Some Came Running

A few words on "The Arrangement"

Kirk and Kirk

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

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

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

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

Why The Arrangement? Why now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REACTIONS

From the NYPL Perf Arts clippings file…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attitudes Of American Motion-Picture-Actors-Turned-Directors Toward Transexuality: A Brief Survey

Sondra Locke in A Reflection Of Fear, 1972, William A. Fraker.

Back in June, venerable American cinema practitioner and semi-certified auteur Clint Eastwood, a still-formidable filmmaker but increasingly grizzled (almost to the point of approaching crotchety, even—what do you want, and you should be this productive and alert when you turn 900 years of age) public figure, cracked something like a Caitlyn Jenner joke. At a taping of something called "The Guy's Choice Awards" (no, I don't know either; Clint should be more careful of the invitations he accepts if you ask me), Eastwood, presenting something or other to Dwayne Johnson, mentioned sport figures turned film actors, and ended the citation with "Jim Brown and Caitlyn Somebody." The no-doubt sensitivity-trained redeemed dudebros of Spike TV, or whoever they are, immediately announced that they were gonna cut out the offending reference in the televised version of the show. 

Then a funny thing happened: on learning of the joke, the Internet did not explode. Most of the reactions I saw were just kind of shruggy. One might have expected a huge outpouring of derision just as overflow from Eastwood's ridiculous Chair Routine. But no. And why? Maybe because people are better informed than we like to think they are. (Well, actually, it can't be that, but play along.) After all, despite the fact that much of his genre oeuvre is peppered with references that could be taken as homophobic (if I recall correctly The Rookie is a real overachiever in this respect), when it's time to get serious Eastwood's relatively sympathetic, even sensitive, to issues of identity and sexuality. He went so far as to cast The Lady Chablis, the drag performer who identifies as female as herself in his film of Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil. There's also J. Edgar, which, whatever you think of it otherwise, is remarkably straightforward and non-smirky in its depictions of the title character's torment in the closet. So his record speaks well of him. Which allowed pretty much everyone who heard about the joke to take it for what it was—a half-hearted attempt at nudge-nudge topical humor that wouldn't have been out of place in a '70s Carson monologue. No big deal.

I was a bit amused in a peripheral way, though, as a result of some recollections of Eastwood history both personal and professional. As Eastwood people know, the actor-director had, beginning in 1975, a relatively long-term personal and professional association with Locke. She co-starred with him in some very strong pictures he directed: The Outlaw Josey Wales (masterpiece! admired by Orson Welles!), The Gauntlet (ridiculous super fun! Art Pepper plays in the soundtrack orchestra!) and Bronco Billy (possible masterpiece! Capraesque!). She's also in the two orangutan movies, and Sudden Impact. Anyway. The association did NOT END WELL, as Locke describes in a 1997 autobiography titled The Good, The Bad, And The Very Ugly: A Hollywood Journey.

Eastwood's version of the breakup was somewhat more terse. In an interview in the March 1997 issue of Playboy, responding to some of Locke's allegations, he brings up Locke's relationship with her husband Gordon Anderson, to whom she remained married during the entirety of her relationship to Eastwood. Anderson was/is gay, something of a mystic, and Eastwood would like his interviewer for Playboy, Bernard Weinraub, believe he (Eastwood) was a model of patience and forebearance in tolerating the whole arrangement. 

“I mean, it’s just a different scene. I can’t explain it without going into a…I mean, your eyes might not stay in their sockets. They’re liable to come too far out of your head. They were pals when they were kids, and they both believe in fairy tales and call each other Hobbit and stuff like that. And so they hang out together, and I guess she’s supportive of him and he’s supportive of her, and somehow they feed each other. She didn’t like my son living with me and it just got messy. It just wasn’t the kind of existence I wanted.”

And there you have it. I'm not sure what "it" is, I admit. I do know that ever since I read that interview (I got this issue of Playboy for the articles for real—cover model and O.J. trial witness person Faye Resnick isn't even remotely my type) the phrase "call each other Hobbit" has really stuck in my mind. I bring this up because—actually, I'm starting to wonder myself—well, I bring this up not to wag a finger at Eastwood's seeming defensiveness (have I mentioned I'm kind of a fan?) but because it ties in, albeit obliquely, with an interesting bit of movie trivia from Sondra Locke's career.  Locke is a striking beauty, lissome, with haunting eyes, and she also has a quality that could be described as androgynous. This quality was used profitably in the 1972 release A Reflection of Fear. Calling it an "effective, well-photographed surprise thriller," The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film gives its précis thusly: "A young girl (Sondra Locke) lives in a fantasy world with Aaron, a doll she believes can kill people. Her father (Robert Shaw) returns after 10 years. Sally Kellerman is her new stepmother. Mary Ure is her mother. Many of the cast members die. This Psycho-ish tale sat on the shelf for two years before being released in a cut version." Now if you're anything like me, your ears prick up when you read "Psycho-ish tale" and sure enough...the twist in this "surprise thriller" is (spoiler alert!) that Locke's character struggles with gender dysphoria. That is, she's a very conflicted trans person. What a coincidence.

