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TCM CLASSIC MOVIE FESTIVAL 2013 DAY 2: CHRONICLES OF DELIVERANCE AND DEATH
Well, that was a bit longer of a layoff between posts than I
intended or anticipated, but I’m still here, folks. Let’s do Day Two!
***********************************
I have decided that Friday, April 26, spent bumping around
from auditorium to auditorium and throughout
the greater lobby area of the Chinese multiplex for the 2013 TCM Classic
Film Festival, was probably the single greatest day dedicated to watching
movies that I’ve ever spent in my not-so-illustrious 53 years on this planet. Seven
movies in a span of approximately 17 hours, with no breaks other than the time
it took to get in and out of lines leading into the theaters and the restrooms.
(I packed lunch and dinner.) The Swimmer,
Voyage to Italy, Ruggles of Red Gap, I Am Suzanne!, It Always Rains on Sunday,
Hondo and Plan Nine From Outer Space,
all great in their own special ways. So what to do for an encore?
Well, one thing was for certain—there would be nowhere near
the amount of cinema consumed on Saturday as there had been the previous day.
After I said my bleary-eyed post-Ed Wood good-byes to Richard and Ariel, I
trudged through the front door of my humble Glendale manse at around 3:00 a.m.,
but I didn’t actually get to sleep until about 3:30. As I tumbled gracelessly down
the rabbit hole toward some desperately needed shuteye, I calculated my simple
plan—I would set the alarm for around 9:00 a.m., thus skipping the festival of
Bugs Bunny cartoons scheduled to celebrate the iconic character’s 75th
birthday which began around 9:30 a.m., and instead make my way back to the
Chinese complex in time for the Deliverance
screening which started around 11:45 a.m. I figured I could get by on
somewhere in the neighborhood of six hours of sleep and still have enough in
the tank to get me through the four movies I had on the docket for the day.
But my dazed and confused body had other ideas. Without any
electronic prompting from my clock, my eyes popped open promptly at 6:30 a.m.,
after two whole 90-minute sleep cycles. I was wide awake, exhausted but unable
to keep my head from stirring about the movies of the past day and the ones yet
to come. When it became clear, after a few minutes of tossing and turning, that
I wasn’t going to get any more sleep, I decided to get up and start writing up what
I’d seen of the festival so far. After logging part one of my post on Friday’s
adventure, I hightailed it to the train station and hopped the one stop into
Hollywood. This day would be slower, more measured, but still filled with the
promise of transcending whatever physical reservations I had in favor of
another brilliant experience.
Once I arrived, with some considerable excitement I settled
into my spot toward the front of the Chinese #1, the big centerpiece auditorium
(477 seats) within the Chinese multiplex, in anticipation of seeing Deliverance on the big screen for the
first time since 1973, when I was a 13-year-old high school freshman. I was already
fairly movie savvy at that age, and I’d heard talk about the movie circulating
since its release—by the time it made it to our hometown theater the Academy
Awards for 1972 had already passed, so word of the grueling nightmares that
awaited its four weekend adventurers (and those who bought tickets to see it)
had trickled down even to the most isolated corners of Southern Oregon. But
even if I knew (more or less) what to expect, my dad, who barely paid attention
to the movies, wouldn’t have known Deliverance
from Up the Creek. So when I cleverly
appealed to his taste for the outdoors and casually suggested that maybe we
could go see that new canoeing movie (I needed that accompanied adult to
circumvent the “R” rating), he glanced at the tiny ad on the local movie
calendar, which conveniently showed only the name of the movie, pictures of the
actors looming over a silhouette of three men paddling their boat, and an
ominous tag line (“Where does the camping trip end… and the nightmare begin?”),
and agreed to take me to see it. Success!
