Some Came Running

The McCarey Treatment: "An Affair to Remember," "Love Affair," And "Sleepless in Seattle"

Some time after my book Made Men: The Story of 'Goodfellas' was published, my editor at Hnover Square Press and I were discussing a followup, and I thought it would be fun to do something counterintuitive. The 30th anniversary of the release of Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle was nigh. The movie interested me for a number of reasons, not least of them being its links to classical Hollywood. Specifically the way the whole plot hinges on that of two prior films directed by Leo McCarey. I also had a wonderful experience with Nick Pileggi, the patriarch of Goodfellas who had been Ephron's husband until her death in 2012. He thought the project a good idea, gave me a couple of contacts, and stepped aside. He insisted that his and Ephron's professional activities had almost no crossover. (This despite Ephron taking enthusiastic interest in Nick's mob-chronicling work, and crafting the script of My Blue Heaven around her own personal experience of Henry Hill.)

The project was fun for a little while, and then less fun, and then a bit nightmarish. I'm not inclined to detail it here. Well — one thing was that nobody in the cast would speak with me and every behind-the-scenes individual I did interview had an axe or two to grind with respect to Ephron. The best part of the process was interviewing Calvin Trillin, a hero of mine who has a small role in Sleepless, and who said to me, unprompted, about his friend, "Nora was bossy."

Anyway, At a certain point I gave it up and started work on what has recently been published as The World Is Yours: The Story of 'Scarface.' Fun! 

But I shouldn't let what work I did do on the Sleepless project go to waste, and I have been neglecting this poor blog for quite some time (although a new Blu-ray-4K Ultra Consumer Guide is in fact in the works and should be up before the end of August). So I give you my chapter on the McCarey films, keeping the bracketed source citations that would have gone in the back of the actual book intact just so you can see how scrupulous I am. 

 

            One of the most affectionately cited scenes in Sleepless in Seattle is the one on which it’s the guys’ turn to talk about An Affair to Remember. It may indeed have had an inordinate and not salutary effect on mainstream intragender movie discourse

            “It’s a chick movie” is how Sam describes it. That’s enough, in his mind, and the mind of his brother-in-law Greg, played by Victor Garber, to dismiss it entirely. Not in a malicious, shoot-it-into-the-sun way; they just would prefer it not sully their consciousnesses too much. They’ll sit through such an item if necessary — it’s a generous gesture on date night — but that’s it. After sister-in-law Suzy, played by Rita Wilson, Hanks’ wife in real life, goes through an elaborate, emotional monologue on the heartbreaking qualities of Affair — one that we have been primed for by the conversations between Annie and Becky about the picture — Sam and Greg jokingly describe their emotional responses to mid-60s action blockbuster. “I cried at the end of The Dirty Dozen,” Victor Garber’s Greg says of the Robert-Aldrich-directed World War II picture about a suicide squad of largely psychotic misfits, most of whom indeed do buy it by the picture’s end. Tom Hanks’ Sam invokes cast member Trini Lopez as having endured a particularly poignant end. Lopez, a pop star who rocketed to superstardom playing Latin-tinged fare, was one of two bits of stunt casting in Dozen; the other was record-breaking fullback Jim Brown, who of course was obliged to show off his remarkable running-with-something-in-his-hands skills (in this case a series of grenades rather than a football) for the movie’s thrilling climax.

            “Stop it you guys,“ Suzy says after a bit, still sniffling. The banter, however, is good natured; not the out-for-blood culture war stuff you see too frequently on social media nowadays.

            If you’ve read Nora Ephron’s essays, and seen the movies she made, the casual allusions they contain would incline you to believe that weaving An Affair to Remember into the narrative of Sleepless in Seattle was her idea. I myself was a little surprised to learn from Jeff Arch that the device was indeed his, and that it went back to an experience he had in his late teens, watching Affair on television with his girlfriend. The movie, he says, struck him as improbably sentimental drivel throughout. And yet at the end he found himself reduced to tears. And that’s the difference between Arch and the Sleepless guys: they do not melt at the end of Affair. (Nor, we can confidently infer, do they cry at the end of The Dirty Dozen.)

            Arch recalls: “I was watching on TV with a girlfriend in college, in 1974. At one point I was just so fed up and I thought this was so hokey. I was cynical and I turned to her – I'm a Sagittarius, and we’re known for not knowing when to shut up. I was about to make the biggest crack about what a crock of shit this thing is, and I saw she was crying like Niagara Falls. One of the few times in my life where I didn’t say the thing I was going to say because I saw the power of that. And then I got kind of into the device — you know, it is a very powerful structurally thing. And then we talked. While we were really close, I had the girlfriend out of town and she had the boyfriend out at a different college.   And I said to her, “Look, if our lives don't work out, we’ll meet at the top of the Empire State Building on New Years’ Day of 1980,” which seems — when you’re in 1974 and you’re 19 or 20 years old — like a really, really long time.

            “She said, ‘Sure.’ And we didn’t meet, because things…worked out differently. Then at some point, had an idea to write a play about two people who only speak to each other on the phone for business, and then eventually meet. I couldn’t figure out how to do that. I just had this visual of their desks on stage starting at extreme ends and as the play moved on, their debts were going to move closer. So I had an idea of people falling in love before they met each other, with that pretext.”

            An Affair to Remember, a lush, widescreen and color affair made for 20^th Century Fox, is arguably a swan song of American romantic cinema, or comedy, or tragicomedy. The 1957 movie and its original Love Affair, from 1939, were both conceived, co-written and directed by Leo McCarey, a director elevated to reassessment in the 1960s when Andrew Sarris pronounced him a “Far Side of Paradise” auteur in The American Cinema: Directors and Direction 1929 to 1968 and Peter Bogdanovich recorded an oral history with McCarey for the American Film Institute. McCarey’s movies ran the gamut; he began as a director of Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts, gave the Marx Brothers their collective anarchic heads in Duck Soup, waved the flag in a heartwarming and funny fashion in Ruggles of Red Gap, made romantic comedy a little less screwball than Howard Hawks did with The Awful Truth.

            An Affair to Remember at least in part exists because of a regret that Cary Grant carried with him for a couple of decades. In 1937 Grant worked with director Leo McCarey on the classic screwball comedy The Awful Truth, co-starring with Irene Dunne. Grant’s experience was, from his perspective, less than ideal. McCarey had an improvisational approach that Grant wasn’t used to. He visited the set of the 1939 Love Affair and saw what wonders the McCarey touch achieved with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne and pictured himself in the Boyer role.

            On an audio commentary recorded for a DVD edition of Sleepless in Seattle, Nora Ephron says “film snobs think Love Affair is better than An Affair to Remember but nothing to me is as good as Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant.” You can’t call Leo McCarey a film snob, but he too preferred Love Affair to Affair to Remember. Displaying what F. Scott Fitzgerald considered the hallmark of a first-rate intelligence (that is, the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s head and still retain the ability to function), McCarey also allowed, in his way, that Cary Grant was the ideal star to sell this tale. He had written the role of Nicky for Charles Boyer, yes. But, as he told Peter Bogdanovich: “Boyer came out much better than Cary. But Cary meant a lot more at the box office.” One could argue in the case of An Affair To Remember, that this wasn’t merely reflexive; watching Love Affair today, there’s a sense in which Boyer’s performance feels less than contemporary, while Grant (possibly in part because his persona is still considered and experienced as archetypal) has more enduring credibility. To be more specific, Boyer’s stateliness is particularly to pertinent to the religiosity of Love Affair which is largely absent in Affair to Remember and, let’s be frank, would have likely been a turn off to the characters in Sleepless.

            McCarey and Grant worked together again twice after Truth, on the Garson Kanin-directed My Favorite Wife (which McCarey developed, helped write, and was set to direct; an automobile accident put him, according to second female lead Gail Patrick, “at death’s door,” [James Bawden, Films in Review, 1981] but he remained as producer) and Once Upon A Honeymoon.  As much as McCarey and Grant had not gotten along on Truth, it’s been argued that McCarey, a dapper dresser who could be hilarious and insouciant before the film industry and alcoholism stressed him out of shape, helped shape what became known as the Grant persona. The confidence, the swings between understatement and manic comic indignation, the style, the walk — all these aspects of what we consider the quintessential Grant persona are honed to perfection in Grant’s performance in The Awful Truth. Director Alfred Hitchcock, whom McCarey is on the record as admiring, refined these aspects of Grant’s screen personality even further.

            And except for the clothes sense, apparently few if any of the personality traits we see in Grant on screen were manifested by Grant in real life. In his sometimes acid memoir, Dropped Names, Frank Langella recalls dining with Tony Curtis, who had idolized Grant growing up and eventually worked with him on Blake Edwards’ 1959 Operation Petticoat. Because it was a “huge hit” Curtis allowed that he would have worked with Grant again anytime, he was astonished at the gap between the man and his screen persona. “The guy turns out to be a fucking bore,” Langella quotes Curtis. “He knew better than all of us where to put the camera, how to say the line, how to play the scene. He had no humor and no charm. I would do anything to avoid having lunch with him.” Langella had heard similarly from Mel Brooks. “I thought I’d kill myself if I had to eat a meal with this guy again.”  [Langella pg. 308]

            McCarey responded “Impossible” to Bogdanovich when asked what Grant was like to work with on The Awful Truth. By the same token, at this point in his career, Grant might have considered McCarey similarly. In the second volume of his biography of Bing Crosby — whose public persona was humongously enhanced by his portrayal of kindly but hip priest Father O’Malley in McCarey’s hit Going My Way and its sequel The Bells of Saint Mary’s — Gary Giddins writes: “McCarey’s method of shooting […] demanded more concentration than memorizing a script. Leo’s actors related similar anecdotes attesting to the mood on his sets. George Burns wrote of W.C. Fields sitting by himself in a corner, learning his lines during the filming of Six of a Kind; he had given up learning them at home the night before after he realized they changed every day. Ralph Bellamy groused that on The Awful Truth, nobody but McCarey knew what was going on. On The Milky Way, McCarey acted out for Adolph Menjou a long, illogical speech he wanted him to deliver for his big scene with Harold Lloyd. After he ‘did it for me with all the gestures,’ Menjou wrote, McCarey asked, ‘Why not adlib it,’ as it’s all ‘hocus pocus’ anyway? ‘Maybe,’ Leo joked, ‘we’ve discovered a new technique…. The McCarey system, the ultimate in the true are of making motion pictures.’ Menjou summed it up: ‘He was kidding about the new technique [but] he wasn’t kidding about adlibbing the scene.’” [pg 344, Giddins]

            The set of An Affair To Remember was not so confusing, in part because Grant and Kerr already had a template to work from: the original Love Affair. Both films hinge on two substantial plot components: the ocean cruise on which the lovers, separated from their land-based obligations, romantic and otherwise, and locked in a kind of romantic isolation that’s only enhanced by a visit to a venerated relation, and the proposed rendezvous at the Empire State Building.

