A Girl and a Gun

FROM MASON DRUCKMAN

George Fasel, Film Critic

[Note: as you see from his post, Mason Druckman is a colleage and  friend of George, long standing.  George named his son after him.]

The game went something like this.  I would say "Regis Toomey." George would answer, "Charles Winninger. "I would offer, Ïlka Chase." George would counter with "DeForrest Kelley" or "Jack Conrad" or "Flora Robson," or any of hundreds of second- and third-tier Hollywood actors, mostly American, whose names he and I strained to dredge up from memories forged over three decades of (in my case at least) unsystematic movie going.  It was the 1960s; George and I were assistant professors at Reed College in Portland, Oregon; and over a glass of house red one rainy night we discovered we had a mutual interest in this minute aspect of film trivia.

How interest evolved into competition I cannot recall, but the attempt to outdo one another in coming up with obscure (but not entirely unknown) figures from the bowels of b-moviedom grew from something of a passing fancy into a kind of professorial pissing contest from which we derived enormous pleasure.  I might pick up my phone and hear, Ärt Baker" (George's voice), then, "click." I would leave a note in Geroge's faculty mailbox saying only "Fay Bainter."  One of us might receive an unsigned letter (we lived seven minutes apart) that read "J. Carrol Naish" centered on an 81/2 x 11 piece of stationery.  The game came to an end after several months only when we fixed on the actor whom George regarded as the exemplar of what, whether we knew it or not, we had been striving for: our nominee for the most often seen, littlest known and least memorable performer on the silver screen, the one, the only, Paul Kelly.

Paul Kelly, the soft-spoken, jut-jawed, closed-mouth, tough-looking studio regular who showed up in 130 films  over a career that ran from 1911, when he was a child artist, to 1956, the year of his death, who was listed as "Tuck, another detective" in "Special Delivery"(1927), as "Jimmie Fields, pilot" in "Tarzan's New York Adventure"(1942), and who played General George Armstrong Custer in "Wyoming"(1940) and Lt. John Hudson in "Springfield Rifle"(1952).  I agreed with Geroge that Kelly was our man, and it was clear that a pair of Ph.D.s from two prestigious West Coast universities had, through the strenuous exertions of their combined intellects, reached a pinnacle in the pursuit of a category that truly could be said to be utterly without significance.  For us, however, it was a pinnacle, and having reached it, we were content to leave it and move on.

But in George's case, not very far.  Towards the end of our game I mentioned that between halves of a Celtics game I had caught Kelly palying a rebel officer in a Sunday afternoon flick on television.  With some heat, George replied, "What? Kelly was on and you didn't call me?" I knew then that George was much deeper into film than I would ever be; although we agreed on the fact that  Kelly had extraordinarily little talent and would be remembered by almost no one, he had been a long-lasting survivor in the evolution of the film industry, and , for George, nothing about the history of the industry could be uninteresting, unimportant or negligible: however inconsequential Kelly might be in the big picture, if he was showing on the tube, George did not want to miss him.

Its now the early seventies.  Geroge and I have left Reed, he for the University of Missouri's history department, I for the editor's office of "The Oregon Times,"an alternative monthly of news and opinion published out of Portland.  George is the magaziné film reviewer.

You could not (at least in those days) review films playing in metropolitan Portland from halfway across the country, and Geroge didn't really try.  Although occassionally what he was viewing in Columbia, Missouri might intersect with what "Oregon Times" readers were scheduled to see locally, thereby giving him a chance to express opinions on current offerings, these were rare, and for the most part - at $25 per column- for four years George was left free to deliver a series of erudite and lucid commentaries on some of his favorite cinematic topics, past and present.  What follows are a few excerpts from some of these.  Regular viewers of this blog may recognize the George Fasel whose views so many of us respect and admire.

On Woody Allen's "Play It Again Sam"- July 1972

Things picked up toward the end, mostly, because we got more of Bogey - who is done with such skill by Jerry Lacey that we stop marveling at the impersonation almost at once and go al0ng with the gimmick.  (It did look, however, as though Lacey were smoking king-size filter tips, a sissification in which the real Bogey would never have indulged.)

On porno movies - September 1973

Personally, I put pornographic films in the category of entertainments which, for me, is also occupied by ballet.  Both are capable of demonstrating unusual physical prowess, both occasionally display moments of inventiveness and wit.

Still, as long as these remain voluntary diversions, I see no reason either to attend them myself or restrict others from doing so - provided of course, that someone does not emerge from a performance of Swan Lake crazed with lust and force me to perform a pas de deux against my will.

