Some Came Running

Schnook

Ray Liotta, Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese, 1990

Henry Hill

When I was a kid, I was watching a television talk show on which the recently paroled Depresion-era criminal Alvin Karpis, or maybe just someone who was associated with him, was a guest. And this guest was asked to describe his confederate Clyde Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde and Bonnie and Clyde fame, and this fellow said—and I seem to remember this part exactly—he said, "Well I'll tell you one thing for sure, he weren't no Clyde Beatty." He meant Warren Beatty, of course, but the confusion with the (by-now-not-quite-so) famous circus dude was kind of touching. In any event, the point was and remains well-taken.

When Beatty made Bonnie and Clyde, the real Clyde Barrow was long dead, and hence could not reappear in some medium or other to break the spell cast by the movie and Beatty's work in it. This was not the case with Henry Hill, the source of Nick Pileggi's non-fiction book Wiseguys and its subsequent film adaptation, Martin Scorsese's 1990 GoodFellas.

GoodFellas is frequently cited as a harrowing deglamourization of the gangster life/lifestyle, although it certainly owns up to the perks that criminality can ofttimes furnish; still in all, it shoots down various romantic notions concerning honor among thieves and depicts with great conviction a milieu that's not just entirely morally bankrupt but essentially tawdry, vulgar, squalid, and all that. 

Still. In their essay "The Power And The Gory," Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson take Scorsese's 1976 Taxi Driver to task, among other ways, thusly: "The intense [Robert] DeNiro is sold as a misfit psychotic and, at the same time, a charismatic star who centers every shot and is given a prismatic detailing." They hold Scorsese specifically responsible for this. But is the fault (if it is in fact a "fault" in the first place) Scorsese's, or is it narrative fictional cinema's itself?

The question could not help but come up in one's mind every time Henry Hill himself deigned to come out of protective custody hiding and appear on some news-based or reality-type television show or other. He seemed a recognizable type, of sorts; a real mook, if you will. Bit of an attention whore as well, which I imagine was part of the pathology that helped get him into the life, and trouble, in the first place. One thing he definitively was not was Ray Liotta. 

As protean as Liotta's performance in the film is, as eager and unhesitating as he is as a performer to plumb the sweaty, powdered-nose depths of his character's eventual depravity, as much of his actorly vanity as he is able to shed, he still remains...a performer, and a performer with an innate sense of charisma. Which is, ultimately, necessary in some way to audience engagement in even the most brutally honest but nevertheless conventionally conceived/structured narrative fictional film. If Henry Hill, who died Tuesday at the age of 69, had himself been able to summon the ability to be nothing but himself and harnessed that ability into performance as himself, and then took the role of himself in GoodFellas—I know I'm dealing in a lot of rank implausibilities here, but bear with me, and also that's the whole point—the movie would have been a stone drag to sit through. Because, from all available appearance, Henry Hill really WAS a schnook, albeit one who hit and shot people a fair amount more than schnooks such as you and I. 

Hitchcock and actors

Herewith, my humble contribution to a wonderful cinephilia-friendly cause, the third For The Love Of Film Blogathon, proceeds from which will help finance a restoration of a worthy film in which the maestro had an early-career involvement. Please see the bloggers cited in the logo below, and/or look at today's piece by my friend Self Styled Siren. And click here to make what will be a much appreciated and worthwhile donation.

I cannot find the exact citation, unfortunately, but I recall reading back in the '90s a magazine story chronicling the making of director Gus Van Sant's ostensibly shot-by-shot recreation of Psycho, and said piece containing many quotes from the participating actors in which they justified/rationalized their participation in the project, which, depending on who you were talking to was either a senseless kockamamie scheme or some kind of conceptual coup. And I remember William H. Macy, who was playing the part of Arbogast that had been originated by Martin Balsam, opining that one good reason, for him, to get on board with what many might consider a desecration was to get some kind of payback with respect to Hitchcock, because Macy didn't like that thing Hitchcock said about actors, that they were "cattle." And I read this, and I sighed. Because Macy is a soulful and not unintelligent man, and his misbegotten notion that Hitchcock was somehow the enemy of actors is unfortunate. And, I guess, very hard to kill. 

The Hitchcock of 1939, anticipating a trip from Great Britain to Hollywood, in an interview in Film Weekly (reprinted in the invaluable Sidney Gottlieb-edited compilation Hitchcock on Hitchcock), revealed not just a great enthusiasm for American stars, but (and this shouldn't really come as a surprise) an acute sensitivity with respect to both particular abilities and potential. On Gary Cooper: "[He] has that rare faculty of being able to rivet the attention of an audience while he does nothing." Andre De Toth saw this in Cooper too, although he did not articulate it in quite the same way. On Carole Lombard: "I should like to cast [her] not in the type of superficial comedy which she so often plays but in a much more meaty comedy-drama,giving her plenty of scope for characterization." Once in Hollywood, Hitchcock and Lombard became friends. And they collaborated, on Mr. And Mrs. Smith, a 1941 divorce comedy that Hitchcock, in one of his legendary interviews with François Truffaut, kind of pooh-poohed: "That picture was done as a friendly gesture to [...] Lombard...I didn't really understand the type of people portrayed in the film, all I did was photograph the scenes as written." It was on the set of this picture that Lombard played the famous practical joke in which she built a mini-corral on the set and stocked it with three pieces of livestock tagged with the names of the film's three principal players. 

