I just came across this piece on Dancer in the Dark I wrote a long time ago for Sight and Sound. It’s now online at: http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/53
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Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, USA, 1944)
Noirs have never ceased being in vogue but interest has been even stronger than usual recently with the BFI publishing its Top Ten list of American noirs and an interesting infographic on what makes a noir also from the BFI trending on social media. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s list of overlooked noirs has also been making the rounds.
Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady fits most of the characteristics they all describe but doesn’t make Rosenbaum’s list. It seems a key noir but one that doesn’t feature as much in the discussions of the mode as one might expect. In the introductory essay entitled ‘The Making of Phantom Lady: Film Noir in the Starting Blocks’ that accompanies the Arrow Academy edition of the film, Alex K. Rode contextualises it alongside Double Indemnity and Laura and credits it with jumpstarting the career of Joan Harrison as producer, Cornel Woolrich and Siodmak himself and writes that ‘the picture became a stylistic trendsetter for the emerging film noir movement’.Though a popular success in its day, Phantom Lady is a noir treasured primarily by connoisseurs of the genre.
Phantom Lady begins with an extraordinary close-up of the back of a woman’s head (Fig A). She’s wearing an ostentatious fur-lined hat whose plumes extend practically to the edges of the 4-3 frame (see fig. 1). Who is this woman? Why so ostentatious a hat? Why is she filmed from behind? Why is the focus shallow so that the emphasis is on the back of her head and on her hat? Who is this faceless woman with fur and plumes? All will be important but the film doesn’t tell us right away. Instead, the the hat seems to come into being with increasing light, the camera pulls back, the set comes into focus – a bar –we see a barman, the woman turns her head, shows us her face and we see her borrow a nickel. The camera begins to pursue her, but we don’t know where her destination is because rather than trail her there, the camera instead follows an incoming man to the bar. This sequence shot will be rhymed by the last sequence shot in the scene but the scene there will end on the barman for reasons that will subsequently become clearer. This is a film where every camera movement, every choice of composition or editing seems purposeful.
In three minutes a world, a mood, and a dilemma are clearly established. A lonely man meets a lonely woman bar. He’s got tickets for a hit show but has been stood up. Will she join him? The woman, hysterical for reasons not yet known to us, agrees but only on condition that they don’t exchange names and addresses. From the first shot, the film hooks us narratively and has us purring with pleasure at the skilled and inventive visual storytelling. Just as importantly, from the first scene, the élan and complexity of the staging, announces that one is witnessing the work of a great director.
I felt like David Parkinson, when he writes on ‘How I Fell for Robert Siodmak’, there are some directors, ‘who knock you for six the first time you encounter one of their films, with the result that you not only remember that particular epiphany for years to come but immediately want to see more of their work.’ Phantom Lady proved a similar encounter with Robert Siodmak for me as well: the staging at the scenes at the bar, the angles, the shooting in depth, the travelling shots across the bar, it’s not dazzling, it doesn’t strike you dumb, but one just purrs with pleasure at seeing a filmmaker who knows his way around camera and mise-en-scène as ingeniously as Siodmak does here.
In another excellent piece on noir for the BFI, Parkinson writes: ‘Siodmak didn’t patent the noir formula, but he showed how to blend German expressionism and French existentialism with American angst and, in the process, he directed more canonical landmarks than anyone else in the new genre’s heyday. Dismayed by the world around him, Siodmak examined societal injustice, domestic turmoil, gender conflict, sexual repression, psychological trauma and the rise of the career criminal. Preferring to shoot on controllable studio sets rather than on location, he used deep-focus photography, precise camera moves, meticulously designed mises-en-scène and sculpted lighting effects to create milieux beset by paranoia, greed, lust, obsession and violence. Multiple flashbacks, rapid cuts, mirrored images and unsettling scores reinforced the sense of urban alienation, moral decay and nightmarish paranoia.’ Not all of these are evident in Phantom Lady but most are; and that’s part of the enduring fascination of the film for me: how a film that is not quite good enough can still be a canonical noir, arguably the ur-text of the genre (though I’m quite happy to use cycle or style or mode if that better fits your understanding of the body of films. I in fact prefer cycle to refer to these films from the early 40’s to late 50s).
Phantom Lady raises interesting dilemmas; it’s the work of someone who has a mastery of the medium but who doesn’t quite have control of the material he’s given to work with; it’s also one of the most memorable and significant of the cycle of 40s film noirs, sharing the same sense of dislocation and alienation, the trope of the investigation or search for the woman – and this film manages to find several ‘phantom ladies’ –; the distinctive high key-lighting that encases a world in shadows that are not merely landscape or background but moral and in this case almost metaphysical. Siodmak and cinematographer Woody Bredell, through their skill at composition and lighting, make of these shadows and shapes some of the most beautiful and haunting images of 1940s cinema. Yet, the pulpiness of the material – adapted by Bernard C. Shoenfeld from a Cornell Woolrich novel he wrote under the name of William Irish — and some of the worst acting of any landmark film prevent this from being as good a film as its impact would suggest.
Yet the film is full of interesting tangents; extra-diegetically, the screenplay is credited Joan Harrison, Hitchcock’s past and future collaborator. Does this have any bearing on the film’s focusing on a woman who’s impersonating women, performing different types of femininity, and in search of a ‘Phantom Lady’ to help save the man she loves? The film also has proffers a wink to Carmen Miranda, the other and extra-diegetic Chica Boom Girl, then at the height of her fame and being impersonated by everyone, perhaps most famously Mickey Rooney. . Franchot Tone, the biggest marquee star in the film, only appears half-way through and as a villain. The film links the then fashionable Freudian psychology to madness, and links the villain to Modern Art explicitly by associating him with Van Gogh’s self-portrait. Serial killing and Modern Art go together in this film.
Visually the film clearly owes a debt to German Expressionism and the use of lighting, canted angles and overt symbolism is fascinating particularly in the extraordinary sequence where Elisha Cook Jr. jams with the jazz band. The scene with the secretary following the barman to get him to confess that he does know the ‘Phantom Lady’ are also examples of superb noir mise-en-scène: staged in depth, the film begins by showing Carol (Ella Raines)alone, staring; then people gather, then she’s the only there, then she disappears. Later, when we’re shown her following him, amidst these little pools of light illuminating little but the rain, we only see her (superb) legs. There’s then this wonderful moment at the train station when they’re waiting for the train and each of them is acting with their eyes, and there’s this instant when it’s indicated he might push her but for this black lady entering the station. It’s a lovely moment of tension, indecision; the hint that something much darker than what we’ve seen so far is a possibility. The whole scene culminates in the bartender being run over by a car whilst trying to get away from her. She’s wearing a plastic see-through rain-coat not unlike Joan Bennett’s in Scarlett Street; whilst all that’s left of the duplicitous barman is his hat, in a puddle of water on the road, glistening from the light of the street lamps in the cold dark night.
The film is marred by the performances of the leads. Allan Curtis is handsome but very wooden. Ella Raines is very beautiful if stiff as the good-girl secretary and then hams it up way too broadly when she impersonates the good-time girl. As already indicated Franchot Tone appears late in the movie, as the hero’s best friend, and everything that prevented him from being a star — he can pass for handsome but isn’t quite, there’s a slight superior sourness to his puss and a kind of distancing to his person, part of the reason that though highly regarded as an actor, he never quite made it as a star – is used very effectively here. Indeed, Siodmak does better with the supporting players – Regis Toomey is a delight as the detective who’s always hewing gum, always in character, always focused on what’s happening on the scene. His eyes are always doing something, particularly noticeable in relation to the lovely lump that is Alan Curtis. And of course the superb Elisha Cook Jr. as the nervy, needy, and seedy sideman.
Structurally, the film has a fascinating premise: everyone remembers him (the bartender, the cabdriver) but no one remembers her; she’s the Phantom Lady. The film, like other noirs, involves an investigation of a woman (the wife who’s murdered, the witness who’s disappeared, etc) but here, and unusually in noir, it is a woman who is chercheing la femme and the woman rescues the man rather than cause his destruction, and she does this by donning different masquerades of womanhood. It’s quite extraordinary.
