Some Came Running

Momofuku Milk Bar to old-time Carroll Gardens: "Drop dead," more or less

Because "controversial" 360 Smith itself wasn't enough of an insult, here's the greeting the newly opened retail space of the building, an outlet of Momofuku Milk Bar, has for us on its opening day. I'm sure if more people grouse as I'm doing, some suave Momofuku-ite will issue an order to "lighten up." And of course who am I kidding as I'm at least gonna try the place. Still. Major eyeroll. 

Major medical

I guess I'm in a pretty good mood this week, as I didn't have such a bad time at two of the big-and-not-particularly-intellectually-challenging motion pictures opening this week, and thus did not feel compelled to give them two hard a time in my reviews of them for MSN Movies, but regardless of mood I'll stand by my verdicts on Wrath of the Titans and Mirror, Mirror, which latter costars, as seen above, a young lady named Lily Collins who's apparently the daughter of the guy who played extra drums on Eno's "Mother Whale Eyeless" on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).

The Hepburn-Tracy Project, #4: "The Sea of Grass" (Elia Kazan, 1947)

Glenn Kenny: In his autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, the great director concludes the section chronicling the making of Sea of Grass thusly: “It’s the only picture I’ve made that I’m ever ashamed of. Don’t see it.” Having tied ourselves to the project of watching all nine motion pictures co-starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, we were not able to heed his advice. And having not heeded his advice and seen the picture, my inclination to protest “It’s not THAT bad” is tempered by my understanding of pretty much exactly why Kazan didn’t care for it. It’s all up on screen, although the ten or so pages in Kazan’s autobiography that detail just why he’s ashamed of it are persuasive and compelling and worth reading. In short, Kazan allowed himself to be eaten up by what he calls “the Metromill,” a system that you sometimes hear about the genius of, a system wherein so many of the particulars concerning the film had been decided on and contrived before Kazan himself even stepped on the lot. Henry James described (and I know you and our readers have heard this a million times before, sorry) the artist as an individual on whom “nothing is lost,” and reading Kazan’s plaints—he was irritated at the horses Metro was giving him for this 19^th-century-set melodrama, complaining that they were too fat and cozy to be convincing as active farm animals—one feels the hand, understand the eye, of this artist, and he’s such a compelling writer that as he goes on about the difficulties posed by Sea of Grass, you empathize with him. And then he cuts off the discussion with a firm “Don’t see it” and that directive seems to carry the force of law.

But. As I say. We were obliged. And the film’s flaws aside, I have to say that what struck me particularly, at first, was how relatively daring this film seemed in terms of content. Consider that this 1947 film features a heroine who runs off from her (admittedly abusive and awful) husband and conceives and bears a child with another man, and is nevertheless, like, allowed to live, more or less. Not only does Hepburn’s Lutie do this, she does this with the most bitter enemy of said husband, Tracy’s Jim Brewton. It’s always bracing to see Tracy playing a bastard, although as is the convention with studio films about brawny, stubborn cattleman of the ‘40s and ‘50s, it’s made very clear that he is a Bastard With A Vision, yeah, yeah, whatever. And it is also odd to see Hepburn playing a character so largely tentative. Although as Lutie’s actions attest, when she ceases being tentative, it’s in a fairly big way.

I could speculate on what I thought Kazan’s relatively new-fangled notions about acting brought to the table with respect to the two stars, who had been doing it the Hollywood way for the better part of two decades apiece. (The actual age difference between Kazan and his actors wasn’t huge; he was nine year’s Tracy’s junior, and two years Hepburn’s.) But that would be projecting, to be honest. I remember at one point, Claire, you asking me why Kazan made a particular choice with respect to something, and I said. “I don’t know. If Martin Scorsese were here, he could tell us. Although actually, if Martin Scorsese were here, he would say,’What am I doing here? You two are in your pajamas.’” Do you remember your question?

