Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Nothing To Come Back For
And then suddenly things changed. I wasn’t expecting them to. Truthfully, it seemed like the moment had passed. Everything isn’t perfect, I’m not saying that, but something did happen. And, maybe appropriately, it happened on the way to the movies. In front of the Chinese Theater back during the 2023 TCM Classic Film Festival when I had just seen THE WILD BUNCH in 70mm up the street sitting next to HEATHERS screenwriter Daniel Waters, if I can briefly name drop, and had some time to kill before COOL HAND LUKE at the Chinese. That’s when, thanks to my friend Jeff, I met her. A brief meeting for starters, yes, but there would be another soon enough and then things proceeded from there. At the time, I had no idea what had just happened. I was just going to see COOL HAND LUKE, after all. But that was the very moment things changed. There’s no point in talking about it all too much but this is a piece about the film I saw at the point when nothing was ever going to be the same again. I just didn’t know it yet.
Oddly enough, for a film that has unexpectedly played a surprising role in things, COOL HAND LUKE isn’t even one I’ve seen all that much. Long ago a DVD I rented didn’t work and then for reasons that make no sense I never actually got around to trying it again until years later so the TCM screening was only my second time. This background matters to no one but me but it does matter and even though COOL HAND LUKE is, admittedly, a minor player in the greater narrative of all this it’s still worth pointing out. As for the film itself, released in the fall of 1967, it truly stands out as one of those they simply don’t make anymore. Just looking at the opening credits reveals a jaw-dropping array of names both in front of and behind the camera that leap out in terms of how much of a sense of pure craft is felt in every single scene. Maybe nobody makes movies like this anymore because there’s no one around to do it. For years I mainly associated this film with the line in the CHEERS pilot arguing it’s “the sweatiest movie ever made” but more than that it’s about a personality that won’t quit, no matter how much the clamp of authority tries to hammer down on him and how that standoff affects everyone watching all this play out. It’s a movie that’s better than you think it is, even if you already love it, and I wish I’d seen it earlier. Just like I wish I’d met her earlier. But there’s nothing to do about any of this. Which is maybe one way all these things connect with each other.
Caught late one night while drunkenly cutting the heads off parking meters in his small town, Lucas Jackson (Paul Newman) is sentenced to two years in a prison chain gang farm. The place is run by the Captain (Strother Martin) along with strict guards that include the silent and very imposing Walking Boss who they call the Man with No Eyes (Morgan Woodward) due to his mirrored sunglasses. Luke is a decorated veteran but even he doesn’t seem too impressed by this. As he settles in with the fellow prisoners he doesn’t seem intimidated by anything at all so and at first does what he is told each day so eventually his cool, seemingly uncaring attitude wins over his fellow prisoners including group leader Dragline (George Kennedy). But soon after a visit from his sick mother Arletta (Jo Van Fleet), word comes of her passing so the Captain and the guards act fast to make sure Luke won’t try to escape leading to a rebellion that he doesn’t intend on stopping.
The parking meter tag reading “VIOLATION” clicks up in the very first shot of the film, as if telling Luke exactly what he is. Maybe it’s telling us what we are too. Luke is certainly some sort of violation to the normal order of things and maybe him just existing is the greatest violation of all. But signs are everywhere in COOL HAND LUKE, telling us, telling him, what he’s supposed to do and he sees no reason to keep following those orders. COOL HAND LUKE is about the signs that are always around telling us what we’re supposed to be doing, telling us what we are, but more than that it’s about the smile on Paul Newman’s face, the smile Luke is always willing to give someone so they can’t see through him. It’s a smile that doesn’t care what’s about to happen since he hasn’t thought much about it anyway, he just doesn’t want to let them get him down. Paul Newman is what COOL HAND LUKE is, but COOL HAND LUKE is also everything around him. It’s a film that lives and breathes as it moves effortlessly from scene to scene, capturing just the right sense of defiance in those moments that come from Luke but also in the faces around him observing all this. It builds to a point where the end result seems inevitable since a man like Luke can’t react to what they do to him any other way, done with a beautifully unrushed nature that helps you live in this film as you absorb it all. As Ed Lauter’s police captain in TRUE ROMANCE might have said, it’s a good fucking movie.
Of course, Paul Newman isn’t in every shot in the film but if Luke is in the shot Luke is what matters. COOL HAND LUKE is uniquely a great character study almost because of, or maybe in spite of, what we don’t actually learn about him. “Nothing can be a real cool hand,” he says about the card game bluff that leads to his nickname, just as they all get nicknames in this place which helps keep them separate from the outside world, his own nickname one that comes from nothing just as he only shows everyone around him nothing. And in that blank slate which refuses to quit is something the other guys can admire, can aspire to, getting Dragline’s respect and then everyone else around them. It almost certainly never occurs to Luke how far all this is going to go. “Just passing time,” he says when confronted with details of his war service that ended with some commendations but not much else at all, busted down from sergeant back to Buck Private where he started. For a while he knows enough to keep his head down and stay quiet, unlike fellow prisoner Ralph Waite who is in no way prepared for what this place is, where they has to ask the bosses permission to do any single thing while clearing brush or whatever it is they’re doing along the road. Once Luke figures out the rules and how things work from day to day, he can do the same thing here only it’s going to wind up with even less. He gets them to pave that road faster than anyone thought because why the hell not, what else is there to do after all. Even better, they’ll get to confuse the guards while getting the job done. Even after the triumphant moment of realizing the job is done it’s a familiar sign reading STOP that the camera zooms in on as if telling him he may as well stop, all this hard work will get him on their bad side no matter what so there’s really no point. After all, sometimes you smile at the wrong people and the very idea of following the rules simply for your own pleasure in this place gets you nowhere. Luke just doesn’t care. What Luke is, who he is proving it in his famous pledge to eat fifty eggs in an hour and he really does it before sprawling out in that famous Christ pose, showing them the impossible for no reason at all. “No one can eat fifty eggs” someone says right after he did it. That’s what you say when a myth is right in front of you.
Luke barely seems to acknowledge or even look at his fellow inmates and he certainly never helps them with their own problems, let alone try to be any sort of leader. It’s not about them. It’s about him and it’s about how they react to him or, at times, don’t at all, standing by silently as they watch him, unable to do anything else. Whether he’s their Christ or not, whether they’re all his disciples, the imagery is sometimes obvious although I’m the wrong guy to speculate much on this aspect but it’s how they react to him. He creates the myth of himself through all the defiance he displays, not even afraid of a rattlesnake and reaching up to the sky during a rainstorm Shawshank-style as if baiting the lord that he can do anything to Luke that he wants but there’s no redemption to be found here, not one that anyone will offer, no amount of spirituals sung by Harry Dean Stanton to help him and no magical place to tunnel out to. As for the guards, meanwhile, all they need to do is sit there and watch him, silent. They don’t have to do anything but wait.
Luke’s mother also has no help to offer him when she visits, only coming to say goodbye when she clearly knows the end is near, looking at him with love, knowing there’s nothing she can do, nothing she could ever do. Maybe she knew the violation he was going to be. It’s one of the quietest moments of the film as well as one of the most crucial turning points, answering so much about who he is while still not revealing very much at all. His mother loves him while knowing he’s a screwup and when she’s finally gone, he’s alone. Even Hud had a family that wanted to care about him, at least up to a point. Luke is simply let go, free and clear, nothing left but his banjo as if finally receiving assurance from the lord after screaming up to the sky at him that he really will always be alone. And when she dies there’s nothing to keep him anywhere. When those things happen it all changes. Things seem different. Things look different. And you can’t stay where you were. What happens leads to Luke’s escape attempts which all seem to be on impulse because why not and it seems like he wants to fuck with the guards as much as he wants to escape anyway, it all comes from the feeling of when Luke by himself finally plays that banjo as he searches for answers that he’ll never get and maybe never really want.
