A Girl and a Gun

BEST OF THE YEAR

It’s been an interesting experience, this first nine months of blogging, and by and large a good year. Enough people had enough interesting to say about the site to make all the technical hassle well worth it. I had two months in Paris, than which the only thing better is three months in Paris. I made it through the entire year without wandering into a single Ben Stiller movie, and only fell off my Tom Hanks wagon once—and never again, I swear—and saw enough of Jude Law to last me a lifetime. I got to know the work of Wong Kar-Wai, for which I’m grateful; saw Quentin Tarantino on a Paris street—the guy even walks like his movies; and saw some good new movies, not enough—it’s never enough—but some.

I don’t much like ten-best lists; I find them arbitrary and nearly indefensible, since standards of taste are rarely defined (and damned hard to define in the bargain). Moreover, while I help raise the national average on movie-going slightly, I’m not a pro and can’t see as much as a daily paper reviewer—for that matter, wouldn’t want to. I have no interest in The Aviator or Sponge Bob Square Pants. I also don’t much care for the idea of spending a couple of hours at Kinsey, although to experience a fair sampling of films that some intelligent critics liked, I should and may, if things turn dry enough during the pre-Oscar weeks. I want to see The Woodsman and The Assassination of Richard Nixon but can’t be sure I’m going to squeeze them in during the next five days, so my list may be revised after the first of the year. In other words, it’s a pretty personal, and selective set of choices, and exists only for the sake of any discussion it merits. I list the best films I saw in 2004, a year in which I looked at something over one hundred movies. I confine myself to films released in the US during 2004, whenever they may have been made, although French new releases during the two months I was there also figure in, even if they have not been released in the US yet. I put them in descending order of my enthusiasm.

The Best
Moolaadé
Treatment of a difficult subject (female genital mutilation) with maximum impact and great tact, and of the changes being wrought by globalization on traditional society. Ousman Sembene affords a measure of dignity for all the characters, even the worst of the patriarchal males.

Before Sunset
Richard Linklater’s romance for grown-ups, with second chances but without guarantees, and the most appropriate—i.e. fitting and satisfying—ending I have seen since The Third Man.

The Dreamers
Bertolucci at his richest, most excessive best. You didn’t like it? You don’t like movies.

Days of Being Wild (1990; first US theatrical release)
An earlier effort by perhaps the most original and imaginative director working right now, Wong Kar-Wai.

Bad Education
A Russian nesting-doll of a movie, one secret inside another inside another inside another, all of them bearing on gay male love, exploitation, and obsession. By the inimitable Almodóvar.

Dogville
A Christian parable, a story about America, a story about revenge—gripping, beautifully acted, and hard as nails. Von Trier’s not going away, so you might as well get acquainted.

Kill Bill Vol. 2
Another revenge drama, but this one high on atmospherics, bravura performances, great fight scenes, and—believe it or not—some interesting character development. Great work from QT.

Sideways
Love amid the vineyards, sort of, we hope. It’s a pretty typical romantic comedy, but saved by the way it really uses its setting and by top-notch ensemble acting, all written and woven together by Alexander Payne.

Pretty Good
*NB: the three films starred in this list all had their Paris premiers during the two months I was there, and as far as I was concerned, that qualified them for a 2004 list; none, to my knowledge, has been in theatrical release in the US thus far.

Infernal Affairs*
Two moles in Hong Kong, one a cop underground in the mob, another a mobster underground in the police. Stylish, fast, violent. Point Blank East.

Land of Plenty*
This is us, US, best and worst, the Wim Wenders way.

Notre Musique
Godard at seventy-four, leaving us with a lot to think about, even more to look at. His images are as arresting as they were when he was thirty.

The Agronomist
A brave radio journalist who raised his voice for democracy in Haiti and paid for it with his life. Jonathan Demme’s best film of the year by far.

Collateral
Hitman and taxi driver collide in nightime LA. It’s all about Michael Mann’s style, which can carry almost any film.

Ae … Fond Kiss
Interracial love in contemporary Britain. Ken Loach makes no promises that it’s going to work, but makes us want it to. Second-tier Loach, which means several cuts above most other filmmakers.

Old Boy*
Again, revenge, this time in contemporary South Korea. Not for the timid, but if you’ve got the stomach, your eyes will be popping out of your head.

The Big Red One (1984; restored 2004)
Richard Schickel’s restoration of Sam Fuller’s greatest work, now much closer to Fuller’s original vision.

The Merchant of Venice
A solid adaptation, by director Michael Radford, retaining enough of the original’s complexity to be interesting, and with superb performances. Lynn Collins’s Portia gives Al Pacino a run for his money.

Intimate Strangers
Small, intimate, personal, funny, sweet, sad, French. If that’s not enough, Sandrine Bonnaire.

Best Performances
(subject to additions in next few weeks)

Female:
Fatoumata Coulibaly, Moolaadé
Julie Delpy, Before Sunset
Lynn Collins, The Merchant of Venice
Carina Lau, Days of Being Wild

Male:
Don Cheadle, Hotel Rwanda
Leslie Cheung, Days of Being Wild
Thomas Church Haden, Sideways

Happy New Year to all, except that moron "clearing brush" in Texas while the world drowns.

