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FILM DISCOVERIES OF 2014

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

December 23, 2014

Let the proliferation of year-end lists wash over you with a resigned calm. And let me add another one to the ocean of opinion. Today I’m presenting my top ten new-to-me movies of 2014. That is, older films that I have seen for the first time. They are the backbone of any movie-going year, whether it’s catching up to acknowledged classics (for me, The Best Years of Our Lives) or going trawling for obscure auteurist gems (Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby, Edward L. Cahn’s Redhead). It’s a way to draw attention to a wider range of filmgoing possibilities, so you don’t have to read about Boyhood for the bazillionth time (though, if you do, my appreciation is over here). All credit goes to prodigious blogger Brian Saur from Rupert Pupkin Speaks, who collects “Favorite Film Discoveries” from writers, programmers and filmmakers every year, and asked me to contribute once upon a time. I found the exercise invigorating, more so than the usual end-of-year recycling, so you have him to thank or blame.

The films are presented in alphabetical order

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, directed by William Wyler)

I had been indoctrinated in aversion to Wyler, from half-remembered slams by Andrew Sarris. This is not Sarris’ fault but my own, as he was a persistent re-evaulator, trying to undermine his own biases. But now that I’m here, my goodness what a movie. Wyler was a serviceman for three years, and knew who these men were and how they lived. The deep focus cinematography by Gregg Toland is justly famous, but it’s the gestures inside of it that make it work so beautifully. The orchestration of glances as the family silently reacts to Homer’s amputation isolates him even as he’s surrounded by well-wishers.

On Blu-ray from Warner Brothers

Broken Lullaby (1932, directed by Ernst Lubtisch)

Lubitsch’s only non-comic sound film is a post-traumatic post-WWI drama about a shellshocked vet who seeks penance for bayoneting a German soldier in the trenches. He travels to atone to his victim’s parents, but when he arrives, he can’t bring himself to admit his guilt. Instead he falls in love with their daughter. Like in many of Lubitsch’s comedies, it’s about a man who fakes his life so beautifully he almost makes it come true. It opens with a blast of dialectical montage, cutting rhythmically between a Paris belfry’s bells and a battlefield cannon, the drums of the soldier’s homecoming parade sliced in with a wounded vet’s screams. It is as potent a three minutes as anything Eisenstein concocted. But then, a stylstic shift into daring long takes and a subdued, declamatory kind of acting. There is an unbroken two-minute take of two mothers grieving over their sons that is devastating in its quietude.

Unavailable on home video or VOD

Carnival of Souls (1962, directed by Herk Harvey)

This miraculous motion picture is a dip into the Midwestern uncanny, ghosts haunting the long flat highways and abandoned amusements. It’s one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen, undoubtedly aided by viewing it on July 4th weekend, where bottle rockets were popping off behind my head every five minutes. I was too gripped to turn around and look at the firecracking kids outside, for fear I would see that face reflected in the window.

On DVD from Criterion (I watched it on Hulu Plus)

The Clockmaker of St. Paul (1974, directed by Bertrand Tavernier)

Tavernier’s debut feature is a subdued adaptation of a Simenon novel about a habit-minded watchmaker whose estranged son is wanted for murder. Shot in Tavernier’s hometown of Lyon, it traces the father’s ritualized walks through his city as he grapples with this rupture in his life. The outdoor photography is hushed and autumnal,the death of summer framing the father’s unspoken struggle over his son’s situation, which rouses the communist factory workers at which his son worked, as well as the accusatory owners. The father’s motivations and inner being are kept opaque, his inner workings as unfathomable as his clocks are understandable. So when his decision arrives, it is with the gathering force of a thunderbolt.

On Region 2 DVD from Optimum

Forgotten Faces (1928, directed by Victor Schertzinger)

The undisputed highlight of this year’s Capitolfest in Rome, NY, this is a visually extravagant crime melodrama. The story is a convoluted stew involving gentlemen thieves, orphaned daughters, scheming mothers, and a devoted sidekick named Froggy (William Powell). Not memorable material, but the clarity and elegance of its late silent film style are often overwhelming. There are elegant tracking shots, provocative use of off-screen space, and complicated spiraling sets that are split in half and filmed in a Wes Anderson-esque dollhouse style. It’s enough to make one shake a fist at the sky and rue the coming of sound.

Unavailable on home video or VOD

Good Sam (1948, directed by Leo McCarey)

I am morally obligated to write about every Leo McCarey movie someday, so this year it was Good Sam, a complicated moral fable about the unintended consequences of doing good. Gary Cooper is Sam, an inveterate do-gooder whose charity consistently leads to troubles, whether its debt, permanent visitors or missing cars. The film’s central theme is the impossibility of saintliness in a consumer society – one in which Sam becomes an object of ridicule (by his boss, his wife and the world at large), rather than lauded for his selflessness. Cooper is appropriately skittish and perpetually aghast, but the real star is Ann Sheridan as his put upon wife. Her acerbic realism cuts the sweetness of Sam’s saintliness, and she provides the greatest laughs in the film – especially when she busts out cackling at Sam as he uncharacteristically runs down a neighbor (who happens to be sitting right behind him).

On Blu-ray and DVD from Olive Films

The Long Day Closes (1992, directed by Terence Davies)

Note perfect reminiscence about growing up lonely and growing up in the movies, usually the same thing.

On DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection

Mongo’s Back in Town (1971, directed by Marvin J. Chomsky)

A relentlessly downbeat telefilm noir starring Joe Don Baker as the titular Mongo. Mongo is a beast intent on destroying his hometown. His milquetoast brother summons him back to San Pedro, CA in order to knock off a local competitor, but instead Mongo brings the whole criminal edifice down around everyone’s heads. Baker is gruff and relentless, an analogue to Lee Marvin’s Walker in Point Blank (1967). Nothing will sway Mongo from his own disgust. The rest of the cast includes Telly Savalas, Martin Sheen and Sally Field, all dumb witnesses to Mongo’s clumsy, bloody vengeance.

On MOD-DVD from CBS Films

Redhead (1941, directed by Edward L. Cahn)

I am contractually obligated to write about 10-12 Edward L. Cahn movies this year, and this one was my favorite (When the Clock Strikes finishing a close second). It’s a downbeat suicide comedy about a pair of mismatched lovers(one rich, one poor) who meet each other both on the precipice of leaping off a cliff. They save each other instead, opening a roadside diner and learning how to live on modest means. It’s death-driven, class-conscious comedy only possible in the dark, delightful world of Cahn.

Available to stream on Amazon Instant Video

A Touch of Zen/The Valiant Ones (1969/1975, both directed by King Hu)

One of the major events in NYC was the BAM Cinematek’s King Hu retrospective. I was only able to make it to these two, but they are jaw dropping spectacles. I preferred the relentless logic of The Valiant Ones, in which the intricately choreographed battles are mapped out on chess boards, and each faction is eliminated with unforgiving procession. The earlier Touch of Zen is more inside the head than the hands, a Buddhist fable of enlightenment in which blood turns into told and only through self-abnegation can come glory.

Both are out of print on DVD

Utamaro and his Five Women (1946, directed by Kenji Mizoguchi)

Wherein the life of an artist (here woodblock print portratist Utamaro) is presented as one of continuous battle, in which everyone suffers, his models most of all.

Available on Region 2 DVD from Artificial Eye

FINAL REPOSE: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945)

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

December 16, 2014

Albert Lewin is an elusive figure in the history of Hollywood. He was an educated aesthete with a B.A. from NYU and a M.A. from Harvard who took a job as a script reader at Samuel Goldwyn studios. He swiftly rose through the ranks after Goldwyn was absorbed by MGM, and he was one of the five “Thalberg Men” who facilitated the studios success, overseeing hits like Spawn of the North and Mutiny on the Bounty. When not overseeing super productions, Lewin directed six unusual features, almost all about artistically inclined loners enmeshed in a debilitating obsession. His most famous film is his 1945 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is now available on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive. It is a startlingly controlled production, from Hurd Hatfield’s evocatively blank lead performance to the deep focus photography of DP Harry Stradling, which gives ample space for Gray’s emptiness to expand.

