Some Came Running

A short break

I won't be blogging over the weekend; I've been very kindly invited by the folks at the University of Arizona's literary journal, Sonora Review, to participate in a day of readings commemorating David Foster Wallace. (I contributed a remembrance of Wallace to the journal's upcoming double issue, devoted to Wallace's memory.) I'll probably write at least a little about the event after I get back, early next week. Watch some good movies while I'm gone. Some images from a new DVD of a picture I'm extremely excited to see in this format will be popping up here over the time I'm away, to keep you at least a little entertained. 

A career in internet villainy

For my sins—literally—I am cited, and quoted, in a very well-turned Vanity Fair online piece by Jim Windolf about the flame wars on novelist Keith Gessen and still-odious dribbler Emily Gould. No, I'm not proud of what I did, but...she is hateful, trivial, all sorts of bad things. And the twaddle she wrote in the wake of David Foster Wallace's death (I won't link to it) just...oh, man. Don't even get me started.

However. It occurs to me that between this, my role as a slimy web escort reviewer in The Girlfriend Experience, my sudden and inexplicable (even to myself) compulsion to taunt David Poland, and so much more, I might be pursuing a path of the sort that inspired some studio publicist to concoct the "Man You Love To Hate!" campaign around Erich von Stroheim. Perhaps this is not the wisest course of action. How can I make myself lovable again? 

My cat is dead, so there's only one cute animal in the house I can pose with...

Digital restoration and its discontents: the first in a potentially infinite series

So I was looking at Paramount's new disc of John Ford's 1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Volume 8 of the company's very welcome Centennial Collection, and enjoying the digital restoration quite a bit. I imagine you won't be surprised to learn that, as an auteurist of a certain stripe and someone with taste, I'm a big fan of the film, embracing both its obvious (to me) glories and endearing (again, to me) flaws. Anyhow, I was reflecting on the way the new digital cleanup of the picture emphasized some of the film's more set-bound aspects, and it occurred to me that a side-by-side comparison of this new disc and the one issued in 2001 might be of interest. I had to shut off the film to do some errands; when I got back, I cued up the 2001 version in my second DVD player, up to the point where I had stopped the new one; the saloon kitchen scene, right after Hallie (Vera Miles) has told Ranse (James Stewart) she can't read, and stormed from the room in humiliation. The below screen cap is from the 2001 version.

Valance, 2001 DVD

People on quaaludes should not blog.

"Is Wolverine the comic book equivalent of Hal Ashby and Waldo Salt’s Coming Home with mutant powers? No." —David Poland

Deep thought

"There is a saying among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defense. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general."—Isaiah Berlin

Kangaroo Jack stole the money. And he's not giving it back. Hence, a kangaroo is a hedgehog.

Think about it.  

When film critics act: a selective survey

In commemoration of tonight's Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, in which your humble servant plays the role of an exceedingly reprehensible character known (to himself, mostly, is my theory) as "The Erotic Connoisseur," I here pay homage to the pioneers who paved the way for me: the rare film critics who put themselves in the shoes of the performers they analyze and appraise.

There have been more than a few critics/reviewers who have played themselves in films—Leonard Maltin, Stewart Klein, Roger Ebert—and they don't count. I'm only looking at critics who have actually acted. To wit: Steven's claim that what I do in Girlfriend is "just Glenn being Glenn" notwithstanding, I am not playing myself in the film, for my mother raised me better than that. Rather, I am portraying someone with my vocabulary, and an attitude that's not entirely foreign to me. This no doubt holds true for a number of the critics below.

Eugene Archer as Sam in La Collectioneusse, Eric Rohmer, !967

Archer is one of the unsung heroes of the auteur theory in America. The New York Times writer traveled to France on a Fulbright scholarship in 1957 and quickly fell in with the Cahiers du Cinema crowd, who introduced him to a new way of looking at movies, and to some directors heretofore unknown to him as well. "Who the hell is Howard Hawks?" Archer asked of his acolyte Andrew Sarris in a letter to that then-young critic. They both soon found out. The critical groundswell these discoveries touched off changed the way all of us look at movies. Without Archer, we might not be sitting here amiably chatting about, say, El Dorado every now and again. 

