Some Came Running

The trouble with movie stars

I remember the thought occurring to me well into a screening of, believe it or not, Milos Forman's 2006 Goya's Ghosts. I was thinking, this is Forman's most interesting movie in quite a while, it's not working entirely, but he's making some bold choices, and it's going to get lambasted, and mainly because of Natalie Portman. It wasn't that she was bad, it was just that she was so...Natalie Portman that her character had trouble registering, and her character was the real key to the film. And I thought, I wonder how this film will play in 15 or twenty years, when Natalie Portman's Portman-ness isn't quite so nearly palpable in the zeitgeist. Will the picture be able to make itself felt more truly by then?

I recall these thoughts as internet film writers the world over go slightly batty tripping over themselves to agree with an individual who they'd characterize as either full of it or an insensitive boor 99 percent of the rest of the time. I refer, of course, to Sean Penn, who tried to express to the French publication Le Figaro his misgivings about Terrence Malick's recent The Tree of Life without seeming peevish or that he was speaking altogether from wounded vanity or ego (there is a slight distinction between the two). I refer you to Richard Brody's ruminations on the statement, as Richard's post is both admirably civil and sufficiently eccentric to have earned the impatient dismissal of the renowned esthete John Nolte.

Whether you sympathize with Penn or not, there is the fact that with both audiences and critics, the announcement of Sean Penn's presence in a movie brings with it an expectation that Penn will not only appear in a large portion of the film, but that he will do things in it other than sit or stand around looking deeply perturbed. That he will perform Feats of Acting that audiences and critics have come to expect from hi, whether they be chameleonic or merely steeped in emotional intensity. Penn's is the movie star iconography of the master thespian, and while Malick's film does many things, it does not honor Penn's iconography, at least not in any conventional way. 

By contrast, Mike Nichols' 1965 film adaptation of Edward Albee's sensational play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? isn't just that, or maybe even that, at all; it's also or primarily a film about MOVIE STARS acting in an adaptation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Specifically, about Elizabeth Taylor throwing away everything that makes her "Elizabeth Taylor" and still being Elizabeth Taylor anyway. How aware was Mike Nichols of this? Very aware, I'd say; aware enough so that almost 40 years later his film adaptation of Patrick Mawber's sensational play Closer was a film about Julia Roberts talking really, really dirty. People who complain about Judy Garland having been too old to play Esther Blodgett in Cukor's 1954 A Star is Born are missing the point in twelve different ways, as the film is about NOTHING BUT Judy Garland playing Esther Blodgett, everyone else's impeccable contributions notwithstanding. Just as North By Northwest is Hitchcock making the ultimate Cary Grant film by Hitchcock. And so on. 

Ignore star iconography at your film's peril, as Joseph Losey learned with his almost impossibly muddled 1968 Secret Ceremony, in which he had La Liz and Mia Farrow enact proto-ur-Lynchian encounters with no regard for the extradiegetic resonances of the screen personalities, treating them as mere performers. Actually, Losey didn't learn, not right away at least, as he next made the ineffable Boom! with Liz and Dick entirely in sub-surreal earnest. 

As for Malick, in his latter-day films he doesn't so much ignore star iconography as he behaves as if it doesn't exist. And again, there is a slight distinction between the two. It's clear that he casts for presence, and it's pretty clear in Tree of Life that he wanted what Sean Penn's got. He just wants it differently. Which perhaps inevitably (or is that so?) creates a disjoint with an audience conditioned to expect, or want, a certain Penn-ness. Something not dissimilar is in effect with Malick's ostensible comeback film, 1998's The Thin Red Line, which was so star-studded, and within which certain of the stars made appearances much more fleeting than one would expect from such names within the context of a "star studded" film. Hence, the first viewing of the picture one might ostensibly spending an inordinate amount of time noting, "There's Travolta! There's Clooney!" and so on. It's only with several viewings that one can break through that. Just as it might take several viewings of Tree of Life to fully get past the circumstances of Penn's manifestation in the film. Add to this the fact that Milick arguably needs these names in order to get his films made, and that talents of Penn's caliber are falling over themselves to work with Malick, and this particular conundrum gets knottier still. 

The Hepburn-Tracy Project, #2: "Keeper of the Flame" (George Cukor, 1942)

For part one, go here. 

