 70s, droning (so much that should be a capital D) on endlessly in and out until it feels like we’ve heard some of the songs half a dozen times, to not affect whatever your opinion of the film will be (incidentally, Baskin appeared as musical guest on SATURDAY NIGHT LOVE around the time this film was released in a show hosted by Sissy Spacek, no doubt as promotion for it and the soundtrack album). It’s interesting to read comments out there on how much people seem to positively hate listening to him but without these songs the movie would simply be something else altogether, for better or worse. There’s a genuine yearning in there and, honestly, they stick with me enough that if the soundtrack became available on CD I’d want to have it. Baskin’s own life may very well be a key inspiration anyway, given that it’s a film about a songwriter who is the heir to a fortune just as Baskin, son of one of the founders of Baskin Robbins, himself is. There are clearly mirrors here, presented in a haze of Carradine’s character always drinking, unable to connect or communicate with anyone including these women throwing themselves at him, his music being sung by someone else, the movie itself seeming to exist in a haze through this city of one night stands that Baskin sings about.

As for the film, it’s a sort of jigsaw of characters trying too hard in love, in sex, and moments occasionally poking through to indicate what the meaning of it all is. Geraldine Chaplin speaks of being the only person in a movie theater at one point and it almost seems like she could be talking about this film, unspooling to audiences consisting of single people who take away from it all whatever they see of themselves in what’s onscreen. Daydreams and traffic, says Sally Kellerman of her reluctance to take the freeway in Los Angeles since it doesn’t let her daydream and that seems to be a metaphor for the movie itself. Instead of taking a straight route it wants to wander, get lost in certain moments and more than a few times these detours are pretty damn annoying, with characters meeting and being drawn to each other whether they should be or not. “I think we’re fast becoming old friends,” Kellerman tells Keitel when she’s trying to ingratiate herself after they’ve only just met, not very likely when none of these people even feel comfortable with themselves. Part of me wants to ascribe a word like ‘playful’ to it but in actuality the film isn’t really a pleasant enough experience for that. Still, that doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth to it in some way.

Probably the one thing about the film which stays with me above all is its recurring use of characters briefly breaking the fourth wall. It’s subtle at first—it’s not clear if Chaplin is even talking to herself, to a cab driver or to us—and one early occurrence involving Sally Kellerman happens so fast it almost plays as subliminal or an endearing mistake so the first few times I almost wasn’t even sure if it happened but it soon becomes certain this is part of the very fabric of the film. These characters that can’t connect with each other, who have no idea how to react to each other’s feelings, are in fact letting us in on their own secret, revealing something to us that they can’t share with anything else. One particularly surprising nude scene seems representative for how bare the film is meant to be, how awkward and haunting it really is. Maybe what you’re meant to take away from the deliberately enigmatic final shot that plays through the end credits is that you can’t strain yourself to make sense of L.A., to over explain it, to try to convince people who you want them to think you are. All you can do is find some kind of peace within yourself.

The performances are very much a part of the rhythm of the piece but it still feels like Rudolph isn’t using them as well as he would have a few years later even though the lack of chemistry, of connection, in every scene seems totally intentional. Keith Carradine is internal in his mannerisms and he’s meant to be, Geraldine Chaplin seemed to find her groove with the director big time in the following year’s REMEMBER MY NAME. Harvey Keitel offers an earnest charm which eventually pokes through his businesslike exterior and one moment by himself in an elevator excited about some good news is just about the most likeably human moment the entire film. Sally Kellerman is also particularly good in portraying her own desperate loneliness and Sissy Spacek’s waiflike nature is used to good effect (plus she’s nude part of the time, so I guess program this on a double bill with Michael Ritchie’s PRIME CUT). John Considine affects a pretty dead on portrait of 70s L.A. sleaze as Kellerman’s husband and not appearing as much as I’d like is the memorably beguiling Diahnne Abbott, of TAXI DRIVER and THE KING OF COMEDY, as one of Carradine’s conquests and she somehow seems to capture something just right in what the tone should be.

The movie may be forgotten by most of the world but it still feels important that I was finally able to see it. Very recent I was in Rocket Video, an L.A. rental store that is sadly going out of business and was having a closing sale. I went to look for rarities and instead of DVDs that I knew would be easily found elsewhere I was going carefully through their VHS racks in search of titles that are most likely becoming increasingly rare as time goes on. Near the very end of my hunt, right there among the Ws in the Drama section, I saw their copy of WELCOME TO L.A. and without even thinking I snagged it immediately. I’ve watched it and the tape doesn’t seem to be in very good shape—I’m not even sure if it would be a good idea to watch it again in this player—but for all I knew this was going to be the last time I’d ever see it in a video store. And sooner or later I might need to drift through it again on nights when I have that particular feeling. Hey, you never know.

More Honor Than A Winner

2011-09-28T20:28:00.001-07:00

It wasn’t much of a surprise when after the emergence of Quentin Tarantino in the 90s with RESERVOIR DOGS and, especially, the massive success of PULP FICTION that we were treated to a wave of films featuring hired killers, snappy patter and blood-infused jet black comedy. That’s just what Hollywood does. My own recollection is that some of these offshoots are better than others with more than a few never even making it beyond the ranks of a miniscule theatrical release and shelves of video stores in those pre-DVD days. A few probably have minor cult followings of their own by now. Most are already forgotten and were probably never very good to begin with. At the very least several of them managed to find their own unique spin on the formula while also providing parts for actors who might not have gotten such chances otherwise and I have to admit that maybe enough time has gone by that some of them provide a certain kind of nostalgia for me.

Released in September 1996, 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY is fifteen years old now and though it never comes close to the best of Tarantino the film has a certain slick, fast-paced quality with a tight construction that is enough to make it genuinely entertaining at times. Since I have my own ambivalent feelings about the place I do sort of wish that the film had more to say about the valley as promised in the title. Unless it has to do with work I never want to go there very much, so naturally I’ve had several jobs there over the years and I can understand about what it’s like to get stuck there. But whatever it may promise, the film doesn’t seem to have that much to say about what it’s like to live there beyond the tentative nature of people drifting past each other in daily life and how the place can prevent people from staying true to what they really are deep down. It might not even be that much of a stretch to say that it could just as easily be called 2 DAYS OVERLOOKING THE VALLEY considering how much of it takes place up there in the hills overlooking it all and doesn’t even go north of Ventura Blvd into the more middle class sections all that much (in ‘96 we still had to wait for Paul Thomas Anderson to make his presence known for the definitive cinematic look at the valley). Revisiting it years later does offer a reminder of why people paid so much attention to Charlize Theron right off the bat while also offering a clearer picture of both the film’s strengths and drawbacks. It’s a movie that ultimately wants to be about the losers finally coming out ahead which makes it somewhat endearing but it still feels like it could have used a little more weight, raising the question of how much can happen in a minute to change your life but the answers it comes up with are a little too gimmicky. Too bad, because as anyone who’s spent time in the valley certainly knows, a minute can be a very long time.

The plot revolves around several different groups of people. There’s the hitmen team of Lee Woods (James Spader) and Dosmo Pizzo (Danny Aiello) who pull off the job of killing Roy Foxx (Peter Horton) as ex-wife Becky (Teri Hatcher) lies in bed next to him, knocked out by an injection Lee has given her. There’s gorgeous Helga Svelgen (Charlize Theron), Lee’s girlfriend who figures into the job somehow. There’s art dealer Allan Hopper (Greg Cruttwell), in immense pain from a kidney stone and his beleagured assistant Susan Parish (Glenne Headly) who are taken hostage by Dosmo after he escapes an attempt by Lee to get him out of the way. There’s washed-up film director Teddy Peppers (Paul Mazursky) who is trying to put a few last things in order before blowing his brains out and in trying to give away his dog encounters nurse Audrey Hopper (Marsha Mason), Allan’s step-sister. And there’s the two cops, ambitious Wes Taylor (Eric Stoltz) and hot-headed Alvin Strayer (Jeff Daniels), who stumble on to the murder scene and figure into it all. Of course, many of these various people come together in unexpected ways.

Tone is difficult, one of the toughest things of all for a movie to nail and a few of those post-Tarantino films would take some kind of misstep along the way, maybe being a bit too mannered with its approach, too obvious with pop-culture references or sometimes taking the darkly comic nihilism a step too far, one too many brains splattered against a wall. One of the strengths of 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY, written and directed by John Herzfeld, is that it’s actually pretty successful with its own tone for the most part, managing to capture that feel of the sun hanging in the sky during another hot day out there in Studio City as a touch of darkness hangs in the air while feeling set more in the ‘real’ world than these things sometimes are and making the choice to keep away from pop culture references. Another is momentum and the film does know to keep things moving right off the bat, packing its narrative into a deliberately tight timeframe according to the title (although it does leave the valley on at least one occasion), slamming from one scene to the next while also continually willing to observe the behavior of the various actors in a way which brings a welcome energy throughout. There’s also a good amount of snappy dialogue (“I hate when people ask if they can ask me a question”) and some interesting use of locations from a massage parlor Stoltz takes an interest in to one of those massive parks Mazursky visits early on as well as vantage points from the hills overlooking the valley which always seem inherently cinematic-- mention also should be made of D.P. Oliver Wood who frames his Scope shots to give a feel of genuine expansiveness to the entire film along with providing the various leads with close-ups that may be among the best some of them have ever had (particularly Theron, no surprise) and helps to make the characters seem that much more vivid.

Having said all that, one thing which stuck out to me on this viewing was just how thin 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY is at times. True, for a film in which not very much happens it does have a nice, snappy pace and a game cast working at full throttle. But the expected complications never quite twist around as much as might be expected and the overall design doesn’t quite feel as layered as it should. There are certain surprises but some of what happens is just a little too easy, the way people wind up intersecting never coming off as the jolt it should be. The characters seem to casually meet up with each other as opposed to colliding with them and there’s also a late-in-the-game McGuffin which has such a ‘so what’ tinge to it it’s as if it was added several drafts in to give a legitimate reason for the climax to take place. Maybe it’s that the film is trying a little too hard to get the plot to connect up while not taking advantage of tertiary characters or situations on the sidelines for any statement it wants to really make about ‘the valley’ and what it represents to take hold. Some bits like a random cutaway to Lawrence Tierney (like Stoltz, a carryover from Tarantino) in a hotel room complaining about the noise caused by the fight upstairs offers a hint of that sort of thing but the movie could use more of it and it stays with the main players too much for that to ever happen.

Along with several TV movies to his credit, Herzfeld had years earlier also directed the notorious John Travolta-Olivia Newton John comedy TWO OF A KIND which interestingly went unmentioned in the 2 DAYS press materials that referred to the film as his feature directorial debut—the Los Angeles Times even ran an article at the time calling him on it. As effective as the flashiness and energy often is the film also has a certain shallow quality of the sort that I think Tarantino is unfairly accused of at times and, at the very least, some of the attempts at genuine depth to the characters feel a little underdeveloped as if another draft or two was still needed. There are themes in 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY of people who have to make the decision of whether or not to change who they are, of so called-losers going up against so called-winners, of certain people finally getting their comeuppance in their homes up in the hills and of beauty being overwhelmed by ugliness as represented by the fate of the utterly stunning Charlize Theron, looking fresh out of the Replicant vat in that skin-tight outfit until she takes her own game one step too far. As well-paced as it is some ends feel a little too loose and a few things make me wonder if the movie was cut down at points—much of the growing connection between Mason and Mazursky’s characters feels truncated whether it was or not since she we never get to hear the backstory behind the person she’s visiting in the cemetery or even get a good reason why she correctly determines to all that he’s suicidal. The way the film discards a few of the main characters before the climax is also frustrating, particularly in the case of Daniels which just makes his character arc seem muddled and incomplete.

