The above quote comes from Brooklyn born Robert Stone, one of the great novelists of the last half-century, who passed away on Saturday at his home in Key West at the age of 77. Stone’s most recent novel was 2013’s fine The Death of the Black Haired Girl, but he’ll likely always be best known for his 1974 novel Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award.
Dog Soldiers was adapted by Stone himself for Karel Reisz’s 1978 film Who’ll Stop The Rain, starring Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld and Michael Moriarty. As literary adaptations go (aside from the asinine title change), it’s quite effective, retaining Stone’s strong dialogue and weary world-view. His other books of fiction included his first novel, 1967’s A Hall of Mirrors, 1981’s A Flag For Sunrise, 1992’s Outerbridge Reach, the 1997 short story collection Bear and His Daughter (which includes his widely-lauded, gut-wrenching story “Helping”) and his 1998 novel Damascus Gate.
I’ll never forget spending that Yankees-filled summer of 1998 lugging my hardcover copy of Stone’s 500 page novel back and forth to the beach. He also published a memoir of his early years in 2007, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, which touched on his friendship with fellow novelist Ken Kesey as well as his time spent in New Orleans as an encyclopedia salesman among other episodes. Wherever Stone traveled and whatever subjects he took on, his interests and point of view were uniquely American and not by accident. As he stated in an interview with The Paris Review from 1985:
“What I’m always trying to do is define that process in American life that puts people in a state of anomie, of frustration. The national promise is so great that a tremendous bitterness is evoked by its elusiveness. That was Fitzgerald’s subject, and it’s mine. So many people go bonkers in this country—I mean, they’re doing all the right things and they’re still not getting off.”
Earlier in the interview, he states, “That is my subject. America and Americans.” From his first novel to his last, few have ever written about them as well.
“I like to act in films, I like to shoot ’em, I like to direct ’em, I like to be around ’em. I like the feel of it and it’s something I respect. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s a crappy film or a good film. Anyone who can make a film, I already love. But I feel sorry if they don’t put any thought in it because then they missed the boat.”
-John Cassavetes
So far, summer 2013 seems like a dud of a movie-going season. Luckily, BAM is coming to the rescue with a retrospective of the films of iconoclastic filmmaker and actor John Cassavetes. It’s often said that Cassavetes’ films are not for everyone, which is true, but it should be taken as a compliment. The series, which runs through July 31st, mixes Cassavetes’ work as a writer and director with some of his more memorable roles acting for other directors, like Robert Aldrich’s THE DIRTY DOZEN (which won him an Oscar nomination), Don Siegel’s THE KILLERS, Elaine May’s MIKEY AND NICKEY (co-starring Falk) and Roman Polanski’s ROSEMARY’S BABY.
Cassavetes’ self-financed 1968 film FACES (screening on July 17) was nominated for three Academy Awards, and had a major impact on the industry itself and also on filmmakers like his friend and protégé Martin Scorsese, and contemporaries like Woody Allen, Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich. In addition to paving the way for the independent film movement in the United States, Cassavetes’ movies present human emotion and behavior in stark, jarring, occasionally hilarious and sometimes harrowing ways. Simply put – there’s nothing else quite like them. Cassavetes created a stock company of fantastic and idiosyncratic performers, including Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel and perhaps most famously and importantly, his wife and muse, the great Gena Rowlands. Rowlands’ performance in Cassavetes’ A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE was widely lauded, Oscar-nominated and has become justly legendary, but her work her husband’s other films, like the criminally under-seen OPENING NIGHT, which kicks off the series on Saturday, is equally stunning. It’s enough to cure you of superhero movies.
Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller Jawsis commonly regarded as the first summer blockbuster and as a result, the movie that lead to the death of the creative boom of “New Hollywood” in the late 60s and early 70s. Its influence on not just the movies that followed in its wake, but also the marketing, business and making of movies is incalculable. However, even among film fans who bemoan the changes that the massive success of Jaws brought on, it’s hard to find anyone who dislikes the movie itself. Unlike many sudden cinema phenomena, Jaws has had remarkable staying power, enchanting and scaring the wits out of audiences via cable TV and home video ever since owning the box-office in the summer of ’75.
What’s more is that instead of simply being a nostalgia trip that doesn’t really live up to the adoring affection of its hard core fans (I’m looking at you, Star Wars geeks), Jaws holds its own as a great movie. I know personally, the summer doesn’t feel complete without at least one evening spent watching Brody, Quint and Hooper aboard the Orca. All of this leads to the excitement surrounding the recent Blu-ray debut of Jaws earlier this month. The good news is that the movie hasn’t looked or sounded this good since the summer of ’75. (See the excellent review and screen capture comparisons here at the invaluable website, DVD Beaver.)
I recently read Peter Benchley’s novel of the same name for the first time, and I was eager to watch the movie again, comparing and contrasting what was kept, what was changed and what was completely eliminated for the screenplay, written largely by Carl Gottlieb (who also appears in the film as Meadows, the editor of the Amity town newspaper), with help from Benchley and uncredited work by playwright Howard Sackler, John Milius and Jaws co-star Robert Shaw. The novel Jaws was better than I’d expected it to be, but the screenplay and movie are a vast improvement.
It’s easy to jump on the obvious reasons the movie worked in ’75 and still works now – terrific performances by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Murray Hamilton and especially Robert Shaw, John Williams’ memorable score, Spielberg’s taut direction. Other reasons the film became a classic are less obvious, but no less important. The technological limits of the mid 70s meant that we didn’t see much of the shark. There was no CGI, and the mechanical shark was rarely functioning properly during the shoot.
