“I don’t feel like an old man. I feel like a young man who has something wrong with him.”-- Chuck Jones
**********************
"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing...
Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lives into truths. Of course, fantasy and reality are equally personal, and equally felt, so their confusion is a matter of only relative importance... I am the sum of my errors and doubts as well as my certainties."
Luis Bunuel
It's been a while coming, but Barbara Stanwyck is currently winning a tug of war for status as my favorite actress, overcoming long-time titleholder Carole Lombard. This being Stanwyck's centennial year, and after having revisited wonders like Forty Guns, The Violent Men, The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity, Baby Face and the velvety sass of her Sugarpuss O’Shea in Ball of Fire (above) all fairly recently, the victory is all but a given. Time to start looking at some of the superb writing available about this great star and marvelous actress, and there’s no better place to begin than with Jim Emerson, who wrote this about Stanwyck last month in his post “Bow Down to Babs”:
“In both The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire -- two of her most dazzling and endearing comic performances, from the same year! -- Stanwyck acts as a leveling life-force, puncturing all pretensions and knocking her co-stars' bumbling intellectual noggins out of the hazy cerebral clouds. What she achieves is not unlike what a much ditzier, flakier, upper-crust screwball heroine, Katharine Hepburn, does for/to bespectacled paleontologist Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby. But Stanwyck brings salvation from the streets rather than the penthouse. Jean Arthur in Easy Living (1937) -- written by Sturges -- is a delightful working gal, but Stanwyck is far more streetwise. Tough, strong, and smart, but no less feminine than some of her screwball sisters, she has learned to survive in a cut-throat world, living by her wits. She's at her best when she's in control, and she usually is. In many of her most famous movies the unspoken truth of any given scene is that she knows exactly what she's doing -- until, perhaps, her emotions sneak up on her and overthrow her instincts, by unexpectedly allowing her to fall head-over-heels for her (relatively) naive and helpless male prey.”
David Hudson and GreenCine Daily point the way toward Terrence Rafferty’s ”The Infinite Variety of the Lady Stanwyck”, which highlights her 100th birthday in light of a brief career retrospective beginning Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music:
”There are only a few ways to be a movie star, and Barbara Stanwyck, Brooklyn-born 100 years ago, took the hardest and probably the best one: she kept the audience guessing. She wasn’t jaw-droppingly beautiful (though her eyes were lovely and her legs were famously good). She didn’t have an outsize, force-of-nature personality. And she wasn’t an instantly recognizable type — a vamp or girl next door or ‘career woman’ or high-society madcap, to name a few of the popular personae available to actresses of her era. She played versions of all those roles at one time or another, without getting stuck in any of them. You couldn’t tell who Barbara Stanwyck was just by looking at her; it took a little trouble to get to know her, and she had the ability — a star’s ability — to make millions of viewers believe she was worth the trouble.”
Finally, Anthony Lane at The New Yorker checks in with a piece that is fine and lengthy and as suitably reverent as Lane is ever apt to be. It’s called “Lady be Good”:
”Seventeen years after her death, there has been a shift in Stanwyck’s reputation. To addicts of old Hollywood, as to pining critics, no actress delivered a more accomplished body of work; to the general public, however, her name is fading into the past. All we have of Stanwyck is a collection of films—but what a collection—and thus the temptation to conflate the woman with her roles is overpowering. Think of a jockey riding multiple mounts in an afternoon and you have some idea of the Stanwyck who had four pictures released in 1941 and again in 1946. Like many stars, she was loaned out on contract from one stable to another, but she made the switches work to her advantage, so that neither Columbia nor Warner Bros., for instance, both of whom worked her hard in the early years, was able to fence her in. In later years, she negotiated short contracts with M-G-M, R.K.O., Paramount, and Twentieth Century Fox. Nobody seemed to own her: not the studios, not her husbands, not Frank Capra or Preston Sturges, not Zeppo Marx, her agent in the thirties. She had self-possession, and that was ownership enough. Samuel Goldwyn tried for three other Sugarpusses—Ginger Rogers, Jean Arthur, and Carole Lombard—before settling on Stanwyck, yet the role now seems inconceivable in the hands of anyone else. That is the way with the brightest stars: as much by accident as by design, they pull toward them the scripts and directors most likely to enrich, even to mythologize, our sense of who they are. We feel as if we have some share in a great public secret. All in all, as Sugarpuss says, ‘Pretty good getting, for a gal that came up the hard way.’”
Barbara Stanwyck was born on July 16, 1907, and in between now and that day this year hopefully there will be one tribute after another, in hopes of celebrating this fascinating, tough and alluring actress’s career and counteracting what Lane sees as a fading of her star in the eyes of the general public. There’s lots more to read about Stanwyck than just these three fine pieces. Go ahead. Google “Barbara Stanwyck,” and let’s get started.
In digging up that picture of the Cinemagic Theater in Portland, Oregon that I used on the previous post, I stumbled upon a real treasure chest for those who love to look at photos of the fading facades of the American moviegoing past. Photographer Don Lewis, whose shot of the Cinemagic that is, has posted a wonderful 336-picture slideshow entitled Vanishing Movie Theaters that really should be seen by anyone who still fondly remembers the days before the multiplex was king. Some of the theaters in Lewis’s collection are still open—the Bagdad in Portland, Oregon, seen above, is now a McMenamin’s-owned pub and theater, but it’s still cranking. However, many are not—for them, the last picture show faded a long time ago. I’ll never forget what it was like to walk up at dusk to the box-office of my local movie palace—it was located under a field of bright bulbs that covered the underside of the marquee overhang, and when I was a kid it made the Alger Theater seem like the most wonderful place on Earth. Even when the bright sunlight revealed that it was hardly that, it still managed to retain a special aura. Lewis’ photographs, even the saddest shots of dilapidated and neglected facades and marquees, have that aura too, and I suspect they will for anyone who remembers when movies were shown in big and small palaces, buildings that bestowed magic on them whether they deserved it or not
Being part of Adam Ross's "Friday Screen Tests" is a whole lot better than getting my name in the new phone book!
Anyone who has spent any time in the blogosphere, either as a reader or writer, knows that one of the great pleasures of being involved in it is becoming acquainted with new people-- fellow bloggers, readers, critics, people from all over the world. Other than getting to keep my own writing muscles in tone, after having let them lay dormant for so many years, this has easily been the most fruitful and satisfying element of starting this blog two and a half years ago. I have received e-mails and worked with several critics who I’d read for several years prior to the inception of SLIFR, which has been thrilling enough. But on top of that, I’ve met and even become friends with several other bloggers and critics and readers who I’d never had the pleasure of knowing before, some who come from my own backyards (Oregon and California), many from all points throughout the country, and several from the other side of the planet. For someone for whom the world has never really been very big, these meetings and friendships have been a very happy revelation. It’s pretty great to be so connected to a world of people who may not always think like you do, but who share that same passion for the possibilities of the art of film, people who won’t automatically fall asleep or shoo you out the door when you start going on about your love for Gloria Grahame, Cinemascope, or a movie that no one else gives two shits about. And you just never know who’s gonna come calling next. A couple of months ago I received an e-mail from fellow blogger Adam Ross, who comments here occasionally and runs his very own site entitled DVD Panache, a delightful smorgasblog that is never less than sharp, often thoughtful and, on occasion, exhaustive. Lately Adam has taken to highlighting the blogs he finds himself returning to over and over again in a series entitled Friday Screen Tests, in which he poses a series of questions to the bloggers in his sights and lets them have free rein on his site to answer them. Recently he has given space to Ted Pigeon of The Cinematic Art, Tuwa of Stairs in Movies as well as Tuwa’s Shanty and the Roots Canal, and Corvallis, Oregon’s own Damian Arlyn of Windmills of My Mind. When he contacted me to ask if I’d be interested in taking part, I was indeed honored, though I must say I took a molasses-in-January approach to returning my answers to him. And they weren’t questions that could be easily tossed off—it took me some time to figure out what the answers were and how best to formulate them— kind of like the professor quizzes on my own site, only this time I wasn’t writing the questions. Here are the ten posers Adam tossed my way:
1. Describe the frequency of your movie watching
2. Has there been a movie recently that absolutely shattered your expectations (good or bad)?
3. Can you give a singular answer to the question "what is your favorite movie?"
4. You hear someone say "I hate old movies" -- what movie would you have them watch?
5. What about "movies never scare me"?
6. What was the first time in your life when you saw a movie and immediately wanted to either write about it or have a group discussion about it?
7. If you could go back in time and see any movie during its original theatrical run (staying only in your seat so as not to alter time),what would it be?
8. Is there a movie for you that epitomizes the phrase "so bad it's good"?
9. Has there ever been a movie that made you seriously consider changing careers (or career paths)?
10. On the worst day of your life, what movie will you put in?
Adam assured me that he would let me know when my day on DVD Panache was to come. Well, dear readers, my day was yesterday! And now you can head directly to DVD Panache your own selves and find out what my answers to these questions are, and at the same time discover, if you haven’t yet already, why Adam’s blog occupies a spot on my sidebar. Adam has lots of kind and generous things to say about this blog— he claims it was the first film blog he ever read! He even likes all the sidebar links to favorite movie theaters throughout Oregon, though he gently chastises me for leaving out his favorite from Portland, the Cinemagic. The theater was, I thought, an unknown quantity to me until I realized that during my day it was an art house known as the Fine Arts. So I do know it, Adam, and you’re right—it’s a beauty. I hope you, and everyone else, enjoys the pic of the former Fine Arts that I was able to unearth from the link you provided. And thanks a ton, Adam, for including me in your project. Hopefully someday you’ll have enough for a whole book!
