Tag Archives: Elliot Gould

Ritrovato Lockdown 2020 – Day Six

 

Richard Layne and José Arroyo discuss the main strands of the sixth day of Ritrovato 2020’s digital film programme. We spend a considerable amount of time discussing Robert Altman’s California Split (1974), which we loved, and  George Marshall’s Tap Roots (1948), which we didn’t. We also discuss a considerable number of shorts, beginning withSarah Maldoror’s important Léon G. Damas (1994) and two more imaginative programs of shorts. Richard couldn’t quite get into Hanns Schwarz’ Liebling der götter/ Darling of the Gods (1930) and José missed out on it through bad planning so we will provide a link in the blog where you can follow up on it on the blogs of Dean Cairns and Pamela Hutchinson. A mixed program but a most interesting day.

The podcast can also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

This is the short film La briglia sul collo (the one about the badly behaved kid) that Richard comments on in the podcast:

Some of you may be interested in the image capture below:

California Split

Tap Roots

Léon G. Damas

Mysterious Murder Shorts

José Arroyo

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, USA, 1973)

 

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The Long Goodbye is by now an acknowledged classic. It wasn’t always so. As Pauline Kael writes in her 1973 review, ‘It’s a knockout of a movie that has taken eight months to arrive in New York because after being badly reviewed in Los Angeles last March and after being badly received (perfect irony) it folded out of town. It’s probably the best American movie ever made that almost didn’t open in New York.’ Charles Champlin, one of the initial culprits, titled his review ‘A Private Eye’s Honour Blackened’. But as early as 1974, Stewart Garrett in Film Quarterly was already underlining its importance and influence: ‘‘the masterwork of America’s most interesting working director….In watching Chinatown, one can feel The Long Goodbye lurking behind it with the latent force of a foregone conclusion’. All I want to do here is add my praise, point to a couple of aspects of the film’s particular brilliance, and also indicate some problems with the film that its biggest fans have been too quick to gloss over.

The movie begins and ends with an extract from the song ‘Hooray for Hollywood’, a nod to dreamland and part of the film’s homage to noir and the detective genre. Elliot Gould is a different Marlowe than Humphrey Bogart, looser, gentler, even more addicted to tobacco, with cigarettes constantly dangling from his thick, sensuous lips. The car he drives, the apartment building he lives in, the bars he frequents, all conjure up the forties. But the LA he moves through, a character of its own in this film (the skyline, the highways, the all-night supermarkets, Malibu), with the women in the apartment next door making hash brownies, practicing yoga, and dancing topless, all point to the film’s present. And that interplay between past and present, figured through the casting of Elliot Gould as the central character, is one of joys of the film.

 

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Gould’s Marlow,  unkempt, seeming to offer a wry, disbelieving and humours look at everything he sees, is convincingly single, marginal, and over-reliant on his cat for company. He is the most unkempt and bedraggled of leading man: loose, irreverent but convincingly embodying someone who carries the night with him like a halo; a knight errant reeking of stale tobacco, too much booze and too little sleep. His friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouten) calls hims a born loser.

David Thomson writes of how Altman ‘spends the whole film concentrating on the way Elliott Gould moves, murmurs, sighs, and allows silence or stillness to prevail’. And this at a time when as Pauline Kael writes in her review of the film, by 1973 , ‘Audiences may have felt that they’d already had it with Elliot Gould; the young men who looked like him in 1971 have got cleaned up and barbered and turned into Mark Spitz. But it actually adds poignancy to the film that Gould himself is already an anachronism…Gould comes back with his best performance yet. It’s his movie.’ It certainly is. Next to M*A*S*H and Bob &Carol&Ted&Alice, it’s also become the one he’s most associated with.

 

The first few scenes in the film dazzle. The whole sequence with the cat at the beginning where Marlowe gets up to feed it, the cat jumping from counter, to fridge, and onto Marlowe’s shoulder is disarming and rather wondrous. Even those who don’t love cats will be charmed. But the scene also conveys quite a bit about who Marlowe is: someone lonely, who relies on cats for company; someone responsible and loving who cares that the cat is well fed and willing to go out in the middle of the night to buy the cat’s preferred brand; a good neighbour too, prepared to get the brownie mix the women next door ask for  and unwilling to charge them for it: a gent or a chump? The choices Altman makes to show and tell us the story are constantly surprising, witty and wondrous on their own. See above, a minor example, that begins inside the apartment, showing us the city’s skyline, then the women, then the women in the city, before dollying down, something that looks like a peek at a little leg action before showing us, perfectly framed, Marlowe arriving in his vintage car.

