Five Easy Pieces, a still-pertinent saga Life In These United States, and stuff, turns 40 this year, and a newly restored version of the film plays at L.A.'s great NuArt theater this weekend to celebrate. I spoke to Karen Black and director Bob Rafelson about the picture and wrote about it for the Los Angeles Times, here. Enjoy.
The exceptionally untimely death of Alex Chilton, one of the most dynamic talents of American popular music, period, got me thinking and listening hard. While I'm having trouble digging up my copy of High Priest (a record that was underappreciated and misunderstood in its time, but that I think gives a really thoroughgoing picture of everything Chilton was about), the recent Big Star box set Keep An Eye On The Sky has been a near-constant companion in recent weeks. (Not only is it filled with fantastic music, by the way; its sonics are absolutely magnificent, best I've ever heard the group on CD.) And of course, next time I go to my barber, odds are extremely good that I'll hear The Box Tops' "Cry Like A Baby," as the place's radio is perpetually tuned to WCBS-FM. What an odd career.
Chilton's music hasn't been particularly widely represented in Hollywood motion pictures, but where and when it has been, it's been pertinent, noteworthy. Over at The Auteurs' Notebook today I do a little ruminating on Chilton in the movies, with the help of some generous observations from writer/director Greg Mottola (The Daytrippers, Superbad, Adventureland). You may read the piece here.
Great news that I ought to have blogged about earlier: the visionary theater manager Nelson Page and his sound and vision ace Pete Apruzzese are, after a brief hiatus, back in charge at Suffern, N.Y.'s Lafayette Theater, a beautiful old-time movie palace built in the late '20s and maintained in palatial splendor, complete with a fully-functioning and truly mighty Wurlitzer organ. Which means, among other things, that the Saturday morning special screenings of classic films—Big Screen Classics, as the series (which operates at three theaters, in fact) is called, is also back. I revisited the site yesterday, Holy Saturday to us Catholics, for a particularly apropos screening: Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 rethink of his silent 1923 The Ten Commandments.
More about the movie in a moment. First, I want to rhapsodize a bit about the house itself, which I wrote about for the first time here. It's one of the few movie emporiums wherein one feels thrilled to be just sitting there before the lights go down. Look in front of you, and there's the gorgeous curtain. Look behind you and there's the lovely chandelier.
It's just a spectacular atmosphere. And when the Wurlitzer's really going—you can see its percussion array in a nook stage left—the atmosphere is like nothing else out there. Just transportive.
I also hugely admire Nelson's attention to detail. During the actual screenings, he has the sound from the movies piped into the rest rooms, so incontinent viewers can somewhat follow what's going on. I haven't been in a theater that sported such a feature since the old Palace in Dumont, New Jersey in the mid-'60s, and even now I think I might be mixing that house up with a long-gone theater in Fort Lee. With typical wit, Nelson doesn't just pipe the audio into the men's room—he's got the speaker secreted in the body of an old-school radio, a nice touch.
In short, it feels like a privilege to watch a film at the Lafayette, and I implore those of a similar bent to mine to make an effort to check it out, even for a showing of the new Clash of The Titans, which is the theater's first-run feature at the moment.
But it was a special treat to see Commandments there. The critic J. Hoberman once pronounced, "Bluntly put, to not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures," and while I thoroughly agree with that notion, I also think it applies equally to DeMille, who some might conceive as Bresson's directly opposite number. DeMille's is a cinema of utmost and utter spectacle (something Bresson actually had an appreciation of, as witness his admiration for Goldfinger), and what's interesting to note when watching this VistaVision-shot film, in glorious color and such, is how very much it resembles a silent picture. DeMille stages a number of sequences practically as tableaux, having some characters hold poses when not in action (I was particularly struck by the frozen mournful attitude of Nina Foch's Bithiah, Moses' adoptive mother, as the Pharaoh Seti (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) pronounces the banishment of Moses). The cutting is not fast. The camera doesn't move a whole lot, and when it does, the director makes you feel it; as, for instance the way the camera backs up as the mist of pestilence creeps into the labyrinthian dwelling place of the Hebrew slaves, while John Derek's Joshua make his way to the house of Moses.
