Some Came Running

Dropping The Ball With Olivia De Havilland

In the late summer of 2004, I had the great honor of being invited to interview Olivia De Havilland for Premiere. We spent a little over an hour and a half in a suite at The Pierre in Manhattan, and out discussion ranged over a large number of points in her career and life, not including her musical number in Thank Your Lucky Stars or her strained relations with her sister, Joan Fontaine. And of course Gone With The Wind came up. I no longer have a transcript of the interview, but I do have the finished article. I structured the piece so that my questions were not included (I rather enjoy this anachronistic practice, particularly when more and more these days when I read interviews with performers and directors the questions are longer, more tortured, and more self-important than the answers), and so, Miss De Havilland's thoughts about the movie appear as below, in the article under a subhead of the film's title. 

The movie has universal appeal for not only individuals but for whole nations. I got letters from every country in the worlds. All countries have experienced war and defeat. And survival. They can identify with that film for, I think, that reason. Whole populations know what it’s like to flee. And then of course individuals, their lives go through great crises and events and disappointments and worse than that.

The film was beautifully cast. It’s a most remarkable job of casting. Vivien, especially. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Clark was perfect, perfect. Prissy [Butterfly McQueen] was perfect. All of the others.

It was an immense responsibility for the different actors. Especially for Clark. Because he had to match in the film the readers’ impression, image, of Rhett Butler. And his career was at stake. And, well—he matched the image, didn’t he?

I just loved the character of Melanie. And had wonderful help, both from George Cukor and from [director] Victor Fleming in developing the character. She was such a loving person. Of course, to play a loving person well, you become loving. And you become happy. I think loving people are happy people. Scarlett did not have that happiness. She had other emotions, but I don’t think she had happiness. Melanie did. So she was a beloved character and one that blessed me during those six months of playing her. 

As I mentioned, I don't have the transcript so I can't tell you what my question was, but I still do recall, vividly, how disarmed and surprised I was when she began talking about the film from the perspective of countries/populations experiencing war and defeat. And I thought, in all honesty, that her perspective was interesting and legitimate, and it helped me look in the movie in a new way, because for a very long time I considered it a movie about how awesome plantations were, and as awesome as they looked in the film, designed as they were by the great William Cameron Menzies, I took some exception to that view. 

And of course Gone With The Wind is about more than how awesome plantations were, and it is about what De Havilland was talking about, and I was happy to, when I brought up the film, let her take the conversational reins. I declined to interject, "But racism!"

One the one hand, this arguably makes me a bad journalist. On the other hand, why should I, in the context of an interview meant to constitute a career retrospective, hold De Havilland responsible, or answerable, for what was/is in fact a systemic concern? I mean, quite a few of the people responsible for adapting Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-Prize-winning (yes it did!) novel to the screen were not un-progressive in their politics, at least for their time. David O. Selznick might have been a garden-variety Yankee racist in his everyday life but he did not advocate slavery. George Cukor was a gay man. The racial politics of both the film itself and the people who made it are delved into in revelatory detail in a 1999 Atlantic article by Leonard J. Leff that I recommend highly. 

"I, for one, have no desire to produce any anti-Negro film," Leff quotes Selznick, in a memo to screenwriter Sidney Howard. I have no doubt that Selznick was sincere. But, not to be a kind of socio/psychotherapist, that statement also underscores how poorly Selznick understood whatever racism he himself harbored. Because there's no doubt that Gone With The Wind is a racist film. It doesn't merely put forth "unfortunate racial attitudes" (and what a very caucasian phrase that is), racism is in its DNA. It is not a difficult point to understand. Try a thought experiment: were you to undertake a remake of Gone With The Wind that would expunge the material of its racist content, how would you go about doing it? Well, easy, right: first thing you'd do is take it out of the antebellum South. Oh wait. 

