Time waits for no one, and he won't wait for me – The Rolling Stones
Time. Once you hit the teen mark in life – what a beautiful horrible time that is. Dreamy and crazy and banal and violent – in action or in mind – melodramatic and real and hormonally addled. In the case of Rusty James – sometimes not so smart, but oftentimes intensely poetic – in movement, in words, in the way you look at your surroundings – be it your drunken dad’s apartment, your girlfriend’s intelligent beautiful face, your older brother’s odd, sad, sleepwalking swagger, and listening to that older brother even if you don’t understand half of what he says. And then there’s those brightly colored rumble fish in the pet store… they need to be free. And they have very little time.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish presents and ponders these dreamlike feelings of teen-hood as an expressionistic mood piece – a reverie that feels of this world and out of this world but so rooted in an emotional truth that the picture, at times, feels Shakespearean.
The start of my piece on Francis Ford Coppola's masterful, beautiful "Rumble Fish" -- in Ed Brubaker's next Criminal -- read the rest in the newest issue -- look for it today.
Out now! The Newest Sight & Sound with my interview with Quentin Tarantino. Quentin and I dig into a lot. You do not know just how thrilled I was about our Ralph Meeker discussion and DiCaprio’s discovery of him, among other things...
"Across an effusive nine-page interview with Kim Morgan, Tarantino unpacks the alternative history he invented for his star creation, shares the deep-Hollywood tales he gleaned from Bruce Dern and the late Burt Reynolds, and explains how both DiCaprio’s discovery of Ralph Meeker and Brad Pitt’s father’s love of TV westerns fed into DiCaprio’s characterization."
Buy a digital copy or look for on US newsstands....
Excited to announce this film series -- starting tonight!
In anticipation of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, Quentin curated ten films from the Columbia Pictures library -- the dates ranging from 1958-1970. Ten films that influenced his masterful movie. I've joined Quentin to dig in and discuss these fascinating movies (our conversations all shot at the fabulous New Beverly Theater) so please, do yourself a favor, and check out these pictures.
Watch on the Sony Movie Channel from July 21-25 -- the series airs five nights, in more than 80 territories worldwide. There's also some sneak peek scenes from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, opening this Friday, July 26.
Here's the list of movies:
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969; director: Paul Mazursky)
Cactus Flower (1969; director: Gene Saks)
Easy Rider (1969; director: Dennis Hopper)
Model Shop (1969; director: Jacques Demy)
Battle of the Coral Sea (1959; director: Paul Wendkos)
Getting Straight (1970; director: Richard Rush)
The Wrecking Crew (1968; director: Phil Karlson) Hammerhead (1968; director: David Miller)
Farewell to a goddamn original, baby. Rip Torn, whose career lasted from the 1950s and into the 2000's has left us and there are many roles I want to write about -- Payday, Maidstone, Sweet Bird of Youth, Coming Apart, Cross Creek, The Man Who Fell to Earth... and so much more, but here's one I love of early Rip Torn -- on the early 60s TV show Naked City. He tore up the small screen here... He was one of my favorites. Won't be another one like him ever again.
Young and beautiful oddballs Tuesday Weld and Rip Torn -- together -- in sickness and in health. Underscore sickness. Madly in love, madly in lust, the actors play two recently married, demented hillbillies in heat like ardent caterwauling kitties -- cute as hell but dangerous to disrupt lest you’d like your eyeball torn out of your socket. Gorgeous, wild-eyed sociopaths (named Ansel and Ora Mae) driving down from the hills of Arkansas and into the mean streets of New York City, they yell about traffic, argue over dolls, fix their sites on wedding rings, grab guns and gobble frog legs cooked up by Torn in their dingy motel room. They also get it on -- obviously. After child bride Tuesday playfully antagonizes Rip, laughing and hitting him with a pillow, they fall to the bed in a haze of pillow feathers, picking feather from hair, lip and lashes. And then kiss passionately.