            These were visions that occurred to McCarey while returning from a European vacation with his wife Stella. The time off — they departed from Hollywood in October of 1937 — was well-deserved and much needed. McCarey had not one but two masterpieces out that year, one being The Awful Truth and the other the heartbreaking tragedy of old age Make Way For Tomorrow, a still-devastating picture about the inverse of parental neglect of children that reportedly inspired the Yasuhiro Ozu classic Tokyo Story. McCarey was fond of both pictures but held Tomorrow closest to his heart — he was to remark, when accepting the Best Director award for Truth in March of 1938, “Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.”

            As much as he needed, and got, some rest and relaxation his trip, on the cruise back to the States something was gnawing at him. And Stella noticed. McCarey recalled to Bogdanovich his wife saying, “You’re always at you lowest ebb when you’re trying to get a new idea.” [Bog pg 417] After a period of stewing, he got the new idea. Here’s how he put it to Stella: “Suppose you and I were talking to each other when the boat sailed from England and we got to know each other on the trip. We felt ourselves inseparable. By the time the trip was over, we were madly in love with each other but by the time the boat docked we have found out that each is obligated to somebody else.” [Bog.pg 417]

            The Empire State Building idea came later. At the end of the cruise, when McCarey looked at the Manhattan skyline (the same skyline, minus the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, that inspired Fritz Lang to concoct Metropolis; Lang’s first sight of it was in 1924). And from there he concocted the twist: Terri’s inability to make the rendezvous there because of being incapacitated in an auto accident. “I have a theory,” McCarey told Bogdanovich, “which I call the ineluctability of incidents. The idea is that if something happens, some other thing inevitable flows from it — like night follows day; events are linked together. I always develop my stories that way, in a series of events that succeed and provoke each other. I never really have intrigues.” [Bog., pg 416] Terri’s disappearance is certainly a provoking incident. But it’s one that Nicky takes to be an intrigue, freezing him — and her — up when they run into each other at a concert, before their painful and glorious rediscovery of each other and reconciliation.  

            With these ideas in place, McCarey fleshed out the story with Mildred Cram, then turned over screenwriting duties to Donald Ogden Stewart (who helped adapt Holiday, the Philip Barry play which George Cukor filmed with Grant and Katharine Hepburn) and Delmar Daves. It would take almost a year for McCarey’s notions to hit a soundstage: The shooting of the film then titled Love Match commenced on October 3, 1938. While gossip columnists reported that the female lead was coveted by actresses ranging from Greta Garbo to Helen Hayes [Gehring, pg. 139] McCarey had,” hand-tailored” for Love Affair his Awful Truth star Irene Dunne, “which included making her a nightclub entertainer in order that Irene could sing during the picture.” [Bog pg 417] He did not tailor Nicky to Cary Grant. Indeed, the ebullience inherent in Dunne notwithstanding, McCarey biographer Wes D. Gehring sees in the creation of Love Affair McCarey steering to a more overtly and comprehensive sincerity: “Romantic comedy’s one-foot-in-reality-base suited McCarey better than the ludicrousness of screwball farce,” he avers.

            The resultant film was received rhapsodically, and not just by film snobs, either. Gehring cites a characteristic contemporary review from Clark Wales of the trade publication Screen and Radio Weekly: “Recommending a Leo McCarey production is something like recommending a million dollars or beauty or a long and happy life. Any of these is a very fine thing to have and the only trouble is that there are not enough of them.” While box-office figures are not readily available, the movie proved to be the second-most popular to be produced and distributed by RKO Pictures, the first having been George Stevens’ Kipling-inspired adventure picture Gunga Din, which starred…Cary Grant.

            McCarey’s 1940s were defined by the two blockbusters Going My Way and The Bells of Saint Mary’s, after which he made Good Sam, another fantasia of Catholic faith (“Sam,” besides being the name of the lead character played by Gary Cooper, stood for “Samaritan”). It was less well-received and indeed has not been subjected to any meaningful critical reassessment. One can picture McCarey at that low ebb, looking for ideas as the 1950s commenced. Gehring speculates about the reasons for McCarey’s reduced productivity. Alcoholism, and an increasing dependence on painkillers that he began using in the wake of the 1939 auto accident that had taken him out of the director’s chair on My Favorite Wife. McCarey also suffered a terrible personal loss in the months after the release of Good Sam: the suicide death of his younger brother, Ray, with whom he had been close. And of course there was what film historian Joseph McBride has called (with respect to McCarey’s friend and colleague Frank Capra) “the catastrophe of success.” Going My Way and Bells had been such monumental, zeitgeist-defining hits that McCarey was very possibly torn between the impulse to try to duplicate them and the desire to break free of them. Hence, as Gehring puts it, he pursued “some very odd unrealized film proposals.” One being a picture about Adam and Eve — he’d privately hatched the idea in the thirties — starring Bells female lead Ingrid Bergman and John Wayne. McCarey spent a lot of money on research, and on the talents of songwriter Harry Warren, developing a musical about Marco Polo. He also wanted his friend Alfred Hitchcock to act for him, in a picture in which the Master of Suspense would “get away with the perfect crime.” [Gehring, pg. 219].

            In any event, his first realized picture of the 1950s was 1952’s My Son John, a HUAC-boosting anti-Communist family melodrama whose production was highly inconvenienced by the death of leading man Robert Walker prior to the end of principal photography. McCarey was forced to cobble together his finale, in which John sees the error of his Red ways, from footage in his friend Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, and to contemporary eyes the hedging and splicing is very plain to see, and somewhat cringe-inducing. Would the picture have been less so had Walker lived to complete his performance? Difficult to say. To these eyes, John is the movie in which the patriotism of Ruggles of Red Gap curdles into paranoia. Its my-country-right-or-wrong ethos is blunt to the point of bathos, and as the critic Robin Wood has pointed out, it’s almost completely contradicted in the late McCarey film Rally Round The Flag, Boys, which just underscores how impossible it is to expect coherent politics out of a lot of classical Hollywood filmmakers. John got a bit of a shellacking from the press but was placed in the top ten films of 1952 list by the ever-mysterious National Board of Review, and got an award from the Catholic Institute of the Press because of course it did. Its box office was low.

            1952 was also the year in which rumors of a Love Affair remake began circulating: in November of that year, syndicated columnist Joe Hyams reported that Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl, who would marry in 1952 (and present the world with future prime time soap sensation Lorenzo Lamas four years later) were interested in starring in a new version of the picture. But it was Twentieth Century Fox and Cary Grant who were the motors for the 1957 movie. In his 1984 biography of Grant, Haunted Idol, Geoffrey Wansell writes that Grant “could still remember visiting the set of the original to talk with Irene Dunne and wishing he had been playing in it.”

            In McCarey’s estimation, Grant went from “impossible” to “terrific” in An Affair to Remember. The remake, as was customary from Twentieth Century Fox since its introduction of the format in 1953, was in breathtaking widescreen CinemaScope and glorious DeLuxe Color (this was a one-strip variant of Technicolor, which required three strips of film being exposed at once, in synch with each other). The sound was Westrex stereo, showcasing the sumptuous voice of Vic Damone singing the title song, music by Harry Warren and lyrics in part by McCarey himself. This was McCarey’s first time out with color and widescreen, and ace cinematographer Milton Krasner, who’d been working in the CinemaScope format since its beginnings — lensing the melodrama/romantic travelogue Three Coins in the Fountain and the sword-and-sandal Christianity epic Demetrius and the Gladiators (directed, as it happens, by Delmer Daves) practically back to back for 1954 releases — grounded the visuals beautifully. The technical “improvements” aside, McCarey saw the remake as an opportunity to reach a new audience. He told Bogdanovich, “A lot of people said it was the best love story they ever saw on screen — and it’s also my favorite love story. Two decades had passed; a lot of young people couldn’t have seen the first version, so I felt I should tell the story again — for them.” Prior to shooting the picture, he told the New York Times that contemporary Hollywood was “afraid of honest emotion. It’s considered old-fashioned if a fellow takes his hat off to kiss a girl. They all seem to be trying to find a trick way to say ‘I love you.’ What are they trying to prove? Love is the oldest and noblest emotion.” (Eventually, when asked to name his favorites among his pictures, McCarey would reflect, “Well, I guess Make Way For Tomorrow, Love Affair, An Affair to Remember, Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary’s. There are moments I like in all the films. I’ve always said, if only I could make a picture out of just the favorite moments.”)

            If leading lady Deborah Kerr was hard-pressed to reproduce the ebullience of Irene Dunne (and indeed, while Terry remains a singer in the remake, she’s an altogether more subdued kind than Dunne — not quite lounge as opposed to nightclub, but certainly more of a natural balladeer in attitude; her singing voice was dubbed by the perennial Marni Nixon), she certainly could sell nobility without breaking a sweat.

            As for Cary Grant, he was, as he entered his early fifties, arguably at his apogee as a screen star. If we agree that Affair was his peak as a romantic lead, we can note that in North By Northwest, produced a few years after Affair, represented his apotheosis as a Hitchcock lead. These achievements help explain why, for Ephron, Affair was the Hollywood Romantic Film and a superior iteration of Love Affair. Affair to Remember starred an all-caps Cary Grant. As much as Boyer had been in vogue after Pepe Le Moko and Algiers, he never quite made it to all-caps status. (By 1957 Boyer had moved into supporting roles in film; see his work as a fatherly but not quite competent sanitarium administrator in Vincente Minnelli’s 1955 The Cobweb. He had also made himself a tidy sum in television production.)

"Cinema Speculation," by Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino is above all else an entertainer, so one expects his “first work of non-fiction,” per the jacket copy, to be entertaining. And so it is. Brash and uninhibitedly opinionated, written in a conversational style that’s hard to pull off successfully (and indeed he often doesn’t do that, but he does do it often enough that you stay with him through the awkwardness), Cinema Speculation, which mostly focuses on Hollywood pictures (and picture-makers) Tarantino discovered in his unusual youth, serves up vivid reading for hours on end.

Tarantino is also, like many of us, subject to market forces. And while I’d never argue that Cinema Speculation isn’t exactly the book he wanted to write (for better or worse), this reader was mildly let down at how frequently he was told something he already knew, at least in terms of subject and theme. The Tarantino I have gotten the biggest kick out of reading — and the one I’ve learned the most from, because frankly, the guy has seen and absorbed a good deal more cinema than I have — is the one who would speak at length to Tim Lucas about his “50 Best Sequels,” which he did in issue 172 (Jan.-Feb. 2013) of Video Watchdog. You know that bit in “Who Put The Bomp?” when Barry Mann sings “who was that man? / I’d like to shake his hand?” I feel that way about Tarantino just for introducing me to the spectacularly perverse Amityville II: The Possession. Tarantino’s appreciation for the minutiae of underappreciated cinema is frequently (not always) matched by remarkable insight into the material — and he can also make convincing arguments as to why it’s good. As to whether the chauvinism that often accompanies his stated allegiances is justified, or ought to be tolerated (what are you gonna do if you don’t wanna tolerate it?), I don’t much care. I’m just always grateful to have new places to go digging.