Well, it’s been just over a month since Professor Irwin Corey submitted his Foremostly Authoritative Spring Break Quiz for your amusement (or, perhaps, for your frustration), and as is becoming some kind of tradition/pattern/growing body of evidence as to my laziness, I have finally now gotten around to posting my own answers to the professor’s queries. Many have mentioned in the comments column how this batch seemed a little more difficult than usual, and as usual I really didn’t think so—until I sat down to try to answer them myself. Often, as I read the questions for the first time, I have some kind of idea floating in the back of my head as to what my answer of at least some of them might be. But this time around, I have to agree with those who claim that the professor is more demanding than other staff members of the past have been. My No. 2 lead pencil is but a nub now, and my brain feels similarly abused. But that’s not to say it hasn’t been fun. This batch of answers submitted by the professor’s diligent and intelligent student body have really risen to the occasion too, and I look forward, sometime between now and the upcoming summer quiz, to gathering up Professor Corey’s teacher’s pets and highlighting them in the same way I did those of Professor Dave Jennings. But for now, behold the results of turning Prof. Corey’s inquisition in on myself. The results are often not pretty, but if you’ve read this site for any length of time I’m sure you’ve come to expect that. So, with that in mind, let’s open up my Blue Book and see what’s inside…
1) What movie did you have to see multiple times before deciding whether you liked or disliked it?
Back in my college days, when I could and would see just about everything that came out (what other reason could there possibly be for seeing agonizing artifacts Chapter Two or Same Time, Next Year on the big screen or at all?) it was not unusual for me to see movies more than once, even ones I didn’t like—for when the urge to NOT study was dominating all other more responsible impulses, the movies were always the first option for my friends and I. Sometimes all that was available was romantic bilge water like the two movies cited above, or perhaps a 1970 Raquel Welch movie (Restless) released to unsuspecting viewers in 1978 as if it were brand-spanking-new. But there were other movies that actually latched onto my consciousness, movies that I didn’t like and in some cases still don’t like, that I saw with my friends more than once. For me, going back to see a movie like Apocalypse Now or Altered States more than once was to acknowledge that there were elements at play that were often far more interesting than in more conventional films that I could say with more certainty that I “liked.” And, strangely enough, the jury is still out for me on those two movies. Just about the time I thought I’d settled on a pretty positive view of Apocalypse Now, after about 12 times around and a very checkered history with it, along came Apocalypse Now Redux to muddy up the waters for me all over again. Blaaagh and I threw in the DVD of Altered States last summer—a movie he’s always liked more than I have—and I had to admit that revisiting it was captivating and went beyond nostalgia for the spring of 1980. Though I still found the overcooked academia of the dialogue stilted and forbidding, I also got tugged in by the story and by Ken Russell’s hallucinatory amalgam of Revelation-based religious imagery, Castaneda-esque folderol and the way he (and Paddy Chayefsky) fuse it to a Jekyll-and-Hyde horror template. We didn’t finish watching it last summer, but I long to, just to see if 20 years or so have changed my ultimately negative response.
But the movie I can say I flat-out hated when I saw it twice on the big screen during its Christmas 1979 run was Steven Spielberg’s 1941. Critics and magazine reporters eager to watch the wunderkind responsible for Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind belly-flop on a grand scale set the tone for the shaky reception of 1941 early on—before any of us knew the term “buzz,” the movie had a ton of negative word-of-mouth working against it right up to the day of its release. Critical response was typified by the New York Times’ Vincent Canby (whose review I read in the university library before I saw the movie):
“The huge, profligate scale on which Mr. Spielberg… has constructed 1941 works against the intended hilarity. There are too many characters who aren't immediately comic. There are too many simultaneous actions that necessitate a lot of cross-cutting, and cross-cutting between unrelated anecdotes can kill a laugh faster than a yawn.”
Going in, everyone seemed to know that 1941 was best viewed as Spielberg’s comeuppance, though for what I’m not sure—perhaps for making three terrific movies in a row? (I’m including the box-office dud The Sugarland Express in this delightful trio.) And when I saw it I thought Canby was right. Again, my friend Blaaagh seemed to like it more than the average bear, and when we went back to see it again together I told myself it was kind of an expedition to take further note of what Spielberg did wrong. And note the wrong-headedness of 1941 I dutifully did.
Cut to a late night about two years later. I encountered 1941 on HBO, and somehow, scaled down to a 19-inch TV screen, stripped of the deafening soundtrack and rumble of artillery and exploding bombs coming at me from every which way, I discovered myself laughing. A couple more viewings and I became convinced I was completely wrong about this movie from the start. How could I have missed the brilliance of the USO dance set-piece? Or the maniacal wonder of Warren Oates’s sputtering Colonel “Madman” Maddox? Or the subversive glee in which Spielberg, and just as importantly scenarists Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, dismantle a nation’s paranoia and jingoistic fury in the context of this nation’s last great, justifiable war? Or the way the movie comedically embraces and simultaneously dismantles prevalent racist stereotypes of the era? Or the way John Williams’ score (his best and most joyous, in my opinion) dances about and accentuates the big moments as well as the small? (I collapsed in delight upon noticing the flourishes of flutes that sonically decorate puffs of smoke erupting from the cigar of psychotic pilot Wild Bill Kelso, played by John Belushi as Bluto Squared, and furious.)
I’ve seen 1941 at least 20 times in various formats since its 1979 release—I even got to create the closed-captions for the re-release on video and laserdisc of the uncut version that Universal unveiled in the mid ‘90s. And though the conventional critical wisdom is still largely negative, it was absolutely wonderful to discover some years later than Pauline Kael, who never wrote a full review of the movie, was a fan of 1941. In her review of Used Cars (which she also loved, God bless her), she wrote of Spielberg’s movie:
“1941 had a choppy beginning; it seemed to start with the story already under way, and Spielberg overdid some of the broad, cartoon aspects—some of the performers seemed to be carrying placards telling you what was wacko about them. But the U.S.O. jitterbug number is one of the greatest pieces of film choreography I’ve ever seen, and the film overall is an amazing, orgiastic comedy, with the pop culture of an era compacted into a day and a night. Its commercial failure in this country didn’t make much sense to me. It was accused of gigantism, and it did seem huge, though part of what was so disarmingly fresh about it was the miniature recreation of Hollywood Boulevard at night in 1941, with little floodlights illuminating the toy cars tootling around the corners and toy planes flying so low they were buzzing through the streets.”
And I was delighted to find out online friend and film critic Paul Matwychuk is quoted on RottenTomatoes.com as proclaiming 1941 as “"the most underrated film of Steven Spielberg's entire career." (Unfortunately, there’s no link to a review. How can I get your review, Paul?!)
But for all of my experience with 1941 since its original release, the irony is, I’ll probably never again get the opportunity to see it the way it was meant to be seen-- on the big screen. I’d love another chance to experience 1941 the way I should have back in 1979, with my newfound appreciation, and the movie’s gigantism, intact. And in this time of war, I wonder if Spielberg and Zemeckis and Gale’s none-too-flattering picture of American patriotic fervor and fear of The Other turned in on itself might find a more sympathetic audience.
(Speaking of gigantism, I’ll try not to be so logorrheic from here on out!)
Press play for a look at the teaser trailer for 1941 featuring Belushi as the atavistic fighter pilot known here as Wild Wayne Kelso (by the time the movie came out, the name was changed to Wild Bill). This trailer was apparently in theaters the Christmas before the movie was actually released.
2) Inaugural entry into the Academy of the Overrated How about Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up? Around Thanksgiving of 2005 I wrote briefly about my thoughts on this movie, and nothing has much changed: “Alienation Cinema’s equivalent to a Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic—let’s dance around and frug and fret with the denizens of swinging 1960s-era London and secretly dig all the happenings that we’ll constantly insist, through our visual grammar and sound design, are symptoms of the sick soul of society. (The zombified supermodels David Hemmings makes a living taking pictures of didn’t look like they were having that bad of a time.) Antonioni is so distanced—coolly, deliberately—from his subjects and their world that the movie comes off as being one of those muted, nebulous templates for whatever concerns and/or meanings the viewer wishes to project upon it. And to top it off, the movie begins and ends with mimes running madly about London and engaging in a tennis game with no net, no rackets and, of course, no balls. I’ve nothing against ennui, but please, let it feel more felt (or would that be authentically numbed), less trendy and manufactured than what Antonioni concocts for Blow-up.”
3) Favorite sly or not-so-sly reference to another film or bit of pop culture within another film. I’m trying very hard just to think of something off the top of my head, and like a Rorschach ink blot test, where first impressions are most important, here’s what came bubbling up to the surface: the commercials for Goo-Goo Clusters sung on stage at the Grand Ole Opry before Haven Hamilton takes the Opry stage in Nashville-- “Go get a Goo-Goo… it’s good!” (Here’s a link to a story about how the Opry and Goo-Goo Clusters recently parted ways.) Come to think of it, Nashville’s opening credits also serve as a hilarious parody of those old mile-a-minute K-Tel record album commercials, and that’s pretty damn spiffy too!
4) Favorite Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger movie It’s got to be the magical realism of A Canterbury Tale, one of the most disarming and transporting movies I’ve ever seen.
5) Your favorite Oscar moment Several have already mentioned William Holden’s impromptu tribute to Barbara Stanwyck, to whose generosity, professional dignity, and friendship he attributed the success of his career. (When Stanwyck finally did get an honorary Oscar, the same year Holden passed away, she dedicated her award to her good friend.) But here are the two I know I’ll always remember, one profoundly moving, one profoundly silly and delightful. The first is, of course, the wonderful tribute given by Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep to Robert Altman (in which they tweaked both the canned, badly written lines usually read by uncomfortable actors in introducing awards, as well as Altman’s own singular style of overlapping dialogue), followed, of course, by Altman’s appearance immediately afterwards, during which he revealed his 10-year-old heart transplant and his desire to keep on making movies. The second came somewhere in the mid ‘70s. John Huston is onstage ready to introduce a young singer who was at that time just beginning to make strides into the world of acting on the strength of a couple of successful runs at the TV variety show format. Imagine the gruff, portentous, and slightly impish tones of Huston wrapping themselves around this intro: “Ladies and gentlemen… the incomparable…Cher-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!” It ain’t no streaker, but it makes me smile. (Though if this ever happens on the Oscars, it’ll automatically make my top five!)
UPDATE 4/26/07: Reader Bob Turnbull has graciously pointed that the William Holden-Barbara Stanwyck Oscar moment could be found on (where else?) YouTube. Press play and enjoy. Thanks, Bob.
6) Hugo Weaving or Guy Pearce? As much as I love Weaving’s voice in Happy Feet and Babe, and his performances in the first Matrix movie and V for Vendetta, I have to give the edge to Guy Pearce on the strength of The Proposition, Memento. L.A. Confidential and, most importantly, Ravenous.
