Some Came Running

Foreign Region DVD Report: "A Jester's Tale," Karel Zeman, 1964

Last month the Film Society of Lincoln Center showed, as part of its "Strange Lands: International Sci-Fi" series, Karel Zeman's 1958 Vynálaz zkázy, an unusual live-action/animation hybrid derived from several Jules Verne tales. Well, actually, the Society showed The Fabulous World Of Jules Verne, the English-dubbed and presumably re-edited version of the film that Joseph E. Levine prepared for U.S. release in 1961. That's the only version of the film I've seen—I recall it as a kind of mind-blowing staple of afternoon and late-night television as a kid, as was Zeman's Baron Munchausen picture—and I presume it was the only version of the film available. Cheesy intro—hosted by Hugh Downs, game-show host and network television's answer to amiable pedagogy—and oddly cobbled narrative notwithstanding, World is still a trip, its peculiarly proportioned and designed backdrops/sets and swatches of animated action giving the whole film a feel of fantastic engravings come to life. Zeman's work clearly influenced Terry Gilliam, whose clip-art animated collages made more irreverent use of 19th-century graphic styles. But both filmmakers share an irreverent wit. More recently, the depictions of the title edifice in Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, and the action sequences of that film, show a distinctly Zeman-esque elan. 

For all that I was a little surprised at how well-attended the screening of the Zeman film was, and plenty gratified. Subsequent inquiries yielded exciting information; my colleague Jordan Hoffman told me, after the screening, of a Zeman museum in Prague. A restoration of Vynálaz zkázy is in the works; someday soon, we'll be able to see the picture with a Czech soundtrack, a possibly more coherent storyline, and, pace the Downs family, no Hugh Downs. Most exciting: the release by the great U.K. DVD label Second Run of Zeman's Bláznova kronica, A Jester's Tale, Zeman's 1964 30 Years War fantasia. I was terrifically excited to watch this picture—one of the rare instances in this critic's life in which I can have a completely new and largely unanticipated film experience based on an impression that's still somewhat mysterious. Unknown factors included the plot. And to tell you the truth, after watching the movie, a recounting of the plot is hardly the thing I want to impart to the reader. What I want to impart is that if you live in the U.S. and have a foreign-region DVD player, this disc is, I think, the reason you have that player. Jester's Tale is a miraculous watch. Zeman's work here combines the rollicking exuberance of the Czech New Wave (the female lead is the delightful Emília Vásárová; the future "first lady of Slovak theatre" was only in her ealry 20s here) with the magical mechanics of Meliés; every frame is an intoxicant. There's the optically-printed lightning (seen in the screen capture above).

The amusing, brief bits of "pure" animation, such as what we see above, put modernist caricatures in the foreground of antique engravings to sardonic effect without breaking the film's peculiar spell. 

My favorite scene is at the movie's midpoint, when Vásáryová's character, who's been disguising herself as a male Fool, is unmasked by the film's villain and wanders the halls of the castle where the movie's hero is half-heartedly masquerading as a nobleman. She takes a short, hallucinogenic journey around the artworks, which come to various forms of life and seem to concoct a montage encapsulating an allegory of war and the fall of man. It's both visually ravishing and emotionally bracing, a head-spinning jolt that, again, doesn't mess with but in fact enhances the movie's overall character. I hope this release, which showcases a beautiful version of the film, conscientiously transfered (exactly what one expects from Second Run) is a portent and that further Zeman magic will soon be more easily accessible to Western audiences. 

Image of the day (with subtitle), 5/24/12

Enrique Irazoqui as Christ in Il vangelo secondo Matteo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964

Screen capture from the standard-def disc of the invaluable Eureka!/Masters of Cinema dual-format edition of the film. 

For The Anchoress, with a hearty "Up yours, whatever in hell 'yours' actually is." Hat tip to Roy Edroso and his also invaluable albeit infuriating alicublog.