The writer's performance in Rohmer's La Collectioneusse is, I think, my favorite of any such turns. The film, which might just as well be titled I Could Have Gotten Laid, But... focuses on Patrick Bauchau's hilariously pompous art gallery manager Adrian as, on a self-imposed vacation in the south of France, he lords it over Haydée (Haydée Politoff),a gorgeous and free-spirited housemate (whom he dubs a "collector" of men), before he decides that she just might warrant his amorous attentions after all. Archer's Sam is a supremely ironic, supremely sardonic American antique expert who can barely contain his sour amusement as Adrien dangles Haydée before him, believing Sam to be complicit in whatever game he's playing. Adrien and Sam's little exchanges of (very male) one-upsmanship culminate in a conversation wherein Sam absolutely eviscerates Adrien, albeit in the most overtly polite way possible. 

Archer went on to contribute to the screenplays of Barbet Schroeder's More and Claude Chabrol's Ten Day Wonder. There is next to no biographical information on the man available on the internet as far as I can find; I seem to recall that he died in the early '70s. Both he and Bauchau are thanked in the acknowledgements of Andrew Sarris' seminal The American Cinema. 

Rex Reed as Myron in Myra Breckinridge, Michael Sarne, 1970

Let's give him this: the guy had...what's the word?...oh yes, balls. Would any of you all out there ever do a scene in which you had to grab frantically at your chest and shriek "Where are my tits?"

It was quite a big deal when the young celeb profiler and critic Reed, whose kinda-sorta matinee idol looks earned him the nickname "Sexy Rexy," was tapped for the role of the male half of Gore Vidal's Hollywood-obsessed pan-tran-sexual creation. Directed by a former British pop singer whose main claim to fame at the time was having been a boyfriend of Brigitte Bardot's, Myra Breckinridge is still one of the most magnificent disasters that a then struggling-to-be-hip American film industry has ever produced, and a terrible wonder to behold today. 

But give Reed credit: he was quite game (even though he apparently had to be forcefully coaxed into delivering the above cited query concerning mammary gland location). He does a little soft-shoe in the opening sequence. He simulates getting head from Raquel Welch, and enjoying it. And so on. But still—he's terrible. His line readings are flat throughout, and not in a good way. The nadir comes when his Myron is strolling through an orgy and a nude woman asks him, "What movie am I?" He looks down at her pubic area and, not even bothering to work up the tone of indolent contempt that was, and still is, a trademark of his, drawls, "How Green Was My Valley." Ugh. 

Naturally, Reed's participation in this debacle provided a rich opportunity for many he had wounded with his oft-poison pen to avenge their honor. Not to mention making him an even riper target for those who just didn't like him. "Any movie that opens with John Carradine as a doctor surgically removing Rex Reed's cock has got the right idea even if it did go wrong," notes The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. Again, to his everlasting credit, Reed took it all in stride, and even went on portray parodies of himself in '78's Superman and '84's Irreconcilable Differences. In 1981 he took on another actual acting role, in another notorious flop, the Sun-Myung Moon financed Inchon, but his scenes were deleted. Which is a shame, if you ask me. Reed still covers film for The New York Observer, playing a more urbane cousin of Abe Simpson. 

No photos, please

Some mid-'60s mooks don't care how prophetic it is, they don't wanna have any part of David Holzman's Diary. The groundbreaking 1967 Jim McBride film is the subject of today's Foreign Region DVD Report, at The Auteurs'.

"The Limits of Control"

Given the unforced cool that lead actor Isaac DeBankolé so effortlessly projects from the moment he walks into the frame (I don't believe there's another man alive right now who can wear sharkskin without looking like a dink), one would presume that this picture will find writer/director Jim Jarmusch working in his most hardcore deadpan/ironic mode. But while the picture is, one could say, almost relentlessly Jarmuschian, it is also quite possibly the filmmaker's most earnest work. This is merely the first of several paradoxes inherent in The Limits of Control, paradoxes that tempt one to compare it with a Zen koan. 

