OCTOBER 2004
Safe
Sideways
Moolaadé
Undertow
Vera Drake
The Anatomy of Hell
I Heart Huckabees
The Brown Bunny
Shanghai Gesture
Uncovered
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
Modigliani
I Married a Watch
It Happened Tomorrow
And Then There Were None
The Woman on the Beach
While the City Sleeps

Safe (1995)—10/30/04
I caught up with this Tod Haynes film after nearly a decade, and liked it: a woman made ill by a toxic environment, or perhaps by an empty, superficial life, or perhaps by new age charlatans, or perhaps by her own anxieties and ignorance. Or maybe it’s all of them. What looks like it’s going to be a standard suburban “homemaker,” as she calls herself, seeing the vapidity of her existence becomes much more interesting and complex as things go along. Very satisfying.
I would probably think of this film as another in Julianne Moore’s growing collection of suburban housewife turns (The Hours and Far from Heaven [both 2002], the latter also from Haynes) if personal coincidence did not prompt me to classify it as another Steve Gilborn doctor turn. Steve was a graduate student in drama at Stanford and we were fellow students in the graduate humanities program, a two-year run of seminars that earned one a dual Ph.D. We were reasonably good friends, and after getting our degrees he went off to MIT to teach humanities while I started my academic career at Reed. I ran into him in Paris, 1969, and again in New York in 1978 (the last occasion on which I saw him in three dimensions), by which time he had “turned pro”—leaving the academy to try to make a living in acting. He went from regional theater and commercials into television and film, and casting agents have apparently decided that he makes a convincing physician. His first role in that guise, if IMDb has it right, is as a medical examiner on “Columbo,” and by my count there have been eight shots as doctors, including Dr. Hubbard in Safe, Dr. Blake in Nurse Betty (2000), and an unnamed doctor in Coastlines. It’s gotten to the point where, if I ran into him on the street, I probably wouldn’t recognize him unless he were wearing a white coat. Good luck, Steve.

Sideways (2004)—10/30/04
I don’t know whether Alexander Payne is a particularly good director—I was lukewarm about Citizen Ruth (1996) and Election (1999) and avoided About Schmidt (2002) because I loved Louis Begley’s novel and could not abide the drastic changes in setting and character. Sideways is perfectly agreeable, however, and does show that Payne has his knack for character development: the Laura Dern, Matthew Broderick, and (I’m told) Jack Nicholson characters were all first-rate. Here, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church make a slight and slightly too familiar story worth your time.
It’s a buddy movie with a road movie angle: two guys, one about to get married, on a grande bouffe week in California wine country before the ceremony. If the buddies don’t click in a buddy movie, it’s cooked; here, they’re terrific together as a pair of guys who need to distract attention (principally their own) from their decline. Giamatti’s schnuck, a failed-novelist junior high school teacher whose wife dumped him, hides behind the jargon of an oenophile. Church’s stud, a former tv actor now in voice-overs and fading, disguises career anxiety behind a rampant libido. It works, and in part because Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh have characters who are much more than convenient bedmates.
Church’s character is, shall we say, uncomfortably close to his own resumé, which is mostly in small-bore tv work. Giamatti, a graduate of Yale Drama School (and the son of Bart Giamatti, the former president of Yale who went on to be president of the American League and, briefly, commissioner of baseball), has been getting parts steadily for more than twenty years. Only with last year’s American Splendor did he demonstrate, perhaps to the surprise of many, that he could carry a film, although he got a tremendous lift from Hope Davis. Here, he has closed the debate decisively. Is there anyone else around who could have delivered this line so convincingly: “I am not drinking merlot tonight, I am not drinking fucking merlot.”

Moolaadé (2004)—10/28/04
The great Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene is now in his ninth decade, but if his latest film, and first in four years, is any indication, he hasn’t lost a step. This staggeringly well-made story of a contemporary Burkina Faso village and the civil war that erupts in it over the issue of female genital mutilation says so much, and says it so fluidly and economically, that I had no idea—until I sat down to write these words—just how jammed with information, color, character, and themes the film had been.
It begins with four young girls (aged something like five to ten) who are in flight from the village’s semi-official order of women (known as les exciseuses) who perform female circumcisions. The girls have no idea of what cultural and political stakes are invested in the practice; they simply, passionately, do not want to be “cut.” They’re afraid. They go to Collé, the middle wife of farmer, who has refused to let her own daughter be subject to excision some years earlier, and Collé provides them with moolaadé, or ritual protection, which can only be lifted if her husband orders her to speak the word ending it, an order she cannot refuse. The entire story unwinds from this situation . . . but not quite.
Because while fear and fundamental decency have motivated the girls and Collé, we also see two other elements at work, subtly altering village attitudes. The outside world enters through the portable radio, of which most families own one, and the life’s blood of the radio is the batteries sold by the merchant who comes to the village with his cart. The radio brings music, distraction, and entertainment to the very hard-working women of a family, and connects them with the outside world—Islamic radio preachers, for instance, and news broadcasts.
Then there is the village chieftain’s son, who has a job in Paris, and who is returning with money, which he dispenses to people, western gadgets, and most of all contemporary thinking—such as, he, and not his father, is going to decide whom he will marry.
If I were to try to describe how the basic story premise and these two elements work together for most of the film, I would leave out so much detail and subtle commentary that it would disfigure this gorgeous work of art. Best to say that it builds to a gigantic confrontation, vaguely reminiscent of “Lysistrata,” in which most of the women—now converted to an anti-mutilation position after a supremely heroic act by Collé and by a terrible tragedy—face off against the men, who insist, mistakenly, that female circumcision is mandated by the Koran. The entire face-off revolves in the village square around a pile of all the village’s portable radios, confiscated from the wives and set fire by the men, but still tuned to a dozen different stations.
Sembene has been almost the only cinematic voice with which black Africans have spoken to the west in the last forty years. How fortunate for them, and for us, that it such an eloquent one.

