Some Came Running

The current cinema, M-word edition

I think both Alexei German's Hard To Be A God (above) and Abderrahamane Sisako's Timbuktu are masterpieces, but they're also films that demonstrate the necessary elasticity of the possibly overused term. German's film, decades in the making, insistently unpleasant if not harrowing, replete with narrative difficulty and sleeve-tugging if not wedgie-pulling subtext, a meticulous immersion into an awful created world that's a mirror of our own, feels very much like a magnum opus. Sisako's film, gorgeous, quietly virtuosic, telling a tragic and at times harrowing story but also graced with moments of quiet beauty and suffused with an abiding wisdom that it shares with a subdued but entirely righteous anger seems "merely" like a story Sisako wants to tell. How much these apprehensions/intuitions have to do with the fact that German's is a posthumous film and Sisako, at age 53, has many more movies to make, is of course an open question In the meantime, I review both films for RogerEbert.com at the links attached to the titles. 

The German film's run at NYC's Anthology Film Archives is part of a substantial retrospective of the great director's work, including such wonders as 1971's Trial On The Road (further proof of my maxim that the Russians made the absolute best World War II films) and the harrowing, phantasmagoric 1998 Khrustalyov, My Car!, both of which I wrote a bit about here. I hope to write more on German (or Guerman) soon. 

The peculiar current cinema

This week, for RogerEbert.com, I explain why I'm not as crazy about Peter Strickland's The Duke of Burgundy (from which the above pretty picture derives) as a person like myself perhaps ought to be. And it gets more problematic from there, with reviews of the George-Lucas-originated (or perhaps the correct word is "misbegotten") Strange Magic, and finally, the execrable Mommy, from Xavier Dolan, who puts the English-language "terrible" into "enfant terrible."

A professional film critic™ answers your "American Sniper" questions

Dear Professional Film Critic,

does the movie American Sniper really “glorify a killer?”

Well, gosh, you put it that way, it sounds pretty terrible. But some outlets and individuals are using that term to frame the movie, so…

Anyway, here’s the thing. American Sniper does take the war in Iraq at face value, as in it was a war and that the United States was within its right to wage it and all that. And, you know, in a war, the body waging it sends soldiers, and one thing soldiers do, one of the main things soldiers do, some would argue, is kill. Killing is something every soldier is trained to do, I think. You know, I bet even the nice chaplain played by Leon Ames in Battleground is probably trained to kill. I doubt that he’s encouraged to kill, but he probably knows how to do it, and can if necessary. What the hell do I know about the military, I was 13 when they ended the draft and too old to enlist by the time people (none that I knew, though) would tell you it was the patriotic thing to do. Although come to think of it the Army might have made a better career than the one I’m enjoying now. But enough about me. In any event, given that Special Forces operative Chris Kyle, the subject of the movie, was trained and employed as a very specific kind of soldier, one who pretty much did nothing BUT kill, and because he did a pretty good job of it, by both the official record and his own accounting (which many have taken issue with, although the official record is apparently acknowledged as solid), and since the movie doesn’t really take issue with the notion that Kyle was what is generally referred to as a “war hero,” then yes, I guess the movie CAN be seen as “glorifying” a “killer.” But there’d have to be a lot of, what are they these days in sports records?...asterisk?...next to “killer” if you’re gonna go that route. I mean it’s not like he did all this killing in Iraq and then came home to face charges. It was all, like, state-sanctioned killing. Seems a little unfair to get all up in his face for that, no? 

Dear Professional Film Critic,

what’s the deal with the robot baby in the movie?

Did that bother you? I mean, I kind of noticed it when I looked specifically for it and yeah it was a little goofy but I don’t know. Frankly I’m a little bugged when real newborns get explicit exposure in movies. In the battle between verisimilitude and lobster-red naked infants squirming uncomfortably before cameras and lights I’m something of a conscientious objector. Although the tradition does go back quite a ways: I was surprised, watching King Vidor’s 1928 classic The Crowd again recently, to see that the birth of its hero John is handled with not just a real live baby in full view of the camera but a real live baby in full view of the camera if you know what I’m saying etc. In any event, word from the film’s screenwriter is that the movie’s first live baby showed up with fever, the second was a no-show, and that’s when director Clint Eastwood called in the prop department. Eastwood’s a real git-er-done kind of director. Here he explains that it was Don Siegel who taught him this, so complain to Don Siegel, you philistine: “Don knew exactly which shots to shoot. But he wasn’t rigid. He could add or change a shot at the last minute. I’ve worked with directors who are completely pole-axed if you suggest a change in a scene. I bumped my head while we were shooting In The Line Of Fire. To hide the bruise, I asked Wolfgang Petersen whether I could enter a shot from the right rather than the left. Wolfgang had a lot of trouble reorganizing the scene, because he’d imagined it all from the one angle. A detail had changed and it threw him off balance. This was never the case with Don. Sergio would have taken time to think and probably have said OK, but Don wouldn’t have blinked an eyelid. He believed that there were no rules, or if there were rules, they were made to be broken.” That’s from a piece by Eastwood in the invaluable collection Projections 4 ½ (in association with Positif). You should check it out. I trust I don’t have to explain to you who “Sergio” is.