 As Claudia Rankine points out in a recent New York Times Magazine essay, "Anti-black racism is in the culture. It’s in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system." It is quite explicitly on display throughout Gone With The Wind, in ways, as Leff's article demonstrates, that its filmmakers were somehow completely unaware of. But to acknowledge that it's a racist film makes many, many people uncomfortable. Which one could take as an indication of the way racism is so deeply ingrained in the white American character. I allow that people can have a meaningful relationship with Gone With The Wind either in spite of or without acknowledging its racism. But to use weasel phrases like "unfortunate racial attitudes" instead of "racism" is pure nonsense. 

I bring all this up, of course, because my friend Lou Lumenick recently turned some heads with his brief essay in the New York Post suggesting that Gone With The Wind ought not enjoy pop culture pantheon privilege. Reading the piece now, it looks quite a bit milder than its many detractors are making it out to be; in the time-tested tradition of Salon think pieces, it asks why "we" continue to embrace GWTW while deploring the Confederate flag. And then it says "maybe" the movie's best off relegated to museums rather than regular theaters for its 75th anniversary. And for that "maybe" Lou gets called a Nazi! Whoa!

I actually don't agree entirely with Lou. And I've long pondered the fact that in some corners Gone With The Wind gets the conventional-wisdom cultural pass that Birth Of A Nation doesn't, merely on the unstated grounds that GWTW's racism is arguably less virulent/more "benign" than Nation's. How virulent does your racism have to be before you recognize it as racism, I wonder? Because, you know,  Hattie McDaniels' Mammie turned out to be the best friend Scarlett ever really had, even if Scarlett was too Scarletty to know it. As if Mammie had any choice in the matter of her association with Scarlett. "Unfortunate," you betcha. 

So one may well be befuddles by the fact that cultural attitudes with respect to Gone With The Wind haven't caught up with those on Nation, but the answer to the question it brings up should be blindingly obvious: The ostensible Post-Racial Society is a contrivance. 

And I wasn't going to make Olivia De Havilland my poster child for that. Premiere wasn't The New Inquiry. As for the current Wind concern, I'm not really with what people think Lou said. I think it should be shown everywhere that people want to see it.  I think the secretive, stubborn self-censorship that Disney executes on its objectionable content of past years is craven and shameful and I much prefer Warners' practice of putting an informative disclaimer at the front of the content in question. That said, there has to be a cast of mind in which one can admire Gone With The Wind's portrayals of suffering, and of goodness, and of petulance, and of perseverance, while acknowledging, with eyes wide open, that the engine on which its story runs is at least partially powered by a particular kind of hatred. 

Growing Up Lee

Joseph Failla, my movie-going pal from the late 1960s on, and a sometime DVD reviewer for Premiere back in the early aughts, wrote me with some reminiscences and observations on the late Christopher Lee, which I reproduce below: 

It was my mother who first introduced me to the world of Christopher Lee when she bought me the Famous Films issue #2, CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN / HORROR OF DRACULA magazine, which featured both Hammer classics in pictorial form. Except for the cover art, all the pics used were in black and white, the magazine did, however, get across the unique tone of the films. Already having a background in Karloff and Lugosi, I knew (so to speak), I wasn't in Kansas anymore. It thrilled me to read a film in comic book form, in a sense this  became my first keepsake of an actual movie.

 

And this brought me into the orbit of Christopher Lee, who would have such a presence outside the confines of horror and fantasy that when the time came for me to widen my view into other genres, Lee was still there in full force. Although I was never quite able to separate him from the humble Hammer productions where I first learned of him, he remained a recognizable, charismatic and enduring connection to my own youth as my movie appreciation and understanding continued to grow.

 

To explain the longevity of my relationship with Lee and his films, the first time I saw Lee onscreen in a theatre was in DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS in 1964. The first time I saw HORROR OF DRACULA, it was on Super 8 black and white film, projected on a sheet in a friend's garage, even though it was only snippets of the film's highlights, it was extremely exciting to experience in any form regardless. It would be another 30 years before I could see a 35mm print with slightly faded color, projected properly in a legitimate theater.

 

While HORROR OF DRACULA cannot be beat for shocks, tautness, and the teaming of Lee with Peter Cushing, I may actually prefer DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE as my favorite Lee Dracula film since it's the most religious of the series, making the struggle between good and evil even more profound.

