Some Came Running

A few words on "The Arrangement"

Kirk and Kirk

On May 25th I had the honor of presenting, at the great NY moviehouse The Metrograph, Elia Kazan's 1969 The Arrangement. These are the program notes for the show: 

“Plastic people! Oh baby now you’re such a drag!” So bellowed The Mothers of Invention in 1967. That same year Elia Kazan issued a not dissimilar cri de coeur in his doorstop-size novel “The Arrangement,” which he adapted into a film two years later. In Kazan’s complaint,  Kirk Douglas’ compulsively adulterous ad exec mounts his own rebellion against a values system that has made him affluent but empty. Is this a frantic, truculent indulgence? A film maudit of monumental proportions? Kazan’s own Skidoo? You have see this rarely-screened curio to find out.

A few of you out there have been kind enough to inquire if I could make my pre-screening remarks available in prose form. I worked from what I regard as loose notes, but I cleaned them up into something resembling what I said and/or an actual text. See below. 

In my program notes I quoted Frank Zappa’s “Plastic People.” Here’s another Zappa quote: “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”

Why The Arrangement? Why now?

This screening came about as a result of some casual conversations I had with Jake Perlin, one of the programmers here. I had a book idea I’d been toying with, about the Great Hollywood Directors— Hitchcock, Preminger, Wyler, Kazan, and more — and the ways that they, and their work, reacted beginning in the early ‘60s when (and Preminger’s efforts had a lot to do with this in the first place) the Production Code imploded and these filmmakers had the freedom to do things that they’d never been allowed to do. In Hitchcock’s case, for instance, you have the morbidly explicit rape scene of Frenzy. With Preminger you have the explorations of Skidoo and the Burgess Meredith nude scene in Such Good Friends. With Kazan, you have The Arrangement.

Now this movie didn’t start with a compulsion to break boundaries in filmmaking. Kazan, in the mid ‘60s, had what he considered a profound sense of dissatisfaction in his life which he channeled into a novel, which happened to coincide with a shifting zeitgeist. His marriage to Molly Kazan had ended with her death in 1963; he subsequently married Barbara Loden in 1967. He had a lot of tortured feelings concerning both relationships, which he details in his fascinating autobiography. In The Arrangement he wrestles with not just those feelings but a larger disgust with the phoniness of American life. Status symbols, affluence, their stifling influence on interpersonal relationships, particularly those of love. Which were coming into collision with the counterculture, which believed love should be free.

Now you’re wondering if Jake and I were discussing these issues. No.

This program was supposed to have been a double feature. The second feature was to have been 1960’s Strangers When We Meet, directed by Richard Quine and starring Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak, Barbara Rush, Ernie Kovacs and Walter Matthau. Written by Evan Hunter, whose estate, we have discovered, now retains the rights to the film.

Quine is what a friend of mine has called a  “major minor” Hollywood director and Strangers is one of his best, a work of great sensitivity and prescience. While The Arrangement knocks over its metaphors like a drunk entering a darkened living room and stumbling over the furniture, Strangers brings a real deftness to the whole work/love/integrity theme. And its treatment of insidious sexism —Kim Novak’s character is all but persecuted for looking like, well, Kim Novak — is also very sharp.

So that was supposed to be the idea — the sexual revolution, 1960 and 1969, with Kirk Douglas the iconic bracketing. But we could not find a 35 print of Strangers, so here we are.

One of the rather nastier features of The Arrangement is its treatment of Deborah Kerr. If you thought her having to almost yodel “Doodle me James” in the 1966  Casino Royale was undignified, get a load of what she goes through here.  Kazan’s novel put across a certain amount of complexity on top of its baseline sexism, but in the film this too often translates into an attitude of  “Why must I, a new man with new ideas, be saddled with an OLD WIFE?”

The movie’s pre-echoes of Network are not limited to a particular manifestation of misogyny, but with Faye Dunaway as the object of desire that quality is hard to ignore. Neither film bothers to recognize that it’s the male-constructed power structures that help make the bitches that so bewitch the hapless middle-aged male. At least Strangers tries to bust its characters out of circumscribed gender roles, recognizes the oppression.

Michael Higgins, later  of Wanda, plays the Douglas character’s brother Michael; look for an uncredited Barry Sullivan…Richard Boone, six months younger than Douglas, plays Douglas’ dad, and look, there’s practically teenage Michael Murphy as a priest!

Just when you think it’s peaked, the movie  gets weirder. When Dunaway is setting a table for Douglas and Boone you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

Joni Mitchell was commissioned to write a song for the movie, and she did. It wasn’t used in the film, but the song “The Arrangement” appears on Court and Spark and bemoans the “credit card and the swimming pool in the backyard.”