If it’s an attempt at interlocking narratives where the game of 52 pick-up all comes together in the end that’s one thing, if it’s Altman-style anecdotes where we don’t need to necessarily follow people all the way to the end that’s another and if 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY is trying to do both I’m not sure it totally pulls off that balance along with some comedy that’s a little too obvious like Aiello’s hitman who’s afraid of dogs and decides to cook for himself while holding his gun on his hostages—in fairness, Aiello manages to makes these scenes work pretty well and for some reason I particularly like when he asks if they have any rapini for what he’s preparing. The movie also has some pretty bad music, particularly a needlessly distracting song played on the soundtrack as Mazursky puts a gun to his forehead in a cemetery ready to blow his brains out, totally wrong for such an emotional moment and it’s the sort of choice that dilutes the entire film as a result. It’s surprising to learn that Jerry Goldsmith of all people composed a score which was rejected and based on the clips found on Youtube what he provided (more emotional, less arch and for all I know not at all what Herzfeld wanted) it clearly would have made it a different film, for better or worse. Maybe it would have provided the sort of depth that I wish it had. Maybe that’s not what it was going for anyway. But there is an undeniable energy and momentum to 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY—it moves, it’s never dull and at times really is enjoyable in a late 90s Tarantino knockoff kind of way. Plus it has that famous fight between Teri Hatcher and Charlize Theron, a pretty awesome scene which makes me wonder how I can even think to say anything bad about the film at all. I like 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY, I really do, I just wish that maybe a few extra blanks had been filled in to make it even richer. I can certainly relate to the quixotic thought that a loser may indeed have more honor than a winner, as Mazursky’s washed-up director states at one point or of the frustration Teri Hatcher’s Olympic skier feels with having come in fourth place several times running. It’s something that one needs to remember in this town, as you’re trying to make your way down one of the side streets in North Hollywood, doing anything you can to get back to Los Feliz before nightfall. Trust me, I always do the best I can to be out of the valley after the sun goes down. It just seems like common sense.

As strong as the entire cast is, it’s clearly Charlize Theron who stands out not only because of how absolutely stunning she is but because of how much her genuine, unusual presence really pops off the screen, bringing an intensity to her role that makes you always wonder what’s going on with her and what she’s thinking. It transforms the movie into something more than it might have been otherwise, taking what might have been a standard neo-noir femme fatale role and turning it into something unexpected, all the way up to her very last moment which has always stayed with me through the years, looking like the utterly damaged porcelain doll that she really is. James Spader, with that stopwatch he uses to always giving his prey one more minute, is as queasily intriguing as you would want him to be and he plays the part effectively but as scripted he never really has a single human response to anything so the character feels like more of a construction, the post-Tarantino hired killer that he is, than a living, breathing person. Teri Hatcher nicely balances the possible duplicitous feelings going on within her good girl exterior, Danny Aiello takes what might be the most clichéd role (hired killer nice guy) and manages to give him depth, Glenne Headly endearingly bounces off of him, Greg Cruttwell sells the agony his art world prick is going through while Eric Stoltz and Jeff Daniels build enough tension between the two of them that it’s too bad it’s never really paid off—Daniels, an obvious case of casting against type, in particular makes his underwritten part fascinating and deserving of his own movie. Mazursky, possibly building off any personal feelings of where his career really was in the mid-90s, is simply dynamite, just about the single best performance here with a pain in his eyes no one else approaches and it’s hard for me not to root for him to regain the dignity his director has obviously lost. It’s also interesting that Aiello played what was essentially Mazursky’s surrogate role in the 1993 comedy THE PICKLE and the physical resemblance between the two allows for an interesting effect, providing some extra tension in their scenes as if there’s much more going on than is being spoken. And there’s also Marsha Mason, directed by Mazursky years earlier in BLUME IN LOVE, who provides a nicely sensible balance to the rest of the danger that is felt with Aiello holding the gun on them and she correctly seems like more of a normal person than these movies usually have. A few of the smaller roles pop out as well--playing an idiot actor who smilingly says the worst things imaginable to Mazursky, personal favorite Austin Pendleton absolutely nails his one scene (plus one small extra beat later on) big time, Kathleen Luong brings a beguiling ambiguity to her Vietnamese masseuse and making “special appearances” are Louise Fletcher as a landlord and Keith Carradine as a valley police detective.

I don’t know if I’m always thinking ‘this is a nice place to live’ like Daniels barks out at one point since that’s not always what comes to mind when I drive down certain streets, but I guess I can understand. He was born there, he stays there, it’s what he is. 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY does get me to feel strangely nostalgic for those days in a way that I’m still trying to figure out but thinking about how much it’s a part of that time reminds me that while some of these films were being made Quentin Tarantino himself was stepping away from this approach as would become evident with the following years much more contemplative JACKIE BROWN, underappreciated in its time but by now it almost feels like there’s more passion for it out there than even the legendary PULP FICTION. But for a few years in the nineties this kind of approach to dark, violence infused comedy just seemed like part of the pop culture beast, when the thought that there would only be a minute to change our lives still seemed prevalent. Now that I’m older I know it takes a little longer. One of the final images of the film has someone heading to the future, for one more chance to do better than fourth place, regardless of what it’s taken to get there so I suppose you could say that 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY is really about finding some kind of hope in the possibilities of what still might come in the future regardless of what’s already happened in the past. Now that I think about it, there are far worse things to take away from a movie.

Ecological Balance

2011-09-22T21:49:00.000-07:00

As autumn begins, so does the new TV season, one which I have a somewhat greater interest in than I usually do, but let’s leave that aside for the time being. Recently I was told that someone I know slightly saw NETWORK for the first time and hated it. I really don’t know what to say about this. If I knew the person in question better I could take some guesses but…really? NETWORK? Were they expecting a broad comedy? Were they not approaching it in the context of the time it was made? Do they just not understand anything about anything? Has NETWORK really become obsolete for some people out there? And in asking these questions have I in some way become like William Holden’s Max Schumacher, wondering what the hell has happened to the world?

Earlier this year, even before the April death of legendary director Sidney Lumet, there was a period where for whatever reason I found myself watching NETWORK quite a lot. I’m still not sure why. Maybe because as I get older, becoming more attuned to everything going on, it’s like the movie crystallizes more and more for me. When I was younger I think I had found myself looking at it as a sort of past version of the future to come—of course, that doesn’t make very much sense since NETWORK (and please don’t think this is meant to be any sort of definitive look at the film. It may not even be my own definitive look at it) is very much set during the time it was made in, with not only numerous topical references (has any other movie ever mentioned PHYLLIS?) but specifically dated through ’75-’76 so we can track the months of the storyline. We’re now more than a few years past the point where much of NETWORK can be taken as any sort of satire anymore, not in a world someone on a reality show commits suicide which is followed by a special where the other people on the program talk about it. Not where CNN chooses to devote most of its coverage on a single day to the death of someone like Anna Nicole Smith. It made slightly more sense for the so-called entertainment-related news show I worked for at the time to devote as much attention to it as they did but not that much more. And now, several years after her death, Anna Nicole Smith already seems to be totally forgotten probably because she was someone who, after all, never actually did anything.

It also might be my favorite Sidney Lumet film, the one I find myself drawn to watching the most, more than 12 ANGRY MEN, more than DOG DAY AFTERNOON—I’m not necessarily saying it’s his best and, admittedly, there are still a few titles I have to get around to but there may be some irony in how it’s not only more associated with the man who wrote it, Paddy Chayefsky, but it’s one of a handful of films which has an authorial “by” credit attributing that writer immediately following the film’s title. But maybe to say that would be to ignore just how much Sidney Lumet really did when he directed NETWORK. It might be an interesting assignment for anyone to compare it to, say, the Arthur Hiller-directed THE HOSPITAL which was also written by Chayefsky and, for that matter, features a similar possessive credit. It’s not even all that hard to imagine that Lumet might have been a possibility for that film at one point and certainly Hiller has never been anyone’s idea of a grand visual stylist—there’s a considerable lack of discipline in that film’s direction but he clearly knew enough to keep out of the way of the text as well as hold his camera on George C. Scott during his biggest scene (“WE KNOW NOTHING! WE HEAL NOTHING!!”) so it clearly wasn’t just a case of a hack shooting coverage and following the script. Still, NETWORK not only seems to me to be a better script than THE HOSPITAL (all the murder mystery stuff in that film is never really my favorite), there’s also so much visual confidence in the film displayed in how Lumet is willing to do nothing but just hold on the faces framed within those offices they make their hatchet-job decisions in amidst the jungles of Manhattan. Aside from what might be an extraneous twenty seconds as the camera pans across Elaine’s during Max and Diana’s first date (which I’m glad is there anyway for the brief piece of 70s singles bar vibe it offers) there’s practically not a wasted frame in the film and his dry yet humane style which is deceptively complex in its framing means that NETWORK has aged fascinatingly well, moving from the send-up it once may have been into the mirror it acts as now where real life simply can’t be ridiculed anymore.

I’m not sure there’s anything to be gained from breaking down the plot and I certainly don’t want to spend time comparing certain characters to some possibly deranged individuals actually out there in the world. But since it seems there are people out there who still haven’t seen it yet here goes. Admittedly, this is partly for my own amusement. When legendary UBS Evening News anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is informed that his tenure is coming to an end due to declining ratings he promptly goes drinking with network news chief and old friend Max Schumacher (William Holden) where he jokingly, drunkenly muses about how high the ratings would be if he killed himself on the air. The next night he goes on and announces that he is going to do exactly that the following Tuesday. (“Howard just said he was going to blow his brains out next Tuesday,” one of the few people in the control booth actually listening to him calmly reiterates). He is relieved of his duties immediately but convinces Max to give him one final night to sign off. So he goes on and claims that he made the threat simply because he “ran out of bullshit” after which he is yanked off once again but not before Max, enraged over what is about to be done to his news division by the conglomerate CCA which has recently purchased IBS, lets him remain on the air to say whatever he wants. Nevertheless, Beale’s outbursts get the attention of network programming head Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) who convinces corporate manager Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), who is in the middle of consolidating all activity in the network to conform to corporate standards to maximize profits, that there might be something in keeping him on the air. Schumacher and Christensen spend the night together but the situation escalates, resulting in Beale going on the air in a total frenzy, going on and yelling “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” By this point Beale is a national sensation who people everywhere are drawn to and his show is no longer The Nightly News but “The Howard Beale Show” a part of the entertainment division with Schumacher fired and Christensen firmly in charge although soon enough the two have begun a full-fledged affair. Christensen takes advantage of this success by launching new shows that continue her hot ratings streak including “The Mao-se Tung Hour” a chronicle of a terrorist group known as the Ecumenical Liberation Group and their criminal activities. But soon things begin to go wrong when Beale goes on the air to protest a deal which will allow CCA to be taken over by a Saudi Arabian conglomerate, leading to the CCA chairman Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) to be brought in from on high. But he has his own agenda and launches Beale on a new and even more surprising crusade.