 

Lee was the best of all possible Fu Manchus in some of the oddest films made about the character. 

 

He was a great Bond villain in one of the weakest Bond films. Which led to him saying about playing a Bond villain, his only regret was "you can only do it once". 

 

A favorite Lee performance was a rare turn as the hero battling sin and depravity in THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, a wonderful flip side second feature with HORROR HOTEL, starring Lee as his own devil worshipping "opposite number" .

 

His expert swordsmanship was on full display in Lester's THREE and FOUR MUSKETEERS. It was here he seemed to inherit the same fate of Basil Rathbone, who also could slice up any of his fellow performers but was not allowed to win any of his screen sword scuffles as we could not ask for a more effective villain.

 

One of the great strengths of Jackson's Rings Trilogy of films is the casting, even down to the smallest of roles. But no actor was made better use of in this series than Lee himself. He was a most believable practitioner of the black arts, having demonstrated an affinity for such mischief in a host of prior films setting the foundation for a evil film persona in stone.

 

Perhaps now his involvement in the STAR WARS prequels will garner a little more respect for the much disliked recent series of chapters. I for one couldn't have been happier to see Lee join the ranks of STAR WARS in any capacity but his Count Dooku, while recalling his gothic villainy, complete with cape and castle bring more of a sense of symmetry and coming full circle with the original trilogy than any other element I could imagine. Although belated, Lee would now join his former screen partner Peter Cushing once again as a participating co-star, at least in spirit. 

Call Mr. Lee

Inveigling Suzan Farmer in Dracula: Prince Of Darkness, Terence Fisher, 1966

I don't know why I took the news of Sir Christopher Lee's death so hard this morning. It's not as if his face and his voice have been crucially intertwined with all the reasons I love movies, or anything. Oh, wait. it is that. But, you know, he WAS 93. Maybe I thought he was going to live forever.

One of the greatest pleasures of my professional life, hell, maybe of my life, period, was an hour-long interview I conducted with Lee in late 1994. I don't even remember what the occasion was, but it was for a column I had at TV Guide so I guess he had a special or some sort of hosting gig. In any event, I had been told that Lee could be a prickly interview subject, but that absolutely turned out not to be the case when I spoke with him. Perhaps he was in a terrific mood. Maybe I had good questions. All I know is that at a certain point I thought, "I'm not going to be able to get him off the phone." This observation was not a complaint. 

The most moving and surprising portion of the conversation was when Lee was recalling his friend Peter Cushing, who had just passed away in the summer of that year. Lee missed his friend terribly but also delighted in telling me the way the two would keep each other entertained in the down time during the shoots of the many films they worked in together. Apparently they were both keen Looney Tunes fans, and used to conduct entire conversations in the voices of their favorite characters. To demonstrate, Lee actually laid his Foghorn Leghorn impersonation on me. 

I'll let that sink in for a second. 

I also asked Lee about his occasionally misbegotten work with microbudget auteur Jesus "Jess" Franco, and elicited a rather amusing backhanded compliment from Lee about the filmmaker: "Not an untalented man, by the way." There was more, quite a bit of it, too much for a 500-word column in TV Guide (which my editor, cheekily and to my great delight, headlined "Christopher And His Kind") and I thought that when I could get around to it, I'd whip up a complete transcript and give it to my friend-who-I've-still-never-met-in-person Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog.

I bet you know what happens next. I lost the tape, and have never been able to find it. To this day, whenever I come upon an unmarked audio cassette in the bottom of some drawer and file cabinet, I pop it in my recorder with the small mad hope that it might be the Lee conversation. It never is. But I still remember. And I'll never forget.

Martin Amis on "Goodfellas"

Me, in my living room, holding up the October 1997 issue of Premiere. 