We don’t see them consummate their lust further than that. We don’t need to because it’s all there. But we see them kill. They shoot a police officer, a guy selling a gun, customers, and workers in a bank, among other victims who are also assaulted for their car or punched for money and attacked for dynamite. Yes, Rip Torn manages to steal some dynamite if that’s not poetic enough considering his presence. And when she, Weld, witnesses any of this mayhem, we see Tuesday get turned on by it. This is not some movie I dreamed up. This is an episode of a television show that those familiar with it surely know what I’m talking about, and one that likely lodged in many lucky kid’s minds after he or she switched on their parent’s GE console in 1962.
This was the third season of the excellent, influential television show Naked City -- episode 13 -- entitled “A Case Study of Two Savages,” scripted by Frank Pierson (who would later co-write Cool Hand Luke and Dog Day Afternoon) and directed by William A. Graham (who directed series like 12 O’ Clock High, The Fugitive and the TV movie, Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones). As with many Naked City stories, this one (from 1962) dared to not only shock early TV viewers with its outburst of violence, but offer little relief or explanation about such real-life occurrences inspired from the outside world (this one, by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate who had rampaged only a few years earlier and who are mentioned in this episode specifically.) The influential, gritty and still-hard hitting Naked City (created by Stirling Silliphant, who later wrote In the Heat of the Night), shot on location in New York City (the series was inspired by the superb 1948 Jules Dassin noir, The Naked City, which was inspired by famed NYC photographer, Weegee), offered no easy condemnations of the criminal’s actions and instead a cynical, searching dose of complexity and shading. There’s a lingering question that hangs over many episodes featuring future movie stars (just to name a few: George C. Scott, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, James Coburn, Burt Reynolds) -- Why? And that why is not answered. It’s never going to be answered.
As the two young ones drive into the city, the narrator attempts to present some reason for their casual approach to killing, Torn’s in particular: because men are born to kill. It’s only that society has progressed and kids might have been raised semi-right (and Torn’s character ain’t), that they might overcome the killer instinct. As he intones:
“15, 000 years ago, man came out of the caves. Today, whenever we encounter the violence and the savagery to which belonged to those times, all we can do is marvel at how far the human race has come in only 15,000 years. When Ansel Boake was four-years-old he killed his first thing: one of his mother’s chickens. After Ansel killed his mother’s chicken, his father thrashed him. By the time he was 16, Ansel had thrashed his father. Ansel Boake had no friends, he never learned to read, he never held a job longer than three months. But he could wander in the woods without a compass and not get lost. He could live off the land, killing food with gun, knife, snare, fishhook or rock or his bare hands equally well. Ansel Boake met Ora Mae Youngham eight days ago. Six days, fourteen hours and nine minutes ago, they were married. In the last six days, fourteen hours and nine minutes, Ansel Boake and his wife Ora Mae have shot and killed a filling station attendant in Frankfurt, Kentucky during the course of a hold-up, knifed a motel manager in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and shot and killed a hitchhiker they picked up in Elizabeth, New Jersey.”
And then they drive into the city … oh, boy. While the show’s lead, Det. Adam Flint (Paul Burke) has run into a drugstore while his partner, Det. Frank Arcaro (Harry Bellaver) waits in the car, Arcaro notices an automobile next to him with a broken plate. Arkansas. He nicely warns the drivers. He’s just letting them know. Ansel quarrels, alarmed or maybe just itchin’ to kill, and he shoots an officer dead. He also shoots Arcaro. Bang. Bang. It’s a stunning moment to see straight away, loyal viewers wondering if Rip Torn just iced a favorite character. Arcaro doesn’t die, but he’s later seen in the hospital, high on morphine talking about how his mother made sure he wore clean underwear every day as a kid (an intriguing moment of vulnerability), and then asks Flint, Why? “Find out why that character shot me. It’s on my mind. Why?” Flint becomes obsessed, even a bit crazed, trying to find out. Meanwhile, Ansel and Ora Mae wander around the city, taking a carriage ride (Ansel drives the horse and whips it, which feel perverse when Torn does it), robbing a bar, a gun store and stealing a car. By the time they decide to rob a bank, Flint’s caught up to the lovers and suddenly the near hour-long running time feels too short. Ansel’s shot dead and Ora Mae sobs over his body. It’s done? We want more of them.