7) Movie that you feel gave you the greatest insight into a world/culture/person/place/event that you had no understanding of before seeing it Barbara Kopple's Harlan County U.S.A.
8) Favorite Samuel Fuller movie Right now it’s a three-way tie between Pickup on South Street, The Naked Kiss and the unexpectedly splendid Run of the Arrow. I just saw The Steel Helmet for the first time, however, and it was pretty impressive.
9) Monica Bellucci or Maria Grazia Cucinotta?
Maria Grazia Cucinotta is spectacularly lovely, and her brief appearance as a doomed villainess was the best thing about the otherwise forgettable James Bond entry The World Is Not Enough. But Monica Bellucci wins by virtue of the poster for Malena alone (I still haven’t seen the movie) and the way director Christopher Gans, in perhaps the greatest instance of graphic continuity in the history of cinema (maybe!), lap dissolves from a rolling mountain range to Bellucci in a reclining position, the splendid, undulating curves of her body matching the mountains peak for peak.
10) What movie can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile? There are a lot of movies I can think of that work on me like a tonic-- His Girl Friday, Rio Bravo, Only Angels Have Wings, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes-- some of them are even directed by someone other than Howard Hawks (Singin’ in the Rain, The Long Goodbye, Amarcord, The Big Lebowski, Dressed to Kill). But again, going with the first title that bubbles to the surface seems to be working here, because there can be no denying that a visit to the bustling campus of Huxley College, in the company of Pinky, Baravelli and Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, is always good for what ails me. I speak, of course, of the Marx Brothers and Horse Feathers.
11) Conversely, what movie can destroy a day’s worth of good humor just by catching a glimpse of it while channel surfing?
Just about any movie by Alan Parker will do the trick, but most egregiously Midnight Express and Mississippi Burning, for the particular way they aestheticize and misrepresent the factual basis of their stories in favor of Parker’s favorite M.O., the picturesque and utterly senseless sucker punch to the gut.
12) Favorite John Boorman movie
Boorman’s best movies, in my estimation, are probably also his most celebrated-- Deliverance and Hope and Glory. But I also hold a soft spot for one of his most ignored pictures, the disarmingly personal family comedy Where the Heart Is, starring Uma Thurman, Dabney Coleman and Crispin Glover. And though I find it hard to defend on any basis other than visual, Exorcist II: The Heretic, by any standard a hoary and miscalculated folly from start to finish, is a movie I’ve always wanted to see again. I remain in awe of just how defiantly Boorman flew in the face of audience expectations in pursuit of something that must have felt awfully real to him. Boorman's a Jungian naturalist whose florid imaginings of man’s fall from grace, visual and thematic motifs apparent in almost all his features, never found more perverse expression than they did here.
13) Warren Oates or Bruce Dern?
Don’t get me wrong. I love Bruce Dern. He’ll always have Marnie, The Wild Angels, The Trip, Hang ‘Em High, Bloody Mama, The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, Silent Running, Smile, Black Sunday, Coming Home, The Driver and The ‘burbs.
But can those really compete with Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, The Shooting, In the Heat of the Night, The Wild Bunch, There Was a Crooked Man…, The Hired Hand, Dillinger, Badlands, The White Dawn, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Cockfighter, Rancho Deluxe, Race with the Devil, 1941 and Stripes? Oh, and I just finished watching Two-Lane Blacktop again, which I’m now convinced is one of the great American movies, of the ‘70s or anytime. Dern it, it can only be Warren Oates.
14) Your favorite aspect ratio
Cinemascope 2.35.1. I’m also partial to Panavision and Super Panavision 70. But I like the answer someone else gave earlier: whatever one the director chose.
15) Before he died in 1984, Francois Truffaut once said: “The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it.” Is there any evidence that Truffaut was right? Is it Truffaut’s tomorrow yet? I think Truffaut’s own movies prove clearly enough that his tomorrow was already here when he was making movies himself. From all we know of him, who else could have made The 400 Blows or The Wild Child or Small Change? And as much as the blow-‘em-up-real-good aesthetic of Michael Bay reigns so supreme in Hollywood today (even though Bay’s name is no longer synonymous with unbridled B.O. success), I would venture to guess that bloated, brainless pictures like Bad Boys II and The Island probably resemble Michael Bay to an uncomfortable degree too. Quentin Tarantino. Paul Verhoeven. The Coen Brothers. Jonathan Caouette. Walter Hill. Brian De Palma. Uwe Boll. There was no need for Truffaut to be speaking in the future tense.
16) Favorite Werner Herzog movie
I had a thorny relationship with Aguirre, the Wrath of God when I was coming of age cinema-wise in college—it was a huge film for cineastes in the mid to late ‘70s, but I was insufficiently unwrapped from my cocoon of familiar American fare to deal with it when I saw it. As much as I suspect I’d love it now, I must leave it off my list-- The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser too—and believe me, Netflix has been informed that I need to see both of these movies, and several other Herzog films, again. Honestly speaking, right now I’d choose either Grizzly Man or the ethereal lunacy of The Wild Blue Yonder (all the while cheering mightily for The White Diamond and Little Dieter Needs to Fly). And since they wouldn’t exist without him, I would also include two brilliant documents from filmmaker Les Blank-- Burden of Dreams and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. And I can’t wait to see Incident at Loch Ness!
17) Favorite movie featuring a rampaging, oversized or otherwise mutated beast, or beasts
Six months ago I would have said Godzilla vs. Mothra, or perhaps Tarantula, or Them! But in April of 2007 there is only one answer for me—no, Filmbrain, it is not too soon to choose The Host.
(You may have already seen this trailer—it’s the Korean version—or the one attached to the U.S. release, and hopefully you’ve seen the movie. But if you haven’t and you’ve any inclination to see a superior example of just how supple and adaptable the horror genre can be when it is approached with imagination, seriousness and a unique comic vision—all of which this trailer hints at without giving away the entire game—then you really must see The Host.)
18) Sandra Bernhard or Sarah Silverman?
I think I’d probably rather spend time with Sarah Silverman, and Jesus Is Magic is, well, magic. But Sandra Bernhard has The King of Comedy and Without You I’m Nothing and those wonderful, awful, aggressively uncomfortable appearances on the old Late Night with David Letterman show in her column. Advantage: Bernhard.
Also, I can’t stand it when someone says “I’m too old for this shit” before embarking on some boneheaded misadventure designed to blow up things real good in Cinemascope and/or Panavision. And especially when Danny Glover says it, I definitely am.
20) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom-- yes or no?
I’m willing to give it another try, especially since I did such a 180 on 1941. And Temple of Doom does have that spectacular “Anything Goes” opening number and subsequent slapstick scramble for a giant diamond that is so reminiscent of the U.S.O. number in 1941. But, God, did this movie give m a headache in 1984. I actually liked the movie’s grisly tendencies, but the incessant chattering and squawking and screaming of sidekicks Kate Capshaw (no Karen Allen she) and Ke Huy Quan, and the movie’s visual hyperactivity, wore me out. That said, I think it’s high time I give it one more go around.
21) Favorite Nicholas Ray movie
In a walk, In a Lonely Place, with Johnny Guitar a very close second.
22) Inaugural entry into the Academy of the Underrated
Ron Shelton’s uncompromising, brutal and profound Cobb, ignored by most and misunderstood by many who did see it when it was briefly released in 1994, it is perhaps the most bitter and truthful examination of the concept of hero in sport legend ever made.
23) Your favorite movie dealing with the subject of television
For cheerful nostalgia: My Favorite Year For belly laughs: The Groove Tube For the frightening possibilities and hope for the New Flesh: Videodrome
24) Bruno Ganz or Patrick Bauchau?
Patrick Bauchau for The State of Things, though if what I’ve heard holds true, when I finally see Downfall I may want to go back and change this answer.
25) Your favorite documentary, or non-fiction, film
I know I’m spineless, but I couldn’t do anything here but a three-way tie: Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County U.S.A., which had a more profound impact on me when I saw it on PBS at age 17 that I could have ever anticipated;
Ken Burns’ Baseball, which in 1994 introduced me to a whole new world that I couldn’t live without today;
and Kristian Fraga’s Anytown U.S.A., as devastating a portrait of American politics as I have ever seen.
26) According to Orson Welles, the director’s job is to “preside over accidents.” Name a favorite moment from a movie that seems like an accident, or a unintended, privileged moment. How did it enhance or distract from the total experience of the movie? There is a moment in The Stunt Man when possibly Satanic director Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole) first speaks to the fugitive Cameron (Steve Railsback)—the man on the run has just jumped in the ocean to save someone he thinks is an old lady who has fallen off a rock into the sea. He is shocked to discover the old lady is a very famous, very young actress, Nina Franklin (Barbara Hershey), and as he pulls himself up onto the shore, he is met by Cross, who recognizes him as the man he saw running from the police who may have caused a deadly accident during the shooting of a stunt. Cross decides to blackmail Cameron into replacing the stunt man who died in the accident, thus providing a hiding place for the man and supplying himself a pawn for his delusions of grandeur on the set. As Cross circles the exhausted Cameron, who sits slumped on the beach, and taunts him with thinly veiled threats as well as promises of a peek into the glamorous world of movies, the camera supplies a circular panning motion to match Cross’s movements. In the background, as Cross continues to speak, a wave crests and appears to ride along the top of the breaker wall behind Cross, and it breaks at exactly the pace and speed of the camera movement, as if being led by the camera, or as if being dictated as a visual flourish by Cross and/or the actual director of The Stunt Man, Richard Rush. The impossible timing of that breaking wave can only be explained by good fortune, yet its appearance is so lovely, so perfect, that it lends subtle visual credence to the movie’s underlying theme of obsessive movie directors as possibly Satanic deities who truly can bend nature to their will for the sake of their films, who may be out only to use people like Cameron for their films and then destroy them. It’s a breathtaking moment, a beautiful accident, yet you could miss it if you’re not watching carefully-- quite fitting for the whole of The Stunt Man, a movie that it pays to watch very carefully.