The happy result is that the moments when we do actually see the shark make a huge impact and still make people jump in their seats. Spielberg has said that if he’d made the movie 30 years later, he would have used new technology, we would have seen a lot more of the shark and the resulting movie, by his own admission wouldn’t have been nearly as good. The audience relies on Williams’ score, POV shots of swimmers and clever visual cues like the floating barrels to let us know that the shark has returned to wreak havoc.
Another element that keeps the movie from being a staid, formulaic monster movie is Spielberg’s insistence on shooting on Martha’s Vineyard and on the Atlantic Ocean instead of in Hollywood. The Jaws shoot took over the island for months and incorporated many locals into the cast, not only as extras, but in key speaking parts as well. The organic small-town America feel of Amity Island would have been lost on the Universal lot. The film plays upon primal human fears; not simply that there are beasts in the wild who can kill and maim us when we least expect it, but also more mundane fears about losing our businesses, losing our standing in a community or within our family. It’s also simply a hell of a lot of fun.
If you haven’t seen it in years, or if you’re like me and can quote random lines from the movie at will, or if for some strange quirk of fate you’ve never seen Jaws, the new Blu-ray edition comes highly recommended.
At first glance, Jack Nicholson and Michelangelo Antonioni would seem a mismatched pair: Antonioni, the gloomy, solemn, European master of existential alienation and Nicholson, all Irish-American brashness and energy — the most charismatic and aggressive movie star since James Cagney. However, with Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger, the odd couple proved to be a formidable team. Though the film failed to deliver to producer Carlo Ponti’s box-office hopes in the 1970s and was initially dismissed by many critics as a minor outing for both the director and star, its stature has grown and deepened over the decades, helped by a 2005 theatrical rerelease and subsequent DVD. Over thirty five years later, it stands as an artistic high water mark for both men. However, for those who can only envision Jack Nicholson as a hyper, wild-eyed madman, The Passenger offers an opportunity to see the depth and subtlety of his work, before he became hemmed in by audience expectations.
Nicholson, the quintessential star of 1970s “New Hollywood” spent the first half of that decade on an extraordinary run of iconic roles – including Five Easy Pieces’ Bobby Dupea, Chinatown’s J.J. Gittes, The Last Detail’s Buddusky and, of course One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’s R.P. McMurphy (the part that finally landed Nicholson a Best Actor Academy Award). Nicholson’s performance as David Locke in The Passenger stands up to his work in any of those films, while finding the actor in a far more subdued mode.
Locke is an English born, American educated journalist researching a story about guerrillas in an unnamed African desert country. After a particular hot and frustrating day in the desert, he returns to his hotel to find that he has no soap for a shower. He knocks on the door of his neighbor, looking to borrow some and finds the man lying dead. Through flashbacks and an audio recording made by Locke, we see that the man, Robertson, was a fellow Englishman, roughly the same size and build as Locke, and with a similar hairline. Locke mysteriously and impetuously decides to switch identities with the corpse and disappear from his life, assuming the life of Robertson. While this snap decision to leave his wife and career behind, and start anew as a stranger in a strange land happens easily enough for Locke, he finds himself a pursued man – both by the producer and philandering wife he’s left behind in England and by people who want what Robertson had to sell or want him dead or arrested. It seems Robertson was not simply a travelling businessman, but an illegal arms dealer, supplying the guerrillas.
By evading the narrative of his own existence, Locke now finds himself thrust deeper into the story he was attempting to cover. It’s a set-up that could easily be the plot of a very different sort of film, a suspense thriller made by Hitchcock, Polanski or DePalma; in Antonioni’s hands, it becomes a hypnotic, meandering investigation of identity, destiny and narrative itself. We’re never quite sure what has driven Locke to leave his life behind. Scenes of his wife back in London, and flashbacks to their life together hint that the marriage was unhappy, but his wife spearheads the search for Robertson once Locke is officially “dead.” We watch him have a frustrating time researching his story in the desert, but it’s also made clear that Locke is successful and internationally known as a writer and broadcaster. In “Jump Cut,” Martin Walsh wrote of the film:
“At one point early in the film Nicholson points out that ‘we translate every experience into the same old codes’…Its importance for our understanding of The Passenger is of crucial significance. On one level, it helps make sense of Nicholson’s desire to cease being David Locke, to adopt a new identity, to escape the tyranny of the co-ordinates of his present existence, to re-open his life to new experiences. However, the way in which David Locke attempts to recharge his life proves fraught with unanticipated, uncontrollable dangers…”
Locke/Robertson leaves Africa for Europe, where, in Barcelona, he finds an unexpected travelling companion and lover, played by Maria Schneider (Last Tango In Paris). Together they become a couple on the lam, as Nicholson allows himself to be swept along in this new narrative he’s entered, despite its dangers. The girl follows suit, following Locke on his odd journey as if on some sort of scavenger hunt.
Locke continues along Robertson’s path, using the dead man’s datebook as his guide and talisman, until things meet their inevitable end in a dusty Spanish hotel courtyard, where all the main characters converge and Antonioni pulls off one of the most incredible shots you’ll ever see in a movie.
Looking back, it’s fascinating to watch Nicholson play this character at this point in his career. He’d played quiet, brooding characters before (e.g. Bob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens), but the success of Cuckoo’s Nest and relative failure of The Passenger (and of Arthur Penn’s western The Missouri Breaks, which paired Nicholson with Marlon Brando in the following year) may have pushed Nicholson into the relative safety of his more familiar screen persona, which Stanley Kubrick was soon to push to an extreme in his film of The Shining.