Undertow (2004)--10/27/04
This little piece of swamp gothic has elicited yelps of delight from a number of critics; I proved immune to its charms. The widower John and his sons, Tim, who is ten, and Chris, who is about fifteen, live in something of shack, raising hogs and such. That’s about it for quite a while until John’s brother Deel shows up. He’s been a guest of the state for some years, and there’s been bad blood between the brothers for years. You know Deel is trouble from the redneck swagger that Josh Lucas equips him with, and the real trouble has to do—I’m sorry, this gets rather embarrassing—with some “Messican gold coins” that their father passed on to them, but Deel, being in the jug, hasn’t been able to enjoy. Well, there’s violence, and more, and then a long, long chase with Deel in pursuit of the two boys and the coins. The end is never in doubt, of course, because it’s tipped in the very first scene with v/o by the other grandfather.
We are told that the story originated with none other than Terrence Malick, although the final version was done by David Gordon Green (who directed) and Joe Conway. If theirs is an improvement, I can’t imagine what earlier drafts looked like. Moreover, Green can’t stop fiddling with the film, sticking in freeze frames, stutters, slow motion, and every other imaginable distracting device. He also tries to cover the threadbare spots in the story with local color and atmosphere; no soap. They’re just tedious dead spots with monologues from the ten-year old about chiggers. And such.

Vera Drake (2004)—10/26/04
Andrew, the very smart guy over at filmbrain, surprised me in his closing sketch of the New York Film Festival by saying that Vera Drake was disappointing and asking, Has Mike Leigh gone soft? Hard to credit from the man who made Naked (1993), Secrets and Lies (1996), and Topsy Turvy (1999). But Andrew may be on to something. The film, set in 1950 London, when the necessities of life weren’t much more available than during the war, follows the Drake family—a closely-knit bunch of four—along their various paths. Stan is an automobile mechanic, in business with his brother; his wife Vera, like him perhaps just on the sunny side of fifty, is a domestic; Ethel is the homely and painfully shy daughter in her twenties; her brother Sid a happy, upbeat salesman of gentlemen’s clothes, like his sister living at home.
Vera is a cheery, providing mother and friend, neighbor, and all-around helpmate. This side of her extends to giving abortions to young women in trouble, to whom she is steered by an unpleasant acquaintance; Vera takes no money for the services, which she sees as what any decent person would do. Her family knows nothing about this avocation, which inevitably catches up with her, and a strong, fundamentally happy family is destroyed. There ought to have been more a feeling of inexorable fate grinding down the Drakes, but somehow Leigh manages to let it all seem rather commonplace: you do wrong, however well-intentioned you have been, you pay the price. Has Vera never seen that she might be discovered? That she is breaking the law and might have to face the consequences? The film recognizes that there is a certain amount of social hypocrisy involved: the daughter of one of Vera’s employers is more or less raped, gets pregnant, but has the money to go to a psychiatrist and then a doctor who “arrange” things for her. But Vera doesn’t apply a means test to her girls, never sees herself as affording them advantages their economic situation denies them. Nor does she ever evince any doubts about what she was doing. How is that possible? There is every reason to see her as a person of rather commonplace moral values, not a crusading reformer or militant feminist. Could she really have performed abortions without hesitation or afterthought? In a working-class London neighborhood in 1950? We are meant to feel sorry for Vera as her fate unwinds (rather long-windedly, I thought), but it’s hard to do more than shake your head about someone so little introspective as never to ask, Am I quite sure about this? It's too much to swallow.
For all that his own script betrays him, Leigh is—as usual—superbly well served by his cast. Beyond Imelda Staunton in the title role, I would call attention to Phil Davis as her husband, Alex Kelly as Ethel—as fine a job of acting almost solely by facial expression as you’re going to see—and Eddie Marsan as Reg, her boyfriend.