Dear Professional Film Critic,

does the movie view/portray the Iraqi people as irredeemable savages?

This is kind of a tough one. I would say “no,” but I will admit that the movie frames Iraq within severely straitened circumstances, circumstances specific to the condition and the mission of its lead character, the aforementioned Chris Kyle, an American sniper. The title of the movie, we may recall, is “American Sniper,” not “American Ambassador” or “Civilian Outreach Guy.” Inasmuch as there even was such a thing as civil or civic society in Iraq after we were greeted as liberators there (and again, for reasons explained above, I myself cannot claim any direct experience with respect to any of this, thank God), from what accounts I’ve read it was pretty, um, fraught, and the U.S. Special Forces weren’t really sent to places that weren’t particularly fraught. And so on. Not to drag Boyhood into this, but remember the second stepdad in Boyhood, Jim, before he’s the stepdad and he’s just a student of Patricia Arquette’s and he seems kind of not an asshole and he’s telling the story about one of his tours in Iraq and the differences between the approaches of different squadrons when entering Iraqi territories and interacting with civilians? Right, well, that’s a whole movie right there. And the experience of a special forces operative, I think—and this goes back to the first question—has to do with touching down and securing areas wherein and from which you are only supposed to kill. Notice I’m not saying “kill bad guys.” I’m not here to make judgments. But, no, it’s true—the movie doesn’t feature many Iraqi nice guys or even recognizably regular Iraqis. There’s one who’s particularly holy-shit-inducing in his malevolence, and is pitted against a very fearful native of the country who has cooperated with the Americans. These depictions, to my eye, are conceptualized toward conveying the mind-melting hell of violent conflict that is the everyday working world for the title character, rather than a programmatic attempt to get the audience hissing at an entire race of people as villains. The perspective is, I admit, narrow, but as someone who likes the film, I want to believe it’s necessarily so. A friend who disagrees is reminded of Alan Dershowitz’s heinous 2006 Los Angeles Times op-ed piece titled “’Civilian Casualty? That’s A Gray Area.” 

Maybe "Selma" is too smart to be an Oscar movie anyway

 

When I saw Ava DuVernay’s Selma last December, I, like many other critics, was terrifically taken with it. And I was also a little surprised. I was not surprised that it was good—DuVernay’s 2012 Middle of Nowhere demonstrated she had both considerable talent and considerable perspective—but at the way it was good. DuVernay stuck to her metaphorical guns with respect to perspective and declined to deliver a Great Man biopic. Instead she wove a drama of considerable intelligence, empathy, and analytical chops. She made a film sufficiently unconventional so as to be called radical, a film whose style—or perhaps the better word for what I mean is “mode”—I thought, owed more to Steven Soderbergh’s Che than it did to Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi.

Right-wing Internet gadfly John Nolte probably hit the nails on the heads of  hundreds of voting AMPAS members when he wrote, on Twitter, “Selma's biggest problem is that it just doesn't soar at the end. You wait for that emotional release. It never comes. Real failure.” This is an interesting point, for a number of reasons, one of which would arguably center around the request “Define ‘soar’.” (It would be in poor taste for me to speculate as to what kind of film with Martin Luther King as its central character would “soar” for Nolte, whose Twitter feed after the quoted observation has since, as of this writing, been dedicated to all-caps yelling at Ava DuVernay fans about how Martin Scorsese didn’t get an Oscar for Raging Bull either and how they should just shut up.) But Nolte’s not exactly wrong. I was moved by Selma, and by its ending, but that ending, which breaks away from the staged drama of the march and the speech from Martin Luther King  (David Oyelowo) to intercut actual documentary footage of the events and people. It’s a stirring moment, yes, but it’s a distinctly anti-manipulative one. Instead of using cinematic craft and guile to provide a you-are-there feel, and then perhaps to force an idea of being transported on the viewer, the movie steps back and says “this happened.” Your “emotional release” may vary—as I said, I myself was moved—but the movie’s sense of integrity eschews a particular kind of sentimentality. It won’t indulge deceit.