But this book wasn’t written by that Tarantino. (It contains maybe one reference to William Witney?) I think that may be because, like so many of us, Tarantino is obliged to cooperate with the market, and I suspect that his editors at Harper (which is part of the company where my own publisher, Hanover Square Press, also resides), felt that a book which interwove memoir with considerations of pictures starring the likes of Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood and directed by the likes of Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Schrader might have more commercial potential. And that’s what we have here.

The book is a lot of fun for several reasons. First, for better or worse, Tarantino seems to have almost effortless access to his six-year-old self, stretching all the way to his sixteen-or-so-year-old self. His recollections of the movies he saw, where he saw them, his own often uncomprehending reactions to them, and the audience’s reactions to them, are not often exactly charming, but they are compelling and credible. And his raw impressions form childhood meld almost seamlessly into his, let’s call it adult analysis of the pictures. For as much as he is eager to project an image of cool (look at him glowering in his author photo on the back flap of the dust jacket!) Tarantino’s personality has an awkward side — it’s kind of hard to describe, but it’s an insecurity and vulnerability that’s pretty common among (for lack of a better term) “film nerds,” particularly in their adolescence. It’s a social liability that also renders them unusually sensitive. Tarantino, here and elsewhere, hides this with his bluster (in this book, a lot of things he doesn’t like really “suck,” and so on) but he’s also remarkably up front about what moves him.

Which is not to say that I recommend this book because it’ll provide a skeleton key to Tarantino’s personality. As if anyone really needs one. No, it’s because when he combines the film nerd with the wannabe critic and blends in the working director he still is today, he comes up with some really valuable insight. And the insider stuff he gets from the likes of Niele McQueen, Walter Hill, John Flynn and other film folk is fantastic, always, cutting through the mythology so many of us critics can’t help but try to construct about how Hollywood films get (got?) made and why.

When he argues that Taxi Driver would not have gone into production had not Death Wish made a fortune, he’s applying good critical observation combined with his own experience as a professional filmmaker whose fate often rests in the hands of those marketers I mentioned earlier. They’re everywhere.

He’s also exceptionally good about conveying Ye Olde Direct Experience of Moviemaking. In his chapter on Taxi Driver, he recalls himself, age 15, viewing the film for the first time in 1977, on a double bill with a far less distinguished “Revengeamatic” called The Farmer, with an almost all-Black audience in Scottsdale:

For the film’s first half — to us, the audience in the Carson Twin Cinema — it was a comedy about a stupid idiot who’s turning into more and more of a nutter as the story goes on.

I doubt during its Grand Palais screening at the Cannes Film Festival Taxi Driver induced as many laughs as it did that Saturday afternoon. But in a way, the black audience laughing at Travis Bickle’s antics in Taxi Driver wasn’t that different from that hip Sunset Strip (mostly) white audience at the Tiffany laughing at Peter Boyle’s Joe.

Then the moment happened that made the whole theater burst into hysterics. That one guy walking down the street, ranting and raving that he’s going to kill his woman (“I’ll kill her! I’ll kill that bitch!”). We laughed so hard at that guy, we were a little disconnected from the movie for the next twenty minutes. Because we kept cracking each other up about it. That guy was so funny, we had to make ourselves stop laughing.

What was it about the I’ll kill that bitch guy that cracked our audience up so much? Simple, everybody in the theater had seen that guy before. I had seen that guy. And when we stepped outside the theatre into the Scottsdale shopping center where the Carson Twin Cinema was located, we might see that guy again. But what really cracked us up was we had never seen that guy in a Hollywood movie.

Reading that passage I rather wish that Tarantino had worked with a stronger editor; the writing’s a little lumpy. But what he gets to here is really important, and really not talked about enough in film writing: how audiences respond and why. Who knows. Maybe they just don’t anymore. When we mourn the potential passing of the theatrical experience, we should also be thinking about the decline of the neighborhood theater, and the weird ways that movies could move us in specific environments. Tarantino doesn’t play his experiences with Black audiences for exotic appeal as, say, Harlan Ellison might have (and I probably have). He considers the responses for what they were: honest. This becomes particularly clear in the book’s final chapter, a homage to a nomadic adult Black friend, Floyd, that details the guy’s aesthetic with sober, admiring clarity.

I found myself agreeing with him a lot — about John Flynn’s The Outfit, which he’s completely right about (“except for the freeze-frame at the end,” I thought to myself, and then I watched the ending again and thought, “Nah, he’s right about that too”), about Dirty Harry, you know, that sorta thing. He’s really weird about Boorman’s Point Blank, and I don’t think he makes his case against it, as I don’t think he makes his case for Deliverance going “slack.” But I decline to speculate about just why he feels like dumping on Boorman so much. I mentioned his bluster before — I was startled at times about how blunt and brash he can be. He’s not at all afraid of potentially ticking off filmmakers one infers that he’s been friendly with in the past. “De Palma would fall on his face and never really get back up again after fucking up Tom Wolfe” is a weird thing to say, given De Palma then went on to make Raising Cain, Carlito’s Way, Snake Eyes, Femme Fatale (maybe the ultimate De Palma film in my opinion) and Mission Impossible.

By the same token, he’s not always as perversely contrarian as you might expect him to be — he actually calls Clint Eastwood’s chimp movie Every Which Way But Loose “abysmal.” Eyebrows will raise at his generous praise of Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley, not by me, though, because I haven’t seen it. Although now I intend to. Partially because he ties its inspiration to the East Side Kids movies. Partially because he ties its setting to that of a Raoul Walsh ‘50s picture, Glory Alley, that I also haven’t seen.  Also because Tarantino’s writing on Stallone strongly suggests that the thing he values most as a filmgoer and a filmmaker is surprise: “Everything about Rocky took audiences by complete surprise. The unknown guy in the lead, how emotional the film ended up being, that incredibly stirring score by Bill Conti, and one of the most dynamic climaxes most of us had ever experienced in a cinema.” Arguably he’s a little overheated when he writes “dare I say Stallone is the best director Stallone has ever worked with.” A very cursory look at Stallone’s filmography might make you tilt your head a bit — Luis Llosa and Bruce Malmuth are not terribly distinguished names — but as you dig deeper you think, wait, what about…Ted Kotcheff? John Landis? And then you’re like, OKAY, what about John Huston? Woody Allen? PAUL BARTEL? The formulation might work if he means Stallone is the best director for Stallone. But even so. The idea is finally just kind of funny. And it's in keeping with the fact that his internal logic relative to the cinema he grew up with is packed with contradictions that will never, and probably ought never, be resolved.

The book can frustrate in different ways. In a chapter about Schrader’s Hardcore, looking at its opening scenes, he writes, “When we first meet sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Kristen at a Grand Rapids Christmas church party, she looks like a runaway even in her own home.” That’s great. He continues: “One look at her and you can tell she’s either going to be a junkie, a child prostitute, or a suicide victim.” Okay, show your work. A little later, he almost does, revealing that Schrader recruited the sallow-looking actress who plays Kristen, Ilah Davis, from the world of porn. And the volume has its share of redundancies and typos, which, given my own experience, I’m not inclined to get all that huffy about. (Although mixing up “imply” and “infer,” as he does in the chapter about The Getaway, is kind of shocking given how much us pedants go on about it all the time.) (And since I first posted, a correspondent has pointed out a genuinely mortifying Richard/Robert Mulligan mix-up that I didn't catch.)

Two more things: the “no-white-pimps” bit introduced in the Taxi Driver chapter has a fantastic punchline in the Hardcore chapter. And I kind of agree with him about Willy Best in The Ghost Breakers — the character he plays in the film, because he’s going up against Bob Hope at his most craven, functions as a sort of existential coeval, and their work together becomes a not-quite neutral but definitely not-as-unpalatable-as-it-might-have-been dance of comedic stylings.

Buñuel's least favorite Buñuel: "La fievre monte a El Pao"

Gérard Philipe and  Maria Félix in Fievre.

Myself and others have not infrequently had the occasion to quote Luis Buñuel’s reflection on his career as a filmmaker, to the effect that, while he’d often been obliged to work with scanty budgets and subjects that he didn’t find aesthetically congenial, he’d never put on film something that contradicted his morality. For instance, in my New York Times’ review of Ingmar Bergman’s rarely seen This Can’t Happen Here — a 1950 anti-Communist propaganda narrative that Bergman very soon came to see as a bad move — I kicked off with what I thought was the Buñuel quote: “I never made a single scene that contradicted my convictions or my morality.”

Trying to track down the quote recently, what I found was a slightly different pronouncement. Which is from a 1964 interview with Wilfried Berghahn, for the German film magazine Filmkritik, and it goes like this: “It is quite true that in the beginning, caught up by necessity, I was forced to make cheap films. But I never made a film which went against my conscience or convictions.” In the excerpt from the quote as cited on the site cranes are flying, Buñuel continues: “I have never made a superficial, uninteresting film.”

But in his conversations with the Mexican film critics José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent in 1974 through 1975, collected in the invaluable book Objects of Desire: Conversations With Luis Buñuel, he reveals some considerable misgivings about 1959’s La fievre monte a El Pao. Turrent says, “It doesn’t seem like you have very good memories of La fievre monte a El Pao.” Buñuel responds: “No, and neither did Gérard Philipe. It’s the last film he acted in. One day during filming we dropped our masks. ‘Why did you agree to make this film?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘And you?’ ‘I don’t know either,’ I told him.”

I’m not familiar with the situation in today’s France, but here in the States, French film star Gerard Philipe is barely remembered, in part because his career did not even span two decades. He died in 1960, at age 37, not too long after completing Fievre. But prior to that the delicately handsome actor was something of a matinee idol in his country.  His greatest cinephile hits include Ophuls’ 1950 La Ronde and Vadim’s 1959 Les Liaisons Dangereuses; he also made pictures with Allegret, Becker, Clair, Guitry, and Autant-Lara, the latter if I recall correctly something of a bete noir for the anti-Cinema du Papa agitators of Cahiers du Cinema. (Godard called Autant-Lara’s 1947 Devil in the Flesh, starring Philipe, “miserable,” so there’s that.)

Buñuel explains why he agreed to make the film with customary bluntness: “My agent proposed it from Paris. A certain producer wanted to make a film with me and came to see me in Mexico. The truth is that it didn’t interest me much, and I accepted it only because at the time I took everything offered to me, as long as it wasn’t humiliating, because I didn’t have any money and lived day to day. I think my lack of interest is apparent. It turned out to be a very routine film, made to get out of my financial predicament.”

