Show Boat

May 14, 2011 By in Movies Tags: , Leave a comment

The landmark musicals of theater history haven’t fared very well on film. Usually, they’ve had their scores trashed (such as Lady in the Dark and Pal Joey), suffered from big-movie-star miscasting (such as Guys and Dolls, Gypsy and Chicago) or been presented intact but with such fussy over-fidelity that they’re dead on the screen (such as South Pacific and My Fair Lady).

So it’s something of a miracle that the first great musical, maybe the greatest stage musical of all — Show Boat, by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein — reached movie theaters with its beautiful score intact, with the best and most legendary cast members playing their original roles, and filmed with cinematic intelligence by a great director. And most miraculously of all, the movie Show Boat came from the cheapest, blandest and most mediocre studio in Hollywood history — Universal Pictures.

Universal had tried before in 1929. They had bought the film rights to Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel, which had been a big best seller, and were filming a silent version when lightning struck twice. First, Ferber sold the stage rights to Florenz Ziegfeld and the resulting musical became Broadway’s biggest hit and a groundbreaking leap forward in terms of seriousness of story and theme. Second, the movies were swept by the craze for talking pictures. So here was Universal, having just finished making a silent version of a book for a public that wanted to see a famous musical. The solution was to add a talking prologue, with songs performed by a few original cast members, like a variety show, and shoehorn a couple of songs by other composers into the movie randomly. Though it was a financial success, the result was widely regarded as a hodgepodge and an artistic failure, as it is today.

I’d be hard pressed to think of another time in the history of movies that something like this happened, but Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, decided to try again and do it right. Only seven years after the first film, he hired Oscar Hammerstein, who had written Show Boat’s libretto, to write a screenplay with story and songs true to the original. The score was largely retained; a couple of fine new Hammerstein/Kern songs were added (in fact the two went on adding and subtracting songs to Show Boat into the 1940s). Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan were signed to repeat their stage performances, which was very brave of the studio — Robeson was a pariah due to his left wing politics and refusal to kowtow to anyone; Morgan was on a career slide due to alcoholism, and Hollywood had long since washed its hands of her. The decision to include them shows how serious Laemmle was about rectifying his earlier error. And so Show Boat offers the opportunity to see two of the most legendary performances in the history of American musical theater in one film.

Laemmle also put his best director on the project. James Whale is famous for a quartet of Universal monster movies (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man), so much so that horror has taken over his resume. But what makes his horror films among the best, if not the best, is the kinetic aliveness of his direction (which sometimes meant that his shots don’t match; the film’s only flaw is that it’s choppy in places). Show Boat could have been a static record of a famous stage production, but in Whale’s hands, it’s a movie. There’s so much going on in every frame that it almost feels like 3-D, and you’re always aware of the characters watching each other and reacting to each other. When Helen Morgan sings her great torch song “Bill,” with its famous lyric by P.G. Wodehouse, chorus girls, janitors and washerwomen slowly stop their work and gather at the edges of the room; one discreetly wipes away a tear with her apron. When Paul Robeson sits on a dock and sings “Ol’ Man River,” maybe the most famous performance of the most famous song in theater history, Whale’s camera circles him ecstatically, finally ending on a sustained closeup that you hope will never end. Sadly, it does: someone foolishly intercut scenes of Robeson acting out the lyric (toting barges, lifting bales, getting a little drunk and landing in jail). But then we go back to Robeson singing, and it’s one of the most beautiful, stirring sights anyone ever saw.

The leads are great as well. It can’t be the easiest thing in the world to play Magnolia Hawkes and Gaylord Ravenal, Southern belle and riverboat gambler, and not look just a little bit ridiculous. And singing, yet. I’m not a big fan of operetta, with its stilted and formal performance style, but Irene Dunne and Allan Jones are the two best performers who ever attempted it. Dunne is particularly skillful, convincingly aging from innocent late teens to worldly wise 50s (she was about 38) without hitting a single false note. She does a crazy, eye-rolling shuffle to “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and performs “Gallivantin’ Around” in blackface, and manages to keep her dignity as an actress and keep you focused on Magnolia, not on Irene Dunne. And it must be said that she never looked more girlish or more radiantly beautiful than in this film.

If Jones is remembered at all today, it’s as the only bearable male lead in the Marx Brothers’ film career (in A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races). In Show Boat, he has a tricky role, as a riverboat dandy who’s dashing and charming but also weak and irresponsible. He’s a gambler who loses spectacularly, and losing doesn’t bring out the best in him. He’s much softer than Magnolia, who turns out to be the strong and resilient one. Late in the movie, he takes a menial position just to be around his grown daughter, who doesn’t know him. You accept this melodramatic, masochistic turn of events largely because of the gentleness and simplicity Jones brings to it. His daughter is his legacy; she’s all he has. He makes you understand that Ravenal is a sensitive man who doesn’t like himself very much and clings to a dignity he doesn’t really feel; it’s a terrific, subtle performance.

But everybody in Show Boat is great. As Magnolia’s parents Captain Andy and Parthenia, Charles Winninger and Helen Westley bring out all the comedy and pathos in their parts without overdoing it. Not easy: in the MGM remake from 1951, it’s hard to even look at Joe E. Brown and Agnes Moorehead thrashing around in the same roles. Winninger is particularly outstanding in a scene near the end where he saves his daughter’s singing career by coaching her from the footlights, and his emotion is so full that he can only express it by leading the entire audience in a sing-along reprise. All through the movie, song is a vehicle for emotion rather than an excuse to wow you with a big production number. “Make Believe,” the gorgeous love song that brings Magnolia and Ravenal together, also is a brilliant foreshadowing of their self-delusion and ultimate missed connection.

Maybe the most remarkable thing about Show Boat is the relationships between the black and white characters. In no other ’30s movie, and maybe no other movie before the 1970s, do blacks and whites mingle so freely and with so much ease. Though the movie shows you a world in which African Americans are subservient, poor and ignorant, it’s not trafficking in stereotypes or endorsing prejudice. Far from it. The most sympathetic character is Julie (Morgan), who has mixed blood and loses her job and her husband after being hounded by the law. The movie, like the show, is suffused with the idea that racism is evil, ugly, and ruinous. The characters, living in the post-Civil War South, can’t change the world around them but nonetheless treat each other like human beings. When Irene Dunne does her shuffle and her blackface number, it isn’t condescending — Magnolia has been brought up and nurtured by African Americans; she’s one of them.