Hitchcock's retrospective disconnection from Mr. And Mrs. Smith, juxtaposed with his previously stated eagerness to push Carole Lombard's performance envelope, suggests several questions, the most obvious being "What happened?" Well, it's entirely possible that nothing happened. That while Hitchcock's observations concerning the various actors were sharp and truly meant, his stated desire to remold them in certain ways was little more than public-relations bluster/diplomacy.On the other hand, the fact is that Hitchcock did approach Gary Cooper for the lead in Foreign Correspondent, and Cooper turned it down, which he (Cooper) later regretted.  But whether or not Hitchcock's creative struggles with David O. Selznick during the making of Rebecca made the director subsequently dig in his heels harder with respect to hermetically sealing his creative process in the future, it's difficult to argue against the notion that the actor had a very specific and kind of immovable secondary place in Hitchcock's creative process. But it's also incorrect to translate this into an attitude of actual hostility. In his autobiography, Elia Kazan goes over the ways that different directors handle/respond to actors. His view: "Hitchcock told his screen stories as much as possible without help from his actors' performances. When Cary Grant, going into a film, asked him how he should play his part, Hitchcock answered, 'Just do what you always do.' Hitchcock relied on his camera angles and his montage [...] to do what on stage we relied on the actors for." Note the neutrality of Kazan's description; recall also Hitchcock's observation on Gary Cooper's ability to resonate while doing "nothing;" juxtapose with the theory behind the Kuleshov effect; and there's all the more reason to regret that Cooper and Hitchcock never got together.

Of course, Hitchcock made no bones or apologies for the fact that he considered shooting to be the most boring part of making a film. His pre-production work was the process by which he developed the movie in his head and assembled the means by which it could be materialized. So the actual shooting became a mechanical process, not unlike stuffing sausage casings. You could understand why an actor who was savvy to this attitude might build a resentment toward this. You can also understand how one actor might take "Just do what you always do" as a compliment and sign of respect, or as an insult. Until the period when he was getting all weird with his leading ladies, Hitchcock's expectation of a performer was that he or she would bring their best abilities and have whatever homework they felt they needed to do, done. Various acting methods and the work of directors like, well, Kazan, brought a notion of a more active collaboration between actor and director to the fore. The actor would not be playing a role in someone else's motion picture but creating a character/characterization, and hence the actor's notion of what was proper for the picture was to be taken rather seriously. This kind of idea, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say, was anathema to Hitchcock, who was only concerned with filming what HE saw. Here's how he describes (to Truffaut) his difficulty with Paul Newman during the filming of 1966's Torn Curtain, discussing a scene that was ultimately cut from the film: "As you know, he's a 'method' actor, and he found it hard to just give me one of those neutral looks I needed to cut from his point of view. Instead of looking toward Gromek's brother, toward the knife or the sausage, he played the scene in the 'method' style, with emotion, and he was always turning away." If we look at the camera as a pen, then here we can see Newman as runny ink. Martin Scorsese can be seen as having, in some ways, synthesizing Kazan's sympathy for actors with Hitchcock's plastic storytelling style. Talking about working with Newman some twenty years after Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, for 1986's The Color of Money, he recalls (in the Faber and Faber book Scorsese on Scorsese): "Paul [is the] kind of actor who doesn't like to improvise that much on the set, so [...] everything was rehearsed beforehand. We did it the way he suggested, which was to take two complete weeks and just work out with the actors in a loft. I was really nervous, because it was like the theater [...] So when he said, 'What you do is take a tape and mark out an area for a chair; then you tape out an area for a bed,' I could foresee those terrible theater things when people pretend a door is there, which I hate. I said, 'What if we use a real chair?' 'A chair is good,' he said, to my relief."

While we cannot imagine Hitchcock in such a situation getting anywhere near to, let alone beyond "just work out with the actors in a loft," we shouldn't, by the same token, beat his ghost or his films over the head with some conception that he, and they, are anti-human-performer. That's a rap more applicable to, say, Michael Bay.

Morgan, a suitable case for treatment

Come on, you'd use that as a headline too, if you could. Anyway. Over at MSN Entertainment, in commemoration of his upcoming feting at the Golden Globes, I give the once-over to Morgan Freeman and his screen career, citing ten of his best pieces of work in chronological order. Remember when he was a real badass bad guy instead of a kind of lordly suave bad guy, as in more recent work such as Wanted or (God spare you) Lucky Number Slevin? If you don't, you really need to check the man out in Street Smart, from back in 1987, in which he costarred with Christopher Reeve. Damn. 

An interview with Michael Fassbender

Another piece that originally appeared in the late Nomad Edition, Wide Screen. This one of a slightly older vintage, having been conducted and run in February of this year in conjunction with the release of Jane Eyre. But we also discuss (a little) Shame, which had just started shooting, A Dangerous Method (from which the above shot derives), and Haywire. I chopped a good deal of my "YOU were in a Soderbergh movie?!!? I was in a Soderbergh movie!!!!" blather from the transcript before putting this in for the edit. 

I think that, much-commented on genetic gifts aside, Fassbender really has got it. The whole thing. The most impressive film lead actor I've seen come along in a decade. So, enjoy. 

The role of the brooding, romantic, secretive Jane Eyre hero Edward Rochester has been essayed in the past by a veritable hall of fame of great actors and/or leading men: Orson Welles, Charlton Heston, George C. Scott and William Hurt, to name but a handful. Now, in a version of the Charlotte Brontë literary classic directed by Sin Nombre helmer Cary Fukunaga and costarring Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, The Kids Are All Right) in the title role, the very busy half-Irish, half-German thespian Michael Fassbender takes a stab at the role, and the results could very well solidify Fassbender’s status as both a great actor and a very viable leading man for American audiences.

Fassbender impressed cinephiles with his turns in the likes of Steve McQueen’s Hunger (playing real-life IRA martyr Bobby Sands) and Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and made an impact with larger audiences in the far-ranging ensemble of Quentin Tarantino’s crazed and very revisionist-history treatment of World War II, Inglourious Basterds. On the eve of the release of Jane Eyre, which opens on March 11, the 33-year-old Fassbender talked about his burgeoning filmography (one picture not discussed was his upcoming entry in the blockbuster category, X-Men: First Class, in which he portrays the villain Magneto), his approach to character, and the exciting roller-coaster ride that’s been his career over the past few years. 