But wait! There's more! Well after the now-long-forgotten "Guy's Choice Awards," Caitlyn Jenner was awarded an ESPY—I don't even know what that IS—and some folks got agitated over that because the award was for bravery and when you talk about bravery shouldn't you mean something like blah blah etc. etc. Sounds like the whole thing was kinda rigged anyway but that's life these days anyway anyway. So Lone Survivor director Peter "Join The Army, Motherfucker" Berg, these days a one-man recruitment center of sorts, took to Instagram with a mini-photo montage of army vet Gregory D. Gadson and Caitlyn Jenner and captioned it "“One man traded 2 legs for the freedom of the other to trade 2 balls for 2 boobs. Guess which man made the cover of Vanity Fair, was praised for his courage by President Obama and is to be honored with the ‘Arthur Ashe Courage Award’ by ESPN? Yup.” Yow. 

Linda Fiorentino and A Reflection Of Peter Berg, The Last Seduction, John Dahl, 1994

Berg, whose shoot-from-the-hip reputation precedes him ("That review was FUCKING UNCOOL" he once bellowed at a Premiere colleague of mine, displeased with my pan of his directorial debut Very Bad Things) soon issued the standard completely-insincere-two-hours-later apology, calling himself a "strong supporter of equality and the rights of trans people everywhere." As well he should be. And, interestingly enough, there's a trans theme in Berg's filmography as well, from back when he was an actor (ah, the threads are FINALLY coming together). If I know my core demographic I'd hazard to say that pretty much everyone reading this has seen John Dahl's nifty 1994 neo-noir The Last Seduction, in which ultry-sultry Linda Fiorentino gets pretty hot-and-heavy with a sack-of-hammers-dumb lunk played by Berg. After discovering that (oy, I've still gotta say it: spoiler alert!) the abandoned wife of Berg's character is trans, Fiorentino, rather than celebrating and supporting our human diversity and sexual fluidity, blackmails Berg's character into doing her bidding, such as it is. All in the interest of self-preservation, mind you; nothing malicious about it. 

As it happens, I was briefly acquainted with Serena, the actress who played the trans wife, and who I believe died some years back. But that's a different story, and my memory of it remains rather hazy. Any how: you've made it this far and what have you got? Two American actors-turned-directors who made Caitlyn Jenner comments but who also have trans themes in their (in one case extended) filmographies. This might help you on a pub trivia night. Who knows. 

Cameron Crowe, Victim Of Auteurism

Don't try this at home: Charles Boyer, Jennifer Jones, and Philip Morris, Cluny Brown, Ernst Lubitsch, 1946

Last evening, near the end of Film Twitter’s “We Need To Talk About Cameron” quasi-telethon, the critic Tina Hassannia registered some disapprobation thusly:

“ALOHA reviews are all framed in the auteurist framework, which inherently treats the white, male director as an artist worthy of discussion.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think of the movie, at the end of the day what’s important is: what’s going on with Cameron Crowe?”

“Now imagine trying to have a similar conversation about any mediocre, messy, or outright bad movie by a director who isn’t white or male.”

“When was the last time that happened?"

I have no trouble imagining having the “similar conversations” posited by Hassania, as I’ve had them, in the pre-Twitter days. “What’s going on with Spike Lee?” was a big question around the time of Girl 6, and again with She Hate Me; “What’s going on with Jane Campion?” was a big question for some with Holy Smoke (not for me—I loved it) and more so with In The Cut (yeah, that was bad).  The political sensitivities of young critics these days are so finely tuned that it’s hard to know sometimes whether a protest is part of an attempt to create a new critical paradigm centered around diversity, or just some kind of high-functioning troll activity (if I understand Hassannia’s subsequent Twitter updates correctly, Spike Lee doesn’t really count). But as we’re framing within the auteurist framework, and so much of the most interesting and provocative criticism happening today at least carries the implication that auteur-based criticism has somehow ruined almost everything, it’s worth noting that—judging from appearances, at least—a lot of Cameron Crowe’s current troubles stem from auteurism, or a misapprehension of auteurism.

Not that I’ve seen Aloha, or am in a particular hurry to. I began worrying about Cameron Crowe, like so many others, upon seeing Elizabethtown, in Toronto in 2005. Actually, not to get all inside baseball, but I had been worried about Crowe even before cameras started rolling on that picture. I knew that Crowe had written the script, an ambitious comedy-drama, with Leonardo DiCaprio in mind, and that DiCaprio was now determined to do only Serious Movies with Serious Directors such as Martin Scorsese, which left Crowe without a bankable leading man. And so it went. Anyway, I was at Toronto for the premiere of Elizabethtown, and Crowe personally returned to the scene of his Almost Famous triumph to deliver a quasi-apology at the beginning of the press screening of his new film, which was indeed, alas, Elizabethtown. I felt bad after seeing it. My thoughts were these: One, that Crowe was maybe the best-intentioned and most big-hearted of American directors (maybe I should have been thinking “of white male American directors,” but I wasn’t, I cannot tell a lie). Two, that because his kind of picture is so difficult to get produced nowadays, prior commercial triumphs or not (and let us not forget that between Almost Famous and Elizabethtown, there was Vanilla Sky), Crowe apparently feels compelled to cram EVERYTHING HE KNOW AND FEELS INTO EACH AND EVERY INDIVIDUAL FILM HE MAKES. The directors Crowe frequently cites as models and mentors, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, working within the studio system (Lubitsch was even, at one point, a studio executive), had the advantage of being able to produce with some consistency; if they couldn’t do something they wanted on Project X, they might be able to get it done on Project Y. They didn’t have the nagging consciousness of each individual film maybe being their last.