Claire Kenny: I’m sorry to say, GK, I don’t remember my question. What I do remember is a lot of sitting on the sofa and moaning “Lord, when will this thing ever end?” For that reason I’m hard-pressed to explain why—but nonetheless compelled to admit that—I so thoroughly disobeyed Kazan by watching his non-masterpiece all the way through a second time, by myself. I’m still not clear how that happened…my intention in popping the disc back in for another go-round was to skim enough to refresh my memory regarding the smashing pioneer-woman gowns Walter Plunkett designed for Hepburn, about which I’d promised The Siren I would say a few words. And somehow I found myself unable to skip over one frame of a movie I hadn’t even much liked the first time. I can’t say that I liked it any better the second, but if it is in fact a failure (not really my place to say), it’s maybe all the more interesting for the nature of its failings. Among its biggest problems are length and scope—it’s both too short for the kind of epic sprawl it seems to want to capture, and too long for the relatively few major characters and details it provides. Three decades later, Conrad Richter’s novel might have looked like a natural fit for a TV miniseries, but it’s too trudging and unwieldy for this format—we’re offered glimpses of potentially rich conflicts and dramatic byways that are left unexplored, while we linger in scenes of extended exposition. But the outlines of something resonant and interesting and visually compelling and morally ambiguous are in place, and watching that promise sort of die on the vine is captivating in its own way.

And then as you mention, the casting against type and racy-for-the-era content make this noteworthy as a kind of curiosity. I had a hard time getting a read on Hepburn’s Lutie, and all that frantic, unfocused energy—was the nervous pitch of her performance meant to be a character choice? Though I don’t want to fall too far down this particular rabbit hole, part of the fascination with the movie is trying to figure out just what she’s going for. Hepburn’s characters are always grounded in her own sharp and relentless intelligence, and it’s as if here, she decided the character was more instinct than intellect, and had no idea how to work with that—her version of a non-brainy girl was someone with 25% more breath in her voice, or something.

I’m not sure I so much agree with you on the Jim Brewton character—yes, Bastard With a Vision, but I don’t think The Vision was meant to significantly mitigate his general awfulness. It seemed more like the ultimate expression of said awfulness, inasmuch as he was basically a land-drunk mercenary determined to keep his neighbors impoverished. It’s true that he had the almighty fall-on-your-knees-miraculous ability to identify the plains as better suited for grazing than farming, but then he also had a corresponding conviction that figuring this out meant that he deserved all the cattle. So though the character does have a few stray sympathetic qualities, he wasn’t especially ambiguous.

Glenn Kenny: What’s interesting to remember is that there were likely DOZENS of films not dissimilar to Sea of Grass churned out by MGM and other studios year in, year out all through the supposed Golden Age of Hollywood moviemaking, and the reason this picture is remembered at all is because of a particular confluence of talent it brought together. Clearly that confluence of talent did not succeed in creating a work that transcended its generic constraints and/or the studio house style, so to speak. But the collaboration seen in this context certainly does point to a sense in which our perspective on film history gets skewed. Necessarily skewed, I’d say, as one literally can’t see everything.

In any event, beyond the non-transcendence, and this might have been what helped hook you in on that second viewing in the first place, there are the incidental pleasures of the house style, which was responsible in a sense for the costumes you mention.  From my perspective, they have mostly to do with the casting. Melvyn Douglas is a pretty strong counter to Tracy; nice to see him facing a strong male presence, certainly spruces up the narrative. Also welcome are glimpses of Harry Carey and Robert Walker.  For lovers of older films, these faces/personalities resonate a particular way, and their welcome charisma and ability makes a slog such as this something less of a slog.

Claire Kenny: Absolutely agreed—the casting is exceptional, particularly in the case of Douglas, who makes trouble while staying just on the clean side of smarmy.

But back to those costumes, at last…Plunkett’s lovely work on this is particularly noteworthy for highlighting the dual challenges of a costume designer: serving a film and a character while also serving the body and physical presence of the actor. Katharine Hepburn’s lean, angular frame is not naturally suited to lacy frills or the calico homespun-homesteader look, but Plunkett ingeniously solves this issue by keeping her gowns very structured—instead of a lace collar, a pleated ruff; instead of a shawl, a trim, military-inspired jacket. A bell sleeve is balanced by a slender skirt, and the drama of more voluminous dresses is tempered by dark colors. This attention to details of tailoring, with firm grounding in the period’s style, lets Plunkett make Hepburn look at home even in white eyelet. White eyelet! While “Walter Plunkett aces period design!” isn’t going to read as big news to anyone who loves film costuming, a moment’s recognition, please, for the wise technician inside the artist.