"Chimes At Midnight" DVD Consumer Guide

Some rate Orson Welles' 1965 Shakespeare compression/adaptation Chimes At Midnight as a) the greatest Shakespeare film ever, or at least close, and/or b) one of Welles' greatest cinematic achievements period. You want testimonials? Chimes is the subject of one of Pauline Kael's most rhapsodic critical swoons, one written not for The New Yorker but The New Republic. Here is one of my favorite passages from the long piece: "He [Welles] has directed a sequence, the battle of Shrewsbury, which is unlike anything he has ever done, indeed, unlike any battle ever done on screen before. It ranks with the best of Griffith, John Ford, Eisenstein, Kurosawa—that is, with the best ever done." Go read it, it's in both For Keeps and the recent Library of America selection of her work. Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars, therein calls Chimes an "amazing and, to me, so-far-bottomless [...] film fusion of the Henry IV plays."

Yes: the film is not even two hours long, but it feels like an entire world, an inexhaustible environment of artistic and emotional richness And I've only ever seen the damn thing on television. And in largely not very good versions. One hears not infrequently of screenings of "restored" versions and whatnot. But so far, no doubt at least in part because of legal questions pertaining to both the film's actual producers and the rights of verious individuals and parties claiming to have a claim in the Welles estate, a completely confidence-inspiring steward of the work has yet to emerge.

So Welles enthusiasts—although I should dare say that the category "Welles enthusiast" should encompass the entirety of cinema enthusiasts, but I imagine that "the Internet" or some creation of it might contradict me on that point—who desire to enjoy Chimes At Midnight, also called Falstaff, on video have had to rely on what might be considered bootlegs. But can an object that is for all intents and purposes an orphan actually be bootlegged? It's a question that I, a person who tends to eschew bootlegs for personal ethical reasons that I won't bore you with, don't get much joy out of grappling with. In the case of Chimes, though, I want it in my life, I want it in my library, and I want to be able to enjoy it once or twice a year at least, because it's not just great Shakespeare, a great Shakespeare adaptation, etc.; it's a genuinely magical film, as spellbinding and strange and funny and poignant and inventive as any damne thing Welles attached his name to. As a result of this desire, I now have three DVDs of the movie at my right hand at the moment. We begin with bad news, and end with pretty good news. 

1) Campanadas a medianoche, Suevia Films, circa 2007.

My then-Premiere colleague Andy Webster paid through the nose for a copy of this Spain-issued Region B PAL disc back in the day when researching a Welles DVD Filmography for the magazine. These days, you can get a used copy for anywhere between fifty bucks and...what's this? Two hundred bucks? Yup. I wouldn't go for it now, particularly as I can't expense it, and neither should you. The transfer preserves the film's 1.66 aspect ratio...albeit within a 4:3 box that is not enhanced for widescreen displays. The transfer also looks interlaced as opposed to progressive, and while largely clean, is very gray and largely dull. Detail is shaky, unremarkable. The sound is advertised as Dolby Stereo and is reasonably clear. As with his prior The Trial, Mr. Arkadin, and other films, Welles made this with no direct sound, and often the actors speaking on screen are not who we hear on the soundtrack (Marina Vlady and Fernando Rey are pertinent examples). Contemporary technology could have helped Welles' DIY approach yield smoother results but, you know. —C-

 

 2) Chimes At Midnight, Nostalgia Family Video, version copyrighted 2008.

Bargain hunters (I see a used copy floating around for about twenty-five bucks at Amazon right now; new versions pop up now and again for even less) and those who are senselessly deprived of region-free players will see the value of this version, but it's no great shakes.  At all. Again, a 1.66 picture in an unenhanced 4:3 box, and what's worse, when not viewing in zoom mode, there's a wavering blue horizontal line in the lower right corner of the 4:3 box (not visible in the screen capture above). The materials seem a trifle newer than those used for the Suevia version, but again, they are gray, gray, gray. The look is often more like that of a well-preserved '50s kinetoscope than that of a film. The sound is clear. Docked a notch from the Suevia for the blue line. —D+

3) Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight), Films Sans Frontieres, 2011

This strange label with its odd practices: sometimes going region-free, as befits its name...and sometimes not. This is an all-region disc in theory but as it's in the PAL broadcast format you need an all-region player to watch it. I'm sure glad I do. For one thing, this is the first disc version I've seen that is enhanced for widescreen displays. While I don't have the tools to make a precise determination, I discern that the image presented is close to 1.66 if not exactly there; maybe a hair or so wider than it ought be. Not entirely sure, as I said. But what's really crucial is that the image itself is worthy of nearly filling a whole display. The black-and-white is very definite, and gorgeous; there's a magnificent boost of clarity and detail and very little, if any at all, visible digital artifacts: no obvious edge-enhancement or noise reduction. But again, a great deal of detail. Check out the dialogue between Keith Baxter's Prince Hal and John Gielgud's Henry IV about 37 minutes in; the abysses of black that frame the characters in the chilly isolation of the castle throne room. Magnificent. 