But I did not count on my mom’s interest. Unexpectedly, she
decided to tag along, and I ended up sitting between the two of them for the
entire movie. As the attack on Ned Beatty and Jon Voight began, I realized
I may have miscalculated the situation, and my own comfort level, somewhat. The
scene was much more frightening than I anticipated, so much so that upon
viewing the movie later as an adult I realized that even at 13 I didn’t fully
comprehend what was really going on, even to the point of blocking out some of
the more graphic details and suggestions that were right there on screen. And I
distinctly remember being aware of my mom staring daggers at me during that
scene and at several points afterward, telegraphing just how much trouble I was in for when the lights finally did come
up. (Curiously, I have very little memory of my dad’s reaction to the scene.)
Deliverance has,
in the years since that fateful night, loomed large in my own personal movie
mythology, for that experience with my parents but also because the movie has
remained such a powerful and difficult experience all on its own. And I
certainly never would have guessed that 40 years after my first somewhat
traumatic experience with the movie I would be seeing it again in the presence
of four of the men who helped make it. But here I was, in a packed house, the
lights dimmed to darkness, watching the silhouetted figures of Jon Voight, Ned
Beatty, Burt Reynolds and director John Boorman being guided to the stage
where, once the lights came up again, they would be interviewed by TCM’s Ben
Mankiewicz as an introduction to this morning’s beautiful DCP presentation of
the movie. When the TCM Classic Film Festival schedule was first announced,
only Jon Voight had been lined up to participate in the screening. But as
Reynolds, Boorman and Beatty were eventually announced buzz surrounding the
appearance began to build, and by the time the panel began the big auditorium
was packed. Had they known they would be presenting what amounted to a Deliverance reunion, the programmers
might have opted for the 1,100 seats of the big Chinese auditorium instead. (If
only Ronny Cox, Vilmos Zsigmond and perhaps even Billy Redden could have been there!)
It’s hard to overstate my delight in seeing these actors and
this director gathered together on the same stage to celebrate this movie.
Boorman, 80, seemed to these eyes as vital and engaged as he did when I saw him
introduce Hope and Glory at a UCLA
screening 25 or so years ago, and even though his production has tailed off
since 2006 he seemed ready to go, quite enjoying revisiting what must have been
a grueling physical experience in attempting to exact visual poetry to match or
at least stand beside the language of James Dickey’s novel while on such a
logistically challenging shoot. With all respect given to Boorman, Voight
assumed the role of éminence grise on the
panel, offering a few anecdotes to lead off the discussion (moderated by Ben
Mankiewicz) before more or less ceding the spotlight to his costars.
Reynolds was delightful in what for him amounted to a
somewhat stately repose, his casual wit and charm slowed somewhat by age but
not dimmed in terms of pure zing—he still has the power to evoke all those
star-making, wattage-sustaining appearances on the couch next to Johnny Carson.
He still, near the end of a long career balanced by box-office stardom and
eventual audience indifference, seemed in awe of the fact that he was cast at
all in Deliverance, a vote of
confidence from Boorman which still resonates for him today. “I may have been
in 90 movies,” the actor intoned as the panel came to a close, “but I feel like
I’ve really only been in one film.” If the line seemed a little honed and polished
from use since the 40th anniversary celebrations of this movie began
a year or so ago, it was also marked by sincerity, something not always in
ample supply among the many arched eyebrows that have marked Reynolds’ long
career.
But by far the most amusing was Beatty. At first he seemed
to regard the comments of his fellow actors with a kind of gruff mask of
stone-faced patience, the kind a beleaguered grandparent might put on in the
face of misbehaving children before the inevitable furious eruption. But when Mankiewicz finally swung the
spotlight in his direction, Beatty seized the stage with a theatrical flurry of
grumpiness that was a marvel to behold, mock dressing-down the “Hollywood
Boulevard crowd” packing the auditorium and simultaneously winking at the
two-ton elephant in the room. (“I know why you’re all here!”) The TCM host
finally worked up the gumption to ask Beatty about the experience of this being
his first movie, the scene being its
nightmare centerpiece, and Beatty recalled Boorman worrying over how he felt
about playing a scene of such heinous victimization. “Well, it’s acting, isn’t it?” Beatty recalled
responding, thus dispelling the trauma viewers of Deliverance have for four decades imagined the actor must have
suffered as a result of such on-screen degradation.