Visually, the film is beautiful with arguably as many images that are both typical and iconic as in any noir. The writing is pulpy; the acting often amateurish and stiff. But, oh the direction: the direction is a thing of beauty. After I saw The Spiral Staircase last year, I wrote, The real star, however, is director Robert Siodmak: his camera movements alone are a thrill to see; they creep, glide, close in, pay attention, sweep, peek, penetrate; all in wonderful compositions that will elicit awe and joy in those who can appreciate them’. This is at least as true of Phantom Lady but with even more beautiful images and ingeniously directed scenes that act almost as contemporary set-pieces. A B-movie, but one in which phantom ladies, masquerades, performativity, modern art, madness and desire intersect in dark and rainy urban streets; A B-movie directed by a master of the medium.
Aside from the fine introductory essay by Alan K. Rode, the Arrow Academy release also features Dark and Deadly: 50 Years of Film Noir, an interesting documentary featuring contributions from filmmakers who worked in the original post-war classics (John Alton, Edward Dmytrik, Robert Wise) but mainly as a starting point to an understanding of the 90s revival (contributors here include Dennis Hopper, John Dahl, Carl Franklin, James Foley and others. Critic Ruby Rich is the standout contributor in the film.
José Arroyo
[1] Alan Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini, Robert Porfirio, ‘Introduction: The Classic Period’ Film Noir: The Encyclopedia London: Overlook Duckworth, 2010, p. 15.
[2] James Naremore, ‘American Film Noir: The History of an Idea’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 49, no. 2. (Winter, 1995-960, pp. 12-28, pp. 18-19.
Can I Go Now?: The Life of Sue Mengers, Hollywood’s First Superagent
Can I Go Now?: The Life of Sue Mengers, Hollywood’s First Superagent
By Brian Kellow
New York: Viking, 2015
A biography of the greatest agent of one of the greatest periods of American cinema is a book to read; especially if that agent is a woman; and even more so, if she zings one-liners like Sue Mengers.
Brian Kellow’s book is admirably researched and a great read. We learn that Mengers was Jewish, born in Hanover, and that her family only emigrated to the US in 1935. Kellow depicts Menger’s struggles with her mother as the driving force in her life: ‘My mother, the Gorgon’ says Mengers in the very first sentence of Chapter One. But surely hazard, chance, the luck to have ended up in New York whilst many of her relatives in Germany ended up in ovens must also have informed her very particular way of being in the world and helped shape her actions?
In the first few chapters, Kellow depicts Mengers as a character out of Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything: a combination of Joan Harris and Peggy Olsen from Mad Men in the process of becoming like a character in a Jacqueline Sussann novel. She begins intelligent, hard-working, and with incredible drive and proceeds to shed her inhibitions in order to get what she wants, all the while scheming to get more power, and more permanent sources of it, than transient desirability could be cashed for. That’s how Mengers worked her way from acting school (she was pretty enough to think of becoming a star), to working as a general receptionist at MCA, then run by Lew Wasserman, to working as Jay Kanter’s secretary. Kanter was the agent for Brando, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe amongst others; and Mengers took and made the calls. If the boys of her stature, the Geffens and the Ovitzes, made it up through the mailroom, Mengers – and she had no peer amongst women – made it through the secretarial pool.
In 1957 Mengers left MCA, landed at the Baum and Newborn Agency — smaller but offering more room to rise — and by ‘59, Sue was secretary to Charles Baker, head of the theatre department at the William Morris Agency, one of the biggest, oldest and most respected in the business and still run by the legendary Abe Lastfogel, who had joined in 1912. Whilst there, Mengers met Alice Lee “Boaty” Boatwright, a young casting director who was to become a great aid, resource and life-long friend. One of the interesting things about the book is that it demonstrates that whilst Mengers could play with the boys, and on their own terms, she earned and enjoyed the trust and confidence of the girls.
In 1963 Mengers went to work for Korman Associates, another small firm whose list was mainly B, and whose most famous client was probably Joan Bennett. By then, Bennett’s star had plummeted to such depths that a leading role in the ABC-TV hit daytime soap, Dark Shadows, was considered a career boost (Interestingly, it was produced by Lela Swift, who also directed 588 episodes). Mengers was relentless in pursuing new talent, always already stars — she didn’t have the patience to develop unknowns — and made such a name for herself that people, famous people, were already talking about her.
Menbgers was friends with Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, then at the peak of their stardom; Nicky Haslam, already the jet setting society designer, and Gore Vidal and his partner Howard Austen — whom Mengers would become deeply devoted to — and many others. According to Haslam, Vidal and Mengers made ‘topping jokes, topping remarks. They wouldn’t exactly put people down; they would just to react to what people said with much funnier lines.’
Mengers had a talent for friendship. She had the wit and the chutzpah to be what was then called a ‘fag hag’ — she was at ease with gay men and their culture and shared in the outsider’s ironic stance; she could be a man’s woman – she certainly loved the boys; and, most importantly, she was a girly girl who helped many of what would become the most powerful women in Hollywood in the Blockbuster Era (Sherry Lansing and Elaine Goldsmith) get a leg-up in the business. Many of her friendships would be lifelong ones and she inspired rare devotion in her friends if not always in her clients.
Part of Mengers’ attraction was her smarts, her flouting of social conventions and her wit. She’d been Constance Bennett’s agent in the 60s when the 30s Diva was finding it hard to get a job and, after much hard work, landed her a choice part as Lana Turner’s mother in Madame X, only to have Bennett hound her for star billing or at least her name in a box. She died of a cerebral haemorrhage shortly after making the film and Mengers couldn’t resist quipping, ‘Well, at least she’s got her box now’. After the Manson gang murdered Sharon Tate in her home, she soothed an anxious Barbra Streisand by telling her, ‘Don’t worry honey. Stars aren’t being murdered. Only featured players’. And famously, ‘if you can’t say anything nice about someone, come sit by me.’
Mengers relished having so many of the top stars and directors of a defining epoch in American cinema on her roster, amongst them: Gene Hackman, Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, Ali McGraw, Faye Dunaway, Michael Caine, Peter Bogdanovich, Mike Nichols and even Brian de Palma. But she saw Barbra Streisand, then the biggest star not only in the movies but in the whole of the world of entertainment, as the lynchpin to her roster. She considered her a ‘soul’ sister, managed her career throughout the 70s and would be devastated when Streisand left her in ’81.
Nonetheless, throughout the 70s, Mengers personified the figure of ‘The Hollywood Agent’ in American Culture, the only woman ever to do so. CBS 60 Minutes, then a top-ten network show and one of the most respected news programs on American television, did a profile of her in her trademark pink shades, speaking in her baby girl voice: ‘I was a little pisher, a little nothing, making $135 a week as a secretary for the William Morris agency in New York,’ she tells Mike Wallace,’…and I thought, Gee, what they do isn’t that hard, you know. And I like the way they live, and I like those expense accounts, and I like the cars…And I suddenly thought: that beats typing.
Sue Mengers has been a legend for a long time. In 1973’s The Last of Sheila, Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, a client, based the character of the bulldozing agent played by Dyan Cannon on Mengers. And everyone in the know, and even some who weren’t quite, knew who was being referred to. As recently as 2013, Bette Midler played her in the hit Broadway play, I’ll Eat You Last. Mengers is a myth and a legend.
What Kellow does in Can I Go Now? that’s so great is that he a brings the person to life ; we get to know the funniness, the love of pot, the talent for bringing people together at dinner parties, the good times and the good business. Kellow also does an excellent job of charting the development of the agency business in the US – the book is a great, more personal companion to Frank Rose’s excellent The Agency: William Morris and the Secret History of Showbusiness and to Connie Bruck’s equally good When Hollywood had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence. The book is also a marvellously entertaining recounting of some of the biggest deals in the business, featuring some of the most important stars and movies of that great decade of American Cinema, the 70s. It’s a book to read.
