Sunset Gun

A Winters & Harrington Holiday: Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?

“Shelley did it superbly, with perhaps the thought of her own daughter contributing to the sense of loss and horror she conveyed as the girl’s mummified body crumbles in her hands.” – Curtis Harrington

Auntie Roo is a sad woman. And Christmas would be dismal without the children. Not her children, but the children, the orphans. So, the children must visit. And Auntie Roo must entertain. She will shower the kids with presents and fill them up with treats and laugh and sing and it all sounds so sweet. And some of her loving generosity is sweet but … Auntie Roo is not well. She is, in fact, dangerous.

And yet, we don’t dislike Auntie Roo. Not entirely. As Shelley Winters plays this disturbed, lonely lady in Curtis Harrington’s dreamy-creepy Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, we can only feel sorry for her, no matter how crazy and, at times, terrifying she is – snatching children, screaming for her dead daughter, tending to a mummified corpse… Yes, that’s right. Tending to a mummified corpse. We should be scared of her, perhaps even disgusted by this freaky soul, but we’re more perplexed and intrigued. And importantly, we (or rather, I) have sympathy for her. Much of our sympathy has to do with director Harrington’s sensitivity and insight towards the addled woman at the center of this dark fairy tale, and much of this has to with the performance of a brassy, bereaved Shelley Winters. She is wonderful here – weird, lonely, irritating, vulgar, funny, pathetic and very human – Winters fleshes out what could have been a one note crazy person with almost embarrassing vulnerability.

Winters always had a very specific quality of a wounded obnoxiousness that was very much her own, and in certain roles, it could alternate from whiny and pathetic, to irate psycho, to hilarious dame within seconds. No one whines like Shelley Winters (“Ohhh…. I’m lonely!” she moans to Humbert Humbert). Her whining is funny and mortifying and sad and you cringe because it’s just so nakedly needy. You want her to stop and yet her timing is so perfect, you wince, and then you want her to continue. Continue the annoyance, Shelley! At times, she plays aggressively needy to the point of dominance. Like she knows she’s being irritating and does not give a shit – like she’s actually getting off on how annoying she is. In her most pitiful roles, she could feel suffocating to her co-stars and even to the viewer (think George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun), and we feel simultaneously terrible for wishing she’d go away and for her really, truly going away (in the case of A Place in the Sun – tragic Shelley dies). We can’t stand her, and then the poor woman does something or has something done to her that breaks our heart. Winters showcased a complexity and depth that went beyond “the cow…the obnoxious Mama…the brainless baba…” (as James Mason’s Humbert wrote of her in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita). And she was brave to play such braying, potentially unlikable parts. Brave to be dumpy, brave to be annoying, brave to be braying.

And she’s often given such little honor in her more piteous performances, which makes her watery death in Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter so poignant, both narratively and stylistically. Shelley is snuffed out, but she is composed in such a hauntingly beautiful shot, that liquid submersion, that Laughton granted her one of the most lyrical deaths in all of cinema. There she is sitting in her watery grave – her hair waving with the seaweed. It’s transcendent.

In Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (set in Edwardian England) she is not afforded such beauty in death, but it’s not an ugly death and we’re not, in fact, hoping she will die, which is interesting. And the moment she’s on screen, we’re curious about her character right away, ready to see what Shelley will do next. Will she complain? Cry dejectedly? Yell at a man? No, her first moment is quite gentle – she is singing, and with nary a whine. Decked out in a maroon gown, a diamond tiara, a diamond necklace, and long white gloves, the sparkling, though faded and melancholic Rosie Forrest (a.k.a. Auntie Roo) sits next to a child’s crib alone, singing the British and Irish Folk song, “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme.” This surely wasn’t just some song Harrington plucked out for old time affect – it seems intentional in tune and lyrics. A song notable for its haunting refrain of “thyme” – a doubling that means your virginity or your purity, or a way of expressing time… Let no man steal either one:

“Come all you fair and tender maids That flourish in your prime. Beware, beware keep your garden fair. Let no man steal your thyme; Let no man steal your thyme. For when your thyme is past and gone, he’ll care no more for you, and every place where your thyme was waste, will all spread o’re with rue, will all spread o’re with rue. For woman is a branchy tree, and man’s a clinging vine, and from your branches carelessly, he’ll take what he can find, he’ll take what he can find.”

Will spread o’re with rue… Roo?

There doesn’t seem to be any suitors for Rosie nor does she appear to want one. No man will steal her time. Oh, but the right child – that is different. And it’s not like the world wants Rosie in that way anymore, which is a shame (she’s often fabulous), but the world isn’t a kind place to aging women in mansions who… dance, hold séances, wriggle into costumes for entertainment and, well, bray. Her husband, a magician, is gone forever (she’s a widow), and she lives in an enormous home favored by the town’s children of the town for looking like a gingerbread house. It’s a cheerful place, it would seem, but it’s really not at all – it’s shadowed with death and decay. You see that in the first scene too. After Auntie Roo sings the pretty but ominous tune, she peers into the crib to view a young blonde girl – a delusion – that’s what she thinks she sees (or wants to see). In actuality, it’s the mummified corpse (it had to be said again) of her dead daughter – a dusty gross thing she will place in a coffin. In a dreamy black and white flashback shown later in the picture, we see that her darling daughter suffered a tragic accident on the staircase banister – which seems absurd and almost funny but it’s told with such a fever-pitch of “Oh my god!” that it works. This needless tragedy has made the poor woman lose her mind, and you can understand why, though her methods of remembering the dearly departed are obviously troubling.

But back to that mummified corpse – the picture presents the revelation as a shock but somehow it doesn’t play like one – not to me anyway. I think, what else would Auntie Roo be singing to? As the picture surveys the creepy room with its dolls and stuffed animals (shot by cinematographer Desmond Dickinson, whom Harrington wasn’t pleased with – you can see how a moodier look would have been preferable and the cinematography hampers the film a bit) a corpse is not a stretch – even in the first scene. And this could be to the picture’s detriment, but it’s not. The movie works more as a character study and less as a horror movie (which viewers likely expect), or even as a straight-up psycho-biddy – a.k.a. movies in which aging actresses go insane, commit murder or serve rats for lunch. The psycho biddy, hagsploitation or the more preferable, respectful term – Grande Dame Guignol – is a genre I love, no matter how varied the quality of pictures are among them. Some are borderline exploitative, some quite sensitive, but most are full of intriguing insights and psychodrama with fantastic, operatic performances by actresses – movie stars— who don’t just chew the scenery, but tear up the screen, bravely showcasing the unfair horror of aging from a perspective of such intense female fear (and male sexism) that some of these pictures border on the surreal.

My god, it should not be so scary to age, but in Hollywood, that kind of fear twists into the darkest places imaginable, both absurd and entirely believable. There’s an uneasy feeling to some Grande Dame Guignol – that the films are seeking revenge on such beautiful stars, that audiences, and particularly men, enjoy watching such iconic beauties looking so ravaged and crazy. That they love to see the mighty fall. I love watching them, not because of faded beauty, but because the women are powerhouses and still striking and electric on screen. To me, these actresses are so fearless, so charismatic, and interpreted these parts with such specific style and soul (if we count this movie as one of the first – Gloria Swanson – in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. is truly her own work of art – and still gorgeous, I might add), that I can only look at their visages with respect and sometimes awe. Shitty men reveling in their demise? I don’t know except, fuck that and fuck those guys. One should admire these actresses for taking these parts and never coasting, giving these films their all (like Joan Crawford in William Castle’s incredible Straight-Jacket). Bette Davis and Joan are the Grande Dames in Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and, my god, what performances. What a look and edge Bette crafted – her Baby Jane Hudson is so in your face and shocking that she’s as punk as Johnny Rotten. To rebel and stir it up as a young man? That’s to be expected. To rebel and cause audible gasps an older woman? And as an older actress? That takes some serious guts.

With Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, Harrington delves into this aging, strange, sad woman and two strange, sad children who enter her life with scares not always coming from crazy Roo. The woman can’t let go of her tragic past, she can’t stand to be alone, and the children, chiefly the brother, wants to keep his sister to himself.  In his typically esoteric and compelling way, Harrington updated the “Hansel and Gretel” story wherein the mean lonely witch isn’t always so mean, and the nice abandoned kids aren’t always so nice. It’s a fascinating way to tell the story – with so many shadings – it’s never that simple.

The meaner kid (though that’s too easy a word to describe him) is orphan Christopher Coombs (Mark Lester), who has a vivid imagination, enough to frighten the other children at the orphanage where lives he with this little sister, Katy (Chloe Franks). He’s close to his sister, and he looks out for her, but he’s an odd child. He seems a bit… obsessed with her. But like obsessive Auntie Roo, he doesn’t want to be alone (though he would never believe he had anything in common with that woman). Every year a handful of the most well-behaved kids in the orphanage are allowed to spend Christmas at Auntie Roo’s impressive gingerbread-looking house, only Christopher and Katy are punished (for Christopher’s willful imagination), and not allowed to attend. But they sneak in anyway. They’re discovered and reprimanded, but sweet-psycho Roo accepts them – chiefly because she thinks she recognizes her deceased daughter Katherine in young Katy. Could she be? And if not, perhaps she can make her be. This is when things start going even nuttier.

Auntie Roo is charitable with the all of the kids – she throws them a lavish Christmas morning complete with loads of presents under the gorgeous tree. What orphan wouldn’t want to spend the holidays with Auntie Roo? She even sings a song and dances for them— to Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Tit Willow.” But Christopher is suspicious – he sees Katy and himself as a version of Hansel and Gretel and this woman is going to keep them, fatten them up, maybe even eat them. It’s a unique device – Christopher imagining and narrating in his head these scenarios of Roo being a witch. He even climbs into her dumbwaiter and spies on her – she’s singing “Let No Many Steal Your Thyme,” and he witnesses Roo placing her daughter’s corpse in a small coffin, wearing all black and a black veil. Well, that is something. His imagination doesn’t seem so mischievous or wrong at this point – and it’s not. Auntie Roo may not be a witch, but she’s certainly alarming. But no one is going to listen to Christopher because, like the eye-rolling a “daffy” older lady often gets, many people don’t respect children, or believe them. With that, Roo and Christopher are somewhat united, and this is part of the picture’s complicated magic.

What I love here is that cultured, innovative, cineaste Curtis Harrington (his entire life was fascinating) – shows such respect and even reverence for certain actors (and all kinds of artists), and actresses in more specific cases, that he understood them for being beautiful, odd-looking and even fading. In older actresses, particularly movie stars, he still saw and appreciated their charisma. From his adoration of Marlene Dietrich (and her mentor, Josef Von Sternberg, of which Harrington wrote a monograph of in the 1950s), to Simone Signoret (whom he worked with in Games and spoke highly of his entire life – she warned him that she was “fat” before starting the picture), to Gloria Swanson (his star of the TV movie Killer Bees, of which he said: “Gloria showed only love and acceptance toward the bees as we poured them on her skin. Kate Jackson, on the other hand, shuddered and was repelled by them.”), to Bette Davis, whom he wanted to work with, and many others. Harrington found these older actresses vital, still interesting, still stars. And in this picture, he allowed Winters a little more depth than a casual moviegoer might expect from a movie within this genre – although, as said, these actresses always gave a lot within the Grande Dame Guignol.

And he allowed her to be something many can relate to –  lonely. Not just pathetic, not just silly or scary, but lonely. Yes, she’s frightening, she’s even funny at times, but she’s grieving and she’s going insane. But Harrington isn’t exploiting this predicament for laughs or easy terror, just as he wasn’t with his fantastic What’s the Matter with Helen?(another one of the greats in the genre Grande Dame Guignol) featuring stellar performances by Winters and Debbie Reynolds (who looked gorgeous). Watching Winters end that picture playing “Goody-Goody” on the piano – with that madness, desperation and sadness in her smile, is truly haunting and incredibly sad. It’s one of Harrington’s greatest pictures among such interesting work, and he really got Winters, no matter how much off-screen drama occurred with the actress.

Here’s how much he got actresses/movie stars: In his excellent autobiography, “Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood,” he wrote a lovely recollection from the time he was working with Jerry Wald, after he’d directed his avant-garde short films and before his hauntingly beautiful Night Tide was made. One day, he took in the astounding star appeal of Joan Crawford. Harrington talks of watching dailies of an older Crawford in Robert Aldrich’s masterful Autumn Leaves, which he called a “revelation”:

“For the first time, I became aware of what the term ‘movie star’ means. The word ‘star’ in the context of a top movie personality is very appropriate, since astronomically speaking, a star is a body that is illuminated from within. This illumination from within is what I witnessed that day in a projection room at Columbia Studios. The shoot had taken place during the summer. The camera was set on a close-up of Joan Crawford between takes, looking very wilted and ordinary, fanning herself in the heat. Then the clapboard was thrust in front of her, the clapper lowered, and a voice said, ‘Scene eighty-four, take three.’ In that split second, I witnessed an ordinary, exhausted woman center all of her energies and come vibrantly alive as Joan Crawford, the Movie Star. It was a metaphysical experience.

”Metaphysical. I’m not sure he felt this strongly about Shelley Winters – she was never Joan Crawford – but he understood Winters’ power and star quality and unique neediness. And he understood her pathos. As Roo holds a séance conducted by fake psychic Mr. Benton (a great Ralph Richardson) with Auntie Roo’s shifty, psychopathic butler Albie (a creepy Michael Gothard) included – they have been tricking her – and you hate them for it. You don’t laugh at her, you realize what awful people are exploiting her. One of the servants, Clarine (Judy Cornwall), is providing the ghostly voice of Roo’s dead daughter, making Roo hold on to hope even more, and Benton to rake in even more dough, that bastard. They’re so unscrupulous, such scumbags, that they don’t feel a thing when a beseeching Roo hollers out for her child: “Oh, Katharine stay! Stay my darling. Please forgive me! Forgive me! Give me another chance! I love you so much! Oh, Katherine! I need you, stay with me! I’m so lonely, stay with… Katherine!!”

Dear lord. It’s an intense scene – Shelley howling her desolation (she does this a lot throughput the movie, horrifying and sometimes darkly funny). But after this outcry, the picture does a quick, smart cut to Katy shot from outside of a doleful window at the orphanage, from which she is staring into the grey and depressing landscape. Katy doesn’t know it yet, but she will become Roo’s obsession, and the picture hints that perhaps she is some kind of reincarnation of Roo’s dead daughter. And, so, after Auntie Roo’s Christmas get together is over, Roo really does snatch Katy. Christopher was right in his worry and, yet, you still don’t like him all that much. He’s always scaring people, his sister included, and he doesn’t seem like a good influence on her mental state. He manages to break back into Roo’s house to “save” his sister and I always think, maybe Katy would be better off with Auntie Roo. And, indeed, at one point, Katy does tell her brother that she’d rather live with Roo.

Christopher is having none of this and plans their escape while stuffing Roo’s jewels in the back of the teddy bear (reminiscent of Pearl’s doll in Night of the Hunter), Roo gave to Katy (it was her daughter’s before, and the stuffed animal even sits at the séance). But the kids are soon caught and then stuck with Auntie Roo – enduring her combination of creepy sweetness (some of it genuine, some I don’t know what the hell she’s doing) and horror (watching Christopher watch Roo eating is something else – hilarious and bizarre). Christopher has had to survive, and you can’t blame the kid for being hardened and crafty and even a liar and a thief – but there’s a gleam in his eye whenever he sets to antagonizing Auntie Roo, and it looks murderous. Like you can see it – that his future will lead to violence and sociopathy. Though he certainly hates Roo for a solid reason (kidnapping), and he really, truly views her as a witch (he takes his fairy tales seriously, but then perhaps, he takes them seriously when convenient), you feel his fairy tale also fits his purpose of destroying someone. Burn the witch!

You can feel the rot in this kid and Lester plays Christopher with such mystery and contempt that the horror shifts – who are we rooting for here?  We should be hoping the kids are free but… we don’t want to see Auntie Roo obliterated. I don’t, anyway. And though these kids must escape, he and Katy take to some drastic, cruel measures to get the hell out of there: they lock Roo in a room and set it on fire. Yes, they burn poor Auntie Roo to death – and that lovely gingerbread house goes up in flames. Whoever Slew? Now we know. But no one else in the movie does.

When Dr. Mason (Pat Heywood) understands what the children have been through, he says: “Poor little devils, they’ll probably have nightmares till the day they die.” Maybe they will. Maybe. Christopher, with his refrain of the story of “Hansel and Gretel,” closes out the movie with this: “Hansel and Gretel knew that the wicked witch could not harm anyone else and they were happy. They also knew that with the wicked witch’s treasure they would not be hungry again. So, they lived happily ever after.”

Well, I suppose. But I kind of despise Christopher for torching Auntie Roo. And this will sound wrong, but I do hope he wakes up to one of those nightmares Dr. Mason reckons will occur. Chiefly, one of Auntie Roo, or rather, Shelley Winters, standing there in that gown and gloves and tiara and mummified corpse child, singing softly:

Beware, beware keep your garden fair. Let no man steal your thyme; Let no man steal your thyme. For when your thyme is past and gone, he’ll care no more for you, and every place where your thyme was waste, will all spread o’re with rue, will all spread o’re with rue.

Originally published at the New Beverly.

Stella & Stanton: Fallen Angel

June: “Why did you go to see that girl in the diner?”

Eric: “What girl?”

There’s a sickness hanging over Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel that clings to every location, every set, every fluid camera move, and every off, but very human expression on the actor’s often haunted faces. And it's all heightened by the attraction to one woman -- Stella. Oh, Stella (Linda Darnell), the young beautiful waitress at Pop’s Eats whom men want to save, paw, marry, or again, paw.  And of course, more than just paw. What a guy wouldn’t do for a tumble. And what a guy would do when he knows he’ll never get a tumble. But one of those guys isn’t just your usual lust-filled creep, one of those guys will be a murderer. And right away, we see the impending sexual doom -- we don't know who or exactly what, but we see it.

When the movie opens and our hero (or anti-hero), the traveling con man Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews) steps off the bus and into this dark and misty California beach town, he walks into Pop’s, we take in this gorgeous image and feel it -- suffused with sex and danger and seedy hometown rot -- the entire picture, shot by Joseph LaShelle, is bathed in this scummy beauty. There’s just men in that diner, and they’re all wondering about one thing -- Stella. Where is she? Why has she been gone for so long? Dear god, did she off herself? One imposing, gravely looking man, ex NY cop Mark Judd, (Charles Bickford) says, “Not Stella. Back in New York, I handled 31 suicide cases personally. Everything from poison to jumping in front of the Flatbush subway. Stella's not the type.” OK. So, what type is she, I ask the guy bragging about personally handling suicide? It already appears that nobody truly cares or bothers to actually understand Stella. They just want her to be something to them. And in Fallen Angel, she’s not the type all of these men want her to be. And this goes beyond Stella --  all of the film’s characters, male and female, go against their societal norms of “type.”

We’ll be rooting (if that’s the right word) for con man Eric Stanton against the mysterious, almost kinkily violent cop, even when we know Eric is treating another woman (lonely June, played by Alice Faye, who doesn’t want to remain as innocent as see seems) like garbage, and we’ll be disgusted by kindly old Pops who runs the diner, just as Stella is. Pops (Percy Kilbride) hasn’t done a thing to her (on screen anyway), and yet, right away we understand why Stella spits at him, “You make me sick.” Pops has given her the feeble “I told you so” about some cad she went on a date with and he gets … “You make me sick.” Not, buzz off, Pop, or, stay out of my business. Her dismissiveness is seething with the interior dialogue of I know what you want. I know why you “care” so greatly about me and my bad date. I know why I have this job. Ick. Pop. His “paternal” affection might be the creepiest of all. Who knows what she’s had to endure or listen to while she’s re-filling the ketchup containers at closing time.

So, the moment we see her bitterly slump back into the diner, hungry and with tired aching feet -- a low rent Laura returning from the dead (indeed, this was a follow up to Preminger’s hit, Laura, with the same leading man, and a similar story of one-woman obsession, only with down-and-outers and much more desperation) – we don’t think she’s trouble, we think these men are. Oh sure, check out the gorgeous supposed femme fatale in the beautiful, lush Darnell who was only 21 when she made this and yet feels like she’s had decades of shit heaped on her (it doesn’t take too many years for a woman to understand this). She’s matter-of-fact tough and fixated on money and marriage, but not really bad.

Everything about her, from the weary way she walks around the diner and hands back change to customers --  this lady is sick of it all. And Darnell is so excellent here, that, like all of these men, we don’t want her to go out of town too long either. We want to see her on screen -- in this diner -- a limbo of lust. The filmmakers agreed and pumped up Darnell over star Faye, cutting out some of Faye’s scenes and even supposedly her singing number (!), something that upset Faye, mirroring the “innocent” she plays in June. June is the woman Eric marries in order to fleece her, so he can marry sexy Stella and give her what she wants over some tumble in her crummy little apartment -- money. Eric even cuts his wedding night short and leaves his wife alone to see… Stella. He wakes up on the couch in the stately home with doilies and nice curtains that his new bride shares with her spinster sister, Clara (Anne Revere) and his wife … forgives him -- what the hell is wrong with this woman? He also learns that Stella has been murdered. 

This leads to who did it? Eric will be a suspect, as will June’s sister, as will Stella’s almost steady, Dave Atkins (Bruce Cabot) who gets an interrogation and beating so sickening and vicious by Judd (who is now handling the case) that we wonder if this is his disgusting thrill. (It is -- he’s a sick man, quite literally) Even Pop is considered a possibility, not a surprise in this world (scripted by Harry Kleiner from Marty Holland’s novel), where everyone has motive beyond their obsession. Yes, there is Stella, but there’s loneliness, bitterness, impotence, and what the hell am I doing with my life? Do I matter at all in this universe? All of this existential angst narrowed in on this poor woman whose dark world seems only lightened by the song she obsessively plays on the diner’s jukebox and one that hovers over the movie, again, like a dingier “Laura” (the song -- “Slowly” -- perhaps a sexual pace she wishes men would follow). Another joy: in her introduction scene, Stella scarfs (though somehow daintily scarf) down a hamburger (she’s hungry, and she’s eating that thing, but she’s not gonna mess up that perfect lipstick), after walking in the night when a guy got too fresh. Watching Darnell eat that hamburger is such a real joy and so convincing you’ll crave a creepy Pop’s burger too – this hamburger won’t let her down.

I’m not going to spoil the ending and reveal who did it. But I will say it wasn’t Eric. The double cross to June wasn’t something he could probably really go through with and he certainly wouldn’t murder someone, as shifty as he is. I’ll ruin one thing though – June stays with him -- even after he married her for money, left her alone on her wedding night and was in love with another woman the entire time. It seems like an easy resolution, the two of them driving off together in the end with June asking where to, and Eric answering, “home.” Now he’s a settled, domestic fellow with this nice little wife? Not a chance.

In fact, it’s one of the grimmest “romantic” endings I’ve ever seen. Eric has told June that it wouldn’t have lasted with Stella, and he’s probably right, but … this is the answer? Poor June, she’s not gonna have a good life. And Stella… why does she have to be dead? She’s the one with everyone’s number. She knows, like Preminger knows, like the writers know, what lurks in the heart of anyone putting on their best face: “You talk different, sure, but you drive just like the rest.”

Business: Murder By Contract

“Why are you miserable? Cause you haven't got any dough? And why haven't you got any dough? Because you're too scared to go out and get it yourself. You want it to come to you. Well, nothing comes to you, Harry. Nothing except one thing... death. Death comes to you... comes to everybody. Only everybody thinks they'll live forever.” Claude (Vince Edwards), Murder By Contract

In Irving Lerner’s Murder By Contact, Claude doesn’t like women. And more specifically, he doesn’t like killing women. Since it’s his job to kill people, presumably all kinds of people, this comes as a potential moral jolt when he announces his aversion to the two mob men facilitating the murder. Claude (he has no last name) has been hired to knock off a person named Billie Williams – this person is going to testify to a grand jury against a gangster – and Claude’s taken a train all the way from New York City to Los Angeles to accomplish the hit. He’s been leisurely about it. The moment he stepped off the train (in Glendale, he’s not going to be seen at a bigger station), he’s had the two men who picked him up drive his handsome mug all over the place— he wants to see the sights. He wants to take in the Pacific Ocean. He wants to swim. He wants to go deep-sea fishing. He also wants to think. And he wants to make sure there’s no funny business going on. By the time he’s ready to accomplish his task, we’re nearly a half an hour into the picture and Claude has tested the men’s patience so much that they can’t figure him out. One likes him, he likes listening to him talk; he even dries his back after Claude swims (he seems a little in love with him, in fact). The other more cantankerous fellow who mockingly calls him “Superman” thinks he’s a pain in the ass and even weirder than the average contract killer. But they wait until he’s well rested and ready and then finally, they venture up to the potential dead person’s house. Claude spies a woman walking in the living room. Is that his wife, he asks? That’s the target, the two men say. Claude panics. A woman? No one told him it was a woman. This is the part of the movie where you think Claude has a moral code when it comes to the opposite sex. It’s not as simple as all that.

Nothing is simple in Lerner’s lean, low budget 1958 masterpiece (shot in eight days), a noir of sorts, but something more cool (as in crisply composed) and modern that it’s hard to classify simply as noir. And it doesn’t need to be classified. More in common with films that followed it – the assassin as monk of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, the assassin as organized list maker, working out to keep himself murderously awake in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (no surprise Scorsese reveres this movie and worked with Lerner) and the deadpan style of Jim Jarmusch – Murder By Contract is entirely its own dissolute creature.  A movie of sunny wide open spaces in which rot and existential dread cling to the jaunty, jaundiced characters like the smog we don’t see (it’s too bright), the light and L.A. neighborhoods (shot by Ace Lucien Ballard, scored with a spare guitar by Perry Botkin recalling The Third Man) underscores that it is a movie of the late 1950s, when stability and a nice house were a yearned for and achievable American dream, but a questioned dream like so many other things in a consumer-driven society. You may end up, metaphorically speaking, like Claude’s target, the night club singer Billie (Caprice Torie) – depressed, stuck inside under guarded watch with the television blaring all day, eating your delivered soup and sandwiches, slamming the keys to your piano in anguish as you play a lovely classical piece only you care about. This is no “femme fatale,” this is a woman sitting in a prison, smoking all day with literal killers (and now Claude) lurking all around her.  By the end of the film, as scared and as tough as she is, part of her seems like she doesn’t even give a shit anymore.

Lerner, with a background in ethnographic filmmaking (one early 1940’s documentary stars Pete Seeger and features Woody Guthrie, among others) connected killing with business, a common trope in this kind of movie, but he (and screenwriter Ben Simcoe) took it one step further with the killer (played brilliantly by Vince Edwards, also in Lerner’s fatalistic City of Fear), wanting to make a fast buck so he can get to the unglamorous business of buying a house and settling down. He’s new to the game, no spotty past to speak of. He’s never been to prison, he doesn’t even carry a gun, he just wants to make large sums of money to fast track a more leisurely life. That he has to unleash a cold-hearted psychopath makes no difference to him. Business:

“Now, why would a stranger kill a stranger? Because somebody’s willing to pay. It’s business. Same as any other business. You murder the competition. Instead of price-cutting, throat cutting. Same thing. There are a lot of people around who would like to see other people die a fast death or they can’t see to it themselves. They got conscience. Religion. Families. They’re afraid of punishment here, or hereafter. Me. Ha. I can’t be bothered with any of that nonsense. I look at it like a good business. The risk is high but so is the profit. I wasn’t born this way. I trained myself. I eliminate personal feeling…. I feel hot. I feel cold. I get sleepy and I get hungry.”

Claude’s focus and methodical approach (Lerner and Ballard frame this beautifully) is partly what does him in. Women are hard to kill. They blur his focus. He spits: “It’s not a matter of sex, it’s a matter of money. If I’d-a known it was a woman, I’d've asked double. I don’t like women. They don’t stand still. When they move, it’s hard to figure out why or wherefore. They’re not dependable. It’s tough to kill somebody who’s not dependable.” It’s an amusing speech, both sexist and weirdly, not sexist at all. Women may not be dependable to him but, without really knowing it, he’s describing women as complex, curious.

The movie showcases this with Billie and two other women – a sad, sloppy drunk painting the apartment she’s afraid of kicking out of and a call girl whose endured who knows what in her line of work. Both drunk and call girl inadvertently help Claude, and Billie, in the end, tells him to leave, she won’t nark him out. These women are hanging by their fingernails to live in a world that is crushing them down and breaking their spirit. And they are outsiders, like Claude, who, in a bracing scene with a male hotel room service attendant, surely remembers what it means to be a wage slave. That Lerner gives all of these women enough time in their brief moments to reveal their shattered selves inside their outward, supposedly, untrustworthy exteriors, gives Murder By Contract a depth that seeps into Claude, who, by the end, simply can’t kill Billie.