In the history of the movies, there are few actors and roles linked as indelibly as Boris Karloff and Frankenstein’s monster. Karloff had been acting in the movies for a decade by the time he donned Jack Pierce’s make-up in director James Whale’s “Frankenstein,” (which debuted 80 years ago this December) but it was the monster that made him a star. In return, Karloff made Universal’s (and Jack Pierce’s) version of Frankenstein’s monster an icon for the ages. Mary Shelley may have created the character in her 1818 novel, but its Pierce’s make-up and Karloff’s portrayal – the flat head, neck bolts, ill-fitting suit coat and heavy platform boots – that dominate the popular conception of him.
When Universal Pictures set out to make “Frankenstein,” it was to star Bela Lugosi, capitalizing on his “Dracula” success. However, after a few failed make-up tests, Lugosi left the project. Whale brought in 44 year old character actor Karloff, who created a movie monster for the ages. The monster doesn’t speak in the first Frankenstein film, but Karloff’s performance is a masterpiece of movie acting. Universal Pictures had thought the film would make Colin Clive (as Dr. Henry Frankenstein) a star, but instead audiences took to Karloff’s monster. Karloff’s monster, shuffles and lurches, moans and grunts, smashes and strangles and whimpers in fear. The image of the monster reaching for the light coming through the open ceiling seems to imbue the murderous brute with a spiritual yearning. The most shocking moment comes when the monster drowns a little girl as they play beside a pond. The monster is bewildered and confused that little Maria does not float the same way the flowers they had been tossing in the water had. The movie’s script had taken a turn from Shelley’s novel, attempting to take away any humanity from the character of the monster, to make him a monster that could simply be seen as dangerous and bad and needing to be killed, but somehow Karloff got through to audiences anyway. As the townspeople revel in burning down the old mill with the monster inside, chances are even 1931 audiences were sad to see the monster go.
The film was a hit and Universal went on to make several more Frankenstein films, with and without Karloff. The first of these, “Bride of Frankenstein,” also directed by Whale and starring Karloff and Clive, is the rare sequel that equals or surpasses the original. It’s also one of the loopiest horror movies ever made, with an introductory sequence of Shelley, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley sitting around on a stormy night to set up the sequel with her telling them that the story didn’t end the way they thought but — there was more! From there we re-enter the story of the monster, Henry Frankenstein (It’s unclear why the doctor’s name was changed from Victor, his name in the novel), and his bride Elizabeth. Now add a second “mad scientist,” Dr. Pretorius who also has learned how to create life and wants to team up with Frankenstein to create more creatures. Frankenstein wants no part of it, so Pretorius kidnaps Elizabeth to coerce him. Meanwhile, the monster, who had survived the first film’s fire thanks to an underground well is roaming around the countryside on a rampage. Luckily for him, he stumbles upon a blind hermit who feeds him and begins to teach him to speak. Yes, this is the sequence parodied so brilliantly by Peter Boyle and Gene Hackman in Mel Brooks’ great “Young Frankenstein,” but even the original scenes are hilarious (“Alone – baaaad! Friend – gooooood!”). Ultimately, the monster is detained long enough by Pretorius and Frankenstein so he can watch them create his bride – a female monster played by Elsa Lanchester (who also played Mary Shelley in the prologue). However, she doesn’t take much of a shine to Karloff’s monster (“She haaaaate me!”) and he decides to blow up the lab and all inside it, being nice enough to let his creator, Frankenstein and Elizabeth run to safety first. (Frankenstein’s monster here has clearly advanced to the mentality of an adolescent male – when the girl you like doesn’t want to get together with you, hey – flip that switch and melodramatically blow everyone up.)
Although Karloff would play a variety of roles throughout his long film, stage and television career, he would always be linked to the horror genre and to Frankenstein in particular. However, he was always appreciative of the role that made him a star. As he said, “The monster was the best friend I ever had.”
For one week starting today, Film Forum is screening a new 35 mm print of Howard Hawks’ great 1938 comedy Bringing Up Baby. Sheila O’Malley, who writes the terrific blog, The Sheila Variations, has a fun piece about the flick and it’s racy subtext at Capital New York.
Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and Howard Hawks – what more can a movie lover ask for? This is one of the great screen comedies, folks, don’t miss it.
In all the tributes over this past week to Sidney Lumet, many have cited Lumet’s strong track record of guiding his actors to exceptional, even iconic performances. While Al Pacino’s work in Lumet’s “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon” may be the most famous examples of this, I don’t think any of Lumet’s lead actors was ever better than Paul Newman as a down and out alcoholic Boston lawyer in “The Verdict.”
“The Verdict’s” success is due to the remarkable collaboration between Lumet, Newman and David Mamet, who wrote the script. Mamet’s screenplay takes what could have been either a run of the mill redemption story or courtroom drama and finds those keen details that Lumet and his cast bring to life brilliantly. There are those little moments, like Frank Galvin (Newman) sipping his shot of whiskey off of the bar, too shaky to dare risk raising it to his lips that make the bigger ones, like his argument in chambers with a corrupt judge (Milo O’Shea), or his stunning summation really pay off.
Newman doesn’t just play a drunk; he captures a drunk’s self-loathing, his fear, his shame and ultimately, the slow rekindling of his pride and the attendant panic that it may be too late. The supporting cast around Newman, including Jack Warden, Charlotte Rampling, Edward Binns, and particularly the great James Mason performs at the same high level.