Glenn Kenny: I have to admit two things about Keeper of the Flame: first, that I’d never seen it, and honestly had barely even heard of it before encountering it in this collection. And that given the descriptions of it I looked at almost directly before viewing it, I kind of dreaded it, George Cukor behind the camera or not. Come to think of it I’m not sure why I dreaded it, since theme-wise, it bears a certain resemblance to a couple of pieces of political-sociological pulp of which I’m kind of fond, for instance, Gabriel Over The White House. Before I get ahead of myself, lemme describe the picture. The followup to the popular and Oscar-winning (for Best Original Screenplay, of all things; Hepburn got a Best Actress nom) Woman of the Year is not romantic comedy, not even vaguely. You’d think maybe it would, what with Cukor directing and a script by Donald Ogden Stewart (who adapted both Holiday and The Philadelphia Story for the screen). But no. This is a Great-Man-With-Feet-Of-Not-Clay-But-Potential-Fascist-Steel melodrama, with an intriguing twist: the Great Man is never seen. True, as it were, to  the film’s title. The flame is the heroism and ideals of the never-seen Robert Forrest, a national hero for we-never-learn-what-exactly. Forrest meets his death in a spectacular auto crash, and the vultures of the press descend on the town wherein his compound is situated, but only one, Spencer Tracy’s former war correspondent Stephen O’Malley, is crafty enough to make it into the manse, where he meet’s Forrest’s  widow Christine (Hepburn, of course), the titular keeper of the flame—or is she? Soon O’Malley finds all manner of creepiness under all manner of rocks, including a surly groundskeeper (Howard DaSilva), a worshipful uptight amenuensis (Richard Whorf, in a sinister variation, coincidentally, of Dan Tobin’s character in Woman of the Year, or so it seems when you watch the two pictures in close temporal proximity) and Forrest’s loony mom (Margaret Wycherly). We learn that at the time of his death Forrest was working on a project to…Make America Fascist. And the truth about him has to come out! But there are powerful forces working to suppress that truth!

The material, as you see, has a lot of contextually fascinating resonances to it. Some consider the film to be a pronounced critique of the isolationist politics and suspicious fellow-travelling of Charles Lindbergh, a theory bolstered somewhat by the film’s stubbornness in withholding just what it was besides wartime valor that made Robert Forrest such a renowned national hero. I’ve read a latter-day consideration of the film that posits the scenario could conceivably have provided some inspiration for Philip Roth’s alternative-history novel The Plot Against America. This is the sort of thing I should be all over, but in fact I was kind of scared that the film it would resemble most would be another Tracy-starrer, 1933’s The Power And The Glory, a Great-Man-With-Feet-Of-Clay picture with an excellent pedigree; its writer Preston Sturges pointed out that its narrative innovations, more or less ignored at the time, were similar ones to what Citizen Kane would be praised to the skies for less than a decade later. That may be true, but it’s also a demonstration that if your innovations don’t resonate on the screen, they don’t resonate period, and The Power and the Glory is so thoroughly pedestrian in its mise-en-scene and overall direction that one recalls it as a real slog. And for some reason I was worried that Keeper of the Flame would be that as well.

Claire Kenny: You and I are on just the same page here, in terms of the film both confounding our expectations of content, and exceeding our expectations of quality. I know that we both relished the viewing, and found this satisfying, and satisfyingly ridiculous (in the way only a really juicy melodrama can be), for probably much the same reasons. The main difference in the way we approached the film is that you were a far better student than I--the only "advance reading" I did was the copy on the DVD box, which left me with the same dread you mention, which I likewise shortly found myself unable to justify. You mention the pervasive creepiness, but what I felt more was suspense. We know as soon as Tracy shows up that there is Something to Investigate, but the big bad truth about Robert Forrest is a long time emerging--is he a wronged man who was killed by his wife's lover? was he involved in shady business dealings? is Hepburn protecting him or herself?--and the buildup is entirely delicious. It's then jarring in the best kind of way (although giant clues pop up throughout) when his secret turns out to be the Big F. In the context of the time especially, a threat of fascism surely couldn't have been much scarier, but it's such a high-minded plan to make fascism the villain of a popular entertainment--and since Forrest himself is never seen, fascism really is pretty much literally the villain. As dated as this feels (I'm entirely conditioned by the movies I've grown up with to expect the shameful secret to be something sordid and very physical, like incest or serial murder or a gimp with a ball gag in the basement), it's more a delightful relic of its time than a wilted old bouquet in the manner of, say, Woman of the Year.

