I'm on a road trip to LA and spent my birthday in Fargo, North Dakota. Turned on the motel TV upon waking and saw *these* fantastic mugs: O'Brien, Lovejoy and Talman in Ida Lupino's 'The Hitch-Hiker.' Now *that* was a present. And perfect for the long drive ahead. Well, maybe not. I won't be picking up any Talmans along the way...
Here's a bit, briefly (I'll write more about Lupino later. I'm on the road!) on Lupino's terrific, terrifying1953 noir:
In the 1930s and '40s, the great Ida Lupino earned deserved esteem as an actress with her tough, sensitive performances in movies like High Sierra, They Drive by Night, Moontide and one of my favorites (among so many more) Road House, and would continue her talents into the 1950s with The Big Knife, While the City Sleeps and the searing yet roughly romantic Nicholas Ray masterpiece On Dangerous Ground.
But the intelligent, unique and creative actress spent time studying the mechanics behind the camera, resulting in forming (with her then husband Collier Young) the independent company The Filmakers, where Lupino would eventually work as producer, director and screenwriter on many fascinating pictures. Lupino's first directing job came with the 1949 picture Not Wanted (for her company The Filmmakers), taking over for director Elmer Clifton after his heart attack. In 1950 she made Outrage, a thoughtful, emotional B-thriller that took on the controversial subject of rape -- and not so easily. She made you think when audiences could have simply gotten an exploitative kick from the then saucy subject matter. Throughout her career as a director, Lupino would continue to approach taboo subjects with sensitivity and grit (The Bigamist is another interesting standout I love and have written about a few times), but, for me, her greatest film is the intriguing psychodrama The Hitch-Hiker, starring Edmond O'Brien, Frank Lovejoy and a bug-eyed, wonderfully insane William Talman.
Chronicling a horrifying road trip in which two fishermen (O'Brien and Lovejoy -- both such underrated, interesting actors with such well upholstered faces) pick up a deranged hitchhiker (Talman, another force), Lupino directs with shadowy menace and intense nervousness (mirroring postwar anxiety) in this tight character study/thriller. Thanks to Lupino at the helm, that back-seat driver of a panic attack Talman pointing that gun and the artistry of cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, this movie is truly scary. And man, these are some faces she's directing -- you can barely stand watching poor Lovejoy and O'Brien endure this nightmare and yet, I feel like I could look at their mugs for hours.
Yes indeed, before Kathryn Bigelow, women could direct hard boiled so called "men's pictures" that were uncompromising and frightening. And she well understood women too -- Lupino understood people, and people in dire straights. And yet she remained humble about her status and talents. She called herself the "Poor man's Don Siegel," and was dubbed the "Queen of the B's" and enjoyed a solid career (especially for a female director), making a string of fiercely independent, entertaining, thought-provoking pictures that stand the test of time. Thankfully many have now sung her praises (including Martin Scorsese) and books have been published about her, citing her influence, distinct style and cinematic bravery. She's more than a B, but she's certainly a Queen -- a tough queen of her own kind. And a female director every woman (and man) working in the business should study and revere.
She's all over the place, but I'm back to her. It's June 1st and, as always, I'm happily, sadly and at this point, superstitiously back to her. Norma Jeane, Marilyn, M.M., or as Norman Mailer called her, "more than the silver witch of us all" -- Marilyn Monroe. Every year I must celebrate with her -- it would feel wrong if I didn't. At this point, even the thought of not mentioning her makes me sense something terrible will happen. It's just a birthday but, well, most people become anxious on birthdays. I hate birthdays. So, June 1st. Today. She would have been 86 years old. And this year marks the 50th anniversary of her death.
"Don't you let them grind you up here." That's what Montgomery Clift says to her in The Misfits -- something that always resonates well beyond the parched Nevada landscape their characters are enduring. And God bless Monty Clift, he was -- on screen -- the last man to perform a heroic action for his beautiful fellow misfit -- he untied those damn horses.
In John Huston's The Misfits -- their only picture together -- the two share a powerful kind of chemistry uniquely their own. World-weary and haunted, knowing and childlike, they're akin to the picture's fading cowboys -- vital stars with all their power, but ones in need of shade and rest and some healthier people around them. Both are movie stars for sure, but they reveal a gorgeousness that's a little worn, almost, sick of themselves -- it's painfully poignant to watch them at the end of the road. The movie reflected their own lives: As much as they enjoyed their status, as talented and as lovely as they were, both might have wanted to hang it all up.
But then, do they really? And to do what? And with whom? What to do in this life except settle down with Clark Gable's cowboy? But is that such a great idea? Thinking that in real life, Monroe's author was her husband (Arthur Miller) and her character was inspired by her, it's tough not to separate how doomed all of this feels. Miller and Monroe would end it, Gable would die after making the movie, Monroe would slide into a pill addled depression and would soon, infamously pass away. And then Clift would follow a few years later. I always wished Monty and Marilyn (in the movie and in real life) would have run off together, no matter how unstable the match. Yes, both were probably too damaged, too self destructive, too complicated to take care of anybody but themselves and Clift was homosexual but ... oh maybe it could have worked. You feel it when Clift says to Monroe: "I don't like to see the way they grind up women here ... Don't you let them grind you up here." He doesn't just love her, he understands her.
Especially when he performs the heroic task of untying those Mustangs for Monroe. I think because it's Clift and because it's Monroe that this noble gesture becomes so overwhelmingly moving, so eloquent. Yes, it's a movie, but again, I will eternally love Monty for saying screw the money and letting those horses go -- for her.
And I will forever love Marilyn. How can one not love Marilyn? So I return to my ode for her day, her birthday, the birthday of cinema’s ultimate fractured sex goddess.
As I have written:
Despite all those coffee mugs emblazoned with her image, countless MM impersonators, and that certain movie last year, one that did not come anywhere within the zip code of Marilyn (in spite of Michelle Williams valiant attempt), and so many sexy starlets naming her as an influence, she remains fascinating.
It’s not just that she died tragically and in mysterious circumstances though, that has certainly added to her legend. It’s not just for her famous husbands and her Happy-Birthday-Mr. President dalliances with the Kennedy's (something I've always found incredibly sad -- what else was going on there?). And it’s not just for her iconic beauty and glamour.
No, there’s something more to Marilyn that makes her continually interesting. It's all her now legendary tragic contradictions -- her messy, mixed-up life, her massive consumption of pills and champagne, her continual and final mental instability juxtaposed with her peaches and cream gorgeousness, her absolute command of the big screen (in spite of her problems with lines) and her ultimate, natural talent. It’s her ability, after all these decades, to still pop off the screen with such undeniable “It” that we almost take her for granted. Of course Marilyn Monroe is one of the most famous women in the world, who doesn’t know how wonderful she is?
But then, watch her again perform “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with effortless charisma and cleverness, observe her studied, but certainly real and potent melancholy in The Misfits (and every scene with Montgomery Clift - her beautiful brother in brilliance), enjoy the Freudian fantasy -- the erotic fun she’s having in The Seven Year Itch, think about all that sexed up sadness from Some Like It Hot (and yes, she makes you actually think about it: "I'm through with love, I'll never love again..." even in that fantastic flesh colored dress -- at that moment, she really means it). Further, view her va-va-voom bad girl in Niagara, her tragic, heartbreaking instability in one of her best performances and movies, Don't Bother to Knock, her jeans-wearing authenticity in Clash By Night, and revel in her garish vulnerability and sweetness (and my God those beautiful close-ups) in Bus Stop -- she is just so wonderful.
I had a thing for MM ever since I was a little girl (we were born on the same day). I even composed a slightly scandalous speech in the 7th Grade proclaiming the movie star was murdered (I think she ended her own life now, by accident or on purpose. As I go through life in general, and see how both sick this town can be, and glommy men can be towards vulnerabilities -- I better understand why she felt so alone). But even without young conspiracy theories, most little girls love MM in some way, especially those obsessed with movies. My love would would reignite later in life after I watched nearly all her films by high school and then, moved on to other celluloid goddesses -- a list of women I could rattle off forever -- I’d work through their movies (and still do) but I'd always come back for Marilyn. It's hard to leave that woman.
I realized later in life that I favored Marilyn both early in her career, when she was so fresh and un-mannered in films like The Asphalt Jungle, All About Eve, Don't Bother to Knock (in which she's brilliant) and one of my favorite MM performances, Clash By Night (Marilyn slopping around in jeans eating that candy bar! So natural, so her.)
I adore her work during her so-called decline, like her odd glamour-puss beatnik performance from Let's Make Love, her sad eyed, superb method style in The Misfits and the absolutely mesmerizing bits and pieces I’ve seen of her in the ill-fated Something's Got To Give. She looked so stunning, so fit, who would think she was to die mere months later?
Like re-reading a great novel or play, you understand her better with age. And with age she can seem exasperating. You understand why people gave up on her -- they had their own lives to live. But then, there were so many insensitive creeps out there. Or those who just didn't understand mental illness. In My Week with Marilyn, poor MM is going through hell and we're of course supposed to feel for her, but we're supposed to feel for the young man who continues to watch this woman fall apart too.
Why? Sure he was young and naive and thrilled she found him special enough to spend time with, but he made me ill. How many men felt so "understanding" because they let her cry on their shoulder while getting their rocks off watching her roll around in tear-stained white sheets? What did they know about anything? And how did they ever help her? Ugh. Find her a Thelma Ritter or an Eve Arden (ah, if only we could all find a Thelma Ritter or Eve Arden). I just kept thinking to myself -- get out of her room, I don't care if she's summoning you. She's high. She's despondent. Never mind if any of what the character (Colin Clark) wrote was true, even star Michelle Williams questioned his story. She said in an interview: "When you read both of his books, you do get the sense that he's writing with the advantage of hindsight, and he's put some awfully big words in his own mouth...I think he says in the book that Marilyn wanted to make love, but he said, 'Oh, no!' And you're like, 'Oh, sure.' I'm sure that there was a relationship there. To what extent it was consummated, I don't know." God, I hope it wasn't. Sleep on the couch you asshole.
But that taps into something that through the years makes Monroe so powerful. That as manufactured as her screen persona was -- we can imagine how her skin might have felt. Or how her perfume might have smelled. Or even her sweat. Of course we'd all like to be in her presence, at least once, just to experience her realness. Or her real fakeness. Her tragedy is so merged with her fantasy that her humanness becomes one of the sexiest things about her, which is why her photographs are so endlessly intriguing, so haunting, like Milton Greene's "Black Sitting."
Like so many others, I'm fascinated by her later photo sessions; especially Douglas Kirkland's intimate photos where he was a young man on an early job and she instructed that they stay in the room together. And then there's Bert Stern’s iconic final sitting. MM is less made up, wearing simple clothes (if you ever look at the Christie's book on her auction, you'll notice how basic her personal style was) and you notice her skin aging, her fascinating flaws -- you can even see her possible appendectomy (one is not sure what happened) scar. But there is something so fantastically real, morbid almost, about these pictures. She looks a little modern (I always think of Deborah Harry or what Edie Sedgwick might have aged into when I look at these), very drunk and wonderfully rough around the edges -- less the big eyed-blonde and more the world weary movie star.
As Norman Mailer wrote of her in his perceptive ode Marilyn (I think, better than Gloria Steinem's victim-oriented tome -- Mailer understood Monroe's sometimes complicit nature, her manipulations, thereby making her neither total innocent nor wide-eyed dummy) she was, “a female spurt of wit and sensitive energy who could hang like a sloth for days in a muddy-mooded coma; a child girl, yet an actress to loose a riot by dropping her glove at a premiere; a fountain of charm and a dreary bore…she was certainly more than the silver witch of us all.”
Yes. Lying on that mattress on the floor in that modest little house at the end of her life, so many women (and men too) can understand and/or relate to her sadness -- and so many can see what demons led to her demise ... and yet, she remains mysterious.
And though she may be ultra ubiquitous she also remains important. Sexy, breathy, objectified, so-called dumb blonde? Someone's got to show them how to do it. And perhaps even more important, someone's got to reveal so much joy and pain yet remain so very specifically enigmatic. The cracked fantasy.
Recently, The Guardian's film blog ran a small piece highlighting the trailer for Wes Anderson's upcoming -- and for Anderson fans, greatly anticipated -- Moonrise Kingdom (which I haven't seen but will review soon). With perhaps a mixture of love and mockery, the writer checked off the usual Anderson tropes: "Every box is ticked: Schwartzman, Murray, pint-sized precocity, a retro palette, distracted dads, slo-mo hand-holding, fab hats, dead-centre deadpan," and then asked readers to weigh in on what they thought. As you can imagine, opinions were split between excitement and annoyance. One of the more amusing comments came from a reader who stated, "You can tell this is a discussion about Wes Anderson movies when it boils down to the fact that he's definitely using a different font this time."Ah, yes, Anderson's attention to detail -- the clothes, the pastel colors, the walkie- talkies, megaphones and record players, the ... Dalmatian mice.
Those things that many critics have decried as an addiction to quirk, annoyingly twee, an overly precious and obnoxious palette that values style over substance -- a critique that's decidedly more tired and lazy than anything Wes Anderson's ever done.
In fact, nothing Wes Anderson creates is lazy. Even when you spy a kind of cinematic reference (I see much from Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude -- particularly Ashby's "Trouble" sequence), there's always a twist. It takes an aggressive stylist, innovative soul and industrious spirit to create Margot Tenenbaum, raccoon eyeliner, mink coat, Izod dress, missing finger and all. She is singular Anderson (you actually forget Gwyneth Paltrow is playing her), not only for her personal style, but for her bittersweet beauty, her sad, fatherless childhood, her past triumphs, future failures and her deadpan demeanor, something that fills his frame so perfectly that she becomes overwhelmingly touching. I challenge anyone to get through Nico's haunting "These Days" without, at least once, thinking of Margot Tenenbaum stepping off the Green Line bus. It's Nico's curious mixture of deadpan and emotion, of course, and so perfectly merged with deadpan, emotional Margot. And yet, she's likable, intelligent and funny too. In short, she is style and substance. She's not merely a cardboard cut-out of quirk -- she's an interesting, mysterious woman, and nothing you've seen in any other film, and she's now so iconic that no other filmmaker could create her. She practically carries her own copyright. And yet, we recognize her, somewhere, in some kind of buried childhood memory.
Which leads me to one essential element of Wes Anderson: nostalgia. And not just nostalgia for nostalgia's sake, collecting memories like Star Wars action figures encased in original packaging, never to be played with. No, he's getting at something deeper and more melancholic: those feelings of childhood that are both beautiful and painful because we can only access them through memories, pictures, music and our father's clunky old dial phone (something you'll see in an Anderson movie, no matter what year it is).