"I find it hilarious that most of the stuff being written about movies is how conventional they are, and then you have people [...] upset that something's not conventional," Steven Soderbergh remarked at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008, responding to some critical slings and arrows hurled at Che when it played there that May. (Soderbergh would take a form of revenge against critics later that year, hiring an actual walrus to give an unflattering portrayal of an escort-reviewer in his 2009 release The Girlfriend Experience.) I imagine that there is if not upset, at least a fair amount of discomfort concerning the unconventional aspects of Selma within the more barnacle-crusted ranks of the Academy. As for the movie’s alleged smear of  Lyndon Johnson: whether it is one or not, and its actual extent if it is one, is arguable. But I thought it was within DuVernay’s rights, as an artist and maybe particularly as a black artist, to have Johnson’s character stand in for some particular manifestations of white fear. Johnson’s mild resentment at King’s insistence, as depicted in the film, is revelatory. It’s also rather funny—a good bit—that Johnson decides to act as King has asked largely because Johnson becomes more pissed off at George Wallace than he has been, or ever gets, with King. Whether this is factually true or not is less important in this film’s scheme than not just the dramatic truth of the scenes themselves, but also the truth the scenes demonstrate. Truth about how history, or rather, what we come to see as “History,” is made; almost by accident, pivoted on the pettiest of motivations, perhaps. Similarly, DuVernay’s conception of King seems very much informed by, among other things, what for lack of a better term I’ll call her female tolerance. Clearly DuVernay and her film admire King, but Selma doesn’t quite worship him. It’s not just a matter of acknowledging his flaws and failings as a husband, or depicting him smoking a cigarette while composing a difficult letter. There’s a larger, more intellectual dynamic at work here too. It’s seen in the way DuVernay insists that King, while the most publicly prominent leader of the Civil Rights movement, was not the SOLE leader of it. DuVernay’s careful staging of tactics meetings, her vividly limned portraits of younger figures such as John Lewis, even the single scene in which Malcolm X appears, all stress the value of collective action—that is, the importance of the Civil Rights movement as a movement. And here too the movie resists sentimentality. Not only that, it suggests a continuity and sounds, implicitly, a call to action. Call-to-action movies are not the sort of thing the Academy enjoys. It likes a nice neat social justice movie that sits back and says “problem solved” after the Great Man at its center has done his work. Or, in the case of the aforementioned Gandhi, says “isn’t it a shame things went so wrong, too bad nothing really can be done.” Selma is not just a movie about getting a job done, it’s about thinking things through, and it very often depicts its characters thinking things through. There’s nothing to which Old Hollywood is more hostile than actual thought, except maybe its cinematic depiction. And yes, I know that movies about Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking also got nominated for Best Picture Oscars. But those movies are hardly concerned with thought. 

Anita Ekberg and something that's probably not the Kuleshov Effect

Against Jerry Lewis in Hollywood Or Bust, Frank Tashlin, 1956.

 

Ekberg, who died yesterday at age 83, is the first of Bob Dylan's "Country'll Grow" trinity to shuffle off this mortal coil. To call her the poster girl for the Male Gaze is both somewhat apt and entirely reductive. Nevertheless, here is a rendering of her mouth as it appears on a giant advertisement for Call Me Bwana in From Russia With Love.

Back to the well

Ricardo Montalban in Battleground.

For some reason, I thought that it might be fun over the Christmas holiday to give myself more work. With little to nothing going on in terms of “real” work during this period, I figured I’d go on a sort of cinema vacation: revisit a group of films just for the hell of it. Actually, only partially for the hell of it; I thought, the better to revive the enthusiasms that led me to write about motion pictures in the first place, I’d revisit pictures that were essential to the formation of my sensibility. A rather mordant sensibility, it turns out. What’s up with that? I was crazy about movies for a very long time before I even began to conceive of forming a critical apparatus with which to deal with them, but I knew from almost right off the bat (the first movie I remember watching in its entirety was The Haunting) what I wanted from movies. I did not go to cinema in search of beings akin to me (God forbid that, in fact), but I was not looking for a non-mindful form of  “escape;” rather, I wanted intoxicants, narcotics. This is one reason why, whenever I am compiling some kind of “greatest ever” movies list in private, I sometimes have to remind myself about, say, Rules of the Game. A great work of art but not one that affected me in the same way as The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, if you get what I’m saying.