Does he have a crisis of conscience? And, if so, why does he suddenly feel something? He appears almost sickened when pulling off his tie and fixing to strangle Billie, poisoned by a heart. Perhaps he’s spent so much time trying to kill her (in other unsuccessful attempts) that while watching her sad, trapped life, he now feels a connection to her that’s both empathetic and terrifying. The American Dream is now kaput. The guy who just wanted a damn house winds up dead under Billie’s nice home, trapped like a rat. Claude says earlier, “The only type of killing that’s safe is when a stranger kills a stranger.” Billie is no longer a stranger. In Murder By Contract that revelation is now scary, tragic and strangely beautiful.

Aug Sight & Sound: McCoy, West & Fuller

“It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.” -- Nathanael West, Day of the Locust

I've got a few pieces in this August's Sight & Sound.

The cover story is a compendium of writers discussing novels and short stories about movies & moviemaking -- I write about Horace McCoy's "I Should Have Stayed at Home" and nathanael West's "Day of the Locust."

My other longer piece is on the great Samuel Fuller and his movies at Columbia -- I write about seven of his pictures, including two of my Fuller favorites, Underworld USA and The Crimson Kimono, along with the charming It Happened In Hollywood, the very short (!) Adventure in Sahara, the needs-more-Fuller Power of the Press, and the impressive Scandal Sheet.

On shooting The Crimson Kimono's dangerous opening, in which stripper Sugar Torch runs for her life down a busy downtown LA street, Fuller reflected later about how no one on the street (these were not paid extras, but real people) gave a damn about this poor woman. In “The Third Face” he wrote of watching that scene with head of Columbia, Sam Briskin: “When I looked at the rushes with Sam Briskin, we realized that nobody, not even a passing sailor or a homeless drunk-was paying any attention to the big, scantily clad gal running along that downtown street. Nobody gave a damn. ‘What the hell's wrong with this country?’ asked Briskin.”

Pick it up! 

Elaine May and Mikey and Nicky

Mikey: You call me "The Echo. " And you tell everybody that I have to say everything twice because I got a tunnel in my head. The second time is the echo.

Nicky: Mikey, everybody says everything. I mean, what's the difference? I was kidding. Don't you ever kid?

Mikey: You make me out a joke to Resnick. Just like you made me out a joke to that girl.

Nicky: Mikey, you're wrong. And I'd do anything for you. Anything.

A shorter riff on this movie...

At the beginning of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, John Cassavetes’ Nicky is holed up in a seedy motel room in Philadelphia, terrified and desperate. He’s in the midst of a nervous breakdown and looks like he’s been up for days with his messy, bed-head hair, handsome, haggard face and wrinkled white dress shirt sticking to his thin frame in an angst-filled, ulcer-ridden sweat. He’s stooped on a dingy bed and staring nervously rat-eyed at the dirty, chain-locked door, hoping no one busts through. He’s got a gun. Of course he’s got a gun. This place is the kind of fleabag hovel where people shoot through filthy locked doors or bribe front desk clerks who’ll look the other way when an offender blasts through those grungy openings and commit whatever bit of unpleasantness that happens on the other side. The joint is haunted with the lives of those who hide in the rooms, sitting on bed-bugged blankets full of dope, hope and desperate dreams. Nicky isn’t dreaming, his life is a wide-awake-nightmare. But he does have hope – he hopes to stay alive.

He's got a good reason to be scared – he’s heard there's a contract out on him. He calls the buddy he’s known since childhood, Mikey (Peter Falk) and begs for help. Nicky knows Mikey’s going to come up, even if Nicky throws down a towel and nearly knocks Mikey with a bottle. You feel for him. Mickey reassures him, spending the entire movie with his pal. Mikey’s an old friend and Nicky can trust him. Oh… hold on. Can he? Is he on the level? When you eventually learn that Mikey is not  on the level (and you don’t catch this right away), and once you realize that the hit man (played by Ned Beatty) on Nicky’s trail is being aided along by Mikey, you start to piece together that this friend isn’t the one Nicky should have called. You’re on Nicky’s side. You think. Keep watching. No, you’re on both of their sides because, what kind of hell are these men trapped within? What kind of life is this? Is Mikey really going to deceive Nicky? Is Nicky maybe a sociopath?

As the night wears on and these two talk, fight, hit each other and smack a troubled, sensitive woman, the friends reveal more and more about themselves and your emotions shift all over the place. Whatever alliances you had, whatever charm you’ve felt from these two guys, all that has been dragged around and sullied, dirtied up like that door in Nicky’s dumpy motel room. And May shoots it that way, never allowing a glamorous moment to enter the frame. You can practically smell the bars they’re drinking in. And yet, you don’t want to get out of this movie, you don’t want to unlock the door and make a run for it. You like being stuck with these two small-timers, you’re fascinated and drawn to them, and you wonder where this is all gonna end … who is going to make it through the night?

That is the genius of writer director May and her actor’s Cassavetes and Falk. In one night, in the ghostly urban environ of Philadelphia (a decidedly less romantic place than New York City or Chicago or Los Angeles, or at least May shoots it that way, haunting, at times oddly beautiful), we tag along with two scumbags who talk in junky beat-up bars and on city busses or in the streets and we are enlivened, anxious, depressed, disturbed and empathetic. By trusting the chemistry and brilliant interplay between Cassavetes and Falk, May not only shows her subjects as flawed, violent, vulnerable, selfish, guilt-ridden and manipulative men carrying around decades of resentment (as many friends do) but men who are constantly on the precipice of violence, emotion or literal, and violence ready to do them or someone else in. You feel jangly and uncomfortable watching these two – you are waiting for a shoe or two or three shoes to drop. Maybe on Falk’s head.

There’s nothing noble about these guys – when they stop off at Nicky’s mistresses apartment, Nicky spouts some hollow “I love you” line so he can nail her on the floor, while Mikey’s hunched over in her depressing kitchen, waiting for them to finish and for his turn. When Mikey’s rebuffed, he smacks her. Just as feel like Mikey’s a real son of a bitch, you feel sorry for him minutes later (in spite of yourself) when he accuses Nicky of setting the scene up to embarrass him, to hurt his male ego. But then you start to believe Mikey when he claims she’s just a psycho and needs to be coddled with sweet talk before the act, and then you realize you’re buying this atrocious behavior. God, you’re right there on the street with them. Nicky breaks Mikey’s watch – his father’s watch, something that holds sentimental value. What an asshole, you think. But they’re both assholes. You want to keep on with them regardless. They’re so compelling that they make unlikable characters not, lovable, but magnetic and, at times, totally recognizable. It’s what people call a “high wire act” and the artists walk it bravely. Too bad some critics in 1976 didn’t think much of this movie ( not all of course) - a movie that now stands as one of the most underrated works of the 1970s. What were they thinking?

This was considered, by some, a darker turn for May, who had directed the brilliant comedies A New Leaf (which she wrote) and The Heartbreak Kid (written by Neil Simon) prior to this, though it’s not like those two films were light comedies. The Heartbreak Kid is as bleak as anything in Mikey and Nicky (maybe even bleaker) but we don’t get to see the sunny beauty of Cybill Shepherd running around in a bathing suit to quell any of the acidity (though her brittle beauty is the catalyst towards selfish, terrible Charles Grodin marital doom). Instead we see the perpetually ruffled and combative Cassavetes’ protagonists (and of course May was compared to Cassavetes’ own films – Husbands being a chief picture) skulking around in a paranoiac frenzy. And she captured their movements, their words, their chemistry, creating a world that feels empty (the streets) and full all at once. Full of fear, full of possible love that probably won't happen. Full of deceit. What she does with the darkness, the bars, the hotel rooms and the talk -- it's all perfectly realized -- and she keeps you off kilter in a way where you can't take your eyes away from these two supposed low-lifes.

She shot a lot on this one. The movie carries a notorious production history (it’s been talked about retrospectively enough, but May notoriously went over budget, reportedly shot more film than Gone with the Wind and, at one point, reportedly hid reels somewhere in Connecticut). She didn’t direct another film until her vastly underrated, excellent Ishtar came out eleven years later. Well, that’s a shame.

Mikey and Nicky is also funny, grooving on the darkly comedic and very human rhythms of Cassavetes and Falk through which even their explosions of violence play as darkly humorous, at least for a moment, until you’re taken aback and saddened by the needlessness of it all. It’s painful and poignant and challenging and funny and finally, heartbreaking. The picture ends as you might expect it to and yet, it feels totally surprising, this rush of emotion you feel as Nicky bangs on Mikey’s much nicer door, nicer than the one in his crappy motel room. He’s yelling in misery: “Mikey, you son of a bitch! You bastard! You bastard! Mikey!” His life is nearly over and damn, you really feel it. You believe it. You believe every second of this movie. A line uttered earlier by Mikey is now, not so much funny as more awfully prophetic, circling back to desperate Nicky screaming at his door: “It’s very hard to talk to a dead person. I have nothing in common.” Maybe Mikey’s telling himself that at this anguished moment. Maybe not.

Originally published in Kill Or Be Killed

Kill or Be Killed: He Ran All the Way

“When an actor doesn't face a conflict, he loses confidence in himself. I always want to have a struggle because I believe it will help me accomplish more.” – John Garfield

Nick Robbey is trapped. Everywhere. No matter what. The man can’t even escape this claustrophobic life he trudges through while sleeping. Sleep – a place where you can run through sunny fields, bask in wealth, make it with beautiful girls, or just truly, actually sleep – enjoy the warm cocoon of dark nothingness; your body restoring itself for another good or bad day of something – anything – at least you slept well. No such luck for poor Nick – you get the sense this fella is always being chased and traumatized and worried and haunted, awake or not. Running. All the Way. Where?

By the end you see where and it’s not through some sunny field – it’s staggering in a gutter with Shelley Winters close behind. That Nick is brilliant John Garfield in director John Berry’s tough, poignant and doomed (on and off the screen), He Ran All the Way – a movie that opens with this beautiful loser tossing and turning in his bed, sweaty and convulsed in bad dreams. But he wakes up to something worse – reality – his mother (a harsh as hell Gladys George). After hollering at him for moaning in his slumber (no maternal instinct in this woman), she pulls open the dingy shades of his room and screeches: “If you were a man you’d be out looking for a job!” His reply? “If you were a man I’d kick your teeth in.”  This ain’t no happy family. But family will become something important to Nick in this picture – even if he has to force his way into one.

Read it all (my essay on "He Ran All the Way") in the newest and final of Ed Brubaker's "Kill Or Be Killed" -- out now. Pick it up or order here.

Happy Birthday Marilyn Monroe: Nell

“There was just this scene of one woman seeing another who was helpless and in pain. It was so real, I responded. I really reacted to her. She moved me so that tears came into my eyes. Believe me, such moments happened rarely, if ever again, in the early things I was doing out there.” – Anne Bancroft on Marilyn Monroe

The moment Marilyn Monroe walks into the hotel of Don’t Bother to Knock – we are enthralled. It’s her first scene in the movie and without knowing anything about her beautiful, troubled Nell, and what her beautiful, troubled Nell has been through, we feel a pall hanging over this young woman. Monroe, on sight, is that powerful. Monroe’s tentative gait and unsure eyes enter the space (its own kind of asylum) where the lounge singer, Lyn Lesley (a grounded, lovely Anne Bancroft) sings swoony tunes in a cowboy themed room. It’s an intriguing juxtaposition – a nervous 1952 Marilyn (ten years before her death) – less made up, darker blonde hair, simple dress – passes the poster of glamorous Bancroft – not knowing she’ll be in a room with that woman’s soon-to-be ex, cocky pilot, Jed (Richard Widmark). That’s not so surprising – a seduction with Widmark. This is Marilyn Monroe after all, and even clad in simple frock and sad expression, she’s stunning to behold. But what feels unexpected is that the most understanding characters, the ones who will really sit down with this poor young woman and approach her with kindness, will be that hotel chanteuse and that cocky pilot. There’s no irredeemable cad in this picture and there’s no femme fatale either – even if the movie’s poster blared: “A wicked sensation as the lonely girl in Room 809!”

The scene continues and we’re further drawn to Nell. She walks up to a man she knows –  the elevator operator (Elijah Cook Jr.) – and she smiles. It feels disarming to us, and it surprises him, possibly angers him: “What’s the smile about?” He asks. “You seem so different in those clothes,” she answers with a curious mixture of eager happiness, even some relief. It’s a nice comment that is met with the slightly defensive: “I’m different all the time.” Immediately I’m thinking – let her say something nice, jeez. And then I think, he’s probably right – that he is different all of the time – and not in a good way. Cook Jr. excels at being so simultaneously wormy and woeful that right away you feel … she ought not be around this guy. Later you’ll learn he is indeed, not so nice to her, even as he’s supposedly doing her a solid. We don’t know how to feel about him.You see, not long ago, she was released from an insane asylum in Oregon, and she’s come to stay with him, her Uncle, in New York City. He’s gotten her a gig to babysit the child of some swanky hotel guests that night and she wonders if she’s ready for it. He thinks she’s getting better. He should have listened to her hesitation.

Nell reads to her little charge and then quickly puts the girl to bed. She eats the chocolates she turned down originally (a wonderful little moment) and walks through the suite, performing a beautiful, silent scene lasting two minutes where Monroe’s expressions, body language, how she reacts to objects, everything, comment on both her hope and her turmoil. Nell turns the dial on the radio (in a lovely, lingering touch, Lyn’s songs are piped into the rooms – Jed cannot escape her), then clicks off the radio, almost annoyed. She is drawn to the vanity table and puts on the mother’s perfume and diamond jewelry. There is something so touching and intoxicating about Marilyn placing those earrings next to her face – Norma Jeane to Marilyn – her skin lights up. And then she hears an airplane and everything darkens. She becomes haunted, her worried eyes moving towards the sound, her body twisting towards the window. It’s mysterious, but telling; it’s filling in details and nuanced. Nothing about this is easy, acting wise, and Marilyn makes it look effortless.

Director Roy Ward Baker shot on a short schedule, in sequence and reportedly printed the first takes. If true, she is all the more impressive. (As much as I revere The Misfits and Marilyn in it, I have seen interviews with Arthur Miller in which he says The Misfits was her first real dramatic role and I never understand what  he is saying -- Don't Bother to Knock was certainly a dramatic role. As were Niagara and Bus Stop and River of No Return, and there's drama and pathos in her comedic roles, as well as her smaller parts in pictures like Clash By Night and The Asphalt Jungle.)

Watching her act silently, you further understand why she was one of the most brilliant models of all time. As I wrote of her in an essay for Playboy, she had the God-given talent, artistry and charisma to turn on that inner light, and she had the intelligence to dim that light as well, to create darker, erotic images, sad images, vulnerable images. If she was scared, she was also brave.

In another room, there is the man who will take all of her in – Jed – restless and stinging after Lyn has dumped him for being, well, a cad. “You lack an understanding heart,” Lyn opines. In an incredibly erotic flirtation, he spies Nell from his window to hers (the use of space in this picture is wonderfully utilized –black and white cinematography by Lucien Ballard) and when lonely Nell signals him from her room, he comes over for a good time. He puts up with her odd behavior until it gets a little too much. Widmark is fantastic here – he moves from sexy to smug to sympathetic and we never doubt it. He’s turned on and then he’s concerned and then he just wants to get out. But he can’t shake how sad this woman is. When she comes on strong, something most men would dream of, he exclaims, confused and annoyed: "You bother me! I can't figure you out! You're silk on one side and sandpaper on the other!" MM answers, tragic: "I'll be whatever you want me to be!" He asks the sensible, perplexed question: "Why?"

Well… she has cracked, that’s why. But not because she’s wicked. Her husband died and she remains debilitated by a deep mourning that fogs her mind into thinking Widmark is her dead love. She wants to resurrect caring, protection, escape. Her life was hard. Her parents whipped her. She’s attempted suicide. And who knows what is happening with that Uncle. She’s holding on and protecting herself. She’s vulnerable while deep rage pours out of her. That death and that abuse makes her cling to Jed and terrify the child (she ties her up so she’ll be quiet, and in another scene, you get the sense she might push her out of a window), and Marilyn showcases this with such raw intensity, such honesty, that she is genuinely disturbing. We are truly concerned for her. But Nell doesn't really mean any harm – and Jed doesn’t think so either. She needs help, and, perhaps, she yearns to be herself, to be appreciated, and to be appreciated for not being what everyone wants her to be. Normal. What does that mean?

There’s such a prophetic sadness to Monroe’s complex performance, and knowing all we do (or think we know– there are so many books – MM manages to be ubiquitous and mysterious at the same time), it most likely wasn't a stretch for young Marilyn to understand the pathology and despondency of her character. As Donald Spoto wrote: “Marilyn made of Nell not a stereotypical madwoman but the recognizable casualty of a wider urban madness… As she said her lines that winter … she may well have thought of her own girlhood; when she spoke of the character’s loneliness in an Oregon asylum, the memory of her Portland visit with Gladys [her mother] may have come to mind.”

It’s a heartbreaking portrait, and a movie that sympathizes with Nell, but the moral of the story comes somewhat at Nell's expense – Widmark’s Jed becomes the decent man for not giving into temptation with the damaged woman. He finally shows an “understanding heart.” It’s almost heroic because, in real life, many men wouldn't be sensitive enough to resist. And you know that Nell will learn that soon enough. Likely, she already has.

Kill Or Be Killed: Fallen Angel

“You talk different, sure, but you drive just like the rest.” -- A tired-of-it Linda Darnell as lovely Stella, the woman who can't get every damn man OFF HER BACK, and who has everyone's number in Otto Preminger's wonderfully dime-store "Laura" -- "Fallen Angel" -- the movie I dive into in this month's "Kill or Be Killed." I love this gorgeously shot movie (by Joseph LaShelle) and all of the performances. I even like the weird kinda "happy" ending that is entirely dysfunctional. And, of course, how Linda Darnell eats a hamburger. Out today. Pick it up now! 

Kill Or Be Killed: Too Late For Tears

“I let you in because, well, housewives can get awfully bored sometimes…”

“What is it, Jane? I just don’t understand you.” So asks Arthur Kennedy’s upright husband to Lizabeth Scott’s kinked, cryptic wife in Byron Haskin’s Too Late for Tears, a movie as much about one woman suffering her own private hell (an infernal boredom with the late 1940’s bonds of traditional marriage, a disgust with patronizing rich people) as it is about a coveted bag of loot. And of course, murder – murder enacted by this “femme fatale” who hides her new furs in a comfy, nutritious place – the kitchen.

Read it all (my essay on "Too Late for Tears" starring the fantastic Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea) in the newest of Ed Brubaker's "Kill Or Be Killed" -- out now. Pick it up or order here.

Bringing It All Back Home: The Hired Hand

“The Hired Hand is the America of what Walt Whitman means to me. I’d respect Peter for no other reason than showing me the family as an ideal unit. That’s very close to me, I’ve gone through divorce.” – Warren Oates (“Warren Oates: A Wild Life,” Susan Compo)

“Morality sucks. Clearly, so does gravity, but we can prove gravity. We can’t prove morality. It doesn’t exist at all. Don’t pay any attention to it. Those were the characters that Alan Sharp had written so beautifully. He has this old slang of that time. It comes just rolling off Warren Oates’ tongue, and you’re right there in that time in 1881. It wasn’t really a three-way deal, sexually, but the inference was that she was not a bad person, but that she didn’t have any compunction about forgetting the man who ran out on her six years earlier, and having sex with someone else. Women get horny, too. They did in 1881.” – Peter Fonda (Onion AV Club interview, 2003)

Peter Fonda and Warren Oates looking at each other – it’s an achingly beautiful thing. You feel the depth and concern of these two men, their friendship, lived-in and real, their faces, one blonde and stoic, sometimes dreamy eyed and languid, a little lost, mysterious; the other dark-haired and soulful, but wily, and with a toothy grin and crinkly smile that can veer from loving laughter to murder ballad darkness – as Oates put it himself, a face like, “two miles of country road.” Captain America and Bennie. Iconic oddballs. Gorgeous in their own way and so deeply American. You see them together, take in their natural chemistry, and think, of course they love each otherTake this scene in Fonda’s elegiac, western, his masterpiece, The Hired Hand – it’s the moment in which we learn Fonda’s cowboy drifter, Harry Collings has a wife he left seven years ago. One of their riding companions, the youngster of the three, Dan Griffen (Robert Pratt), seems little interested, he doesn’t understand the depth or importance of this revelation and prattles on while Harry’s best friend, Arch Harris (Oates) looks at his good friend. Fonda gets up from the saloon and walks towards the door, as he walks, face melancholic, Oates watches him as if no one else is in the room. Dan says to Arch, “The hell with him we can go to the coast together…” and Oates states, while still watching Fonda, the seven years. Seven years – it’s been seven years that the wife and kid have been waiting for Fonda, or lamenting he’s never coming back, or perhaps forgetting he ever existed or not even caring if he does anymore. Who knows how they feel? His eyes are full of compassion and concern and maybe even worry as he gazes at his friend, studying his movements, knowing right then and there, without saying anything, this is a significant event.

Fonda’s face says, without words, I have a wife and kid out there. I need to go back. Oates’ face says: He has a wife and kid out there. He should go back. And then there’s the added question mark to Oates’ gaze: But will I lose my friend if he does?  It’s a meaningful exchange of such subtle, empathetic acting and beautiful, pure chemistry — they are so … powerful together. You believe every moment between them. It’s a meaningful exchange of such subtle, empathetic acting and beautiful, pure chemistry – they are so … powerful together. You believe every moment between them.

The Hired Hand was a first for quite a few people, a movie made with love and vision and the care to be quiet and reflective, something that came off both hippie dippy to some, and simple and sincere to others. Or both. Or perhaps it’s really a unique alchemy of many things. A revisionist western, or a hippie western, or just a different kind of western, the way Monte Hellman’s masterful The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind are so spare and existential, showing the west as a place full of mystery – mythic, yes, but the mythic almost looming over characters as a reminder of what once was, or who they should be, but also confusing; a place full of rough absurdities. Fonda’s reflection (from a lovely script by Scottish novelist and screenwriter Alan Sharp who wrote Ulzana’s Raid and Night Moves) was spare, if that is even the right word considering how visually stunning and scored the picture is. It also played with mythic ideas – what one should be or is required to be or was thought to be back then as a roaming man – but it was also bound to family and friendship and the struggle to come to terms with … a woman.

Not just duty to a woman in a traditional sense, but a woman’s needs. It asks, what happened when he left? This is and was a refreshing question and Peter’s sister, Jane was pleased that it was what one would call something you don’t hear much of – a “feminist” western. His father, Henry, a western hero, reportedly admired it as well. Surely this made Peter happy, particularly with family at the core of this movie. In fact, at one point Fonda wanted his father to play the Warren Oates part. Fonda Sr. thought he was too old. Well, that would have been interesting, but Oates is so beautiful here and the movie is so powerful, so singular, that it works in every way. Every way. Alas, when released, Universal didn’t think so, which is really, really unfortunate. Though the film received mixed reviews, some quite impressed, the studio was upset with the final product. This was not the western they wanted, and it played in theaters for a scant time. It was pulled and buried in obscurity. You watch the movie now and that makes you angry. It wasn’t until 2001 that Fonda re-released it in a lovingly restored director’s cut (he also made the film shorter), and finally received the adulation and attention it deserved.

It was also a movie in which Fonda was given full artistic control. Coming off the phenomena and financial success of Easy Rider (1969), Universal allowed Fonda TheHired Hand to be his movie, his debut. Since Fonda co-wrote, produced and starred in Easy Rider, trust was granted, or perhaps a “this is what the kids want” devil may care attitude. How could it fail? After the counterculture, and everyone, embraced Easy Rider– yes. This is Captain America’s movie – people will go. Not surprisingly, that same year, Universal allowed Easy Rider co-star, and director, Dennis Hopper, to take off and make the fascinating, experimental The Last Movie, a notoriously complicated experience, and something that wasn’t a commercial success (it won the Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival, but didn’t fare well financially and was mixed, critically, in the states, the New York Times called it “an extravagant mess,” though Stanley Kaufman championed it). Both men were and are talented directors with their own unique style and vision. The reaction to The Hired Hand reportedly left Fonda with a kind of gentle disappointment. That’s upsetting – it should have hung around longer, it should have been seen on the big screen (in initial release) more. It needs to be seen on the big screen. The fact that this film became more available in the 2000’s (on DVD), and was re-released in a director’s cut, underscores all those years Fonda was saddened by its quick obscurity. From 1971 all the way to 2001. That’s a long time. As Fonda say, “Universal tried to bury this film back in ’71. But the people who loved it really loved it. And they’ve kept on loving it.” They do (including Martin Scorsese) and they continue to.

Fonda directed this sweet, painful, gritty, gorgeous, mystical and emotional story with a visual lyricism that tells its tale through its images (and score) as much as the script does. Working with the relative newcomer (in America), cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. The Hired Hand has been deemed his first movie, but he shot, distinctly, James Landis’ The Sadist and the underseen James Bruner picture, Summer Children, before that, and some other B movies – you can see the master’s talent and style in those movies. (Zsigmond said, “Before that, I basically did commercials. The Hired Hand was probably the first time that I actually had a dramatic story with good actors.”) But the magnificent, highly stylized choices he and Fonda worked with here immediately set the picture apart and certainly cemented Zsigmond’s tremendous craft – it’s a uniquely stunning picture. The long lenses, dissolves, slow motion, the figures in silhouette, the lens flare and the exquisite, expressive colors –all of this – created a superb tone poem of imagery that, at times, feels transcendent. (Editor Frank Mazzola’s lyrical montages also swirl into the mix, underscoring or adding emotions and mystery.)

An early scene of Fonda riding his horse through the water shows him in an almost other-universe of light, color and nature – he’s suffused in a deeply blue world, and he no longer looks like just a man on a horse, but he looks like a man in a painting. Adding to this poetry is the brilliant score by Fonda’s friend, Bruce Langhorne, who had never scored a movie. A musician, and session man, who had worked in Greenwich Village with everyone from Bob Dylan (Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” was inspired by Langhorne, he also played on many of Dylan’s records) to Joan Baez to Richie Havens, Langhorne’s score is a character in itself, speaking when the film needn’t, but never obtrusive. Using varied instruments including soprano recorder, harmonica, upright piano, organ, dulcimer, and fiddle, the effect feels the landscapes Fonda directs, it instinctively understands the emotions conveyed on screen, while weaving itself into the poem of a movie. The score became as famous as the movie, and was released 35 years later. As Scissor Tail editions described:

“[Langhorne] opted out of scoring the film in a projection room, instead chose to shoot the film onto a small black and white camera to take back to his home in Laurel Canyon. He would watch the film and play along to it as his girlfriend at the time would record him and play it back, allowing him to overdub Farfisa Organ, piano, banjo, fiddle, harmonica, recorder, and Appalachian dulcimer onto his Revox reel to reel. Bruce’s 1920 Martin guitar is most prominent throughout the record. The Results were a uniquely wide and lonesome soundscape. The closest comparison might be Sandy Bull or possibly John Fahey, but nothing of its kind or even of its time poses a resemblance to Langhorne’s minimal masterpiece."

There’s a dreaminess to The Hired Hand that shifts between feeling live and direct, and then, wistful, faraway, like you are always reaching for something, and even if it’s right in front of you, speaking frankly, you’re looking beyond. Or trying to understand something larger than yourself. You see it in Fonda’s eyes, you see it in Oates’ eyes, and then you see it in moments that you’re not even sure of – like when coming across something very real that doesn’t look real, not at first. Not right away.

What comes across is when the men (including young Pratt) find a dead girl in the water – something that feels not just incredibly sad, but portentous to the understandably disturbed men. A dreamy, natural reverie is interrupted by something that’s at first unreal, and then shapes into what is tough and hard in life, and something of which they know of – of course. But this girl’s death feels like something else. And it makes them think. It makes you think as well. People die. And women die. With those thoughts lingering, Fonda begins pondering life, that wife he left behind. Fonda needs to go back. That little girl in the water – dead as anything and drifting – that could be her. Or him. Or anyone. Life needs to change. Or at least it needs to stop drifting the way it is.

This is when Verna Bloom comes in. Or, rather, Fonda returns to her, his wife. An excellent stage-trained actress (she had made two movies prior, Medium Cool and Street Scene), Bloom is wonderfully unadorned here, though uniquely lovely, and she’s playing older than her co-lead by ten years (the actors were, in fact, the same age). I love her performance – she’s at once, matter of fact and sexual, then hard, then vulnerable. She’s complex. She’s real. She’s so real, in fact, that her sexuality feels striking and so refreshing that it’s almost startling to see, and not in any obvious come-hither way, but in the way that women just need to be pleased, like any man needs to be pleased. And she’s so open about it.

When Fonda does come back (almost like a new relationship) and back to their child, who has now grown into a young girl of about ten (again, you think of that portent at the film’s beginning), he brings his best friend Oates with him. The wife is skeptical at first. This man abandoned her. Why should she allow him back in her life? And who is this other guy? How is this going to even work? Fonda doesn’t ask to be her husband again, not right away, but just to work as her hired hand. He’ll work for his wife, he’ll get to know her again, if she likes. In a potent little moment, she asks, “Why’d you come back?” He answers, “Got tired of the life.” It’s a spare exchange, and she is maintaining her strength, her toughness, but Bloom is so marvelous, you can feel her emotions vibrating under that hard shell.