I think just spending a few minutes writing that out has increased my appreciation even more for how dense the storytelling of NETWORK is, for how expertly every beat and character are laid out by Chayefsky, not to mention how much dialogue within its ultra-lengthy monologues that could very easily be referencing right now, down to a mention of hiring writers for what is essentially a reality program decades before there even was such a phrase--a recent article in the New York Times (you know, the Holy Goddamn New York Times!) which discusses some of his detailed notes made as he was writing the script couldn’t be more valuable to read now. It’s been pointed out by others before me how the basic setups of both NETWORK and THE HOSPITAL (as well as Chayefsky’s THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY, also directed by Arthur Hiller) similarly revolve around men who are operating under a delusion but NETWORK cuts a little deeper, probably because of its own maker’s closeness to the subject. It strikes me that both Lumet and Chayefsky were of a similar age, both old enough to consciously remember a world without TV and both there at the point of its inception into mass media, each working in the format’s early days to great success and no doubt they witnessed what had happened to the form as it moved past the days of serious drama in live TV down through insipid sitcoms and where it was by the time this film was made. The two male leads of NETWORK are not quite mirror images of each other but they do of course have a generational commonality and by a certain point the narrative seems to shelter them from each other, almost as if it would be a violation to keep them in the same frame. As a matter of fact, Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen is never even in the same scene as Howard Beale which has long intrigued me, although dialogue indicates they interact (there’s even a still of the two together but beats me if this is a cut scene) and as she gets closer to Max Schumacher the narrative pulls away from Beale as any sort of human figure. He’s totally mad and there’s no point in observing him at any other time so all that matters is when he’s on television, dummy.

Coming from Chayefsky’s words NETWORK was and is about not only what television is becoming but also society is becoming, which is almost the same thing anyway. Beale has gone insane but in the madness is something that people are clearly responding to since it’s someone to articulate their rage as Diana’s analysis tells her—it’s really hard not to bring certain current events into this. From the vantage point of the film, television drives somebody crazy and that madness drives the society viewing him back to television all the more. I may be wrong but I sense slightly more anger coming from those words he wrote than from Lumet’s interpretation of them, essentially making the director the Max Schumacher to the author’s Howard Beale. Diana Christensen doesn’t seem to understand a single word he’s saying to her during their final scene, looking at him as if he’s saying he’s about to get on a rocket to Pluto. She doesn’t get it and the movie doesn’t even want to offer the glimmer of a possibility that she ever might. But it feels like Lumet wishes that she would. I look around the way the world is right now and I don’t even know if I have it in me to be mad as hell anymore. I’m just really fucking sad about it all. I suspect, even as far back as 1976, Sidney Lumet was as well but maybe, just maybe, he had the glimmer of hope that when Max Schumacher exits the frame, never to be seen again, he was possibly able to find some glimmer of hope in his winter years as he turned his back entirely on this universe he had spent all of his professional life in. As for Chayefsky, we of course lost him in 1981, far too soon. Just over a year after CNN launched, just over a month before Entertainment Tonight began, at the dawn of Reagan, before the internet, before all the real life Howard Beales and Mao Tse-Tung Hours came to the forefront of it all. He was needed. He still is.

Every single performance stay with me right down to the tiniest of phrasings from the way Finch says “Shrill, shrieking fraud,” Duvall screaming “IT’S A BIG TITTED HIT!!” or the way the phrase “since man crawled out of the slime,” oozes it’s way out of Ned Beatty’s mouth as if he really has been around long enough to have first hand knowledge. Faye Dunaway, in a role that uses every ounce of her physicality like no other ever did, fully embraces the skin and dark soul of Diana Christensen and won her Oscar, Peter Finch who embraced utter madness like few others ever have onscreen received his posthumously (I doubt the average person knows Finch from anything else now. I wrote about THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE once if anyone’s interested) while Beatrice Straight with her “winter romance” howl probably still has the least amount of screen time for any winner but she is unforgettable.

Robert Duvall oozes true, genuine icy viciousness through every deliberate phrasing he has (“Intractable and adamantine”) and it may very well be one of his most underappreciated performances. But for me it’s William Holden, who lost the Oscar to Finch, that is the streak of greatness in the film over all the others, delivering a searing portrait with every inch of his booze-lined face revealing a phenomenally humane portrait of this flawed, desperate man who is trying to come to grips with what his place in the world has become with the end of everything he’s ever known. Ned Beatty also received an Oscar nomination for his CCA Chairman/Face of God in what is essentially one scene, Wesley Addy of KISS ME DEADLY is the network president who has essentially allowed his balls to be cut off and Marlene Warfield is activist Laureen Hobbs whose fiery rage gets channeled into where her ratings are headed. Lance Henriksen, also in DOG DAY AFTERNOON and PRINCE OF THE CITY for Lumet, is uncredited as one of the lawyers negotiating with the Great Ahmed Kahn and though some sources have Tim Robbins as one of the assassins at the very end I’m going to go ahead and say that isn’t right.

When you think about it, NETWORK ends where it ends way back in ’76 and thirty-five years later we still have to deal with that as more and more of the ‘simple human decency’ in society gets drained away. There’s a circular nature to Chayefsky’s story in how things ultimately play out—it’s a movie that begins with someone about to be taken off the air due to lousy ratings and ends with them finally taken off the air for lousy ratings. But I suppose when it comes to television, there never is very much in the way of progress and I remember the time when I worked at the entertainment news program which I will not name, a period of several years during which things seemed to shift things towards a nastier, much more toxic direction and the death of Michael Jackson was certainly one of the catalysts of that happening. The following weeks after that were one of the more intense periods I can remember while working there and the day before the funeral I was called into the office of the executive producer, a Diana Christensen in real life if there ever was one, after a minor error which I had been involved with had made it on the show for one of the feeds. Getting screamed at by her was an almost unspeakably terrifying experience, sweat dripping down my face like Robert Hays trying to make the landing at the end of AIRPLANE! as I wiped my brow with cheap napkins until she barked at me to stop that and said I wasn’t getting fired but that I had to do….better. I was dismissed at some point but to this day I actually have no recollection whatsoever of leaving her office, after which I went off to be alone and, well, collect myself. Later that day the Executive Producer’s number two who had also been in that meeting, less of a Christensen type who I sometimes saw a glimmer of humanity in, told me since she thought I had handled myself well. I never asked her exactly what she meant by that since I couldn’t possibly imagine how. And since I was laid off about six months after that, it really doesn’t matter anyway. I suspect NETWORK will continue to tell me things as I get older facing my own dreams of youth lost (“Was I ever that young?”) and the world continues to change. It may not be something that I’m looking forward to but I guess I have no choice but to just wait and see what’s going to happen. Along with waiting for what the reaction is going to be the next time someone I know sees it for the first time and what that may really mean in the end.

No Romance Of Old Money

2011-09-16T17:25:00.000-07:00

Lately there have been more than a few nights where I’ve found myself staying awake maybe later than I should be. Not really doing much of anything you understand, just not sleeping, faced with those feelings of loneliness that come on at a certain hour, staring at the ceiling, waiting to see if the TCM Open All Night bumper has aired yet and when it does I try to force myself to shut the set off. Sometimes that happens, what can I say. Back during my extended period of unemployment I had rediscovered the pleasure of going to the Dresden late on weeknights for a drink or two, spending money that I really shouldn’t have. There was just something appealing about the old school noir vibe of being there as things were winding down, Marty & Elayne finishing up their final set as the bar emptied out and I would just sit chatting with the attractive bartender I know who works there. Of course, the irony is that now I have a little bit of money to spend more freely but since I actually have to wake up at a certain hour in the morning I’m not as willing to go out for a few late drinks. So I just sit at home brooding instead, thinking about how nice it would be to be out with someone that late, to wash away the regret I sometimes feel during those hours and wonder what I can still make of the few minutes the day has left.

It’s a safe bet that if there’s ever an Avco-Embassy logo at the start of a movie I’m going to like what I’m about to see. Someone could probably come up with an exception to that rule but regardless I always get a little tingle in the back of my head whenever I see it familiar from when I was younger, a feeling of genuine comfort that automatically tells me everything is going to be all right for the next few hours. In my dreams, I can see some of those titles. PHANTASM. MURDER BY DECREE. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. THE HOWLING. TIME BANDITS. SUPER FUZZ. SWAMP THING. WINTER KILLS. HOPSCOTCH. Even CARBON COPY, why the hell not. It’s nice to know that there are still some other films with that logo out there that have fallen through the cracks somehow, ready to still be discovered. Better late than never, I guess. Case in point among those Avco-Embassy releases would be Harold Becker’s THE BLACK MARBLE, based on the novel by Joseph Wambaugh who also wrote the screenplay. Released in 1980 the film is so low-key it feels like a whole new word needs to be invented to describe the particular mood it gives off and combined with that is the naturally manic energy of female lead Paula Prentiss, one of my favorite actresses, who seems dialed down so much that it’s almost like more of a real person than she ever played and it gives me a whole new level of appreciation of how good she was. It’s a cop movie, yes, but one with not much more action than the average episode of BARNEY MILLER. Instead it maintains its own relaxed, oddball tone that plays as so unique it makes it a little tough to classify the film—just calling it ‘quirky’ doesn’t do the job and I’m not sure that anyone who would want the movie to have a little more oomph in the end might not be wrong. But it does have numerous charms that make it unique and, either way, I’m glad I finally saw it.

Hollywood police sergeant and proud Russian-American A.M. Valnikov (Robert Foxworth) is a mess. Drinking way too much vodka every night, barely able to walk around during the day without looking like he’s going to keel over, he’s assigned a partner in one Sergeant Natalie Zimmerman (Paula Prentiss) who knows exactly what sort of shape Valnikov is in and is none too happy about it. Meanwhile, down on his luck dog trainer Philo Skinner (Harry Dean Stanton), deep in debt to the mob, has come up with a plan to make some quick money by kidnapping a beloved show dog belonging to heiress Madeline Whitfield (Barbara Babcock) who he assumes wouldn’t have any trouble coming up with the ransom. But very quickly things don’t go as planned and when Valnikov begins to investigate just as he’s in the middle of trying to get his new partner to warm up to him, he really has no idea what he’s getting himself into.

There are elements to THE BLACK MARBLE that make me like it just on principle—Los Angeles, bleakly humorous character study, Paula Prentiss. There’s a certain quiet intelligence to the way it’s all put together and maybe I found myself responding to some of these parts purely for my own reasons. Hey, look--I’m just sitting here, looking for movies that might interest me, movies with a pulse, movies with people, movies that aren’t remakes, movies that exist beyond providing an excuse to make me pay extra for a 3D surcharge. At this point it’s been many, many months since I saw a film in 3D and that’s a streak I’ll be happy to keep going. They don’t make movies like THE BLACK MARBLE anymore. It takes a pleasure in its characters paying attention to each other, learning about each other, that simply doesn’t happen. Strongly character-based (the plot synopsis above is fairly short for a reason), it’s low key and quiet as well maybe a little too sedate particularly in the first hour with possibly a few beats that feel missing—if there’s going to be dialogue where somebody complains how crazy another character is it would probably help to actually see a decent example of this since Foxworth plays Valnikov as more of a severely depressed alcoholic than a crazy loose cannon (the opening scene involving him embarrassing himself in public almost feels like an attempt to remedy this). As much as director Becker mentions the phrase ‘dark comedy’ on what I heard of the DVD audio commentary it still feels a little like a looser approach would have brought out the comic tension in a way to get to that darkness the film is going for. For a fair amount of time the tone is maybe a little too mild except for the dangerous unpredictability that comes from the escalating desperation of Stanton’s Philo Skinner and his threats over the phone to Babcock’s increasingly despondent Madeline Whitfield.