Looking at the summation speech, I was struck by Lumet’s quiet but incredibly effective technique. The scene is one, long interrupted take. The camera holds the wide shot for a full two minutes, only moving when Newman approaches the jury box. Then slowly, it moves in on Newman, as his speech draws us in deeper, as if we are the jurors. Lumet’s decision to use one long take allows Newman to build up slowly, to really let Mamet’s words create the true force of their meaning. He finishes, and slumps back into his seat. We can sense the physical and emotional exhaustion of both the character and the actor.
Lumet, Newman and Mamet were all nominated for Academy Awards for “The Verdict.” None of them won.
This past Sunday marked the 30th anniversary of the New York premiere of one of the great films of the 1980s, the far too seldom seen Cutter’s Way a/k/a Cutter and Bone. Over at Edward Copeland’s film blog, J.D. offers a terrific account of how the film was made, essentially dumped by the studio and then luckily “saved from obscurity.” For fans of the film or just those interested in the machinations of the Hollywood machine, it’s a must-read.
Cutter’s Way is a movie I find myself liking more and more each time I see it. Bridges does great work here and he and John Heard (as Cutter) play exceptionally well off of each other. As J.D. puts it, “Heard plays Cutter like a character straight out of a Tom Waits song.” His need for action, for something other than liquor and self-pity, creates a terrific dynamic with Bridges’ do-nothing yacht rat gigolo. Between the two male leads is a remarkable performance by Lisa Eichhorn as Cutter’s depressed alcoholic wife, who plays one of the saddest love scenes ever put on film.
Cutter’s Way takes its time introducing the cast of characters and the world they inhabit. The film gradually lets you get to know them and their daily routine. Jeff Bridges proves once again that he is one of the best American actors working in film today. He portrays Bone as a man afraid of commitment, content to do little but fall back on his pretty boy looks to bed any woman who crosses his path. As one character tells him, “Sooner or later you’re going to have to make a decision about something.” This could be the underlying thesis of the whole film: making decisions and taking a stand about something.
The film (directed by Czech emigre Ivan Passer) has a lot in common with the great paranoia thrillers of the 1970s (e.g. Chinatown, The Parallax View, The Conversation) and it feels now as if it served as the parting shot for that cycle, as the 70s drifted into the 80s.
While watching the 94 year old Kirk Douglas mugging at the Academy Awards this past Sunday night, my mind jumped to one of Douglas’s most acclaimed films, Vincente Minnelli’s “The Bad and the Beautiful.” Minnelli’s 1952 film is considered one of the great “inside-baseball” movies about Hollywood and it had been on my “to see” list for ages. The following day, I got my hands on a copy and rectified the situation and was not disappointed. “The Bad and the Beautiful” is a real treat for anyone who loves the great Hollywood movies of that golden era (roughly from the advent of sound into the 1950s) and the stories about the men and women who made them.
“The Bad and the Beautiful” is full of smart, strong performances from Dick Powell, Walter Pidgeon, a gorgeous Lana Turner, Barry Sullivan and the great Gloria Grahame, but there’s no denying that despite Turner’s top billing, this is Douglas’ picture. Douglas is Jonathan Shields, a brilliant, ruthless, unscrupulous producer and studio bigwig and he commands the screen in every scene he appears in. He manages the neat trick of being both loathsome and likeable, kind and cutting, often at the same moment. It may well be Douglas’ best moment as an actor, though he lost the Academy Award that year to Gary Cooper, for “High Noon.” (I’m as big a Gary Cooper fan as the next guy, but “High Noon” is an overrated film and Douglas was robbed.) Oddly, the film was nominated for 6 Oscars and won 5 of them, without being nominated for Best Picture, or Minnelli being nominated for Best Director.
For those of you who only know Minnelli from his great musicals like “An American In Paris” (1951) or “The Band Wagon” (1953), check this film out, as well as the other exceptional melodramas he made, like “Some Came Running” (1958) with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley Maclaine and “Home From The Hill” (1960) with Robert Mitchum. Minnelli’s widescreen compositions, use of color, depth and design, elegantly moving camera, and the occasionally overwrought emotion of the films had a big impact on later directors like Martin Scorsese, Peter Bodganovich and Richard Linklater. Minnelli used Cinemascope brilliantly, to express subtle nuances and changes in personal relationships between characters, and those of class and social standing. “The Bad and the Beautiful” is in black and white and in the standard academy 4:3 ratio, but it lead the way to the sorts of stories Minnelli would be telling throughout the decade to come. Don’t sleep on this underrated and important American artist.
Thanks to the ongoing marvel that is Netflix Streaming, many previously hard to find and slept-on films are finding their way to our televisions, in fairly stunning quality. Recently I stumbled upon a movie I’d been seeking out for years and had basically given up on, Robert Culp’s 1972 detective film Hickey & Boggs.
Hickey & Boggs was one of a spate of revisionist private-eye movies that proliferated in the late 60s and early 70s, along with better known examples like The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973), Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975) and Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974). For years I only knew of it because it was always referenced in books about 1970s cinema, genre revisionism or neo noir – I’d never seen it on TV or in a video store. To me, Hickey & Boggs only existed as still photographs of director-star Culp and his co-star, Bill Cosby, holding .44 Magnums, so I was more than happy to find it available for instant streaming.