The versions of this film available on the U.S. Amazon site are rather confusingly categorized, and hence you can't necessarly be sure what you're getting. I never bought the Brazilian issue of this disc, nor the British disc from a few years back that is now fetching almost three hundred dollars on the site as I write this. To be assured of getting THIS version, I'd suggest ordering it directly from French Amazon, where it'll set you back about twelve Euros plus shipping. All I can tell you is while it's not an official or sanctioned restoration, it's the most consistently enjoyable presentation of the film I've seen, period. Until there's a Blu-ray (and I think the materials used here could support one) from some firm as well-regarded as Criterion and/or Masters of Cinema, this should be considered the home version of record. —A- 

UPDATE: Damn. All the while I was working on this, and the much-bruited (by the company itself) Mr. Bongo version—a "definaitive [sic], restored version," yet—comes out in Britain, under my nose. (See the comment by Robert Sweeney below.) I shall seek it out and report on it as soon as possible. If it's a patch on the Films Sans Frontieres version, it should be very special indeed. We'll see, and report.

Thread of "Carnage"

Because the Some Came Running readership demands it. Or requests it, or something. (And while I try to be accomodating, no I don't think Typepad is gonna let me allow commenters to have italics via markdown.)

And because it gives me an excuse to put up this screen grab in which the director's cameo is made manifest (that's him, as a grumpy neighbor—he even has a line, it sounds like "Jesus Christ," which is what I was about to say—framed between Jodie Foster's hands as Christoph Waltz's character looks on quizzically).

Play nice. 

"The Black Book" versus "Reign of Terror"

Who says this blog is afraid to answer the tough questions, to boldly tackle the really burning issues of the day?

To wit: Given that VCI Entertainment issued a not-all-that bad DVD version of Anthony Mann's delightful French Revolution pop-noir 1948 Reign of Terror AKA The Black Book, is the new version of the Mann film recently released by the burn-on-demand Sony subsidiary Columbia Classics worth a look, let alone an investment of 20 bucks or thereabouts?

Well, we've delved into the question and the answer is, HELL YEAH.

The relative enthusiasm with which the VCI release was met with beck in 2008 was of course relative to the fact that prior video iterations of the film looked like sock puppet theater, on account of their being quasi-bootlegs of the title which had fallen into the slough of despond known as public domain. The VCI version was made from undeniably soft materials, but transferred with care. If the magnificent chiaroscuros concocted by Mann and his most crucial collaborator, cinematographer John Alton, were clearly not all that they could be, well, they were enough to extrapolate from. Given the state of affairs concerning the film's provenance and such, DVD Beaver reviewers Gregory Meshman and Gary W. Tooze said of the release, "This may be as good as it gets."

This was of course before the burn-on-demand DVD marketing scheme got going. My suspicion is that some cinephile at Sony knew that the studio had some very superior materials in the vault, and that the only way to get them released would be through just such a corporate sidebar as was pioneered by the Warner Archive. Alas, Jeanine Basinger's otherwise quite thorough Mann biography doesn't go into how Reign of Terror got its name changed to The Black Book, but I suspect it was retitled after the independent low-budget production was picked up for distribution by Columbia.

In any event, the difference between the VCI Reign and the Columbia Classics Book is stark from the very opening montage, including this introductory shot of Richard Basehart's "Don't call me Max" Robespierre. The VCI version is the first, the Sony the second. 

VCI.

Sony.

The extent to which the materials used for the VCI edition are washed out is extremely evident in the flames, and behind the flames. The level of relative detail is plainly discernable in details such as Basehart's teeth.