Glenn Kenny: Yes, exactly. A lot of the delight has to do with the pacing. The themes and characterizations and their treatment are a, true, a bit creaky and antiquated and all, but the picture itself really moves right along. Tracy as always gives great Man-of-Integrity value, and Tragic Heroine was never really a problem for Hepburn, so they’re both very enjoyable here. (The supporting cast is also impeccable; DaSilve always gave good sinister grump, and could turn that into fundamentally warm decent guy on a dime; I didn’t mention some good early Forrest Tucker action, he plays a menacing relative of a character). What’s odd, or maybe admirable, is that there are not even subtextual sparks between them in their interplay (their characters do not become romantically entangled in this picture, making this unique in their canon); he’s all do-the-right- thing, she’s all torn-between-love-and-disillusionment-and-duty-but- duty-to-what, and they don’t have any opportunity to connect in any other way. Claire, did you find this alienating/off-putting, or did the anomaly add to the fun?

Claire Kenny: Well, I’ll tell you, GK, I actually don’t agree with the premise that there were no sparks between them—though now I’m starting to doubt myself and wondering if I saw things just because I was expecting to find them there? Definitely, there was not the overt romantic involvement of their other films, but I nonetheless thought that an undercurrent of sexual tension was inherent in the way their characters were set against each other: as an investigator bound on uncovering the secret Hepburn felt compelled to keep, Stephen was her antagonist; at the same time, as the one person in the world of the film with the wherewithal to reveal the truth that Christine didn’t really want to hide, he was her rescuer. As archaic as that whole damsel-in-distress/white-knight setup is, Christine’s conflict about her own role creates the classic push-pull at the heart of all romantic friction. I’d say the anomaly here—other than the fact that a real romance never comes to fruition—is that the classic Tracy-Hepburn battle is one of words, while Keeper of the Flame trades more in wordless stares and meaningful pauses. I was happy if unsurprised to find that they could handle this form of interaction just as skillfully as they manage pages of banter.

Up next: 1945's Without Love, the DVD of which happens to include one of Glenn's all-time favorite Tex Avery cartoons, Swing Shift Cinderella. Not sure if that will also be subject to discussion. "Um, pardon me miss, I'm lookin' for the dame they call..."

The Hepburn-Tracy Project, #1: "Woman of the Year" (George Stevens, 1942)

In late April, Warner Home Video scored a coup of sorts and put out a DVD box called Tracy & Hepburn: The Definitive Collection, which puts together all nine of the films co-starring legends Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in one handy-dandy package. A great number of the films they made together are not under the Warner rubric, so, like the recent Kazan box set from Fox, this is a bit of a diplomatic achievement. The thing about the Tracy-Hepburn collaborations is that, until I'd say as late as Adam's Rib, they don't look as if they were really approached as such, that is, as collaborative works by two distinctive artists; they were just films that had the two stars, who were romantically involved off-screen, working together. They didn't signify as "Tracy and Hepburn" pictures in other words.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Or I should say ourselves. When I got the box set, I proposed to My Lovely Wife Claire that it might be a fun thing for us to assess together, since she and I are so VERY much like Tracy and Hepburn themselves. But seriously. Claire did some DVD reviewing for me back in the Premiere days, and I've always been a fan of her writing, and her overall perceptiveness and sunniness and all sorts of "ness" informs my work at its best, I like to think. So, this informal project, wherein we watch the Tracy/Hepburn pictures and concoct, each week, a "dialogue" about the picture. 

The first picture is the first that Hepburn and Tracy made together, of course, the 1942 Woman of the Year, directed by George Stevens, in which sports columnist Tracy falls for "emancipated" highfalutin political columnist and knows-all-the-right-people gadabout Hepburn, and shows her the proper place for a...well, I don't need to say it. The movie happens to rank pretty high on our friend The Self-Styled Siren's "Ten Movies The Siren Should Love...But Does Not" list, and when we popped it in Claire, who had not seen the picture before, was curious as to why. It didn't take her long to find out, as our dialogue below attests...

