Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Bicycle Thieves
Ladri di Biciclette
(Bicyle Thieves)
Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 film, Bicycle Thieves was once considered the greatest movie ever made. This was in 1952 when the British Film Institute’s editors of Sight and Sound commissioned its first poll of international critics – What were the ten best movies ever made? The film voted as number one was de Sica’s picture. (A few laters, the film slipped to sixth place and hasn’t been mentioned in this ranking for many years.)
I can attest to the fact that this film had a profound impact on people who saw the picture in theaters when it was relatively new. Twenty five or more years ago, I was in Albert Lea helping Ken Strom try a car crash case. We were defending for the insurance company and Bob Leighton represented the plaintiff who had suffered soft-tissue injuries in the collision. As is the case today, Minnesota lawyers are forced to rely upon depositions to prove the scope and extent of their client’s traumatic injuries. In smaller cases, lawyers took the deposition and, then, read the testimony into evidence before the jury. Terry Meany, a well-known trial lawyer practicing with Leighton, drove over the Freeborn County and he played the role of the doctor, taking the stand and answering the printed questions put to him by his partner. This sort of thing is dull. Strom had me at his side so that I could sit at counsel table with the hapless defendant during the hour or so when the deposition was read into evidence. If I remember correctly, Mr. Strom went outside and made some phone calls and flirted with the court personnel. I sat in the courtroom dutifully following along in my copy of the transcript as the testimony was read into the record. Mr. Strom had told me to withdraw objections that had been made a couple months earlier when the testimony was actually taken. Accordingly, from time to time, I would stand up as an objection approached in the transcript and withdraw it.
After the deposition was read into evidence, the Court adjourned for the day. It was our turn to offer testimony but we didn’t have any witnesses ready and so the Judge recessed around 4:15 pm. Mr. Strom admired Terry Meany, although he also told me often that he was sometimes dishonest and couldn’t be trusted. (I’m sure Meany said the same thing about Mr. Strom.) Strom and Meany decided to have a few drinks after the trial and, so, I met them – I had driven separately – in a gloomy tavern in one of the hotels out on the strip. It was a place across from several used car lots and located behind the lobby in the motel. I think the bar was called something like "The Granary".
Old lions like Mr. Strom and Terry Meany went out of their way to chat-up the waitress. Both of them apparently knew her somehow. We had mixed drinks and, after a several, Terry Meany got a little sentimental. He said that when he was young, he was idealistic and wanted to serve the cause of justice. Meany told us that he had been greatly affected by a movie that he called The Bicycle Thief. Meany said that the movie was a revelation to him and that it had changed his life. "It’s the greatest movie I ever saw," Meany said. Mr. Strom looked to me for a comment. It was pretty clear that he hadn’t seen the movie and had no interest in it and didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking. "Beckmann knows about stuff like that," Mr. Strom said. I nodded sagely. Meany said: "Isn’t it a great movie? I know that I was crying at the end of the movie." I said that The Bicycle Thief was, indeed, a great movie and a fine example of Italian neo-realism. But that was all that I knew about the film. I had never seen it and had no interest in the picture. The Bicycle Thief, like the films of Ingmar Bergman, was something that had fascinated by father and his generation. Cinema had moved on since that time. Meany confirmed this thought by saying to me that he thought The Seventh Seal was the second greatest movie that he had ever seen. Mr. Strom was baffled and changed the subject to sports.
In one of her essays, Pauline Kael describes going to de Sica’s earlier movie Shoeshine (1946). She had just suffered a disappointment in love and the film triggered torrents of tears. As she staggered out of the movie theater, she heard another woman say that she couldn’t see "what all the fuss was about." This caused Ms. Kael to cry even more. In her essay, Pauline Kael said that she didn’t know if she was crying over her lost boyfriend or because of the movie or because the world was such a cruel and heartless place that it could harbor people who were not moved by Shoeshine.
Ultimately, Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves are at the root of a thousand later films. The entire Iranian New Wave derives from de Sica’s movies. The little boy who tries to return his friend’s homework in Abbas Kiastoami’s Where is the Friend’s House? (1982) is brother to the characters in Bicycle Thieves desperately searching for the stolen bicycle. Many of Satjayit Ray’s pictures, particularly those in the Apu cycle are unthinkable without the model of Bicycle Thieves and other Italian neo-realist films. Dozens of American independent features are also modeled on these pictures – Kelly Reichardt’s film Wendy and Lucy (2008) about a homeless woman looking for her lost dog is an example of a movie that derives in large part from Bicycle Thieves.
Italian Neo-Realism
Italian neo-realism begins with the dingy small-town dives in Visconti’s Ossessione (1942). Visconti shot on location and the sordid tale of lust and murder that his film depicts (based on James Cain’s The Postman always rings twice) brought a new kind of detailed verismo to Italian films. (Ossessione is also regarded as a proto film noir.) As far as international critics were concerned, the break-through picture was Rome: Open City (1945), Rossellini’s documentary-style war-film – when Anna Magnani, not a conventionally beautiful actress but a force of nature, is gunned-down on the city streets, she sprawls on the pavement with her thighs and underpants exposed. This was not something that you could see in Hollywood or British pictures and signaled a new esthetic. Later, Rossellini made pictures in the ruins of European cities using entirely non-professional actors – Paisan (1946) was produced in this way as was his unbearably bleak Germany Year Zero (1948) shot in the wreckage of Berlin. The movement was self-defeating – audiences in the post-war period were looking for escapist fare not pessimistic films about poverty and starvation. Vittorio de Sica, probably the most talented of the neo-realists, made one more picture in that vein, Umberto D. (1952), another film that is so grim that it is almost impossible to watch – the movie is about an old pensioner who is literally starving to death and his only real companion, a small dog named Flike. (Ingmar Bergman said he had seen the movie over a hundred times and it was the film that "(he) most loved.) By the mid-fifties, the Italian neo-realist movement had run its course and was replaced by a series of racy comedies that did very well with American audiences. Estimates vary, but by some accounts there were only 21 actual neo-realist films produced in Italy.) De Sica returned to neo-realism once with his 1961 film Two Women, the film that made Sophia Loren famous, but was content to direct light sex-comedies for the next decade or so.
Neo-realism didn’t emerge from a void. De Sica was familiar with some of Jean Renoir’s films that have an intensely realist, almost documentary slant. Visconti had been an assistant on Renoir’s 1935 Toni, a movie about guest-workers in southern France filmed entirely on location. (Toni is a masterpiece – the movie looks like it was shot yesterday.) In Italy, the director Antonio Blasetti directed the film 1860 (1935), a movie about an anonymous Italian man riding to join Garibaldi’s partisans during the Risorgimento. This film, also shot with natural light and on location, uses non-professional actors and, also, positioned itself as a response (and rebuke) to the so-called Telefoni Bianchi ("White Telephone") movies, mostly light comedies based on American musicals and vehicles for Italian matinee idols. (De Sica was himself fantastically handsome and a major star in romantic comedies produced in Italy in the twenties and thirties – he came to directing after a highly successful career as a leading man.) De Sica’s favorite film maker was Charlie Chaplin and several shots in Bicycle Thieves play homage to the American comedian. Chaplin’s movies in the twenties are generally set in closely observed milieu, generally featuring characters that are poor or just a step above being homeless.
Italian neo-realism is closely related to verismo, that is, realism as a movement in literature and opera in the late 19th century. (Puccini’s Tosca is considered an example of verismo in opera.) Verismo in turn is an expression of an international trend in novels and literature – in Germany, Gerhardt Hauptmann’s plays are regarded as "realist" in character; in France, Zola’s novels, particularly Germinal belong to this genre. In American literature, Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, among others, wrote realistic novels with the genre culminating in the work of Theodore Dreiser.
In film, neo-realism is characterized by shooting on location and using natural light. To the extent possible, these films cast non-actors in principal roles. The film may have rough edges – sometimes, people on the street gape at the camera and the acting may be uneven. Neo-realist films are set among poor or working class people and may exploit exotic locations – for instance, the fishing villages and remote islands in La Terra Trema (1948) or the slopes of the volcano in Stromboli (1950). Some films are set amidst people and occupations that would seem foreign to urban Italian audiences – Bitter Rice (1949) about the rice harvest and migrant workers in the Po River valley is an example of such a film.
Bicycle Thieves was shot "guerilla-style" in Rome – this means, camera set-ups and locations were not approved by authorities and no licenses were issued for the shoots. De Sica had to work quickly, before local cops forced him to move on. One might think that making a movie in this way is simpler and more efficient than the elaborate studio system for film production. This is untrue. In fact, it is much more difficult to shoot a film using natural light and on location. Studios were devised in order to eliminate the very significant difficulties of making a movie on-location. In general, the neo-realist films were more expensive than studio productions and the film-making process for these pictures was fraught with difficulty.
Neo-realism, which burst through the conventions of the "white telephone" studio films, is sometimes seen as transition to the French nouvelle vague. And, as I have noted above neo-realism remains an important strain in recent films – in Italy, the trend never really died: Ermanno Olmi’s pictures continued to use non-actors in prosaic settings: Olmi’s first two films, Il Posto ("The Job" 1961) and Fidanzati ("The Betrothed" 1963) are distinctly neo-realist in form. Olmi’s great later pictures 1978's The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (which played for two years in Minneapolis) and The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988) are luminously beautiful examples of neo-realist esthetics although rendered more complex by the introduction of magical realism and professional acting (The Holy Drinker stars Rutger Hauer of all people) to the scrupulously ascetic formula. (In researching this note, I was saddened to see that Ermanno Olmi, certainly one of the greatest humanist film makers, died on May 5, 2018).
Some Imaginary Versions of Bicycle Thieves
De Sica was generous in granting credits. Everyone who had an idea that was incorporated in some shot or line in Bicycle Thieves was credited as a screen-writer. Hence, the long list of writers who are credited with the screenplay. (In fact, the only writers who worked with de Sica from beginning to end in the production process were Suso Cecchi di Amico, who wrote most of the dialogue, and Cesare Zavattini, a close collaborator with the director.) Early in the production, Sergio Amidei, worked with de Sica and Zavattini on the movie. Amidei was an ardent Communist. He clashed with de Sica about the film’s ending. Amidei wanted the hero to go the local branch of the Italian Communist party where the film would conclude with the father and son being fully reimbursed for the stolen bicycle.
De Sica sought funding for the movie from the American producer David O. Selznick. Selznick was very interested in the movie and said that his studio would fund the film on the condition that the role of the father be played by Cary Grant.
City Symphony
Bicycle Thieves is partly a "city symphony." This is type of film that celebrates a single city, usually organized by the metropolis’ urban activities from dusk to dawn. Most such films are documentaries and range throughout the city that they are portraying. Other films of this sort offer dawn to dusk sojourns through big cities and are semi-dramatic – parts of Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979)have this characteristic.
In Bicycle Thieves, most of the travel between places is plausible. With a few exceptions, a Roman watching the movie would be able to identify where the action is occurring and, therefore, would also understand the geography of the spaces intervening between shots.
The film begins 5 miles to the north of the City Center in the apartment complex Citta Val Maleina. The hero and his family live in the cheerless modern-day tenements built in that area, structures that were isolated from the rest of the city in 1948. The soothsayer lives in the Trastavere district – this is on the west bank of the Tiber south of Vatican City. When he has his bicycle, the hero travels Citta Val Maleina south into central Rome, dropping his small son off at a gas station and, then, proceeding into the city through the ancient Porta Pia. The bicycle is stolen along the Via de Trafora and the thief rides through the Trafora Umberto tunnel that bores under the Quirinal Hill.
The next day, the hero and his garbage collector friends inspect bikes and bicycle parts at an arcade in central Rome, across from the famous Piazza Vittorio Emmanual. The hero glimpses the thief talking to an old man – the thief flees through the old Porte Portese (this is a block from the Tiber near Trastavere). The chase that follows is in labyrinth of streets in Trastavere. Disappointed the hero crosses the Ponte Palantino, walking behind the old man. Here there is a continuity gap – the church to which old man goes is several kilometers away, far from the Tiber, the Church of Santi Nereo e Achilles by the baths of Caracalla. (De Sica is generally not interested in portraying scenic or famous vistas of Rome – therefore, he avoids shots showing Roman ruins, many of which would intervene between the Ponte Palantino and the Church of Santi Nere e Achilles.) The scene where the hero suspects that Bruno may have drowned also breaks continuity – it is several miles down the Tiber from the Ponte Palantiyo. De Sica needed a place where the Tiber was relatively accessible and not flowing in a deep gorge.
The film concludes in neighborhoods around the Stadio Flamina, the soccer stadium. The hero and Bruno are last scene swallowed by the crowd on the Via Flamina – one of Rome’s most ancient streets and an important thoroughfare that leads out into the campagna.
Examples of city symphonies include Manahatta (based on Walt Whitman’s poem - 1921), Walter Ruttmann’s famous Berlin - Symphony of a Great City (1927), People on Sunday (Ulmer and Siodmak with a script by Billy Wilder - 1930), A propos de Nice (Jean Vigo - 1930), Douro, Faina Fluvial (de Oliveira 1931), and, most recently, Of Time and the City (Terence Davies 2008).