This was not a hard rule regarding my selection, though. As you’ll see, there was a Current Events Pretext for picking one film, and the World War II movie popped into my head via a stray social media remark from my friend Tom Carson. As for the others, though, they were/are each in some way parts of my personal pantheon, other people’s work that nevertheless hangs in The Museum Of Me. Would spending time with them invigorate my enthusiasm for The Work? Interesting question. Below are the observations I made on each of them.

King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack [and Willis O’Brien], 1933)

The movie seems a lot less innocent the older it, and I, get. Not that this is a source of great concern to me; in a sense I find its relentless malevolent lurid sensationalism kind of admirable, and I understand why some of the Surrealists did too. It’s also funny in the way the diegesis begins with a heap of delightful idiomatic sassy Pre-Code dialogue (“I go out and sweat blood to make a swell picture,” etc.) and then a long central section of the movie leading up to Kong’s rout of Skull Island seems to have literally nothing on the soundtrack but harsh screams and animal noises and the crackle of Kong breaking that dead dinosaur’s jaw. And yes, of course the movie is a complete mess of racialism. I wondered, idly, as I watched, the extent to which the completely African-American-free depiction of Manhattan was actually calculated. Also noteworthy was how the giant animatronic Kong head used in close-ups is an entirely different character from Willis O’Brien’s clearly more beloved full-body model Kong.

The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940)

I picked this because why not, given all the chatter about The Interview and the comparisons (specious, it can confidently be said even if one hasn’t seen The Interview, which I haven’t) and all that. Ron Rosenbaum hates this movie, considering it both arrogant and a squandered opportunity. By the same token, as much of a genius as Chaplin was, I imagine he’d have to be even more of a genius and something of a saint in order, by 1938, to perceive Hitler in a position of utter detachment from his own (Chaplin’s, that is) ego. (Note this observation from around the same year, in the Spectator, cited in David Robinson’s biography of Chaplin: “In Herr Hitler the angel [i.e. Chaplin] has become a devil. The soleless boots have become Reitstiefel; the shapeless trousers, riding breeches; the cane, a riding crop; the bowler, a forage cap. The Tramp has become a storm trooper; only the moustache is the same.”)

It is almost impossible for anyone alive today to imagine a pre-Holocaust Hitler, but that is, for better or worse, the Hitler Chaplin was addressing with his film, and that combined with Chaplin’s ego-driven indignation at the effrontery of this character are large parts of what make the film fall flat, seen today. Another problem is that while Chaplin was great at parables he’s not that good with satire (“kill off the Jews…wipe out the brunettes,” ugh) and, as smart as he was, he wasn’t quite what you call an intellectual. His ambition, which in this film includes the desire (slight, admittedly) to be seen as one, wreak havoc with his better artistic instincts here; a sinking feeling intrudes as one endures the painfully unfunny Great War prologue. Interestingly enough, the movie only begins to find its footing when Paulette Goddard shows up. There is no other film about which this can be said, I think. (Not to disrespect Miss Goddard, mind you.) Roberto Rossellini called Chaplin’s much-maligned 1957 A King In New York “the film of a free man,” this, too, is the film of a free man, albeit a free man flailing.  Certain of its infelicities are kind of fascination: Chaplin’s Mack Sennett-derived conception of storm troopers has some interesting side effects, one of them being that Billy Gilbert makes more sense here than he does in His Girl Friday. For all that…I do find the movie’s closing speech strangely stirring, and I felt (that is, registered) Chaplin’s desire to be sincere in an almost awkward way as I took these notes from it:  “The power they took from the people will return to the people…you are not machines…you have the love of humanity in your hearts…don’t fight for slavery…the power to create happiness…”

Battleground (William Wellman, 1949)

This sketch of the siege of Bastogne is a great stealth Christmas film, and also a marvelous kind of “hang out film” despite the context being one that you’d never want to hang out in. Atmospheric, quiet, almost no “plot.” Equal measures of lyricism (Montalban’s character, Rodrigues, has never seen snow before), warmth, and dread. Even the seemingly manufactured-for-uplift coda (sounding what Paul Fussell called the “one optimistic and morale-sustaining voice” of the Hollywood WWII film) is handled in a downbeat, matter-of-fact fashion. There are remarkable performances from all the members of what Jeanine Basinger dubbed “the universal platoon.”

Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

In its levels of detail and immersion, possibly the most convincingly novelistic movie ever made. How did they do all that action stuff in that rain (real or manufactured as it might have been)?

Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)

All things considered, maybe I shoulda watched The Murderer Lives At Number 21, a much earlier Clouzot picture I haven’t seen before. Not that this was bad, not at all, but it didn’t hit me in the way I was hoping. And anyway, the whole point of this exercise was to watch stuff I HAD seen before.  Despite it coming after Wages of Fear, Diabolique has stretches in which if feels way less assured. A good deal of the French Provincial stuff is really kind of cringe inducing, e.g. the innkeeper’s histrionics when the clanging of the pipes is making it impossible for him to hear his radio show. Jesus. The point’s supposed to be one of suspense: is he going to get so mad that he’s gonna go upstairs and see S. Signoret and V. Clouzot with a dead guy in the filled tub? Instead Clouzot lets Nöel Roquevert make a full-fledged “comedy” routine out of it.  Hitchcock would have never allowed such a thing, which is one reason Hitchcock’s a consistently/demonstrably better director than Clouzot. Still. There’s some pretty strong stuff here. What are you gonna do.

Belle de jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)

I believe J. Hoberman has called this “a perfect film” and he is indeed correct. Not only is there nothing wrong with it, there’s everything right with it. So much is going on, and yet all of it seems effortless, comfortable in mastery and drollery. The choppiness of the cuts in the opening “dream” sequence is bracing (and reminiscent of the dedication ceremony scene in L’age d’or somehow) but also weirdly sets the film’s fluidity of tone. Also noteworthy:  the way Buñuel both sends up and respects the prerogatives of the “women’s picture” and/or melodrama. It’s kind of staggering, too, especially given Buñuel’s admitted delight in indulging his own kinks/fetishes here, how non-“masculine” or macho the film is. In a sense the auteur is like Flaubert, and not just in a “Madame Bovary, ç’est moi” way. Part of it is his refusal to be heavy-handed, as in the way he cuts from a client of Severine’s discovering “you like the rough stuff” to a shot of Mme Anais and her girls playing gin rummy. (I don’t imagine you will find anything even vaguely equivalent to this transition in the film of Fifty Shades of Derp.) I love how the buzzing box brandished by the nonsense-speaking Asian client is treated as a throwaway, as is the robbery committed by Francisco Rabal and Pierre Clementi that introduces those two knucklehead characters. The picture is also full of weirdly numinous dialogue: brothel maid Pallas saying “I even dream about you sometimes” or Rabal’s “I’d slit my father’s throat for less.” Also: the elaborate dolly-then-zoom in the duel dream sequence. Clementi’s steel teeth. God, this movie.

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

If Dr. Strangelove is Stanley Kubrick on Mad Magazine, Clockwork is Stanley Kubrick on Zap! Comix, or something like that. Almost all of Kubrick’s films have a cartoonish element, but I think there’s three of them that qualify as full-on comic books of a sort: Strangelove, Clockwork, and Lolita. Right, I know what you’re thinking: my putting Lolita on that list is as quirky and brilliant and provocative as Robin Wood saying, “But Scarface belongs with the comedies.” Wait, you’re not thinking that? Anyway. The first fifteen minutes of the movie are just one in-your-face violation of taste and propriety and morality after another, and there’s no point in denying the extent to which Kubrick enjoys the spectacle. In John Baxter’s bio of the director, actor Adrienne Corri, who was a social friend of Kubrick’s, recalled lobbying for the part of the victim of the brutal rape in the movie’s first section (I don’t recall that either Corri or Baxter clarifies why on earth any sentient being would actively lobby for that part, but hey) and having Kubrick respond “But Corri, what if I don’t like the tits?” Do not hold it against me for noticing that the, um, tits displayed throughout the film are all highly likable. In point of fact maybe they’re the only outright attractive features in the film. There’s so much here that’s dispiriting, puzzling; there’s an amazing amount of bravura, too-bravura, filmmaking done in the service of a vision so narrow and monochromatic that it’s almost…hell, I don’t know what it is. Things I flashed on: The frost-breath of Alex as he invites Billy and his gang to fight. The pan as the would-be victim of Billy’s gang runs off stage. The Pythonesque stylings of the chief prison guard played by Michael Bates. The shot of the lightning, very Universal Pictures…and Alex’s voiceover reflection during a Ludovico session “it’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen,” which may just be what the whole damn film is really only about anyway. 

Elke Sommer in Lisa and the Devil.