What a sight, those two massive talents – these two one-of-a-kinds. Titans. The future Pretty Poison and that sexy hothead who later bashed Norman Mailer’s head in with a hammer. Man, they should have made a movie together. They did, The Cincinnati Kid, but that wasn’t together. But they should have done something like this again. They’re just burning with charisma here. Two brilliant actors in their youthful prime, already notoriously tempestuous and unpredictable off-screen, not quite knowing the cult figures they’ll become a few decades later. They are so believably psycho, yet so watchable that they feel dangerous to desire (and many desired Weld at this time; getting turned on by Torn must have been a radical jolt). And though playing backwoods scumbags, the actors brought such counterculture hipness and unusual feral intensity to their parts that you had to wonder what people were thinking as they watched in their living rooms. Do I like them? Terrence Malick would weave his transcendent tale later.
Invading Gotham from the country, Weld and Torn mirror the city’s instability, darkness and kink. They’re scary. They’re beautiful. They’re sexy. How can they not be? The show had to know by casting Torn and Tuesday as thrill killers, the viewers would feel a stirring that made them either exhilarated or uncomfortable. Torn’s cocked-eyebrow handsomeness, his native Texan authenticity, his puckish sometimes demonic grin, his eyes, brooding to laughing to inviting to downright insane is electric bouncing off of Weld’s teenage talent and loveliness, her lushness and mysterious eyes, sometimes placid, sometimes excited, her curiosity and, here, kittenish sexuality mixed with her intelligence and her weird, fascinating wickedness -- she can be sweet as pie but also, wonderfully, not right in the head. We’re drawn to this pair, they promise sex but they also promise violence. We wonder why they’re so fucked up. (We wonder if we’re fucked up) We’ll never know. Nor does Naked City, which, once again, asks, why?
Burke understands the reasons why Ansel shot everyone else (to steal), but why Arcaro? He asks the girl: “Your husband shot him also. Why?” Ora Mae answers: “I don’t know. Just for the hell of it, I guess.”
Out today! Ed Brubaker's newest Criminal in which I write about Norman Foster's atmospheric, gorgeous & moving "Woman on the Run" starring Ann Sheridan in one of her greatest performances. Order here.
From my piece:
"Ann Sheridan (the “Oomph girl!” – a moniker she detested. She once said: “Oomph" is what a fat man says when he leans over to tie his shoelace in a telephone booth.”) gives one of her greatest, perhaps her greatest performance here: Tough, but vulnerable, jaundiced but sophisticated, she’s able to light up when she really starts to see that her marriage has been muddled by a dreary fog. And they both (she and her husband) let it happen. It’s powerful and disarmingly moving that the picture’s finale occurs on what’s often representational of love: a rollercoaster (up and down and up and down and a lot of screaming and laughing and fear) and Sheridan is so moved to finally see her husband, that she screams his name with fear and love. It’s a beautiful moment...
"Sheridan plays a woman who appears to have a hard heart tamped down by disappointment and marital atrophy – but as the movie reveals, she is full of love and understanding once she really opens herself up again. Marriage is viewed through a dreamy, demented landscape here, but it’s part of the institution’s tumultuous journey. A key moment in Woman on the Run occurs when, before Frank flees, he’s asked by an inspector if he’s married. His answer: “In a way.” Yes, in a way. But by the end of the movie, what that really means, romantically, is, it’s their way."
One of the most arresting images I’ve ever seen of Marilyn Monroe came not from a movie or newsreel footage or one of her many photographs. It came from a blanket.
Driving through Death Valley on a long road trip, I stopped in a tiny town for gas and a cold drink. Few seemed to live in this town: it served as a pit stop, a place to either check your radiator or check your mind (or, in my case, both) — one of those locales that offer such a bare minimum of services that a candy bar has never tasted so good. Delirious from hours of 70 mph signposts, I stumbled back into my car, feeling as if modern civilization had melted around me. For months, I’d been working on a piece about Marilyn (a cover story for Playboy -- she was never really pleased about that centerfold, though she handled it with great spirit, as nothing to be ashamed of -- and it's a beautiful image). Marilyn had been on my mind nearly every day.