And that kind of obsolete technology (old television sets tied to radiators, VHS tapes, records) can fuse with our past movie watching experiences with a kind of phantom palpability. Recently I re-watched Midnight Cowboy, and became misty over, not just the tragic story and of course Harry Nilsson's beautiful "Everybody's Talkin,'" but that the picture brought me back to a childhood memory that was both in touch with and removed from reality. I had to question where that flood of memories was coming from: Watching the movie at home from school on TV? The idea of that kind of New York City -- the New York I never experienced because the movie was released before I was born -- but those who lived there certainly did experience? And harshly remember? And then, the gentle, nearly child-like love of these two men that I figured, even at my young age, was also sexual? As gritty as Midnight Cowboy is, it does have an innocence about it. And though it's far grimier than anything Wes Anderson has ever created, I thought of Anderson. Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo could fit into Anderson's universe, albeit with a different kind of ending. John Schlesinger's bus death is more grindingly, powerfully tragic than any of Anderson's mournful finales, but I can see Joe Buck getting on with with his life in an Anderson-like Florida too. The idea of Joe Buck attempting the kind of optimism and dreams many of Anderson's characters want to have (like Max Fischer), sans Ratso is heartbreaking in itself. And I love that that there was no direct homage (save for, maybe, Owen Wilson's cowboy-clad Eli Cash in The Royal Tenenbaums) that brought me to that thought. It was a swirling cinematic idea and repressed childhood memory, but pushed to the present by Anderson in cohoots with myself. It almost sounds insane. Oh, the magic of movies.
It's not surprising that most of Anderson's adults act much like children -- or rather, act like what we, as children, might have imagined we'd be like as adults. We'd hail dented gypsy cabs in New York, travel on the Darjeeling Limited (for me and my love of train travel this was extra special) with our siblings or, as in The Life Aquatic, become Jacques Cousteau Zissou explorers, calling our competition "my nemesis." It's a lovely presage that the book Max Fischer checks out in Rushmore is "Diving for Sunken Treasure" by Jacques Cousteau.
That's not to say Anderson's films are adolescent. There's too much adult reflection and seriousness within his meticulously art-directed frames. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) may be a lovable, nattily dressed deadbeat dad, but he's also, eventually, a regretful man who truly loves his family. The shot of the one son who resents him most, the business-minded, now excessively safety-oriented Chaz (a red tracksuit-clad Ben Stiller), sitting teary-eyed with a vulnerable and dying Royal in the back of an ambulance hits the viewer with such a powerful punch that you are smacked into the reality of loss. It's so emotional that, for some of us, you can feel it in your stomach and without warning, you spontaneously sob. Your dad may have been horrible, but he's still your dad. That's not just style. And though it's universal, particularly among so many kids of divorce, it's not easy sentimentality either.
But back to his style and signature. Anderson loves his slow-mo shots (and montages) set to music (and with great taste -- the Kinks, the Who, Brian Jones-era Rolling Stones, Love, David Bowie, David Bowie in Portuguese, Nico) to the point where it drives some viewers crazy. Or, in the case of an Indian boy's funeral in The Darjeeling Limited, offends them (I don't agree with that critique and find the slow-mo during that tragic moment powerful, allowing us to drink in all of what's happening -- for all of the characters). Anderson's slow-mo has become so recognizable that a savvy YouTuber created a video comprised of Wes Anderson slo-mo shots, all set to Ja Rule. I have no problem with Ja Rule, but it's not quite the same as Max Fischer emerging from an elevator to the Who's "A Quick One, While He's Away."
And then there's the God's-eye view. Anderson adores that shot with an almost fervid fetishization tantamount to Hitchcock's love of blondes. Books, letters, laminated lists, even Richie Tenenbaum's bleeding, suicidal wrists are shot from above. For me, each method serves its purpose with potent panache. A slow-mo allows us to drink in the scene and even feel placed in the action. The omnispective POV has us floating above it, like a memory. Who stamps library books anymore? It's perfect to view this outdated act from above, like how we often dream -- out of body: something dislodged, both spatially and temporally, from the past.
It's interesting, then, that Anderson's still startlingly wonderful debut feature, Bottle Rocket, finds his most compelling character planning for the future. Owen Wilson's Dignan has listed a detailed 50-year plan of goals for his small crew (namely his best friend Anthony, played by his brother Luke) that involves petty criminal shenanigans, like robbing a book store (with unfortunate small bags), family homes ("You took the earrings, Dignan? ") and a cold-storage facility, leading to Dignan's valiant efforts to save crew member Apple Jack, and to his swift arrest. Though Anderson would go further with set design and detail, Dignan is an Anderson (and Wilson) creation through and through -- his defining moment in which viewers were absolutely disarmed by a character and actor (Wilson brought a unique style and wit that has been part of Anderson's universe since). And further, in an era of Tarantino rip-offs (the 1990s), we were absolutely struck by the movie's inherent sweetness.
Dignan, like Anderson, is thoroughly well-organized, micromanaging the kind of world he wants to live in, from his yellow jumpsuit (he's ordered a dozen of them) to the correct way Anthony should escape from a mental institution. And yet, in the real world, Dignan, like all of us, just can't achieve that kind of perfection, which by film's end is overwhelmingly poignant. The ever-enthusiastic Dignan (no matter what) jokes (perhaps half-jokes) from the prison yard something like an action movie shoot: "Here are just a few of the key ingredients: dynamite, pole vaulting, laughing gas, choppers -- can you see how incredible this is going to be? -- hang gliding, come on!" Is this Dignan? Or Wes Anderson? Pity Dignan couldn't have become a movie director. And, damn. Dignan's final bit of goofy bravery set to "2000 Man" -- it's so funny and beautiful and sad and perfect: "They'll never catch me... because I'm fucking innocent."
So, back to Anderson's critics. When J.D. Salinger passed away, I wrote a piece for MSN and here about his influence on cinema (even as Salinger, save for one bad attempt, never wanted any movies made of his work). Wes Anderson was a major part of that piece, and I pointed out that critics of Salinger slapped Anderson with similar derision. Both have been called overly precious, overly privileged and overly adoring of characters living in a vacuum of nostalgia and sweetness, dislocated from reality. Well, what, exactly, is wrong with nostalgia and sweetness? Especially if it's crafted with genuine heart and individual éclat?
And Anderson's distinct dislocation, inertia and wistfulness -- from the Tenenbaums to the Foxes -- is part of the point. When Anderson sets it beautifully, like when Margot and Richie Tenenbaum tearfully discuss his suicide attempt and profess their love for each other in their tent while listening to the Stones' "She Smiled Sweetly," Anderson allows the record to keep playing, and so when we hear, up next, "Ruby Tuesday," the entire moment is filled with such bittersweet beauty, that you can't help but be moved -- and not by a suicide necessarily -- more a memory of a perfect little moment.
We do have those in life -- even when they're sad ones. As Henry Allen wrote in his remembrance of Salinger, "Hemingway was a writer who made unhappiness beautiful. Salinger took it a step further -- with the same uncanny ability to evoke the world his characters move through, he made it a virtue." The same could be said of Anderson. That, and as Dignan so poignantly stated, "I'm not always as confident as I look." None of us are.
Well, perhaps, even with all of his failings, excluding this man.
Originally published and extended for my piece at MSN Movies.
Last night, while watching “Mad Men," a thought occurred to me -- where on earth is actor Patrick Warburton? Yes, Patrick Warburton. Please don't forget our fine character actors. Elaine's boyfriend on "Seinfeld." The blue-suited lead of the smart and funny "The Tick," a frequent voice for animated features. An actor with a whole lot of bravado, oddball sexy appeal and mystery. He’s both of this world and entirely retro. Or, perhaps, not of this earth. There is no actor like the great Patrick Warburton.
We see this best in Warburton’s single-minded, yet weirdly emotional, mother-loving, car salesman turned moviemaker in the outstanding, and outstandingly strange, "The Woman Chaser" -- a movie too few have experienced.
A pity. And a pity that Warbuton isn’t cast enough in film and television. And if a show could use the Warburton bizzaro-swagger, it is "Mad Men" -- he would inject some handsome, barrel chested, devilish power and left-field humor without being entirely arch. You never know what Warburton is up to -- it's not easy irony -- he's too strange for that. Wonderfully strange. He's just as he is -- a man out of time and yet, timeless. He'd fit right in and jive up the joint without feeling forced or silly. He wouldn't need to change his speaking style, he wouldn't need to join the Hari Krishna's to appear different and he'd never need to arch a brow. And in inspired moments, he's a madman. Matthew Wiener, are you listening?
So with that, I'm returning to a movie in which Warburton excels. The underlooked, frequently brilliant “The Woman Chaser”(from 1999) -- a film that showcases this captivating son of a bitch and does the source material (Charles Wileford’s novel of the same name) proud.
Here’s more:
You can’t quite get your hands around The Woman Chaser, and that’s all for the good. It’s a heap of contradictions that absolutely refuses to be compartmentalized. You’ll either love this slice of humorous sociopathic angst (and yes, in The Woman Chaser, there is such a thing as sociopathic angst) or (as some critics did) attempt to corner it as something it’s not. What it is, is vintage Willeford (who was also adapted in two other long-underrated, now classics -- Monte Hellman’s Cockfigher and George Armitages’s Miami Blues) and so true to the author that his widow approved every frame of this underseen treasure.
Directed by Robinson Devor, whose only credit up to this point was a wonderfully weird 30-minute documentary about Hollywood billboard phenom Angelyne (he has since directed Police Beat which I need to see and the infamous horse sex documentary, Zoo. You can’t say Devor isn’t multi-faceted) The Woman Chaser is something of a lost film, or at least tough to find (I cherish my VHS copy). Released in 1999 and, according to my colleague Sean Axmaker, a small amount of DVDs were pressed, exclusive to Hollywood Video. And even those few are sadly out of print. For whatever reason the picture hasn’t been properly released, regrettable for all those viewers who missed the movie in theaters. And that’s too bad -- it’s an unnerving, hilarious slice of Los Angeles life and wildly unique on top.
As stated earlier, adapted from pulp novelist Willeford’s 1960 novel of the same name and filmed (gorgeously) in a black and white transfer from a color print, The Woman Chaser is faithful to its beautifully seedy genre. It’s serious, to a point, but never plays it straight, always aiming for a cockeyed joke that’s both reflexive and perfectly in tune with the picture. And yet, somehow it manages to refrain from something that’s especially annoying when it comes to film noir (one of my favorite film genres) -- tired ironic send-up. The film is not entirely, a comedy. I can only imagine how tough it was to craft such an arch, subversive film that remains to the very last frame, curiously understated, never making fun of its characters (not really, more exposing all of their varied and frequently touching flaws), but unafraid to reveal how completely out of control they will become.
The story begins circa 1960 with grifter Richard Hudson (Warburton) fresh from San Francisco, purchasing a used car dealership in his hometown of Los Angeles. He’s a gifted, unscrupulous salesman (“anyone and everyone can be bought” he believes) who makes his dealers wear Santa Claus suits in the middle of summer. Richard preys on people’s vulnerabilities with a twisted logic that’s too complex to classify as mere evil -- it's some personality quirk that’s all his own (for instance, he seduces an old woman collecting pennies for the church to see if she could be bought, and also beds a teenager with the intent to harshly educate her). With obvious Oedipal fixation, he moves back home with Mother (Lynette Bennett), an aging beauty living in a Sunset Blvd. style mansion with her washed up Hollywood director husband, the gentle milquetoast Leo Steinberg (a great Paul Malevitz).
After a delicate, then frenzied (and hilarious) session of ballet dancing with Mother (one of the picture’s strangely beautiful but bizarre highlights), Richard comes to the conclusion that his life is meaningless unless he creates something ("Isn't making money the reason for existence?"). More specifically if he creates a work of art. Since other arts take too much time and skill to learn, Richard reckons that writing and directing a movie is just the thing. Convincing Leo to back him, he concocts the very inspired Detour like, Murder By Contract inspired (that spare guitar), B-noir entitled, The Man Who Got Away, a grim, existential tale about a truck driver who flees his life, then accidentally kills a little girl and is chased down by a vigilante mob. You’re never allowed to see the entire picture, but what you do witness looks to be soulful, gritty brilliance. I want to see this movie.
Releasing the picture proves difficult as it clocks in at 63 minutes (too short for theaters and too long for television), but Richard will not compromise -- he will neither cut nor lengthen the thing and so, well, I won’t reveal what happens. Let’s just say, it’s quite dramatic.
The actions and philosophizing of Richard moving from conception to actual filmmaking are too intriguing to spoil, but one thing is for certain: Richard is a born auteur. He’s also a cold-blooded narcissist (“To me!” he toasts while dipping in a pool) but a sensitive lug in moments of stress—somehow the son of a bitch cries, endearingly.
But then that could be an act -- you have no idea with this character. Thanks to the refreshingly untamed Warburton and his bombastic, staccato, yet wry and enigmatic performance, the picture delivers an off-kilter world where the absurd, scummy and sublime intermingle right on the edge. His performance lives in a movie that reveals a fascinating, yet strangely familiar insanity true to the spirit of Los Angeles where you can feel violated, entertained and inspired in the same twenty minutes.
Sophisticated and kookily innovative, Devor’s direction isn’t simply retro-nostalgia showing off its lovely mid century modern architecture and kitsch (though that is lovingly filmed). No, the City of Angels is a slick, rotting kingdom of scrubbed close-ups, skewed angles -- a twisted, cocky and wormy land that will fight your creativity and vision at any chance. With that, violently defending your work (which Richard does -- and that’s all I will say) is the wicked solution but, in the end, oddly inspirational.
Mad Men needs him. He’s sardonic, and he gets the era. He can play serious, but is unafraid of being disarmingly funny and sociopathic -- often at the same time. And he’d look damn good in the era’s suits. And there’s… Joan. And if Don Draper returns to his wicked, wicked ways, well, Megan might come a calling. After all she’s an actress. The Girl Who Got Away? Warburton could handle that.
Suddenly, Last Summer. Joseph L. Mankiewicz. 1959.
Jesus, Joseph and especially Mary I love this movie...