While one can’t quite call Fievre a buried Buñuel, it’s not one that’s frequently revived, so I never saw it until this month, courtesy of a solid all-region French Blu-ray (with English subtitles yet) from Pathé, complete with a “restored by” box on the front cover. You may recall Pathé was widely criticized for its digital scrubbing of Carné’s Les enfants du paradis back in 2012, and it may have learned something from that episode. I didn’t consider the image here bothersome in the slightest but some might still find its rendering of Gabriel Figueroa’s cinematography a little more Mr. Clean that it ought to be. I’m thinking of Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary’s remarks about contemporary video transfers in my friend Farran Smith Nehme’s interview with the idiosyncratic duo in the September 2022 issue of Sight and Sound, with Tarantino rhapsodizing over the days when  “Ninety-nine per cent of every video transfer was done from a direct print of a movie. They had a 35mm or a 16mm, usually a 35. They had the best print they could get, but it was a print,” and Avary chiming in that sometimes an original negative scan is “sometimes worse” than one from an interpositive. Such sources, Tarantino points out, “Never saw a lab…never played in a theatre, never entertained and audience…that print has no life.”

Does it seem like I’m waltzing around articulating my direct experience of the movie? Well I probably am, in part because Buñuel’s own implicit assessment of the work is so spot on. “Despite everything, I tried to make a professional, well-made film, and even to put in interesting details.” And guess what? He did. The movie is set on a fictional Caribbean island where its tyrant Vargas is assassinated. The aftermath relates a triangle of intrigue between Vazquez, the martinet’s mild-mannered and idealistic secretary (Philipe), Gual, the underhanded and corrupt military leader making an out-and-out power grab (Jean Servais, best-known for his portrayal of a hangdog heist man in Rififi), and Inés (Maria Félix), Vargas’ widow, who had been conducting an affair with an officer before her husband was killed and who now flits between the sincere attentions of Vazquez and the perverse desires of Gual.

Overt politics never interested Buñuel, but sexual politics certainly did, and it’s interesting that he didn’t opt to emphasize them more in this scenario. Certainly, once he got the assignment, he took it seriously; in a December 1958 letter to his Paris-based agent, Paulette Dorise (reproduced in the volume Luis Buñuel: A Life In Letters), he wrote of his work on the screenplay, which was based on a novel by Henri Castillou: “Luckily filming is still three and a half months away, which will give me time to introduce new improvements, as well as the changes that are likely to emerge from your notes. I am happy with the work in general. Despite what you may think, the adaptation was very, very difficult.” For all its difficulty, Buñuel must have felt obliged to stick closely with the overtly political aspects of the story. Because watching the movie, it’s entirely self-evident that Vazquez is a much less compelling character than Gual. It’s not that Buñuel couldn’t make idealistic characters interesting; I mean, look at Nazarin. The problem here is that Vazquez’s idealism doesn’t propel him into the absurd that way that Nazarin’s does. And there’s also Philipe’s delicacy. Some observers of the movie have said he looks physically ill here; he doesn’t, really; he was never an intimidating presence (his portrayal of the ultimately hapless and feeble Count in Ophuls’ La Ronde almost a decade earlier uses his corporeal wispiness to great effect), and again, Buñuel is right on when recalling this movie 15 years after its making: “The role didn’t go very well for Gérard; he wasn’t the man for that character, that was obvious even in the way he wore his pistol hanging loosely on his belt.”

On the other hand, Servais’ Gual is really something, particularly as he toys sexually with Maria Felix’s uninhibited Inés, giving her precise instructions on how to undress for him and then dismissing her with an abruptness that suggests self-disgust but could be something rather more peculiar. Servais’ hooded eyes and dispirited jowls put across a paranoid mood that’s practically Nixonian.

The scenes between Servais and Felix, one of which Buñuel claimed to have adapted from Tosca, are the liveliest in the movie. Another sequence, in which two former henchmen divide the worldly goods of a master who’s just been put to death, has a droll Buñuelian mordancy. So too, does Vazquez’s declaration of love for Inés, which he makes from a subservient position, while cleaning up broken glass in what was once Vargas’ office. But there’s no surrealism, either lower-case “s” or upper. And there’s not much fever, and there’s practically no mounting. So while it’s a Buñuel picture as per the credits, one is left with the conviction that it’s something less than un vrai Buñuel picture.

In a February 1960 letter to Buñuel, his friend the film critic Georges Sadoul wrote from Paris:

“Anne Philipe” — Gerard’s widow — “came to dinner last week, the first time we’d seen her since the death of poor Gérard, we had so much to talk about we didn’t have a chance to ask her about you, we were also afraid of stirring up sad, recent memories. We were genuinely relieved to discover that Gérard’s death was not related to any kind of amoebic infection. The doctors were mistake, thinking there was an amoebic connection, when it was in fact cancer; so, no one can now claim he died prematurely because he went to make a film in Mexico, where he was supposed to have contracted a terrible illness.”

Blu-ray and 4K Consumer Guide, WInter 2021

So I’m still maintaining this blog, but obviously haven’t posted on it too much. Like Dick Cheney vis a vis Vietnam, I have other priorities. There’s also the fact (not that I pay too much heed to it) that blogs really aren’t a thing anymore; they feel almost archaic. Yet here we are.

Some of the aforementioned priorities have diminished recently. I’m not going to get into detail but some of my readers at other publications may have noticed my contributions becoming lesser in number. This eventuality sees with it a diminishment in personal revenue, which led me to consider starting a newsletter, a subscription one even. So, I started gathering materials for such an undertaking, including notes for the Consumer Guide I’m publishing below. I made notes for other things, too, most hilariously an essay about a recent Van Der Graaf Generator box set, which would surely have rocketed my subscription base past Andrew Sullivan’s and Bari Weiss’s combined. All the while, a feeling gnawed at me. That feeling being: I don’t want to do this. Obviously conducting a newsletter hustle requires the hustler to go into it absolutely wholeheartedly and (in some respects, not necessarily the most obvious ones) cheerfully. Resentful hesitancy signals half-heartedness, and half-heartedness is no way to run a Substack or whatever it would have been.

And again, without going into detail, my anxieties concerning revenue are not what they were a few months ago. So there’s not going to be a Substack, not yet. And there’s probably not going to be an essay about the Van Der Graaf Generator box set either. (Sorry!) But there is, here, a Consumer Guide, now with some 4K UHD titles. And it is dedicated, for reasons he’ll understand, to the great Tim Lucas. Thanks for reading, as ever.

EQUIPMENT
My prediction in the last Guide, which was, “between now and next March I’ll get a goddamn PlayStation 5 and will try and knock out a 4K Ultra Disc Consumer Guide for variety and perversity’s sake,” proved highly laughable in the PS 5 department. Have you gotten yours yet? I just recently got a notice from B&H saying, “WE WILL NEVER HAVE THIS.” But anyway. At a certain point, specifically upon remembering that I hadn’t used my PS 4 for game playing in eleven years, I packed the thing up, sent it to a nephew who has four young boys, and got a Sony UBp-X800 multi-region 4K player and it’s pretty snazzy. Then there’s the Sony KD50X690E display and Yamaha RXV-385 A/V receiver. Which doesn’t have Dolby Atmos. For now, I’ll live.

The Damned (Criterion)

I recollect this picture being quite a scandal on its initial U.S. release — the distinguished maestro Luchino Visconti done gone and made an “X” rated movie. About Nazis! A couple of years later it would turn up at two in the morning on Channel 7 and I never bothered to stay up and watch because I figured it’d been cut to ribbons. When I finally got around to seeing it the first time what I was most struck by wasn’t the content but by how crazy Visconti decided to go with the zoom lens. Makes Jess Franco look like Carl Dreyer. Okay, not quite. But thank the creator that he curbed this tendency when he made Death In Venice soon after. Then again, the style here is suited to the movie’s almost hysterical account of Third Reich decadence/degradation/depravity and such. Maurice Jarre’s opening music inspires similar “what’s got into you?” thoughts. Bearing down hard on the anti-Communism of its Nazi characters in its first thirty minutes or so, it then sets in motion a relatively nuance-free account of fascist interpersonal dynamics. It’s kinda like Succession, but with actual Nazis! And with zero, or hardly any, likable characters. In many instances of laying it on with a trowel, it offers the sight of a naked Ingrid Thulin languishing in a bed rhapsodizing about power. The movie is possibly best considered as crazier cousin to Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero in its unrelenting depiction of not just Nazi, but German nihilism. In the end, Helmut Berger’s Martin wins out not because he’s wiliest in the batch, but because he’s the most depraved. The transfer of the sometimes handsome, sometimes Tinto-Brass-level-lurid imagery is terrific. — A

 

Dead and Buried (Blue Underground)

This 1981 oddity has a premise that would be acceptable in a fantastic black comedy, which apparently this was originally intended to be. But its New Direction, suggested in part by the excellent effects work by Stan Winston, casts it as a mostly intense, gritted-teeth grindhouse horror. In which the premise is pretty laughable. But never mind. The movie’s midsection is a series of compulsively watchable scare scenes set in the dark and fog and distinguished by go-for-broke sensational brutality. As it happened, Winston left the movie after the New Direction was determined, and wasn’t around for the shooting of one late-scenario death, and the crummy effects therein show. (You’ll definitely know it when you see it.) The 4K rendering has a subdued pallet, plenty of grain, and packs quite a punch, and Joe Renzetti’s score will give your subwoofer/woofers a bit of a workout. The voluminous extras feature four separate audio commentaries, to which I can only say “thanks, but come on.” Your mileage may vary of course.  —A-

Deep Blues (Film Movement)

Dave Stewart, or to be more precise, David A. Stewart, commissioned, co-produced, and appears in this 1991 documentary shot largely in North Mississippi, about blues music as a still-vital and everyday practice in those parts. And yes, it’s that Stewart, the Eurythmics fellow, who’s first seen in black t-shirt and wire-rimmed dark glasses looking at a couple of busking blues men in a Beale Street park on a hot sunny day. But don’t balk — further inspection reveals Stewart’s got both head and heart in the right place, and in the supplemental outtakes he jams pretty credibly with R.L. Burnside on “Big Boss Man.” On Beale, Stewart is soon joined by Robert Palmer — the music critic, not the “Addicted to Love” fellow — who acts as docent. Palmer was from the south and relocated there after doing time in New York City as, among other things, a music critic for the New York Times. He also made some pretty fantastic music, in part with the great boho band The Insect Trust. A little less than a decade older than Stewart, the friendly, scholarly Palmer here looks older than that still — he would die of liver disease in 1997. A bad loss in a lot of ways. The movie is simple: Palmer, sometimes with Stewart, sometimes without, travels to the homes of musicians whose roots go all the way back to Robert Johnson — among these figures Johnson is a lot less of a mystery than he is in the larger culture — and lets them talk. And play. And director Robert Mugge keeps his camera unobtrusive. Shot on 35 in a rough and ready style, the Blu-ray looks fantastic in its way, and the plain old stereo soundtrack is vivid and crisp. Along the way you’ll learn who or what “Johnny Cockaroo” is. You’ll also spend a lot of time with Big Jack Johnson, a helluva guitar player, whose nickname “The Oil Man” derives from the fact that he made his main living driving an oil delivery truck. An interesting oddity: the white rhythm section guys in these Black-led bands all look like George Costanza, or some variant thereof. Mugge’s commentary is a dry but informative production account, in which he relates, among other things, why the pre-cult-stardom Burnside is seen here playing a cherry Telecaster. Inspirational dialogue: “The musician, he’s usually down on his luck.” Inspirational commentary line: “One of the traditions when filming or recording rural blues artists is to bring along a fifth of whiskey as a show of respect, but in our experience many southern blues artists preferred Crown Royal.”  —A+