And then … there she was. Driving away, I spied Marilyn on the side of the road, 20 feet from the gas station. With a mixture of excitement and a strange sadness, I jumped out of the car and stared. Her face was hanging from clothespins, blowing in the breeze, next to an open garage. A warm blanket in the hot sun, set against the blue sky, flapping and undulating in the merciful wind, her face changing shape and expression. This desolate desert Marilyn, so frank and alone, just hanging there, cleared away all the clutter of so many T-shirts, stickers, shower curtains, pillows, purses, wall clocks, and coffee mugs — all those Marilyns you walk right past in any given gift shop on Hollywood Boulevard. A little hypnotized and maybe a little crazy, I thought of how Marilyn described herself, as the woman who “belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.” I had to film it.
That was the summer of 2012, the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s passing, a year when Marilyn was on many people’s minds, whether they wanted her there or not. I did want her there, so much so that I was flooding my mind with all things Marilyn, which, given the seemingly infinite amount of material out there, isn’t hard to do. Reading and rereading the books and biographies, rewatching her movies, staring at her photos, and visiting the Hollywood Museum’s Marilyn exhibit (where, among other personal effects, dresses, shirts, telegrams, prescription pill bottles, and notes to Dr. Greenson were on display), I became consumed, as so many have before me.
Out there in the desert, I thought of Marilyn and John Huston’s gorgeous sad end of the line, The Misfits — one of my favorite Marilyn performances and movies. And, again, I thought of the other misfit, Marilyn. I thought of her marriage to Arthur Miller (and I thought of my own marriage which was worrying me ... and staring at the lonely blanket of MM, for the purpose of decoration and for the purpose of warming a stranger, almost brought me to tears).
End of the line ... Her once hope-filled marriage -- this brilliant, world-weary, haunted, mischievous, smart, artistic woman emulates The Misfits fading cowboys. A movie star in a cruel industry wondering how much time she has left. But still a movie star for sure, but one beset with a gorgeousness that's a little beautifully worn, wise. a little, almost, sick of herself. Troubled ... Which, to me, makes her all the more beautiful. Real. And real life spilled into the picture with Miller — sick of her marriage, but really did she want it to end? Probably she did. Perhaps she didn’t. One thing is for sure: the movie had to end. The marriage had to end too.
Marriages end in Reno. They start there too but they end in that dusty strange place. As Marilyn said:
“When we were first married, he saw me as so beautiful and innocent among Hollywood wolves that I tried to be like that. I almost became his student in life and literature . . . But when the monster showed, Arthur couldn’t believe it.” “I disappointed him when that happened. But I felt he knew and loved all of me. I wasn’t sweet all through. He should love the monster, too. But maybe I’m too demanding. Maybe there’s no man who could put up with all of me. I put Arthur through a lot, I know. But he also put me through a lot.”
Indeed he did. But Marilyn is so charitable here. As Miller, said, “I had no inkling of what to do or say anymore and sensed she [Marilyn] was in a rage against me or herself or the kind of work she was doing. She seemed to be filling with distrust not only for my opinions of her acting [in The Misfits], but also for Huston’s.” Her rage. In herself in Miller. Her distrust."
He had “no inkling” what to say but he has a pretty good inkling regarding her rage ... take a look deeper regarding that rage. And those reservoirs of rage under that beautiful blonde face and body is why she is brilliant in the movie. It’s hard to know what to say. Just let Marilyn release it. So as Monroe screams, in her big, blistering moment in The Misfits, filmed in a haunting, almost unmerciful long shot, making Monroe a speck of blonde hair and denim in the desert while the men observe and comment on her words from afar — Ii’s perfect. And so powerful. She has to scream, almost an invisible creature in the desert and the dust as the men look with differed expressions. She needs to be heard. Monroe hollers:
"Killers! Murderers! You're liars! All of you, liars! You're only happy when you can see something die! Why don't you kill yourself to be happy? You and your God's country! Freedom! I pity you! You're three dear, sweet, dead men!”
She understood those words. Miller must have too. And we do too... We try to understand and we never forget Marilyn.