The Anatomy of Hell (2004)—10/25/04
My Catherine Breillat education began, and threatened to end, with this little film. The lady has developed a reputation for being something of a pioneer in erotic cinema, although I found nothing erotic in her most recent effort. It’s the story of a woman who goes to a gay bar, picks up a gay guy, and then teaches him about women. After the pickup, there are four episodes, and an ambiguous ending that may or may not have “really happened.”
Anyone who visits this site with even random drop-bys must know that I am unstinting in my admiration for the French, but on the flip side of their enormously practical and worldly orientation is a passion for abstraction and arid intellectuality, something I attribute to the style of education in their better lycées: too much Descartes, not enough Voltaire. Breillat mixes in some feminist verbiage with the gay’s rather too poetically formulated ideology of woman-hating, and it’s snooze time before they unfold very far. Add to this that the guy is played by Rocco Siffredi, an Italian who I am informed is a major star in American porn flicks, with such credits to his portfolio as Rocco’s Best Buttfucks and Captain Organ. He speaks execrable French, and his acting talent is just about what you would expect from someone in his line of work. Imagine Ron Jeremy playing Lear.

I Heart Huckabees (2004)—10/24/04
For all I know, David O. Russell is a meticulous director who storyboards every arched eyebrow and vocal inflection. But it is one of the more agreeable traits of his newest film that it has the feel of an undertaking where he gathered the cast together, tossed the script on the table, and said, “What do you want to do with this?” It’s a loosey-goosey, throw-it-against-the-barn-door-and-see-if-it-sticks-and-if-it-doesn’t-to-hell-with-it sort of movie. The script has one interesting concept: an existential detective agency, and Russell gets far more laughs out of it that you might imagine, in large part because old pros Lily Tomlin and (especially) Dustin Hoffman are running the agency. Yet a lot of the fun comes from watching people we don’t ordinarily associate with comedy being funny: Jude Law, Mark Wahlberg, and the divine Isabelle Huppert.

New York
Hero (2004)—10/23/04
It was often remarked of the Tarantino Kill Bill films that the big fight scenes, and especially that dandy with the Crazy Eighty-Eights in the restaurant, were essentially dance numbers, choreographed rather than directed. Hero is an action film, which is structured like an entire musical, one production number after another after another. Here, the production numbers are fight scenes, which—since the huge influence of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—are really special effects moments, people flying about and doing physically impossible things. All is beautifully photographed and the art design is breathtaking. But the result is a lot more of the same, even with the dash of Rashomon, and I thought it got pretty tedious. I take a back seat to nobody in my admiration of the great Chinese actor Tony Leung, but he couldn’t do much to relieve the tedium of all this fakery. The really bright spot in the cast was Daoming Chen as the King of Qin, a man with Shakespearean dimensions, a Macbeth of early medieval China.

Paris
The Brown Bunny (2003)—10/18/04
What are we to make of Vincent Gallo? There’s more to him than an ego on a rampage (though there’s that); the man has some talent, even though he has not submitted it to discipline, and neither of his feature-length films can be dismissed. Buffalo 66 (1998) was manic, touching, out of control, on the money, and infuriating from one minute to the next. On balance, I liked it. The new one has been dragging the baggage of Gallo’s feud with Roger Ebert after the critic eviscerated the print shown at Cannes last year. (They’ve since made up.) Interestingly, for all his reputation of thinking the average film critic couldn’t find his (or her) ass with both hands if it were on fire, in response Gallo cut one-fourth of that version; what we have now is about ninety minutes, and certainly the better for that, although there are lots of longueurs and needlessly distended moments. The Brown Bunny is also toting the notorietyof non-simulated fellation with Chloë Sevigny at the controls. (This is by no means the breakthrough widely touted. The first one, which actually proceeded bluntly to climax, was in Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses [1976]). In my view, oral sex is overrated as a spectator sport, but just to make sure Gallo actually wrenches any possible element of lasciviousness and titillation right out of the scene by filling it with anger and cruelty.
Beneath all this is a decent pass at a road movie. Gallo is Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer who—after losing a race in the northeast—drives across country to a race in LA, where he also once lived with a girl named Daisy. He gases up his van with the cycle inside, then persuades a girl named Violet at the cash register (Alice Vernesci) to come with him, though he is a perfect stranger. He’s so pathetically needy and suffering that she agrees, so he drives her to her house where she can pack a few things, and when she goes inside, he drives off. It’s a Vinny Gallo moment: predictable because we see how empty Bud is, and know this girl can’t begin to fill him up. His desperation is beyond treatment, and he knows it. Even so, the moment works.
But then he does it again—stops the van at a rest stop where a middle-aged woman sits alone at an outdoor table with a cup of coffee and cigarettes. Bud sits down with her, sees that she’s obviously suffering, and they start kissing. Then the woman, Lilly, sees that Bud’s equally in pain, and tries to comfort him, but she’s helpless. To this point, the scene is beautifully played, and the expressiveness on the face of Cheryl Tiegs (fifty-six when the film was made) is affecting. Gallo shows her the greatest respect by not hiding the manifold signs of her aging, but lets her show how beautiful she’s managed it all. Then he torpedoes the scene by walking away. Once got the message across; twice was unnecessary. There follows a third time, with a Vegas hooker named Rose (Elizabeth Blake), in case anyone had dozed off earlier.
There are certainly dozeable moments—lots of long, long passages on the road with sunsets over the vast flatness of the midwest, lots more shot through a windshield that doesn’t seem to get cleaned once between the east coast and the west coast, lots and lots and lots of shots of Bud at the wheel, Bud gasing the van, Bud holding his hand out the window. A few of these moments are effective; the loneliness of the journey has some strong visual impact. But again it’s too much, so that when interest could have been sustained in what’s at the root of Bud’s suffering, Gallo—who is on the screen in almost every shot and often on it alone—lets it slip away.
We get at the mystery in the last half hour, when Sevigny, as Daisy, appears. There’s a twist, and then another, which I won’t go into, except to say that it all feels a little rushed after the languorous road scenes, and while it works on paper, it doesn’t have quite the impact I suspect Gallo was seeking. We do get the sense that he is saying: at the end of the road, there may be nothing there.
The Brown Bunny stars Gallo, who also wrote, produced, directed, and edited it and acted as Director of Photography and one of three cameramen. This kind of one-man band is fine when the man in question has good judgment born of long experience and a sense of proportion. John Sayles comes to mind. I get the impression Gallo doesn’t want anyone looking over his shoulder, but it might not be a bad idea. Of course, if he’s not calling all the shots, he might not get to make out with Cheryl Tiegs and get blown by Chloë Sevigny.