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In The Long Goodbye much  is filmed through windows, which sometimes look onto something else, allowing action to happen on at least two planes. However the dominant use of this is to show the play of what’s happening between foreground and background, with the pane of glass, allowing partial sight of what’s beyond the glass and the reflection itself only partially showing what’s in front of it; and both together still only adding up to two partial views that don’t make a whole but which suggest there’s a background to things, and things themselves are but pale reflections of a greater underlying reality. You can see an example of this in the still above, from the the interrogation scene at the police station with the two way mirror. It’s a beautiful, expressive composition. According to Richard K. Ferncase, ‘the photography by Vilmos Zsigmond is unlike the heavy chiaroscuro of traditional noir’.  However, as evident in the still above, whilst it might be unlike, it certainly nods to and references it. In fact it’s part of a series of references: the gatekeeper who does imitations of James Stewart, Walter Brennan, Barbara Stanwyck etc; the way Marlowe lights matches a la Walter Neff, the hospital scene where it seems like the Invisible Man or Bogart before his plastic surgery in Dark Passage, etc.

This must be one of Vilmos Zsigmond’s greatest achievements as a cinematographer. Garret writes of how, ‘Altman accentuated the smog-drenched haze of his landscape by slightly overexposing, or ‘fogging’ the entire print.’ Ferncase admires the ‘diaphanous ozone of pastel hues, blue shadowns, and highlights of shimmering gossamer’ Zsigmond created by post-flashing the film. Zsigmond himself attributes this to a low budget: ‘We…flashed the film heavily, even more than we flashed it on McCabe. And the reason was basically because we didn’t have a big budget there for big lights and all that. So we were really very creative about how, with the little amount of equipment that we had, how we are going to do a movie in a professional way. A couple of things we invented on that movie — like flashing fifty per cent, which is way over the top. But by doing that we didn’t have to hardly use any lights when go from outside or inside and go outside again.’.

Robert Reed Altman notes how, ‘On Long Goodbye the camera never stopped moving. The minute the dolly stopped the camera started zooming. At the end of the zoom it would dolly and then it would zoom again, and it just kept moving. Why did he do it? Just to give the story a felling, a mood, to keep the audience an an edge’. Zsigmond describes how this came to be, ”On Images, when we wanted to have something strange going on, because the woman is crazy, we decided to do this thing — zooming and moving sideways. And zooming, and dollying sideways. Or zooming forward. What is missing? Up and down! So we had to be able to go up and down, dolly sideways, back and forth, and zoom in and out. Then we made The Long Goodbye and Robert said, ‘Remember that scene we shot in Images? Let’s shoot this movie all that way’.

They did. But it’s worth remarking that whilst Altman was happy to let actors improvise and to grab and use anything useful or interesting that happened to pass by the camera’s path  (the funeral procession, the dogs fucking in Mexico, etc.), the use of the camera seems to me to be highly conscious and controlled. See the scene below when Marlowe brings Roger Wade (a magnificent Sterling Hayden, like wounded lion on its last legs) home to his wife.

In the scene above Marlowe has just brought Wade back home to his wife Eileen (Nina van Pallandt), who’d hired Marlowe to do just that. As Marlowe heads to the beach, note how they’re both filmed outside a window, Wade cornered into the left side of the frame, his wife on the right; the palm trees reflected on the glass but outside. Inside the house is dark, the conversation pointed. In the next shot we get closer to Wade but stil framed within frames, encased in his situation, with window shades acting like bars behind him. In the third shot, we get closer to where the first shot was but Wade seems even murkier, hidden. When Eileen says ‘milk, is that what you really want,’ The camera zooms in, first on him, then her, then him, and as he walks over to her, we see Marlow behind a second window in the back. So we are seeing a domestic scene through a window, sunny California reflected in the palms in front, in the surf behind, something dark happening inside the house, and Marlow, pondering outside, for the moment their plaything, and playing on the surf behind, seen through two sets of glass. Much of the scene will be played like that until Wade goes to join Marlowe outside. Brilliantly evocative images, vey expressive of the characters, their situation and their dynamic, and they seem to me to be perfectly controlled to express just that. In fact that series of images evoke what the film’s about (see below)

 