José Arroyo
Judy Garland on Judy Garland
Judy Garland on Judy Garland, edited by Randy L. Schmidt. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014
It could be argued that of all Studio-Era stars, Judy Garland is the one that continues to be most present in the culture; most seen and heard, most discussed, indeed so much of a reference point that we might take her presence for granted. Every Easter we see her in Easter Parade with Fred Astaire; every Christmas it’s ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ in Meet Me in St. Louis; not a year goes by where we don’t have an opportunity to see The Wizard of Oz, recently even in Cinemas and in 3-D. Her death in 1969 was said to have sparked the Stonewall Riots, the subject of one of this year’s great flop movies. She’s a gay icon. But the obsession with her life and career is, as Susan Boyt so movingly demonstrated in the excellent My Judy Garland Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), not limited to gay males d’un certain age. End of the Rainbow, a musical show about her life, is still touring after its debut in 2005, and Tracie Bennett won the Tony for her performance in the play in 2012. This year, Lorna Luft, the other Garland daughter, has been touring the UK in The Judy Garland Songbook and Variety just announced that The Judy Garland Show, which ran for a short time in 1963 and 1964, would, with The Merv Griffin show, anchor the new Talk-Variety block on Get TV.
All the above is a context as to why I was so eager to read Judy Garland on Judy Garland: Interviews and Encounters. In the back cover of the book, Sam Irvin, author of Kay Thompson: From Funny Face to Eloise, tells us, ‘The Holy Grail for fans of Judy Garland! Randy Schmidt is the Indiana Jones of Garland archaeology. Never before has Judy been given such laser-focused spotlight to speak for herself – and like her greatest musical perofrmances, she takes center stage and wows us with every phrase.’ After reading the book, my first thought was, ‘who does Sam Irvin think he’s kidding’?
The book is composed of interviews garnered from radio, the fan magazines, newspapers and later television. They’re organised by decade. The first two deades are clearly studio stage-managed. Thus in the 30s we get a lot about how Judy’s stuck ‘In-Between’, the title of one of her great hits of the period, where she’s not yet a child but can’t quite go on dates. The forties are very much a way of stage-managing the public reception of her love life; mentions of Artie Shaw and then her elopement with David Rose, her subsequent marriage and divorce with Vincente Minnelli and the birth of Liza. The fifties are only partially covered and we only get slected interviews mainly from the fan magazines until 1955, thus covering the period where she was fired from MGM to the moment just after the release of A Star is Born. The Sixties is expectedly necrophiliac but covers a greater diversity of material, including excellent interviews with Art Buchwald and a transcript from a superb interview with Gypsy Rose Lee on TV.
On the one hand, it’s great to see these collected in one volume. On the other, most of them are quite readily available and the ones culled from TV or radio would be so much better to listen to or watch that one feels disappointed. One doesn’t really begin to hear her ‘voice’ until the sixties, though there are some hints in the 50s material as well.
There’s no question that this is rich source material; and that Randy L. Schmidt has done a good job of collating it together. But reading through the material one wishes someone had offered an analysis or more of a context for each of those periods covered as it raises a lot of questions and answers none: Are Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland the key popularisers of the concept of the teenager in the twentieth century?;How did what Garland mean evolve throughout the 40s? Is anything Garland did in the 50s different to what Sinatra did and is the differing ways they were imaged and publicised not a continued marker of an oppressive sexism? How could someone who worked at that pace across so many media and into middle age in the Sixties avoid drugs and alcohol when much younger people in that decade were much quicker to succumb? How could someone who never stopped working and always earned top dollar never have any money (i.e. were Freddie Fields and David Begelman, her managers in the sixties, thieves?} These are the questions the book raises, though it is perhaps unfair to expect a book of this kind – a collection of interviews – to answer them. I nonetheless wish someone would.
Thus a good collection of interviews, with quite a lot of repetition amongst them, less context and analysis then one would have hoped even within the scope of such a book, and ultimately a disappointment.
For Garland completists only.
José Arroyo
Peter O’Toole: The Definitive Biography by Robert Sellers
Peter O’Toole: The Definitive Biography by Robert Sellers
London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2015.
It’s always a mistake for any biography to announce itself as ‘definitive’ in the title: it invites contradiction; and on the evidence of reading Peter O’Toole: The Definitive Biography, it will not be the last word on the great star: the interior life, what drove him at different stages in his life, even why so many of his film performances continue to thrill when the films themselves don’t, are questions the book does not answer satisfactorily.
But to say that it is not definitive is not to say that it is not good. In fact it’s the best one we’ve got so far and Robert Sellers has conducted dozens of new interviews, dug up and clarified essential facts that we did not know or which were not clear before – for example, he firmly establishes that whilst his father was Irish and his mother Scottish, O’Toole himself was born in Leeds – and we even get charming nuggets such as the following: ‘O’Toole left RADA, aged twenty-three, with a little blue book that every student was given upon graduation, The RADA Keepsake and Counsellor. It gave indispensable advice for the rocky road that lay ahead, gems like: ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t get the job as long as the shoes you were wearing at the audition were clean.’
Sellers is very good at contextualising O’Toole’s first steps as an actor. We learn that O’Toole ended up in the same class at RADA as Albert Finney and Alan Bates; actors who would really come into their own and symbolise a new type of British cinema in the sixties. Interestingly, of these, and even if one were to include his great friend Richard Harris, O’Toole is the one who would remain least associated with the dominant currents of British Cinema in this period. He’s got no equivalent to Finney’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Harris’ This Sporting Life and Bates is almost exclusively associated with British Cinema (Georgy Girl, Women in Love, The Go-Between, Far From the Madding Crowd, etc.). O’Toole was different. His first big splash was in Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, where Noel Coward quipped he was so pretty he should have been called Florence of Arabia. It was a ‘runway production’; British story, director etc. but also international money and international stars (Anthony Quinn, Omar Shariff); a typical Sam Spiegel production. And it’s interesting that many of O’Toole’s greatest success or most famous films of the 60s would have strong associations with Britain but all be in one way or another ‘international’: Becket, Lion in Winter, Lord Jim, Goodbye Mr. Chips, even, in different ways, What’s New Pussycat.
Sellers is marvellous at illuminating his work in theatre. He interviews lots of his contemporaries, co-stars, people who worked with him in various capacities and their accounts are vivid and illuminating. We do get real insight into his time at the Bristol Old Vic, his star-making turn at the Royal Court and the West End in The Long and the Short and the Tall in 59, his legendary performance as Shylock at Stratford for Peter Hall, the famously disastrous Macbeth in 1980 and of course late triumphs such as Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. These aspects of the book are excellent .
The personal life, his relationship with his father and with his son, with his two wives and two daughters, all of these are sketched out clearly if a bit unsatisfactorily, though the fault here might be more with this reader’s wanting to know more than with the way the book tells it. Certainly Sellers seems to have had unprecedented access to the family and to personal papers, all of which are put to good use in the book.
The picture is of a star who continues to dazzle, a man with somewhat bipolar tendencies who drank to unconsciousness during one part of his life and until his body could take it no more; a selfish but good man; a literary man who delighted in performing and in the admiration and applause of others. This is all vividly sketched. So why the grumbling? I suppose I would have wanted more on the film career; that’s what we see now; that’s what matters disproportionally now; that was a large part of his life then. As the book makes clear, he loved being a film star. Lastly, I don’t think we get enough of a sense of who Peter O’Toole was as a person; his actions are clearly narrated and well-documented by the book; his fears, dreams, desires still remain opaque. I suppose we can consult O’Toole’s own excellent autobiographies: Loitering With Intent: The Child and Loitering With Intent: The Apprentice. But they’re only partially revealing, and only on that period before he became famous. Nonetheless, these are perhaps the grumblings of a fan: Sellers’ book tells us so much more than we already knew that it’s begrudging to criticise him for not telling us as much as we want to know. Thus the book might not be definitive. But it is essential to anyone who wants to know more about Peter O’Toole.
José Arroyo
Grace Jones: I’ll Never Write My Memoirs
Grace Jones: I’ll Never Write My Memoirs
by Grace Jones, as told to Paul Morley, London: Simon and Schuster, 2015.
It’s out, seems written rather than dictated — a credit to the writing of Paul Morley –full of wonderful imagery and in a unique voice; very intelligent too, with some of the most acute observations on the development of the discotheque and on disco music that I’ve ever read.