Mommy? Oh my... Katharine Hepburn as Violet Venable. Hepburn is at her most deliciously vicious here, playing a New Orleans widow unnaturally obsessed with her poet son Sebastian, who died (rather dramatically) while vacationing with her beautiful niece Catherine (a fantastically gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor -- that white bathing suit...). This Violet is a Blanche DuBois gone to demon seed. Ditching those fur pieces and lamps draped with scarves, Violet's a Southern Belle who faces aging by diving straight into Diabolatry. And with that, and with my love for Tennessee Williams, cinema and fascinating female characters, I can only shout out a Hell, Yes with a Bon Scott call of Hey, Satan! Violet is impeccably formal, insanely, yet, almost wonderfully eccentric if she weren't so rotten (she descends to greet people in a grand elevator and has a garden filled with creepy plants that she talks about... a lot) and then she's just downright depraved; her fixation on Sebastian (who, if you've not seen the movie, finds himself cannibalized) is a good ol' Oedipal situation. Or... is there an even more specific complex where the mother yearns to sleep with her homosexual son? Or at least procure for him? What was Joe Orton's mum like? I will research...
Memorable Quote: There are quite a few -- this is after all, Tennessee Williams, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal. I'm fond of Violet's little mommy chestnut, just what you want to hear when you bring her breakfast in bed on Mother's Day: "Most people's lives, what are they but trails of debris - each day more debris, more debris... long, long trails of debris, with nothing to clean it all up but death." But I get a head spinning thrill (and horror) from "Help!" -- Catherine's blood-curdling scream once her head doctor (a sad-eyed but down to business Montgomery Clift) gets to the root of what just happened suddenly last damn summer. Christ.
Meanest Moment: There's many, but I'm going with forcing the distressed but clearly not insane Catherine as a candidate for a lobotomy just so she won't spill the beans over Violet's sick doings with her late son (who perhaps, just perhaps, could have enjoyed a nice time on holiday, picking up good looking fellas and indulging some romance had homosexuality not been such an issue). That aside, thank goodness pretty Catherine benefits from her supportive shrink (Oh, Monty...) to get to the bottom of this poisoned well. And diseased womb.
Maternal Comeuppance? Indeed. Catherine does not get the lobotomy, and Violet's weirdness goes beyond her passion for Venus flytraps, of course. Catherine and doctor walk off hand-in-hand. Things didn't end as well for son Sebastian, alas. But still. For Mama Hepburn, I clap my hands together like Sandy Dennis hollering for "Violence" in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "Violet!"
So, again... Happy Mother's Day!
Note: Young Guy Maddin played Montgomery Clift's Dr. Cukrowicz in Winnipeg's Black Hole Theater production of "Suddenly, Last Summer." This bit of history been a thrill for me, and an endless nightmare for him, especially when I start conversations with: "My son, Sebastian and I constructed our days. Each day we would carve each day like a piece of sculpture, leaving behind us a trail of days like a gallery of sculpture until suddenly, last summer."
Rock pioneer Link Wray, most famous for "Rumble" was boss in every era.
In 2000, at a small club in Portland, Oregon I witnesses this for myself. The half Shawnee shaman, at the age of 71, performed one of the greatest shows I've ever seen in my life. Some time had passed since Quentin Tarantino featured Wray's famed "Rumble" in Pulp Fiction, so the "Rawhide" rocker attracted a smaller crowd this time around. The better for all of us. The crowd consisted of die-hard Rockabillies, a smattering of older people, varied Wray fans, me and my little sister. I stood in the front, hands on stage, and watched one of rock n' roll's most influential guitar Gods work his power -- taking all that is raucous and dark and soulful and yes, light, and hypnotizing us. There were no bad vibes in that cramped crowd of potential rowdies. Moving on stage like the half-Shawnee he was, he worked us as if performing some kind of Native American rock and roll rain dance, while still playing down and dirty -- music that made us feel alive and real and raw. And then dreamy -- a seedy, sexy, soulful, demonic, beatific dream.
And then this wide awake fever dream became so tangibly real -- a moment that's remained a highlight of my life: Link Wray handed me his guitar in the middle of "Rumble." Yes, he actually, mid performance, leaned over from the stage, and placed his guitar in my hands. And that devil (an angel in disguise) did so with a grin on his face. I was holding Link Wray's guitar! I didn't scream or cry or crumble into Beatlemania hysterics, instead I held it as long as I could and then, in a trance-like state, passed that sacred idol through the crowd. This was to be shared. And Link just took it all in -- jovial and delighted as the awed audience passed it along, and with great, religious respect. He trusted us. It was safely returned back to Wray who, in spite of his dark image (Wray was still one of the greatest looking leather clad rockers ever) and menacing sound, smiled broadly. I still have his pick, stashed safely in my jewelry box.
Sadly, Link Wray, born May 2, 1929, passed away in 2005. I wish he was still with us. Wray brought so much to American rock music. Distortion, feedback, the power cord and a raw, dirty, crunchy, heavy sound that everyone from Poison Ivy to Pete Towsend to Jimmy Page to Neil Young credit as most influential. Some even claim him the father of heavy metal. "Ace of Spades," "Jack the Ripper," the brilliant "Rumble" (watch Wray rock the ever-loving hell out of that one here) and one of my favorites "Comanche" are just a few of his classics. And then there's "Rawhide" as seen here on "American Bandstand."
The way Dick Clark mentions "Rumble" cracks me up. He says: "They've had one very big hit record gone by, a thing [at first I thought he said 'I think'] called 'Rumble.'" Quite a thing, Mr. Clark. And a think! That was a powerful hit. I've always loved that in 1957, "Rumble" was banned from a number of radio stations -- banned for its menacing suggestion. There were no lyrics! This is how complicated and primal and mysterious his music could be. And a true testament to his art.
And, as I stated from the outset, Wray rocked in every era. I revere all of his work (I especially love his Dylan covers -- "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" and "Girl from the North Country") and I love his unique singing voice -- that cracked voice -- a voice I hear in Dylan or Jagger screaming rough or even in Van Morrison -- but so distinctly Link Wray. His baritone, just slightly, beautifully broken, crooning through Elvis' "Love Me Tender" is plaintive and lovely. And his "Girl from the Northern Country," released in 1964, feelss so both ahead of its time and timelessly intimate -- it's so gravelly gorgeous, so different, so... Link. Wray really admired Dylan, but I prefer Wray's strikingly raw and emphatically romantic version:
And I get so damn excited when I hear what he was up to in the 1970s. Not enough '70s Wray is discussed or heard. Wray excelled with his seemingly smaller records in an era of enormous Stones and Zep releases with some gritty LPs that feel ahead of their time then and now. The Black Keys and Jack White would kill to imbide whatever magical potion Wray was concoting. And as much as I respect the Keys and White, they'll never achieve the alchemy of Wray. And they would surely agree.
I could ramble forever about his '70s records (and I won't even begin to touch the utter ridiculousnes that this man has not been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), but here's one track: Wray’s “I’m So Glad, I’m So Proud” from his 1973 album “Beans and Fatback.” Recorded in 1971 by Link’s brother Vernon, in a chicken shack (Link’s Three Track Studio) on Wray’s Accokeek, Maryland farm, this is the shit. My favorite ’70s Wray is his self titled “Link Wray,” featuring the masterpiece “La De Da” (a song the “Exile”-era Stones had to have heard) but this one, this one is a whole lot of hot damn. Screw Clapton. Link Wray is God.
And check out Jimmy Page in "It Might Get Loud" here. In the face of "Rumble," he can't contain himself. He’s a kid again! He MUST air guitar to Link Wray!
And sad women... From the archives and updated: "Days of Wine and Roses."
In Blake Edwards' Days of Wine and Roses you can easily see -- even if you didn't know the movie was about alcoholism -- that Lee Remick is going to fall, hard and bad, for liquor. Beginning the movie as a teetotaler, a woman who's only vice is the love of chocolate; we see her weakness arrive when her date (played by Jack Lemmon) insists she imbibe. Knowing that she'll enjoy it, he orders her a fancy chocolate cocktail and watches her delicately down the concoction with an almost vampiric joy, as if knowing another potential boozer is a sixth sense. It's a sad moment watching poor Remick throw that drink back, her innocent enjoyment and eventual giddiness made all the more tragic by how unaware she is. In the midst of an almost predatory drinker and harboring the right kind of troubled past or brain chemicals or addictive personality, we know this woman will not be able to innocently drink again.
First directed in 1958 for the classic television anthology Playhouse 90, Days of Wine and Roses was originally filmed by John Frankenheimer in a searing TV play that starred Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie. The grittier vision with the arguably darker, more complicated, experimental director at the helm (watch Seconds, The Manchurian Candidate, All Fall Down, The French Connection 2 -- this man understood human pain) the original has been considered, by many, superior to the 1962 big screen adaptation and Laurie the better actress. Since I revere Frankenheimer, I can understand the preference. And yet I think Edwards' version (who also understood human suffering and horror -- watch the opening of Experiment in Terror) is just as interesting. Chiefly for how "normal" Lemmon and Remick are.
It often feels perverse watching Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick squirm -- especially Lemmon. All through his career, from The Apartment to Save the Tiger to Glengarry Glen Ross, the high-strung, twinkly-eyed actor was always craving more out of life. But that something more, even when given a happy ending (like The Apartment, which isn't so happy) he will seemingly never satisfy. He'll never quench that thirst. With humor (Some Like It Hot) and devastation (Glengarry Glen Ross), he's desperately hanging by a thread, perpetually frustrated. He may win The Apartment's Fran Kubelik in the end but will he keep her? Or will she become Remick's Kirsten Arnesen Clay?
The actors are indeed different in the alternate versions (both written by J.P. Miller) but all bring something specific and true to their performances. That Lemmon and Remick appear the passive, nice, normal, All-American couple, fluffy on the outside or even, obnoxiously "regular," their fall into the abyss is, at times, shocking, and then familiar and then, truly depressing. These are the people who get married, have kids and move to the suburbs, not a flop house next to the closest watering hole. For these two, there's no romance in either scenario.
Lemmon begins the movie as a drunk (though he doesn't know it) and much like his legendary character in The Apartment, engages in unseemly activities to move up the sleazy corporate ladder. A gregarious PR executive with less charm than he thinks he has, he goes so far as to supply hookers for his bosses just to keep a job that will prove to be unrewarding. Remick is the pretty, Encyclopedia-reading secretary (whom he mistakes as one of the girls at a party -- an awkward, harsh scene) and in a moment of fate for two future sots sharing an addiction they don't even know they have yet, they fall in love, marry, have a child and become desperate drunkards. He loses his job, she can't take care of their neglected child, he tries to dry out, she hits near rock bottom, sleeping with strangers for liquor. And by film's end, we don't know what their future holds.
As acted by a twitchy, sometimes smarmy Lemmon and a wide-eyed, dippy, sweet, eventually bitter Remick, both actors become sympathetic with characters who go from lovable to potentially unlikable to absolutely shattering. You feel for them. When Lemmon digs up and destroys his father-in-law's greenhouse (a wonderfully stoic Charles Bickford) on a selfish, hysterical search for one bottle of booze, his desperation is so embarrassingly human and so pitiful that you're not only shielding your eyes from his destructive digging but for his abasement. And when a strung-out Remick comes home later in the movie to Lemmon fresh from AA, no one needs to further discuss what she's been doing all night, how much she's lowered herself. But then, maybe she had a good time.
Though the Alcoholics Anonymous sequences have been considered heavy handed and maybe a bit irritating, this seems to be the point. What a drag, spending the rest of your life being lectured; living whatever de-mystified new life AA expert Jack Klugman is leading. How awful to sit around a bunch of grim one-day-at-a-timers, underscoring how so very not special you are. You are average. And yet, perhaps not-so-average. What kind of people will Lemmon discover at those meetings? Don Birnam? It won't be Don Draper. More like Freddy Rumsen. Even AA-understanding viewers of Mad Men are disturbed by the schlubby normalcy of Freddy. What a buzz kill, taking all the sparkle and swank out of those perfectly clinking cocktails.
Lemmon and Remick are sexier than Freddy, but those drinks stop looking so good. Who knows what will become of this couple. Unlike the sexy, though suitably addled (those horror movie DTs) Ray Milland as that clever writer -- that "don't be ridic" Don Birnam dipsomaniac of the great Lost Weekend, or Susan Hayward's deliciously melodramatic Lillian Roth and all her "crying tomorrow," Lemmon and Remick's most interesting characteristic is, sadly, that they are alcoholics. They can't indulge the brilliant mental gymnastics of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf's George and Martha, whose addiction and spitefulness are, in a highly dysfunctional way, disarmingly romantic and strangely heroic. Lee and Jack -- they're like a lot of people -- just regular old drunks. No wonder they drink.
Since today is the birthday of Bette Davis and I need this woman in my life (I'll never get her!) I'm reposting an ode to Bette...
I wish I could have met Bette Davis. Just once in my life. I wouldn't have cared if she hollered at me, blew cigarette smoke in my face, crisply informed me that my apartment was a "dump" or told me to take "Fountain" -- any of it -- I'd take abuse from Ms. Davis just to listen to that voice. And maybe, perhaps more than likely, she would have been nice. She herself said: "I'm the nicest goddamn dame that ever lived." But nice or not, I would have loved to solicit advice from that woman. Bette Davis as life coach. That could work for me. A life coach who states: "Never, never trust anyone who asks for white wine. It means they're phonies."
Yes. Bette. For if there is or was any female figure to whom others should turn to in times of crisis, loneliness and despair, it is Bette Davis. Why? Because Bette Davis is every woman (and some men) wrapped into one: ugly and beautiful, sweet and biting, honest and deceitful, classy and vulgar. There isn't a side of Bette that every woman doesn't see in herself. Her face -- those buggy eyes flickering with homeliness and yet an odd beauty (never forget how uniquely gorgeous Bette was as a young starlet), sadness, insanity, malevolence, rage and finally, strength. And then her bearing -- both instantly recognizable, iconic and, then surprising. The Bette way -- all coiled up and ready to strike (as in Another Man’s Poison) or sloppy and cruelly casual (like in WhatEver Happened to Baby Jane?: “Here’s your lunch” she announces to Joan before promptly serving her a rat) or lovely and wary (as in All This, and Heaven Too) or brassy and swishy (as in Jezebel) or elegantly deceitful (as in The Letter) or nervously mousy turned coolly gorgeous (as in Now, Voyager) or just plain gloriously melodramatic then vulnerable and tough (as in All About Eve) or heart-breakingingly desperate (as in The Star). There are moments when Bette seems almost turned inside out, as if she’s revealing the innards of the female psyche -- which is exactly why she can appear so damn terrifying at times.