Despite the presence of Culp and his I Spy co-star Cosby, the film, written by then-rising star Walter Hill, is a downbeat affair. Al Hickey (the Cos) and Frank Boggs (Culp) are partners in a two man Los Angeles private eye firm, ex-cops and divorced losers. Boggs is an alcoholic whose stripper ex-wife likes to taunt him from the stage (“Eat your heart out.”) and Hickey is desperate to repair his family and be a father and husband again, but his ex (Rosalind Cash) is having none of it. Hickey and Boggs are broke, financially and spiritually.
The two are hired by a creepy, possibly pedophile lawyer named Rice to find a missing girl, which brings them deep into a web of gangsters, thugs, black militants and stolen mob money. The closer they get to cracking the case, the deeper the hole they dig themselves. The bad guys want them dead and the cops want them out of the way or in jail. What’s worse is that they can’t even figure out why they’re putting themselves through all of this. “It’s not about anything,” Hickey repeatedly complains. And while they carry the same enormous, deadly pistol as Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan, they don’t share his deadly accuracy. “I gotta get a bigger gun,” Boggs complains, “I can’t hit anything anymore.”
Hickey & Boggs was the only film Culp directed, and it’s a pity he didn’t go behind the camera again. The film is well-paced, well-acted and Culp has a good sense of the city and the contrast between the dark places the characters go and the bright, sun-bleached, wide open expanses the action often plays itself out in (the L.A. Coliseum, the beach, a collapsing hillside mansion). Hill’s script was supposedly written for Jason Robards and Strother Martin, which makes one wonder if the original intent was to get Culp’s good friend Sam Peckinpah to direct. No matter, Culp makes the most of the material and gives a very generous performance, allowing for really nice work from the rest of the cast (including a very young James Woods and Michael Moriarty) to shine.
The biggest impression is made by Cosby. Cosby gets a couple sardonic one-liners in, but this is a straight dramatic role, with his character going to some pretty dark places emotionally, and he’s excellent. He’s always believable and always seems to be giving each scene the proper energy. Sadly, the film didn’t do well, and Cosby spent the bulk of the remainder of the 1970s in silly (albeit fun) comedies with Sidney Poitier. What a shame that he wasn’t given more of a chance to shine as a dramatic actor during those peak years. Hickey & Boggs provides a tantalizing “What if?”
For fans of Cosby, Culp or neo-noir, Hickey & Boggs is a must-see.
Beefheart (along with his high school chum Frank Zappa) virtually invented avant-garde or underground rock music. At its heart, his music was based on the blues (the influence of Howlin’ Wolf on the Captain’s vocals is undeniable), but the blues was never a staid museum piece to Van Vliet – it was a living, breathing thing that he could mold, bend, even mangle to his liking. His early albums Safe as Milk and the double lp Trout Mask Replica (produced by Zappa) didn’t sell much, but found a home with adventurous and discerning listeners, including the famous or soon-to-be-famous, like John Lennon, Joe Strummer, Mark Mothersbaugh and Tom Waits. Waits once said of Beefheart: “Once you’ve heard Beefheart, it’s hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood.” Beefheart continued through the 70s and early 80s with great albums, among them Lick My Decals Off, Baby, The Spotlight Kid, Bongo Fury (live, with Zappa & the Mothers), Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) and what may be his best and most accessible album, Clear Spot.
Personally, I first heard Trout Mask Replica when I was 18 or 19, and I was never the same. It was so weird and off-kilter to my ears, and yet oddly welcoming: as if he was opening a door to somewhere exotic, but slightly forbidding, seeing if you were game for the journey. I’ve never regretted accepting the invitation.Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons spoke of hearing Trout Mask at 15 and thinking:
“…that it was the worst thing I’d ever heard. I said to myself, they’re not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn’t believe Frank Zappa could do this to me – and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realised they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I’d ever heard.”
Even though the Captain hadn’t made an album since 1982 (he’d retired to his other creative outlet, painting), the mark he left on modern music is as indelible as his album titles were indecipherable. Thanks, Don…the dust blows forward and the dust blows back.
Remakes are a tricky business. Well, I should specify remakes of great movies are a tricky business (e.g. “The Maltese Falcon” had been adapted for the screen twice before Huston & Bogart got their hands on it, and no one seemed to notice). Don Siegel’s 1956 film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is, to my view a great movie. However, it was a B-movie, made on the cheap with few resources beyond a great story (adapted from Jack Finney’s novel “The Body Snatchers”) and a terrifically skilled director. Maybe that’s what drove Philip Kaufman to remake “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” in 1978. Whatever his motivations were, it’s one of the few remakes that really work: respectful of its source material, while carving out its own distinct cinematic territory in its own time. It’s also a very entertaining and truly creepy movie that blends horror with a genre that’s always been a personal favorite: the 1970s paranoia thriller.
Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland, still with the shaggy curls and mustache you all loved in “Don’t Look Now” and “National Lampoon’s Animal House”) is a city health inspector and Brooke Adams pays Elizabeth, the co-worker and friend he’s clearly pining over. Together, they begin to piece together something strange going on. Soon after the appearance of a strange new plant no one can identify, a flowering pod, people start to behave strangely. Elizabeth’s boyfriend and Matthew’s dry cleaner, among others, just don’t seem like normal anymore. Matthew’s friends Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright, both excellent) find something even more disturbing at their mud bath spa. As fans of any of the film versions of Body Snatchers know, and our heroes soon discover, the pods are from “deep space” and are creating perfect, soulless replicas of everyone in sight as they sleep.