Paris
Shanghai Gesture (1941?)—10/16/04
The interrogative above is because, while IMDb gives that as the release date, the film itself carries a dates of 1936 and (“copyright renewed”) 1939. I’d say the latter date. It’s a rare Josef von Sternberg that does not star Marlene Dietrich, the woman he turned into an icon with astounding lighting and adoring camera angles. He tries to do the same here with Gene Tierney, but as gorgeous as Tierney was, she had none of Dietrich’s character. Even so, the film is great fun.
It’s Shanghai in late 1930-something. In the opening street scene (shot, of course, on Hollywood sets), the ever-present von Sternberg fog machine is going full blast to get interesting shadows, lighting effects, mystery, danger. And what about those two guys coming through the crowd in the ricksha, the Chinese and the Arab? They look—wait! It’s Clyde Fillmore and Victor Mature (in a fez, perhaps his finest moment). Along comes a wisecracking blonde from Brooklyn. Hold on, the ride is just beginning.
There’s really no summarizing the movie. It’s centered around a big casino run by one Mother Gin Sling, and the shots of that several-tiered site, usually from above, are amazing: it’s an opera house, set up for great tragedy; it’s an arena for life and death struggles; it’s the descending circles of Dante’s hell; it’s whatever you want it to be by virtue of von Sternberg’s suggestive visual style and fluid camera. People at the very lowest level are playing roulette, most of them unable to stop. (The roulette croupier is Marcel Dalio, a role he was about to reprise in Casablanca.) People wander in and out. There is some sort of threat to Mother Gin Sling’s empire. She may or may not prevail. The threat emanates from a real estate baron played by Walter Huston to whom Mother has some previous connection, as yet unrecognized by anyone else. Throughout these goings on, there are lots of minor characters to keep things lively—Eric Blore, for example, Albert Basserman (who played the last hope of peace in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent [1940]), and even Mike Mazurki (who was Hungarian) as a ricksha driver.
It all becomes (without going into any more details) far darker than you would expect from a Hollywood film of this period. It looks to have been a Tierney vehicle, but nobody every accused Tierney of being able to act, and the film was taken over by Una Munson, who plays Mother Gin Sling. If you have a chance, don’t miss her.
One thought: for decades, we’ve been treated, and rightly so, to analysis by film historians of the terrible racism leveled against African-Americans in the US film industry over the years, especially before World War II. All true, but there is also truly dreadful and abundant evidence of the treatment of Asians by the same industry (see the Charlie Chan series). In this film, there are three Chinese characters with speaking parts more than a grunt or a nod, and they are all played by westerners in low-rent makeup. It’s both embarrassing and infuriating.