This is where the film turns into something audiences probably weren’t expecting: a movie about a man who returns to his wife and a movie about a man who comes to terms with her sexuality. There’s a frank exchange between the two of them after Fonda and Oates have heard in town about how many men she’s slept with since he left – all the hired hands she takes to her bed – the typical “the woman is a whore” moment. The two men are livid, and further than that, Fonda is confused. But later that night, he discusses the situation and talks with her and … she lays it out, bare. Essentially, she says: You left, I walked this house lonely night after night, and then, I decided to do something about it. She did do something about it. She states: “Sometimes I’d have him and he’d have me… But not all of them…” It addresses many of those westerns in which you wonder, what are the women thinking about, past their husband, past their children, past the horses or whatever else? All those things lingering in movies – like the sexual tension between Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur in Shane, or the obvious unspoken past love between John Wayne and Dorothy Jordan in The Searchers. Those women weren’t alone like Bloom is in this picture, but clearly, they wanted other men too, even while married. And the men who wandered off drifting, just as Fonda did in The Hired Hand, well, they wanted to sleep with them, and they wanted their love. You know Ladd’s Shane is yearning for something, something to hold on to. Here, had Bloom so desired, she would have invited Shane in and held him close. And more. As Fonda said in an interview, “Women get horny too. They did in 1881.”

But what ties all of this tension and yearning and attempts at understanding together so gorgeously and perceptively is Warren Oates, the best friend. He is so close to Fonda that Bloom accuses him of marrying him, not her. (Oates and Fonda would go on to become best friends themselves, Oates both pal and father figure, and they’d memorably make other pictures together, including Race With the Devil and 92 in the Shade). Fonda understood Oates as more than a character actor, he got his depth, his experience, his sex appeal: “I had watched Warren in a couple of films and realized there was something else going on in this man. When he wasn’t playing the assistant sidekick character or the doofus goofus role, he had this quality which in a strange way was dashing—like Bogart. He had to play wisdom and experience and when it came time to cast the role, I didn’t even think of anyone else.”

And you get his sex appeal in The Hired Hand right alongside Bloom. Bloom doesn’t resent Oates as an interloper, and, instead they, too, share lovely moments together. He treats her with the utmost respect, something that feels supremely touching, as women are so frequently not treated that way. At times you think, who are these men? Why are they so patient and accepting? But, then, you further think, why wouldn’t they be so sensitive? Drifters, misfits, however they would be labeled, who is to say the Old West wasn’t full of unconventional situations not ruled by fear of God or the townspeople’s gossip or typical “masculine” attitudes that we all think everyone exhibited back in the day? I mean, of course it wasn’t all that. And why should these men and this woman care what people think? They just want to start their lives over again and keep the family together – who cares about the petty gossips? As exhibited by that poor girl in the water – people die – adults die. People you love die. They know that.

Oates is with them in regards to these sentiments – live your life – though he realizes his own attraction could be getting in the way of his friend. He wishes for Fonda to just be with his wife and restore the original family. And, so, he leaves. It’s a gently heartbreaking moment because, well, we don’t want him to leave. It feels wrong and even a little scary. And, in the end, perhaps he shouldn’t have left – trouble awaits him. The trouble isn’t his fault, but this past trouble catching up with him, ropes in Fonda. And Fonda will … I can’t say anymore. Oates will return to Bloom, bringing Fonda’s horse with him. Whether or not he will stay is up to question, giving the movie its aching, high lonesome power… we want him to stay. Someone stay. Someone stay because nothing lasts. In an earlier scene between Oates and Bloom, she fears Fonda will leave again, and says resolutely and with fear, “He’ll go. Just a matter of time.” Oates answers with a line that sums up the film, the west, life, the nature of love and friendship, even his own mortality and loving union with Fonda, he says: “Well, most things are, ma’am. One way or the other.”

Originally published at the New Beverly, extended from my essay for Arrow.

Kill Or Be Killed: Don't Bother To Knock

"There was just this scene of one woman seeing another who was helpless and in pain. It was so real, I responded. I really reacted to her. She moved me so that tears came into my eyes. Believe me, such moments happened rarely, if ever again, in the early things I was doing out there.” – Anne Bancroft on Marilyn Monroe's heartbreaking, complex performance in "Don't Bother to Knock"

Out today  -- the newest of Ed Brubaker's Kill Or Be Killed featuring my essay on one of Marilyn Monroe's finest performances (an early, brilliant leading role not discussed enough for how impressive she was), Roy Ward Baker's Don't Bother to Knock, also starring Richard Widmark and Anne Bancroft. Pick it up or order here.

Max & Lion: Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow

“Just remember, all right, that you’re a person. You’re a person, right? And you were a kid before, and you’ve made mistakes… so you ran. That’s all.”

The opening shot of Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow is so beautiful, so wide-open and haunting, it’s reminiscent of an Andrew Wyeth painting, “Christina’s World” without the house to look towards or “Winter 1946” made a bit darker with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s vast dramatic sky and evocatively framed tree.  You hear an oncoming storm and see a man walking down a hill, you have no idea who he is yet, he’s a small figure amidst the expanse, making his way down a pale, straw-colored mound set against a dark blue sky turning grey – he’s merely traveling, at peace, or in danger, or dangerous himself, we don’t know yet.

We see him struggle through barbed wire as he attempts to head towards his destination, the open road, and he’s snagged and rolling through the stuff – it’s not easy. He thinks (and we think) he’s alone until another man is shown looking at him from a tree, curious and amused by the other’s struggle with the fence. Once the man from the hill gets through the wire and slips onto the pavement, he’s greeted by the other with a “How you doing? You okay?” The man from the hill has no interest in making new friends and doesn’t answer. He moves along grumpily, even after the same man cheerfully jumps out in front of him and introduces himself: “Hi. I’m Francis.” The Andrew Wyeth tableau then turns to these two wanderers waiting for cars – a pair of strangers barely speaking to one another with a California two-lane blacktop between them, each one enacting their outer shields to make it through life – one, tough and distrusting, the other clowning and inviting. They will become friends. They’ll ramble along together. They’ll plan. Life will happen. For one, life will fall apart.

Scarecrow is a movie about two American vagabonds, men returning from cramped spaces (a boat, a prison) that were full of other men, wandering through a big world both lonely and crowded – hungry and horny and hopeful, sometimes furious, and just eager that everything may work out alright, somehow. The bigger and older one, more prone to anger but insistent on planning a new life is Max (Gene Hackman), who has recently served six years in San Quentin. He wears extra layers of clothes and a ratty Letterman sweater because he’s frequently cold. He claims to be “the meanest son of a bitch alive” and continues this declaration with, “I don’t trust anybody. I don’t love anybody. And l can tear the ass out of a goddamn elephant, too.” The younger and smaller one is Francis Lionel (Al Pacino) whom Max names “Lion” (he can’t call him Francis, likely this seems too formal), a good-natured, almost baby-faced man who at times acts, not like a dumb child, he’s not dumb at all, but mysteriously innocent, as if he’s hiding something darker, something he wishes not to face. You don’t see it immediately, whatever you’re sensing, but you wonder. Lion would rather smile and make others laugh; just get on through life without incident. Wouldn’t a lot of us?

He has returned from five years at sea, which sounds so vague and romantic that it almost seems metaphorical but presumably life happened to him out there. Before that, he left behind a wife pregnant with his child in Detroit. He’s sent them money and his goal is to see them again, particularly his kid, but he has no idea of the kid’s sex, so he’s bought the now 5-year-old a little lamp that he carries in a white gift box with a red bow. He carries this thing no matter what. It’s present so much in the film, you keep your eye out for it – did he lose it? Nope. Still there. You really don’t want him to lose that box. You feel as if something terrible will happen to him if he does. Why is that box making everything seem so precarious?

You wonder about these two men – when they were out there wandering alone. How long were they out there? Were they just fine on their own? Maybe they felt free and good, at first, but given how quickly they take to each other, it’s hard to imagine one without the other, not because they needed just anyone, but because they needed this particular person, this kind of chemistry. Max feels it strongly enough that, for a guy who trusts and loves no one, he quickly asks Lion to help him with the car wash business he wishes to set up in Pittsburgh. Max has plans and tabulates numbers in a little notebook – that notebook gives him some kind of importance; he’s not just an anyone even if his kind sister doesn’t think he’s got good sense. Max’s plan wasn’t to meet Lion, but the serendipitous way in which we can meet a stranger, in this case, in that wide-open Wyeth-like landscape begins to feel exactly a part of Max’s plan – but not for what he thinks. Lion just seemed to show up – from where and for why . . . who knows?

There are a lot of questions as we follow these guys around, ones that need not be answered, as they fall in love with each other (platonically) while we fall in love with them. The movie knows we’ll fall for them, but doesn’t force this on us – Schatzberg (and his screenwriter, Garry Michael White) are so clearly fond of Max and Lion, and the actors inhabit their roles so brilliantly, that you trail along with them. You move along to the groove and disruptions of their journey through diners and dive bars and freight trains and visits to family and a prison farm and cities that feel unwelcome and sad. And you feel protective of them too. Especially Lion. It’s a gentle movie punctuated by violence, and one moment of brutality that’s quite devastating, and then a phone call, just one damn phone call, that wrecks a character.  That phone call was suggested earlier as a way to plan better – maybe planning’s not always the best idea.

Before that phone call, these men get to know each other, hitching, meeting women (only Max feels the itch to get laid – Lion is so disinterested it’s genuinely curious as to why . . . he can’t be that pure and it’s not because he doesn’t like women. This only makes him more intriguing) and, in a rough spot, winding up on a prison farm. Max is so upset at Lion for getting them there (it’s entirely Lion’s fault) that he leaves the kid to his own devices, and ever-eager to make friends, Lion gets chummy with an inmate (a superb Richard Lynch) who beats him senseless after Lion refuses to give him fellatio. The way Lion attempts to defuse the situation before it gets brutal is tremendously touching – he’s playing it off, at first, casually, a kind of goofy no big deal, just so the guy will leave him alone, but it doesn’t work. Lion’s charm probably pisses him off even more (“I’m not making fun of you” says Lion). Max could have helped him prepare for such a thing, taught him about these matters, after all he’s been to prison (in an earlier scene Lion says to Max, “In the joint, no women, right?” Max answers, “No.” Lion asks, “So how’d you get laid?” Max pauses a bit and says nothing. Read that however you read it . . .), but he angrily abandons his friend. He returns after Lion’s been brutalized, but once out, they change a bit, with the traumatized Lion still trying hard to be amiable, but clearly haunted, while Max exhibits extra sensitivity towards Lion – he wants to make him laugh and even does a joking strip tease, taking off those layers of clothes he wears because he’s always so inexplicably cold.

As Lion become more and more obviously troubled, you wonder just why he’s been so innocent and pleasant towards people. How did he survive out there at sea? I look at him and I wonder – what happened before what’s about to happen to him? Lion has set up his own moving philosophy based on scarecrows. He figures the straw men are put up by farmers, not to scare crows, but to make the birds laugh. I’ve read some criticism of Lion’s (and the movie’s) commitment to this idea – that it’s too obvious – but I don’t agree. I think this is exactly something a young guy might tell himself to get through life – why wouldn’t it be allegorically obvious and who cares if it is? He’s a man on the road – he observes his surroundings, he’s noticed scarecrows and doesn’t see their sinister qualities, he sees their humor.  But it’s not just a bright-side-of-life philosophy; it’s a tweaked observation. It’s even a bit desperate – something acquired based on the survival to stave off demons and darkness. Lion says, “People can’t stay mad at you if you make them laugh.” Actually, in his case, they can and they do, and in such brutal ways that one telephone conversation (with his wife) debilitates him, so much that he loses mind and he’s off to . . . another kind of prison. He tried the scarecrow on himself – brushing off his heartbreak with humor and even a lie to Max. Every time Lion attempts to repress his pain with a smile, you feel a crack of recognition, because, who hasn’t done the same?

Scarecrow was Schatzberg’s third movie after the excellent and stylish character studies, in very different ways – Puzzle of a Downfall Child and The Panic in Needle Park – and the picture won the Grand Prix at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival (sharing the honor with The Hireling directed by Alan Bridges). It didn’t fare so well in the U.S., critics here were not quite as enamored with it as the French were (though some did admire it and reviewed it well), but through time, it became a relatively unheralded picture from the 1970s (in the last few years that’s changed, thankfully). I have no idea why this gorgeous, potent picture wasn’t as well regarded and can only think – perhaps it’s too gentle? Schatzberg (a brilliant photographer himself, you can see how much he loves a face, particularly Pacino’s) and Zsigmond really showcase America with its rolling natural beauty, the hills and the sky and the long stretches of lonely asphalt. They also show an America full of sweet people or terrible people or just average people not paying any mind; a place of charming junk or lowdown waste, a place to roam, a place to become imprisoned. Confinement seems a constant threat in Scarecrow and it looms over the movie as a danger while loneliness nips at the heels of these close, freewheeling friends.

Very few people choose total solitude, and as tough as Max plays it, his life is a lot fuller with his smiling, sensitive buddy around. And Hackman grows to that depth of feeling naturally – never a trace of insincerity in his performance, he moves from brash to outbursts of laughter to rage to tremulous caring exquisitely.  It all sounds so simple, but the purity of how much these two wind up caring for one another is extraordinarily moving, largely because the actors are so nuanced, both delicate and powerful. As Francis/Lion, I’ve never seen Al Pacino so endearing and young as he is here, not just in age but in his face and movements – his large, expressive eyes, laughing one second, peaceful and kind the next, the way he walks, the way he helps Max with his sweater, and just his disarmingly lovable demeanor without being silly or overacting sweetness to the point of sugar shock. He’s nice. (Why does that feel so radical and / or strange in moments?) You’ll see some comparisons to Steinback’s Of Mice and Men, with the gruff wiser guy protecting the simpler, innocent one, but Pacino isn’t touched, and he’s not entirely green either, he’s more mysterious than that.

He taps into what makes Scarecrow so effective and why it lingers with you long after watching Max bang his boot on that ticket counter in the picture’s final scene. You wonder why people are the way they are. You hope Max will come back to Lion. He bought a round trip ticket. Will he get caught up in something else? Of course you don’t know. There’s an enormous world out there, mysterious and unpredictable, a world in which, no matter how much you plan, you cannot control. And you can’t always meet it with a smile. That’s both beautiful and terrifying and . . . you have to laugh.

Kill Or Be Killed: Shock Corridor

“Whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad.”

Out today! The newest issue of Ed Brubaker's "Kill Or Be Killed" in which I write about Samuel Fuller's wonderfully absurdist, savage Shock Corridor. Pick it up or order here. 

And Happy Valentine's Day!

My Favorite Ten of 2017 (and more coming soon)

Here are my favorite pictures of 2017 (including one TV series I will consider a film -- don't yell at me). In no order. And I will fill in my thoughts, expand on them later (soon!). But before January comes to a close, I wanted to get my favorites out there. I've not seen everything yet so this could change (and I'm not going to list anyone I'm close to/working with). I think this is likely-mostly-positively my ten. And honorable mentions are coming soon...

Good Time -- Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie

Phantom Thread -- Paul Thomas Anderson

The Florida Project -- Sean Baker

The Killing of a Sacred Deer -- Yorgos Lanthimos

Get Out -- Jordan Peele

Faces Places -- Agnès Varda, JR

Personal Shopper -- Olivier Assayas

Dawson City: Frozen Time -- Bill Morrison

I Called Him Morgan -- Kasper Collin

Twin Peaks: The Return (don't argue with me on this) -- David Lynch

And, as said, there will be more...

Kill Or Be Killed 15: The Cobweb

My newest essay for Ed Brubaker's Kill Or Be Killed takes on Vincente Minnelli beautiful, wonderfully obsessive, The Cobweb, starring  Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Charles Boyer, Gloria Grahame, Lillian Gish, Oscar Levant, Adele Jergens, Fay Wray, John Kerr and Susan Strasberg... 

“On The Cobweb, I’d arrive on the set and there he’d [Vincente Minnelli] be up on the boom, zooming up to the drapes, and I thought to myself, ‘He’s really in heaven now.’ The bloody drapes. It was all about the goddamned drapes in The Cobweb.” – Lauren Bacall

The drapes. The drapes in the library of the high-end private psychiatric clinic. Those dreary old Lilian Gish Miss Inch chosen drapes just hanging there for decades – taunting, not only the patients, but the doctors even more – enough to cause tense confrontations, enraged phone calls and … if you put your subtitles on while watching the movie, “fabric ripping.” Anyone who’s seen Vincent Minnelli’s The Cobweb (1955) knows what I’m talking about because those drapes and the trouble they cause ...

Read the entire essay in the newest Kill Or Be Killed. Order here.

Happy Birthday Sal Mineo

From a piece I wrote for the New Beverly's Sal Mineo Festival. 

Sal Mineo was stunning. Hauntingly and uniquely so. His large, brown eyes, sweetly sad and darkly intense, his cleft-chinned handsomeness mixed with an almost cherubic baby beauty that remained child-like longer than he probably would have preferred, were so striking and different that the youth was discovered on the sidewalk. He was with other kids, but Sal stood out. It was 1948 and Sal was outside playing with his sister and friends when a man approached the children. The man asked if the kids would like to be on TV. Sal smarted something back at him and right away – the man saw something a little extra in this kid. He asked to speak to their mother. Later, Sal was approached by a casting agent and likely observed what the other guy observed – his loveliness, yes, but also the child’s charisma and charm, things that pop on stage and in photographs and on television and, wonderfully, writ large, on movie screens.

Mineo had that it. It’s not just a matter of attraction; it’s a matter of intrigue, a multifaceted intensity that could move from terrific joy when he breaks out into a laugh with James Dean to bursts of mischievousness, manically slapping the drums as Gene Krupa in Don Weis’ The Gene Krupa Story to the poignancy he shows in just about everything he did. Just look at James Dean looking at Mineo and Mineo looking back at Dean in the mansion scene from Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (and in particular, the footage of production tests, shot on the sound stages for A Streetcar Named Desire). As much as I adore Natalie Wood in the picture, it’s Dean and Mineo bewitching the viewer with their shared gaze – and not just because Dean was so captivating – but because Mineo was so poignant and mysterious. Take a look at that rehearsal footage – Dean and Mineo playfully horse around until they collapse on the floor, all three leads attentive to Dean, Mineo’s head next to Dean’s as Wood strokes Dean’s hair. Later, Dean drapes his arm around both Natalie and Sal. Dean moves in closer and gives him a little kiss. He hands Sal a cigarette and Mineo cheekily blows smoke on Dean. Jesus. It’s both lovely to look at and sexually charged; their chemistry is undeniable and the attraction so palpable — it’s exciting to see these young men working off each other and also bittersweet. Dean is the bolder of the two, but it’s Mineo’s vulnerability and doe eyes that cast the spell, as if Dean can’t deny what’s right next to him. And he couldn’t. Rebel would not have been the same without Sal Mineo.

The Bronx-born son of a casket maker, the kid who ran from and fought bullies in school, the boy who made himself a little toughie as other boys were calling him a sissy, seemed destined to become a star. From his first stage role – in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo where he runs across the stage (his line: “The goat is in the yard!”) – to his last acclaimed role, also on stage, in James Kirkwood Jr.’s P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, where he stars as a crook Vito tied to a kitchen sink, Mineo always remained interesting in spite of how the industry perceived him later in life. To some, he was viewed as frozen in time, forever that teenager, a relic of the 1950s. Of course he absolutely was not that but as often in Hollywood – they don’t like their child stars to grow up, even if they grow up into fascinating actors. Sal’s career struggles makes one angry and disheartened at the industry’s lack of imagination and an uptight homophobic world – Mineo should have been allowed more work and more time. That’s not saying he didn’t continue to create interesting work – he did – from stage to TV to movies.

Even in dinner theater, which he disliked, Mineo was by many accounts, impressive. He was daring in an era when such things scandalized squares, he was an artist, ahead of his time, unafraid of controversial subject matter (look up the searing prison-drama play he directed and starred in, opposite young Don Johnson, Fortune and Men’s Eyes), and he lived his life the way he wanted to. When you dive into Mineo’s life and work (I recommend Michael Gregg Michaud’s excellent, essential “Sal Mineo: A Biography,” which aided me greatly in learning more about Mineo), you’re captivated by this very complex, interesting actor and man. You also become upset over what could have been (I thought of all the parts he could have played into the late 70s and on, the directors he could have worked with, the projects he could have directed). You even feel protective. Not that Mineo was pathetic or entirely lost, he was quite strong in fact, but when you know how it’s going to end for Sal . . . you can’t help yourself.

So, it’s touching to know that James Dean took Mineo, under his wing while the other kids on Rebel (excluding Wood, a friend) thought him strange. According to Lawrence Frascella’s “Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Making of Rebel Without a Cause,” actress Beverly Long said that “most of the actors playing gang members ‘never paid any attention’ to Mineo. ‘He was just young – and weird . . . He was a raging homosexual even in those days. [Sal later stated he was bi-sexual] He was very precious – no fun at all.’ [I doubt he was ‘precious’] Now, however, she admits, ‘We could have been nicer.’” Indeed, Ms. Long. You could have been nicer. Though their alienation likely only deepened his performance as Plato and his bond with Dean.

As Frascella continues: “The other cast members may have been somewhat jealous of the attention that Dean paid to Mineo. ‘If anyone was a bit closer to Dean it was Sal Mineo,’ [said Gary Nelson, second assistant director on Rebel]. ‘If he talked to anyone, it was Sal.’” Dean also saw something more in Mineo’s troubled Plato – he was inspired by Sal’s pathos and dramatic pull. Weeping over Plato’s body, Dean was emotional in real life. As detailed in Michaud’s book, Dean “acted as if Sal himself had been shot.” Sal said: “Immediately after the scene, I noticed there was a change in the relationship. He was very protective, and for the whole time he’d never let me out of his sight. He was always there . . . In Plato’s death scene I understood what being loved meant. Now here was the chance for me to feel what it would be like for someone close, someone that I idolized, to be grieving for me. It was an opportunity to experience what kind of grief that would be, what would he be like, what he would sound like, what would he be thinking.” Given what happened to both Dean and Mineo, this statement is doubly haunting and enormously moving.

Rebel co-star Dennis Hopper famously and frequently has been quoted saying a version of this – that Dean’s acting style was in one hand, Marlon Brando saying, “Fuck you!” and in the other hand, Montgomery Clift saying, “Please forgive me.” One could say something similar regarding Mineo, but I’d add another hand – young Peter Lorre saying, “Hide me” – the kid who killed that litter of puppies. That was Sal’s intriguing dimension; something he’d also tap into on stage and in the darker material that interested him. It’s not surprising, then, that he tried to buy the rights to Midnight Cowboy with the intention of playing Ratso Rizzo (he would have been splendid). He yearned to play the role of Perry Smith in Richard Brooks’ adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Now, Robert Blake is excellent, I love him in the part, but I can’t get over imagining how great Mineo would have been as Smith, his switchblade kid all grown up, the murderer and Capote muse. He also wanted to play Michael Corleone – with his Sicilian heritage he found himself exactly suited for the story. Obviously that didn’t happen. He was disappointed.

In 1965 Mineo starred in the perfectly seedy, perverse and weirdly beautiful Who Killed Teddy Bear (directed by Joseph Cates -- and of which I wrote about for Ed Brubaker's Kill Or Be Killed), one of his greatest performances and pictures (really, you must see it). The film was considered a low rent trashy curio, now something of a cult classic, though Mineo was given some fine notices (as he should have). He is brilliant in the picture, which lives in a kind of Warholian universe, downtown pulp with a gritty artiness to it – you could imagine the Velvet Underground showing up somewhere or Edie Sedgwick walking into the frame.  As the deranged stalker, Mineo is both creepy and disarmingly vulnerable. He’s also gloriously sexualized in a way that manages to not feel exploitative and more artful, more leeringly thoughtful. So much curious attention is paid to his body (an extended work-out scene, a bathing suit pool scene no one forgets and his dance with Juliet Prowse, Mineo wearing tight pants and a shirt that shows off his midriff) that it becomes an independent point of discussion rather than the mere gazing of a beautiful young man.

Mineo takes it so much further in this bold performance – you’re thinking about beefcake and violence and sex and then sex messing up a traumatized character’s mind. And you’re even thinking about Mineo himself, the character’s he’s running away from, as if Plato is all grown up, still gorgeous but manlier, and now totally deranged. Take a look at your switchblade kid now. And yet, you still feel for him, you still find a point of identification. There’s something both enigmatic and relatable about Mineo. Nicholas Ray was dead-on with his instinct of casting the teenager in Rebel. In a loaded statement if there ever was one, Ray said of Sal: “I saw this kid in the back who looked like my son except he was prettier.”

Sal was huge in the 1950s. He had a small, impressive role in George Steven’s Giant, and then he starred in, among others, Lewis R. Foster’s Tonka, Alfred L. Werker’s The Young Don’t Cry, Richard Bartlett’s Rock, Pretty Baby, and in Thomas Carr’s superb Dino as a powerfully tough, wounded juvenile delinquent whose been fucked with way too many times (and who hints at worse). His intense monologues, all flashing eyes and angry, abused and sad, opposite a calm Brian Keith are at times, heartbreaking (this was a reprise of Mineo’s impressive role on the televised Dino, with a wonderful Ralph Meeker in the Brian Keith role, originally played for Studio One). Sal’s youthful draw, the explosion of popularity that, quickly and, by the time of Don Siegel’s outstanding Crime in the Streets would be coined as “Mineo Mania,” would eventually wind up hurting his career. It was tough for Mineo to transition, or to be allowed to. He was deservedly nominated for two supporting actor Academy Awards (Rebel Without a Cause and Otto Preminger’s Exodus), and by 1965, he was in Ronald Neame’s Escape from Zahrain, Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton and Bernhard Wicki’s The Longest Day, John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn and George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told. As I mentioned, there was also Who Killed Teddy Bear, which sadly did nothing for future work. But in the ’50s and like Dean, Mineo tapped into the restless hearts of teenage culture, and not just who they crushed on or who they listened to, but their troubles, their delinquency, real or fantasized about, their need to be heard, to be taken seriously, even if by threat or melodrama.

Watching Mineo’s co-star and lead, John Cassavetes’ very serious 18-year-old in Crime in the Streets, we’re actually watching a very serious actor in his late 20s playing a teen. But kids related to that heaviness; that their youthful concerns could be considered important in an adult movie aimed at them. And they loved Mineo. Mineo and the mania was used as a large selling point for an excited teenage audience. Wonderfully acted and interestingly set bound (Crime has a terrific opening rumble sequence) the movie is potently brutal and Cassavetes is really, really believably mean until he breaks and future director Mark Rydell is especially sociopathic (the dialogue coach is credited to Sam Peckinpah). Mineo, however, is the most layered and troubled of the group, giving the most sensitive performance. After all, he was a teenager. He looked like a teenager, even younger than his own years at times, so much that in the picture, the boys call his character “Baby.” In many ways, he’s the most credible cast member, just as he is in a smaller role in Robert Wise’s Somebody Up There Likes Me, in which he plays the more believable New York street youth to Paul Newman’s Rocky Graziano.

But Mineo’s power at playing that kind of kid, and sometimes against men who would be considered the new guard like Cassavetes or Hopper or Newman (all older than him), unfairly relegated the actor to the old guard once he found himself deeper into the 1960s. As Mineo told Boze Hadleigh in 1972: “Hollywood don’t flex its muscle-brain. What you start out as is pretty much how you wind up. I mean, you get typed in the first thing that clicks, then they don’t give you no more fuckin’ chances.” He also said, “When I started in films, I was fifteen, sixteen, and I had this baby face that made me look like a wheat flour dumpling or something. And my fucking name didn’t exactly help.” Watching Mineo in his range of roles, and the pictures featured in the New Beverly’s Sal Mineo series (Giant, Rebel, The Gene Krupa Story, Exodus, Raoul Walsh’s A Private’s Affair, The Young Don’t Cry, Somebody Up There Likes Me, Cheyenne Autumn, Who Killed Teddy Bear, Bernard L. Kowalski’s Krakatoa: East Of Java, Crime in the Streets and Dino), you really see how diverse his talent was. From playing a Native American in Cheyenne Autumn to a singing and dancing private, ex beatnik, and one stealing every scene in A Private’s Affair, to the powerfully bitter Auschwitz survivor, Dov Landau, who becomes militant by joining the Irgun in Exodus, he stands out, with layers and depth and even a self mocking charm (in A Private’s Affair) that wasn’t shown enough (according to everything I read, Mineo had a wicked sense of humor and healthy humor about himself as well).

That Mineo didn’t get no more “fuckin’ chances” is a shame, but he continued to work, directing on stage and putting together provocative projects that never came to fruition (Fallen Dove, written by Mineo and Elliot Mintz, The Wrong People, about young boys in Morocco and their exploitation, McCaffery, about hustlers, which was about set to go until the terrible happened).