Claire Kenny: This was not at all what I expected, and I’m afraid I just didn’t much enjoy it…I think you felt the same? I feel like I’m SUPPOSED to enjoy it; I know that it’s a “classic,” and obviously KH/ST have all the fabulous zesty crackly brainy interactions we expect, but there was just too much stuff I would have to overlook. This is for the obvious thematic (anti-feminist) reasons, but they manifested themselves in ways I wasn’t anticipating. I thought, if anything, it was going to be one of those things where the big fancy career girl is Just Too Uppity For Her Own Good, and he’s going to have to “tame” her, which would of course have been frustrating and off-putting. But this was really worse in a way, because it’s not just that Hepburn’s Tess is smart and ambitious and successful, it’s that she’s not LIKABLE. She’s selfish and inconsiderate and flighty, exhibited most appallingly in her surprise adoption of an orphan and subsequent disinterest in even the most fundamental aspects of his wellbeing. Meanwhile Tracy’s Sam cranks around this big beautiful apartment, pouting over being neglected and getting no time alone with his new wife, and maybe you shouldn't have gotten married after knowing someone for thirty seconds, Spence?? I’m not sure what we’re supposed to get from this—is she insufferable because she doesn’t embrace her wifely station, or are we supposed to think of her as insufferable by nature, and in turn think of this quality as essential to feminine success? I realize I should make allowances for its datedness, but it may have aged past the point of being bearable.  The ending is…meh. The slapstick element of Tess’s attempts to make breakfast for Sam don’t really work—something is off with the pacing, it’s just not madcap enough—and her implied assumption of a more subservient role irks. On the other hand, I wasn’t clear what she was going to do exactly—it seemed the plan was basically “work less, hyphenate last name, leave my slick apartment behind for this townhouse complex.”  Which is fine, I guess. No suggestion that Sam was going work less, but this is probably too much to expect for 1942.

I do give the movie bonus points for Tess’s father’s scrumptious country house in Connecticut.  I’m a sucker for classic-movie country houses.

Glenn Kenny: You got more takeaway from the ostensible content than I did...or is it that I'm just an insensitive male? Everything you're saying about the offensiveness of the chauvinism is entirely correct, but none of that registered for me as strongly as just what a logy, dry, and leaden picture this is from stem to (almost) stern. George Stevens at his best is, as we all know from reading our copies of The American Cinema, an auteur, but damn, when I see a Stevens film that doesn't click for me I tend to ask myself, where the hell is George Stevens at his best, because this sure as hell is pretty far from it. [N.B., that's merely a quasi-rhetorical question designed to conjure my particular feeling of frustration with this movie; but for actual answers concerning Stevens' greatness, you could do worse than to check out Raymond De Felitta's pieces about him at Movies 'Til Dawn—part one is here—and/or The Siren's recent breakdown of a classic scene from Giant.]The Hepburn/Tracy "chemistry" is there but just barely...it seeps through the cracks of the cretinous plotting (man, that business with the orphaned kid is beyond crassly lame) and only really comes to life —and here's the main thing I disagree with you about concerning the film—in the finale, which, content aside, is a funny slapstick bit that harks back to Stevens' days as a director of Laurel and Hardy shorts, and underscores the teams' core talents in the comic arena. It is, admitedly, almost completely out of place here, but welcome nonetheless. If I may be so bold I'd like to speculate that had Hepburn and Tracy not wound up together romantically, they might have never been cast together again on the "strength" of this film. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Claire Kenny: It's not that I got more out of this than you did--I think I was having the same problems as you, and the most interesting emotional response I could find was righteous indignation. Which is really not saying much--"the only thing your movie offered me, Mr. Stevens, was enough offensive content to keep me moderately annoyed for two hours." I keep thinking about your last statement, though, and I can't decide whether or not I agree. It's of course a false exercise, because we have all the benefits of hindsight and a body of terrific joint work to look back on, but I can see why a viewer in 1942 would look at this and see the potential for lots of wonderful future pairings. Neither actor is at all like any other film actor I can think of, of any period, and the combination of their specific talents and intelligences and weird rough edges is something that doesn't make conceptual sense until you see it onscreen. Even from this weak start, I see what made people want more. And I'm still not with you on the finale. Here's why: I think that for slapstick (which I'll admit is not my favorite thing) to be really effective, the environmental obstacles almost have to take on the qualities of another character who's in active battle with the performer(s). And for THAT to work, the performer has to appear to *believe* that the obstacles have wills of their own, and might win the battle--whereas Katharine Hepburn is not believable as someone who can't master her environment. She's only effectively undone on film by some kind of emotional circumstance; she doesn't read as someone incapable in practical ways. So here, she looks like someone very good at waffle-making pretending like she doesn't know how to make waffles. Stevens compensates for this with lingering shots of the wafflemaker bubbling over, or whatever, which kills the pace.