Bruno and his Father
The little boy who acts the part of Bruno was cast from about 5000 children who applied for the part. (In fact, in some histories of the film, little boy who plays the role was not seeking an audition – rather, his father was auditioning for the part of the father and de Sica noticed the small boy, immediately felt that he was perfect for the role, and, so, urged him to apply for that part.) The actor’s name is Enzo Staiola. Child stars have a short shelf-life. After appearing in a half-dozen movies, Enzo Staiola retired from the film business at 15, completed his education and became a math teacher.
Lamberto Maggiorani plays the part of Antonio, the father. Maggiorani was a working man – he labored on a lathe in a furniture factory. Maggiorani was paid one-thousand dollars for his performance and used the money to rent a better apartment and take his family on a vacation. Strangely, he couldn’t act and seems to be playing himself in the movie – this was established by attempts to cast him in other pictures. He wasn’t able to perform successfully and, even, de Sica couldn’t coax a plausible performance from him after Bicycle Thieves. (He appears uncredited in a couple shots in de Sica’s Umberto D. made a couple years later.) Maggiorani worked as an extra in a few films and, then, gave up on movies. He tried to return to his job in the factory but found that his job had been given to another man. Furthermore, his former friends and associates didn’t want anything to do with him because he refused to share "the millions that he had made" for his performance in Bicycle Thieves – of course, these millions were an envious fantasy of his former friends and he didn’t have any money at all. Maggiorani never found reasonable employment after Bicycle Thieves and he died in poverty in 1983. Cesare Zavattini was so moved by his fate that he wrote a film scenario called Tu, Maggiorani (You, Maggiorani). But the movie, with its strong Communist message, was never produced.
Bazin
Perhaps, the greatest defender of Italian neo-realism was Andre Bazin, the influential French film critic and founder (in 1943) of Cahiers du Cinema. Bazin’s guiding thesis was that film is essentially a "decal" or "fingerprint" that takes an abiding impression of the real world. Accordingly, film is inextricably connected to realism – film shows us a "real world", that is the essence of the medium.
Bazin in his essay "Introduction to Film Style" notes that movies diverged in their very earliest form, bifurcating between fantasy and realism. Melies Trip to the Moon (1902) does not "cancel" the Lumiere brothers 1895 documentary "Train arriving at a Station" – rather, the two streams in film production have been concurrent since the inception of the movies. For complex reasons, some of them related to his Catholic faith, Bazin determined that film’s essential characteristics required that movies show fidelity to the truth. (Bazin is an esthetic essentialist like Clive Bell and Clement Greenberg in art criticism – Greenberg’s argument, for instance, was that Pollock’s action paintings were the culmination of art history since painting involves deploying paint on the field of a two-dimensional canvas.) In order to demonstrate a commitment to the truth, films should eschew vigorous montage, a device that forces the viewer to conclusions foisted upon him or her by the director. Similarly, the viewer’s free will is asserted in shots that are composed "in depth" (using deep focus) to allow the spectator to determine what in the panorama he should focus on. The spectator’s eye should not be forced into any particular frame of reference but allowed to range freely over the image – thus, intrusive close-ups should be avoided and the director should make himself "invisible." For this reason, Bazin and his followers praised Howard Hawks extravagantly – in a movie like Rio Bravo (1959), we don’t have any sense of the director urging us to one position or another. He simply stages the action and allows us to make up our own minds as to what we are seeing.
Needless to say, Bazin highly praised the Italian neo-realists and, particularly, de Sica. But his other favorite director was Orson Welles, a film-maker who is arguably one of the very most manipulative of all auteurs. (Bazin has to engage in extreme contortions to make his fealty to Welles fit into his esthetic scheme – it comes down to Welles use of composition in deep-focus, an inadequate basis to claim that the director, essentially a follower of the most fantastic vein in German expressionist, is some kind of realist.) Bazin thought that de Sica’s Umberto D. was one of the greatest film’s ever produced. At the climax of the movie, the starving and destitute Umberto persuades his little dog, Flick, to hold out his paws over an upturned hat, literally "begging" so that his proud, but desperate, master is spared that indignity. No one can see this sequence without shedding tears. But, surely, it must be conceded that the imagery is profoundly manipulative.
Empathy
Roger Ebert wrote that "movies are like a machine that generates empathy."
I’ve noticed that people seem to be divided into two camps. Some people see themselves in the afflicted – this is an affectation because I am not an impoverished Italian working man as in Bicycle thieves nor an ambitious peasant boy from a remote Indian village as in Pather Panchali. However, I can imagine myself in the plight experienced by these characters. Conversely, there are many people who can not imagine themselves under any circumstances as being capable of committing a crime or engaging in a dishonorable act or suffering as a result of discrimination or ignorance or poverty. People of this latter sort fancy themselves as hard-headed pragmatists with a realistic relationship to the world – but, of course, this is a fantasy since no one succeeds except by luck and through the support of others. Those who lack empathy almost invariably believe that they are not among the afflicted because they are better than others, more hardworking and more deserving of good things. The tonic for these people is to be shown movies like Ozu’s films or Bicycle Thieves – perhaps, these films will inspire empathy.
But is empathy a good thing? In itself, I suppose, empathy is just a form of useless sentimentalism. And kindly emotions are not substitutes for kindly acts. Bicycle Thieves succeeds if it encourages you to be generous and understanding and to act in that way. This is to make high claims for the efficacy of the film. But, it was, if you recall, once thought the greatest movie ever made.
Scene of the Crime and Eddie Mueller's Noir Alley
Scene of the Crime is a routine police procedural directed by MGM's Roy Rowland, a competent if largely unimaginative film maker. According to Eddie Mueller who introduced the film on TCM's Noir Alley, a program dedicated to film noir, the movie represented MGM's first foray into this genre. The film did well at its release in 1949 and, the next year, MGM released a half-dozen pictures that we would now characterize as noir -- including one of the signature works of that kind, Anthony Mann's Border Incident. The Scene of the Crime is ingeniously plotted: three cops set out to solve a murder, the death by gunfire of another off-duty cop killed while carrying one-thousand dollars (and, therefore, suspected of bribery.) The three cops form a team led by Van Johnson, the actor playing the film's hero. One of the cops is a novice and the third an experienced "flatfoot." This triumvirate is designed for maximum information-transfer to the audience: the seasoned cops have to explain to the novice what is going on and the wise old police officer (played by the excellent John McIntyre -- a fixture on TV westerns when I was a boy) makes wise cracks and provides experienced commentary. The plot is violent but the film is exceedingly verbose -- everyone talks in ultra-hardboiled argot: "you could be your blood when you're sirened away" someone says, "sirened away" meaning hauled from the crime scene in an ambulance. Gunmen are called "lobos" and there's an impenetrable line about "knowing that you know what I know you know." A glamor girl does a reverse strip tease and Van Johnson's wife clings to him in a suitably wifely manner. The cops threaten suspects with being scalded by hot coffee and, generally, a good time is had by all. The only reason to recommend the film is a spectacular, almost Shakespearean, turn by Norman Lloyd playing a sinister snitch nicknamed "Sleepy." Lloyd is astonishing, menacing in a understated way, and punctuating his threats with a mirthless "yuck-yuck". Unfortunately, there's not enough of him in the film (he gets murdered) and the rest of the picture, despite its lurid plot, is a snooze.
Eddie Mueller introduces the films on Noir Alley. Mueller has written a book on noir pictures and has provided excellent commentary tracts on DVD editions of some of the movies that he shows. Mueller is saturnine with wit like a dry martini and he's compulsively watchable -- he looks like one of the shadowy figures in the films that he showcases, dressed in a pinstripe suit with a satin bouquet in his breast pocket. Most film noir are fairly short, usually about ninety minutes and, so, Mueller is given substantial latitude to provide both preface and postlude to the films presented on the show. Often, his commentary is significantly better than the rather routine movies that he screens and he never fails to provide interesting and useful facts about the films. I first heard Mueller on a DVD commentary track exchanging wise-cracks with the crime writer James Ellroy with respect to a little neo-realist crime picture, Andre de Toth's Crime Wave -- he and Ellroy got into a squabble about exactly what section of the California criminal code was being violated in a robbery in the opening scene in the film and, from that point forth, the commentary was a cinephile's dream. Noir Alley airs on Saturday nights at 11:00 pm (CST) and, then, again on Sunday morning at 9:00 am on TCM -- it's well worth watching.
Eddie Mueller introduces the films on Noir Alley. Mueller has written a book on noir pictures and has provided excellent commentary tracts on DVD editions of some of the movies that he shows. Mueller is saturnine with wit like a dry martini and he's compulsively watchable -- he looks like one of the shadowy figures in the films that he showcases, dressed in a pinstripe suit with a satin bouquet in his breast pocket. Most film noir are fairly short, usually about ninety minutes and, so, Mueller is given substantial latitude to provide both preface and postlude to the films presented on the show. Often, his commentary is significantly better than the rather routine movies that he screens and he never fails to provide interesting and useful facts about the films. I first heard Mueller on a DVD commentary track exchanging wise-cracks with the crime writer James Ellroy with respect to a little neo-realist crime picture, Andre de Toth's Crime Wave -- he and Ellroy got into a squabble about exactly what section of the California criminal code was being violated in a robbery in the opening scene in the film and, from that point forth, the commentary was a cinephile's dream. Noir Alley airs on Saturday nights at 11:00 pm (CST) and, then, again on Sunday morning at 9:00 am on TCM -- it's well worth watching.
Sunday, July 29, 2018
Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing explores the proposition that human feelings are the product of argument and declaration. Theorists of religion have long known that nothing is really believed until it is publicly proclaimed -- hence, liturgies and creeds that demand public verbal assent. Shakespeare's innovation in this profound comedy is to apply this thesis to romantic love. In Much Ado, the characters are always either talking themselves (or others) in or out of love. The report that Beatrice loves Benedict, although all the evidence seems to be to the contrary, inspires Benedict to frenzied soliloquies in which he takes the cue supplied by others to literally talk himself into passionate, romantic love. Beatrice does the same thing. Shakespeare's universe is strangely symmetrical and lucid -- if people can be talked into love, they can also be talked into the most savage jealousy and hatred. The play demonstrates this truth as well, skating (like all Shakespeare's comedies) along the wrathful edge of tragedy, but, somehow, at the last minute, averting the catastrophe.
Door County Shakespeare's production of Much Ado (I saw the show on July 23) is presented at the Bjorklunden estate on the east flank of the peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan just south of Bailey's Harbor. The stage is reached by a winding road that leads from the inland State Highway through a dense woods to some clearings a hundred yards or so away from the mild grassy shoreline. (Be careful on the road: you are apt to encounter deer.) The Bjorklunden estate and gardens are now a conference center for the University of Wisconsin and there is a sort of manor house in the woods and a big dark chapel, erected on the model of a Norwegian Stavekirche, screened by sepulchral looking evergreens. Folding chairs are set on risers facing a great, hoary maple tree. A wooden platform fronts the maple tree and there is a kind of treehouse erected ten or twelve feet above the platform accessed by two sets of wooden steps. Lanterns hang down from the trees upper branches and there are also some spotlights suspended in the foliage behind the audience to illumine the stage. A wooden wall backs the tree as seen from the audience so that characters can make entrances from one side or the other -- there are 'tiring rooms, a kind of privy-shaped shack 50 feet or so behind the stage in the shrubbery: if you are distracted, you can see actors advancing toward the stage from that place. The audience area probably seats about 100 people -- when I attended (on a Monday night), there were probably 50 people at the show. Toilets consist of portapotties near the parking lot. The company consists of about 15 actors and so some roles have to be doubled. The actors were all highly proficient, spoke the verse well, and performed with great enthusiasm and aplomb. The company consisted largely of the kind of well-trained, excellent actors who are not quite handsome or beautiful enough to succeed on Tv or on Broadway -- nonetheless, I thought them just as well-spoken and effective as the actors I have seen on the Great White Way or at the Guthrie Theater. An example is the fellow who played Benedict -- he was a little swarthy man with a big nose and a cocky strut: frankly speaking, too short to be commanding as a matinee idol, but, nonetheless, seen at close-range (and the proximity at this show was merciless) extremely compelling. Similarly, the woman playing Hero was not conventionally beautiful -- even, perhaps, a little homely -- but she was very good and it was refreshing to see the glamor part played by someone with an ordinary appearance. (Beatrice was played by a very beautiful woman and, reviewing her credits in the program, her curriculum vita includes Hollywood, TV, and independently produced movies.) The presentation of the play was lucid, direct, and easily understood. The show is directed to make vivid use of the surrounding forest and its pathways. Actors enter the play from all sides and, sometimes, we hear people singing or talking in the dense forest. At one point, Benedict, who is eavesdropping on two men who are enticing him into love for Beatrice, sneaks into the audience -- he lurks in the first row, hiding his face behind a program and, then, disappears. At a key moment in the dialogue on-stage, a funny bit of speech, as we are intently watching the action, Benedict pops out of hiding and smartly whacks one of the audience members right on the top of his head, slapping the poor fellow's bald spot with a loud "whap!", startling the audience and, needless to say, the foil of this jest. (I know -- I was the one slapped on the crown with the program.) All of this is very amusing and crowd-pleasing.