Aside from the addition of a few characters, the film hews closely to Wilde’s story. It regards Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield), a preternaturally handsome young gentleman who becomes horrified at the thought of his aging. While gazing at the portrait of himself that had just been completed, Gray makes a passionate wish for the painting to reflect the aging process, but that his body remain young and unlined. His wish is granted. The painting reflects his true face, while he flesh becomes a mask. When his love of a nightclub singer (Angela Lansbury) encounters tragedy, Gray turns to all varieties of debauchery as a distraction, and the painting’s face becomes more and more grotesque, a rebuke to Gray’s fetishization of youth.

Every element of the movie is thought through and fussed over. The interior of Gray’s apartment is designed to look like a museum, a cold receptacle that does not seem to allow for a human presence. Hurd Hatfield gives a performance of dreamlike roboticism, as if controlled by joystick off-screen, his voice an uninflected monotone. It is incredibly bold to have a void at the center of your movie, but Lewin seems to push Hatfield more and more into nothingness, until all that’s left of him are those improbably high cheekbones. Hatfield’s face is a marvel in itself, with fine feminine features lending his face a striking asexuality. In the original publication of Wilde’s novella, references to homosexuality were removed by the publisher. In the film, Gray’s proclivities are strongly suggested in a scene where a doctor arrives and is blackmailed to aid Gray in a crime. The act for which he is being blackmailed is never stated, which becomes a proof of its own.

The one chance Gray has to escape his narcissism is in his infatuation with Sibyl Vane (Angela Lansbury), the main attraction at the seedy Two Turtles Pub. He first sees Vane on stage as she croons the schmaltzy, affecting “Goodbye Little Yellow Bird” in her singsong voice as the emcee tosses feathers in her wake. Gray sees an unaffected innocence in her performance, and returns repeatedly to bathe in her naturalness. It is in these encounters in which flickers of life still emerge behind Hatfield’s eyes. But instead of following his heart he follows the instructions of the social butterfly/philosopher of pleasure Lord Henry Wotton (George Sanders). Gray is a blank slate, and Wotton fills him up with witty, empty words of self-love. And so Gray is put on the path to self-destruction, and the painting seems to rot off the canvas.

The painting in The Picture of Dorian Gray serves a similar purpose as the curse in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Lewin’s 1951 feature adaptation of the seafaring fable. In it, James Mason is the titular Dutchman, doomed to sail the seven seas until he finds a woman who is willing to die for him (in this case, Ava Gardner). Like the portrait, the curse is a supernatural element that isolates the central character. In the film the Dutchman is a portrait artist, using painting as an escape from his endless existence. He is more heroic than Gray, actively seeking a way out of his loneliness, whereas Gray is directed straight to oblivion. But both films are studies of men with artistic temperaments driven to solitude and drawn to madness.

The “after” painting of Gray’s ugly moral state was made by Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, who Lewin admired. Albright made exaggeratedly unforgiving self-portraits, emphasizing every flap and fold of his aging face and neck. Who better to paint Gray’s true self than that? Albright’s figures look illuminated from within, and the fantastical nature of his exaggerations often has him grouped with the magic realists. Albright was commissioned to paint both the “before” and “after” portraits of Gray, but his process was so slow-moving and demanding that he only ever completed the “after”. The “before” was ultimately painted by Henrique Medina. Albright’s portrait is one of the great movie paintings, a phantasmagoric rendering of a diseased, pustule-ridden lout, his decaying presence infecting the room around him, everything dissolving back into organic matter.

JUST VISITING: STARMAN and THE TALE OF THE PRINCESS KAGUYA

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

December 9, 2014

Inside each hand, a miracle. Starman (1984) and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) both envision the ineffable, of presences that transcend our earthly domain. But both also celebrate the joys allowed to those bound in flesh, of Dutch apple pie and a frolic in the woods. Odd things happen when movies are viewed in quick succession. As I watched Starman and Kaguya, their stories seemed to be the same story. Both features follow an alien lifeform adapting to Earth. In Starman it’s a crash-landed alien anthropologist trekking back to his rendezvous point, while in Kaguya it’s a princess who was discovered inside of a bamboo shoot, and presumed to be a gift of the heavens. There are comic fish-out-of-water segments in adapting to their new environments, as well as doomed romances that spark and snuff out due to the whole long-distance relationship problem (it’s tough when you’re in different galaxies). But they are bittersweet films, ones that make the transcendent visible, only for it to disappear in the end.

Starman (1984) was a cursed property at Columbia Pictures. It was the project the studio chose to make instead of E.T. They were developing both, but the head of the studio at the time, Frank Price, prioritized Starman. Spielberg moved E.T. to Universal, where it became the highest grossing film of all time up until that point. Trying to escape the stink of lost money, Columbia shelved Starman for a year, until it was resurrected by John Carpenter, who had just directed the Stephen King killer car adaptation Christine (1983) for Columbia. It was a change of pace for Carpenter, who had not strayed too far from his horror wheelhouse. He was a student of film history though, and admired how the studio directors could have a go at every possible genre, often in the same year. On Starman, Carpenter tried to make his Capra movie. He told New York Magazine that:

Starman meets this widow, played by Karen Allen, and falls in love. But he’s an alien, and she doesn’t know how to react. It’s like Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. I wanted to create that same kind of romantic tension.

Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen) is speechless to discover her dead husband alive in her living room. The “Starman” had crash landed in the field outside her house, and taken on human form by melding itself with her husband’s DNA.When she recovers from the shock, she realizes that this is an impostor. The eyes are glassy and blank, his movements ungainly and staccato, like a baby bird. His English vocabulary was gleaned from the album included in the Voyager satellite, their communication reliant upon body language and intuition. Jenny, still in mourning, is hypnotized by this specter, and reluctantly helps him on his trip from Wisconsin to Arizona — where he will rendezvous with his mother ship and return home. Despite the sci-fi trappings, the bulk of the film is a road trip romantic comedy in the It Happened One Night mold. They are a duo thrown together by circumstance who flirt their way across the U.S., with Jenny initiating him into United States culture. He learns to kiss from studying the late show on TV of From Here to Eternity. Shot on location in Monument Valley and the Meteor Crater in Arizona, along with stops in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, it’s Carpenter’s most American movie. And he doesn’t move the camera too much, keeping things in medium shot and letting the landscapes and actors do the work. And Jeff Bridges, who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, is entrancing. He’s an actor that allows you to see him think – which is essential for the part of a quickly adaptive alien being. He’s constantly computing, weighing and evaluating, conveyed in his bird-like head bobs and the gentle querying in his gaze. Karen Allen is quite moving as his straight woman, her arc from exasperation to indulgence to affection demonstrated in her wide-set searching eyes. For a feel-good romance, Starman is awfully downbeat. The government is an exploitative war machine chasing Starman to use him as a lab rat, while the romantic union is an impossibility. They live on separate planes, the gorgeous heartbreaker of an ending closing in on Allen’s face, expressing a terrible kind of wonder and loss.

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, the latest and probably final film from anime master Isao Takahata, is another tale of a fantastic visitor who embeds themselves in human concerns. It is based on a tenth century Japanese folktale, one of the oldest narratives in the culture. It concerns a lowly bamboo cutter who finds an infant the size of his thumb inside of a glowing stalk – named Kaguya. He brings her home and raises her as his own. She grows at an exponential rate, so the local children nickname her “Little Bamboo”. The bamboo cutter is convinced the gods desire the child to become a princess, and feel confirmed in that fact when he is gifted with a treasure. He tears his family away from their country home and tries to raise her as a noble, with plucked eyebrows and deference to her elders. Instead, Kaguya would rather be chasing kittens and tending to her garden. She pines for home and her childhood love Sutemaru, until one day she is forced to return to her real home, a place not of earth or of heaven.