REACTIONS

From the NYPL Perf Arts clippings file…

Judith Crist: “126 minutes of sturm, drang and banality and about as turgid a job of soap-suds cinema to be found outside of Peyton Place reruns”

“The sight of a 44-year-old wallowing in self-searchings that would embarrass today’s 14-year-old by its simple-mindedness is simply boring”

“As a neophyte novelist, Kazan was entitled to a trash wallow, but his spreading The Arrangement over the big screen is inexcusable”  — New York mag Nov 24, 1969

John Simon: “ a senseless and banal story that reels from platitude to platitude”

My old friend Joseph Failla wrote to me:  “You sure don't pick the easy ones to present, I've seen THE ARRANGEMENT and thought it was great. I know late Kazan becomes difficult but I've never understood Maltin's bomb rating either.Compelling from the opening moments till it's dreamy, hallucinatory conclusion. My favorite touch, Kirk's Batman style punch up in a bar.”

Not in a bar, as it happens, but imagined by Kurt as he looks into Dunaway’s NYC apartment window and sees a man (future Lars von Trier day player John Randolph Jones) in there.  

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. 

Man and Beast In "Inherent Vice"

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Hunter S. Thompson used that Samuel Johnson observation as the epigraph for his 1971 Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, and one of the many things Thompson achieved in that ruthless work was in revealing the pain that even good men are capable of inflicting once they’ve made beasts of themselves. It’s not for nothing that Terry Gilliam, adapting that book into a film in 1998, made Chapter Eight of Part Two of that book, in which Thompson and his “attorney” terrorize a diner waitress, into the most nakedly exposed raw nerve of the story (Ellen Barkin is exceptionally jarring in the waitress role). In his extremely appropriate adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson makes some very distinct shifts of stress to, among other things, bring an almost Gravity’s Rainbow level of despair and pessimism to bear on what is, I reckon, the coziest finale of a Pynchon book to date. And, as in Gilliam’s adaptation of Thompson, the shift into a darker tone finds its footing in a scene of unpleasant interaction between man and woman. 

Or at least that’s how I see it. Funny how reasonable people can differ, and as we move forward be warned, I’ll be getting into a little detail about the plotting and scenes of Anderson’s movie.  Here’s my friend Manohla Dargis’ description of the scene I have in mind, from her New York Times review of the movie: “a strip scene that’s straight from the book and is at once bleak—the woman disrobing confesses to selling herself out—and a fantasy of female erotic power. It’s a beautifully staged and played interlude, but also the one time when Mr. Anderson is himself seduced by an illusion. It harshed my mellow.” I see the bleakness of the scene to be sure; indeed, I think the bleakness is entirely the point. As for whether or not it’s a fantasy of female erotic power, while I don’t want to overshare, I don’t find the exchange as it’s depicted under the circumstances to be entirely far-fetched. (Although I’ve seen even more affronted reactions to it in social media, including one person who comes close to suggesting that Anderson’s treatment of actress Katherine Waterson in the scene skirts sexual assault.) As for Manohla’s observation with respect to her mellow, I think the whole point of the scene is to harsh, if not entirely deprive you, of your mellow. It’s the emotional fulcrum of the whole movie, and in a way an apologia (in the classical sense) for Joaquin Pheonix’s Phoenix's completely uningratiating performance in a role that one might have assumed was MEANT to be a likable one (like Jeff Lebowski, “Doc” Sportello is intended in certain respects as a cannabis-infused spiritual heir to Philip Marlowe). Especially after the film’s rainy-day flashback that gorgeously sentimentalizes the Doc-Shasta romance, the curdled eroticism of the strip scene shows the two characters in a thoroughly broken context, communicating through various languages of power that they never wanted to learn or maybe even acknowledge in the first place. Not only does it shockingly put the movie on a new track, it also recontextualizes a lot of the seemingly aimless goofiness that went on previously. What ruined these former flower children? Late capitalism, lack of faith, the Golden Fang? Whatever the root cause (and the movie doesn’t put a finger on it) the rot has set in, and that’s why Anderson rejigger’s Pynchon’s ending. The book’s final note is one of warm affection between Doc and Coy Harlingen, and Anderson stages their exchange in person rather than over the phone, showing Doc at a remove from the family life Harlingen is now getting a second chance at; the movie then continues with a grotesquely comic but also shudderingly poignant scene cementing Doc’s relationship as not-so-secret-sharer with fascist cop Bigfoot (Josh Brolin). This hearkens back, in a way, to the Freddie Quell/Lancaster Dodd dynamic in The Master, which is a topic for another time, perhaps. I'm suggesting a rich web of emotional and cultural association, and it's this web that makes Inherent Vice so outstanding and haunting, and one reason why (spoiler alert) it’s my top film of the year. 

A few early notes on the film version of "Inherent Vice"

Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel Inherent Vice opens with an epigraph: "Under the paving stones, the beach!" which the author designates as "Grafitto, Paris, May 1968." The sentiment is frequently credited to the philosophers and activists now called "the Situationists," and beyond the nod to a certain mode of radical thought, the quote's resonance as the novel begins is, depending on how much context you freight the quote with, both melancholy—the events of the book take place in 1970, well after the May strikes were squelched, and soon after Manson and Altamont and all that perceptually put a stake through the heart of the counterculture—and kind of wry, as the semi-lost souls who populate the book are operating in and around a California beach town inspired, it is said, by Manhattan Beach, where Pynchon reportedly lived in the late '60s and early '70s while writing Gravity's Rainbow.

Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's film of the book places the epigraph at the very very end of the movie, after the final credits unroll. It's the movie's "stinger," so to speak. I can't speak to why Anderson chose to place it at the very end, whether that means he's paying a perfunctory respect to the philosophical current it represents (I don't believe that anyway) or whether he thinks that waving the Situationist flag in any form these days is perceptually the contemporary equivalent of going and carrying pictures of Chairman Mao. But it's there. And it's not unimportant. 

More prominently placed in this beautiful film (and it is beautiful, from the very beginning, when a tight shot of a serene Joanna Newsom is interrupted by what looks like a blossoming deep blue lens flare, which turns out to be a dissolve into the nocturnal weed haze inhabited by the lead character "Doc" Sportello, a Firesign Theater idea of a private dick if there ever was one) is an observation about addiction and recovery and who's running that whole show in these United States. On investigating an entity called "the Golden Fang"—an entity whose identity shifts, in absurd and absurdist degrees, through Pynchon's narrative—the paranoid (or, rather, "paranoid") Sportello hits on an idea: "It was occuring to Doc now, as he recalled what Jason Velveeta had said about vertical integration, that if the Golden Fang could get its customers strung out, why not turn around and sell them a program to help them kick? Get them coming and going, twice as much revnue and no worries about new customers—as long as American life was something to be escaped from , the cartel could always be sure of a bottomless pool of new customers." The second half of that passage is repeated verbatim in Newsom's voiceover, and it's crucial. 

The movie walks a very particular high wire, soaking in a series of madcap-surreal hijinks in an ambling, agreeable fashion to such an extent that even viewers resistant to demanding "what's the point" might think "what's the point."  Which isn't to say the humor isn't delightful. Anderson has mentioned Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (EARLY Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, to be sure) as a reference point, and it's there, as in the near-obscene sight of Josh Brolin relishing a chocolate-covered banana in soft focus, or the dialogue misunderstanding beginning with "Go to bed." Hints of Jerry Lewis, too, as in a wonderful shot of a line of people veering to their right while Sportello, holding up the rear, continues straight ahead. But this is a Paul Thomas Anderson movie: the fun stuff engages but holds you in suspension, waiting for the kick in the gut. Which does happen, There is, about an hour and forty-five minutes into the film, a turnabout, a scene which again reproduces the dialogue and to a certain extent the action of a scene in the novel, but shifts the emphases in a way that's pure Anderson, bringing a shocking amount of raw emotion and wrong to an exchange that the book almost throws away. The scene delivers what the film has been withholding, and this places everything that's come before in a sort of relief, and colors everything that comes after. It is, to my mind, pretty incredible. And despite the scene being "only" two people in a room, it speaks to everything the movie has on its mind. It's funny; we can talk ourselves silly about how Gone Girl may or may not have a "woman problem," but when it comes to discussing the notion of how dominant ideology in a capitalist system also determines power relations between the sexes, it's "check, please" time. I'll leave it at that for now. 

In hewing close to Pynchon, Anderson finds a new freedom, or a further elasticity to the freedom he started exercisng most strenuously in Magnolia. I've seen a scene in which Sportello is surrounded by a group of nose-picking FBI agents described as "cringeworthy;" and it is, if what you demand from motion pictures is a straight line, an unwavering tone, a particular fidelity to, I don't know, EXACTLY what it is that Altman or Ashby did and you no want his One True Inheritor to keep doing, or something. Pynchon's freedom is manifested in, say, the above-quoted sentences, which contain mordant observations on this American life juxtaposed against a character named "Jason Velveeta." The whole of Gravity's Rainbow, from banana breakfast to the head of a V2 missile touching the roof of a London cinema, is a musical, for heaven's sake. 

I wasn't going to write about this movie until more people were able to see it, but I wanted to get these ideas out there, as people are talking about it and are going to talk about it. I'll have more at a future date. I should extend my appreciation to the New York Film Festival for the opportunity to see the movie at such an early date (it comes to theaters on December 12). I think it's great. 

NYFF 2013: Nine crucial pieces of dialogue in "12 Years A Slave"

Chewitel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender in 12 Years A Slave. The dialogue they exchange in the scene pictured is taken very nearly verbatim from the source material. 

Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave, which played at the New York Film Festival last week and comes to theaters on the 17th of October, is as extraordinary a film as most of its reviews claim it is. The acting and the direction are indeed remarkable, but I was also struck by John Ridley's script, the dialogue in which very convincingly simulates mid-19th-century modes of North American speech while augmenting the already-powerful narrative with extremely trenchant philosophical and psychological observations, pronouncements, and maxims. The implications of these words, particularly within their contexts, are extraordinary, and it's to the credit of Ridley (an extremely able writer whose prior work as I've experienced it has been notably smart but never acheived precisely this level of depth), McQueen and the extraordinary cast that the nuggets of disquieting added value never play as contrived or forced. I record nine of them below, with descriptions that I hope are sufficiently discreet so as not to constitute "spoilers;" nevertheless, some readers may prefer to look at this piece after they have seen the movie themselves. 