When the villain, Don John, is first discovered, we see him wearing a Union army blue uniform, saturnine with the red face of a drinker, protesting that he is a man of few words. Don John is clearly a prototype for Iago in Othello -- his motive for sowing discord among the troops returned from the war is completely undisclosed. The conceit of the play as here directed is that the soldiers have returned from the Civil War to Door County and that the action takes place around a Fourth of July celebration at one of the big manors on the peninsula. At one point a banner for a Wisconsin regiment is unfurled and there is red, white, and blue bunting on the stage. Door County references abide. Everyone is always drinking cherry cider and big crates of fresh cherries are stacked on stage. Several excellent songs enliven the action performed by a small blue-grass group -- each musician also plays a part in the action. In one of the songs, the musicians mimic picking cherries and firing muskets, harmonizing that they would rather be a "picker than a soldier." (This is all anachronistic since the famous cherry orchards on the Door peninsula were not planted until the 1890's and didn't characterize the landscape until after World War One.) Of course, Don John turns out to be pretty proficient in speech, traducing Hero to the extent that her fiancée denounces her as a whore and her own father disowns her. The same passion that flared upon the recommendation of others now turns to vicious cruelty on the same hearsay basis. Benedict and Beatrice confer as to what should be done and there is an absolutely spine-chilling moment when Beatrice, who seems the sunny soul of mirth, demands that her new lover murder Don John. She is absolutely serious and her challenge curdles the play's happiness into something approaching terror. Words murder in Shakespeare. Of course, the calamity, multiple corpses piled up on stage as in the tragedies, is avoided. Significantly, the mechanism for saving the characters from slaughtering one another is Dogberry and his inept Night-watch. Dogberry can bare speak any English at all and, so, it seems is immunized from the gales of libel and slander that have overtaken the company of soldiers and their ladies. Too much speech is deadly and it takes a buffoon who can scarcely speak to break the malign enchantment that has seized the characters in the play.
It was dark after intermission and the beams of the spotlights illumined thousands of mosquitos hovering anxiously over the audience. I think the area where the audience was seated had been treated with a powerful bug-repellant -- the haze of mosquitos didn't dare to descend into the audience. But it was disconcerting to say the least to see that vast cloud of mosquitos forming a canopy over the crowd watching the show.
Door County Shakespeare's production of Much Ado (I saw the show on July 23) is presented at the Bjorklunden estate on the east flank of the peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan just south of Bailey's Harbor. The stage is reached by a winding road that leads from the inland State Highway through a dense woods to some clearings a hundred yards or so away from the mild grassy shoreline. (Be careful on the road: you are apt to encounter deer.) The Bjorklunden estate and gardens are now a conference center for the University of Wisconsin and there is a sort of manor house in the woods and a big dark chapel, erected on the model of a Norwegian Stavekirche, screened by sepulchral looking evergreens. Folding chairs are set on risers facing a great, hoary maple tree. A wooden platform fronts the maple tree and there is a kind of treehouse erected ten or twelve feet above the platform accessed by two sets of wooden steps. Lanterns hang down from the trees upper branches and there are also some spotlights suspended in the foliage behind the audience to illumine the stage. A wooden wall backs the tree as seen from the audience so that characters can make entrances from one side or the other -- there are 'tiring rooms, a kind of privy-shaped shack 50 feet or so behind the stage in the shrubbery: if you are distracted, you can see actors advancing toward the stage from that place. The audience area probably seats about 100 people -- when I attended (on a Monday night), there were probably 50 people at the show. Toilets consist of portapotties near the parking lot. The company consists of about 15 actors and so some roles have to be doubled. The actors were all highly proficient, spoke the verse well, and performed with great enthusiasm and aplomb. The company consisted largely of the kind of well-trained, excellent actors who are not quite handsome or beautiful enough to succeed on Tv or on Broadway -- nonetheless, I thought them just as well-spoken and effective as the actors I have seen on the Great White Way or at the Guthrie Theater. An example is the fellow who played Benedict -- he was a little swarthy man with a big nose and a cocky strut: frankly speaking, too short to be commanding as a matinee idol, but, nonetheless, seen at close-range (and the proximity at this show was merciless) extremely compelling. Similarly, the woman playing Hero was not conventionally beautiful -- even, perhaps, a little homely -- but she was very good and it was refreshing to see the glamor part played by someone with an ordinary appearance. (Beatrice was played by a very beautiful woman and, reviewing her credits in the program, her curriculum vita includes Hollywood, TV, and independently produced movies.) The presentation of the play was lucid, direct, and easily understood. The show is directed to make vivid use of the surrounding forest and its pathways. Actors enter the play from all sides and, sometimes, we hear people singing or talking in the dense forest. At one point, Benedict, who is eavesdropping on two men who are enticing him into love for Beatrice, sneaks into the audience -- he lurks in the first row, hiding his face behind a program and, then, disappears. At a key moment in the dialogue on-stage, a funny bit of speech, as we are intently watching the action, Benedict pops out of hiding and smartly whacks one of the audience members right on the top of his head, slapping the poor fellow's bald spot with a loud "whap!", startling the audience and, needless to say, the foil of this jest. (I know -- I was the one slapped on the crown with the program.) All of this is very amusing and crowd-pleasing.
When the villain, Don John, is first discovered, we see him wearing a Union army blue uniform, saturnine with the red face of a drinker, protesting that he is a man of few words. Don John is clearly a prototype for Iago in Othello -- his motive for sowing discord among the troops returned from the war is completely undisclosed. The conceit of the play as here directed is that the soldiers have returned from the Civil War to Door County and that the action takes place around a Fourth of July celebration at one of the big manors on the peninsula. At one point a banner for a Wisconsin regiment is unfurled and there is red, white, and blue bunting on the stage. Door County references abide. Everyone is always drinking cherry cider and big crates of fresh cherries are stacked on stage. Several excellent songs enliven the action performed by a small blue-grass group -- each musician also plays a part in the action. In one of the songs, the musicians mimic picking cherries and firing muskets, harmonizing that they would rather be a "picker than a soldier." (This is all anachronistic since the famous cherry orchards on the Door peninsula were not planted until the 1890's and didn't characterize the landscape until after World War One.) Of course, Don John turns out to be pretty proficient in speech, traducing Hero to the extent that her fiancée denounces her as a whore and her own father disowns her. The same passion that flared upon the recommendation of others now turns to vicious cruelty on the same hearsay basis. Benedict and Beatrice confer as to what should be done and there is an absolutely spine-chilling moment when Beatrice, who seems the sunny soul of mirth, demands that her new lover murder Don John. She is absolutely serious and her challenge curdles the play's happiness into something approaching terror. Words murder in Shakespeare. Of course, the calamity, multiple corpses piled up on stage as in the tragedies, is avoided. Significantly, the mechanism for saving the characters from slaughtering one another is Dogberry and his inept Night-watch. Dogberry can bare speak any English at all and, so, it seems is immunized from the gales of libel and slander that have overtaken the company of soldiers and their ladies. Too much speech is deadly and it takes a buffoon who can scarcely speak to break the malign enchantment that has seized the characters in the play.
It was dark after intermission and the beams of the spotlights illumined thousands of mosquitos hovering anxiously over the audience. I think the area where the audience was seated had been treated with a powerful bug-repellant -- the haze of mosquitos didn't dare to descend into the audience. But it was disconcerting to say the least to see that vast cloud of mosquitos forming a canopy over the crowd watching the show.
Saturday, July 21, 2018
Spirits of the Dead (Histoires Extraordinaire)
Spirits of the Dead (1968) is a trilogy of short films "liberally adapted" (as the titles to one of the episodes tells us) from three short stories by Edgar Alan Poe. By the time the movie was made Roger Corman and American International, with the help of Vincent Price, had already made movies based on Poe's most famous short stories. The Europeans who made Spirits of the Dead were left with the dregs of Poe's oeuvre -- his first, uncharacteristically Teutonic, tale "Metzengerstein", "William Wilson" (the best Poe story in this collection), and a decidedly minor work, "Toby Dammit -- or Never bet the Devil your Head". One should note that the European Poe differs from America's version of that writer -- and, perhaps, these stories have more critical traction in Paris and Rome than in Los Angeles. Two of the stories, "Metzengerstein" and "William Wilson" are mostly just excuses for soft-core European porn, exploitation flicks with lurid imagery presented in a peculiarly understated and tasteful style. Federico Fellini's unbelievably garish "Toby Dammit" is astonishing on all levels.
Roger Vadim directs "Metzengerstein". An evil baroness (Jane Fonda) tyrannizes her people and spends her evenings spooning with gorgeous lesbians and their depraved boyfriends. The baroness traipses around in garments that have to be seen to be believed, generally form-fitting lingerie with long translucent, silk capes. Sometimes, she wears Sci-Fi fantasy garb -- much of the film (shot by Claude Renoir of all people) looks like a warm-up for Barbarella -- for instance, a mahogany-colored corset that seems painted onto her pointy breasts. The baroness tries to seduce her cousin, played by Peter Fonda as a character far more conventionally feminine than the (anti-) heroine. (He has a cute pet owl). When he rejects her, she burns his stables to incinerate his beloved horses. The hapless object of the baroness' affections dies in the blaze but seems to be reincarnated as a huge black stallion. The baroness falls in love with the stallion, enjoying picturesque rides in the surf on the scenic Brittany sea-shore. Sometimes, she entertains the big horse by playing her lute. A fire has destroyed a tapestry in the baroness' orgy room, now in disuse because she spends all her time frolicking with the horse. A ascetic-looking weaver restores the tapestry and gives the big black horse on the wall-hanging red eyes. "Why?" someone asks. "Red as flame," the weaver says. Clearly, the baroness' romance with the horse is ill-fated. Lightning sets the countryside on fire and the horse, carrying Jane Fonda, dives into the flames, apparently immolating them both. The movie is unintentionally funny -- in one scene, Jane Fonda rides her horse to an atmospheric, ruinous castle on the rocky sea-coast. Her retainers there greet her by hanging some poor bastard. As Jane Fonda approaches the misty ruined castle, the wide-screen shot is framed to show her on horseback with some courtiers and the hanged man dangling immediately to her right on the screen. "I just love this place," the Baroness says in a cheery voice ignoring the corpse about four feet from her. This episode is awful, but it's not unwatchable -- in fact, it's fun in perverse way. (Jane Fonda looks great in her tight corsets and legs bare to her crotch and there's a spectacularly beautiful Brittany castle, Kerouzere,featured in a number of exteriors.)
Louis Malle's "William Wilson" cleaves fairly closely to Poe's Doppelgaenger story. The film has a complicated structure involving flash-forwards and flashbacks, but it's generally clear. The titular character is a vicious bully who is stalked by a kind and virtuous double. When the evil William Wilson does something awful, the kind William Wilson tries to undo the bad deed. The movie is atmospherically shot in old barracks. moldering fortresses and a town dominated by cathedral with a fateful campanile filmed like the Mission bell tower in Vertigo. Mostly, the picture is an excuse for showing naked girls. After inventively torturing a schoolmate with a barrel full of rats, Wilson goes to medical school. We get to see a cadaver sliced open in close up and, then, applying the lessons of the day to his evening debauchery, Wilson captures a girl, ties her stark naked to the dissecting table, and threatens to vivisect her for the amusement of his equally vicious classmates. The good William Wilson arrives and tries to save the girl but she gets sliced open anyway. These antics get Wilson expelled from medical school and he joins the Austrian army. One night, he runs into a beautiful woman (Brigitte Bardot as brunette, chomping on cigars). They duel in an all-night poker game and, by cheating, Wilson finally beats her. Of course, the last wager involved the woman betting herself. Having lost the game, Wilson (Alain Delon) strips her to the waist and starts flogging her with a willow switch for his amusement and the delectation of his buddies. He, then, proposes that one of his buddies rape the woman. The good Wilson appears at this point and exposes that his double was cheating. (The military officers are all appalled that Wilson cheated and cast him out of their company in disgrace; it never occurred to them to accuse him of dishonor when he flogs the woman or proposes her rape.) Bad Wilson and good Wilson duel and good Wilson gets gutted. After confessing to a priest (so that the film can be structured mostly as a flashback), bad Wilson flings himself off the church tower and ends up merging with good Wilson who is still clutching the dagger stuck in his belly. The movie is okay but Louis Malle has "phoned in" the direction -- it's obvious that he has almost no interest in the material. There are a few good shots, but the production is generally lackluster.