That consciousness is part of the artistic and intellectual DNA of at least two generations of “personal filmmakers.” Which Lubitsch and Wilder, both directors icons of critics and creators of the Possessory Credit School, were in fact not. One of the features of what we call "Auteurism," or "auteurism," as we know it, and so on, is how damned confused it is. The politique des auteurs as articulated by Bazin and Truffaut is a different kettle of fish from auteurism as articulated by Andrew Sarris. And while Sarris was in fact pretty careful about differentiating between illuminating evidence of a director’s personal signature and avowing that the director or “auteur” is the creative be-all and end-all of every artistically worthwhile film made, he might as well not bothered given the crude way such notions are bandied about on an almost daily basis. In any event, one thing that gets lost in the shuffle is that the “personal touches” that distinguish Lubitsch and Wilder films from more routine Hollywood fare of its time is that these touches were by-products of a process that Crowe either doesn’t have access to or doesn’t want. Reading Charles Brackett’s recently published diaries, one is struck by how often Brackett virtually roles his eyes at Wilder’s insistence on narrative coherence—“Billy’s terrifying neurosis that everything isn’t crystal clear to the audience” is how he puts it at one point. Contrast this “neurotic” precision with the loose baggy monsters Crowe has to fight tooth and nail to get made at all, and then has to cut by thirty minutes or however long. The self-consciousness of the contemporary “personal touch”—even when adapting an intriguing Spanish-language horror/sci-fi romance, Crowe was madly compelled to transform it into My Empathetic Tortured Biopic Of My Old Boss Jann Wenner—can be laid, I think, pretty squarely at the feet of slavish devotion to misunderstood auteurism. Combined, paradoxically enough, with the production-on-my-own-terms ethos of the early French New Wave. All of which seems to have left Crowe in a pretty, and seemingly inextricable, pickle. At least when Lee and Campion went off the rails, they did so trying to accomplish something a little different from their prior fare. One reason I’m not in a hurry to see Aloha is because the accounts of the movie have me thinking dog-returning-to-its-own-vomit. 

The "Paradine" Letters, Part 3

  "As if she could smell him..." M. Paradine (Alida Valli) senses the presence of Latour (Louis Jourdan)

Dear Farran,

Well thank you for sending me a nice slow Vertigo pitch across the plate. Your point is interesting and, I think, valid. But, given the structure of the extant film—it rather is a shame we’ll never be able to see the longer cuts—one has to look at Paradine sideways to get to that conclusion. But I like, anyway. It’s interesting too, that, during this particular period, the mid-to-late 40s (and for me, Hitchcock at the ABSOLUTE “height of his powers” is the stretch starting with ‘43’s Shadow of a Doubt and ending with ‘60’s Psycho), we find Hitchcock’s viewer-identification/sympathy strategies tilted to the female characters, e.g. Ingrid Bergman in both Notorious and Under Capricorn, Ann Todd to a somewhat lesser extent (strictly in terms of screen time, at least) here.

While it’s absolutely a stretch to call Hitchcock a feminist filmmaker, I think there’s still a lot of room to do some critical digging on his depictions of women. (Robin Wood’s chapter on Hitchcock and Bergman in his Hitchcock’s Films Revisited is a good start.)  Someone, it occurs to me, could get a nice paper out of the way Hitchcock used his own daughter, Patricia, in his films. As you’ve pointed out elsewhere, in The Paradine Case, the not-well-known-enough Joan Tetzel plays a sarcastic young woman affecting to be jaded beyond her years, an anticipation of Patricia’s snarky senator’s-younger-daughter in 1951’s Strangers on a Train. 

In any event, your alternative reading of the movie underscores an almost entirely irrefutable truth about what makes Hitchcock a great filmmaker. He conceived Paradine Case as a way to tell a story that related to his own fears/neuroses: that is, the tale of a good man’s sexual humiliation at the hands of a (Hitchcock’s words) “nymphomaniac” and a “clod.” He did not get that, largely due to Selznick’s hand. But, as you demonstrate, he didn’t get nothing, either. Even when Hitchcock’s explicit plans fail, his instinct does not, nor does his artistry.

One thing I’m increasingly fascinated by is what I hesitate to call the movie’s Pirandellian dimension. Hitchcock famously insisted that the production design recreated the actual interior of the Old Bailey to a very precise degree. This is very much the theatre in which a “real” drama is played. The main actors, or course, are in costume, as they are during a formal dinner party at the movie’s beginning. It’s at this latter scene that Hitchcock meant to establish a particular character dynamic. At this affair, the sight of Ann Todd’s bare shoulder electrifies Charles Laughton’s Judge Horfield. Hitchcock establishes this in a bravura feat of both shooting and editing. He begins with a medium close-up of Laughton entering the party, and then speedily dollies in on the actor/character as something catches his attention. He then cuts on motion to a medium shot of Todd, and this shot itself is already dollying in fast (this was all done before the zoom lens as we know it was developed) to Todd’s shoulder, and once the camera rests on a close-up of the shoulder, the scene cuts back to Laughton’s reaction. We get the picture as surely as getting hit by a lightning bolt. Then Laughton makes his intentions known and brazenly comes on to Todd’s Mrs. Keane. Her refusal to play along is ostensibly what leads to Horfield’s dismissive, contemptuous treatment of Gregory Peck’s Keane in court, but this isn’t followed through with the strength of this initial impetus. I suspect this theme was diluted in the film’s trimming.

 

Something not like the Kuleshov Effect: Charles Laughton fixates on Ann Todd. 