Looking at and reading about Mineo’s later work, particularly Who Killed Teddy Bear, Fortune and Men’s Eyes and P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, you can see touches of Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, Hubert Selby Jr., Tennessee Williams and, of course, Midnight Cowboy writer James Leo Herlihy. This is not exactly a guy stuck in the 1950s. This is a kid who grew up fast in the 1950s, who spent a lot of money on his family (a lot) and who wound up losing much more, living in more humble digs, using set pieces and props for furnishings. He did have good ideas. According to Mineo’s friend Eric Williams in Michaud’s biography, Sal even bought the rights to Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, which he could never get made. He reportedly (not sure if this is exactly how it all went down) handed the book to Peter Bogdanovich (the two befriended each other while Bogdanovich was covering Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn) and quite clearly, that worked out well for Bogdanovich.

When reading Michaud’s biography, I was really struck by Mineo’s final days, before he died too early in life and so terribly in 1976. (I completely understood why James Franco was moved to make an entire film about those hours with his his underrated, impressive, touching Sal starring Val Lerner). Like anyone not anticipating the end, Mineo was working through his day, rehearsing his play and dropping by a nearby mini mart, buying a pack of smokes and a Hostess cupcake before driving home that night. When reading these details, something about that Mineo buying that damn cupcake destroyed me. I thought of the fascinating dualities to Mineo – his extraordinary life and his regular life. This exceptional man who was Rebel’s Plato; who posed nude (face shielded) in Harold Stevenson’s famous painting “The New Adam” (and in 1962); who played frantic drumming Krupa admirably and with style; who did sexy-weirdo-sadness in Teddy Bear; who was a two-time Oscar nominee playing a Manson like figure on an episode of S.W.A.T (and powerfully, do not discount his TV appearances); who was the young man on Shindig! who cut records and discovered other kids who cut records and became stars (namely, Bobby Sherman); who was the young guy on a celebrity panel game show who said women should marry men ten years younger if they wanted to (Lee Marvin thought so too, but for different reasons); the little boy who ran across the stage with the line “The goat is in the yard!” – Mineo was a complex, fascinating man doing something regular – buying junk food like everyone else does – not knowing he’d be walking into a horror that would end his life. That cupcake was almost his last meal. Parking his car in the garage to his West Hollywood apartment on Holloway Drive, a man (later fingered as Lionel Ray Williams in a case that is still confused with misinformation and prejudice, as if Sal was cruising when he was simply walking home) jumped out from the dark and stabbed him. He stabbed him once, but where it counts – in the heart. Mineo died quickly. He was 37-years old.

Mineo had said in interview a year before: “I’m thirty-six now, and I still fantasize. And it’s very bizarre how so much of what’s happened in my life I’ve fantasized way ahead of time as a kid. It jolts me sometimes, how it manifests itself, when it was a seed that I planted as a little kid, y’know? I’m just so terrified that one day I’ll become realistic, and when I do, it’ll be all over. I just won’t be stopped if I want something. It may take years, but it will happen.” He shouldn’t have been stopped. Viva Sal.

New Year's Eve & Inherent Vice

Because Phantom Thread was one of my favorites of 2017 and I've not written about it yet, here's my piece on Inherent Vice, first published at the New Beverly. If you know me, you know I love this one more than I could contain in one piece...

“If there is something comforting – religious, if you want – about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” – Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

Obfuscation is a balm. Paranoia or conspiracy or lamenting the tangled reasons and non-reasons and imagined reasons for the end of a relationship, thinking of the past, of ghosts – often these types of rabbit holes are comforting. As long as they don’t become sink holes. And often all can intertwine in a rambling interior narrative of connections and “what if?” thinking that busies your mind from what you’re frequently avoiding – pain. Wistful memories are a lot more soothing, even if they make you sad. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, hippie, stoner, romantic PI, Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) listens when his ex walks back into his life, and bringing a labyrinthian mystery, says, “It isn’t what you’re thinking, Doc.” He answers, “Don’t worry, thinking comes later.” It does, and sooner rather than later – thinking that becomes muddied and strange and absurd and hilarious and ominous and beautiful and ugly and, what does this mean?

You can get overwhelmed by these complexities. You can also be exhilarated by them, the recognizable insanity (and it is recognizable, even bafflement is recognizable) of it all. Inherent Vice seeps into your soul, like the Neil Young songs and that faraway boat Doc and his maritime lawyer, the lovable Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro), are always looking at or that almost inexplicably mournful opening shot of Gordita Beach – that gap between beach pads – the light, the colors, the music (shot by Robert Elswit). Why is this is so heartachingly beautiful? The movie doesn’t so much require multiple viewings, it seduces you to revisit it, again and again, pulling you in far enough, while remaining just enough out of reach. You feel as if you need it. There are those who yearn to untangle the plot, but for me, among the many riches of watching Inherent Vice is searching to find something; something elusive, something you attempt to hold on to. But you know you’re not going to find it exactly because the movie works on an emotional current unlike any other I’ve ever seen. It’s like the first time I heard Love’s “Forever Changes” (and then listened to it over and over again), that masterful merging of haunting beauty, darkness, mystery, romanticism, crafted by a Los Angeles band who challenged any idea that the sunny Southern Californian 1967 Summer of Love was something every hippie bought into. As writer Andrew Hultkrans said of lead singer Arthur Lee: “Arthur Lee was one member of the ’60s counterculture who didn’t buy flower-power wholesale, who intuitively understood that letting the sunshine in wouldn’t instantly vaporize the world’s (or his own) dark stuff.

By the 1970 of Inherent Vice (adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel), characters seem attuned to the “dark stuff” – they’re already feeling coarsened to the new decade, weaving together once heroin-addled saxophone players turned COINTELPRO informants with dental syndicates of drug cartels and Nixon and Reagan and . . . a hippie movement picked up by the establishment to exploit for monetary reasons or reasons more nefarious than that. It’s haunting and humorous, and Anderson strikes the perfect surrealistic duality/mind-melding balance (if “balance” is the right word) between the two opposing forces that are now merging into a deadened, dreamlike reality. Like secretly tortured Lt. Det. Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin)/sometimes Adam-12 TV extra and ad pitchman puts on an afro wig and hippie beads and talks youth jargon from Doc’s TV: “Hey man, I don’t want you paying rent. Rent’s a hassle. I want to see you in your own pad. The Channel View Estates, Artesia’s newest and grooviest housing development. No buzz-kill credit checks. No minimum down payments. That’s not your bag. But check this out: fully equipped kitchen with automatic self-cleaning oven and breakfast nook. Out of sight. Attached one car and available two car garage and best of all, a view of the Dominguez Flood Control Channel that can only be described in two words: Right On!” Doc freaks out a little when, in a minor hallucination, Bigfoot leans into the ad and addresses Doc personally: “What’s up, Doc?” How far away are they from each other, really? Doc could go crazy wading through all of these correlations.

The trick (this is not really advice, just obvious common sense for the paranoid and the melancholic) is to ride out those thoughts and densely packed connections so it doesn’t choke you; like when you’re so suspicious you don’t leave the house, checking the blinds for imaginary intruders, wondering if your pot has been laced with PCP. Doc does smoke PCP, on accident, via an Aryan Brotherhood heavy (“Acid invites you through a door. PCP opens the door, shoves you through, slams it behind you and locks it.”), but he fights through the horrible high, valiantly and violently (it’s one of the picture’s many stunning scenes – watching hippie Doc utilize a firearm with an intensity and know-how and fear we’ve not seen on his face yet). And if that does happen, even without the PCP – paranoia that makes you feel as if your brain has disconnected from your body like a balloon floating off to the ocean – hopefully you can get up the next day and think about it; find reason for your freak-out. You know Doc could. Maybe that panic attack was a result of heightened sensitivity and almost extra sensory perception of something about to unfold? Some warning, whatever that is, that hasn’t found its way to you brain yet? The way dogs can sense earthquakes before everyone else does and hide under cars.

This isn’t a bad trait for a P.I., in spite of how humorous and a bit absurd the stoned gumshoe seems when set against the gimlet-drinking Philip Marlowe of the past. (Many have compared this picture to Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski, and that’s apt, and Anderson discussed a host of influences, from Police Squad! to Neil Young’s Journey Through the Past to Alex Cox’s Repo Man to Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown to Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, but, truly, this movie exists in its own universe) Pynchon (and the movie, too, which sticks closely to the novel with some deviations and additions, also Joanna Newsom’s Sortilège becoming a Jiminy Cricket-like narrator) calls that kind of intuition, when you sense something from your nervousness, “Doper’s ESP” (I feel like Thomas Pynchon has had more than a few illuminating anxiety attacks). Weaving throughout the various areas of Los Angeles and its sunshine suffused with an ominous undertow of darkness and corruption, Doc bumbles around on his own stoner wavelength – he’s good at his job in the way he works it. Partly, because he’s game, intrigued by various characters, surprised at times, and yet, low key. Madness doesn’t perturb him for too long, this is the sea the fish swim in, and he’s got a case to solve. Doc, who in spite of the slapstick humor and stoner indolence, is not dumb or too baked to be productive, he’s actually quite clever, and – this is key to the movie’s richness – he’s a guy who actually cares about people.

Doc is given opportunity to make spinning, divergent connections regarding his ex, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), that night she sways into his little Gordita Beach pad (serving for Pynchon’s Manhattan Beach). She’s looking beautiful but “flatland,” looking like she swore she’d never look. She’s also dragged in a dramatic entanglement and, now, a new case for Doc. In her own way, she’s back with him, but then, as they say separately, twice in the film, “of course not.” This relationship will grow ever poignant as we watch Doc remember Shasta in lyrical sequences, and we see that at its center, this is a movie about a doomed relationship. So, all of the theories, dark operations, conspiracies and period-detail gloom mix in with Doc’s sentiment and sadness towards Shasta. They divert him, and yet, they make him closer to her.

Shasta reveals that her new boyfriend, bigwig real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann (a sublime Eric Roberts), is in danger, and she’s in a position to be complicit. Mickey’s wife and her lover/spiritual coach are conspiring to throw Mickey into a loony bin, hoping Shasta will aid in their plan; get him when he’s vulnerable. She doesn’t want to. Soon enough, both Mickey and Shasta go missing. Doc’s now on it more than ever. His ex-old lady is missing, causing frequent moments of fear and lamentations, and, in his own tripped-out headspace, a quality that’s both mellow and on edge. He’s stoned but he’s alert (not all potheads are useless, this is about as stupid as people thinking they suffer Reefer Madness manias). But he does get lost in the maze a few times. In a part of Pynchon’s novel I love (which reflects the movie), circular questioning finds Doc wondering about Shasta and the web of intrigue. It riddles Doc as he smokes out with his old partner (not a character in the picture) Fritz Drybeam:

"That Mickey, known to be a generous Reagan contributor, might be active in some anti-Communist crusade came as no big surprise. But how deeply was Shasta involved? Who had arranged for her passage out of the country aboard the Golden Fang? Was it Mickey? Was it somebody else paying her off for her services in putting the snatch on Mickey? What could she have gotten into so heavy-duty that the only way out was to help set up the man she was supposed to be in love with? Bummer, man. Bumm. Er.

"Assuming she even wanted out. Maybe she really wanted to remain in whatever it was, and Mickey stood in the way of that, or maybe Shasta was seeing Sloane’s boyfriend Riggs on the side, and maybe Sloane found out and was trying to get revenge by setting Shasta up for Mickey’s murder, or maybe Mickey was jealous of Riggs and tried to have him iced only the plan misfired and whoever had contracted to do the deed showed up and by accident killed Mickey, or maybe it was on purpose because the so-far-unknown hitperson really wanted to run off with Sloane. . . .”

Doc comes to the only conclusion these obsessive kinds of thought processes yield: He exclaims: “Gahhh!” Yes, he’s really, really high. In the novel Fritz informs him that PIs should stay away from drugs. All of  “‘em alternate universes just make the job that much more complicated,” he says. Doc argues that Sherlock Holmes was a good PI and he did a lot of cocaine, so, not true. His friend tells him Sherlock Holmes wasn’t a real guy. Doc disagrees: “No, he’s real. He lives at this real address in London. Well, maybe not anymore, it was years ago, he has to be dead by now.” Freak-out over. Digressions can really calm a person down.

And the picture’s digressions (for there are many, wonderfully so) present a collection of characters whom Doc encounters with confusion, suspicion, fear, lust, fondness, empathy . . . so many various expressions. These disparate personalities, oddball, touching, sexy, terrifying or merely baffling, serve the detective story well, but they also add texture and depth to both the movie and to Doc. Part of Inherent Vice’s power is watching a brilliant Phoenix’s sensitive and mischievous face observing a person. His expressive blue eyes really study people, even when he’s supremely stoned. From Jade (a charming Hong Chau), who’s like the Joan Blondell of the movie; to prim-but-not-so-prim, kind-of girlfriend Deputy D.A. Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon); to his brief scene with Roberts’ Mickey in which Doc (and the audience) take in this man’s haunted face, moving from a weird “Hello little hippie” sweetness to expressing, nearly every poignantly tragic moment in the movie with just a few powerful close-ups of his face (my god, it’s lovely to see Eric Roberts on screen like that); to the way Doc kindly listens and nods as Hope Harligen (Jena Malone) describes her seedy meet-cute with her missing husband, Coy (Owen Wilson), handing Doc a graphic photo of their baby, which makes him quickly, hilariously, yell aloud, and then swiftly compose himself.

Another remarkably mixed mood moment is Doc’s dinner with Crocker Fenway (Martin Donovan), the wealthy, sneering snob who rewards Doc for saving his teenage daughter from demented dentist, Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short coming off like Austin Powers’ degenerate uncle and a touch of Phil Spector). Doc, dressed his best (that turquoise necklace) listens to Fenway detailing, with horror, the transgressions his daughter endured, and not all because of sex, but because of Blatnoyd’s tackiness (“The wallpaper. The lamps” – if you’ve ever wondered how a person could perfectly describe disdain for lamps, Donovan will quell your curiosity). Doc’s attempting to be both nice and tough, but Fenway insults him. The various expressions flickering on Doc’s face makes you feel for him in general (you feel for Doc a lot in this movie), but also feel (and this is without condescension) proud when he sticks up for himself: “I may not be as well connected, and for sure not as much into revenge as you folks are. But if you jive with me, my man. I say to you . . .” and he makes a click click sound. I love that sound he makes. It’s disarmingly touching.

Doc’s relationship with Shasta is like a simultaneous love and ghost story. Often she appears like an idealized dream, the way we frequently remember those we pine for, forgetting the bad times. A flashback of the two running through the rain to Neil Young’s “Journey Through the Past” is so overwhelming romantic and stirring that it feels personal, like even personal to the viewer (who hasn’t had this kind of idyllic memory come to them before? Who wouldn’t want to return right back to that perfect feeling?). Things become, perhaps, real (in a still dreamy sense) in a powerful extended scene in which Doc has angry/emotional sexual encounter with Shasta. She sits naked detailing what Mickey made her do – is she taunting him? Expressing sadness and trauma? Is she getting off on it? It could be all things, and not because she’s a “femme fatale” or a bad person, or merely fucking with him, it’s much more nuanced than that. And so is Doc’s response. This scene’s been deemed controversial by some, a male fantasy even, but that takes away all of its complexity and rawness, for both Doc and Shasta. It’s an extraordinarily thorny moment, between two people who really know one another. It’s supposed to be discomforting and sad and emotionally honest. You’re supposed to think about it. It also shows that their relationship is more complicated than his idealizations.

A separate essay could detail the relationship between Doc and the hilariously severe, incredibly damaged Bigfoot (“Like a bad luck planet in today’s horoscope, here’s the old, hippie-hating mad dog himself . . . SAG member, John Wayne walk, flat top of Flintstones proportion, and that little evil shit twinkle in his eye that says, civil rights violations.”) The interplay between Phoenix and Brolin (who is extraordinary) is so exquisitely timed, from big moments to seemingly throwaway lines (nothing is throwaway here), that their connection takes on a plaintive depth that builds and builds until, you are taken aback by how moved you are (and you really start to like Bigfoot). When Doc realizes that his nemesis and, in a strange way, his ally, is mourning the death of his partner (who he was probably in love with) Bigfoot’s actions attain a more dejectedly distressed meaning. His anger and chocolate covered banana sucking and yearning for respect shows a man who is on the edge of, likely, a complete nervous breakdown. The man who berates Doc constantly and who stomps on him (literally), and who puffs up his chest and yells “Molto Pan-a-cake-o!” is, in fact, the saddest character in the movie. By the time he eats a plate of marijuana, lamenting that Doc’s not come around after the case is closed, tears stream down Doc’s face. You’re stunned by what Bigfoot’s doing, and then, my god, are you moved. Doc asks: “Are you OK, brother?”  Bigfoot answers: “I’m not your brother.” Ever empathetic Doc replies: “Yeah, but you could use a keeper.

These characters will have more rabbit holes to dive down, but the case is over, and rather than rejoice, there’s a sadness that ends the picture with a  . . . what now? As Sortilège narrates: “Yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever.” That’s why we like to whirl with endless conspiracies because, well, they often never end. 

The one bit of closure has a poignantly heroic Doc saving Coy and dropping him off to his wife. But while you’re happy for Coy, the camera lingers on Doc’s bittersweet, forlorn face sitting in his car as Jonny Greenwood’s gorgeously melancholic score underlines the emotion. Nothing is wrapped up for him. Even when he’s driving off with Shasta, nothing is for certain. Who knows what’s in store? Who knows if it’s really even happening? Should we attempt to figure it out? “Of course not.”

 

Merry Christmas: It's a Wonderful Life

From my piece originally published at the New Beverly

Mr. Emil Gower: I owe everything to George Bailey. Help him, dear Father.Giuseppe Martini: Joseph, Jesus and Mary. Help my friend, Mr. Bailey.

Ma Bailey: Help my son, George, tonight.

Bert: He never thinks about himself, God, that’s why he’s in trouble.

Ernie Bishop: George is a good guy. Give him a break, God. Mary: I love him, dear Lord. Watch over him tonight.

Janie Bailey: Please, God, something’s the matter with Daddy. Zuzu Bailey: Please bring Daddy back.

“Get me! I’m giving out wings!” – Nick, the bartender

It’s a wonderful nightmare – and the nightmare starts rolling downhill and snowballing, not only by James Stewart’s suffering George Bailey, but by Thomas Mitchell’s sweet, absent minded, animal-loving Uncle Billy. Think of his scene – when he can’t find the money. Jesus, imagine being Uncle Billy? On that fateful Christmas Eve in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s Uncle Billy who louses everything up by his innocent mistake – losing the deposit money to Lionel Barrymore’s rotten Mr. Potter, who then steals it. Cheerfully filling out the 8,000-dollar deposit slip in the bank, he notices Mr. Potter wheeled in by one of his henchman, and bids him a somewhat disingenuous hello. He’s not happy to see him. No one is happy to see that greedy, no-feeling blight on this community. Nevertheless, Uncle Billy, greets him, and grabs Potter’s newspaper – bragging about George’s brother winning the Congressional Medal of Honor, “written right there in print. “You just can’t keep those Bailey Boys down,” he says with pride and gloating glee. Mr. Potter doesn’t give a rat’s ass (or secretly, he does) and snarls about that “slacker” George Bailey (I always think of the Senior Lebowski in this moment, even if George Bailey is nothing like the Dude – “The bums lost!”). Uncle Billy folds the deposit money into the newspaper and hands it back to Potter: He continues to exult for the Baileys with a smirk, messing with Mr. Potter. He’s having a good time shoving this in Mr. Potter’s face! He’s being cocky, even. But… don’t go too far Uncle Billy, for, let me repeat myself – he hands over the money to Mr. Potter – something one fears so much that one might go crazy thinking such fear actually formed itself and happened.

So evidently Uncle Billy isn’t allowed to just slightly gloat in this Wonderful Life universe – he can’t even walk away from a party without crashing into something and falling down – he’s a lovably disorganized, slightly kooky guy until he’s not so lovable – at least not to George Bailey anymore. So, every time I see Uncle Billy smile and fold that newspaper with the money inside and just hand it over to Mr. Potter I nearly scream. I scream thinking of myself, too. That moment of recognition in yourself – the nightmarish thought of committing some kind of easy blunder that results in consequences so dire, that you wish you’d never left the house that morning. Or that week, for that matter. The “what if?” spiral that leads to catastrophizing – a “what if?” that will become a grim alternate reality for George Bailey, when one wishes that, one not only never stepped out of the house, but never stepped outside for a week. In Bailey’s case, he wished he had never stepped into life

I realize there would be no movie if Uncle Billy didn’t hand that 8,000 dollars over to evil Mr. Potter and I’ve seen it enough to anticipate the moment, but it’s still horrifying to watch – knowing that Christmas Eve-happy Uncle Billy will soon turn to sinking-dread Uncle Billy. And then, that panic, that anger, that suicidal ideation infecting George Bailey, who has been storing up dread and regret and running away fantasies for years. Bailey will lose it, turn on his family, get punched in a bar, crash a car, run through the snow to jump off a bridge only to be saved by Henry Travers’ lovable second-class guardian angel, Clarence. He’s shown what Bedford Falls would have really been like had George had never been born. It would be Pottersville – a seedy, mean (admittedly, more interesting) rough town, controlled by Mr. Potter; and a place where no one knows George. No one knows him? He yells at friendly faces desperately in this “Twilight Zone” journey – and George goes crazier. Clarence is sending him over the edge faster than jumping off that bridge – and he’s waking George up as if the cold water below jolted him alive. It’s like George fell asleep after crashing that car, and fell into this nightmare – this Dickensian Christmas ghost story about a man who was never there.

But before that descent into madness, Uncle Billy informs George of the loss, and you can feel both of these men unraveling, just vibrating from the screen. They rush outside, retracing Uncle Billy’s steps through Bedford Falls, “Did you buy anything?” George demands, and I wince for Uncle Billy franticly thinking. Who hasn’t been there? Who hasn’t been in Uncle Billy’s place? They wind up in Uncle Billy’s study with an enraged, panic-stricken George hollering at what is now a totally broken man. Uncle Billy is weeping.

George: Maybe-Maybe! I don’t want any maybe. We’ve got to find that money!

Uncle Billy: I’m no good to you, George. I…

George: Uncle Billy, do you… Listen to me. Do you have any secret place hiding place?

Uncle Billy: I’ve gone over the whole house, even in rooms that have been locked ever since I lost Laura.

George: Listen to me, listen to me! Think! Think!

Uncle Billy: I can’t think anymore, George. I can’t think anymore. It hurts…

George: Where’s that money, you silly, stupid old fool?! Where’s that money? Do you realize what this means? It means bankruptcy and scandal, and prison! That’s what it means. One of us is going to jail! Well, it’s not gonna be me.

“Rooms that have been locked ever since I lost Laura?” “It hurts?” Someone has not been having such a wonderful life, and it’s not George Bailey. Uncle Billy is a widower who lives with multiple animals – among others, a monkey, a dog, a raven (Jimmy, who would appear in all of Capra’s movies after You Can’t Take It with You) and a cute little squirrel who sweetly crawls up Billy’s arm for comfort when he’s sitting at his desk, sobbing. Mitchell’s mixture of gentleness and, at this point, deep, heartfelt loss, not just of the money, but of his wife, is both bracing and moving. It’s the moment you truly realize Uncle Billy has his own demons and maybe Bedford Falls is all he’s got – never mind how George feels stymied all the time. Or, rather, maybe Uncle Billy would like to get the hell out of there too. We don’t know. It’s not all about George Bailey.

When Uncle Billy says, “It hurts.” I’m sure it does. You realize this man’s been living in sadness with furry friends for … we’re not sure how long. (Nothing wrong in living with lots of animals – it may have kept Uncle Billy sane, in fact, it’s just others who find him eccentric) And now he’s sent his nephew spiraling into madness and despair, and feels he’s destroyed everything. My God, the guilt. And, remember, this is the second time Uncle Billy has fucked up. How did Uncle Billy not attempt suicide that night? Where were the angels watching over Uncle Billy? He has loving pets – perhaps, that was comforting enough. Perhaps. The horror movie begins.

And I mean it gets really scary at this point – full blown level ten panic attack. George is going to have to take the fall for Uncle Billy, which is respectable of him, and seems to be his continual helpful duty (and submerged dread) in the town, but watching him yell at vulnerable Billy – it’s so violent. Stewart is so tall and overpowering and nearly deranged and Mitchell looks so small and sunken in this moment. The two play off of each other perfectly –  and you are worried for both of them. Stewart expresses his manic anger brilliantly and with such visceral emotion – the pained face, that flop of sweaty hair on his forehead, his distinct voice, so folksy and charming before, now twisting into an almost warbling howl unlike anything anyone’s really heard. No one sounds like James Stewart in the first place, but when he’s enraged, he doesn’t even sound of this earth.

Capra understood his capacity for the swooning mental breakdown in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, as if decency will make a man go nearly insane (you see this in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town as well), but he dug into something much thornier and angrier here – and a mysterious darkness lurking under all of that wholesomeness. The darkness later tapped into via Anthony Mann and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock, who saw the obsession, madness, kinkiness and repressed anger within the All-American movie star.

But this All-American “wholesomeness,” not just in Stewart, but in the very idea of anything purely “All-American” and wholesome, specifically, is full of complexity, mystery, much of which is not wholesome. Obviously the All-American contains darkness, madness, rot or horror – we’ve experienced it, we’ve seen it, we’ve read it (read writers like Hawthorne, Melville, Poe and more … Horace McCoy, William Lindsay Gresham … the list goes on). Wholesome? Is that even possible? No one is that good or that innocent and never have been. People are angry and obsessed and repressed. And what is more All-American than repressed anger boiling to the surface? Of being spitting mad and calcified that the so-called American Dream didn’t work out for you? And never mind the American Dream (so many Americans have different dreams – many just dream to survive), just that one (George) is stuck in what others might consider the dream – a beautiful, charming wife, lovely children, a gorgeous old rambling house, a good job. Young (and older) George Bailey wanted to do things, go places – be his own man. He didn’t want to stay in Bedford Falls, he didn’t want to take over his father’s business. He could have made money and enjoyed a posh life, or he could have rambled and walked into a seedy situation, like John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

So, he’s sacrificed, become a pillar of the community, has a great love with Mary (a sublime Donna Reed) and he appears happy – but that lingering “what if I had done this, what if I had lived there?” flickers across his face, sometimes clearly, sometimes in just a flash of his eyes. Sometimes when he looks at Gloria Grahame’s Violet. But with the money missing, that “what if?” has now exploded into the catastrophic. And hurled at Uncle Billy who is wishing a lot of things were different too. And soon, again, George wishes he were never born.

But if that had been the case, he wouldn’t have stopped his old boss, the broken-down pharmacist Mr. Gower (H.B. Warner, a Capra favorite, and Jesus Christ in Cecil B. Demille’s The King of Kings) from accidentally poisoning a customer. Another dark, layered confrontation in which an accident could have led to death – and George has to do something about it. In a few scenes, we learn a lot about one man’s misery and a young, scared but caring George’s reaction to it. Here, however, it is George who is on the other end of wrathful sadness, batted around and hollered at like Uncle Billy. Sensitive young George notices an open telegram on view – that Mr. Gower’s son has died from influenza – and that a grief-stricken Mr. Gower is drunk. Mr. Gower is so intoxicated that he’s mistakenly mixed a prescription with poison –  cyanide. It’s for an emergency delivery and George, noticing the grave error, isn’t sure what to do. He seeks the advice of his father, who is getting a nasty ear-full from Mr. Potter. Mr. Potter is deeply insulting, calling George’s father a failure: “Are you running a business or a charity ward?” It’s a traumatizing thing for a kid to see. And he’s standing there, holding poison.

A shaken George returns to Mr. Gower with the prescription and is … yelled at. It’s the first scene of violence in the movie – Gower lunges at George, slapping his bad ear (he lost his hearing from saving his younger brother in a sledding accident), and poor George is trying to collect himself while crying: “Don’t hurt my sore ear again … Don’t hurt my sore ear again!” 

When Mr. Gower realizes this kid has just saved another’s life, and him from ruin – the look on Warner’s haggard face is so mournful, full of such a powerful, sinking self-recognition that when he embraces George – it’s one of the most moving moments in the entire picture. As George (so beautifully played by Bobby Anderson) backs away, Mr. Gower holds him. Both are crying: “I won’t ever tell anyone!” George cries. “I know what you’re feeling. I won’t tell a soul. Hope to die, I won’t.”

And he never did. Hope to die. To die, not to have never been born, as he wishes. But Clarence gives grown-up George a strong sample of his later wish, because had he never been born, he would have never been known. And George learns he doesn’t want that either. Not just because the alternate reality Pottersville is a noir-soaked sin city without him (and frankly, I prefer Nick’s bar over Martini’s, save for the cruelty, but it looks more fun, and with the boogie woogie piano player Meade Lux Lewis at the keys), but because no one knows who in the hell George is. And, worse, if they do, they might view him as insane.