Paris
Uncovered: The War in Iraq (2004)—10/16/04
Robert Greenwald followed up his Outfoxed, a documentary on our unbalanced friends at Fox News, a film I have not yet seen, with this documentary on the war. It is completely absorbing, a careful, rigorous piece of work which gets all the main characters on record about WMDs in Iraq, time after time after time, then brings on something like two dozen long-time veterans of CIA, DoD, DoE, and DoS intelligence, along with some people from the weapons inspection teams, to refute them chapter and verse, effectively closing the door behind W, the Cheyn-saw, Condi, Rumi, and Powell when they try to back out. The most devastating case is made against Powell, whose vaunted integrity is reduced to shreds. All this is done more or less quietly, with no showing off.
Unfortunately for Greenwald and his financing people, a little number called Farenheit 9/11 beat him to the punch. I’ve lost track of how many millions Moore’s film (which I admired, but which has none of the tightness of argument and evidentiary support of Greenwald’s) has made by now. But IMDb says that Uncovered made just over $31,000 in the US on seven screens (in NYC, SF, and LA) during a few days in August. It deserves much, much better.

Paris
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)--10/14/04
John Cassavetes was famously driven to go his own way in the making of films, and films are the better for it (mostly). He strove for emotional truth and found the only way he could achieve it, again mostly, was by blunt and sometimes brutal confrontation. Film audiences, especially in America, are not known to be hungry for this sort of thing, but Cassavetes, rather heroically, in my opinion, found his people and hewed to his mission.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is these days sold as film noir, and there’s some of the genre’s veneer on it (including one long scene in an automobile that so dark you can’t see a goddamned thing). But it’s really about self-deception, something so common in us all that it’s not easy seeing it played out. Cassavetes makes it slightly easier for us to observe by making his main character something of a sleazewad, the owner of a strip club in Los Angeles. But we all delude ourselves (I’m doing everything I can, it isn’t my fault, I’ve got things under control, and the ever-popular I’m not going to die), on a reasonably regular basis, as far as I can tell, and it isn’t long before we see enough of Cosmo in ourselves to make the theater seat extremely uncomfortable. His club is successful, and at the opening he pays off a loan shark who set him up in business at a swinging interest rate, a task that has taken him seven years. He’s on top of the world, and he takes three of his young dancers (respectively, gulp, blink, and oooh) with him on an offshore gambling boat, where he loses more than he was carrying. The top of the world suddenly starts to look like the bottom when we meet these guys, but Cosmo is still in control, right?
All of this is structured in a way to create an objectification of self-delusion in the story that Cosmo himself should have learned from. At his club, there is a chunky, dumpy middle-aged “entertainer” who sings (a capella and dreadfully) while the girls strip around him. His professional name is Mr. Sophistication, and he is what used be called when I went to college an objective correlative: he thinks he’s the star of Cosmo’s stage shows, when he’s a pathetic freak people come to laugh at while they’re ogling the girls. But to Cosmo, he’s the centerpiece, just as the flimsy, twelfth-rate acts Cosmo considers his productions, which he’s “created” and “directed.” When you’re kidding yourself and you don’t want to look closely at it, you don’t look closely at others who are doing the same.
Eventually, of course, the bad guys tell Cosmo what he already knows—that he doesn’t have the cash to pay off his five-figure debt. But he can erase it if he’ll polish a Chinese gangster who’s in their hair. The title of the film tells you that the target dies. I’ll leave it to you to watch all the complication thereunto attending.
The film is (like most Cassavetes films) beautifully played, in a semi-improvisatory style where—at least when it comes to dialogue—more is better. Like most people, Cassavetes’s characters don’t know when to shut up. Ben Gazzara, a Cassavetes regular, is a wonderful Cosmo, cocky, nowhere near achieving the degree of mastery he thinks (and he reveals little hints that reality is getting through, then suppresses them), his vulnerability constantly struggling with his need to deny. The chorines are mostly decorative, although Alice Freedlund as Sherry gives it a little more. Best are the thugs, led by Morgan Woodward, who certainly scared the hell out of me; Seymour Cassel, another Cassavetes stock-company performer; and Timothy Carey. You might remember him from twenty years earlier as one of the three soldiers condemned to be shot for high command blunders in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (195 ).
The print I saw was badly scratched. Moreover, I’m not quite sure what I saw. The original cut was 135 minutes; the US release was 108 minutes; theversion I saw, perhaps the European release, was 114 minutes. Your best bet is to buy or rent the five-filmCassavetes package (including Killing)just put out by Criterion.