WIDE SCREEN:  In the films you’ve worked on, there have frequently been some very interesting narrative and/or directorial strategies coming in to play. In Steve McQueen’s Hunger, the Bobby Sands character, who you play, really isn't introduced as the lead character until almost a third of the way into the film. When you're working with someone like McQueen, or the idiosyncratic French director François Ozon on Angel, or Andrea on Fish Tank, both of whom also take unusual choices in their films, do you feel coming in that you're more of a creative collaborator, that you're in on what they're about, as you're going through the process? I know it varies with each director, but working on Hunger, for instance, how acutely did you realize that the Sands character was going to be oozed into the film, as opposed to being introduced in a more conventional way as the subject of the film? 

FASSBENDER: I was aware, because it was it was explicitly that way in the script, you know! We didn't get to meet him till I don't know what page it was, but it was quite well into the story. And that's fine. It doesn't bother me one way or the other really. I mean, my job kind of entails getting the character and learning my lines and hitting my marks and all of that. So what sort of style a director wants to shoot it or what sort of way he or she is going to present it, it doesn't really ; I don't know that we discussed that.

I was very lucky to work with François. He was the first guy that gave me a leading role in a film when nobody knew who I was then at all. So I just I turned up with the character, did my work on the character, and tried to sort of get inside his head and figure that out. And that's the sort of conversations that I would have with him. It's like he'd be saying, “Oh, why don't you do X?”  And I'd be like, “Oh, well would we do X when we do something like…” — or, you know, “Wouldn't you do rather, Y?” or — “wouldn't you do something like this?”

But in terms of the style of the film, or what [Ozon] was trying to do, that's kind of not really my department. So it keeps everything nice and clean if I need to take care of what I need to take care of, and the director does his thing. That's what I love about film. You said it's a collaborative thing.  It's like, I’ll approach the prop guy, I’ll say, “Oh, I've got this lighter, do you think that's interesting for the character?” Or costume or hair, make-up, they create a look for you, and you're like, “Oh, I didn't see it like that myself.” There are all sorts of eyes on the piece, all sorts of input. It’s like, if you read a story and I read a story, you'll read it one way and I'll read it a different way, and we'll have different ideas of it. So then when we come together and try and work on putting it across, I might think, “Oh, wow, I didn't think of that at all,” or “I didn't see that.” And then you put it all together with lots of people; like the DP's, and the art department; the heads of all the departments. That's what's interesting. Does it come together and does it jell, or not? 

WIDE SCREEN:  With Jane Eyre, it's, like Angel, another period piece; Rochester is a character who's, of course, been played rather famously, in other films. Was that something you were particularly conscious of, or did you want to ignore the other film versions go back to the literary source? 

FASSBENDER:  Well, no, I watched pretty much I think all of them. As much as I sort of could get my hands on. I watched Orson Welles; I'm obviously a big fan of Orson Welles. But, while I thought I'd find some things for the character with what he did, what was going on in the [1943] film played in a very dated way. Very sort of over-dramatic, for the purposes of where we wanted to go with the piece.

That was the same feeling I had, when at one point I thought I was doing Wuthering Heights, and I watched Laurence Olivier's version and again, it was like wow, the particular approach here just dates big-time. And again, very dramatic, emphatic style. So I did dial it back to what I thought I could bring. I just studied the character as is in the book and the script, and what I found him to be… obviously he's like this Byronic hero, there's a little trace of that. But I also thought there's something quite bipolar about him, and I just didn't want him, I don't know, to fall into total moodiness. I didn't want to play him with large brush strokes, I wanted to find all the little fine, strange details about him. 

I think that’s what the director, Cary Fukanaga, had in mind. That's what interested me as well. Number one, of course, is that my mom and my sister love the story! So I kind of thought, well, it would be nice to see if I can give them a Rochester they like; let's see what they think of my Rochester, sort of give it a go. So that was attractive to me from the beginning.

And then once Cary got on board I thought, well, this is really interesting now. And then Mia, I was like, oh, even more impressed. I had seen her on In Treatment, and I was blown away. She's got so much maturity and makes really original choices. I don't feel like she's ever lying in her performances.  She's amazing as Jane. She comes on set and like wow, it's Jane. And then you see Mia as she herself is, and she's totally different.

WIDE SCREEN: You bring a lot of physicality to certain roles, from the emaciated hunger-striking prisoner in Hunger to the object of desire for both mother and daughter in Fish Tank; what did you try to do for that side of Rochester?

FASSBENDER:  I thought that he should have a weight to him. People of that era, I think, were used to riding horses and being in the saddle for hours and working out in the countryside. Obviously they're landowners, so they have to maintain the land. I really like the idea that he's a hands-on sort of guy around the land when he's there, when he's home. So I just wanted to give him a lot of weight. 

I wanted this feeling that he's got this weight on him, Bertha in the attic. I wanted that with him everywhere he goes, this shadow sort of hovering over him. And he had that in his physical life as well. But yeah, I didn't… it didn't require me to put on weight or go the gym or anything like that.

WIDE SCREEN:  In Fish Tank, which is just out on DVD in the States, yours is an interesting role in a lot of ways. Your character is kind of the lust object, for both the camera itself and a couple of the female characters. Also, your character seems kind of on the ball; he's got interests, intriguing musical tastes and so on. And it's almost as if the viewer can view him as a surrogate. Then it turns out he's really not that good of a guy at all.

In a sense the film sort of pulls the rug out from under the viewer. How much of this were you juggling as a performer during the making of the film? Because you do keep the character sympathetic in a certain respect, despite the fact that he's doing bad things.

FASSBENDER:  Yeah. Well I think it's more interesting, because it's just like if you have somebody sitting in the audience and they go, wow, that guy's actually kind of a normal sort of guy. And normal people do things that aren't so cool. But, you know, this was a case where I never got a script. Andrea didn't want to give us a script. But when she gave me the breakdown of the story, I knew what was coming, I knew how it was going to be, and I knew the reason she didn't give me a script was because she didn't want me to load it with anything. 