There are people who go through life like this, alive, with no one knowing who they are or giving a damn to find out. Invisible people. Or outsiders people cross the street to avoid. And this idea reveals itself when a wrecked vagrant walks into Nick’s and it turns out to be Mr. Gower – drunk and vulnerable and beaten down by life. Nick (Sheldon Leonard), tells that “rummy” to get out and humiliates the man by spraying Gower’s face with seltzer water – he’s a pariah. George is horrified, yelling for his old boss and friend. But Gower did twenty years for poisoning a kid (aha) and if never-been-born-George knows him, then, according to Nick, he must be a sicko “jailbird” too. Quickly, in Pottersville, George has gone from a nobody no one knows to a creep, possibly a criminal and certainly crazy – aligned with Gower and Uncle Billy, whom George’s mother (Beulah Bondi) informs him is in an insane asylum. I am not surprised Billy has been placed in an insane asylum. He lost his business – probably when someone trusted him with a large sum of cash and that “old fool” left it all in an umbrella in a cab – something of the sort.  Poor Uncle Billy.

There is more of the down-and-out in Pottersville – chiefly, Mary, who becomes a dowdy librarian had George never been born, which would almost be a laugh (she’s still lovely to me, and at least she has a good job and reads books – she’s not as desperate and tragic as Grahame’s flirtatious Violet) – but it’s more saddening that George sees that she is now an invisible person, that, she like him, has vanished, that she’s never experienced love, that she’s never met him. And she has no idea who he is (The movie was apparently personal to Capra –  he could relate to the fear of being forgotten, unseen – returning from World War II, making this picture, which was not a flop, but not the success he wished it to be. It received mixed reviews, but the bad reviews hurt him.)

In fact, Mary may be quite an interesting, intelligent woman a person would love to talk to, just as she was in Bedford Falls, but Pottersville doesn’t seem to care. She’s not … what? Pretty enough? It’s absurd but the world is mean. Seeing her quickly walking from the library makes George even crazier, and he starts yelling and grabbing at her like a maniac, and she screams and screams for help, and he is desperate for her to see who he is and he’s probably going to get arrested for accosting a woman and … when is the nightmare going to end.

It’ll end – and George Bailey will be running through Bedford Falls wishing every person and thing a manic Merry Christmas. “Merry Christmas, movie house! Merry Christmas, Emporium! Merry Christmas, you wonderful old Building and Loan!!” He even wishes Mr. Potter a Merry Christmas. After the dark night of the soul, he appreciates quaint Bedford Falls. The famous finale will happen – the family reunited and all of the town’s generosity pouring into the Bailey home, saving George from the slammer, and we cry for such giving, and it’s beautifully crafted and magically shot by cinematographer Joseph Walker (snow is so hauntingly beautiful in this movie – gentle and gorgeous and then, at times, foreboding), but the darkness of the picture lingers. And it’s a darkness that we felt even before Pottersville – all of those scenes of nice people cracking up.

As corny as some have thought this movie was or is, and as old-fashioned as it may have seemed to some critics who, at the time, much preferred William Wyler’s masterpiece, The Best Years of Our Lives, it’s too dreamlike and strange, too uniquely told, too, in fact, scary, to seem antiquated and purely sentimental to me. And it’s sometimes unhinged – melodramatic isn’t the right word – unhinged seems more appropriate, and to the point of feeling unexpected jolts even if we’ve seen the picture a hundred times. When Stewart is standing outside his mother’s boarding house in Pottersville, and the film goes so close on his face, eyes wide and terrified, he looks right at us for a second. I honestly don’t know what to think at that moment. I certainly feel for him, but I also marvel at how intense and bold the filmmaking is here. I’m waiting for a quivering theremin wobble and a bat to bite the head off a rat – a la The Lost Weekend – like Bailey’s suffering delirium tremens. But of course, he’s not – he’s not hallucinating. He has simply switched realities, which is much more terrifying.

This may seem odd, but when I watch It’s a Wonderful Life, I often think of Hitchcock’s small-towners in Shadow of a Doubt (also co-starring Henry Travers), wherein Teresa Wright is like young George Bailey – she wants so much more out of life, and she thinks she’s made of different stuff than the others. She doesn’t yearn for anything like her parent’s life and laments that her mother works “like a dog” – hoping a miracle will come to lift her up. And then a miracle does come – but that miracle isn’t an angel – it’s her charming, sociopathic Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten). James Stewart will have the angel on his shoulder, Teresa Wright gets the devil. Both appreciate their lives after their dark rites of passage in which, to quote Uncle Charlie, “the world is a foul sty.” She’s not going to forget Uncle Charlie. George is not going to forget Clarence and his nightmare of Pottersville. But how often will he think of it? Will it be too painful? Will he become a bit more like Uncle Billy? Not disorganized, not crowding his house with critters, but avoiding any revisit to the horror. Like Uncle Billy said: “I can’t think anymore, George. I can’t think anymore. It hurts.” Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls.

Jolly Old Saint Nick & Nora Charles

From my piece published at the New Beverly.

Reporter: Say listen, is he working on a case?
Nora Charles: Yes, yes!
Reporter: What case?
Nora Charles: A case of scotch. Pitch in and help him.

Nick Charles likes to drink. Nick Charles likes to drink a lot – copious amounts of alcohol – one glass emptied in one hand, the other reaching for another with an elegance and panache that’s as graceful as a tipsy, never fully drunk dancer. Indeed, he compares the mixing of drinks to dance, breaking it down to a bartender: “The important thing is the rhythm. Always have rhythm in your shaking. Now a Manhattan you shake to fox-trot time, a Bronx to two-step time, a dry martini you always shake to waltz time.

In his lush waltz time (or maybe a fox-trot), he’s gulping his wife’s drink down before passing her the empty glass, to which she takes with amusement. She, as in Nora Charles, drinks too, with merriment and style and with routine like Nick, and she also consumes liberally, almost as much or as much as her husband. It’s not too hard to keep track of who drinks the most as it would appear to be Nick, though he may just be seen onscreen imbibing with exceptional volume. I have no idea how much Nora’s putting away during her walks with Asta, their pet terrier. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter – they both drink enough and with such brio, that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’s George and Martha, had they been around, would raise their glasses to them as kindred dipsomaniacal spirits. But George and Martha, as intelligent and as morbidly funny and as mean and finally, as poignant as they are, could never contend with Nick and Nora Charles.

Nick and Nora would roll their eyes and throw down a wicked bon mot over their “Hey, swampy” insults – for they’re never sloppy or mean or ugly about their drinking – and think of the bemused looks they’d give one another around George and Martha’s “truth or illusion.” (I am imagining Nick and Nora in George and Martha’s academic abode, sitting on that couch, laughing when George busts out that umbrella gun, and then wanting to leave because they’d rather drink in their sterling, silvery apartment, crawl into their silk night clothes and order in a “flock of sandwiches,” and then drink more).

So, George and Martha could never “get” them as guests. You can’t get people who are that shimmering and witty while drinking – a happily married couple and who aren’t shocked by profuse alcohol consumption. Maybe they should be frightened those two could represent their future but… let’s not spoil things here, and, they’re not thinking of that. Nick and Nora, a real team, are in love and live life entirely the way they want to – they’ve created a world of their own that’s sophisticated and mischievous and intelligent and funny and full of adventure, and, yes, beautiful clothes. And the correct intoxicants. And crime, buffered by their glittering bubble. As such, they appear to be one of the most positive and positively happy couples in filmdom. A marriage of equals. And two playful quick-witted lovebirds who, as I’ve stated numerous times here, drink a lot.

This glamorous twosome are William Powell as Nick and Myrna Loy as Nora, in W.S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man, an exceptional merging of mystery and seminal screwball and modern marital allure, adapted from the popular Dashiell Hammett novel (his last), who also drank (in an understatement). It’s said that Hammett’s relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman was the inspiration to create these heavy drinking characters, and likely so, but The Thin Man is a much more idealized version of the Hammett-Hellman union and the drinking. Screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich were a married couple, and they lightened up the darker edges of the novel, and perhaps their own marriage played a part (wouldn’t we all want to be Nick and Nora Charles?). Still, as Hellman wrote of Hammett in the New Yorker, after his death: “For years we made jokes about the day I would write about him. In the early years, I would say, ‘Tell me more about the girl in San Francisco. The silly one who lived across the hall in Pine Street.’ And he would laugh and say, ‘She lived across the hall in Pine Street and was silly.’ ‘Tell more than that. How much did you like her, and—?’ He would yawn: ‘Finish your drink and go to sleep.’” Nick would tell Nora the same, except he’d “gallantly” finish her drink for her.

We first meet Nick at a bar talking fox trots and waltzes when it comes to creating cocktails – he’s only slightly slurred in his speech, not quite lit and immediately charming as William Powell always is. (The word charming seems almost needless when you simply read his name – if you know William Powell you already know he is.) He comes face-to-face with a young woman, not his wife whom we’ve not met yet. Gasp! No, no, it’s nothing like that and Nora wouldn’t bat an eye anyway. She trusts her husband or she’s perfectly fine with a flirt. One life to live and all that. Also, he’s a little tipsy. This woman is lovely Dorothy Wynant (Maureen O’Sullivan), who remembers Nick back when he was a full time employed detective, back when she was a little girl: “You used to fascinate me, a real live detective. You told me the most wonderful stories. Were they true?” He answers, “Probably not.” Nick once worked on a case for her father (the titular “thin man” which sounds so ominous), and now he’s gone missing. She’s worried, he was supposed to be around for her upcoming wedding, it’s nearing Christmas and… she has a strange family. 

Dorothy’s father, Clyde Wynant (Edward Ellis) who is sweet to her but not so lovable in real life (or at least he chooses shifty romantic interests) is divorced from her somewhat ridiculous mother, Mimi (Minna Gombell) and is in a rocky relationship with his two-timing secretary, Julia (Natalie Moorhead), who keeps company with some shady-looking so-and-sos. Naturally there are problems, and both ex-wife and girlfriend are concerned about his money which raises suspicion. Meanwhile, Mimi has re-married some deviously handsome fellow named Chris (Cesar Romero) who doesn’t work and is sensitive to his idle pointed out (“You’ve hurt his feelings!” Mimi exclaims), and her son, the Leopold and Loeb-looking Gilbert (William Henry) is a strange kid who likes to spy on people, listen in on phone calls (when accused of eavesdropping, he says, “Of course. What’s an extension for?”), digging into the gory details of true crime and then, the more dramatic parts of Freudianism – the Oedipus Complex and a mother fixation, of which he states he has. (OK, so he’s not that weird – not by today’s standards anyway.) This is the family Nick and Nora will get dragged into, somewhat (no one can really drag these two anywhere), after the retired detective decides to take on the case and digs in deeper after Julia is murdered. Now the father is not only missing but the prime suspect as well.

This all happening around the flurry of Christmas parties and cocktails and drunk friends calling their mothers and strange men showing up at the door in the middle of the night, Nick and Nora contend with a family so screwy that no one in it needs to drink to appear under the influence. In the novel Gilbert is experimenting with harder drugs like morphine and curious about cocaine (“that’s to supposed to sharpen the brain, isn’t it?” he asks) and though there’s not a mention of that in the movie, you can imagine quite a few of these characters snorting or injecting something illicit as they bounce around the rooms. But Nick and Nora just drink – and with unflappable tolerance. After all, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution was passed the year before in 1933, thus ending national Prohibition, so, drink away! Of course, Nick and Nora always drank as everyone did under Prohibition, but never mind that, celebrate! Celebrate more. And have another. Have six, and order five more as Nora does when she is finally introduced in the picture.

And what an introduction –  she comes into the bar with Asta (Skippy) in tow, arms full of Christmas presents, and falls flat on her face. Elegant, gorgeous Myrna Loy takes a tumble and manages to be elegant and gorgeous about it. And funny, with a timing and wit all her own. She also walks in on her husband’s impromptu meeting with his pretty potential new client, Dorothy, and is amused by the possible job. You see, these two don’t need to work since, as Nick jokes to his wealthy wife, “I’m too busy seeing you don’t Iose the money I married you for.” But Nora is up for the thrill and for the seedier amusements of life (“Oh, Nicky, I love you because you know such lovely people.” she says with loving sarcasm) and she wants to help out poor Dorothy. Eventually Nick will relent and, as the complicated case continues on, Nick and Nora never abate with their merry lives, throwing one hell of a Christmas party in a beautifully shot and timed sequence that proves how well they can handle their liquor – everyone else singing “Oh Christmas Tree” are soused out of their minds.

But there’s Nick and Nora, floating around the rooms, wise cracking, ordering food, drinking (of course), taking in Dorothy and then Mimi and then even Gilbert who starts confusing drunks by using the term sexagenarian (“A sexagenarian? But we can’t put that in the paper.”) Nick escorts Gilbert out easily and amusingly, by grabbing his hat and walking towards the door as Gilbert exclaims: “Hey, that’s my hat!” To which Nick says, “Come and get it, while it’s hot.” Why this is both so funny and so graceful is almost mysterious in its simplicity, effortless but not effortless. It’s just as Roger Ebert said of Powell: “William Powell is to dialogue as Fred Astaire is to dance. His delivery is so droll and insinuating, so knowing and innocent at the same time, that it hardly matters what he’s saying.” Well, it does matter, particularly in the later My Man Godfrey where Powell says, “The only difference between a derelict and a man is a job.” but I entirely understand Ebert’s point. Much of the joy is merely listening to Powell, which makes all of the sequels to The Thin Man and, particularly, the Lux Radio Theater versions, so enjoyable and such an art form, and one nearly lost.

Myrna Loy also makes it look all so easy. Loy hadn’t been this funny yet, and had often been cast as the “exotic” or the vamp, which she is not here, but she is most certainly not the opposite – “normal” long-suffering wife, arms akimbo waiting for her hubby to finish his latest shenanigan. She’s right there with him – joking, sleuthing, drinking. Loy had previously starred with Powell in Van Dyke’s Manhattan Melodrama (their first of fourteen films together – six being the Thin Man pictures) and their chemistry was so perfect, so natural, like two people who finish each other’s sentences, that many fans thought they were a couple in real life. Loy is crisp and sweet, elegant and goofy and bemused, never annoyed – quick to make a playful sour face or sit patiently on Christmas morning (in her new fur coat, no less – their lounging clothes are spectacular here) as Nick horses around with his present – a B.B. gun – he’s lying on the couch and taking shots at the Christmas balls on the tree. You know, every day Christmas morning things. “You act as though it were the only Christmas present you ever had,” she wryly observes. It’s a lovely, almost subversive little moment of their lives together – these two adults who’ve bonded, not by children (unless you count Asta), but by fun that verges on the precipice of irresponsibility. But who are they responsible to? Each other. And are they letting each other down? Not a chance.

The Thin Man (remarkably shot in around two weeks) is a wickedly fun, sexy, intelligent intoxicant. You get something of a contact high watching the dazzling, slightly anarchic Nick and Nora imbibe, tossing off their good-natured barbs with such elegant ease. And the picture remains a still-modern depiction of what is, let’s face it, an aspirational marriage. A daring merging of darker crime elements with screwball comedy (decomposing bodies as dinner repartee), the picture was something of a risk, and one that paid off. As detailed in Roger Bryant’s “William Powell: The Life and Films,” Samuel Marx, then the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s story department said: “I’d bought this sprightly detective story for fourteen thousand dollars, and we had no idea whether this kind of comedy would go. It had two unprecedented elements… they were having fun with murder, and they were a married couple who acted with total sophistication… The matrimonial combination… even that was a risk, because in those days you got married at the end of the movie, not at the beginning. Marriage wasn’t supposed to be fun.” Nowadays, it would be the drinking that wasn’t supposed to be fun. With The Thin Man you get both. And most especially, you get Nick and Nora Charles – tipsy and witty and living in a world of their own making. A world’s that’s crazy anyway, so why the hell not live it the way you can? As Nora says at their doozy of an Agatha Christie-like, suspect filled dinner party: “Waiter, will you serve the nuts? I mean, will you serve the guests the nuts?”

Questions Arose: His Kind of Woman

From my piece published at the New Beverly.

“Questions arose. Like, what in the fuck was going on here, basically.” – Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

I love watching Robert Mitchum amble around His Kind of Woman with that particular walk of his, navigating this schizophrenic maze of a movie like it’s a typical day in the life of … Bob Mitchum: Light up a reefer, what’s Jim Backus up to? What the hell does Charles McGraw want? Millionaire but probably not a millionaire Jane Russell is wooing that actor Vincent Price playing an actor. Fine, fine. We’re all friends. Or enemies. Who knows? Guess I’ll mingle.

Mitchum never lights up a reefer in the movie, he doesn’t even drink (he has milk in one scene, orders ginger ale in another) but you can imagine it happening off camera. And, again, he does saunter with his special kind of physical cool – that walk he found baffling for being so “interesting” to people. His response to that? “Hell, I’m just trying to hold my gut in.” Well, this movie isn’t trying to hold its gut in, and if it ever had any intention to, it abandoned that mission and went on a manic munchie binge, unbuckled its belt, and let it all out. And then took another hit. His Kind of Woman might not have been made to be a movie with marijuana in mind (though Mitchum was busted for it in 1948 – did two months’ time and was released in 1949) but this is a pot-smoker’s movie, a stoner noir with a knotty plot and loads of characters doing weird shit – characters who seem, not just stoned, but who make you feel stoned once you settle into the thing.

This is a movie where our lead actor hangs around for nearly an hour before he really figures out just “what in the fuck was going on here, basically.” He’s in a John Farrow movie, a Richard Fleischer movie, a Vincent Price movie, a Howard Hughes movie, and a Howard Hughes movie that, off-screen, is obsessing over the details like the eccentric billionaire instructing an assistant on how to properly open a can of peaches.

When I quote Pynchon, it’s not just a joke, this feels like Pynchon, a world Doc Sportello would stumble upon, putting the pieces together with his Doper’s ESP because, sure. What does this all mean? There’s the German writer Martin Krafft (John Mylong), always in dark sunglasses who plays chess with himself but is actually a plastic surgeon for Raymond Burr’s moody mobster Nick Ferraro. Mamie Van Doren, not as Mamie Van Doren but it doesn’t really matter, shows up for a second. I mentioned Jim Backus. He’s a creepy investment broker named Myron Winton who is trying to gamble away a recently married young couple’s money, presumably to take off with the bride. Nice try, Backus. No dice. A bravura Vincent Price is a crazed actor named Mark Cardigan and not just a crazed actor in the usual sense but a game-hunting crazed married actor having an affair with Jane Russell and one who will become so amped up with adventure and bloodlust that he really starts shooting bad guys, announcing things like, “I must rid all the seas of pirates!” He’s so intoxicated with what he’s doing that he literally shoves Jane Russell in a closet – she may be pretty but she can’t help him and worse, she’s a scene stealer.

This is a movie where Mitchum irons his money. When he runs out of money he irons his pants.

Money-ironer Mitchum is gambler Dan Milner (he has such a normal name), who has just been sprung from a month in jail and, with little prospects, accepts a shady deal. It’s $50,000 to head out to Mexico, presumably for a year, no idea why. Well, why not? He needs the money because he owes money, naturally. He does not appear to have much else going on other than that he’s Robert Mitchum. He’s flown away and meets beautiful, supposed rich girl, Lenore Brent (Russell) in a Mexican cantina while awaiting his next plane, where she charmingly sings “Five Little Miles from San Berdoo” and insists only on champagne. They wind up in the same plane together and off to the same impressive, crazy-ass resort – a play land for cops, gangsters, actors, German novelist plastic surgeons, Jim Backus, I’ve already said this … And then the movie really gets to ambling around, with Mitchum’s Dan trying to figure out what is what and who is who and who to trust inside this surrealistic alternate universe.

He meets almost all of the aforementioned people (and more) at a gorgeously constructed Mexican resort called Morro’s Lodge, an enormous, modern tropical retreat – a set built for the movie that really could be a resort.  The sharp modern angles amidst all the lushness and curvaceous philodendron leaves add to the film’s surreal atmosphere — it was even created with its own beach. The rooms have low ceilings (or maybe they just seem lower when Mitchum’s standing in them) and everything looks gorgeously off — like a place you’d love to hang out at but a place that could drive you crazy. A glorious hideaway with a fake beach. Since we’re going to spend a lot of time in this glorious hideaway, John Farrow (with cinematographer Harry J. Wild) showcases the lodge in a stunning, dreamy single take that floats through the place in all its clean-lined glory, bustling with guests, until it lands on Mitchum. He enters with that walk of his, looking sharp. But… dig this place. He both fits in and doesn’t fit in. Kind of like everyone else here.

As mentioned, Price’s crazy Mark Cardigan is enjoying the lodge, hunting, and having a romance with Russell’s Lenore who is, guess what? She’s not actually rich and is gold-digging Cardigan, but she’s still likable and never presented as the fatale, which is a refreshing aspect to the story. She’s using him? So what? He’s using her. And she’s amusing about it. And Milner likes her – a lot – their chemistry (also seen in another Mitchum/Russell/Hughes RKO picture with two directors – Macao) is so sexy and witty, with banter so sharp but good-natured, that you absolutely buy Mitchum having no problem being pals with a woman he’s sexually attracted to. (Friends in real life, this adds to their buddy allure). And they both stay friends with Cardigan who is … well, he’s narcissistic and nuts, and maybe even dangerous, if you step in a boat with him. Since Price was quite fond of both Russell and Mitchum, we buy all of this too. Who else are they going to hang with out there? On top of this, Cardigan is having the most actorly mid-life crisis breakdown you’ve ever seen, and it’s just too entertaining for both the audience and perhaps Milner to not take it all in.

Cardigan takes over everything – and the movie shifts with him, pushing this tonally strange noir over the edge into pure comedy, or a feverish satire, mixed with an extended, sadistic almost homoerotic beating served to Mitchum on Ferraro’s yacht. That beating is quite something – Mitchum shirtless and suffering and injected – and it goes on and on and on while Price’s Cardigan is out to save him, donning a cape, manning a boat, quoting Shakespeare and all. Mixing comic relief with this kind of brutality is almost bracing – one minute we’re howling over Vincent Price hamming it up to high heaven, the next we’re wincing at poor Mitchum, looking Saint Sebastian-like, as he’s going to pass out from pain.

But before all that pain – before Milner learns why’ll he’ll endure this kind of pain, there’s Charles McGraw as the heavy, Thompson, who needs to be mentioned because he’s just kind of wafting around the edges of this movie. He’s mixed in with Krafft and Ferraro, but Dan doesn’t understand the extent of this until a maybe drunk guy (Tim Holt) lands his plane at the resort (this is a Howard Hughes movie, after all) and fills him in. That guy tells him he’s an undercover agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, because, of course. And then Milner learns the truth – bad guy Raymond Burr wants his face. He needs to get back into Italy undercover as Milner, and I guess it’s not so hard to attach Robert Mitchum’s face to Raymond Burr’s body. At this point you may feel like you’re dreaming, and not just because of the plot, it’s just the overall vibe and spirit of the movie. You follow along with the loony path of Cardigan – who, in an almost meta performance, takes this whole thing AS a movie he’s starring in. Even quipping about the movies in a near death moment.

Milner: I’m too young to die. How about you?

Cardigan: Too well-known.

Milner: Well, if you do get killed, I’ll make sure you get a first-rate funeral in Hollywood, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

Cardigan: I’ve already had it. My last picture died there.

And Milner almost dies. That beating – it is vicious and kinky by 1951 standards, and extra strange because producer Howard Hughes wanted more of it. The production and post-production dragged on when John Farrow was excused by Hughes, and replaced by Richard Fleischer, who added scenes and re-shot scenes, including the beating and more (more!) Vincent Price – a great decision if you dig how loony this picture turns out to be. (And you should – Price is fantastic.) He also cut the original actor playing Ferraro and cast Raymond Burr, with Fleischer re-shooting all of his scenes. Lee Server’s excellent biography on Mitchum, “Baby, I Don’t Care,” has an amusing, absorbing rundown of this exhausting production, particularly regarding Hughes’ constant tinkering, and how Mitchum eventually soured, and turned to extra drinking. From Server’s book, actor Tony Caruso said of the beating scene, “Hughes was sending all these messages, ‘Do this, do that. Have Caruso hit him harder. Hit him in the gut. I want to see his fist go in deep’ – all that kind of crap.” And then there’s this instance of Hughes’ obsessiveness, which seemed to seep into the bizarreness of the film itself. Via Server:

“Of all the newly invented material, Hughes had become most excited by the scene in which an ex-Nazi plastic surgeon offers to dispose of the Mitchum character with an injection of an experimental drug. Hughes declared that he would write the dialogue for this scene himself, and to Fleischer’s amazement Hughes not only wrote it but sent along an acetate recording of himself speaking the German doctor’s lines in a high-pitched TexaBavarian accent.”

Wow. Talking experimental drugs in a “TexaBavarian” accent. Perhaps Hughes should have cast himself as the doctor with the dark glasses – or at least dubbed in his voice to make this movie even extra gloriously topsy-turvy. You’d think the actors might look nervous, even, at times, besieged on screen, given how long this production went on, but they don’t. None of them. When in Rome? And Mitchum glides through this groovy quagmire with his cool and hunky grace intact, nary a trace of effort – surviving Raymond Burr, surviving that Nazi doctor, surviving Howard Hughes. I’m blurring the work of Howard Hughes into the story like he’s an actual character in the picture – but the more you learn about the production, the more you feel like Hughes is one – hiding out in one of those rooms at Morro’s Lodge, worrying about more than the door handles. His Kind of Woman was His Kind of Movie – and for all sorts of strange, stoned reasons – it works. I exult in its cracked, inebriated wonder. As Cardigan says, “This place is dangerous. The time right deadly. The drinks are on me, my bucko!”

A Rose and Her Thorn: Rabid

From my piece published at the New Beverly.

“One is not totally in control of making one’s metaphor when making a movie. You find that it seems right, and you’re not necessarily able to articulate why it is right. Certainly the premise of Rabid is outrageous on a certain level… Now, there was a time when I was making this movie where I said to my producers, ‘This makes no sense at all. This cannot work …’  He convinced me. He said, ‘No, it’s really got something. The imagery is really powerful and it will work….’ What people saw it as was a kind of metaphor for AIDS, later on, or for the spreading of various viruses, whether they were talking about the spreading of the virus of Cronenberg filmmaking, I’m not sure, maybe somebody’s going to propose that. But in terms of your own personal interpretation and whether or not the film strikes you as scary or ridiculous, well, I’ll leave it up to you.” – David Cronenberg

There’s a scene near the end of David Cronenberg’s Rabid in which beautiful, rabid Rose is revealed to her boyfriend, Hart. She’s just sucked the blood from her best friend who will join the epidemic of foaming-mouth zombies, suffering a new strain of rabies that is engulfing Montreal in panic and destruction. Hart’s been searching for his love – poor injured Rose (he crashed his motorcycle with her riding on back, nearly killing her) – after she’s had emergency skin grafting surgery to save her life. She’s stuck in an institute of rich plastic surgery patients, one man is snootily revolted that her bloodied body is brought in for others to witness (ugh!), but her life is saved.

But she takes off – mayhem has ensued.

What on earth is going on? Well, then Hart sees her – on the floor of her friend’s apartment, Rose’s sharp, recently acquired phallus retracting back into the vaginal orifice that has manifested from her armpit after experimental surgery – surgery she didn’t ask for. And from that plastic surgery center –  it was the closest place to tend to her. Rose was not getting work done (I feel I must point that out because we know how those stories can spin, and I feel protective of Rose). Something about this injured girl next door entering this center feels both comic and exceedingly sad. They didn’t mess with her face, but we know this new, powerful mutation is present – we’ve been following Rose throughout this ordeal – and we are fascinated. Her mixture of terror, warmth and sexual intensity is alarming and, at times, heartbreaking. She’s strong and vulnerable and she can’t seem to reconcile the two – never mind the new power that’s unleashed. We see the men look at her and wonder what she wonders. But we also understand. She has a strange, startling power and she uses it. Repressed down, under that pretty face and welcoming smile, she’s most likely deeply angry. She also feels guilty about being so angry.

So, when Hart sees what she’s done to her friend, she looks at Hart with a penetrating mixture of deep shame and desperate self-defense. “It’s not my fault,” she nearly whispers as he stares at her in shock. Montreal, now descending into a terrifying virus, a madness, citizens infected with a zombie disease that will probably spread throughout the world, Hart figures out it was she who started it and turns on her. (Shades of the woman in the diner in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds – screaming at Melanie Daniels: “I think you’re evil! Evil!”) He states: “It’s you. It’s been you all along.” She asks, anxiously, “What are you talking about?” He becomes irate: “You carry the plague! You’ve killed hundreds of people!”