Ultimately the film finds what it needs to be which is the genuine chemistry between the two leads so it has no problem interrupting its ‘plot’ for a long stretch to do nothing but focus on Valnikov and Zimmerman as they begin to finally connect and know each other, coming alive for the first time. Placed up against this, when certain darkly comic anecdotes drift through the police station, as if part of a more ‘wacky’ 70s dark comedy about cops, they really don’t fit. Small of scale and seemingly set in a Los Angeles so barren compared with the way it is now that it feels like the entire film is taking place during a long weekend where most people have blown town (there are some nice views of what the city looked like then too--Valnikov lives up near the Alto Nido apartments, familiar from SUNSET BLVD). An often quiet movie with a lilting Maurice Jarre score poking through on occasion to underline Valnikov’s romantic notions, THE BLACK MARBLE is about people in the midst of disillusionment, drifting into middle age with not much to show for anything they’ve ever done and no longer certain where they’re going—a few of them even have children who are mentioned but don’t seem to be part of their lives at all and they’re certainly not as close to them as Madeline Whitfield is to her beloved prize dog Vicky. The closest it ever comes to an action scene is all about how out of shape the two involved are, one agonizingly chasing the other very slowly through an enclosed space and it’s an extremely well-staged, suspenseful sequence. The tone is sly, allowing us to find our way into it and even when in one scene involving Pat Hingle playing an informant whose excessive scratching gets both Foxworth and Prentiss to start scratching as well, but the movie never seems to go out of its way to underline the joke.

Becker, who made this shortly after THE ONION FIELD which was also based on Wambaugh (he’s also made the likes of likes of TAPS, SEA OF LOVE and MALICE and I may as well come clean that not only have I never read Wambaugh, I’ve never seen THE ONION FIELD. I’m sorry.), directs things in a very clean style with relaxed Scope compositions courtesy of the great DP Owen Roizman, willing to let the actors play scenes out while at the same time knowing exactly where to place his camera at certain moments to provide the maximum amount of tension where there might not be otherwise. Per an interview with Becker, it’s Quentin Tarantino’s favorite film of his which doesn't seem like much of a surprise (I can imagine the Coen Brothers being fans as well what with the whole kidnapping subplot) and a line can easily be drawn from what develops between the mature pairing of Foxworth and Prentiss here to Pam Grier and Robert Forster’s relationship in JACKIE BROWN. It’s also refreshing to see a film, and one from 1980 yet, where a cop is paired up with a woman and not only is it never an issue she’s also portrayed as having a slightly harder exterior than the male half of their partnership as well. When she does warm up to him it never comes at the expense of what’s been established while also revealing more of who she is. One character asks why some people seem to always be the ones to pick the black marble, the one that indicates bad luck. In the world as presented here, that seems to be just about everyone. Within the pokiness of its rhythms THE BLACK MARBLE maintains an affection for its characters as well as an awareness of how to change things, to let your place in the world become what you make of it—you can blame everyone else for your troubles like Stanton’s character continually does, you can curl up and hide like Babcock’s desperate heiress or you can hopefully find the right person to express yourself to, take that chance, embrace the moment when violin music swells up. It’s satisfying and I love the way that final shot holds through the credits. It helps the movie and these two people stay with me.

Not an actor whose film work has become the most well-known part of his career, Robert Foxworth takes on this role willingly looking as bad as possible during his first scenes but the way he’s portrayed parallels how Zimmerman comes to see him—more than anything, Valnikov’s inherent decency ultimately comes through, particularly in the kindness seen inn his eyes. Foxworth’s likability adds to how his pride over his Russian-American heritage never feels gimmicky but rather a key part of who he is. In one of her last feature appearances, and I guess you could call it her final lead role, Paula Prentiss’ more relaxed style combined with that amazing voice of hers reveals a side to her talent unlike what’s found in some of her best-known (and nuttier) roles—she feels settled in, that much more assured of herself than maybe she did earlier in her career. She sells her performance just by how her voice seems to soften every time she calls her partner “Valnikov” as the film goes on and a moment like how she insists on drinking vodka during their dinner because she’s thirty-goddamn-nine years old just reminds me how crazy I am about her. The way she looks at Foxworth as he pulls up to his place for their night together is one of those moments where I once again wish we had twenty more movies starring her. As for Harry Dean Stanton, if you’re a fan of his (and who isn’t?) and you’ve never seen this film, you really should with him turning in what is almost the definitive Harry Dean Stanton portrayal of a noir loser, as vivid as Elisha Cook Jr. in THE KILLING while selling the thin line between how desperate he is and how stupidly dangerous he could possibly be if given the chance. Barbara Babcock offers a touching portrait of genuine loneliness as Madeline Whitfield, expressing more emotion than she seems to know what to do with and becoming increasingly desperate to save the creature who means more to her than anything in the world. It’s a small cast beyond the leads but a number of familiar faces turn up in brief performances particularly Christopher Lloyd, visible for only an instant but instantly recognizable as a mob collector and James Woods, one of the leads in THE ONION FIELD, appearing several times as a street violinist who plays for the cops in what feels very much like an in-jokey cameo.

Some of the revelations which come to light involving how Valnikov is haunted by recurring dreams of a certain rabbit are very well played by Foxworth but as the film went on I found myself less interested in this background and more involved with what was currently going on around him. Ultimately it’s some of these tonal and pacing issues which make me wonder if a more finely attuned hand could have somehow made this very good, now sadly neglected film, even better (as a public service, I should point out that there are a handful of moments which would probably upset people sensitive to the treatment of dogs in films, although nothing disturbing is ever actually shown). But the best parts of THE BLACK MARBLE live up to how vivid these characters become in the film’s quiet ambitions as they try to get through their own days, making the decisions they force themselves to make. Do we pick the black marble or does it get handed to us? Which choice am I making when I lie awake late at night wondering what’s going to come next? I’m still trying to find out the answer.

You're Just Glad You Heard It

2011-09-10T19:57:00.000-07:00

It seemed like I was going to get to see Peter Bogdanovich’s THE THING CALLED LOVE, a romance set in the world of country music starring River Phoenix and Samantha Mathis, when it opened back in August 1993 but things didn’t work out that way. Mostly because it didn’t really open. I was actually in New Mexico that particular week, noticed that it was opening on Friday and then when I flew back to L.A. there was no sign of it. Looking up the stats, the film did in fact open on 490 screens in the southwest on August 27(same day as Blake Edwards’ final film SON OF THE PINK PANTHER, speaking of directors I maintain a certain interest in), but it didn’t do very much business and that seems to have been about it for a theatrical release. To my knowledge the film has never had a single showing in L.A., even at the American Cinematheque, and when I saw it on video months after the fact it didn’t make much of an impression. Regardless, the version released on DVD was slightly expanded into a directors cut although I get the feeling few out there have bothered to take notice. Offering a genuine sense of affection for its world and characters THE THING CALLED LOVE is very pleasant but maybe not very much more than that—it’s pretty slight overall and maybe a little ordinary in how it tells its story although much of what seems to have been added consists of grace notes which are a big help in what sort of effect the film ultimately has. And looking at it now I can’t help but connect myself with how I was right around the age of the lead characters when it was made and somehow the film seems more meaningful to me as a result. Even if I’ve never really spent any time at all in Nashville.

The summer of ’93 was actually the time when I first moved out to Los Angeles, probably too young and stupid to know what I was doing. A lot of time has passed since then, enough that recently I was watching CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM and wondering who the 40ish love interest in the episode was played by only to shout out, “Holy crap, that was Samantha Mathis??!!” when the credits rolled and the name went by. She still looks pretty great, don’t get me wrong, it just isn’t the same. I’m getting old. Time has gone by. Maybe my memory from then of gazing at Mathis on this movie’s poster in the Los Angeles theaters where it would never play combined with how vivid my recollections of that summer still are is what causes THE THING CALLED LOVE to have a certain added resonance with me regardless of my own lack of interest in country music. As much as things never quite seem to fully connect as much as they should it’s clear that Bogdanovich never wants to settle on anyone being a simple stock characterization which is probably what the film has going for it more than anything else. Plus it marks the final lead role for River Phoenix who died just a few months after the abortive release something that seems to make the film more significant in a way that I still can’t fully express. It also remains the last film directed by Peter Bogdanovich for a major studio (to date, I’ll hopefully add) and while an ‘is that it?’ response to the movie may be understandable, for him just observing these people doing the best they can in life seems to be enough. During the film’s very best moments maybe it’s enough for me to.

Aspiring songwriter Miranda Presley (“No relation”--Samantha Mathis) leaves New York and heads to Nashville hoping to break into the music business. Soon after she gets there Miranda tries out at the famed Bluebird Café run by the stern but fair Lucy (K.T. Oslin) and the people who begin falling into her life include Linda Lue Linden (Sandra Bullock) who latches onto Miranda as a best friend almost immediately, good-natured Kyle Davidson (Dermot Mulroney) who makes no secret of his crush on Miranda and, most importantly, brooding James Wright (River Phoenix) who may be the most talented of any of them. In spite of the interest James has in Miranda being evident immediately the relationship isn’t easy in getting going and as they grow closer some of James’ other interests may derail where things are going for them before it even gets started.

Country music of course played a part in Bogdanovich’s THEY ALL LAUGHED (a film I love more and more all the time), set in a New York where more people seem to be interested in it than ever happens in real life. Taking place in a city where country music really is a big deal, THE THING CALLED LOVE (written by Carol Heikkinen) dials down the manic screwball behavior the director is sometimes known for to focus on character dynamics that still feel very much like other films the director has made, if not also taken from a few Lubitsch films made in the 30s that he’s seen a million times. Nothing extraordinary happens during the running time to make it play out all that differently from what you’d expect but he’s clearly just interested in the telling of it, the lived-in feel of the setting and just observing these characters in their good ways and petty ways as well. Miranda goes to Nashville, pursues her music and makes friends but she doesn’t go on spectacularly wacky adventures, she doesn’t get into any real trouble even when the cops are called after she breaks into a car to leave a demo tape and never encounters any really bad people—she simply goes there and lives her life. You can tell Bogdanovich is touched by the hopes of these people and for the most part he shoots his film in a very simple style, maybe almost too simple in how it does its best to play many scenes out in master shots, eschewing a standard touristy look at Nashville (a few second unit-type shots excepted and there are never any stock Southern stereotypes) in favor of just soaking in the environment that the characters actually spend time in. And it never tries to depict its world with the bigger than life flavor of something like URBAN COWBOY—even the Bluebird Café, where much of the action takes place, is set in a pretty normal shopping mall although Bogdanovich can’t seem to resist the occasional quirky touch to keep the local flavor coming like the wacky motel room Miranda stays in or how she goes to a barber who claims he once cut Elvis’s hair. There’s also maybe a slight feeling that Bogdanovich is so intent on playing things in such a naturalistic fashion dependant on how the actors are playing the scenes that he’s holding back on adding a little more oomph to some scenes. When at one point he stages a minor traffic accident followed by something that diffuses all tension immediately the moment plays with a nimbleness that few other directors would have attempted and it’s too bad this sort of energy isn’t around a little more during the film.