Quite a progressive movie for 1936, and for a minor studio in some financial trouble. Laemmle had a lot riding on Show Boat. Like Ravenal, he was a gambler. And he lost: the movie was a hit, but due to the time and care he’d invested, it was so expensive that it failed to turn a profit. As a result, the receivers moved in and he was ousted from the studio he had founded. But again, like Ravenal, he left quite a legacy. Show Boat is many things… an irreplaceable record of a key moment in theatrical history, a high point in classical Hollywood filmmaking, a moving bit of make believe, and an eloquent understated plea for tolerance and decency. And for all its antiquated technique and performing style, maybe the finest movie musical ever made.

Donald Trump, Mon Semblable, Mon Frere

April 30, 2011 By in The Martini Shot Tags: Leave a comment

thedonald

Like many of us, I’ve spent too much time lately thinking about Donald Trump. Which is to say, I’ve been thinking about him.

Back when I worked in Manhattan, it was easy enough to ignore him. You just stop looking at the billboards. You avoid his buildings — the giant letter “T” inlaid in the sidewalk is your tipoff. And for the past few years, I could always hit the mute button or fast forward through any commercials that showed him glowering and firing people.

But for the past week or so, the news media has been All Trump All the Time. They shake him in front of me like a squeaky orange chew toy, and I’ve been barking and lunging on cue.

I like to think I’m smarter than a dog, so as of now I’m taking back my power.

In metaphysics, it’s a core principle that when you resist something, when you feel passionate dislike for something or someone, you need to look at it more closely… because it’s some part of you that you’re resisting and hating. You need to identify that rejected part of you, and bring some love to it.

So the first metaphysical step is to ask myself, how am I like Donald Trump?

Is there some part of me that’s a fat, ill-spoken, spray-tanned blowhard with a bad comb-over, cynically appealing to people’s ignorance, fear and racism simply in order to get some attention?

Naturally, the first answer that comes to mind is: No, I don’t think so. I’m a slim, articulate, soft spoken man who wants to share a spiritual perspective and uplift people. That’s a given, right?

Ah, but let’s look deeper.

Trump’s pathetic and transparent attempts to improve his appearance? Well, they show how insecure he is about his looks, that he’s getting older and he’s fighting it. I can relate to that, actually.

The pompousness and the inability to shut the fuck up, long after people have tired of hearing the same old self-aggrandizing bullshit? Um, okay, guilty. Sometimes.

The insatiable need for attention and approval, even to the point of becoming negative in order to get it?

*sigh*

But what about the the disrespect of the President? What about the racism? What about the spreading of lies and the damage to our national discourse?

Well, what about it? There are appeals to the worst of human nature all around us. We’re being sold our own damnation everywhere we look. Nobody is forcing us to buy…. but buy we do. The people selling it just want our money, which in metaphysical terms means they want our energy and our power.

Maybe what’s at the bottom of our obsession with this guy is that there’s a little bit of him in all of us. If you stuck a bunch of microphones in our faces, maybe we’d all say we’re proud of ourselves even if we’d just been total jackasses. Maybe we’d all take out billboards with our faces on them, if we could afford it.

So, Mr. Trump — may I call you Donald? — I’m going to start giving you my real attention and power. I’m going to see myself in you: the scared little boy who wants to be noticed, who needs some approval, who will sometimes do unskillful things to get it.

I’m going to bring some compassion to you. I’m going to love you.

But, you know… with one hand on the mute button.

The Lady Eve

March 21, 2011 By in Movies Tags: , Leave a comment

She takes a bite from an apple, then wonders aloud what would happen if she “clunked him on the head with it” … just before dropping it on him from a three-story height. She sticks out her foot to trip him, and when he gets back up, berates him for damaging her shoe. She cozies up to him so her crooked associates can cheat him at cards. She calls him by a babyish nickname he loathes. She blatantly cock teases him, and when he’s bashfully choking on his own desire, tells him “you should be kept on a leash!” Later, she has him tripping over himself without any help, as he takes a series of embarrassing stumbles in front of his entire family. Finally, she marries him, and then on the honeymoon coldly and ritually humiliates him sexually. Mustering up the tatters of his shredded self respect, he leaves…and takes his final inexorable fall into a huge oozing pit of mud.

It’s a love story.

It’s also a romantic comedy, maybe the greatest. The Lady Eve, written and directed by Preston Sturges at the peak of his powers in 1941, is not a boy-meets-girl story. It’s a Paradise Lost story, only in this case “paradise” is living in a comfortable, smug world of ignorance and illusion. A woman introduces sin into a backward young man’s life, he responds by being hurtful and unforgiving, and she makes him pay the price for his narrow-minded weakness by reappearing in a new incarnation and making him fall in love with her all over again. Despite the dazzling wit and slapstick comedy, it’s a fundamentally serious movie, starring two fundamentally serious actors — Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda.

Stars of the classic era were expected to be able to do everything, but Stanwyck and Fonda made few comedies in their long careers, and most of the others are dismal. She usually played tough lower-class women fighting for respect, and he’s remembered as a prototypical mid-century liberal hero: quiet, slow to anger, judicious, and upright. Their skill at drama gives The Lady Eve an unusual undertone of seriousness — when they wound each other, you really feel it. In most classic movies about the battle of the sexes, especially movies of the 1940s, the woman has to be tamed, subjugated, put in her place. In this movie, the man has to be stripped of his immaturity, insensitivity, and self righteousness — his unconscious belief that the woman is an extension of his own vanity. What’s remarkable is how exhilarating it is to watch that happen.