LAST OF THE YEAR

My final film commentaries for 2004 are:

Million Dollar Baby (2004)—12/30/04
Clint Eastwood is old enough to have grown up in the age of radio. I wonder if he ever attended a live broadcast. If he did, I know where he got some of the inspiration for his new weeper. Those programs had electric signs on the side of the stage that flashed “APPLAUSE” when that was wanted, and sometimes the instruction was goosed up by an announcer standing silently under the sign and waving his arms frantically at the audience. Million Dollar Baby is full of those sorts of cues, the ones that tell you to laugh, cry, cheer, and sneer. Where critics are finding its marks of transcendence I cannot imagine. Like most sports movies, it’s about an underdog who triumphs, though in this case there’s a sort of twist at the end—but one that’s meant to wring sentiment from us. Everything falls into place just as we know it will from the outset, and when it falls apart, that too goes according to formula. Eastwood and Morgan Freeman as his sidekick do their respective specialties: gritty gruffness over a soft interior and gruff grittiness expressing folksy wisdom and down-home moral authority. Hillary Swank at least provides energy and pep, but she’s basically a likeable, independent-minded young woman who likes to hit people. The bad guys are no more imaginative. Swank’s family are what you get from central casting when you order up trailer park white trash. A villainous boxer is dark skinned, with corn rows, but East German, for crying out loud. It’s a terrible picture, and could well beat out Sideways, Neverland, Ray, and Kinsey for best picture Oscar.

The Merchant of Venice (2004)—12/29/04
Film adaptations of Shakespeare come with built-in limitations. The text must be cut, and sometimes is cut drastically and rearranged in the process: the Mel Gibson Hamlet (1990) shared with the original only some characters’ names and some speeches, many of them in different places from that originally designated. The action is frequently “opened up” for film, which means real locations at the cost of the stage’s immediacy and intimacy. Commercial success customarily demands a little American star power (Kenneth Branagh recruited Keanu Reeves and Denzel Washington, both unfortunately, for Much Ado About Nothing in 1993, then three years later Billy Crystal and Jack Lemmon for his own Hamlet). This tactic can help at the box office, maybe, but sacrifices British pros who know how to speak the verse properly.
Michael Radford has gotten round most of these difficulties. His adaptation of the original is smart. He cuts mostly from speeches rather than whole scenes, and there is only one radical rearrangement that I could spot (Lorenzo’s speech to Jessica about the stars, and her father). His use of Venice for the setting is first rate: it’s chilly, a little drab, none of the calendar art to which the city is customarily subjected (see David Lean’s Summertime [1955]), all perfectly appropriate for an unsettling play. His only American of note is Al Pacino, who plays Shylock, but Pacino has played Shakespeare before, and his Looking for Richard (1996) gave evidence of fluency with iambic pentameter. For the rest, the cast is a number of pretty good and a few very good Brits doing their national poet right proud.
People are sometimes startled to hear The Merchant of Venice referred to, correctly, as a comedy. Indeed, so it was played for most of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth, a time when prejudice against Jews was common. (When Shakespeare wrote the play, at the end of the sixteenth century, Jews had been banished from England for more than three hundred years, although of course they were still scattered here and there.) Shylock was the comic butt, insulted and laughed at by other characters, ultimately defeated in a legal confrontation, stripped of his wealth, forced to convert to Christianity—an act the audience no doubt considered the best thing he could hope for. We do not know that this interpretation governed the stagings in Shakespeare’s own time, but it was well within Elizabethan theatrical conventions. It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that actors began to shade Shylock with sympathy; a century later, he became a full-fledged tragic figure. This trend has continued through the twentieth century, especially after the Holocaust, and Radford now carries it into the twenty-first.
But he also preserves many of the play’s carefully arranged ambiguities. The characters are anything but pasteboard cutouts. (Clint Eastwood, take note.) Shylock himself may get our sympathy at the end, but he is in many respects narrow, tight-fisted, a man who locks his daughter in when he leaves his house, a man who pretends to overlook the fact that Antonio, the titular character, has spat upon him in public but in fact nurses the grudge lovingly, a man who refuses every reasonable appeal to soften his literal-minded reading of his contract with Antonio—a pound of flesh if Antonio’s debt is not paid. Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, deceives her father by stealing some of his money, running off with a Christian, for whom she converts, and even giving away a ring which had originally belonged to her deceased mother to Antonio, in return for the gift of a monkey (a symbol of eroticism in the sixteenth century—was there once something between Antonio and Jessica?) Antonio has nothing but contempt for this Jewish moneylender, but himself is a moneylender. His debt is incurred to give his friend, the penniless nobleman Bassanio, a stake to outfit himself in order to woo a rich woman. Bassanio, while devoted to his close friend Antonio (and perhaps a little more than devoted; Radford does nothing to mute the homoerotic dimension of the relationship), is also basically a fortune-hunter on the make. Later, after winning Portia, she gives him a ring which she admonishes him never to take off or give away. In short order, he has given the ring away, at Antonio’s urging. Portia herself is a rich and extremely smart young woman who disguises herself (mustache and all) as a young lawyer who defends Antonio in the trial scene. She urges mercy upon Shylock to no avail, and then ultimately defeats him by turning his own literalmindedness against him and showing absolutely no mercy herself, exposing Shylock to the most severe of penalties. It is to this “lawyer” that Bassanio gives the ring after he/she requests it as payment for services rendered. She persuades him to break the oath that she had insisted he swear, for the principal reason that she can do it and thereby gain the upper hand in her marriage. Finally, the anti-Jewish unpleasantness of many of the Christian characters, while toned down substantially by Radford’s adaptation, is hardly idle banter, the same being true for many of Shylock’s observations about Christians (mostly left out here).
The play remains a comedy: the happy ending at Portia’s palace in Belmont is a comic delight, but there is no blinking away what Philip Roth has called “the human stain.” As always at his best, Shakespeare entertains and troubles, troubles and entertains.
The playing is for the most part excellent. Pacino gives us a touch too much of yiddisher for his accent, but he handles the driven, angry Shylock with the great conviction. Jeremy Irons, as Antonio, gives the impression that he has been speaking in iambs since birth. Joseph Fiennes is an adequate Bassanio, but Lynn Collins, a young lady from Texas for whom this is the first leading role, was outstanding as Portia. Special mention for David Harewood as the Prince of Morocco, one of the failed suitors for Portia’s hand and fortune. He lights up the screen with great flair and does what great British actors often do for tiny Shakespearean parts: makes them very big.
Want more? Go to Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All, and Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World, both published this year. Garber devotes a chapter to a reading of each play, and her treatment of Merchant is smart, very well-informed, and goes much, much deeper than anything here; she is of course dealing with the play as written, not as adapted by Radford, but it’s richly informative, especially about the signficance of the three caskets which are at the heart of the wooing-of-Portia process and, for that matter, the whole play. Greenblatt’s book is a historicist account of Shakespeare’s career, which is to say it argues that his work is integrated with his surrounding culture in interesting ways rather than simply the work of a rare genius (though it is also that, of course). His pages on this play are instructive and, like most of the work, suggestive where they are not entirely persuasive.

Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

The news of Susan Sontag's death yesterday hit me with an unanticipated sense of personal loss. I did not realize that I had never begun to imagine a world without her forthright, insistent voice at a time when most public intellectuals have either gone silent or wanted to make certain they weren't annoying anyone important. Her curiosity, intellectual range, and fierce independence are irreplaceable, and the hunger to hear important truths about our lives and our world will be that much harder to satisfy. She had been a cancer patient off and on for some thirty years, so that her death by leukemia should perhaps not come as a great surprise; but I wasn't ready for it, and don't know how I would have prepared myself.

Sontag wrote on film, of course--her essay on Godard remains fresh and relevant--and even directed and wrote four films between 1969 and 1983. She also returned to her fictional vocation, set aside for a long time after Death Kit (1967), although I've always suspected that the special cachet that attaches to a novelist was something she prized, for all the plaudits showered upon her essays., which I think are her most valuable achievements. She was a cultural critic in the best sense, that is, one for whom culture was virtually all embracing: film, literature, photography, but also camp, illness, and politics. She always knew exactly what she thought and why, until she changed her mind. The obituary writers have had a grand old time charting her shifts of position (on European communism, Leni Riefenstahl, and on and on). I suspect such people feel far more comfortable with those who stake out one position and hold to it, facts, morality, and common sense to the contrary notwithstanding. Yes, I do have a prominent American politician in mind. The New York Times obituary seemed to take particular relish in devising a long list of adjectives variously applied to her by her supporters and her critics alike: I counted forty-two. This list, if accurate, would in all likelihood have been taken as a compliment by Sontag; she enjoyed stirring things up. But it also suggests a certain preference for people who don't divide, much less polarize, their audience, safe, "sane" people, people with a measured, balanced outlook, people . . . well, people like those who edit and write for the often hopelessly dull and boring New York Times.

I saw her in autumn 2002 when she shared the stage of the 92 Street Y in New York with W.G. Sebald, the brilliant German writer who lived the postwar years in England and who died senselessly in an automobile accident a few months after their joint appearance. She read an essay on, of all people--the woman who had read everything worth reading from Baudrillard and Barthes and all those knotty Europeans who scare off American readers--Richard Halliburton, the dashing adventurer who wrote books about swimming the Hellespont and other feats of derring-do, books with titles like The Royal Road to Romance, staples of my early teen years. During the question period, someone inevitably raised the short remarks she published in The New Yorker a week or so after 9/11 which caused her no end of grief from dull-witted detractors. Essentially, she had argued that it was pointless to talk about a war against "evil," since that meant a struggle with no possible end to it, since evil will always be with us, and no identifiable target, since evil was amorphous and took many forms, often impossible to define. She suggested that the terrorists were in fact reacting to things the United States did, policies and actions and definable attitudes. This was not to say that the US had brought the attacks on itself, but rather that there were prescriptions we might discuss and consider as a response. That evening, Sontag still seemed genuinely astonished at the venom and rage her remarks inspired. I hope, in recent months, she took a little solace in the fact that several analysts have begun to consider the "war on terror" as not one of "good" versus "evil," not as proceeding from cultural roots, from implacable religious fanaticism, but rather from behavioral sources--our support of Israel and its consequences for the Palestinians, our policies in the Middle East, and so forth. For more on this subject, see the thoughtful and informative piece by Jonathan Raban in the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books.

Sontag is one of those authors endlessly re-readable, and everything, I believe, is in print. In addition, I heartily recommend the compact little study put out earlier this year by Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, a book that sheds considerable light on the two subjects and on the task of criticism itself.

Us ... and Everyone Else

There is an instructive anecdote in the current issue of Sight and Sound.  Korean director Park Chan-Wook talks about a screening in Los Angeles of the third installment of his Vengeance trilogy, Mr. Vengeance, which arrived with terrific advance buzz.  The theater was about eighty-five percent full, says Park, which was nice, but he noted that in Europe the place would have been packed.  “I get the feeling people here aren’t interested in other cultures,” he said.  Funny he should mention that, just as Hotel Rwanda is demonstrating the shameful cold shoulder turned by western countries, but the US in particular, to the massive slaughters of 1994 in the titular country.