Why Grace Jones remains fascinating is clear: throughout the 70s and eighties she was at the centre of a dynamic intersection of art, fashion, music and celebrity culture, with even a short but memorable raid into the movies; as a model in Paris, she roomed with Jerry Hall and Jessica Lange; she was photographed by Helmut Newton, painted by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring designed for her videos, Issey Miyake and Kenzo designed her clothes, Phillip Treacy designed her hats, Jean-Paul Goude directed her videos. She was a star of Studio 54 when it was the centre of Club culture, the same for the Garage later, and Le Palace in Paris after that; she and Dolph Lundgren were the celebrity couple of their day and as visually striking as any duo in the 20th Century. She co-starred with Schwarzenegger and Eddy Murphy in their heyday and is one of the most memorable of Bond villains; and this is all be before we get to the music, which is, justly, what she is most celebrated for — she produced music that has stood the test of time even as it vividly represents it;
The joy of reading this book is that as an intelligent woman, a cultured woman with lots of experience, she’s got a lot of perceptive things to say on all the cultural moments and movements she participated in, and she says it honestly and with warmth and a great deal of humour. ‘I wanted what I did to be entertainment, but the entertainment that is really art that likes to party’. It was and is; and the book vividly demonstrates how and why Grace Jones is an artist.
José Arroyo
Listen to Me Marlon (Stevan Riley, USA, 2015)
Listen to Me Marlon (Stevan Riley, USA, 2015)
One sometimes can’t help but hoot at the notion that method actors created a new, more ‘realistic’ style of acting. One sees them now in old movies – James Dean, whom I love, is the most famous name that comes to mind — flailing about and being ever so ‘intense’ and, when one recovers one’s composure, one reads it, at best, as a style, different but no better, and sometimes a lot more mannered and worse than what preceded and followed it.
There are exceptions to all of this of courses. And Marlon Brando is one such. He’s simply a great actor, a monumental one. There are reasons why he was instantly celebrated, instantly influential, why he changed the course of American acting, first on stage and later on film. It is also worth remembering that in his heyday as a box office film star, his competition consisted of John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Burt Lancaster, William Holden, James Stewart, and Glenn Ford; more traditional film stars who often surpassed him in the box office rankings.
Brando was not only instantly influential but also instantly mythologised. In ‘The Glamour of Delinquency,’ writing not only from another century but from what seems another world, Pauline Kael says, ‘The United States has now achieved what critics of socialism have always posited as the end result of a socialist state: a prosperous, empty, uninspiring uniformity. (If we do not have exactly what Marx meant by a classless society, we do have something so close to it that the term is certainly no longer an alluring goal). What promises does maturity hold for a teenager: a guaranteed annual wage, taxes, social security, hospitalization insurance, and death….It may be because this culture offers nothing that stirs youthful enthusiasm that it has spewed up a negative reaction: for the first time in American history we have a widespread nihilistic movement, so nihilistic it doesn’t even have a program, and, ironically, its only leader is a movie star: Marlon Brando.’[1]
That’s quite a burden to put on anyone, much less young and anguished artist.
I thought I knew all I wanted to know about Marlon Brando. I’d read all the biographies, including his own rambly autobiography, Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me; I’d seen the key films, and I felt my interest in Brando had been satiated, exhausted frankly. But Listen to Me Marlon is endlessly fascinating and deeply moving. What the film has to offer that’s new is vast amounts of audiotape that Brando recorded for himself, sometimes to meditate, sometimes because he couldn’t get to sleep, sometimes because he wanted a record, evidence. But the film also edits these mountains of tape into a structure and a narrative and finds excellent images to accompany Marlon’s voice, speaking in his twilight years, in the night, and into the void, as a means of making sense of what’s happened, what he searched for and what he lost, what turned him from a beacon and into an overweight depressive who couldn’t even take care of that which he loved most, his children.
The film begins by Brando telling us that his face has been scanned by a computer, in motion, and whilst conveying different expressions and that, out of these, the computer could then generate much more, i.e. the actor is now unnecessary, even the actor’s job has been taken over by a machine. The film then proceeds to demonstrate why this can never be so, as we hear Brando recite some of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquies, interspersed throughout the film, usually spoken to himself from memory — this is a language he loved that expressed something he felt to be true — to make sense of his life, very movingly. The first is from Macbeth:
‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing’
Brando’s career is a metaphor for America in what’s been called ‘The American Century’: so much talent, so much beauty, so much genius, so many gifts bestowed by the gods, so easily corrupted, thrown away, deprecated, debased; an amazing talent to turn the many bounties bestowed by the Gods into nasty, self-agrandizing ugliness. Yet, the film makes us understand this. The abusive father, the shame and pity incurred by his mother’s being the town drunk, the insecurity engendered by the feeling that he wasn’t very bright, that all he had to offer was his beauty, his escape to New York and the freedom and release he found there. One senses that this rejection of Omaha, middle America, all the Rockwell Saturday Evening Post certainties, also gave him freedom. Impossible to dictate behaviour, norms, societal niceties to a child if one parent’s a wife beater and the other passes out on Main Street.
The freedom is what enabled him to search and to express that which he found, that which he found lacking, and that which he was searching for but couldn’t find. The film demonstrates what a great, versatile and original actor Brando was through a whole series of clips of his most celebrated performances: The Men, The Wild One, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, Guys and Dolls, Last Tango in Paris and many of his most infamous flops, including Chaplin’s The Millionairess and Mutiny on the Bounty. The one that struck me most is the moment in The Godfather where he’s told of his son Sonny’s death, acknowledges it, clearly tries to restrain the emotion that he’s feeling, but then he exhales from one side of his nose and half his face seems to collapse, indicating the depths of his grief thought an uncontrollable moment of breath. It’s such an original and beautiful acting choice: so right. One can’t imagine anyone else doing it and one can’t imagine Don Corleone feeling anything less.
Near the beginning of the film, when Brando’s describing his first days in New York, how kind Stella Adler had been to him and how much she taught him, the revelling in his triumph in the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, the film evokes the same kind of nocturnal, alcohol fuelled, sexual freedom Gore Vidal so well describes in Palimpsest as being characteristic of New York in the late 40s. It was the ‘American Century’ but Americans had come back changed from the war and didn’t believe the old verities. Everything was possible.
Much of the film is devoted to showing the descent into tragedy; but the film very cleverly interweaves the triumphs with disaster; the great performances with the failed relationships; what his island in Tahiti meant to him with the fact that even an island couldn’t protect his children from misfortune; the box-office success wit the relationship with his father; his fight for civil rights and the rights of indigenous people with his own inability to keep his own home together. It’s a messy life the film presents, a complex one, riveting and moving
When he begins reciting Sonnet 29 into his tape:
‘When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising’
We don’t miss the last few lines of the sonnet:
‘Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.’
The film makes us understand and feel his loneliness, his sense of failure; we regret that he gave up on acting around the time of Apocalypse Now. Decline was perhaps inevitable but Brando’s fall and the way he fell…it’s not only that he turned into a joke — the great beauty and sex symbol now so fat he could barely move, though even as a joke he never lost his popularly acknowledged title as ‘the greatest film actor of his generation, but that decline turned to tragedy: a son jailed for murder, a daughter committing suicide, nothing but fast food for comfort and only audiotape to talk through and make sense of his life.
It’s a great film; and though I’ve focussed here on the audiotape, there is also fantastic footage, not only from the films but from press conferences – Brando flirting with a journalist in the early sixties is something to behold – old tv shows showing him interviewed at home with his father, his marching with Dr. King and his speaking on behalf of Native Americans on Cavett. It’s a complex weave of a life with a central insight – that Brando overvalued sex and couldn’t understand or accept love, presumably until he had his own children. And there’s an interesting tension that the film provokes between how he saw himself; a small-town boy, abused and mistrustful, fundamentally decent, not too bright and what the world saw; a beautiful, explosive actor, seemingly capable of understanding and expressing all that people are capable of feeling.
Listen to Me Marlon is a film to see. In a superb recent interview with the director and some of his children in The Guardian, one of them, Miko Brando says, ‘This film is about as close as you get to knowing him without ever meeting him’. One senses that, even as it makes one want to know more.