They attempt to enlist the help of Matthew’s good friend David Kibler (Leonard Nimoy) a noted psychiatrist and best-selling self-help author. Nimoy’s performance is crucial – he’s having so much fun playing Kibler, with such aloofness and measure, that the audience can’t help but keep wondering, “Is he or isn’t he?” He manages to seem both warm and friendly and cold and calculating, whether trying to reunite a concerned wife to her pod person husband, or assessing the validity of his friends’ story.
While Siegel’s film was set in a small town in California, Kaufman’s (scripted by W.D. Richter) transplants it to a big city: San Francisco. The crowds and architecture of the city serve the story well, amping up the sense of dread and paranoia. What if that cold stranger who just passed you on the street wasn’t just a cold stranger? Why is that janitor staring at you like that? Why is that mob chasing that man down the street? (The man being chased through the streets is played by the star of the 1956 film, Kevin McCarthy, in a witty and smart cameo. Kafuman even gives Siegel himself a part as a cab driver.) Just who, really, do you trust?
Siegel’s film is widely read as an allegory about the Cold War hysteria of the 1950s. (But from which side? The fear that evil, soulless beings that look just like us could be infiltrating our happy society or that McCarthyism had turned us into unthinking, uncaring, sleeping drones?) Kaufman and Richter set their film in the then present, the late 1970s and seem to be spoofing the near fascistic groupthink and narcissism of the “me generation.” Once overtaken by the space pods, people claim to be happy and relaxed, but show no emotion or individuality. They’re told that it will be easier if they just relent, fall asleep and join them, where they’ll no longer feel hate or love. It’s a future Matthew wants no part of.
However, this is no bloated, didactic lecture – the film is a hell of a lot of fun. Kaufman’s compositions and pacing keep the film taut and also give it a persistent undercurrent of dread. We know something’s wrong, even if the characters haven’t figured it out yet.
Kaufman’s remake was a critical and box-office success. (I can recall going to see it back in the winter of ’79 with a group of neighborhood kids led by my friend Will’s dad, an actor, who told us all about the original version and Kevin McCarthy on the walk home.) Pauline Kael was one of the film’s critical champions and called the film “undiluted pleasure and excitement.” She also wrote,
“…the director, Phil Kaufman, provides such confident professionalism that you sit back in the assurance that every spooky nuance you’re catching is just what was intended.”
Writing in New York magazine, David Denby said that he found Kaufman’s film even more entertaining than Siegel’s and offered this:
“Like all great horror films, is an insinuatingly sensual experience: Our morbid curiosity is engaged and then exploited. We are drawn into complicity with the dark, oozy terrors of nature run riot and human beings deformed and mutated.”
If the pod people ever do land on Earth, just make sure to throw in a copy of this movie – you’re sure not to fall asleep.
Wednesday was a sad day for cinephiles — Arthur Penn, the visionary director of Bonnie and Clyde, passed away at 88. As well as being one of the great American filmmakers of the 60s and 70s, Penn also knew tremendous success directing for the stage, as well as television. Dave Kehr has a fairly comprehensive and thoughtful obituary in the New York Times. Roger Ebert also weighs in with a warm tribute. From Kehr’s piece, here’s a quote from Paul Schrader that nicely states what the fuss is all about:
“Arthur Penn brought the sensibility of ’60s European art films to American movies,” the writer-director Paul Schrader said. “He paved the way for the new generation of American directors who came out of film schools.”
Penn was not simply a stylist, but a director who got the best out of his actors: think of Gene Hackman in the brilliant, underrated neo-noir Night Moves, or Jack Nicholson, wonderfully underplaying to Marlon Brando’s outlandish dandy of a gunslinger in The Missouri Breaks. (Heck, he even got something out of Arlo Guthrie in Alice’s Restaurant.)
However, Penn will no doubt best be remembered for Bonnie and Clyde, a film usually attached to words like “seminal,” “revolutionary” and “watershed.” It not only indelibly altered Hollywood movies, but movie criticism as well. The vastly different reactions of old guard critics like the Times’ Bosley Crowther (who loathed it) to those of “young turks” like Ebert and Pauline Kael (in her first piece for The New Yorker) marked a new attitude in American film criticism to match the new films and younger audiences filling late 60s theaters. It’s also worth noting that it’s success essentially saved Warren Beatty’s career and launched Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman and Gene Wilder as movie stars. Looking back 40 plus years later, it’s easy to appreciate what a vivid and vital movie Bonnie and Clyde remains, if decades of copycats have taken away the shock that 1967 audiences felt.
It will be interesting to read more comments on Penn’s life and work as they roll in from his collaborators and directors he inspired (I’m especially curious to hear from Beatty and Martin Scorsese). Now that 3D and CGI have too often become a substitute for substance in the cinema, it’s sad to see another master go.
It was the 1970s, and the bewildered youth of America needed a hero. Instead, we got Evel Knievel. Knievel, the self-proclaimed world’s greatest daredevil, roared out of Butte, Montana sometime in the 1960s with a unique flair for self-promotion, a collection of red, white and blue capes and a willingness to put himself in harm’s way by jumping over things on a motorcycle. Cars, Greyhound buses, a shark tank – Knievel revved up his motorcycle and flew over them. Sometimes he landed safely, sometimes he’d crash or careen out of control, his body thrown across the tarmac like an unwanted rag doll, leaving Wide World Of Sports announcers to ask each other “Will this be Evel’s final jump?”