     Hotel Rwanda is one of the nobler and better executed films of the year, a drama of political madness—but also political indifference and cowardice—with a drama of personal heroism embedded in it.  American audiences, I fear, are liable to glom onto the latter dimension, with their proclivity to turn everything into a story of bravery, determination, and ultimately success.  But the success here was a tiny pinprick in the genocidal massacre of more than 800,000 Rwandans—most of them Tutsis—in 1994.  An indispensable companion piece to Terry George’s film, by the way, is the 1998 book by Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families. 

     Paul Rusesasabagina was the manager of an elite Belgian-owned hotel for well-heeled western tourists, diplomats, and businessmen.  When the massacres by the Hutu minority, of whom he was one, broke out, he began taking in neighbors, then other Rwandans, putting them up in his hotel, which enjoyed the protection of UN peacekeepers.  As the deaths mounted through the hundreds of thousands, the silence from the west was deafening, although journalists were sending back footage which played on the nightly news programs of numerous nations.  The Belgians sent in a small force to get all whites out of the country, but left the Rwandans to their own devices.  That the twelve hundred people Rusesabagina sheltered in the hotel survived, or survived as long as they did, was largely due to his intelligence, humanity, cleverness, and refusal to give up. 

     The film plays the issue of western inaction effectively.  We catch snatches of evidence only—the US State department spokesperson refusing in a radio interview to use the word “genocide,” clearly on orders from higher up, or President Clinton’s smiling face on a magazine cover tucked into the corner of a shot.  The point has been made, as it was repeatedly and forcefully ten years ago.  The moral maniacs who wanted to drive Clinton from office because of an interlude of sexual indiscretion were not much heard from on this issue, perhaps his greatest dereliction of duty during his eight years in office, an unforgivable refusal to exercise American power and leadership when it would have been decisive and saved many, many lived.

     Hotel Rwanda’s success stems in large measure not only from intelligent direction, but also from the efforts of Don Cheadle, who plays Rusesasabagina.  Cheadle, who turned forty last month, spent many years in supporting parts, but with the American version of Traffic (2000) showed he can handle a lead with ease.  He made four films, in considerable parts, in 2001, and four more this year.  He inhabits the part and insists that we come with him into its interior, its doubts, fears, terrors for the safety of his (Tutu) wife and children, his deference to those in power (always for an end), his lying and bribery and finally his momentary collapse under overwhelming stress.  Cheadle chooses an interesting way to dramatize that unraveling.  His character is a formal, impeccable man, rarely seen at work without crisp white shirt and tie beneath a dark suit.  But when the pressure mounts and mounts, in the shape of a back road littered with Tutsi bodies as far as the eye can see, he cannot tie his necktie.  He tries again, fails more ridiculously, and with this failure understands that his life as he once knew it has come to an end.  Cheadle is in almost every frame of the film, and while there are others doing fine work—Sophie Okonedo as his wife is especially good—but without Cheadle, there is no film. 

     Stephen Holden, the third-string film reviewer of The New York Times, was generally sympathetic to the film yesterday, and while he believed “the movie's sentimental excesses are forgivable, given the subject matter,” he also opined, as far as I can tell largely with respect to an (admittedly otiose) remark by Okonedo’s character that her husband was “a good man,” that “even as they trigger your tear ducts, you wonder if your emotional buttons have pushed been too hard and too often just to squeeze out an extra drop of sympathy.”  I would have thought that the historical record was brutally clear: apparently events and their coverage did not exert sufficient pressure on the emotional buttons ten years ago to make much of an impression.  Any extra pushing would seem justifiable, for all the good it does.

Last of Noir

New York’s Film Forum finishes its Essential Noir retrospective with some strong entries, three of which I mention below.  I do take some exception to certain parts of the programming, however.  It seems to me that films like The Woman in the Window, Force of Evil, The Lost Weekend, and Gilda were either not truly representative of the genre nor particularly good films—neither, as with Gilda.  I was disappointed to see equally noirish films which were also better films left out.  Everyone here will have a title or two, and mine would be Cagney’s fabulous psycho turn in White Heat (1949) and the original D.O.A. (1950), with Edmond O’Brien as the doomed Frank Bigelow and small but indelible bits by Neville Brand and Luther Adler.  In any case, here are my last capsule views from the retro.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

A perfect film, nothing less, made so by crackling dialogue (by Clifford Odets) spoken by performers at their top-notch best (Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster, yes, but also Emile Meyer and even the ordinarily pathetic Martin Milner coming on strong), all photographed in some of the best black-and-white you’ll ever see anywhere by James Wong Howe.  Alexander Mackendrick rode herd on them all.  I don’t think films ever got any darker than this, a sour rhapsody to the grime beneath New York’s glitter, and there’s a gorgeous looking DVD for your delectation (although you really need larger screen to take it all in).  Even if you saw it, oh, fifteen, even ten years ago, it’s worth another look.

Touch of Evil (1958)

I was fortunate enough to see the partially restored version, on which Walter Murch and Richard Schickel worked, guided by the fifty-eight page memo Welles wrote after seeing the studio’s cut (read: mangling) of the film he submitted.  Welles was permitted one viewing and one viewing only.  He wrote the memo, which was discarded, but a copy—and much of the original footage—surfaced, and the result is that a film I’ve always liked is now one I love.  The opening shot, a swooping, looping crane shot on the streets of the border town where the film is set, just knocks you back on your heels.  And then the fun begins.  Of course, it’s as much grotesquerie as thriller and a satire on noire as much as noir.  How could it be otherwise with the baleinic Welles (who seems at this point to have whizzed past 300 lbs. without even noticing the road sign), Akim Tamiroff as a Mexican (no worse than his Spanish revolutionary in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but still), and Marlene Dietrich as a Mexican/Gypsy madame in a dark wig?  Wooeee.  The one sticking point is Charlton Heston as Vargas, the Mexican policeman, who is as wooden as ever and doesn’t even bother to throw us the bone of a hint of a Mexican accent.   Joseph Calleia as Sgt. Menzies, the loyal sidekick of the corrupt cop played by Welles, adds a lot of tang, with—in smaller parts Mercedes McCambridge as a gang leader, Dennis Weaver as a motel night man, old Welles pals from Mercury Theater days Ray Collins and Joseph Cotton, and even Zsa Zsa Gabor as a woman who runs a strip club.  I haven’t had so much fun in a movie since the time I saw next to Jacqueline Bisset.