The movie itself remains uniquely powerful, one of the most
brilliant exercises in foreboding and sustained, indefinable dread I think I’ve
ever seen, as well as a savvy and damning dissection of the codes of macho
authority so often celebrated without examination in American action thrillers.
As I alluded earlier, Boorman finds a way into Dickey’s book by not allowing
its specifically literary pleasures to haunt the film in absentia, by infusing
even its most placid imagery of water, nature, and nature defiled with the
suggestion of the fury and fear present when all hell rises to the surface and
sets its own inexplicable course. And speaking of surfaces, I’d always thought
Pauline Kael was probably right when, in her review of Carrie, she suggested that by staging the interrupted nightmare
that ends the 1976 film Brian De Palma had managed to pull off the sort of
cinematic boo-job that Boorman muffed at the end of Deliverance.
But after seeing the movie here, it struck me that
while the juxtaposition of the hand rising to the glassy surface of the river
with Voight’s Drew lurching up out of bed, away from (but never far enough away
from) the horrible memories of his experience, doesn’t have the adrenalized
shock of De Palma’s sequence, what Boorman does hardly qualifies as a mistake.
Rather than use the hard cut from dream to reality, in Deliverance Boorman employs an appropriately more fluid, fairly
rapid lap dissolve to shift between images. The final effect then is not the
gasping leap out of the nightmare, but rather something more reflective of the
ineffable disorientation one feels, even when awakened with a start, in the
transition from a horror-filled dream back into a reality where the horror
insists on lingering. It’s a transition that seems well-tailored to the
wide-screen nightmare Ed and Bobby and Lewis, and the audience, have just
survived.
I left the Deliverance
screened elated, but also exhausted, a feeling which in the moment I put down
to the experience of seeing this grueling movie under such ideal circumstances.
But as I settled in with my friend and fellow film critic Doug Cummings (whose
own account of the 2013 TCM Film festival can be found here) for Nicholas Ray’s debut feature, They Live By Night (1948), it was becoming clear to me that the creeping weariness I was
beginning to feel was probably more a symptom of the previous day’s blissful
endurance test than a holdover of empathy for those ill-fated weekend warriors
headed down the Cahulawassee River. The screening was introduced by the “czar
of noir,” Eddie Muller (left), who also introduced the previous day’s highlight It Always Rains on Sunday, and
who brought out the director’s widow, Susan Ray (right), for a brief and fascinating discussion of
Ray’s working methods, his vision for realizing Edward Anderson’s novel Thieves Like Us
as a movie, and even Ray’s eventual movement, at the end of his career, toward
the avant-garde with We Can’t Go Home Again, a
movie that couldn’t have seemed more formally different than the Hollywood
classic we were about to watch.
Of course, the most obvious connection between these two career
bookends, They Live by Night
and We Can't Go Home Again, is their concern for the marginalized in
the societies they conjure, whether that society be the hard-scrabble
environment of crime and survival in Depression-era Mississippi or the conclave
of creative neuroses at the center of Ray’s experimental film started in
cooperation with his students in the film department of SUNY Binghamton in
1976. (Ray was still working on the movie at the time of his death; the most
complete version of the film premiered at the Lincoln Center in 2011, primarily
as a result of the efforts of the Nicholas Ray Foundation, headed by Susan
Ray.)
But they also share a fascination for formal innovation. Ray scrambled
the screen in WCGHA with
multiplied images and radically manipulated fields of vision, montages of
generational unrest and long, rambling, apparently improvised character
interludes. The sort of innovation he introduced in They Live by Night
is the kind that viewers of contemporary films take for granted but should be
apparent to anyone used to the common visual language of film as it was
perceived in 1948. The movie was the first to employ an extended helicopter
shot (it opens the film and follows the car which carries the three
gangsters—Farley Granger, Howard Da Silva and Jay C. Flippen—along the road to
their various dates with destiny). And it was also sensitive to the subtleties
of aural and visual textures in ways audiences were not entirely used to, as a
means to enhance the ill-fated relationship between Granger’s Bowie and Cathy
O’Donnell’s Keechie as they set out on the run from the law and the inevitable.