Fellini's "Toby Dammit" is a frenetic dose of sheer, adrenaline-soaked hysteria. (With its bravura camera-work, alarming color scheme, and sweat-drenched performance by Terence Stamp, the movie resembles in tone George Miller's little vignette in The Twilight Zone featuring the man tormented by goblins who are tearing his passenger jet apart as it blasts through a turbulent thunderstorm.) The film begins with a cockpit scenes in an airplane descending to land at Rome -- orange filters and dark color-scheme (faces flare up like flames) make it seem like the plane is landing in Hell. The airport terminal is similarly terrifying, filled with grotesque figures and hectoring announcers on black-and-white TVs. Stamp is delirious with booze and drugs and he sees a little girl in white with a white ball -- she represents Satan to him. (Fellini stole this indelible image from Mario Bava -- in turn, Scorsese stole the image and used it in his Last Temptation of Christ.) Toby Dammit (Stamp) has been hired to act in a "Catholic Western" showing Christ's redemption as performed "on the prairies." He rides in a limousine with smarmy priests and, then, finds himself ensnared in an infernal Roman traffic jam -- similar to the traffic jam in 8 1/2 and a precursor to the visionary traffic sequences in Fellini's Roma. Somehow, Stamp ends up at the Italian version of the Oscars (people receive a statue of a "golden She-wolf"). More ghastly faces loom in the darkness and voluptuous women strut around while other girls in white and dressed like caryatids stand as a silent chorus on stage. Stamp's character mutters some insults and, then, runs away from the ceremony (it seems to be occurring in some kind of cistern). He hops in a yellow Ferrari and zooms around town. But it's nightmare village with narrow lanes and innumerable dead-ends. At last, he tries to escape the place by jumping his car over a gap in a shattered bridge. There's a wire strung across the bridge decking and, although the Ferrari successfully makes the leap, the hero's head doesn't. (Again Scorsese steals from this film -- a slow dolly up to the wire stained with blood from the decapitation is quoted exactly in Raging Bull: Jake LaMotta has just take a terrible beating but will not go down -- the camera tracks forward to show the blood stained rope to which he was clinging.) Fellini's super-charged segment is full of disorienting and shocking close-ups, bizarre hellish landscapes, and a jumbled sound track that sounds like a Robert Altman dialogue scene on methamphetamine. (At one point, we hear Ray Charles crooning "Ruby".) The film is a tremendous accomplishment on all levels and Terence Stamp, playing a despicable character, seems almost sympathetic by the end of his torments. There's too much in the movie, an avalanche of ideas and images, but the film is, certainly, startling and a reminder of Fellini's pictorial genius.
Roger Vadim directs "Metzengerstein". An evil baroness (Jane Fonda) tyrannizes her people and spends her evenings spooning with gorgeous lesbians and their depraved boyfriends. The baroness traipses around in garments that have to be seen to be believed, generally form-fitting lingerie with long translucent, silk capes. Sometimes, she wears Sci-Fi fantasy garb -- much of the film (shot by Claude Renoir of all people) looks like a warm-up for Barbarella -- for instance, a mahogany-colored corset that seems painted onto her pointy breasts. The baroness tries to seduce her cousin, played by Peter Fonda as a character far more conventionally feminine than the (anti-) heroine. (He has a cute pet owl). When he rejects her, she burns his stables to incinerate his beloved horses. The hapless object of the baroness' affections dies in the blaze but seems to be reincarnated as a huge black stallion. The baroness falls in love with the stallion, enjoying picturesque rides in the surf on the scenic Brittany sea-shore. Sometimes, she entertains the big horse by playing her lute. A fire has destroyed a tapestry in the baroness' orgy room, now in disuse because she spends all her time frolicking with the horse. A ascetic-looking weaver restores the tapestry and gives the big black horse on the wall-hanging red eyes. "Why?" someone asks. "Red as flame," the weaver says. Clearly, the baroness' romance with the horse is ill-fated. Lightning sets the countryside on fire and the horse, carrying Jane Fonda, dives into the flames, apparently immolating them both. The movie is unintentionally funny -- in one scene, Jane Fonda rides her horse to an atmospheric, ruinous castle on the rocky sea-coast. Her retainers there greet her by hanging some poor bastard. As Jane Fonda approaches the misty ruined castle, the wide-screen shot is framed to show her on horseback with some courtiers and the hanged man dangling immediately to her right on the screen. "I just love this place," the Baroness says in a cheery voice ignoring the corpse about four feet from her. This episode is awful, but it's not unwatchable -- in fact, it's fun in perverse way. (Jane Fonda looks great in her tight corsets and legs bare to her crotch and there's a spectacularly beautiful Brittany castle, Kerouzere,featured in a number of exteriors.)
Louis Malle's "William Wilson" cleaves fairly closely to Poe's Doppelgaenger story. The film has a complicated structure involving flash-forwards and flashbacks, but it's generally clear. The titular character is a vicious bully who is stalked by a kind and virtuous double. When the evil William Wilson does something awful, the kind William Wilson tries to undo the bad deed. The movie is atmospherically shot in old barracks. moldering fortresses and a town dominated by cathedral with a fateful campanile filmed like the Mission bell tower in Vertigo. Mostly, the picture is an excuse for showing naked girls. After inventively torturing a schoolmate with a barrel full of rats, Wilson goes to medical school. We get to see a cadaver sliced open in close up and, then, applying the lessons of the day to his evening debauchery, Wilson captures a girl, ties her stark naked to the dissecting table, and threatens to vivisect her for the amusement of his equally vicious classmates. The good William Wilson arrives and tries to save the girl but she gets sliced open anyway. These antics get Wilson expelled from medical school and he joins the Austrian army. One night, he runs into a beautiful woman (Brigitte Bardot as brunette, chomping on cigars). They duel in an all-night poker game and, by cheating, Wilson finally beats her. Of course, the last wager involved the woman betting herself. Having lost the game, Wilson (Alain Delon) strips her to the waist and starts flogging her with a willow switch for his amusement and the delectation of his buddies. He, then, proposes that one of his buddies rape the woman. The good Wilson appears at this point and exposes that his double was cheating. (The military officers are all appalled that Wilson cheated and cast him out of their company in disgrace; it never occurred to them to accuse him of dishonor when he flogs the woman or proposes her rape.) Bad Wilson and good Wilson duel and good Wilson gets gutted. After confessing to a priest (so that the film can be structured mostly as a flashback), bad Wilson flings himself off the church tower and ends up merging with good Wilson who is still clutching the dagger stuck in his belly. The movie is okay but Louis Malle has "phoned in" the direction -- it's obvious that he has almost no interest in the material. There are a few good shots, but the production is generally lackluster.
Fellini's "Toby Dammit" is a frenetic dose of sheer, adrenaline-soaked hysteria. (With its bravura camera-work, alarming color scheme, and sweat-drenched performance by Terence Stamp, the movie resembles in tone George Miller's little vignette in The Twilight Zone featuring the man tormented by goblins who are tearing his passenger jet apart as it blasts through a turbulent thunderstorm.) The film begins with a cockpit scenes in an airplane descending to land at Rome -- orange filters and dark color-scheme (faces flare up like flames) make it seem like the plane is landing in Hell. The airport terminal is similarly terrifying, filled with grotesque figures and hectoring announcers on black-and-white TVs. Stamp is delirious with booze and drugs and he sees a little girl in white with a white ball -- she represents Satan to him. (Fellini stole this indelible image from Mario Bava -- in turn, Scorsese stole the image and used it in his Last Temptation of Christ.) Toby Dammit (Stamp) has been hired to act in a "Catholic Western" showing Christ's redemption as performed "on the prairies." He rides in a limousine with smarmy priests and, then, finds himself ensnared in an infernal Roman traffic jam -- similar to the traffic jam in 8 1/2 and a precursor to the visionary traffic sequences in Fellini's Roma. Somehow, Stamp ends up at the Italian version of the Oscars (people receive a statue of a "golden She-wolf"). More ghastly faces loom in the darkness and voluptuous women strut around while other girls in white and dressed like caryatids stand as a silent chorus on stage. Stamp's character mutters some insults and, then, runs away from the ceremony (it seems to be occurring in some kind of cistern). He hops in a yellow Ferrari and zooms around town. But it's nightmare village with narrow lanes and innumerable dead-ends. At last, he tries to escape the place by jumping his car over a gap in a shattered bridge. There's a wire strung across the bridge decking and, although the Ferrari successfully makes the leap, the hero's head doesn't. (Again Scorsese steals from this film -- a slow dolly up to the wire stained with blood from the decapitation is quoted exactly in Raging Bull: Jake LaMotta has just take a terrible beating but will not go down -- the camera tracks forward to show the blood stained rope to which he was clinging.) Fellini's super-charged segment is full of disorienting and shocking close-ups, bizarre hellish landscapes, and a jumbled sound track that sounds like a Robert Altman dialogue scene on methamphetamine. (At one point, we hear Ray Charles crooning "Ruby".) The film is a tremendous accomplishment on all levels and Terence Stamp, playing a despicable character, seems almost sympathetic by the end of his torments. There's too much in the movie, an avalanche of ideas and images, but the film is, certainly, startling and a reminder of Fellini's pictorial genius.
Friday, July 20, 2018
Time of the Gypsies (film group essay)
Two Villages
Serbian director, Emir Kusturica, hosts an annual film festival in the town of Kuestendorff, a small mountain village in western Serbia. The village is very small and has the Serbian name Drvngrad. Kusturica attends all the films that are screened in the festival. His acolytes call him "the Professor." He lives in a handsome house in the town.
The town’s main boulevard in Federico Fellini Street. The movie theater named after Stanley Kubrick is at Nikola Tesla Square. Other streets in the town are named after "Che" Guevera, Joe Strummer of The Clash, and several well-known football and tennis stars. There are four ski-slopes overlooking the mountain. Pictures show a town that is too pretty to be true. And, in fact, there is no real Kuestendorff. The village was built as a set for Kusturica’s 2004 movie Life is a Miracle.
Kusturica is a hirsute, jovial fellow, a good friend of Vladimir Putin, and a defender of the Russian regime. He is a controversial figure in Europe, either reviled as a pro-Serbian nationalist or much admired for his pan-Slavic views. Kusturica has built another village on the other side of the country on the eastern border of Serbia – this is Andricgrad named after the novelist Ivo Andric (the author of The Bridge on the Drina). Kusturica has been trying to film The Bridge on the Drina for years and he constructed this town as a set for that movie.
Kusturica said that he built these two villages to replace his hometown, Sarajevo, a city that he describes as having been destroyed in the Bosnian war (1992 - 1995).
The Director
Emir Kusturica was born in Sarajevo in 1954. His father was a Serbian journalist. The family was Muslim but non-observant. Emir was a rebellious boy and got in a lot of trouble. He played a small role in a 1972 film about Serbo-Croatian partisans operating out of Sarajevo during World War II, an experience that seems to have led him away
Kusturica took an interest in movies and graduated from film school in Prague in 1978. He made his first feature in 1981, Do you remember Dolly Bell? described as a coming-of-age picture. The film wons a silver prize at the Venice Film Festival. Kusturica’s next picture When Father was Away on Business (1985) was highly acclaimed and entered in competition as Best Foreign Film at the Oscars (it didn’t win). Kusturica’s Time of the Gypsies was released 1989.
Arizona Dreams (1993) in Kusturica’s one American film, shot on location and starring Johnny Depp. (Kusturica has erected a bronze statue to Depp in Kuestendorff). Underground (1995) is probably Kusturica’s magnum opus, a long film summarizing the history of Yugoslavia. This movie has proven to be intensely controversial – it is either denounced as Serbian nationalist propaganda or honored as a carnal, comical surrealist film. In the movie, Kusturica seems to suggest that the violence in Yugoslavia was caused by an excess of testosterone in the land’s menfolk. Various critics, including Serbians, have derided the move, but others claim it is a masterpiece. These films were made against the backdrop of the Bosnian War (1992 to 1995), a conflict in which Serbia was perceived as the agressor and alleged to have committed serious war crimes and atrocities.
Black Cat, White Cat (1998) returns to a subject that earlier interested Kusturica, the plight of the Romani or gypsies. Super 8 Stories is a documentary about a touring rock and roll band, the No Smoking Orchestra – since 1986, Kusturica has played bass guitar in that group. (In 2007, Kusturica tried to mount a punk rock opera based Time of the Gypsies using the No Smoking Orchestra as the house-band. The show never really congealed.) Life is Miracle (2004) involves soccer players on opposite sides of the Bosnian war. Promise me this is another film involving involving the war as is On the Milky Road (2016), a movie about star-crossed lovers caught up in the war. Between 2007's Promise me this and On the Milky Road, Kusturica made a documentary about his favorite soccer player Maradone (2008) – the footballer has a road named after him in Kuestendorff – and a short subject in the omnibus film sponsored by Maria Vargas Lhosa, various directors’ responses to the idea of God, Words with God (2014). Kusturica converted to the Serbian Orthodox Church in 2005. When Kusturica’s 2016 film, On the Milky Road was not shown at Cannes that year, it was rumored that the Serbian had been ejected from the film festival because of his support for Vladimir Putin and that leader’s policies. (In fact, On the Milky Road simply hadn’t been finally edited when the film festival took place.)