In any event, my point is that all of the main characters of the movie, save Laughton’s, are severely circumscribed by the formalities of their environment. Formalities that are so exacting that one can mistake this movie for a period piece. But it is not: its London features electricity and double-decker buses, and an establishing shot of the Old Bailey exterior shows it undergoing post-Blitz reconstruction. In any event, the only reason Laughton’s character is not similarly circumscribed is because of his power. He literally IS the law here. Everyone else is toiling under what the kids nowadays call “the dominant ideology,” and playing their roles within its hierarchy. There’s a definite sadness about this state of affairs expressed in the film. It’s not as if Hitchcock is going full Ford Madox Ford in bemoaning sexual repression (“Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?”, as we remember from The Good Soldier), but there’s more than an implication of a similar sentiment. It comes across most definitely in the exchanges between Joan Tetzel’s Judy and Charles Coburn’s Simon, father-and-daughter sideline observers of the whole sorry business.

The ornate settings in which Laughton/Horfield plays with unabashed free range (it must be said though that Hitchcock gets a far more controlled performance out of Laughton here than he did in Jamaica Inn, in which Laughton’s super-glazed hamming is delightful nonetheless) are a stark contrast to the dingy confines of the prison where Valli’s Maddalena Paradine dwells through most of the film. If you’ll forgive me, in more sweeping philosophical terms, the difference is to me reminiscent of the red pill/blue pill worlds of The Matrix. No, really. Hitchcock’s intention was different, but not, ultimately, in political terms, THAT different: “What interested me in this picture was to take a person like Mrs. Paradine, to put her in the hands of the police, to have her submit to all their formalities, and to say to her maid, as she was leaving her home between the two inspectors, ‘I don’t think I shall be back for dinner.’ And then to show her spending the night in a cell, from which, in fact, she will never emerge. […]It may be an expression of my own fear, but I’ve always felt the drama of a situation in which a normal person is suddenly deprived of freedom and incarcerated […]”

As Leff relates, this mode of contrast did not please the movie’s producer: “At least three scenes between Valli and Peck occurred in a spare five by six conference room at Halloway Prison. […] Hitchcock often put his actors in confined places to make them (and the audience) sweat. The stark scenes in this virtually unfurnished room—the antithesis of the mahogany-and-marble home of Maddalena Paradine—adumbrate the documentary style of The Wrong Man. Valli and Peck worked on the set for nine days, producing footage remarkable for its severity. Selznick meanwhile badgered Hitchcock to leave the gangster-in-a-cell style to other, lesser studios […]” As astute as Selznick could be, he did not have much of an appreciation for mise-en-scène at times.

I feel bad for self-proclaimed Hitchcock nuts who pooh-pooh this picture, or any other non-thriller Hitchcock. (It’s true that I lean more to Robin Wood’s side than Rohmer and Chabrol’s on Mr. and Mrs. Smith; while Rohmer and Chabrol are correct in identifying that film’s most Hitchcockian scene, said scene is also borderline grotesque, and Wood is right in nailing down the film’s defining weakness, which is that Norman Krasna’s script is a borderline crass rehash of The Awful Truth.) Because no matter what the material, Hitchcock’s always inventing, stretching, testing, film language itself, which is never not interesting. As Rohmer and Chabrol state at the conclusion of their book, “In Hitchcock’s work form does not embellish content, it creates it.” And it’s almost always a kick to watch that miracle take place before one’s eyes. Don't you think?

GK

This is the third of a four-part series. See part one below; part two here; and I'll update when part four appears at the Siren's blog tomorrow, and maybe I'll put up a kind of post-game show when we're done...

UPDATE: The Siren's thrilling (it really is!) conclusion to this exchange is now posted, here. 

A professional film critic™ answers your "American Sniper" questions

Dear Professional Film Critic,

does the movie American Sniper really “glorify a killer?”

Well, gosh, you put it that way, it sounds pretty terrible. But some outlets and individuals are using that term to frame the movie, so…

Anyway, here’s the thing. American Sniper does take the war in Iraq at face value, as in it was a war and that the United States was within its right to wage it and all that. And, you know, in a war, the body waging it sends soldiers, and one thing soldiers do, one of the main things soldiers do, some would argue, is kill. Killing is something every soldier is trained to do, I think. You know, I bet even the nice chaplain played by Leon Ames in Battleground is probably trained to kill. I doubt that he’s encouraged to kill, but he probably knows how to do it, and can if necessary. What the hell do I know about the military, I was 13 when they ended the draft and too old to enlist by the time people (none that I knew, though) would tell you it was the patriotic thing to do. Although come to think of it the Army might have made a better career than the one I’m enjoying now. But enough about me. In any event, given that Special Forces operative Chris Kyle, the subject of the movie, was trained and employed as a very specific kind of soldier, one who pretty much did nothing BUT kill, and because he did a pretty good job of it, by both the official record and his own accounting (which many have taken issue with, although the official record is apparently acknowledged as solid), and since the movie doesn’t really take issue with the notion that Kyle was what is generally referred to as a “war hero,” then yes, I guess the movie CAN be seen as “glorifying” a “killer.” But there’d have to be a lot of, what are they these days in sports records?...asterisk?...next to “killer” if you’re gonna go that route. I mean it’s not like he did all this killing in Iraq and then came home to face charges. It was all, like, state-sanctioned killing. Seems a little unfair to get all up in his face for that, no? 

Dear Professional Film Critic,

what’s the deal with the robot baby in the movie?

