Some Came Running

Tales From the Warner Archives #7: "The Last Flight" (William Dieterle, 1931)

As I myself get older, I bristle at the phrase "old movies" more and more. My first principle that un vrai film est un vrai film allows no room for what some might call ageist hierarchies. I get shirty even when the issue is raised in a relatively innocuous fashion. I remember going on Anderson Cooper's show on CNN back in 2003 to flog Premiere's "Hottest Sex Scenes" feature, and the very gracious Mr. Cooper mentioned, in a genial tone, that the top five pictures on the list were, and I quote, "relatively older movies." Hardly an unreasonable observation—the films in the top five were Blow-Up, Some Like It Hot, ...And God Created Woman, Vixen, and Last Tango In Paris (and this is what you get when you allow the likes of myself to be the sole arbiter and author of such a list, by the way; none of that Indecent Proposal bullshit for me, no sirree). And I gave him a reasoned, reasonable answer. But I remember thinking, with a little bit of hostility, "What do you mean by older, posh boy? You and Blow-Up are pretty much the same age." I'm like that, what can I tell you. 

 

All this is by way of prefacing the statement of fact that The Last Flight, directed by German emigre Dieterle from an adaptation by John Monk Saunders of his novel Single Woman, is what you might call an inescapably old film. As notable and frank and moving as it is, it does creak rather conspicuously at times, and that's life. And if you can get around—or better still, actually appreciate—that, it's a terrifically noteworthy movie experience. 

 

Flight, based in part on Saunder's own experiences (a World War I aviator, he also wrote Wellman's classic Wings, and won an Oscar for his script for The Dawn Patrol), tells the story of a group of damaged American Great War vets galivanting their way through Paris and Spain, fueled by massive amounts of liquor and all pursuing the same expat lovely, the enigmatic Nikki (a lovely Helen Chandler). Yes, the storyline does sound familiar, and yes, there is a bullfighting scene in here...Yes, Saunders' Single Lady would seem to owe a lot to Papa's The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, but what we're likely looking at here are accounts of near-parallel existences, rather than text theft. 

The ringleader of the black-tie sporting group of heartbroken would-be wolves in this picture is Cary, played by silent film superstar Richard Barthelmess, and again he here puts paid to the too-much perpetrated myth that he couldn't carry a talking picture. The acting styles here are pretty much all on the slightly overemphasizing side of the silent mode, but the performances—Cary's pals are played by a group of the era's stars and future stars, names undreamt of in the Twitterific Kidcrits'™ philosophy, including Johnny Mack Brown and David Manners—are all earnest, unforced. 

 

One aspect of the film that's rather bracingly prominent is its treatment of what I believe was not quite yet known as alcoholism. "What should I drink now, I suppose?" is a constant refrain with these characters, and they're all pretty explicit about the fact that they're looking for strong mood uplifters. Nikki is constantly wondering what such and such a cocktail is going to do for her. "It'll make you bark like a fox," Cary advises at one point. "But I don't want to bark like a fox." "It'll make you laugh and play." Yes—laugh and play is what these characters all want to do, and they think the drink is gonna help, and it never, ever does. Looking at one of Cary's crew, miserable in his cups, Nikki asks Cary what's going to finally help the guy get better. "He'll have to be...reborn," Cary says ruefully. It's a striking line, especially so when one puts together that this film was made about five years before the official founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, a recovery group that posits a "spiritual awakening"  as key to a program of sobriety. Kind of in the same ballpark as a rebirth, I'd say. But such an option seems definitively out of most of these characters' reaches, and Nikki and Cary end up together more or less via attrition—all of Cary's comrades go by the wayside, victims of their war trauma and their powerlessness over alcohol. (And Saunders himself took his own life in 1940.)

 

One of those companions, Francis, seen above with the gun, is played by Elliott Nugent, who went on to become a very accomplished and celebrated playwright and director (he helmed the Bob Hope version of The Cat and the Canary, which I get all excited about here). Nugent also went on to have his own harrowing experiences with drinking and depression, which he recounts with admirable courage in his 1965 memoir Events Leading Up To The Comedy. Among the most heartbreaking bits in the account is his telling of the last days of his friend, the great James Thurber (with whom Nugent collaborated on the play The Male Animal), and what Thurber turned into as he "began his daily five-o-clock drinking." "He began to work on a bitter autobiography to be called What Happened To Me. [...] 'This will be the real truth, for the first time,' he told me. 'I can't hide any more behind the mask of comedy that I've used all my life. People are not funny; they are vicious and horrible—and so is life!'"