It’s a small story, with the presence of River Phoenix maybe placing more weight on every scene he's in than the movie can handle (in a way, like how THEY ALL LAUGHED had to deal with the spectre of Dorothy Stratten, murdered after shooting wrapped) and it’s hard not to think about what his particular approach here is or what may have been going on between takes. Reviews like Roger Ebert’s, written after Phoenix’s death, seemed to treat the movie as nothing more than a search for evidence of drug use and I don’t really know what to say about this except that it’s not something I can bring myself to do, although the actor does look older here than he really was—certainly also older than a few of the films he made not too long before this—and there’s a moodiness to his screen presence here which suggests an actor who is maybe distracted but also one who is doing whatever he could to keep his the role he’s playing from being just a standard movie star love interest. His chemistry with Mathis is edgy, uncertain, with the two leads (who did become a couple afterwards and Mathis was there that final night at the Viper Room) appearing to still be feeling each other out in the final scenes and there is a palpable uncertainty evident in their energy even when things are going well for the couple. If the script was ever designed to play as more of a standard romantic comedy that’s clearly not where things ended up.

In directing the film Bogdanovich seems content to let his camera hold on his leads as they gaze at each other through their music, inserting his own touches within the frame where he can, in particular a sequence at a drive-in (just like Bogdanovich’s TARGETS!) where John Ford’s THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is showing, a film about a romantic triangle playing in a film about a romantic triangle (“The oldest story in the book” as Phoenix’s character says, acknowledging the clichéd nature of what we’re watching) and when the two of them come up with their own song about the classic western together it’s one of the sweetest passages of the entire film--falling for each other through music, kind of like AT LONG LAST LOVE! And as ordinary as some of the film may look the location of Phoenix’s house, nestled right next to some train tracks, is almost unbearably romantic and when the director’s own voice is heard during this section on the radio as a disc jockey (just as it is in THEY ALL LAUGHED) it almost plays as an indication that a moment like this is really the reason he’s making the movie to begin with.

Much as I may connect it with a certain point in time for myself THE THING CALLED LOVE isn’t really locked into 1993 or Generation X or anything like that so it never feels like a country music REALITY BITES. What the film does do is offer a feeling of freedom, of the time when you’re young when you’re still trying to figure things out and you haven’t looked down from that tightrope yet to fully understand how difficult what you’re trying to do is with relationships that are kind of messy, such as the obstacles that keep the two girls from becoming the best of friends that the overly friendly Linda Lue would like them to be—the lone wolf New York nature of Miranda is something I can understand. Sometimes the person who’s going to change your life can walk right in front of you at a moment’s notice and even when the credits roll it isn’t entirely clear on which direction certain parts of this dynamic are going to go. It wears its heart on its sleeve, expressed by Mulroney in saying that he loves country music because of how simple it is without any sarcasm, it either makes you laugh or cry. It almost could just as easily be the director talking about the Hollywood Golden Age films he misses and listening to him on the audio commentary where he points out scenes shot not in Nashville but back in Hollywood soundstage at Paramount makes what he’s doing sound all the more quaint. THE THING CALLED LOVE is maybe a little too plain in its storytelling but within that simplicity is an exploration of people who are ultimately complex, each for reasons of their own, and not always that likable as they try to discard their past in favor of the future they think they need. And sometimes when you set out to begin your life, you later realize that it’s actually started even before you were ready but, as Mulroney’s character points out at one point, you’re just glad you heard it anyway. I can understand. It’s small but it’s sweet. It’s too goofy at times but it feels hopeful, even if it is a little tentative about that. It sits back and lets the music happen, it lets the words and feelings flow from their eyes. Maybe that’s not such a bad quality to have.

River Phoenix is top billed but it really is Samantha Mathis’s movie. Never really as glammed up as she appears on that poster Mathis takes control of every shot she’s in with a combination of fierce determination and fear that she has no idea what she’s really doing. With not much of a backstory outside of a few lines and that Yankees cap she determinedly wears Mathis has a tentative enthusiasm and awkwardness that is totally endearing, ideal for what the film needs. She may not have become the big star it seemed like she was going to for a few minutes but I’m glad there’s this performance by her, as well as that giant close-up when she leans down at Phoenix during one love scene and recites Robert Graves (an added moment according to the commentary, so thank you to Peter Bogdanovich for that). As for Phoenix there’s always something going on with him onscreen and some of it is hugely moving now, like how he can make his character’s feelings known for Miranda just by the way he says her name. But it still feels like there’s a layer somehow missing from the performance as if they never found the right hook for the character and it never quite comes together as well as something like his downright haunting work in Nancy Savoca’s vastly underappreciated DOGFIGHT. Sandra Bullock is cute as a button playing Linda Lue and it’s no surprise she emerged soon after this (If I squint I can see a touch of Cybill Shepherd in how Bogdanovich directs her—maybe in Mathis as well), Mulroney brings the right sort of likable nature to his out-of-place Connecticut kid even if it’s clear why he comes in second to James, Anthony Clark is Linda Lue’s boyfriend Billy and singer K.T. Oslin makes for a reliable voice of reason as Lucy, owner of the Bluebird Café. Trisha Yearwood also turns up, one of several real-life figures making cameos. I’d say more about the songs, some of which were written by the actors who perform them, but I’m the last person who should be offering critiques on country music although the Mathis-Phoenix duet of “Blame It On Your Heart” is pretty catchy.

I drove across this country by myself when I moved out to California, leaving the Twin Towers which appear in the opening shot of this film behind me, a past being left in favor of the future I was searching for. Nashville wasn’t on my agenda, of course—when I hit that town I just kept on moving down Rt. 40 without stopping. I think of those days and I think of the road out in front of me, the future out in front of me. I was younger then, with all the hope in the world. Stupid of me, I know. My own feelings about THE THING CALLED LOVE have little to do with the actual film, I’ll admit that, but there’s something to be said about figuring out how to press on, to keep moving forward, moving past writing what’s just a novelty song to writing something that comes from actual life experience and that in itself can be ‘a good start’. I still haven’t become a disciple of country music but I can say that I appreciate what this film is trying to say, probably even more now than I ever did.

At One Time Or Another

2011-09-01T20:26:00.001-07:00

Yes, I may defend the films of Blake Edwards more than most people but that doesn’t mean I’m always going to let things slide when it comes to a few of them. Sure, I said a few halfway generous things about A FINE MESS and when it comes to SON OF THE PINK PANTHER, his unfortunate cinematic swan song, I at least tried to approach the film in a charitable way in order to place it in the context of his entire career. But I’m on record as having less kind things to say about the likes of MICKI + MAUDE and BLIND DATE so even I’ve got my breaking point and that may be where SUNSET comes in. Pairing two big stars the director had worked with in the past—namely, Bruce Willis and James Garner—while both exploring a piece of Hollywood lore and attempting a melding of genres SUNSET has ambition but it feels like an almost total washout, a film with such a surprisingly lethargic feel throughout that it just feels dead almost from the very first scene. So little of it works to the point that it becomes not only a bad film but a genuinely curious one as if somebody just stopped paying attention to what was going on during the production. Admittedly, there are a few elements found in there which make me almost sympathetic to what was being attempted but maybe even those could be considered a reach and probably just proves that I can’t bring myself to ever be too negative towards his films. Still, I guess this one comes pretty close. I saw it on opening weekend way back at the end of April 1988 and even at that young age I didn’t think it worked though it was difficult for me to really understand why. Now, all these years later, looking at the DVD for my very first viewing since then I was more than willing to keep an open mind but remember what I said about the very first scene? That’s about as long as my optimism lasted.

Hollywood, 1929: Famous cowboy movie star Tom Mix (Bruce Willis) is ordered by his studio head Alfie Alperin (Malcolm MacDowell), powerful producer and former screen comedian himself, to star in a movie based on the exploits of Wyatt Earp (James Garner) with the legendary lawman even coming to Hollywood to serve as technical advisor. The two men hit it off and when Earp is asked to do a favor for long ago lady friend Christina (Patricia Hodge) who just happens to be Alperin’s wife, involving her son Michael (Dermot Mulroney) Mix tags along as he begins to show Earp around Hollywood. But what happens instead soon leads to a discovery of murder and the two men, along with studio publicist Nancy Shoemaker (Kathleen Quinlan) and Cheryl King (Mariel Hemingway) who is a close acquaintance of the murder victim, find themselves in the middle of a wide-ranging Tinseltown conspiracy.

Like several of Blake Edwards’ other films, SUNSET opens with a sequence which turns out to be part of a movie being shot--the moment we hear ‘cut’ happens coincides with the director’s onscreen credit--setting the stage for the world of artifice this is set in, a Hollywood world of mirrors, where no one is what they seem, legend or not. This is one of several elements in the film where I found myself vaguely reminded of certain plot beats from other films by Edwards, rhythms which should feel comfortable in this context and recognizably a part of his work but it feels like the proper inspiration never hit in writing this screenplay (Edwards receives sole credit, based on the unpublished novel by Rod Amateu) to make this work on its own. There’s a surprising lack of engagement—a feeling of dead air that can’t even by found in some of the more manic films he directed that people hate—and by a certain point it really does feel like he was simply content to get the scenes as written in the can with little fuss and move on. For long stretches there’s very little in the film to point to as stylistically resembling one of his films outside of the expected Scope use, a few scene transitions and introducing Mariel Hemmingway in a pageboy haircut and dressed as a man to insert the requisite male-female gender confusion. Scene after scene just lies there and in spite of an intriguing cast few people get a chance stand out, especially surprising considering how actors in other Edwards films often make huge impressions in just a single scene.

Bruce Willis had worked with Edwards the previous year on BLIND DATE which implies the two men got along yet looking at this film now (I may as well point out that the credits for SUNSET bill it as “A Hudson Hawk Production” three years before that film was released), his presence is kept so low-key that even though it’s only his second starring role in a feature it feels like little more than a walkthrough for the actor on the level of what he’d later do in WHOLE NINE YARDS-type projects, maintaining the absolute minimum of interest and though we see Tom Mix do a few trick stunts on his horse no one seems to have thought to really work this stuff into the movie and the laid back personality he projects never seems like somebody who would even bother to show off in this way. Tom Mix objects to Wyatt Earp’s arrival which is immediately followed by the two getting along immediately upon meeting nevertheless, but it’s all kept on a level of mild banter at best so no real chemistry ever develops, there’s no real spark to any of their scenes beyond just a feel of geniality. It’s as if, mirroring how it plays in the film, Willis himself found out that he was going to be sharing the spotlight right before shooting started so he agreed to show up and get along with his co-star but not do much more than that. As a result Garner, who almost seems to be playing it as if he showed up with only a day’s notice to do a favor for his old friend, just runs off with the film by effortlessly by injecting what little charm there is all on his own from the first moment he appears. As weak as some of the material might be, he does a strong job with what turns out to be the lion’s share of the dramatic stuff as well, with Willis either absent or off to the side at points where you’d expect him to be in the middle of all the action. It’s hard not to wonder what problems were apparent in the script and what was changed later on in editing—we never even meet the murder victim so it’s tough to have much of an interest in why she was killed and when another key character dies offscreen late in the film, almost never to be mentioned again, it feels like the movie has just lost interest in its own story. Or was never clear on what it was in the first place.