José Arroyo
[1] Pauline Kael, ‘The Glamour of Delinquency’, I Lost It At The Movies, New York, An Atlantic Monthly Press Book, Little, Brown and Company, 1965, p. 45
Weekly Update September 17
Straight Out of Compton (USA, F. Gary Gray, 2015)
It’s not quite good but I liked it very much and it’s very affecting. The film depicts the rationale for the foundation of Niggaz With Attitude ‘N.W.A.’ – social oppression and police brutality of apartheid-like proportions – their subsequent career as recording stars, the various ways they broke up into solo careers, how they were cheated by their management, and the death of one of its founding members due to AIDS. The music is exciting, even if I can’t understand half of it, and the film brims with energy; it’s a great protest musical, though one in which women don’t figure except as sex things with guns. There are some excellent charismatic performances, particularly from Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre and O’Shea Jackson Jr, as Ice Cube. Paul Giametti as Jerry Heller is outstanding in a complex portrayal of a manager who believes, witnesses, supports but can’t stop his hand from dipping into the till. The Rodney King beating and subsequent riots figure centrally and will resonate strongly with contemporary viewers. Plus ça change….My over-riding feeling upon seeing this was one of sadness. Musicals were once all about joy, utopia, community, energy. This one is a weeping cry of fury and rage at what America’s become for black people; and it’s very affecting.
Legend (Brian Helgeland, UK, 2015)
The film’s not bad; it’s great to see those early 60s costumes and sets; it’s interesting to revisit the Krays; the storytelling sometimes ignites with black humour….But it’s just not good enough: it doesn’t tell us anything new about the Krays, doesn’t offer any new insights into the period or even fraternal bonds or what might make one a criminal or indeed even the pleasures derived from that criminality. Also, I can’t imagine a bigger fan of Tom Hardy’s than I; and he does get two showy roles here; and he definitely makes Ronnie and Reg distinct; but I also think the conceptualisation of the character of Reg is misguided; stiff, unemotional, without humour, seemingly inhuman and kind of wearing a Shrek-lite mask. It’s a risk a great actor takes but one in which he here fails; particularly in comparison with Jesse Eisenberg’s turn in The Double, where each of the characters seem to be human, to breathe. Emily Browning as Frances Shea, streetsmart but doe-like and fragile, is the character that comes off best. There’s a lot of interesting stuff to be said about the depiction of a homosexual milieu in early sixties London but that will have to wait for another time.
American Ultra (Nima Nourizadhe, USA, 2015):
Everything Jesse Eisenberg does in American Ultra is interesting; and he and Kristen Stewart are so endearing together — the ideal small-town stoner couple — that one hopes they’ll be teamed up again in a better film than this very interesting failure: the film is ok; it’s not offensive; and people were laughing in all the right places: it just didn’t soar (though it has its moments).
Irrational Man (Woody Allen, USA, 2015):
Irrational Man is a total bore, old hat and lazy, Joachin Phoenix is a blank onscreen for the first time even as he demonstrates he’s the least vain actor currently working in American by flaunting his endearingly big belly: the gut tells us more and better than his face. Woody Allen seems to have read no philosopher that wasn’t fashionable in the 1960s and his professors seem to live in houses that might be every adjunct’s dream but the reality of no one I know working in academia. Emma Stone is brilliant and the only reason to see the film. I’ve defended even Allen’s most uneven films in the past; and I do think he’s still one of the most interesting and formally daring filmmakers currently working. But you wouldn’t know it from watching this. Irrational Man feels like an illustrated short story he dictated to an underling; and it definitely feels phoned in. Also, I don’t know if it’s the film or the print I saw, but visually nothing was as pretty or as bright as the material demanded.
The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (Wes Ball, USA, 2015)
Who is Wes Ball and how did he get to direct a movie? The characters in the Maze Runner: Scorch Trials run and run but you don’t know where, and you have no clue what might save them, and eventually you don’t care. Lily Taylor, Patricia Clarkson and especially Aiden Gillen do bring a bit of zip and are all that prevents one from sleeping through the forthcoming apocalypse.
Transporter Refuelled (Camille Delamarre, France, 2015)
Transporter Refuelled is great fun: no dumber than the rest of the films in the series; just as stylish; great action sequences that make sense; and Ed Skrein is so handsome and moves so well he almost makes one forget Jason Statham. Plus it’s directed, very well, by a woman: Camille Delamarre. It’s a reboot that’s definitely ignited and I hope more will follow.
José Arroyo
Tough Love/ Härte (Rosa Von Praunheim, Germany, 2015)
The film tells the story of Andreas Marquadt, a handsome karate champ, violent gangster and ex-con. Marquadt’s father tried to kill him as a toddler, his mother sexually abused him from pre-pubescence to the time he left home. Von Praunheim too easily ‘explains’ Marquadt’s career as a brutal, manipulative pimp in the light of this past. Certainly Marquadt himself, now married to the one girl he exploited who still stuck by him in jail, finds an excuse for his subsequent brutality to others in his childhood experiences. These, however, are the worst aspects of the film.
The reason to see Tough Love is the dexterity with which Von Praunheim tells this story, easily moving from a post-rehab present shot as documentary in colour to a black-and-white re-enactment, compellingly dramatised by Von Praunheim. The sex scenes are clinical, distanced, objective. Sex here is always about something else, usually power, domination, the with-holding of love. Von Praunheim’s great achievement is firstly to get such superb performances from Hanno Koffler as the young Marquadt; Louise Hayer, who looks like Romy Schneider and is very charismatic as Marion Erdmann, the 16 year-old who falls for and is victimised by Marquadt but who ends up staying by him; and Katy Karrenbauer as the loving, abusive and manipulative mom. Von Praunheim and his cast, working with sketchy, fake, indicative, sets, make the people and the past live and breathe; they reveal; with humour, understanding and compassion; where the documentary footage of Marquandt explains, excuses, hides, reveals only in refracted form and only what he wants to present himself as. The real Erdmann, masochistic, romantic, charismatic; a living embodiment of German Romanticism made flesh now, is very enthralling.
Von Praunheim makes films that always seem a slight mish-mash, they’re never perfect, and yet they’re often more compassionate, empathetic, understanding and memorable; more accepting of people’s many failings, and more willing to explore them deeper and in more original forms than many other, more celebrated filmmakers. I was delighted to see Tough Love, recommend it, and am grateful to the Festival des films du monde in Montreal to have created a context in which I could re-encounter the work of such a fascinating filmmakers after so many years. There should be more Von Praunheim shown in Britain. In fact a career retrospective is long overdue.
Seen at the Festival des films du monde, September 2015
José Arroyo
Une heure de tranquillité/ Do Not Disturb (Patrice Leconte, France, 2014)
I went to see this for Rossy de Palma and it was worth seeing for her. She’s middle-aged now, a bit zaftig. She’s still got the wonky Picasso eyes, which evoke a memory of the strange and marvellous energy her mere presence once catapulted into any film, but can now pass for an ordinary working-class middle-aged Spanish lady, as she does here. The film seems to me a nothing; or to be fair, nothing I understand. It’s a farce in which Michel Leproux (Christian Clavier) is seeking one hour of tranquillity in which to listen to that great jazz album he’s been longing to hear all his life and finally found but gets constantly interrupted: his wife reveals an affair; the son brings in a Phillipino family to stay, the Polish plumber who is really Portuguese bursts the pipes, his mistress comes to reveal their affair to the wife etc. It’s very French and very sitcommy. I did not find it funny though the audience I saw it with could not stop laughing in ways that I simply didn’t get: offering guests at the neighbourhood party expensive wine got howls of laughter. I found the representation of Rossy de Palma as the Spanish maid, the jokes about the Portuguese/Polish plumber and the whole bit with the Phillipinos a bit crude and slightly racist. What it did make me think of is how certain people can just lift a film out of ordinariness and make it worthwhile to see and think about, like some expensive and exotic ingredient in a store-bought trifle. In this film it’s Rossy of course, who seems to be acting in a coarser, better film than this one — she feels slightly out of place; and Carole Bouquet as the wife, who doesn’t get to do very much but manages to express quite a bit and is so extremely beautiful one can’t help but be riveted by her mere presence.
José Arroyo
The Evil That Men Do (Ramon Térmens, Spain, 2015)
‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is interred with their bones’. So says Shakespeare in Julius Caesar and so shows this film.