And that is…way more than I intended to say about this movie, which I watched 100% more times than I meant to, and probably will not watch again. Right? We’re not watching this again, are we?

Glenn Kenny: No. We are not. Next we will treat Frank Capra's State of the Union, which stars, beyond Hepburn and Tracy, our favorite Jessica Fletcher portrayer Angela Lansbury, boiiii!!!!! And we'll have that posted in way fewer than eight months, we promise!

The special knowledge of the "browbeat" writer

So today at Slate there's an awful lot of content concerning the one thing that everybody there cares an awful lot about, which is Mad Men, and former managing editor of PEN America (!) David Haglund takes it upon himself to explain to everybody what "ye-ye" was, and the whole deal with that song what's-her-nut sings in French, and What It All Means. It's good to get these ballpark estimates concerning what constitutes socially acceptable droolerdom among the Park-Slopey chattering classes, I admit, but what caught my eye particularly in Haglund's very thoroughly detailed exegesis was the following passage about one Gillian Hills, who recorded the "original" of "that French song:" "In 1966, the year tonight's Mad Men episode takes place, Hills appeared in Blow-Up, perhaps the quintessential Swinging Sixties film (the movie was a surprise hit in the U.S., and helped kill off the Production Code.) She played an aspiring model who has a threesome with the lead character, a photographer played by David Hemmings, and another aspiring model, played by Jane Birkin. (Hills sort of reprised this role in A Clockwork Orange, in which her character partcipates, to quote IMDb, 'in an afternoon sex marathon to the music of the William Tell overture' with the protagonist, Alex, and her character's best friend.)" 

Letting be the whole "music of the William Tell overture" thing (like, as opposed to the "choreography of the William Tell overture?"); what cocked my eyebrow on reading was the "character's best friend" bit. Like, huh? The two girls Alex picks up in the record shop have precisely one line between them, the one about whether "Bratty" (the girl played by Hills, FTR) is gonna pick up a record by "Googly Gogol" or "Johnny Zhivago." That's it. There's no, "If you get Johnny Zhivago, I'm sure you'll lend it to me, being my best friend and all." I mean, really, they could have just met, each having spotted the same five-pound-note on the street and agreeing to cooperate and split it by buying an LP each. Or they could be cousins, which would make the whole three-way thing that much sicker. I just think the flat "best friend" declaration presumes too much. Also, I played the fast-motion sex scene back in step mode, to see if I could catch any interaction between the girls that would indicate that level of intimacy, and I still insist that Haglund is reaching here. 

The war for cliché

It seems like over the weekend I've read and/or heard the phrase "star-making performance," or some variant thereof, something like a dozen times, relative to Jennifer Lawrence's performance in The Hunger Games, and something or other that Jessica Paré did on Mad Men. Well, bully for Lawrence and Paré and all, but isn't the conventional wisdom nowadays that stars don't matter? That they're not the thing that, um, "puts butts in seats," and are hence immaterial? And, if the conventional wisdom is indeed the case, then what good is a "star-making performance," or "being" a "star?" Is "being" a "star" even possible, or desirablem, given this circumstance? Or is it just that opinion-mongers are so obsessed with the sound of their own voices that actual coherence, let alone consistency, doesn't even figure into their pronouncements at all? (Never mind the sheer utter unimaginative rhetorical entropy that a phrase such as "star-making performance" embodies.) I dunno, maybe Smash has changed everything?

Just asking.