Did that bother you? I mean, I kind of noticed it when I looked specifically for it and yeah it was a little goofy but I don’t know. Frankly I’m a little bugged when real newborns get explicit exposure in movies. In the battle between verisimilitude and lobster-red naked infants squirming uncomfortably before cameras and lights I’m something of a conscientious objector. Although the tradition does go back quite a ways: I was surprised, watching King Vidor’s 1928 classic The Crowd again recently, to see that the birth of its hero John is handled with not just a real live baby in full view of the camera but a real live baby in full view of the camera if you know what I’m saying etc. In any event, word from the film’s screenwriter is that the movie’s first live baby showed up with fever, the second was a no-show, and that’s when director Clint Eastwood called in the prop department. Eastwood’s a real git-er-done kind of director. Here he explains that it was Don Siegel who taught him this, so complain to Don Siegel, you philistine: “Don knew exactly which shots to shoot. But he wasn’t rigid. He could add or change a shot at the last minute. I’ve worked with directors who are completely pole-axed if you suggest a change in a scene. I bumped my head while we were shooting In The Line Of Fire. To hide the bruise, I asked Wolfgang Petersen whether I could enter a shot from the right rather than the left. Wolfgang had a lot of trouble reorganizing the scene, because he’d imagined it all from the one angle. A detail had changed and it threw him off balance. This was never the case with Don. Sergio would have taken time to think and probably have said OK, but Don wouldn’t have blinked an eyelid. He believed that there were no rules, or if there were rules, they were made to be broken.” That’s from a piece by Eastwood in the invaluable collection Projections 4 ½ (in association with Positif). You should check it out. I trust I don’t have to explain to you who “Sergio” is.

Dear Professional Film Critic,

does the movie view/portray the Iraqi people as irredeemable savages?

This is kind of a tough one. I would say “no,” but I will admit that the movie frames Iraq within severely straitened circumstances, circumstances specific to the condition and the mission of its lead character, the aforementioned Chris Kyle, an American sniper. The title of the movie, we may recall, is “American Sniper,” not “American Ambassador” or “Civilian Outreach Guy.” Inasmuch as there even was such a thing as civil or civic society in Iraq after we were greeted as liberators there (and again, for reasons explained above, I myself cannot claim any direct experience with respect to any of this, thank God), from what accounts I’ve read it was pretty, um, fraught, and the U.S. Special Forces weren’t really sent to places that weren’t particularly fraught. And so on. Not to drag Boyhood into this, but remember the second stepdad in Boyhood, Jim, before he’s the stepdad and he’s just a student of Patricia Arquette’s and he seems kind of not an asshole and he’s telling the story about one of his tours in Iraq and the differences between the approaches of different squadrons when entering Iraqi territories and interacting with civilians? Right, well, that’s a whole movie right there. And the experience of a special forces operative, I think—and this goes back to the first question—has to do with touching down and securing areas wherein and from which you are only supposed to kill. Notice I’m not saying “kill bad guys.” I’m not here to make judgments. But, no, it’s true—the movie doesn’t feature many Iraqi nice guys or even recognizably regular Iraqis. There’s one who’s particularly holy-shit-inducing in his malevolence, and is pitted against a very fearful native of the country who has cooperated with the Americans. These depictions, to my eye, are conceptualized toward conveying the mind-melting hell of violent conflict that is the everyday working world for the title character, rather than a programmatic attempt to get the audience hissing at an entire race of people as villains. The perspective is, I admit, narrow, but as someone who likes the film, I want to believe it’s necessarily so. A friend who disagrees is reminded of Alan Dershowitz’s heinous 2006 Los Angeles Times op-ed piece titled “’Civilian Casualty? That’s A Gray Area.” 

A new film by Gina Telaroli: "Here's To The Future!"

Water and script pages, Here's To The Future, Gina Telaroli, 2014

The young filmmaker Gina Telaroli has a new picture premiering this upcoming Saturday, December  13, at the Migrating Forms festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Here's To The Future! is both an immediately engaging and consistently (playfully) challenging piece of work; I characterize it below as an essay film disguised as a process film. The premise of the movie is simple: Telaroli assembles a small crew and variable cast to enact a scene from an obscure Michael Curtiz-directed melodrama from the early '30s, The Cabin In The Cotton  (which costarred soon-to-be-casualty-of-the-talkies Richard Barthelmess and not-yet-ascended star Bette Davis), and gives herself a single afternoon to get it done. (It occurs to me now that there's also something slightly OULIPean about the enterprise.) All of the folks assembled have their own devices which are shooting the shooting and the finished feature intercuts footage off devices ranging from a Blackberry Curve to a Canon 60D. Where Telaroli's prior feature, 2012's Traveling Light (which I wrote about here) made a kind of abstract narrative out of an abandoned attempt at a different narrative film, Here's To The Future! adopts an interrogative mode from the get-go. But because it gets so close to the people who are part of it, the movie never feels hermetic or theoretical. It's both as unconventional and accessible as filmmaking gets, in a funny way. Go see it. 

I engaged Gina, who's a friend, in an e-mail interview, and here's how it went.

GK:  Your first feature, A Little Death is, from all appearances, a pretty conventionally conceived and produced narrative film in that it seems to be the work of actors and a crew working from a script, etcetera. Traveling Light is a movie that aspired to be one thing, and ended up as something else due to circumstances of shooting and then again with respect to editing. Here’s To The Future! is something else yet again: a kind of essay film in the disguise of a process film. Was that what your conception was from beginning to end or, as with Traveling Light, was that something that changed along the timeline of the production?