All pretty great stuff, I think. And as screened at the Lafayette, pretty wide:
Yep, that's a 2.20 aspect ratio, wider than VistaVision's 1.85. This version is the full "roadshow" length, but the print was a "Super VistaVision" version created for a revival of the film in 1989. The studio transferred the picture to 70mm, and cropped the image for a wider frame. (This creates some issues with the title crawl at the beginning, which projectionist Pete Apruzzese had to re-rack throughout so folks could actually read the whole thing.) After the screening, Pete came out with my old friend Joseph Failla and I for a brief repast, and I asked Pete why he and Nelson had chosen to screen this particular version. He answered that it wasn't a choice. Rather, this was the only print Paramount had for theatrical screenings. An odd state of affairs, particularly given that in 1999 the picture was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress—you'd think a studio might be proud of this fact and, you know, do part of its part. Well, now that Paramount seems to be taking a slightly more active interest in preservation and restoration (see its really terrific new DVD and Blu-ray disc of The African Queen, which Dave Kehr wrote evocatively about a few weeks ago), perhaps we shall see some positive action on the Commandments front. In the meantime, a few weeks hence the Lafayette will be screening that newly restored print of Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes that I'm sure many of you have heard about. I'm sure to be there. And I'm tempted to see Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much there in about two weeks. Heck, if Suffern weren't such a challenging trek from Brooklyn, I'd be there every Saturday this season.
BTW, the title of this post is, of course, a reference to the famous line that Edward G. Robinson, in fact, never actually says in the film. The word his treacherous character Dathan (and every other character in the film) uses is "deliverer." Which isn't as catchy as "messiah," is it.
In commemoration of the opening today of a remake of Clash of the Titans, I contribute a modest history of giant f**king scorpions in cinema to The Auteurs' Notebook, for today's Topics, etc. Above, a couple of the aforesaid creatures as created by Willis O'Brien for The Black Scorpion.
Above, from Ossos (1997)
I suppose before going into Costa's sin I ought to confess my own, which is that I walked out of the first Cannes press screening of Colossal Youth back in 2006, about forty-five minutes in. I admit I was a bit suspicious of it, not quite sure if the film, which was following the wanderings of a clearly "authentic" displaced person named Ventura, was going to turn out to be one of those smirky, "Hey, look at me, I'm using real dispossessed people to articulate my 'vision,' and doesn't that make you uncomfortable, you bourgeois twat? Boo-yah, in your FACE!" exercises that reached a kind of apotheosis with Ulrich Seidl's loathesome Import/Export, which was to screen at Cannes the next year, and which I stubbornly sat through the entirety of for the sole purpose of being able to fully own my contempt for it. There was a quality to it that suggested it would be something rather different than that...but whatever it was, at that particular moment in time, I wasn't in the mood for it (it was early evening, I was hungry, and the picture was going to go on for about another two hours), and I bolted. That I did so at pretty much the same time as another more prominent critic did actually filled me with an ambivalence that contained more than a dollop of shame.
Over the next year I learned a lot more about the Portuguese filmmaker, and was able to catch up with the work at an August 2007 retrospective at Anthology Film Archives. Colossal Youth, as it happens, was the final part of a trilogy of films Costa began making in the late 1990s, after making a picture called Casa de Lava on the island of Cape Verde. It was from the residents of that island that Costa learned of Fontinhas, a poor area outside of Lisbon proper, where many of the residents of the island wound up after emigrating to Lisbon in the hopes of changing their lives. Costa was already a filmmaker of remarkable sensitivity and sensibility when he began shooting Ossos in Fontinhas, but working there would wind up transforming him profoundly.
I discuss some of this in my review of the extraordinary Second Run DVD of Costa's 1989 debut feature O Sangue, which appeared as a Foreign Region DVD Report at The Auteurs' Notebook in autumn of last year. In that piece, I refer to what I'll call Costa's "sin" here. The new Criterion release of Costa's trilogy, an extraordinary box set entitled "Letters From Fontinhas: Three Films By Pedro Costa" gives one the opportunity to examine it more closely, and to appreciate the ways in which Costa adapted his approach to his subject and subjects.