As for the light and shadow—and most importantly, darkness, Alton's stock-in-trade and likely a great influence on the future work of Gordon Willis—well, see these screen caps from a slightly later scene showing the first secret meeting between the characters played by Robert Cummings and Arlene Dahl:

VCI.

Sony.

"The movie represents a total triumph of form over content—or, perhaps, form over lack of content," Basinger notes. It's impossible, really, to fully appreciate the form unless it's presented faithfully, or well, or whatever your preferred term. Though the Columbia Classics disc is a DVR, it's made from a mighty fine master. I can just imagine what kind of a Blu-ray the materials might yield, and I bet I'm GONNA have to imagine that for the forseeable future. Am I gonna toss my VCI disc? No, because it also contains a good version of ANOTHER Alton-shot (albeit not Mann-directed) genre picture, The Amazing Mr. X, starring Turhan Bey, WTFIU, and because the Reign presentation also has a good and informative audio commentary by Alan Rode, who's joined by Arlene Dahl. (Hmm. I forget whether that commentary goes into the specifics of the name switch, but never mind.) But when I just want to watch Mann's film—and I'll probably want to at least every other Bastille Day or so—the Columbia Classics one, which you can indeed buy through the Warner Archive or through ClassicFlix and no doubt other outlets, is the one I'll pop into the player. 

Otto Preminger and the new freedoms: "Such Good Friends" (1971)

An entire book, or at the very least some sort of monograph, could be written about the ways that various old-school Hollywood directors (and even some not entirely old-school and/or studio-system-raised filmmakers) dealt with the license to show rather than imply that the collapse of the Production Code and the permissive culture of the '60s and '70s didn't just allow, but encouraged. Consider the very tasteful nudity of Wyler's 1965 The Collector, the deeply uncomfortable rape-and-strangulation scene in Hitchcock's 1972 Frenzy, the way Kubrick pigged out with the nudity and violence with 1971's A Clockwork Orange. And then there's Preminger. As Chris Fujiwara points out in his excellent critical biography The World And Its Double: The Life And Work Of Otto Preminger, the "vogue for nudity in American films" of the early '70s was something for which Preminger, "as a public opponent of censorship and a producer whose challenges to the Production Code helped lead to the MPAA's adoption of the ratings system [...] might have taken a little credit." It instead was, Fujiwara continues, "something from which he refrained from drawing much benefit in his films." Looking at the first few minutes of his 1971 film Such Good Friends one might conclude that Preminger was in fact rather befuddled by the access his camera could now conceivably enjoy. The movie opens with Dyan Cannon's character Julie Messinger dressing for a Manhattan literary party that just EVERYBODY will be at (Norman Mailer's name is dropped, repeatedly, by Julie's husband Richard, played by Laurence Luckinbill) and wearing this very revealing knit top (one of those things that looks like a mislabeled macrame plant holder; man, the counterculture really yielded some weird fashions, didn't it?) with a heavy-duty and entirely visible bra underneath; on being advised that the visible bra just isn't making it, she doffs the bra, and the top in this context is sufficiently revealing that Cannon's reported refusal to actually appear nude in the film (the very peculiar naked Polaroid we see of her later in the film is quite clearly a doctored photo) seems a little beside the point.

In any event, she leaves her building to catch a cab, and the reaction of her doorman (one Oscar Grossman) to her virtual deshabille inspires a sight gag that would seem more at home in a Three Stooges short than in any Preminger film (with, of course, the ever-possible-exception of Skidoo). 

One can almost hear the perhaps-stifling-a-"boner" "BOING!" sound effect, although, blessedly, it does not in fact materialize on the soundtrack.

And Julie is at first confused...

...and then affronted. Life is confusing in this ever-changing world in which we're living, that's for sure. 