27) Favorite Wim Wenders movie
It has to be The State of Things, followed very, very closely by Kings of the Road.
28) Elizabeth Pena or Penelope Cruz?
In Volver Penelope Cruz was captivating beyond my every expectation, erasing the horror, if only for two hours, of her appearances in movies like Blow and Gothika. (And I must admit a prurient interest in seeing Bandidas.) But this isn’t even a real contest. From the first time I saw Elizabeth Pena, as a maid, sultry and smoking while sitting in an upstairs window sill awaiting the arrival of her lover (and employer) Richard Dreyfuss in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, I knew I’d discovered a talented screen beauty I’d follow anywhere. Not surprisingly, she’s never had as many great parts as she deserves, and she’s been in a lot of forgettable stuff-- Jacob’s Ladder, Batteries Not Included, Vibes. But she was funny in La Bamba, riveting in Lone Star, indescribably sexy and sharp in Shannon’s Deal (both for John Sayles) and flat-out great in Joe Dante’s The Second Civil War, and it was a genuine thrill to hear her sultry voice coming out of the mouth of Mirage, the villainous sidekick from The Incredibles. I even liked her in the sitcom dud I Married Dora! My wife and I were eating in a modest little sushi restaurant at the corner of Fountain and Sunset in Hollywood about 10 years ago when Pena and a man I assumed to be her husband walked in and sat down near us. I was so star-struck at that moment I never did manage to gather enough reserve to interrupt her dinner and say something. I regret that, and at the same time I’m glad I didn’t too. For me, just seeing Pena on screen is plenty wonderful enough, and I look forward to those rare moments when the movies give her something to do that is worthy of her exciting talent and exceptional screen presence.
"Sister, sister, oh so fair, why is there blood all over your hair?"-- What Ever happened to Baby Jane? (1962; Robert Aldrich)
and... "Due to the horrifying nature of this film, no one will be admitted to the theatre"-- Schlock (1971; John Landis)
30) As a reader, filmgoer, or film critic, what do you want from a film critic, or from film criticism? And where do you see film criticism in general headed?
I love to read reviewers and critics who use the language to inform and to entertain and throw light on the subject that they are passionate about, and not as a cudgel to browbeat readers (or other critics) or attempt to make themselves out to be the only word that matters. I want to read a writer who isn’t concerned with regurgitating plot, who isn’t worried about seeming foolish for going out on a limb, who doesn’t rub my nose in his/her eclectic taste or contrarianism for contrariness’s sake, who can tell me what he or she thinks about a movie without saying “I liked it!” or “I hated it!” Because a critic’s opinion isn’t even half the story—it’s how he or she can show me the movie as they saw it through their own eyes that matters to me. If they can do that, that opinion doesn’t have to be so baldly stated—it’ll be there in the passion of the language and the commitment to the experience. As for the future of the art form that is film criticism, we’re seeing a shift in the way people see it and experience it right now, and it’s got a lot to do with the way criticism itself is being rethought and made interactive on sites like Jim Emerson’s Scanners, David Hudson’s Green Cine Daily, Matt Zoller Seitz’s The House Next Door, Slant magazine and a lot of the smart, serious, and fun blogs (maybe even this one) that exist as creative satellites in that same universe. It’s exciting to be even a peripheral part of rethinking how criticism is produced and consumed, and even though I don’t have a clue what it’s going to mean for the future, the right here and now has been made plenty exciting by these new developments. We’re all the beneficiaries of a lot of free-floating wisdom and passion and respect for history and probing critical acumen on these sites, and that’s something to be both excited about and very grateful for.
Movie classics and films from the classical era of movies always will matter, as historical pieces and as works that can speak to us from across the temporal divide. It may not seem that new movies matter as much if your only source for what’s happening now is the entertainment pages of your local newspaper, where two-page ads for A Night at the Museum make despair seem like the only sane response. But a little digging, and a little clicking along the sidebar on the right side of this page, will reveal treasures of cinema that will restore your faith. They often come from far-flung places all around the globe, and as difficult as it is to see many of these films on big screens in America in the 21st century, something as simple and inexpensive as a Netflix membership can literally open up a whole new world. So the short answer is, yes.
Another long and busy week, and no new posts in eight days? What the hell?! Well, there is a story to be told. I just haven't figured out whether it's of any interest, or how to tell it yet. But the cheap and dirty fact is, I'm still here, and I've got some stuff planned for blogging this the weekend, plus some thoughts on the immediate future as well. But right now, in just trolling around for something wonderful to leave you with for the weekend, I couldn't top this. Thanks for sticking around through a more or less dormant week at SLIFR. For now, just press play and enjoy!
First there were the families last week who took their young ones to see the PG-rated sci-fi fantasy The Last Mimzy and, due to an error in the projection booth, were treated to the opening scene of The Hills Have Eyes 2, featuring a woman chained up and screaming for dear life as she gives birth to a mutant baby. And the release of Grindhouse has thrown even more light onto the dice-and-splice world of projectionists in sleazy grindhouse cinemas, whose battered, badly-maintained equipment routinely shredded the few prints of these films that were available and allowed those projectionists to collect frames featuring topless cheerleaders and nasty night-duty nurses from those prints— and sometimes entire sequences, thus the context for Grindhouse’s hilariously timed “REEL MISSING” cards.
I don’t think I’ve ever been witness to as ghastly a juxtaposition as that Mimzy/Eyes 2 disaster, or the kind of subliminal augmentation that so made Tyler Durden’s day in Fight Club. My stories of projector problems, growing up with my local movie house in the ‘60s and ‘70s, make up a pretty familiar laundry list—hallucinatory melting frames; the gradual fade-to-black that signaled a dying carbon-arc stick; reel changeovers accompanied by inexplicable sonic booms on the soundtrack; if it was a ‘Scope film being shown, the anamorphic lens would almost always need to be radically adjusted mid-film after every reel change; or any combination of the above at once, which usually resulted in complete shutdown of the movie, a tidal wave of flop sweat in the projection booth, and a chorus of “Put a quarter in it!” from the razor-sharp wits sitting among us in auditorium peanut gallery. And there was one instance I remember pretty vividly—a quiet pastoral scene which ended one of the reels in Disney’s original version of The Incredible Journey was interrupted rather shockingly when the changeover occurred and it was revealed that the projectionist had, instead of the next reel of the movie, accidentally loaded up the cartoon he’d showed before the feature—dogs and cats at rest together under the night sky suddenly, mercilessly gave way to a giant close-up of a grinning Donald Duck, shafts of light streaming from behind his head, and a fanfare leading into Donald’s theme song. The lights went dark, the quiet mood of the movie ruined, a few of the older patrons picked themselves up off the floor, and the rest of us did our part to uphold a tradition that I’m sure still continues in my hometown, where a hilarious comment only gains in hilarity if it can be passed down to a new generation of impatient morons—of course, we all began chanting “Put a quarter in it! Put a quarter in it!”
J.R. Jones, film critic for the Chicago Reader, has taken some madcap inspiration from the Mimzy incident, as well as his own memories of projecting films in the ‘70s, and come up with a hilarious proposition in his brief piece entitled “We Apologize For The Inconvenience.” And don’t stop at the end of the piece— there are a lot of anecdotal contributions in the comments section from other projectionists and “victimized” moviegoers too. So enjoy J.R. Jones recipe for stirring up audiences in the multiplex and the art house, and then, if you’re an ex- or current projectionist or an audience member who can bear witness and would like to share any good anecdotes of spectacular projection snafus, please do. It’s Open Forum Day at SLIFR, so please feel free to post comments on anything you're interested in talking about. But the question of the day is: What’s your best story of when things went terribly wrong with the projector, or anything else, at the movies?
So it turns out that all the marketing in the world can’t make up for the fact that Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and, most importantly, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, sincerely overestimated just how many people were going to want to see Grindhouse, their lovingly detailed replication of a ‘70s B-movie double feature.
Whatever. In the aftermath of Pulp Fiction, similar miscalculations have been made for just about everything released by these directors, with the exception of Sin City which, if memory serves, rang up plenty big box-office cash. No matter how lovingly or relentlessly sold, there just aren’t enough folks in my demographic (just north of 45) who cherish, or are willing to own up to cherishing, B-movies like Switchblade Sisters, Zombie, Coffy, The Swingin’ Cheerleaders or Trip with the Teacher to make Grindhouse a big Wild Hogs-sized hit. And there’s a scene in Tarantino’s Death Proof, the second half of this very special night out at the movies, that provides a razor-sharp critical analysis of the problem at the heart of pitching Grindhouse to the all-important 18-to-25-year-olds that pump the lifeblood through what’s left of Hollywood. A character who goes by the name of Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) sits at a bar regaling a group of indulgent young cuties with tales of his past work, throwing out names like “Bob Urich” and Vega$ and, gulp, The Virginian. The young women nod vacantly, but appreciatively, as Mike continues to spin his tales, until he stops for a moment and then asks, “Do you even recognize the names of these shows?” The women, caught, have to admit that they don’t, and Mike is consigned, by all but an unfortunate one of them, to the special zone of irrelevancy occupied by the arcane pop culture of an older generation. In this moment, it’s hard not to see Tarantino himself, as Stephanie Zacharek observed in her review of Grindhouse, as a similar kind of generational proselytizer—Stuntman Quentin—carrying a vast wealth of knowledge of movie history around in that gigantic cranium, preaching the gospel of cinematic and pop culture minutiae and obscure talents to a younger generation that may not so readily relate to his historically minded artist/entertainer’s perspective.
But putting aside Harvey Weinstein’s panicked teeth-gnashing about Grindhouse’s opening weekend box-office and performance, and his utterly illogical notion to split the movies up in a couple of weeks and re-release them with added footage—essentially spending countless more millions to try to resell what he’s already perceived the general moviegoing public either doesn’t understand or even necessarily want— we still have the movie itself (for however much longer Weinstein allows) to consider. The three-hour and 15-minute Grindhouse that is still in theaters, consisting of Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, and the surrounding fake trailers and bounty of hilarious details—missing reel cards, scratched reels, bad splices, muddy sound, bleached and tinted patches, et al-- is clearly not for everybody—I don’t even get paid to make savvy marketing guesses, and I could have told Harvey that them what likes Norbit and Wild Hogs and Blades of Glory may not flock to his movie (especially on Easter weekend). But for heathens and film-savvy fans eager to revisit the heyday of pus-and-blood zombie epics, road-rage-fueled revenge thrillers and directors like Jack Hill, Lucio Fulci and George A. Romero, when downtown urban grindhouses and, perhaps even more importantly for my generation (and Tarantino’s), drive-ins served as musty, rickety, sticky cathedrals for exhibiting the violent, sleazy, amoral dregs of movie culture, Grindhouse is a 195-minute bliss-out, a giddy orgy of nostalgia, reinvention and, maybe for some, redemption of a kind of movie most often held beneath contempt by critics and even moviegoers.