They used to make movies like this, they really did, whoever ‘they’ are, and it’s hard not to think about what these movies used to be. At the time this was normal, expected, just something new opening in theaters starring Paul Newman. Stuart Rosenberg directed a few films before this as well as some television and his most notable credits that come after all feel random so in the end he’s remembered now primarily as the director of COOL HAND LUKE and, well, other things. THE APRIL FOOLS, a Jack Lemmon-Catherine Deneuve romantic comedy which followed, seems genetically designed for me so I wish I liked it better. There’s the Elliott Gould social satire MOVE which is difficult to find now, the not-bad Walter Matthau cop thriller THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN along with several other Paul Newman vehicles that don’t have anywhere near this kind of pop culture footprint. There’s also the smash THE AMITYVILLE HORROR plus his other prison drama BRUBAKER which, in fairness, I still haven’t seen, along with THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE which on a prestige level might be the only one with a reputation that comes close to LUKE. But never mind all that. Maybe he never made a better film than COOL HAND LUKE, possibly due to working with the right star and material, possibly due to all the right people around him to help make this happen.
Maybe the best way to put it is that it feels like Stuart Rosenberg is in the zone here in the directing the film, correctly finding what each scene needs to be about while keeping just the right balance among everything around him, the feel of the prison farm, the glare of the sun in the early morning, the silent gazes of the other prisoners when they know they have to be quiet. The film has breathing room, Rosenberg’s direction here always captures the essence of what each scene is meant to be, soaking in the hot Florida environment while balancing between keeping the star of the film front and center with all these other guys in the frame around him. Even if it’s a Paul Newman movie, which it definitely is, what they’re doing always seems to matter.
As much as all this is true, it still feels like a film made by the great cinematographer Conrad Hall just as much as by its director, each of those shots managing to be stunning while still moving the story forward at the same time in showing how Luke fits in with this crew. On an elemental level, there isn’t a single uninteresting shot in the entire running time and something like the little camera move that occurs when Luke does those pull-ups during the egg eating contest, the moment has such a playful nature it feels like the camera is directly attached to Luke himself. Even those interstitial-type shots of the chain gang working add so much mood and texture to help this sense of imagery stick in the mind after, all of it implying a certain sense of freedom as much as it can never be found. The editing by Sam O’Steen always breaks down sequences into shots and moments that go together seamlessly with the whole thing whether the guys all leering at Joy Harmon washing her car or the clock ticking as Luke eats all those eggs along with those interstitial montages of the days and nights going on and on, always keeping the structure of different events moving forward. The more I watch it, the more I soak into the rhythms provided by every single moment which makes me think it might low key be one of the most well edited films ever.
Neither Hall nor O’Steen were Oscar nominated for their work here but the phenomenal screenplay by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson based on Pearce’s novel was and it’s almost deceptively episodic in the way it gradually unfurls the pieces of the story at first along with a spotlight on all that dialogue which incisively cuts right to the point. The conflict is laid out beautifully in those moments and it makes things like the silent reactions Luke gives to all those rules and stamping down by the guards more powerful. It relishes the language of what he fights against, maybe most enjoyably in something like the introductory speech given by the great Clifton James as the floor walker continually punctuating how any rule breaker will “spend the night in the box” which clearly plays like what a similar speech years later in THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (needless to say, also starring Paul Newman) where Tim Robbins is repeatedly told in his mailroom orientation how if he makes any mistake “they dock ya!” was riffing on, clearly portraying the giant Hudsucker corporation as its own sort of prison with its own rules, just set in a world where Luke wasn’t the one who had to worry about them anymore.
Composer Lalo Schifrin’s score also received an Oscar nomination and his gentle main theme hangs in the air throughout, along with the recurring reminders that lead to the way it pounds in day after day on the road, all these elements making up the texture of the film, a story about a guy who doesn’t want to do what people want him to do. Those moments keep the film building up to the clash we know is coming and the way those moments pay off when they finally come, especially the way Strother Martin collects himself and makes his ‘failure to communicate’ pronouncement to all the inmates, using the formality of the phrase to assert his power over them. The power of the moment lays out exactly what the film is saying and Strother Martin makes it his own immortality right there, about those people on their own side who insist on communicating with you their way, how Luke needs to learn the rules for his own good as the Captain would say, always insisting the sadism they believe in is right and they won’t rest until you say the same.
This may or may not resemble an actual Florida prison camp of the period when it’s set, presumably at some point in the ‘50s, but none of this really matters since the metaphor is clear, the very idea of captivity is what Luke is fighting against just as much as he fights against everything he encounters. The very concept of a prison film is unavoidably metaphoric anyway, the one place he’s forced to be and is always going to have to break out of since Luke is a guy who can’t stay down, won’t stay down even through all the mental torture and flat out sadism they use on him to make his mind right, as they put it, and do only what they ever say. Realism isn’t the strictest concern here and, wisely, the film simply jumps over a few captures after Luke escapes, speaking to their inevitability. What matters is what happens when they catch him again and try to break him, the one thing they intend to do and the one thing they know how to do. “Stop feeding off me!” he shouts at all the other prisoners who want to, need to, look up to him, when brought back to the camp. But no matter what, he can’t stop. Even after they break him. He has no choice and final escape is really all he has left, no answers to get when he reaches the church to ask his final questions, needing to know if there’s any possible way he can win. Those questions we ask at certain times, not knowing if we’ll ever get an answer and not sure if we even want one.
In some ways we don’t know any more about Luke at the end of the film than we do at the beginning. At the beginning we’re asking who this guy is and maybe that’s what we’re doing at the end. The answer is simple since he’s Paul Newman and everything that represents. But he’s also us. After all, sometimes the answers are simpler than we realize. We don’t know what we should do. There are no answers. When you’re a hard case, you have to find your own way when the worst has already happened. Even if all you get out of it is a pair of broken sunglasses meant to shield a pair of eyes you can never see, well, that’s something. It allows for the uplift of the final moments, with an editorially created ending anticipating ANNIE HALL years before that film allowing us to look back on all the good times and get one more look at all those shots of Luke’s smile to help us remember. That’s what the very last shot says, revealing a certain photo that has been taped back up. It was all a show, but it was also real. It had to be real. And if it wasn’t real, then we’ll never fully understand what it was. That’s what I’m still asking about some of what’s happened in my own life, even now that it’s all been forever changed.
What Paul Newman does here is a rarity, a great performance in addition to being a great movie star performance and it seems worth pointing out that they might not be the same things. It’s very much designed to be a movie star role and Luke is meant to be a star to everyone else in the prison camp so it makes perfect sense. The way he takes over the screen with every ounce of his confidence is unforgettable, taking that cockiness of Luke and his ultimate unreadability to a place that it feels like no other actor could have reached. The truly great roles/performances by the actor speak to the power that comes the moment he steps onscreen whether THE HUSTLER, HUD, SLAP SHOT, THE VERDICT or THE COLOR OF MONEY. But what this one has is the hidden sense of futility which comes along with that power, seeming to know that none of what he has will do him any good in the end. It’s his film and was likely always meant to be. But there is still George Kennedy who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar (Newman, for the record, was nominated but lost Best Actor to Rod Steiger for IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT) along with Strother Martin who also deserved to be nominated for it, showing how laid back and untroubled his true evil is until he can’t hold it back anymore. In her one scene, Jo Van Fleet makes every single line enigmatic while also displaying the love for her son that she knew would never be quite right. And all those character actors. The completely silent Morgan Woodward and his mirrored sunglasses is intimidatingly unforgettable and it’s like late ‘60s Character Actor Central here with the likes of Lou Antonio, Ralph Waite, Luke Askew, Wayne Rogers, Anthony Zerbe, Harry Dean Stanton, Joe Don Baker, plus Dennis Hopper who doesn’t really have any dialogue at all but our eyes get drawn to him each time he’s in a shot, partly because he’s Dennis Hopper but also because he’s doing something interesting every single time he’s onscreen.