Ray’s biographer, Bernard Eisenschitz, wrote in 1993 that “Only Welles similarly
tried to define acoustic and even verbal textures as much as the visual,” and
it seems clear watching this movie today that the influence of Welles and Citizen Kane, which came out only seven
years prior, was a welcome, if also inescapable influence.
I only wish I had been better prepared to see it. I enjoyed
it immensely, of course, but midway through I also began feeling the pull of my
eyelids, and I suspect that hovering twilight, which I never actually succumbed
to, tempered and dulled my receptors to the full effect of what this moving
drama had to offer. The one thing that I can’t put down to lack of rest was the
insistent echo of Robert Altman, whose own brilliant adaptation of Anderson’s Thieves Like Us was released in 1974. Having
seen it a dozen or so times, I’m much more familiar with Altman’s version,
which traded Granger and O’Donnell’s Bowie and Keechie for those of Keith
Carradine and Shelley Duvall. Its particular rhythms and images, and even its
sonic particulars, kept intruding (not entirely unpleasantly) with my
experience of Ray’s movie. Had I been more fully rested I might not have been
so susceptible to this kind of reverie, but in a strange way I don’t really
regret it. It only pointed up to me the possible value of one day comparing
the films more directly, tracing Ray’s achievements and his influences on
Altman as well as the ways Altman’s movie manages to strike out on its own
individual path despite the remarkable allegiance both directors offer toward
Anderson’s basic outline.
I said good-bye to Doug and stumbled off toward the Egyptian
Theater for the rest of the evening, where I would see Max Von Sydow in person
before a screening of The Seventh Seal
and then Ann Blyth, Hollywood’s biggest nightmare daughter, introduce Mildred Pierce. The journey out of and away from the central
Chinese multiplex would be the first (and only) time I would leave the friendly
confines of that bustling area, what I’ve come to think of as the Grand Central
Station of the Turner Classic Film Festival, over the course of the entire
weekend. I never even made it over to the “Big Chinese” this year, which is in
itself a particular shame, since immediately after the festival closed that
storied auditorium was shut down to the general public so that an interior
remodeling of the Hollywood landmark could commence— after having its
traditional seating and dimensions gutted, sometime later this year arguably
the most famous movie theater in the world still in operation will reopen as a
gigantic IMAX venue. As it turns out, the last movie I will have ever seen in
that grand and familiar setting, where so much of Hollywood history played out
over the course of its 86-year history, was Rio
Bravo, in the presence of Angie Dickinson, on the final afternoon of last
year’s TCM festival.
The window between the end of Nicholas Ray and the beginning
of Ingmar Bergman was open plenty wide enough to make the jaunt to the Egyptian
less urgent than it might have otherwise been, which is one of the main reasons
why I decided on this part of my weekend schedule. There were plenty of
temptations at the Egyptian and elsewhere in the festival offerings, but often
the time between films was only a half hour or 45 minutes, making the projected
journey between screenings a little more harrowing than I preferred. (Sometimes
even just going from upstairs to downstairs within the Chinese multiplex from
one showing to the next was cutting it close in terms of line placement and
getting a decent seat, especially if I was headed toward one of the smaller
auditoriums.) But since the space
between They Live by Night and The Seventh Seal was unusually generous,
I made my way east down Hollywood Boulevard, buzzing in between the usual
Saturday evening jungle of humanity. I was actually able to breathe some fresh
air (all things being relative, especially in Hollywood) and take what amounted
to an evening stroll toward what surely would be another memorable evening.