This is when my heart sinks for poor Rose (played by a liltingly affecting, at times poetic Marilyn Chambers) and I think David Cronenberg’s does as well. When she protests with such sadness: “I’m still me! I’m still Rose!” I think, oh, Rose, you are still you! With the same heart, the need for warmth, and your completely understandable fear and rage that many of us (particularly women) understand. When Rose cries to her doctor in an earlier scene, wailing, “I’m hideous, doctor! I’m crazy and I’m a monster!” we feel her anguish and self- loathing – that terror of destruction, that people hate you and that you deserve it (even when she doesn’t). It’s all played out with such primal urgency and it’s hard to articulate because Rabid is not a morality tale, it feels more like a dark fairy tale. Even her name – Rose – conjuring up duality is reminiscent of sleeping princesses and Anne Sexton poems. It opens so idyllically – Rose goes for a romantic motorcycle ride, two lovely people in love in leather on a nice day, and then …  she wakes up “hideous.” And after doing so, having no control over a narrative that will turn her into an Eve, a Lilith, a vampire and a woman with both a vagina and a sharp, scary dick – something a man cannot compete with. Hart yells: “You’re not Rose!"

Throughout its running time, Rabid works on such a primitive and lyrically allegorical level that we move along with it – curious and horrified and titillated to see where it will go. It’s funny and sad and absurd and a little bit of a turn on, too –  which seems strange. But maybe not. Cronenberg does not judge.

But, back to this moment with Hart (played by the uniquely pretty, almost feminine Frank Moore), at this moment, the movie shifts into a penetratingly potent metaphor of blame, of guilt, of anger, of disgust. A lover’s quarrel filled with the internalized hatred of the body. And this is something women often feel – they sometimes feel disgusting and worry about it – and in particular, they (we) feel disgusting to men. We have stomachs that swell with water retention and we curl on bathroom floors with cramps painful enough to make us vomit. We have fibroids. We have cysts. We have cysts with hair and bones and teeth. We have blood coming out of our  …“wherever.” It’s nature, it’s unfair anyone would judge or not trust a woman for bleeding but the idea that bleeding is weakness persists. As Rose declares that she needs blood to subsist, it’s upsetting and she’s scared, but it’s strong too. Blood is a source of strength. And also, anger. Rose then screams: “It’s YOUR FAULT!"

When I first saw this movie, I thought she might kill Hart, perhaps accidentally. I thought he wouldn’t understand her, or at least not even try. (No one really understands each other here, and that’s another intriguing aspect to Rabid) But in a beautifully tender moment, Hart turns off the anger and feels awful for her. He did get into that crash on the motorcycle and he did harm her. But it’s not his fault either. Really, nothing is anyone’s fault in Rabid, one of the reasons Cronenberg is always so complex. His film’s are often so emotionally messy, and bodily messy, tapping into very recognizable and mythic feelings of repression, of a loss of control, of psycho sexual urges, of mutations, of agency … positive and negative. In many of Cronenberg’s films, there is blood coming from the … wherever (see The Brood). And he’s comfortable with it, fascinated by the duality of women. But he knows others are not, or at least scared of women, which makes Rose’s boyfriend a kind soul: “There’s got to be a way we can fix this,” he says, attempting to soothe her. How moving. He’s walked in on his bloodsucking vaginal phallus girlfriend (!) and eventually sees her as Rose again. But there’s no way to fix it and she screams and runs and he falls down the stairs. She does not penetrate him for his blood, because she, I presume, loves him. She’ll make the sacrifice by the end. It’s terribly sad.

It seems odd to say that Rabid is a beautiful film, but in so many ways, it is. From the shots of Chambers in her fur coat, walking the streets at night, to her scurrying through the countryside, from even her bizarre orifice, it’s filled with haunting imagery. There are theories one can ascribe to it, some morbidly funny, some political, some virus-related, but, to me, it rolls along to its own rhythm, with you to make of it what you will – Cronenberg’s as messy as a period and as unexpected as a hormonal surge.

Sissy Spacek was the first choice to play Rose, but, as much as I revere Spacek, I’m glad Marilyn Chambers was cast. She’s so wonderful to take in, to think about,  so empathetic and so powerfully mysterious. She’s lovable and scary. The once-Ivory Snow soap box girl turned porn star (Behind the Green Door, Resurrection of Eve) has a blonde beauty that’s so fresh and simple (she was known for not looking like what one would expect a porn actress to look like) yet she is so exceedingly sexy in her unadorned way. Cronenberg does not feel like he’s exploiting her – she’s so natural, from the simplicity of her white panties, to the way her breasts look. Particularly when they’re on display as she’s shivering with cold and needing a hug – a moment I find tremendously moving even if she rams her razor phallus into the man who nervously hugs her. Chambers’ Rose has a face that is hard to read and, so, open to possibilities. The kind of face that reflects back something to others, or whatever men and women project onto her. She either looks back at you – you get her – or you’re baffled by her. 

I love a scene in which Rose sucks the blood from a cow. It’s the most gorgeously fairy tale sequence in the movie, beautifully shot in the darkly blue-tinted sky as she walks along on a rainy night. She arrives at a farmhouse and like a sweet princess, is attracted to the warmth and fur of the cow (lying down). She tenderly pets the creature, projecting a multitude of emotions – kindness, innocence, a need to touch, to feel this breathing creature, she then feeds on the cow’s blood. And then she vomits. When the farmer catches her, he does what many men want to do to her – fuck her – and so she feeds on his blood. I suppose we’re to root for her here but I really wish she could have napped, silently, for just a little while, with that cow. Poor Rose.

Thinking of Rose, and the poignancy of Chambers’ performance, I thought of some obvious analogies – of Ann Brontë writing, “But he that dares not grasp the thorn, should never crave the rose.” At the end of Rabid I recalled “Mrs Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf: “’Roses, she thought sardonically, All trash, m’dear.’” Rose is not that, of course, but she knows no one will ever see her the same and is terrified by what Hart has told her.  And so she locks herself in a room with an infected man and waits… It’s a test, but she essentially allows herself to die. And, literally, at the end, she is dumped in the trash as an anonymous Rose, workers ditching her body unaware she could be the cure. Not all, trash m’dear.

Kill Or Be Killed: The Hitch-Hiker

Ed Brubaker's newest Kill Or Be Killed comes out November 29. My newest piece covers the brutal, beautifully crafted Ida Lupino film, The Hitch-Hiker, starring Edmond O'Brien, Frank Lovejoy and William Talman. The film was based on spree killer Billy Cook, who had a deformed eye & "HARD LUCK" tattooed on his fingers. When arrested he said, "I hate everybody's guts." Order here. And here's just a tiny bit of my piece:

“This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours or that young couple across the aisle. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. For the facts are actual.”

Sometime in 1951 or 1952, actress, film director and movie star Ida Lupino walked into San Quentin and met a multiple murderer. The murderer was spree killer Billy Cook, a young man who had killed six people in the span of 22 days by road and by car, posing as a hitchhiker, holding hostage and/or doing away with a nice mechanic (whom Cook spared), an entire family, and a deputy sheriff. He killed a dog too...

As detailed in “The Making of The Hitch-Hiker,” Lupino said:

“I was allowed to see Billy Cook briefly for safety issues. I found San Quentin to be cold, dark and a very scary place inside. In fact, I was told by Collie (Collier Young) not to go; it was not safe. I needed a release from Billy Cook to do our film about him. My company, Filmakers, paid $3,000.00 to his attorney for exclusive rights to his story. I found Billy to be cold and aloof. I was afraid of him. Billy Cook had ‘Hard Luck’ tattooed on the fingers of his left hand and a deformed right eyelid that would never close completely. I could not wait to get the hell out of San Quentin...”

Again, to read my essay and the comic, order here.

Love (and Memory) Is Strange: Badlands

From my piece on Badlands, published at the New Beverly.

“Where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me? Or killed anybody? This very moment. If my Mom had never met my Dad? If she’d of never died? And what’s the man I’ll marry going to look like? What’s he doing right this minute? Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn’t know me? Does it show on his face?"

I saw Badlands on TV when I was in middle school. At least I think I saw it. I was 13. I remember scenes, or I remember the memory of seeing scenes, because I had been staying home from school for a week, sick, only I wasn’t sick, I was delirious. I was having an awful few months and I hadn’t been sleeping. My insomnia and nerves were so terrible that I was walking around in a dazed, somnambulant state and watching movies would get my mind off whatever was troubling me. I liked wandering around outside but I was too tired so I would curl up on the couch and sleep in the day, eyes opening and closing to the TV and to movies, images melding into daytime and into dreams. Badlands feels swirled in my own dreams, younger and older, but during those bad months, I wasn’t dreaming much.

I didn’t know why I couldn’t sleep and it frightened me. I didn’t like being inside my own head, sinking into my thoughts. Movies were a way to mix up my mind, glazing my brain from things I didn’t want to think about and buoying my spirits. Often my own thoughts and the images I was watching would merge – this is my life – and if you’re tired enough (or maybe crazy, and lack of sleep can make you crazy), you are in a movie. That’s why Badlands felt (or feels) a part of that beautiful, disturbing escape, an escape from thinking my raw thoughts too much. It’s like the frames of Badlands were snapshots I had taken in my own mind. But of course those were Terrence Malick’s snapshots. He handed them over to me, and to everyone else haunted by the picture. Badlands is a powerful thing.

And thoughts are so powerful when you’re young. They start to really expand and flower when you’re 12 or 13; your brain is still growing. Those thoughts can seem strange, exciting and wonderful, but sometimes disturbing – adolescence makes you jump to different places, feel new sensations, and experience a darkness that makes you wonder if the odd stuff coming to you are just impressions running through your mind, or if you actually think that way. Your curiosity is like the girl in Badlands – Sissy Spacek’s Holly looking through the pictures in her dad’s stereopticon and wondering about what could have happened had her circumstances been different. What her future would become. And you lay awake and worry – worry how Holly was worried about tossing her sick catfish into the yard. Was that a terrible thing to do? You think of living in different cities, you think of running away, meeting a boy, you think of driving off in your parent’s car in the middle of the night. I tried that – driving the car before I knew how to. I backed it into a large pine tree

Those thoughts and that car and that pine tree make me think of watching Badlands. But this is all a fevered memory and my recall may be wrong. Maybe I’m imprinting a future impression on the past and how I saw Badlands because I know I watched Badlands in full, in a conscious state, when I was a little older, when it became a favorite movie. But the first viewing – maybe that’s like a memory the way you look at a photograph of yourself as a kid and wonder if you really do remember that trip to the beach.  You’re gathering information based on a picture you’ve looked at numerous times. Would you remember anything if you didn’t have that picture? Martin Sheen’s Kit and Spacek’s Holly were pictures, music and voices I heard, I think, in and out of consciousness on that couch. Kit’s good-looking, charming, sometimes a little dumb, casually cold-blooded “character” (he really wants to be a character) and Holly’s strange, ethereal beauty, her questionable lack of concern for others’ deaths (we know Kit doesn’t mind) save for her catfish and briefly, her own dad (played by Warren Oates), and her flowery narration are firmly planted in my mind. It’s real to me and yet, totally fantastical to me. Kit and Holly’s own mythmaking rolls into my own movie mythmaking and even a few events in my young life.

But did I see this? I’m sure I’d heard of Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, the real life lovers the picture was inspired from. During two deadly winter months from 1957-58, 19-year-old Starkweather murdered eleven people in the states of Nebraska and Wyoming with his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril in tow. Was she a captive, an accomplice or caught up in a crazy romantic delusion? He was put to death, she was given life (she served 17 years). Reporters, the public and mostly teens were fascinated by this duo and this boy who reminded them more of a nihilistic James Dean than a boogeyman, though he certainly scared a lot of people. The couple is as mythically American as Bonnie and Clyde, only more terrifying and senseless, killing and stealing cars and grabbing items from houses in the late 1950’s.  They weren’t modern day Robin Hoods robbing banks during the depression; they were rebels without a cause taken to the extreme of teenage rebellion and alienation. But like Bonnie and Clyde, they looked good. As such, they were made for the movies

Even Charlie’s name, Starkweather, conjures up a cinematic image, a temperature, a chill. Leaving their imprint on popular culture from Bruce Springsteen to The Sadist to a Naked City episode, “A Case Study of Two Savages,” starring Rip Torn and Tuesday Weld, the dark romance of the leather-clad bad boy stuck – it’s something kids gravitate towards, and even with Starkweather’s brutal murders (including a baby), he’s glamorized – kids often glide over the horrifying, focusing on the They Live By Night lovers-on-the-run allure (which could have inspired Starkweather, the second Nicholas Ray movie he may have crafted himself on next to Rebel Without a Cause). Uniquely, however, save for their loveliness, Malick’s Badlands doesn’t glamorize the pair, not in the usual way, even as rapturously beautiful as the picture is. The killers are softened, yes, but their murders, though awful, are less heinous, and their disconnect towards death is merged with the heart-aching beauty and the wonder of nature. You’re not sure if you feel for them, if you feel for how lost and delusional they are, or if you feel for the idyllic world they’re hoping for – the stunning world Malick is placing around them. Because we hope and hoped for that world too, we even ache for it.

That ache is what feels layered inside me. It’s wrapped up in a powerful memory. So did I see it at 13? It doesn’t matter – I feel like I saw Warren Oates painting that big sign with all of those big fat clouds in the blue sky, I feel like I remember him shooting Holly’s dog, I feel like I remember Kit running through that SwissFamily Robinson-like fort and sleeping under that Maxfield Parrish painting swiped from the dad’s house, I feel like I remember the two dancing to “Love is Strange,” Holly barefoot, Kit in boots, and I feel like I remember Holly sitting in the car with Kit reading that movie magazine: “Rumor: Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth are in love. Fact: True. But not with each other

I’ve now seen Malick’s first film, a masterpiece, so many times that it’s permanently embedded in my brain and it twists inside my grey matter with images and impressions from countless viewings, including my own unreliable recollection at 13. The movie is so special, so enchanted, so truly transcendent that it clings to your very soul, a palimpsest on the brain. If that sounds hyperbolic, so be it. But the moment I hear Carl Orff’s “Gassenhauer” in the movie, or anywhere, I get goosebumps. Sometimes I want to cry. The way it starts out quietly, delicately, and then builds and builds, the drums moving towards that crescendo, it feels like the most dramatic music box a little girl ever opened – timorous innocence becoming stronger and more confident. Faded adolescent memories come to me in brighter detail, full of hope and promise and sadness and those first feelings of falling in love. And then, growing up and realizing that person isn’t what you built them up to be in your fevered adolescent brain (or your adult brain). You, yourself, are an unreliable narrator, just as Holly is in Badlands.

Part of Malick’s brilliance lies in the way the picture is narrated by Spacek’s little 15-year-old girl who, at times, seems both younger than her years and older – a girl who, from the outset, is estranged from her father (“He tried to act cheerful, but he could never be consoled by the little stranger he found in his house,” she narrates). Her dad (Oates, so weirdly beautiful here, both fearsome father and broken-hearted widower who kept his wedding cake in the freezer for ten years) forbids her to see the local bad boy, 25-year-old Kit, a garbage collector who is fired from his job and who puffs himself up in a world that doesn’t give a shit about him. He’s a cool young man, gorgeous in his 1950’s blue jeans, but he doesn’t seem to fool others with his big talk. He can fool a teenager, however. Holly recalls he “was handsomer than anybody I’d ever met. He looked just like James Dean.” That would be quite something for a shy girl who believes she lacks personality, a girl simply twirling her baton in those white shorts on the lawn. And then this boy comes along, changing her fate forever. She likes that he appreciates her mind, and not just sex.

They fall in love, they bond on a deeper level. Only, we never really see them discuss deeper ideas about life, we just get glimpses of their worldview on the periphery of events – like when Holly feels guilty for throwing out that sick catfish. She confides in Kit who tells her he does stuff like this too, and that some of his behavior would be considered strange. We then watch him stand on a dead cow in the feedlot.  A catfish in the yard isn’t so weird; it’s something a confused teenager would do if she were fearful of witnessing death.  Maybe she has good reasons to fear death – her mother died, her father shoots her dog dead for seeing Kit behind his back, and what if she died a virgin? She doesn’t want to die. Kit seems less concerned about death. He just wants to be somebody. He wants to leave a mark. And he does. He’s finally given some respect and certainly celebrity when he’s caught. And in the end, chained up and chatting up the authorities, throwing out keepsakes to the law so they’ll remember him, he seems, finally, even happy.

We don’t know how much of Holly’s sometimes florid recollections are a true representation of how she feels; about the brutal events on their crime spree. Though I do believe her reveries – I believe them in terms of how she wants to feel at the time, or how she wants to remember them at the time. But her romantic notions turn into tedium and annoyance towards Kit, even a wish he’d die. The rush of teen love is always dramatic, and so when Holly says: “In the stench and slime of the feedlot, he’d remember how I looked the night before, how I ran my hand through his hair and traced the outline of his lips with my fingertip. He wanted to die with me, and I dreamed of being lost forever in his arms.” You don’t doubt her. But you also watch their scenes together and observe them talk about banal things, like garbage on the street, or a tree falling in the water; Kit records a series of bromides on the Dictaphone when they take a break holed up in the rich man’s house they’re holding hostage.  Holly seems joyful and attracted but sometimes, disappointed and irritated. When they finally have sex she asks: “Is that all there is to it? Gosh, what was everybody talking about?” Kit answers, “Don’t ask me.”

 

The stench and slime of the feedlot seems how Kit views the world outside of Holly – and he craves glamour and respect. He likes to leave markers with rocks, or bury personal items either for the purpose of returning to (which won’t happen) or for others to discover. Holly intones: “He said that nobody else would know where we’d put them, and that we’d come back someday, maybe, and they’d still be sitting here, just the same, but we’d be different. And if we never got back, well, somebody might dig them up a thousand years from now and wouldn’t they wonder!” Wouldn’t they. The need to feel, not only alive, but for others to know that you were alive, runs throughout the movie – Kit and Holly creating their own pictures and movies through both romance and heinous acts. Kit knows it will mean something and as he speeds from the law near the end, he fixes the rearview mirror to look at himself. It’s got to at least look good. 

Creating an idyllic world is an escape from the junk of life; a need to transcend regular existence, so taking in the picture’s glory of nature, we feel like we could always escape day-to-day banalities if we tried. Holly observes nature, loving the “cooing of the doves and the hum of dragonflies… the air made it always seem lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone.” Kit wants more; he’s searching for some fabled kingdom. As Holly narrates: “We took off at sunset, on a line toward the mountains of Saskatchewan, for Kit a magical land beyond the reach of the law.” That magical land is . . . where? It’s either everywhere, in moments, if you really appreciate nature, or, in Kit’s case, in his death, when he’ll be so mythologized that songs will be written and movies will be made about him. Malick understands this eternal desire. Not to be famous, but to be remembered, not to remain specks of dust in such an enormous world.

The movie pulls you in different directions, the way those thoughts that riddle your sleep do when you’re young. The road, the music, the period detail that’s more timeless than stuck in an era; more a dark fairy tale rather than a 1950’s story, the rapturous American landscape and bittersweet romance led by characters who could almost be viewed as ciphers, and yet, they’re not. Their remoteness is not so distant that you can’t feel for them, in spite of yourself. They’re even quite funny, in an understated way. Because Sheen and Spacek are so perfectly cast and they play their characters so inscrutably innocent, and yet, so blasé and scary, not one scene between them rings obvious or absurdly psycho; like they’re yearning to tell us something or reaching out to us for help. After watching a man bleed to death, a heartbreaking scene, Holly narrates:

“At this moment, I didn’t feel shame or fear, but just kind of blah, like when you’re sitting there and all the water’s run out of the bathtub.” Malick doesn’t moralize or explain and even Holly’s voiceovers inform very little about the depth of their problems. But you see the bloom fall off the rose: “We had our bad moments, like any couple. Kit accused me of only being along for the ride, while at times I wished he’d fall in the river and drown, so I could watch.”

Malick’s debut is one of the most extraordinary first films in all of cinema – he was working an alchemy and a genius that felt otherworldly (something he’d continue in subsequent pictures, Badlands remains my favorite). The film, as I’ve made obvious here, became an obsession for me. Its poetic understanding of the intense, alienated teen; their extreme impulses, but also their mystery and banality, how that understanding is wrapped in our own mythos, moves me in mysterious ways.

One of my favorite moments is during Kit and Holly’s long drive through the Great Plains, where their isolation matches the spare landscape – the enormous sky and almost unsettlingly magnificent sunsets. Amidst all of this cinematic gorgeousness, their long and bloody road trip is turning. Holly is weary and wary of living out of the car. They live like animals, she thinks, and she’s becoming wiser as she pictures her ill-fated future with Kit. But, then, there’s that moment, that sublimely beautiful moment: In the black of night, with only the car lights illuminating the darkness, they dance to Nat King Cole’s “A Blossom Fell” from the tinny car radio. Holly may not even be enjoying this moment, but we are as we watch them together. Kit says, “Boy, if I could sing a song like that, I mean, if I could sing a song about the way I feel right now, it’d be a hit.”

Badlands affected me and still affects me and continues to give me chills. And it runs through my mind almost as my own memory, tapping into something primal and wistful and musical – that youthful feeling of the new, influential and forbidden. And then losing that feeling. Badlands haunted me in my sleepless half-awake young self, and I’ll stick to that evocation even if I’m not sure of the exact age. My own memories with the movie and the memories and images of the movie itself, what Malick was meditating on, echo what Carson McCullers wrote about wistfulness; things we long for but can never really attain: “We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”

Her Shadow Between Us: Rebecca

From my piece published at the New Beverly.

“Her shadow between us all the time,” he said. “Her damned shadow keeping us from one another. How could I hold you like this, my darling, my little love, with the fear always in my heart that this would happen? I remembered her eyes as she looked at me before she died. I remembered that slow treacherous smile. She knew this would happen even then. She knew she would win in the end.” – Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

There’s a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca that I find startling not for being scary or cruel or moodily mysterious, but for being so disarmingly matter of fact. We’ve heard different takes on the intimidatingly beautiful, now dead, Rebecca de Winter, the black-haired goddess with gorgeous taste in décor, lingerie, bedding and those three things every man and woman yearn for: “breeding, brains and beauty,” that her almost unearthly perfection is constantly uttered with a kind of hypnotized rapture. And with that rapture there is hatred, seething hatred – chiefly from her widower husband, Maxim de Winter (played by Laurence Olivier) – who sees this goddess as a gorgon, pure evil, and the destructor of not only his marriage, but his manhood, his very sense of self inside his own home – the grand estate called “Manderley.” Everything Rebecca touched left an imprint, people, pets, objects, clothing, writing desks, windows, even the sea couldn’t sweep her away, and she haunts every corner of the estate just as she haunts the minds of those who knew her. Maxim’s obsession is so deep that he’s infected his second wife (played by Joan Fontaine) with Rebecca-mania, and she, or rather, “I” (as she’s referred to in the movie and in the Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel), can’t move an inch without a reminder of the past beauty. We naturally feel for “I,” a lost young woman plucked away from her vulgar dowager employer by the wealthy, mysterious Maxim, (“I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool” he snips, with little charm) and is soon swallowed up by his house and the various obsessives around him, chiefly the looming housekeeper Mrs. Danvers.

The second Mrs. de Winter (an often heartbreaking woman) is yearning to be loved by her cruel, often smug husband, and to escape the shadow of the ever-present Rebecca. She’s an orphan, insecure and frightened, and she’s grateful for a home, but can she have any sort of her own space within it? Can she start out anew with her husband? Well, no, she cannot. How can one escape the past and create a future when even one’s napkins are embroidered with the previous Mrs. de Winter’s omnipresent “R”? 

But back to that stirring moment – when the movie is removed from Rebecca’s satiny, sensual bedroom (Judith Anderson’s impressively weird, hateful but clearly lovelorn Mrs. Danvers makes you love Rebecca, and you can practically feel the silk of her nightgown and nun-sewn undergarments) and into a more down-to-earth, clinical setting – a doctor’s office. There sits the doctor who diagnosed Rebecca (and who revealed to her that she had cancer, a very human condition) discussing his past patient without agenda, without romance. Indeed, he remembered her as beautiful and powerful, but he also says something about her that’s affirmative and almost simple, not in a trance as the others – that she was “wonderful.” He says: “I remember her standing here holding out her hand for the photograph. ‘I want to know the truth,’ she said. ‘I don’t want soft words and a bedside manner. If I’m for it, you can tell me right away.’ I knew she was not the type to accept a lie. She’d asked for the truth, so I let her have it. She thanked me and I never saw her again, so I assumed that …”  He will be interrupted by those present, but continues his assessment of Rebecca, directing his take of this woman to her embittered husband. Something about how resolute the doctor turns and says to Maxim: “Your wife was a wonderful woman, Mr. de Winter.”

It’s almost as if he’s saying, stop complaining, you moody bore. Wonderful is a term Maxim would never have used about Rebecca, as in excellent, great, marvelous, exceptional in an interesting way. Who knows what the doctor had heard from Rebecca about her marriage, perhaps nothing in regards to how her husband viewed her, but for all of Rebecca’s dreadfulness howled by Maxim to the second Mrs. de Winter (“It wouldn’t make for sanity, would it, living with the devil?”), perhaps she was actually as the doctor stated: strong, not one to be lied to and wonderful. But Maxim doesn’t want you to think that. The initial response when watching the movie (and reading du Maurier’s novel) is that Rebecca was living a lie, hiding a horrid secret, charming on the surface, but a horror to be married to. Listen to Maxim wail about her:

“Well, I went there with Rebecca on our honeymoon. That was where I found out about her. Four days after we were married. She stood there laughing, her black hair blowing in the wind, and told me all about herself. Everything. Things I’ll never tell a living soul. I wanted to kill her … ‘I’ll make a bargain with you,’ she said. ”You’d look rather foolish trying to divorce me now after four days of marriage, ‘so I’ll play the part of a devoted wife, mistress of your precious Manderley ‘I’ll make it the most famous showplace in England, if you like, ”and people will visit us and envy us… ‘and say we’re the luckiest, happiest couple in the country. What a grand joke it will be! What a triumph!’ I should never have accepted her dirty bargain, but I did. I was younger then and tremendously conscious of the family honor."

Well, what does that say about him? He’s certainly a resentful coward. And what on earth was Rebecca hiding about herself that only he knew? Affairs? With men and women? Drugs? Debauchery? What? This is destructive to a marriage and scandalous then and now, but, my goodness Mr. de Winter, calm down.  Everyone has their own take on Rebecca, and I’m always intrigued by the doctor’s summation – he’s speaking of this fabled woman as a person with a multi-faceted humanity, even a vulnerability for that moment, when she was faced with her own mortality. Did her strength near death come from knowing she’d haunt not only Manderley but the hearts and minds of seemingly every person she encountered? Was she that calculated and knowing? Did she know she’d never be forgotten? Did she know she’d even achieve a mythic power in death? Or did she merely want to die as she lived her life – on her own terms? Was she all of these things? If so, why does that make her evil? Even if she strayed? It doesn’t appear that Maxim was the most loving husband in the first place, and was consumed by appearance, that damn Manderley (you’re almost glad when the place burns down, though it’ll never erase Rebecca since the story is being told after the fact). But, who are we to believe?

No one, I feel, which makes the story so powerful and unforgettable. I find myself filling in the blanks or re-writing others opinions of this fascinating woman, wondering what their view of her says about them, not just the woman.  She is the central character – ever present in the negative spaces – without a voice. A character whose narrative is being written by various friends, lovers, admirers, obsessives. It’s an utterly bewitching way to tell a story and craft a character – in Hitchcock’s movie and in Daphne du Maurier’s novel – a ghost so alive that she makes the others seem like specters without her. Even objects, shot so potently and at times, fervent, fetishistic (watch how Mrs. Danvers famously caresses Rebecca’s underwear), vibrate with the mark of Rebecca. The second Mrs. de Winter breaks a china cupid, walking through the house with enormous doors, terrified to touch such totemic things. She is so scared to tell anyone about breaking it that she hides the pieces in the back of Rebecca’s old desk. Later, a big fuss is made of this tiny mistake and a servant is almost fired when Mrs. Danvers spots the cupid missing. Such drama! Such closely-watched luxury! Maybe the second Mrs. de Winter subconsciously broke the ornament on purpose, and who could blame her? It is, after all, cupid, and cupid seems destined to die in this dysfunctional marriage.

There is so much to consider when writing about Rebecca – the film’s backstory with Selznick (this was Hitchcock’s first American film, and he and Hitchcock did not see eye-to-eye, in fact, Hitchcock didn’t think the film was fully his); the brilliant source novel by du Maurier, and du Maurier herself (a married woman who had female lovers but blanched at the term lesbian: “… by God and by Christ if anyone should call that sort of love by that unattractive word that begins with ‘L,’ I’d tear their guts out,” she wrote a lover); the feverish chronicling of two doomed marriages; the image construction of Hitchcock; the gothic power and mood (indeed by its first words uttered: “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”) But I’m thinking of the film’s great big question mark – who was Rebecca, really? We’re wondering as much as poor Joan Fontaine, who is so unsure of herself, so used to being addressed in such dismissive terms, that the beautiful actress makes herself not mousy, but drained by the force of Rebecca’s memory. She’s struggling to not just be equal to Rebecca, but to be even seen as a full-fledged woman (Maxim seems more comforted by their age difference and that she remain a big-eyed child). Looking at how women’s power and agency is such a terrifying force to (mostly) men in Rebecca, there are times I feel Rebecca’s fortitude is a continued rebellion – she’s howling from the grave, full of mischief and madness. She’s still upsetting the status quo.