The animation is drawn in with colored pencil and watercolor, a vibrantly beautiful aesthetic. The lines are loose and flowing, and the delicate, minimalist aesthetic seemingly leaves landscapes half formed, as if developing along with Kaguya. When she dreams of escape from her gilded city cage, the form deteriorates into rough sketches. As she imagines herself running away, bull-headed through the city streets and back to the country, her body is formed by a few strokes, the forest rendered in thick lines of charcoal, the world seemingly convulsing around her. It’s a tour de force sequence, and one that shows Kaguya’s control. Starman is a victim of circumstance, but Kaguya can shape the environments in which she lives. When required to take a husband, she puts them off with impossible tasks, guaranteeing herself a preferred life as a spinster, tending her gardens and living inside her head.

Kaguya’s departure to her home world is remarkably similar to that of Starman. There is an approaching cloud that resolves into an interstellar conveyance, one which elicits awe and dread. This is the final departure, the end of transcendent possibilities. In both we are granted the POV of the humans who are left behind, left with our conflicted emotions and vulnerable bodies. Starman is an essentially optimistic film, Jenny left with a hopeful gaze into the future. The ones Kaguya leaves behind are bereft, left with nothing but memories of their miraculous child, now gone forever. What in Starman is a possibility, in Kaguya is a rebuke.

CAGNEY THE COMEDIAN: BOY MEETS GIRL (1938)

February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

December 2, 2014

By the end of 1935 James Cagney was irritated. Under his Warner Brothers contract he was assigned four-to-five movies a year, almost all in the pugilist-gangster mold. Cagney was getting burnt out on the repetition, just as he was becoming a top ten box office attraction. Seeking a higher salary as well as greater input into his roles, Cagney walked off the studio lot and sued them for back pay. He had become a bad boy on-screen as well as off. He spent his time separated from WB making a couple of small features for the independent Grand National Pictures (Great Guy (’36) and Something to Sing About (’37)). The suit was settled in 1938, and Cagney was back at work at WB. His return film was the inside-Hollywood farce Boy Meets Girl, which was a recent Broadway hit. A rapid-fire parody of tinseltown excesses — it tracks the rise and fall of a literally newborn superstar — it allowed Cagney to stretch his comic chops. He gets to enact all of his mischievous Hollywood fantasies: mouthing off to the unit production chief (Ralph Bellamy), insulting soft-headed actors and inciting extras to riot. Cagney and Pat O’Brien play exaggerated versions of the famously acerbic screenwriting team of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur as they sweet talk their way into the heart of a naive mother whose baby becomes an overnight star. This cockeyed comedy is now available on DVD from the Warner Archive.

The 1935 stage play by Bella and Samuel Spewack must have appealed to Cagney as a change of pace. Instead of intimidating through violence, here it is only his wits alone that will get him out of Hollywood alive, or at least a decent paycheck. The Spewacks wrote the screenplay adaptation, having to sidestep the Production Code requirements that were then already in force. The mother could no longer be unwed, and unknown quantities of double entendres hit the cutting room floor. Bella Spewack was a young leftist who started her writing career as a reporter for the socialist New York Call newspaper. Samuel was a stringer for the New York World, and they spent years together as Moscow correspondents at their mutual publications. They eventually married and transitioned to the theater, gaining a reputation, and sizable hits, for their high-wire farces. Their first success was Clear All Wires (1932), a comedy about their time in Moscow that was turned into a Lee Tracy film the following year. Boy Meets Girl opened on Broadway on November 27, 1935, and ran for 669 performances. It introduced the following exchange into American parlance: “‘Listen’, Benson says. ‘I’ve been writing stories for 11 years. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl.’” They went on to write the book for Kiss Me Kate (1949).

Boy Meets Girl follows the exploits of screenwriters Robert Law (Cagney) and J.C. Benson (Pat O’Brien), who are assigned to write a feature for the slow-witted cowboy star Larry Toms (Dick Foran). None of their vague, half-baked ideas please producer C. Elliott Friday (Ralph Bellamy), until a sweet, naive waitress enters the room to deliver their lunch. Susie (Marie Wilson) faints from the strain of lugging all of their turkey sandwiches, and she reveals her pregnancy. Benson and Law immediately brainstorm a story about Toms raising a baby in the Wild West, and sign Susie’s unborn child to a contract. As the embryo’s godfathers, they claim power of attorney. The baby, branded Happy, becomes a box office sensation, saving the jobs of everyone on the lot. Toms maneuvers to marry Susie in order to wrest control of Happy – but Benson and Law have a few more tricks up their sleeve (disguises, lies, switcheroos) as everyone desperately tries to hold onto their position.

The film adaptation of Boy Meets Girl is dangerously fast. Cagney was concerned audiences wouldn’t be able to follow the action it proceeded as such a pace. In his autobiography, Cagney on Cagney he recalls that, “Pat and I were harassed by the producer’s insistence on more speed.” Director Lloyd Bacon was happy to oblige. Bacon was a reliable company man who had developed a rapport with Cagney and his crew. Though not much of a stylist – Boy Meets Girl is a definitively stagebound production — he allowed for much experimentation from his actors. When Bacon got a job, wrote Cagney, he didn’t ask “‘When? Where? What? How?’ Lloyd would just say, ‘Who?’ ‘Who?’ translates to ‘Who have I got?’ and usually who he got was who he wanted to get — his gang, the stock company: Pat O’Brien, Frank McHugh, Cagney, Allen Jenkins, and others of us who worked so well with each other and with him.” This was Cagney’s drinking crew as well, referred to as his “Club” in a 1938 issue of Modern Screen. These were his collaborators and his friends, and the looseness on display is contagious.

In the early sequences O’Brien and Cagney have something a Marx Brothers mind meld going on, moving in sequence, finishing each other’s sentences, and treating Ralph Bellamy as their Margaret Dumont. They set up a vinyl recording of clacking typewriters to mask their escape to on-set hijinks. As the Busby Berkeley-esque director is about to kick them off the set, Cagney shouts, “Do you believe in the dance as an interpretive force? I do.” Then they stalk off in top hats. Later on they try on costumes from a doomed period piece Young England, donning foppish blonde wigs and castle guard garb. As the music department warbles a ballad in the background, Cagney tosses off his hair and does a little soft shoe. Benson and Law will seemingly do anything to avoid doing their jobs. They are supreme artists of the procrastinating arts, and Cagney’s devilish grin and spastic physicality combine to form the perfect expression of goofing off. When Cagney puts on a foppish disguise (squarish glasses, beret, long scarf) and steamrolls past a young radio announcer (a young, nervous-looking Ronald Reagan) and convinces Rodney to pretend to be Happy’s father, the film reaches a Marxian levels of insanity.

It’s the appearance of Susie that stirs their dormant creative juices. She is the first real person to appear, who cares not a whit for stories, stars or box office. Marie Wilson uses her saucer eyes and jittering falsetto to create a woman of unflappable sincerity. But she is no simp – she just believes in people over show business. Her pursuit of the struggling English actor Rodney (Bruce Lester) is surprisingly affecting, considering the chaos instigated all around her. She met him briefly, and his unaffected sincerity chimed with her own. Their scene together is one of unforced charm – two working class types somehow shoved together in the executive producer’s office (it’s a long story) and telling each other their dreams of success. Susie’s “secret ambition” is to attend high school, while he tries out his one line from Young England on her. They are the beating heart of a rather savage satire, one in which the entire Hollywood system is revealed to be one long con. Happy the baby is only allowed to be human once his contract runs out.

The film scored with critics but not with audiences, and in 1943 Cagney told Photoplay he wished he had never made it. That stance softened over time, as he had second thoughts while viewing it on television: “It’s the same film, but I sense that the years have done something for it — what, I don’t know.” Whatever it’s doing, the years continue to make Boy Meets Girl look good.