Like the subsequent In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth, the cast of Ossos is made up largely of real Fontinhas residents, but unlike the subsequent films, the non-actors are playing roles and enacting a story concocted by Costa. None of this is particularly bothersome or problematic. Late in the film there's a scene in which the character Eduarda (Isabel Ruth), an outsider, enters the labyrinth of Fontinhas to visit Tina (Maria Lipkina). Who is listening, on a boom box, to a live recording of the British punk group Wire, playing its song "Lowdown" (chorus: "Drowning in the big swim/rising to the SUR-FACE!"). The boom box is switched off; the characters commune; the father of Tina's child enters the frame; words are exchanged; and the music begins again. Only this time the "Lowdown" we hear is the studio version from the seminal album Pink Flag.
The problem here isn't that the music is inapt; tonally, it "works" with the scene. The verisimilitude issue is a little more pertinent; the likelihood that in the late 1990s a young woman living in a Lisbon slum is going to be listening to the 1977 work of a British band is, well, iffy. But not entirely out of the realm of the probable. That the viewer hears two different versions of the song, though, starts to smack of a certain...connoisseurship. (And indeed, Costa has spoken of his deep admiration for the group, and its influence on his aesthetic.) And here we get to the nub of Costa's error. Whether or not the music "works," it still represents a sort of directorial imposition. There's a falseness to it that's essential, that goes beyond mere questions of cinematic verisimilitude.
In an video interview with the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin that makes up just one of the voluminous extras in the extraordinary Criterion set, Costa recalled being upbraided by one of Ossos' cast members, Vanda Duarte, who told him "You have to stop the faking." She wasn't referring to the use of music, necessarily (Costa doesn't mention a specific instance of faking that Duarte objected to), but Costa got the message. Hence, the straits of In Vanda's Room, an epic film that largely takes place in the title dwelling, where Duarte and her sister Zita consume drugs and gossip as their neighborhood is torn down around them. This non-fiction fiction (the production process of the digitally-shot picture was incredibly painstaking, exacting, and again, this is covered in the box's supplements) seems to eschew the influence of a sensibility "outside" of it, at least until the Gyorgy Kurtag music that plays over the end credits. (In an essay in the box's booklet, Thom Andersen cites the perhaps "pseudodiegetic sound" of a song by French chanteuse and one time yé-yé girl Nicoletta that opens the film, which to these ears sounded like something that could have been coming from some European manifestation of oldies radio.)
Ventura in Colossal Youth, 2006
By the time he made Colossal Youth, Costa had become so familiar with Fontinhas—which, as it happens, was being pretty much wiped out as he was making his films—that he could comfortably re-integrate his sensibility into that film. Hence, then, the picture's English-language title (a nod to another seminal recording the 1980 record by the Welsh group Young Marble Giants) and lead "actor" Ventura's obsessive, incantory recitation/adaptation of a letter/poem by surrealist and French Resistance martyr Robert Desnos. Ventura's poignant, strangely magisterial presence is so potent that he can be seen as the picture's definitive co-auteur. It is rather ironic that Fontinhas comes down just as Costa becomes a filmmaker whose soul has finally melded with the place.