Also interesting is that two, really, troubled people – Oliver’s Maxim and Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers (“Danny,” as she’s known to Rebecca, which gives her a more down-home other life we don’t know anything about) – are in their way dueling to own the narrative of Rebecca. One, Danny, keeps her atop the pedestal of perfection, and the other, Maxim, knocked her off after four days of marriage. How could anyone live up to such expectations? I’m more inclined towards cousin, cad and obvious lover, Mr. Favell (played deliciously by George Sanders), who witnessed Rebecca untamed, but then, who can trust him either? Olivier plays Maxim with such a combination of doomed suffering and selfish, spoiled intractability that he’s generally unlikable in the right way throughout the movie, and save for looking as a young Olivier looks (pretty) and for a few moments of his charm (his honeymoon footage with Fontaine’s second Mrs. de Winter is sweet), he’s not anyone we’re hoping Fontaine winds up with. The story has been compared to Jane Eyre, and it shares similarities except that we are not yearning for Maxim and his young bride to make it, as we are Jane and Rochester (no matter how insane). There is little romance here, and instead a vehement meditation on love and obsession over one extraordinary woman. Again, who is Rebecca? Thinking of Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil, “she was some kind of woman. But, what does it matter what you say about people?”

The Artistry of a Nightmare: Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Happy Halloween! From my piece at the New Beverly

“The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin. It is all the more tragic in that they were young. But, had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day. For them, an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare. The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” 

Sally running in the night. She is screaming and running, her white pants and long, golden hair gleaming in a darkness lit only by the moon. We’re watching her as she keeps running and running and running and screaming and screaming and screaming as a large man pursues, close behind. He’s wearing a skin mask and wielding a chainsaw that seems extra loud and extra horrifying – the ghastly saw sound that’s transformed from the regular use of limbing and bucking and felling trees, and is now a tool for cutting through skin and bone. Sally has witnessed just that – the cutting through skin and bone – from the hands and instrument of this terrifying creature/person/animal/thing chasing behind when her complaining wheelchair-bound brother, Franklin, was sliced right in front of her eyes. This thing, whom we will later learn is named “Leatherface” is, in fact, a human being, which is somehow scarier than any kind of mythological monster chasing poor Sally. And he chases and chases and chases – he is seemingly never going to stop. His bloodthirsty need to cut and kill is amped up and swelled with sick adrenaline just as her fight or flight mechanism has kicked in to ultimate breathless survival. She could win a triathlon with this kind of endurance, and she runs and dodges and cuts through brush and bramble with her legs and arms and face, not concerned with being scraped by the nature around her.

There is something seemingly unnatural (though entirely comprised of skin and meat and flesh, save for the chainsaw) close behind, and the outside night and landscape envelope around her. It’s both claustrophobic and agoraphobic. When there is everywhere to run, where is there to hide? Even the dark night can’t obscure heart-breaking Sally, she’s almost shining in it, and her fear is so visceral and real and such a wide-awake nightmare, that your thoughts race with her thoughts. You even feel her vision, focusing your gaze ahead along with her as she hopes and screamingly prays to run towards any kind of safety – a house, a person, a car, anything – her running echoing the inner hell of a level-ten panic attack blurring your side vision, but fixing on what is in front of you. She can’t see what’s in front of her except desperate possible freedom, and then she spies that house and clamors her way in. But that’s no freedom – there’s a half alive old man and a Mrs. Bates-like corpse sitting next to him – and she’ll jump through a window and resume back to the running and screaming and running and screaming through brush and bramble and on to another “safety” that isn’t a safety at all.

No safety. Ever. You are not passive as you are watching this. And no matter how many times you take in this long sequence (or, rather, I – I will speak for myself, I can’t account for others, though I sense many would agree), you never feel unaffected by this dreadful pursuit. Relentless isn’t an adequate word to describe this sequence; there should be another term for it, something mirroring the trauma we can feel in our bones. It’s true. We can almost smell her fear, we can feel Leatherface’s breath, his blade, even his hands that aren’t even free, he’s holding a chainsaw, and we sense him grabbing her hair (even if he doesn’t) as it flies behind Sally like a long, dreadful scarf.

That vicious, unforgettable pursuit from the late, great Tobe Hooper’s landmark masterpiece, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, so powerfully acted by Marilyn Burns and Gunnar Hansen (and by the entire cast throughout the movie), is both horrifying and distressingly emotional. It is also strangely beautiful in its nightmare vision, real and unreal – you are down on the ground with the trauma, running alongside it – and you can’t process any of this until later, when the images float in your head, usually at night when you are attempting to sleep. (Dear lord, these kinds of things can happen.How close have I been to a family of lunatics?) Hooper’s low budget work of incredible ingenuity is filled with beautiful craft and stunning visions that never take cues from a standard playbook of horror – they appear and sound and move to the poetry of a director (and editors, J. Larry Caroll and Sallye Richardson, and cinematographer, Daniel Pearl) who is considering the stench and the heat as well as the skin and the bones and the muddy mental tones, both terrifying and comic – sometimes all at once. And then there’s that scary idea that things seemingly solid and All-American – family and meat – have twisted and rotted to the point of gleeful sociopathy.

Certainly, this has been expressed or known before (nowhere is ever innocent), but there is a special quality to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that feels like an assault, and certainly at the time, like nothing anyone had ever seen. You practically feel the movie spilling out of Hooper’s head, as artfully planned and written (by Hooper and Kim Henkel) as it was. The reality of a dangerous, absolutely not innocent world (Vietnam, post Manson-family fear still resonating in the culture, Manson-family-like hitchers, whatever the hell is in our meat) is amped up into a horror movie that feels almost like a documentary-fantasia. As told in a 1986 L.M. Kit Carson essay in Film Comment, Hooper talked about the movies in his head:

“I can remember my first 6mm lens-shot looking up out of the crib at the shadows dancing on the ceiling. At the same time, I was learning to talk, I was learning to see everything in camera coverage: wide shots, close-ups, etc. I didn’t exactly know I did this until I was about 20: one evening outside San Francisco I was watching the Pacific Ocean from a Cliffside—suddenly the Panavision aperture in my head widened and went away. And I realized that all those damn years I’d been shooting movies, with and without a camera.”

You absolute get that Hooper’s been shooting pictures in his head, and may even worry about him a little. From the low angle shot of Teri McMinn’s Pam walking from the swing; to the wide shot of the demented hitchhiker, Edwin Neal (incredible here, he’s so needy-creepy, but you almost feel sorry for him), kicked out of the bus and flailing his arms, practically dancing some kind of pagan invocation (that moment always, always sticks with me); to Hansen’s Leatherface exploding out of the sliding metal door with such a shock and such perfect timing that it never fails to surprise; to the opening credit sequence (that magnesium flash sound); to the brilliant set piece at the family dinner table, where everyone involved (Burns, Neal, Hansen, Jim Siedow, John Dugan) were actually losing it from shooting in the heat and with extreme exhaustion and whatever else was going on (read this fascinating piece from Texas Monthly all about the shoot), the picture is visually stunning and sui generis. You are dropped into a sort of fairy tale – Little Red Riding Hood meets the Big Bad Wolf’s weird-ass family or Hansel and Gretel pick up the Ed Gein’s long lost brother – and further understand that those Grimm tales resonate because they were produced and imagined from the horrors and fears of real life. With that, the picture became its own kind of fable – not warning tale, for it never works that kind of obviousness – but a lore that soaks into the collective consciousness almost as if it actually happened. Indeed, the opening narration, intoned by a serious John Larroquette, makes it seem as it did. Spawning sequels and even a bad remake along with countless essays and academic study and late-night screenings and discussion and controversy, it’s a movie that is watched endlessly, but never softens with age. It never de-sensitives, even as the violence is relatively bloodless.

And I think that’s a positive within all of the mayhem presented within – we should be sensitive to violence, we should be disturbed by what is depicted in the film. Further, we should know or, rather, accept, that some things cannot be explained – life is scary and dark and it makes little sense at times. Life is also, like the film, darkly humorous. In the picture, the humor comes in a way that makes you catch yourself. You are almost laughing or you are laughing, and, not out of delight, but out of some blacker place, or maybe for relief, a relief that doesn’t really come. Kind of like how those nice, twangy country songs on the van’s radio don’t help soften things either – my favorite is “Fool for a Blonde” by Roger Bartlett & Friends, a song poor Sally will likely think of differently once this is all done. With all of this swirling together and with the images and sound design, the film’s humor is blurred with the horror in a curious way – it’s unsettling and mysterious. I think of when these Texan teenagers take a little break from their road trip, and that old man is seen yammering on – an old guy no one really pays attention to (except us) – but they should. He says: “Things happen here about, they don’t tell about. I see things. You see, they say that it’s just an old man talking. You laugh at an old man, it’s them that laughs and knows better.”

Indeed. And laughing with the film feels dangerous because the film itself does – every corner of the thing. How many movies still feel threatening after all these years? Movies that you think about on long road trips through isolated areas or movies that come to you, giving you a chill when you encounter a strange person at a lonely gas station? Would you ever dare pick up a hitchhiker (which seems scarier now since few thumb rides anymore)? This is a movie you dream about, or thought you dreamt – those awful chase dreams – running and screaming on endless loops in the dark night as poor Sally does. Often you can’t scream in those dreams, and you want to. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Sally’s screams – from her long run fleeing Leatherface, to the demented experience at the family dinner table – are not freeing or even helpful.

They are choked with desperation and, finally, exhaustion. And we are exhausted right along with her. Thank God she has the strength to bust out of that house, saving herself, and, as a result, is saved by that trucker, the one light in the darkness. Smiling (or some version of horror-smiling) and covered in blood in the back of the truck, nearly embracing her potential freedom (please, don’t let the truck stall or the driver turn into an evil monster, we think), Sally is finally, finally, getting the hell out of this nightmare. It’s a beautiful and poignant scene: it’s that one moment of hope for the world and almost happiness. Almost.

Kill Or Be Killed 13: Joseph Losey's M

Out now! My next essay for Ed Brubaker's Kill Or Be Killed: Joseph Losey's underseen, and that overused term (but in this case, apt), underrated "M." Order here.

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The opening shot of Joseph Losey’s M finds our murderous leading man, a tortured creature who will end the picture dragged, desperately dragged and in a heap, down on the ground – ascending. It’s 1950 (the movie was released in 1951) and this perverse jumble of psychotic nerves hops on Angels Flight looking almost like an anonymous regular person. Almost. Somehow (and this is a credit to Losey, cinematographer Ernest Laszlo and actor David Wayne) we immediately know that he is not. Not regular. But not in any kind of obvious way. Walking out of the dark Los Angeles downtown night, clad in suit and fedora, upward he goes on the cable railway, watching the city below, his face obscured from the camera (we only see his back), his perversions mysterious to those on board – except to us. We know this man is not like the others even before we see the newspaper headline blazing, “Child Killer Sought,” as the title credit “M” is superimposed over the paper. It’s a powerful introduction – creepy, enigmatic, beautiful, seedy, even dangerous just in terms of height (does he want to jump off?) –  all eerie, inky darkness and menacing light below. It mirrors the unstable duality of this character – a devil on Angels Flight. Here is a man who yearns to rise above his corrupt desires but, every time, he painfully falls down, down, down into his sick, sick, sick soul. And he does so right away.

A Family Tragedy: The Wolf Man

From my piece for the New Beverly.

Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night; May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.

Lon Chaney Jr. does not look like the son of Claude Rains. Not only does he not look like Rains physically, with his tall stature and everyman awkwardness, but with his voice, his sometimes-lumbering carriage, his lack of suaveness and his sad, lost eyes that seem to be perpetually looking for a father figure, or a lover, or a soft bunny rabbit to hold –  anything to sooth what haunts this man underneath his “normal” exterior. Something is missing within him, and we’re not sure what, but in Chaney Jr.’s best performances, that lost boy quality makes him immensely moving (watch Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men). And, so, in George Waggner’s The Wolf Man, Chaney Jr.’s genetic disparity with elegant Rains works – it immediately sets up a distinction with a dad he left (fled from?) eighteen years earlier for reasons we’re not entirely certain of, and it makes us sympathetic to both him and his father – a father who is quietly grieving the loss of his older son. The Claude Rains dad (Sir John Talbot) clearly loves the Chaney Jr. son (the very average-Joe-named Larry), even if his son is, perhaps, the black sheep of the family, the outcast, and the father has a feeling why his son took off all of those years ago: sibling rivalry. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps not? We don’t know. It takes the death of Larry’s brother (who looks exactly like Larry) to make him return with the idea to run the estate. Is that the only reason? Did he really miss his father? Why on earth was he gone for nearly 20 years? Is there something wrong … with him?

In the movie’s opening scene between Larry and Sir John, father discusses his living son’s estrangement frankly, something that could seem obvious; to be spelling it out so succinctly, but is instead, refreshing in its simultaneous directness and mystery. Sir John dives right into the possible wedge between them and wishes it would cease, but it’s from Sir John’s viewpoint, and we never learn what Larry might have endured. Perhaps the home life was awful. Perhaps his brother was a terrible person.  As Sir John pokes at a fire in his grand, Welsh estate with the dead older son, John Jr.’s, portrait hanging ominously above, Larry sits down and listens to the psychological musings of his father. Rains talks with him, not angrily, just directly, and it’s a nicely realized moment:

Sir John: You know, Larry, there’s developed what amounts to a tradition about the Talbot sons. The elder, next in line of succession and so forth is considered in everything. The younger, frequently resents the position in which he’s found and leaves home, just as you did.

Larry: Yes, but I’m here now.

Sir John: Fortunately. But isn’t it a sad commentary on our relationship that it took a hunting accident and your brother’s death to bring you?

Reading this could almost sound passive aggressive, but it’s not. Rains’ crispness and warmth is merely telling his son the way he sees things, that he’s thought about this, and that he takes the blame too. In terms of his child-rearing and what has been expected of the sons, Sir John continues:

Sir John: The whole tradition is the Talbot’s be the stick necked un-demonstrative type. Frequently this has been carried to very unhappy extremes.

Larry: Don’t I know that…

Curious. What does Larry know so well that he utters this immediately? That the unhappy extremes resulted in him leaving for eighteen years? Just that? That he was competing with his brother and that was too much for him so he needed to set himself apart from the family (that is the obvious answer). But to the film’s credit (and Curt Siodmak’s wonderful script), there’s more here for us to ponder, for instance, is there something darker and more dramatic going on in this family? In Larry himself? In his father? Those uncertainties hang over the picture with an enigmatic question mark, and are never solved, making the character’s actions and unlucky predicaments intriguing all the way through – even in more staid moments. The picture is filled with a foggy, dreamlike beauty (and creepiness, shot by cinematographer Joseph Valentine), that reflects the dreamy beauty and creepiness of Larry and Sir John, their questionable family history and maybe even their minds. The loveliness and horror of the environment mirror what Sir John discusses about the duality of man, and, perhaps, how Larry’s been submerging baser, wolf instincts into a foggy underworld – before he even becomes a werewolf.

Putting aside the folklore turned into the literal lycanthropy, Larry is already revealing wolfy aspects to his personality – which are quite normal. Only with Larry, this seems a bit off. Look how he tries to pick up pretty Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers), for instance. He’s pushy, slightly immature and a little creepy. He watched her through a telescope and fixated on her earrings (moon earrings), which he brings up to her as a supposedly charming thing to do –  being a Peeping Tom. In the early 1940’s this might pass as normal flirting for men (spying), even if women were made uncomfortable by it, but with Chaney Jr., it plays in the movie like a clunky pass. We’re almost cringing. She’s not sure about him not only because she has other suitors, but because… he’s this weird guy trying to be normal. You already know he’s not going to get the girl. And, yet, he’s sympathetic, lovable (she feels he is, too, and is indeed, drawn to him), and even tragic at that point. As her boyfriend (Frank Andrews) says later after meeting him: “There’s something very tragic about that man and I’m sure that nothing but harm will come to you through him.

Those themes of marked tragedy and duality are also carried over into the fascinating gypsy characters, fortune teller Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya) and her son Bela (Bela Lugosi), who in so many ways merge with the family Talbot – Sir John and Maleva. Both have afflicted sons with dual natures they cannot control (and conditions that are not their fault), both have quite a few thoughts about it, and both sons will die. Sir John believes in science, god and psychology; he believes men can be so influenced by superstitious folklore, and that a normal individual can imagine himself so strongly that he thinks he’s becoming a monster. Maleva believes in the folklore, for she has seen it first-hand, but her acceptance and directness, and also the protection of her son (which leads to an attempt to protect Larry – as much as she can), mirrors Sir John. The toney Welsh family and the traveling gypsies are not too far removed – they are individuals and they are unique. They stick out. You get a sense many in the town suspects something about the Talbots in a negative way (cursed?), and in the gossipy townsfolk’s busy-body averageness, they talk about it. When Larry does in fact turn into the Wolf Man and wreaks havoc at night, some are quick to “know” – to know something; that they suspected murder within this family in the first place. And without proof. One woman sneers: “Very strange there were no murders before Larry Talbot arrived… I know what I know. You should have seen the way he looked at me in Conliffe’s shop. Like a wild animal. With murder in his eyes.”

When Larry pushes himself on a date with Gwen and, accidentally, with her friend, Jenny (Fay Helm), he skulks out at night to meet her as she leaves work – essentially crashing the girl’s night out. Kind of a drag. But they all go along, seemingly happily. The threesome venture out to Maleva and her son, Bela, for the thrill of fortune telling, but as Bela is clearly suffering, Jenny is soon killed by him. Bravely, Larry attacks Bela, whom he sees as a wolf, but he sadly cannot save Jenny. To Larry he has killed an animal who has bitten him, and that is that. Not so. In a portentous moment, he’s already heard about the werewolf curse and bought the wolf cane from Gwen’s antique story (this wolfish flirtation sets Larry right on the road to becoming a Wolf Man, with Gwen explaining the curse, little does she know at that point), and bludgeons the wolf with the silver-tipped cane. Things get complicated when Colonel Paul Montford (Ralph Bellamy) and other’s investigating see that he’s actually killed a man, poor, tortured Bela, instead. Dr. Lloyd (Warren William – this is a terrific cast) suspects he might be crazy. It’s not a ridiculous thing to suspect. Sir John expresses anger over the idea that Larry should be locked up, and in an enlightened way, believes men are murky creatures, expressing this thought frequently. Larry will soon be turning into a werewolf at night, something that is making him terrified and crazed (who can blame him?) and he expresses his horrible fear to his father. Sir John’s answer would be reassuring if Larry wasn’t literally growing hair all over his body (beautifully created, by Jack Pierce), but one can understand Sir John’s thoughts. He says:

“Larry, to some people life is very simple. They decide that this is good, that is bad, this is wrong, that’s right. There’s no right and wrong, no good and bad. No shadings in grey. All blacks and whites … Now, others of us find that good, bad, right, wrong, are many-sided, complex things. We try to see every side. But the more we see, the less sure we are. Now you ask me if I believe a man can become a wolf. Well, if you mean he can take on the physical characteristics of an animal, no. It’s fantastic. However, I do believe that most anything can happen to a man in his own mind.”

Indeed, they can. And, so, even as we watch Larry turn into a werewolf, we can imagine that he is, in fact, losing his senses. That this is all some horrific fantasia – as if he’s a wolfish drug addict, waking up with animal prints in his room, passed out in his clothes, not sure what he did the night before but feeling immense guilt over it. As his father said, “It’s a legend. You’ll find something like it in the folklore of nearly every nation. The scientific name for it is lycanthropia. It’s a variety of schizophrenia.” You half believe Sir John, even as you know you are watching The Wolf Man (a movie crafted from mythology, but a story all its own – there was no source novel for this one, it was Siodmak’s creation). With insanity and surreality in mind, the sequence of Larry’s first transformation and subsequent attack is hallucinatory, stressful and weirdly lovely. He rushes home and begins removing his clothes –  bursting, a literal fever dream. He then sits in a chair and it is there when we see his transformation beginning, but, not with his face as we might expect (a la Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as this story resembles), instead, we see his legs and feet changing: they are slowly covered with hair. Larry is visibly distraught by the freaky body conversion – he’s caught some new sickness brought on by the werewolf curse (but perhaps brought on by his mind), and he’s losing his mind. We feel for him. As we look at his two feet on the floor grow hairier and hairier, Larry then stands up and, in a touch that is strangely beautiful and even vulnerable, we watch Larry walking on his tip toes.

The picture transitions to just show Larry’s feet and lower legs again, now out of his room, and walking on those tip toes in the foggy forest. His careful movements are intriguing –  he is walking almost gingerly, like on eggshells, and these movements are a touching thing to behold. Even as the Wolf Man there is something sad and careful about Larry. As the camera moves up, we see Larry in his full transformation – hunched over, face full of hair and wolf-ishness, he wanders through the miasma looking for, what? Seeing him peer from around a tree and growl, he’s both scary and something from a dream – he’s even gorgeous in this man-animal creation. The fog and the studio crafted woods are not at all real, nor should they, adding a sense of illusory mystification to Larry’s state. When he attacks the grave-digger, we’re sorry for both poor fellows.

And on it goes, more and more Larry is suffering and panicking and trying his hardest to tell his father to help him –  that this werewolf curse is real. What’s so interesting about this 1941 story is that we can’t fault Rains’ Sir John for his comfort towards Larry – a person would think they were crazy, even if they know the affliction is real, and it’s good that someone tells them they can cure themselves at home. That could be what one wants to hear. And why would Rains believe this mythology? It’s hard to find blame in this film – there are no bad guys. So in an unintended ultimate family showdown, perhaps manifested from resentment or guilt or hatred, whatever that mysterious question mark is hanging there between father and son, and which reigns so powerful over this movie, Sir John will wind up killing his son. On accident. A sort of hunting accident, as he believes Larry to be an animal, like how his previous son died. And he’ll enact exactly what his younger son did (kill a wolf that turned out to be a man) and with his son’s own cane. From son to father.

The Wolf Man, in the end, is not really a terrifying movie, it’s a family tragedy, superbly acted by Chaney Jr. and Rains, and a movie that is, in the end, terribly sad. With Rains realizing he’s killed his own son, Maleva’s poetic mediation becomes all the more moving: “The way you walked was thorny, though no fault of your own, but as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end. Now you will have peace for eternity.”

Kill Or Be Killed: Who Killed Teddy Bear

Ed Brubaker's newest Kill Or Be Killed is still out. I wrote a piece digging into Joseph Cates' strangely beautiful, disturbing, "Who Killed Teddy Bear?" featuring a brilliant, daring Sal Mineo. Pick it up or order here: https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/kill-or-be-killed-12

“I played a telephone freak, and we were having this hassle with the censors. In some of the shots while I was on the phone they wanted to sorta suggest that I was masturbating, but I couldn’t be naked. So I was just wearing jockey shorts. It turned out that was the first American film where a man wore jockey shorts on-screen.” – Sal Mineo “I was a lesbian owner of a disco who fell in love with Juliet Prowse and got strangled on Ninety-third Street and East End Avenue with a silk stocking by Sal Mineo. Jesus, who’s not going to play that part?” – Elaine Stritch

Joseph Cates’ Who Killed Teddy Bear? is a movie that lives in its own kind of sickly stunning, neon-blinking 1965 New York City nightfall – a terrifying and terrified world that’s drawn towards deviancy while desperately running from it. A world that punishes perverts via men who become so obsessed with punishing perverts, that they become perverts themselves; and perhaps even more demented than the nutjobs they bust. A world that observes the beauty of the pursued, but relishes, indeed pants over the beauty of the pursuer, focusing very specifically on the physicality of the depraved. And that’s a depraved Sal Mineo, which is really something quite unique and disquietly beautiful here...

Read more in that issue here.

A Scarf: The Panic In Needle Park

From my piece published at The New Beverly

Helen: I don’t like to wake up alone.

Bobby: I don’t want you to. But it happens sometimes.

The smallest thing can change a life forever. In the case of Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park, it’s a scarf. A thoughtful moment in which one stranger gives a shit about another, and just for a mere few seconds, the stranger’s scarf warms the young woman who lies shivering on a bed, bleeding, in full view of her insensitive boyfriend. It’s a much-appreciated gesture of kindness after this woman has sat cold and in pain on a grim subway ride after having an abortion. There’s something extra sad about a woman taking a subway back, alone, from such a procedure (no one came with her? Did she want to be by herself?) and writers John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion well understand this (think of Maria’s trip to the abortionist in Didion’s Play It As It Lays, the novel and in Frank Perry’s movie). We don’t know what’s happened to this woman when we first see her in that tube, but that she looks troubled and in pain, emotionally and physically, as she hangs on to the pole. She’s grateful just to sit down once the crowded passengers exit to the next stop and she catches her breath, looking not just sad but . . . this is my life right now. That kind of a look. It’s not a long scene, but it opens the film – a solitary woman likely thinking of her bloody, gunky insides that could have held a baby, whether she wanted the baby or not, and wondering how she’s going to get through this, as she speeds along surrounded by glass and metal and plastic, full of people thinking of their own lives.

The scarf is a bonding, romantic moment for a lonely person, she can feel a part of him as she nestles it close to her face. Lonely people need each other – that’s a given – but according to many theories, lonely people, when given the opportunity, feel they need drugs, and more and more drugs. Johann Hari, who wrote “Chasing the Scream: The First and the Last Days on the War on Drugs,” wrote about such studies, citing Professor Peter Cohen who argued that “human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It’s how we get our satisfaction. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find – the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about ‘addiction’ altogether, and instead call it ‘bonding.’ A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else. So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

That young woman on the subway, Helen (Kitty Winn), will become connected to the young man with the scarf, Bobby (Al Pacino), pulled in by his sweetness and charm, his streetwise beauty, his bad boy strut that’s overcompensating a bit – he needs to seem tougher and cooler than he is – and eventually she’ll be seduced by the heroin that’s keeping him together.  The drug will rule everything in their lives, where they live, how they work, who they’re friends with, and the effects of the drug, that warmth that spreads through you and cradles you into narcotic consolation, must be there. You feel adrift and alone enough, the overwhelming hug of heroin becomes more important than your boyfriend’s hugs – and if your boyfriend is doing it too, he understands the persistent need – he needs it too. So finding your drugs and fixing each other makes you the Bonnie and Clyde of junk, bonded, together until the end, you think. Until the stuff makes you rat the other one out.

Bobby not only gives Helen his scarf, he visits her in the hospital (“I come for my scarf” he says sweetly, not at all coming for his scarf but to see this “terrific looking chick” again). The bleeding has become so bad that she checks herself in and she lies in bed thinking of her next move. Fort Wayne, Indiana she tells Bobby, that’s where her family lives. Presumably she’s at the end of her rope in New York City, dating an artist (a memorable Raul Julia in a small role) and hobbling to the emergency room by herself. But Bobby’s outside the place waiting for her (sometimes that means nearly everything if someone is simply waiting for you) so when she walks out of the hospital and sees him there that is . . . it.  She’s fallen for the guy. The Panic in Needle Park is, after all, a love story, and the beginning of Helen and Bobby is poignantly romantic, the sincerity of how Bobby (the way he looks at her with his beautiful brown eyes) feels towards pretty Helen who looks like a “nice” girl (the idea of what that means anyway), the quiet, artistic girl everyone probably had a crush on in high school. Helen’s a little more complicated than that stereotype, just as Bobby’s not merely the bad boy, he’s not just a nice guy either, and the performances by Winn and Pacino get that – they are everyday people and addicts and they are absolutely compelling to watch

Schatzberg’s gritty, documentary-style picture, his second movie (shot with cinematographer Adam Holender, who also shot Midnight Cowboy), doesn’t flinch from the needles in arms, crying babies rolling on seedy mattresses and wiped-out junkies, of all ages, passing out on park benches or mumbling about election years causing the panic of product (“What election?” “I don’t know man, some election.”) Schatzberg had done a lot of living himself at that point, an acclaimed photographer of fashion, street and portraiture (he famously shot Bob Dylan’s cover of “Blonde on Blonde”), the man had snapped everyone from Edie Sedgwick to Andre De Toth to the Rolling Stones to Phil Ochs to LaVern Baker and more. His first film, the striking, experimental character study about a troubled ex-model, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, was based on a model he knew and starred an actress he also knew quite well, and shot beautifully (an excellent Faye Dunaway). With Panic, the director showcases his talent for street photography and filming faces and (as I stated in my piece on his third film, Scarecrow), he loves Pacino (this was Pacino’s first starring role, and it’s brilliant). Pacino’s gum smacking, his expressive face, his charm that’s sometimes dumb and sometimes tender, his anger, his guile, his doped-out stupors – it’s all expressed in a performance that’s both touching and maddening. And likable. You get why Helen is drawn to him. And you get why he’s drawn to Helen. Winn, wonderfully understated and a little shy, has those faraway eyes that evoke, simultaneously, a fresh start and some kind of terrible past. They both look like people you might know.