Deep Red 4K (Arrow)

The friend who introduced me to Argento way back in 1978 at a screening of Suspiria at the legendary Paterson Plaza Theater — where the projectionist omitted an entire reel of the picture, and it made no difference to the narrative coherence —long ago abjured the director’s work, repelled by its trucking in what he called “the pornography of violence.” Watching this 1975 landmark, wherein Argento shucked most of his Hitchcock influence in favor of something relatively new and entirely garish, I felt my pal’s point in a more pronounced way than I have in a long while. The bathtub-scalding murder, and the camera’s lingering on the victim’s awful burns, really squinched me out. The images seemed completely unnecessary, like that shot of the knife plunging into a beating organ in Suspiria. (On the commentary track from Troy Haworth and Nathaniel Thompson, one of them notes that in the aftermath of the breakup between Argento and Daria Nicolodi, the female lead here, Nicolodi actually accused Argento of being a notorious, at-large serial killer.)  By the same token, going too far is one of the perquisites of guignol, arguably. And while Argento’s image-making instincts take him, and you, places where no one ought to tread, it also inspires some truly fantastic, elegantly disturbing picture. The quick cut to Macha Meril’s mouth as she takes a drink of water and can’t keep it in is oddly beautiful, practically Magritte-worthy. This too is the sort of thing that wouldn’t occur to most filmmakers and shows why Argento was special in the first place. In any event: this magnificent 4K rendering doesn’t present anything like a subdued color pallet, nosirree Bob. The mono soundtrack acceptable, but man, the 5.1 is a kick in the head with the incredible Goblin score and such. Story still doesn’t make any damn sense though, and who cares. —A+

Dune 4K (Arrow)

Having sat through the Villeneuve Dune not once but twice (crazy, right? Second time was mainly a cousin date though, honest), and having long held a complicated admiration for this vexed Lynch effort, I approached a re-review of this movie in any format with some trepidation. What if it felt more cheesy than Lynchian? This splendid presentation assured me the unrealized vision here was more 60/40, or even 70/30 in favor of Lynch. A trifle overlit in the way of ‘80s Hollywood pictures at the time, it’s still packed with sinister weirdnesses (Robin Wood, a stalwart Lynch hater, came down hard on the homophobia of that Harkonnen scene, and I can’t say he didn’t have a point). The dialogue between Jose Ferrer and that “Navigator” is almost Eraserhead-worthy in its way, as is the sight of Alicia Witt with that dagger. As far as that pesky narrative is concerned, hell, this lays out the whole plot in the first ten minutes! Pas de problem! But as we get further in, the awkward condensation of scenes (dissolves and such, which are very Lynchian, but not entirely well-judged) becomes highly noticeable. The wonky Star Wars touches are a little blush worthy — “activate a fighter,” you betcha. In other news, Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul has an iPad, and in this version, they actually DO say “jihad.” So there. The disc is beautiful, and the only way you should ever watch this at home.  —A-

The Emperor Waltz (Kino Lorber)

Moderately fascinating Wilder. Released the same year (1948) as A Foreign Affair, this would have been a valentine to Old Europe, countering Affair’s poison-pen letter to post WW II Germany. The director envisioned a Lubitsch homage but felt he didn’t pull it off. Producer and co-writer Charles Brackett pronounced it “in no way outstanding” in his journal.  Still there’s Technicolor, which is reproduced handsomely here save for the odd out-of-register-looking shot. And there’s Bing Crosby. Where McCarey used Crosby’s insouciant, irreverent persona to buttress piety, here Wilder has him swing into Old Vienna like Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea rocked the academic hermitage in Ball of Fire. Here Crosby’s character extols the virtues of the newly-invented phonograph and its accompanying devil music.  Joseph McBride’s exemplary commentary touches on Wilder’s affinity for jazz, first articulated back when Wilder was a German journalist. It also explores Wilder’s reasons for enlisting Der Bingle, and the conflicts between leading lady Joan Fontaine and her costar. — B+

The Guns of Navarone 4K (Paramount)

At its best, this UHD disc makes you feel like you’re looking at a miniaturized version of seeing Real CinemaScope, and for the first time. Those Greek columns and varied geologic formations have a genuine tactile quality. When Quinn’s sniping at the white-clad Germans from the mountaintop, I was like, “Wow! Look at that ROCK!”  Nevertheless Robert Harris, in his post at Home Theater Forum, is right (well of course he is) about the weaknesses sporadically inherent in the image overall. The sometimes dupey look is built into the original camera negative. These are most glaringly noticeable almost right away, with the optical effects of newsreel insets over the static shot of the title guns.  My ultimate takeaway was: when it’s great, it’s great and when it’s not it makes you appreciate the great parts. As for the movie’s content, I was slightly surprised all over again by some of it. You gotta hand it to screenwriter/producer Carl Foreman for keeping the narrative in the mire of it’s-a-helluva-thing-to-kill-a-man pessimism, countering the standard Hollywood heroics. Not that those aren’t there, of course, and “fan service” is certainly evident in the final death tally of the characters. For all that, when Peck says “You’re up to your neck,” it really does register. And the movie most credibly demonstrates a venerable World War II picture truism: When you’ve got a really tough job, leave it to the partisans. — A

 Halloween 4K (Shout Factory)

Inspirational commentary line: “John Carpenter was so committed to realism, we actually killed that dog.” — A+

The Incredible Shrinking Man (Criterion)

Once you’ve sat through this 1957 classic in its entirety, you’ll have one question, that being “So just where did Scott Carey record the narration?” Possibly the same place where Toby Dammit recorded his, I reckon. Anyway. A Universal picture, directed by Jack Arnold and produced by Albert Zugsmith, it of course features William Schallert in a key supporting role, that of a doctor. The one who has to ponder the statement: “People don’t get shorter…they just don’t get shorter.” And yet Scott Carey does, and at each stage of his shrinkage deals with it in different ways, like almost having an affair with a carnival employee. Eventually he gets into a doll house and there has his first face off with the cat. As housecats go, it’s pretty mangy looking. And a real biter too. Lead actor Grant Williams looks a tad like Aaron Sorkin, really. The transfer shows off the movie’s admirable effects ingenuity. But also underscores the optical effects that tend to look dupey. It’s kind of staggering this hasn’t been remade — not that I’m recommending it — given what effects supervisors could do with LCD backdrops and such. In any event, the overall presentation of this Existential Nightmare Redeemed (remember, as Scott notes in his recorded-God-knows-where narration, his reduction to near-atom size is in fact the Beginning Of A Great Adventure, maybe) is exemplary Criterion — respectful and thorough. In supplements, Richard Matheson’s son talks Eisenhower era anxiety; there’s a pleasing, coherent effects breakdown; and comedian Dana Gould and cinematic maestro Joe Dante discuss the movie in amiable, diverting, often amusing style. — A

 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 4K (Paramount)

Good news! My post-teen misogyny seems to have substantially waned, because I did not bristle with loathing over Kate Capshaw’s performance the way I did when I first saw the picture at the not-all-that tender age of 24. For whatever reason her characterization of a character who’s supposed to be mostly endearingly exasperating in a screwball comedy way made me just plain exasperated. Watching the movie now I was more inclined to notice that the Willie Scott role is actually anti-screwball in its conception: while the exasperating females in Bringing Up Baby and The Awful Truth and what have you are almost uniformly smarter and more resourceful than their male counterparts/foils, the nightclub singer along for the ride with Indy and Short Round is just an imposition and burden, albeit a physically attractive one. Now, as to Short Round…oh never mind. This is one of four films included in Paramount’s 4K UHD set of Jones movies, and it’s the only one I’ve watched so far and I was very taken by its look and sound. And I was largely taken by the movie itself, in spite of all its very manifest flaws and objectionable bits (not mutually exclusive, these) because the action set pieces are such a kick. I lay blame for the faults (all of them) on screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. Not to gang up on the team behind Howard the Duck — and hey, I think Messiah of Evil is a too-unheralded chef d’oeuvre of sorts — but the binding material they concoct is complete plaster compared to the story structure that held Raiders together. Of course it’s ultimately Spielberg’s mistake in accepting this flimsy contrivance but I surmise he was too excited about putting together the set pieces to really notice or care. Maybe. Anyway, the set pieces: great.— A

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 4K (Kino Lorber)

It’s kind of weird, and certainly against all odds, that (up until Ferrara's 1993 Body Snatchers, at least) this story has been made into a moving picture three times and all three of the moving pictures are in their way exceptional. (At the time I first posted this, I had forgotten that the 2007 The Invasion had broken the streak...and why wouldn't I forget that?) This one, directed by Phillip Kaufman in 1978 from a script by the too-undervalued W.D. Richter, is oft lauded for its satirical bent (the pods come to San Francisco, then the mecca of self-help and self-realization cult-like processes, get it?) and that factors into its effectiveness to be sure — Chicago-born Kaufman had been a Frisco resident since 1960, gets the environment with an offhanded mastery. But the movie is also steeped in an atmospheric unease that goes far beyond satire. It’s a film of genuinely eccentric, unnerving choices. From the opening in which the pods leave an alien planet and journey to earth with truly overbearing music (Denny Zeitlin) accompanying the action onward. Brooke Adams and Art Hindle are introduced by a voyeuristic camera, moving implacably down corridors to home in on the reflections of their characters rather than the characters themselves. The scenario makes an already unhappy marriage the fulcrum on which the discovery is first hinged. Cinematographer Michael Chapman, only a couple of pictures ahead of Taxi Driver, almost repeats the famed lateral dolly from the excruciating Bickle-on-the-pay-phone scene in a shot in which Adams and Donald Sutherland clinch by an elevator, about 24 minutes in. Dig, too, the distorted reflection of Jeff Goldblum in the bookstore mirror, and the fact that Sutherland never repairs the shattered windshield he suffers at the beginning of the movie. The 4K image on this edition is fabulous added value to the overall cinematic richness. —  A+

Jet Pilot (Kino Lorber)

