Some Came Running

On "The End Of The Tour"

The sagacious Jeffrey Wells has informed me that word "around the campfire" (yeah, I know) is that I've "had it out" for The End of the Tour since before its shooting even wrapped, and that my opinion of it now that it's a real live film is not to be trusted. It's true; I didn't think that making David Lipsky's useful book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself into a movie was a particularly commendable idea, but once the film was a reality I tried to go into it with an open mind. And, to be honest, I ended up hating it even more than I could have reasonably anticipated. So much that I sat through it twice, just to be sure. Just like with Where The Wild Things Are. 

The results of my consideration of the film are published today at The Guardian. Getting this piece out has been a long and painful process, but, contrary to what David Poland has implicitly speculated, it's not because I feel left out of the lovefest that's now being celebrated—inexplicably, to my mind—on the film's behalf. As if I'm really that weak with respect to my own opinions. No, it's painful because David Foster Wallace is someone I still miss. And because the portrayal of him in the movie is not a "tribute." And I hope that the phrase "ghoulish self-aggrandizement" sticks like shit to the bottom of Jason Segel's shoe throughout his shitty Oscar campaign. (In case you were wondering why this post has no illustration from the movie.)

GQ, as part of the aforementioned lovefest, put up a piece called "5 David Foster Wallace Pieces You Should Read Before Seeing The End Of The Tour." For the very first time, I was actively pleased to see a Wallace recommendation list that did not include "David Lynch Keeps His Head" and "Big Red Son." I've written about Wallace before, on this blog, and was interviewed about him by Jeremiah Kipp; the Guardian piece is my first professional effort on the subject. 

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. 

Birdman

Channing Pollock is, I think, pretty great in Georges Franju's Judex. In the segments in which he appears unmasked, he's got a stolid near-blank affect that is, I think, entirely apropos to the unusual revised conception Franju applied to the character—a somewhat puritanical, stiff avenger, and hardly an omnipotent hero. Pollock's mien is often attributed to the fact that he was, indeed, a stage magician and not an actor. But an effective performance is an effective performance, and Pollock deserves credit. As I write in my piece for the Criterion Collection's Current blog, Pollock never achieved international cinematic fame but he was a VERY big deal in the worlds of magic and nightclub showbiz. I've always been fascinated by this disparity, and the recent Criterion release of a beautiful edition of Franju's film gave the the pretext to explore it further. Check out my findings here. 

Below, Pollock as a jewel thief, and another iconic character in French pop culture of the time, in Rocambole, released the same year as Judex. 

A few words about "Robert De Niro: Anatomy of an Actor"

On July 28, Phaidon will release two new books in its Cahiers du Cinema "Anatomy of an Actor" series, one of which is my own study of Robert De Niro. The other is Amy Nicholson's look at the work of Tom Cruise, an intriguing excerpt or offshoot of which appears here. I suppose a good number of readers out there are familiar with the series, which examines careers of contemporary actors via detailed essays on ten individual films. Although we're still almost two months from the book's actual pub date (and there will be events around the release of the book, and hopefully some excerptions and interviews here and there prior to the big day, which I'll keep you informed about, both here and on my Twitter feed [@Glenn_Kenny]) I thought it would not be completely useless to talk a little bit about the book now. 

I now recall that I neglected to thank the filmmaker and writer Nicholas Saada in the acknowledgements section of the book, which is definitely my bad because he apparently set the ball rolling, referring an editor at the then-newly-formed Cahiers du Cinema imprint at Phaidon to me. I had an appointment with said editor around July of 2012, when she was visiting New York. She showed me a few of the new Cahiers titles, including Michael Henry Wilson's mammoth Scorsese on Scorsese, and asked me if I had any ideas. I immediately pitched a Richard Quine biography. "Yes, he is brilliant, but..." was the response, and then we moved on to the just-launched Anatomy of an Actor series, and I said I'd put together ten films of De Niro's that might make for a comprehensive or at least intriguing study. The ten films were, and remained:

Bang the Drum Slowly, John Hancock, 1973

Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese, 1973

The Godfather, Part II, Francis Ford Coppola, 1974

Taxi Driver, Scorsese, 1976

Raging Bull, Scorsese, 1980

The King of Comedy, Scorsese, 1983

Midnight Run, Martin Brest, 1988

Awakenings, Penny Marshall, 1990

Meet the Parents, Jay Roach, 2000

Stone, John Curran, 2010

There was some concern about my not including 1995's Heat, which I do treat in a sidebar; my logic was that his appearance in that film, while containing a superb performance, did not constitute a latter-day career milestone, so to speak. From Midnight Run on, a lot of, if not most of, De Niro's work has to do with exploiting his cachet as a movie star, a status that had never really been conferred to him prior to the Brest film. Awakenings and Meet the Parents, regardless of what you think of them, represent moves on a movie industry chess board, while Heat merely keeps the core contituency happy. Also, I suspected that Karina Longworth would tackle that film in her own Anatomy of Al Pacino, which was close to publication as I started work on De Niro. As it happens, I was correct in my surmise, and Karina did a terrifc job looking at both actors in her Heat chapter. (I should thank Karina here for her words of advice and encouragement on this project. Over the years in engaging her I have been unforgivably rude and obnoxious; one of the many good things about taking on this project was that it gave me an appropriate opportunity to reach out to her with an apology, which she graciously accepted, and I am happy to have mended fences with her.)

When word got out that I was doing this project (and it was quite a bit of time before I got the go-ahead), some people asked me if I was going to "take De Niro to task" for such depradations as Rocky and Bullwinkle, 15 Minutes, a half a dozen VODish titles co-starring 50 Cent, etc., etc. The answer then and now is/was "No."  This is not to say that I lavish praise on such efforts. In my introduction, after noting that in making Rocky and Bullwinkle and Shark Tale, De Niro was at least in part motivated by a desire to be in something that his young kids could see, I continue, "The main problem with Rocky and Bullwinkle, and to an arguably lesser extent Shark Tale, is that they ended up being movies that no one should see." However. I don't believe it is ever the critic's job to take an artists "to task" as such, or, for that matter, to offer career advice. I gotta be honest, it drives me fucking nuts when I read somebody offering "X really ought to make a children's film" or "Y ought to work with Z;" it always strikes me as smug busybodying, the middlebrow answer to TMZ coverage. What I try to do in the book, true to its title, is examine De Niro's work and his choices, and also to dig up some satisfying answers to questions that seem to torment some of his one-time admirers. But the fulcrum of my thesis has to do with how we mythologize great performers, and how in so doing we're almost doomed to be eventually disappointed in them. 

That said, I am certainly very glad the little-seen Stone exists, because once you get to the contemporary section of De Niro's career, good performances in good movies are thin on the ground, there's no getting around it. I would have not really enjoyed delving back into Being Flynn, echoes of Taxi Driver or no; as strong as its central performances are, it's eventually almost as sentimental as, well, Awakenings. And while in Awakenings the physical precision of De Niro's performance was a pushback to the sentimentaliy, here no such subversion is allowed to occur.  If you haven't seen Stone, I'd suggest you seek it out now, even if you don't plan on buying my book. It is strange, strong, resolutely unsentimental. My chapter on the film contains some terrific insights from Edward Norton, who was kind enough to grant me an interview. 

"Seconds" and the semiotics of Rock Hudson

Seconds was not a hit when it was first released in the fall of 1966, but I recall interest in the movie being kind of high in my household at the time, when I was seven. My parents were not what one would nowadays call cinephiles, but they did, as they used to say, like movies, and they kept up with them to a certain extent. My mom, like, I suppose, many women of her generation (she was a couple months shy of 28 at the time of the film's release), was an admirer of Rock Hudson. She also enjoyed, to an extent, horror movies (it was at her behest that I had seen my first horror picture, The Haunting, a little prior to 1966, on the television, on an evening when my dad was working and she didn't want to watch alone). Seconds, then, was a movie that intrigued my mom and a lot of friends her age because a) it was an unusual picture, a disturbing picture, but also a "modern" picture, a picture about what was happening "now;" and b) because its central conceit had an old person who hated his life undergoing a seemingly miraculous transformation into, well, Rock Hudson.

In a sense that conceit seemed almost a joke, and in the DVD supplements I've looked at on Criterion's excellent new edition of John Frankenheimer's picture, both Frankenheimer's widow Evans Frankenheimer and the movie's female lead Salome Jens discuss the pains taken to make the transformation as credible as possible, how when Hudson first appears in the film he's still got the white hair of John Randolph, and convincing plastic surgery scars and so on. He only becomes dreamboat Rock after the scars have healed and his character undergoes extensive physical therapy and training (acted out by the fit Hudson in baggy sweat shirt and pants). 