MISSING REELS: A NOVEL OF SILENT MOVIE LOVE

February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

Repertory cinema regulars can be off-putting types. They log their screenings like kids with baseball cards, reducing art to a collectible. This is the stereotype, at least, of shut-in cinephile obsessives. And these people exist – head to any Friday night screening at MoMA, where the rustle of plastic bags replaces human interaction. One might say this is not a promising milieu for a novel, but then they might not have the effervescent prose of Farran Smith Nehme’s Missing Reels. Smith Nehme is better known as the Self-Styled Siren, classic film blogger extraordinaire, undoubtedly familiar to readers of this site. A contagiously enthusiastic writer, she also has the rare talent of focusing in on performances – from the elaboration of star personas down to the minutest detail of their fashion choices. Missing Reels is her first novel, and it faithfully recreates the repertory movie scene in late 1980s NYC, focusing specifically on the silent movie nut crowd. It begins as a bittersweet screwball romance about being young and poor in the city, and develops into a shaggy dog mystery involving a lost silent feature that may yet be found.

Ceinwen (pronounced KINE-wen) is a young escapee from Yazoo City, Mississippi, scraping by as a sales assistant at a vintage clothing store. She is something of a film obsessive, but not so much of the collector kind (always more of a sweaty male pursuit). She embraces it as a lifestyle, trying to model her behavior and fashion off her favorite stars (Jean Harlow, especially) in order to distract herself from the daily grind of her existence. She lives in a flat on Avenue C with two gay roommates (Talmadge and Jim), who tolerate her particular strain of movie madness. Things start percolating when Ceinwen becomes fascinated with her buttoned-up old neighbor Miriam, whom she is convinced has a Hollywood past. Then Matthew enters her clothing store. A British mathematics postdoc at NYU, he ambles in looking for a gift for his Italian girlfriend, and an on-and-off whirlwind romance ensues. Ceinwen pursues both Miriam and Matthew, though when she discovers that Miriam did star in one forgotten silent, The Mysteries of Udolpho (invented for the book), she is hell bent on finding a surviving 35mm print. Both the print and Matthew seem to be equally elusive.

The book’s early stages take time to establish the precariousness of Ceinwen’s existence. She often doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from. Chapter two begins:

It was Wednesday. Payday was Thursday. The rain started soon after Ceinwen arrived, and there were few customers. When Lily told her to go to lunch she laid her assets on the counter and totaled them up. $1.28 in small change and half a pack of Marlboro Lights. As expected, Ceinwen was broke.

Afterward is a precise breakdown of how she can stretch that cash – with a coffee cup and a buttered roll, and the possibility of a handout from Jim. Ceinwen has loving names for all of the elements in her discounted life. There is the “Smelly Deli” (self-explanatory) as well as the “Busted” coffee, a pseudonym for Bustelo, a particularly gritty coffee familiar to underpaid New Yorkers. But though she can barely eat, she is able to maintain a glamorous vintage wardrobe, partly through the help of Talmadge’s light fingers. Nehme is adept at describing the materiality of her clothes, their texture and fit. Here is a descriptive passage of a dress she is to wear with one of her first dates with Matthew:

Sleeveless, dropped waist, obviously from the 1920s. The fabric was silk velvet, a greenish bronze that shimmered even under their dim lights. The neckline was deep and the skirt was gathered a bit in front, the ham cascading down to about mid-calf. No lace, no trimming, just the gleam of the fabric.

The clothes allow Ceinwen to traverse different worlds, to a feel a part of something outside the Smelly Deli, and connect to a lineage that runs through Harlow’s stockings.

Though Ceinwen had watched classic film since she was a child, she is no match for the obsessives she meets in her journeys. The most generous is Matthew’s department head, Harry, who has the enthusiastic generosity of a true believer (and who would make an ideal blogger). Here he is making rapid-fire recommendations for Ceinwen’s viewing schedule:

“There was a French New Wave series at The New Yorker, they needed to see Breathless and The 400 Blows and Le Bonnes Femmes. How about Walsh, how about Wellman, check out Ophuls, how much Lubitsch have you seen, how about this Fritz Lang. See here Matthew, you want macho, I’ll give you macho. Sam Fuller. Anthony Mann. John Huston double feature at Theater 80.”

Nehme lovingly details these real and long-gone rep houses, from the shoddy rear projection at Theater 80 to the wobbly floors at the Thalia. They were landmarks for Nehme’s heroic age of moviegoing, and all had disappeared by the time of my arrival in New York City. I can’t help but feel deprived. The book is as much about the death of a certain kind of moviegoing in NYC as anything else. There are still wonderful rep houses in NYC, but just not nearly as varied or cheap or disreputable.

The central thread of the book deals with Miriam’s secret life in film, and the ultimate fate of her doomed feature The Mysteries of Udolpho, an erotic melodrama directed be self-destructive German by the name of Emil Arnheim (a nod to early film critic Rudolf Arnheim). During the search Ceinwen uncovers an entire production history, the kind of original research necessary for any kind for film history or criticism, or in this case – narrative. Nehme skillfully balances the film plot and the screwball romance one, bouncing them off each other as equally tangled mysteries. Both the existence of a film print and Matthew’s emotions are impossible to gauge. The plot curlicues are never less than crisp and engaging, but I value the book the most for its evocation of a time and place – and the rather understated way in which it states how film history, and especially the effort put into discovering this history, has an intrinsic value. It recaptures a past – one that Miriam may want to forget – but a past that would have disappeared without Ceinwen’s efforts. And now those efforts can be built upon by future fictional scholars, wackos and obsessives, in the novels hopefully in Nehme’s future.

THE PERILS OF COLLEEN: COLLEEN MOORE IN SYNTHETIC SIN AND WHY BE GOOD?

February 22, 2020June 22, 2022 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

November 18, 2014

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Through serendipity, skill and plain dumb luck, the last two silent films featuring comedic firecracker Colleen Moore have been restored through the work of The Vitaphone Project and Warner Brothers. Presumed lost, Synthetic Sin (1929) and Why Be Good? (1929) were sitting in a Bologna archive, waiting for money and TLC to set them free. They received their restoration premieres at Film Forum in NYC, and both are risque flapper comedies in which Mrs. Moore’s high-spirited subversive tests the boundaries of accepted female behavior. Why Be Good? was just released by Warner Archive on DVD with its full Vitaphone audio (which adds synchronized sound effects and a jazzy score). Each was directed by William A. Seiter, an inventive gag man as well as a sensitive shaper of star personas, from the Dadaist antics of Wheeler and Woolsey through the stubborn independence of Ginger Rogers. One of his earlier star-whisperer jobs was for child actor Baby Peggy, in The Family Secret (1924). A preserved Library of Congress print screened at MoMA’s To Save and Project festival of film preservation last month. Though Baby Peggy and Colleen Moore are after different things (chocolate and men, respectively) they each destabilize the society around them by daring to be independent.

William A. Seiter was born in New York City in 1890, the oldest son of a prominent family who were co-owners of Higgins & Seiter, purveyors of fine china and rich cut glass. He ran away from a steady paycheck to Hollywood in 1912. He made ends meet as one of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops and as a Western stuntman. He got his first featured part in the 1931 biblical short The Three Wise Men (1913). According to his daughter Jessica Seiter Niblo’s memoir Movietown Baby Grows Up, her father thought he was “so bad I just quit acting.” So instead he would crash movie sets with his friend (and future director) Sidney Franklin, pretending to be assistant directors. They faked it until they made it, and Seiter started directing comedy shorts in 1915. His first great success came with a series of comedies he directed for star Reginald Denny between 1924 and 1928. Dave Kehr described Seiter’s style in the Denny films as “a kind of domestic naturalism, with lightly comic sketches of middle-class young marrieds that anticipate the situation comedies of the Fifties.” Having learned every side of the business, he was an actor’s director. One of his actors Neil Hamilton would give Seiter the most practical of praise in Photoplay: “I cannot forget the treatment accorded me by Mr. Seiter. He is that rare personality in the business who does not believe in working after four thirty. Having been an actor himself once, he realizes that a day spent in front of the cameras, with one’s vitality being slowly consumed by the terrific heat of the lights, is no easy task.”