But much of it comes down to the things that are remembered by us, whether from films or our own lives. COOL HAND LUKE is likely thought of now as one of the strongest Paul Newman films as well as an exemplary example of a studio film at the start of the New Hollywood with scenes like the fifty eggs plus Strother Martin’s legendary ‘failure to communicate’ utterance. It’s also likely that the film’s greatest legacy in pop culture might be how it later utilized the “Tar Sequence” track from Lalo Schifrin’s phenomenal score and turned it into the instantly recognizable Eyewitness News theme that played during local newscasts for decades after. The film’s legacy in my own life now is a little different, even if it’s just as unexpected. But you never know what’s going to happen no matter how insistent you are. How everything changed one day when I was at the Chinese Theater, a place which no matter how much it’s changed what with renovations and IMAX and all that has always meant a lot to me. It’s where I saw PULP FICTION on opening night, after all. Now it means so much more. Nobody can eat fifty eggs, just like nobody is going to meet the love of their life in front of the Chinese Theater, but it did happen. And several months later we went back there and saw STOP MAKING SENSE, our first movie together at that theater. It was a good choice. We also saw plenty at the 2024 TCM Classic Film Festival the following year, but that’s a story for another time. What’s important for now is that she gave me my smile. Just as Luke still has his smile at the end of the film. That’s the one thing they couldn’t take from him and makes me wish mine could turn up even more than it does now, but we’ll wait and see about that. COOL HAND LUKE is a great film about never losing it and how we can get to that place if we don’t let the world take it away but it’s even better than that. And who really knows what to ever say about the things that happen as we find our own way, hopefully with the people who mean more to us than we ever thought possible.
Sunday, July 7, 2024
Water Under The Dam
My mother never saw THE IRISHMAN. Somehow this seems important. It wasn’t that she couldn’t have, it was right there on Netflix. And she had already seen numerous Martin Scorsese films over the decades which, of course, is what you did in New York. She’s the one who took me to see AFTER HOURS, my very first Scorsese in a theater. This is a memory that matters. Years later we saw GANGS OF NEW YORK at the Chinese during one of her holiday visits out to L.A. and of course she also loved GOODFELLAS as everyone did even if as time went on she only remembered the funny stuff, but that’s normal. She even expressed interest when the film was released in late 2019 but her health at the time made me think that she might not want to be reminded of certain things, since so much of the film is about The End and being close to it, and I didn’t try pushing it on her. So when she passed late on Thanksgiving night, 2022 as far as I know she had still never seen THE IRISHMAN. It doesn’t really matter. If a film means something to you, it might be for your own reasons more than anything that’s actually in the film so whatever the reasons might be THE IRISHMAN has grown to mean a lot to me over the past few years. It makes me think about events in my own life from long ago and what they really meant, it makes me wonder about a future I still have to find my way into and hopefully somehow will. It’s a film about the past leading to a future that is a long, slow, inevitable end which the main character refuses to acknowledge, even after he’s done so much that he can never atone for. Can any of us move past what we’ve done? Can any of us move past whatever our parents were, what they were to us? I suppose we have to, since the alternative isn’t worth facing. THE IRISHMAN is not about my mother, this is obvious. But maybe certain feelings get mixed in there, maybe also some feelings about my father who incidentally may have preferred CASINO to GOODFELLAS, along with other things I don’t want to think about. At the very least, it’s a film about things that happened which we maybe don’t want to remember as well as something we’re all going to face eventually, however long it takes.
THE IRISHMAN is also about America, just as many Martin Scorsese pictures are. The mid-70s horror of TAXI DRIVER, the stylized post-war of NEW YORK, NEW YORK, the media future of THE KING OF COMEDY, the financial orgy of THE WOLF OF WALL STREET and this is just for starters. THE IRISHMAN is easily the most sprawling of them, taking us from a version of America that used to exist back in the twentieth century, when the adults were seemingly in charge and we thought they knew what was best. It was an America of unions and storefronts and music by Jackie Gleason and glossy hotel ballrooms and a glorious future that seemed to go as far as the eye could see. This is a country that once had Howard Johnson’s, after all. We used to have Roger Mudd on TV every night. Through all this it’s asking how the events of the twentieth century created people and how did they in turn go on to shape the rest of it, whether anyone knew or not. This glorious world of mid-century America is basically the same as the world of crime it depicts so if one dies then the other dies, I suppose, or it all just turns into the present we’re living in right now. To bring up another film starring the same two leads, if THE GODFATHER PART II is about the dual journey of a parent and child through twentieth-century America showing what all that leads to, then THE IRISHMAN feels like it’s more interested in peering silently backward at the lives our parents once lead, the world they were a part of, the damage it all caused when they thought things were so much better and where they live now in our minds, like it or not.
For whatever reason THE IRISHMAN is also only partly THE IRISHMAN since it also goes by I HEARD YOU PAINT HOUSES, the name of the book by Charles Brandt it’s based on which is how the movie defiantly begins; both titles appear in the end credits. Maybe they could have come up with something better but, of course, Robert De Niro had already starred in a film called ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. Whatever the name, it’s the story of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), talking to no one, talking to us, about working as a truck driver long ago and his chance encounter with mobster Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) which led to a life as a hitman for the mob aka ‘painting houses’. This new path took him up the ladder to the top of where unions and organized crime merged, becoming a close friend and advisor to none other than famed labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) and what Frank’s involvement with trying to mediate some sort of peace between the two sides eventually led to.
There’s something about the special feeling of sitting in a theater waiting to see the new Martin Scorsese film. That feeling of anticipation which grows undeniably stronger each time leading to this point where we have to be honest and admit we can no longer be sure just how many more times this is going to happen. Then from this comes the initial discovery on first viewing of what each film really is beyond any expectations, beginning from that first rush of pure exhilarating cinema before deepening into whatever it really is and how we can accept that. It’s a feeling which keeps so many of them rewatchable as we return to get that contact high followed by the cold water of reality right before the credits roll. Not even five years since its release, THE IRISHMAN has already become one of those for me even if it does that without ever achieving the rush of exhilaration we might have expected, cinematic or otherwise. It’s not that kind of film and doesn’t want to be, instead showing in minute detail the steady pace of becoming part of this life in a way that feels addictively meditative, allowing me to continually focus on what happens from one moment to the next. I’ve already lost count of how many viewings there have been for me so far, from the one time I got to see it in a theater all the way through the comfort viewings circa Covid lockdown and then continuing past my mother’s death which brought an undeniable extra layer to it all. The reflection brought out in it feels like this is meant to be the ultimate statement on the guys the director has been making movies about for decades by now, starring people whose very presence adds immeasurably to how much this means. It’s a film that shows reaching the top of the mountain, a mountain the guys in MEAN STREETS never had a shot of climbing, but that film is part of a scrappier, younger man’s aesthetic, not fully aware of the gravity of it all just yet. This film feels like it’s meant to be the summation, the final word, a film about the end even if we already know it isn’t really that for the director. Ahead of release much of what anyone knew about it was the gangster movie aspect and the de-aging digital effects that some people spend too much time harping on. Now it’s five years later and some of those things matter, some of them really don’t at all anymore.