So I knew that I just had to play [Connor] like really kind of easy and free and encouraging and charming. And that's what’s kind of interesting, because when the people leave the cinema, they're like well, it makes them feel… it's an uncomfortable feeling because it's closer to them.  It's like we all have the capabilities of doing all these things, like killing somebody, or taking advantage of somebody like that. And when you make it very real in embodying a person that you can relate to and understand or say, ‘Oh, I know that guy,’ then I think it makes the whole experience more real for people and therefore they have to question things, morals and principles. It's more interesting. 

WIDE SCREEN:  Is that kind of stuff you look for when you're looking for parts?

FASSBENDER:  Um. I think ambiguity is something that I do like to try and find within characters, yeah.  

WIDE SCREEN:  In Fish Tank, you worked with Katie Jarvis, who's brand new, not an very experienced actor. And in the upcoming Haywire, you worked with Gina Carano, who's not an experienced actor but is well versed in mixed martial arts. What’s it like to work with people who aren’t as well-trained or well-versed in performing?

FASSBENDER: Well, Katie's amazing. When you see it on the screen, she's completely vivid and there. It was great working with her because we did an improvisation and she was game. No fear. She's not really interested in acting. So it gives her that sort of extra sort of something, I suppose, that she doesn't care. I think in the hands of the right director, like Andrea Arnold, who did Fish Tank, or Steven Soderbergh with Haywire, it works.

Anyway I think acting, it's 90 percent intuition.  Training is good. I think you learn most out there in the field, practically. But I do think, having had training — I went to drama school — when things go wrong and when you sort of get the fear or lose focus, I do have a structure that I can fall back on. It's like, “Where am I coming from? Where am I going? What do I want from this person? How does this person make me feel?” There's a drill that I can go back into that will get me so that I can focus. And that's a great thing to have.

But with dealing with non-actors, it's always interesting, because they're bringing something fresh. It's interesting when you bring in somebody that hasn't learned from the same rule book, so they're just bringing whatever they bring from their world into the mix.

WIDE SCREEN: You’ve been working an awful lot, and you have worked and are preparing to work with some really world-class directors, including some of the people we’ve talked about, and also Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds , David Cronenberg with the upcoming A Dangerous Method, and a Ridley Scott project coming up…

FASSBENDER: It’s been kind of crazy! It's like I'm in a dream, really. When I realized that I wanted to do acting, I was 17, and when I was 18, I put on a play of [Quentin Tarantino’s] Reservoir Dogs. So Quentin was a massive influence right at the beginning for me. But to be on set, being directed by him and working, and to be in a new scene that was a classic Tarantino Mexican stand-off, in one of his film… it was really just sort of a dream. I couldn't believe it. And he is everything that you would imagine him to be. Full of energy, full of enthusiasm, full of information and just — he just lives, sleeps, breathes film. 

And then Cronenberg is like an engineer. He's like a scientist. He's just so precise, so gentle and so easy. His films can be quite different, but the energy on set is very pleasant and bright. He's just so super bright. And very non-taxing on his actors. And similar to Steven Soderbergh in that precision and intelligence and pleasantness; you can see it in both of them, the way they size everything up the minute they walk on to the set. It’s fantastic to work with people who are so creative and have such a grasp of the situation on a film set.

The trouble with movie stars

I remember the thought occurring to me well into a screening of, believe it or not, Milos Forman's 2006 Goya's Ghosts. I was thinking, this is Forman's most interesting movie in quite a while, it's not working entirely, but he's making some bold choices, and it's going to get lambasted, and mainly because of Natalie Portman. It wasn't that she was bad, it was just that she was so...Natalie Portman that her character had trouble registering, and her character was the real key to the film. And I thought, I wonder how this film will play in 15 or twenty years, when Natalie Portman's Portman-ness isn't quite so nearly palpable in the zeitgeist. Will the picture be able to make itself felt more truly by then?

I recall these thoughts as internet film writers the world over go slightly batty tripping over themselves to agree with an individual who they'd characterize as either full of it or an insensitive boor 99 percent of the rest of the time. I refer, of course, to Sean Penn, who tried to express to the French publication Le Figaro his misgivings about Terrence Malick's recent The Tree of Life without seeming peevish or that he was speaking altogether from wounded vanity or ego (there is a slight distinction between the two). I refer you to Richard Brody's ruminations on the statement, as Richard's post is both admirably civil and sufficiently eccentric to have earned the impatient dismissal of the renowned esthete John Nolte.

Whether you sympathize with Penn or not, there is the fact that with both audiences and critics, the announcement of Sean Penn's presence in a movie brings with it an expectation that Penn will not only appear in a large portion of the film, but that he will do things in it other than sit or stand around looking deeply perturbed. That he will perform Feats of Acting that audiences and critics have come to expect from hi, whether they be chameleonic or merely steeped in emotional intensity. Penn's is the movie star iconography of the master thespian, and while Malick's film does many things, it does not honor Penn's iconography, at least not in any conventional way. 

By contrast, Mike Nichols' 1965 film adaptation of Edward Albee's sensational play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? isn't just that, or maybe even that, at all; it's also or primarily a film about MOVIE STARS acting in an adaptation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Specifically, about Elizabeth Taylor throwing away everything that makes her "Elizabeth Taylor" and still being Elizabeth Taylor anyway. How aware was Mike Nichols of this? Very aware, I'd say; aware enough so that almost 40 years later his film adaptation of Patrick Mawber's sensational play Closer was a film about Julia Roberts talking really, really dirty. People who complain about Judy Garland having been too old to play Esther Blodgett in Cukor's 1954 A Star is Born are missing the point in twelve different ways, as the film is about NOTHING BUT Judy Garland playing Esther Blodgett, everyone else's impeccable contributions notwithstanding. Just as North By Northwest is Hitchcock making the ultimate Cary Grant film by Hitchcock. And so on. 