But she had her soft moments (watch her opposite Charles Boyer in aforementioned All This, and Heaven Too and you'll see what I mean). In later years Bette recalled, "Christ, I was always bitching about how I hated my face in those days. Compared to what I look like now, I was an absolute living doll!"
She was a doll. God knows she had those famous, buggy-beautiful eyes, silky skin and an ample chest, but Davis, like most women, lived with numerous imperfections. But she didn't harp on these flaws or engage in diva delusions, instead she gleefully, sometimes perversely played up her problem areas. And it sometimes made her all the more attractive. In All About Eve, she's supposed to be an insecure, aging star, yet even when a young Marilyn Monroe walks on (who looks like a peach, even after undoubtedly consuming numerous benzos and splits of champagne), you can't take your eyes off Bette.
And it wasn't just her looks -- it was her style. Everything Bette did -- walking (in minced steps), talking (with exacting enunciation), smoking (in circular jabs) -- she did with a flourish. Like Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn and the great Tallulah Bankhead (who really should have made more movies) Bette was her own unforgettable invention, an unconventional glamour-puss, who stands the test of time. Unlike sanctioned beauty, Bette's particular magic is something that never fades.
Neither did Bette's ballsy view of life and relationships, so wonderfully expressed on (and frequently off) the big screen. For instance, what to do when dumped? Go out in a blaze of glory. Though her demise was devastating in Of Human Bondage, she pulled off a stunning, final fuck you to poor Leslie Howard. Bette, who insisted on looking the damaged strumpet against director John Cromwell's wishes was not only one of the first actresses to choose looking this bad on screen but also appeared like some kind of punk rock prototype (young Courtney Love must have studied this scene) or, like Bukowski wrote of Barfly Faye Dunaway, a "distressed goddess."
Sitting in a flophouse, emaciated and dying, but still snarling all ugly/sweaty-hot-sexy in her revealing slip, bleached blonde hair and runny eye makeup -- all it took was a few withering looks to leave Leslie Howard's passive-aggressive club footed doctor with an image to smolder for a lifetime. In a very un-Camille like performance, she seemed to be saying: "Here I am, warts and all. Can't handle it? Your loss. Now go live your boring life with you new boring girlfriend."
And what about giving someone the cold shoulder? Bette showed women how to deal with the delicate situation of the brush off (or tease) by sparing him the psych-speak and exiting with a baffler: As Ms. Davis' Southern belle character drawled in Cabin in the Cotton, "I'd love to kiss you, but I've just washed my hair." (Try this one out). And along these same lines, she also reveled in showing that not all women want marriage and babies.
In Beyond the Forest (a movie she didn't want to make but was brilliant in nonetheless), Davis' character is married to Joseph Cotten -- not a bad catch by any stretch. But she grows bored and becomes critical of what marital bliss and good living are supposed to be ("What a dump" she bitches about their house). Though cast as an evildoer in the film, I've always felt sympathy for her Rosa Moline --- she was limited, in love with another and then, dear God, pregnant. So how to remedy this situation? She hauled herself off the side of a mountain, pregnant belly in tow. Sure, it wasn't the nicest, safest move (and it certainly wasn't as glamorous as Gene Tierney’s tumble down the stairs in Leave Her to Heaven), but perhaps through the dictates of the Production Code, this was the only way she could not have that baby. And she wanted to move to Chicago -- high-tail it out of that stifling, small town where everyone talked shit about her. And... yeah, yeah, yeah... she was having an affair with David Brian (who ditches her), and she's dangerous with firearms. I don't care. I feel for Rosa Moline. "If I don't get out of here I'll die. If I don't get out of here I hope I die and burn."
Feisty. That's the overused word. And yet, as much as women and men say they love the "feisty" ladies, it often simply comes down to the bitch. That other overused word. What a bitch. And I think a few women are even worse regarding this insult (sit down and act like a nice little lady). Bette would say bullshit to all that and then proceed to call Joan Crawford a bitch or, rather, just state flatly: "I wouldn't piss on her if she was on fire." I prefer the word Bette herself used -- guts. "No guts, no glory." Like other women with guts, she made a man's head spin: Is she a bitch? Or an assertive fox? This is the continuous (and exciting) inward query (and you know hubby Gary Merrill got all hot and bothered by that alluring combo). Well, she's both. She's human. Like a lot of strong women, she probably suffered a Napoleon complex, but we love that in men (Pacino, De Niro). We get a thrill watching Joe Pesci shove a pen in a man's eye. But Bette? That would scare the shit out of us. Just imagine what Bette could do to an attacker -- the carnage a maniacal Bette would leave defending herself -- all that flying fur, red scratching fingernails and a lit cigarette to the face. I can’t see Bette Davis successfully getting mugged.
And I imagine that if Miss Davis couldn't win a physical fight, she could reign victorious via a verbal arsenal of movie lines that were nearly as lethal or often, just witheringly honest. No, she didn't write them, but it sure sounded like she did. Take, for instance:
Marked Woman: "I'll get even if I have to crawl back from the grave."
It's Love I'm After: "You're going to have love for breakfast, love for luncheon and love for dinner. Sweet, sugary, sticky worship. You're going to have a steady diet of it till you're ready to scream, you billy goat!"
Jezebel: "I'll make him live, I will. Whatever you might do, I can do more, 'cause I know how to fight better than you."
Old Acquaintance: "It's late, and I'm very, very tired of youth and love and self-sacrifice."
All About Eve: "Nice speech, Eve. But I wouldn't worry too much about your heart. You can always put that award where your heart ought to be."
And the more subtle diamond dagger from The Little Foxes: "I don't ask for things I don't think I can get."
But she wasn't just tough, she was honest. Think of this, from the endlessly quotable All About Eve. It could be Davis herself discussing her own name and stardom: "And what is that, besides something spelled out in light bulbs, I mean - besides something called a temperament, which consists mostly of swooping about on a broomstick and screaming at the top of my voice? Infants behave the way I do, you know. They carry on and misbehave - they'd get drunk if they knew how - when they can't have what they want, when they feel unwanted or insecure or unloved."
Oh, Bette. She didn't act the Diva, she was the Diva. But strangely down to earth too. She hated airs, which contributed to her dislike towards Joan Crawford (that, and something to do with Franchot Tone) and one of the reasons she slammed poor co-star Celeste Holm from All About Eve -- bemoaning perky Holm's on set salutations, Bette snarled, "ugh manners." As artificial as her carefully constructed lips were (that line!), Davis detested fakes, and forced, silly sentiments, things that would, as Bette said, “provoke anyone of sensibility to nausea.” This attitude helped make her so wonderfully, lovably real and stable against a fantastically fake and annoying-verging-on-nervous-breakdown Miriam Hopkins (whom she loathed in real life) in one of my favorites, Old Acquaintance. She wasn't always a bitch. Of her legendary All About Eve character Margo, Bette stated: "Margo Channing was not a bitch. She was an actress who was getting older and was not too happy about it. And why should she? Anyone who says that life begins at forty is full of it. As people get older their bodies begin to decay. They get sick. They forget things. What's good about that?"
So with that hatred of the passing of time, here's to those dreaded birthdays Bette Davis. Like you ask/tell that Oscar statuette you placed on the dashboard during your dipsomaniacal drive through Hollywood in The Star, I'd love to have been able to ask, just once: "Come on Bette, let's you and me get drunk."
That is, Kier's characters -- his spirits, have left the building -- along with a lot of other gifted actors and crew and assistants and curious onlookers, who haunted the Pompidou, and made this filmmaking -- this happening -- this fascinating, concentrated experience what it was. And of course, Guy Maddin has left the building, which still feels like a dream in itself. There were days I watched Guy directing and wondered, to quote one of Roger Ebert's greatest lines (via one of Russ Meyer's greatest movies), "This is my happening and it freaks me out!"
Yes. A Happening. If the Carrie Nations showed up singing "Sweet Talking Candy Man" with hot pink ectoplasm flying out of their mini skirts, I would not have been the least bit surprised. Guy Maddin's SPIRITISMES, his ongoing project of shooting short, psychically divined adaptations of long, lost, aborted and unrealized films has ended -- at the Pompidou in Paris. Guy made seventeen films, one a day, for seventeen days straight in Paris. And that's just the start. The project will live on in newer places, with more films to be made. Many, many more. And so many more with Udo. A man who can play any role, a man who has lived, a man of fine taste, a man who has worked with Paul Morrissey to Fassbinder to Van Sant to Von Trier and so many more... and a man who knows his way around a good Steak Tartar.
But back in Paris -- the beautiful set (created by Guy's superb, artistic production designer, Galen Johnson) has been broken down, the costumes (by the excellent, creative, sublimely patient Elodie Mard) have been boxed up, the live stream voyeur cams have been turned off, the Pompidou onlookers are staring at other exhibits and not at... Charlotte Rampling chastising Udo Kier as a sheriff clad in sexy baby doll nightgown (from William Wellman's Ladies of the Mob); or Mathieu Amalric pretending he purchashed duplicates of his own precious collection of objects, including a boar's head and gifting them to his wife, Amira Casar, only to learn that all of his snowballing misdeeds are occurring in an elevator (from Lottie Lyell's The Blue Mountains Mystery);
or an intense, heartbroken Andre Wilms as a deaf barber slowly approaching his beguiling wife, Charlotte Rampling, with a pair of scissors, afer he discovers a mysterious device that allows him to hear again -- to hear his wife having an affair (from Marshall Neilan's Bits of Life);
or Amira Casar facing the corpse of the man (played by Christophe Paou) who killed her husband, dragged into her home by Jacques Nolot, who murdered the murderer, and then -- Amira -- falling in love with the corpse, making love to the corpse, ripping off her nylons over the corpse and oh my ... Jacques Nolot is not happy about this (from Benjamin Fondane's Tararira).
And then so many of the other terrific actors, from the mesmerizing Slimane Dazi, so touching and soulful in George Schneevoigt's Gardener Boy Sought, and then so sexy and debauched in Erich von Stroheim's Poto-Poto; to Elina Löwensohn, doing the most beautifully crazy Moe Howard impersonation in Jack Cummings' Hello Pop; to an incredibly powerful Victoire du Bois, losing her mind and screaming for all the musuem to hear while tangled in fishnet (in Alfred Hitchcock's The Blind Man, here she is The Blind Woman); to the on-screen, live streaming meeting of Charlotte Rampling and Amira Casar (in Jacques Feyder's Therese Raquin) -- exciting not only for their acting and chemistry, but for something not many women have in common -- they both famously modeled for Helmut Newton.
And everyone so gifted, consummate, bringing their own unique faces and acting to the project -- Miguel Cueva, Mathieu Demy, Victoire du Bois, Jeanne de France, Adèle Haenel, Ariane Labed, Maria de Medeiros, Jacques Nolot, Christophe Paou, Jean-Baptiste Phou, Jean-François Stévenin, Robinson Stévenin and of course, Geraldine Chaplin and Luce Vigo. And always, always the brilliant Udo.
Watching the daughters of Charlie Chaplin and Jean Vigo hold hands in seance and look into each others eyes (conjuring Jean Vigo's unrealized Lignes de la main) was exceptionally moving. For them as well. It brought tears to Chaplin, Vigo and Maddin's eyes. And Luce was generous enough to provide the set (for that day only, she made sure to return it safely home) with something of her own -- so precious to her, and so powerful to see hanging on the wall -- an actual portrait of a very young Jean Vigo, painted when the brilliant artist was a slumbering child.
But the project continues on -- Guy will march along, making his one hundred short films all over the world -- at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, in Sao Paulo, Brazil and at New York's MOMA (you can read more about it in this interview with Guy at The Playlist and on here too), for this ambitious project that I'm excited to be a collaborator.
And Guy threw me in the mix. I was a whore tempted by a priest played by the great Dazi (in Erich von Stroheim's Poto-Poto), married Udo Kier only to be killed by Elina Löwensohn's wedding gift -- a swan (in Nino Martoglio's Lost in the Dark), and I inhabited Curly (in some fashion), from the lost Jack Cummings' Three Stooges' short Hello Pop alongside Victoire du Bois and Elina Löwensohn.
That one was particularly, wonderfully insane. Three women thinking they're the Stooges for reasons unknown. It felt like an especially glamorous/horrifying/possibly funny (it was funny to us) look into an unseen corner of The Snake Pit or the side antics of those nymphos from Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, complete with eye gouges, face slaps and rolling punches.
So with that, I can't wait to see all of the films -- these lost or unrealized films -- re-done by Maddin in often wildly experimentally different directions, by filmmakers as diverse as Jean Vigo, Alfred Hitchcock, Kenji Mizoguchi, Lois Weber, Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, Jacques Feyder, Alexandre Dovjenko and more. And more to come.
One thing I happily discovered was the talented on set photographer Cecile Grâce Janvier who has provided all of the pictures in this post, with permission of Maddin.
She took many beautiful, mysterious, wonderfully inventive photos (some on digital, but mostly with a film camera -- film god bless her), and you can look at more of her work here.
As Guy said: "Every day my actors will plunge themselves deep into a trance, and open themselves up to possession by the unhappy spirit of a lost film. And every day my actors will act out the long forgotten choreographies that once lived so luminously on the big screen for thousands, maybe millions of viewers."
They did. And they will continue to do so. To a museum, website, live streaming web cam and a theater near you. Coming soon...
As others have always pointed out, he wasn’t impish, charming, “Circus Boy” Mickey Dolenz, the guy who everyone wanted to be friends with and who sang “I’m a Believer” in that unmistakable Mickey voice. He wasn’t the cool, laconic, hep, cap-wearing Michael Nesmith, the one who wrote the great “Circle Sky,” and who palled with Frank Zappa, the one who is considered an innovator of MTV (though the show itself should be seen as an innovator as well). And he wasn’t sensitive folkie Peter Tork.
He was Davy. The one all the girls screamed for. The one Marcia Brady went ga-ga over and lived out every girl’s dream by actually going to the prom with him (“Girl. Look what you’ve done to me!”) The British one. The short one. The ex jockey, the ex Artful Dodger -- the song and dance man who wasn’t quite as hip as the rest of the fellows. And yet, in his own way, he was just as hip.
The Monkees needed Davy Jones. The show, inspired by Richard Lester and most especially A Hard Day’s Night and Help! about a group of friends/pop band (it ran from 1966-1968) was co-created by none other than Five Easy Pieces director Bob Rafelson, who quite clearly and quite cheekily, knew what he was doing. And in spite of its initial detractors -- detractors I can’t believe exist today (think of all the prefabricated boy groups – who sing terrible material and can’t even play an instrument! The Monkees could actually play and write their own songs…) it’s a piece of history that produced some of the greatest pop songs of that time: “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone,” “Daydream Believer,” “Valeri" (one of my favorite songs Davy sang),” “A Little Bit Me (A Little Bit You),” “Last Train to Clarksville,” “Cuddly Toy,” “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” “I’m A Believer,” “Star Collector,” "Mary, Mary” and more and more and more.