Frank Sheeran’s life is long and the film is long. Maybe it doesn’t have to be as long as it is but nothing has to be anything and there is so much pleasure in each of the side trips taken by the film, each new viewing revealing another detail which makes it that much richer. What stood out to me recently were all the silences as someone, often De Niro, keeps glaring silently, beats where the film held on shots as if wanting us to remember these places where things happen, forcing us to remember such moments as everything changes. If the film wasn’t so long those moments wouldn’t matter as much, the way time proceeds forward until we can barely tell anymore how far it’s gone. The narrative as laid out in the screenplay by Steven Zaillian is careful and methodical, with a beautiful clarity to the dual framing device that breaks things down, the map of the trip being taken and the way Frank Sheeran’s own life becomes mapped out, each leading to the exact same destination. Like the drive, the film doesn’t need to rush. The seemingly unimportant stops are there for a reason so the metronome pacing carefully laid out by Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker brings a focus to every single moment that keeps it going, a ticking in Frank’s head he ignores but it’s always there. It begins to feel like a movie about the feeling that comes within those cuts, pacing that allows each moment to get deep inside us as it just keeps going and going. CASINO and THE WOLF OF WALL STREET are both a shade under three hours which seems contractually deliberate i.e. “don’t go one second over a 180 minute runtime” while THE IRISHMAN gets even more breathing room at three-and-a-half, more time to focus on all the wrong choices being made and all the silent realizations that come when it’s too late, although you can cut that down by about ten minutes if you don’t want to count the credits. And through all that is the Robbie Robertson theme with the low notes of that cello which cut down into the soul, pressing on and on.
The widescreen approach that Scorsese has largely used over the past few decades is here eschewed in favor of something more visually hemmed in, focused more on the simple act of people dealing with each other up close with so much going on around them, whether because this was made for Netflix or a byproduct of the complicated effects work (incidentally, the only other film of his in recent years not in some form of widescreen was HUGO) is unclear but there is what feels like the gleaming, perfect look often found at the streaming site which is still evident on the Criterion Blu-ray. Either way, the look brought to it by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (now best known for shooting both BARBIE and KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON which came out a few months apart from each other) is impeccable and he brings such emotional life to each of those closeups. Those shots are an integral part of the visual effects concept to the whole film and even after multiple viewings it still works better at certain points more than others with the overall smoothing out nature of the appearances almost always unavoidable. Even if it’s a miracle of technology it’s maybe a flawed miracle and whether it’s one that serves any real purpose here or in any other film is still open to debate. But the very existence of the effects becomes so much a part of the very subtext of the film anyway that how perfect they might be only seems to matter up to a certain point. Besides, these are men who were always old to begin with so it wouldn’t work as well with younger guys in the roles anyway, no matter what age they were playing, so the way that genuine advanced age is always felt makes total sense and with each revisit any nitpicking over it all seems to matter less and less.
“I met what was gonna turn out to be the rest of my life,” Frank tells us after being formally introduced to Russell Bufalino which serves as this film’s version of Henry Hill recalling “It was when I met the world,” about the first moment Jimmy Conway entered his life in GOODFELLAS. For Henry it really does feel like the start of something but for Frank, even at the beginning, it’s like it was already over for him with everything decided thanks to the war that essentially created him, the ‘good war’, which gave him the ‘whatever happens, happens’ philosophy he chose to live his life by. To break the narrative up into pieces it’s Frank’s arrival into this world, his ascension and the falling to Earth after the death at his own hands of the most important person he’ll ever meet. It’s framed by the journey to this event which is doubly framed by him looking back at all this as he tells his story, maybe to us, maybe to no one at all, simply trying to convince himself that it all had some sort of purpose. He somehow becomes a close confidant of Hoffa almost unnervingly fast and they become like an old married couple in their pajamas almost instantly, which pleasingly gives us a De Niro/Pacino friendship we’ve really never had onscreen before (let’s forget about RIGHTEOUS KILL), just as everything that happens in Frank’s ascension from mere truck driver almost seems a little too good to be true to have really taken place, no matter how willing he was to ‘paint houses’ but even that portrayal of the American dream feels like part of the dark humor which is there and has to be there, as undeniable a part of that world, just as it’s an undeniable part of a Martin Scorsese film, as it is.
People used to seem older. Or maybe I was just younger. Either way, they were adults then and it makes sense that everyone in this film always seems older than the age they likely really are. In Frank’s mind, he always was old so when Bufalino calls him ‘kid’ the first time they meet it seems a little crazy, digital de-aging technology or not. The chronology of the film could be looked up to break it all down to exact dates and as much as it may be common knowledge when certain events took place, it still all feels like it takes place in a general sort of past. Scorsese likely remembers dates by when certain films came out anyway so when a key arrest is made Don Siegel’s THE SHOOTIST is playing across the street, because of course it is and it feels like the end of the road that began all the way back when Harvey Keitel went to see RIO BRAVO in Scorsese’s first feature WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR. This matters too, the feeling that we’re traveling through the past of various Scorsese films we’ve already lived over and over making references to both American history and his own cinematic history, whether the Copacabana or Don Rickles, trying to remember what happened in Columbus Circle whether in films or reality, plus one historical point that even briefly involves David Ferrie, previously played by Joe Pesci in Olver Stone’s JFK. Brushing up against another film, brushing up against some form of actual history. Even the details involving the Joe Gallo hit manage to cross over with the recent making-of-THE GODFATHER miniseries THE OFFER (sort of enjoyable in a Chinese takeout way but not much more than that, RIP Al Ruddy) and without getting into what’s true or not I’m more open to believing the version this film presents than the idea that Joe Gallo being killed allowed Francis Ford Coppola to film on location in Sicily. Even the use of scores from older films, such as a lyrical track from THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA under one sequence, are a key part of this approach and it’s something Scorsese has done before, most notably the way CASINO utilized Georges Delerue’s theme from CONTEMPT to underscore its own portrayal of marital agony. There’s of course a certain similarity to the way Tarantino has utilized scores from other films over the years as a sort of meta-commentary through his own versions of history and since this never happened before 1997’s JACKIE BROWN it’s hard not to wonder if he was at all inspired when CASINO was released a few years earlier. The specific choices come from different eras just as the two men do but when used they feel equally personal, additional pieces of the past somehow trying to be heard and remembered, no matter how distant they may be.