Paris
Modigliani (2004)—10/10/04
It wasn’t that this biopic set in the Paris art world of 1919-20 suffered from the same defects as almost every biopic ever made—the compulsive name-dropping (“Cocteau, old man, come over for a drink, everyone’s here, Pablo, Gertrude, everyone”), the anachronisms (an Italian state official announces himself in the name of the “Repubblica Italiana” in the early 1890s, when Italy was a monarchy), the wild distortions and inventions that anyone with a fifth-grade education could pick out. It wasn’t that the international cast couldn’t decide what English with a French accent, to stand in for people speaking French in an English-language film, ought to sound like, so we got at least ten different versions. It wasn’t that Modigliani and Jeanne amble down an empty Paris (actually, a set in Bucharest) street in 1919 late one night, tipsy and in love, then dance to the strains of . . . Edith Piaf (born 1915) singing “La Vie en Rose” (written 1942). It wasn’t even that the damned thing refused to stop—not only was it a long, long (nearly) two hours, it had something like five natural climaxes, one after the other after . . . no, it wasn’t even that.
It was the shabby, stupid, manipulative sentimentality that pervaded the entire enterprise, the mendacity of director Mick Davis in his second feature, which he also “wrote.” (The word is a stretch for lines like “I cannot escape destiny” and that sort of garbage.) Most of the plot is sheer invention, centering around a Modigliani rivalry with Picasso, the premise that Modigliani would not show his work, without which the plot simply collapses, and resisted selling it. In fact, Modigliani had a number of shows in studios and galleries. The film is at least correct in that it shows him to have been a self-destructive drunk and drug addict, but asks for us to bear with him, redemption is just around the corner—we can count on this, almost, because the gorgeous Elsa Zylberstein plays his lover, Jeanne Hébuterne, and women who look like her generally get a bad dude on the right track. The redemption will come when Modi finally agrees to enter a competition (which never happened) which includes Picasso, and others, and Picasso and Modi both paint paintings they never painted, and Jeanne takes home the 5,000 francs, but Modi never sees it, because he decides to get plastered while the competition is being judged, tries to run out on his bill, gets beat up, and dies.
The whole enterprise, with the exception of one or two facts, is as false as all the Modiglianis and Picasso fakes we are shown, and indeed everyone in the every audience dumb enough (like me) to spend a little money to see it will know they are fakes, because the insurance on using the real thing—for which permission couldn’t be obtained in any case—would be prohibitive. So we know we’re looking at phonies, which encourages our suspicion that the whole undertaking is phoney.
No member of the cast is especially interesting, though they do suggest that casting was done by someone associated with the United Nations. Zylberstein is French, Amid Djabili (Picasso) is British of Iranian heritage, Eva Herzigova (Olga Picasso) is Czech, and Andy Garcia (Modigliani) was born in Cuba. Garcia here is as wrong as they get, wrong for the part, wrong trying to bring it off. He’s a respectable ensemble actor—see The Untouchables (1987) and especially Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995)—but a lousy lead. To make things worse, he’s put on a fair amount of flab (Modigliani was lean), looks a lot older (Modi was thirty-five when he died, Andy’s forty-eight), and does a sitcom version of an Italian—with the hands, enough already. It’s also a considerably physical role, lots of jumping about on tables, dancing, prancing, that sort of thing, which Garcia would be well advised to avoid in the future. Chris Walken can do this kind of stuff; Andy Garcia should stick to snarling hoods. Finally, the part is written for Modi to be a charmer, and Garcia works hard at the charm, which is the problem—he’s working, and it should come naturally.
Amedeo Modigliani was a talented painter (and sculptor) who did some portraits and nudes of great beauty. But he was a lush who drank away his talent and essentially destroyed the life of the baby he created with Jeanne, Giovanna Modigliani, as well as the baby Jeanne was carrying when she committed suicide a day after his death. I find it hard to root for him and consider his death sad, but a self-inflicted tragedy. Too bad Davis didn’t have the guts to make that film. You’ve been warned.

Paris
I Married a Witch (1942)
It Happened Tomorrow (1944)
And Then There Were None (1945)—10/04
If Jean Renoir never quite found his groove in the US, René Clair got in it at once and stayed there for ten years before returning to France. Clair had already demonstrated his great gift for comedy, beginning with The Italian Straw Hat (1927, silent), Under the Rooftops of Paris (1930), Le Million, and A Nous la liberté (both 1931). His first American film, The Ghost Goes West (1935) was a lovely little comedy about a Scottish family, and ghost, in the American west, with Robert Donat and Elsa Lanchester backed up by the incomparable Eugene Pallette, he of the cement-mixer voice. After a quickie in England, Clair came back to do The Flame of New Orleans (1941) with La Dietrich, a film I hope to catch up with in the next couple of weeks. But then came three beauties, all being shown as part of a Clair festival in the Latin Quarter.
I Married a Witch is a frothy little romantic fantasy I’ve loved for many years. Frederic March marries a woman (Veronica Lake) who is the descendant of Salem witches, and, with her father, Cecil Kellaway, they end up fulfilling March’s ambition to be governor of Massachusetts by casting a spell on the entire state. As March’s best pal, Robert Benchley, puts it, shaking his head at a vote of several hundred thousand to zero for the other guy, “He didn’t even vote for himself.” (Benchley was one of the few guys who could keep a simple line like that really simple, and get huge roars from the audience.) March finally convinces Lake that they can’t use these powers any more, it’s not . . . well, right, somehow, but that involves getting papa Kellaway under lock and key, or more precisely in a bottle with a firm stopper. Fabulous fun.
It Happened Tomorrow is, to borrow a term from Shakespearean criticism, something of a problem comedy. The laughs are not so much at things you could call funny as improbable, though with a logic of their own. It’s set in mid-nineteenth century America, during the Civil War. Dick Powell is a reporter who wants to get to tomorrow’s news before it occurs; John Philliber is a strange old guy who actually delivers him tomorrow’s paper, but with the advice that he shouldn’t use it. Powell does, of course, to make some safe bets on the races and so forth, until one day he comes across a piece about himself he doesn’t want to see. Neat, tight, solid.
And Then There Were None is taken from an Agatha Christie novel, Ten Little Niggers (released in this country as Ten Little Indians). Ten people, unknown to one another, are invited by an unknown host to an island off the English coast. There are hints that these are people not without shadows on their past. One by one, they start dying off—and not by natural causes. It becomes clear that one of them is dispatching all the rest, and the issue becomes not only who, but why? There’s plenty of dark humor along the way, and some grand character actors fill the playbill: Walter Huston, Barry Fitzgerald, Mischa Auer, Judith Anderson, C. Aubrey Smith, Richard Haydn. June Duprez and Louis Hayward are the romantic leads; for years, Hayward was the guy you went to when you couldn’t get Errol Flynn for a swordfighting movie—Captain Pirate, The Fortunes of Captain Blood, The Return of Monte Cristo, The Lady in the Iron Mask, The Black Arrow. You get the idea.
Clair worked on the scripts of most of his films, and he was gifted with a consummate sense of pace and timing. He knew when to hit the jets, when to slow things down and let you catch your breath. He seemed to understand the American sense of humor, and the comic possibilities of the language, almost from the moment he arrived. All of the Clair films mentioned here are available on video, and most on DVD. Not a bad way to spend a weekend.