Literary interlude

ERASMUS DARWIN (1731-1802)

Erasmus Darwin, M.B., grandfather and to some extent precursor of the more famous Darwin whose evolutionary hypotheseses were for some time accepted as law, was a Lichfield physician of some personality. His bodily and mental vigour was extreme, his eccentricities included that of drinking only "English wines," his temper was imperious and irascible, and he heartily disliked Dr. Johnson, who returned his dislike thoroughly: for each lion deemed the other a bore.

Darwin's grotesque verse, a critic has remarked, everywhere shows a powerful mind. The Loves of the Plants was published in 1789, and was followed by Zoonomia, or Laws of Organic Life, and Phytologia, or the Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening. The first was praised by Cowper, Hayley, and Walpole; two of these being men of piety and benevolence, the third a man of fashion. The vivid romance of Elize which follows is unique in that never before has an English (or any other) poet so clearly demonstrated the folly of taking the children to see a battle. Not only does the constant rushing about make them peevish, fretful, and overheated, but a ball may easily sink into their mother's neck and she may fall to the ground, hiding her babes within her blood-stained vest. The agony of the warrior after finishing the battle is graphically conveyed; yet he, too, has a blood-stained vest, in which he immediately wraps the children, thereby staving off the inevitable rash, whooping-cough, and croup.

It might be justly added that in this age of univeral exploitation in print of erotic situation Darwin's tribute to the chastity of the Truffle strikes a welcome note. His respiring lampreys will probably arouse little emotion in a generation to whom similar embraces have become, by assiduous contemplation of American superfilm, a commonplace.

—from The Stuffed Owl, An Anthology of Bad Verse, selected and arranged by D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, 1930

The golden age of inappropriate behavior in movie theaters

What follows below in a different typeface is excerpted from a post I wrote for my old blog at Premiere, "In The Company Of Glenn," apropos the opening of the I-still-think-rather-delightful motion picture Grindhouse. The post was called "My Grindhouse Days" and you can read the whole thing here. 

I’ve seen a lot of seedy movies in a lot of seedy venues in my time, but the so-called grindhouse that looms largest in my memory is the Plaza Theater, which occupied the corner of Union and Redwood Avenues in scenic Paterson, N.J. until it was demolished in 2001.

 

(Caution: "salty" language follows.)

I was introduced to The Plaza in the fall of 1977, shortly after I started attending William Paterson College, which was located in nearby Wayne. I had been taken under the wings of some of the older guys at the college paper, fellows who numbered bad movies as among their favorite things. Our little band’s ringleader, the late, great “Diamond” Don Markle, enjoyed nothing better than getting way stoned and, say, catching a 2 A.M. airing of They Saved Hitler's Brain on Channel 9.

Don sometimes rhapsodized about making his own exploitation flicks—his never-to-be epic Blue Water, White Kelvinator was to climax with the tossing of his old refrigerator over the nearby Paterson Falls. Back when Paterson was still a thriving industrial center, The Plaza was an art-deco gem. But by ‘77 Paterson was severely depressed, much of it a semi-urban slum. It was in such dumps that even its criminals were enervated—the one time I was mugged there, my “assailant” was a glue-sniffing hunch back who offered me a whiff of his paper bag, demanded my wallet after I demurred, and punched me quite lightly on the nose after I demurred again. And the Plaza had become a hole—I can’t recall the concession stand being open there, ever—that showed kung-fu triple features by day and horror/sexploitation double features by night. 

So naturally it became one of our favorite hangouts. The first bill we saw there, or so I recall, was Horror High and Dracula's Dog. Horror High was the real deal—trashy and stupid and inept as all get out, while Albert-Band-directed Dracula’s Dog (featuring Michael Pataki and a slumming Jose Ferrer) was dullsville in the not-so-grand Band tradition. A tradition I had little knowledge of at the time. (As far as the IMDB is concerned, though, I couldn’t have seen Dracula’s Dog when I remember seeing it, around Thanksgiving of ’77, as the IMDB places its release date as June of 1978. I can still hear Don, as plain as day, in his stentorian-announcer voice, heralding the glories of “Horrrrrur High AND DuuuuuhhhRRacula’s Daaawgg” which he absolutely could not have done in June of ’78, as by that time he was dead, killed by a drunk driver. Who got six months of license suspension, if I recall correctly. But, as we see, recollection can be a funny thing. And so can the IMDB.)