That undeniable feeling of The End is made clear right from the beginning in the prolonged opening shot where we eventually find Frank in that nursing home, all by himself and seemingly ready to talk. It’s also the way people are introduced alongside a title card describing their eventual, often violent, deaths which becomes this film’s version of the BARRY LYNDON epilogue showing how the only thing that defines them is a very specific kind of end that makes them all equal. Nothing that happened when they were alive will be remembered except for the fate of the one guy ‘liked by all’ which provides one of the biggest laughs of all. Aside from him, only Frank somehow makes it all the way through, past the point where anyone will remember. For a film where it feels like that main character takes absolutely no pleasure in anything, so much attention is paid to the way time is spent enjoying those tiny pleasures in our lives, often food, the ones we barely even think about as they happen, all of it seems like it’s part of a world that doesn’t really exist anymore. The steak, the ice cream sundaes Jimmy likes not to mention the ginger ale, the hot dogs at Lum’s that are steamed in beer, the choice Frank is given of having corn flakes or Total for breakfast, the cigarette breaks the wives insist on during their drive. There’s a sense in the film of wanting to hold onto the past, whatever it was, hold onto those pleasures and the way things were, no matter how horrible what was going on was. The way Scorsese alums like Don Rickles and Jerry Vale turn up here as played by Jim Norton and Steven Van Zandt as if makes total sense for them to be here and even if they’re gone it’s still going to happen, he way he’s just as insistent on De Niro, Pacino and Pesci still playing characters much younger than they really were at the time so the film wouldn’t have any meaning otherwise. The way we can’t move on from what we’ve done and the things that were done to us. “They wouldn’t dare!” Hoffa chokes out when the anvil is coming down and there’s nothing he can do about it. There was nothing we could ever do to change things.
Frank stays quiet so much of the time, saying nothing to silent orders he’s given but never really saying much of anything at all and it’s almost a surprise when he willingly speaks so it’s even more of a shock when he actually makes a joke, like suggesting ‘twelve and a half minutes’ as the middle ground for how late it’s acceptable to arrive at a meeting. Maybe his most likable moment in the whole film is early on when he says he doesn’t mind the cold, feeling relatable for a brief moment even amid the drudgery of a workday. His silence is the perfect opposite to Hoffa’s bluster, even when no matter how close they are Hoffa doesn’t notice him standing a few feet away during one of his screaming fits. It takes time for the film to get to Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa but when he turns up and, forgetting whatever the real Hoffa was like, the effect he gives off is a bolt of lightning in how alive and energetic he seems, human in a way that no one else in the movie is with all the foibles and passion that come with it. He’s not a man who gingerly dips his break into some wine, he wants to enjoy his hot fudge sundae and have a good time while doing it while making sure that know one messes with that enjoyment to bring out his temper, that glare of resentment as he chews his steak. After all, some of us spend our lives getting annoyed by the people who wear shorts and show up late and Hoffa just seems to know that sometimes all you can do is make sure the fight doesn’t end until you say so. But as Frank learns, when the most important person in your life is gone, nothing else is going to matter and things fall apart anyway. Frank does all these things never questioning what he’s supposed to do, the way Lee Marvin as Walker in John Boorman’s POINT BLANK barely seems to know or remember why he cares so much about the money he’s owed by the mob, just as Frank has no answer for why he blindly follows these orders. An abrupt edit placed when Frank calls Jo Hoffa on the phone even feels as if he’s trying to slice the particular memory of this one solitary moment out of his brain to somehow avoid remembering but in the end has no choice but to forever live by himself with the only thing he feels any guilt over.
This is set in an east coast that always feels like what the past is to me, even if this is centered more in Philly than any New York that I knew, but I still connect it to those distant memories of restaurants in Queens or Long Island that I was taken to as a kid. And that’s the mood it has more than shots. Trying to one-up the GOODFELLAS Copacabana shot wouldn’t be right. The closest to the expected virtuoso Steadicam shots coming during one hit with bouncy Percy Faith music on the soundtrack that ends as the camera moves in on a peaceful arrangement of flowers, whether appropriate for a funeral or a scene in VERTIGO and the much later scene depicting the hit at Umbertos Clam House which almost feels dreamlike, Frank floating through the orders he’s silently been given. More than the cinematic rush we get from such great shots it’s about the mood, the looks between the actors, the rhythms of those cuts placed into a montage running over the entire film.
So much is revealed in the greatness of the testimonial dinner sequence and the way it presents how these guys deal with each other individually and what their own loyalty really is as the weight of it all begins to come crushing down. The sequence is highlighted by The Golddiggers singing “The Time is Now” in the background with that refrain of “Yesterday is Over” heard under conversation as if there’s really going to be a future for any of them. It already feels like an underrated musical selection by Scorsese and the choice is so completely shallow in its period hollowness, so perfectly plastic in its pastiche style it feels even more perfect that it barely even seems like a real song with lyrics that seems to ask how much the past even matters, how much anything we do matters and doesn’t it seem like it’s mattering less and less all the time. Maybe it never mattered anyway, considering where things ended up. The life of Frank Sheeran as presented comes off as a Forrest Gump of mob killings but that alone still makes him important in American history, one that’s more aware of the suffering around him but I’m still not even thinking about if a word the main character says in his narration is even true, just that the film is choosing to print the legend, to take a line from a John Ford film that seems pertinent here, whatever legend Frank has chosen to justify to himself. Someone I know and shall go unnamed here has a family connection to Russell Bufalino and was angered by the film, telling me he was nothing like the way he’s portrayed here. Does even this matter? Does anything we’ve ever known about our parents or our past really matter?
Whatever Peggy knows about her father, it’s clear she knows what’s going on. Maybe she doesn’t know what she knows, but she does know and from a very young age, the payoff to all those shots in earlier Scorsese films of kids silently watching the goings-on between their parents and forever marking them. In his own silence to her, Frank doesn’t even deny it while “Pretend You Don’t See Her” plays as she dances with Hoffa which both recalls when it was heard long ago in GOODFELLAS as well as serving as a message to Frank telling what he needs to do, to pretend he doesn’t see her. Or hear her. Or speak to her. And he never even thinks about it. What he would do is never even a question. Played by Lucy Galina as a child and Anna Paquin as an adult, the role is the lynchpin in everything that Frank ignored, Paquin almost completely silent in the role and if she’d gotten a nomination simply for the way she asks “Why?” as part of her one real line of dialogue it still would have been deserved. In the end, that silence he caused is all he gets and when he does find one of his daughters willing to talk, anything he does has to say is far too late. I’m not sure if there’s an actual reconciliation that really lasts in Scorsese’s entire filmography. When something is over, it’s over. Those who judge you do so by their silence, to use the title of another film. “It was no more complicated than that,” he says about what happened to Hoffa and it becomes harder to shake the film’s final glimpse of him the more time goes on. The film is about those moments in our childhood when our parents didn’t speak but we knew something was going on. It’s asking what you have done in your life, what do you have at the end because of that and what really mattered. Whether or not this is the truth about Jimmy Hoffa doesn’t really matter. We all fall short in the end, but it’s up to us how far.
But it also wouldn’t be a Scorsese film about these things if it all wasn’t as funny as it is so much of the time, those moments where someone gets a little too annoyed by nothing at all even if it’s more gallows humor than ever before, the laughs cutting deep until you bleed and choke on them before the sound can come out. Those tiny pleasures are all through the film, the horrible laughs are there depicting the danger of sitting in a car’s front seat with someone behind you. The tone feels a little like the way we imagine Scorsese laughing incessantly, the way he does at Fran Lebowitz, but this drops away more and more until he’s silently remembering everything he never wants to think about. It’s none of our business. It’s easy to get lost in all that Teamster infighting and bickering of the middle section but the big showdown with Stephen Graham’s Tony Pro over traffic and how late you’re allowed to be to a meeting gets funnier every single time then from the testimonial dinner for Frank on the film is never less than masterful, the big event held up by the curious delivery of a frozen fish—another one of those pleasures in life that Frank will never know— that never gets fully explained and even that joke is diffused by the tension brought to it by Frank. The last thing we hear Russell say as he’s being taken to church is, “Don’t laugh, you’ll see,” which could be a warning given at the start of any number of Scorsese films and the last 45 minutes are devastatingly brutal, nothing left to laugh over or get any pleasure in. In the blink of an eye it’s the twenty-first century and he stays alive past the point where he literally can’t stand up anymore. Something similar happened to my mother this way and after that night she never got to go back to her home again which is what I’m always thinking of when this happens. Like the narrative span of so many other Scorsese films, it’s funny until it’s not. It’s funny until two people are in a room together too long, no more patience for any of those jokes. It’s funny until somebody refuses to realize how unfunny they really are. It’s funny until there’s a dead body left behind as you leave the room. This is what you are to some people and where you wind up, like it or not. It’s what it is.