Kusturica’s pro-Putin and intensely nationalist Serbian inclinations have stirred controversy. "The No Smoking Orchestra" dedicated a laudatory song ("Wanted Man") to an accused Serbian war criminal, Radivan Karajzic and the Kusturica’s films seem to be less likely to be distributed in the West since the controversy over Underground (1995).
Punk Rock
Emir Kusturica may be the only significant director who fancies himself also a rock star. The No Smoking Orchestra is on tour this summer. It will be playing in Montenegro in August and Barcelona this October. The band is currently touring wearing bandoliers and huge sombreros. On the evidence of You Tube, the music sounds a little like demented Klezmer mixed with equally demented Mariachi band music – in othe words, it’s great. One of the band’s signature numbers is "Fuck you MTV" – a title that seems pretty anachronistic since MTV has not been taste-maker or aired music videos to any degree since about 1995.
Schutka
If the Romany had a capitol city (although the very notion is inimical to Gypsy identity), it would be Schutka, a sprawling, squalid ghetto outside Skopje, a city located in what is now Macedonia, but previously a part of Yugoslavia. Over 50,000 Romany live in Schutka and make that place their home-base when they wander abroad. Kusturica traveled to Schutka and lived there for nine months, gathering ethnographic information about the Romany and assessing people in the ghetto for parts in his movie.
The opening sequences in Time of the Gypsies were shot in Schutka and the film reverts to that place from time to time. Perhan’s funeral was also filmed in Schutka. Without exception, the gypsy actors in the movie were recruited in Schutka. Ljubic Adzovic, the woman who plays Perhan’s grandmother, lived in Schutka – she was the mother of nine children and supported herself by palm-reading. The young woman who plays Danira (Elvira Sari) was available only part of the year – in certain seasons, she traveled with a band of gypsies to Westphalia in Germany where they supported themselves by committing petty crimes and begging.
Schutka has the largest concentration of Romany people anywhere in the world.
Kusturica’s Gypsies
Challenged by European journalists about his portrayal of Romany people, Kusturica replied:
I portray gypsies, not "The Gypsies." They are people that live faster than we do – they have short life expectancies and, at forty, a gypsy is older than we are at 60. They are always in crisis. Thus, they experience everything very intensely, very strongly, very swiftly. Even physically, they are different from us – their body temperatures are generally well above 100 degrees.
Kusturica had to teach his actors to say their lines by memory. They couldn’t read his script because most of the gypsies cast in the film were illiterate. The Romany, themselves, have no written language.
Feast of St. George
Early in the film, Kusturica shows us an idealized image of the Slavic festival, the Feast of St. George. This festival takes place on May 6. On that day, people eat barbecued lamb and garland their hair with flowers. The festival, of course, is a remnant of a pagan Spring fertility festival and, in Slavic lands, is generally understood in that light. An indelible representation of the Feast of St. George or its pagan predecessor can be seen in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev – the film shows bonfires, naked people dancing in meadows, and nude girls, with flowers in their hair, offering themselves to monks. Kusturica’s portrayal of this event is equally spectacular: it appears as a dream sequence with Perhan embracing his turkey, rafts of burning debris floating in a broad river that is filled with gypsies, and, at last, a sexual encounter between Perhan and Azra – they float down the river naked in a coffin-like box. The music on the sountrack is a Serbian hymn to St. George. On a large raft, we see a Popanz or large scarecrow figure of St. George. This figure is intended to scare away demons. St. George, of course, was a great slayer of dragons and he appearance in effigy on his feast day is intended to vanquish evil spirits who infest the earth.
The Romany
Sometime around 600 A.D., a family group, possibly a small village, of Indian peasants emigrated from their homeland in the Punjab. (DNA testing shows that 70 percent of all Romany people carry markers affiliated with a single male line.) It is sometimes said that these Indians were likely "Untouchable" or lower caste, a clan disenfranchised by India’s rigid caste system. These people reached Iran around 900 A.D. where their presence as conjurors, thieves, and beggars is recorded in their Persian Book of Kings (the Shahnameh).
The Romany arrived in Greece and the Balkans around 1200. At that time, many of them were enslaved by the Mongols. The local Slavs (the Wallachians) also enslaved some of the Romany, but ignored others. By 1400, some the Romany had reached England. There they were harassed, branded, and their women mutilated by having their ears cut off. In most of Europe, the story was the same – the Romany arrived in an area, were immediately persecuted severely, and, then, fled from that region. Ultimately, the majority of the people established encampments in the Balkans. However, they continued to travel widely across the Europe and have, generally, been regarded as a dispersed (or diaspora) population.
Romany is a language that derives from Sanskrit. All Romany people are, at least, bilingual – they speak Romany in their family groups and the language of the country in which they are settled. They have no laws and no political structure. A figure called the "King of the Gypsies" is often associated with them – however, usually the "King of the Gypsies" is a man nominated for the role because of his chicanery and low status. "The King" is eminently disposable and so, when the authorities decide to harass the gypsies by arresting or killing their "King," no real harm is accomplished.
The Skopje gypsies are a mixture of Eastern Orthodox Christians and Muslims. (This can be clearly seen in Kusturica’s film in which some of the characters are obviously Christian while others are equally clearly Muslim.) Their religious practices also contain odd vestiges of Hindu beliefs, including cults dedicated to the worship of the goddess Kali.
No one knows for sure how many Romany exist. They are stateless, mostly illiterate, and don’t cooperate with census-takers. (An estimate is that there are, possibly, 14 million Romany today.) They are despised by most Europeans (when not being lionized as exotic, charming musicians and fortune-tellers) and usually persecuted wherever they go. European hatred of Gypsies is startling and unashamed. In Greece, a tour guide told us that certain areas were "infested" by Gypsies and that you should avoid them like the plague. On the side of a mountain in rural Greece, I saw a gypsy encampment and it was, in fact, horrifying – the squalor was unbelievable. A refined Italian tourist guide told us that we should not even look at gypsies – "they are very dangerous" and "no good will come of you looking at them." That said, gypsy beggars are ubiquitous in European cities – we saw a number of gypsy beggars in Ruben Ostlund’s The Square. Every European cathedral has a half-dozen gypsies sprawled around the threshold to the church, many of them women with small and, apparently, sickly babies, begging for coins from the tourists.
Periodically, governments try to eradicate the Romany. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen killed them wherever they were found – they generally weren’t deemed worthy of transportation to concentration camps because their work ethic (or lack thereof) made them unreliable slave laborers. The gypsies were mostly shot dead where they were encamped and, then, bulldozed into mass graves. How many died? Estimates vary between 250,000 to as high as 1.5 million. As recently, as 2010, the French government raided Romany encampments, confiscated their goods, and bulldozed their shacks and Airstream trailers.
Another film
In 1967, Alexander Petrovic, a Yugoslavian film maker, directed I even met happy gypsies. Petrovic’s movies the FIPRESCI (International Association of Film Critics) award in Cannes as wall as the Palm d’Or. Petrovic shot his film near Sarajevo and used real Romany in the production. The film was shot with dialogue in Romany. This film established a couple things: first, Europeans, although they hate and fear actual gypsies, like to see movies about them; second, Yugoslavia’s gypsies were a resource that could be exploited in films.
I even met happy Gypsies is a leading example of the sardonic so-called Yugoslavian "Black Wave", a film movement probably best characterized by Dusan Makajavev’s picture made in the late sixties and early seventies, including most notoriously WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie.
Telekinesis
Telekinesis is a popular subject in film. In Time of the Gypsies, Perhan is telekinetic – this plot element seems to me unnecessary and detracts from the film. However, Kusturica’s commitment to "magical realism" drives him to include this feature in the movie. Telekinesis, of course, often manifests itself as levitation and Time of the Gypsies is replete with scenes of objects floating in the air, most notably, the sequence in which Azra gives birth while a train roars by (a genuinely surprising and shocking scene), the bridal veil that haunts the various characters, and, of course, the sequence in which the pathological gambler, Merzdan, drags his family’s home off its foundations to shake down his mother for money that she has squirreled away. (Being suspended with feet off the ground is one of the visual motifs central to Time of the Gypsies – a good example of another scene exploiting this effect is when Perhan tries to hang himself.) Turkeys can’t fly or, at least, not very far and so the epiphany of the ghost turkey to the dying Perhan at the end of the film is also an example of a miraculous levitation. Kusturica, I suppose, would claim that the levitations in the film are, perhaps, homage to Chagall, an artist who often used this motif in his paintings. I read the levitation motif as more related to Merzdan’s attack on his mother’s shack – Romany life is nomadic and, therefore, unsupported; the Gypsies as people without a country are "groundless" – they hover evanescently in various places, here today and gone tomorrow.
The most famous movie featuring telekinesis is Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976 and remade in 2013). De Palma’s The Fury (1978) also invokes telekinesis and is the prototype for many movies involving telekinetic adolescents weaponized by evil government agents – the X-men franchise has this flavor. Chronicle (2012) is an excellent film about telekinetic young men. Innumerable recent films use telekinesis as a plot point. See, for instance, Dark City (1998), Firestarter (1984), Matilda (1996), Phenomenon (1996), Push (2009). At the end of Tarkovsky’s 1979 Stalker, the mutant child seems to display telekinetic powers – although this is ambiguous. Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) features battles between telekinetic warriors who have been recruited by sinister military-industrial complex coroprations.
Telekinesis is a theme that appeals to young people and, almost always, the proponents of this power are adolescents or young adults, often kids who are otherwise powerless. This super-power seems to reflect wish-fulfilment on the part audiences, the desire to be all-powerful and savagely influential in the world. The notion that these movies demonstrate is that the id of a young person is powerful, rebellious, and can affect the world in various ways. The idea is that this power is both wonderful and terrible; it is incapable of being governed. The telekinesis theme in Time of the Gypsies is mirrored by Perhan’s rise to become a successful gangster with a crew of his own begging the streets of Milan. Perhan is driven to accomplish great things and this is symbolized by his ability to use his mind to hurl objects (including a murder weapon at the climax) through the air.
Moral Reservations
No doubt, Time of the Gypsies is an impressive film. Long and intricate, the movie grants us a startling glimpse into a way of life that is, certainly, unknown to Americans. A justification for movies and novels is that such art works allow us to participate with characters and folk ways that we would otherwise experience. Our identification with the characters in a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for instance, takes us into close contact with extraordinary, passionate people who lead their lives according to principles very remote from our experience. The same is true of historical novels or books that were written generations earlier – when I read Frank Norris, for instance, I am granted an insight into ways of being in the world that may no longer exist. The Time of the Gypsies represents for us what it might be like to be a gypsy in 1989 – this is something none of us can possibly know except by hearsay or written report.
The last twenty minutes of the film is masterful. Kusturica consolidates all his visual motifs and provides us with a powerful argument for a kind of tragic fatalism – we are not masters of our passions, nor do we control the world around us. Ultimately, our striving brings us face-to-face with evidence of our failures. We can’t escape the accidents of our birth or destiny. There is no God to rig the cosmic dice – despite our prayers, some things are simply unavoidable: Jesus hangs on the Cross upside-down as a symbol that he has no power to help us. The world is a squalid parade of horrors shot through rarely by moments of beauty and grace. Like the gypsies, we are fundamentally homeless in the world – at any moment someone can pull our house away from its foundation and leave it dangling in the cold, empty sky. Kusturic melds the image of turkey with the ghostly bridal veil floating over the mud; he visually connects the image of the boxes mysteriously moving under their own volition over the muddy roads with the uncanny shot of the gangster trapped and dying in a coffin-like toilet causing the outhouse to seem to walk across the meadow. This image, in turn, rhymes with the pictures of Perhan and Azar, more or less, naked in the coffin-shaped box drifting along the river lit by floating rafts of fire. The Milan cathedral is an image of power and confidence, the full force of a civilization that his cast out the gypsies. Elements of Tarkovsky illumine some of the scenes. Other shots, particularly some of the deep focus imagery, are reminiscent of the sequences in Fellini, an important influence on Kusturica. The visionary desolation of the ghetto where the gypsies live near Skopje and the encampment at Milan marked by the billboard of the soccer player is memorable; imagery of this kind arises in the films made Bela Tarr, particularly the nightmare communal farm in Satantango. The soundtrack is memorable and the complex mise-en-scene with layers and layers of activity occurring on location is often astonishing.
But I have strong moral objections to the film. Kusturica won various awards at Cannes in 1989. Roger Ebert was at the festival. He wrote an essay on the film noting that, every time, he came to Cannes, he saw a gypsy girl begging on the street. Each year, of course, she would be a year older and, each year, her expertise in various kinds of criminal endeavor seemed to increase. Ebert wondered what she would have thought of Time of the Gypsies if, somehow, she had been admitted to a theater where it was screened. We can pretty much stipulate that there were no gypsies on the jury that awarded the Palm d’Or to the movie.
Here is a thought experiment.