Such Good Friends is a strange duck to be sure; as Dave Kehr pointed out in his excellent Times piece on the recent DVDs of it and Preminger's prior Hurry Sundown, both recent DVD releases on the invaluable Olive label. Dave calls it a a picture that "seems in active opposition to its cultural moment" in the review proper, and "a provocatively unpleasant comedy" on his own website, where there's a good comments thread (as usual) on the topic. Both assessments strike me as about right. Many synopses of the film describe it as a story of a woman who, upon discovering that her unexpectedly comatose husband has been serially and relentlessly and elaborately cheating on her, embarks on a series of affairs. That's not quite right. Julie doesn't make this discovery into about an hour into this hour-and-forty-minute film, and once she does, what she embarks on aren't so much affairs as they are mutually humiliating sexual encounters. The hour leading up to her discovery largely concerns itself with a relentless and merciless examination of the New York media world of its time. Fujiwara makes an indirect link in his book between the subject matter here and the fact that Preminger himself was one of the "characters" in Tom Wolfe's famed account of that Black Panther fundraising party at Leonard Bernstein's place, in Wolfe's reportorial essay "Radical Chic." Julie's husband is a magazine art director who's just published a book, and the world they share—one from which their two little boys seem entirely estranged from—is cramped and snotty and oppressive, for all its bourgeois comforts. And the film's first hour takes its own sweet time dissecting that world, albeit in a desultory way that sometimes reveals flashes of mise-en-scene brilliance from Preminger and only occasional glimpses of the scalpel-like wit of Elaine May, who was the pseudonymously credited writer (adapting Lois Gould's novel), the last in a long line of scribes on this project. The picture is rather preoccupied, early on, with Julie's own insecurities, both sexual and emotional, and the viewer is made privy to her bizarre fantasies, including a ravishing by a hunky, glass-smashing cabbie. Most bizarre is the instance of nudity Fujiwara cites as Preminger's "ironic reaction" to the prior-noted vogue for nudity. At the all-important party where Norman Mailer is supposed to turn up, Julie and her husband instead meet the aged and  slightly truculent egomaniacal novelist Bernard Kalman, whose new book is entitled Weissman. And for some reason Julie is compelled to imagine Kalman naked. Was it ever said that the late, great Burgess Meredith was ever anything less than game? If so, below you shall find your possible not-safe-for-work refutation of that notion.

Image of the day, 4/22/11

Jeff Daniels, Melanie Griffith, some extras, and various Feelies (visible: Dave Weckerman, Stanley Demeski, the top of Bill Million's hair) in Something Wild, Jonathan Demme, 1986. As much as I loved the fact that the Feelies were in this film as "The Willies," the high-school reunion band, I didn't think their music was represented as "accurately" as it might have been, even though that IS them playing; as galvanic as the sight of Dave singing Bowie's "Fame" is, it's not really what the group's about. I had forgotten, though, something very clever that Demme does at this point in the scene, right before villain Ray Liotta turns up; the lights go down, and the band starts in on the very evocative intro to the song "Loveless Love," which begins on a note of tentative lyricism and then grows more tense and propulsive. The music, and the people, change the mood even as the shot itself stays the same; Daniels and Griffith kiss, it's a magical moment, but then the sinister Liotta enters, frame right, circles behind and sidles into Griffith, just as Bill and Glenn Mercer's guitars are meshing and strumming just a little tighter and a little denser. Very cool. Olivier Assayas uses the same song to similar effect in Carlos.

The Feelies have an absolutely superb new album out (on both CD and vinyl), called Here Before; the Criterion edition of Something Wild comes out on standard-def DVD and Blu-ray on May 10.

Coffin Joe redux

José Mojica Marins and Rui Rezende in Encarnação do Demônio (Embodiment of Evil), directed by Marins, 2008

I've quoted this passage from Caetano Veloso's memoir, Tropical Truth, before: 

In 1967, people were talking about a Brazilian B movie that Glauber Rocha had liked, A meia-noite levarei tua alma (I'll Take Your Soul At Midnight), directed by the Paulista José Mojica Marins. In him Glauber sensed a primitive Nietzsche, although the production was a horror movie made on the sort of precarious budget typical of a small-town Brazilian circus. The director went around wearing the same black cape and long nails of the character he had created in the film (and in others afterwards). Marins was—in every sense—popular. In the film, he both exposed our poverty and attacked the religious conventions that were inimical to a bold individual will. The Catholic imagination appeared mixed with the pornography of terror, laughable visual effects, and dialogues on the edge of street language. Torquato [Neto, Brazilian journalist and poet] insisted that it was pure charm on Glauber's (and my) part to show aesthetic interest in such a pile of trash. He did not believe that I could see in the film a radical version of what Glauber had tried to do in Land of Anguish. But it was truly difficult, at that time, to admit to a critical posture that, soon after, would become commonplace. (It would be inspired again by the old black-and-white version [sic] of The Fly, Freaks, and The Incredible Shrinking Man, all of which delighted me at the Electric Cinema when I arrived in London in 1969; and Torquato himself to this day is remembered for his participation in Nosferatu no Brasil [Nosferatu in Brazil], a film made in the seventies by Ivan Cordoso, which gave rise to a cult of Mojica Marins and kindred figures[...])