Glenn Kenny: Touché. I can’t say you’re wrong in your analysis of that penultimate scene, Maybe I was so longing for a Laurel and Hardy short by that point in the dreary Woman that I overcompensated imaginatively. In any event, the picture itself is sufficiently dispiriting as a viewing experience (as opposed to a subject for historical study, that is) that I’m almost overeager to get to the next…

The next will be Keeper of the Flame, directed by George Cukor. Stay tuned!

Arthur Russell, too fast for Vin Diesel

My friend Gary Lucas has posted an archival tape of an abortive recording session featuring the future Vin Diesel and the beats of the late latter-day cult figure (and all-the-time genius) Arthur Russell. Yes, my friends, it really happened, and you can now hear over three minutes of the session going down. As Gary notes, Russell's tricky beat keeps dropping out, as it were, from under Diesel, and the fledgling rapper has a bit of a hard time with it. In fairness to Diesel, it's a construction that would provide all but the most rhythmically sophisticated emcees a challenge. In further fairness to Diesel, as far as his timbre and delivery are concerned, I, and probably you, have heard a lot worse. Still in all it's probably better for everyone (excepting Jeffrey Wells), that Le Dieseldorf ended up where he did. Have a listen here.

Lien on me

My pals at MSN Movies had an amusing notion for a Tax Day special feature—a roundup on those whom several critics and zeitgeist observers consider "The Most Taxing People In Movies." I gave myself a particular challenge here, choosing a figure I am instinctively sympathetic to, but have been disappointed by during the past, um, decade. My selection/justification is here. Others surround my entry. Enjoy! Agree or disagree! Get angry! Or not! And so on.

An excerpt from "The Auteurist's Guide to the Elizabeth Taylor Filmography," Nomad Wide Screen

Joseph Losey with Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of the notorious Boom!

In this week's issue of Nomad Editions' Wide Screen, a tribute to Elizabeth Taylor, featuring an obituary by the ineffable Self-Styled Siren, a best-of-on-DVD consideration from Tony Dayoub, Vadim Rizov's look at the best and worst of Taylor tributes, a couple of lovely photo portfolios assembled by our crack picture editor Laurie Kratochvil, and a piece by myself on the Taylor filmo perceived through a sort-of auteurist prism. Below is a portion of the article; to read it in its entirety, do consider a free trial subscription to the publication which you may learn about more here.

Mervyn LeRoy

“LeRoy has converted his innate vulgarity into a personal style,” Andrew Sarris noted, before adding, “His Little Caesar is feeble next to Hawks’s Scarface, and his Little Women far littler than Cukor’s, but you can’t have everything.” And indeed, for emotional power (or convincing Hollywood schmaltz), LeRoy’s 1949 version of the Louisa May Alcott classic, starring Taylor as Amy, Meet Me in St. Louis’s adorable moppet Margaret O’Brien as Beth, and June Allyson as Jo (and Peter Lawford as Laurie, yeesh) is no match for the 1933 film featuring Katharine Hepburn as Jo, Joan Bennett as Amy, and Jean Parker as Beth. (Poor forgotten Douglass Montgomery played Laurie.) Still, it is pretty snappy in the manner that the director of such pre-code speed rides as Three on a Match, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and Heat Lightning was something of a past master at. Taylor had been slated to play the lead in LeRoy’s stab at a Biblical epic, Quo Vadis, but production hassles scotched that; she did an uncredited extra bit as an arena slave.