Out of the Past (1947)

Jacques Tourneur’s little gem shimmers more than ever.  It’s pure noir, from dark urban settings (though played against gorgeous northern California mountains and lakes) to rampant amorality (although hero Jeff Markham, played by Robert Mitchum, is actually a straight guy), to voiceover flashbacks and nifty small parts.  The main heavy is an appropriately lizardly Kirk Douglas, which means that in his scenes with Mitchum we have two chins with dimples that appear to have been custom drilled by an artist.  But Jane’s Greer’s Kathy nearly takes over the heavy spotlight; when Mitchum’s told that nobody’s all bad, he says, “She comes the closest.”  The dialogue is tight and tough, and Mitchum handles it beautifully, with crisp, clean readings one after another.  He was just thirty when the film was released, blindingly handsome in an interesting way, and while he projects insecurity well here from time to time, you can feel his confidence oozing through.  (At about this stage in his career, he proposed to a woman by telling her, “Stick with me, baby, and you’ll be farting through silk.”)  His breakthrough came two years earlier in The Story of G.I. Joe, and with Tourneur’s film he was on his way.  If this one slipped past you, go for the nice DVD.

Strangers on a Train (1951)

Not, I think, a noir film, and I’m not sure Hitchcock could produce one; Psycho was more of a horror film, and this one is a sort of thriller with a lot of soft spots but one very fine scene and one unforgettable performance.  From Patricia Highsmith’s novel, two men meet on a train: each has a problem most conveniently solved by the elimination of a person, but that elimination would certainly be traced back to them as the most motive-driven people.  So, they should “exchange” murders.  Bruno (Robert Walker) will kill Guy’s (Farley Granger) estranged wife so he can get a divorce; tennis pro Guy will kill Bruno’s skinflint father who won’t turn loose the inheritance that is rightly Bruno’s.  Guy writes Bruno off as a nut.  He is a nut, but writing him off is not smart.  Bruno maneuvers him into an untenable position and kills the ex-wife.  The great scene comes when Bruno is off to plant some incriminating evidence and drops the evidence down the grate of a street drain while Guy, trying to create his own cover, is finishing a tennis match.  The cross-cutting is superb, the suspense (for once in a Hitchcock film) wound tight.  The performance is Walker’s, his one moment in the cinematic sun, and he makes the most of it.  Otherwise, there’s a lot of soft spots, consisting of performers like Jesse Royce Landis, Leo G. Carroll, and the vastly forgettable Ruth Roman. 

Basic Black

Time to check back in with the Film Forum’s Essential Noir retro.  It’s been a mixed bag, and while I won’t try to report on everything, I’ll hit a few more highs and lows.

Gun Crazy (1949)

The film with one of the best noir titles was one of the biggest disappointments.  It’s an ur-Bonnie and Clyde story, dull midwestern guy and girl, both good with guns, become a couple.  But post-war times are hard, they end up having to steal to eat, and the robberies inevitably lead to some killings and half the cops in the country are on their tail.  You can tell the end is coming when she convinces him to do “one last job,” which is a dead-certain tip-off, like the movie that begins with the cop on his last day before retiring.  It’s not very funny, and it’s not very exciting; the acting is weak, the story predictable, and the direction rather plodding.  John Dall plays the guy, and he’s got a winning grin but that’s about it.  The movie’s reputation, such as it is, rests upon the performance of Peggy Cummins, the innocent-looking Welsh import usually cast as the embodiment of apple-cheeked virtue.  Here, as a raving killer, she failed to impress, frighten, amuse, or otherwise entertain me.  Netflix has it if you’re determined.

The Lady from Shanghai (1948)

Another matter altogether.  It’s a minor opus in the Welles canon, and thoroughly odd, but in interesting ways.  He made the picture as vehicle for his then wife, Rita Hayworth, but started throwing in other things, presumably because he discovered Hayworth couldn’t act.  It’s the story of an Irish sailor (who, for reasons I never sorted out, always wears a suit and tie) who goes to work on a rich lawyer’s yacht principally because the lawyer, a late-middle-aged fellow played by Everett Sloane, has a gorgeous young wife (guess who).  The lawyer also has a wacko partner, crazy as a Republican, played by Glenn Anders, who seems like nothing more than a lunatic distraction until he suddenly starts to look like someone with a plot of his own cooking.  There are some very rich scenes—Sloane and Welles in the sailors’ hiring hall in New York is a dandy, and so is the one with Welles and Hayworth trying to figure out what to do next while strolling through the San Francisco aquarium.  The atmospherics keep you hanging in there long after the plot seems to wander off on its own.  But stay with it for the (justly famous) last scene, a shoot-out in the crazy-mirror room of a carnival fun house.  Don’t ask how the chacters got there: they got there because that’s where Welles wanted to finish the picture.  You’ll be glad he did. 