No, they were not Jimi Hendrix or the The Rolling Stones or The Beatles. No. They were for kids. Sort of. Perhaps secretly for adults. They were subversive -- and could have been a lot more had they gotten extra control. They knew what was down. But again, as a kid. You just knew how special they were -- you felt that extra something to those songs and crazy stories. When they ran on re-runs on Nickelodeon, my sister and I became almost manically obsessed with them. They provided a lot of happiness and escape from what we considered the dullsville of our time. The pop songs! The clothes! The shenanigans! Why couldn’t we turn on a radio and hear “Randy Scouse Git”?
The older I got and the more I researched, the more I realized how much they managed to transcend mere bubblegum and turn it into something more, something mysterious -- and how much they tried. I realized many adults did respect The Monkees, as they should have. Dig just a few of the songwriters and compositions they worked with -- Neil Diamond, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, John Stewart and the great Harry Nilsson. That genius Jack Nitzsche even provided backing music for the band.
And then there was their masterpiece (or, chaos-ter-piece) Head (directed by Rafelson and co-written by Jack Nicholson). See, back then, if you had a novelty band, and you still had to sing and play your instruments, you still had to prove yourself. And The Monkees had some balls when they made that 1968 counterculture movie -- a movie that opens with the band running (I'm thinking from girls, but who knows when it comes to this picture...your mind runs away with the band itself) through a quite serious, official ribbon cutting on a bridge only to have Mickey jump off that bridge in form of suicide/surrender (you think N Sync would have done that? Or make an anti war movie for that matter?). It’s a funny, shrewd deconstruction of Monkees mania. And it's often so gorgeous. After the plunge into a watery death/swim, complete with mermaids, one of their most hauntingly beautiful songs kicks in -- the exquisite, psychedelic “Porpoise Song.” This is one of my favorite musical moments in all of film. How can you dismiss The Monkees after this sublime sequence and song? I have no idea what Jean-Luc Godard thinks of the picture or the TV show or the band, but I want to believe he reveres them.
As the LA Times reported from Bob Rafelson: “It's a sad day for me. Of all the films I've made that have received attention from the Academy Awards, or Cannes [Film Festival] or the New York Film Critics Awards, nothing ever pleased me more than hearing a [radio] announcer say 'Here's Davy Jones singing "Daydream Believer." '
But Davy wasn’t all “Daydream Believer.” He also sang, in Head, Harry Nillson’s magnificent “Daddy’s Song.” He does Nillson proud. It’s pure song and dance Davy. Joyful, nostalgic, a little insane -- perhaps without him even realizing it -- and then just downright poignant. Mickey and Mike were always my favorites, but I adore Davy. And the more I comb through his clips, I feel like I was taking him for granted. He makes me so happy. He always did. Oh, Davy. “Look what you’ve done to me!”
As Jones asks in "Daydream Believer" -- "What number is this, Chip?" Oh, the number. His last number. He was only 66. The the same year the show began. A great year for music. And a great memory for many -- and for many of different generations. Rest in Peace, Mr. Jones. You knew how happy we could be.
Well, I am a prostitute in this never produced 1933 Stroheim script entitled Poto-Poto. Udo Kier is my pimp but my new love turns out to be another pimp -- a priest -- the intense Slimane Dazi (so powerful in A Prophet). I must say I enjoyed kissing a priest. A priest played by him. The talented Ariane Labed plays Udo's new acquisition, something she's none too happy about. And a lot more happens. This is of course, all part of Maddin's SPIRITISMES shooting at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Here is a short, though not exact synopsis written by Guy's team:
"In an effort to acquire enough money for the medicine her dying mother requires, Masha, at the roulette wheel of a riverboat casino/brothel, bets herself in marriage against the wealth of sadistic sugar baron, Jan. She loses, and is forced to marry the horrible man. When he makes her the brothel’s madam, she exploits her new position in order to diminish and humiliate her new husband."
The cast includes Kier, Jacques Bonnaffé, Amira Casar, Geraldine Chaplin, Miguel Cueva, Slimane Dazi, Jeanne de France, Ariane Labed and Sherpa Macilu. I was thrown in last minute (Guy always does this to me... so here I am. I'm Udo's opiate addled prostitute. It's much easier that way.
I'm just happy I get to make out with a priest. I always wanted to do that.
"Over eighty percent of silent films are lost. I’ve always considered a lost film as a narrative with no known final resting place -- doomed to wander the landscape of film history, sad, miserable and unable to project itself to the people who might love it." -- Guy Maddin
The spirits will rise...
A project that has long haunted the obsessive and hard working Guy Maddin and one that's haunted our household in nearly every conceivable way (happy, unhappy, insane spirits, or merely the thoughts of those spirits, have a way of infecting our lives, quite personally. And a few smashed objects along the way. I like to think that Erich von Stroheim hurled that plate against the wall...), the reality, or the dream reality; the prenominal, the fantastical... there are so many ways to describe what is happening. In short, the Hauntings have begun. Watch. Live.
Today begins the first day of Guy Maddin's SPIRITISMES at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (which run until March 12). As the Pompidou writes "Guy Maddin invites daily visitors to the Centre Pompidou to attend the making of a new film. During 'séances'...Maddin and his actors will allow themselves to be possessed by the wandering spirits of the dead, to bring their movies back to life."
Filmmaking, dead made undead, is happening live at the Centre -- lost or unrealized films by directors as diverse as Jean Vigo, Kenji Mizoguchi, Lois Weber, William Wellman, von Stroheim (I will appear in that particular Poto-Poto), Alexandre Dovjenko and more are coming -- rising from the dead, in their own unique way. Maddin will be shooting one film a day, starting today, from February 22 to March 12. You can watch live streaming, between 11 AM to 9 PM (6 AM -3 PM ET) all those days. For those of you in the States, get up early or indulge your insomnia.
And then there's the impressive array of actors. Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Amalric, Slimane Dazi, Rudy Andriamimarinosy, Jacques Bonnaffé, Amira Casar, Géraldine Chaplin, Miguel Cueva, Mathieu Demy, Jeanne de France, Adèle Haenel, Ariane Labed, Elina Löwensohn, Maria de Medeiros, Jacques Nolot, Christophe Paou, Jean-Baptiste Phou, Jean-François Stévenin, Robinson Stévenin and André Wilms will all take part. Please look at the full list of pictures, or seances, at the Centre Pompiodu, here.
As Guy said:
"Over eighty percent of silent films are lost. I’ve always considered a lost film as a narrative with no known final resting place -- doomed to wander the landscape of film history, sad, miserable, and unable to project itself to the people who might love it. Their friends, their family, their loved ones and the public.
"This absence haunts me. I need to see these films. It’s eventually occurred to me that the best way to see them would to make contact with their miserable spirits and invite them to possess me. And with actors quite willing to participate in some para-normal cinematic experiments.
"These are not direct re-creations or the imitations of the films themselves. I would never dare consider myself capable of even the lousiest impersonation and wish to pay respect to all -- Jean Vigo, Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, Ed Wood and all.
"Every day my actors will plunge themselves deep into a trance, and open themselves up to possession by the unhappy spirit of a lost film. And every day my actors will act out the long forgotten choreographies that once lived so luminously on the big screen for thousands, maybe millions of viewers."
As Guy told the Pompidou:
"This project made its way into my head for almost twenty years. During all these years, he moved my heart and even my soul, until I myself am possessed! I learned that there are lost films. Beautiful films, made for a very long, generally silent, popular films, glorified, loved, raised to the level of myth by millions of spectators, some obsessively. Films which, however, dying in obscurity. Since I realized this, I literally haunted. Some of these films were destroyed by the studios, simply because they needed shelves, some were thrown into the sea or burned in a bonfire at picnics countryside. Others were reduced to dust because they were poorly preserved, others perished in the flames in an accident of projection. Some of these films have simply disappeared from history.
"These are films that have no abode, films can not be thrown in their public accounts unfortunates condemned to wander forever in the landscape of film history. It is the fact of not being able to see, that haunts me, because they were all made for that! I feel their pain wandering when I go to the movies, particularly in old cinemas. Yes, these films sadden me as much as they intrigue me. I thought that the only way to restore a situation as melancholy was to hold séances to contact these desperate souls and give them the chance to show again a part of themselves, even tiny. I decided to set up a device in which we could all attend these séances and perhaps, if we're lucky, take a look at the past glories of cinema."
Guy will not only shoot, but attempt to make paranormal contact with the spirit of the lost film (not literallly, of course. But you never know what could happen...) working like a spirit photographer, recording what transpires -- ectoplasm, trances, twitches and of course, the re-imagined films themselves -- dream narratives, shorts that well deserve their title: Hauntings.
He will eventually edit the pictures, and this ambitious project will be moving on to many places (including MoMA in New York) and with many more actors and films to re-create, and many more ways to view them. Online, in the cinema, live-streaming and directly live in person. If you can't be present, again, you can watch online. And you do not want to miss the chance to watch Udo -- Udo's eyes. Udo eyes could awaken the deadest of the dead, those who would never choose to rise again. And so can Guy.
Please watch it all live here. And I will be updating as much as possible. I'm working here, so it can be hard to break away -- especially when I'm doing such things like, pulling a ribbon of ectoplasm out of Charlotte Rampling's mouth. I never thought I would have done such a thing, but it, strangely, seemed quite natural. (I must be delirious) Of course, she looked beautiful and intense -- ribbon fluttering, with those spellbinding eyes and those famous lips, allowing the silky spirit to emerge.
(Speaking of silky spirits -- I would be remiss to not mention For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon to help raise funds for the National Film Preservation Foundation. Contribute! As we are attempting to bring lost films to life, remember all those pictures that should remain alive and well. This project underscores the importance of such matters all the more. The tireless minds and beautiful words at The Self Styled Siren and Ferdy On Films have been on this, and you should be too. But I will write more about that on another post...)
For now, we began with Lines of the Hand. An unrealized film by Jean Vigo starring Vigo's daughter Luce Vigo. Also with that other famous daughter, Geraldine Chaplin and the great Udo Kier. Today is Marshall Neilan's Bits of Life with Rampling, Kier, Jacques Bonnaffe, Miguel Cueva, Sherpa Macilu and Andre Wilms The set-up has begun. And there are so many more to come.
One of the most important, influential and heart stopping soul singers ever, the genius, Otis Redding gave us about four years of gorgeously gravelly voiced/smoothly sexy/heartbreaking music. Four years. That's all we got. But Redding’s output is so damn extraordinary with songs like “These Arms of Mine,” “I’ve Been Loving You,” “Try a Little Tenderness,” "I Love You More than Words Can Say" (if that song doesn't get you where you live, whether together or broken up, you're not human), "Respect," Mr. Pitiful," “Open the Door” (one of my favorites -- the refrain just kills me, can you even imagine not letting Otis in that goddman door? No one pleads like Otis Redding.) and of course, the plaintive, lonely [Sittin’ On] The Dock on the Bay,” which only proved he was at his artistic peak, that again, why? Why did he have to leave us so early? WHY?
Fate or whatever senseless bad luck bullshit that has nothing to do with a real God up there proved to be one of music's greatest tragedies, and 26-year old Redding perished in a plane accident in 1967. The idea of what he would have furthered in his career is too maddening to ponder. Life is just too unfair to make sense of sometimes.
But Otis could help us make sense of of life, frequently. And with a sublime, soulful simplicity that manages to be so damn complicated and so damn moving that I can't get through at least six of his songs without getting teary eyed about, not just things happening in my own life, but things occurring in the world at large, or just mysterious things I can't even articulate. Have you heard his version of "White Christmas?" I don't even think about Christmas when I hear that song -- there's so much more going on there.
And then there's his classic "Try A Little Tenderness." Yes, we've all heard it, we've heard it a lot. But listen to it. Listen to the words. In a world of glib snark, rotten communication, selfishness, narcissism, easy refusals of looking at the other damn side of a situation, walking in another man or woman's shoes or just being real and kind, and not with extra emoticons attached to a hollow message, but real, the song is not only a gorgeous celebration of trying just that one word, it's almost shockingly profound. This one could save more conflicts than months and months of couple's therapy.
As Redding sang, "It's not just sentimental, no no no. She has her grief and care...But the soft words. They are spoke so gentle, yeah. It makes it easier, easier to bare." Yes indeed. It makes it a hell of a lot easier. Try it. Don't worry, it's not corny. Otis Redding does not express himself anywhere near any kind of corn. Happy Valentine's Day. I say we spend it, regardless of our relationship status, with Otis Redding.
What were the best older movies you watched in 2011 for the first time? That was the question fellow blogger Rupert Pupkin (as in Rupert Pupkin Speaks) asked earlier this year. My answer was, quite a few, actually, and .... thinking further, why did I not write about more of these movies throughout the year, here, on Sunset Gun? Well, better late than never and so, with a push from Pupkin (that sounds interesting), I compiled my list for my site and double published it on his (check out many other writers and filmmakers who have contributed to this series) -- so to spread the film love around.
Here are ten first times, stirring new discoveries, or movies I had longed to watch and finally saw:
Other Men's Women(William Wellman) 1931
Too many think of pre-code movies in terms of mere sauciness. A place where they can catch a glimpse of Joan Blondell walking around in her skivvies or Barbra Stanwyck sleeping her way to the top. While this is certainly an important aspect to pre-code -- the inhibition and frank depictions of real life and sex (thankfully, because where else can I stare at Toby Wing’s nipples in a negligee?) the best pictures offer up kinky kicks with depth -- relaxing or spazzing out, in some cases, into something more relevant. Real thoughts about women, men, economic struggles, crime, jealousies -- so much -- this is what I love about pre-code. There’s a maturity, a lack of naiveté, loads of realism or surrealism or melodrama, or a combination of all three. William Wellman’s Other Men’s Women, while certainly unafraid of melodrama, falls in the “realism” category, and often plays like neo-realism before its time. The story -- a frank depiction of a man falling for his best friend’s wife and she falling for him is lovely, sad, impossible and without any ha-cha-cha. I love that it’s set on the railroad (so many wonderful train shots, and with bright outdoor lighting) and that it stars the intriguing, naturalistic Grant Withers as an engineer, who falls for Mary Astor, the wife of his co-worker and friend Regis Toomey. The men will fight, but there are no villains here.