The Family Secret (1924) is an odd amalgam of Victorian melodrama and sitcom slapstick. It was a vehicle for Baby Peggy (real name Diana Serra Cary), who had become a superstar at age five after making over 150 shorts for Century Studios between 1921 and 1923. Universal signed her to make features, and they chose to adapt the Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Little Princess, The Secret Garden) novel Editha’s Burglar, a Story for Children. Margaret Selfridge (Gladys Hulette) secretly marries Garry Holmes (Edward Earle) against the wishes of her father Sim (Frank Currier). Sim bans Garry from his home, and then has him arrested for burglary when Garry tries to see his wife and newborn baby (Cary). All of the creaky melodramatics halt when the story shifts from the parents to the child, and you can almost sense the entire cast relaxing. The movie then settles into a string of comic set pieces as Baby Peggy undermines any attempt at a functional household. She skips a reading lesson from her nanny and hides in the flour bin; brings home a stray dog whose fleas infest the spinsters at a tea party; wanders onto the streets and bonds with the lower classes, learning how to steal fruit from street urchins and rib the cops. It is that last section that is especially affecting. Peggy has no conception of money’s use value since she lives with it as a given. So on the outside she trades her dress for a banana. Seiter builds scenarios around Peggy’s natural mischievous innocence, and shapes a rickety melodrama into something improbably affecting.

Colleen Moore also exudes a mischievous innocence, but one that perpetually bumps up against the double standards that confront women. Moore’s freedom from restraint is alluring, but it is always in danger of becoming too alluring, in which case the movies pull back and reveal her to be a good girl after all. Moore had long dreamed of becoming a movie star, and kept a scrapbook of her favorite performers – aspirationally leaving the last page blank for herself. She lived a few blocks away from Essanay studios in Chicago, and she appeared for them as a background extra. Her uncle Walter Howey, the managing editor for the Chicago Examiner, got her a screen test with D.W. Griffith, since Howey had helped Griffith get Birth of a Nation and Intolerance past the censorship board. The Colleen Moore persona is synonymous with that of the “flapper”, post-WWI women who flouted conventional gender roles by smoking, drinking and sleeping with whomever they wanted. This image was popularized in the 1923 Colleen Moore film Flaming Youth, in which Moore dallies with her mother’s ex-lover. Of that movie, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked, “I was the spark that lit up flaming youth, and Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble.” With her razor-sharp bob, bamboo-thin body and bowtie lips, she became the physical embodiment of the flapper ethos. Seemingly all elbows and knees, she was the ideal angular construction to dance the Charleston, and had the impish personality to give all that movement an air of subversiveness. Moore married producer John McCormick during the production of Flaming Youth, and together they would define what flappers looked and acted like to the majority of Americans.

By 1929 the flapper character was business as usual, but Moore was still packing them into theaters. Synthetic Sin is based on a 1927 play by Frederick and Fanny Hatton, produced by McCormick, and concerns a small town girl from “Magnolia Gap” who has dreams of becoming a legendary stage tragedienne. Though the feature looks fantastic (it was projected on DCP), it is missing most of the Vitaphone “soundtrack”, which added sound effects and popular songs of the period over the silent feature. Only the last reel of this audio remains.

When hometown hero playwright Donald Anthony (Antonio Moreno) returns home to premiere a new work, every high school drama queen clamors to play the lead. Betty (Colleen Moore) and her sister Margery (Kathryn McGuire) are the most insistent. Betty is spazzy and unsophisticated, her audition more akin to a Saturday Night Live cast hopeful. It involves a “mad Ophelia” scene of flailing limbs and swinging wig pigtails that nearly choke her out. The showstopper, for me anyway, is Moore’s impression of classical pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski. She dons an Einstein fright wig, applies a bushy moustache, and slams the keys like a proto-headbanger. Seiter is always interested in the clash between high and low – as in Peggy’s trip around the working class in The Family Secret. One of his 1930s comedies, If You Could Only Cook, has an out-of work Jean Arthur convince car company president Hubert Marshall to pretend to be her husband so she can get a job as a maid.

Betty continues to travesty the high arts in Synthetic Sin by interrupting her sister’s flouncy “Grecian dance” with a gruesome blackface shuck and jive routine that might keep this movie from ever getting released on home video. Donald is convinced just enough to give Betty the part in the play – but she flops, getting laughs instead of tears. Thinking she has not suffered enough in life to become a true tragic actor, Betty travels to NYC to get a taste of the fast life. Betty is something like the first method actor. So she checks into a fleabag motel and invites every hard-looking, gun-toting gangster into her apartment for carousing. In one impressive dolly shot, Moore walks down a busy street towards a retreating camera while trying on different expressions and poses, from haughty to flirtatious, hand implanted on hip. Her attempts at vamping are hilarious – she runs her hand through her mark’s hair, staring exaggeratedly into his eyes, before getting hair gel all over her fingers and disgustedly wiping them on his lapel. Betty doesn’t belong as a criminal or a super serious artiste. She was built to be funny, though instead of getting a farce all of her own, the movie ends depressingly with Betty declaring that the only career she wants is to be Donald’s wife.

Why Be Good? proposes a different kind of conundrum. In this one Colleen Moore is well versed in the games of seduction, though deep down, the film promises us, what she really wants is marriage. Though the studio and screenwriters are still a little too wary of having a truly independent woman who can sleep with whom she wants, one look at Colleen Moore’s Charleston tells a completely different story. Moore plays the aptly named Pert Kelly, “an effervescent American girl” who is introduced winning a dance competition and then shutting everyone down with, “I’m naturally too hot for this old folks’ home.” Luckily all of the Vitaphone audio is present here to accompany her hot steppin’, and the track also has some pretty clever inventions, including a drunken rendition of “Sweet Adeline” interpreted by two muted, whining trumpets.

Though Pert is a queen by night at elaborate nightclubs like “The Boiler”, which blows steam over its already hot dancers, by day she’s a department store clerk who pines for the personnel manager Peabody Jr. (Neil Hamilton). In an inspired bit of pantomime, she rests her head on his shadow behind an office window, and then draws his face on in lipstick. He is literally a marked man, and she will get him one way or another. The conventional ending of Why Be Good? is earned — she follows her desires and ends up with what she wants, and escapes the drudgery of department store work in the process. Of course her family just can’t understand her partying ways and interest in Peabody Jr. , but in an inspiring moment of flapper cinema, she explains to her father the whole point of this proto-feminist movement:

Pop, listen to me! This is 1929 — not 1899 — I contribute as much money to this house as you do — and as long as I think it is harmless, I’m going to wear what I like, and do what I like! …I want to go out, and dance, and have fun, as long as I can, as much as I can!

The fun ended for Moore with the coming of talkies. She divorced McCormick, her first sound films flopped, and she made her last film in 1934.