Gilda (1946)

A poor movie—bowling balls could slip untouched through the holes in the plot—and not much of a noir, intended by Harry Cohn at Columbia strictly as a vehicle for his newest big star, Rita Hayworth.  She was born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn, of Cuban parents, and after a substantial makeover—including lifting her hairline measureably and experimenting with all sorts of hair colors—they found the look.  She henceforth had long, dazzling red hair and terrific eyes, all on display in a famous WWII pinup that made her world famous.  Nobody was quite sure what to do with her at first—she did weak comedies, she danced (and pretty well) with Fred Astaire—but Gilda put her over the top.  In it, drifter Johnny (Glenn Ford) is picked up by casino owner Bunsen (George Macready) and given a job.  Bunsen then marries Gilda, who, it turns out, had a history with Johnny.  Their relationship never seems to get resolved, Bunsen it turns out is involved in some sort of inane auxiliary plot about a giant tungsten (!) cartel, and there’s more than a faint aroma of a homoerotic attraction between the two male leads.  Given all the confusion and silliness, it’s best to enjoy Hayworth flouncing about and acting coy, better still to dig her “Put the Blame on Mame” number at the end and as close as movies got to a strip tease in those days.  My irrepressible association with this film: Lenny Bruce had a bit about teenagers discovering glue-sniffing, and he imagines a movie in which a teenager innocent savors its joys while putting together his model airplane.  He does the teenager in the voice of George Macready (“I do believe I’m getting loaded on this Lepage’s”). 

The Woman in the Window (1944)

It’s hard to see how this film makes it into a noir festival, even if you disregard my admittedly arbitrary post-war rule for the genre’s beginnings.  It isn’t especially dark, just a cautionary tale—with a light ironic touch at the end to show that any hints of a world going wrong were all in fun, folks—about middle age.  I suppose the festival organizers saw that Dan Duryea was in the cast and decided it must be noir.  Well, Duryea is the best thing in the film by a long chalk, but he shows up late and doesn’t last long.  Edward G. Robinson is a fiftyish psychology teacher—at his age, only an assistant professor? what’s the problem? forget the classroom and start churning out those journal articles, Eddie—who stays in New York while his wife and kids go off to Maine for summer vacation.  He dines in his club with his two friends, then meets an enchanting woman on the way out.  They get involved, although—Hollywood was as deep in the Production Code in 1944 as America was in the war—it’s “just good friends.”  Things go south, just as his friends kiddingly warned him they would do if he sowed any wild oats in his wife’s absence.  There’s a killing, a coverup, which unravels, Duryea shows up, things go forward, looking worse and worse for Robinson and the woman, Joan Bennett.  But then there is a deux ex machina—helpful, those—followed by a twist.  I won’t reveal it, but think de Palma’s chickenshit ending to Dressed to Kill (1980).  The film has polish, thanks to its main players and the Fritz Lang direction, but neither soul nor spine, and it’s about as noir as Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.”

The Big Heat (1953)

Another from Lang, and usually cited as hardcore mainstream noir.  Hmm.  Glenn Ford—and I want it appreciated as a measure of my devotion to things filmic that I sat through two Glenn Ford movies in the space of a week—is the ever popular cop who won’t stop pursuing the crooked Mr. Big who runs the town even when the politicos at the top of the department send down the word that he’s to lay off.  They send stronger hints.  No soap.  Then they murder his wife, Jocelyn Brando (sister).  Mistake.  He gets them in the end, which I think you’d figure.  The best part of the film are Lee Marvin, as Mr. Big’s right-hand man, pointing the muscle in this direction and that, and Gloria Grahame, who is hilarious as his girlfriend.  She’s really the main reason, and a good one, to see this rather tired film from a half-century ago.  Grahame could be sexy as hell (those eyes), dumb or smart, cruel or sweet, easily hurt, wicked in vengeance—and all in the same character.  She was thirty when this film was released; I remember her being interviewed on television a few years later when she was maybe thirty-five, the interviewer being an early talk-show host of about the same age who said, “You’ve always been one of my favorites, ever since I was a little kid.”  Her smile never disappeared, but you could have ignited asbestos with those eyes.  Here, she has the film’s best line when she first goes into Ford’s crummy hotel room: “Oh,” she says, looking at the furniture, “this is great—early nothing.”  Marvin is pretty good in a genre-confined role, but when his hair went gray and he started underplaying, he was able to produce the kind of triumph he had in Point Blank (1967).  You wouldn’t know it to look at them in The Big Heat, but Marvin at the time was a year younger than Grahame.  Finally, in a dreadful piece of miscasting, Alexander Scourby plays Mr. Big with a wretched fake urban-Italian accent.  Scourby was television’s most famous narrator in the 1950s and ‘60s, the voice behind a lot of commercials and the wildly popular “Victory at Sea” documentary series on the US navy in WWII, scored by Richard Rodgers.  (For those with a long enough memory, when Nixon was being besieged in the final months of his presidency, he would often retire to a private hideaway in the Old Executive Office Building, reached by an underground passage from the White House, lock himself in with a bottle of scotch and his ever-present yellow scratch pads, and put “Victory at Sea” on the stereo full blast.  No kidding.) 

Do Not Adjust Your Set

Surprise—and welcome to the new site (still under construction) of A Girl and a Gun.  You can either continue to click on your old bookmark of agirlandagun.net, which is how you got here this time.  Or, you can make a new bookmark of the url you see above.  I’m in the process of transferring old content over—for all those insomniacs out there, it’s better for you to read old film journal entries than to take a pill—and should have that whipped early in the week.  In the meantime, new entries will of course appear on the main page here.  Shorter entries will all be here; longer ones will spill over on a to-be-continued page; everything will be archived.  Design changes will take a bit longer but are in the planning stage.  I hope the new site will be easier for you to navigate (hyperlinks working, etc.), as I’m sure it will be for me to work with. 