In any era, a self-made celebrity like Knievel is bound to wind up on the silver screen. Knievel’s story was told in an eponymously titled 1971 film starring George Hamilton as Knievel, who famously described himself as “the last gladiator.” However, after his infamous Snake River Canyon jump, his line of toy cycles and dolls and another 5 years of jumps and crashes, the time was right to try to make a movie star out of Evel himself.
Thus, in 1977, movie audiences around the world were treated to Viva Knievel!, starring Evel Knievel as…Evel Knievel. Could he act? Would it matter? Not to kids like me, who could barely put down our Stunt Cycles or put away our Tour Vans long enough to sit through one of the greatest bad movies of all time.
As a film, Viva Knievel! is much like watching one of Knievel’s crashes. It’s an unholy mess, and yet we can’t look away, and it contains one of the strangest casts in movie history. Gordon Douglas directed the film, and one wonders if he got the job due to his rapport with Frank Sinatra. Douglas directed Sinatra in five films in the 1960s and was known as one of the few directors who could control Sinatra or at least get along with him. Warner Brothers may have felt he’d be the man to ride rein on Knievel. The problem with that thinking is that Frank Sinatra may have been difficult, but he could actually act and pretty damned well when he wanted to.
The film opens with Knievel sneaking into an orphanage at night to bring children the uplifting gift of Evel Knievel action figures. One child is so moved by Knievel’s presence, he throws away his crutches and tells Knievel he’s the reason he can walk again. That’s right folks – Knievel might have inspired your children to shatter their own bones emulating his crazy stunts, but don’t worry – his inspiration will have them out of their hospital beds in no time at all.
Soon enough, Knievel’s setting up his next jump with his alcoholic mechanic sidekick Will, played by Gene Kelly. GENE KELLY? Yes, that Gene Kelly. The cinematic icon, beloved the world over, now inexplicably reduced to playing Evel Knievel’s second banana. (What’s worse is that Kelly is genuinely bad in the role.) We also meet Evel’s unscrupulous promoter, played by Red Buttons. Apparently Warner Brothers was under the impression that the best way to make Knievel a movie star was to surround him with people who were really current and hip in 1977, you know, like Red Buttons and Gene Kelly. We’re treated to a great scene of Kelly threatening Buttons because he feels Evel’s last jump hadn’t been safe enough.
“What’s the matter with you? Evel is my pal too!” is Buttons’ meek response.
Happy birthday to one of the true heavyweights of stage and screen – Peter O’Toole turns 78 today. O’Toole is not only an exceptional actor, he’s also a true “star” in a way we rarely see anymore. He may have been riffing on Errol Flynn in his brilliant performance in My Favorite Year, but it was clear there was more than a little of himself in Alan Swann too.
O’Toole’s sometimes boozy, seemingly always cheerful, outsized personality and his talk show appearances are as legendary as his performances (remember him riding a camel onto the stage for David Letterman?). Nominated 8 times for the Best Actor Oscar, he’s never won, but did accept an honorary Academy Award for his body of work (which he initially refused). Here’s a snippet from one of those nominated performances, as movie director Eli Cross in Richard Rush’s 1980 film The Stunt Man:
When critics discuss Woody Allen’s best films, or the great films of the 1980s, I’m consistently disappointed that there isn’t more discussion of his 1987 picture Radio Days. Coming on the heels of his great and somewhat audacious Hannah and Her Sisters, audiences and critics alike seemed to mistake Radio Days as something slight – a fine, funny movie, but not a major statement. As time passes, it becomes clearer and clearer that Radio Days is one of Allen’s most perfectly realized films.
Joe (Seth Green), is the narrator/Woody as a child, a radio-obsessed kid living in Rockaway Beach with his parents (Michael Tucker and Julie Kavner, both excellent), his grandparents, cousin Ruthie, Uncle Abe (Josh Mostel) and Aunt Ceil, and his sweetly optimistic spinster Aunt Bea (Diane Wiest). The film is full of cameos by Allen veterans and notable character actors: Jeff Daniels, Tony Roberts, Danny Aiello, Wallace Shawn, Kenneth Mars, et al. Even Diane Keaton appears as a singer late in the film.
However, it’s Allen’s stand in family that remains the heart of the piece. Radio Days is the most warm-hearted film of Allen’s career and one of his most personal statements. It’s a love letter not only to the pre-TV days when radio ruled American consciousness, but also to family and childhood and to the stories we tell and the way we tell them.
Radio Days has a unique structure: we don’t follow a story from beginning to end, rather we get served a series of anecdotes that are conjured up by the songs and shows of 1940s radio. Allen serves as the voice-over narrator, stringing together memories and commentary on the action, which splits time between a fictionalized version of his own family and childhood, the glamorous world of the radio stars themselves and the rise of Sally White (Mia Farrow) a cigarette girl who dreams of radio stardom. (Allen’s narration functions much like the greek chorus of stand up comics did in Broadway Danny Rose.)
Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, much like the racetrack heist is portrays, is a finely tuned machine – an intricate meshing of myriad moving parts, some big, some small, and all of them integral to its success. Although not Kubrick’s first film, The Killing was his true arrival on the scene as a cinematic force to be reckoned with.
The Killing is the story of ex-con Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), who assembles a make-shift crew of would-be crooks to rob the Bay Meadows racetrack of $2 million dollars during a big money stakes race. In addition to the Hayden, who starred in another classic film noir caper, John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, Kubrick assembles a fantastic group of underutilized character actors to round out the gang.