Some of it is Fonda. With his open face, drawling Midwestern speech, and lanky physical coltishness, he’s basically asking for it. There’s something vaguely infuriating about Henry Fonda; maybe it’s all that goodness. In the late ’60s, he finally played a villain, in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, and it’s revelatory to see cold menace finally glaring from those blue eyes — the meanness that seemed to be there all along, buried beneath his sanctimonious blandness. In The Lady Eve, the repeated humiliations he undergoes aren’t just funny, they feel almost liberating. The air of the film is charged by the excitement of watching her slap him around. “I need him,” she murmurs at one point, staring off in the distance, “like the axe needs the turkey.”

Sturges created the script for Stanwyck, after her remarkable performance in Remember the Night, a movie he wrote (but didn’t direct) the previous year. In Remember the Night, she plays a hardened shoplifter who gradually rediscovers her own humanity and goodness during a Christmas holiday in the heartland. It sounds terrible, but it’s beautifully written and Stanwyck makes the character’s evolution utterly convincing and deeply touching. She makes you feel how precarious vulnerability is, and how much strength it takes to maintain it. In The Lady Eve, the same dynamic is at work, but the balance is shifted. We feel the tenderness, shame, and hurt feelings underneath her tough exterior. She’s a grown up: she shows how idealism and cynicism can reside in the same heart in an uneasy truce. She has a wonderful little riff about her ideal man — a little short guy, a practical ideal you can find in any barber shop — that would be typical screwball-comedy dizzy-dame chatter if it weren’t for the genuine world-weariness Stanwyck and Sturges convey beneath their bright remarks.

Maybe the greatest joy of Preston Sturges is his unique, but very accurate, vision of America as a nation full of wiseasses. In his movies, the leads don’t get all the jokes; every character has something snarky to say. In The Palm Beach Story, he gives the best line in the script to a Pullman porter (“Gentleman tipped me a dime all the way from Jacksonville to Palm Beach — she’s alone but she don’t know it.”). He loved his actors, but his sin as a director was his weakness for letting them amp up the comedy with too much shouting, running around and arm-flapping. That wild energy becomes a muted, urgent subtext in The Lady Eve. Because Stanwyck, her father and his gang are criminals moving among the rich in their world of steamships and country houses, their acerbic comments are subtle signals to each other (and us) that they’re the most trustworthy people on the screen, because they’re the most experienced, and the smartest. Watching Stanwyck take Fonda for a ride and give him the shellacking he deserves, we get to share in and enjoy that smartness.

Even their tenderest love scenes contrast her hard-earned wisdom with his obtuseness: “I don’t deserve you,” he says at one point (most of his remarks are just about that fatuous), and she reveals a world of complicated self-awareness as she answers ardently “oh, but you do… if anybody ever deserved me, you do… so richly.” Most romantic comedies come down to this: will they/won’t they, and when? The Lady Eve asks more timeless questions. Will he finally see her as more than a mere appendage? Will she wise him up and make a man of him? Can love survive the loss of innocence?

Season of Glass

December 8, 2010 By in Pop Culture, The Martini Shot Tags: , Leave a comment

gun

“A lot of us are looking for fathers. Mine was physically not there; most people’s are not there mentally and physically, always at the office or busy with other things. So all these leaders are substitute fathers, whether they be religious or political. All this bit about electing a President. We pick our daddy out of a dog pound of daddies. This is the daddy that looks like the daddy in the commercials. He’s got the nice gray hair and the right teeth and the parting’s on the right side. This is the daddy we choose. The political arena gives us a President, then we put him on a platform and start punishing him and screaming at him because Daddy can’t do miracles. Daddy doesn’t heal us.”

These words, as timely today as they were 30 years ago, are John Lennon’s. They’re from an interview he gave to Playboy in November of 1980. I grabbed it off the stands on December 8 and took it to work to read. I could read a 20,000-word Playboy interview at work because I was the 22-year-old night stockman at a department store, with no duties except being on call to carry TV sets out to people’s cars. Other than that I sat in the basement, usually drinking beer and finding other highly antisocial ways to amuse myself. Like reading Playboy.

The interview was Lennon’s first major statement in many years. He had just emerged from five years of hibernation—five years in which rock and roll had never been worse. The mellow singer-songwriter vibe of the early 70s had turned slick and hollow; disco had come along and provided the death knell. There were signs of hope on the edges thanks to Elvis Costello, The Clash, The Police, and a few others, but what many of us were waiting for was Lennon to come back and lead the way.

He had other ideas. Double Fantasy, the new album, was actually a showcase for Yoko. The B-52s song Rock Lobster was a big hit around that time, and Lennon thought it was a ripoff of Yoko’s style: wild guitars mixed with warbled screaming. He thought her time had come. Like many other powerful men throughout history, he wanted his wife to be his equal on the public stage, whether the public wanted her there or not. Yoko was part of the interview too… I read past her parts impatiently. What did Lennon have to say, that’s what mattered. I was about halfway through reading it when the phone rang.

“Lennon’s been shot,” said my friend Gary.

What? No he hasn’t. He’s right here, talking to me. I ran upstairs to the electronics department. In the TV section, a wall of sets, maybe 100 or more screens, all tuned to Monday Night Football. I arrived just in time to see hundreds of Howard Cosells in their blue blazers and toupees, all solemnly intoning that Former. Beatle. John. Lennon. Had. Just….

I made my way home, somehow. Talked to Gary again, briefly. His voice was hollow. Turned on the radio. The late night deejays were as messed up as I was. They played every one of his songs, and the best were the really obscure ones. Angela. New York City. Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out. I sat staring at the poster from Imagine. It showed John at his white grand piano in his white room in Tittenhurst Park, his big white mansion in England. This poster was the only decoration in my all-white room. Needless to say, I’d gotten into John lately. So I sat and listened through the night, crying my bitter and uncomprehending tears. The world was crying with me, but that was very little comfort.

The next weeks brought the usual celebrity death orgy, with wall to wall coverage and endless footage and canned, lifeless tributes. The song Imagine, once a pleasant little wisp of cotton candy idealism, became a dirge, and unlistenable. Meanwhile, nobody talked about guns… how ridiculously easy it is to get them in this country, even if you’re a schizophrenic and off your medications. No, no, no talk about anything real, or what we can do in a practical way to make the world a saner and safer place. Gun control? No, just dirges and crocodile tears.