Joseph Losey

The American-born Losey left the United States in the 1950s (HUAC, again) and continued his career in Europe; by the time he teamed up with Taylor and Burton, he was well-regarded not just for his Hollywood and post-Hollywood noirs (The Prowler and Time Without Pity among them) but for two films, Accident and The Servant, made in collaboration with the esteemed playwright Harold Pinter. Still, viable marketplace work seemed to elude him, so he jumped at the chance to work with the then-married international superstars. But again with Tennessee Williams! In this case, 1968’s Boom! a version of one of Williams’s oddest works, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, in which a much married reclusive woman of wealth is visited by a shambling, poetic Angel of Death. Guess who plays whom. As I wrote of this film, and Taylor’s performance, elsewhere, prior to her passing: “problematic for Taylor was the fact that she seemed to forget more and more about acting as the years went on. Look at her in A Place in the Sun, or in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and then look at her here. She shows a narrow range in both of the former films, but at least she’s working that range; she’s paying attention and working with precision. Here she’s all over the place, the result of Losey’s inability, or is it refusal, to direct her.” Boom! is still, in some circles, considered a candidate for Worst Film Ever made… although of course John Waters considers it a classic of its kind. 

Despite the critical drubbing, Losey and Taylor were actually eager to work together again, and they teamed up almost immediately thereafter for Secret Ceremony, a very peculiar film in which Hollywood iconography goes way against the grain of art-film theme and treatment. Again, in another context I wrote this about the film: “The first 20 minutes are kind of remarkable. They’re almost entirely dialogue-free, and depict a little cat-and-mouse game between Taylor’s character Leonora (who we later find out is a prostitute) and the rather gaga girl Cenci (Mia Farrow, unnervingly Paltrow-esque avant la lettre)… [W]hat we’re watching isn’t about plausibility. It’s cinematic theater of the absurd with horror flourishes, and it’s mesmerizing... The problem, finally, is with the figures. Even 40 years after the fact, the strongest thing that registers here is that two Hollywood legends are acting really, really weird. By the time Taylor and Farrow wind up play-fighting over a rubber ducky in an oversize bathtub, all bets are off as far as this piece working in any way that Losey and company might have intended.” Secret Ceremony had sufficient strengths to suggest that a third Taylor-Losey collaboration — perhaps on a less affected piece of contemporary material, — might have borne more artistically satisfying fruit. But it was not to be. Losey did, however, re-team with Burton in 1972 for the underseen and underrated The Assasination of Trotsky.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz

The great writer and director’s masterpiece All About Eve shows he was thoroughly at home with ambition, betrayal and self-destruction when it was set in the world of reasonably functional (in a day-to-day sense) individuals. He was on much less certain footing in dealing with the deranged modern baroque realms concocted by Tennessee Williams. Hence, 1959’s Suddenly, Last Summer, adapted by Gore Vidal from a Williams play, is oft-regarded as a piece of high camp, despite its scrupulously serious treatment, and notwithstanding the, thespic efforts of Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and a particularly damaged-seeming Montgomery Clift. Its near-hysteria is for some ameliorated by the sight of Taylor at her most ravishing in a white one-piece swimsuit.

Mankiewicz and Taylor got on sufficiently well during the making of the picture, and that factored into Mankiewicz’s ill-fated assignment to replace Rouben Mamoulian on the set of the lavish Cleopatra, the troubled production that birthed the Taylor-Burton romance. Again, it seems that a historical epic set in the ancient world is a less-than-congenial setting for Mankiewicz’s particular talents, but he proved very dedicated to the film, or the idea of the film, and concocted a six-hour version that he wanted to have released in two parts. An attempt to reconstruct that version is underway; in the meantime, the extant four-hour cut is, while certainly on the stiff side, hardly the disaster it was proclaimed to be at the time of the picture’s box-office flop, which some have cited as the beginning of the end for the entity that once was 20^th Century Fox.

Vincente Minnelli

Oddly enough, while many cinephiles might tend to rank the three collaborations between Taylor and the great cinematic stylist Vincente Minnelli as minor Minnelli works, seen from a particular angle — the Taylor one — this teaming might be viewed as unusually fruitful, producing two of the most enjoyable and congenial films of her career, and one of the more unusual and overtly thoughtful as well. In 1950’s Father of the Bride, Taylor was still an ingénue (all of 18), co-starring as the daughter of Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, about to marry amiable boy-next-door type Don Taylor (no relation). A fascinating look at the alcohol-fueled American middle class of the post-war era, it’s a snappy, knowing comedy to which Minnelli brings more than a soupçon of his decorative taste. His sure hand with the Comedy of Anxiety, in this particular case economic anxiety, is also felt. But it’s felt even more strongly in the film’s 1951 sequel, Father’s Little Dividend, admittedly in a scene in which Taylor doesn’t participate, and which is not as comedic as all that; it’s a sequence late in the picture in which Tracy’s character “loses” his new grandchild. Almost as nightmarish and angst-ridden as the Halloween scene in Meet Me in St. Louis, it’s a mini-masterpiece of Minnelli edginess. Similarly, Minnelli’s 1965 The Sandpiper , starring Taylor as a free spirit and single mom and Burton as the minister and educator who falls for her — and framed by the majestic vistas of Big Sur country — is best considered not as a Taylor-Burton vehicle but in the continuum of Minnelli dramas about the anxiousness of nonconformity such as Tea and Sympathy, Home from the Hill, The Cobweb, and so on. In this light, the picture works beautifully and stands out as one of Minnelli’s stronger ’60s efforts.