There’s just a lot of eventual tragedy among good, imperfect people. No one really wants to cause suffering and yet, people suffer. It’s such a gentle, soulful picture that really makes you feel all of this heartsickness, and perhaps relate to it as well. Added bonus: Joan Blondell and a young James Cagney co-star. When Cagney makes his appearance walking atop a train, it was so spectacular that I literally gasped. I thought: "Where has this movie been all my life?"
Rage in Heaven (W.S. Van Dyke) 1941
I’ve always admired Robert Montgomery, particularly for his merits as an actor/director with Ride the Pink Horse and The Lady in the Lake, and I think he’s taken for granted as an intriguing screen presence. I became slightly obsessed with him in 2011, reveling in so many performances in which he played someone charming and light, deceptively sweet or… slightly… off. He’s so easygoing and natural on screen -- his lines never feel forced and though a smart-alec, he’s rarely smug -- he always wins me over with a laugh or an unexpected moment. Like in, Forsaking All Others, swiping his finger on Joan Crawford’s face mask and licking it off like frosting (back when you could do that to Joan). He’s naturally funny. And naturally strange. And he can really play a whacked out nutjob quite convincingly. There’s his famous psychopath in Night Must Fall, of course, but then there’s his weirded out, distracted performance in the problematic production, Rage in Heaven, a movie that, to me, works, regardless of any on-set issues. Reportedly, Montgomery didn’t want to make the movie, he wanted a break or vacation from his MGM contract but was forced into the role. In retaliation he delivered his lines as flat as possible within this super melodramatic milieu.
Well, his angry decision worked, and he’s just so strange that we utterly believe this millionaire is a suicidal madman, one step away from the loony bin he left at the beginning of the movie. We certainly understand why he falls for Ingrid Bergman, who marries him, in spite of the growing triangle involving his best friend (the normal one here -- George Sanders, when George Sanders was allowed to be the normal one). And we certainly understand his jealousy; even if his neurosis becomes so insane he sets up poor Sanders, Leave Her To Heaven style. There’s a lot going on here, and a lot of it might seem a mess to viewers, but it’s a fascinating clash -- and Montgomery gives good crazy, even when he’s phoning it in, which then makes him appear even crazier. He might be a genius.
The Threat(Felix E. Feist) 1949
How in the name of Felix E. Feist did I manage to miss The Threat all of these years? What a no nonsense, lean and mean movie this was -- a tense, rough, fantastically acted action/hostage picture with not one ounce of flab on it. Current action pictures, or really any modern motion picture should take note of this one. I mean, what’s with all the 120 plus running times of late? Get to the point. We’re not stupid. We can read between the lines, Hollywood. Or in the case of this movie, the broken furniture. This stars one of my most favorite tough guy/icons of noir, Charles McGraw as a ruthless killer who breaks out of Folsom only to kidnap the police detective (Michael O’Shea) and district attorney (Frank Conroy) responsible for his incarceration (with Anthony Caruso, Frank Richards and Virginia Grey along for the ride.) Everyone’s terrific here, but it’s McGraw’s show all the way -- from his silent menace to his effectively terrifying bursts of violence -- like breaking a chair on a guy’s head. He is like nothing you’ve ever seen, and probably never will again. (Is there any actor alive like McGraw?)
It mostly takes place in a California desert hideaway, providing even more tension as McGraw and company, quite literally, sweat and sweat and grow crazier and crazier through this 66-minute exercise in hysterical entrapment. Again, 66 damn minutes, and not a loss of intensity, style, intelligence and Charlie-McGraw-magnitude. Again, Hollywood. Watch your old movies, dammit.
M (Joseph Losey) 1951
I had longed to see this picture for years and years and could never track down an even semi-decent-deficient copy, but I broke down and watched something viewable, even as the quality frustrated me. I revere Joseph Losey, from his masterworks like The Prowler and The Servant to his more wildly baroque and excessive bouts like Boom! so I believed other Losey-philes who hold this re-make in high regard. I’ve heard non believers, however, grouse about actor David Wayne filling in for Peter Lorre’s brilliant performance in Fritz Lang’s masterpiece -- that he’s too understated, too boring; there’s just no heft to him. Well, the subtlety works and he comes off not only incredibly creepy but an effective cipher who allows Losey’s spectacular supporting cast -- Martin Gabel, Luther Adler, Norman Lloyd, Raymond Burr and Jim Backus -- to work off and perhaps even through him by going larger (Luther Adler is especially strong here).
Ernest Laszlo’s cinematography and depiction of 1950s Los Angeles is exceptional -- from the seedy Bunker Hill locations to a terrific use of the Bradbury Building where the killer is hunted, to the use of mannequins (women, children, sexuality, parts), all wind up into a powerful mob hysteria, underscoring that era’s political paranoia and what would happen to the soon-to-be exiled HUAC target Losey. Thankfully, he embraced Britain, and become one of the greatest filmmakers of the 1960s. He also, in Secret Ceremony, got Elizabeth Taylor to take an on screen bath with Mia Farrow… He’s a treasure.
The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad) 1963
This was the only film Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad ever made before her untimely death in 1967 but it’s been cited as a massively influential work of Iranian cinema, particularly influencing the Iranian New Wave. Under a half hour long, the beautifully shot black and white document/meditation is horrifying, heartbreaking, hopeful and mysterious, and it will never leave me. Documenting a leper colony with brave assurance and a sensitivity towards not just her subject’s unsightly plight, but to the poetry and beauty they possess, the picture goes beyond trite observations of happiness in spite of tragedy and into the realm of pure cinematic poetry.
Even as some of the afflicted do indeed possess joy, Farrokhzad (who was 27-years old when she directed this) makes us truly feel their sadness, while showing their regular lives (women apply makeup. Children do play), underscoring their humanity. Outcasts are often intriguing -- we love the beautiful loser -- but in this case, we must face outcasts of ravaged survivors, and through Farrokhzad’s blunt, but gentle poetry, see them not as losers, but beautifully brave and often very regular human beings. A masterpiece.
Remember Last Night?(James Whale) 1935
Technically, I saw this picture in 2010, as it played at the Santa Monica Aero Dec. 30 (a double feature with Ruggles of Red Gap), but since it was the perfect, inebriated (and boy is this movie inebriated) way to ring in the New Year, I think of it as a 2011 viewing. And it’s about people who can’t remember anything about the night before, so why not 2011? A rare treat to see on the big screen, this charming, debauched screwball comedy directed by James Whale (who should have done more movies like this -- it's not like his legendary horror movies didn't contain loads of wit) has a wonderful premise -- a rich, reckless couple wake up (Robert Young and Constance Cummings), hung-over after their continual nights of partying and discover a dead man in one of the guest rooms. Well, what the hell happened? Who knows? Everyone, including all of their friends, were too damn drunk to remember.
Edward Arnold plays the police detective who’s not just struggling with the case, but the company Young and Cummings keep -- a glamorous mess of dipsomaniacs who can’t stay in one room, much less one house for more than 20 minutes without sauced-up shenanigans occurring (including a freaked out Blackface number). What I love, among many other things, about this movie is that even a dead man can’t sober up these characters. It just makes them drink all the more. Which is exactly what many of us would do, only, with a lot less style.
Big House U.S.A. (Howard W. Koch) 1955
The cast is so fan-fucking-tastic here, that this movie could be about anything -- a bunch of men whittling wood and watching birds -- it would still be interesting. Luckily it’s much more dramatic than all that -- it’s Ralph Meeker hucking a child into a canyon; it’s Charles Bronson getting his face blow-torched off (is that even grammatically correct? Ah, it’s the only way to describe it); it’s Broderick Crawford instructing that Bronson’s face get blow-torched off so no one can identify him, and a hell of a lot more. But again, the cast, dear heaven this cast: My beloved Meeker, Crawford, a young Bronson, William Talman, and Lon Chaney Jr. for chrissakes.
The story finds sleazy Meeker kidnapping a poor little boy for ransom, taking him into the depths of a Colorado park, only to end with the asthmatic kid falling to his death after the child attempts to escape. Yeah. The kid dies in the first twenty minutes. If Michael Haneke were to watch this moment, he'd say “Shit. Too soon!” When Meeker is sent to prison, he’s met by the aforementioned collection of unforgettable screen presences -- men, to be blunt, you do not want to fuck with. And then it turns into a prison escape movie in which, I suppose, we’re supposed to root for Meeker, but he’s not exactly a swell guy, which makes the picture all the more interesting and unexpected. One word for this movie: Uncompromising. But it’s a lot of violent, tough, tension packed fun (if fun is the right word) and it’s wonderful to see that handsome caddish so-and-so Kiss Me Deadly era Meeker headlining this menagerie of mugs.
Last House on Dead End Street (Roger Watkins) 1977
I’m not sure why I’m even discussing this one, as it was not a favorite. This movie is vile. But it made an impression on me. It genuinely scared me. I had a tough time feeling normal after watching it. I attempted to view this movie over ten years ago, intrigued by its cult status, but was so disturbed, and not just scared disturbed, but disturbed-disturbed -- like my soul is being soiled forever and I’ll never get to take it back disturbed -- that I had to turn it off. And I stick with movies – even when they’re nearly inducing anxiety attacks. But not this one. For horror aficionados, the picture is infamous, with the backstory and the troubled, mysterious director and all kinds of dysfunctional stuff I don’t feel like getting into because I don’t want to remember it, frankly. I’m not even sure why I brought up this movie. Oh yes, it scared the shit out of me for reasons that go beyond the movie (it’s about making snuff films) --- I can’t even articulate what they are. It’s not the gore; it’s the sick spirit of the thing. Whatever mental states were expressed behind and in front of the camera feel so damaged that they induce exactly the response intended in the viewer. With that, it manages to be a sick success. Some think it a grindhouse horror masterpiece; I’m not so sure. However, if you want to be freaked out, and you’re sick of all those remarkably un-scary and stupid “found footage”-like movies currently in theaters, watch this one instead. This feels like found footage covered in dirt and blood and various other mystery fluids I’d like to forget.
Anyway, after getting through this, I promptly watched about four Doris Day movies as a palate cleanser. I never imagined With Six You Get Eggroll could feel like one of the grandest celebrations of life I’d ever seen, but after Last House on Dead End Street, it sure did.
Loophole (Harold D. Schuster) 1954
I saw this at the Film Noir Festival last year (where I also present films -- The Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs through the Film Noir Foundation) and it has stuck with me more than any other discovery at that festival. Even the picture I introduced, Six Bridges to Cross (which I liked quite a bit.) But this one, what a wide-awake nightmare it was -- and one that felt very real and relatable, especially today as many of us struggle through this miserable economy. The underrated, versatile Barry Sullivan plays a nice bank clerk who is blamed for a theft, straight from his bank drawer, that he didn’t commit. Watching Sullivan anxiously figure out his losses at the end of the workday and wondering just what the hell he’s going to do about it is almost unbearably painful. He waits through the weekend and then reports the situation on Monday -- which then makes him a prime suspect in the robbery.
Enter the unstoppable terminator of second chances -- a police and bank insurance bond investigator played by the great Charles McGraw and Sullivan’s life becomes a never-ending nightmare where, even after he’s fired from his job, and the police lose interest in the case, McGraw makes it a mission to destroy any chance for this guy to keep any kind of employment. Sullivan and his wife (played by Dorothy Malone) just get poorer and poorer as he can’t keep any damn job thanks to this psycho force of crooked bureaucratic hell. I don’t know if I’ve ever hated McGraw in a movie, but I hated him (as we are supposed to hate him) in this one. Kafka would have loved this movie.
Film by Samuel Beckett (Alan Schneider) 1965
It’s wonderfully perverse to shoot an entire picture starring one of the greatest, most brilliant and beautiful faces of cinema, Buster Keaton and showing only the back of his head through nearly, the entire movie. But what tension it creates to finally see that face by film end, and with such startling power and poetry. And sadness. And then, celebration. Famously written by Samuel Beckett, directed by Alan Schneider with cinematography by the great Boris Kaufman, I’d read much about this picture but had never actually seen it until last year and then promptly wondered how on earth I had missed it all of these years. There it was, just sitting on YouTube, which also seemed perverse (too easy!). Shot in 1964, released in ’65, it was 68-year-old Keaton’s last film (he passed away in 1966), which adds an extra level of poignancy to the 20 minute silent film.
There’s been much academic analysis about the picture, in which Keaton eventually ends up in a room where the camera follows him looking at things (cats, birds, fish, pictures). Keaton does different things – he shoves animals out of the room, he tears up photos, or he simply looks at things. Of course it’s fascinating. It’s Beckett, Kaufman and Keaton. But what does it mean? Here’s what Kevin Brownlow got from Samuel Beckett when he asked him to describe the picture to “the man on the street.” Beckett said, “It's about a man trying to escape from perception of all kinds - from all perceivers - even divine perceivers. There is a picture, which he pulls down. But he can't escape from self-perception. It is an idea from Bishop Berkeley, the Irish philosopher and idealist, ‘To be is to be perceived’ – ‘Esse est percipi.’ The man who desires to cease to be must cease to be perceived. If being is being perceived, to cease being is to cease to be perceived.” So, watch. And perceive:
I had missed Gaspar Noé. And I'm missing him again.
The French enfant terrible who helmed one of the greatest pictures of the 1990’s, I Stand Alone, and who, with Irreversible, placed Monica Bellucci in a situation that angered even those nonplussed by Susan George’s episode in Straw Dogs had been, pre-Enter the Void, absent from the screen far too long. Yes, he had made a short for the sexually explicit Destricted project, and there were the condom commercials from years back, but Mr. Noé needed another full length feature under his (whipping) belt. And then came, eight years later, that wonderment of crazy, vile, gorgeous genius, Enter the Void. It was well worth waiting for -- a hopped up, dream-weaving nightmare of horror and beauty -- a hallucinatory work of virtuosity (Noé's camera movements have the ability to seize me emotionally and physically -- to create out-of-body experiences, no drugs required) that's also a touching/tragic story about a brother and a sister. It was one of the greatest movies of 2009. His aesthetic and innovation is uniquely his own (with a POV hat tip, or shared line, to Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake -- wonder what Montgomery would have thought...), and he remains, one of the greatest French directors living. One of the greatest living directors, period, in fact.