As for Nugent himself, he ends Events thusly: "I am learning to try to forgive myself, so much as is within my power. Pray for me, dear grandchildren—and for all good people of whatever religion who live in this lovely and often frightening world; God knows we need such petitions."

This demon on my back

Images and wisdom delivery

"Hollywood or Bust is to The Girl Can't Help It as —making due allowance—L'ecole des femmes is to Le Misanthrope. Taking Howard Hawks' beloved theme of a journey (although the journey from New York to Hollywood corresponds to our own Paris-Cote d'Azur, films like this are impossible in France because the theme of migration came to us from America and we are incapable of handling it with the same naturalness), Tashlin indulges a riot of poetic fantasies where charm and comic invention alternate in a constant felicity of expression. The plot is thin, certainly, but the merit is all the greater. To have turned Dean Martin into a comedian is feat enough to rate his director a place at the very top.

"Louis Jouvet quotes somewhere this definition of the theater by Alfred de Vigny: a thought which is metamorphosed into a mechanism. So Tashlin, a man of the cinema and the cinema of color, does the opposite of Vigny's dictum. The proof is Jerry Lewis' face, where the height of artifice blends at times with the nobility of true documentary.

"To sum up, Frank Tashlin has not renovated the Hollywood comedy. He has done better. There is not a degree of difference between Hollywood or Bust and It Happened One Night, between The Girl Can't Help It and Design For Living, but a difference in kind. Tashlin, in other words, has not renewed but created. And henceforth, when you talk about a comedy, don't say 'It's Chaplinesque'; say loud and clear, 'It's Tashlinesque.'"

—Jean-Luc Godard, "Hollywood Or Bust," Cahiers du Cinema 73, July 1957, translation Tom Milne

Scenes I'd like to see...

 ...just once. Just once. Really. Just once I'd like to see one of the Twitterific Kidcrits,™ or even one or two of their venerated elders, file a review that reads something like this: "I didn't really like [Film X], I didn't find it engaging on the levels I'm accustomed to, but then again, I also really didn't understand a lot of the allusions in the film and I'm not particularly well-versed in the philosophical precepts that the movie seems to be extrapolating from. So while I didn't like it, I also have to admit that I didn't get it, and that at some level, I'm really underqualified to deliver an entirely reliable assessment of it."

But of course one doesn't get that, does one? Instead, one gets semi-sneers at Godard "disciples" (that would be Roger Ebert, on his Twitter feed, which by now must be the length of Infinite Jest and War and Peace combined), shrugging-offs of that perennial mass of straw men, the "elitists," or the "ivory tower group" (Todd McCarthy's writeup is a more considered dismissal than his use of that term might indicate, I have to admit, and the man is admirably upfront about his prejudices), and quite a bit of virtually spittle-flecked "How dare you even presume to question my intellectual bona fides just because I don't like this!" bluster from the TKs™, of course. As I wrote to someone a couple of days ago, when it comes to this sort of material, I can't trust the verdict of a reviewer who most likely thinks that "Guattari" is the thing that Philippe Garrel can no longer entends. Don't get me wrong; what I'm looking for w/r/t Film Socialisme isn't necessarily some extended ode to Godard's ineffable/infallible genius. But all this...it's just so bloody predictable.

"Solitary Man"

Okay, so right now I'm obligated to put my money, such as it is, where my ethical mouth is, as I'm gonna write some very complimentary things about a movie made by a couple of friends of mine.  I don't think it's a secret to anyone who's followed my work over the years that I've been buddies with Brian Koppelman and David Levien since I met them on the set of their first produced film as screenwriters, Rounders, back in 1998. And I hope I'm not being too...is "obsequious" the word?...when I further point out that Brian and David have been/are not just film-world friends but, you know, very real, very constant, almost-get-you-out-of-jail friends. Literally, even. (It's a long story. Short Bart Simpson version: "I didn't do it!" No, really.) Furthermore, I've got an intimacy with their new film, Solitary Man, that few critics have the privilege of enjoying; I've read the script (something I actually make a practice of not doing most of the time, I believe I turned against it after a traumatic experience with an Ehren Kruger work about ten years ago) and seen three different cuts of the film, including the final. Which I think is splendid. Putting aside my personal conflicts as much as it is possible, I hereby proclaim that Solitary Man, which opens Friday in Los Angeles and New York, is a terrific character-driven drama (with comedy) of the ilk that many complain is not made anymore, and that if you are one of said complainers, you ought to take my advice and check this picture out, because you will be very taken with it.