Why is this so? Why Marilyn? I’m not entirely certain unless it’s because she’s so ever-present that you start to project your own qualities and feelings onto her. The more you study her, the more you excavate her history and personae, the more you find yourself using her as a mirror, and the more you find that she reflects something back at you. It seems silly at times, this obsession, this rendering, this exorcism: she’s just a movie star. Yet “her story continues to grow,” as S. Paige Beatty reflects in American Monroe: The Making of the Body Politic (1995),
"And as it grows it assumes new meanings and possibilities. Those who tell Marilyn’s tale negotiate myriad ways of being in America past and present. The dreams, conspiracy theories, photos, tributes, postcards, and refrigerator magnets run together with increasing speed only to crash in a heap of detritus at the feet of the angel of history. Looking back over her shoulder, Marilyn rushes forward, compelled by the wreckage piling in her wake."
Beatty wrote this beautiful passage almost two decades ago, and Marilyn’s still rushing forward, still looking over her shoulder nearly 20 years later. It’s doubtful she’ll ever stop.
That year of 2012 Marilyn deluge found her gracing magazine covers from Vanity Fair to Playboy, and starring in a new documentary (Love, Marilyn) as well as several new books (Marilyn by Magnum, Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox, and a rerelease of Norman Mailer’s Marilyn, with photographs by Bert Stern from her last sitting). She inspired a storyline on the TV series Smash, a line of MAC makeup (the color collection was referred to as “distinctly Marilyn”), and starred as ghost spokeswoman for a lovingly crafted, surprisingly moving Chanel No. 5 commercial, which used her famous, provocative answer to the question of what she wore to bed: “Just a few drops of Chanel no. 5.” Chanel surprised viewers with Marilyn’s own voice, taken from an interview conducted soon before her death, as if she were speaking from the grave. And Marilyn loomed large, quite literally, when in a 26-foot tall, 34,000-pound statue, “Forever Marilyn,” was moved from Chicago to downtown Palm Springs, her white Seven Year Itch dress fluttering and enormous. Marilyn was not only everywhere that year: she was elevated, in stature and in sophistication.
Now that the anniversary had passed, the flood has slowed but had not let up. In March 2013, a 33-page comic book titled Tribute: Marilyn Monroe, written by Dina Gachman, illustrated by Nathan Girten, and colored by Dan Barnes, was released. The comic covered the star’s sad, glamorous and tumultuous life: her humble, heartbreaking beginnings when she was shuffled through foster homes, her young marriage to Jim Dougherty at age 16, her divorce, her early modeling career, her struggle and rise in Hollywood, her famous marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Miller, her movie roles, and her eventual downfall. It’s a sensitive, celebratory ode to Monroe, with some charming, unexpected details that prove Gachman did her homework: for instance, the fact that teen Norma Jeanne cooked peas and carrots because she liked the colors (something ex-husband Dougherty relayed in an interview), and the story of how Marilyn and her early roommate, Shelley Winters, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, who then crashed into Charlie Chaplin’s tennis court.
I was worried, for a moment, when I read Gachman’s Indiewire essay, in which she admits that, upon receiving the assignment to write about Marilyn Monroe, she didn’t have a “huge amount of respect for her.” But, predictably, extensive reading and research resulted in a newfound appreciation and admiration of her intelligence and talent. In Tribute, you can sense Gachman wanted to do Marilyn justice, and with the fresh, excited perspective of a newly christened devotee. “I really fell in love with her,” she writes.
And new love is refreshing. One would think that this woman — the woman Mailer so eloquently called “more than the silver witch of us all” — had already been represented to death. And yet, she remains, decades after her death, enthralling. Ubiquity may cause some to take Marilyn for granted, or even to become tired of her, but it will never, ever diminish her. Andy Warhol, the first artist to put her in what was, essentially, a comic-book setting, knew it right away. His Marilyn Diptych (1962), created weeks after her death, with its rows of colorful Marilyns juxtaposed with the inkier, moodier black and white Marilyns, is a prescient, powerful work. Placing a picture that already seemed like a relic (a va-va-voom publicity shot from Niagara) into a modern pop art tableau, he exposed her timelessness and her versatility. Each of the 50 duplicate images, on closer inspection, are different.