But it seemed like a joke, or a potential joke, for different reasons that it might to the contemporary cinephile or quasi-cinephile who's swallowed a lot of the conventional wisdom on Hudson, as in the multiple commentors on Dana Stevens' solid Slate consideration of the film who want us to make sure they are aware that Hudson wasn't much of an actor. Considerations of Hudson's acting ability (which know-somethingish types will forever continue to underate anyway) were not paramount to whatever appeal Seconds might have had; no, what made the Rock Hudson idea potentially funny was that it was in a sense too good to be true. This Rock Hudson was Hudson before his forced outing. The phrase "the man every man wants to be, and every woman wants to be with" or whatever it is, had not been coined yet (I don't think), but that is in fact the ideal which he represented to middle-class American pop-culture consumers. But at the same time Hudson himself, and the whole idea of the matinee idol, period, were on the cusp of cultural obsolescence. There's something about this fact, and the fact that Seconds was shot in black-and-white, which was then at the time supposed to lend a "documentary" or "real-life" feel to film footage, that added to the particular power with which the movie resonated at the time with the people who saw it. People who were not, as it happened, particularly invested in seeing Rock Hudson redeem or prove himself as an actor. 

Because the matinee idol did not have to be an "actor;" performing virtuosity simply was not where their value was located. As it happens I believe Rock Hudson a very effective performer who may well have been a good, or "good," actor, and I think that it's almost neurotic to preface any assessment of his work with an assurance that you "know" he wasn't all that talented. With the exception of, you know, something now rightly deemed impossible in hindsight like Tazu, Son Of Cochise, Hudson was more often than not entirely right in executing the particulars of each of his film roles. Above and beyond the amusing MacMahonist notion  (applied to Charlton Heston, as we recall) of physical beauty so acute as to constitute tragedy. 

But it is still to Hudson's credit that when seen today his work in Seconds can live up to expectations that his actual audience didn't even think to entertain in 1966. His performance is remarkably somber and yet he doesn't make it drag on the audience; he seems to instinctively understand that a brooding Rock Hudson is still pretty easy on the eyes, which frees him up to really brood—not go "ultry-sultry" but look as if he's just been informed of the actual existence of death or something. Some sources say that he made the movie at around the time he was just beginning to share the reality of his life as a gay man with some of his friends; arguably, this dimension added some genuine depth to the who-am-I tortures his character puts himself through. 

It is worth remembering, too, that sometimes Hudson's closest collaborators and biggest boosters could underestimate him. In the volume Sirk on Sirk the great director, who steered Hudson through several wonderful films, recalls choreographing Hudson for 1957's The Tarnished Angels: "There are some lines [from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'...] I read [...] to Hudson in order to give him an idea of what Faulkner had in mind for the reporter character"—the lines are those beginning "No! I am not Prince Hamlet," and ending at "at times, the Fool"—This is what I wanted Hudson to be, and I told him so: 'You are not the Prince in this movie,' I told him—'that's Stack.' To my surprise, he understood, although he knew that this meant in a way he would have to play second fiddle."  

"Real" orgasms

I.

I sometimes wonder the extent to which the much-celebrated Katz's Deli "I'll have what she's having" scene in Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner's 1989 When Harry Met Sally affected the sex lives of the Joe and Josephine Popcorns, if you'll excuse the phrase, who have seen it over the years. The scene is a classic for a reason; Meg Ryan's Sally hoists Billy Crystal's Harry by the petard of his own sexist presumption but good. But one reason the movie is as cozy a concoction as it is has to do with the fact that after the punchline, it never returns to the topic of female orgasm; the discomfort Harry feels after initially sleeping with Sally and then fleeing from her prior to the inevitable fateful facing of facts and return to romance has nothing to do with this particular facet of sexual or emotional exchange. Someone might expect, in the depiction of their growing intimacy, a query from the acceptably neurotic Harry along the lines of "how do I know you're not faking it with me?" But the viewer is left to presume that they've worked that all out. Actually, given the way the movie progresses to its conclusion, my feeling is that the filmmakers were/are hoping that you've pretty much forgotten about the whole thing. This is When Harry Met Sally, not The Mother And The Whore. The viewer is meant to feel pleasant feelings, not particularly complicated or uncomfortable or unpleasant ones. 

This idea as it pertains to comedy, and to romantic comedy, is changing—see Girls on the one hand, and the Hangover movies on the other (what they share in common is the view that pretty much all sexual relations are somehow predicated on hostility)—and it's also changing as it pertains to drama, and romantic drama. The ideas change, but the issues of representation remain just as fraught. Next to race, the depiction of sexuality on screen is about the most fraught thing ever, and right now it is as fraught as  it ever has been. And critics, depending on their ideological perspective, direct and/or unique experience, or just plain contrarian pissiness (to name just three of what could be dozens of factors) will unpack a given work dealing with this representation in sometimes wildly divergent ways. 