Vincent Canby in his New York Times review called SUNSET such a mess that he “thought the projectionist had misplaced a reel, but he hadn’t” which says something about how the various parts of the story never really connect but more to that point there’s just no life to any number of individual scenes to give things a tangible reality, none of the joy found in other films where Edwards seems to love letting things play out in long takes. And from this, no consistent tone ever really develops. The basic concept of these legendary figures teaming up sounds like a romp, if not a flat-out comedy, about the good old days of picture-making and that sort of feel seems injected sporadically but at the same time much of what goes on is surprisingly nasty and unpleasant—lots of talk of rape and that sort of thing—which drains any possibility of charm out of the would-be banter. “Half the movie wants to be cheerful and the other half seems morbid and disenchanted,” said Roger Ebert in his mixed review but reading that sentence strikes me that if a film correctly executes such an array of tonal shifts that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. SUNSET, on the other hand, quickly just becomes too disjointed, too disinterested with itself, too lackadaisically drifting from one scene to the next, never seeming to remember to keep us interested in the story. No actual rhythm ever takes hold--even the 1983 Edwards remake of THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN, which I don’t really like very much, feels like it’s slow and sedate for reasons that are at least connected to what the movie is trying to be. Here, it’s just a mish-mash of tones and plot strands that never seem to come together. Too many elements feel either half-hearted or glossed over like Earp flashing back to what really happened during a certain shootout as he watches the reenactment filmed and there is a feel that the film really wants to be about how looking back through rose-colored glasses eventually puts forth the lie that is history (“Give or take a lie or two” is the oft-repeated refrain which was even used on the film’s poster and some other pertinent dialogue ties into this as well) but the movie never does enough with any of this for it to develop into a coherent theme.

There are tantalizing glimpses of what might have been an interesting storyline, like a visit to a brothel where the girls all look like movie stars that makes me wonder if James Ellroy stumbled across this on cable while writing the novel of L.A. CONFIDENTIAL and the sight of the legendary Wyatt Earp in an airplane probably makes SUNSET unique for that reason alone. It also strikes me that casting James Garner as Wyatt Earp is pretty great in concept too but I guess I should finally give John Sturges’ HOUR OF THE GUN a try if I want some satisfaction out of that. And there is a certain amount of intrigue present during the climactic sequence set at the Academy Awards where certain revelations come to light, many of which surrounding the sourness felt in the portrayal of McDowell’s obviously Chaplin-like figure—I imagine partly meant to be what if he had retired from acting to run United Artists—which inserts a backstory seemingly based on the Thomas Ince case, filmed by Peter Bogdanovich as THE CAT’S MEOW. I don’t know if this is meant to be the director offering his own opinion on Chaplin or just a general exploration of a particularly dark chapter in early Hollywood. Maybe it makes the most sense to look at it all as a very dark attempt by Edwards to place the most beloved icon in Hollywood history (as well as a legendary comic figure, making me wonder if there’s any of Edwards’ feelings about Peter Sellers in there as well) at the center of the sleaze, cruelty and nastiness that infiltrates it and has always been there, no matter how glitzy it may always appear from the outside. It’s certainly a consistent theme from the man who made THE PARTY and S.O.B. but there’s no darkly comic kick to it this time, let alone any grudging affection that can be found at the bottom of this particular cocktail, so it all comes off as maybe a little too dark—Alfie Alperin, seen in his comic guise as “The Happy Hobo” is so obviously meant to be Chaplin that it almost just becomes kind of a head-scratcher. Was Edwards trying to get back at him for something from decades past? And yet, even within such a muddled concept some of it feels surprisingly poignant--when a major character makes a dying confession late in the film the moment plays as not only strangely and surprisingly disarming, it allowed me to suddenly feel sympathy for what is essentially one of the film’s villains. Because this film that I had felt so disengaged from was somehow able to pull this off I found myself suddenly both achieving a certain amount of respect for it but also feeling bad that it didn’t live up to this moment more often so it could figure out what it really needed to be mixed in somewhere through all those tonal shifts.

I’ve spent so little time even thinking about Bruce Willis while writing this which has to say something. The book “Returning to the Scene: Blake Edwards Volume 2” by William Luhr and Peter Lehman states that the actor studied several films Mix starred in only to have Edwards direct him to play the part in his own style. Clearly Willis is trying to not play the part as MOONLIGHTING’s David Addison but doesn’t seem to have any other ideas so, with his career-defining role of John McClane still several months in the future at this point, Tom Mix just kind of vanishes into the woodwork. When there’s the would-be showstopper of him dancing a tango at a nightclub it really doesn’t have any effect at all. It’s Garner who has the true charisma and as strange as him playing love scenes opposite Mariel Hemmingway (who's not at all bad and she seems to be trying, but there's not much to work with) he has true screen charisma, sometimes getting laughs or some kind of emotional response out of almost nothing at all. It’s just not enough to save the movie. Malcolm McDowell seems game as the Chaplin-like figure with just the right touch of menace but that it doesn’t seem quite right really isn’t his fault—either his performance or his character just seems like it should be in a different movie. Patricia Hodge plays a sort of regal fragility which seems intriguing but the movie doesn’t have much of an interest in her. Jennifer Edwards, daughter of the director of course, does bring something of a brittle intensity to her role as Alfie’s sister, continually trying to seem more posh than she knows she is and any awkwardness that seems evident—it’s as if the character is acting as much as she is—makes sense, particularly in her final scene. M. Emmet Walsh has some enjoyable moments as the studio security chief (I can’t entirely hate a movie where he and Garner spar with each other), the always welcome Kathleen Quinlan is pretty much wasted as Tom’s romantic interest (her hair doesn’t do her any favors either, even if it is period appropriate) and Joe Dellasandro doesn’t get to make much of an impression as gangster Dutch Kieffer. In what appears to be his first feature, Dermot Mulroney has a role that we hear more about than we ever see so it feels like some of it may have been left on the cutting room floor, Vernon Wells of THE ROAD WARRIOR and INNERSPACE is an Australian tough guy who turns up to fight Willis and Edwards regular Herb Tanney cameos as a train conductor billed as “Steem Tanney”.

The one element of the film I have absolutely nothing bad to say about, which probably comes as no surprise, is Henry Mancini’s score which is particularly good even for him, both bringing much of the drama and suspense that actually feels a part of the story when it’s required and a western theme which is so good, so phenomenally rousing, that I kind of wish a western could be made to go around it—when a full-blown version of it kicks in late in the movie as Tom and Wyatt set out on horses it’s probably the most alive moment in the whole movie and for once totally sells the high-spirited adventure and sheer movie-ness that it’s striving for. Yet another reminder how much someone like Mancini and the rich sense of melody that he could bring to all the films he scored, Edwards or otherwise, is still missed today.

In real life the two men really were in fact friends along with being much older than they’re both portrayed here. They never solved mysteries together but Mix was a pallbearer for Earp when he died in January 1929, as anyone who remembers Robert Mitchum’s narration at the end of TOMBSTONE will confirm. That very little of this particular film has to do with real life, give or take a lie or two, isn’t really that big an issue since it’s all supposed to be fanciful anyway but it does seem strange that the film pretty much ignores that silent films were essentially over by the time the film is set (a reference to “Fox and Chaplin are gambling on sound” doesn’t make much sense at all) and Tom Mix was nearing the end of his superstardom. I can imagine someone regarding SUNSET as elegiac in its look at another age of Hollywood but there really isn’t anything in the actual film to support such a label. I’m not even sure if the title is supposed to reflect the end of that era, coinciding with the beginning of the Academy Awards and the building up of the industry as sound takes over, with the wild days of silent films as represented by Tom Mix serving as the last remnant of the old west that Wyatt Earp represents. That sounds like an interesting concept but I’m not sure it’s really found in this movie, at least not without some digging. Hell, maybe the title is just a reference to Murnau’s SUNRISE anyway. For Blake Edwards, SUNSET feels like a movie that got away from him at some point, made all the more clear by the things in there which do somehow stand out for all the right reasons. When James Garner’s Wyatt Earp at the very end is told, “Come back,” as he leaves and the legend replies with, “You never know,” the moment feels so optimistic and yet sad that it’s nice to imagine these heroes frozen in time, never facing their mortality, living out their legend in a sunset that never ends. Again, that’s not really in the actual movie but sometimes, especially when I’m watching Blake Edwards films over and over, I need to try to find these things anyway.

Far In The Back Of My Mind

2011-08-26T21:18:00.000-07:00

There I was, back in May 2002, alone with John Frankenheimer interviewing the man in his living room. It’s not necessary to say how nervous I was beforehand—this was, after all, the director of BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ, SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, SECONDS, GRAND PRIX, FRENCH CONNECTION II, BLACK SUNDAY, along with many others—but as much as I had prepared, as much as I had to ask him, there were a few topics that I wasn’t sure if I should even try bringing up. Since part of the interview was covering the role of politics in his career he didn’t hesitate to mention Bobby Kennedy, a friend who he had actually driven to the Ambassador on the night he was assassinated. But there was also a film he had made just a few years earlier that even then had achieved a certain kind of notoriety and I was hesitant to go there. As things turned out, I didn’t have much to worry about. Throughout our talk the man couldn’t have been more gracious with me and then there came a point late in the interview when he was talking about a wide, general range of topics having to do with the film industry, talking about how hard it is, how you have to persevere and then out of nowhere he stated (I’m writing this entirely from the vivid memory of the moment which has always stayed with me), “…and I honestly have to say that making THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU was the most horrendous experience of my life. Any time, anywhere. I felt lost. I felt totally, totally lost. There was a point in the middle of making that movie where we had no script. And we didn’t know what was going to happen. Who was going to take over the island or anything. But I brought a writer over to work on it and somehow I got through it. I may have ruined it, but I got through it.” At that point I removed my jaw from the floor, picked it up and muttered something like, “I would imagine that any questions about that movie you just wouldn’t want to get into.” To which he replied, “Well, you just couldn’t print it. But you want to come back up here again sometime, we’ll do it for the time capsule.” Frankenheimer died two months later. Damn it, I would have loved that interview. He seemed like an amazing man.

So fifteen years after its release on August 23, 1996 and several years now past the deaths of its director and most iconic star, what are we to make of this version of THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU? On the one hand, it’s not an uninteresting piece of work with a uniquely bizarre tone, memorable Stan Winston makeup on the creatures, the hand of Frankenheimer’s gripping visual style continually in evidence and, of course, an expectedly odd (and by now somewhat infamous) Marlon Brando performance as the titular doctor. On the other hand…where can I really start except to say that the film feels like the work of someone who was, well, lost. Totally, totally lost. Whether it’s his worst film is arguable (few have probably ever seen THE EXTRAORDINARY SEAMAN which would be a contender, trust me) but regardless of where it ranks in his long career rarely has there been a film from a director of his stature that, however it managed to happen, has somehow come out as such a mess.