Ignore star iconography at your film's peril, as Joseph Losey learned with his almost impossibly muddled 1968 Secret Ceremony, in which he had La Liz and Mia Farrow enact proto-ur-Lynchian encounters with no regard for the extradiegetic resonances of the screen personalities, treating them as mere performers. Actually, Losey didn't learn, not right away at least, as he next made the ineffable Boom! with Liz and Dick entirely in sub-surreal earnest. 

As for Malick, in his latter-day films he doesn't so much ignore star iconography as he behaves as if it doesn't exist. And again, there is a slight distinction between the two. It's clear that he casts for presence, and it's pretty clear in Tree of Life that he wanted what Sean Penn's got. He just wants it differently. Which perhaps inevitably (or is that so?) creates a disjoint with an audience conditioned to expect, or want, a certain Penn-ness. Something not dissimilar is in effect with Malick's ostensible comeback film, 1998's The Thin Red Line, which was so star-studded, and within which certain of the stars made appearances much more fleeting than one would expect from such names within the context of a "star studded" film. Hence, the first viewing of the picture one might ostensibly spending an inordinate amount of time noting, "There's Travolta! There's Clooney!" and so on. It's only with several viewings that one can break through that. Just as it might take several viewings of Tree of Life to fully get past the circumstances of Penn's manifestation in the film. Add to this the fact that Milick arguably needs these names in order to get his films made, and that talents of Penn's caliber are falling over themselves to work with Malick, and this particular conundrum gets knottier still. 

The Hepburn-Tracy Project, #2: "Keeper of the Flame" (George Cukor, 1942)

For part one, go here. 

Glenn Kenny: I have to admit two things about Keeper of the Flame: first, that I’d never seen it, and honestly had barely even heard of it before encountering it in this collection. And that given the descriptions of it I looked at almost directly before viewing it, I kind of dreaded it, George Cukor behind the camera or not. Come to think of it I’m not sure why I dreaded it, since theme-wise, it bears a certain resemblance to a couple of pieces of political-sociological pulp of which I’m kind of fond, for instance, Gabriel Over The White House. Before I get ahead of myself, lemme describe the picture. The followup to the popular and Oscar-winning (for Best Original Screenplay, of all things; Hepburn got a Best Actress nom) Woman of the Year is not romantic comedy, not even vaguely. You’d think maybe it would, what with Cukor directing and a script by Donald Ogden Stewart (who adapted both Holiday and The Philadelphia Story for the screen). But no. This is a Great-Man-With-Feet-Of-Not-Clay-But-Potential-Fascist-Steel melodrama, with an intriguing twist: the Great Man is never seen. True, as it were, to  the film’s title. The flame is the heroism and ideals of the never-seen Robert Forrest, a national hero for we-never-learn-what-exactly. Forrest meets his death in a spectacular auto crash, and the vultures of the press descend on the town wherein his compound is situated, but only one, Spencer Tracy’s former war correspondent Stephen O’Malley, is crafty enough to make it into the manse, where he meet’s Forrest’s  widow Christine (Hepburn, of course), the titular keeper of the flame—or is she? Soon O’Malley finds all manner of creepiness under all manner of rocks, including a surly groundskeeper (Howard DaSilva), a worshipful uptight amenuensis (Richard Whorf, in a sinister variation, coincidentally, of Dan Tobin’s character in Woman of the Year, or so it seems when you watch the two pictures in close temporal proximity) and Forrest’s loony mom (Margaret Wycherly). We learn that at the time of his death Forrest was working on a project to…Make America Fascist. And the truth about him has to come out! But there are powerful forces working to suppress that truth!

The material, as you see, has a lot of contextually fascinating resonances to it. Some consider the film to be a pronounced critique of the isolationist politics and suspicious fellow-travelling of Charles Lindbergh, a theory bolstered somewhat by the film’s stubbornness in withholding just what it was besides wartime valor that made Robert Forrest such a renowned national hero. I’ve read a latter-day consideration of the film that posits the scenario could conceivably have provided some inspiration for Philip Roth’s alternative-history novel The Plot Against America. This is the sort of thing I should be all over, but in fact I was kind of scared that the film it would resemble most would be another Tracy-starrer, 1933’s The Power And The Glory, a Great-Man-With-Feet-Of-Clay picture with an excellent pedigree; its writer Preston Sturges pointed out that its narrative innovations, more or less ignored at the time, were similar ones to what Citizen Kane would be praised to the skies for less than a decade later. That may be true, but it’s also a demonstration that if your innovations don’t resonate on the screen, they don’t resonate period, and The Power and the Glory is so thoroughly pedestrian in its mise-en-scene and overall direction that one recalls it as a real slog. And for some reason I was worried that Keeper of the Flame would be that as well.

Claire Kenny: You and I are on just the same page here, in terms of the film both confounding our expectations of content, and exceeding our expectations of quality. I know that we both relished the viewing, and found this satisfying, and satisfyingly ridiculous (in the way only a really juicy melodrama can be), for probably much the same reasons. The main difference in the way we approached the film is that you were a far better student than I--the only "advance reading" I did was the copy on the DVD box, which left me with the same dread you mention, which I likewise shortly found myself unable to justify. You mention the pervasive creepiness, but what I felt more was suspense. We know as soon as Tracy shows up that there is Something to Investigate, but the big bad truth about Robert Forrest is a long time emerging--is he a wronged man who was killed by his wife's lover? was he involved in shady business dealings? is Hepburn protecting him or herself?--and the buildup is entirely delicious. It's then jarring in the best kind of way (although giant clues pop up throughout) when his secret turns out to be the Big F. In the context of the time especially, a threat of fascism surely couldn't have been much scarier, but it's such a high-minded plan to make fascism the villain of a popular entertainment--and since Forrest himself is never seen, fascism really is pretty much literally the villain. As dated as this feels (I'm entirely conditioned by the movies I've grown up with to expect the shameful secret to be something sordid and very physical, like incest or serial murder or a gimp with a ball gag in the basement), it's more a delightful relic of its time than a wilted old bouquet in the manner of, say, Woman of the Year.