The scene where the Wades and Marlowe are gathered together for the first time, rhymes with their last one. This time it’s Marlowe and Eileen who talk, and the discussion is about the husband, who as the camera zooms past Eileen and Marlowe’s conversation, and through the window, we see heading, fully dressed, into the ocean. The camera cuts to them from the outside, once more seeing through a window, but the darkness is on the outside now, and we don’t hear what they’re saying. What we hear now is the sounds of night on the beach — the waves, the surf — , and what we see, clearly and without mediation is Wade letting the surf engulf him. It’s a perfect riposte to the first scene, taking elements of the same style, but accentuating different ones — analogous to the way the film uses ‘The Long Goodbye’ song but in completely different arrangements as the film unfolds –, and creating a series of images that remain beautiful and startling in themselves but beautifully express what’s going on, what’s led to this. Had I extended the scene longer, you’d be able to see Eileen and Marlow also engulfed by the sea, the Doberman prancing by the shore, and that indelible image of the dog returning only with Wade’s walking stick. It’s great.

 

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Schwarzenegger makes an uncredited appearance in The Long Goodbye, screaming for attention by flexing his tits, and looking considerably shorter than Elliot Gould. An interesting contrast between a characteristic leading man of the 70s and how what that represents gave way to Schwarzenegger’s dominance in the 80s and 90s, and what that in turn came to represent. But though this is a fun moment in the film, its also what I liked least about it: i.e. the stunt casting. Nina van Pallandt is beautiful and she’s ok. But think of what Faye Dunaway might have brought to the role. Director Mark Rydell as gangster Marty Augustine is also ok but imagine Joe Pesci. As to Jim Bouton, a former ballplayer and TV presenter as Terry Lennox, to say that he’s wooden is to praise too highly. There’s a place in in cinema for this type of casting– and a history of much success — but see what a talented pro like David Carradine brings to the prison scene — not to mention Sterling Hayden and Elliot Gould both so great — and imagine the dimensions skilled and talented actors might have brought to the movie. The Long Goodbye is great in spite of, not because of, the casting of these small but important roles.

 

Many thanks to Dave Stewart for bringing this Jack Davis ‘Mad’-esque poster of the film to my attention:

*The Vilmos Zsigmond and Robert Reed Altman quotes are taken from Mitchell Zuckoff’s great book on Altman, Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, New York, Knopg, 2009.

 

José Arroyo

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky, USA, 1969)

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A film from a time when movies were America’s national theatre; ideas were explored and dramatised in order for the audience, which was then the nation, to have a discussion on how to be, how to love, how to strive for personal freedom without hurting others and in a world where the old certainties no longer held and new ways of being hadn’t yet been codified and entrenched. Bob & Carol is very much a film of its time, a Hollywood film of its time. Bob (Robert Culp) and Carol (Natalie Wood) go to a seminar where they learn that the path to personal freedom is to be honest about their feelings and express them. This leads to their exploring an open relationship, which at first shocks their closest friends, Ted (Elliot Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon) and subsequently disturbs Alice and entices Ted. At the end they all end up in the same bed and the closing song is the Burt Bacharach hit, ‘What the World Needs Now (Is Love Sweet Love)’.

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Natalie rocking a mini

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was an enormous success, reportedly grossing over 30 million on a 2 million dollar budget. It was the fifth top grossing film of 1969 and it’s worth mentioning that the films above it were, in order, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider and Hello, Dolly! Below it were Paint Your Wagon, True Grit, Cactus Flower, Goodbye Columbus, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The struggles between the old dying Hollywood (Hello, Dolly! Paint Your Wagon, True Grit) and the new and emerging one (Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider) playing out in the list itself, with Cactus Flower, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Goodbye, Columbus attempting to manoeuvre new ideas and ways of being into old forms.

Bob &Carol is more adventurous, both formally and thematically. It’s a zeitgeist film that still holds up well today. The opening scene with nude women basking in the sunshine as we hear Handel’s Hallellujah chorus; Robert Culp’s Nehru jackets, frilly collars and cuffs, and multiple beaded necklaces; Elliot Gould, giving a great performance but then seen as ‘ethnic’-looking and with the hairiest back in the history of the movies;  the mini-skirts; the pot-smoking scenes, and the final orgy: all speak their time. The glossy cinematography by Charles Lang is lovely to look at and it’s worth saying that Natalie Wood, who is less ‘good’ than Gould or Cannon, is nonetheless filmed as the movie star she was, and there are moments where she seems to glow and refract light; it’s a great pleasure to see. Quincy Jones’ score is a triumphant mix of the classic and the mod or the melding of two types of classic as when Sarah Vaughn sings Handel.  Paul Mazursky’s take is always a funny and loving one, and in this instance, made both more pleasurable but less complex by being glitzed up, yet still asking questions pertinent today (see for example the great scene with Ted and Alice discussing consensual sex in marriage) . It’s a film that still holds up, hugely enjoyable and currently on MUBI.