The actual 25th anniversary of the U.S. release of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas isn't until September, but already it is being commemorated; there was a special screening at the Robert De Niro-spearheaded Tribeca Film Festival, a newly mastered Blu-ray disc is out (haven't watched yet; I've been busy), and my proposal for a making-of book on the movie was passed on by at least a dozen publishers in the past year. And I guess others are preparing their own appreciations, and starting on their research; hence, a post last night on Twitter from New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, asking "Where oh where can I get a copy of the Martin Amis essay on Goodfellas," and calling me out by name, as if I were perhaps some kind of underground Premiere archivist. 

Well. I did commission the Amis piece, for the 10th Anniversary special issue of Premiere (cover stars were Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, and Kevin Costner, deemed "The New Visionaries," well that didn't exactly pan out), and I edited said piece (actually not so much—I made one suggestion for an amendation, via fax, to Amis' agency, and got back a fax from M.A. telling me to go ahead with it—the assent did contain a hint of audible eyeroll as I recall—and then I didn't even make the change I had proposed, but at least if I wanted to I could say I had done something), and I do have the issue in my not insubstantial but hardly complete personal archive of Premiere print editions. 

The nearly 20-year print run of the magazine has never been digitized, and it's tiring to retell the story of why that's the case, and of how much I despise the individual who I hold responsible for the whole thing, etcetera. Every now and then I'll be looking for an old Premiere piece—one of my own, one of somebody else's; turns out it was a pretty good magazine overall, and a useful historical research resource—and I'll find that some enterprising soul with a lot of time on his or her hands has input the article (badly, in many cases, but that's a side hazard of amateurism in nearly every sense), which is considerate. Possibly not exactly legal but good God it's the Internet. 

The question of who actually has the rights to digitize the print run of Premiere is not one that I can answer, although I've sometimes thought about a crowd-funding campaign to do it myself. If such a thing ever got off the ground, inevitably someone would approach me and say, "You can't do that," which might be initially unpleasant but would also force the issue: shit would get sorted. 

In any event, I was up at around six this morning, and Amis' piece is pretty short (the David Foster Wallace piece on Terminator 2 that found a home in a U.K. bookstore house organ and is reprinted in Both Flesh And Not had originally been commissioned for this 10th Anniversary feature package, "10 Movies That Defined Our Decade" [cover line: "10 Movies That Rocked Our World"], but Dave, as was his wont, brought it in at WAY over the three-to-five-hundred-word length that our format for the package dictated, so we agreed to drop it rather than shoehorn it in, and Christopher Buckley ended up with the T2 piece which was aptly brief and crisp; Amis' essay is, hmm, let's see here, a hair under 500 words), so I figured rather than go out to Kinko's or something and scan a PDF of the thing, I'd just input it myself and put it up on my poor and often content-starved blog. So here it is. Thanks for the bug in my ear, Kyle Smith, and thanks to my now-neighbor Martin Amis. And apologies, maybe, to the Andrew Wylie Agency. 

It’s hardly news to say that Francis Ford Coppola made three movies about the mob. They form an obvious trilogy, purchasable in a video three-pack. Rather less obviously, Martin Scorsese is responsible for a mob trilogy too. The films are Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino—with Mean Streets as a kind of poetic preamble or portent. 

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is essentially trash: gripping trash, but still trash. In Coppola’s hands, the Puzo novel is, so to speak, rewritten by Nabokov, and the penny dreadful becomes an operatic masterpiece. The elevation is drastic, and brilliant, but it isn’t quite seamless. Puzo was cowriter on all three pictures, and his vulgar romanticism remains a contaminant. Although Coppola’s moral critique is both intelligent and severe, a laxity in the script accidentally allows the Corleones to be taken at their own evaluation. These men are not, or not simply, the murderous whores of Mammon; they also owe allegiance to a Puzoan fritto misto of honor, blood, uxoriousness, church attendance, and Sicily. In real life, of course, the mob had long abandoned such marginalia. After the Godfather craze, ludicrously, obeisances came back into gangster fashion, as postmodern accessories.