Glenn Kenny: Yes, exactly. A lot of the delight has to do with the pacing. The themes and characterizations and their treatment are a, true, a bit creaky and antiquated and all, but the picture itself really moves right along. Tracy as always gives great Man-of-Integrity value, and Tragic Heroine was never really a problem for Hepburn, so they’re both very enjoyable here. (The supporting cast is also impeccable; DaSilve always gave good sinister grump, and could turn that into fundamentally warm decent guy on a dime; I didn’t mention some good early Forrest Tucker action, he plays a menacing relative of a character). What’s odd, or maybe admirable, is that there are not even subtextual sparks between them in their interplay (their characters do not become romantically entangled in this picture, making this unique in their canon); he’s all do-the-right- thing, she’s all torn-between-love-and-disillusionment-and-duty-but- duty-to-what, and they don’t have any opportunity to connect in any other way. Claire, did you find this alienating/off-putting, or did the anomaly add to the fun?

Claire Kenny: Well, I’ll tell you, GK, I actually don’t agree with the premise that there were no sparks between them—though now I’m starting to doubt myself and wondering if I saw things just because I was expecting to find them there? Definitely, there was not the overt romantic involvement of their other films, but I nonetheless thought that an undercurrent of sexual tension was inherent in the way their characters were set against each other: as an investigator bound on uncovering the secret Hepburn felt compelled to keep, Stephen was her antagonist; at the same time, as the one person in the world of the film with the wherewithal to reveal the truth that Christine didn’t really want to hide, he was her rescuer. As archaic as that whole damsel-in-distress/white-knight setup is, Christine’s conflict about her own role creates the classic push-pull at the heart of all romantic friction. I’d say the anomaly here—other than the fact that a real romance never comes to fruition—is that the classic Tracy-Hepburn battle is one of words, while Keeper of the Flame trades more in wordless stares and meaningful pauses. I was happy if unsurprised to find that they could handle this form of interaction just as skillfully as they manage pages of banter.

Up next: 1945's Without Love, the DVD of which happens to include one of Glenn's all-time favorite Tex Avery cartoons, Swing Shift Cinderella. Not sure if that will also be subject to discussion. "Um, pardon me miss, I'm lookin' for the dame they call..."

The Hepburn-Tracy Project, #1: "Woman of the Year" (George Stevens, 1942)

In late April, Warner Home Video scored a coup of sorts and put out a DVD box called Tracy & Hepburn: The Definitive Collection, which puts together all nine of the films co-starring legends Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in one handy-dandy package. A great number of the films they made together are not under the Warner rubric, so, like the recent Kazan box set from Fox, this is a bit of a diplomatic achievement. The thing about the Tracy-Hepburn collaborations is that, until I'd say as late as Adam's Rib, they don't look as if they were really approached as such, that is, as collaborative works by two distinctive artists; they were just films that had the two stars, who were romantically involved off-screen, working together. They didn't signify as "Tracy and Hepburn" pictures in other words.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Or I should say ourselves. When I got the box set, I proposed to My Lovely Wife Claire that it might be a fun thing for us to assess together, since she and I are so VERY much like Tracy and Hepburn themselves. But seriously. Claire did some DVD reviewing for me back in the Premiere days, and I've always been a fan of her writing, and her overall perceptiveness and sunniness and all sorts of "ness" informs my work at its best, I like to think. So, this informal project, wherein we watch the Tracy/Hepburn pictures and concoct, each week, a "dialogue" about the picture. 

The first picture is the first that Hepburn and Tracy made together, of course, the 1942 Woman of the Year, directed by George Stevens, in which sports columnist Tracy falls for "emancipated" highfalutin political columnist and knows-all-the-right-people gadabout Hepburn, and shows her the proper place for a...well, I don't need to say it. The movie happens to rank pretty high on our friend The Self-Styled Siren's "Ten Movies The Siren Should Love...But Does Not" list, and when we popped it in Claire, who had not seen the picture before, was curious as to why. It didn't take her long to find out, as our dialogue below attests...

Claire Kenny: This was not at all what I expected, and I’m afraid I just didn’t much enjoy it…I think you felt the same? I feel like I’m SUPPOSED to enjoy it; I know that it’s a “classic,” and obviously KH/ST have all the fabulous zesty crackly brainy interactions we expect, but there was just too much stuff I would have to overlook. This is for the obvious thematic (anti-feminist) reasons, but they manifested themselves in ways I wasn’t anticipating. I thought, if anything, it was going to be one of those things where the big fancy career girl is Just Too Uppity For Her Own Good, and he’s going to have to “tame” her, which would of course have been frustrating and off-putting. But this was really worse in a way, because it’s not just that Hepburn’s Tess is smart and ambitious and successful, it’s that she’s not LIKABLE. She’s selfish and inconsiderate and flighty, exhibited most appallingly in her surprise adoption of an orphan and subsequent disinterest in even the most fundamental aspects of his wellbeing. Meanwhile Tracy’s Sam cranks around this big beautiful apartment, pouting over being neglected and getting no time alone with his new wife, and maybe you shouldn't have gotten married after knowing someone for thirty seconds, Spence?? I’m not sure what we’re supposed to get from this—is she insufferable because she doesn’t embrace her wifely station, or are we supposed to think of her as insufferable by nature, and in turn think of this quality as essential to feminine success? I realize I should make allowances for its datedness, but it may have aged past the point of being bearable.  The ending is…meh. The slapstick element of Tess’s attempts to make breakfast for Sam don’t really work—something is off with the pacing, it’s just not madcap enough—and her implied assumption of a more subservient role irks. On the other hand, I wasn’t clear what she was going to do exactly—it seemed the plan was basically “work less, hyphenate last name, leave my slick apartment behind for this townhouse complex.”  Which is fine, I guess. No suggestion that Sam was going work less, but this is probably too much to expect for 1942.