After a spectacularly funny phony trailer for a macho vigilante thriller called Machete, directed by Rodriguez and starring the near-iconic badass Danny Trejo (“These guys were fucking with the wrong Mexican!”), the double feature starts in earnest with Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, which, for all the exacting effort put into making the print look like it’s been run through the gears of a series of badly maintained projectors, is pretty much B-movie nostalgia served straight up. It’s a borderline incoherent zombie narrative with a whiff of parody, but never the deadly ironist’s wink, which hangs together just long enough to showcase the latest in zombie gore and lusciously ambivalent sexual iconography, courtesy of Rose MacGowan’s ambitious stripper (she wants to be a stand-up comedian) whose leg is eaten, and then replaced with a machine gun/grenade launcher by her gunslinger boyfriend (Freddy Rodriguez).
Planet Terror gathers together a group of societal castoffs and ne’er-do-wells in the battle against a government-created zombie crisis—Howard Hawks by way of John Carpenter—but Rodriguez isn’t so much interested in examining or expanding the form of this kind of cheapie thriller as he is mounting the most spectacular version of it possible. Of course, all the effects are far more sophisticated than those on display in Fulci’s The Beyond or Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and Rodriguez’s movie lurches far more rapidly and spastically toward ever-escalating and ever-gorier set pieces than the real thing did—back in the mid ‘70s, the patches in-between eyeball-gougings and decapitations were frequently marred by dull stretches of character drama or other manifestations of listless pacing and bad direction. Rodriguez, ironically, is served well by the pastiche form of Planet Terror, in which coherence is not a high priority, because coherence isn’t exactly one of his strengths either. He’s a sensationalist as a director-- most of his stylistic effects exist in a vacuum created by a relentless pursuit of cool, and this pursuit almost always results in bad movies (Desperado, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Spy Kids 3-D, From Dusk Till Dawn). You get the sense that Rodriguez makes movies primarily so he can sit around on the set with his legs kicked up, strumming a guitar and hiding underneath a cowboy hat between takes, conjuring an image of cool and movies of insistently facile and hollow imagery.
But here Rodriguez seems, for once, to be having fun as a director, staging large-scaled scenes of fleshy destruction—the bodies don’t splatter as much as explode, like balloon people filled with plasma and gristle—and setting up razor-thin parallels to the kind of social commentary that would often provide B-movies of this ilk with some much appreciated (if often ill-advised) political context, or subtext. (Planet Terror could be subtitled Apocalypse Wow!) And whenever the action kicks into gear, Rodriguez responds by striking a stylistic coup by using the textural pleasures of those ragged grindhouse prints as devices to amplify the action on top of the already whirligig editing and sound—the scratches and pops and jittery frames get even scratchier and poppier and jitterier when MacGowan tilts her lovely frame, lifts what used to be her leg and mows down another in an endless line of shuffling undead meat-sacks with another spray of machine gun fire.
Once Planet Terror reaches its conclusion, it’s time for the entertainment before the second feature, which consists of perfectly pitched genre trailers by currently hot genre directors. Rob Zombie’s delirious Werewolf Women of the S.S. climaxes with a suitably bizarre celebrity cameo and is so goddamn weird in itself that I’m sure I must have dreamt it. Fans of the British horror offerings from companies like Amicus will appreciate Edgar Wright’s witty and precise evocation of these relatively sophisticated pictures, though respect for a great joke prevents me from revealing the title of this particular fake thriller. And Eli Roth’s entry in the holiday-themed slasher genre preview, Thanksgiving (“This year there’s no more leftovers!”), may be the best thing he’s ever done, right down to the ghastly surprise awaiting a vivacious cheerleader on a trampoline. (One bonus granted to us at the drive-in where I saw Grindhouse Saturday night—a real 15-minute intermission was inserted after Planet Terror, but before the onslaught of trailers, to accommodate the limits of the reels in the projection booth, which can only hold movies that max out at two hours and 45 minutes, as well as the limits of one's bladder.)
The double feature takes on a completely different tone, however, with Tarantino’s Death Proof. A person whose name I can’t remember to credit commented last week that Rodriguez directs Planet Terror like someone who’s heard all about grindhouse movies, but Tarantino directs Death Proof like a fan who’s really processed them, like someone to whom they actually have meaning and resonance, someone who has a discernable approach that exists outside the original texts but has nevertheless been grounded in them. I think some of the resistance to and/or disappointment in Death Proof can be traced to the way it has been marketed—as a relentless chrome-and-burning-rubber thriller. It’s a bait and switch familiar to Tarantino and any B-movie fan-- in the world of low-budget exploitation filmmaking the posters were often way more satisfying than the movies themselves, trafficking in a spectacular clashing of potent graphic design and hyperbolic ad copy that routinely outstripped the energy and style (or lack thereof) flickering away on screen.
Death Proof promises gruesome, high-octane action, and unlike many of the B-movies of yore (Death Race 2000 being a notable exception) it delivers on its promise. Where the bait and switch comes in is that Tarantino, in Grindhouse’s most radical act of reinvention, mixes the creeping dread of a sinister car thriller with exacting visual and aural recreations of the cheerleader and female-revenge pictures (both Jack Hill specialties) and his own unceasing desire to hang out and listen to the characters he must eventually put in harm’s way, which is here recast in the textural sensitivity and patience of Monte Hellman’s brilliant road movie Two-Lane Blacktop. (And here I must take time out to route you to D.K. Holm’s excellent review of Grindhouse, the only other piece of writing I’ve read that makes note of what is, for me, this crucial connection to Hellman’s film.)
David Edelstein writes of Death Proof: “What makes some critics' knee-jerk derision of Tarantino so vexing is that he's more than a violence peddler. He's a predatory humanist. He loves just to hang out with his soon-to-be beleaguered characters… (He’s) a movie freak who loves women onscreen almost as much as he loves to punish women onscreen, and who (this is what makes him an artist) gets off most on his own ambivalence.” This ambivalence powers the first 20 minutes of the movie, in which we’re introduced to the Austin city lights courtesy of a carload of profane hotties in short-shorts—a local radio personality (Sydney Tamilia Poitier) and her smokin’, drinkin’, sexed-up friends (Jordan Ladd and Vanessa Ferlito). Tarantino draws out this loose-limbed night out to near its numbed vanishing point, daring impatient audiences to get fed up with this brooding, bitching posse as they spin their wheels and knock back shots in a dingy hot spot. They eventually catch the eye of Stuntman Mike (Russell), a man who seems to have been haunting one of them—Ferlito’s Arlene spots his muscled-up Chevy Nova, complete with skull and crossbones and a Rubber Duck ornament on the hood, parked ominously outside the bar, and the movie’s inexplicable sense of dread begins to mount. Tarantino likes these largely obnoxious women and doesn’t want to let them out of the cocoon of protective inebriation he’s spun for them (he even plays the dive’s bartender-in-residence), even though he knows he must. And up to now the movie has much of the same cool openness to the rhythm of experience as it comes that was a hallmark of Two-Lane Blacktop, and an ability to see how moving on the road, while here not so much open as haunted, informs the arrogance and entitlement these girls radiate. (To those that don’t respond to the rhythms of Death Proof, however, this openness comes off like aimless indulgence and lack of direction.)
Reservoir Dames?
But Stuntman Mike is soon revealed to have far more sinister plans than his jokey barroom John Wayne impersonations, anecdotes of “old” Hollywood, and his honest self-assessments (“Honey, I ain’t stalkin’ you, but that don’t mean I’m not a wolf”) would indicate. And Death Proof, already the second half of a bifurcated B-movie revelry, takes a tonal right turn worthy of Psycho, after a brilliant and terrifying head-on collision that pays tribute to each victim in awful acknowledgment of the violability of their bodies, into the territory where cheerleaders swing, sisters unite in righteous fury and muscle cars thunder along hot pavement on which the likes of Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry are significant name-checks. Tarantino serves up four more hot chicks—an actress decked out in a cheerleader uniform (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a make-up artist (RosarioDawson) and two stuntwomen (Zoe Bell and Tracie Thoms)—all on time-out from a movie shoot who kill more time with more patented Tarantino talk, some of it teetering on self-parody, and all of it much sweeter and more entertaining than the banter of the doomed trio of the first half. As D.K. Holm observes, we don’t want to see these women die.
But we know who they will eventually meet, and faster than you can say Samuel Z. Arkoff it happens, while the two stuntwomen test-drive a 1970 Dodge Challenger just like the one in Vanishing Point, with Bell hanging onto the hood by two belt straps. The car chase Tarantino serves up here more than fulfills the harrowing promise of the advertising—the old-school, no-CGI aesthetic of visceral car-chase action is put to the best expression since Ronin, and leads to the movie’s mind-boggling, pulse-pounding switcheroo, a situation that allows Russell to explode out of the scarred, hot-leather mythos he’s constructed for Mike into giddy new territory. (Russell, by the way, is his usual superb self here, and a bit of a brave surprise as well.)
It takes a while to process than there’s a whole lot less futzing around with the scratched-burnt-torn film aesthetic in Death Proof, and the moment you notice it (it’ll come for everyone in a different point in the movie, most probably) is the moment you’ll realize you’ve been sucked in by Death Proof as a movie, not just as an elaborate stunt. It is, I think, one of Tarantino’s best films in that he has found a way to fuse the aesthetic of different of drive-in movie archetypes and apply his relentless cinephilia to a movie that is certainly an homage, but more importantly one that expresses the brutal feeling of a born storyteller for his characters. The movie beautifully apes the stoned, fuzzy aesthetic and flat compositions of a typical Crown International Pictures release (Tarantino was his own director of photography) while offering up something resembling people we’re granted the time to get to know—and some of them are unpleasant as hell—as grist for the grindhouse mill, and it ends up winding a loping, natural path back to the ambivalence of Tarantino’s most emotionally resonant film, Jackie Brown (itself in part a B-movie homage starring Foxy Brown herself, Pam Grier), and a suitably wild, abrupt conclusion.