On Robert Altman - September 1974

Altman seems always to be asking, "Why are these people doing this?"And when we answer disapprovingly, he seems to ask us, "What makes you so much better?" He is constantly questioning, wondering, laughing - at us and at himself and at anything laughable - but always with a straight face.  It has been written that all of Altman's characters are striving for freedom, and this is probably true.  But what of us, his audience? Does any thinking person ever emerge from an Altman film truly liberated?  The gamblers in California Split come out with their money.  But how free are they?  Not very.  And you?

On Japanese director Yazujiro Ozu - December 1975

His conservatism was more than a matter of film technique.  For all that he explored the foibles and frailties of the Japanese family, he plainly looked upon it as something like a sacred institution.  He was wholly committed to traditional Japanese culture and looked with wry humor at such interlopers as television and golf.  His films usually end with a parting - a death, a marriage of a final child - which is treated with a mixture of regret and resignation.  Ozu accepted the inevitability of separation as one of those irresistable processes of nature.  Perhaps we are at a point where to say that " life goes on" is so trite and banal and obvious that we not longer recognize its abiding importance.

George himself was a conservative in the Ozu sense: in a life given to intellectual endeavor, concern for family - who they were and what lay in store for them - was always on his mind.  Now, despite feeling that George died well before his time, his family will go resolutely on with their lives, in a process which, as George's beloved Ozu instructs us, is entirely natural and inevitable.

Mason Druckman

Berkeley, California 

FROM MARION FASEL

A TRIBUTE:  HOME MOVIES

A lifelong cineophile, Dad always found a way to watch old, foreign and obscure movies at home.  When my older sister Kimberley, my younger brother Mason and I were young children growing up in Missouri in the 1970s, Dad would bring home a projector, screen and canisters of movies from the film department of the University of Missouri-Columbia where he was a professor.  Our weekend festivals included Singin' in the Rain, Yellow Submarine, Help!, Bringing Up Baby, Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers flicks and, of course, the Searchers.  When we were pre-teens, Dad took us to see foreign films.  When I asked him recently, "Didn't you think we were a little young for such fare?" He said, "Well, no.  You were old enough to read."

When the VCR was invented in the 80s, Dad must have been one of the first in line to pay around $900 for the contraption.  We continued to watch foreign films and the classics.  But Dad also understood my generation's passion for Star Wars.  He duped the first 2 of the original trilogy in his office in New York City where he had moved and joined the Communications company at a major bank.  His copy made it possible for us to watch the video at any time.

I will be forever grateful to my father for a complete education in classic movies.  It was this knowledge -- not 4 years at New York University -- that made it possible for me to become a co-author, at age 25, of a history of jewelry in the movies, Hollywood Jewels: Movies, Jewelry, Stars (Abrams 1992).

More recently with retirement Dad enjoyed films almost full time at festivals in New York and Paris.  He took advantage of the Internet to locate hard to find films and he was a subscriber to Netflix.  (The queue of films he was reviewing or waiting to be released to DVD is listed below.)  He was passionate about A Girl and A Gun, sharing his thoughts with all of you and getting your responses.  Thank you.

Ethan and Marty are searching for you Dad.

All my love, Marion

At Home

1. The Long Goodbye  2. Underground  3. When Father Was Away on Business

Queue

1. LÁrgent 2. Maborosi 3. Night Moves 4. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne 5. Boudu Saved from Drowning 6. The River 7. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

Saved

1. Moolaade 2. Shoeshine 3. The Revolutioon Will Not Be Televised.

NOTICE 

We, his family, are sad to tell you that George Fasel died Wednesday evening, August 17, after a long and courageous battle with cancer.  He was 67.

We want you to know that George considered this blog and you -- the community which responded from around the world -- as one of the best parts of a long and successful career as writer, historian, professor, film critic, financial PR executive, and now, blogger.

We will continue to maintain the site and will be posting tributes from his family and friends.  We will answer or post as many of your comments in his memory as we can.

George relied on the Film Forum in New York City, www.filmforum.org, to see hard-to-find films and films which he thought were still best seen the old way.  Contributions can be made in his memory to support this resource.

If you would like to make a contribution, you can send a check, payable to The Moving Image, to:  Film Forum 209 West Houston Street;  New York, New York, 10014, Attn. Sonya.  Please write In Memory of George Fasel on the front of the check so that your gift can be recognized as such.

Ruth, his wife.