It's worth noting that there is not a whole lot of recorded dialogue in the first four-fifths or so of the Solomon Northup memoir on which the movie is based. What dialogue is taken from the book is, as it happens, lifted almost verbatim. Of the nine bits of dialogue examined below, two derive directly from the book, and it's a testament to Ridley's sensitivity and inventiveness that he makes his dialogue not just out of such speech that's recorded in the book, but out of certain particular emotional articulations put down by the memoirist. 

1) "The reality to come is that we will be transported Southward."

Shortly after free man of color Northup is hoodwinked into entering a slave state and subsequently drugged and kidnapped, he waits anxiously in a cell with a two other black men who have arrived at a similar circumstance. They both speak to him with an articulate resignation, because they know what's going on, to the extent that as soon as their brutal white handlers enter the room they put on the masks of shambling half-idiots. Northup expresses absolute incredulity at his plight and wonders aloud as to how he might be able to correct what he believes to have been a mistake. The line above, in which the phrase "the reality to come" has a particular resonance in its resignation, is spoken to Northup  in a devastating fatalistic tone by the actor Chris Chalk, in the role of Clemens. 

2) "You luxuriate in his favor. I survive."

Also in Northup's party traveling from Virginia to Louisiana to be sold is Eliza (Adepero Oduye), a woman who is subsequently mercilessly separated from her two children and sold with Northup to Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), an ostensibly "humane" master who nevertheless employs a brutal overseer played by Paul Dano. After the educated and worldly Northup, while continuing to conceal his identity (on arriving in Louisiana he is commanded to take the name "Platt"), impresses Ford with his engineering acumen, he is treated in a fashion that makes his station somewhat more tolerable, while Eliza, heartbroken over the loss of her children, literally cannot stop crying. She directs the above accusation to Northup after he (very gently) upbraids her about her behavior, which he fears will bring her into disfavor, single her out for punishment. 

Not to trivialize the situation of the people depicted in the motion picture, but luxuriating in the favor of an individual or corporate entity very much remains a condition pertaining to employment to this day.

3) "Whatever the circumstances, you are an exceptional nigger, Platt. But I fear no good will come of it."

Because of some confusion in my notes, I initially wrote, "This is spoken to Northup/Platt by Epps (Michael Fassbender), the 'nigger breaker' to whom Ford sells Platt. Epps' 'fear,' obviously, is for Platt rather than for himself. Or is it? As cut and dried as the master/slave relationship might seem, this line implies hierarchies within it that subsequent events lay out most discomfitingly." As it happens, the line is actually spoken by Cumberbatch's seemingly kindly Ford, and is a reflection of the fact that his very exceptionalism has put him in a position where Dano's raging overseer has very nearly lynched him. The point of Cumberbatch's character, and something the actor plays with considerable resourcefulness, is that he is in no way redeemed by being a nice slave owner: he directly benefits from human misery, directly partakes in a system that allows him to do so. That he goes about this business with more gentleness and consideration than others does not change the fundamental fact of the matter.  And like the song says, "isn't he a bit like you and me?" Or more than a bit, even. The movie is not blunt in showing the viewer his or her complicity in injustice, but it's very definite in doing so. It seems that many people deal with this by changing the subject to how well the movie ought to do in the Oscar race, which is pretty funny. Maybe.

4) "Nigger among niggers. God gave her to me."

This is Epps again, speaking of Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o), the small, delicate but very hard-working (she consistently outpicks her fellows in the cotton field, and by huge margins) slave girl for whom Epps nurses a very deep erotic obsession, and obsession not unnoticed by Epps' wife (Sarah Paulson). His pride, his sense of possession, his torture over his attraction to her: Fassbender of course plays all this with absolute commitment. The character, also a very nasty drunk, is powerful, and powerfully repellent. In an interview with Film Comment, director McQueen observes "The funny thing is, I have a lot of sympathy for Epps because he's in love with Patsey." That's true, but it's also true that there is no possibility of any kind of fair exchange of emotion or understanding between them because of the absolute power Epps has over Patsey. One thing that's gone largely unremarked upon in the praise of this film is how mercilessly it lays bare the debased, depraved psychosexual pathology of slavery in the United States. Through patient demonstration, it argues quite coherently that the thing that destroyed black culture was white people. More than once watching 12 Years A Slave I recalled Susan Sontag's notorious 1967 pronouncement "the white race is the cancer of human history," a statement subsequently renounced by the writer. It is arguably a hyperbolic and rhetorically irresponsible statement. And yet I think it bears some examination with respect to this particular narrative. In any event, this may sound flip, but I defy anyone who sits through this movie to ever be able to comfortably listen to the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar" again any time soon. 