As I did, I started thinking about past years here at the
Turner Classic Film Festival-- the excitement and gratitude I felt over even
being able to attend the festival’s inaugural year, drinking in the
atmosphere of being surrounded by so much Hollywood history, and the appreciation
of Hollywood history, and how I felt like I could never possibly become jaded
about the privilege of being a part of it all. Despite my idealistic
enthusiasm, it’s inevitable that in subsequent years the first blush of that
particularly sweet-smelling rose would have worn off somewhat—when your first
experience with a festival starts off with watching a synchronized swimming
display poolside at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in the presence of Esther
Williams and Betty Garrett, followed by a screening of Neptune’s Daughter amongst the cabanas and palm trees of this most
luxurious (and, again, storied) of filmland locations, a certain amount of
downhill grade should be expected. Of course each year has been packed with
once-in-a-lifetime moments that I wouldn’t have traded for anything, either in
the moment or looking back now. And by the time last year’s festival rolled
around, I still wondered how anyone could possibly arch an eyebrow at this
party, even though one of the year’s signature tributes, to producer Robert
Evans, accounted for screenings of genuinely great movies like The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, but also allowed for the imprimatur of “classic” to be bestowed upon white
elephants like Love Story and Black Sunday, the movie I ended up
finishing the festival off with last year.
Plenty of grumbling could also be overheard from local
cinephiles, first-time attendees as well as veterans, about the pass-oriented
system adopted by TCM, which meant that some of these writers, who were used to
their press credentials getting them to the front of whatever line they might
happen to find themselves in, ended up standing outside in the rain (literally,
at one point), audibly complaining about how they would never attend the
festival again. (In the parlance of
our times, whatever, dudes.)
Deep in the heart of Year Four, I found myself thinking
about where the TCM Festival might go next. It’s obviously a festival which is
largely oriented toward out-of-town folks who buy a pass not only for the
festival but as part of the whole Hollywood experience, whatever that is these
days, so of course the programming, especially in the bigger venues, is going
to tilt toward the standard classic movie fare that is guaranteed to satisfy
fans of the TCM channel from all over the world who have ponied up thousands of
dollars in passes, travel and hotel fare just to be here. You don’t have to
have a finely tuned sensibility to detect the pull of commerce for the folks at
Turner, and there have been times, especially over the last couple of years,
when I’ve looked around and wondered about the experience of the TCM Classic
Film Festival in Hollywood and that of one of the channel’s recently initiated Classic Cruises and how the two might be converging.
But then I meet folks like Millie De Chirico, a programmer for the channel (she heads up the “TCM Underground” schedule
seen on Saturday nights) who is one of many TCM representatives who introduce
each and every one of the screenings, and my faith is renewed. Folks like De
Chirico are legion at the channel, thank God, and they’re the ones in there
keeping up the connections with people like historian Kevin Brownlow, Film Forum
programmer Bruce Goldstein and MoMA film archivist/preservationist Katie
Trainor, all of whom have been directly connected to some of the greatest and
most fascinating moments I’ve had here over the past four seasons. They are in
there shepherding the influences and curating a schedule that isn’t completely
dominated by the sorts of movies that pop up on Everyman’s list of great Hollywood
classics. And they’re the reason why I was able to have the kind of day I had
here Friday at the festival, a day packed with treasures of the more
off-the-beaten-path variety, treasures oriented toward the more adventurous
festival-goer, who’d rather take a chance on something unfamiliar to balance out
the undeniable pleasures of yielding to the embrace of the inviting arms of
nostalgia.
Residents of Los Angeles have a bad reputation for being
ignorant or dismissive of film culture, which is why new and exciting movies
from outside the mainstream tend to have a hard time finding screens and screen
time here—a phenomenon that is not exactly exclusive to Los Angeles, by the
way. But many of those who take advantage of (and may take for granted) the
myriad repertory and special screenings available in Los Angeles every week,
who would revel in some of the great opportunities to see the rarities and
restorations that so often are a part of this festival’s programming, may not
be able to afford festival passes that would allow them to see the sort of
screenings that sometimes go unnoticed by the throng crushing their way in to
see Casablanca. (And these are
usually the screenings that end up in smaller auditoriums that fill up much
quicker—stand-by tickets for these shows are tough to come by.)