Assume that a movie is produced about a disenfranchised ethnic minority. Let’s use Native Americans for our minority – people who are readily recognizable, generally live somewhere else, and are considered exotic and, possibly, troublesome. In our movie, the following traits are not only attributed to this community, but, in fact, lavishly dramatized:
1. Indians are drunk all the time;
2. Indians are superstitious, guided by soothsayers and palm-readers;
3. Indians would rather dance than work;
4. Indians are willing to prostitute their children to make a buck;
5. Indians are violent;
6. Indians engage in all sorts of petty (as well as serious) criminal behavior;
7. Indians keep livestock (for instance, turkeys) in their homes;
8. Indians are vulgar (Elvis tapestries?), beggars, con-men, and thieves;
9. Indians live in squalor and family members are always grappling in the mud;
10. Indian women are mostly whores;
11. Indians are lascivious;
12. Indians are self-destructive – when thwarted in their wishes, they get drunk and burn themselves with cigarettes;
13. Indian children are generally unsure of the identity of their fathers;
14. Indian are willing to sell their own children;
15. Indians routinely engage in smuggling and human trafficking.
And, so, the list goes on. Would a film making these assertions against a minority population living in poverty be racist? Of course, every proposition advanced in this list is asserted by Kusturica as being characteristic of the Romany.
Emir Kusturica’s response to the accusation that his film is racist is simple enough: my film merely shows the unpleasant truth about Romany life. Although we wouldn’t want to say these things about any group of people, all of these aspersions are true when cast upon gypsies. In fact, Kusturica climaxes his film with an image that materializes a standard ethnic slur: Gypsies are so greedy that they would steal the coins off
the eyes of their father’s corpse. What seems to be a poignant and penetrating observation about Perhan’s little son is really just a filmed version of a well-established ethnic slur. It would be like ending a film about African -Americans by showing a barefoot Black man grinning as he steals a watermelon from a watermelon patch.
(In this context, Kusturica’s defense that he is merely realistically dramatizing the truth about gypsy life rings a little hollow when applied to a film that contains telekinesis, levitation, and a radiant ghost turkey.)
It is, perhaps, less than anodyne to recall that Kusturica is a proud Serb. In the last few years, he was denounced at Cannes for announcing his conversion to Eastern Orthodox Catholicism and, then, stating (in the context of the annexation of Crimea): "Of course, I think Vladimir Putin is a great man. If I were British, I would fear Putin. If I were Obama, I would, perhaps, even fight Putin. But as a Serb I love him." Kusturica’s most ambitious film, Underground, has been interpreted as justifying ethnic cleansing in what was once Yugoslavia. Some of these criticisms are unwarranted – as is often the case, the most vehement attacks on the movie were made by people who had not bothered to see the film. But there is reason to consider whether a partisan Serb should have much credibility on the subject of ethnic minorities. The Serbs seem to have rounded up Muslim Bosnians and either killed them or interred them in concentration camps where thousands died of mistreatment. The Serbs advanced a program of ethnic cleansing in which gang-rape was a tool of intimidation.
But, of course, it’s probably unfair to attribute these misdeeds to Kusturica although he has been outspoken in his defense of Serbia. Not all gypsies are thieves and beggars. Not all Serbs are war-criminals.
Tragedy or Comedy
To what genre does Kusturica’s Time of the Gypsies belong?
In his Poetics at 1448 b, Aristotle says: "Tragedy differs from comedy in this respect. The latter sets out to depict people as worse than they are today, the former as better." Clearly, Time of the Gypsies depicts people as worse than they really are – although this begs the question whether the negative portrayal of human life is the result of Kusturica’s bigotry with respect to the Romany people. But, setting aside this cavil, is Time of the Gypsies some kind of comedy?
Probably, these categories don’t apply here. Most likely, a critic might argue that Time of the Gypsies is a Menippean Satire – that is, a narrative that grounds human behavior in bodily functions and demands. The leading example of such satire is Petronius Satyricon although Apuleis’ The Golden Ass is another, and more artistically successful, version of this genre.
Some critics have claimed that Time of the Gypsies is modeled on Francis Coppola’s The Godfather. Indeed, there are elements in the film that suggest this comparison – Perhan starts out as an innocent and, in fact, isn’t even full-blooded Gypsy (he has a Slovenian father). He is like Michael in The Godfather, the golden boy that family members seek to insulate from the criminality in which he is immersed. But, of course, he succumbs to pressure and ends up becoming a successful gangster, so wholly invested in that perverse culture that he plans to sell his wife’s first child.
The Godfather, however, feels like tragedy. Time of the Gypsies does not.
Tuesday, July 17, 2018
The Whole Shootin' Match
1.
A few days before his fiftieth birthday, Eagle Pennell, the Texas film maker, died. He was, according to the obituary of his friend, Lewis Black, a "hopeless drunk." A few days before he died, Pennell was living under a freeway underpass in Houston, Texas, begging on the streets for beer money, and deriding those who sought help a Rehab Centers as "pussies." This is not surprising. When Roger Ebert went for a walk with Pennell at Telluride after a screening of The Whole Shootin’ Match, the critic, who was no stranger to the subject himself, told Pennell that the film was "about alcoholism". Pennell didn’t disagree with him.
2.
Pennell made two films that are now regarded as successful and moving: The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978) and Last Night at the Alamo (1984). Both movies involve drunks, the lead roles played in each picture, by Sonny Davis and Lou Perryman. The Whole Shootin’ Match involves Perryman and Davis as playing losers, somewhat like a boozing Laurel and Hardy. Their "get rich" schemes are failures and they seem always one step away from succumbing to hopelessness – at the end of the film, the character played with a perpetual grin by Sonny Davis tries to blow out his brains. He is unsuccessful, but, then, of course, he doesn’t do anything right. In Last Night at the Alamo, a low-end bar in Houston is threatened with demolition. The bar’s habitues gather to defend the bar and one of them, armed with a shotgun, tries to rally the men to fight the bulldozers scheduled to demolish the place in the morning. But, of course, the barflies just get hopelessly drunk instead. The poster for the film announced: Some face the future head on, at the Alamo, they’re facing the future dead drunk.
For yeas, Pennell tried to produce a script that he had written about the Texas historical figure, James Fannin. Fannin was the feckless commander who lost the battle at Coleto Creek with the result that he and 344 of his men were butchered by Santa Ana and his troops at Goliad. He’s the guy who didn’t send reinforcements to the Alamo.
3.
Eagle Pennell was born Glenn Irwin Pinnell in 1952. His father was an Aggie – he taught engineering at Texas A & M and Pennell was raised at College Station. Pinnell was a poor student. He took courses in radio, film and Tv at Texas A & M but dropped out in his junior year. For awhile, he worked producing sports highlight films for a company in Austin. Management of the company let Pinnell borrow its equipment to work on his own films on the weekend. He made a couple of short documentaries including one about rodeo riders. Sometime in his early twenties, Pinnell changed his name to "Eagle Pennell". People said that he had prominent nose like an eagle’s beak and he adopted the last name from a character in his favorite film, John Ford’s She wore a Yellow Ribbon – in that movie, there is a Lieutenant Pennell who doesn’t get the girl. (Lou Perryman on a commentary track says that the young man was a huge fan of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and also paid homage to that film maker with the name that he chose for himself.)
Pennell was friends with an eccentric and wealthy rare bookseller in Austin, John H. Jenkins. Jenkins, who specialized in rare books about Texas, financed most of The Whole Shootin’ Match. The movie was shot on weekends using borrowed 16 mm equipment from Pennell’s employer. One participant in the process said that the movie cost $6000 to make with any $25,000 spent post-production.
The Whole Shootin’ Match played at Park City, Utah at Robert Redford’s first film festival. Redford was so impressed with the movie that he formed the Sundance Foundation to support independent film making and, further, changed to mission of the Park City festival to premiering independently produced films. In this respect, The Whole Shootin’ Match, a film that no one has seen, is one of the most consequential movies ever produced in this country. The doors seemed to have blasted open for Pennell. But, true to form, he wasn’t able to exploit his success. Hollywood was interested in his screenplay about James Fannin, one of history’s ultimate losers. After a couple years trying to sell that idea, Pennell wrote a road-movie and went to New York City to pitch it to a production company. Unfortunately, Pennell got blind drunk, tried to grope the female executive assigned to the project, and, then, went home in disgrace.
The next year, Pennell turned up in Saudi Arabia where he made industrial films. He saved enough money to partially finance Closing Night at the Alamo (1984). The picture was released at the Berliln Film Festival where it won a number of awards and the movie was highly regarded by critics. But Pennell subverted his success by heavy drinking. Nonetheless, he managed to direct three more feature films. Ice House (1989) was a crime film vehicle for Melissa Gilbert, the child star of Little House on the Prairie produced by her then-husband – the picture sank like a stone. House full of Soul (1990) and Doc’s Full Service (1994) are said to be films about losers struggling with alcoholism. Elements of these films seem to be surreal but these effects are, generally, the result of Pennell’s incompetence in the way the pictures are shot and edited. None of these pictures is available to be seen. Last Night at the Alamo exists on VHS – copies cost 180 dollars.
After the failure of Doc’s Full Service in 1994 (the film was shown at South by Southwest in Austin but nowhere else), Pennell devoted his time to drinking himself to death. He accomplished this task in 2002. At the time of his death, a script that he had written, My Dog bit Elvis, has been accepted by the Independent Television studio and, in fact, had been funded.
4.
Pennell was a determined man. There is a story about how the final scenes in The Whole Shootin’ Match were produced. The film was shot in chronological sequence and Pennell was running out of money. He took his cast and crew early on Saturday morning to Balcones Canyons National Wildlife Reserve and they shot the last rolls of their film on a foggy afternoon and early evening several miles down one of the trails in the park. Pennell’s cast and crew all had jobs to which they had to return to on Monday and he was afraid that if he didn’t get the end of the film in the can that weekend, the picture would never be finished.
Pennell persuaded everyone to wait for him as he made a desperate effort to get enough film to finish the movie. He knew that his financier, the rare book dealer John Jenkins was at a soiree at the LBJ library about 40 miles away. Pennell drove to the library, met with Jenkins, got some additional cash, and, then, drove to Austin to pick six or seven 100 foot rolls of film. He got back to Balcones where his cast and crew had spent a miserable night shivering and cold, although half-drunk, on the mountain called the Devil’s Backbone. Everyone sat around until the morning fog and light matched the evening fog and light and Pennell got his last shots which are the final shots in the movie.
All of the locations in the film were places that were loaned to Pennell for his production. The scenes involving the belligerent old man in the wheelchair were shot at the J. Frank Dobie ranch, at a cottage that is offered to Texas writers who need solitude to complete their work. (Dobie was the doyenne of Texas historical writers and a friend of Jenkins.)
Jenkins was shot in the back of the head in April 1989. He was writing a biography of one of the Republic of Texas’ presidents, Edward Burleson. The murder was covered-up as a suicide – to shoot himself the right-handed Jenkins would have had to fire the gun with his left hand, muzzle pressed to the back of his skull. Further, after dead, he would have had to hidden the gun so successfully that it was never again found. (Weird things happened in Jenkins life – his book warehouse burned in 1985 resulting in the loss of millions of dollars worth of irreplaceable rare books. Jenkins, then, became a professional poker player while continuing to write about Texas history and about a publishing house as well.) Jenkins can be seen around the edges of some of scenes in the film, particularly those in the Scoot Inn.
5.
The Whole Shootin’ Match is not a flawless film by any means. Scenes shot in allegedly moving trucks at night are theatrical and either charming or clueless depending upon your perspective. (Pennell never developed, or sought to develop, much technical proficiency). The middle of the film sags, particularly the dream sequence that is, then, followed by footage that exactly recapitulates the dream – it’s not clear why Pennell shot the dream twice and the scenes are amateurish in all respect. The dream sequence follows a scene inexplicable even to the people who were in the movie – this is a scene in which Eagle Pennell with his girlfriend at the time and a third actor watch a Dallas Cowboy’s game and mug outrageously at the screen. (About this sequence, Lou Perryman asked: "What was he trying to show?" And "who the hell was running the camera?") Perryman and Davis both admit on the commentary track on the 2006 DVD revival and restoration of the film that they began the picture as rank amateurs and ended acting very proficiently.
The bar scenes were shot with real barflies at the Scoot Inn, an Austin dive. Pennell shot in the bar very early in the morning so as not to disturb the actual clientele to the greatest extent possible. Davis recalls that the owner of the bar was an inveterate drunk and very prone to seizures in the morning. Davis recalls finding him on his back in the toilet flopping around and foaming at the mouth. He had been incontinent and tiles were wet and stained with shit. "He’s just havin’ another one of his strokes," the bar owner’s wife said, dismissing the whole thing as unimportant.
6.