BOOB TUBE: UHF (1989)

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

November 11, 2014

UHF was released to apoplectic critics and an apathetic public on July 21st, 1989. Its opening weekend box office put it in eleventh place, behind the nearly month-old run of Weekend at Bernie’s. It would disappear from theaters a few weeks later. Today it comes out in a “25th Anniversary Edition” Blu-ray from Shout! Factory, having etched itself into the nostalgia nodes of thirty-something weirdos. I count myself among them. During those awkward pre-teen years (before “tween” made the age period sound appealing) “Weird Al” Yankovic was something of a secular god, his mild pop-culture subversiveness a convenient way to channel my milquetoast angst. In 1979 Yankovic changed The Knack’s “My Sharona” into “My Bologna” and netted a recording contract, those albums introducing the possibility of oppositional thinking into my half-formed brain. Plus he dressed funny and had polka breaks in between tunes. No downside! His crossover moment occurred on the album Even Worse (1988), which spawned the MTV music video staple “Fat”, a nearly shot-for-shot parody of Michael Jackson’s “Bad”. With the success of the album (it was his first to reach platinum) and the ubiquitous video, the brave souls at the now-defunct Orion Pictures gave him the chance to make a movie. Yankovic and his manager Jay Levey conceived UHF as a delivery system for parodies, along the lines of Kentucky Fried Movie. It turned out to be something more like a combo of SCTV and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but whatever it was, people hated it. Roger Ebert called it “routine, predictable and dumb — real dumb”, while Jonathan Rosenbaum described it as “awful by any standard”. But though I no longer listen to Yankovic’s albums, I still find UHF to be uproarious.

The movie presents “Weird Al” as a sad sack dreamer named George. He’s introduced with a fantasy of himself as Indiana Jones, stealing an Oscar from a booby-trapped ancient temple. At the end of it he’s flattened by a boulder, and there’s a cut from his rubberized body to a hamburger on a skillet. He’s a fry jockey at Big Edna’s Burger World, a position from which he and his trusted doofus friend Bob (David Bowe) will be fired. He’s doomed to more hot dog-in-a-Twinkie dinners until his degenerate gambler uncle Harvey (Stanley Brock) wins a dilapidated UHF television station in a poker game. Harvey taps George to be station manager, and right before George runs the place further into the ground, their janitor Stanley Spadowski (Michael Richards) becomes a variety show sensation and shoots them to the top of the ratings. This attracts the attention of villainous network affiliate head R.J. Fletcher (a jowl-shaking Kevin McCarthy), who unloads all of his dirty tricks to put George out of business.

The antics to save the station are constantly interrupted by commercials and clips, a series of non sequiturs that are the raison d’etre of the film. These include ads for used car salesman Crazy Ernie (“I’m gonna club a baby seal to make a deal”) and highly specialized department store Spatula City (We sell spatulas/And that’s all!”). These are absurdist miniatures that work as well in isolation as they do in the movie. If released on YouTube today, they would light up aggregators as much as Adult Swim’s Too Many Cooks did earlier this week. Each sketch takes a different approach, from the magnificent bad punning of Conan the Librarian (who slices a late book returner in half) to the more direct parody of Geraldo Rivera with George’s apocalyptic Town Talk. Viewing it for the nth time last week, however, I was most amused by the shows that we never see. There is one scene where George is planning the schedule, padding things out around Spadowski’s runaway hit. There are the gross-out moves like “Name That Stain” or “The Wonderful World of Phlegm”, and then the more surreal items like the Friday night quartet of “Druids on Parade”, “The Volcano Worshipers Hour”, “Underwater Bingo for Teens” and “Fun With Dirt”. We don’t see a frame of these shows, but the movie manages to parody the mania for reality television a decade before it happens. Their station’s entire success is based on cheap “reality” programming, whether it’s Spadowski’s in-the-moment spazzing or competitive shows like “Bowling for Burgers” or “Strip Solitaire”.

What cannot be ignored today, though, is its reductive depiction of race. One of George’s neighbors and friends is the martial arts instructor Kuni (Gedde Watanabe), whose humor is supposed to come from his heavily accented English and karate poses. Then there’s “Raul’s Wild Kingdom”, featuring the only Hispanic member of the cast. Speaking like Speedy Gonzalez, he lives in a hovel overrun with animals where he teaches poodles how to fly. It’s, as the kids like to say, problematic. If you can look past it, the film has wonderful performances, and I even found Yankovic to be an appealing presence, though Ebert disagrees:

his physical presence is undermined by bad posture and an indistinct speaking voice. He needs to practice throwing back his shoulders and strutting; he creates a dispirited vacuum at the center of many scenes.

I find this “indistinctness” to be interesting. He is mostly recessive until moments of extreme self-doubt, when he lashes out in violence. He screams at Bob to hit him in the face with a crowbar, and is prone to slamming his head on countertops when depressed. It’s an unstable performance, his slacker schizo something that Adam Sandler might have taken inspiration from for his weirder, more interesting comedies (Zohan, That’s My Boy). Michael Richards exhibits the physical elasticity that made him a star, though he elicits more pity than laughter in this one. His character is something of a tragic one, a lonesome mentally deficient janitor whose best friend is a mop. The true star of the film is Kevin McCarthy, who is clearly having a ball as the red meat villain R.J. Fletcher. He is sexist, sadistic and mean to people from all races and religions. McCarthy works on every variation of scowl, his mouth muscles permanently strained downward. Through all his huffing and puffing and bad mouthing, McCarthy walks away with the movie, his blustering in disbelief that “A UHF station!” beat them in the ratings a line reading whose tenor and bluster is permanently embedded in my synapses.

But then, I cannot be objective about this movie. Some of my fondest memories involve listening to a cassette tape of the UHF soundtrack with my brother. We heard the movie before we saw it, imagining the jokes in our heads. On certain long afternoons in the early 1990s, “Weird Al”‘s twenty second blast of cock rock “Let Me Be Your Hog” was the funniest thing in the world. Divorced of its context (Uncle Harvey listening to it on the radio), it was just a strange man making pig noises and screaming to a soaring guitar riff. It was nonsense, it was bliss.

THE HUNTED: RITUALS (1977)

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

November 4, 2014

Though Halloween has passed, it is still possible to watch horror movies. It’s quite pleasant, too, not being harangued about the best one “you’ve never seen” every other mouse click. I celebrated this freedom from list fascism by attending a twelve hour horror movie marathon at Anthology Film Archives on November 1st. It was an eclectic selection that ranged through low-budget Mexican vampires, classy British omnibus films, and schlocky AIP giant rat attacks. The title that stuck in my cranium and asked to be dispatched in this space is the 1977 Canadian survival horror obscurity Rituals (aka The Creeper). A post-Deliverance male bonding death march starring Hal Holbrook, it pits a group of alcoholic doctors against a psychically damaged ex-soldier in the wilds of Northern Ontario. The film relentlessly strips away the men’s defenses until they are physically and emotionally bare, live nerve endings that become easy targets for the almost entirely unseen soldier. In their profession the doctors have made mistakes, often tragic ones, and their medical ethics loom large when they are forced to deal with their own mortality. The only decent home video version is an out-of-print DVD from Code Red, but it’s well worth tracking down.

England-born director Peter Carter made his career in Canadian television, but first broke through with the independent feature The Rowdyman (1972), about an aging womanizer in Newfoundland. It’s a scruffy comedy that makes extensive use of location shooting, so you get a rich sense of the town, from the loser’s matchbox sized apartment, to the local paper mill, to “Lucky’s Chop Suey House” on the main drag. Writer and star Gordon Pinsent won the best actor at the Canadian Film Awards for his efforts, though I could understand maybe one out of every ten words through his thick Newfie accent. Rituals is Carter’s second feature, and he retains the specific sense of place. Locations are key to the film’s movement, from the lush, fecund greenery of their initial hike to the parched desert land around a man made dam. Whether Carter’s third feature, the Peter Fonda/Jerry Reed AIP trucker adventure High Ballin’ continues this specificity, I leave to my more intrepid readers to discover. Carter died in 1983, soon after making the Christopher Plummer action comedy Highpoint.

The screenplay for Rituals was written by first timer Ian Sutherland, and produced by character actor Lawrence Dane (who co-stars as the whiny Mitzi). It was Dane’s second and final producing credit. This was, for the most part, a film made by newcomers under difficult circumstances. For much of the film the actors are trudging through fly-choked forests or swirling rapids. I found one headline about the production, from the Montreal Star, that reads “Flies major hazard in tough ‘Rituals” shooting.” It must have been miserable for the actors and the crew. But it is a film of great control, though also one of understandable sadism. The effects build slowly, and the payoffs are oblique.