GT: Like Traveling Light, HTTF! isn’t conventional in terms of its conception and is very much a product of circumstances, some in my control and some not. The scene we are shooting was actually supposed to be part of a short film I was making for an omnibus project that was centered on the theme of ‘proof.’ I was going to make a film comprised of documentary footage I shot in Ohio and have that transition to the narrative scene we shot on that Sunday in September.  The omnibus project fell through, so that film never got made, but even before that project turned to dust, I knew I was more interested in the document of the shoot itself and the repetition in the performances of the scene, that that was the real “movie.”

GK:  It looks as if, in the films where you work from footage you generate yourself and/or with the collaboration of your colleagues, your role as director is less that of a traditional auteur and more as a conductor or prompter. You’re creating a set of circumstances for creative people to enact and recording and digesting—via editing—the results. Is that an accurate characterization?

GT: I don’t disagree with what you wrote, though something about your question feels like it discredits my voice as the author a bit?  My films are 100% the result of circumstance and they are definitely dependent on collaboration and the people I work with, which I love, but I still put all the elements in the room, if that makes sense. For HTTF!  I chose the scene, the people, the day, and I did direct a lot of the footage, even if it’s used in a different context.  Also, while it isn’t directing exactly, I have to imagine the mood, the general feeling of the day and thus the progression of events was due in part to the environment I created and sustained. 

Also, in Classic Hollywood (and even in the current iteration of the studio system) directors didn’t necessarily have a lot of choice about content or collaborators but of course the entire idea of the auteur was developed around them.  The main difference here is that instead of directing a traditional story with the creative elements given to me (script, actors, crew), I’m basically directing the story in the edit with the creative elements given to me (footage).

I do like the idea of comparing myself to a conductor although I think a more accurate metaphoric description might be that what I do is like being a contestant on MasterChef during one of the Mystery Box Challenges. Ultimately I have to use the ingredients given to me (footage) but at the end of the day I’m still the author, the recipe prepared is mine. 

GK: Why did you want to reenact this particular scene from The Cabin In The Cotton?

GT: The simple and practical answer, which always factors into my no-budget filmmaking, is that I needed something that looked and felt like a movie scene and I needed that scene to be a simple one with minimal characters that could be shot in an apartment in one afternoon.  After those practical considerations came the fact that in the months leading up to that shoot, Film Forum was having one of their pre-code series and I was going nightly and rabidly emailing with friends about the films we were seeing, which were proving very inspirational and also timely, with August 8th’s Black Monday. Of all the movies at Film Forum, The Cabin In The Cotton really hit home in terms of its strange and complex ideas about economics and solidarity politics. I was also drawn to the baffling combination of a fresh-faced Bette Davis and a soundly confused and tired Richard Barthelmess.  So, as per usual, the choice was a product of circumstance and practical concerns, as well as thematic appropriateness and my own bizarre interests and fixations.

I will say that I am getting a lot of joy from the fact that everyone who talks to me about the movie is asking about why I chose this scene. That is, I really really like the idea of people being curious and placing all this importance on a pretty random, mostly forgotten, and by all accounts insignificant movie from 1932. That doesn’t happen very often anymore. It’s actually going to be on TCM on January 21st at 8:45, so interested parties should set their DVRs.

GK: “I just think it needs to look really real,” an offscreen voice is heard saying at the beginning of the film. The multiple frames contained within the movie—the credits list seven discrete recording devices—in themselves suggest different standards of realism, but even so, other considerations come into play. The personalities of the players kind of mutate as the movie moves along; a viewer might find cinematographer Eric Phillips-Horst a little uptight and wonky at the outset, and his sheer joy at the end is kind of unexpected and infectious. Was illuminating the conundrum about cinema—that it both shows and withholds, and can be very cagey about giving what one might call "the whole picture"—part of your scheme?

GT: I’ll start with the specifics here and then get a little more general.  With Eric, who actually is the person who speaks the line you reference, I think this is partially due to process. For the first two acts of the movie, more than anyone else, he’s working and has a very specific task that requires a very specific focus and energy, especially when there’s a time crunch because your talent has to finish at specific times to get to their day jobs.  The third act is the first point in the movie where he is actually able to relax and just be himself, and in the case of Eric, himself is very much something I would associate with joy.  In any case, I really like that his “character” worked that way for you—in terms of character development but mostly in terms of a document of labor.

Something I often thought about while editing was how the movie would change or work for people that knew the people in movie personally and those that didn’t.  Ultimately, I think it’s (appropriately) a lot like pre-code cinema, which featured a round-robin of rotating character actors. That is, if you are familiar with (know in a sense) Ruth Donnelly, Guy Kibbee, Allen Jenkins, Emma Dunn, Ned Sparks etc.,you’re given a key to go deeper with those films. The rhythms of those movies change and the jokes resonate in a different way and in some cases the jokes only exist because of knowledge of the actor and their previous roles. That being said, obviously Blessed Event isn’t any less of a movie if you don’t recognize the actors, it’s just a slightly different one.  Fassbinder’s films function similarly.

In terms of withholding and showing, what’s been very interesting and surprising to me thus far has been people’s different interpretations, not of what things mean so much as what is actually happening—who is saying what, who has the camera, where the sound is coming from, what’s on purpose and what isn’t, who is acting and who isn’t.