Schrader/DeNiro/Scorsese/Farber/Patterson

One of the many nice things about the new Blu-ray disc of the restoration of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is that the supplements restore to us  the very first audio commentary on the film, featuring the film's screenwriter Paul Schrader as well as its director. Recorded in 1986 for the Criterion Collection laser disc of the film, it's a commentary in the Criterion style—serious, frank, in-depth, not the sort of self-congratulatory "I love this shot" stuff that audio commentaries became associated with in the height of the DVD boom. In any event, when Criterion's license on the film went out, Sony began overseeing the DVD editions, and the exemplary laser disc commentary went by the wayside; somebody at Sony was on the ball enough to acquire the material from Criterion and include it here. It's still a bracing listen. From the hindsight of ten years past, and having endured any number of personal and artistic crucibles since the making of Taxi Driver, Schrader and Scorsese are in reflective frames of mind, fully cognizant of the fact that Taxi Driver was in a sense an extraordinary occurrence. Scorsese: "It was a beautiful script. There’s only two scripts that I’ve gotten that were completely there, that we hardly had to do any work on…Taxi Driver was the first one, later on it was King of Comedy by Paul Zimmerman[...] Bob and myself felt as if it had been written for us in a funny way." Schrader: "[It was v]ery much a serendipity. Three people coming together at a certain point in their lives all needing to say the same thing. You know, occasionally in art you get lucky, and you’re in the right place at the right time with the right people."

It is particularly interesting to listen to them talk about what they were feeling, about what they were doing, in conjunction with exploring what a couple of first-rate critics, Manny Farber and his partner Patricia Patterson, saw them doing in the film. The Farber/Patterson essay, "The Power And The Gory," was first published in the May/June 1976 issue of Film Comment. (Taxi Driver premiered in February of that year.) It can now be read in the Library of America's indispensible volume, Farber on Film. An extremely detailed and vivid piece of prose, it alternates so vehemently between admiration for the film and grave offense at it that it can almost be considered as a piece of Writing Against Itself. The arguments against the film are not, as it happens, as easy to dismiss outright as Pauline Kael's hideously smug and classist "What am I doing here watching these two dumb f--ks?" whinge on Raging Bull. Farber and Patterson characterize as "diversionary" the "pounding, illustrative music that grinds you," and "the spike words which stud the [...] soundtrack."'Pussy' and 'fuck' have never been harvested so often; the black race is mauled by verbal inventions spoken with elaborate pizzazz styling[...]" The picture winds up Farber and Patterson to the extent that it turns them into "plausibles," to use Alfred Hitchcock's coinage for his least favorite kind of movie viewer, and they make a list of "plot impossibles." They inveigh against the use of the DeNiro: "the intense DeNiro is sold as a misfit psychotic, and, at the same time, a charismatic star who centers every shot[...]" To some, that paradox might seem key to the film's glory, but Farber and Patterson are clearly quite irritated by this. They cannot, however, disguise their delight at the bravura filmmaking: "The amount of twisting questions that are thrown at the spectator highlights its director's boldness in intricate visuals." Still, one senses that Farber and Patterson can't enjoy their enjoyment. They deeply distrust the film. A key to reading the essay: they frequently use variations on the verb "sell," and when they do, that's a signal that they're gonna bitch about something. They even take the filmmakers to task on the marketing of the picture: "The movie's ad campaign (the poster of DeNiro as a looming presence, the interviews with crew members almost before the final mixing, the terrible schlock novel now sold in every supermarket which takes [Arthur] Bremer's diary and Schrader's script to an unbelievably trashy depth) is revelatory of what the filmmakers feel it takes to move, score, and hold your territory in a competitive U.S.A. society."