Cops and Robbers

Knowing full well that any film I watched within a week or so of re-viewing The Conformist could hardly get a fair shake from me, I let my mind run loose and trip hither and thither.  It stopped momentarily on American gangster films.  Back in the 1970s, film and cultural historians had a field day with the genre, finding in Depression-era underworld films a great source for a critique of (failing) capitalism, an economic system that knew only how to pillage people who were supposed to benefit from it.  Because the production code soon kicked into high gear and made certain that the right moral judgments were reached before the fade to credits, there was nothing all that subversive here, but the point got across--except in those movies where the gangsters were the implicit heroes, social bandits who were ripping off the establishment which had compromised all claims on their (or anyone else's) loyalty.  But the situation produced some strange films, one's with strong production values (by the standards of the time) trying to square up with the "right" view of things.

I looked again after many, many years at Michael Curtiz's Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), in which a couple of kids on the economic margins of New York's Hell's Kitchen run afoul of the law, but only one of them, Rocky Sullivan, does time.  He does it for his pal willingly, and when he gets out--after a few more stretches and deeper trouble with the cops--he's what he is, a crook, consorting with crooks, and his old pal is a priest.  (The Roman Catholic Church was the main institutional force behind the code.)  Rocky comes back to the old neighborhood, sees his buddy the priest, horses around with one of the street gangs--the rudiments of what became the East Side kids and then the Bowery Boys, including Leo Gorcey, Bobby Jordan, and Huntz Hall, although with Bobby Halop getting most of the lines--and gets sucked deeper into the underworld with a bent lawyer who is trying to steal from him.  Rocky gets cornered, shoots his way out, taking a couple of cops with him, but is finally captured, tried, sentenced to the chair.  The priest convinces him to go out not like a brave punk, which he is, but "a yellow rat," for the sake of the kids, not to make himself a hero to them.  Surprisingly, Rocky complies.

Angels gets all its oomph from James Cagney as Rocky and all its treacle from Pat O'Brien as Jerry, the priest.  The character reversal at the end is so unbelievable and so schmaltzy as to provoke sustained laughter, and it's also characteristic of its time.  Society will never be reformed, we see clearly, but there is redemption for individuals who recognize the authority of the church militant.  Cagney's energy and electric physical presence--the guy can't shrug his way into a jacket without creating ripples in you--truly carried the movie, and Curtiz had the good sense to keep him on screen probably eighty per cent of the time.  Humphrey Bogart played the weasely lawyer and Ann Sheridan the love interest who oddly drops out of the picture about three-fourths of the way through.

The next year, Warner Bros., famed for its "social realism," followed right up with The Roaring Twenties, a sort of chronicle of the bootlegging phenomenon of the decade.  Cagney plays a bootlegger with a heart of gold, but who falls in with bad types (weren't all bootleggers bad types? just keep going).  Humphrey Bogart plays his crooked partner, ably assisted by the glorious Paul Kelly (who had turned talking out of the side of his mouth before Dick Cheney had told his first lie), Jeffrey Lynn his straight partner, Priscilla Lane plays a singer for whom Cagney falls but whose heart is with Lynn.  Ultimately, Cagney sees he's thrown in his lot with the wrong side, shoots his way out with maximum damage to the criminals, but is killed himself . . . dying on the front steps of a church (in this instance, Protestant: the code was sometimes ecumenical).  Cagney's fire carried the show, Bogart was convincingly bumped off at the end, conventional morality was served, plodding through the melodrama was like wading through molasses, and Priscilla Lane sang entirely too much (she could have been a minimally acceptable chorus singer if she could have carried a tune). 

In both of these films, the cops are bumblers and fumblers, but ultimately have their hearts in the right place and are more or less straight.  When, after passing through the amoral stage of post-war film noir, cops returned, it was in an entirely different guise.  There was Dirty Harry in all his guises, to be sure, but the cake was awarded to New York's finest in The French Connection (1970)--with the footnote that the two earlier films were also set in New York, a bigger cinematic symbol of a sinkhole of corruption than either Chicago or Los Angeles.  Popeye and Russo make a royal mess of things, finally find the dope, kill the wrong prople, are dismissed and reassigned, and what keeps William Friedkin's film going is not the story or the energy of performers but the slam-bang action to little other point than slam-bang action.  Whereas the Warners' pictures had their vaunted "realism," they were all shot on sets; Connection used NYC indoor and outdoor set-ups and looked and smelled more like the genuine article.  And yet their unrelieved striving for showing it "how it was" never felt right: grit can be good, but too much of anything gets under your skin after a while, and Friedkin never quite gets his movie to settle in, tell its story. 