The following fall I moved into an apartment a block up from the Plaza, and forays became more frequent. Men of means by no means, my pals and I often found that a dinner of frozen ravioli followed by a joint followed by a walk down to the Plaza could constitute a cheap AND memorable night out.

It was there I saw Argento’s Suspiria for the first time, screened, in the fashion paid homage to in Rodriguez and Tarantino’s Grindhouse, with a full reel missing. The movie doesn’t make any more or less sense complete, incidentally. (And I still love it.)

But the Plaza was not regarded by most of its patrons as a place of discovery, a sacred vessel of cinema, or any such thing. More than once I saw guys walk in with blaring boomboxes perched on their shoulders—and they would leave them blaring in the aisle. The talking-back-to-the-screen was largely ubiquitous, and pretty consistently entertaining. One commentary during the middle of the appalling Nazi Love Camp Number 27—not to be confused with the appalling Love Camp 7—was particularly memorable.

In Nazi Love Camp Number 27, the young Jewish woman Hannah (played by the late Sirpa Lane, who previously starred in Borowczyk’s The Beast—if you have to ask, don’t) is forced into prostitution by the title, you know, Nazis, but before that, she’s in some kind of prison…and the corpulent lesbian warden of the place wants Hannah, but Hannah isn’t having it, the warden condemns Hannah to death, and at the execution site a Nazi captain’s there, and he sees Hannah, defiant to the end, spit in the warden’s eye, and this captain, who says he likes Hannah’s “spunk,” orders the warden to release Hannah into his custody. He takes Hannah home, stands her in front of a small, square, low-to-the-floor glass coffee table, and orders her to strip. She does. Hannah strips an awful lot in the movie, if I recall correctly. 

“And now, “ the captain says to her, “I vould like you to meet Axel!”

This was too much for the guys sitting behind us, who broke out into giggles.

“Axel!” one of them wailed. “That’s either his cock, or his dog!”

Yeah, could go either way. This Gestapo sicko was just the type to introduce a human female into his canine’s harem. Nicknaming his johnson seemed right up his alley as well.

In short order a big German shepherd, who could not have looked less interested, wandered into the frame. The actress playing Hannah feigned terror and started circling the tiny coffee table in a panic. The shepherd, finally taking his trainer’s cues, began to amiably chase the woman.

Again, the guys behind us were beside themselves, as were we. “Sheeeit,” one of them chortled, “my dog never had it so good!”

Anyway. Another story from the Plaza era involved my taking my girlfriend at the time to see Humanoids From The Deep. (Which is really, in its way, a pretty hot date movie.) In the middle of the film a couple of guys a few rows in front of us starting cursing each other out, resulting in the beginnings of something like a knife fight. Not much more than a few desultory swipes were exchange, but blades were unsheathed. The funny part was that somewhere during the middle of the exchange one of the gentlemen involved paused and looked up toward my girlfriend and said "Scuse the language, miss." No, really. 

Some ten years later I went, with another crew, to a Times Square movie house to see a double feature of Bad Dreams and Brain Damage. Good stuff. In between the two movies there was a PSA in which Rae Dawn Chong tried to warn audience members off crack use. This actually served as a sort of mnemonic to this guy sitting a few rows in front of us, who soon fired up his pipe. I don't know if Frank Henenlotter would approve of his work being consumed under such conditions. 

I bring all this up by way of apologizing for/rationalizing my inability to get what is apparently appropriately worked up about people texting during screenings. 

Images of the day, 4/23/12

Zangiku Monogatari (The Story Of The Last Chrysanthemums), Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939 

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher, 2011

Ferrara on the final day

A review of Abel Ferrara's eschatological study 4:44 Last Day On Earth, for MSN Movies. Using the above song, in either the featured Galaxie 500 version or the Young Marble Giants' original, might have spruced the picture up. But no.

Badass digest

Also, I'm super-tetchy, which means it's likely I'd kill you just for spelling my name wrong.

For context, see here.