Howard Hughes wanted a movie about aviation and hotness. Josef Von Sternberg wanted…work. The hijinks began in 1949, pairing a 22-year-old (but looking 18) Janet Leigh with a 42-year-old (but looking 55) John Wayne. The cast also features J.C. Flippen at his most suave. No really, he’s very polished here, as befits his ARMY BRASS role. The result, not unleashed on a drooling public until 1957) was one of the most exhilarating movies about nothing, or maybe about star charisma, ever made. Leigh, as a not-quite-defecting Soviet flyer (oh those egalitarian commies), doesn’t even try an accent, and I’d bet that Sternberg didn’t even ask her to. A typical Hughes touch is the obnoxious leering jet sound effects as Leigh removes each individual piece of her flight suit after landing. The Kino disc does not advertise as a new scan, but it looks plenty sharp and we’re offered a choice between 1.37 and 1.85 aspect ratios — given when its principal photography began, you know which one to watch. The movie’s depictions of American Plenty are properly vulgar, what with the half-foot-thick steaks, which actually trigger Leigh’s ultimate abandonment of the USSR. Where there are zero steaks and the barracks are in such a poor area they can’t even afford real scenery — the backdrops are remarkably obvious paintings. Its utter, blissful triviality is so scrupulously hewed to that it becomes transcendent, and hence Essential Cinema. There’s no commentary. Make up your own.  Andrew Sarris: “an ecstatic flight of speed, grace and color.” Jean-Luc Godard: “Chaplin said […] tragedy is life in close-up, and comedy, life in long shot. I said to myself, I’m going to make a comedy in close-up: the film will be tragi-comic. Sternberg’s Jet Pilot is also a close-up comedy. That’s why it didn’t go down well.” Inspirational dialogue, as Wayne shows Leigh some U.S.-made lingerie: “That’s one thing we have in common with the Soviets.” “What’s that?” “We both believe in uplifting the masses.” And from Leigh, solo: “The water is so hot.” — A

 John Carpenter’s The Thing 4K (Universal)

After watching this in 4K for the first time, I looked up the contemporary reviews of the movie and came to the conclusion that film critics, as a class, were then almost as dumb as film actors. Maybe dumber. And the situation is, revisionism on this particular movie notwithstanding, even worse today. I will not be taking any questions at this time. Anyhow. Image wise, I found this superb; what audiophiles call reference quality. The actual audio has elicited some dissatisfaction in certain corners but to my ears the lossless DTX soundtrack gets the job done. Carpenter’s mastery of film language is strongly present throughout, and it’s instructive to keep track of when he and cinematographer Dean Cundey keep their anamorphic frame in full focus and when and how they go shallow. In the latter instances they keep the backgrounds distinct but not too distinct. A nice kind of head-fake in the “don’t look behind you” suspense column. — A+

 The Misadventures of Biffle and Shooster (Kino)

So this is neither a Blu-ray or a 4K release — indeed, with 4K especially you might say super-high-resolution would, given the nature of the material, “defeat its own purpose” — and it’s not brand spanking new and the filmmaker is an old friend which is a crucial reason I’ve not covered this disc. The friend is Michael Schlesinger, a venerable and passionate film scholar and enthusiast who did a lot of hard time managing rep for a mega-corporation that often didn’t know its assets from its elbow. You’ve likely heard his commentaries on fare such as It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World and The Producers and other not-dissimilar titles, in which case you know the kind of madcap stuff he likes. The fictional comedy team of Biffle and Shooster is a concept that could only have sprung from his mind, and I do mean that as a compliment. The five picture collected here are made-in-the-21^st-century fake comedy shorts from the ‘30s, featuring the above-named and titular fictional comedy team. Played of course by real actors, Nick Santa Maria and Will Ryan, who shared Mike’s vision to the extent that they’re credited as co-creators of their characters.  Santa Maria’s Biffle is the goofy super-nervous one and Ryan is the dyspeptic and relatively straight-mannish Shooster. On this collection they Stooge and Niagara Falls their way through five “missions of mayhem” including a private-eye spoof guest-starring Robert Forster and an unapologetically Borscht-Belt Bride of Frankenstein send up. Much of the humor is as apt to elicit groans as laughs. I don’t think that’s accidental — the nudging is the point. I was sad to learn last month of the death of Will Ryan, half of the duo of amiable zanies. It reminded me that one thing about the Biffle and Shooster shorts that was wholly unmitigated was its absolute movie love. And that makes this object worth buying, and cherishing. —A

New York Ninja (Vinegar Syndrome)

Vinegar Syndrome’s devotion to the Grindhouse Dream in all its manifestations is 100 percent admirable even if not every title upon which it expends such exemplary care gives me the buzz I’m seeking. (Volume one of its Forgotten Giallo box had me muttering “there are reasons these were forgotten” more than once.)  I was at least mildly skeptical about this special project for the company, an unfinished 1984 picture with a self-explanatory title. Abandoned by director/star John Liu before any editing process began, with no dialogue or music nor any script to consult, it was assembled into a whole by Kurtis Spieler, who provides an informative commentary. A company of classic exploitation movie actors — Leon Isaac Kennedy, Linnea Quigley, Michael Berryman, Cynthia Rothrock, and Ginger Lynn Allen — dubbed in newly-written dialogue, some of it apparently extrapolated via lip-reading. I know what you might be thinking and I thought it too: “Uh-huh.” It was only after a recommendation from my buddy the writer and artist Bob Fingerman that I sought took the plunge, and I’m rather glad I did. Ninja really does approximate the True Grindhouse Experience in the Comfort Of Your Own Home (which is a big plus when you get to be my age). The likely wholly unlicensed NYC lensing is big on period interest (although a little on the narrow side — Liu never wastes a chance to get the Twin Towers in his lens), the plotline (initially concerned with a personal revenge story set in a milieu in which “drugged out scum” are roaming wild in the city doing horrible crimes) dips into some weird sci-fi shit about a half-hour in, the fake newspaper headlines are so bad they’re almost poignant (“Another Lady Vanishes Abductions Continue”) and so on. The music and dubbing are so apropos you’d swear this thing is a fully realized 1984 film. And the image quality is shockingly good, like straight-from-the-lab good. A unique entertainment. Inspirational dialogue: “Looks like we got ourselves a hero!” — A

 A Night at the Opera (Warner Archive)

As a Marxist sourpuss, I used to hew to the party line that Irving Thalberg ruined the brothers for film by imposing tighter structures and such on their anarchic antics. My memories of Allan Jones in this were particularly cringe. I don’t know if it’s age or Scott Walker who softened me up to the guy, but now I find him entirely tolerable and hell, if Zeppo wanted to retire why not. And I also very much enjoy the movie itself, and not just because Harpo doesn’t get to chase any gamines around. It’s a focused light comedy that goes down easy and has a lot of marvelous highlights. The musical interlude shipboard is awfully sweet too — Harpo and Chico Among The Children, acting like they should. Also: “Boogity boogity boogity.” The image here has a wonderful brisk clarity. Yes, the picture was/is at the top of a long downward slope for the fellas but nothing in the actual film necessarily indicates this. Give it a shot, you may be pleasantly surprised. — A

Operation Burma/Santa Fe Trail (Warner Archive)

I remember reading, way back in the day, in some Andrew Sarris volume or other, Sarris averring that the Raoul Walsh/Errol Flynn pictures were better than the Michael Curtiz/Errol Flynn pictures, so when these came from the Warner Archives at roughly the same time I figured it might be fun to use them to put the idea to the test. Burma is one of the made-during-World-War-II movies (first screened January 1945) in which the Japanese forces are referred to in the racist terms they were likely referred to as by actual Allied soldiers in that was and is additionally one of the “Give America all the credit” WW II movies. This is the Walsh movie, with a Franz Waxman score, and both craftpersons are pulling out all the stops here. This transfer is from original materials so there’s no “Sorry, Great Britain for snubbing you” disclaimer in the opening — this was put on prints after Great Britain raised holy hell about it. Way after Great Britain raised holy hell about it — 1952. Despite all the fictionalization this is a very wonky picture that’s consistently confident in putting across the illusion that it’s giving you the real story fair and square. That of “Merrill’s Marauders,” such as they are, slicing through a “Jap-infested jungle,” yeow. Looks clean as a whistle, with lots of what you could call “good” grain. Contains many lingering shots of reconnaissance plane equipment and such. Featuring Samuel Beckett lookalike Erville Alderson and the future Doberman.  Now. As for Santa Fe Trail. Curtiz in 1940, on a pretty good run as you may recall. You know you’re in for some “fun” when an explanatory opening text speaks of West Point’s “brilliant commandant” Robert E. Lee. But it gets worse. This phantasmagorical slop bucket of racist rationalization and Confederate-coddling is objectionable from start to finish but you almost have to hand it to the ideologically blinkered Curtiz — he would have made a great used car salesman. Curtiz’s fluid, impassioned camera never misses a trick, the staging is masterful, Sol Polito cinematography has that good Expressionist redolence. The movie also, one has to say, underscores Curtiz’s weaknesses as a director — his people are a lot shallower than those of Hawks and Ford. But the leads are great eye candy — Flynn grows and keeps a mustache, Olivia de Havilland is absolutely charming. Reagan is Reagan, and he’s playing George Custer, so you can happily imagine his ultimate fate. Raymond Massey’s John Brown is introduced about 25 minutes in. The actor displays utter conviction playing an utter nutjob but he refuses to project villainy, a salutary choice. Must have chapped Ward Bond’s ass to play an abolitionist, you think? Anti-inspirational dialogue, from Flynn’s J.E.B. Stuart: “It isn’t our job to decide who’s right and who’s wrong about slavery. Any more than it is John Brown’s.” Oh get stuffed. — A- to both.

The Outsiders: The Complete Novel 4K (Warner)

S.E. Hinton’s novel was foisted upon me when I was in my early teens as something I “ought to” read (as opposed to A Clockwork Orange or Funeral Rites, both of which I’d perhaps too-enthusiastically consumed by this time) and it did nothing for me. Not just because its terse, plain prose style didn’t appeal to me at all, but because as a Jersey suburbanite I couldn’t get with these relentlessly sentimental post-greaser mid-Western kids. And despite my devotion to Coppola, my 23-year-old self couldn’t relate to them onscreen, either. (Rumble Fish is a wholly other story, for reasons I explored here.) Watching this new rendition of the film it still speaks to me loudest as a curio of high visual interest, especially with respect to the stuff homaging Gone With The Wind. I also dig those GIANT closeups of Ponyboy as he goes into his reverie. Helluva cast, too: Tom Waits! William Smith! Melanie Meyrink! Coppola’s new, and rather moving, ten-minute intro to the film reminds you that he is the only director in recorded history who made a film at the request of middle school student petition.  — A+

The Servant 4K (Canal)

Some movies reveal themselves to you more and more on repeated viewings, and why wouldn’t they. The uncanny thing about The Servant is that it just gets more naggingly mysterious and disturbing. This spotless presentation conveys the film’s frostiness almost too well. You can choose between watching in 1.66 and 1.77 aspect ratios. Given that the compositions are such you’d swear that the movie emerged from Zeus’s (Losey’s, that is) brow in 1.66, I can’t imagine why you’d watch in 1.77. Because you can, I guess. — A+  

 Sex World 4K (Vinegar Syndrome)

Certainly some of you out there must be wondering: what does porn look like in 4K? Specifically, what does vintage porn, which for a brief span of time was actually shot on 35mm film, look like in 4K? Well. Let me tell you. The colors in this 1978 quasi-futuristic yarn of the troubled souls looking for satisfaction/catharsis at the title resort are often remarkable vivid. So, too, are the pimples and ingrown hairs on the intimate body parts of several performers. While directed by Anthony Spinelli, the movie suffers from Gerard Damiano Disease, that is, a compulsion to get almost sick-makingly self-serious about the dysfunctions its motley characters suffer from. Also it really skimps on the Annette Haven content. I absolutely credit Vinegar Syndrome for being format pioneers here, while wishing they’d have given the 4K treatment to something more funsy, like Mary Mary. I’m sure they have their reasons.. — B

 Some Came Running (Warner Archive)

What can I say? I named this damn blog after the movie, which I went into some detail on here.  And a few years later, for Decider, I wrote on it some more. So hell yes, I have been wishing and hoping that this would make it to Blu-ray for some time. Now it has, and It looks remarkably fine, crisp and clear with excellent color values. Director Vincente Minnelli’s mise-en-scene is as on point as ever and his camera ever so slightly more noticeably mobile than usual. The proscenium is less prominent than in such other landmark melodramas as 1955’s The Cobweb or 1960’s Home From The Hill. The final shot, a graceful funeral scene that closes with the very significant gesture of Dean Martin’s Alabama taking his hat off to a character he had previously rather grossly disparaged, is an all time. And watching it, I was hit with the nauseating realization that the Russo brothers were likely paying their own form of homage to it in the ghastly closing shot of Endgame. Anyway, this shot is way better than the one in Endgame. — A+

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.  