What I take from all of this is that we've never really figured out how to put a decent gangster film on screen without falling into genre conventions.  We're either code or anti-code, drearily conventional in our moral judgments or trying desperately to overcome them.  We can't simply say, here's this story about crime, let's try to get into it; we're always looking over our shoulders.  An occasional noir broke the mold; Point Blank was itself without apology.  The French Connection was all too characteristic, as we the two Warner Bros.' pieces.

A final Cagney note.  To the degree that his gangster films worked, it was because his characters galvanized the audience, accomplished that tricky feat of making us pull for the bad guy while understanding he had to go down ultimately, a little like Lucifer in Milton's Paradise Lost.  His last theatrical film was Ragtime (1981), in which he had a bit as Rhinelander Waldo, the police commissioner, and had to deal with Kenneth McMillan as a creep of major proportions with whom he must deal all the same.  Cagney was eighty-two, and the old furnace had pretty much banked down.  But when he had reached the end of his patience with McMillan, he exploded into a brief blast of disgust as only he could do, calling McMillan's character "a piece of human garbage."  The  New York audience I saw it with went wild with this tiny flash of the old Jimmy, screamed and applauded and roared with approval.  It was one of the few decent moments in a lousy movie, and one of the great movie-house moments of my life.  He was one of our greatest, and I doubt we'll ever find another one like him.

A Masterpiece, and then Some

Let us put aside for a moment that The Conformist (1970) is the most magnificently photographed, scored, choreographed, and costumed film made--ever, anywhere--because while those are not insignificant achievements, there is more to this work by Bernardo Bertolucci, who finished it when he was just short of thirty.  It is also the most evocative and stirring political movie of the post-World War II era, a framing of the emptiness and deindividualization which was the goal of fascism and how that experience played out in one particular life.  I first saw it more than thirty years ago and was deeply moved and impressed; this time around, I was floored with admiration and astonishment.

Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a youngish Italian philosophy professor who announces his adherence to fascism and Mussolini early in his own career, looking for favor and advancement, but also looking for identity, "stability and security."  His rather odd goal is "to be like everyone else," which is of course the goal that fascism has for man; the end product is to be uniformity, predictability, reliability, and it is possible to see how--for what used to be called an "other-directed" man, one who seeks his leads from the external world rather than from conscience or reflection--it could be an attractive pursuit.  In the course of proving himself to his fascist betters, Marcello takes on a nasty assignment, the elimination of an Italian professor (once his thesis director) who is now in France saying unpleasant things about the regime back home.  But he's not as callous and unfeeling as he has thought, his feelings for the professor's young wife start complicating things, and then his own wife's feelings for the professor's young wife give things another turn, and then everything goes wrong, for him and for the homeland, where we see it all coming apart in the picture's 1943 coda set in the ground-floor coils of the Coliseum, the perfect symbol for the crumbled result of Italy's attempt to restore past imperial glory. 

To say that Marcello waltzes through these situations with the blitheness we might expect of a man with no internal compass is no abuse of an active verb.  The characters here, as in so many of Bertolucci's earlier movies, cannot express the deeper rhythms the director is trying to reach by simply walking from here to there.  They skitter, stroll, tip-toe--most of all, they dance, or march, to music.  For Bertolucci, the dance is how we break out of our most rigidly imposed social conventions to achieve some flow, some beauty, some intimacy.  The great dance of the blind at the boathouse here, and the republican/resistance demonstration march at the end, recall the dances of Before the Revolution (1964), The Spider's Strategem (1970), and Last Tango in Paris (1972).  They are all breathtaking and hypnotic.

More: in every scene, the camera slips about into unlikely places, then quickly emerges into conventional setups, then again edges around a corner and sneaks a look from a revealing angle, but does it all on the fly.  Nobody moves a camera like Bertolucci, and nobody moves one for him like Vittorio Storraro, the greatest color cinemtographer of our age.  This may have been the movie in which Bertolucci forever broke the stranglehold of Godard's influence, but not of the master's insistence upon image over text.  The Conformist is not meant to be summarized verbally, and cannot be: it is a succession of images, often staggering: long vistas, camera moving a ground level parting fallen leaves as it progresses, huge rooms empty except for one person (again, the visualization of fascism), views from outside in through windows, and the reverse.  Nor are these simply compositions.  Gitt Margrini did his  customary spectacular job on costume design for a period picture, so that clothing becomes skin, and Georges Delerue's score is just what you want: managing somehow to be memorable and unobtrusive at the same time. Yet  none of this is showing off: it all makes a perfectly integrated point, and you wouldn't want to change a frame or a note. 