Doug Cummings has a suggestion that I think
is a good one—a festival pass, good for three, or maybe five movies—as a
gesture toward the city around which the festival revolves, which would allow
interested locals easier, more affordable access to some of the more rarified
gems on the schedule. Then when these screenings get some buzz going around the
festival and end up selling out, which they sometimes do, they can be
reprogrammed into one of the Sunday slots always reserved for pictures that end
up being more attractive to people than anyone could have anticipated.
The other thing that I sensed was different about this year
is that for the first time I kept to myself much more than in years past, an
observation that undoubtedly says much more about me than anything going on at
the festival. Much of the pleasure I’ve had from festivals past was derived
from meeting people who I’d engaged in conversation while in line—I’ve met a
lot of people at the festival this way, and I’ve enjoyed seeing them again in
subsequent years. Last year too seemed to be a great occasion for meeting
friends in real life with whom I’d only ever enjoyed a “virtual” Internet
connection with before, through our enthusiastic adventures in film writing-- a
strange phenomenon, to be sure, and one which I suspect will only become more
common. I don’t mean to suggest that I was in any way a grumbling hermit this
year—the great movie-appreciating friends I’ve been lucky enough to meet here
and elsewhere who make the TCM Fest a touchstone of their year spent a lot of
time with me, especially on Friday, and the experience of those movies simply wouldn’t
have been as vivid without them.
However, and maybe this was just my bad luck, this year
while parked in line I ended up overhearing a lot of conversations that didn’t
exactly make me want to jump in and participate—for some reason the topic of
comparing RVs and RV road trips seemed to be in the air. But that potential
roundtable was scintillating compared to the one I overheard between a mother
and her two daughters, in their late 20s probably, Mom relating the story of
talking to some guy at the festival who apparently got a bit too caught up in
the subject. “He started going on about this one guy in some old movie he
liked,” the elder complained to the younger. “Who was he talking about?” asked
one of the girls, and Mom could only sigh. “Oh, I don’t know. But he just
wouldn’t shut up, and I just kept thinking, ‘God, it’s only a movie!’” That’s a
phrase—“It’s only a movie”—I would never have expected to hear uttered by
anyone at this festival, or any film
festival, really, and I privately mourned for those who couldn’t get into
screenings because these women’s asses were taking up seats instead. Couldn’t
they have gone on the cruise instead?
So I was standing in line in the courtyard of the Egyptian
Theater awaiting admittance to the screening of The Seventh Seal, my nose in a book (the festival atmosphere
inspired me to again pick up Theodore Roszak’s Flicker), the air thick with talk of exciting moments from the
weekend so far and, of course, gas mileage comparisons between a stock
Winnebago and the fully decked-out Fleetwood Expedition. There happened to be a
trivia contest being held as part of the general and inescapable busy-ness
dominating the shaded area outside the theater—a VW bus with its rear hatch
popped open had a TV monitor dropped into the seat space, a monitor which was,
for some reason, showing clips from The
Producers, not among this year’s line-up (although Mel Brooks was in the
building on Friday night with The Twelve
Chairs), and every available flat place upon which to park one’s tuchis was taken up by folks hunched
over laptops. The trivia host, seriously miked for maximum projection, read
some of the easier questions from the TCM
Classic Movie Trivia book, throwing the contest open to whoever amongst us
in line, or among those just milling about, could raise their hands first. I
tried to get my hand up in time to answer one-- “A River Runs Through It won an Oscar in what category?”-- and one
of the host’s assistants pointed at me. But before I could respond, the host
spotted someone else who eagerly shouted, “Best Cinematography! Philippe
Rousselot!” So it was not me who picked up whatever DVD box set was being let
go for that question.