I've been thinking of Mojica Marins and Ze de Caijao (Coffin Joe), about whom I first wrote for this blog here, because I just got the Synapse Films Blu-ray of 2008's Encarnação do Demônio (Embodiment of Evil) Marins' rather improbable-seeming comeback film for the character. Or at least I figured it was improbable, in large part due to the fact that Mojica Marins, 14 years after that 1994 Chiller theatre Expo appearance, was rather likely to cut an even less-imposing figure than the not-very-formidable one he did then.

But I underestimated Mojica Marins' intelligence, not to mention inspiration. At the beginning of Embodiment, just as Coffin Joe is about to be released from prison after a 40-year term (and this indeed syncs up nicely with the conclusion of the last "proper" Coffin Joe film, '67s Esta Noite Encarnerai no Teu Cadaver [This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse]—if I'm not mistaken, while Mojica Marins appeared as Coffin Joe in many subsequent films, those pictures were about the character's impact as a pop culture figure rather than installments in his saga, so to speak), one of the many officials who's balking at his proposed release rationalizes things by insisting that the guy is just "a crazy old man." And indeed, except for those weird-ass long fingernails, there's nothing particularly fearsome about the guy; the top hat, cape and medallion all produce a vaguely comic effect. Waiting for him at the prison gate is his wide-eyed Loyal Henchman, who is actually called, pace Woody Tobias Jr., "Bruno," and played with disquieting conviction by Rui Rezende. Quite the anachronistically ridiculous  pair the two make, prowling the streets of Sao Paolo by night. But in the shot from which the above screen capture is taken, the two characters are about to stop and behold a couple of street urchins, each no more than ten years old each, sitting in a doorway huffing glue from paper bags. "He exposed our poverty," Veloso recalled. "Ain't a damn thing changed, " Method Man said. Such is the atmosphere in which Mojica Marins' deranged character, obsessed with propagating, as it were, the "purity" of his "bloodline," thrives. And when he's returned to his longtime lair, he finds that Bruno's got a small cadre of pierced and tattooed young people ready to earn the fruits of Coffin Joe's weltanschauung, such as they are and such as it is. 

"Nothing can affect a mind that believes nothing," a wise and beautiful young gypsy woman advises Joe during the ensuing orgy of blasphemous hallucinations and appalling tortures. You'd think after Fear Factor that scenes in which young lovelies have their heads dunked into large bowls full of squirming live insects might lose some of their punch. But as it happens the film has a lot of the crude power that the older picture has, and Mojica Marins takes full advantage of what he can get away with. Which is to say, don't be fooled by the crazy old man bit—this is "authentic sadistic cinema" to the bone, not "funsy" stuff. You have been warned. But for those with the stomach for it, there's something in Embodiment of Evil that is genuinely radical in a way that the creators of such meretricious gunk as the Hostel and Saw films can't even conceive of. What's that thing that Lynne Gorman's character says in Videodrome? "It has a philosophy. And that's what makes it dangerous."

The disc is released on March 29; on Monday, March 21, the ReRun Gastropub Theater in Brooklyn will be hosting a free preview screening of the Blu-ray, tickets for which can be acquired here. 

Down with O.P.E.