Michael Douglas scores what I consider a latter-day career high with his performance as Ben Kalmen, a one-time monster car dealer who's fallen into both disrepute and fiscal mayhem in the wake of a post-midlife decision to pretty much say "fuck it" to whatever once meant anything to him. He now spends his days, as his daughter Susan (Jenna Fisher, in as sly and seemingly self-effacing a turn as her Pam in the TV series The Office) so memorably puts it, "slutting up Lexington Avenue," preying on the local cougars, as it were, and trying to get a new business concern going. Central to that concern's startup is the influence of his woozy, stinking rich girlfriend Jordan (Mary Louise Parker), whose you-can't-tell-me precocious daughter Allyson (Imogene Poots) is applying to Ben's alma mater, whose library he endowed. Ben's palaver to Allyson about relationships-as-transactions, laid out over drinks during a weekend jaunt to that college (where Ben also reconnects with an old buddy played by Danny DeVito, and proffers crass but useful social life advice to a green student played by Jesse Eisenberg) results in what you'd call a grievously ill-advised liaison for the two, and if you thought Ben's life was a bit of a mess before the fallout from this, um, transaction, well, he's got farther to fall. And maybe someplace to rise up to. 

Kalmen's really a movie character for the ages, an unctuously charming slimeball who may have a heart of...well, not necessarily gold, but at least something not manifestly toxic, under his slick exterior. If you wanna talk about him in terms of '70s movies, pitch him somewhere between Jack Lemmon's Harry Stoner in Avildsen's Save the Tiger (1973) and Roy Scheider's Joe Gideon in Fosse's All That Jazz (1979). He's also got a coarse swagger that one associates with some of the anti-heroes of David Mamet, one of Brian's favorite writers. (While Koppelman and Levien co-directed the film, Solitary Man differs from their prior projects in that it's from a solo script by Brian.) But finally he is his own man, a thoroughly recognizable type even if you don't know the Manhattan milieus through which he imagines he's still cutting a formidable swath (and the moods and mores of which the filmmakers capture with beautiful, accurate, efficient shorthand). Even if you feel disgusted by the very ground he's walking on, Koppelman and Levien make you feel somehow invested in his fate. 

The film's look has a lot of clean lines and a good, intimate feel to it; the cinematographer was Alwin Kuchlar, who also shot, among other pictures, a stone favorite of mine, Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar. The picture is brilliantly cast down to the tiniest parts—Susan Sarandon is warmly Sarandonesque as Ben's exasperated but still affectionate ex-wife; Ben Shenkman's beautiful as a would-be Kalmen backer who has to tell the dealer no; Richard Schiff has a devastating bit as a private banker who delivers some unwelcome news to Ben; an uncredited Olivia Thirlby is enchanting as the bright girlfriend of Eisenberg's character, and so it goes on. 

The fellows' directorial debut, 2001's Knockaround Guys, had a nifty premise and an appealing cast, but its was frequently indistinct and less than sure-footed. Here the directing team has created not only a fully-realized movie, but a fully realized Koppelman/Levien movie—the kind of picture they were meant to make, the kind of picture that they got into the game to make in the first place. And I know it wasn't all that easy—some day, if I ever get to teach a class in editing, I'll bring them in to explain how they were able to improve the movie by a very large percent by merely excising a bit of data at the very end, and how fraught their decision to do so seemed to one of them until it was actually executed—but they really pulled it off. Good for them, and good for you, I think.  

Service advisory

There will be no Foreign Region DVD Report at The Daily Notebook today. Nor will there be a Topics column at The Daily Notebook at the end of the week. This is so not to distract from the very excellent Cannes coverage that's become the main brief of The Daily Notebook for the time being. And see how nice it sound, when you refer to it as "The Daily Notebook?" The columns will pick up again next week.

UPDATE: My Twitter followers should know that I am deactivating that account, which turned out to be a lot more trouble than it was worth. Sorry, I just shouldn't be allowed near certain forms of social media. 

Woody one-note

The writer/director and now only-sometime actor Woody Allen brought his new film, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, to Cannes last week. I'm not there, so I didn't see it, but I did read about the film and its press conference, at which the reliably droll former standup comic amused the crowd with his complaints about aging, and re-reiterated his philosophy of life. To wit: " I do feel that it's a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience, and the only way you can be happy is if you . . . deceive yourself."

As the filmmaker admits, this undergrad existential/solipsist notion has been his hard line for years. And I know that a lot of my fellow critics have taken Allen to task, particularly with regard to his more recent films, for being rather out of touch with the way life is lived now, and for the transparent disingenuousness of the topical references he'll occasionally throw into a film believing it will ameliorate something that in fact permeates the very atmosphere of his work. All that is true and valid, but the problem goes deeper than that. The problem has to do with Allen's crabbed, cramped philosophy. While what he's saying about life may well be true, one gets the impression that he's never bothered to step back and reexamine his perspective as an a priori perspective, let alone that perspective as it relates to what's happening in the world today. It may be true that every great artist tells the same story over and over, but what said artist also does is try to tell that story in new ways. Which is what made a movie like Zelig and even parts of Sweet and Lowdown so thrilling. And, by the same token, made a movie like Shadows and Fog rather embarrassing. But at least there was an effort there. 