In 1969, expressing what he characterized as his sole major disappointment in director Tony Richardson's adaptation of his novel Laughter In The Dark (whose female lead's name, Anna Karina,  apparently amused him no end), Vladimir Nabokov said: "Theatrical acting, in the course of the last centuries, has led to incredible refinements of stylized pantomime in the representation of, say, a person eating, or getting deliciously drunk, or looking for his spectacles, or making a proposal of marriage. Not so in regard to the imitation of the sexual act which on the stage has absolutely no tradition behind it. The Swedes and we have to start from scratch and what I have witnessed up to now on screen—the blotchy male shoulder, the false howls of bliss, the four or five mingled feet—all of it is primitive, commonplace, conventional and therefore disgusting. The lack of art and style in these paltry copulations is particularly brought into evidence by their clashing with the marvelously high level of acting in virtually all other imitations of natural gestures on our stage and screen. This is an attractive topic to ponder further, and directors should take notice of it." This was in an interview with Philip Oakes of the Sunday Times of London that ran on June 22 1969 and was of course reprinted in Strong Opinions, a compendium of interviews and essays and occasionals by Nabokov. 

Since 1969, significant strides, one could say, have been made in the on-screen depiction of the sex act, although it would be useless to speculate as to whether they might have found favor with the notoriously particular Nabokov. Nudity is no longer so taboo, although the proscriptions regarding who may see nudity in films remain pretty strong. The simulation of sex acts has become more realistic via the use of prosthetics (see Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy, a droll behind-the-scenes look at the absurdity and awkwardness of a film set not unlike one of Breillat's own) and digital manipulation (by which means, say, an actress' body stocking can be handily erased). There is also a mild trend toward unsimulated sex. The sex in the early films of Joe Swanberg, while staged, is often not simulated. Martin Scorsese once said he didn't like nude scenes because they stopped a film's narrative dead; cinematic open-heart surgeon John Cassavetes also largely abjured them, perhaps for different reasons. In films such as those of Swanberg's, they are inextricable from the narrative. Although I continue to insist that the discomfort the scenes in Swanberg's films might cause in a viewer have little to do with Swanberg's intentions or motivations. (I continue to believe that Swanberg began his moviemaking efforts as a Joe Francis with a film-appreciation-class schtick under his belt, and that his current films are an attempt to live that unsavory fact down.) In matters sexual as depicted on screen, there's a continuing fascination with/desire for the real. Only it's not desired in the context of pornography, at least that's the party line. Pornography, no matter what it show us, isn't art. Pornography doesn't win Palmes d'Or, nor does it get its participants commended for their bravery. Pornography doesn't count. But why should it not? 

II.

Here is a passage from "Big Red Son," David Foster Wallace's essay chronicling the Adult Video News Awards of 1998. The character of "Harold Hecuba" is in fact Evan Wright, who was a writer and editor at Hustler magazine at the time. Not to potentially alienate any of my younger readership by getting too "Losing My Edge" on them, I can confirm that Wallace, writing under a dual pseudonym, here sets down the story pretty much as Wright told it (maybe overselling the super-decent-guy aspects of the detective character just a teensy bit): 

"Mr. Harold Hecuba, whose magazine job entails reviewing dozens of adult releases every month, has an interesting vignette about a Los Angeles Police Dept. detective he met once when H.H.'s car got broken into and a whole box of Elegant Angel Inc. videotapes was stolen (a box with H.H.'s name and work address right on it) and subsequently recovered by the LAPD. A detective brought the box back to Hecuba personally, a gesture that H.H. remembered thinking was unusually thoughtful and conscientious until it emerged that the detective had really just used the box's return as an excuse to meet Hecuba, whose critical work he appeared to know, and to discuss the ins and outs of the adult-video industry. It turned out that this detective—60, happily married, a grandpa, shy, polite, clearly a decent guy—was a hard-core fan. He and Hecuba ended up over coffee, and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obviously decent fellow squarely on the side of law and civic virtue was a porn fan, the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was 'the faces,' i.e. the actresses' faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized 'fuck-me-I'm-a-nasty-girl' sneer and became, suddenly, real people. 'Sometimes—and you never know when, is the thing—sometimes all of a sudden they'll kind of reveal themselves' was the detective's way of putting it. 'Their what-do-you-call...humanness.' It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors—sometimes very gifted actors—go about feigning genuine humanity, i.e.: 'In real movies, it's all on purpose. I suppose what I like in porno is the accident of it.'"

Below, although it is not in any way explicit, is an arguably "not safe for work" image of then-porn-performer Stephanie Swift in an early appearance, in a segment from a pornographic anthology feature, one of whose prime directives involves demonstrating the intensity of Ms. Swift's actual orgasms. 

Schnook

Ray Liotta, Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese, 1990

Henry Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hitchcock and actors

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morgan, a suitable case for treatment

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

An interview with Michael Fassbender

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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