After a couple of days, I remembered something Lennon had said in the interview.

“It’s better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. I don’t appreciate worship of dead Sid Vicious or dead James Dean or dead John Wayne. What do they teach you? Nothing. Death. I worship the people who survive. Sid Vicious died for what? So that we might rock? I mean, it’s garbage, you know. No, thank you. I’ll take the living and the healthy.”

So I took down the poster and folded it back up. Stopped listening to Lennon. Tried to move on, although there was still an aching hole in my heart, and an overwhelming sense of loss. Not for a man, exactly, but for the whole beautiful dream of the 60s, which I had just missed and which I suppose I’d been hoping would flower again in my twenties. This despite the recent election of cowboy actor Ronald Reagan, a daddy figure many people found very appealing and who fired a few bullseyes straight into any notion of idealism. My generation, to put it mildly, would not be so fortunate.

A few months later, Yoko put out an album called Season of Glass. It had a photo on the cover taken inside the Dakota, looking out over Central Park. John’s blood-splattered glasses sat on a table in front of the window. She wanted to show the violent, sickening reality of how he died and many people recoiled, as usual, from her directness. But as it turned out, the album was a blistering, heartbreaking, all-stops-out tour of the grieving process. By turns tough and achingly vulnerable, always revelatory, often gorgeous.

Fearlessly opening up her heart, she was everything Lennon always said she was. An earth mother. A goddess. A major artist. And she did what all great artists do: she made an intimate connection with me that healed my wounds and made me stronger somehow. Daddy doesn’t heal us… but it seems sometimes Mother can.

Season of Glass is as great as any Beatles album, maybe greater, but the world, busy merchandising its worship of dead John Lennon, didn’t even notice. Thirty years on, nothing has changed. I cringe in anticipation of the anniversary tributes coming this week. Imagine will be played on a loop; gun control won’t even be mentioned. I’ll be avoiding the whole thing as much as possible.

I worship the people who survive. I’ll take the living and the healthy.

Happy Xmas, Yoko.

One Way Passage / Two Seconds

December 2, 2010 By in Movies Tags: Leave a comment

Daydream and Nightmare

Think these are hard times? Try 1932.

It was the worst year of the Great Depression. The economy had already been in free-fall for three years. The latest in a series of oblivious and inept Republican presidents had helped further deregulate markets, which had then spun out of control. Since the crash, Herbert Hoover had been preaching the standard Republican doctrine: self reliance and charitable giving. The tent cities that sprang up all over America to house the legions of newly homeless were named in his honor: Hoovervilles. In June of 1932, when veterans of the previous World War marched on Washington demanding payment of their bonuses, Hoover’s Administration met them with tear gas and bayonets. By the end of the year, 40% of U.S. banks had failed. Drought decimated the Midwest, turning farmland into the “Dust Bowl,” and food was scarce. Some farmers burned their crops for heat, as the coldest winter in history — and a mood of real despair — settled over the country.

Only one thing got better in 1932, and that was the movies. The coming of sound five years earlier had brought a number of technical problems, but these had finally been ironed out. There’s an enormous difference between movies made in 1931 and 1932. The former are static and stiff, with performers who stand and declaim their mostly gawdawful dialogue to the back of the theater. But the movies of 1932 began to move again, with the camera venturing outdoors, the film stock brighter and more textured, and the performers lighter on their feet and acting for the camera instead of imitating stage technique. Movie attendance was down, and so the studios took advantage of the unenforced censorship Code of the time and lured patrons back with sex and violence, to a degree that’s still startling today. And with the economy so bad and life so hard, the movies began to reflect the tough, cynical outlook that was in the air.

Among a bunch of terrific pictures made in 1932, two especially stand out. The first, One Way Passage, is a perfect little daydream of a movie, with the absurd gallantry of the characters nicely set off by the crude pre-Code realism of the settings and details. The other, Two Seconds, is pure Depression-era nightmare.

One Way Passage begins in a Singapore gin joint. To an American audience in its 12th year of Prohibition, the daydream had already begun right there. A bartender is talking to an unseen customer while making a Paradise Cocktail and lovingly describing each step. By the time he makes a flourish out of twisting a lemon rind over the top, you want it as badly as the customer. He turns out to be exactly the actor you’d expect to see at a bar in the 30s — William Powell. The epitome of suavity and sophistication, and that rarest of things: a grown up. He holds the glass out to savor the cocktail and leans in for his first sip, only to be jostled from behind and have most of it slosh out. Turning to curse out the jostler, he finds that it’s a beautiful girl. She’s Kay Francis, an ineffable, strange actress known mostly for being a clotheshorse and for her inability to pronounce the letters R and L. It’s love at first sight, maybe helped by the fact that this was Francis and Powell’s fifth movie together. She smiles brightly and then sees what she’s done.

“Always the most pwecious, the wast dwops,” she comments breathlessly. It’s not just positive thinking. She is, you see, dying of an unnamed but incurable disease. Her doctor has ordered complete rest, but she’s determined to live life to the fullest before she goes. What she doesn’t know, but we soon find out, is that Powell is doomed also. He’s a convicted killer who was sentenced to death in the States and has (as they said back then) taken it on the lam. He can’t stay and chat up Francis, so they drink to their mutual health and then break their glasses on the edge of the bar and lay the stems over each other in honor of their brief meeting. Powell hustles out of the bar, but not fast enough. He’s immediately arrested. A San Francisco cop has been hot on his trail, and plans to take him back to face his fate in the electric chair. His consolation is that he and Francis are on the same boat.

And so romance blossoms, with each aware that doom is around the corner, but neither telling the other. The very real doom that threatened the audience in 1932 is refracted and stylized, but still hangs over the movie and gives it a bitter edge. And the silly old-movie tropes, like the love theme that plays each time Powell and Francis meet, and their ritual of breaking their glasses, pay off beautifully in the final scene. Like the first scene, it’s set at a bar—the movie comes full circle. It’s ridiculous and yet it’s powerfully, hauntingly romantic. You laugh at yourself, but you choke up anyway.