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José Arroyo

Ray Donovan (Ann Biderman Creator, 2013-present)

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I stumbled across Ray Donovan recently and  quickly got hooked for many reasons. A key one was a reminder that one of the joys of such long form television is seeing great actors or stars from the past in real parts, parts that remind us of what they can do, why they became celebrated in the first place: I’d not seen Steven Bauer since Scarface. But here he is – a striking presence — as Avi, a former Israeli Mossad and part of Ray’s team. And then there’s also Jon Voight, in his mid-70s, getting one of the best roles of his life as the Donovan patriarch who ruins everything, for everybody, always. But with enough humour and zest to keep everyone from giving up on him entirely. Elliott Gould brings an aura of The Last Goodbye to the work. James Woods, showing the same charismatic life-force — a kind of gangsterism as sexual appetite — that he conveyed in so many films, but perhaps most famously in Once Upon a Time in America opposite De Niro.

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Grace Zabriskie

Roseanna Arquette is one of the many tough but bruised blondes that grace this film. When Ann-Margret came on I didn’t quite recognise her. I thought who *is* this great actress, can it be? Yes, it is!; Grace Zabriskie’s also fab as an Armenian Godmother. It’s a showstopping performance, a number. She’s constantly drawing attention to what she’s doing, But she looks so fab and is so charismatic doing it that she makes you forget she’s playing really a clichéd and underwritten part. Then there’s also the many femme fatales who appear, of which perhaps the most striking is Katie Holmes, seemingly so recently from Dawson’s Creek.

Hank Azaria also appears in a recurring role, with that humorous sense of danger he displayed even as Robin William’s houseboy and maid of all things in Birdcage, as an FBI hot-shot who quickly slides down the ladder of success. It’s good to see Sherilyn Fenn, even if briefly, as Azaria’s wife. Whoever is the casting director for the show should get a prize. It’s like the show draws on the best of the 70s and 80s without ever stooping to evoking nostalgia for those decades.

ray donovan

What stops the casting from seeming a little like a Murder, She Wrote stuntcast nostalgiafest for a new generation is the themes, the tone, the care with which it’s all done. Ray Donovan — as the fixer who loves his wife, is close to his family — is not necessarily a new archetype. But as embodied by Liev Schreiber, tall, lean, silent, with the pointy nose and the chipmunk cheeks, completely recessive in speech but ready for violence. He’s first of all a marvellous image. But he’s also a great actor and the scenes between he and Paula Malcomson as his wife are so variegated and full of feeling that it hits at something real amidst all the stylishness.

Ray Donovan is a noir, and the wonderful thing about chiaroscuro is that it shows everything in half-light; things are complicated, there are nuances, there are exceptions, the light is a tendency that doesn’t cover or explain everything. Darkness can obscure the light just as light can make darkness recede. Also, that time between dusk and dawn offers a cover in which everyone from all walks of life, races and classes, can meet in the shadows, partake of the unacceptable, the shameful, the sordid, that also makes up part of life. But night is not necessary when that half-light can be created in rooms, by blinds, shades, shutters, confessionals.

At the heart of the series is sexual abuse, primarily, but not only by the Catholic church. Eddie Marson as Terry has had his hand deformed by it, Dash Mihok’s Bunchy Donovan has had his self-esteem destroyed. And Ray? Well the series goes on to tell us.

katherine moennig

If I’m giving the impression of too much testosterone, let me qualify. The show was created by Ann Biderman, who was also show-runner for the first two seasons. It has one of the most intriguing lesbian characters I’ve yet seen: Katherine Moennig’s Lena, cool and sexy, prone to violence — particularly against women — loyal, ready for anything and capable of carrying it through. It’s a terrific character.

Last but not least amongst the enticements is that it has a terrific list of directors, including Michael Apted, but most enticing for me is the name of John Dahl, the director of all those memorable noirs (Red Rock West, The Last Seduction) from the late 80s and early 90s. It’s an amazing combination of talents in really good material. I highly recommend.

José Arroyo