I just finished the new Martin Amis novel, The Pregnant Widow, which I enjoyed a great deal. It is, in a sense, an older/wiser visit to the scenes and moods of early Amis fils works such as The Rachel Papers and Dead Babies—it's a story of "sexual trauma" within a group of young people in the summer of 1970. It also contains some characters and story threads that speak to Amis' current concerns about the rise of extremist Islam, or just plain Islam, in world culture/civilization. Concerns that Amis has expressed in a fashion that some might well consider retrograde, or if you wanna be even nicer about it, ill-articulated, in interviews. Said concerns, I'm glad to note, are addressed with quite a bit more consideration and nuance here. Nevertheless, the theme is an awkward fit—one of the salient points about the Islam situation today is that, back in the final flowering of the counterculture, it really was the last thing that almost anybody saw coming. But I give Amis credit for, you know, trying. 

You just don't find that kind of effort in Allen's work any more; maybe it was never there to begin with, and the stuff outside of its monotonous core was so entertaining and engaging that one didn't notice or care. But the fact is, for a very long time, both philosophically and epistemically, his films have played out in a world after the end, not just of history itself, but of the history of thought. A world in which all philosophical questions have been well and truly settled, and where nothing is up for grabs. Whereas in the world in which we actually exist, pretty much everything's up for grabs. Just ask Slavoj Zizek. 

About Nothing, part 2

I see that there's quite a bit of consternation, and now what they call "debate," over a rather vile collection of words assembled by one Ramin Setoodeh for Newsweek. Allow me to point out, briefly, that much of the dialogue—I'm thinking of Aaron Sorkin's piece on The Huffington Post in particular—rather misses the larger, more crucial point. Said point has less to do with what Setoodeh said in that specific piece than with the fact that Setoodeh actually holds the position he does in the first place. If you've ever read his work on even a sporadic basis, you know that he is a smug idiot of the highest and most consistent order. (Here's Setoodeh on Iron Man 2: "Iron Man 2 is so fierce, it leaves you with only one question: How long before Iron Man 3?" Dude's a little young to be working up a Walter Monheit impersonation. Schmuck probably thinks that using the word "fierce" makes the sentence read like something fresh.) And yet he is referred to by no less a personage as Sorkin as  a "theatre critic." Setoodeh's not a critic, he's a marketing gimmick, a novelty act, a staggeringly mediocre poster boy for a misguided notion of diversity. I mean, seriously...this is a guy who wrote, in his own defense, "if an actor of the stature of George Clooney came out of the closet today, would we accept him as a heterosexual leading man?" Um, whoa. I mean, define "actor." And then define "stature." I think George Clooney's a splendid actor, but I'd rather watch Sir Ian McKellan (who I hasten to add has been much invoked in this exchange) in most of the Shakespeare works I can think of, and I think Clooney would as well. Setoodeh also wrote, in a surprisingly weak bleat, given the swagger of his offending original musing, "I was sharing an honest impression of a play that I saw." Remember, kids, the claim of "honesty" is the last refuge of a craven fucking cretin. I know that I give a handful of my fellows a lot of shit, but man, my usual bete noires come off like Mary McCarthy and Otis Ferguson when compared to this clown. Setoodeh is seriously underqualified to mop up the floors at peep shows. The real problem here is that mainstream organs keep hiring, and then promoting, such specimens, because they're so, you know, provocatively contrarian. 

I love "Everyone"

Like a lot of other critics, I'm a big admirer of Maren Ade's film Everyone Else. (Above is a still from a particularly, um, fraught scene in the picture; that's Birgit Minichmayr with the knife, and Nicole Marischka without.)  I spoke to Ade and to my friend Kent Jones about the film, and the director, for a piece in the Los Angeles Times, which you can read here.

More music, more music

 

   

   

   

  
 

Songs: "Passport," "Dance Of The Just Plain Folks," "Hot Stuff," "Tears Before Bedtime," "Tango Whiskyman," "Lazy Old Sun," "Moten Swing," "Australians In Europe," "Oh Daddy," "La Faulx," "Interstellar Low Ways," "Da Mystery of Chessboxing," "Strapped For Cash," "Percolator," "Zombie"