After surviving a plane crash somewhere in the southern Pacific U.N. negotiator Edward Douglas (David Thewlis) is picked up by a boat by a man who calls himself Montgomery (Val Kilmer) and taken to the island owned by the mysterious and legendary Dr. Moreau (Marlon Brando). Though initially intrigued by the beautiful Aissa (Fairuza Balk) Douglas is soon made suspicious by Montgomery’s odd behavior and strange surroundings. When he finally encounters Moreau, Douglas becomes fully aware of the reasons for the island’s secrecy, learning the horrific truth of the half-human, half-animal creations that the doctor has given life to through his experiments and now controls through a form of shock therapy causing them pain so they will remain subservient. As the weeks goes on and any attempt Douglas makes to escape is proven futile it soon becomes clear that Moreau, who tries to remind his children that his law ‘is necessary’, doesn’t have the control of them that he thinks he does leading to a complete breakdown of that law and a revelation of what may be in store for Douglas if he is unable to find a way off the island away from this madness.

As time goes on the full scope of John Frankenheimer’s career becomes even more fascinating, particularly as you move beyond the dramas and action films one might associate with him at first glance to certain unexpected titles that become all the more strange when they’re combined with the serious approach that always seemed to work best for him. There have been so many rumors and stories about the production of DR. MOREAU (the third official filming of the original H.G. Wells novel, following Earl C. Kenton’s ISLAND OF LOST SOULS in 1933 and Don Taylor’s THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU in 1977), which Frankenheimer took over from HARDWARE director Richard Stanley several days into shooting, that it becomes tough to address the film since it really does seem like a case of someone losing control of a production in ways that go beyond simply critiquing a directorial style. Whether you think it’s ‘bad’ or not just isn’t an adequate description. Even before Brando makes his delayed entrance things begin to go south as if the movie is losing its grip on where the focus should be and while it might be tempting to look at it as the madness of the production (apparently so chaotic that Stanley is rumored to have snuck on to the set in full makeup to observe things) representing the madness of the narrative it never comes off. As things progress it begins to fly off the rails in a sputtering kind of way as if it’s just trying to spin its wheels so certain necessary story beats can occur, actors can make their appearances and it can all wrap up when it’s gotten to feature length.

There are glimmers of a decent story that is naturally inherent in the material and there is intrigue early on when Douglas first encounters Montgomery on the way to the island. Whatever Kilmer’s reasons for deciding to take the supporting role (some reports have him wanting a smaller pary after being served with divorce papers), at first it comes off as the more intriguing choice since he’s not just straitjacketed playing the good guy and I particularly like an early moment where the character just drifts off while giving his backstory, as if even he’s forgotten what led him to this insanity. But these tantalizing hints never build to anything and when Brando finally appears it really just seems to become about this actor hijacking the film more than an examination of an island where madness has begun to reign. It’s as if the rewrites that happened after Frankenheimer came on ((final screenplay credit goes to Stanley and Ron Hutchinson) bled so many things out that there wasn’t much of a story left beyond Thewlis expressing anguish at the twisted horror he witnesses and the plot mechanics of the creatures figuring out how to take over. It’s never boring—a film with all these elements tossed in really couldn’t be and if somebody likes it as just an insane, creature-filled darkly comic nightmare I’m not sure I’d try to say that they’re wrong. But very little about it works, becoming a mishmash of weird actor choices like Kilmer’s prevalent blue material wrapped around his arm or the ice bucket Brando wears in one scene combined with Stan Winston creature makeup that seem to belong in a movie with an entirely different tone.

With Brando in the title role it’s tempting to draw a twisted APOCALYPSE NOW parallel to all this or even read it as some kind of satirical take of things we might have imagined were happening on whatever island he was on for all those years but those possibilities probably aren’t what Frankenheimer, never someone you go to for broad satire, would be interested in. Brando, with his bizarre buck teeth and maybe playing things in a slight Charles Laughton-like manner with his British accent plays what should be a man who believes he has become God in a light comic fashion, unconnected to much of what anyone else is saying or doing. There is something to be said for little bits where he’s demonstrating to some of his ‘children’ what atonal music is, but for the most part he seems determined to detach himself from any sort of expectations that people would have from him in this role in favor of this stuff and it comes off like he’s making a jokey ‘special appearance’ in what’s supposed to be his movie. Ultimately, this promising collaboration between a director and star who conceivably might have worked together thirty years earlier (Imagine--Brando in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE! Frankenheimer directing REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE!) just becomes not much of anything, a big missed opportunity with maybe the director deciding at a certain point that it wasn’t worth the trouble to try to get the lead actor to behave otherwise.

It’s also necessary to mention the character of Moreau’s silent, diminutive double (Nelson de la Rosa, certified by Guinness as the smallest man on Earth), who remains by his side and at one point is playing piano alongside the doctor, a dynamic which of course later reappeared as the much more famous Mini Me as played by Verne Troyer in the AUSTIN POWERS movies (also released by New Line, interestingly). It can’t really be fairly said that Mini Me is a spoof of this since it’s not as if the concept is played all that straight in MOREAU anyway but as much as Brando does seem engaged by de la Rosa, who is an intriguing presence whenever he gets a close-up, it still feels like one of many things just tossed in by actor, director or script to somehow find a hook, some kind of through line which never really happens and as a result a number of potentially interesting elements come off as flat in spite of all the bizarreness, so it feels like any given scene has been put on film in spite of itself, that they had all these actors had spent so much time getting into the heavy creature makeup so something had to be shot. There’s very little sense of pacing or a narrative building into anything—the story is framed by an opening and closing narration by Thewlis to drive certain points home but there’s also a chunk of out of nowhere voiceover at the halfway mark as if it was trying to bridge scenes that were never even shot.

Some of the effort does come through like the impressive production design filmed down in Australia and if there is chaos at least it’s a believable chaos even if it hasn’t been organized right and there are striking touches like how Balk seems made up to deliberately resemble the famous “Afghan Girl” cover of National Geographic. But there’s nothing really there beyond the madness, the weirdness and timeworn thematics of what someone, whether human or beast, will do to survive, so the way certain characters are ultimately dispatched it’s as if the rewrites caused them to be unable to figure out what to do with them or if whichever actor in question was nearing the end of their commitment. Putting aside the makeup there’s some pretty bad early CGI sprinkled in there to aid with creature movement, an energetically propulsive score by Gary Chang who worked with the director several other times and there’s no doubt that Frankenheimer’s compositional sense is as visceral as always—few others have even been able to frame two individuals, one standing behind the other’s shoulder, quite so well.

THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU never really becomes a chore—frankly, it doesn’t go on long enough for that to ever happen (the Director’s Cut on DVD which restores some brutality and gore runs 100 minutes, compared to 95 minutes for the theatrical cut) and I can appreciate how it offers a certain kind of visceral feel at times with a crass, yet hard-edged feel of violence and gore reminiscent of some of Frankenheimer’s earlier work possibly combined with a hint of the madness he himself may have witnessed at points back during the end of the sixties. But all of the screaming and madness as it tries to determine if these creatures are animals or men just leads to a bummer dead end. Ultimately there’s no one to focus on, no one to care about and as much as some of it does manage to be strangely entertaining I can’t think of very much about the film that I actually like or enjoy.

Brando and Kilmer are very much in their own world, as if they weren’t even acting opposite a few of the people they share the screen with. Brando, as fascinating as it may be to watch whatever he does however bizarre his appearance is throughout, is just too out of synch with things and Kilmer (who many of the accounts seem to blame for a lot of the unpleasantness that went on) ultimately has so little presence for a long stretch of time that when he attempts to take things over later on it just doesn’t have any impact and though it seems interesting to have him playing a sort of successor to Brando (complete with him even doing an impression) it all just has a ‘so what’ feel. Thewlis, who replaced Rob Morrow when Stanley left and has said some pretty nasty things about Frankenheimer in interviews, emotes with all the anguish he can muster and seems intent on putting some kind of character into the tiniest of gestures but maybe the actor just doesn’t seem the right leading man for this particular film. Many of the actors buried in makeup, like Ron Perlman as the Sayer of the Law, are pretty much stranded with nothing to play. Surprisingly, it’s Fairuza Balk, who is kind of wasted as the mysterious Aissa and by some accounts tried to flee when Morrow did, who seems to be trying the most to do something that’s actually part of what this film is becoming. It’s a valiant attempt and is probably ultimately in vain but at least it’s something.

By now the film is probably just an odd footnote in the careers of the principles but it also seems notable for how several of those involved are now no longer with us—not just the director and star but also Stan Winston and cinematographer William A. Fraker (he does an excellent job here, particularly in shooting the creatures) who even then were still very active. Time goes by fast, that’s for sure. As for Frankenheimer, it’s nice to imagine that this experience lit a fire deep down making him determined that this wasn’t going to be his final film and two years later he was back with the Robert De Niro action film RONIN, which as far as I’m concerned is flat out awesome—of course, he was also doing some excellent work in cable TV around this time as well. Among the many things I took away from the man that day with him in his living room was how truly, unexpectedly human he came off in that moment where he spoke of his experience on this production. I’ll never know the particular side of the story he hinted at or how that would have lined up with whatever Richard Stanley’s side of things might be but as much as DR. MOREAU falls apart it never feels like the work of someone just going through the motions. If he failed, if he made it into something it shouldn’t have been, well, at least he was striving for something. When I think of that it always makes me want to defend the film a little even more, as foolhardy as it might be to try. It’s difficult to say much of anything about THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, let alone things that are good, partly because for me that next interview that never happened will always be kind of hanging there. Ultimately a pretty big mess, the film is unsatisfying like much of life is unsatisfying. But we somehow still have to get through it. We may ruin it, but we get through it.

Further Than You Think

2011-08-22T20:35:00.000-07:00

I haven’t traveled anywhere this summer—getting a job just as it began pretty much put the kibosh on that. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, I’m very happy to be employed but I am sorry that I didn’t manage to get out of town for a few days, maybe go visit my sister and her family. Her two girls are growing up fast, something which I’m sure comes as a surprise to absolutely no one who has kids and I really would like to see them again, whenever that will be. One morning not too long ago I was talking with the older one on the phone one morning as I was driving into work and for no particular reason I began telling her about the various sights as I headed into the valley so I mentioned Universal Studios which she had definitely heard of because of the theme park, of course followed several minutes later by Warner Brothers and then the Disney lot. I had to explain that this wasn’t actually Disneyland I was passing but when I told her this was where things like MARY POPPINS were filmed she was impressed anyway saying, “That sounds like the best drive to work ever.” She’s probably right too and I loved hearing her say that. It makes me hope that I’ll get the chance to introduce her to a few films as she gets older. What would I show her? What’s appropriate? What would she even like? I guess I’m the wrong person to ask.