In fact the whole movie is corny as hell, yet it never comes off that way. The actors defuse the sentimentality of the material by underplaying it and playing against it. This includes the supporting cast. Warren Hymer and Frank McHugh, usually quite unendurable little toads, have the good luck to share their scenes with the serenely grounded and generous Aline MacMahon, whose sure touch turns them both into princes. The three of them play, respectively, the arresting cop, a drunken thief, and a phony countess who get involved with the lovers and turn out to be their guardian angels. What’s so wonderful about One Way Passage is the balance between the frankly silly fairy-tale plot and the toughness of the characters. Life has battered these people, and their futures are grim. They respond, ultimately, with integrity and generosity. It’s a beautiful vision of Americans: back them against the wall, and they reveal their best selves.

Or… not. In Two Seconds, the hardship of the Depression doesn’t bring out the nobility of the characters. It brings out fear, greed, lust, despair, and ultimately madness. Two Seconds also features a hero who’s on his way to the Chair — John Allen. A crowd of reporters and jail officials has gathered to watch the execution, and one of them comments that after they flip the switch, Allen will have two seconds of consciousness left. Gosh, says one, in those two seconds he’ll remember everything about what brought him to this moment. They flip the switch. And the rest of the movie is those two seconds.

The hum of the electric chair blends into the noise of a riveter. Two men are standing on the girders of an unfinished skyscraper. It’s John and his best friend Bud, played by Edward G. Robinson and Preston Foster. They’re a couple of young guys who are making good money in the Depression, but only because they’re doing this frightening and dangerous work. Bud is a hedonist who blows the money on gambling and women, but John is an idealist. He has big dreams for himself, and he’s picky about women. The truth is he’s the runt who gets stuck with his studly friend’s castoffs, and as the movie proceeds like dirty water swirling down a drain, his aspirations and airs of superiority get thrown back in his face in breathtakingly and increasingly cruel ways.

At first, Preston Foster is slightly hard to take as Bud. He had recently played the role on stage, and he’s still a bit “big” for the movie. I always thought Foster was a lousy actor until I found out that he was also a guitarist and composer; essentially he was a proto-beatnik, and maybe too hip to take seriously the cardboard roles that usually came his way. Despite his overemphasis, he’s intensely likeable as Bud. His love for John is the motor of the movie and one of its few grace notes.

The other grace note is Edward G. Robinson. You wouldn’t think he could play John Allen, who is a muscular, working class, somewhat stupid young guy who gets in way over his head. But Robinson was one of the most skillful of all performers, and he does much more than play the character. He takes you on a journey. I can’t improve on Mick LaSalle’s description, in his book Dangerous Men, of Robinson’s final speech as he’s being sentenced to die. “This is Robinson, great American actor, in the most intense minutes of his film career. He endows the speech with the shape and size of melodrama but maintains the precision of a ballet dancer. Remaining true to his core and so in control, he goes to a deep place, without fear, hesitation, or bluffing, using himself unflinchingly. No movie star ever looked like Robinson, and he’s beautiful.”

I don’t want to say any more about the plot. We know from the beginning that Robinson is going to fry. The drama is seeing the steps by which his ordinary life, and ultimately his mind, comes completely unraveled. As with One Way Passage, the sense of fate closing like a trap is clearly a metaphor for the Depression, and the feeling that ordinary hard times were deepening into something more existentially threatening and terrifying. The movie itself changes from stark realism to near-abstract expressionism. And the ending hits you with the force of a brick hurled in your face. This nightmare offers no salvation, except the sweetness and humanity of Robinson’s art. That’s more than enough.

Each one of these movies runs about an hour, and each packs more story, more honesty, and more maturity into that hour than 90% of the movies being made today. Maybe hard times were good for something.

 

 

Originally published on Edward Copeland on Film.

At the Rally to Restore Sanity

November 3, 2010 By in Explorations, The Martini Shot Leave a comment

Went to DC last weekend for the Rally to Restore Sanity. We knew it would be a big crowd, so rather than taking the Metro, Miranda, Ryan and I walked the two and a half miles from her townhouse down Pennsylvania Ave. to the Mall. It was Saturday October 30, a perfect Fall day with a cool morning breeze that sent a few early leaves scattering around us. We had arranged to meet Phil and Nancy at the Sculpture Garden, and then the plan was to find Steve and Mark, who were already close to the stage. But by the time we got to the Rally itself, we found it impossible to meet up with anyone: there was no cell reception. Two hundred thousand other people were on their devices too, and the grid went down.

As we looked around for a spot to watch from, the crowd continued to grow more dense. At first, many people had staked out little bits of territory with comforters and lawn chairs. Gradually these disappeared as we were all pushed inexorably closer and closer together. Picnic blankets were trampled upon. Lawn chairs were pulled tight. People who had been sitting were forced to stand. By the time the Rally started, we were so wedged in that you literally could not clap unless you raised your hands in the air above you. Fortunately it was the most mellow, good humored group you can imagine. Liberals, of course. We don’t even get mad when you trample our blankets.

At one point, an elderly lady collapsed near us and people began shouting “Medic!” Ryan, who is a nurse, took off immediately toward her. The unmovable crowd miraculously parted for him. She was fine, as it turned out. But you could feel everyone’s jittery collective physical discomfort at being so jammed in. I’ve never been anxious in a crowd before. Thanks to yoga and meditation I knew enough to breathe every time I felt resistance arising. But I couldn’t really see anything. Tiny bits of stage and edges of jumbotrons. Signs on sticks above heads. Mylar balloons. Tops of heads. So I mostly listened. As it turned out, that was fine.

The people behind The Daily Show are pretty clever. Just as the show is a parody that skewers the pompous cliches of TV news programs, the Rally was a parody of a rally. There was a rambling, self contradictory benediction (from Father Guido Sarducci, an inspired choice). Lots of failed chants and goofy singalongs. Awards, tributes and guest speakers. Most of the jokes were good, and everything was geared to support the same message: that we all have to drop the conflict and the name calling if we want to solve our problems. Of course, there was a false equivalency drawn between the right and the left… one side is clearly more angry, divisive and hateful than the other, and I bet you know which side I mean. However, the overall point was well taken: meet your opponent’s anger with some humor, and let’s all see if we can bring it down a notch.

