As MarkVH implies in a comment below, the whole "rule of three" thing, while diverting and perhaps convenient, almost always dissolves under scrutiny. Gloria Stuart, Arthur Penn, Sally Menke, Tony Curtis all passed within the week; as did at least two more talents who enriched the lives of, I'd say, every film lover.
Joe Mantell, Oscar-nominated for his work as Angie in Marty, who also delivered the famous closing line of 1974's Chinatown, as seen above (that's him at left), died this week at age 94. I chose to emphasize Chinatown because I have the DVD and can get a screen cap from it...and also because I'm hoping that Big Hollywood puts the headline "Lefty Film Blogger Praises Casting Choices of Child Rapist" on its marquee, as I could use the traffic...(kidding...)
And then there's Art Gilmore, rarely seen but very often heard in films, who died a couple of days ago at the age of 92. Neither of the folks in the above still from the great Yankee Doodle Dandy is Art—although you'll recognize the fellow with the grin as James Cagney. Gilmore provided the stentorian tones of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (note the cigarette holder) in the film, and did voice work for much, much else besides. My pal Leonard Maltin has a nice remembrance of him here. And yes, the F.D.R. thing does give me the opportunity to make another bad Big Hollywood joke, but I'll spare you. In any event, these two artists brought a lot to the table, for which I'm grateful; God bless 'em, and they will be missed.
Good lord, this is turning out to be a brutal week, isn't it? As is customary, David Hudson's perch at The Daily Notebook is the best way to keep up with the tributes, of which Dave Kehr's is, typically, one of the more astute and appreciative.
I had the privilege of doing a phone interview with Mr. Curtis for Premiere a long, or longish, while back, tied into the DVD release of some classic picture of his that I don't recall. And we got on the subject of Cary Grant, as one will, and he talked about how seeing Grant in Destination Tokyo compelled him to both join the Navy and take up acting, or, rather, the idea of Hollywood stardom. And of how he developed this Cary Grant impersonation way back in the day and how it subsequently pretty much blew his mind to be asked to do this very interesting postmodern Cary Grant avant le lettre bit in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, and how that was pretty much the most fun a person could have, except that same year, pretty much, he was cast in Operation Petticoat, which, like Destination Tokyo, was set on a submarine and starred...Cary Grant himself. And how that pretty much blew his mind even further. And I brought up how Elvis Presley had, well before his own film career began, dyed his hair jet black in homage to Curtis, and we both contemplated that for a second or two, and it blew both our minds. And all the while Curtis, then pretty well into his seventies, spoke with the enthusiasm of a teenage kid.
When I learned of his passing I thought about what I might want to write about him, and considered, not without basis, going the he-was-underrated-and-underappreciated-as-a-film-performer route, and then I thought, "Yeah, but the readers of my blog already know that." Which makes me kind of proud and happy, I must say. In any event: he was an axiom. We may onward see those who fall under his shadow for a good long time, but we won't see his like again. Above, the bit from Some Like It Hot, right before he evokes the immortal image of a telltale roommate strangled with her own brassiere. An imitation, but inimitable.
The director of The Miracle Worker, Mickey One, The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man, Night Moves (from which the above image is taken), and Penn and Teller Get Killed, to name but a few films, apparently died on the evening of his 88th birthday. David Hudson rounds up the obits and tributes here.
Vincent Vega makes a point about maintaining loyalty...
...and Mia Wallace silently, dryly concurs, sort of.
Except of course they are in completely different rooms; Vega (John Travolta) is in the bathroom of Mia's house, giving himself a good talking to about the ethics of hitting on his boss's wife. Mia (Uma Thurman) is downstairs, blasting music on the stereo, having a smoke, and while we don't know exactly what she's thinking, as we do about Vincent courtesy of his monologue, we can infer from her subsequent actions that she's got all manner of mischief on her mind. The fact that her raised eyebrow seems to directly address Vincent's concerns we can put down to a number of factors, most of which we would, if we were being totally honest with ourselves, admit that we were merely guessing act. What we do know for sure is that the two pieces of film, the two shots, that create this droll effect, which feeds so much (and does so rather subtly) into the drama that follows, were juxtaposed by an individual with a superb eye and a superb feel for drama, an individual who Pulp Fiction's co-writer and director Quentin Tarantino was delighted to admit—almost boast, really—was a crucial, invaluable factor in the overall shaping of his work. An individual who, with so many other films to shape seemingly ahead of her, has not lived to shape them. Sally Menke's end was an awful, tragic loss in an awful lot of respects. The also invaluable David Hudson at The Daily Notebook is keeping us updated on the news and tributes.