Paris
The Woman on the Beach (1947)—10/4/04
As the Nazis scared Fritz Lang out of Germany (see journal entry immediately below), they scared Jean Renoir out of France when they invaded, conquered, and occupied. Renoir came to the states and made some films: an anti-Nazi This Land is Mine (1943), The Southerner (1945), Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), then went to India for The River (1951). He returned to make a number of films in France, but lived and died in Southern California. Renoir’s legendary status as a director is built largely on films he made in the 1930s, and for the most part they are stunning. La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939) I regard as one of the three or four best films ever made, a work that is nothing less than perfect. But when he moved to America, his films slipped several notches. Certainly working in a different language was a problem; he was fluent in English but it’s just not the same as operating in the native tongue. The cultural differences may have caused him problems, though he was sensitive to regional differences—The Southerner, about rural poverty, is perhaps his best American effort.
The Woman on the Beach is not a work by which I wish to remember him. It’s a very fuzzy melodrama: a Coast Guard officer who was torpedoed and suffers from recurring nightmares of drowning; a blind former painter; the painter’s wife, a self-described “tramp.” The lieutenant seems to be going crazy, and keeps saying that he needs to “know himself.” He has a nice, conventional girl friend, but the painter’s wife is irresistible. But the painter is possessive and wildly jealous, and may have to be eliminated if the affair is to go forward. There’s material here for something dark and twisty, I suppose, but Renoir loses the handle on it. He never quite decides what the lieutenant’s problem is, so all the guy’s raving introspection seems pointless. Does the painter’s wife love him or hate him? Does she stay with him out of passion, wifely loyalty, or guilt? Scenes open bumpily, never appearing to go anywhere, then sputter out.
The one bright spot in all this is the painter, taken on by Charles Bickford, a splendid character actor who seems to have been born in late middle age. His voice is a great instrument, and he plays it effortlessly. Robert Ryan is the Coast Guard officer. In a career largely devoted to playing heavies—and playing them superbly—he finds himself at sea (sorry) with a semi-crazy who’s really a nice guy underneath it all. Joan Bennett is the wife, and while she has her moments, the role is written in such a contradictory, obscure way that she never puts any clear conviction into the character—probably because she has no idea who this woman is and what she’s doing.