In the end, Frank is alone with nothing that ever mattered to him but that gaudy ring on his finger that will probably still be there when he dies, no one left to care that he was one of a few to ever be given it and a few photos of the past, whatever that past ever really meant including one of his wife, the one he ended his first marriage to be with, who we never learned much about beyond that she smoked. Maybe he never learned much more either and he’s not even going to be buried next to her. So maybe his ‘whatever happens, happens’ philosophy was never enough. Fuck it, Bufalino basically says at both the beginning and the end. Frank doesn’t seem so sure about that anymore but it’s still how he always lived, he just hasn’t put it into words. He hasn’t really said anything and now he’s left trying to justify it all, whatever the truth really is. The one moment that haunts him years later isn’t even one where he actually killed someone but what he did after. Eventually all he has left is the crypt he buys and the green coffin which is probably the snazziest purchase he’s ever made in his life and maybe the most individual choice he’s ever made, while still ignoring everything that the very idea of burning up in cremation symbolizes. “In the Still of the Night” is played at the start and it returns later as a sign of doom that can’t be turned away from and we remember it, taking us to the end, long after the music has stopped as they always do when the fun stops in Scorsese films and the world feels completely dead. It feels like a fair question to ask if there’s anything to the memory of a life at all if it doesn’t come with any guilt. And Frank doesn’t have the answer. Of course, it’s the end of THE SEARCHERS being recalled when Frank is seen in the final shot, having long since made the choice to stay on the other side of that door. Only in this case it’s a door not completely closed, as if waiting for Hoffa to reappear, waiting for Peggy, waiting for anyone, but also a refusal to commit just like Frank spent his life doing but more than that he’s alone at the end just as any number of other Scorsese protagonists have been through the years. But Travis Bickle still had his cab, Jimmy Doyle had his nightclub, Jake LaMotta had his nightclub act, Paul Hackett had his job, Henry Hill had his exile, Ace Rothstein had his ability to pick winners, Howard Hughes had his madness. All Frank Sheeran has is the inevitable, even as he’s hoping for something more, desperately bargaining for a way out.
So much of this feeling is found in the sheer sense of focus coming from Robert De Niro in every scene and the result is at times overwhelming, very likely one of his most underrated performances with every ounce of that silent power exploding from the very stoniness of his expression and how his eyes are registering it all, whether saying anything or not with each movement carrying so much weight, especially that little nod he gives to Pacino at a crucial moment to get him into a car. He’s essentially playing a walking, talking brick wall and how much his eyes alone tell the story of what he’s doing, playing somebody who did all the wrong things for the wrong reasons and only realizing this at the end, not even understanding reasons why or why he should ever feel any different. He’s a thug, nothing more than that, but it’s balanced out by the ultra-dry humor that comes through more often than you’d think with his narration of the line “They steam them in beer” about the hot dogs from Lum’s that is maybe one of the best line readings Robert De Niro ever given and now all I want is one of those hot dogs. As De Niro remains constantly still, Al Pacino is all about movement and he delivers a gloriously huge performance in a portrayal of someone, however accurate it is to the real person, who despite what he does and knows makes him seem to represent all that is good in the world and what could possibly be. He barrels through and it’s a thrill to see him do this especially when he’s playing off Joe Pesci in their big scene together is one of the true underdiscussed pleasures of the film, one actor so angry, one staying so calm, so quiet, the way he repeats ‘some people’ multiple times. You can’t say that Joe Pesci steals the movie, it’s not that kind of performance, but the way he seems to choose each word, each syllable, each gesture, very carefully, causes you to lean forward to catch every single word he says and the impeccably quiet nature of it is unforgettable. No surprise, there are too many others to mention. Harvey Keitel for the way he explains what saying, “I do” means when offering up an answer to a question he posed, Ray Romano as Bill Bufalino, Stephen Graham as Tony Pro, Kathrine Narducci as Carrie Bufalino, Jessie Plemons as Chuckie, Welker White as Jo Hoffa (particularly for the way she turns down a Lum’s hot dog), Louis Cancelmi as Sally Bugs (particularly for the way he grills Chuckie about the fish), Marin Ireland as Frank’s other daughter Dolores, Action Bronson as the casket salesman, Dascha Polanco as the nurse who’s never heard of Jimmy Hoffa and doesn’t need to hear Frank musing about how fast time goes.
“The most personal is the most creative,” was what Bong Joon-ho said in quoting Scorsese about making a film when accepting his Oscar for Best Director at the Oscars the same year THE IRISHMAN home empty handed, clearly the most emotional moment of that night. And the best films do feel personal for the one who’s making it, just as personal for the person seeing the film, seeing it again, returning to it again and again for the hit or to be reminded of that feeling. Just as personal for the person writing about the film, trying to understand, trying to remember, trying to accept the past and how awful it may have been at times because otherwise how will we ever remember when it was good. I remember these things just as I watch certain Martin Scorsese films over and over. You can probably guess a few of them and THE IRISHMAN has become one by now as well. On each new viewing I feel some guilt myself, but that’s my own business. The film ends and I want to start it again but instead I wait a little, keeping that Criterion Blu-ray close by which means it may get rewatched almost to the point of obsession anyway. But it does mean that Netflix has accomplished at least one good thing while it’s been around, much as we may hate to admit it. Of course, several other Scorsese films already became this for me long ago. You can probably guess a few of the titles. I remember those films just as I remember the world of my mother, the world of both my parents, which is no more. There were things she said to me about memories she had, wanting me to know how she felt long ago. I remembered other things, but I didn’t say that. But it still makes me think about where they came from and where I wound up. How much time we have left to remember things. And if any of that really matters.
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Back At That Pool Again
Things change. That’s what happens as time goes on, like it or not. Films, on the other hand, don’t change. How much they mean to you can change and some matter even more as the years go by, while others fade away. In those cases, it’s often for the best. The reasons for all this become more clear as the films in question start to make more sense to the person you’ve grown into. And there are always reasons. Certain films deserve those reasons.
Watching SUNSET BLVD. again and, say what you will about him, but Joe Gillis apparently had a couple of B-pictures to his credit and I respect that. It seems to matter. He was in the Writers Guild, after all, which counts for something. And every morning lately when getting on the 101 North from Franklin I look over at the Alto Nido apartments across the way and give Joe a little wave, imagining him inside working on those original stories that are never going to get him anywhere. It’s left ambiguous just how good Joe Gillis ever was as a screenwriter but suddenly watching the film this time it feels more apparent than ever that none of the ideas for scripts that he’s sitting there pounding out are any good. None of them. They’re all just the work of somebody trying to come up with something, anything, and winding up with nothing. And if he ever got the chance to pitch the story of the film he’s the main character of, he should still bring in Billy Wilder & Charles Brackett to do the real work. But if we were ever meant to believe that Joe was a great writer, or even a halfway special writer, this would be a very different film. I wouldn’t think about him as much, that’s for sure. Paramount reader Betty Schaefer, one of ‘the message kids’, knows Joe by reputation as someone with talent so maybe he did have some even if it’s slipped away by the time the movie starts, drained out of him. “It’s from hunger,” Betty says about his BASES LOADED outline, which could also be a decent review of plenty of movies from the past thirty years or so. Whatever work Joe did on Norma Desmond’s version of SALOME doesn’t seem to have impressed C.B. DeMille either but maybe we can chalk that up to whatever Norma insisted he put in there. Maybe. Joe’s narration of his story gives the impression of someone with a knack for churning out sentences that contain a punchy, colorful flavor but maybe also with a hard-boiled edge that’s putting a little too much effort into the phrasing. Regardless, he was still trying. He didn’t want to go back to that copy desk in Ohio. And even though he says he was on his way out of town I’m still not convinced that Joe Gillis was really going to leave.