GK: There’s also a subtextual interrogation of the mechanics of desire going on in this movie. At some point each of the female actors who’s portraying the Bette Davis role comments upon, or makes a physical adjustment to, her frontal presentation, so to speak. Giving direction to one of your male actors, you are heard saying, “But…you’re a man…”  There’s a brief montage, three shots I think, of unlaced female garments. Whence does/did this arrive from?

GT: I’d almost rather hear you talk more about this than answer the question myself because I’m always thinking about gender and its relationship to cinema on and off screen but I’ve never thought of the movie that way or seen those images in that context when I’ve watched it.

That being said, I think there are a few practical answers to this question.  In terms of the frontal adjustment, I think those shots came to be because 1), people were not thinking about being filmed 2), it was a no-budget set and everyone is wearing many hats, with the actors pretty much taking care of their own wardrobe 3), the microphones were being difficult.  My decision to use those shots likely also stems from many places—the rhythms of movie at those moments, the lighting, the person in the frame, what was being said etc..

I do think the women totally stole the show though, which is due to both the scene itself and the specific people I gathered to perform the scene.

GK: I seem to recall reading somewhere that you were continuing to move away from conventional narrative in your work. Which, I’m sure you’re aware, is kind of interesting given that so much of your critical work is devoted, in several respects, to great narrative filmmaking of classical Hollywood. I’m not suggesting there’s some kind of discrepancy in that, but there are folks who’d say it’s a shame that someone of your obvious talent and vision is working at a remove from the mainstream when the mainstream could use more vital young female filmmakers. Does this sort of concern ever cross your mind?

GT: Well, before my predictably practical answer, thank you! The main thing here is that I’m a working class woman, that is, I have to support myself.  Short of people coming forward to offer their producing services and someone handing me enough cash to make a more traditional movie and also support myself in this obscenely expensive city with shelter, food, and health insurance while I made that traditional movie in its many stages (research, writing, casting, pre-production, shooting, editing, promoting) that isn’t looking like something that is going to happen anytime soon.  My last two films are very much the product of my having a day job, a day job I take very seriously and care about.

Do I think it’s a shame that making movies isn’t my job? I don’t know. It seems an unproductive question for me. I do think having a job keeps me grounded in and connected to what it means to be a person living in this horrific capitalist system, which provides a tension in my work that I think is missing in a lot of current filmmaking, especially art house and “independent” fare. It also forces me to constantly adapt, to think outside the box and challenge myself and I like that. In theory I guess I’d love to not have a traditional job and to make movies and travel around the world with them but also who knows, I’m a Taurus and I like stability. Plus, I mean, I’m always bloated and tired when I travel and it would suck to be bloated all the time. And I’d really miss my friends.

In terms of Hollywood and women directors, I of course agree that I’d like to see more women in the mainstream. I am currently obsessed with Beyond The Lights and [writer/director] Gina Prince-Bythewood kind of said it all when she told NPR that she’s offered tons of work but that she isn’t able to make movies that she writes, the stories she actually wants to tell. 

So, in a way I guess my answer to your question is that you’re asking the wrong person because ultimately it isn’t up to me.

Waiting For "Birdman"

Even skeptics can anticipate. I won't be seeing Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman (a still is above, featuring costars Michael Keaton and Edward Norton) until about a month from now, and of course I'm highly curious, albeit not particularly keen on participating in any "wars" about the thing. As it happens, when the director's last film, Biutiful, was in theaters, I contributed a piece to Film Comment entitled: "This Can't End Well: How We Live Now, or The New Humanism according to Alejandro González Iñárritu." The piece, which appeared in the November/December 2010 issue, cannot be accessed online, or else I'd just link to it. So I've distilled the gist of my argument from the essay's final paragraphs, for your consideration: 

[…]Iñárritu’s films […] always withhold anything even vaguely resembling a happy ending […] are nevertheless in the uplift business. While trucking in […] liberal pieties, his that’s-just-the-way-it-is perspective resists explicit ideology, so as to evade the idea that there might be anything resembling a genuine political response to any of the human misery his films depict. […] This really does let everybody off the hook, but the perspective doesn’t so much come out and congratulate the audience as it does Iñárritu himself: for his seemingly self-proclaimed insistence on looking at all of the pain of human existence with an unflinching gaze. And of course it is that which spurs on a form of audience self-congratulation: ‘He gets it, and I get it the way that he gets it.’ Iñárritu invites you to wallow in his tragic sense. And this, of course, is what makes his films sort of critic-proof. But it’s also what makes so many critics feel he’s a strong-arm artist, a filmmaker who instead of allowing the audience to respond emotionally, bludgeons or even blackmails them into being moved.

Near the end of [Biutiful], [Javier] Bardem’s character, grinding closer and closer to his death, takes his young daughter in a tight embrace and, almost melting into her, begs, “Remember me. Don’t forget me, Ana.” The shot is simply composed, the sentiment the character expresses is, you’ll excuse the term, universal, and the actors note-perfect. It’s as naked and ‘real’ and moving a thing as Iñárritu has ever put on film, an unabashed and unadorned depiction of human frailty, vulnerability, and vanity. And then he has to go and spoil it all by cutting from that to the in-your-face resolution of a storyline involving a couple of the film’s Asian ‘entrepreneurs,’ which rings ten times more falsely than it ordinarily would have, had the prior scene not rung so true. It’s as if Iñárritu can’t help himself. Again: can he? Looks as if we won’t find out until his next film. 

Kevin Smith on "Star Wars," Then And Now

Hey, a fella can change his mind, right? Lest my juxtaposition be misinterpreted, lemme say I'm psyched that Smith is psyched. I'm mostly acting on a self-interest that will become crystal clear in a moment.