A group of five friends take their yearly vacation in the remote Northern Ontario wilderness. They are all current or ex-doctors, and the trade off who gets to pick the destination. This year it’s DJ (Gary Reineke), who wears a fetching Montreal Expos hat and is rather cavalier with how he discusses the health of his patients. He explains away a botched surgery that he’s just trying to make a living. On the other spectrum is Harry (Hal Holbrook), a by-the-book doctor who extends life spans as long as he can, done with the discipline of his army training (he fought in Korea). Others seem to float in between these two poles, including Mitzi (Dane), who seems to go along to get along, and is more accepting of death as a possibility. At their first night of base camp, there is a sense of hetero male bonding check boxes having to be ticked off. There’s an inflatable sex doll, but she’s mere decoration, as these upper class adventurers pose as partiers but strain to keep their mask of civility as long as possible.

Martin (Robin Gammell), a barely functional alcoholic, quotes the last lines of Yeats’ The Second Coming as they discuss the Native American legend about how the valley was made by the Moon impressing itself on the land: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Martin explains the connection: “-The moon is magic, right? And Yeats was into magic. Yeats was into the moon.” Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an organization dedicated to studying the occult. As Martin is explaining, the camera takes a roaming POV, lurking in the background as if from the perspective of an onlooker. Martin desires the occult and supernatural as a way to escape his own being – and immediately the camera obliges, providing a seemingly mystical presence to watch them. As the film progresses, this presence becomes more and more violent. It begins by stealing their boots, and ends in unrepentant slaughter. Each man’s beliefs are tested and failed by their attacker. The most damning test is reserved for Harry, who is forced to carry an incapacitated Martin throughout the barren landscape. Martin is close to death, and draining Harry’s strength. But his moral code forces him to soldier on with this burden. Harry sets himself up to be a martyr, but in the end he is denied even that. He is granted survival as his final punishment.

TO SAVE AND PROJECT: THE 12TH MOMA INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF FILM PRESERVATION

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 28, 2014

Late last month, on the outrage machine known as Twitter, Variety tweeted the following: “Most films and TV shows are now available online legally, says a new study”. As with most provocative headlines, it turned out to be incredibly misleading. The “study” was commissioned by NBC Universal and performed by audit, tax and advisory firm KPMG. They only chose to track the most “popular and critically-acclaimed” films, which according to them comprises films with the “highest gross box office receipts” and those that won Oscar Best Picture awards. So this is a highly selective, entirely meaningless 808 film sample that overlooks the majority of film history. It’s not surprising then, that 94% of the films in their report were available on streaming platforms. Essentially it is saying that all the films you have already seen are available for you to watch again. 35mm is becoming an archival medium, more stable than digital in its constantly shifting technologies, but that makes archives more reluctant to ship prints to theaters, as Nick Pinkerton reported in his article on the DCP wars in Film Comment. A situation is growing where studios don’t want to ship prints of rare titles, but neither do they want to shell out the money for a decent HD transfer and clean-up, a very expensive proposition to enact on a large scale. Thus my dream of a 127-film 4K-scanned Edward L. Cahn retrospective will never come to pass.

That is why festivals like To Save and Project are so vital. In its twelfth year at the Museum of Modern Art, the series gathers recent restoration projects from around the world, and was organized by film curator Joshua Siegel, adjunct curator Dave Kehr, Adjunct Curator, and curatorial assistant Sophie Cavoulacos. For years a redoubt of celluloid, it has had to bow to the prevailing winds and present digital scans, including this year’s 4K restorations of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and A Fistful of Dollars. But there are also more heroic instances of digital rescue, like the South African blaxploitation soccer-rigging curiosity Joe Bullet (1971, screening 11/8 and 11/13), banned by the government soon after its release but rescued by the Gravel Road African Film Legacy (GRAFL) initiative. I’ve always treasured the festival more for its oddities than its classics, which would emerge elsewhere anyway. Another one is Miss Okichi (1935, screening 10/31 and 11/4), with Kenji Mizoguchi credited as “supervisor”, though elsewhere he is listed as a co-director. It’s a tragic tale of doomed love that feels like a missing piece in Mizoguchi’s filmography, even if more detective work needs to be done about its origins. Then there is the bizarre It’s a Wonderful Life noir Repeat Performance (1947, screening 11/12 and 11/14), in which a murderous dame gets to re-live the year leading up to the moment she kills her husband.

Joe Bullet was one of the first South African films with an all-black cast, a no-budget Shaft that opened briefly in Soweto before being pulled from theaters by the Apartheid government. Though not explicitly political, the image of star Ken Gampu brandishing a gun and enforcing vigilante justice must have struck a nerve. The story revolves around the Eagles soccer team, whose star players are getting attacked by thugs from an opposing squad. When the feud turns violent, the Eagles call on Joe Bullet to even the score. The film has a rough, unfinished quality, with poorly post-dubbed dialogue that was seemingly made up on the spot. But the film has a schlocky energy and DIY vibe, especially in its inventive fight scenes. Mr. Bullet has a sweaty staredown with a King Cobra, opens a door with a bulldozer, and chases the villain up a steel girder in the honest-to-goodness nail-biting finale, complete with a weighted mannequin tossed off the side. Complete with catchy theme song that repeats the main characters name ad infinitum, Joe Bullet has midnight movie screenings in its future. It is also valuable as a document of its own making, capturing the styles, hangouts and cultural scene of black Africans in the early 70s. Gampu sports a checked sportcoat and beige turtleneck ensemble that is the epitome of 70s cool. Gampu was one of the first black African actors to break into Hollywood, he was a “warrior” in The Naked Prey (1965), and later appeared in Zulu Dawn (1979) and The Gods Must be Crazy (1980), again in stereotyped “native” roles. In Joe Bullet Gampu’s unflappable cool was shunted off into shabby locations. The big nightclub scene, with a hard-driving funk band, looks to be shot in a clapboard shack, and the soccer manager’s office looks like that of a custodian’s. There is no physical white presence in Joe Bullet, although their impact is palpable in the economic disadvantages that are etched into every frame.

Miss Okichi (1935) is also about economic imbalance, and the criminal enterprises it encourages. Isuzu Yamada (Throne of Blood) stars as the ill-omened Okichi, whose parents are dead and whose brother is a wanted murderer. To keep her family’s hotel afloat she signs up with a gang in an arranged marriage scheme. The gang targets arranged marriages, and has the beautiful Okichi pretend to be the betrothed. Then they grab the dowry and disappear. Eventually Okichi gets disgusted with all of the deceptions and runs off with one of her marks. It is a dark, necrotic melodrama, steeped in darkness and death. These are the fatalistic lyrics Okichi repeatedly sings to her beloved: “To meet is when parting begins.” The print of the film was housed at Shochiku and presented on Japanese television. David Bordwell writes that Mizoguchi “codirected it with Takashima Tatsunosuke for Dai Ichi Eiga, the production company he formed with Nagata Masaichi.” The MoMA notes list Mizoguchi as “supervisor”, so it’s unclear how much input he actually had in its production. But it features Mizoguchi settings and themes – female self-sacrifice in a patriarchal web, and, as Bordwell notes, scenes of “chiaroscuro melancholy”. Regardless of whether it can be labeled a Mizoguchi film or not, it’s a tough poison pill of a movie, filled with dark beauty.