Of course, people do leave. I know that all too well by now and maybe I shouldn’t make any promises about my own future. Norma Desmond definitely would never leave, especially since she could never possibly imagine a world other than what she knows. We also don’t know just how good an actress Norma was during her own heyday but the way DeMille speaks of her makes me think there was something, even if he was the one who did much of the shaping of that persona. And she feels like a star, no matter how much her own madness informs that. You meet these people in Hollywood. They’re a star, they’ve been a star, they have that power and they drag you into their web if that’s what they want. Of course, Joe Gillis is the one I still relate to, even if I’m closer to Norma’s age by this point and it is certainly Joe Gillis in the first ten minutes of the movie that I’ve felt like more than a few times over the years. In my apartment, trying to write, trying to figure out if it’s any good, trying to avoid the truth of it all and I can’t see what’s coming around the corner. Along with that money problem you constantly need to worry about. Plenty of Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BLVD. is about a Hollywood that’s no longer there but some of it still is and so much of it still hurts. It understands those moments when you just know you could never be anywhere else. And who can really say what sort of Hollywood isn’t there anymore? The way it is, we either deal with it or we don’t. It’s just that sometimes we’re not sure why we still do.
Flashing back from the body of a Hollywood screenwriter discovered in a fancy Beverly Hills swimming pool, we meet Joe Gillis (William Holden) at the end of his financial rope, unable to sell any story ideas and finance guys after his car. On the run from them he quickly turns into what he thinks is an old, abandoned mansion on Sunset Boulevard only to discover that it’s populated by silent film queen Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) who lives there with butler Max (Erich von Stroheim), waiting for her comeback, waiting for nothing. She enlists Joe to help out with a script she’s working on, a remake of Salome, but soon enough Joe realizes that he can’t leave. And why would he. But an encounter back in the real world with friend Artie Green (Jack Webb) and his script reader girlfriend Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) becomes a reminder of what he’s missing and when he tries to do something about it, that new script turns into something else entirely.
I have no idea how many times I’ve seen SUNSET BLVD. by now. Of course, I could say that about plenty of films. But this one feels different. Like only the very best do, this is one that’s become something different as I’ve gotten older, what started as something great has only gotten better, deeper, funnier, scarier. It felt even darker to me this time and it hadn’t been that long since I’d last watched it. What the film means has shifted, looking at it from the outside at somewhere I wish I could be to it turning into a view of a place I have a different perspective on now. And it also says something that SUNSET BLVD. is one of the best films ever made, as close to perfect as can be, with some of the most biting, quotable dialogue ever and it’s still maybe only the third best film ever made by Billy Wilder but I’m willing to have discussions over official rankings. Right from the first moment everything about SUNSET BLVD. is perfection, that narration, the acerbic rhythm of the dialogue in the studio exec’s office, that cynical tone Joe Gillis holds onto as he enters the mansion for the first time, just assuming that it will be enough armor against these two people. He has no idea how much more they know than him and he has no idea just what sort of power Norma is going to have each time she enters a room, the power she still has when she leaves. One of the things that makes it great is those shifting perspectives, the way it allows us to consider the narrative from each of the main character’s viewpoint and the comedy within it, as well as the horror, feels absolutely, scarily true.
But what is truth in Hollywood? What makes you connect with anyone? Just as many days I pass by Joe’s apartment building I’ve also driven down Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, presumably passing the 10000 block where Norma’s mansion was. I also worked for several years at Paramount when most days I would take a walk around the lot during lunch, looking up at the giant soundstages, passing Robert Evans’ office, glancing up at the readers’ department where Betty Schaefer worked. I loved working at Paramount, a major studio that really is in the heart of Hollywood where such a place should be in our dreams. Paramount means even more because of SUNSET BLVD. Most of the film defiantly stays put in Noma Desmond’s mansion, that crumbling world where time stopped in the late 20s and to realize the clock has kept turning after all would be too horrible to confront. Realism is a factor in a film like this involving such larger than life figures, but those times when you suddenly find yourself in certain big houses up in the hills of Beverly Hills or Hollywood, realism has very little to do with things anyway. “Is it a black comedy?” Cameron Crowe asked the director in his book “Conversations with Wilder”. “No. Just a picture,” was the reply. He was right. Of course, it is a comedy, it is a drama, it is a noir, it is a horror movie, it is a damning look at what Hollywood does to people when they’re not looking. In Wilder you get the truth and from that truth comes the cynicism people still talk about when it comes to the director. The acerbic comic tone, the cruelty, maybe even the misogyny in its portrayal of ignoring the inevitability of age. Maybe this is correct, maybe it’s avoiding how much that tone feels like it comes from a jilted romantic or someone who is becoming more accepting of the way the world really is. ‘Curdled Lubitsch’ is how Andrew Sarris once described the Wilder approach, adding ‘romanticism gone sour’ but that isn’t how SUNSET BLVD. plays, a film that has long since moved on from naïve hope that you’re going to change the world. Even the 22 year-old Betty Schaefer seems to be approaching her writing career on a completely pragmatic level.
As for realism, the elegance found in the best of Lubitsch isn’t always so lifelike itself so maybe what Wilder brings is an appropriately rational cynicism, as if Lubitsch was about all the grace in the world while the best of Wilder can be about wondering how the grace was lost. Joe Gillis, after all, has been around Hollywood long enough to feel this way with some reason, to still be trying but to know what the odds really are. Cecil B. De Mille, at least as portrayed here, has an idea of how things really are and even he only has so much power. The film doesn’t hate Norma Desmond but it also knows she’s too far gone to be saved as Joe (or Wilder, or us) sadly shakes his head, that the past itself is way too far gone, and all it can really do is give her that moment of glory near the end when she’s too far gone to even fully understand it. The humanity is there and even Joe tries to offer that to her as he pleads with her near the end, before he's killed and even in his narration afterwards. He knows how much it means to her for the cameras to roll. He even seems to know that, in the end, her story is going to be more important than his own.
“They’re dead! They’re finished!” shouts Norma about the movies early on. Her viewpoint is because of all that dialogue but it’s nothing new. Someone, maybe me, could be shouting that about them even now. The movie knows how eternal the town is, or at least was then, how much this is all going to go on. The sympathy is shown to Norma, at least partly because Joe doesn’t ask for it. Whether or not he deserves it, he really doesn’t care. And just how strange it is, in that mansion. The film doesn’t waste a moment, mapped out in that brilliant script by Wilder and Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman, Jr. whose involvement apparently boiled down to supplying part of the premise which gave him a credit meaning that he’ll forever be one of the writers of SUNSET BLVD, one of the greatest movies ever made. Which of course makes me wonder, just what have I done lately? It even seems important that this film marked the end of Wilder’s collaboration with Brackett for reasons that have always seemed a little unclear, even when one of them got asked about it. The storytelling carefully reveals one layer at a time almost before you realize it just as Max made up Joe’s guest room hours before he knew he was going to stay. It can be easy to forget in all this madness about Norma’s pet monkey who died right before Joe showed up. He becomes the new monkey and never even realizes it, at least until it doesn’t matter anymore.