Burt Lancaster had been a movie star for nearly forty years when he appeared in Scottish director Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, but it’s probably the film that first made me a Lancaster fan. I’m sure I’d seen him before on TV – a movie of the week airing of The Island of Dr. Moreau, or on HBO’s heavy rotation of Zulu Dawn – hell, maybe even a Million Dollar Movie broadcast of John Frankenheimer’s excellent thriller, Seven Days In May. Regardless, while I knew the name and face of Burt Lancaster, he’d never meant anything to me until Local Hero hit cable TV a short while after its 1983 release. I was just old enough to appreciate its charms and to become a fan of its legendary star.
Local Hero finds a Houston oil company yuppie, MacIntyre (Peter Riegert), sent to Scotland by his employer, Knox Oil & Gas, to purchase an entire town and its bay for a new refinery. The research and planning has been done, all that’s left is for the deal to be made with the locals. MacIntyre gets the job due in part to last name. However, he confides to his friend that his parents were Hungarian and they adopted the name MacIntyre because they thought it sounded “American.” That detail gives you some sense of the world view of Forsyth’s film.
This is a true gem of a movie: gentle, but pointed, moody, but hopeful and eccentric and funny without trying too hard. Local Hero gives the viewer the illusion of comfort of familiar terrain while actually being quite unlike any other film.
Forsyth, who had already had one sleeper hit the previous year with Gregory’s Girl, has said that without Lancaster’s star power, the film would likely not have been made. Lancaster plays the CEO of Knox Oil, Felix Happer and though he’s on screen far less than Riegert, he creates a truly memorable character. Lancaster was no longer the acrobat or chiseled tough guy of his youth, but he’d grown into an even better actor.
Happer has some of the qualities we’d expect of the CEO of a massive oil company: he’s a narcissist and a bully. However, he’s got a couple of somewhat endearing quirks, most prominently his fascination with astronomy. When MacIntyre visits Happer for last minute instructions on the deal before flying to Scotland, Happer seems only interested in making sure MacIntyre will call him personally at any time if he witnesses anything unusual in the heavens – especially in Virgo. This sets up the beautiful sequence of a drunken MacIntyre’s rapturous phone call to Happer as he witnesses the aurora borealis for the first time.
Lancaster and Riegert both deliver layered, nuanced performances that keep the delicate balance of whimsy and cold reality in play. (Happer may be a boorish oil billionaire, but you’d like to think that if he ran BP, the current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico would never have played out like this.) Lancaster’s comic touch in his dealings with his quite possibly deranged psychoanalyst is especially deft and charming.
Sir Christopher Lee just turned 88 years old on Thursday. Lee isn’t just a splendid actor, he’s also a very special icon to kids who grew up with “Chiller Theater” and horror movies on the late show. Younger moviegoers probably know him best from Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy and George Lucas’ recent Star Wars prequels. No matter what kind of roles Lee has played over his long, illustrious career, from Sherlock Holmes to Saruman the White to Scaramanga (The man with the golden gun, in the 007 flick of the same name), for many move freaks all over the globe, he will always be Count Dracula.
Of course, Lee wasn’t the first screen Dracula, and there have been many since, but for my money, he was the best. Watching him in his first appearance as the Count, in 1958’s The Horror of Dracula, I’m still scared. Another terrific British actor, Peter Cushing, played Van Helsing versus Lee’s Dracula and starting in the late ’50s they created one of the all-time great screen pairings.
Looking back at his impressive body of work, it’s clear what a great screen presence he is: erudite, charming and radiating intelligence and sexuality–even when he’s playing the Mummy. Here’s a snippet of Lee in one of his greatest non-vampiric roles, as Lord Summerisle in the 1973 cult classic The Wicker Man.
Happy Birthday, Sir Christopher–-here’s hoping you’re around for a few more… C’mon, you didn’t think I wouldn’t give you a little taste of Dracula, didja?
[I’ve wanted to incorporate a regular movie column to the music, art, and food features here at the Banter for more than a minute now, so here goes… My good pal, Matt Blankman, who is mad for movies, will contribute his take, as will some of the other regular Banter contributors. Here’s our debut, cue the lights…Alex Belth]
I’ve spent the last few days enjoying a rare moment of pop culture serendipity which has placed my brain squarely in the 1970s, the decade of my birth. First there’s been Josh Wilker’s fantastic new book Cardboard Gods (which we’ll assume you’re already familiar with to some extent if you’ve been keeping up with the Banter). Josh’s memoir isn’t just largely set in the 1970s, but it’s obviously shaped by it as well, and he sincerely attempts to make sense out of those strange times, how they came to pass and what they meant (and continue to mean) to him.
Soon after seeing Josh do a reading from “Cardboard Gods” last week, I found myself at home watching a new PBS documentary on the John V. Lindsay years (1966-1973) in New York City. To look back at those years now, with clear eyes, one can see many ways that the hope and exuberance of the 1960s gave way to the despair and confusion of the 1970s. How the New Frontier and Great Society faded and left us with gas lines, custom vans, pet rocks and malaise.
Finally, I watched a film from 1971 I’d never seen, The Hospital, which felt like a fictional illustration of so many of the issues present in both the Lindsay doc and Wilker’s book. The Hospital was written by Paddy Chayefsky, who was still enough of a big deal in the early 1970s that he may have been the only screenwriter ever to get his name above the title. Chayefsky’s script was directed by Arthur Hiller, a director who managed to have a lengthy career marked by a number of “big” movies and yet never once seemed to have any discernable personal style. (I’d call him a hack, except he always displayed a knack for comedic timing and knew to trust his script and cast. He may not have been much of an artist, but he wasn’t incompetent.)