Two henchmen, Santiago (Daniel Faraldo) and Benny (Daniel Tarbet), work for a narco kingpin. They run an outfit in the middle of nowhere – but close enough to a taco stand and a Christian revival tent — where they torture and kill their victims. They’re housed in an armed warehouse full of the heads of rivals they’ve captured and murdered, which they occasionally send as messages to the competition. It has a holding chamber reachable only by a portable staircase where they can keep kidnap victims and torture them at leisure. There’s an industrial freezer where corpses in various states of dismemberment can be kept on hold with various body parts defrosted at various times to suit every type of communication. There’s also a surgery fitted out for torture and even an industrial furnace where corpses of those nameless, unloved and thus of no use in this particular kind of communication can be easily cremated. They’re professional and have no qualms about doing their job though Salvador is better at it, more ruthless, whilst Benny is American and can’t quite get rid of his namby-pamby qualities. However, how will they act when the next package they receive is the very lively, spoiled and manipulative 12 year-old daughter of a rival narco honcho.
The Evil That Men Do is a very dark and very funny film with very charismatic performances from Faraldo and also from Sergio Peris-Mencheta as the narco kingpin’s nephew. It’s beautifully shot and directed, a delight to see, except for the one moment, a chainsaw scene more brutal even than the one in Scarface, that even I had to close my eyes at. The film is listed as Spanish though it is clearly Mexican and contains and evokes that lawlessness, lack of respect for life, sheer brutality and barbarism that seems to be part of the very fabric of life in that country today. It’s hard to see this as merely a genre film or even to accept the violence as stylised or cartoony and designed to fit an imaginary world. The director has been so successful in creating so much out of very spare means that the film hits close to the bone of a country in chaos. The darkness and brutality here speak a culture; and the laughs that the film very successfully manages to earn from the audience doesn’t wash away the sadness of a culture reduced to this.
Seen at the Festival des films du monde, Montreal, September 2015, where the film received it’s world premiere.
José Arroyo
Il segreto di Italia/ The Secret of Italia (Antonello Belluco, Italy, 2014)
Il segreto di Italia/ The Secret of Italia is a period film based on historical events. It is set in the town of Codevigo at that moment near the end of WWII when Italy is about to be liberated from Fascism by the Allies in conjunction with partisan rebels made up mostly of members of the Communist Party, some of whom once also used to be Fascists.
The secret of adult Italia (Romina Power) is that for many years she’s been burdened with guilt over a secret that the film will reveal (spoilers ahead): as a teenager (played by Gloria Rizzato) she was in love with Faronacci Fontana (Alberto Vetri), the son of the Fascist mayor of Codevigo, who in turn was in love with a widow called Ada (Maria Vittoria Casarotti Todeschini). When Italia finds them messing around in the hayloft, she reveals their hiding place to the ‘liberating’ forces and the left-wingers take their revenge on the scion of the Fascist mayor by brutally murdering anyone suspected of having a fascist affiliation without trial or due process.
The other secret of Italy that the film crudely attempts to ‘reveal’ is that the mainly Communist partisan rebels who helped liberate Italy with the Allies perpetrated horrible atrocities on innocent civilians, many of them undirected revenge killings, and were themselves thuggish murderers. In this film, the fascists are all nice ordinary people who just wore the black shirt occasionally at village feasts to be polite and because it helped with the business of farming but really they didn’t mean anybody any harm.
This is a messed up film, structurally built around flashbacks that seem unnecessary, and with some unpleasantly brutal scenes. I’ve never seen such a scorching a denunciation of ‘liberating forces’ or such a sweet and nostalgic chocolate-box evocation of Fascists. For that reason alone it’s worth seeing. Certainly anybody interested in Italian culture and history will find it rewards a look, if one with a critical eye.
I understand a suit has already been instigated against the film in Italy and that boycotts have occurred at some screenings. Despite some fine performances, Alberto Vetri’s in particular, the film is so crude – Italia’s secret is that of Italy it exclaims! — it’s not really worth the bother of boycotting: it’s unlikely to find much of an audience. But it is precisely because it mounts such a crude attack on the left and such a glowing defence of the right – and because it is seems to be a component of a structure of feeling in Europe that seems to be on a rising tide, that I recommend a viewing.
José Arroyo
Seen atthe Festival des films du monde, Montreal, September 2015.
La intérprete/The Interpreter (Antonio Pérez Molero, Spain, 2015)
A non-fiction film about organ transplants, almost documenting some of the themes that Pedro Almodóvar dramatised in fictional form in All About My Mother (Spain 1999) and Talk to Her (Spain, 2002).
In La intérprete/The Interpreter, ‘La Crisis’— understood as the social and political crisis which arose out of the 2008 financial meltdown in Spain — is a context through which to understand organ donation; which in turn is itself a particular lens through which to understand contemporary Spain. Unemployment is at 27%; youth unemployment at 58%; over a million families have no one in the family working; over 500,000 homes have been repossessed by the banks
Yet, Spain also leads the world not only in the science of organ transplants — the fairness and efficiency with which they’re distributed — but also in the numbers of organ donations per capita. Whilst the country is suffering from Neo-Liberalism at its worst and most rapacious, here is a social and medical procedure — organ donation and transplant — that relies entirely on human kindness, goodwill, a desire to do good for others, a desire to continue living even in the worst situation, even in death. And as has been demonstrated by recent events in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, one in which the merest whiff of unfairness could destroy the very basis on which the whole edifice rests: people’s willingness to contribute, to commune with the humanity of others, to be willing to donate organs selflessly for the good of others.
Certain stories stay in the mind: a man with a Liverpool FC tattoo found dead on the street with his suitcase. He’s brain dead. But who is he? The interpreter chasing up the phone numbers they find in his wallet from nearest to farthest until she find the son in Sweden; and the kindness of the son who goes out on his bicycle in a snowstorm to find a police station with a fax machine so he can fax the necessary authorisation so that his father’s body can save someone else’s life. People’s goodness can be very moving.
La intérprete/The Interpreter has a tripartite interlocking structure. The focus is on the nurse who is a key interpreter but the film is also threaded through the stories of three patients waiting for a transplant; the film is dedicated, in memoriam, to the two who did not receive them. Another narrative device in the film is encased as part of the story through which we are shown students arriving from all over Latin America to do an MA and learn what Spain has to offer on organ donation and transplant. It is implied that what the students end up learning is something the ruling and political classes can also learn from. The film underlines that it’s kind of a crime that those profiting from the many ways Spain is bleeding at the moment aren’t taught the same lessons in community, goodness and selflessness that ordinary Spaniards and even foreigners are shown performing in this film. Another instance in which the people are better than than those who rule them.
Technically the film has a harsh digital look, but rendered beautiful with animated images to the film’s various components.La intérprete/The Interpreter is intelligent, accomplished and moving. A film that’s made with love, as befits its themes and subjects.
José Arroyo
Seen at Montreal’s Festival des films du monde, September 2015
Labia/ Glibness (Gabriel Patricio Bertini, Argentina 2014)
A dark and funny thriller that exposes the Argentine upper classes as a more elegant but no less brutal mafia, efficiently and ruthlessly organising their criminal activities for the rapacious enrichment of a few families. Dario Levi is Federal Judge Alberto Franccioni. As the film begins, we’re told his daughter needs to get a new kidney or she will die. He’s willing to pay a million for the kidney and go to Orlando for the transplant so the kid can visit Disneyland during her convalescnence. ‘She wants to go to Disney in Orlando instead of Paris?’ fumes the grandmother, who blames her ex-daughter-in-law, a low class blackmailing junky for the lapse in taste.
As the day progresses Alberto is harassed by all kinds pressing concerns, domestic and professional: someone in his staff has stolen a Serrano ham and he needs to figure out who it is; his daughter’s birthday is coming up and he’s got to make arrangements; his ex is trying to blackmail him; his sister is cheating on her husband with his nephew’s music teacher (‘Oh no’ says the grandmother, when she hears another of her grandchildren has descended into the popular and vulgar by exchanging learning violin on a Stradivarius for a guitar lessons, ‘we’ve become a family of guitarreros); he’s been asked to run for Vice-Governor of the Province but so has his millionaire neighbour – should he accept? And if so how to remove his friend from the candidacy without leaving an imprint and continuing on good terms?
Like Tony Sorprano, Francionni is harangued at home but all ruthless smarts in the workplace; he has the music teacher violently dealt with, finds out about the ham, plots the destruction of his competing political candidate and consults his mother, the true Don of the family, as to whether to accept an offer of Vice Governor of the Province. ‘A Vice-Governor is merely the employee of a more ambitious person. You have to aim for President!’ The film is beautifully directed by Bertini, who is not afraid to hold his shots in lengthy medium close-ups on the faces of his extraordinary actors and depicting a brutal, familial world as sordid as it is elegant with a minimum of means and to maximum effect.