For some, Grindhouse will be a long sit, and they may welcome the cutting asunder that the Weinsteins allegedly have planned. But I found the movie intoxicating from first jittery frame to last. It’s so packed with authentic film geek love that I felt transported in a way that honors Grindhouse’s intentions and achievements in the presence of the real deal, which is still unspooling nightly at the New Beverly’s L.A. Grindhouse Festival 2007 through the end of May. That response may have had something to do with seeing it at a drive-in too (I’m seeing it again at the Rialto in Pasadena this weekend, so we’ll see), but I think it has more to do with Stuntman Quentin and Sidekick Robert’s desire to connect with the meaning (or lack thereof) found in the discarded refuse of our collective movie past. If you’re of a like mind, as I always knew I was, Grindhouse is a singular event, a pustulant, smokin’ rubber-scented gift for true believers. I’ll give the last word to David Edelstein whose review, along with D.K. Holm’s, expressed my feelings about this movie (these movies) better than I think I have myself:
“There's another reason that Grindhouse is, for some of us misfits, such a happy trip. It affirms our sense of community. No one at the time wrote much about grindhouse fare. It was mostly too sexist and lowbrow for the Voice, and way too lowbrow for the Times. (In her review of Dawn of the Dead, the sequel to the sixties' most seminal horror film, Janet Maslin boasted about walking out in the first fifteen minutes.) It's true that most of these films were depressingly bad. But there was something vital, something electric about the liveness of that culture. I'm sad that most people will see Grindhouse on video. It should be consumed (or, depending on your perspective, endured) in a theater full of shrieking, gasping, cheering, borderline-ashamed exploitation junkies. Nowadays, people smoke dope and drink and jerk off in front of TV screens in the privacy of their homes. They really need to get out more.”
Amen. If you haven’t yet seen Grindhouse, or even if you have, get yourself to a theater (or a drive-in) and see it before Harvey gets his grubby sausage fingers on it and guts it of its purpose and context in the name of the almighty dollar. Sure, exploitation producer Joseph Brenner was known for doing this same kind of crap back in the day. But that’s one grindhouse tradition not worth keeping alive. I hope Tarantino and Rodriguez can somehow get the Weinsteins to see the light, as projected out from one of the clanking, film-shredding beasts of exhibition that gave the grindhouses, and Grindhouse, its name.
Film director Bob Clark, by most accounts one of the more personable, unpretentious and likable men in the movie business, died early Wednesday, along with his 22-year-old son Ariel Hanrath-Clark, victims of an unlicensed driver speeding down Pacific Coast Highway in the wrong lane under the influence of alcohol. Of course, it shouldn’t matter a bit, Bob Clark’s reputation as a gentleman—even the death of the most spurious Hollywood asshole under such circumstances would be a tragedy. But in this case, death came far too early to a well-loved man whose professional life seemed to be on an upswing (he was busy finalizing plans to remake his biggest hit, Porky’s, with Howard Stern) and who was finally beginning to enjoy a measure of respect from critics and other filmmakers for a career in lowbrow comedies and horror films that, for all the financial success of the Porky’s films (he helmed the first two), spawned two genuine classics, one horror film, one comedy, and both tied to the celebration of the Christmas season.
He adapted Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash into A Christmas Story (1983), wisely hiring Shepherd himself to read the droll narration, and in the process creating a movie that did modest business theatrically, but which became a perennial favorite through repeated viewings in the early days of home video. It’s an inspired, pitch-perfect evocation of a postwar Rockwellian past spun with just enough saltiness to make for several hilarious and memorable set pieces. Hearing Darren McGavin, as Shepherd’s harried and harassed father, spewing untranslated mock curses was worth the price of admission alone.
Left to right, R.D. Robb (Schwartz), Ian Petrella (Randy Parker), Peter Billingsley (Ralphie), Scott Schwartz (Flick) and Zack Ward (Scut Farkus) flank Bob Clark at a recent appearance at the Arclight Cinemas to promote the 20th anniversary of the release of A Christmas Story.
And in 1974, after making low-budget shockers like Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and Dead of Night, he unleashed Silent Night, Deadly Night in Canada in 1974. The film, which played in the USA under the title Black Christmas, was a favorite of mine, and after having not seen for nearly 20 years, I revisited it recently, convinced that my memory of it being an effective but routine thriller would far exceed the reality of seeing it as a jaded adult horror fan. I wrote of Black Christmas last October:
“Like A Bay of Blood was to Friday the 13th, Bob Clark’s holiday-themed slasher film was an admitted influence on John Carpenter, and it predates Halloween by three years. But many of the genre’s familiar visual motifs are present here, including long periods of foreboding silence and an early stab at Steadicam-type camera movement to suggest the killer’s point of view. (In an interview, Clark admitted that the movements were done sans Steadicam, with a camera mounted on the operator’s head.) Black Christmas, a slasher thriller taking the form of a whodunit set on a small college campus, features a pretty good cast, including Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, John Saxon and Margot Kidder, who steals the movie outright as one of Hussey’s foul-mouthed sorority sisters who engages the killer in a memorable trash-talking phone call. (It was Kidder, in this film, who introduced me, at age 15, to the word “fellatio.”) Clark does a fine job teasing the audience with the various possibilities as to the killer’s identity. But where Halloween offers a creditable back story for the knife-wielding Michael Meyers, Clark and company offer no such comfort, either at the beginning or the end of the film, leaving the audience chilled in a way that goes far beyond the movie’s wintry setting. And Black Christmas registers at least one grisly image into the horror hall of fame—that screaming woman in the rocking chair, her gasping visage wrapped in plastic, a human Christmas present from the movie’s relentless psycho to the rest of the terrorized sorority sisters and, of course, to us.”
The big surprise in viewing Black Christmas was not that it matched my memory, but actually exceeded it. Kim Morgan, in her tribute to Clark today, called Black Christmasa masterpiece, and though I wouldn’t have said so a year ago, I’m pretty close to agreement with that statement after seeing it again last year. Its influence on the trajectory of the modern horror film, I think, can’t and shouldn’t be understated. And for those who never met him (I’m one) who are interested in a look at what Bob Clark was like with an appreciative audience, the special edition Black Christmas DVD features footage of Clark in a Q-and-A at the New Beverly here in Los Angeles on a recent screening of his horror classic. Bob Clark made a lot of forgettable films, it’s true, as well as a couple of lesser-known pictures that are far better than their reputation or obscurity would suggest—the savagely-reviewed lawyer comedy From the Hip (1987) starring Judd Nelson, and the relatively lavish Sherlock Holmes-Jack the Ripper thriller Murder by Decree (1979), which featured the best cast—Christopher Plummer, James Mason, Donald Sutherland, John Gielgud, just for starters— with which Clark would ever work. But for any one director to have his name on not one, but two acknowledged genre classics is no small achievement, and there is no doubt that A Christmas Story and Black Christmas will continue to be remembered long after Porky’s, Rhinestone and Baby Geniuses have been forgotten. The saddest commentary on Clark’s life and career is that they could be so mindlessly, instantly snatched away in a horrific set of circumstances that remain far too common on every street and highway in our country and around the world.
Not much time to cobble a post together right now, but since I’m between classes this week I’ve got a little more opportunity than usual to get some stuff up and running. As usual, there’s a plethora of great items to read concerning any and all film-related subjects, most of it rounded up on the supreme gathering site for all of us interested in film, GreenCine Daily, which is, after all, where I heard about most of the stuff I’m highlighting tonight. David Hudson, Craig Phillips and company continue to astound, day in and day out, with the wealth of links and commentary available on this magnificent site. When people talk about the ways film criticism and film writing is changing because of the Internet, I have to believe that those changes would not be so noticeable or important, or even possible, without the core of information distribution that is GreenCine Daily. I can’t remember what my cloistered was like before I got hooked on this site, and that’s a big 10-4 and an “Amen!” for lost memories.
I’m planning a big drive-in get-together this weekend in conjunction with the Southern California Drive-in Movie Society-- yes, we’re all putting a convoy together to go see Meet the Robinsons… pause… pause… No, that was last weekend. This weekend we’re headed out to the famous Mission Tiki Drive-in to open up the drive-in season with—what else?-- Grindhouse. What a great opportunity it’s going to be to see this movie, of all movies, on a drive-in screen where it belongs. And I extend an invitation to everyone reading this in the area who would like to come out and join us, say hi, and enjoy a trip down ‘70s exploitation memory lane with Tarantino and Rodriguez and the rest of this explosive romper room set. Just look for the big SoCalDIMS banner in the middle of whatever lot Grindhouse will be playing— I’m expecting at least 50 of my sex-and-violence-loving friends for a tailgate party that’ll be in full swing for about two hours before the movie starts. And then the fun will really begin when the Technalight projector fires up around 7:45 and Planet Terror gets underway. This is the movie event of the season, at least for movie-event-starved types like myself, who don’t get out to many film festivals or press screenings or the like, and I sincerely hope if you’re anywhere near Los Angeles this weekend that you’ll join us!
With Grindhouse in mind, here’s a few ways you can get yourself primed for the big show Internet style. The reviews are starting to come in from the writers who you actually care to pay attention to, and they’re pretty good and pretty thoughtful. Scott Foundas of the L.A. Weekly checks in with an early report in the Minneapolis-St. Paul City Pages:
“There exists some debate about audience familiarity with the term "grindhouse," and even a certain confusion about the origins of the word itself—whether it refers to the movies that composed a gilded age of exploitation cinema or to the all-night urban theaters in which they were regularly shown. It matters little, though, for so richly evocative is Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse of an earlier generation's guilty cinematic pleasures that you can practically feel the stick of dried soda under your sneakers and smell the faint aroma of bum emanating from the row behind you.”