The director, influenced by 70s cinema, William Castle shock-a-tude, pornography, Godard, Céline, Nietzsche and (as I have argued, whether he knows this or not), even Thomas Hardy, and then an animal all his own, was and is the great Gallic hope for a new generation of savage filmmaking. Unlike some current filmmakers who traffic in mere shock, or art house directors striking a transgressive pose, Noé is a genuine artist, but unpretentious -- a man who loves nothing more than upsetting his audience (or, in the case of Irreversible, making some faint), while injecting his screaming compositions with substantive thought, intelligence and philosophy.
So as I am in Paris, and with French filmmaking on my mind (not to mention a spirited discussion with a French director about Noé -- who also thinks him a genius) I was in the mood to re-visit his debut blast of brilliance, over ten years later, 1998’s I Stand Alone. This is the movie that caused a daily critic to walk out during the screening I attended, this is the movie that bonded me with my sister (long story), and this is the film that I told a colleague to see on a date. That advice didn’t work out so well.
When first reviewing the blisteringly brilliant picture, I quoted an anecdote by director Paul Schrader. Schrader said:
“I had an interesting lunch recently with a French director named Gaspar Noé who wanted to do a film with me, something with violence and pornography and all that. And I said to him, 'I don't think anyone's shockable anymore.'"
Now I admire, sometimes revere Paul Schrader, and I would probably agree with him at that moment, but with I Stand Alone (and the latter Irreversible) he was positively wrong. For Noé had not only made one of the most shocking pictures in decades, but also one of the most stylistically impressive, emotionally challenging, thematically intimidating, astoundingly touching and, in its own warped way, weirdly funny. I Stand Alone, or Seul Contre Tous (Alone Against All) is a hair grabber that drags you around the muck and pushes your face into its world so far that -- and this is rare with such hard cinema -- you’ll experience moments of such bizarre, hideous beauty that you’re left significantly moved. It attacks one's senses with such transgressive power that by its end, one feels flustered, simultaneously full and empty. I Stand Alone rattles in your brain long after the movie's disquieting end.
As I mentioned before, with nods to Céline, Dostoevsky, Schrader, Godard and even William Castle, I Stand Alone chronicles, as the film's titles claim, the "tragedy of a jobless butcher struggling to survive in the bowels of his nation." As the picture opens, the nameless butcher's entire life is inventively, humorously revealed via a slideshow. It describes how a French World War II orphan became a butcher, and is sent to prison after stabbing a guy he thought raped his daughter. The movie jettisons us to 1980 and into the head of said butcher (embodied magnificently by Philippe Nahon), who, now released from prison, is living an emasculated life with his pregnant girlfriend and her obtrusive mother in a depressing housing tract in France.
His current domestic predicament only escalates his alienation and rage, feelings made clear in angry interior monologues that grow more bile-ridden as the film continues (the man, like the film, isn't subtle). When his refusal (or inability) to smile causes him to lose a job at a supermarket deli (have we felt this? I sure have), the butcher becomes a night watchman at a home for the elderly, where in one stirring moment, he assists a woman's euthanization. Afterwards, he visits a porn theater and, during a hardcore penetration close-up, he muses inwardly, "If you're a cock, you gotta stay hard to be respected; [otherwise] your only role and purpose is to be reamed." (Simple, to the point, and it always gets to me. This is not something only men can relate to. Women feel this way also -- a lot.)
Soon after, he argues bitterly with his mistress and, in one of the film's most brutal moments, beats her, kicking her pregnant stomach (this is when the aforementioned female critic left the theater). This sick underbelly we have witnessed with amusement and detachment has, now, in fact been literally reamed. And it is at this point, that the film's existential loathing gives us our first challenge: The man we felt immediate sympathy for, the cantankerous oldster who has made us laugh with his stark philosophical observations, has finally committed a sickening act of violence. And he doesn't regret it. Confronting his modern audience, hardened from years of on-screen violence, Noé essentially asks: How do you like your underground hero now? Are you still cheering him on?
Somehow, in many ways, we are -- which points to the film's mind spinning, confusing power. With dwindling money, no job prospects and a gun, the butcher grows increasingly disgruntled over everything -- class, race, love, sexuality -- and his thoughts become both clear-headed and garbled. In the hands of a more simplistic filmmaker, this could be tedious or predictable. Noé , however, is not here just to shock. Like Taxi Driver, I Stand Alone represents a national reflection, here it’s France entering the 1980’s, personifying such unease with an unrelenting, furious protagonist.
And Noé crafts a film that is so aesthetically violent -- sharp gunshot sounds are used as jarring, disarming tangents, illustrating a shift in scenery or thought -- that it’s surprising to realize just how little blood is actually shed onscreen. The movie deals almost entirely in thoughts of violence, rather than acts. The butcher rattles on about this or that problem, but mostly remains stuck in states of fantasy or inertia. But he is so potently angry and the filmmaking so unyieldingly ferocious, it simply feels violent.
And Noé never slips once in this assault, even testing the viewer’s typical film sensibilities. In the picture's most infamous moment, a title card flashes on screen and cautions: “You Have 30 Seconds to Leave the Cinema.” It's a bold move, one filled with humor and horror (one part Godard, one part Castle), and despite the shocking images and words that come before it, Noé manages to back up that warning with a sequence that sent my emotions into a tailspin of sadness, distress and an unsettling amount of confusing compassion (you just have to see the ending). But many don't stay until the ending and that's intriguing in itself.
As my friend, writer Kent Adamson said, "The audience is as significant as Noé... The walkouts are part of the drama, and the lesson in humanity." Indeed. It's always more interesting to watch Noé on the big screen, with an audience. I've seen all of his pictures in the theater and find the reactions fascinating; multi-layered. I wonder about the walk-outs because they can't all be for the same reason. As in, people can't all simply be offended. Something else is going on. When I first saw Irreversible I was frightened I wouldn't be able to handle the swirling camera and low level police siren spiked soundtrack. Would it induce a panic attack? It was more upsetting to me than the famous moment with Ms. Bellucci and I was clinging to a xanax. And then, I just lost myself in it. And then I wondered if that was healthy. And then I wondered about wondering -- what does "healthy" even mean? And on it went. That experience, as with all of his films, was disturbing, enlightening and mysterious. Just more of the many reasons I love Noé... Anxiety can be good. You feel those nerve endings, your blood pumping. You feel alive.
And I Stand Alone is truly alive -- savage, poetic, edgy, pervy, romantic, bloody cinema -- a grim, exciting, nerve-wracking work of art that doesn’t just stick in your brain, but finds a way to stuff its fingers up there as well. All five of them. Seul Contre Tous? Sous le soleil exactement, Mr. Noé.
I'm currently in Paris, which is beautiful and eventful and I'll have much to write/discuss soon.
For now, a boring weather report. It's quite chilly (for this Angeleno) but whenever my maladjusted blood gets to shivering, I remember (fondly) the cozy Gimli fishing shack from less than a month ago and toughen up.
Gimli is just so beautiful. And yes, extremely cold. And that cold plays tricks on me. All I see here is that I apparently must find a way to emulate the hermit in the gatefold of Led Zeppelin IV (this is something I think of often. I don't know why. Insanity.) It's a sad attempt (no lantern? No beard? The stick is all wrong.) but a blizzard can really mess with your head.
My brain just kept repeating the symbols .
I've moved on to "Dont j'ai oublié l'adresse, A Los Angeles, Cent vingt mili' tonns de pétrol' brut, Cent vingt mill' tonn's, Dans le Torrey Canyon." I'll come back to that that later...
I love Joan. Forget Christina. Though I'm sure Ms. Crawford was no cake walk when it came to child rearing (more like rare steak walk, if you're up on your Mommie Dearest), I don't judge Joan's acting talent based on how she handled her Comet cleanser. And besides, the bathroom probably was filthy. You know how kids are.
I'm more in line with Bette Davis, who found Joan so phony, so full of airs, so... oh please. But that made Joan, Joan. I love her specifically for her manufactured persona -- her insane need to be a damn star, even while sick and receiving her Oscar in bed. I refuse to choose Bette over Joan (and I've been asked to). Margot Channing over Mildred Pierce? They're both extraordinary creatures (though I'd rather be and be friends with Davis).
But this is about Joan. That control Bette was so irritated by, well it worked quite well for Joan in terms of her talent. Case in point, a movie I adore and have written about a few times -- Harriet Craig. In an interview with David Frost she admitted, with good humor, relating to this part. And oh my, what an admission. I guess this is the closest Joan came to neo-realism. Yes, not surprisingly, Joan was good at playing a controlling, conniving women who will stop at nothing (nothing!) that gets in the way of her marriage. And in Harriet Craig she’s just so sickeningly splendiferous, that you almost root for her.
A daring portrait that revealed the dark, spirit-breaking side of marriage, and the desires of many women to be something else (even if it meant working that something else through their marriages -- and in an ultra negative way), this 1950 picture directed by Vincent Sherman (who really dug into both Joan and Bette) has remained woefully under-seen. It's too bad because it features one of Joan’s most riveting and true-to-life on-screen beeotchs and yet, a woman with just an ounce of vulnerability, Never forget Joan was a vulnerable woman -- on screen and off.
The movie will get under your skin in ways you might not have imagined -- even if you’re unmarried. If you are married, think about your happiness before watching this domestic horror-show of passive aggressive manipulation. And don't watch it with your significant other. I have watched this picture numerous times and with my sister, for reasons I should not disclose but, what the hell. Harriet Craig is my stepmother. I mean, exactly. I won't go into specific details. That's not fair. Even if I'm right.
It's not typical of me to admit such personal information about another person in my writing, and I like to give a person a break (something made her that way, and it probably wasn't pleasant and I want to understand. I just wish I knew), except well, I miss my father, and it looks like I may never see him again. My sister and I -- we'll put up with anything to see our dad. But we're sick of it. For years my stepmother's nickname (she's never heard it -- she would kill me) has been a pretty simple one: Harriet Craig. When we were kids, my brother, sister and I called her (never to her face, again, she'd kill us) Nurse Ratched (she actually had Muzak piped throughout her house, to keep things "calm," I suppose -- which only furthered our inner little R. P. McMurphys, and then we remembered how that worked out for him), but Harriet Craig is just right -- it hits the nail not on, but through the proverbial head. I swear I'm not being Christina here. Anyway, I'd eat that rare steak.
But back to the real Harriet Craig (in the movie). Adapted from George Kelly's play, the movie was in fact a remake of the 1936 Rosalind Russell film Craig's Wife, directed by Dorothy Arzner. Though that picture is usually considered the better picture, I’m fond of Crawford’s special kind of bent and find it more timeless. Not only does she brings that extra Joan panache to the role of a borderline sociopathic wife but she brings more inner turmoil and even a tad bit of sympathy. She also brings more order, coldness and an especially annoying obsession for perfection. If her marriage were a corporation, she would be CEO. But it's not. And she didn't make that choice in life. She should have. But that opportunity is not something that comes easy to a woman, if ever. This is where many women may understand her. Even today.
Poor old Wendell Corey plays the hen-pecked husband whose personal life and interests are sapped by wifey Joan who throws a fit if he puts his feet anywhere near the furniture, smokes a cigar, visits a pal or has a friendly conversation with the widow next door. And then she sabotages his chances for a promotion. The smothering domination reaches an all time high. It almost becomes a horror movie. Actually it is something of a horror movie.
And it's a movie. So I find myself at times, liking her. I wish I liked my stepmother as much as I liked Joan. (That's entertainment) Don't worry, my stepmother will never read this and if she does, perhaps something will happen. Something melodramatic because melodrama is often very real. I mean, she too is some kind of creature. I'm often impressed by her weird manipulations. And I want to have a good relationship, no matter how bizarre. Even Bette Davis would agree. And she is powerful. Power means something.
And if she's wearing Adrian next time I see her, I may forgive her for everything. Well, not everything, but a lot. Perhaps we'd come to terms on a few things. Perhaps, to quote Faye as Joan, we'd simply be mad not at you, he or she, but mad at the dirt. Because, in a better world, I don't want her to end up like Harriet Craig.
Because today is David Lynch's birthday. And because I adore Los Angeles in all of its sunny/dark schizophrenic glory. It's the one city where I feel like it's OK to feel insane. And that makes me feel sane.
I'm in Paris for a few months, which is wonderful and will offer many creative adventures (chiefly the project I'm working on). And, of course, it's a place of countless complexities, high and low, deeply historical, cinematic, literary and on and on. And it's one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Still, I'm always happy to return to ugly/gorgeous, happy/sad, winning/desperate, crazy, crazy, crazy Los Angeles.
Like James Ellroy wrote regarding his return to L.A. (and in reference to W.H. Auden) Ellroy's beloved L.A. is "The Great Right Place." Sayeth Ellroy: "As L.A. bids pundits to spin epigrams. W.H. Auden called L.A. 'The Great Wrong Place.' I'll ascribe intent. Auden saw L.A. as a lodestone for opportunists and psychically maimed misfits. I sense this because I fall into both categories. Auden couched L.A. in a film-noir construction. Losers migrated here to start over and become someone else. L.A. was a magnet for lives in desperate duress. The sheer indifference of the place consumed the migrants and drove them mad. They succumbed to madness in a sexy locale. The place itself provided solace and recompense. They had the comfort of other arriviste losers. They entered the L.A. spiritus mundi. They handed out their head shots. They joined that unique L.A. casting call."
He could have been describing Lynch's ultimate L.A. movie: Mulholland Dr.
So, with that, a re-post. And again, Happy Birthday Mr. Lynch.
David Lynch gets America. America the beautiful, America the bizarre. We can discuss how "weird" he is, how inscrutable his movies can be, how much he loves oddly conceived babies, oddly shaped humans, oddly pale-faced Robert Blake, oddly obsessed Crispin Glover and his "lunch!", but the man gets what drives our subconscious, our sweet dreams, our nightmares.
So naturally, Lynch understands one of the oddest cities on earth -- Los Angeles. With his brilliant, labyrinthine Mulholland Dr., a movie that started out like a jilted starlet (it was an axed TV pilot) he digs underneath our peculiar Hollywood system -- a system that pedals dreams, desire, sex, money, magic -- dreams that have the ability to spread like a celluloid sickness all over America (especially during the 2000’s. Did he know how prescient he was going to be?). Through the bright-eyes of innocent Betty (Naomi Watts, in a career defining performance), a starlet seeking fame in La La land, he presents a twisted, romantic, funny, terrifying and deeply emotional mystery involving a gorgeous amnesiac, a monster behind a diner, a persona altering box, a pair of elderly folks who slither under doors, and a director who answers to a dwarf, a mobster and a cowboy. And let’s not forget Coco.