One that occurred to me, since it probably occurs to anyone trying to think of the right movie to show to girls, was Jim Henson’s LABYRINTH which for all I know she’s probably seen anyway. The film seems to be known to enough people by now—no, scratch that, it seems to be LOVED by people now—that you’d think it was a big hit when it opened 25 years ago on June 27, 1986 but it actually came in 8th place for the weekend with total box office stopping dead at $12.7 million, considerably less than what Henson’s THE DARK CRYSTAL had made several years before. A pretty strong cult has developed around it but who knows when or how—there was a limited theatrical release a few years back for the 20th Anniversary, Diablo Cody selected it as when she was programming a festival at the New Beverly, a pretty great joke referencing it on an episode of FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS and the film has even inspired an actual masquerade ball called Labyrinth of Jareth—the next one is being held in L.A. in July 2012! And yet for something that feels such a part of the decade in all our Generation X memories it’s actually one of those fantasy films that doesn’t feel rooted in the 80s much at all, even with all those David Bowie songs. There’s a vibe which keeps it somehow out of time which seems perfect considering how the film’s opening shot presents things in a way that doesn’t make it apparent right away when the film is set. The film maybe seems even more special now than it ever did and makes clear just how much Jim Henson really is desperately missed, over twenty years after his death. It’s not without some drawbacks but within a story that is in part about what the nature of such stories really are and what they can mean is something that makes it extremely rewarding on repeat viewings. In comparison, the recent film version of WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE—a book that was very obviously a key inspiration for LABYRINTH and Maurice Sendak even receives an onscreen acknowledgement—was something that seemed to have its heart in the right place but lacked a decent narrative to go with its effects and earnest tone. That film came out less than two years ago and I remember next to nothing about it while though LABYRINTH may not have made the strongest impression on me whenever I first saw it on video, years later there were snatches from it that still lingered in my head as if I’d been watching it every day. These things are harder than they look, I suppose. But I do wonder who the ideal audience for LABYRINTH is in 2011 and beats me if it’s something my nieces would even respond to—is it a film for a roomful of girls at a slumber party or is it for a roomful of people who watched it while growing up and are sitting around at 3AM getting stoned? I mean that in the most benign way, of course and the movie seems to invite this kind of audience with its story of a girl stranded between stories that belong to kids and aspects of growing up which can never be avoided. The tone is somewhat unique in how it combines these pieces but then there’s also…well, what the hell are we supposed to say about those pants that Bowie’s wearing? You probably know what I’m talking about. Since any fondness I have isn’t connected to specific memories and I do my best to run away from these kinds of movies from the 80s this must mean that there’s something special about LABYRINTH, a film aimed at children but I still kind of like watching now.

Teenage Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) lives a life where she buries herself in her fantasy world but she still sometimes has to deal with her baby brother Toby as well as her father and stepmother. After arriving home late to babysit for him yet again she speaks aloud a plea she presumably remembers from her book “The Labyrinth” for the goblins to take Toby away. Little does she suspect that the goblins are actually listening and when they do just that the Goblin King named Jareth (David Bowie) appears to tell her he has only done what she asked. When she pleads for Toby’s return, the Goblin King tells Sarah that if she can make her way through his Labyrinth to his castle in 13 hours he will return Toby to her. If not, Toby will become one of the goblins, belonging to the Goblin King…forever. Sarah soon sets off into the labyrinth in search of the right direction, but confronted with numerous tests and tricks at every turn she quickly realizes that this will not be as easy as she first thought.

It’s funny, I had the idea to write about LABYRINTH since I realized I had the disc lying around, now I’m sitting here trying to figure out why I even own this DVD. It’s not really an issue of nostalgia since I didn’t see it in the theater—I was actually in camp at the time, so you can’t pin the poor grosses on me. Even if I’d gotten the chance maybe I wouldn’t have gone anyway since at that time I was sort of at the age where I’d moved beyond the work of Jim Henson (trust me, as a little kid I was absolutely nuts for the Muppets) and I was still several years away from gaining a new appreciation of it all. I suppose like many people of my generation I desperately wish I could have told him what he meant to me. Anyway, it’s a difficult film to discuss because like any dream the film somewhat defies an attempt to break down its story construction (screenplay by Terry Jones, story by Henson and Dennis Lee) on a rational basis. It’s a case of a film where once you get past the ingenuity of the Henson Studio’s work, it makes sense to focus on the subtext over other things because, well, the film’s story is pretty much all subtext, all the drama basically taking place in this one girls head as she faces the conflict of her past and present, the conflict of her obsession with the fantasy world prefers to remain in—a melding of the various books she buries herself in and other items seen as the camera pans across her room early on—with the responsibilities of the real world that are going to come into play whether she likes it or not. Everything that’s going to happen is laid out, from the very first lines of dialogue through the various book seen in Sarah’s bedroom as well as a few ornaments and only paying so much attention to rules or logic the film ultimately becomes its own thing, sort of a cross between a Bowie concept video album—I just flashed on the Julien Temple short JAZZIN’ FOR BLUE JEAN that he starred in a few years before this—and a creative exploration by Jim Henson (as well as others involved including screenwriter Jones and Executive Producer George Lucas) using his expertise in the world of puppetry to examine some of his own feelings about the power of myth and how he reconciles them to the real world. The playful tone all the way through lets it stand out, discarding the more anarchic elements of the Muppets in favor of a tone that serves this film and its non-Muppet creatures much better than THE DARK CRYSTAL which in spite of its ambitions I kind of remember as being an overly serious slog (I haven’t seen it in years, so who knows). In comparison, LABYRINTH always feels curious and hopeful about what’s coming next, as if the representation of a child who is always asking the right questions, looking for the best solution.

And it’s about a girl, stranded between pre-teen years and the full-on teenage life she doesn’t seem to have much interest in, willingly isolating from everyone around her and probably also focused on memories of her late mother, an actress whose photos adorn her bedroom—some have pointed out that the man in them might be Bowie which adds to the mystique. Sarah’s experience makes her determined to figure things out on her own, as if realizing that things aren’t fair, that you sometimes do need someone around you to help get you through the labyrinth that is life until the point where ultimately it’s all up to you to take a leap of faith, regardless of the consequences. Jennifer Connelly, then in that Leone-Argento muse period, is absolutely perfect casting for this, beautiful yet still somehow relatable—a dream girl who you wish wouldn’t ignore you because hopefully you’d actually have things to talk about. As an actress she’s totally ideal—immature yet still curious, young yet possessing a gravity beyond her years and as an actress I found myself continually aware of a certain technical expertise, how well she was playing what during much of this shoot must have seemed totally illogical. With the exception of the final confrontation there really isn’t a big show stopper in all this which is maybe a little too episodic by a certain point, but beats stay with me through their imagination and ingenuity--the hands that grab her as Sarah falls down a hole, the choice between the two doors, the path across the Bog of Eternal Stench which does exactly what you think it will to anyone who falls in (Hey! That’s cute Jennifer Connelly you’re messing with! Don’t be mean!). As well as the various musical interludes both from Bowie’s Jareth and the marionette-styled Fire Gang each of which begin so slyly that it’s as if the movie has decided to be a musical without actually saying so. David Bowie singing with goblins really is pretty awesome and I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten “Magic Dance” or the end credits version of “Underground” out of my head and I don’t mind one bit. There’s also how Jareth tries to distract Sarah as she moves through the labyrinth in ways that represent the paths her life could take if she doesn’t take some form of responsibility for her brother, and also for herself, possibly culminating in the reveries of the masquerade ball where Sarah, dressed as the sort of princess she probably dreams of being, encounters Jareth and faces the possibility of getting lost in these fantasies, not yet knowing how to reconcile them with responsibility.

Paired up with Sarah for much of her journey is the dwarf Hoggle (performed by Shari Weiser with the voice of Brian Henson), maybe someone with less self esteem than any creature ever seen in a fantasy film, always conflicted in his allegiance and clearly having no idea how to handle this girl who’s actually being nice, as if he can’t imagine why someone would want to be friends with him. I can’t help it, I just feel sorry for the guy—hell, I probably identify with him more than I want to admit—and his dilemma plays as more affecting every time I see the film. Much as I may like the beast Ludo and the gallant Sir Didymus, as well as a few of the other characters who turn up to aid Sarah, they don’t really stick in the memory as much as the film would probably like (to say they don’t measure up to the friends Dorothy Gale makes in Oz is probably the most unfair comparison of all time) and I don’t even know if someone who says that the gentleness of LABYRINTH might be a little too benign is necessarily wrong—you can almost feel Henson pulling back from some Monty Python-styled anarchy that Terry Jones might conceivably have tried to work into the construction of certain scenes. The film is also episodic to the point that I never feel like I need to see the whole thing in one sitting and as much its said how there’s a ticking clock for Sarah there never seems to be all that much jeopardy which could be kind of the point anyway—as much as she worries about how scared Toby might be when he’s with the goblins he’s having much more fun than he was with her. Even the tone isn’t entirely consistent considering the overly manic nature of the final battle which probably could have been cut down by half. But her final confrontation with Jareth in his castle among the M.C. Escher-styled steps going every which way is effective enough on its own, given the extra layer of Bowie singing “Within You” serving as a reminder of where all these myths and fantasies Sarah has to learn how to confront are really coming from.

Up against Connelly, who is probably better than anyone else then or now would be, is David Bowie who is basically David Bowie, often playing his mild bemusement as willingly testing Sarah more than any sort of evil which he really isn’t and he’s maybe a presence more than anything else, with the various songs he sings, that wig and, well, those pants with a considerable bulge that’s more than noticeable (I really want to know, did anybody say something while watching dailies?) playing as more memorable than much of his performance. But maybe that’s the way it should be since he’s not really supposed to be a form of evil Sarah needs to vanquish--her final choice is set up in the film’s first moments as something she not only needs to remember but also fully understand the meaning of (“You have no power over me…”). The way the crucial moment plays out may be a little too abrupt and unsatisfying but it’s not a dealbreaker considering how charming much of the film really is. The final moment also sort of discards any bittersweet feelings in favor of a more conventional happy ending but it’s all a fantasy anyway and I always love how that closing version of “Underground” kicks in so I really don’t mind it. LABYRINTH could never be made today, at least not the way it is. Not only is it too gentle in tone with a decided lack of crassness it seems completely defiant in not trying to explain itself. It’s essentially a dream film but that doesn’t disregard what happens in it. What she goes through makes the character of Sarah into the person she’s eventually going to become.

Directing his final film before his tragic death in 1990, Henson’s style may be a little too casual and yet he constantly seems willing to allow his audience to discover certain things within his frame beginning with that opening shot which doesn’t reveal where we are right away on their own. The intelligence inherent in what he’s at least trying to get across makes it such a shame that we never got to find out what else Henson would have had to offer the world in films or otherwise. I can see how some might look at the film as maybe a little too ‘nice’ because of that style and maybe leaves part of what the film is supposed to mean somewhat hanging. Does Sarah want to be her mother? Does she want to get out of this small town? Who is Jareth really supposed to represent to her? Will she eventually grow up and start going out with much older men who resemble him? Sadly, we will never know the answer to these questions, but I have a feeling she grows into someone resembling certain girls I’ve known, ones I never really had a chance with. Maybe I get more out of this movie than I ever realized before now. Whether my nieces would as well, I don’t know. Maybe someday I’ll find out. Maybe I’ll be left to enjoy LABYRINTH on my own. For now, “Magic Dance” just started up again so I think I’ll sing along. Like those goblins, sometimes I can’t help myself.