You can learn a lot from reading any given comments thread over at Dave Kehr's website. Granted, the place is sometimes a nesting space for overly-vigorous haters of the Coen brothers, and there are one or two participants who seem largely consumed with the sound of their own virtual voices, but on the whole I'd say it's a paradise of erudition, passion, and information. Much of it courtesy of the host himself, who posted the following observation a couple of weeks back:
I saw a good movie last night: “Gold of the Seven Saints,” an obscure Gordon Douglas picture from 1961 that has surfaced in the Warner Archive Collection. It’s a micro-budgeted, black-and-white western (surely, one of the last of its kind), starring two of Warner’s up-and-coming television stars, Clint Walker and Roger Moore, as a pair of trappers who find a vein of gold, and then have to get their haul back to civilization by going through an outlaw gang led by Gene Evans and a private army led by a Mexican warlord (over)played by Robert Middleton. The excellent script, by Leigh Brackett and Leonard Freeman, has a Boetticher flavor to it, with its emphasis on psychological sussing-out, bluffs and betrayals (the two leads love but instinctively distrust each other, which they don’t see as a contradiction). But Douglas, with his bracing sobriety and unflinching apprehension of violence, pushes the action a bit further toward what would become Peckinpah-Leone territory. There’s an ending borrowed from “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” but Douglas plays it quite differently, and I think more effectively, than Huston does, with a quiet, sensible stoicism rather than reaching for a grand cosmic statement. Visually, the film displays all of Douglas’s fondness for darkness and deep-focus space, and manages the rare feat of making Monument Valley look very different than it does in Ford’s work — desolate and threatening rather than mythic and grand. Very nice work from a filmmaker who always brought a high degree of care and commitment to whatever unlikely project he was assigned to — be it giant ants, FBI infiltrators or Liberace.
Well, that was enough to sell me on parting with a few bucks in order to get the Warner Archives disc of the film, and I'm pretty happy I did. I don't have much to add to what Dave said: I heartily ditto his appraisal of the script, for instance. I was most blown away, though, by the aforementioned depiction of Monument Valley. A fair number, alas, of know-somethingish, self-styled cinephiles out there like to rehearse their "takedowns" of something like The Searchers by beginning, "And who could actually live in Monument Valley, anyway? It's a freaking desert." Or some such other equally obvious observation. In any case, Douglas and cinematographer Joseph Biroc give the terrain a more "realistic" treatment and place in the story; it is a threatening environment. Aside from a brief prologue that sets the story in motion, the entire first third of the film is pretty much just Walker and Moore's characters dealing with the desert, and the oft-faraway newfound foes now coming after the duo and their gold. It's terse, almost minimalist filmmaking of the highest order.
Near the end of their desert sojourn the duo find themselves literally walled in. It's going to take some kind of deus ex machina to deliver them from the band of bad guys led by a particularly slimy and sadistic Gene Evans. I don't think it's spoiling all too much to reveal that said deus ex machina arrives in the form of, yes, Chill Wills.
Once Walker and Moore return to some semblance of "normal" society, the picture has a more conventional feel, but fortunately Evans isn't too far behind and the villain devises some pretty nasty tactics in order to persuade the duo to reveal the location of their gold.
Which leads to the Sierra Madre-derived finale. Dave's assertion that it's done more effectively here than in Huston's film is just the sort of thing that drives the know-somethingish types cited above to freak out over "dweeby" or "monkish" "ultra-auteurists." Kind of like if you remark to one of them that To Have and Have Not is a better film than Casablanca. How can anything be "more effective" than Walter Huston stomping his feet and laughing, they sputter; why, it's an iconic moment. So it is, and there's nothing that's going to make it any less iconic, just as "Put your lips together and blow" is never going to supplant "Here's looking at you, kid" in the lingua franca. Such assertions as ours are never made in the belief, or the desire for that matter, that such things will or even ought to occur. In any event, in terms of dramatic practice, the ending of Seven Saints is in fact terrifically handled, and unselfconsciously, at that.
Devotees of Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema may recall the critic's assertion that Douglas "could be dismissed as an efficient technician without too noticeable a personal style" and commendation that Douglas "didn't shirk his job despite the utmost provocation" when assigned to direct Liberace (the film was 1955's staggering Sincerely Yours). Dave's estimation which as we see also takes in I Was A Communist For The FBI and Them!, is more generous. For my money, Seven Saints combined with the aforementioned pictures, and the Frank Sinatra Tony Rome flicks of the '60s, move Douglas out of Sarris' "MIscellany" category and very nearly into "Expressive Esoterica."
Jeepers creepers. My consideration of the in-progress Film Comments Selects series, featuring Phillipe Grandrieux's Un Lac (that's its costar Alexei Solonchev in the still above), among a good many other intriguing things, is here, at The Auteurs'.
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