Browning wrote that "Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or else what’s a heaven for." The context for this famous quote is Browning’s dramatic monologue: "Andrea del Sarto." It may seem odd for me to reference a Victorian poem (1855) in the context of Eagle Pennell’s picaresque film about two alcoholic losers in Texas around 1975. But there is a connection. Andrea del Sarto is not well-known today (or in Browning’s time) because his art is, often, accused of being soulless, spiritually empty – his reach exceeded his gap. Pennell portrays two hapless bar-flies impelled by the hope of striking it rich. Their reach perpetually exceeds their grasp, but their heroism resides in being undeterred by this fact. They are frontiersman on a frontier that is now closed and has no need for their ingenuity, fierce independence, and their general cussedness. (Frederick Jackson Turner, a Wisconsin professor, declared that the frontier, an idea more than a place, that had dominated the American imagination for two centuries closed in 1891 – Turner presented this thesis in 1893. On the frontier, hope outstripped reality: anyone could strike it rich, or by cutting the sod with a plow bring rain to an arid land and turn the desert into realm of exquisite beauty and fruitfulness – all you needed was hard-work and courage and you could make the desert bloom. This open land, a territory of immense promise and possibility, closed in 1891, but the hard-scrabble heroes or anti-heroes in Pennell’s film never got the memo. They remain dreamers, endlessly scheming to grasp a treasure that remains forever outside their reach.) Pennell’s film about these men is also a film about the new frontier of independent movie-making – a man with a camera and some friends working on weekends could make a movie that would enthrall millions and earn him untold riches, the love of beautiful women, and monstrous piles of ice-white cocaine. The dreams of wealth that the figures in his film express are, also, the dream that a movie shot for $6000 could make six million dollars. Hollywood is the new Sutter’s Mill, the new Klondike – Easy Rider made for fifty-thousand dollars grossed a thousand times what it cost; later, Richard Linklater with Dazed and Confused, another Texas movie made with Texas actors would come to rule Hollywood. Who says lightning can’t strike? It strikes all the time. And, so, the dream of quick and easy wealth expressed by Pennell’s dreamers is a version of the same lunge toward fame and fortune that the film itself represents.
7.
Does crudeness guarantee authenticity?
8.
The King of Texas is a documentary about Eagle Pennell, premiered by SXSW in Austin in 2007. The film was directed by Rene Pinnell, Eagle’s nephew (and the son of his brother Charles Pinnell). In the movie, Charles Pinnell recalls that his brother showed-up at his house in the middle of the night dead-drunk and pounded on his door. Charles talked to his brother for awhile. Eagle was an unpredictable mean drunk and so Charles wouldn’t let him in the house. He recalls Eagle staggering away in the darkness.
Eagle died two months later. After his burial, Charles Pinnell had a nightmare. Eagle had come to his house and was standing outside. Charles let him inside and Eagle went to the bathroom to take a shower. He was trying to wash the mortician’s make-up and rouge off his face. The whole house smelled of death. The corpse was decomposing. Charles told Eagle: "You have to go. You’re dead now." Eagle wouldn’t leave. The stench got worse. "I don’t want to be dead," Eagle said. And he began to cry.
Sunday, July 15, 2018
Skyscraper
Everyone knows that, in late June 2018, a plucky raccoon climbed to the top of the skyscraper occupied by Minnesota Public Radio. The little creature was called "the MPR raccoon." The MPR raccoon had to climb about 18 or 20 stories. In The Skyscraper, Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson climbs 96 stories, heaving himself upward, on a huge crane parked conveniently close to a towering 202 level skyscraper that happens to be on fire. It would be fun to say that the MPR raccoon's exploits were more thrilling than those of the Rock in this noisy 2018 thriller (directed by Marshall Thurber). But, in fact, The Skyscraper is a fairly good movie of its type -- it is exciting, has good special effects, and the stunts are well-executed as well as, more or less, plausible. There aren't too many blatant violations of the laws of physics and the story, although moronic, is, at least, consistent.
For those of us in Minnesota, the movie begins with evidence that no one in Hollywood has ever been to this State (As Trump would say, we are in flyover country.) At a place called Ash Lake, Minnesota, a domestic dispute has escalated into a massive stand-off involving members of the FBI. This is wildly implausible because FBI members don't typically (or ever) get involved in battles between husbands and their wives. Things get even more outrageous when the FBI team rappels down a six-hundred foot cliff to get to the cabin where an anguished husband is holding his wife and three children hostage. Exactly where in the mountains of Minnesota is this supposed to be happening? This is the obligatory trauma scene explaining why the Rock has retired from his life of violence and become a good family man, living, when next we see him, in the eponymous skyscraper in Hong Kong, and hobbling around on one prosthetic (but, as it turns out highly useful) leg. He is security expert and has mastered the computer topography and defensive systems of the 202-story double helix-shaped tower. The Rock goes off to a job interview. Bad guys intervene and a bunch of people get killed by a team of Asian assassins led by a female ninja. Here's where the first of the film's many reaction shots occurs: the female ninja murders about 36 people in hand-to-hand combat -- the camera cuts to one of her associates who looks at her wide-eyed as in "Wow! where did she learn to do that?" and, then, shrugs nonchalantly. Throughout the film, there are lots of images of people watching the Rock's exploits dangling from the outside of the tower. At the climax, when all ends happily (except for the army of villains who have been killed), cheering crowds remind us how to respond to the derring-do on-screen -- it's manipulative and a homage to Die Hard, the obvious source for much of this film.
The movie is pretty much non-stop action. People dodge fiery falling debris and hang from the brink of abysses over roaring flames. The Rock climbs around on the outside of the skyscraper and, despite a dozen wounds, kills bad guys left and right. Computers get hacked, shut down, and, then, rebooted in just the nick of time. Elevators hurl through tubes lined with flames. And there's a final shoot-out that is stolen in whole cloth from The Lady of Shanghai -- for some reason, the designer of the skyscraper has installed a pop-up hall of mirrors that occupies the interior of the pearl-shaped bulb atop the skyscraper. There's absolutely no reason for the seventy-five or so obelisk-mirrors that surround the characters in the film's last ten minutes except to allow for much misdirection and fusillades of machine gun fire into the mirrors that erupt into shards. (Welles staged the whole thing infinitely better.) Everything is fun and, despite the high body count, this is family friendly entertainment -- the hero is battling to save his plucky wife and two children until the roles are reversed and she is battling to save him. (The Rocks' wife, played by Neve Campbell, gets to duke it out with the evil lady Ninja -- thus, the film also boasts an impressive cat-fight.) No one swears or drops any F-bombs and, so, you can take your kids to this picture without any fear of being embarrassed by the events on-screen. Indeed, you can take your kids to the picture without any fear of anyone being frightened either -- although the situation is always dire, we know that Rock and his wife and two kids are going to survive every deadly situation into which they are hurled. Just when things get most desperate, of course, we know that rescue is nigh. Ultimately, this is a weakness of a film of this kind. We know that the high-priced stars are invulnerable. (That's why it would be fair to say that the rescue of the Wild Boars from the cave in Thailand was, in fact, a lot more thrilling than this film because the outcome was always seriously in doubt -- not so in The Skyscraper.) It would be nice to see the Rock ram his elbow into a glass-encased niche, breaking glass, access a fire extinguisher and axe, sever an artery in his arm, and bleed out on the floor. When the Rock pitches a big man-sized fake-bronze column, an inscrutable ornament on one of the floors, off the skyscraper, I was rooting that the heavy object would land right on the head of Neve Campbell and one of the hero's kids. But no such luck. The issue is never ever in doubt.
For those of us in Minnesota, the movie begins with evidence that no one in Hollywood has ever been to this State (As Trump would say, we are in flyover country.) At a place called Ash Lake, Minnesota, a domestic dispute has escalated into a massive stand-off involving members of the FBI. This is wildly implausible because FBI members don't typically (or ever) get involved in battles between husbands and their wives. Things get even more outrageous when the FBI team rappels down a six-hundred foot cliff to get to the cabin where an anguished husband is holding his wife and three children hostage. Exactly where in the mountains of Minnesota is this supposed to be happening? This is the obligatory trauma scene explaining why the Rock has retired from his life of violence and become a good family man, living, when next we see him, in the eponymous skyscraper in Hong Kong, and hobbling around on one prosthetic (but, as it turns out highly useful) leg. He is security expert and has mastered the computer topography and defensive systems of the 202-story double helix-shaped tower. The Rock goes off to a job interview. Bad guys intervene and a bunch of people get killed by a team of Asian assassins led by a female ninja. Here's where the first of the film's many reaction shots occurs: the female ninja murders about 36 people in hand-to-hand combat -- the camera cuts to one of her associates who looks at her wide-eyed as in "Wow! where did she learn to do that?" and, then, shrugs nonchalantly. Throughout the film, there are lots of images of people watching the Rock's exploits dangling from the outside of the tower. At the climax, when all ends happily (except for the army of villains who have been killed), cheering crowds remind us how to respond to the derring-do on-screen -- it's manipulative and a homage to Die Hard, the obvious source for much of this film.
The movie is pretty much non-stop action. People dodge fiery falling debris and hang from the brink of abysses over roaring flames. The Rock climbs around on the outside of the skyscraper and, despite a dozen wounds, kills bad guys left and right. Computers get hacked, shut down, and, then, rebooted in just the nick of time. Elevators hurl through tubes lined with flames. And there's a final shoot-out that is stolen in whole cloth from The Lady of Shanghai -- for some reason, the designer of the skyscraper has installed a pop-up hall of mirrors that occupies the interior of the pearl-shaped bulb atop the skyscraper. There's absolutely no reason for the seventy-five or so obelisk-mirrors that surround the characters in the film's last ten minutes except to allow for much misdirection and fusillades of machine gun fire into the mirrors that erupt into shards. (Welles staged the whole thing infinitely better.) Everything is fun and, despite the high body count, this is family friendly entertainment -- the hero is battling to save his plucky wife and two children until the roles are reversed and she is battling to save him. (The Rocks' wife, played by Neve Campbell, gets to duke it out with the evil lady Ninja -- thus, the film also boasts an impressive cat-fight.) No one swears or drops any F-bombs and, so, you can take your kids to this picture without any fear of being embarrassed by the events on-screen. Indeed, you can take your kids to the picture without any fear of anyone being frightened either -- although the situation is always dire, we know that Rock and his wife and two kids are going to survive every deadly situation into which they are hurled. Just when things get most desperate, of course, we know that rescue is nigh. Ultimately, this is a weakness of a film of this kind. We know that the high-priced stars are invulnerable. (That's why it would be fair to say that the rescue of the Wild Boars from the cave in Thailand was, in fact, a lot more thrilling than this film because the outcome was always seriously in doubt -- not so in The Skyscraper.) It would be nice to see the Rock ram his elbow into a glass-encased niche, breaking glass, access a fire extinguisher and axe, sever an artery in his arm, and bleed out on the floor. When the Rock pitches a big man-sized fake-bronze column, an inscrutable ornament on one of the floors, off the skyscraper, I was rooting that the heavy object would land right on the head of Neve Campbell and one of the hero's kids. But no such luck. The issue is never ever in doubt.
Party Girl
Many years ago, I had friends who where members of the Xenon Dance Company, a modern dance ensemble. Sometimes, the recording artist, Prince, would host parties in town. (This was before he lived in his studio at Paisley Park.) His emissaries would pay the girls in the dance company a hundred dollars each to come to the party and dance with his guests. In Nick Ray's Party Girl, showgirls dancing at "The Golden Rooster", a big cabaret in Chicago, are paid to attend a party thrown by Rico Angelo (Lee J. Cobb), the figure playing Al Capone in the movie. We see the girls putting on their sexiest evening gowns for the party. Most of the girls hide their crisp, new hundred dollar bills paid to them for attending in their brassieres. But one of them says: "I need to put this somewhere where it won't be disturbed." So she shoves the hundred dollar bill in her high-heeled shoe. Prince and his guests were chivalrous, I'm told, and similar precautions weren't required at his soirees.
Party Girl (1958) is an intelligent melodrama entangled with a elaborately produced MGM musical. It's got gangsters and showgirls and so what's not to like. Eddie Mueller, who introduced the film for TCM, says that Nick Ray was sick and close to breakdown due to his alcoholism and the rigors of shooting on location with Burl Ives in Wind over the Everglades and Richard Burton in Bitter Victory. He wanted to work close to home in a studio and so accepted the assignment to direct Party Girl, a film entirely produced indoors on a sound-stage in Hollywood -- this was not Ray's preferred way of working but he wanted a job that wouldn't tax him too much. In fact, the production of Party Girl was vexed as well -- Cyd Charisse, the star, was ill for much of the shoot and her sickness delayed the production. Ray himself didn't like the final film much and, in later years, preferred not to talk much about it. But the picture is, for better or worse, marked with Ray's signature themes and, certainly, a visual extravaganza, shot in brilliant, shockingly bright Technicolor in a cinemascope format. The wide screen shots delivered in long takes are full of fascinating, sometimes inexplicable details, and Ray treats his frescos as fields in which scarlets and burgundy reds point out the details that he wants you to see. The imagery is arresting in every way and, although the plot is over-complex, the film is compelling, an adult exploration of themes of corruption and complicity with evil.