The Sentimental Journeys Of "Call Me By Your Name" and "Lady Bird"

“The great irony of Belle de Jour is that a sixty-seven year old Spanish surrealist has set out to liberate humanity of its bourgeois sentimentality only to collide with the most sentimental generation of flowery feelings in human history,” Andrew Sarris wrote in the Village Voice in the early May 1968. His filing deadline was probably right before the events in France of, you know, May 1968, but even so you could say his overall grasp of the zeitgeist as he wrote those words was likely too inflected by some kind of Summer of Love hangover. All that notwithstanding, I have been reminded of Sarris’ observation by the elaborate praise bestowed upon two recent film releases, Lady Bird, an early-2000s coming of age story with autobiographical elements, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, and Call Me By Your Name, an early-1980s coming of age story scripted by James Ivory from a novel by André Aciman, and directed by Luca Guadagnino.

They are the most critically beloved movies of the year, and while they encompass a certain amount of heartbreak and loss, they each hand the viewer a gratitude list—for family, to be precise—to ponder as the closing credits scroll up. They are relentlessly nice movies. They are sentimental.

In her essay “The Miseducation of Lady Bird” in The Baffler, Lauren Oyler circles around this point a bit. After expressing befuddlement over the fact that she has encountered “old white men,” one “middle aged man” and three young women “sporting leather backpacks and elaborate Nikes,” who were more moved by the film than she was, Oyner homes in on the finale of the movie, during which its lead character Christine goes to church, then calls her mother. While both actions as depicted are, I think, given sufficient dramatic buttressing for them to make both narrative and (for some) emotional sense, Oyner is not wrong to call the speech “unapologetically corny” and “exactly what a mother would want to happen.”

Lady Bird is about reconciliation, and in its world view reconciliation involves recognizing who your blood is. It means finally understanding that it’s a shitty thing to tell your mother that you will pay her back all the money she spent on your upbringing just so that you yourself may have the privilege of never having to speak to her again. Agains, I think the movie sells this point very well. Directorially, Gerwig never puts a foot wrong. Lady Bird is very assured and very much believes in the effects it wants to achieve. One thing it never does—and I understand that on a not insignificant level it is because it’s not this kind of movie’s function to do so anyway, maybe—is question why it is salutary to be a movie that makes you want to call your mother after you get out of the theater.

It’s as if this is a given, just the way everything ought to turn out. And this is not, for instance, what we get from the work of Maurice Pialat, whose ruthlessly unsentimental views of the family lives of children and teens are among the greatest highlights of French cinema. And as soft as Truffaut’s portraits of Antoine Doinel in his adulthood could get, one thing they never featured was any kind of rapprochement with the parents of The 400 Blows.

There is never anything too ugly in Lady Bird; there is almost nothing at all ugly in Call Me By Your Name. When its 17-year-old protagonist, Elio, is confounded by his erotic feelings toward Oliver, the spectacularly hunky academic assistant to his professor father, he is at first barely aware of the support system that’s devoted to helping him figure it out. An American academic seasonally situated in a most idyllic and sleepy corner of Italy in summer, Elio’s dad, Lyle, observes Elio and Oliver’s dance at a benign not-quite remove. Annella, the mother (played by Amira Casar, best known in the U.S. for her work in, um, Catherine Breillat’s 2004 Anatomy of Hell) evinces a concern that’s perhaps disingenuous but deliberately never anything like effectual. The situations and circumscribed worlds of these movies are elaborate demonstrations of the mantra of John Lennon’s anti-revolutionary song “Revolution:” “Don’t you know it’s gonna be/all right.”

Of course all of this speaks, indirectly perhaps, to problems of depiction. Lots of people, I suppose, have movies in their heads about their childhoods. But the worse the things recollected, the harder it is to construct the movie version, in your head or on a movie set. When I was in my final year of grade school I had a growth spurt, and my dad gave me this beautiful fringed suede jacket that he had bought in Spain when he lived there as a teenager. One day I wore it to school, and by the end of the day, about two-thirds of its fringes were gone, picked off by classmates who were not terribly fond of me. I can see how that would play in a movie scene. A few years later, right after turning 14, I went to a CYO dance in my town and there were two women in their early 20s there, who thought I was cute. They were sharing from a flask, and they offered me a few swigs from it, and a bit later on one of them was making out with me, much to the disapprobation of one of the dance chaperones, who was the father of a guy who liked to give me a mild pummeling every now and then. We (the woman and I, not that dude's father) left the dance and went a few blocks down to the house where she lived and she backed me up against the oak tree in front of it and showed me that she was carrying a condom. At the time I had very little idea of what a condom actually looked like, and I knew my parents were gonna be hella pissed off if I came home too late, so I went home. I know what that would look like as a movie scene—pretty funny, possibly. Around the same time another classmate bullied me into a series of not un-violent transactions that I had no real way of processing, which I’m still on occasion anguished by, and which I won’t go into detail about only in part because I don’t…want…to. (When this fellow, who seems not to have thrived in adulthood, got in touch with me again a few years ago, for the first time that I can remember, my stomach seemed to literally sink.) I couldn’t make a movie out of that. Neither Gerwig nor Guadagnino would want to, I suspect. Maurice Pialat, not to flatter my adolescence, would eat it right up.

Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name want nothing to do with this kind of discomfort. Lady Bird is commendably discreet, but perhaps unrealistic, in depicting Christine’s first serious sexual encounter within that time-honored cinematic convention of bra sex. Although the central sexual relationship in Call Me By Your Name is between two men, the only full-frontal nudity in the movie is female. While usurped original director James Ivory has expressed disappointment at the relatively chaste depictions in Guadagnino’s film (and the director himself has offered the craven defense that the “market” wouldn’t bear anything more explicit), most people who’ve written about the movie are pretty cool about it not being, you know, too gay. Jeffrey Wells is hardly alone in his consideration of what the movie is “really” about: “What counts is that the mood and drift of this film isn’t really about straight or gay or anything in between. It’s about 'being there' in every possible comprehension of that term — about sensual samplings, summer aromas, warm sunshine, fresh water and that swoony, lifty feeling, etc,” he wrote in January of this year. Other writers with more investment in being perceived as sensitive to certain cultural drifts have tempered that Universal Vibration take. One straight cis-male critic proclaimed that this picture could take an automatic place in the “Queer Cinema Canon,” which pronouncement has received some pushback from writers who, in some respects understandably, believe the Queer Cinema Canon be decided by the queer. From where I sat, the story as realized by Guadagnino, with its attendant extreme care not to depict the sex explicitly, could be said to iron the queerness out of the situation altogether. The movie opts instead for a soft counterculture “it’s all love and it’s all good” perspective, articulated in the much-praised speech that Michael Stuhlbarg, as Lyle, does deliver with spectacular care near the movie’s end. Even Marzia, the French teenager whom Elio uses then throws away like an old dishrag (Esther Garrel, the aforementioned female nude), is full of not just forgiveness but congratulatory fellow-feeling with respect to Elio’s self-actualization via heartbreak.

In a sense, then, this is the furthest thing from a “queer movie;” its whole project is to de-queer Elio’s mode of being. That’s the point of the film’s final shot. Yes, he’s heartbroken and crying, but there’s “beautiful” music, he’s literally crouching in front of a fireplace (the hearth!), and behind him his family, while giving him his space, is preparing a sumptuous holiday meal.

As for Lady Bird, the movie comes with its own feel-good sequel, in the current person of Gerwig. In interviews and on television shows we have access to her story. Not just of her life on her own, but of the making of the movie: the winsome letters she wrote to musicians explaining how much her otherwise–perhaps-much-costlier-to-license song selections were so important to her. The way she was able to hire a cinematographer and merely instruct him to make the film “look like a memory,” which certainly beats having to learn how to do that oneself. How she wore a prom dress while filming the prom scenes. When Matthew Maher turns up near the movie’s end, playing a character who gives Christine a crucial bit of information, I thought of the very particular brand of clout that allows a filmmaker to hire one of the best actors on the New York stage for the express purpose of having him say one word.

These are movies where everything’s going to work out, because “at the end of the day” everybody shares the same values. A rather more tough-minded movie about family was made in America in 1937. There are no real villains in Leo McCarey’s Make Way For Tomorrow, but the tragedy that ultimately befalls its central couple, a pair of seniors who are forced to separate forever, comes from their having raised their now-adult children  in an American values system that all but obliges those children to forsake them. Lady Bird posits a family dynamic that’s fraught, but eventually all falls on the same side of provisional ideology, while Call Me By Your Name posits a paradise in European remove where romantic loss is ameliorated in that spectacularly nurturing hearth. That these cozy fantasies are animating so much enthusiasm is, as they say, very telling about the current cultural moment.

White Saviors: The Micro And The Macro

Ryan Gosling's "Seb" meets John Legend's "Rockit"-era Herbie Hancock as jazz convert Emma Stone looks on.

The largely buoyant movie La La Land was enjoyable enough that I wasn't compelled to go all Jazz Police on it, as I was for writer-director Damien Chazelle's prior effort, the ridiculous Whiplash. But this disinclination is not shared by many in The Discourse, as my friend Tom Carson addresses here, and others address elsewhere that I'm too lazy to search and link to. But a lot of the complaint I've come across really make me nostalgic for the days of "it's only a movie." 

To wit: Ryan Gosling's character Sebastian doesn't "save jazz" at the end of the movie. He opens a fucking club. This maybe HELPS save jazz, but does not save jazz in and of itself. But wait there's more, he's a White Man Who Saves Jazz. Having dispensed slightly with the notion that the mere opening of a club does not itself suffice to Save Jazz, well, it is simply a fact that lots of white folks, from Leo Gordon to those three wacky former schoolteachers who had a go at Sweet Basil (well do I remember one night in the early 90s when some German tourists talked loudly through a Jimmy Giuffre Trio set, thus killing jazz) have opened jazz clubs. But wait, Ryan Gosling as a white man should not be portraying a player of jazz at all, because cultural appropriation and all. Well. It's true that jazz is an African American creation, but it's also true that, much more so than with rhythm and blues or rock and roll, that whites, from Mezz Mezzrow to Bix Beiderbecke to the Boswell Sisters, were Present At Its Various Creations. It's kind of funny to read writers who wouldn't be able to make it through Side A of Monkey Pockie Boo get haughty about this. Not even Amiri Baraka was this doctrinaire; he didn't ask Roswell Rudd to leave the bandstand before getting up with the New York Art Quartet to read "Black Dada Nihilismus." 