The day before, Phil had been kind enough to invite me to join him and Nancy on a tour of the Capitol he’d arranged through some former Poli Sci students of his from his classes at UCLA and Pepperdine. It was sweet and kind of moving to watch these two smart, accomplished, powerful people wandering like wide-eyed kids, absorbing these fascinating little details and the huge historic backdrop to it all. We started out in one of the Senate office buildings, where we got a behind-the-scenes look at the ornate offices and venerable hearing rooms — including the room that held the hearings on the Titanic, Army/McCarthy, organized crime, Watergate, and Iran/Contra… hearings I’d actually watched live (only the last two, thankyouverymuch).

We went to the “crypt” in the bottom of the Capitol, where a marble compass in the floor marks the very center of the city and the point from which the four neighborhoods (NW, NE, SW, SE) all begin. We stood in the Rotunda, this awe-inspiring space with beautiful sunlight pouring down through the Dome’s arching windows… ringed with giant Trumbull paintings and marble statues of the most admirable figures of U.S. history (plus a bronze replica of Reagan somebody snuck in). We also sat in the House and Senate galleries, looking down into those little chambers where some of the noblest words in American history, and some of the stupidest, have been spoken. Just outside the gallery entrances, the tile is visibly worn down and discolored from two centuries of the people walking in to watch their representatives at work.

The highlight of this tour was a half hour we spent in the Budget Committee’s chamber with a gentleman named Chris who manages the office budget process. Chris came to DC as an intern during Watergate, intending to stay a summer or so… he’s been there for 36 years. Soft-spoken, friendly, and articulate. In response to Phil’s question he talked about the decline in civility and comity that he’s witnessed over the past three decades. In the past, congressmen used to debate heatedly and then go hang out after work — they were personal friends and could work together when they needed to. Now more and more, only ideologues get elected. He’s worried about the future and what will happen after he retires in a couple of years.

What he takes comfort from, he said, is the young people. And with good reason: they were awesome. They were everywhere, working as aides and pages and office assistants, all of them professional, bright, and idealistic. Together with the older people we saw, we got a clear picture of the Congress at work — and it’s far from the grotesque caricature offered by the cynical operatives who want to advance corporate power by making people give up on their government. It’s a lot of savvy people working very hard, people who understand the responsibility that comes with power, people who aren’t sitting home in their barcaloungers complaining, but are busy getting things done.

After the Rally and dinner, Phil and Nancy and I walked around the White House — luminous in the floodlights, and home at this particular fortunate moment to a calm, wise and potentially great man. Then we went next door to the Round Robin bar in the Willard hotel. The bar is right off the lobby and is said to be the place where the term “lobbyist” was coined. It’s a tiny little round room ringed with sketches of its more illustrious patrons: Walt Whitman and Mark Twain among them. We had to stand at the bar until John Hodgman and his date vacated their table. So we sat and had martinis like a couple of grownups and toasted to DC and to our little reunion. Until this weekend, I hadn’t seen Phil in 20 years… we’ve had some longstanding, difficult and extremely painful conflicts in our time. But we finally reached across the aisle, so to speak, and recognized the things that connect us are stronger than those that divide us. I hadn’t expected to, but I told him I loved him. He looked surprised; he said the same. Our old issues seemed very far away, like some debate between Hayne and Webster on the Senate floor in 1830… and I bet those dudes went out for drinks afterwards. After I put Phil and Nancy into a taxi I walked out into the clear, crisp Washington evening and thanked the stars over my head for letting me outlive my youth.

There’s going to be the usual ruckus these next few weeks as the gloriously ascendant tea partiers come crowing and clucking into power. The wheel turns, and always some new bunch of people think they’re going to take charge and change everything. But real change takes time, and perseverance, and a willingness to accept and work with other people rather than shutting them out. You have to let go of your grievances, and your need to be right. Compromise has somehow become synonymous with failure, but it’s what our whole beautiful system is built on. And compromise starts with seeing past your own narrow point of view. It’s not the other guy who needs to change, it’s you. If you really want to restore sanity, a rally isn’t going to do it. You have to start with your own.

Buy the Surfboard

September 15, 2010 By in Explorations Leave a comment

About ten minutes ago, I got a professional email, the kind I usually ignore… this one about a financial services conference that had a panel discussion.

One CEO on the panel was talking about using social media as a marketing tool. He compared the rise of social media to a tsunami, and he urged his audience to go ahead and “buy the surfboard.”

That phrase leapt out at me. For one thing, my company has started talking about social media, and I’ve been dragging my feet. Don’t want to think about it, don’t want to get involved. Even though I know it’s the next frontier of my profession, and I need to explore it.

For another thing, I’ve been thinking about learning to surf. No, really. It’s something I wanted to do in my 20s, but for various reasons… didn’t. But it struck me recently that I still could do it. I live in Florida, don’t I? What’s stopping me?

Buy the surfboard.

That is some bloody great advice.

For all of us, there’s some issue where we’re standing at the edge of the pool, tentatively dipping our toe in. Hanging back, hesitating. Making some kind of excuse for inaction: I’m too old, I’ll look foolish, I could never do that, whatever. That’s your ego, trying to be helpful as usual. Protecting you, and in the process half strangling you and blocking your joy.

Meanwhile, there’s your intuition, telling you to get out there and take a few risks. Try something different. Do the thing you’re afraid to do, but can’t stop thinking about either….

Give that attractive stranger a friendly greeting. Sign up for those piano lessons. Call your estranged uncle and apologize. Send your poem to that magazine. Take your friend up on the offer to go rock climbing. End that draining relationship. Go skydiving.

Waiting for a better moment? It won’t come.

Buy the surfboard.

Lucky Lady

August 30, 2010 By in Movies Tags: , Leave a comment

Blog Art - Lucky Lady2

In advance of a DVD release, Fox Movie Channel showed Lucky Lady one afternoon recently — the first airing of this unlucky movie anywhere in my experience since its premiere in 1975. I saw it back then, when I was — ahem — in my teens, and I thought it was pretty good… my strongest memory was of Liza Minnelli playing a Bessie Smith record (“Young Woman Blues”). I’d never even heard of Bessie Smith, but her deep growling and wailing on the soundtrack made a huge impression on me. And any movie that introduces you to Bessie Smith can’t be all bad.