The questions continued. However, humbled as I had been, I
decided to just keep my profile low and quietly make my way in to see Max Von
Sydow, the live 2013 version as well as the black-and-white 1957 issue. Just as
I rounded one of the several hairpin turns in the line near the front entrance
the host shouted out another poser straight out of the book— “The 1997 movie The Brave starring Marlon Brando was
the directorial debut of what popular actor?” The crowd, which had been picking
up prizes left and right on questions relating to Humphrey Bogart and Richard
Zanuck and which city was the setting for The
Sting, offered no response apart from one guy who shouted, “Al Pacino!” After
a few more seconds of silence, I could not resist. “Johnny Depp!” I blurted
out, half-embarrassed that this truly trivial nugget would have so easily
bubbled up to the magma-like surface of my brain. The next few seconds were a
blur. All I remember is some guy tossing my prize toward me—a fleece picnic
blanket neatly embossed with the TCM logo!— pointing a camera at me, telling me
to hold my prize up and smile. Then there was a bright flash, and the next
thing I knew I was watching Ben Mankiewicz sputter his way through an on-stage
interview with Max Von Sydow before an adoring throng.
Mankiewicz actually comported himself nicely, his customary
wise-assery tamped down somewhat in the presence of an actor for whom he clearly
held quite a reserve of respect and regard. Von Sydow seemed genuinely humbled,
nonplussed even, that the turnout to see him before a screening of the great
Ingmar Bergman classic which essentially thrust him onto the world stage would
be so large—the Egyptian seats just over 600, and the place looked, from my
vantage point about halfway down, just behind the auditorium’s exit ramp on the
right, pretty much full. Before bringing out the esteemed actor, Mankiewicz introduced a montage
clip of Von Sydow’s work, one which would have been very much at home on the
channel itself (and may have actually aired on it, for all I know). It did seem
a telling bit of information, and certainly an explanation for things to come,
that for all the clips of the Bergman films he was a part of, as well as Hannah and Her Sisters, Three Days of the Condor,
Minority Report, Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close and The Greatest
Story Ever Told, apart from the applause heard for The Exorcist by far the loudest and most enthusiastic crowd
response came when the crowd caught a glimpse of Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon and, to my astonishment and,
I suppose, delight, the actor’s appearance
as the evil Brewmeister Smith in Strange Brew.
(Strange, indeed!)
After Von Sydow had accepted the bounteous applause offered
him, the men onstage settled into conversation mode and the actor related numerous
anecdotes about Bergman, Sydney Pollock, George Stevens and Woody Allen with equal
vigor and humor. In fact, it was the humor that seemed to throw Mankiewicz. He
had no trouble accepting that Von Sydow was down with a good laugh—he was
responding well to the host’s relaxed, informal approach, after all—but when
Von Sydow related that Bergman was in life, and even on the set, a very funny
guy, well, that was an idea that Mankiewicz just couldn’t wrap his head around.
It flummoxed him so much that he returned, flabbergasted, to the notion a
couple of times before the interview concluded, unable to process how the man
who had given the world psychological puzzle boxes like Persona or grueling relationships dramas like Scenes from a Marriage could possibly enjoy a guffaw or two. (The Strange
Case of Woody Allen, a director renowned for comedy who has made some of the
most resolutely humorless movies ever exposed to celluloid and whose lifestyle seems
defined by anhedonia, unfortunately never came up as a rejoinder.)
I only wish
that as many people who came to see Von Sydow had actually stayed to see the
movie being celebrated. In true contrast to his bleak Scandinavian reputation
there was evidence of Bergman’s sense of humor in the world-famous film that
would follow, but as soon as the interview was over and the preparations to fire
up the projectors began, I’d betI saw at least 50-60 humans headed for the exits. So much
for the international language of cinema, at least at the TCM Classic Film Festival
on a Saturday night.