The "party girl" of the title is Cyd Charisse in the role of Vicki Grey, the leading showgirl at the "The Golden Rooster" revue. Charisse looks old and tired in the film -- her face is visibly gaunt in some images and this adds to the film's effect. She is paid to attend a party put on a by gangster, Rico Angelo -- a drunken orgy in which the mobster is mourning Jean Harlow's marriage (the film is set in the heart of Depression era Chicago -- a place where Ray had gone to college). At the party, Vicki meets the cynical, but gentlemanly Tommy Farrell (Robert Taylor), a world-weary lawyer and mouthpiece for the gangster. Farrell, who walks with a very bad limp and uses a cane, rescues Vicki from the importunities of a minor thug, and, ultimately, a complex relationship arises between the lawyer and the show-girl. The lawyer is literally "crooked" -- he's been maimed by a childhood accident. Vicki is basically a call-girl, a kind of prostitute, with a bad back-story -- this is typical of Nick Ray's films: she was raped when she was fifteen in a dive in Oklahoma and has been a tough cookie ever since that time. At first, contempt is mutual between the prostitute and the shyster -- but, then, they come to realize that they are both variants of the same person, useful conspirators providing humiliating services to bad people. The film posits the question: who's the bigger whore -- Tommy Farrell, Rico Angelo's henchman and mouthpiece, or the prostitute?. Of course, both the crooked lawyer and the bad girl try to go straight and, as per expectations, they fall in love. The lawyer literally straightens up when he has surgery in Sweden that corrects some, but not all, of his limp. Returning to Chicago, Angelo recruits him for one last criminal case defending a psychopathic murderer who has allied himself with the big Chicago boss as his small-town accomplice and gang-leader. This crook, Cookie, is so vicious that he decides to short-circuit the criminal trial in which he is a defendant by bribing a juror. The scheme is discovered and the case mistried. Cookie blames Angelo for the mistrial and a full-fledged gang war erupts. (Here, Ray uses the time-honored approach of showing the gang-war through a series of short one-shot sequences in which various people are machine-gunned -- this is frighteningly well done and reminds us that Ray could have been a great action movie director if he had been more interested in physical as opposed to psychological violence. This sequence, which harkens back to Scarface, was obviously influential on Francis Coppola in similar montage sequences in The Godfather.) Angelo needs Tommy Farrell's services. But, instead, the lawyer sickened by the whole mess, agrees to cooperate with the DA. Farrell knows that he is doomed and so he sends Vicki to the coast. But she doesn't make it. Angelo's thugs catch her and drag her back, threatening to pour acid all over her face, to make Farrell recant his witness testimony. Farrell buys time with his silver-tongued eloquence and, at the last minute, the authorities arrive for a big shoot-out that results in the death of all the gangsters. (In the shoot-out, the thug who forced himself on Vicki in the early scenes in the movie is lured into the searchlit window and blasted by machine gun fire -- he dies in a cascade of glass. Angelo tries to hurl the bottle of acid at Vicki but forgets that the lid has been removed, pouring the stuff into his own eyes. It's all garish and brilliantly shot violence.) The lawyer and the show-girl walk away from the massacre, disappearing into the jungle of the big city.
The plot is borderline absurd but it's filled with tremendous set-pieces: Angelo beats another thug half to death at a testimonial dinner for mobsters in the South Side Club. Throughout the film, Lee J. Cobb is very frightening as the tightly coiled, obsessive gangster. In the opening party scene, he plugs a picture of Jean Harlow with five shots from his .45. A thug threatening Vicki invades her dressing room and burns his hand on one of the lights surrounding her mirror. When Tommy Farrell's former wife shows up -- a pointless scene that just interrupts the movie -- Ray stages the shot with two brightly lit mirrors duplicating all the action: the point is that the two women are both the same and different. It's a startling sequence shot in a way that prefigures some of Fassbinder's more baroque compositions. At the very beginning of the movie, Vicki's roommate, a showgirl is derided as chubby; she declines to attend the party with the mobsters because she is waiting for her married boyfriend's call -- the man has promised to divorce his wife. When Vicki comes home from the party with Tommy in tow, she goes in the bathroom and finds her roommate dead in the bathtub. The suicide has filled the tub with brown-red blood that has lapped over the floor. We see this only for an instant, but the shot provides the color-key to the whole movie -- as the film proceeds, Ray uses scarlet and burgundy to point out details in the cinemascope image and we are always calibrating those colors against the soupy brown-red of blood in the tub. Each red alludes to the showgirl's suicide and, further, suggests the perilous situation in which Vicki Grey finds herself -- Tommy Farrell is also married and has a wife who won't grant him a divorce. (Ray gets red into even monochrome outdoor shots on city streets -- there is always someone selling bright red apples somewhere in the wide-screen image.) Scenes in which Angelo threatens Tommy are remarkable for their décor -- we see swags of curtain as if from a 18th century grand portrait, satin curtains: the gangster sits on a weird throne-like chair that seems inlaid with red velvet figures. The throne has box-like edges that enclose the gangster and is as memorable a piece of furniture as anything in film history -- the only comparable image that I can recall is the red billiard table in Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut. Several shots feature a large astrolabe, an item that seems to have migrated into the picture from a stage production of Brecht's Galileo -- I have no idea what it's doing at The Golden Rooster but there it is. When Vicki is brought into the gangster's hideout at the South Side Club, her face is bizarrely bandaged -- it's as if she's already been mutilated by acid. All of these little details, and there are dozens more, combine to create a film that is intensely interesting, even when your mind wanders a little during the vagaries of the plot. There are also three impressive dance numbers exploiting Cyd Charisse's expressive legs and buttocks -- she has small breasts but these are also on display throughout the movie as well. Somehow the MGM costuming department manages to dress her in yards and yards of red silk while she seems to be, more or less, naked. I didn't like this movie twenty years ago when I saw it in a pan-and-scan version -- you need the full image to appreciate Ray's ingenuity in filling the screen with interesting things to see.
Party Girl (1958) is an intelligent melodrama entangled with a elaborately produced MGM musical. It's got gangsters and showgirls and so what's not to like. Eddie Mueller, who introduced the film for TCM, says that Nick Ray was sick and close to breakdown due to his alcoholism and the rigors of shooting on location with Burl Ives in Wind over the Everglades and Richard Burton in Bitter Victory. He wanted to work close to home in a studio and so accepted the assignment to direct Party Girl, a film entirely produced indoors on a sound-stage in Hollywood -- this was not Ray's preferred way of working but he wanted a job that wouldn't tax him too much. In fact, the production of Party Girl was vexed as well -- Cyd Charisse, the star, was ill for much of the shoot and her sickness delayed the production. Ray himself didn't like the final film much and, in later years, preferred not to talk much about it. But the picture is, for better or worse, marked with Ray's signature themes and, certainly, a visual extravaganza, shot in brilliant, shockingly bright Technicolor in a cinemascope format. The wide screen shots delivered in long takes are full of fascinating, sometimes inexplicable details, and Ray treats his frescos as fields in which scarlets and burgundy reds point out the details that he wants you to see. The imagery is arresting in every way and, although the plot is over-complex, the film is compelling, an adult exploration of themes of corruption and complicity with evil.
The "party girl" of the title is Cyd Charisse in the role of Vicki Grey, the leading showgirl at the "The Golden Rooster" revue. Charisse looks old and tired in the film -- her face is visibly gaunt in some images and this adds to the film's effect. She is paid to attend a party put on a by gangster, Rico Angelo -- a drunken orgy in which the mobster is mourning Jean Harlow's marriage (the film is set in the heart of Depression era Chicago -- a place where Ray had gone to college). At the party, Vicki meets the cynical, but gentlemanly Tommy Farrell (Robert Taylor), a world-weary lawyer and mouthpiece for the gangster. Farrell, who walks with a very bad limp and uses a cane, rescues Vicki from the importunities of a minor thug, and, ultimately, a complex relationship arises between the lawyer and the show-girl. The lawyer is literally "crooked" -- he's been maimed by a childhood accident. Vicki is basically a call-girl, a kind of prostitute, with a bad back-story -- this is typical of Nick Ray's films: she was raped when she was fifteen in a dive in Oklahoma and has been a tough cookie ever since that time. At first, contempt is mutual between the prostitute and the shyster -- but, then, they come to realize that they are both variants of the same person, useful conspirators providing humiliating services to bad people. The film posits the question: who's the bigger whore -- Tommy Farrell, Rico Angelo's henchman and mouthpiece, or the prostitute?. Of course, both the crooked lawyer and the bad girl try to go straight and, as per expectations, they fall in love. The lawyer literally straightens up when he has surgery in Sweden that corrects some, but not all, of his limp. Returning to Chicago, Angelo recruits him for one last criminal case defending a psychopathic murderer who has allied himself with the big Chicago boss as his small-town accomplice and gang-leader. This crook, Cookie, is so vicious that he decides to short-circuit the criminal trial in which he is a defendant by bribing a juror. The scheme is discovered and the case mistried. Cookie blames Angelo for the mistrial and a full-fledged gang war erupts. (Here, Ray uses the time-honored approach of showing the gang-war through a series of short one-shot sequences in which various people are machine-gunned -- this is frighteningly well done and reminds us that Ray could have been a great action movie director if he had been more interested in physical as opposed to psychological violence. This sequence, which harkens back to Scarface, was obviously influential on Francis Coppola in similar montage sequences in The Godfather.) Angelo needs Tommy Farrell's services. But, instead, the lawyer sickened by the whole mess, agrees to cooperate with the DA. Farrell knows that he is doomed and so he sends Vicki to the coast. But she doesn't make it. Angelo's thugs catch her and drag her back, threatening to pour acid all over her face, to make Farrell recant his witness testimony. Farrell buys time with his silver-tongued eloquence and, at the last minute, the authorities arrive for a big shoot-out that results in the death of all the gangsters. (In the shoot-out, the thug who forced himself on Vicki in the early scenes in the movie is lured into the searchlit window and blasted by machine gun fire -- he dies in a cascade of glass. Angelo tries to hurl the bottle of acid at Vicki but forgets that the lid has been removed, pouring the stuff into his own eyes. It's all garish and brilliantly shot violence.) The lawyer and the show-girl walk away from the massacre, disappearing into the jungle of the big city.
The plot is borderline absurd but it's filled with tremendous set-pieces: Angelo beats another thug half to death at a testimonial dinner for mobsters in the South Side Club. Throughout the film, Lee J. Cobb is very frightening as the tightly coiled, obsessive gangster. In the opening party scene, he plugs a picture of Jean Harlow with five shots from his .45. A thug threatening Vicki invades her dressing room and burns his hand on one of the lights surrounding her mirror. When Tommy Farrell's former wife shows up -- a pointless scene that just interrupts the movie -- Ray stages the shot with two brightly lit mirrors duplicating all the action: the point is that the two women are both the same and different. It's a startling sequence shot in a way that prefigures some of Fassbinder's more baroque compositions. At the very beginning of the movie, Vicki's roommate, a showgirl is derided as chubby; she declines to attend the party with the mobsters because she is waiting for her married boyfriend's call -- the man has promised to divorce his wife. When Vicki comes home from the party with Tommy in tow, she goes in the bathroom and finds her roommate dead in the bathtub. The suicide has filled the tub with brown-red blood that has lapped over the floor. We see this only for an instant, but the shot provides the color-key to the whole movie -- as the film proceeds, Ray uses scarlet and burgundy to point out details in the cinemascope image and we are always calibrating those colors against the soupy brown-red of blood in the tub. Each red alludes to the showgirl's suicide and, further, suggests the perilous situation in which Vicki Grey finds herself -- Tommy Farrell is also married and has a wife who won't grant him a divorce. (Ray gets red into even monochrome outdoor shots on city streets -- there is always someone selling bright red apples somewhere in the wide-screen image.) Scenes in which Angelo threatens Tommy are remarkable for their décor -- we see swags of curtain as if from a 18th century grand portrait, satin curtains: the gangster sits on a weird throne-like chair that seems inlaid with red velvet figures. The throne has box-like edges that enclose the gangster and is as memorable a piece of furniture as anything in film history -- the only comparable image that I can recall is the red billiard table in Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut. Several shots feature a large astrolabe, an item that seems to have migrated into the picture from a stage production of Brecht's Galileo -- I have no idea what it's doing at The Golden Rooster but there it is. When Vicki is brought into the gangster's hideout at the South Side Club, her face is bizarrely bandaged -- it's as if she's already been mutilated by acid. All of these little details, and there are dozens more, combine to create a film that is intensely interesting, even when your mind wanders a little during the vagaries of the plot. There are also three impressive dance numbers exploiting Cyd Charisse's expressive legs and buttocks -- she has small breasts but these are also on display throughout the movie as well. Somehow the MGM costuming department manages to dress her in yards and yards of red silk while she seems to be, more or less, naked. I didn't like this movie twenty years ago when I saw it in a pan-and-scan version -- you need the full image to appreciate Ray's ingenuity in filling the screen with interesting things to see.
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