This post is for the wonderful Kim Morgan, recently author of a splendid and aptly-remarked-upon piece about Bing Crosby's screen presence and voice, and who responded, "I wanna hear it Glenn. I got all day too. It's a long hot...autumn over here..." ("here" being L.A.), after I asked, "Anyone wanna hear me talk about how David Bowie's appearance on one of Der Bingle's Xmas specials was the Thin White Duke's way of repaying a stylistic debt?"
Invoking the stylistic debt is something that always makes me think of an interesting assertion by Jerry Lee Lewis, quoted by Nick Tosches in Hellfire, his biography of Lewis: "I'm a stylist [...] There's only four stylists, and that's Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Williams, Al Jolson, and Jimmie Rodgers. Rest of 'em are jes'...imitators." Now. That's a twisted and monomaniacal statement in and of itself, only the more you think about it, the more sense it actually makes, at least within its peculiar bailiwick and with certain allowances for chauvinism if not outright bigotry granted. And even after that, though, one might think to ask Jerry Lee: "What about Crosby?" Because Crosby certainly was a stylist, and he was arguably the stylist that had the biggest influence, or perhaps I should say made the largest amount of aesthetic opportunities possible, for the rock and roll artists. When David Bowie, soon to be promoting his latest album "Heroes", a collection of dramatic ballads and harsh entreaties featuring insistent, often dissonant instrumental backing from the electronic-inflected visionaries Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, deigned to appear on Crosby's 1977 Christmas television special—Bing's last, as he would die in October of that year, not too long after the show had been taped, the reaction among the purveyors of conventional wisdom went along the lines of, "Wow, that kooky avant-garde androgyne weirdo singing alongside the Old Groaner, what's the world coming to and whose idea was this?" Which is still what you hear sometimes to this day, followed by something along the lines of, "But they do make their voices blend together pretty nicely though."
Not to put too fine a point on it, but, "No duh." I imagine that Bowie, a student of pop art as well as an expert purveyor of it, was entirely aware of who he was dealing with in this meeting, and I suspect that Crosby, regardless of his familiarity or lack thereof with the Bowie oeuvre, had a fairly good notion that he was working with a fellow traveler, so to speak. It's not so much to do with the fact that, as Artie Shaw so memorably put it, Crosby was "the first hip white person born in the United States," although that certainly comes into play here. Now let's go to my source for that Shaw quote, Gary Giddins' splendid Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, The Early Years 1903-1940, and its introduction, wherein Giddins takes a whack at summing up the singers' importance: "Crosby was the first white vocalist to appreciate and assimilate the genius of Louis Armstrong, his rhythm, his emotion, his comedy, his sponteneity. Louis and Bing recorded their first important vocals, respectively, in 1926 ('Heebie Jeebies') and 1927 ('Muddy Water') and were the only singes of their era still thriving at the times of their deaths, in the 1970s. When Crosby came of age, most successful male singers were effeminate tenors and recording artists were encouraged to be bland, the better to sell sheet music. The term pop singer didn't exist; it was coined in large measure to describe a breed he invented. Bing perfected the use of the microphone, which transfigured concerts, records, radios, movies—even the nature of social intercourse. As vocal styles became more intimate and talking pictures replaced pantomime, private discourse itself grew more casual and provocative. Bing was the first to render the lyrics of a modern ballad with purpose, the first to suggest and erotic undercurrent."
This is all absolutely correct, but doesn't entirely explain what I'm getting at. In a conversation recently I was trying to describe what made Crosby unique and innovative, and I mentioned that he didn't sing in that particularly big and singerly way that other entertainers of the day did; that by their standards, his voice was nothing to write home about. My interlocuter was stunned; but Crosby had a fantastic voice, and was a great singer. Which is true, but which perception only goes to prove the extent to which his approach to song opened things up. And it's in his approach to song that Bowie owes him the most. There are literally the technological concerns, which Giddins touches upon when talking about Crosby's mastery of the microphone, and which I'll expand upon in a little bit. But let's first discuss the actual approach to song, from the perspectives of both singing apparatus and personality. Prior to Crosby, the dominant vocalist in American popular song was, for better or worse, the aforementioned Jolson; and when Jolson sang, what you got was a big helping of JOLSON SINGING. That is, Jolson's voice was such that you heard IT first, and the song a little bit behind it. We can talk forever about how Crosby's delivery—which, yes, he did adapt from the great Armstrong, who also ought to be on ANYBODY'S list of "stylists"—was so relatively relaxed, not so "proper," occasionally related to what they call "speech-singing" but this is all also related to a more crucial conceptual point. Which is that Crosby was arguably the first vocalist to subordinate his singing chops to the service of the song itself...or, rather, to do so with a creative aim in mind, rather than the goal of selling sheet music.