So I was pretty excited to see the movie again after 35 years. As a movie buff, it’s always nice to discover a “forgotten” film and tell people about it. Maybe it would turn out to be a lost treasure. They’re out there — great little movies that most people have never heard of, and you read about them on the blogs sometimes… Two Seconds, Desert Fury, Strangers When We Meet, No Down Payment, Daisy Kenyon, just to name a few that you can find rapturous little posts about here and there.

Alas, this won’t be one of them. Lucky Lady was supposed to be Fox’s big Christmas hit of 1975: Minnelli’s first movie since Cabaret, co-starring the biggest star of the decade, Burt Reynolds, plus Gene Hackman fresh off his Oscar for The French Connection. It was only a couple of years after The Sting, which had been a hit of immense proportions, and this was an imitation — another story of darling, roguish crooks set in the Roaring ’20s, with cutesy ragtime music and movie stars grinning with cigars in their mouths.

It was even a bit daring for its time: the stars play a floozy and two bums during prohibition, and as they bicker and laugh their way from down-and-outers in Mexico to filthy rich rum runners, they eventually become a ménage a trois… we even see them in bed together. You can tell that the filmmakers were trying for an update of the old ’30s MGM Powell-Harlow-Tracy formula, with a raucous tart battling a tough guy and a mug. Lucky Lady, by the way, is the boat they use to transport hooch up and down the California coast, chased by the Coast Guard and murderous yet comically inept rival bootleggers.

None of it works. There’s no chemistry, for one thing. Hackman was a late replacement for George Segal (who wisely bailed at the last minute). He turned it down also, until the studio offered so much money that he couldn’t refuse, but he looks shamefaced, as if he knows he shouldn’t be there, and as the movie progresses he seems to almost disappear while you’re watching him. Burt Reynolds has a more interesting role, as a klutzy puppy dog with a sad little crush on Minnelli. He’s convincing as a total boob, but not very funny or appealing. You expect Hackman and Reynolds to do the movieish thing and scrap over the woman they both love, but nobody in the movie shows enough feeling to suggest any emotion, much less love.

You couldn’t be in love with Minnelli’s character anyway. Sour and snarling one minute, emotionally vulnerable the next, she’s pigeon-toed and graceless and utterly unappealing. Abrasive boorishness worked for Harlow because her wisecracks were witty and you could feel the joy she took when she told somebody off — she was our heroine, a no-class gal giving the snooty swells a big fat kick in the rear end. Liza Minnelli is (or was…) a very talented woman, but she can’t pull off this particular act. Four or five minutes into the movie, she’s in a dive cantina in Mexico, singing a frowzy fake-cynical Kander and Ebb song, wearing a Harpo Marx wig and a gaudy print dress, and you get the dismal but unmistakable sense that you’re watching a flop.

Not that Fox didn’t try. They poured $13 million into the movie, and there are spectacularly mounted scenes of boats racing along, gun battles, explosions, etc. Some of the sets are huge, though the Teflon-coated fake art deco looks more mid-’70s disco than Jazz Age. They shot three different final scenes, too, after test audiences rejected the original “serious” ending. One of the several attempts found the three characters many years later, still in bed together; this hastily discarded scene of the three actors in lousy old-age makeup is a minor inside-Hollywood legend.

Blog Art - Lucky Lady

Most catastrophically of all, the director Stanley Donen (or someone; the movie reeks of too many chefs) opted to shoot the film using “flashed” cinematography. This technique lets some extra exposure in as the film is being processed. The result washes out the colors and details, puts a smeary haze around the edges, and brightens and softens everything. Basically, it makes the movie excruciating to look at. Have you ever awakened hungover on the deck of a boat in the glaring midday sun? Well Eddie has, kids, and I can testify that that’s how Lucky Lady looks, for two solid hours.

There’s one saving grace note… watching again 35 years later, I was still enchanted for the brief moments when Minnelli put Bessie Smith on the gramophone. Here was the real voice of the 1920s: smoky and defiant, steeped in rueful experience, but joyful, free and bracing as a shot of bootleg gin. When she belts out her timeless lowdown blues, the contrast with the phony, uneasy little movie surrounding her couldn’t be greater.

Cyrus, A Single Man, Life with Father

August 4, 2010 By in Movies Leave a comment

Small Movies, Big Movie

I watched three movies in the past week, two of them new and one of them 63 years old. The two new ones, Cyrus and A Single Man, have pretty much vanished from my consciousness like breath on a mirror. The old one, Life With Father, is still running through my mind.

Cyrus and A Single Man aren’t much alike, at least superficially. The former is about a lonely slob (John C. Reilly) who finally meets a great woman (Marisa Tomei) at a party, but finds his relationship cockblocked by her clinging, obese, devious 20-year-old son (Jonah Hill). The film sets up this kind of creepy incestuous situation but then chickens out and dribbles away, maybe because the actors did a lot of improvising. It’s also damaged by the fact that you have to spend an hour and a half looking at Reilly and Hill, not the prettiest of specimens, and wondering how the hell a woman like Marisa Tomei got mixed up with them.

The latter is about a professor (Colin Firth) struggling to get over the death of his longtime male companion. He plans to commit suicide, and during his last day on earth, he encounters his old lover and best friend (Julianne Moore) and a flirtatious student (Nicholas Hoult) who wants to get closer to him. Directed by fashion photographer Tom Ford, it’s a meticulously designed GQ photo spread come to life, with the camera lingering endlessly on impossibly beautiful male faces. Firth is great at suggesting the gravitational pull of enormous grief, though, and Moore is funny and inventive as always.

What they do have in common is their scripts. Both keep close to a tight little interpersonal situation, with a troubled protagonist slowly fighting his way to some sort of meaningful connection with others. The dialogue is functional and uninspired, and you’d be hard pressed to remember a single line from either. Both depend on the actors to give them depth and make the audience give a damn about the selfish, closed-off characters.