A Scorsese Exchange

At the end of last month (Nov. 28, to be precise), I relieved myself of some irritation at the Scorsese cult, currently taking the form of MS talking at some length about himself (TCM, December 14), and which seemed to me to be less and less justified by his work over the last fifteen years.  I mention it because Aaron, over at www.outoffocus.typepad.com, has taken up the cudgels on MS’s behalf.  (You’ll have to copy the URL into the address bar; my blasted hyperlink still doesn’t work.  I’m hoping to find the time this month to switch hosts.)  I offer some responses to his piece here, and if you’re interested, it may make sense to look at his post.  You could even check mine again: it’s short, won’t take up much of your time. 

     As far as I can tell, Aaron and I actually agree that greatness in Scorsese’s portfolio can be reduced to a small handful of films, and his handful is essentially the same as mine with the exception of The Last Temptation of Christ, which I thought an irredeemable dud, a film that had me giggling in all the wrong places (the great Harvey Keitel as Judas was embarrassingly amusing). The only reason to get behind the film was because of all those fundamentalist deadheads picketing a movie they hadn’t seen.  Aaron is also large-hearted to a number of other Scorsese films.  The slack he wants to cut these efforts—and we’re talking about the likes of Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, Casino, Bringing Out the Dead, Gangs of New York, possibly Kundun (not sure where Aaron stands on that one; my position is slumped in my seat, snoring)—seem to resolve into three arguments. 

     First, Aaron writes, “Scorsese’s personality is still injected into each of these films, and to call any of them poor attempts at filmmaking is just silly.”  The second clause doesn’t seem to follow from the first, but no matter.  Is the injection of personality—and I confess to uncertainty about the meaning of this term—a criterion of greatness?  Should it be?  I suppose Ken Russell’s films were oozing personality.  (By the way, it’s possible to read the ending of the paragraph in question as paraphrasing me saying Gangs was Goodfellas in the nineteenth century.  Didn’t say it, didn’t think it.  Making the same film over and over again is not my idea of impoverished imagination: Ozu did that for more than thirty years, although he found a way to make every single film distinct in our memory.)

     Second, Aaron thinks we think these films only appear weak by comparison with his other efforts because MS’s earlier work elevated our expectations.  Well, of course.  And if a later work is not up to the earlier works’ standards, are we supposed to say, Gee, how unfair of us to want him to produce a modestly respectable film every time out—not necessarily a masterpiece, even something of the modest attainments of After Hours would pass muster.  In a sense, I think Aaron is arguing my case: to wit, that Scorsese once made a group of terrific films, then stopped and for the most part went blatantly commercial, and a lot of people weren’t having it and said, Phooey.  One term for this by no means unusual phenomenon is “artistic decline.”

     Third, Aaron wants to speculate that Scorsese’s work in film preservation and cinema history documentaries has provided him the excitement he used to get from smaller, tighter features.  Fine by me.  Maybe he should stick to those pursuits.  But if he wants to make a turkey like Bringing Out the Dead, don’t expect me to say, Hey, Marty’s getting his kicks elsewhere these days, so we shouldn’t be harsh on his feature work. 

     Aaron is particularly upset by use of the words “sales pitch” to describe all the p.r. that surrounds any new Scorsese film these days.  I am unapologetic.  He and his admirers are trying to keep the nearly comatose legend alive and competitive in the artistically meaningless Oscar scramble. 

     Last thought: Aaron, while I agree that the best of Scorsese is better than the best of those contemporaries of his you named, what happens when you imagine him in the big leagues?  You (and I) mentioned Ford, Hawks, Huston and Welles?  You didn't say anything about Chaplin and Keaton, whose names were also in my piece.  But how many rounds could he go with Kurosawa, Renoir, Fellini, Bergman, Ozu, or Godard?  If a filmmaker is truly towering, he should not be stacked up against pygmies like Bogdanovich and Spielberg. 

Have We Come (Back) to This?

Apparently, Michael Radford’s new film, The Merchant of Venice, with Al Pacino as Shylock and also featuring Jeremy Irons and Joseph Fiennes, has been picked up for US distribution by Sony Classics.  It is of still of some interest to learn from Lindsay Beyerstein that one (unnamed) US distributor looked at a print and then asked Radford if he could paintbox a section of the wallpaper in a certain scene so that the film might be suitable for US television viewers.  Radford was baffled—the film is set in sixteenth-century Venice, when they didn’t have wallpaper—and upon discussion it turned out that they meant a Veronese fresco which depicted, among much else, a naked Cupid.  Radford naturally refused, scarcely believing that such a fuss was being made about the “Cupid’s willie.”

     Growing up in the 1950s, I believed it, and recognize many clues to the same pinched, censorial morality of those years in our current environment.  There was simply no confrontation of sexual situations in film except by the most artful disguise or smuggling—this, you remember, was the time of the marital twin beds.  The word “hell” was considered obscenity, except in a theological context was considered obscenity, and so on and on and on.  Even I, in my post-November 2^nd state of heightened paranoia, do not think we’ll go back that far, but I do think it won’t be for lack of trying.  The Christian right is interested in conversions and, if can’t get them, in suppressing what it considers wrong. 

Essence of Noir?