The Limits of Control takes its title from a phrase of William S. Burroughs, and given the habits of "Lone Man," the unnamed operative portrayed by DeBankolé, one might also presume that the film will reveal the limits of his own self-control. Here is a man who is meticulous in every respect. Sitting in a swank airport lounge, taking instructions from Alex Descas' "Creole" and his "French" translator Jean Francois Stévenin, he sits with exemplary posture, palms on the tops of his thighs, and betrays no emotion or beffudlement when Creole begins mixing philosophical aphorisms with his directives. Lone Man does not order double espressos, but rather two espressos in two cups. He can get insistent on this point. The various coded messages he receives, on small slips of paper folded into match boxes bearing the logo "Le Boxeur," he memorizes in a matter of seconds. He then crumples the paper and swallows it. When confronted with a gorgeous young woman in his hotel room—"Nude," she is called, for she is that, throughout the entire picture, except when she's wearing a see-through plastic raincoat—he rejects her advances. "No sex?" asks the woman (incarnated by Paz de la Huerta), who by all accounts would be entirely irresistible to any other heterosexual male. "Not while I'm working," Lone Man says.

Now, the production company Jarmusch formed for the purposes of this film is called "Pointblank," and the reference is, I trust, obvious. It's more than probable that in an exchange similar to the one described above, a character played by Lee Marvin might have not only denied the young woman, but given her a sharp smack or two and sent her packing, clothes or no clothes. Lone Man does no such thing. Rather, he allows her to sleep next to him every night, spooning him stark naked, while he takes his rest fully clothed save for his suit jacket.

That's control. But it's not what Jarmusch is talking about. 

The true church

I got some bad news around the turn of the year—that the gorgeous Lafayette Theater in Suffern, N.Y., a vintage movie palace complete with full-tilt Wurlitzer (I wrote about the house in the latter section of this post), would no longer be hosting the Big Screen Classics program so lovingly overseen by Nelson Page and Pete Apruzzese. The good news is that the fellas have moved their operation to the Cedar Lane Cinemas in Teaneck, N.J. It ain't exactly the same house, but there's still magic conjured there. My pal Joseph Failla went to a recent screening of On The Waterfront there, and e-mailed me his impressions:

I have to say, watching the film projected as large as it was brought home again just how powerful WATERFRONT still is. Not since my first viewing, watching it as a kid on CH. 9  with my dad oh so long ago, has it hit me quite so hard. First off, it looked different than any DVD or video version I can recall. While the print admittedly had some wear to it, when you talk about grain and texture being part of the picture, it was all here to witness and discuss. They also ran it at 1.85, which differs greatly from the DVD but approximates what was shown on TCM recently. I wish I had screen shots to demonstrate the dissimilarities, but I can now describe the scene with the four thugs waiting outside a saloon for word on Joey Doyle as looking more like a line up rather than some hoods gathering on a street corner.

 

Perhaps the audience had not seen the film in years, but there was an audible gasp when Dugan is killed by the falling crates dropped on him from above. More evidence that the size of the screen makes all the difference in the world. I myself noticed for the first time—even though I knew he was in the film—Fred Gwynne as one of the mugs who throws a tomato at Karl Malden later during the same scene. The images that grabbed me the most were in the sequence where Brando tells Eva Marie Saint the truth about his involvement in her brother's fate. These close ups had long ago burned themselves into my memory, but here they packed the original emotional wallop that can't really be appreciated on television. Speaking of which, the whole shadowy look of the film could place it squarely in noir territory, if not for the inspirational ending. Other standouts were the alley way chase, the discovery of Charlie's body, and Terry Malloy's beating. These scenes as seen on this screen were never more exciting, touching or vivid, in that order.

 

Of course we were all waiting for the "contender" speech; you could feel the anticipation there in the house as soon as Steiger and Brando sat down in the back of the cab. All the praise that gets heaped on this moment is as well deserved today as it ever was. It's an intimate scene which allows the actors to do what they do best with no distractions (Kazan was right about those blinds which block the rear window). No wonder this film is all over RAGING BULL.

 

And as for the "Let's go to work!" ending? When that metal door comes down, it's like a final curtain lowering on a magnificent modern opera. There was a round of applause that lasted well after the film itself finished. All in all I'd say the only sore spot for me is Karl Malden's overdoing it as the concerned Father Barry ("I'm just a potato eater myself."). He just doesn't come off nearly as natural (in the Kazan way) as everyone else does. (He is a hoot in BABY DOLL though.) Now if I can just get the Big Screen Classics guys to run EAST OF EDEN or A FACE IN THE CROWD...

Next Wednesday's show is of Stanley Kramer's gargantuan oddity It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, another picture whose full, um, magnitude, is best appreciated big. I don't think I'll be able to make it, but if you can, you should. 

Deep thought

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise to learn that there are some people in this world who are more interested in the cocks that Vincente Minnelli might have sucked than in the movies he actually made.