This was, it cannot be emphasized enough, a conceptual coup, and it was one that would serve rock artists well as they began to write and interpret their own material (something Crosby, of course, never did). When people talk about Bowie's actual singing style, they often invoke—rather unkindly—Anthony Newley, what with the near-keening testing of the outer limits of a thin voice and range. What's often ignored in a consideration of Bowie's singing is how calculated it is. Put on The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars and listen to the way he sings the opening cut, the apocalyptic "Five Years," and dig how he manipulates and modulates the conversational style in the approach to the lyrics. The next song, "Soul Love" has a totally different approach, a more acerbic, clip, mentholated style that abrades against the hippy-dippy lyrics and the Munchkins-on-ludes backing vocals. The approach to each individual song as its own unit, its own discrete piece of art, as opposed to another opportunity for the singer to exhibit attitude or demonstrate virtuosity, is pure Crosby, I would say. And the way that Bowie was able to polish his performances—through microphone and audiotape technology that Crosby pioneered and, in the case of the latter, actually bankrolled—is utterly necessary to the final artistic commodity, as it were.
Here's Bing singing a sad song of his time:
And Bowie, singing one of his, and ours:
And the fellows dueting. That their voices blend well together is no accident.
Whether you call its Fantastic Planet or by its original title La planete sauvage, Rene Laloux's 1973 film is both magnificently transportive and thought-provoking. A new Region-B-locked Blu-ray from Eureka!/Masters of Cinema is cause for celebration. A look at it in this week's Report, at the Daily Notebook as ever.
Well, God bless her. The thing about someone dying at the age of 100 is that you can get a bit down about it, sure, but very rare are the circumstances that'll make you say, "Oh, well that's just awful!" 100 being 100 and all. Maybe it's just because I learned about the great Stuart's death just as I was getting out of a screening of a (quite disarming) film by Manoel de Oliveira, who will turn 102 in December.
One spends a lot of time thinking about the kind of image one wants to run at this point. Something from The Old Dark House seems a bit obvious, especially considering I used words and images from that film to commemorate Ms. Stuart's 100th birthday this past July 4. Something from Ford's Prisoner of Shark Island might have been nice, but struck me as maybe a little too cinephile counter-intuitive, if you follow me. So I concluded that a shot from Gold Diggers of 1935 would probably be just the thing. And I weren't wrong:
Looking and stepping through the scene, I noticed something that was both kind of gross but also, to me, incredibly endearing and somehow emblematic of why cinema is so...obsessive isn't quite the word I'm looking for, but it'll have to do for now. The scene above is yet another treacly romantic pas-de-deux between Stuart's character, poor-little-rich-showgirl Alice Prentiss and poor-but-dreamy Dick Curtis, played of course by Dick Powell. He belongs to someone else, she's promised to a millionaire played by Hugh Herbert, but they can't keep their hands off each other, although they're trying very hard. This dialogue ends with a clinch, and a kiss that they have to cut off quickly, and here they are, immediately post lip-lock:
That glittering line that's connecting the two of them? It's not any kind of structural object in the background or anything. It's an actual line of spit. It pops in the frame right after this one. If you've got the DVd, go ahead and check it out; once noticed, it's impossible to miss again. I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, wow, there's a mix of Dick Powell and Gloria Stuart's actual saliva up there on the screen; how weird. These unexpected, uncontrollable, sometimes rude intrusions of the real, or maybe it's really The Real, into certain carefully circumscribed and crafted realms of fantasy form as much of cinema's allure as the production numbers in such a film as this do. Don't you think?
A personal-anecdote-and-snark-free consideration of Xavier Beauvois' Of Gods And Men, an official entry in the New York Film Festival and coming soon to theaters from Sony Pictures Classics, is up over at The Daily Notebook.
...(also of Dario Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet, 1971)...
...Jonh Saxon...
...(Dario Argento's Tenebre, 1982)...
...and Tony Lo Bianco...
...(Leonard Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers, 1969)...
This is just weird. That casting director had to have some idea, no? In any event, the Murder, She Wrote episode is 1994's "Proof In The Pudding," and its mystery has among the lamest solutions to any in the series, and believe me, My Lovely Wife and I have seen quite a few episodes. Right now, as you may have inferred, we're working our way through the Season Ten DVD set.
I probably don't need to tell you that the woman in the Flies screen cap with Brandon is the ineffable Mimsy Farmer, or that the woman with Lo Bianco in Killers is the immortal Shirley Stoler. Am I correct?
Kelly Lin (Sue) and Asia Argento (Sandra) in Boarding Gate, Olivier Assayas, 2007
Sue: ...It's a lot of money. I don't have it. In partnership with you, it was possible.
Sandra: Wait. It was me and Lester. Not you.
Sue: Didn't he tell you? I'm the one with all the contacts in Beijing. My brother-in-law works for the Olympic Committee. Lester's from Hong Kong. He doesn't know a thing.
I thought of this in part because I did enjoy A.O. Scott's whack, in the New York Times Magazine, at articulating an Assayas thematic omniverse of sorts. And you may, too.
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