5) "The curse of the Pharoah is but a poor sample of what awaits the plantation class."

Alfre Woodard, playing a once-slave whose own amorous relations with a master have elevated her to a house mistress, makes this prediction in casual conversation with Northup/Platt. For what awaits the plantation class, see, of all things, Gone With The Wind, specifically the sequence depicting the burning of Atlanta. To see the lesson the great great grandchildren of the plantation class have learned from it, see...well, never mind. 

6) "Did you beguile him, Platt? With your slick nigger ways?"

Once, many years ago at the Village Voice, the columnist Nat Hentoff, commenting on something he perceived as specious in a piece by Clayton Riley, characterized Riley, and/or his use of rhetoric, by evoking a "three-card monte dealer." This resulted, as I recall, in Hentoff sustaining a shitstorm of blowback in which he was accused of racism. This was absurd on the face of it, because, really, at the time there was no white man in the United States who had less reason to be tarred as a racist than Nat Hentoff, who, for instance, in 1960 produced Charles Mingus' "Original Faubus Fables," for Christ's sake. And also, you know, three-card monte was a real thing. (I rather wish it would come back: as a method of fleecing New York tourists, it's a hell of a lot more entertaining and even innocent than dressing in a bad Elmo costume and extorting tip money for snapshots.) Still (and—again, if I recollect correctly—Hentoff came to understand this), making the analogy in this case amounted to buying into/perpetuating a vicious racial myth, one that is articulated in the question Epps asks Northup/Platt after Platt returns from a sojourn serving a different master, one who procures for the slave a paying gig as a musician. You can hear the poison narrative of "slick nigger ways" retold by white America every day, and you don't even have to listen terribly hard. 

7) "But beggin' the law's pardon—it lies."

This line is taken directly from the book, spoken by the Canadian-born carpenter Bass, played by Brad Pitt. It refers to the law that permits slavery. Some have commented that Pitt's character plays like some sort of deus ex machina. I would commend those people to the narrative from which the movie was adapted, which is eminently readable and pretty short. In any event, Bass' observation is terse and powerful. 

8) "Sin? There is no sin. Man does as he pleases with his property."

There is a scene late in the picture in which Platt/Northup is compelled to perform an absolutely abhorrent act, at the insistence of Epps, upon a fellow slave. This, like almost every other event in the movie, is in Northup's narrative.  In the book, Northup observes, "I could look on Epps only with unutterable loathing and abhorrence, and thought within myself—‘Thou devil, sooner or later, somewhere in the course of eternal justice, thou shalt answer for this sin!’” In the movie, Northup actually says a variant of this out loud, and with great emotion, to Epps, who, like everyone else in the story, deems himself a Christian. The above is what Epps answers in the movie, and it speaks strongly for itself. 

9) "It would be an unspeakable happiness to see my wife and my family again." 

This is what Northup says to Bass when he finally decides to confide in the kindly and moral carpenter. This is not rendered as dialogue in the book; rather, Northup writes, “I spoke of my wife and children, mentioning their names and ages, and dwelling upon the unspeakable happiness it would be to clasp them to my heart once more before I died.” The notion of "unspeakable happiness" is one well worth reflecting on. 

Faulkner and Sirk, "Pylon" and "The Tarnished Angels," "melodrama" and "art"

I went on a bit of a Faulkner reading jag recently, looking into As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Pylon for the first time since college at least. The experience was both exhilarating and disquieting. I had forgotten what a stone modernist Faulkner was, and I was a little unprepared for both the work's swampiness, and the sharp focus of what Faulkner adapted from Joyce into an entirely American idiom. The compound words of Pylon, and there seemed to be at least two per page, are confoundingly inventive and/or unselfconsciously bizarre (plucked at random, from the first chapter: "murallimning" and "shadowlurked"). It was a pleasure to immerse myself in his multivalent style, and eventually I felt in a better position to appreciate it than I had been in the past.

Same for Faulkner's acute understanding of alcoholism and the alcoholic brain. It's a funny thing: of course there are events in Sanctuary and Pylon, indeed the events in Sanctuary are/were pretty infamous, but there's no way that you can cite these novels for their narrative momentum, nor call them plot-driven. For every one incident that occurs, there are pages and pages depicting drunken paralysis. Temple Drake wakes up in a strange room and it takes her a whole chapter to get to the opposite corner of the room. And it's a small room. I'm exaggerating of course. But not much, I think.  I was often struck by what I perceived as Faulkner's personal tragedy: that his profound understanding of alcoholism came so early and was of so little use to him outside of his art. 