Labia is a very funny, insightful film, held together by an extraordinary central performance by Levi: the humour and suspicion by which he tries to sniff out the information he needs from people too scared to be truthful is fantastically entertaining. The film also boast an an equally great performance by Elena Boggan, who makes of Alberto’s mother a Lady MacBeth of a matriarch, if Lady McBeth could be at equal ease with all of the world’s sophisticated pleasures whilst leaving her conscience unpricked by power’s most brutish necessities. The ending is a cop-out that somewhat spoils what is otherwise an insightful and entertaining film.
José Arroyo
Seen at the Festival des films du monde, Montreal, September 2015
Trainwreck (Judd Apatow, USA, 2015)
Trainwreck is hit and miss. But when it hits, it hits big; and it does hit often: I love Amy Schumer, who I’d never heard of before, and who gets at something painful and real through the comedy, which is often laugh-out-loud. The story is as simple as it is questionable: is Amy going to grow up to be a female version of the arsehole father of hers, Gordon (Colin Quinn)– sex mad, liquor-swilling, drug taking, incapable of commitment – or is she going to grow up, like her sister KIm (Brie Larson)?
The ‘growing up’ in this movie takes the form of having Amy fall in love, change her ways, and win the man she’s been so careless with, Aaron (Bill Hader); wealthy, humanitarian and highly-skilled sports surgeon to the rich and famous; and who, to this member of the audience at least, still doesn’t seem worth the bother. Amy’s ‘growing up’ may also be read as a way of clipping her wings, containing her, reducing her to a more traditional, conservative and conformist model of femininity. Her father could be an arsehole and be loveable. For a woman to continue to be the same past Amy’s age is too horrifying a thought for a movie and its audience to contemplate. Both lose out.
But how can we quibble? Most comedies are imperfect, few have as many jokes that hit as big, almost none centre on a woman and even fewer demonstrate a detectable address to a female audience. I loved it.
Lots of sports stars I don’t know make cameos you probably will enjoy more than I. John Cena, the wrestler, is very funny as an early, too-stiff boyfriend with a body of steel, the emotional life of a tween girl and the sexual imaginary of a homosexual weaned on porn. An almost unrecognisable Tilda Swinton makes an unforgettable appearance as a too-tanned, hard-nosed ‘Essex Girl’ editor of a New York lads mag and steals the few scenes she’s in. Fab.
José Arroyo
The Man From U.N.C.L.E (Guy Ritchie, USA, 2015)
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is unexceptional but rather fun, in a slightly leaden way. Guy Ritchie directs the action well, attempts a cheeky ironic tone for the film he doesn’t always succeed in achieving, and is not very good with those actors who need his help: Armie Hammer is completely inexpressive physically though does a great accent and can find comic timing vocally that somehow eludes other aspects of his performance; Henry Cavill does better and is better looking doing it but he’s done so much weightlifting his body strains at his suits, evoking a kind of physical boxiness that works against that nonchalant physical elegance the character is meant to exude; a rare instance in which a great body works against the role (though his performance is also sabotaged by the cinematography); Alicia Vikander is pretty but can’t find a rhythm for her performance and seems wasted; Elizabeth Debicki fares better as the villainess and her long leggy frame, elegant way of wearing clothes, and understated ironic way with a line makes her very enjoyable to watch. But it is Hugh Grant — only in the film for what seems like two minutes — who steals the show. A trifle, not light or sparkly enough but with some clever action and a great score of 60s tunes. The audience did like it even though either the print or the projection didn’t provide the luminosity the colour palette seemed to require. It is better and more enjoyable than an episode of the old TV show.
José Arroyo
Addendum: I have now seen this twice more on Netflix and found it great fun. My appreciation of Armie Hammer and Alicia Vikander increased; my love of the soundtrack sky-rocketed. It is a trifle, very broad and fast-moving with the set-pieces working much better than my first impression. I now recommend it.
White Nights/ Le Notti Bianche (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1957)
Mario (Marcello Mastroianni), a young clerk, friendless and far from home, returns to Livorno from a trip to the country where he’s been warmed by feeling of home and family, even if the home and family are his boss’ and he himself has had to maintain the distance and deference required by the difference in their social status. As he leaves them and heads towards home, it’s as if the very lights of the city extinguish with each of his steps, externalising that loneliness and alienation he is feeling inside.
On a bridge, past the stray dogs, the homeless and the rubble, he meets a girl who he thinks a prostitute. Desperate for human contact and contrary to his norms of behaviour, he tries to pick her up. To the distress of both, he’s made a mistake. She’s Natalia (Maria Schell), daughter of formerly well-to-do carpet merchants, now fallen on hard times. She lives with her grandmother, blind and so anxious not to lose her that she keeps her literally pinned to her apron. They make a living by repairing carpets and taking in lodgers.
Natalia’s fallen deeply in love with one of them (Jean Marais). He’s courted her, included her grandmother and the rest of the household in the courtship, took them to the opera, pledged his love… but in the end had to leave, abruptly telling her he could not marry her right away but would meet her a year later, on this bridge. She’s been coming there faithfully every day at ten, waiting for he who does not arrive; which is where Natalia meets Mario. After several attempt to avoid him, they begin to talk, to feel less lonely, to connect. All the while she keeps waiting for the man who promised to return.
Mario falls in love with Natalia; is moved by her purity, her goodness, her faith. He courts her. She welcomes — might even need — the attention. But she remains faithful to her ideal. This faith in turn ignites one in Mario; in inspiring his love, she dissolves his sense of alienation even as Mario accepts that Natalia doesn’t love him and might, at best, come to love him later, after sufficient time has passed for her to forget he whom she truly loves now.
Is the stranger a figment of her imagination or someone real? Can such feelings and ideas live amongst the squalor and compromises of every day life? Is there something to believe in and should we have faith? Are we always doomed to be alone? Visconti and Giuseppe Rotuno show us this metaphorically; we see the couple through foggy windows. Natalia’s reality murked up by her dreams; Mario’s options often directly clarified through cleared up windows or the stark directness offered by those stepping out of the shadows. Only for a brief moment does snow purify all, at least before a shiny figure in black comes back into the picture, where Natalia is asked to make a choice, stay on one side, or cross the bridge to another.
White Nights/ Le Notti Bianche is film that sets out to be poetry and succeeds. How you feel and experience the film might depend on how you feel about any film with such intentions. Here a bridge, snow, the contrast between rock and opera, the effects of fog on an image as seen from the outside, all act as metaphors that need decipherment. The film succeeds beautifully but are you up to the task?
As is usual with Visconti, Le Notti Bianche is the fruit of the crème-de-la-créme of cinematic collaborators. Suso Cecchi d’Amico worked with Visconti on the screen adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s story. Giuseppe Rotuno creates a world that is luminous, clearly artificial, but lit as if for a deeper truth, with some strikingly beautiful images. It has one of Nino Rota’s most beautiful scores; one of those where a few recurring bars played on different chords capture a range of feeling, and the changes that range undergoes throughout a film. The costumes are by Piero Tossi.
The actors have rarely been better. I sometimes find Maria Schell a bit tiresome but as Natalia she’s distraught, nervous, optimistic and polite but slightly hysterical; always focussed on her goal, smiling as if spiritually lit by a divine spirit. It’s a stylised, operatic performance, not unlike Alida Valli’s in Senso but here always played in a lower key and with a smile. Marais, already into middle-aged, playing a cipher with potentially a cruel streak, has never seemed to me more handsome or dashing than he is here. In some shots, it’s like the very length of his eyelashes are a trap with which to ensnare the innocent.
As to Mastroianni…one can only sigh with awe. Other women are after him in the film, and not only prostitutes. And unlike the Lodger with his fancy opera, he can only offer her Bill Haley and the Comets. And he can’t even dance! I bet the lodger can dance. But Mastrioanni can feel and weep and communicate all of it clearly with a masculine goofeyness that doesn’t mask that his muddling up the steps is a clear offer of his heart, that there’s a joy in his daring to dance without skill, a trust, and a confidence. That he’s the salt of the earth (and is perhaps why he must cry). To me, his dance, is one of the treasures of cinema.