Repeat Performance is a noir that borrows the plot of It’s a Wonderful Life, though to different ends. George Bailey saw what life would be like without him. For noted actress Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) in Repeat Performance, she has to live her life over again, only to see that she while she can change the path of fate, she cannot alter its destination (it’s a film noir Final Destination). The film opens with Sheila murdering her husband, the camera pushing into the grisly scene through the flapping front door in a bravura shot. While mounting the staircase to her producer’s apartment, she wishes she could live the previous year over again. With nothing other than a cut – there is no angel to guide her – she is thrust back a year, and so she begins to try to change the adulterous path of her husband, the transgression that led to the crime. But nothing Sheila does can change her destiny. This rather ambitious project was the first big budget foray by the Poverty Row studio Eagle Lion. Director Alfred L. Werker (He Walked by Night) replaced Jules Dassin just before filming, and it’s a workmanlike job that can’t overcome the repetitious nature of the material. Though it retains a chill for its downbeat closing scenes, where nothing has materially changed – for all of Sheila’s effort and foresight. Everyone is either dead or alone, and nothing can be done about it. Repeat Performance will screen in a 35mm print restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding from the Film Noir Foundation. To Save and Project runs through November 22nd at the Museum of Modern Art, so if you are in NYC make sure to attend and bear witness to some of the fascinating oddities of film history before they escape back into the vaults.

BOWLING FOR DOLLARS: KINGPIN (1996)

February 20, 2020 robertemmetsweeneyLeave a comment

October 21, 2014

Farrelly Brothers movies are akin to family gatherings. They are filled with extreme neuroses, unexpected violence, and deep undercurrents of affection. Their films are even populated with friends and relatives from their Rhode Island home. Listen to any of their audio commentaries and you’ll find that half the actors are bankers and car salesman who grew up with them back east. Every time I see a Farrelly feature I think of how Manny Farber described Howard Hawks’ “weird mother hen instinct.” The Farrellys have it as well, just weirder. Dumb and Dumber was their directorial debut and an enormous hit, a tale of ignorant male friendship that lowered scatalogical slapstick so far it went below lowbrow and out the other side. It’s also their first attempt at depicting the bonds of brotherhood, in which Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels perform a kind of radical acceptance of each other’s flaws — through complete stupidity, but still (they treated the same theme with greater complexity in Stuck on You, their greatest film and biggest bomb). The long-gestating but certainly not maturing sequel, Dumb and Dumber To, comes out next month.

The Farrellys follow-up to the original Dumb and Dumber, though, will never get a sequel, though it did come out on Blu-ray last week. Kingpin is another tale of success-challenged males learning to live with the other’s failure, this time in the lacquered middle-aged crisis world of bowling. Though where Dumb and Dumber is an abstract performance piece, as Carrey and Daniels could have been performing in front of a blank wall to similar effect, Kingpin tries to embed its outrageous characters into a semblance of the real world. Each bowling alley and auto-body shop is lovingly detailed, and essential to the development of its sad sack characters. The lead failure Roy Munson, Jr. (Woody Harrelson) is from the made-up small town of Ocelot, Iowa, a corroded rust belt city where he was once its proudest son as State Bowling champion, while ending up in a pit-stained flophouse in Scranton, PA dodging his scrofulous landlord’s bill. He sees a way out in the smooth stroke of Amish naif Ishmael (Randy Quaid), who he thinks can win the big bowling competition in Reno, and take down his longtime nemesis Ernie McCracken (Bill Murray).

Kingpin was not an easy project for the Farrelly’s to make. Dumb and Dumber’s massive success was attributed to Jim Carrey, and so the Farrelly’s could not get one of their own projects off the ground. So instead they pursued a script by veteran comedy writers Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan (both of The Golden Girls writing staff). As sports fans they related to the material – they always include bizarre athlete cameos, and the one in Kingpin is something else, Roger Clemens as a raging redneck named “Skidmark”. Since disgraced by Major League Baseball’s Mitchell Report for using anabolic steroids, his short scene as a rageaholic gains retrospective…resonance, let’s say. The lead casting was also problematic, with big stars not wanting to dirty their image with the Farrelly’s outrageous material. Peter Farrelly was roommates with Woody Harrelson during his Cheers days, and had tried to get him to act in Dumb and Dumber, but Harrelson thought the script was “too silly”. So on Kingpin Peter tried again, and finally clinched the deal on a pool hall pit – if Peter sank a complicated bank shot Woody would agree to take the part. Peter nailed it, and Woody did the movie. They had targeted Chris Farley to play Ishmael, but he was tied up in another project, so they went with the more offbeat casting of Randy Quaid, who offered an aw shucks gullibility to the role. Farley would have been outstanding but more aggressive – Quaid’s meek interpretation and ungainly gangliness offered more of a match with Woody’s performance of low-key insecurity.

Perhaps the biggest coup to Quaid’s signing was that he had Bill Murray’s direct number. Usually you have to leave a message at some automated mailbox to which he may or may not respond, but Quaid was able to call Murray and relay the Farrelly’s interest in having him on the film to play the womanizing bowling champ McCracken. In his enigmatic manner he agreed, and then sent no more communication until the day of the shoot, when he arrived in character in that teapot-lid comb-over. His hair is one of the biggest characters in the film, though it just makes fleeting appearances. It is pure stringy, thinning magnificence, and when the comb-over tips off his bald pate, it seems to reach three lanes over. Murray improvised all of his scenes, including the oft-quoted inspirational nonsense: “You’re on a gravy train with biscuit wheels”. The Farrelly’s have famously loose sets, aided by their nepotistic ways as well as their belief that the actors should be allowed the freedom to experiment – and look ridiculous.

While the country was experiencing an economic boom in this period, the focus on the rust belt depicts the areas left behind. When Munson returns to Ocelot, they place an emphasis on the town’s decay, from the shuttered ice cream shop to the corroding gas station of Munson’s long-gone father. Movies of third-tier sports have a tendency to capture America in decline, as in Robert Aldrich’s …All the Marbles, about struggling female pro wrestlers criss-crossing the Midwest. Munson’s home of industrial rot is contrasted with the unreal artificiality of Reno, which is depicted almost entirely inside the neon mall of the National Bowling Stadium. Ernie McCracken is the human avatar of Reno, a slick amoral womanizer who is worshiped for his amorality.

This doesn’t mean the Farrelly’s stint on their patented body-horror comedy – wringing endless jokes out of Munson’s prosthetic hand, which ends up in as many sticky situations as the Addams Family’s Thing. Their movies are ones of extremity, in which bodies and psyches are broken down. Whether it’s idiots in Dumb and Dumber, disabled drunks in Kingpin, schizophrenics in Me, Myself and Irene or conjoined twins in Stuck on You, the Farrellys are obsessed with both physical and psychical deformity. There is a bit of the freak show in their work, something confrontational in how they present these debilities without a shred of pity or condescension. They are full fledged people with the equal ability to screw up as any of us. One of their favorite character actors was Danny Murphy, a quadriplegic who appears in Kingpin as a smirkingly violent goon who flicks on the bowling ball return that cuts off Munson’s hand. When you watch him in Kingpin, he is not “the guy in a wheelchair”, but “that asshole who chopped of Munson’s hand”. And that’s how he preferred it. Murphy appeared in all of their films from then on in a variety of roles, from sympathetic to villainous, until his death this past August.

The exception in Kingpin’s parade of unusual physical specimens is Claudia (Vanessa Angel), a hard-bitten blonde who escapes her abusive hustler boyfriend to join Roy and Ishmael on their journey to Reno. She is unique because of her supposed physical perfection, which for Claudia ironically also keeps her outside of proper society. She is somehow too beautiful, so that no one can act normally around her. She then naturally uses her looks to manipulate people, since they are already manipulated before even speaking to her. She uses her body as a weapon throughout the film, to distract opposing teams, and then to beat the stuffing out of Roy in one of the film’s slapstick highlights.

Kingpin is a great bowling movie because it is a movie about failure. Neither Roy or Ishmael wins the big match in Reno. All of the training montages and team building exercises were for naught. At least by traditional metrics of success. But in the Farrelly world, the trio has endured each other’s flaws and accepted them, through ritualized exchanges of humiliations, mostly hook hands to the face and kicks to the balls. Translated through Farrelly slapstick-sentiment, it’s something like love.