Paris
While the City Sleeps (1956)—10/3/04
Fritz Lang was forty-two years old and Germany’s preeminent filmmaker in 1933 when Josef Goebbels invited him to the propaganda ministry for a little talk. It transpired that Goebbels’s boss thought Metropolis (1925) was the greatest film ever made, and the idea was to put him to work making films for Hitler’s new regime. It was no secret that Lang’s mother was Jewish, but apparently the Nazis were willing to overlook that and make him an honorary Aryan. As Lang told the story, he could look out the windows of Goebbels’s office and see the clock on the exterior wall of a nearby office building. It was a few minutes to noon on a Saturday. He had only minutes to get to the bank. He thanked Goebbels politely, said he would like to discuss the generous offer with his wife, left, and went to his bank, drawing out all his assets. He then phoned his wife and told her to pack. They left almost immediately, going first to France, where Lang directed one film, and then to the US, where he directed twenty-five before returning to Germany for two late efforts. Poor eyesight forced him to stop working, and he died in 1976.
I was in my final months of teaching at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 1970. My colleague and friend Gene Lunn, also an historian of modern Europe with a heavy film addiction, had agreed to join me in a summer school course for Master of Arts in Teaching candidates. But since neither of us had ever taught a film course before, the program wouldn’t authorize us unless we could get a pro to join us. We rustled up Andries Deinum, who taught film and ran something called The Center for the Moving Image at Portland State University.
Andries was born in the Netherlands in 1921 (I believe), went to the UK during the war, where he worked with the OSS, then came to the US—southern California, to be specific. He had worked on documentary films as a very young man, and wanted to get into the US industry. As he told it, “I was walking down Sunset Boulevard one day not long after I arrived, and there, standing on the sidewalk talking to someone, was Fritz Lang. It was like being a young composer in Berlin and suddenly seeing Brahms. I was thunderstruck.” Andries worked for Lang as a personal assistant, and also for John Ford, before getting a teaching job as the University of Southern California in 1950. Things went swimmingly for a while, but Hollywood was of course a major target of the red-baiters running the blacklist, and after a few years Andries—always on the left, and a member of the Communist Party in 1946-50—found himself before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee of cherished memory. They asked him to name names; he politely suggested they blow it out their collective elbow. USC, great guardian of our personal freedoms that it was in those days, fired him the next day. But Andries was a fighter, and he continued to speak out for what he believed in—social activism, freedom of expression and association, the left in general. He served as a sort of research director for the Hollywood Ten before making his way north to Portland.
The Oregon of these days is known as a sort of quirky haven for the unconventional—assisted suicide and that sort of thing. In the early ‘60s, it was run by right-wing yahoos and a nebbish of a mayor named Terry Schrunk. (I had to sign a loyalty oath to teach at Reed, a private institution, in 1963.) Schrunk’s police closed down a theater showing Louis Malle’s The Lovers, there was a protest at city hall, and Andries went toe-to-toe with Hizzoner. To its everlasting credit, Portland State hired him not long thereafter. Andries thought his years in the party were a youthful mistake, but he was never apologetic about it. Communist influence in the movies? “One night, we held a big party because some of us working on a movie had been asked to create a little business for a brief shot of several men going up in an elevator. I gave one of the guys two bars of a tune to whistle. It was ‘The Internationale.’ We partied all night.” He realized he probably wasn’t going to get any directing jobs when, on one set, Lang told him he was going to get his big moment. Andries smoked a pipe in those days, and Lang wanted him to take several big puffs off camera and then blow the smoke into the frame, for atmosphere. After that, teaching started looking pretty good.
Lang had turned out some tight little films when he first came to the US: Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), and later followed with several minor-key beauties, Hangmen Also Die (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944), The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street (both 1945). Rancho Notorious (1952) has its fans and The Big Heat (1953) is always cited as top-drawer noir. By 1956, though, the well was running dry, and While the City Sleeps was not served well by its script, which tries to do far too much and ends up doing almost nothing. It’s a story about a struggle for control of a media empire in New York, and that’s interwoven with a love story, and they’re both tangled up with a serial killer (although they didn’t call them that in 1956). The treatment of the killer is especially dreadful; he’s played by John Barrymore Jr., who seems to have taken his inspiration from the potheads in those marijuana movies made during the ‘30s. It works best as a collection of “moments,” of glances and gestures and jokes and double-entendres (Lang works a surprising amount of sex into the conversations) and amusing reversals, and as a commentary on a phenomenon Lang thought was becoming very big and had no idea how big it would in fact become. He deals with newspapers, television, comic books (!), corporate power, and shows none of them in an especially flattering light.
The cast included Dana Andrews (who is the hero, but also drunk about half the time), George Sanders (who committed suicide in 1972, leaving a note that said, “I’m so bored”), Thomas Mitchell, Rhonda Fleming, Vincent Price (in non-Gothic mode, but still so creepy it’s hard to see how even the golddigger played by Fleming would let him lay a hand on her), Ida Lupino (by far the most effective, and hilarious in a bar scene where Andrews is staring loopily into her cleavage), James Craig, and Howard Duff (the radio voice of Sam Spade, and a great one). At least one of these people seemed to be in every movie I saw during the 1950s. Having them all in the same one was like old home week.
Our course that summer included Lang’s M, on which Andries held forth stunningly; de Sica’s Umberto D; Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution—films I was watching for the first time, and which remain among my personal favorites. As knowledgeable as Andries was, he left the two novices plenty of room, and I think Gene and I grew a lot during those two months. Part of my own growth came from just being in the same room with Gene for a few hours a day. He was one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever known, and if I had not already lost any religious convictions, I’m sure his death from cancer at age forty-eight in 1990 would have finished them off. Andries died in January 1995 at the age of seventy-six.

Comments

[Juno888]

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[fussball]

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[Max]

Good afternoon. Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.
I am from Northern and bad know English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "These are primarily performance fashions, which would be livery in this time."

THX 8-), Max.