Somewhere along the way, Martin Scorsese, or his subconscious, made a crucial decision; his trilogy is nonfiction, based on first-person accounts. “True crime,” as a form, always entails a certain trade-off. You gain in authenticity, but you cannot rearrange the narrative to give it artistic cohesion, artistic shape. You are left with happenstance and inadvertence—with the messiness, the loose ends and false leads, that attend any human life. Scorsese, however, finesses the difficulty. His visual logic provides a guideline through the chaos. And for him, anyway, the mess is the message.

According to Nabokov, the artist doesn’t punish the gangster merely by staging his downfall—a “tiptoeing conspirator,” say, with his cocked handgun. The artist punishes the gangster through ridicule. In Goodfellas the antiheroes blunder through a terrible anticomedy of shootings and beatings, of stabbings and stompings, their lives an unexamined nightmare of contingency. Coppola portrays the mob as a trade union of warrior capitalists. Scorsese’s hoods are sociopaths trapped in a category mistake. And they don’t even get the joke. 

Scorsese has a literary model: Kafka. The influence is most obvious in After Hours, in which Kafka is explicitly quoted, but it also sustains Scorsese’s vision of the underworld. Nothing could be more Kafkaesque than the central tenet of mob life, which runs as follows: This man is your lifelong friend, but he may want to kill you for money; you have to understand that; that is “this thing of ours.” In its dealings with the cosa nostra, Scorsese’s camerawork displays all its inimitable edginess and urgency; but we shouldn’t overlook the director’s steely moral wit. His goons see mob culture as a vibrant alternative to the schmuckville of 9-to-5. Scorsese insists, however, that they are money’s slaves and money’s fools. And he has them bang to rights. 

Ken Russell's "Lisztomania" (White Elephant Blogathon)

What follows is my contribution to the Blogathon hosted by Philip Tatler IV at his apparently ever-name-changing film site. 

My God, what have I done: Roger Daltrey and Nell Campbell (yes, THE Nell Campbell). 

I had rather high hopes for the almost universally reviled 1975 gonzo biopic of composer pianist Franz Liszt as I prepared to view it in full for the first time. Celebrity culture is, we perceive, even more over-the-top today than it was in the 1970s or the 1840s, so I thought it entirely possible that the film, directed by Ken Russell very shortly after his wrapping what would be his pretty-commercially-successful film of The Who's "rock opera" Tommy, might demonstrate a certain prescience viewed in 2015.

But no, actually. Lisztomania remains fixed in its time a two-pronged demonstration of both amusingly wretched excess and what a resourceful and fortunate mad artiste could get away with as a studio-sponsored filmmaker during one decade in the last quarter  of the 20th century. 

Ken Russell was a longtime music maven, one of exceptional taste and, yes, in some cases, prescience: he made a documentary short featuring Davy Graham all the way back in 1959. He gave John Corigliano his first film-scoring gig, for Altered States, in 1980. And so on. Even prior to his feature film examination of Tchaikovsky, 1970's The Music Lovers, Russell had an exceptional and idiosyncratic track record with respect to films on music and musicians, both documentary and fictionalized, largely produced by the BBC. (He cited one of these films, 1968's Delius: Song of Summer, as a personal favorite.) The film follows from the not inaccurate but facile observation that Franz Liszt was something like a 19th century rock star. (As it happens, the coinage "Lisztomania" was a contemporary one, invented by the poet Heinrich Heine.) Hence, one casts a real rock star, The Who's Roger Daltrey, to play super showman Franz. And, because he's Roger Daltrey, you have him flounce about with his shirt off quite a bit. You make an array of Romantic composers look like the after-party of an arena show, with plenty of vulgar and possibly anachronistic dialogue: “Liszt, my dear fellow—" “Oh piss off Brahms." Then you...