Over the weekend the missus and I had the occasion to check out Raising Arizona, a picture the missus had never seen in its entirety before, on DVD. And let me first say that this is a video version in dire need of an upgrade—not optimized for 16:9 displays, for heaven's sake, and featuring a booklet that gets Joel and Ethan Coen mixed up. Watching the 1997 1987 picture today with a trained eye, so to speak, it's interesting to note how relatively technically crude it is—not being caught up in the breathlessness and outrageousness of its baby-in-peril visual gags, one can see how various joins are glue-gunned together, as it were. With practice, the fellows have both pared down their technique and honed it to perfection, and in "maturity" their humor has grown more mordant; it might be instructive at some point to compare shot-by-shot breakdowns of Nicolas Cage and Randall "Tex" Cobb's matchup in this to the first and only meeting between George Clooney and Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading. It's also interesting to see the Coens here indulge in film references of such a blatant nature as to get the whole CHUD crowd chanting "Google goggle! Google goggle! One of us!" or "Two of us!" if they were gonna be all accurate about it. As in the above graffiti tags, a homage to I-shouldn't-have-to-tell-you-so-I-won't. It's doubtful they would ever do anything quite so obvious now.

All that aside, Arizona still works like a charm: it really is the ideal hybrid of a vintage Preston Sturges picture and a vintage Looney Tune. The question of whether the Coens "love" or "hate" their characters—a question I always found beside the point, if not poorly put—is largely overwhelmed by the tidal wave of hilarity. The fact that they have the film's object lesson of mercy and kindness delivered by its most ostensibly venal character is a testimony to the essential fluidity of their approach, or maybe their genuinely ironical worldview. In whatever event, it was, as always, bittersweet to see the late great Trey Wilson at work—along with J.T. Walsh, he was one of latter-day Hollywood's very greatest character actors, and he was gone WAY too soon. The post-kidnap police interrogation scene is not only WIlson at his very very boisterous best, it's also a scene that can stand toe-to-toe with any William-Demarest-led Babel-fest in Sullivan's Travels or what have you. Above, of course, putting the pomade to their respective purities of essence, are John Goodman and William Forsythe.

Ciao, Manhattan, or, the chocolate of reality gets into the peanut butter of fiction in "Sweet Smell of Success"

This post should be considered as a contribution to the above-depicted blogathon; please see here for further details. And please give!

Is Alexander Mackendrick's 1957 The Sweet Smell of Success really a film noir? The Clifford Odets-Ernest Lehman scripted picture isn't a crime movie per se, although it does feature a supremely slimy corrupt cop, a very nasty frame-up, intimations of incestuous feelings, and a constant stream of back-and-forth recriminations and resentments and sublimations of guilt and obsessions that it can't really be anything BUT a noir, can it? As The Siren herself put it when I was hashing out with her whether I was gonna discuss this picture for her and Marilyn Ferdinand's very worthy blogathon, "you've got fate, dark deeds, twisted motives, great shadowy cinematography, what's not to noir?"

Right. Of course there's also the problem that Sweet Smell has already been written about pretty much to death, and if you're a fan of it (and good lord, if you're not a fan of it, what are you doing reading this blog?) basically all you want to know about it right now is how good the new Criterion discs of it (standard def and Blu-ray editions) are, and they are very damn good indeed, by my estimation. In any event, there really isn't, to my mind, all that much new to say about the picture...unless I bring things into the putatively actual, and possibly personal. 

The picture establishes its snappy, practically breakneck, pace—and seedy/glamorous Manhattan milieu—in its credit sequence, which shows us a bustling Times Square as the latest editions of the Globe, the paper for which columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) acts as "The Eyes of Broadway," are loaded onto trucks that will deliver that edition far and wide...and, in one case, to a newsstand literally around the corner from these loading docks, before the feet of hungry press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), who will be quite disappointed to see and mention of his clientele once again absent from Hunsecker's jottings. The avid amateur historian of New Amsterdam will know that newsstand is literally around the corner via a visual parsing of the locations captured by Mackendrick and James Wong Howe for their montage. By gum, those docks look very much like the ones that were on the ground floor of the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street between Broadway/7th Avenue and Eighth Avenue. There they are from street level facing west, behind Curtis' credit. 

If we need any further confirmation of the location, it's provided within a couple of shots; the visual closer is hard to catch when watching the film in a theater, but easy to nail with the tech capabilities of DVD. The trucks of "The Globe" have big ads on their sides advertising Hunsecker's column; but the prop department didn't cover every truck at that loading dock. And as one of the trucks moves out, another truck is visible...