Being that the City Pages rolls with the New Times syndicate, the paper has taken the opportunity to post Nathan Lee’s write-up right alongside Foundas’s:
“Tarantino is a big supporter of the neo-exploitation crowd (two of whose luminaries, Eli Roth and Rob Zombie, contribute ingenious trailers for imaginary films alongside Edgar Wright and Rodriguez), but his own sensibility is sweeter. Death Proof expends most of its energy on boozy barroom camaraderie and baroque restaurant chitchat. Even the villain is rather a dear, while Tarantino clearly relishes his rehabilitation of Russell, on whom he lavishes as much affection as his girls gone wild. And wild they go, pedal to the metal, brandishing iron poles, turning the tables on Stuntman Mike in a giddy automotive assault that climaxes with the finest syncopation since Before Sunset…From first frame to last—and by the time you exit this blockbuster-as-block party behemoth, you'll have taken in a quarter-million of them. This monumentally pointless movie is best summarized by a line from Planet Terror: "At some point in your life, you find a use for every useless talent you have." Rodriguez, Tarantino & Co. aim for nothing more noble than to freak the funk, and it's about goddamn time.”
(Lee’s review is also available in the online edition of the Village Voice.)
Glenn Kenny offers this excellent observation from Premiere Online:
"Death Proof offers 'thrills' that are deeply unpleasant and deeply unwholesome, and it's here that Grindhouse comes closest to achieving the 'climate of perdition' that another surrealist critic, Robert Benayoun termed the hallmark of 'authentic sadistic cinema.' A lot of people associate a taste for grindhouse movies with the tiresome condescension of the 'so-bad-it's-good' ethos, but Tarantino understands the aesthetics of aberrance that animated the explorations of so-called trash hounds."
Foundas also checks in among the virtual pages of the L.A. Weekly with a report on an official summit meeting of grindhouse directors. Conveyed by Tarantino himself, it's a lively round-table featuring Richard Rush (The Stunt Man, Hells Angels on Wheels), Brian Trenchard-Smith (Dead-End Drive-In, BMX Bandits), Allan Arkush (Rock and Roll High School, Get Crazy), George Armitage (Miami Blues, Private Duty Nurses), Lewis Teague (Alligator, The Lad in Red) and the late Bob Clark (Black Christmas, Porky's), who died mere days after the summit took place.
But no one, and I mean no one, is as excited to see Grindhouse on the big screen as that number-one fan of on-screen decapitation, Kim Morgan. From the pages of her MSN Movies Filter blog comes this first-rate interview with Kurt Russell, aka Snake Plissken, aka Stuntman Mike. Then there’s Kim’s smackdown with Time Out writer David Fear over the merits (or lack thereof) of Tarantino, the director. (And actually, if you access the smackdown via Kim’s Sunset Gun blog, you’ll be spared the smirking shot of Tarantino in favor of some much more photogenic shots from the movie.) Finally, Kim rallies for 10 Great Car Movies in anticipation of the reportedly spectacular stunt work in Death Proof. I loved recounting all of the terrific movies Kim mentions here, particularly her number-one pick, but in a rare moment of ‘70s heresy, I have to admit that that last time I saw Vanishing Point (about three years ago) I was considerably underwhelmed. Some of the movie's car stuff is undeniably great, but it doesn’t wear its existential malaise nearly as well as that number-one pick. (No, I’m not telling you what it is. Go find out yourself!) Anyway, I would have replaced Vanishing Point with the less-muscle-car oriented The Italian Job (the original 1969 British version) or John Frankheimer’s full-throttle Ronin. But I’m nitpicking. Go find out what Kim picked as number-one, rent it and watch it before you see Grindhouse.
Final item on the Grindhouse beat: Screengrab's weekly Top Ten list focuses this week on Girls with Guns! See Sigourney Weaver, Anne Parillaud and, let's see... at least eight more ballistic beauties strap 'em on in honor of the opening of Grindhouse. Check out Part One and Part Two of this fun list courtesy of the Screengrab gang. (Thanks for the tip, Bilge.)
Before I go, just to prove that I am thinking about other things than this upcoming B-movie delight, how about another couple of confrontational video clips, both of them as fascinating, if not as repellent, as the David O. Russell/Lily Tomlin shenanigans. Via Anne Thompson and her new digs at Thompson on Hollywood comes a provocative bit of reverse psychology courtesy of actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who turns a video camera on a couple of paparazzi for a short film he calls Pictures of Assholes.
And then there’s this priceless footage of brilliant artists/macho fatheads Norman Mailer and Rip Torn literally ripping and tearing at each other on the set of Mailer’s film Maidhouse, way back in 1971, the dawning of those heady days of the Golden Age of Great American Films, a banner under which Maidhouse is typically not placed.
Finally, two more places to go for good reading: In anticipation of the spectacular new Mario Bava box set, check out Sean Axmaker’s nuanced appreciation of the director at GreenCine. A sample:
“Legend has it that Italian genre veteran Riccardo Freda "pushed" his friend Bava into the director's chair by abandoning not one but two projects for his frequent cinematographer to finish (it's hard to verify the real reason that Freda left the projects, but it makes a good story to justify printing the legend)… Bava was offered a shot a directing a project of his choosing. He chose Nikolai Gogol's short story "Viy" and made his official directorial debut, at age 46, on The Mask of Satan, renamed Black Sunday for the US release.
...From the opening frames, Bava proved that he knew how grab an audience's attention. Barbara Steele, her eyes glaring hate even as her face registers terror, is bound to a stake, spitting curses with hellfire to the robed and masked judges who pronounce her death sentence. A spiked mask is slowly placed over her face and a massive wooden mallet pounds the iron mask with a startling finality as the credits explode in fire (this final shot was excised from the American release). Even as the film eases into an eerie gothic atmosphere of a ghost story, where centuries later the corpse is revived by the innocent descendant (also played by Steele) with a single drop of blood, Bava never eases up on the tension. His vivid style - gliding camerawork, dramatic lighting, striking compositions and atmospheric sets cobbled together from limited resources - set the standard for Italian gothic horror, and his magnificent photography of the weirdly beautiful Steele made her an icon of the genre. Equally good as the devilishly wicked witch, with eyes blazing and evil smile set off by feral teeth, and the haunted innocent, she plays both in this moody, macabre cult classic of cruelty.”
And speaking of Bava, congratulations to Tim Lucas on the completion of what promises to be a great resource on the films of Mario Bava, his new book entitled All the Colors of the Dark. Click on Tim’s name to get a closer look at the sweat and tears, and of course the blood, that went into the writing and finishing of the book.
Paul Clark, frequent SLIFR visitor and proprietor of his own keen blog entitled Silly Hats Only (which always has something cool going on in it), has joined the stable of paid contributors to Bilge Ebiri’s aforementioned Screengrab with a doozy of a piece on Peter Watkins’ first film, a rock and roll tale entitled Privilege, shot by British cinematographer extraordinaire Peter Suschitzky:
“The cinematic influence of Privilege can be felt in a number of subsequent films. Many of the rock movies of the next few decades owe a debt to Privilege, from the bombast of Tommy to the stylishness of Phantom of the Paradise. The rally scenes in Pink Floyd: The Wall are clearly Watkins-inspired. Watkins himself has claimed that no less a filmmaker than Stanley Kubrick cribbed a scene from Privilege for A Clockwork Orange, though it’s hard to tell which one. Likewise, some of the music from the film has been covered or appropriated by a number of artists, from Patti Smith to Big Audio Dynamite.
But even more startling than the film’s direct influences is the story’s almost prophetic nature. It’s hard not to see Steven Shorter in the reluctant, self-destructive pop stars of today, Britney Spears being the obvious example. The efforts by Shorter’s handlers to re-fashion their client’s image clearly anticipates shape-shifters like Madonna. But strangely enough, the person I thought of most while watching Privilege isn’t a musician at all, but Oprah Winfrey — another pop-culture titan whose image is used not only to sell consumer products and spirituality but a whole lifestyle. That Oprah presumably does this of her own free will, rather than being led into it as Shorter is, merely feels like the logical progression of events.”
Congratulations, Paul, on a vivid piece of writing and for your newfound association with Screengrab!
Finally, David Hudson once again points the way to what he terms a Werner Herzog dossier, hours of reading and viewing on the great German director compiled by film journalist Ray Pride. The dossier includes rather amazing footage of Herzog being interviewed in Los Angeles by British journalist Mark Kermode and being shot on camera by an unseen sniper. The bullet turns out to be from an air rifle, but the wounding is no less shocking for that, nor is Herzog’s reserve under fire any less revealing. Says Herzog (after showing Kermode the oozing extent of his wound), “Bottom line, I think the poet must not avert his eyes. You have to take a bold look at what is your environment, what is around you…” The whole dossier is loaded with fascinating links and video clips. Thanks, Ray, for compiling what, for any fan or respecter of Herzog’s work, will be a must-read/see experience.
That’s it for now. I’ll check in over the weekend with my answers to Professor Irwin Corey’s quiz, a report from the Grindhouse Drive-In party, plus more on the opening of drive-in season and anything else that comes across the radar. I hope to see you at the drive-in this weekend, or right here all week long.
I innocently logged onto Netflix a few days ago, and I was greeted by a “Movie Note” from a Netflix Friend of mine who had evidently been paying far-too-close attention to my queue and my general tastes. Next to a picture of the cover art for a little-known screwball comedy from 1943 entitled My Son, the Hero was my Friend’s question/comment, jumping off the screen in a large, purple, impossible-to-miss font:
“What prompted this? Doesn't fit your normal Netflix rental pattern at all."
I stared at the question/comment for a few seconds, and then my own question/comments started to percolatin’: “What is he saying, my fanatical Friend? That I don’t rent enough obscure comedies from the ‘40s? Did he know about the movie and decide that, amongst all of the late-period screwball comedies I could have chosen, this one was so far afield in quality from the others that it merited worried attention? Just how closely is my Friend paying heed to what I’m having sent home to me? (Not that I’m paranoid or anything, but…) Will he feel compelled to chime in again when the reputedly rotten The Life of David Gale (currently #32 with a bullet) finds its way to the surface of my ridiculously long queue? (I probably would.) And why would anyone’s rental patterns but your own (and perhaps even your own) be so fascinating as to merit a question/comment sent down the Netflix pipeline?