Lisa and the Devil (Mario Bava, 1973)

I loved Bava’s images—a coach floating through a menacing forest in slow-motion, Barbara Steele’s haughty-cheekboned grinning/grimacing face bearing the punctures of a medieval torture device—before I knew who the man even was. So of course I became a rabid fan once I did know. This 1973 vision existed for years only in a risible, mutilated version that still had plenty of oneiric mojo. As with so many International Co-Production Genre Pictures there’s a realm of compromise in which even the undiluted vision dwells, one in which the viewer is obliged to accept a lollipop-snarfing Telly Savalas as the embodiment of death and/or evil. His interpretation of the responsibility is largely…interesting, but I can’t get past the nagging feeling that he’s just not taking his job very seriously. Such is the puzzlement faced by not just this Bava fan, I think. On the other hand: one cannot deny the treatment of space that’s as acute in its way as Antonioni’s, the way Bava shoots the lovely Elke Sommer as if she’s a mannequin throughout, the way the labyrinthine plotting recalls both The Old Dark House and Castle of Blood, the late revelation that between Alida Valli’s final moments here and the climax of Black Sabbath’s “A Drop Of Water” sequence, it had to be Bava who inspired Ernest Dickerson to concoct the rolling-walk show with Spike Lee…and so on. Always just a magnificent experience, Lisa is.

I did not, I have to admit, come away from all this consumption with a sense of the World Remade Anew. I mean, I suppose it’s nice for me that I have such “interesting” taste, or at least taste that satisfies certain aspects of Cinephile Conventional Wisdom on the one hand and deviates from that in “interesting” ways which are still, you know, acceptable, but so what. There are a lot of people out there with taste. I was reading a piece by David Ehrlich in Slate the other day about the irresistible rise of Jennifer Aniston’s Best Actress Academy Award nomination odds; in that piece he describes the process by which things came to this apparently sorry pass, and refers to Deadline Hollywood’s Pete Hammond, who apparently got this ball rolling, as “a humanoid pull-quote machine whom the studios pass around like the office stapler.” A funny line, and possibly not an inaccurate characterization, but for some reason I flashed back to 2009, when Robin Wood died, and an Internet “columnist” wrote something vaguely disparaging about Wood’s affection for Rio Bravo, and who chimed in with a comment in defense of Wood, a comment that showed a pretty thorough conversance with the critic’s work? Well, Pete Hammond, whose current line of work doesn’t call for such appreciation, when you come right down to it. And yet, there it was. A few weeks ago I was in the midst of reading a pretty thick tome about a relatively esoteric branch of African-American music, which I had with me at a screening; the book was noticed by a guy who’s pretty well-known on the screening circuit and who’s something of a figure of fun to younger and/or more gainfully employed/socially adept writers, and God knows I’ve had occasion to have ungenerous jest at his expense. “I’d like to check that book out,” he said, after he had wrested its title from me, who displayed I suppose considerable awkward unease at having to conduct a conversation with him. “That music meant a lot to me when I was younger.” 

I remember, in Money, Martin Amis’s John Self proclaiming “’Confidence’ I now regard as a psychopathic state. Confidence, it’s a cry for help. I mean, you look at all that out there, and what you feel is confidence?” And I also remember, not in Money, the phrase “there but for the grace of God go I.” All of this was buzzing in my head after I watched my eight films, and before the events in Paris. That’s where I ended up after going back to the well. 

Rod Taylor, 1934-2015

In Zabriskie Point, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970. With G.D. Spradlin and an unknown actress. 

Actors as a rule don't get to choose their directors but Taylor had the appeal, talent, and luck to get him chosen by a bunch of the greatest: George Stevens (Taylor's in Giant, briefly); John Ford/Jack Cardiff, then Cardiff solo; Hitchcock, Tashlin, M.A., and...Generally Quite Good director Quentin Tarantino eventually. Richard Quine, Burt Kennedy, and Edward Dmytryk were no slouches either, and Taylor worked for them as well. I sought him out for an interview in my Premiere days and was told he didn't see or talk to anybody, so was both gratified and slightly professionally miffed to see him turn up in Inglourious Basterds years later. His entirely honorable and memorable career in cinema had one of its oddest highlights when he played John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee in Darker Than Amber, the same year as Zabriskie Point. Directed by future Enter The Dragon man Robert Clouse, it features one of the most insane fight scenes ever committed to celluloid, a ship's cabin battle with a bizarrely coiffed and VERY amped up William Smith. If you can find it you need to see it.