Of course having finished Pylon I was compelled to rewatch The Tarnished Angels, the 1957 film adapted from that 1935 novel, directed by Douglas Sirk. (Sirk would direct only two more features after this, both masterpieces: A Time To Love And A Time To Die, and Imitation of Life.) In the book Sirk on Sirk, the director cites Faulkner as "a very early influence on my outlook" and says that he had a yen to adapt Pylon during his days at the German studio UFA. Working in Hollywood gave Sirk the chance to adapt the American book as an American director, to retain some of the idiom of the original.  But a literal-minded movie version of Pylon was of course an impossibility in the Hollywood of the 1950s. But I think, I hope, we know this already. The point is that the Hollywood "auteur" of the era in which Sirk was at his most productive and most eloquent was a pragmatist as well as an artist.

And so, Sirk seemingly cheerily admits to his interlocutor Jon Halliday in Sirk on Sirk, "the story had to be completely un-Faulknerized, and it was." A very literal-minded person may well ask at this juncture, "Well what's the point of making the film from the book, then?" And here is where, within the system in which Sirk labored, the personal meets the pragmatic. Here, actually, lie the roots of what is sometimes called "the auteur theory."

In his essay on the comedies of director Allan Dwan, Kent Jones describes a mode of Hollywood moviemaking he calls the "proto-sitcom." He calls the majority of these pictures "attempts to mass-produce the form of romantic comedy that Cukor, Capra, Lubitsch, Hawks, et. al., had perfected in the 1930s" and notes their "new kind of impersonal zip, airiness, and lightness." Allan Dwan, the critic continues, "may have been the only director who knew how (or had the inclination) to harness this industrial beauty [...] [b]ut, very unlike the aforementioned machine-tooled items, Dwan's movies are inflected with little grace notes—sudden tiny shifts in speed or perspective or visual design that gives the films a humming beauty." "Grace notes"—that's an important phrase.

A version of what Jones is talking about applies to Sirk, and it particularly applies to Sirk whether he is adapting Faulkner or Fannie Hurst. In his chat with Halliday, he notes that "while the book is completely transformed, the characters in the film are pretty close to Faulkner's." This might not seem readily apparent. The unnamed reporter co-protagonist in Pylon is described as looking like a ghost, and has a shambling, zombie-like air to his movements; The Tarnished Angel's reporter is given the studly name of Burke Devlin, and is played by Rock Hudson. (It's worth mentioning that Hudson gives one of his most sincere and direct screen performances here, and is very fine indeed.) But leaving aside the matter of surface appearances, Sirk is correct. In both the book and the movie, the reporter gives a speech to his editor in which he confoundedly describes the aerial barnstormers whose story he's dying to write as "not human." That is, as all too human in their isolation from themselves and from each other. And Sirk conveys that in the most refined but potent cinematic means available to him. 

There's also the matter of the grace notes. "Having revealed how much you can take out and still have rock and roll, they now explore how much you can put back in and still have Ramones," Robert Christgau wrote of Rocket To Russia in 1977. Having de-Faulknerized Faulkner in the scripting process, Sirk judiciously chooses moment of pure Faulknerian pain and places them at key junctures in the picture, creating a network of exposed nerve endings. The first is in the "who's your old man" taunting of the young Jack Schumann—whether or not he's the child of pilot Roger Schumann is an issue in both the book and the movie, and the early revelation of the playful cruelty of this world is a defining one. Sirk frames young Jack's trauma economically, in one unflinching, perfectly framed shot in which the kid (beautifully played by Christopher Olsen) flays at the right side of the frame with his short arms, sobbing and yelling, his face disappearing and reappearing in flashes as his head ducks and his arms fly before him. It's a remarkable distillation of the scene as written in Pylon. 

Sirk and screenwriter George Zuckerman also introduce a fascinating bit of intertextuality, something not in the book, having Devlin and Jack's mother, Laverne (Dorothy Malone, brilliant and alternating between haggard and ravishing, sometimes with a mere turn of the head), bond over Willa Cather's My Antonia. "My Antonia, there's another influence," Sirk said to Halliday, in the late 1960s. "As I remember it, My Antonia is a novel about circularity; the hero comes back to the place that he started out from. Today it would look passé, perhaps. But there was a time when I was deeply in love with America, a love that was shaken, though, to a degree, by wars and by Hiroshima, and by the things that happened afterwards, McCarthyism and so on." Though it is itself set in a time behind 1957, in The Tarnished Angels Devlin says of Cather's book, "Nostalgia in Nebraska. Lost farms and faded loves."  Laverne counters, "It brings back memories of home. How I was. And who I was. When I first started reading it. Twelve years ago." She takes up the book again, to finish it, and the below shot is, in the context Sirk creates for it, heartbreaking. 

As it happens Cather was an important influence of Faulkner himself; in her excellent study of Cather and her critics Joan Acocella notes that Faulkner "considered her one of the foremost American novelists." Whether Sirk was aware of that is maybe besides the point, and in fact if the connection is a happy coincidence that only bolsters a particular sense of affinity.

These other shots of isolation (above the actor is Robert Stack; below, Malone is seen with Robert Middleton) are exemplary minor-key grace notes that underscore for me the impression that while The Tarnished Angels cannot transpose Pylon, it authentically honors that book, and Faulkner's particular tragic, humane vision.  The movie in its entirety, aside from being a beauty in and of itself, is also, alas, an object lesson that when critics throw around the term "Sirkian" nowadays, almost none of them actually know what that word means. 