In an interview with Dazed, Schatzberg was asked about the picture’s unflinching realism. He said: “At that time in New York in the 70s, you could see people shooting up in the alleyways. Joan Didion and John Dunne adapted the book ‘Panic in Needle Park’ for the screenplay [by James Mills]. Needle Park was Sherman Square, at Broadway and West 70th, and it was popular because it was where young white addicts could get drugs without going to Harlem. Keith (Richards) was funny – I knew the Stones, I’d photographed them a lot, once dressed as women – and they were in Cannes when I was there with Panic in 1971. Keith said to me, ‘Hey, are you on the hard stuff?’ pointing to his arm, and I said ‘No.’ He said, ‘Then how come you can make a film like that?"

Schatzberg made it by observing other addicts (with Pacino), and probably from people he’d met shooting and running clubs, and, as a great photographer, simply looking at life around him. He shot it in Sherman Square (called Needle Park) where the film’s junkie family congregates, going on about their own dramas and stories, present and past, telling, often, banal stories or talking nonchalantly about things that would shock others with horror. The lifestyle and this family start catching up with the couple and Bobby’s burglar brother, Hank (an incredible, creepily handsome, lizard-looking Richard Bright) wants Bobby to work with him after Bobby intends to marry Helen (this is after she starts shooting up, I guess Bobby thinks this makes it official). Helen tries to work at a diner (she’s useless, she can’t get hot chocolate and jelly donuts right) and she walks off the job. A lot happens – Bobby ODs and almost dies, he gets arrested, he starts handling distribution (a big deal to him), Helen sleeps with Hank (she tells Bobby later who really wishes she’d kept that information to herself), and Helen hooks. As all of this is happening they’re under the eye of a Narcotics Detective, Hotch (Alan Vint), who keeps telling Helen that all junkies will eventually rat each other out and he encourages her to rat out Bobby. Hotch always seems to be there, not just to bust them, but to puncture the romance, the whole idea of together, forever – in dope sickness and in health.

After a lot of hell, and with future hell ahead of them, they buy a puppy, and you know that poor puppy isn’t going to have a normal family life, or a long life for that matter. Roger Ebert, who lauded the movie, didn’t like the puppy bit at all and wished the film had axed it. I’m not sure why, other than it’s a heartbreaking interlude on a ferry where, yes, after Bobby and Helen fix in the bathroom, the puppy jumps off the boat and drowns. Helen cracks and who can blame her? It’s certainly obvious Helen wants that puppy for something innocent and warm to hug, another form of family, another creature to stave off loneliness, a thing to care for when she can barely take care of herself, but that obviousness is because this kind of bad decision-making based on emotion, that need to simply hold something sweet, happens all the time. If not a baby, a puppy. And you can almost hear another junkie telling the story, as if this scene was shot in flashback – the saga of the short life of the puppy, an anecdote rambled on about before nodding off on a park bench. I thought of the cat in Trainspotting, a much more elaborate story, but another bad decision: the cat bought for the girlfriend who rejects it and then the poor guy stays in his apartment with HIV, alone, not taking care of that kitty. He winds up dying from the cat – toxoplasmosis. The difference, and perhaps, unexpected tragedy being that the young man doesn’t even die from an overdose – his condition worsens, brought down by the sweet little kitty.

But the unexpected ending of The Panic in Needle Park is that both Bobby and Helen live. You’re practically waiting for one of them to slip permanently into the abyss and, for a brief moment before expiring, feeling what one of the characters calls the greatest of all highs – death.  But they don’t. And that feels strangely more depressing. Most likely the two are just going to continue on with the same routine. There’s no kind of closure. Helen has ratted out Bobby who winds up in the slammer but in the end, she’s there for him, whether for love or for desperation or for just not wanting to be alone. Or for all of those reasons.  So, there’s Helen waiting for him, the only person to greet him. Almost like romantic, sweet Bobby was waiting for poor Helen when she was released from the hospital, after he visited her playfully looking for that scarf, only now they know each other, there’s no romance in this reunion. Maybe that will dissolve once they shoot up again and they’ll feel good for a while. But for now, Bobby simply says, “Well?” Helen walks along with him. Well, she’s not alone.

MM Playboy 50 Years Later

RIP, Hugh Hefner. I was so glad to honor the woman of Playboy's first cover 50 years later with this cover story on Marilyn Monroe, and to write about her beyond her beauty (beyond those PB pics that she did not take for PB) , and about her power as an artist in her own right. Marilyn was not ashamed of nudity, sexuality and showing both her strength and vulnerability. Her work with photographers was artful and brilliant and not just about sex -- and it was frequently collaborative. I wanted this stressed all these years later.

I understand why people have issues with Hefner (and I really dislike that his crypt is next to her's, leave Marilyn be...) but I wanted to write about how brilliant she was, with *this* essay about her in *that* magazine, for anyone who might not think much of her as an actual artist, and how she was really, at the level of someone like Cindy Sherman in terms of how she helped compose and conceive many of her shots. Not just as a sex symbol. She was so much more, we know, as an actress, but she was also so much more as a model too.

An ode, from my cover story at Playboy Magazine, published December 2012.

“I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody; the other was someone whose name I didn’t know. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.”—Marilyn Monroe

“Daughter of God, weaver of wiles,” Marilyn Monroe, like Sappho’s Aphrodite, will never die. It has been 50 years since she gasped her final breath on that lonely mattress with no bed frame—her beautiful nude body just there, collapsed and unrestricted, that body all men (and women) yearned to cradle, ravage or revere. There she was, Marilyn: her hand clutching the telephone that kept her company when she holed up in her hacienda on Helena Drive; her pill bottles visible; her last phone call with friend Peter Lawford; her odd little housekeeper Eunice seeing lights still on under her door; her devoted though strange Dr. Greenson first on the scene, breaking windows; Marilyn’s agent rushing out of the Hollywood Bowl; the cops; the changed stories; the Kennedys; the mob; the FBI files—what on earthwas going on? A death scene so like Marilyn, that creature of contradictions: bizarrely glamorous and completely degrading, blatantly obvious and unendingly mysterious. Suicide. Accident. Murder. Myth.

Monumental M.M. myths don’t die. When Marilyn’s inner light—that luminosity she could turn on with one brilliant pout of her lips, with one glance of moist, widened eyes, with one flash of that glimmering, sometimes puckish smile—departed her body, she didn’t lose her power. She lost her life, and that was tragic and indeed too soon. But that vulnerable woman, that strong woman—a woman both in charge of her life and deeply unsure of herself, full of hope and dope and dreams and fear of the future—that woman maintained her power.

Marilyn wasn’t a candle in the wind. The well-meaning Sir Elton didn’t write her swan song. Her poetic soulmate, that troubadour of Americana Bob Dylan, granted her that honor. As Marilyn said herself, “I knew where she belonged,” and so did Dylan, the other famous Bobby one wishes she’d made love to or had lived long enough to meet. (Oh, what a couple Bobby Zimmerman and Norma Jeane would have made!) Without intending it for M.M., Dylan placed her in the “ocean and the sky and the whole wide world,” making “She Belongs to Me” belong to Bobby and herself and to all of us. Marilyn, from the moment she stepped in front of a camera, was an artist and she didn’t look back. “She can take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black.” Yes. The complexity of a woman. The lyrical duality of a poet. And she, deep down, must have known this, even if she didn’t believe she had everything she needed. And she remains ever present, ever modern, ever the hypnotist collector. “You are a walking antique.”

Much has been written about Marilyn’s vulnerability, much of it irritating. There’s the sad-eyed pat on the head, the poor little-girl-lost attitude that reduces her to the child-woman so many feminists bristle over, to which I ask, what is wrong with the child-woman? What is wrong with holding on to that lost kid, waiting for your daddy to come home? Then there are those who are quite sincere though simple-minded— Marilyn just needed a hug. She needed love and understanding. Of course she did. And of course it’s never that easy—not with a contradictory creature like Marilyn. And then there’s the more honest, robust look at “vulnerability,” chiefly seen in Norman Mailer’s take on Marilyn.

Mailer was a man who understood the mystery of women, a man who both made love to many women and fucked many women, many beautiful women, a man who admitted he wanted to steal Marilyn from Arthur Miller (“I wanted to meet her so I could steal her. And you know, a criminal will never forgive you for preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart.”) and a man who understood that vulnerability can sometimes be complicit and manipulative, thereby making Marilyn neither total innocent nor doe-eyed dummy. As he wrote, so beautifully, she was, “a female spurt of wit and sensitive energy who could hang like a sloth for days in a muddy-mooded coma; a child-girl, yet an actress to loose a riot by dropping her glove at a premiere; a fountain of charm and a dreary bore. She was certainly more than the silver witch of us all.”

Mailer understood her as both a human and celestial being—the “very Stradivarius of sex.” That may sound like horny hyperbole to some, but to me it places her on the level she deserves—a woman as a poet, an artist in her own being, her own sex, her own talent. And no one has ever captured that specific magic that is Marilyn. No one. Mailer’s words are a gorgeous counterpoint to what that other famous Marilyn biographer, Gloria Steinem, said of Marilyn on the American Masters special “Still Life” a few years back: “She was a joke. She was vulnerable. She was so eager for approval. She was all the things that I feared most being as a teenage girl.”

I don’t believe you, Gloria Steinem. Further, in the same special, Steinem (who I do believe admired Marilyn) comments on Marilyn’s final shoot with photographer George Barris—those gorgeous, timeless, casual shots on the beach, where she’s wrapped in a green towel and smiling or walking along the water in a sweater, staring at the camera with such soulful ambiguity that we can only stare back and wonder what she’s thinking; where she looks so modern, so ready for the 1960s in all her classic Pucci and slimmed-down frame and progressive ideas about sexuality. She’s clearly enjoying the beach, enjoying life. But she’s contemplative too. And this makes these photos poignant, not tragic. She looks so happy and womanly and alive: Who could believe she would die three weeks later? But Steinem, who sees Barris as a “kind man,” felt Marilyn was not her true self in those pictures. “The photographs are rather mannered and female impersonating and pathetic and sad.”

Pathetic? If there’s one thing Marilyn Monroe was never pathetic in front of, no matter the quality of the shot or the quality of the movie, it was a camera. She was a master. She had the God-given talent and charisma to turn on that inner light, and she had the intelligence to dim that light as well, to create darker erotic images (like Milton Greene’s Black Sitting), sad images, vulnerable images. And that is not pathetic. That’s strong. That’s brave. That’s art. Marilyn’s art.

And this instinct of her artistry came to her early. As chronicled by photographer André de Dienes, who shot some of her better-known youthful images, Marilyn yearned to express herself. She suggested ideas (as that other great M.M. photographer, Eve Arnold, can attest to as well). In 1953 the rising star called De Dienes at two in the morning, sleepless, sad and distressed. And in this state, she wanted to take pictures. When he arrived she wore no makeup, her eyes tired, her hair disheveled, and she was on the verge of despair. He was hesitant to shoot, but she insisted he snap her just as she was, in the dark streets of Beverly Hills (all her idea).

In one of the most compelling images, Marilyn is leaning against a tree near a garbage can, eyes closed, in a black coat, lit only by De Dienes’s car headlights. If you didn’t know it was Marilyn, you could mistake it for a Cindy Sherman film still (and Marilyn set it up just as Sherman would). But since she was in real pain, it’s much more raw than Sherman’s work and in line with the dark beauty of a Francesca Woodman. She said to De Dienes, “You usually write captions for your photos. You can put ‘the end of everything’ under these.” The images are heartbreaking— stunningly beautiful and depleted and scary and fascinating. Not only for M.M.’s pain, but also for her modern approach to exposing it.

“I can’t figure you out. You’re silk on one side and sandpaper on the other,” Richard Widmark says to her mentally ill babysitter in Don’t Bother to Knock, released a year before the “end of everything” photos and a movie that feels lost among her Technicolor dreamscapes. How many times had Marilyn heard similar versions of that male confusion? “What are you?” Her movie answer? A breathy “I’ll be any way you want me to be.”

Does she mean it? I hope not. Marilyn is brilliant here: so young and sexually damaged and complex, simmering with erotic heat that flows naturally out of her. There’s a prophetic sadness permeating her performance as this delusional young woman freshly released from an insane asylum. Knowing what we know about Marilyn’s childhood— the mentally ill mother, foster homes, sexual assaults, the longing for a father— she certainly understood the pathology and despondency of her character. She was a woman who wanted to be normal. Normal and special. But mental illness— in real life Marilyn’s greatest fear, that demon—just wouldn’t allow it. The breach between reality and fiction bedeviled her as a walking work of art—no matter how effortlessly sensual she looked in a negligee.

Silk and sandpaper. Love and sex. And again sex. As women, may we just have sex without judgment? Marilyn may have been used early in her career (and all through it), and she certainly harbored anger and sickness over some of those rougher moments, but women like that survive it. And she did. It didn’t destroy her creativity and it didn’t destroy her sex. She may have discussed her background and heartache as a little girl, but she didn’t let go of her carnality, healthy or unhealthy or a mixture of the two. I love what she said in her last interview, before the feminist movement, which often viewed her as a movie star trapped by the male gaze (a tired criticism that forgets how much women revere Marilyn): “We are all born sexual creatures, thank God,” she said, “but it’s a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift. Art, real art, comes from it, everything.”

Real art. Marilyn’s innate acting ability and sexuality radiated in early pictures, like her unaffected, jeans-wearing charm in Clash By Night—a movie in which she utters Clifford Odets’s dialogue with such naturalism you wish the movie were about the girl in those jeans. She held her own with the inimitable George Sanders in All About Eve and gave us more than a mere plum honey in The Asphalt Jungle. In front of the movie camera she was pure talent, pure instinct, pure sex and sympathy and strength, from her fantastically overripe voluptuousness in Niagara to her sweet playfulness in The Seven Year Itch to her impeccable comic timing in Some Like It Hot—imbuing what could have been dumb blonde Sugar Cane into a soulful chanteuse who breaks our hearts and turns us on (that translucent dress!) with “I’m Through With Love.” She is not only dreamlike but bursting through the celluloid with such humanity and temperature that you feel as if you could almost touch her.

In The Misfits, her bravura performance,  the faded cowboys circle around a near faded woman but one still so lovely that classic movie star Clark Gable, sitting on Marilyn’s bed, just next to her exquisite bare back, is humbled by the sight of her. Yes, even Rhett Butler is honored to be touching that skin.

The Misfits was a notoriously tough shoot, but I don’t care how many accounts I’ve read about her lousing up lines, showing up late or not showing up at all. She was worth it. Even Billy Wilder, who was deeply frustrated while working with her, cited her “elegant vulgarity” and her understanding of the camera: “She had a feeling for and a fear of the camera. She also loved the camera. Whatever she did, wherever she stood, there was always that thing that comes through. She was not even aware of it.” 

She must have been aware of it, at least sometimes. Watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Once you get to “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”, with that famous pink dress and those black-clad sadomasochistic ladies hanging from chandeliers (what a fantastically kinky touch!) and Marilyn’s “No, no, no, no, no,” she is such a movie star and yet has such a sense of humor about herself and is just so damn glamorous that she brings you to your knees. And she had to have known that. She wasn’t stupid.

And most self-respecting Marilyn biographers know she wasn’t the dumb blonde. But as much as Marilyn has been written about, with all the usual facts emerging—her pain and her undeniable magic, her epic rise and fall—she still seems, through all these years, misunderstood. Good. For as ubiquitous as she is, she’s still mysterious. She’s still beguiling.

Her films are more layered, enchanting and intricate now. I recently took in Marilyn’s powerful performance in Bus Stop and Lars von Trier’s genius Melancholia back-to-back and thought to myself, My God, would Mr. Von Trier have gotten Marilyn! In Bus Stop she’s the ultimate hillbilly beauty—broken down and abused and filled with all that excitable “Hollywood and Vine” hope that will never pan out. But she’s an angel. Like one of Von Trier’s tortured martyrs, she’s a unique woman because she’s so confused and frustrated, because she’s willing to demean herself. Painted up in that gorgeous chalky white makeup that only M.M. could pull off so naturally, gyrating in that dive, donning costumes probably unwashed for weeks, standing onstage in sexily torn fishnets and bruised legs and sweetly warbling through “That Old Black Magic” (even though M.M. was a talented singer and dancer), she is a deity—a vision that man-child Don Murray sees right away. And he’s right.

Yes, she’s an earthly woman, a woman who sleeps in all day and probably bleeds on the sheets and spills liquor on her clothes and continually embarrasses herself, and a woman so lost or sacrificial that she just gives up her dreams and leaves with that insane cowboy. But that makes her even more interesting and almost guiltily desirable. As I’ve written about Von Trier’s women, they live in hard, oppressive worlds filled with people who harbor little concern for their goodness or who at least attempt to understand their ugliness. I can imagine Marilyn, like Kirsten Dunst’s Justine, basking under that doomsday planet, naked and pale and accepting—absorbing and eroticizing that pain—and, as Marilyn did in film, giving us the pleasure of looking at her beautiful body.

Because through it all, no matter what was happening in her life, Marilyn gave us that gift: pleasure. Pleasure in happiness and pleasure in pain and the pleasure of looking at her. And great artist that she was, looking at her provoked whatever you desired to interpret from her. Her beauty was transcendent. For that, we should do as Dylan instructs: “Bow down to her on Sunday, salute her when her birthday comes.”

"The Nude Marilyn." Originally published in Playboy Magazine. 

Kill Or Be Killed: Born to Kill

Baby they were born to kill ... My essay on Robert Wise's "Born to Kill" starring Lawrence Tierney & Claire Trevor as supreme equals: two fiendish, ferocious creatures. Read it in Ed Brubaker's newest Kill or Be Killed -- out now! Order here: Here's a preview:

Between man, woman and movies, you can discover fair practice, of course, but can you find it with such hard- boiled honesty? Not often enough. So enter that brilliant bastard Lawrence Tierney and cool, cool Claire Trevor in Robert Wise's uncompromising, savage noir, Born to Kill to present such a romantically rotten pair with such strangely satisfying equitability. We’ve heard of the femme fatale time and time again – to the point that it almost bores me. Those sweet faced destroyers of dupes. Even the sweet-faced smart dupes who know what they’re in for but don’t care – their lust overrides all. The characters don’t bore me, mind you, it’s just their easy categorization. Many femme fatales are struggling – they suffer with dreams men have, that the world is there for the taking. But the world is not there for the taking, and not always for men either, but to dream of such a thing? That’s abnormal in “normal” society – and I think that pisses them off. Why must they be one of the … normals?

Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking...

Originally published at the New Beverly

One of the most memorable moments during filming had nothing to do with the movie, but it also had everything to do with the movie. There was a rumor that President Nixon was going to resign. [On that night] we stopped filming. We were onstage at the auditorium and we wheeled in a TV. Everyone watched it and there was a profound silence. It wasn’t a time for cheering. But there was a feeling that we were really doing something, in fact, that was about what this country had gone through.” – Michael Ritchie on his movie Smile

There’s a scene in Michael Ritchie’s satire Smile that fills me with such unexpected emotion, such sympathy, that it stays with me all the way until the end of the movie. It involves Bruce Dern playing a “good” guy – or a guy who prides himself on being a “good” guy in that way people who think they’re good often do. You know, the kind who boast about “helping others,” and encourage everyone else to do the same, and you wonder, do you? Do you really help others? The kind of people you usually don’t trust if you’re a cynic, and nod your head while they offer you endless bromides of encouragement. His name is Big Bob Freelander and he’s a successful RV salesman in the town of Santa Rosa California. His son (Eric Shea), naturally, goes by Little Bob. He’s also the lead judge of a national beauty pageant called The Young American Miss, an event that descends on his town every year and something he takes quite seriously. When he’s handed a gold name tag to honor his top judge status (all other judges get silver) he is genuinely proud of this distinction. His profession, the pageant, his name, his values, the décor of his home – these are things that in many comedies, would constitute for a bullseye painted on Big Bob’s back. “Mock me.” But Ritchie (with writer Jerry Belson) isn’t interested in easily demeaning this very American man with his very hopeful American ideals (who, in fact, is trying to help his friend), even as Ritchie’s gently ribbing everything surrounding this man’s life. Instead, he finds it quietly heartbreaking.

The scene I mentioned involves his best friend, Andy (Nicholas Pryor) who has spent most of the movie in a dipsomaniacal state, disgusted with his life, sick of the town, sick of his wife, Brenda (Barbara Feldon) and hateful of the beauty show. He isn’t buying any of the banalities dished out to him or his suburban existence where, as the camera catches in a perfect shot, a freezer full of TV dinners. He’s not really down with tradition, like creepy rituals involving a chicken (just watch the film), and most especially his wife’s obsession with the beauty contest. Since his wife is the pageant’s crisp, professional Executive Director, this is extra vexing, as his entire life, one he does not want, is centered on this spangled entertainment. And, he makes trophies for a living, if that’s not driving his depression home any further. He’s in the middle of an existential breakdown and he’s turning 35 – that time you start humming along with Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” with zero irony.

Andy is an intriguing character because, in many ways, we’re supposed to relate to him most – we can see why he’s going crazy in this town, we can see why he can barely stand his wife who won’t sleep with him (we can also see why she’s not turned on by a guy who is wasted all the time). He’s the town drunk screaming for us all – what is wrong with you people? But, Smile is not that easy. It’s not using Andy as simply all-knowing shorthand, digging into the banalities of everyone else’s secretly sad lives. What makes him or us so better? Filled with such human characters – from the various judges to the personalities of the teenagers competing in the pageant, to the horny little boys trying to sneak a look at the girls, Smile studies people within this milieu with a kind of documentary detail that humanizes even the most overt assholes. The picture has been compared to both Robert Altman’s masterpiece Nashville and to Christopher Guest’s great Waiting for Guffman, but it’s less ambitious than Nashville, and a lot nicer and deeper than Guffman. It’s also something that feels distinctly Ritchie – the Ritchie of Prime Cut, The Candidate and The Bad News Bears – movies that are alternately funny and pessimistic, joyously profane (like The Bad News Bears) while being brutal, adult and smart.  You feel that Ritchie gets these people – and he did – he once judged a beauty pageant himself.

But back to Andy and that scene. Near the end of the movie, Andy’s had it, his wife has had it with his drunken self-pity, and he threatens to kill himself  – he’s gonna blow his brains out, possibly ruining the fine carpet in their well-maintained home. He shoves the gun in his mouth but Brenda’s contempt causes him to change his mind – he shoots her instead. She isn’t injured badly, and she’s not going to make a thing about it because this should be kept out of the papers! But Andy is placed in a jail cell and he’s talking to Big Bob about his predicament. Bob counsels him:

Bob: Andy it’s very simple. All it takes is a drop more perseverance. A drop more optimism and a drop more energy. Simple.

Andy: Hey. Hey wait a minute. I’ve heard that before.

Bob: Heard what before?

Andy: That drip-drop crap. Brenda read that to me.  That’s right out of the Young American Miss Program.

Bob: A good philosophy is good philosophy and I don’t happen to be a snob about where I get it from. And I can tell you one other thing, as your best friend talking to you right now. Quit wallowing around in all this self-indulgent, self-pity and get out there and start helping others.

Andy: Bob. I’ve finally figured out what you are. You know what you are? A goddamn Young American Miss.

This is the part of the movie where you might think: exactly. Andy has called out Big Bob. In a meaner, easier picture, we might think, good for Andy. Not with Smile. Instead, I felt for Bob. Not only because Andy hurt his feelings, but also because he made him think a bit more (not a bad thing) and sometimes people just don’t want to think, they’d rather escape in their glittering duties – and Dern shows that so beautifully. Bob suddenly turns very inward – we see Dern flinch and without saying a word, he just has this look on his face – of sadness, of emasculation, of offense. But mostly he just takes in what his friend has said, and you can see it got to him. Dern is so excellently layered in this movie, so suddenly afflicted by this conversation, that for the rest of the film he seems troubled and disbelieving of himself. In a previous, beautiful scene, he talks about a time before he was married, when he was nearly set up on a date with Elizabeth Taylor – it’s something he’s wistful about, a kind of glamour he’d never reach, a woman he’d never have (and, in a nice scene, he does talk to his wife about taking a vacation), but it’s not pathetic or silly, it’s just one of those bittersweet moments of a guy living a rather mundane life. So hearing Andy compare Bob to a pageant princess is one of those quietly devastating moments that, when watched in a certain kind of mood, will take you aback and make you think about much of Bob’s attempts to stave off … sadness. And you catch yourself a little, suddenly surprised by how moved you are by Bob. As Pauline Kael said of Dern’s character: “Big Bob speaks in homilies that express exactly how he feels. He’s a donkey, but he doesn’t have a mean bone in his body.”

The entire movie plays with your emotions like this – laughing at the comedic aspects of the flesh show (there’s a not funny, disturbing aspect of this in Richie’s terrific Prime Cut when he lingers on livestock and women), while feeling an undertow of sadness regarding these women’s hopes and dreams. You’re smiling while a girl warbles “Delta Dawn” and then honks her saxophone for her talent portion of the contest and you laugh as another instructs the audience how to pack a suitcase (I happen to think that’s a perfectly acceptable talent). But then you feel for a contestant trying to get through a question and answer session in which she’s told to be herself, but of course, that’s not what’s she’s being told at all. And you sense her stress. You are exhausted by Miss Salinas, Maria Gonzales (Maria O’Brien), who uses her Mexican-American heritage to get a leg up in every situation, and then you see how really shitty the girls are towards her. So what if she’s always making guacamole? What the hell is wrong with that? Joan Prather as Robin is the contestant we follow most closely (she’s Miss Antelope Valley), since she seems to mirror how we feel – ambivalent about it all, serving more as the audience’s eyes than drunken Andy’s. She also rooms with Miss Anaheim, Doria (Annette O’Toole), the teenage veteran who offers advice to Robin, like, say, how having a dead father (as Robin does) could help her in the competition. I love that these two really do become something like friends, and that Doria’s not painted as the pageant hungry villainess; she’s just trying to get through life like everyone else. Doria figures if boys can get scholarships for sports, why can’t women be prized for their charm and beauty? Robin, a little more philosophical and, likely, more political, wonders why boys should get scholarships for sports in the first place

The pageant scenes are filled with amusing, acerbic observations (and young actresses like Melanie Griffith and Coleen Camp), chiefly with the star choreographer played by real life dancer and choreographer Michael Kidd who brings a wonderfully tough, often comically dyspeptic presence – too sophisticated for the town, his Broadway and movie career in the rearview mirror, he’s doing this just for the money. He’s perfectly fine not getting along with the harried, annoying pageant official (Geoffrey Lewis), and he’s late on the job all of the time. So what. He’s also nicer than we think – the hotshot hard-ass dance guy actually cares more about the girls than Lewis’s character does.

Ritchie (with cinematographer Conrad Hall) captures so many details  – the TV dinners, the lodges, the caged mechanical bird in Bob’s house, the portrait in Brenda’s home (of herself) and in an especially well-crafted scene, the nude polaroid that slowly reveals itself while Bob’s son, Little Bob, swears he didn’t take that kind of a photo. Of course he did. That photo also ends the movie in a telling detail – the nudie the kid is busted for and sent to a psychiatrist over, adorns a police officer’s car visor. The cop casually eats a Twinkie and takes a peek at the topless young woman – what’s more creepily All-American than munching on junk food and leering at teenagers from a position of power? And it’s not a surprise, really, that the cop would have the photo, after all, in a sad moment, Bob tries to bond with the servicemen rolling the flag when the pageant is over. Good American that he is, Bob informs them that he too served in the First Infantry Division: “We held the Chosin Reservoir,” Bob says. They ignore Bob’s affiliation and history and brush him off, remarking crassly to each other: “Boy did you see the knockers on Miss Imperial County.

Smile contains numerous scenes that are either as obvious as the cops and the military (so much for the red, white and blue), or potently understated with small, telling details saying so much about how these 1975-era characters (1974 when the film was shot) contend with suburbia and the outside world. Current events are at the periphery of these characters concerns and lives (abortion in brought up in one scene), and yet the this a very 1970s film – you can sense the era’s creeping cynicism working into this town and hanging over it like a pall. As Nat King Cole brilliantly sings “Smile” (composed by Charlie Chaplin, lyrics by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons) opening and closing the film, the song could initially seem ironic – if you’re not paying attention to the words or the great man singing them. No, the song “Smile” is direct and to the heart, and becomes so touching it’s almost too much to bear: “Smile though your heart is aching/Smile even though it’s breaking/When there are clouds in the sky, you’ll get by/If you smile through your fear and sorrow/ Smile and maybe tomorrow/You’ll see the sun come shining through for you…” Dear lord. Nat King Cole is right. What else is one supposed to do? You can’t stay drunk all day. Well, you can, but, as Big Bob says, “A good philosophy is good philosophy and I don’t happen to be a snob about where I get it from.”