This contrasts quite a bit to Schrader's pronouncement (I'm paraphrasing here) that the Taxi Driver script leapt out of him like an animal, or Scorsese's various proclamations concerning his own identification with Travis Bickle's sense of isolation and anger. On the commentary track cited above, Scorsese's remark about feeling the script had been written for him and DeNiro comes after he recounts a clash with studio execs over matching shots in the lunch-with-Betsy scene, recollecting in tranquility that it was a "serious" clash and leaving it to the listener's imagination just how serious it was, given the personal volatility that was much more a part of the Scorsese forefront than it was in 1986, or than it is today. 

Almost forty minutes into the film, there's the shot of Travis on a pay phone after his disastrous porn-theater date with Betsy, hunching over a little, trying to make out what's gone wrong. The camera slowly tracks to the right, and into a view of an empty hallway leading to the front door of the building. Here's Scorsese talking about the shot on the commentary, as he looks at it: "We’re holding on him, and he’s just getting refused and rejected and rejected, then the camera starts to move, to the hall. As if it’s about to reveal something. And it doesn’t. The idea is meant that the revelation comes much later, when he explodes. I think this is one of the last things we shot, one of the last days of shooting…and then he enters the frame and leaves. And when I thought of that shot…it presented to me how the style of the picture would be…where the moves would be…the camera moves would seem…uh, if I could really put it in words I wouldn’t have had to put it on film." At this point Scorsese pauses and seems to gather himself. "The idea is that…theres a sense again of anxiety, a sense of uneasiness, of the camera tracking to an empty hall. Is that his soul?...Is that…the emptiness he’s feeling in his heart? Or are we about to reveal something, is there about to be an explosion, is something terrible about to happen in the hall? It was the idea of keeping the audience off balance all the time, and that was the piece…all the other shots came from that concept that’s in that shot right now. It just turned out to be one of the last shots we took, but it was the first shot I thought of."

One is reminded of Vladimir Nabokov's essay "On A Book Entitled Lolita," and the passage wherein he evokes "Mr. Taxovich, or that class list of Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying 'waterproof,'" and then pronounces, "These are the nerves of the novel." Many an English lit major no doubt said "Really? Charlotte saying 'waterproof'?" and then paged back through the book to find the passage and see if it resonated any differently as a result. It's worth noting that the shot thus doted on by Scorsese isn't even mentioned in the Farber/Patterson essay. 

I don't know if Scorsese or Schrader ever went on record with their reaction to the Farber/Patterson essay, but the two were/are admirers of Farber, and I recall one of them describing a visit the two made to Farber's studio, where they took in his wonderful paintings, as a "pilgrimage." Also, I wonder what Farber would have made of Scorsese's recent Shine A Light, which to my mind is, among other things, very much a film about what it takes to move, score, and hold one's territory in a competitive worldwide market.

Audrey Hitchcock

How To Steal A Million, William Wyler, 1966

Freed by Minnelli

The Long, Long Trailer, 1953 (with Desi Arnaz)

The Cobweb, 1955 (with Eve McVeagh, Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall)

Theorem

Last night I saw The Adjustment Bureau, which, until the point it cracks like an egg and goes all sappy, was a kind of silly but at least somewhat entertaining piece of metaphysical burlesque (although I have no doubt its makers intended it as something rather more serious). Anyway, in the middle of the picture Terence Stamp shows up in the role of a rather formidable uber-functionary of the film's titular organization. And although in the film his character IS given a name, still I thought: "This picture's actually even better if you decide to interpret Stamp's character as a literal continuation of the unnamed fellow he played in Pasolini's Teorema back in the '60s, that decade that ruined everything." I daresay that if director George Nolfi had been a true man of vision, he might have interpolated actual scenes from Teorema into his own film, the way Steven Soderbergh threw in shots of young Stamp from Loach's Poor Cow to contrast with the older and less pleasant WIlson in The Limey. But no. Here my own imagination had to do the work, and I gotta tell you, it made The Adjustment Bureau that much more fun. Try it yourself (only, of course, if you're conversant with the Pasolini; a friend I mentioned this to after the screening looked at me as if I'd lost my mind before sheepishly admitting that he'd never seen the seminal Pier Paolo film) and let me know if you get similar results.