I don't know of a picture which handled atmospherics better after The Conformist until Wong Kar-Wai came along with In the Mood for Love, also placed in the hands of a genius DP, Chris Doyle.  Sadly, I have the impression from hearsay that the film has dropped into the deepest circle of distribution hell.  To say this is a pity is like saying that it would be unfortunate if all the scores and recordings of The Marriage of Figaro or The Magic Flute were somehow lost or destroyed.  This is one of the greatest of all cinematic treasures, and if you're within hitchhiking distance of New York City through August 11, brave the heat--the Film Forum is nicely air-conditioned--and grab it.  It could be your last chance for many years, and even if it ever makes DVD (which doesn't sound too likely at present), this is of them all a big-screen experience non pareil. 

A Joke, and a Post Script for the Siren

A.O. Scott opined that The Aristocrats (2005) was "one of the most original and rigorous pieces of criticism I have encountered in any medium in quite some time."  One can see what he means in the sense that the film is an extended analysis of a single joke with admittedly almost endless impliciations sexual, psychological, and social.  But analysis of humor has always been something of a fool's errand: the more we rake it over, the more we bleed the laughs out of it--unless the analysis is being doing not by an academic department full of literary critics or an auditorium full of shrinks but instead a film  full of (one hundred, they say) professional comedians.  I'm not sure they give us criticism in quite the sense Scott seems to mean; they're thorough and they don't miss much, but their real task is not to answer why the joke, or any joke, makes us laugh but rather to add more laughs to it, to take it in directions nobody had heretofore anticipated--in public or on film.  The result for the audience is one of the funniest ninety-two minutes in recent film comedy, although of course questions of taste do come into play, since there's not much these people don't think is fair game.   If you're old enough to remember that at a certain time the idea of a dirty joke began, "A salesman goes up to the farmhouse door and says he's run out of gas, could the farmer's family put him up for the night . . ." then you're in for a jolt.

It has rapidly become de rigeur among critics since the film's release a few days ago that they not reveal the joke, and I won't.  But the comics do, over and over and over and over and over again, all in talking-head format.  A little tedium creeps in here, as you might expect, but we learn early on that the "joke" isn't our quarry here, it's the getting to it--how these gifted, slightly demented, often smart, and enormously self-conscious (in the sense of knowing what they're saying and doing) people approach  the "joke," that is, the punch line.  As put by Penn Jillette, who worked with director Paul Provenza on putting together the film, and is of course the noisier half of the Penn and Teller comedy/magic team, the goal here is the singer, not the song.  There are big stars to give us some idea of how this works: Robin Williams, George Carlin, Whoopi Goldberg, all that crowd.  But there are also some priceless moments from less luminous names, such as Sarah Silverman reworking the joke, Gilbert Gottfried doing it live at a particularly sensitive historical moment, and--my personal favorite--Kevin Pollack doing a dead-on imitation of the joke as being told by Christopher Walken.  That above all is not to be missed.

I will add only that my respected colleague filmbrain has found The Aristocrats too overflowing with toilet humor (of which there are cesspools full in the film) to give him much joy.  I must concede that point of taste to him.  But I also note that I laughed, mostly hard, throughout the entire hour and a half, and that I cannot ignore the impulses of an id so deeply stirred and kicked about as mine.  As filmmaker Robert Downey, Sr., once put it, "I like bad taste.  It makes the day a little shorter."

My thanks to campaspe for the generous remarks at selfstyledsiren.  She takes issue with my (in no way original) view that western films are generally about the end of the west, or at least of the frontier west.  She writes, "On the most basic level Westerns are, always and without exception, about manhood. They ask, Who's the man here?  Is it me? How do I make it me?"  I regret to say that, after twenty minutes of dead ends and frustrations, I wasn't able to get a response up in her comment section.  So I'll stick some remarks in here. 

If you think about what I wrote and the "who's the man here?" definition, we're really talking about the same thing.  The end of the frontier points to that moment when might no longer made right, when justice was defined not by one strong man emerging from the gunsmoke, but by civil, peaceful decisions.  If you wish, it was when Johnny Ringo, Will Kane, Shane, and Ethan Edwards were all replaced by the social contract, when individuals agreed to vest their monopoly over the powers of coercion in a collective body: society, government, call it what you will.  You didn't have to ask the question, "Who's the man here?" because it was irrelevant; we had decided on a society which in the interest of peace and security placed procedure--what we call due process of law--above individual strength.  The frontier, seen in this admittedly schematic way, is another illustration of the old axiom that you can't get to Locke and Madison without going through Hobbes.  As bad as I think "Liberty Valance" is as a movie, it's a perfect example of the genre in this respect.