The Seventh Seal itself
seems to successfully stand outside the debate (the indifference?) regarding
Ingmar Bergman’s relevance to a new generation of cinephiles—or to the old ones,
for that matter. Maybe it’s because the movie itself which seems to represent
to so many people the whole of the Bergman experience (and for a lot of folks
it probably is the whole of their
Bergman experience). Or maybe it’s because the iconography of the movie, particularly
the image of Death playing Chess with Von Sydow’s Antonius Block, is so
ingrained in our visual language, has been parodied so thoroughly that it seems
to have come out the other end of Satire with a clean slate. But going into the
Egyptian it seemed hardly possible any longer that one could actually watch The Seventh Seal, penetrate the hard
veneer of perceived wisdom and familiarity about it and experience it with
anything like freshness. Yet one of the most striking things about seeing the
movie again—I’d never seen it on anything but 16mm, so the jump to the big screen
at the Egyptian was tossing a bone in the air and having it end up a vast ship
floating in space—was how vivid it was in its theatricality.
Of course Bergman’s roots in theater are well known, and
many of his films, great and small, reflect those roots. But I have to confess I’d
never ruminated much on The Seventh Seal
as anything but a distinctly cinematic creation, for whatever reason that might
be. Yet what in essence could be more theatrical than an existential
confrontation between a soldier of God who revolts against the very mission he’s
been sent on, who directly confronts the delivery system unto the very void he’s
come to realize awaits man at the end of life? The core rejection of logic by
faith obsesses Block in the absence of a fear-created god (“I want knowledge,
not belief”), yet the paradox of the movie is found in the odd exhilaration the
movie’s haunted final images leave you with. Bergman accesses that exhilaration
because of the almost subliminal ways he finds in The Seventh Seal to interweave the two narrative-based arts. The
movie closes on a dance with death that Block accepts, participates in, a dance
which none of us can escape. It sends you out of the theater similarly
entranced, wondering how the sort of mastery of the medium Bergman evidences
here could have ever fallen out of favor.
As I headed up the stairs and out the door to find my place
in line for Mildred Pierce, I wasn’t
too surprised to see that the line for my level of badge extended back and
forth along the hairpins and out to the street. Even factoring in the hundred
or so VIPs already in line with priority seating ahead of us, that meant only about
250 seats out of 600 had been claimed. No problem. Even though I was exhausted
by this point, still only operating on about three hours of sleep, I marched to
the end of the courtyard and proceeded to get in line. But the person at the
end of the line ahead of me quickly informed me that this was not the end of
the line. In actuality, the line broke at that point, only to be restarted westward
at the corner of Hollywood and Seward, where it extended for almost a full city
block down toward Leland Way, which passes directly behind the Egyptian
Theater. I let my mind boggle a little bit as I walked along the sidewalk,
which was bustling with pass-holders raring to see Ann Blyth in person. (I
doubted there would be many walkouts at this screening once the celebrities
left the stage.)
When I finally got to my place at the end of this long,
snaking line, I was given a number in the high 300s, and I could feel what
little wind was left in me slowly leaking away. By the time that VIP line was accommodated,
it would probably have had been augmented by another 100 or so people, which
would mean that I was right on the border of getting in or not getting in where
I stood. And it would take another 45 minutes or so before the line started
moving toward the theater and we would find out just how many of us would fit
in this cavernous, beautifully restored palace. It didn’t take me long to
decide that I was just too tired to waste that much time on a chance.
So I
hopped out of line, bade farewell to Ann Blyth and jumped on the next train
headed back to Universal City. By 10:30 I was back home and stretched out on
the couch, where my wife and kids were thrilling to The Hobbit, a movie I had absolutely no trouble tuning out on my
way toward a deep and restful sleep. Mildred
Pierce would always be there in one form or another. If I was to make the most
of the last day of the 2013 TCM Classic Movie Festival tomorrow, I’d need more
than three hours of sleep. And around the time I formulated that thought, I
slipped away.
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The Deliverance panel videos and many, many more highlights of the TCM Festival can be seen on the TCM Classic Film Festival Web site in their great video gallery.
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Coming next: The report on the concluding day of this year's TCM Film Festival.
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