Auteurism as formulated by Truffaut and Sarris and others instructed cinephiles not to be enslaved by genre hierarchies, and that's one thing. Current mutations of this perspective seem to be tending to a conclusion that quality itself is a hierarchical construct. As a non-academic, I can't speak to the extent to which this notion is useful on the higher plains of theory. In practice on the lower plain of film writing on the internet, it enables a particularly glib kind of perversity. In March of this year, the writer Calum Marsh contributed a piece to Film.com entitled "Tyler Perry's Defense: Why The Filmmaker Deserves Our Respect."  The chatty essay leaves any number of questions unanswered, including "what do you mean 'Our'?", and, "what it is about the punitive sexist moralism of certain of Perry's film's is worthy of respect?", but the issue of immediate concern is Marsh's declaration that Perry at his best is "making some of the strongest melodramas since Douglas Sirk." Again, we leave aside the curious fact that in seeking to legitimize Perry's work, Marsh tries to put Sirk back into the pigeonhole that auteurist critics removed him from.

It does not take a particularly acute critical sense to understand that any posited equivalence between Tyler Perry and Douglas Sirk is a false one. It only takes a functioning pair of eyes, and a functioning pair of ears. Perry's actual cinematic forebear is Hugo Haas, a filmmaker I daresay many young cinephiles of the vulgar auteurist inclination are not familiar with. They might want to look into him. But this kind of false equivalency is not good for film studies students and other living things. 

Softening Parker

The waitress kept asking him if he wanted anything else.

It distracted him from looking out at the street. She had a band on her finger, so finally he said "What's the matter, don't you get enough from your husband?" So after that she left him alone.

She glared awhile from the other end of the counter, but he could ignore that.

—The Hunter, Richard Stark, 1962

Now the room was comfortable, illuminated in pools of amber. Crossing to sit on the right side of the sofa, he said, "Tell me what you think you've got so far."

"You're a wooden nickel, that's all I know right now," she said. "Linda usually keeps white wine in the refrigerator here. Want some?"

She herself did, of course; keeping the tension held down below the surface was hard work. He said, "If you do." 

She smiled. "At last, a human response." 

—Flashfire, Richard Stark, 2000

Lee Marvin in Point Blank, John Boorman, 1967

Jason Statham in Parker, Taylor Hackford, 2013

While it is not likely to be remembered as any kind of major cinematic event, Parker was a pretty decent caper/revenge picture that, contrary to many expectations, did not entirely, or even in all that annoyingly substantive a way, piss on its source material, the above-quoted novel Flashfire by Richard Stark. The reason this distinction is more noteworthy than it ordinarily might be is that the Parker novels by Stark (a not-particularly-well-guarded pen name of Donald E. Westlake, who also wrote dozens of highly-regarded crime novels under his actual name) are rightly beloved by genre aficionados, who have long marveled at Hollywood's seeming unwillingness to bring an undiluted version of the character to the screen. This especially given the brisk, deliberately flat storytelling of these procedurals, which play out for the reader as clean vivid amoral word-movies. 

The problem a lot of the time, of course, is the amorality. Recently on Twitter, the former comic book writer turned television scripter and producer Gerry Conway, expressing his disappointment at the new Parker film, described Stark's original character as an "autistic bank robber." That's an interesting way of putting it. But it summarizes why a Hollywood story editor might consider such a character difficult to "relate" to. The unforgettable opening of the first Parker novel, The Hunter, published in 1962, establishes Parker as practically a T-101 of 2oth century criminality. After walking across the George Washington Bridge into New York, he creates an identity for himself, ransacks some poor sap's bank account, and "raises" eight hundred 1962 dollars by three in the afternoon—seed money for his mission, to retrieve the tens of thousands that a former partner has stolen from him. He is a man of very few words, not someone eager to start fights, but someone who doesn't care about smashing a face in if that's what it takes to get something done. In short, he is what some might call a complete "badass," and part of the enjoyment of reading the Parker books is in the unhealthy thrill of seeing him get away with all manner of extremely antisocial behavior and even enjoying some of what his ill-gotten gains can by, although it isn't too long into the series that one is given to understand that the professional thief's life can be as much of a workaday drag as that of any office-bound stiff's. 