And it’s a film about people who are waiting, so much of it is about that waiting. “Waiting for the gravy train,” as Joe Gillis puts it and it’s what almost all the people in SUNSET BLVD. seem to have in common. Everyone is waiting, even De Mille is waiting to shoot the next scene when we first see him. Norma Desmond is waiting too, waiting for that phone call she’ll never get about her big comeback. The first ten minutes out there in the world Joe is either trying to avoid people or get their attention and it all gets him nowhere. Once he finds himself in the world of Norma he’s just waiting to leave. Even though he has nowhere to go. Deep down don’t we all believe that something like this is going on in Beverly Hills right this minute? Money is just as much a factor with Joe needing it for his car what indirectly leads him into Norma’s driveway in the first place. But it’s not the only factor. Norma has so much money that she doesn’t care about it and at a certain point Joe doesn’t care about all that money either. The very nature of him prostituting himself, if that’s what we’ll call it, goes beyond the money. It’s not a movie about money, after all. It’s about wanting to be known in the end, whether as a star or just one more name in the credits.
And it’s about waiting through all those beginnings and endings. Maybe I’m thinking about a little of both right now, maybe because of my own extremes I’ve had the past few years. We meet Joe Gillis at his own end just as we meet Walter Neff near his end at the start of DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Both films lead right into a flashback structure although it’s not as clear at first in SUNSET BLVD who the real main character of the film is. As for beginnings, Betty Schaefer is apparently no more than 22 and in such a hurry that it would be easy to believe her if she admitted that becoming a writer was more important than her marriage to assistant director Artie Green (or, really, anyone). She probably has lots of opinions on films she’s seen recently like THE HEIRESS and A LETTER TO THREE WIVES that she can’t share with Artie but Joe would be ideal on an intellectual level if she could ever get him to stop talking around the subject. And she helps him want to write again, really write, at least for a little while, the way she gets into his brain and makes him want to do it, to overcome all those ways people never have any idea who writes a movie, that obsession he can’t seem to shake and is keeping him from ever actually really leaving. She knows all the plots, after all. She knows what he wants. Joe’s more romantic relationship with her isn’t quite the same as Walter Neff getting close with Lola Dietrichson played by Jean Heather in DOUBLE INDEMNITY but they serve a similar function as a reminder of the innocence that was once there, both young women seemingly offering the lead a way out of situation they’ve gotten themselves into, or at least a reminder that there really is some kind of innocence left in the world, no matter how much each of the men are already just too far gone.
The New Years’ Eve sequence even plays now as a funhouse mirror version of the end of THE APARTMENT which wouldn’t even be made for another decade, someone this time returning to a person for the absolute wrong reasons unlike what Shirley Maclaine’s Fran Kubelik would do much later. But back to the cynicism or at least back to trying to understand if there is any humanity in SUNSET BLVD, anyone onscreen Billy Wilder really cares about. He seems to know that caring about Joe is like caring about himself and that will only get him so far. Betty is young and she’ll be fine, Joe knows that he doesn’t need to worry about her. Norma, along with a little bit left over for Max, is where his affection goes even if she’ll never be aware of it and likely never care. She’s the one who’s going to get it somehow and in that is a reflection of his own feelings for the movies and for the town named Hollywood that he lived in, as much of a sewer as he understood it to be. SUNSET BLVD. is a film like no other about what it is to be in Hollywood and the choice to remain. Norma was discarded by the town. And in the final shot she envelops it.
Billy Wilder very likely means more to me than any other director. He made films the way I want them to be and make sense in a life that I sometimes find myself caught up in, like it or not. Hoping I get to the right ending, unlike Joe, whether still in Los Angeles or not. No other film seemed to understand Hollywood quite this way until the 2001 appearance of David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DR., named for another road up the hill and several years after Lynch had already taken the name of the much talked about Gordon Cole from SUNSET for a character he played in TWIN PEAKS. The best Hollywood movies, even when they classify as comedies, are really horror films in their way. I’m also still a little fascinated by Robert Aldrich’s THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE which plays as some sort of odd mashup up SUNSET BLVD and VERTIGO even while never nailing down the tone beyond just coming off as sort of weird. A brief redo of the small piece of young Gloria Swanson footage from the unfinished QUEEN KELLY that appears briefly in SUNSET also turns up in Lynch’s even darker more extreme INLAND EMPIRE and the way his outlook has been inspired by Wilder becomes more crystalized the more each of their obsessions seem to mirror each other, effortlessly finding the horror of the real human feelings below the comedy. And SUNSET BLVD. is this original, pure distillation of that view. Even now, in a time when we don’t know how much longer there’ll even be a Paramount, it still matters, at least it does in my dreams.
The compassion the film shows may be for Norma and she may be the one who takes over the final image but it’s William Holden as Joe who holds it all together with a grounding that helps us understand and every single moment feels completely genuine. He has to be as cynical as he is, as dismissive of Norma and Max, so dismissive that he doesn’t realize how deep he’s in until it’s too late, with a believability to his desperation seen just under the surface and to play any of that from a remove would cause it to collapse. His determination is just as strong as that self-loathing and few other actors in 1950 would have been able to give his answer of “Constantly” to the question “Don’t you sometimes hate yourself?” just the right indication that he’s joking but not really joking, not when it comes to this. Maybe it would make sense for the character to be a little younger than Holden projects but that grouchy humanity he brings is essential for holding his presence down just as Gloria Swanson shoots everything else around her off into space, overwhelming each moment even as I sometimes notice how tiny the 4’11 actress really was. The intensity of every look she gives makes it seem like it wouldn’t be allowed to look at anyone else when she’s in frame, plus how much of her performance can be found in each gesture she makes, especially the way she pulls Joe towards her at the end of the New Years’ sequence, making it clear who really has had the power between the two of them all along. The movie really is the two of them but surrounding them with the intensity of Erich von Stroheim who the more you watch the more you pay attention to how much he’s holding this madness that he’s in charge of together plus the way he says the name “Gordon Cole” is one of those things impossible to forget. Nancy Olson may be the ingenue but she never comes off as too innocent, simply looking for the right way to get in a little bit more, knowing what she wants but never guessing just how far she will wind up peering into the town she’s always known.
Bringing it back around to each time I look across the 101 at the Alto Nido Apartments, SUNSET BLVD. reveals a truth that always feels like a reminder both of what I want and what I desperately want to avoid. And it’s also a reminder that, well, even Joe Gillis had those B-movie credits. This makes me wonder just how Billy Wilder thought of Joe Gillis, even in a self-deprecating way. He’s searching for the answers to why he’s still trying to do all this and if Wilder went through this sort of period during his early days in Hollywood, I’m sure he understood. Maybe this feeling is part of why I return to Billy Wilder films so much, pretty much all of them (well, maybe not THE EMPEROR WALTZ), even the few I’d just as soon do without. That look at a humanity that combines glaring in the mirror with unrequited self-hatred with desperately trying to hold out a little bit of hope. Sometimes that happens in Wilder’s films. Sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it’s a draw. But that’s what so much of life becomes. Waiting for that one thing. That one moment. If we’re lucky.
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