Visconti’s virtuosic display of cinematic skills in White Nights/ Le Notti Bianche is truly dazzling. I’ll point you to one simple example, which you can see in the clip above. It’s the moment where Natalia has been telling Mario about the lodger and it’s the one moment in the film where we enter her head. She’s narrating the experience and we’re seeing it as she felt it. Note how seamlessly Visconti moves from the past to the present. See particularly the last ten seconds of the clip, the moment where Maria Schell says, ‘I’ll be yours, yours forever’ and note how seamlessly Visconti takes us from Natalia’s past and her imagination, as she recounts to us how she feels about what happened, to the present and Mario. When the camera cuts from Jean Marais to Maria Schell only to have her embrace Mastroianni. He’s made this move from past to present and a shift in point-of-view, without changing the tone and without even a cut. It’s dazzling.
In spite of being awarded a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the film was not a success when it first came out. I find the posters for the various countries it was released in interesting in its display of different attractions for each culture. Maria Schell gets top billing in all of them but in the Italian poster, the lodger is a faceless figure in the background. The French poster gives second billing to Marais, gives the impression of a romance between Schell and Marais and turns the Mastroianni character into the faceless figure in the bridge. The Danish poster highlights Schell’s whiteness, places Marais and Schell in large size on the left of the poster but places the character on the bridge prominently on the top right of the poster. Each is selling a different thing.
What the film is selling are the concerns of sociology and history. How it feels like to see and what it might yet mean are ongoing concerns. The reason for viewing it now — in spite of protestations from some critics that it’s not amongst the great works of Visconti — is that it is still a great work of a great director, one that requires much of the audience but offers much in return, should the audience be willing to give to and receive from it that which a very great work of this kind requires.
José Arroyo
Senso (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1954)
A Venetian Countess (Alida Valli) loses her reason in succumbing to her senses and to Lieutenant Franz Mahler (Farley Granger) of the invading Austrian Army. She gives up money and position; even betrays her family, her country and her highest ideals; all for a feckless sensualist, a gigolo from the first and one who’ll show himself a quivering coward by the end. That’s where love and desire will take you in the world of Visconti and of Senso.
It’s a beautiful film, gorgeous to look at. Valli seems to float from canal to piazza, in large hooped skirt, in a wind-blown veil, as she suffers, desires, trembles, and looks for and at her lover; whilst refusing to see what is at all times clear to the audience: that he’s a cheap hustler unworthy of such sacrifices. The film is set at the time Garibaldi was uniting Italy and there are clearly points being made about European and Italian history that are beyond my present reach.
But the central story is entirely accessible; and the cinematic means through which to convey that story are the work of a giant of cinema; from the tour de force opening at the opera house to the tragic battle sequences at the end; from the grandeur of the houses right down to the exquisiteness of the pattern of a scarf that Valli holds to her face: everything is perfection. Even Granger, giving an awkward, unskilled performance is to the film’s advantage, as the looks-without-substance characteristic of the actor is so well used to convey that of the character.
A film of faded colours, set at a key historical moment, but focussing rather on the depths to which desire might drive one. A great film.
José Arroyo
In Praise of Francis Ford Coppola
At the NaFilM exhibit at the Museum Montanelli in Prague I was struck by a display of wine of various kinds from Francis Ford Coppola in his capacity as grape grower and vintner: there was the Claret and the Pinot Grigio, the ‘Director’s Cut’ Cabernet Sauvignon, and the ‘Sofia’ Chardonnay. All for sale and all with ten per cent of the proceeds going to NaFilM in aid of the project to found a National Film Museum in the Czech Republic.
Earlier in the month, excited students at EICTV, the Film and Television School of ‘All the Worlds’, based in San Antonio de los Baños in Cuba, informed me that Coppola had arrived with cases and cases of pasta, tomato sauce and wine. He’d cooked them a meal, eaten it with them, shared his knowledge and answered their questions. EICTV is often ranked one of the top film schools and I personally have never found it less than inspiring. But it is undergoing financial difficulties at the moment and Coppola’s visit gave everyone there a boost, particularly since it consisted of giving AND receiving, of sharing, of various kinds of communing.
These two experiences to me indicate not only a praiseworthy philanthropy or an admirable degree of personal kindness but an on-going engagement and concern with film in all its aspects that one can trace pre film school at UCLA and post the various industrial and technological experimentation at Zoetrope. Moreover it’s a cinephilic desire to cultivate the culture of cinema that includes but – as I personally have witnessed – also extends beyond the borders of his own country. I tip my hat off to him.
José Arroyo
The NaFilM exhibit at the Montanelli Museum in Prague.
As a teacher, I sometimes wonder if one spends too much time thinking of doing things for students rather than with them; or even better, with them and for others. This point was brought home to me when Nicky Smith and I visited the NaFilM exhibit at the Montanelli Museum in Prague. NaFilM is a project that was begun three years ago amongst students and friends of the Department of Film Studies at Charles University in Prague with the aim of setting up a Museum of Czech Cinema. Whilst researching the best way of exhibiting film and its history, the project grew to encompass staff and students from other universities in the Czech Republic as well as critics and other interested individuals. The current exhibition is designed as a ‘trailer’ for what a possible National Film Museum could be like. I found it thrilling and inspirational.
The first part of the exhibit deals with sound in cinema in all its aspects and right up to the 50s but begins by countering the widely held notion that early films were silent. Thus, we are shown an exciting clip of a chase sequence and then guided through the various ways in which sound effects were created as well as given the appropriate ‘noise props’ through which to supply them: the sounds of horses’ hooves created with sticks, a machine that gives the sound of wind, etc. These instruments, as well as a ‘noise walkway’ made of various materials, thus help the visitor create a diversity of sounds such as wind, storm, the rustling of leaves, a galloping horse, a moving train etc. It was clear that kids and the curious of all ages delighted in the interactive dimension of this and the museum gave ample opportunity to participate and to witness the results.
The film is full of exciting gadgetry: you can see how the sound of your voice gets visualised and added to celluloid; there’s a room where you can try out different types of lighting effects on a moving train; another one has a gadget where you encase your head in darkness as you’re told aurally of a script which you’re asked to imagine visaully; and so on. The idea is to get the visitor to think about all the different aspects that have historically gone into and comprised filmmaking and learn from the various exercises whilst having fun. It is an unqualified success.
The other areas of the exhibit focus more tightly on Czech cinema. The second part of the exhibition highlighted the role of the avant-garde in the national culture and is shown by a selection of key short films, including documentaries — often shot in Prague — that were delightful and thought-provoking. The exhibit also explains the role of the Dev˘etsil literary club in propagating ideas from French Surrealism into the Czech avant-garde movement known as poetism. The poetists used the principles of collages and free association to create unexpected meanings. Thus the poetists made a very marked contribution to the Czech national film culture and to European avant-garde cultures even though they themselves did not make a single film. It’s a fascinating aspect of the exhibit.
Also on display were a set of gorgeous posters from home and abroad, of which the one that meant the most to me was the beautiful poster for Ernst Lubitsch’s The Love Parade (USA, 1929) advertising that it was showing in what surely must be one of the most beautiful cinemas in all of the world, the Lucerna.
The third and last section of the exhibit dealt with the events of 1968 and beyond; how they affected cinema and in turn how cinema dealt, narrated, imaged and reflected the effects of the Soviet Invasion on the national culture. On exhibit are a series of very beautiful short films as well as a series of ‘imagined’ postcards from some of the most celebrated Czech filmmakers in exile.
The exhibit is selective, a teaser or trailer for the potential National Film Museum. It’s not only interactive in terms of the visitor and the curators, but will be interactive at each stage, including consultation on site and design of the potential museum. It makes the strongest case possible for the construction of such a museum. It’s a model of a pedagogic exercise; generating, exchanging, accruing and distributing knowledge; which,through preservation and exhibition, in turn instigates a dialogue with the visitor to the museum that potentially generates and begins the whole cycle again; and it does this with a focus on the local and the national. This is what this great exhibit does and why it so forcefully makes a case for a future National Museum of Film in the Czech Republic.
José Arroyo