Life With Father couldn’t be more different. It was based on a play, the longest running non-musical play in Broadway history (still). Set at the turn of the century, it’s a big semi-ironic valentine to the Victorian era, with loud blustering supremely know-it-all Father (William Powell) subtly thwarted at every turn by sweet, not-as-rattlebrained-as-she-seems Mother (Irene Dunne). It was shot in bright Technicolor (though the prints are very bad, since it’s never been restored). The performances are very “big” — this was a hit movie based on a hit play, and the actors sock every line out into the depths of the cavernous movie palaces of the 1940s. The script is a beautiful piece of work, right down to the last line… a funny, clever laugh-with-a-tear-in-it that the entire movie has carefully been setting up.

Life With Father isn’t a good movie, exactly, but it’s like a pyramid or an old ornate bank building: an imposing example of dedication and craftsmanship that isn’t possible anymore. It’s really built. Nobody has the time, money, or theatrical know-how to create something like that anymore, and even if they wanted to, it’s gone way out of style. The movie was made for (and reached) a wide popular audience, so it’s broad and obvious, but the clueless man vs. loving wife stuff that worked in 1947 still works. And the timbre of William Powell’s voice is still ringing in my ears.

Cyrus and A Single Man, like most movies now, are made for fragmented audience segments — in this case a few hundred mumblecore fans, or the gay-friendly NPR-listening art house crowd. You either like them or you’ve never heard of them, but either way their lack of inclusiveness is part of what makes them so worthless. Years of test marketing and focus groups have done this damage, and not just to movies but to politics, literature, education, music… everything. Cyrus doesn’t work and A Single Man does, but either way they’re both tiny movies that will be forgotten in another year or so. Whereas Life With Father, if someone bothers to restore and preserve it, will probably be playing forever.

Cyrus

July 26, 2010 By in Movies Leave a comment

George Castanza’s Dream Comes True in Cyrus

A couple of years ago, watching Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, I was seriously offended on behalf of Marisa Tomei for her having to participate in some fairly explicit sex scenes. The problem wasn’t Tomei, who looks more devastating than ever in her 40s. The problem was that she was in bed with the last actor on earth who should be seen unclothed (even a little bit): Philip Seymour Hoffman. Though Hoffman was great as always, the physical disconnect between them made it impossible to suspend disbelief… she was acting all turned on by him, and man, that was some acting.

Now, three years later, here is Tomei cast as a “sex angel” to the lumpish, skeevy John C. Reilly in Cyrus. She hasn’t had a relationship in years, the movie would have us believe, but she’s attracted to Reilly. Uh-huh, as my father used to say when something or someone was full of shit. To add insult to injury, Tomei also plays the mother of the spectacularly bloated and unattractive Jonah Hill. The unlikelihood of either of these gentlemen getting anywhere near a woman like Marisa Tomei isn’t the main problem with Cyrus, but it was the one that irritated me the most.

Reilly plays John, a film editor who has been divorced for several years and lives alone in a messy apartment, eating junk food and staring at his computer screen. As with the heroes of so many of today’s slacker movies, whether mumblecore or not, John is a slovenly loser with no looks, physique, hygiene, money or career prospects… and who yet manages to have giddy, happy sex with a hot woman who responds to his sincerity, or basic decency, or something. Cyrus opens with John’s unbelievably non-acrimonious ex-wife Jamie interrupting him in the middle of masturbation; later he meets Tomei while peeing in some bushes. Are these the sorts of moments that bring hot women into a man’s life? Only in the minds of male screenwriters who have spent way too much time staring at their computer screens.

So John and Tomei’s Molly hook up, and things are going great until he meets her son Cyrus. Fat and beady-eyed, Cyrus is an antisocial lout who has an unhealthy Oedipal obsession with his mom and no intention of sharing her with a boyfriend. (Hill, by the way, looks more like the child of Danny DeVito’s Penguin than that of Marisa Tomei, but let it go.) The first third of the movie is standard comedy-of-social-awkwardness as this situation is set up, but as John moves closer, and eventually into Molly’s house, Cyrus begins a passive-aggressive campaign to break up the relationship. For a while, with the handheld camera moving through the bluish darkened rooms of the house, it’s like a horror movie, and you half expect Cyrus to pop out with a knife like Norman Bates. Then for the last third, the movie makes another shift in tone, and goes all soft and sensitive as we see how much Cyrus is hurting, and he and John forge a tentative reconciliation.

This is one shift too many for the audience, whom I felt were ready for something darker and edgier. There are suggestions of an incestuous relationship between Cyrus and Molly — she spends the night in his bed when he’s upset, he uses the bathroom while she’s showering, etc. But these scenes don’t go anywhere, and Molly is ultimately portrayed as a sane, sweet earth mother who has evidently played no part in making her son a borderline psychopath. Like Mildred Pierce, her only sin is loving her child so much that she’s blind to what a monster she’s created. Or hasn’t created. Again, these are screenwriter contrivances — everything that happens in the movie is for an immediate effect and has no grounding in psychological truth.

The performers are left to make the movie work, and it must be said that Reilly almost pulls it off. He’s a very likable actor, maybe because of the glints of suffering in the little raisin eyes set too close together in his doughy face. We’re with him all the way, and when Cyrus begins his campaign of lying and manipulation, we want John to come up with some clever strategies to beat the little bastard at his own game. But although the movie makes a couple of feints in this direction, evidently the writer/directors Mark and Jay Duplass aren’t up to writing a battle of wits. In fact, much of the movie was improvised by the performers, and several scenes have that repetitive, vamping tediousness that improvisation gets when there’s no inspiration behind it.

Catherine Keener fares particularly badly — she has now officially tilted her head, squinted compassionately and laughed unexpectedly in one too many movies. She plays Jamie, the ex who dumped John several years previously, but still hangs around solicitously, trying to get him to socialize and find happiness in a new relationship. Uh-huh. Cyrus is like a loser’s daydream in which he doesn’t have to change a thing about himself: everybody loves him anyway. Even Marisa Tomei.