I hastily fired back an e-mail, explaining that though I didn’t realize it at the time, the movie was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, a fact that I thought would satisfy my cinephiliac pal. But then I added the real reason-- “Besides, I’ve got a bit of a Patsy Kelly fixation these days”—and left it at that.
Imagine my surprise when my friend, whose knowledge of cinema, particularly Hollywood genre films, handily surpasses my own in a most complete and embarrassing fashion, shot back a curt reply:
“Who’s Patsy Kelly?”
I realized that if my film-soaked Friend didn’t know who Patsy Kelly was, then it was safe to assume that most casual and even passionately devoted movie buffs, not to mention the audience at large that creates $100 million hits out of movies like Wild Hogs and Norbit, wouldn’t know Patsy Kelly from Marjorie Main or Shirley Booth. (And they probably wouldn’t know who the other two were either.) One of the most popular comediennes in American movies in the 1930s and 1940s, Patsy Kelly, her early movies of this period largely unavailable on DVD, now seemed to be vaulted away in musty obscurity with the rest of the stars of a long-forgotten Hollywood.
Patsy was born Bridget Sarah Veronica Rose Kelly in Brooklyn, New York in 1910 and was given the nickname that would stick with her throughout her career by her brother. The actress was discovered by vaudeville star Frank Fay and by 1927 was on Broadway in Harry Delmar's Revels. She also starred on the Great White Way in shows like Three Cheers, Wonder Bar and two for producer Earl Carroll-- Sketch Book (1929) and Vanities (1930).
But after Wonder Bar in 1931, Hollywood, in the personage of producer Hal Roach, came calling, and he signed Kelly to a series of featherweight two-reel comedies co-starring Thelma Todd. Kelly, from the start never one to keep her mind to herself, is quoted as saying about her journey to the movie capital, “"I'll be a flop in movies. Besides, I don't like 'em, and I never did believe there was a place called Hollywood. Somebody made it up!" But it turned out to be very real indeed, and the Roach comedies ended up having a very popular run. The encyclopedic John McElwee has lots of good information about the Roach/Todd/Kelly/Pitts shorts in this detailed post on Todd at his blog Greenbriar Picture Shows. However, his comments re Kelly, who replaced Zasu Pitts in the shorts after money issues made it impossible for her to continue, are restricted to one sentence with which I must good-naturedly take issue: “Zazu’s easier to take than Patsy. Even a subdued Patsy (and Patsy was never subdued) is akin to root canal without benefit of anesthesia.” The series ended after 21 films when Todd died in 1935.
Cresting on a wave of popularity, the once–in-demand actress found herself nearly unemployable by the mid-1940s and ended up taking work as a domestic. Theories to explain why Hollywood was no longer interested in one of its most bankable comic actresses inevitably turn toward Kelly’s hard drinking. But others have claimed that it was her openness about her homosexuality that was most off-putting in a Hollywood that was still a good 45 years from setting a collective toe out of the closet. (She admitted to author Boze Hadleigh in his book Hollywood Lesbians (1996), which was published after the deaths of all the interviewees, that she was gay.) It was Tallulah Bankhead (hardly one to be taken aback by drinking or homosexuality) who ended Kelly's long creative dry spell by hiring her as support in the play Dear Charles in 1954. The two carried on a long, stormy and relatively above-ground relationship for years afterward.
Kelly was a fixture on television in the 1960s, making guest appearances on classic shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bonanza, Laredo and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. She returned sporadically to movies as well, with featured roles in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960), Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1964), The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966) and as Laura-Louise, one of the sinister coven who befriend Mia Farrow and then betray her to Satan in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). She returned to Broadway in 1971 in the revival of No, No, Nanette with hoofers Ruby Keeler and Helen Gallagher. Kelly scored a huge success as the wise-cracking, tap-dancing maid and won Broadway's 1971 Tony Award as Best Supporting or Featured Actress for her performance in the show. She topped that success the following year when she starred in Irene with Debbie Reynolds, and was again nominated for a Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.
Kelly (third from left) with Irregulars costars Edward Herrmann, Cloris Leachman, Karen Valentine, Virginia Capers and Barbara Harris
The actress ended her film career with two Disney movies that helped to prove that the era at the Mouse House dominated by producer Ron Miller wasn’t a complete disaster-- the original 1976 version of Freaky Friday, and the silly ensemble comedy The North Avenue Irregulars, in which Kelly butted heads (and purses and umbrellas) with a bunch of crooks as well as fellow irregulars Edward Herrmann, Cloris Leachman and Barbara Harris. Patsy Kelly died two years after the 1979 release of The North Avenue Irregulars, in 1981 at the age of 71, of cancer.
The North Avenue Irregulars marked the first time I ever saw Patsy Kelly on screen. (I might have run across her on TV as a kid, but if I did I didn’t remember who she was.) But in that movie I remember being enamored of her tough-old-broad shtick. I grew up around some tough old broads who reminded me a lot of Kelly, and so it’s no wonder I loved her. But it was only recently that I began to encounter Patsy Kelly in her prime, in the comedies and musicals that made her Hollywood name in the 1930s and 1940s. My Son, the Hero was made at the end of the first stage of Kelly’s movie career for Poverty Row director Edgar G. Ulmer. It’s a likable comedy, somewhat turgidly paced (given the lickety-split speed of the movies that can be found at its roots), with a typically farcical plot—a low-rent bookie holes up in the mansion of an associate with his girlfriend (Kelly) and a bunch of their cohorts in an attempt to convince the bookie’s returning war-hero son that his old man is a moneyed big shot. Roscoe Karns as the bookie and professional boxer-turned-actor Max “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom as his gigantic good-natured henchman turn in some pretty snappy work amid Ulmer’s no-frills mise-en-scene (Maxie turns to the camera during one would-be frenetic episode and mutters, “What a screwy picture!”) But Kelly provides My Son, the Hero with whatever oomph that it has, and it seems a rarity among her credits that actually allows the dumpling-shaped actress to bring a bit of sex appeal onto the screen, albeit her own brassy variety.
Much, much better is the other Patsy Kelly vehicle I managed to see in the last month, the gee-whiz college romp Pigskin Parade, which, among other things, happens to be the film debut of Judy Garland. Of course, this bit of casting is probably now the primary reason why most people will pay any kind of attention to Pigskin Parade, along with the early peeks it provides of Jack Haley, Jr., an incredibly sexy Betty Grable, Grady Sutton, Stuart Erwin and even, if you look real close, Alan Ladd. It’s a very typical comedy of the period—lowly Texas State University is invited by Yale, due to a staff miscommunication, to participate in a benefit football game. Before the Ivy League hotshots can blush and correct their mistake, the hale and hearty lads and ladies of the tiny rural campus are fit to bursting with musical energy in celebration of their big opportunity. They even bring in a big coach from the East Coast, the lecherous Slug Winters (Haley), helmed by his no-bullshit pigskin aficionado wife (Kelly), to help guide the meat-and-potatoes squad to victory.
But one night, in a hilarious scene that spotlights her nimble physical ability, Kelly confiscates a flask of gin from a couple of frisky co-eds, gets ripped on it herself and is eventually discovered by her husband drunkenly swinging from a pair of gymnastic rings while the big rally dance roars away just one door over. Suitably berated by Slug, she steps into an adjoining workout room where the team quarterback is licking his wounds after being dumped by his best gal. Mrs. Winters tries to cheer him up by showing him how to take a hit on the field and ends up causing a stack of free weights to fall on him, crushing his leg.
Mrs. Winters, embarrassed by her drunken behavior, is quickly enlisted by her husband to help some of the other students scout for a new quarterback. They eventually make it to the watermelon farm outside of town where Amos (Erwin), who will become the team’s bullet-throwing replacement quarterback, lives. But before they find Amos, the audience is treated to another great Kelly moment, this one a deadpan reaction to the inexplicable musical stylings of Amos’s in-bred relative, who tells the group where Amos can be found, but not before letting fly with a bizarre vocal performance that must be seen to be believed—it’s like Dueling Banjos as it would have played on a Mayberry front porch instead of one found in James Dickey's deepest, darkest Tennessee.
Pigskin Parade is in many ways a very routine musical comedy, but it’s lifted up by its bootstraps (or should that be cleat straps) through the efforts of its excellent cast, of which Patsy Kelly is one of the main anchors. Hers is a tough, sassy demeanor wrapped up in hands-on-the-hips defiance and cat-o’-nine-tails tongue lashings, yet she’s always appealing and genuine underneath the salty exterior. I’d even say that she had a very personable kind of beauty about her in her ‘30s pictures, even up through her wild turn in My Son, the Hero. It sounds strange, but while I was watching and admiring her in Pigskin Parade, and hoping I’d get to see more of her very soon, I saw a very strange confluence in her—Kelly has a frisky ingenue's energy and comic timing, as well as the unglamorous physical appeal and brassy, barking bulldog quality of the best straight-up (no pun intended) broads. She was a worthy contemporary of that other great screen dame, Barbara Stanwyck, and though she never showed the range and greatness that Stanwyck (currently battling Carole Lombard for status as my favorite actress) did, she carved out her own niche and honored it time and again. While watching Pigskin Parade, I kept thinking that Patsy Kelly is who might result if time and space could be breached and science could find a way to deposit Maggie Gyllenhaal and Broderick Crawford in the same body; she’s also a wonder and a hoot to watch and one of my new favorites, and she deserves to be remembered by a lot more movie fans than actually know who she is today. Patsy Kelly once told an interviewer, “In 40-odd years in show business, some years I could do no wrong, and some years I could do nothing right. Show business-- I owe it everything - it owes me nothing.” But you owe it to yourself to find out just how delightful a comic actress Patsy Kelly was—and Pigskin Parade is a great place to start.
(And don’t forget—Patsy Kelly stars with Marion Davies, Frank McHugh, Robert Montgomery and Barton MacLane in Lloyd Bacon’s Ever Since Eve this Monday, April 9, at 8:30 a.m. PST on Turner Classic Movies.)
Posts
_01.jpg)
.jpg)