I do give the movie bonus points for Tess’s father’s scrumptious country house in Connecticut.  I’m a sucker for classic-movie country houses.

Glenn Kenny: You got more takeaway from the ostensible content than I did...or is it that I'm just an insensitive male? Everything you're saying about the offensiveness of the chauvinism is entirely correct, but none of that registered for me as strongly as just what a logy, dry, and leaden picture this is from stem to (almost) stern. George Stevens at his best is, as we all know from reading our copies of The American Cinema, an auteur, but damn, when I see a Stevens film that doesn't click for me I tend to ask myself, where the hell is George Stevens at his best, because this sure as hell is pretty far from it. [N.B., that's merely a quasi-rhetorical question designed to conjure my particular feeling of frustration with this movie; but for actual answers concerning Stevens' greatness, you could do worse than to check out Raymond De Felitta's pieces about him at Movies 'Til Dawn—part one is here—and/or The Siren's recent breakdown of a classic scene from Giant.]The Hepburn/Tracy "chemistry" is there but just barely...it seeps through the cracks of the cretinous plotting (man, that business with the orphaned kid is beyond crassly lame) and only really comes to life —and here's the main thing I disagree with you about concerning the film—in the finale, which, content aside, is a funny slapstick bit that harks back to Stevens' days as a director of Laurel and Hardy shorts, and underscores the teams' core talents in the comic arena. It is, admitedly, almost completely out of place here, but welcome nonetheless. If I may be so bold I'd like to speculate that had Hepburn and Tracy not wound up together romantically, they might have never been cast together again on the "strength" of this film. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Claire Kenny: It's not that I got more out of this than you did--I think I was having the same problems as you, and the most interesting emotional response I could find was righteous indignation. Which is really not saying much--"the only thing your movie offered me, Mr. Stevens, was enough offensive content to keep me moderately annoyed for two hours." I keep thinking about your last statement, though, and I can't decide whether or not I agree. It's of course a false exercise, because we have all the benefits of hindsight and a body of terrific joint work to look back on, but I can see why a viewer in 1942 would look at this and see the potential for lots of wonderful future pairings. Neither actor is at all like any other film actor I can think of, of any period, and the combination of their specific talents and intelligences and weird rough edges is something that doesn't make conceptual sense until you see it onscreen. Even from this weak start, I see what made people want more. And I'm still not with you on the finale. Here's why: I think that for slapstick (which I'll admit is not my favorite thing) to be really effective, the environmental obstacles almost have to take on the qualities of another character who's in active battle with the performer(s). And for THAT to work, the performer has to appear to *believe* that the obstacles have wills of their own, and might win the battle--whereas Katharine Hepburn is not believable as someone who can't master her environment. She's only effectively undone on film by some kind of emotional circumstance; she doesn't read as someone incapable in practical ways. So here, she looks like someone very good at waffle-making pretending like she doesn't know how to make waffles. Stevens compensates for this with lingering shots of the wafflemaker bubbling over, or whatever, which kills the pace.

Glenn Kenny: Touché. I can’t say you’re wrong in your analysis of that penultimate scene, Maybe I was so longing for a Laurel and Hardy short by that point in the dreary Woman that I overcompensated imaginatively. In any event, the picture itself is sufficiently dispiriting as a viewing experience (as opposed to a subject for historical study, that is) that I’m almost overeager to get to the next…

The next will be Keeper of the Flame, directed by George Cukor. Stay tuned!

Arthur Russell, too fast for Vin Diesel

My friend Gary Lucas has posted an archival tape of an abortive recording session featuring the future Vin Diesel and the beats of the late latter-day cult figure (and all-the-time genius) Arthur Russell. Yes, my friends, it really happened, and you can now hear over three minutes of the session going down. As Gary notes, Russell's tricky beat keeps dropping out, as it were, from under Diesel, and the fledgling rapper has a bit of a hard time with it. In fairness to Diesel, it's a construction that would provide all but the most rhythmically sophisticated emcees a challenge. In further fairness to Diesel, as far as his timbre and delivery are concerned, I, and probably you, have heard a lot worse. Still in all it's probably better for everyone (excepting Jeffrey Wells), that Le Dieseldorf ended up where he did. Have a listen here.

Lien on me

My pals at MSN Movies had an amusing notion for a Tax Day special feature—a roundup on those whom several critics and zeitgeist observers consider "The Most Taxing People In Movies." I gave myself a particular challenge here, choosing a figure I am instinctively sympathetic to, but have been disappointed by during the past, um, decade. My selection/justification is here. Others surround my entry. Enjoy! Agree or disagree! Get angry! Or not! And so on.

An excerpt from "The Auteurist's Guide to the Elizabeth Taylor Filmography," Nomad Wide Screen

Joseph Losey with Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of the notorious Boom!

In this week's issue of Nomad Editions' Wide Screen, a tribute to Elizabeth Taylor, featuring an obituary by the ineffable Self-Styled Siren, a best-of-on-DVD consideration from Tony Dayoub, Vadim Rizov's look at the best and worst of Taylor tributes, a couple of lovely photo portfolios assembled by our crack picture editor Laurie Kratochvil, and a piece by myself on the Taylor filmo perceived through a sort-of auteurist prism. Below is a portion of the article; to read it in its entirety, do consider a free trial subscription to the publication which you may learn about more here.

Mervyn LeRoy

“LeRoy has converted his innate vulgarity into a personal style,” Andrew Sarris noted, before adding, “His Little Caesar is feeble next to Hawks’s Scarface, and his Little Women far littler than Cukor’s, but you can’t have everything.” And indeed, for emotional power (or convincing Hollywood schmaltz), LeRoy’s 1949 version of the Louisa May Alcott classic, starring Taylor as Amy, Meet Me in St. Louis’s adorable moppet Margaret O’Brien as Beth, and June Allyson as Jo (and Peter Lawford as Laurie, yeesh) is no match for the 1933 film featuring Katharine Hepburn as Jo, Joan Bennett as Amy, and Jean Parker as Beth. (Poor forgotten Douglass Montgomery played Laurie.) Still, it is pretty snappy in the manner that the director of such pre-code speed rides as Three on a Match, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and Heat Lightning was something of a past master at. Taylor had been slated to play the lead in LeRoy’s stab at a Biblical epic, Quo Vadis, but production hassles scotched that; she did an uncredited extra bit as an arena slave.