...and this truck bears a plaque with the New York Times' "All The News That's Fit To Print" motto, and an advertisement for that paper.  

...and off the truck goes.

"I love this dirty town," Hunsecker famously intones a little later in the film, outside and a little down the block from the still-extant restaurant "21," over on 52nd Street. The town would get a lot dirtier in the coming years, and the trucks leaving the Times' loading dock would get a lot bigger. Across the street from the Times' building was a hotel first known as the Dixie, and then known as the Carter (and no, I'm not making that up); never exactly the Waldorf-Astoria, it was for a time the home of the frequently down-on-his-luck writer and race enthusiast known as Colonel Stingo, immortalized by A.J. Liebling in his wonderful book The Honest Rainmaker. By the early 1990s, what had been the hotel's ballroom, I presume, had become one of New York's truly great trannie dives, Sally's II, yclept Sally's Hideaway. It opened its doors at around five o'clock every afternoon, around the time the vast majority of the isle's transgendered population was just getting out of bed, really, save for a handful of stalwart gals whose circumstances necessitated a slight boost of spring to the step. Okay, I'm exaggerating/romanticizing a bit, but you get the idea. While a fair amount of business, that is, hustling, went on at Sally's from the late rush hour onward, its main function was as a place for the indigenous community, such as it was, to socialize. Which also kind of made it a great place for a non-transgendered heavy drinker and substance abuser to isolate, and watch life's rich and strange pageant go by. And so I did, on way too many nights than I sometimes care to recall.

For the trannie prostitute, Sally's was the prelude to Edelweiss, down the way west, next to the diner on 43rd Street and 11th Avenue, which was much more of a "real" nightclub, and had a more sex-tourist/regular-tourist friendly vibe to it. A friend of mine from the transgender world had strong connections to the larger demi-monde, and was frequently asked to act as docent to the celebrity class in their quasi-slumming activities; one night he was deputized with squiring Tim Burton, then-cohort Lisa Marie (this was 1996, around the time of Mars Attacks!), and Francis Ford Coppola to Edelweiss to see the gorgeous dancing Dominican not-girls. Lisa Marie went down a storm with the queens, as you might imagine; Coppola, apparently, walked around marveling at how "theatrical" it all was, and was frequently mistaken for a potential john by some of the working girls, on account of his having kept his overcoat on for the whole visit. Anyway. So on a particularly lucky night, any given girl working at Sally's could hook either a regular client or a new friend and get him to shell out consistent cash for blow, and drinks, and possibly some partying later. This entailed sticking around for the evening "show" at Sally's (lip-syncing in fabulous gowns, natch; my Southern belle pal Miss Gina Germaine really sold Reba McIntire's "Fancy," as you might imagine), waiting around for whoever was dealing the always badly stepped-on coke to show up, and, after that transaction was completed, skipping down to Edelweiss for several nightcaps or more blow or someone to bring to the party later or whatever. Except. (I bet you were wondering where the hell this was leading, right?) If you'd try to catch a cab from Sally's to Edelweiss between one and two-thirty or three in the morning, chances are you'd have to wait outside for some time, because taxi traffic was frequently halted by the fleet of now eighteen-wheeled trucks backing in and pulling out of the Times' loading docks. This activity led to considerable interludes of anxiety for both hunter and game, hustler and hustled; if the john started feeling pangs of conscience (I probably don't need to tell you that good number of these fellows were leading some form of a double life) or, you know, budgetary concerns, this break in the momentum of their, um, headlong rush into sybaritic degradation could conceivably provide them with an exit strategy, escape hatch, what have you. And the queen, left in a relative lurch, would have relatively short notice from then until closing time (which really just meant a dash to some after-hours joint in many cases) to find another sugar daddy for the evening. 

Yeah, it sure was a dirty town, and it still is, but not that way, not anymore. I always thought it was not insignificant that Sally's was padlocked for good on November 13, 1997, the night of the official opening of The Lion King. The photographer Brian Lantelme has a reasonably fabulous website commemorating the joint here. Its contents are not thoroughly NSFW, but still...you might be the type who worries that your work cohorts will take you for a trannie-chaser. Some of the people pictured therein are still my friends; and too many of those pictured therein have died.