Hauntingly beautiful, poignant, funny, subversive, dark, meditative, sexual (Lynch is one of the few American directors who can actually create inspired, erotic and yet intensely emotional sex scenes) and more, Mulholland Dr. poses many questions, but offers few answers, reflecting life in all of its enigmatic complexities. And if you think it’s weird that a box might be responsible for transforming a promising young actress into a suicidal starlet, rubbing herself in a tragic masturbatorial rage, then you need to spend a little more time in Los Angeles. Or on reality television. Or in your girlfriend’s living room after you ditch her. Or in a director’s chair. Or simply walking up and down Hollywood Blvd. between Western and Normandie.
Speaking personally, I can say that living in this city long enough, Mulholland Dr. does not seem that out of the ordinary. And this realization came to me quickly. Directly upon moving here, the very first apartment I looked at, (recommended to me at the noodle joint across from Jumbo’s Clown Room at 2 AM by a weathered, drunk L.A. native waxing nostalgic about seeing Patty Duke perform her mournful "Don't Just Stand There" on Shindig!) was, unbeknownst to me, that very same apartment Ms. Watts inhabited as sad, suicidal Diane. I’ll never forget the creepy familiarity while walking through the grounds, searching for a landlord and knocking on a stranger’s door only to be answered by a stern faced woman who treated me like a suspicious intruder. A lovely place, but, when it hit me just where I was standing, I resisted a possible rental application. I realize it’s only a movie but, no. Living there seemed tantamount to beginning my new life in Roman Polanski’s digs from The Tenant.
That’s how powerful the picture is -- it just gets under your skin and into your bones and bubbles with your blood. It may be notoriously tough to decipher, but truly, Lynch captures the city, its vibe, its ragged romanticism, its cruelty, its impenetrable dysfunction and its absurdity (Billy Ray Cyrus is the pool cleaner. And that makes perfect sense) with his distinct brand of warped clarity. Our country’s often freakish, surreal desperation to emulate or ponder the “glamour” of Hollywood is just as weird and just as affecting and just as relatable as...Winkie’s dream. Mulholland Dr. is a masterpiece. “This is the girl” indeed.
2012. I'm having a tough time getting used to this... number. It sounds too futuristic, and yet, it seems so clunky, like dialing a rotary phone or rewinding a top loader VCR. I'm not sure why I feel this way, but perhaps it has something to do with the only time I use "2012" -- when I'm writing a check, something that's only required for rent and something that makes me feel like I'm cradling a ten pound Western Electric receiver on my shoulder, calling guests invited to my Fondu party. "Don't forget the grass, Cheryl."
Well, no. What am I saying? That clunky check writing, reefer smoking, time machine fantasy my mother lived out in real life is much more charming than "2012." After all, it's not 2010. It's not a Peter Hyams/Arthur C. Clarke movie starring a man who knew how to dial a rotary with Fosse inspired panache (among many other things), the brilliant Roy Scheider. No, it's a Roland Emmerich movie starring John Cusack, an actor who could never, not in a million 2012s, dial a phone like Bob Fosse. It's also the year, if you believe in various theories and chiefly, the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, that earth will suffer a major cataclysmic event. The end of the world. If you're depressed, which I have been nearly every January of my life, look forward to December 21, 2012 because we're all doomed. Let's just hope that doomsday shines as beautifully as planet Melancholia. (I'm not kidding about that.)
So, even as it's January 12, 2012, I'm still thinking about 2011, which had a nicer ring to it. With that, here's my 15 favorite of 2011 as pictured on my Tumblr blog. There were many more people, places and things that I loved. But, from Fernando Pessoa to the Nutty Club Candy factory, I stuck to a hard 15. I may go for 15 more, but I always write things like that, which is very 2011 of me.
Here's one:
This clip of Bukka White which I had never seen before:
To ring in 2012, here is my number one movie of the year:
Melancholia (Lars Von Trier)
Universal and personal, blatant and mysterious, sorrowful and funny, nihilistic and yet, sublimely, romantically, celebratory, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia takes the black bile of its namesake -- the depression of its heroine -- and transforms the “humor” into exaltation. A planet -- a terrifying, dazzling planet that, true to Dane Von Trier’s inspired swan dive (black swan dive) into German romanticism, is set to destroy life on earth: Götterdämmerung via "Tristan and Isolde" (which he uses in the picture’s rapturously beautiful overture), via Ophelia via Cassandra via Von Trier’s own personal mythology. Clinically depressed Justine (a stunningly raw Kirsten Dunst -- Von Trier’s surrogate) does what’s often expected of those afflicted -- wear a brave face and don that damn wedding dress (a creamy dream of a dress that Justine seems strangled by, until she lifts it up and fornicates with another man on a golf green…). Further, she must embrace love, work, family (no matter how dysfunctional) and rules.
Well, Von Trier cannot accept that fate, and in the picture’s first half, in which Justine destroys her nuptials, her actions serve as depressive, rebellious self awareness: “What did you expect?” She asks. Indeed. And then comes planet Melancholia, inching closer and closer, leaving stable sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) panic stricken while Justine, calmly, grimly and at times, cheekily, accepts annihilation, not as easy suicide but as a kind of cosmic extension of despair. Yes. Finally. Justine isn’t wallowing in depression, she’s embracing, seducing it, and in one of the picture’s most exquisite moments, lying beneath it naked -- basking in the glow of doom.
Von Trier, a notorious and real sufferer himself, sincerely understands depression (just as he understood the horrors of anxiety in his brilliant and deeply misunderstood Antichrist), which may be why he maddens so many. How can he do this to these women? Well, because women do suffer, women get depressed, and not merely in simplistic, eye-rolling, I-cry-at-weddings ways (and Justine is not your usual runaway bride, god bless her), but in complicated, sometimes terrifying ways.
Von Trier gets women. I've been stating this for years and have found myself in heated arguments over my stance. But here's something else -- he’s also both in awe and scared of them, which makes him one of the most truthful male filmmakers working. He certainly understands much about human nature -- male and female -- but to me, he is the consummate woman's director. Like George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder before him (but clearly, his own beast), the experimental, profound, bizarre, sickening, poignant and often genius Dane creates female characters of, sometimes, Joan of Arc proportions -- Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville are the most prominent examples -- and lets them both fight and fold under the weight of their existence.
His women, or martyrs, as many would, often rightfully assert, live in a hard, oppressive world, peopled with individuals who harbor little concern for their goodness or, at least attempt to understand their ugliness. They are human, and so, how they respond to such pressures or the conflicts within themselves often create knee-jerk reactions toward Von Trier. Chiefly, he must hate women. No. He does not. He appears to love women. And then, perhaps like most men, at times, he does not love them. They are maddening and victimized and glorious and, in the end, good (or not?). And master von Trier adds to it all a sardonic touch, spicing up his experimental melodrama with heavy doses of dark humor and personal reflection -- he surely both loves and hates himself as well.
Weaving himself into his characters, he’s sadistic, masochist, empathetic, self obsessed, morbid and morbidly funny and then honest and honestly confused. With Melancholia he grants depressives a gift. Taking Justine’s depleted darkness and imbuing her with celestial life through doomsday, he, to recall another German Romantic, creates an Ode to Joy through heartbreaking and gloriously inspirational…woe.
And ten more (with a tie) to be discussed further soon:
The Turin Horse (Belá Tarr)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
The Skin I Live In(Pedro Almodóvar)
Shame (Steve McQueen)
A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)
13 Assassins (Takashi Miike)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Hugo (Martin Scorsese) tied with
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt)
I will explain this tie further but, briefly, these were two of the most interestingly ballsy/subversive big studio pictures the year. A 3-D children's movie (yes, it was for adults too but...) about Georges Méliès (whom many adults non cineastes have never heard of) and the importance of film preservation? A ballsy move. And a popcorn prequel in which we root for apes to destroy mankind? Perhaps that's all I need to say.
Moneyball (Bennett Miller)
Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder)
And I will get to this choice also but, again, briefly, one of the most misunderstood, feminist, wildly experimental, anti-patriarchy pictures this year. Whatever Synder did, or didn't do, he tapped into something powerfully creepy and poignant regarding victimization. There's much more to discuss but for now...
I'm currently working on an essay concerning the Hitchcock handbag -- they're quite fetishistic, vaginal things those handbags -- and I will post that soon, but while staring at all those crisp, snapped, hard bodied rectangular satchels and muffs, I wanted to return to a post about his women (three in particular) who clutched such wombs of wonder. Three wounded, weird, gorgeous, sexually strange but extraordinarily erotic women -- femmes who'd drive most of us to a state of amour fou. And Hitchcock understood such mad love. He also, despite some claims to the contrary, understood women, or rather, a certain kind of woman. Hitchcock, to whom people love to apply the actors as cattle quote ad nauseam, saw something deeply disturbed inside womankind -- especially blonde womankind. He understood their perfected calculations, their sexual mystery, their age-old competitions, and their alternately reserved and hysterical glamour and power.
Though I could point out numerous Hitchcock heroines (Janet Leigh in Psycho for one), three stick out: Vertigo, The Birds and Marnie. All reveal the director's predilection for leaving his heroines vulnerable to danger, dementia and doom. In these films, we can see Hitchcock's bent, or as Camille Paglia states in her excellent assessment of The Birds, his "perverse ode to woman's sexual glamour...in all its seductive phases, from brittle artifice to melting vulnerability."
Who more perfect to represent Paglia's declaration than Kim Novak, who gave the best performance of her life in Vertigo, and Tippi Hedren, a woman whose career seems to have revolved around Hitchcock's? The luminous Grace Kelly, whom I revere, may be considered the quintessential Hitchcock blonde goddess but she's not as cinematically artistic or powerfully damaged as Novak or Hedren. She is a supreme Hitchcock heroine for certain -- an assured actress with mathematically perfect features, a patrician on the outside and a sexual animal underneath, Kelly's not a simplistic princess. And I love that Kelly is interesting because she's too perfect (James Stewart's complaint in Rear Window and why Sinatra fell for her in High Society). And with that, she never touched the wounded, transgressive eroticism of Hedren or Novak. Part of that could lie in Hitchcock himself -- he never tortured her. The more neurotic Hedren and Novak appeared in his pictures (and Hedren was a particularly bizarre interest for the director), the more responsive they seemed to the darker situations their auteur placed them in.
Hitchcock explored truly disturbed female protagonists in his early films, but none matched the wrenching melancholy displayed by Kim Novak in Vertigo. While Stewart was lauded for his flawless performance as the detective who becomes morbidly obsessed with resurrecting the image of his dead lover, Novak unjustly received criticism (at the time) for her uncomfortable portrayal of that lover. She presented a woman whose beauty bequeathed her a power she was ultimately unable to control, making Novak's Madeleine/Judy both wise and naive, hard and soft. Novak revealed the sadness that lurked beneath the smiling facades of bombshells like Marilyn Monroe or Rita Hayworth, by allowing that nervousness to bubble to the surface. It's all in the way she holds herself, talks or furtively moves her eyes. It's as if her mind seems ill-suited for her body, unhealthy almost, making her something of a sexual contradiction. It’s not merely that underneath the classy, gray-suited, sternly coiffed Madeline there's an even bustier, tight-sweatered and common Judy -- it’s that she, like the picture itself, embodies the irrationality of desire.
Like Novak, Tippi Hedren was criticized for her performances in The Birds and Marnie. But time has proven them to be close to or perhaps just as brilliant and challenging as Novak's in Vertigo. The Birds is a movie of endless complexities--all helped, not hindered, by a terrific performance from Hedren. Hedren's Melanie Daniels, an independent rich girl in pursuit of Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) meets all sorts of problems when she journeys to Bodega Bay, including resentment from every other female character (though there's a strong homoerotic undercurrent in her dealings with Suzanne Pleshette).
But what makes the film so intriguing is that it's not just the millions of bloodthirsty birds messing with poor Melanie, it's the gals as well. Watching the weird interplay between Hedren and Mitch's mother (a wonderfully terse Jessica Tandy) brings up all kinds of strange scenarios -- is the mother just being overprotective, or is she a little too caring about her son? Why does she dislike her so much? Indeed, why does every woman in Bodega Bay seem to hate Melanie Daniels? In one of the film’s most telling scenes, a frightened mother blames the bird invasion on Melanie, screaming at her “I think you’re evil! Evil!”
Though a "carefree" playgirl, Melanie is truly a tightly wound bird herself. Her biggest challenge is handling the numerous flocks (human and otherwise) inhabiting the town. Mothers, sisters, earthy women, common townsfolk and birds crack Melanie's pristine exterior of white gloves, mint-green suits and matching handbags. And by the end, those suits and gloves are torn to bits. It’s not just birds against man, its birds against birds (the female variety) and if they’re flocking together, something is deeply, deeply wrong.
In the psycho-sexual thriller Marnie (a film I've seen too many times to count -- which makes me wonder about myself), Hedren's traumatized woman and criminal past leads her into the imprisoning, Freudian arms of Mark Rutland (Sean Connery). Hedren again plays an independent spirit of sorts, albeit an icy, frigid and mentally traumatized one. She can't stand the color red, she has an unusually strong bond with her horse (but then, what women doesn't?) and she loves her cold, flinty mother to the point of masochism. She's clearly never had a normal sexual encounter and though she shows flickers of attraction and flirtation, she appears to hate men. Or maybe just all of humanity.
But the movie expresses sympathy towards Marnie making it hard to blame the woman for her antisocial tendencies. In her experience, men (people) are beasts who've only done her harm (flashback to a very young Bruce Dern freaking out a very young Marnie). In return she violates them by lying, cheating and stealing without ever giving them the full pleasure of her lovely body. If Connery is going to have her, he must break her, via marriage, psychoanalysis and what can only be described as... force.
Like Novak's Madeleine/Judy in Vertigo, Marnie is a magnet for freaky men. And yet, in spite of her pathological frigidity, there's a feeling that somewhere, a ravenous woman could emerge oozing the kind of kinky sexuality that Judy displays in Vertigo.
And yet, through Hitchcock's subversive eyes (and our own), this unhealthy, yet accurate depiction of sexual madness becomes strangely, intensely romantic. Quite clearly Hitchcock, like Woody Allen (as he professed in Husbands and Wives) not so secretly loved his women a little crazy. I think we all do. And perhaps, also, gripping some nifty clutches -- creamy canals just waiting to be cracked.
And now as the day comes to an end... here's to even more Christopher Plummer and more Elliot Gould in 2012. Excuse my brief post and pardon my hyperbole (the day calls for it), but both of these men are goddamn gifts. Merry Christmas!