Joseph Losey

The American-born Losey left the United States in the 1950s (HUAC, again) and continued his career in Europe; by the time he teamed up with Taylor and Burton, he was well-regarded not just for his Hollywood and post-Hollywood noirs (The Prowler and Time Without Pity among them) but for two films, Accident and The Servant, made in collaboration with the esteemed playwright Harold Pinter. Still, viable marketplace work seemed to elude him, so he jumped at the chance to work with the then-married international superstars. But again with Tennessee Williams! In this case, 1968’s Boom! a version of one of Williams’s oddest works, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, in which a much married reclusive woman of wealth is visited by a shambling, poetic Angel of Death. Guess who plays whom. As I wrote of this film, and Taylor’s performance, elsewhere, prior to her passing: “problematic for Taylor was the fact that she seemed to forget more and more about acting as the years went on. Look at her in A Place in the Sun, or in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and then look at her here. She shows a narrow range in both of the former films, but at least she’s working that range; she’s paying attention and working with precision. Here she’s all over the place, the result of Losey’s inability, or is it refusal, to direct her.” Boom! is still, in some circles, considered a candidate for Worst Film Ever made… although of course John Waters considers it a classic of its kind. 

Despite the critical drubbing, Losey and Taylor were actually eager to work together again, and they teamed up almost immediately thereafter for Secret Ceremony, a very peculiar film in which Hollywood iconography goes way against the grain of art-film theme and treatment. Again, in another context I wrote this about the film: “The first 20 minutes are kind of remarkable. They’re almost entirely dialogue-free, and depict a little cat-and-mouse game between Taylor’s character Leonora (who we later find out is a prostitute) and the rather gaga girl Cenci (Mia Farrow, unnervingly Paltrow-esque avant le lettre)… [W]hat we’re watching isn’t about plausibility. It’s cinematic theater of the absurd with horror flourishes, and it’s mesmerizing... The problem, finally, is with the figures. Even 40 years after the fact, the strongest thing that registers here is that two Hollywood legends are acting really, really weird. By the time Taylor and Farrow wind up play-fighting over a rubber ducky in an oversize bathtub, all bets are off as far as this piece working in any way that Losey and company might have intended.” Secret Ceremony had sufficient strengths to suggest that a third Taylor-Losey collaboration — perhaps on a less affected piece of contemporary material, — might have borne more artistically satisfying fruit. But it was not to be. Losey did, however, re-team with Burton in 1972 for the underseen and underrated The Assasination of Trotsky.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The great writer and director’s masterpiece All About Eve shows he was thoroughly at home with ambition, betrayal and self-destruction when it was set in the world of reasonably functional (in a day-to-day sense) individuals. He was on much less certain footing in dealing with the deranged modern baroque realms concocted by Tennessee Williams. Hence, 1959’s Suddenly, Last Summer, adapted by Gore Vidal from a Williams play, is oft-regarded as a piece of high camp, despite its scrupulously serious treatment, and notwithstanding the, thespic efforts of Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and a particularly damaged-seeming Montgomery Clift. Its near-hysteria is for some ameliorated by the sight of Taylor at her most ravishing in a white one-piece swimsuit.

Mankiewicz and Taylor got on sufficiently well during the making of the picture, and that factored into Mankiewicz’s ill-fated assignment to replace Rouben Mamoulian on the set of the lavish Cleopatra, the troubled production that birthed the Taylor-Burton romance. Again, it seems that a historical epic set in the ancient world is a less-than-congenial setting for Mankiewicz’s particular talents, but he proved very dedicated to the film, or the idea of the film, and concocted a six-hour version that he wanted to have released in two parts. An attempt to reconstruct that version is underway; in the meantime, the extant four-hour cut is, while certainly on the stiff side, hardly the disaster it was proclaimed to be at the time of the picture’s box-office flop, which some have cited as the beginning of the end for the entity that once was 20^th Century Fox.

Vincente Minnelli

Oddly enough, while many cinephiles might tend to rank the three collaborations between Taylor and the great cinematic stylist Vincente Minnelli as minor Minnelli works, seen from a particular angle — the Taylor one — this teaming might be viewed as unusually fruitful, producing two of the most enjoyable and congenial films of her career, and one of the more unusual and overtly thoughtful as well. In 1950’s Father of the Bride, Taylor was still an ingénue (all of 18), co-starring as the daughter of Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, about to marry amiable boy-next-door type Don Taylor (no relation). A fascinating look at the alcohol-fueled American middle class of the post-war era, it’s a snappy, knowing comedy to which Minnelli brings more than a soupçon of his decorative taste. His sure hand with the Comedy of Anxiety, in this particular case economic anxiety, is also felt. But it’s felt even more strongly in the film’s 1951 sequel, Father’s Little Dividend, admittedly in a scene in which Taylor doesn’t participate, and which is not as comedic as all that; it’s a sequence late in the picture in which Tracy’s character “loses” his new grandchild. Almost as nightmarish and angst-ridden as the Halloween scene in Meet Me in St. Louis, it’s a mini-masterpiece of Minnelli edginess. Similarly, Minnelli’s 1965 The Sandpiper , starring Taylor as a free spirit and single mom and Burton as the minister and educator who falls for her — and framed by the majestic vistas of Big Sur country — is best considered not as a Taylor-Burton vehicle but in the continuum of Minnelli dramas about the anxiousness of nonconformity such as Tea and Sympathy, Home from the Hill, The Cobweb, and so on. In this light, the picture works beautifully and stands out as one of Minnelli’s stronger ’60s efforts.