This state of affairs becomes even more befuddling when one remembers the infamous Buzzfeed "What's The Deal With Jazz" listicle, in which all the visual examples of jazz practitioners were white people, the writer cannily saving her desire to puke at Miles Davis and Charles Mingus for her prose-only coda. 

In any event, as somebody once said to somebody else, "Lighten up. Smoke a joint." 

Some of my critical colleagues have been expressing dismay in social media that some prominent commentators have blinded themselves to Martin Scorsese's magnificent Silence on the grounds of "Meh, religion," or, more strongly put, "Religion sucks," or, "Both sides do it so why doesn't the movie show the depredations of the Catholic Church." This is unfortunate but I think actually more unavoidable than the La La Land nonsense. The La La Land detractors ridiculously blow up the movie's "chase your dreams" metaphors; the anti-Silence folks pick nits that are either non-existent or entirely beside the point, conveniently skirting the fact that this is an adaptation of a Japanese novel. My opinion on this may be suspect because I was raised Catholic but for me the specifics of the apostasy took second place to larger and even more moving themes. That is, I eventually intuited something beyond Catholicism versus the shogunate and vice-versa. Past faith, I felt Silence addressing issues of will, free will, and whether there really is such a thing as human freedom. The questions it presents, I thought, were more moving and unsettling for the cinematic form in which they were presented. If you're looking at it and going down a list of the things you think it should be showing you because of the cultural baggage you want it to carry (and I'm not saying that the movie is inconsiderate of that cultural baggage—it's not), then you're not going to get it, and too bad. 

A lot of people on my side of the fence insist that the concept of "virtue-signaling" is entirely reactionary but I'm not so sure.

Sartre, Kafka, Welles

"I'm The Jewish Question, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Delighted to meet you." Yvonne Blake (who was also the assistant art director on the film) in François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, 1966

In October of 1944, a few months after the liberation of France, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote short book called Réflexions sur la Question Juive. Its first English translations were titled The Jewish Question—it is one of the living books that announce themselves at the end of Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The currently available English translation has been retitled Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate.

Like much of Sartre, this work is noticeably imperfect, but what flashes of genius it contains are brilliant indeed, and remain pertinent. One passage that struck me is this: “Today these Jews whom the Germans did not deport or murder are coming back to their homes. Many were among the first members of the Resistance; others had sons or cousins in Leclerc’s army. Now all France rejoices and fraternizes in the streets; social conflict seems temporarily forgotten; the newspapers devote whole columns to stories of prisoners of war and deportees. Do we say anything about the Jews? Do we give a thought to those who died in the gas chambers at Lublin? Not a word. Not a line in the newspapers. That is because we must not irritate the anti-Semites; more than ever we need unity. Well-meaning journalists will tell you: ‘In the interest of the Jews themselves, it would not do to talk too much about them just now.’ For four years French society has lived without them; it is just as well not to emphasize too vigorously the fact that they have reappeared.”

As I said, Sartre wrote this in October of 1944. At that point in time Lublin was the only death camp the Allies had found. By the time Orson Welles began work on The Stranger, in the fall of 1945, the other camps had become known to the world. Welles had been cast in the film in the role of Hans Kindler, a fleeing Nazi war criminal (by the movie’s lights, a kind of wunderkind of genocide, a slightly ironic position in which to place Welles in a Hollywood picture) and was eventually persuaded to direct it as well. In the second volume of his protean Welles biography, Simon Callow writes “[t]he degree of [Welles’] input into the script has never been clearly determined, though it seems almost certain that he must have been responsible for the speeches in which Rankin/Kindler analyzes the nature of the Nazi quest, so familiar are they in theme and cadence to Welles’ own speeches, articles and columns.” “Rankin” is the alias Kindler has taken in America; another way this true believer goes undercover is to pretend to be not just thoroughly anti-Nazi, but anti-German. One of his speeches occurs at a dinner scene; Edward G. Robinson’s secret agent, posing as an antiques maven, is dining with Rankin/Kindler, Kindler’s new bride, played by Loretta Young, and her father and teen brother. The scene has many pleasures, one of them being Loretta Young pronouncing the word “Carthaginian,” it is most notable for the way the real Kindler reveals himself to Robinson’s character. Growing increasingly heated in anti-Teutonic fervor (and Callow is right; the words and the way Welles pronounces them are kind of like an inverted, zealous variant of Harry Lime’s “cuckoo clock” speech in The Third Man), Kindler says: “The basic principles of equality and freedom never have and never will take root in Germany. The will to freedom has been voiced in every other tongue. ‘All men are created equal,’ ‘Liberté egalité fraternité,’ but, in German…”

Kindler’s eager young brother-in-law, played by a very appealing Richard Long, butts in:

“There’s Marx. The proletarians unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains…”

“But Marx wasn’t a German. Marx was a Jew,” Kindler responds, almost instantaneously, calm but definite. This differentiation is what gives away Kindler to Robinson’s character. It is also a staggering dramatic manifestation of anti-Semitic thought, which Sartre dissects with incredible vigor in his own book: You’re not THIS, you are THAT, a Jew.

Elsewhere in Sartre, he writes, of the frustrations the Jew experiences in French society: “…it seems to him at one and the same time that his efforts are always crowned with success—for he knows the astonishing successes of his race—and that a curse has made them empty, for he will never acquire the security enjoyed by the most humble Christian.” Sartre continues; “This is perhaps one of the meanings of The Trial by the Jew, Kafka. Like the hero of that novel, the Jew is engaged in a long trial. He does not know his judges, scarcely even his lawyers; he does not know what he is charged with, yet he knows he is considered guilty; judgment is continually put off—for a week, two weeks—he takes advantage of these to prove his position in a thousand ways, but every precaution taken at random pushes him a little deeper into guilt. His external situation may appear brilliant, but the interminable trial invisibly wastes him away, and it happens sometimes, as in the novel, that men seize him, carry him off on the pretense that he has lost his case, and murder him in some vague area of the suburbs.”

Anthony Perkins, Orson Welles, and Max Haufler in The Trial, Welles, 1963

Orson Welles made a film of Kafka’s The Trial in the early ‘60s. Like The Stranger, it was not a project of his own conception. The picture was brought to him by the producer Alexander Salkind, and while the project was plagued by intense money problems it turned out to be one of the very few productions up until that point on which Welles enjoyed complete artistic autonomy right down to the release cut. Setting the story in a stark, black-and-white, completely commerce-and-media-free version of then-contemporary Europe, Welles deracinates the story in particular by casting Anthony Perkins in the role of Josef K. I have not been able to dig up anything in my Welles library to suggest that Welles located a particular kind of otherness in Perkins’ being a thoroughly closeted gay man. Callow addresses the situation thusly: “Perkins’ performance—inherently neurotic, though not notably anxious—does indeed suggest a man with a secret (not much acting called for there).” Perkins’ all-American mode of nervousness suggests Edgar Allan Poe more than Kafka and of course it also suggests Alfred Hitchcock. One thing it never suggests is Jewishness.

And yet Welles, in interviews years after making the film, discusses The Trial in terms of Kafka’s Jewishness. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, explaining why he tampered with the ending of the book, Welles extrapolates: “In the end of the book he lies down there and they kill him. I don’t think Kafka could have stood for that after the deaths of six million Jews. That terrible fact occurred after the writing of The Trial and I think it made Kafka’s ending impossible. If you conceive of K as a Jew, as I did. I don’t mean as a Jewish Jew, but as a non-Christian. It just made it morally impossible for me to see a man who might even possibly be taken by the audience for a Jew lying down and allowing himself to be killed that way.”

Is that true? We have no way of knowing. People on social media today frequently cite a quote from Kafka about there being an infinite amount of hope—but not for us. The quote’s source is a statement he made to his friend and biographer Max Brod, translated in 1947 as “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope—but not for us.” More reliable, perhaps, is the aphorism: “In the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world.” Welles’ argument with Kafka is summed up by Callow thusly: “man is guilty but mankind is not doomed.” Welles’ confusion concerning Kafka has theological roots, as well: “K is not metaphysically guilty at birth as conceived by Kafka, since Kafka was a Jew. The idea of guilt at birth is Christian,” he said to Bogdanovich.

Sartre insists: “The disquietude of the Jew is not metaphysical, it is social.” In Welles’ film, the anxiety is not social as such, it’s free-floating, often hovering between the stools of the metaphysical and the erotic, as Perkins’ Josef K is befuddled in turn by Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Elsa Martinelli. Andrew Sarris called The Trial “the most hateful, the most repellent, and the most perverted film ever made,” but the movie’s particular feel comes from Welles’ specifically American form of optimism abrading Kafka’s pessimism. Which, as Sartre teaches us, was far less abstract than we sometimes like to make it. And as visually beautiful and thrilling and unsettling as Welles’ movie is, one constantly senses that it is a work that is tortuously uncertain of what it wants to mean. This is never in doubt, I think, when reading Kafka.

In the prologue to the film proper, Welles observes of Kafka’s novel: “It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream. Of a nightmare.” Welles’ film is best seen as the filmmaker’s own dream/nightmare of Kafka. While I would not go so far as to say that a work of art palpably changes with the times, the times compel us to see works of art differently. Today’s circumstance does not compel a new reading of Welles’ Trial, but it does demand that we adopt Sartre’s reading of Kafka.

The Current CInema

For the New York Times, reviews of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows, which is not good; The Final Master, which is pretty good; and The Wailing, which is possibly excellent. 

For RogerEbert.com, reviews of Approaching the Unknown, which is okay, and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which is a little better than okay. And yet both are awarded two-and-a-half-stars each by me, which only goes to show about the lack of nuance inherent in a star rating system but what are you going to do. 

In honor of the modified vehicle in which Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and Rafael pursue bad guys, here is a song called "Garbage Truck." 

A Capsule Review Of Yorgos Lanthimos' "The Lobster," By Way Of A 1967 Interview With Luis Buñuel

Q: Do you like Bellochio?

BUÑUEL: I've seen Fists in the Pockets—I don't find it the slightest bit interesting; it's repulsive and far too facile. It's really completely overdone—the blind mother, the retarded brother...the son putting his feet on the mother's coffin—it's too easy...While he was at it, why not show him shitting on his mother's head? It's the only thing he spared us.

—From "Two Interviews With Luis Buñuel," translated from a Cahiers du Cinema article, reprinted in Modern Film Scripts: 'Belle De Jour,' Simon And Schuster, 1971