Stark/Westlake admired the first English-language movie made from a Parker novel, 1967's Point Blank, directed by John Boorman and starring Lee Marvin. While Marvin is an exemplary Parker in every respect, Westlake noted in interviews that when he created the character, he had actually pictured Jack Palance. To judge from interviews, Westlake, who died in 2008, was one of those artists who had a pretty thorough understanding of what they were about. Discussing Point Blank with Patrick McGilligan, he calls it "a terrific film" and observes "the film is more stylized than the book, more mannerist, whereas the Richard Stark books are very flat." Whereas the Parker of The Hunter is practically robotic, Lee Marvin's Walker (Westlake had a rule about selling the rights to Parker novels: unless the producer was going to make a series of Parker films, they'd be obliged to change the name of the character), while exceptionally grim and limited in expression, has a touch of atavism to him. Via the smashed-linearity flashbacks of the movie, the viewer's also given the idea that Walker had some feelings to hurt; his relationship to the partner-in-crime who jilts him, Mal Reese (John Vernon) is portrayed far more warmly than in the book, in which Parker proceeds warily and gets burned anyway. 

For all that, Point Blank represented a pretty accurate representation of the Parker character in terms of menace and relentlessness. Westlake rated the never-released-in-the-U.S. Mise en sac, made in 1966 and adapted from The Score, as "modest but good." Godard's Made In USA, let's face it, does not really count as a Parker picture. Westlake describes the director of the Jim-Brown-starring The Split (based on The Seventh) as "a lox," and the movie's pretty lousy, although it's got a helluva cast, including Ernest Borgnine and Gene Hackman. 1973's The Outfit, directed by John Flynn, who'd go on to make Rolling Thunder, was highly rated by Westlake: "[It's] the one movie made from the Stark books that got the feeling right. The movie was done flat, just like the books." You can judge this yourself by watching the Warner Archive DVD of the movie, or coming to see it at the Brooklyn Public Library on February 26 when I present it as part of the series "Original Gangsters." However. The movie does, in its final shot. make its main characters rather more ingratiating than they are in the book. And there's one scene that kind of exemplifies just what Hollywood can't help but do with this kind of material. In the 1963 book, also called The Outfit, Parker, now unrecognizable to many of his former associates on account of necessary plastic surgery, needs some automobile service, and he gets into a spot of trouble at a Georgia garage-for-reprobates after a woman of the house, who had come on to him, accuses him of raping her. Here's how she's described in the book: "She was very fat, forty or forty-five, with a fat white face under [...] orange hair. She was wearing a dark blue dress with pink flowers on it." Later, she is depicted as grinning at Parker, "showing spaces where she'd lost teeth."

In the movie she is played by Sheree North, with all her teeth, looking like so. 

Anyway, I seem to be straying from what I intended as my point. While the current Parker movie has a little too much Parker-explaining-himself stuff ("I never steal from people who can't afford it") I was mildly surprised, when looking at the book from which the movie was adapted, that this Stark-penned Parker actually IS a more socialized character than the one we meet in The Hunter. In the eight-year run in which Westlake/Stark wrote sixteen Parker novels, he maintained the character's grim pragmatism but added some complicating factors, including a girlfriend and eventual housemate, Claire. Parker had accumulated enough partners who did not burn him that they could be brought together for a relatively epic Parker adventure, the initial finale to the series, Butcher's Moon. One of those partners, a funny, voluble stage actor named Alan Grofield (who I always imagine as being played in a movie by Edward Norton...never gonna happen...), is goofy enough to function as a comic foil to Parker's gruffness, and he's more in line with the characters Westlake created in his novels featuring the relative anti-Parker, John Dortmunder. (The Westlake omniverse is one of the great underappreciated delights of genre literature but too complicated to treat much here.) But the what one realizes at the end of Butcher's Moon is that Parker is in fact, rather fond of the guy, despite the fact that he allows him to be...well, I don't want to spoil it for anyone. If you're reading this you really ought to check out the Parker books, all but four of which are now available from the University of Chicago Press.

The people who made Parker were smart to adapt one of the novels from the post comeback, or post Comeback (for that is indeed the name of the novel in which the ageless Parker returned, after an over twenty-year layoff) run, not just because the old-school crimes that Parker committed in the '60s could largely only be commited in the '60s, but because the Parker who came back IS appreciably different from the guy in the first sixteen. He hasn't become nice, not in the least, but he has acquired not the veneer but the actual cachet of an old pro who knows his dirty business inside and out and whose criminal pragmatism also contains an element of actually conscious restraint. Watching the movie without having looked back at the book first, I tried to recall whether the character of the cop with an eye for Parker's non-criminal helpmate real-estate agent figured in the book at all. (In the movie they're played by Bobby Canavalle and Jennifer Lopez respectively.) He does, and in fact in the book he gets into a bit more of a cat-and-mouse game with Parker, and at the end of the book—this isn't really a spoiler, all things being equal—the two characters practically banter with each other. The Parker of The Hunter did not banter. 

This is not to say that Westlake/Stark compromised his creation. He created Parker out of an intuition, and after a spell of writing, realized this was a character/conceit that he could have some fun with. What followed was not a self-conscious stab at "character growth" or anything so boring but rather playing with the parameters of what he was doing so as to continue having fun. That the Parker series of novels is so thoroughly engrossing is a testimony to both his instincts and skill. And the Statham/Hackford cinematic realization of Parker is sufficiently in the spirit of the original that I would not mind seeing another such adaptation from these guys.