Film Forum, New York’s most interesting cinema, has opened a series called Essential Noir with a number of double features.  I caught the pairing of Detour (1945) and Criss Cross (1949), followed the next day by Force of Evil (1948) and Naked City (1948).  Before touching on the films, let’s say a word or two about the genre.

            I think of it as being a period as much as a genre; the great films noirs were made right after the war and into the early fifties, and they reflected the disillusionment, exhaustion, and cynicism that were the underside of all the unrelieved rot you’ve read about the “greatest generation.”  Disillusionment: the war had been unprecedentedly costly of life, and had included atrocities that beggared the language, like the Holocaust and Hiroshima; exhaustion: from the sheer effort, the depletion of humanity and of national treasure that it had taken to win it; cynicism: about the likelihood that all this killing and destruction had done anythying more than get rid of a couple of dictators.  Was the world a better one than it had been in 1939?  Perhaps, but the same elites were still on top, the same little guys grubbing away on the bottom, and goody-two-shoes moral codes that had featured prominently in movies of the 1930s were simply laughable.  Film noir assumed that you took what you could get, knowing that you’d proably be squashed somewhere along the line—all the more reason to get yours now.  The best of the noirs were fundamentally amoral, or with only a vague nod toward conventional codes of behavior; they assumed the world was like this, that you couldn’t trust what was lurking in the shadows, that everyone was out to get everyone else.

            Unfortunately, it’s become common that any crime film or thriller from the postwar period becomes film noir, or any toughminded crime film from any period, for that matter: The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Murder, My Sweet (1944) are both in the FF series, mistakenly to my mind, and the label often attaches to things like Taxi (1976) and Blood Simple (1984).

 

            Edward Ulmer’s Detour (1945) barely qualifies on historical grounds, but I can see why it’s in Essential Film Noir: it’s plenty dark, both atmospherically and cinematically, and it’s focused on a couple of dead-end characters who wind up ruining one another’s lives.  The problem is that the film isn’t very well written or played.  The character given to Tom Neal is, as written, perhaps unplayable; he’s confused, confusing, alternately capable and clueless, in charge and in a quandary.  Giving this character to Neal was like giving a very sharp knife to a child: the damage to self and environs was bound to be considerable.  Neal’s character is a pianist who amuses himself in the piano bar by playing Chopin, a vamping job which Neal so hilariously botches that the movie almost dies right there.  But along the way, he does pick up a character played by Ann Savage, who redfines bitchy floozihood with great brio.  Her ending is handled with a certain style, however much it strains credulity.

            Criss Cross is an altogether classier matter, and Robert Siodmak’s direction is smooth and assured.  Unfortunately, the complete sap played by Burt Lancaster is so obviously no match for the reptilian villain played by the magnificent Dan Duryea that we know precisely how it’s going to turn out.  For laughs, there is Yvonne de Carlo (born Peggy Middleton; aaah, Hollywood) who looks far older than her twenty-six years when she made the picture and a little too chunky for a hunk like Lancaster.  Worth the price, though, just to see her doing the rhumba with the young (and uncredited) Tony Curtis.  If the film had a hero who looked like he could hold up his end of the bargain, it would be a lot more absorbing.  As it is, it’s only dark because it has one of those so-called Samuel Beckett happy endings (everybodydies).

            I am tempted to include among the defining characteristics of noir that the film be told in flashback with a voiceover.  That’s true of Detour, Criss Cross, and also of Force of Evil, where John Garfield tells us how he screwed up his life—and his brother’s.  The only problem with the film is that there are some determinedly high-minded characters who try to convince us that their way to do things is the way that makes us feel better, and the film loses its darkness whenever they’re allowed to spout off.  Well, not the only problem.  There are two highly disconverting sequences.  In one, Garfield is in a cab on the streets of New York, with rear projection filling the taxi’s back window.  Although we’re clearly in postwar New York, all the cars on the street behind him are from the early 1930s—the only process photography they had on hand?  Please.  Next, we’re at a New York racetrack, presumably Belmont or Aqueduct, except that as the horses break from the gate and the camera pulls back, we see impressive mountains in the background, mountains of the sort that are, ahem, rather scarce around Gotham.  In fact, they are southern California’s San Gabriel mountains, among which I grew up, and the track is Santa Anita. 

            I thought by far the best of the four was Naked City, which I had seen before only once—when it came out and I was approaching ten.  Remembered it pretty well, though.  The best thing about it is New York location shooting, which was rare in the early postwar years and which director Jules Dassin (Rififi, Never On Sunday) made the centerpiece of his movie.  It’s a police procedural about a murdering jewel thief and the cops chasing him.  Chief cop is Barry Fitzgerald, relieved of the priestly garb which he so often wore in these years (most memorably in the mawkish, revolting Going My Way [1945]).  He’s funny, wise, and he carries the film.  The inevitable young, green sidekick is played by Don Taylor, the Bill Pullman of his day and about as effective.  He hoofs it all over the city chasing leads, and that’s often entertaining, although one must ask: why walk downtown to Police HQ, then subway up to the Bronx Criminal Court?  Did the police have some aversion to using the telephone to get in touch with outposts of the criminal justice system?  No, the filmmakers simply wanted to show as much of New York as possible. 

Naked City is not told in flashback, but it does have voice-over narration by its producer, the Broadway columnist Mark Hellinger, and it’s not bad.  But this gritty, complex, beautiful city is the star, and Dassin lets it steal most of the scenes.  I don’t really find this film noir, just a good procedural in which the good guys win, of course, the bad guys get what’s coming to them, and life goes on around them.  But if you’ve missed it, don’t. 

            More reports on the retrospective in the days ahead.