"I [...] could no longer be considered a die-hard fan. While I still had mountains of respect for what Lucas had created, and enough affection for what I felt were just some old movies that meant a lot for me growing up to keep referencing them in movies I now found myself making, I'd long since gotten divorced from my childhood marriage to Star Wars. [...] Lest you think I'm a total dork in denial, though, I'd like to point out for the record that I finally extricated myself from the stranglehold Star Wars seemed to have on my life by not naming our kid Leia or Boba, tempting as that might have been. I mean, sooner or later, you've gotta grow up, right? So we named our daughter Harley Quinn.

"After a Batman villainess."

—Kevin Smith, "Married To The Force," from A Galaxy Not So Far Away: Writers and Artists on 25 Years of 'Star Wars,' ed. Glenn Kenny, Owl Books, 2002

"Visited JJ and his EP VII set [...] all I can share are [...]  tears and snotty nose of joy. The Force is WITH this movie. Holy Sith.."

—Kevin Smith, on Instagram, June 30, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did Julien Temple invent Baz Luhrmann?

Patsy Kensit attempting to make an anthem of a song called "Having It All" in Temple's Absolute Beginners.

I have to admit I was kind of disappointed with my level of disappointment with Baz Luhrmann's film of The Great Gatsby. At least one other critic of my acquaintance has noted that as summer movies go, it's the one that's the most fun to argue about, but I'm not much inclined to join said fun, just because I don't feel all that strongly about this Gatsby. While A.O. Scott avers that the movie is "eminently enjoyable," and good for him, I found it a bit of a slog, although when I cite its slogginess I take care to make it clear that I'm in now real way offended by what Luhrmann "does" with or to the book; as much as I was unengaged, I wasn't affronted either. If anything, I found the enterprise, for all its mammoth-ness, kind of tired. Flappers dancing to Jay-Z did not excite my sense of sacrilege at all; indeed, I found that and other such showbiz fillips as the movie offered entirely expected.

Now when Luhrmann had the cheek to put "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in Moulin Rouge, and have it bellowed by Jim Broadbent, that was my idea of purposeful, almost revelatory sacrilege, and a reminder that an anti-showbiz protest is in fact an irreplaceable staple of showbiz. The anachronisms of Gatsby don't just tell us what we already know, they make points that unduly flatter us, as we intone sentences about how the materialism of the so-called Jazz Age is echoed in today's hip-hop fueled madness for "bling," and man, I just lost a little bit of the will to live merely typing that. The more people have been talking about Gatsby, the less I've been inclined to think about Gatsby. Instead, my thought turn to Julien Temple, about ten years Luhrmann's senior, and I think, why isn't HE allowed to make these sorts of movies anymore. By "these sorts of movies" you might think I mean, yeah, Baz Luhrmann movies, that is, gargantuan-budgeted lavish real-or-quasi-musicals—and think how genuinely sacreligious Gatsby would have been as a real musical, with its lead character, say, rapping about how good it felt to be, well, him; how queasily exhilarating the picture could have been if Luhrmann had risked that sort of ridiculousness and made it pay off—that take years in the gestation and production. Not quite, I'd answer. But in thinking, or not thinking, about Gatsby I also got to really thinking about Absolute Beginners, the musical Temple, a punk-weaned filmmaker who assembled a Sex Pistols feature of sorts before moving to music videos, made in 1986, quite some time before Luhrmann's film debut, Strictly Ballroom. The picture was poorly recieved at the time it came out. Looking at it now, it seems practically prophetic of the whole Luhrmann aesthetic, albeit with some interesting differences—none of which really explain why Temple's career in doing this sort of thing faltered, while Luhrmann's took off. That's not to say that Absolute Beginners is anything like a perfect film, but in terms of its conception and overall "attitude" it's remarkably and often giddily free. Adapted from a Colin MacInnes novel of social upheaval in '50s London, it stays true to its source in its fashion (e.g., a sense of social consciousness/conscience) while exercising a colorful fluidity in most other respects. I looked at it the other day and thought it held up pretty well; not only that, all the things that critics of its day gave it a hard time for—established pop songs lip-synched by the actors/characters within the diegisis, a purposeful carelessness in coloring outside the lines of its ostensible period, and more—are now regarded as, depending on the critic,  entirely acceptable devices (particularly when Luhrmann uses them), or no big deal. It's true that Temple doesn't nose around the vicinity of Camp as much as Luhrmann does, and that the relentless Brit-centricness of Absolute Beginners' content might have been as much of a roadblock to its making a wide impact as its formal playfulness was...but all things considered I have to say that Beginners qualifies as a movie that was genuinely ahead of its time, and that Luhrmann came along with an ethos that flirted with the postmodern even as it gave up big fat heartfelt melodramatic frissons in a superelaborate package just when mass audiences were ready for it. Temple's subsequent Earth Girls Are Easy is also way better than its reputation suggests, but doesn't function as well for my case because it's more overtly frivolous. 

These days Temple mostly gets to make imaginative, knowledgable documentaries about music and musicians, but his last fiction feature, 2000's Pandaemonium, which sort of makes rock stars of Wordworth and Coleridge, albeit not in a stupid way, showed that he's still in possession of the technical chops and the perspective to make cheekily new the things audiences have become accustomed to thinking of as old. It rather makes one regret that the only filmmaker today with permission to make Baz Luhrmann movies is, well, Baz Luhrmann.