Then you what? Russell seems to have not put a lot of really coherent thought into his screenplay, and the film plays out like a series of Russell-lized sketches from Liszt's life, with half-hearted but ticcy pastiche largely ruling the day, as in a depiction of Liszt's child-producing years that see Daltrey donning a Little Tramp uniform, complete with Chaplin mustache. While his sense of story construction, such as it is, abandons him, Russell's musicological chops stay somewhat keen albeit increasingly deranged. Russell really, really, really doesn't like Wagner. The fellow first turns up in a sailor's cap with Nietzsche's name circling its brim, arrogant but nevertheless flattered by Liszt's attention and compliments. But he walks out of a Liszt recital after seeing Franz scatter some Wagner themes into his musical extrapolations only to constantly fall back on the teeny-bopper-fan-pleasing "Chopsticks," Liszt's big hit single. Wagner: The First Rockist, apparently.

Interestingly, it's Wagner, played with stalwart conviction if no particular insight by Paul Nicholas (again, I must insist that what he's given to work with would have flummoxed Daniel Day-Lewis), who gets the most personality here, hopping from petulant student to Dr. Frankenstein to Dracula to Hitler in less than an hour and fifty, while Daltrey's Liszt is a strutting mooncalf with a May Pole-sized dick. (That's not meant metaphorically. There really is a scene in which he grows a giant phallus, and his female coterie do a May dance, or something, around it.) 

One of said coterie is played by Nell Campbell, and she is in several scenes dressed pretty much identically to the way she is in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. See her in this chorus line, third from left.

The movie actually has a great number of what I'll kindly call affinities with the London stage version of Rocky Horror and its subsequent film. Campbell was in both, and her uninhibited work as the "groupie" Columbia won her a small cult that grew sufficiently to propel her to Texas-Guinan-style heights in '80s New York night life. Rocky Horror Picture Show was shot, very nicely, by Peter Suschitzky, who I dare say must have felt a more than slight case of deja vu while working on Lisztomania, to which he contributes many beautiful vistas  Not just due to Campbell's presence but the lifting of the Frankenstein's monster conceit. In Rocky Horror Dr. Frank N. Furter uses Universal monster movie methods to create his ultimate dumb hunk, Rocky. In Lisztomania Wagner does the same thing, albeit with a higher budget and more elaborate production design, to create his Siegfried, the hero of the Ring cycle and Germany's redeemer. The punchline of Russell's joke is that he cast Rick Wakeman, the prog-rock keyboard hero who oversaw the movie's soundtrack, as Siegfried, and dressed him in a Thor Halloween costume or something (I think it's too late to sue, Marvel Studios). Wakeman's kind of lanky and soft, nobody's idea of an ubermensch, and the first thing he does on stepping off the lab's slab (in platform boots, no less) is quaff a stein of pilsener and belch. Is this some kind of clever anti-nationalist joke, or just a bunch of drunkards taking the incoherent piss?

For better or worse, it's most probably the latter, and the joke truly curdles after Wagner rises from the grave brandishing an electric-guitar-machine-gun and shooting down cartoonish skullcapped Jews in a backlot ghetto. 

The pop-art trappings of this period of Russell film are sometimes deemed psychedelic but their garishness and incoherence are more truly representative of the alcoholic bender. Lisztomania is certainly a curious film, and very watchable in its curiousness, but it's ultimately a hectoring film. It's like you met a guy at a bar and he was telling you some interesting stuff—"That's pretty fascinating, that you should find a similarity between Cosima Wagner and Kundry in Parsifal!"— but then there's that one-too-many point that you now can't put your finger on, and suddenly you're stuck under the table with the guy and he's telling you his tab has run out and you've got to spot him something. 

Borowczyk, Bava, Hughes

I Feel Free: Marina Pierro in Walerian Borowczyk's Jekyll. 

For RogerEbert.com last week I wrote about new Blu-rays of Mario Bava's Blood And Black Lace and Walerian Borowczyk's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, two incredible films with a wealth of psychosexual provocation built in. So much so that I didn't mention how incredible both Blu-rays actually look. They look incredible. My friend James White, who's been a key figure in Arrow's still-ongoing Borowczyk project, informs me that Arrow won Focal International Awards "Best Archive Restoration/Preservation Project" just recently for the Borowczyk box Camera Obscura.

In a very nearly entirely different vein, I considered My Ferris Bueller Problem, And Ours, over at Decider.