It’s easy to say that the two halves of the picture represent the two sides of Marilyn: one side the bright star, the other the darker, moodier Marilyn who is fading away. But the work is more surreptitious than that. Warhol seemed to know instinctively that the viewers would project their own thoughts on her image. Helpless victim, powerful sex goddess, movie star, beauty icon, camp icon, cartoon — we take her in many ways, positive, negative, or a mixture of both. Warhol, bless him, catapulted Marilyn into the modern era after she lost the ability to do it herself (and, rest assured, she would have).
What did Marilyn want us to see? Well, of course, we’ll never really know, and that is an enormous part of Marilyn’s power. You can see this in her work in front of the camera, as a brilliant, creative photographer’s model, with, among other greats, Andre de Dienes, Eve Arnold, Milton H. Greene, Bruce Davidson, Richard Avedon, Erich Hartman, George Barris, Bert Stern, Phil Stern, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dennis Stock, Philippe Halsman, Elliott Erwitt, Douglas Kirkland, and Inge Morath (who shot some of the more powerful photos of Marilyn alone and with her husband Arthur Miller as their relationship was disintegrating — and, who, interestingly, became Miller’s next wife). Morath loved photographing Marilyn. Most photographers did. As Eve Arnold said:
"I never knew anyone who even came close to Marilyn in natural ability to use both photographer and still camera. She was special in this, and for me, there has been no one like her before or after. She has remained the measuring rod by which I have — unconsciously — judged other subjects."
Marilyn died young and beautiful, but she still inspires, beguiles, and offers new gifts, like that cheap blanket I encountered in the middle of nowhere.
I hope that blanket is keeping someone warm at night, as Marilyn famously claimed her work failed to do: “A career is wonderful, but you can't curl up with it on a cold night.” But thank God for that career — the movies, the photographs, the life. Even after tragically expiring on that lonely mattress, nude, in her rather humble Beverly Hills hacienda, she never lost her mythic power. In her last picture, The Misfits, Montgomery Clift’s cowboy poignantly and revealingly tells Marilyn’s Roslyn, “Don't you let them grind you up. Hear?” Decades later, we still hear you, Monty.
“Rock ‘n’ roll is an attitude: it’s not a musical form of a strict sort. It’s a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock ‘n’ roll, or a movie can be rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a way of living your life.” – Lester Bangs
“I thought of it as being a kind of attack… Attacking the audience. I remember talking about it at one point and saying, ‘I want people to get infuriated by it.’ I wanted to seduce everybody into the movie and into the style. And then just take them apart with it. I guess I wanted to make a kind of angry gesture.” – Martin Scorsese (Conversations with Scorsese, Richard Schickel)
GoodFellas is music. It’s like a concept album. I don’t know which album specifically – but an album all its own.
And it’s not just a Martin Scorsese mix-tape, it’s something the director manipulated through his vision – as his own production – he laid the tracks. Romance, sex, menace, murder – he thought of the music intertwining in the scenes, commenting on characters and actions, music moving alongside the characters, getting into their heads. He wrote the music into the script before shooting. He was thinking in pictures and thinking in music. And he crafts a kind of magic here that vibrates. It’s the double album with the epic scope of “Exile on Main Street” (even if none of those songs are in the movie – it’s songs from “Let it Bleed” and then Mick Jagger’s solo record “Memo From Turner”) but then of course it’s, among many others, Harry Nilsson and the Cadillacs and George Harrison and Muddy Waters and Tony Bennett and Cream and Derek and the Dominos and The Crystals and Donovan and Sid Vicious singing “My Way” because there is no way that movie is gonna end with Sinatra singing it (no offense to Frank). And that’s just the half of the music. It’s an album I can listen to over and over and never grow tired of it. It pulls a lot out of me – it’s still dangerous, soulful, sexy, scary, innovative, crazy…
This is not to glamorize GoodFellas – the end result of the movie is a brutal, bloody, sad decline – a giant stumble from an illusory life of “brotherhood” and into dishonor, the end of a marriage, the end of an era.
When people think this movie is some kind of guidebook to cool (as cool as many of these guys look – check out Ray Liotta’s sharp-suited, sexy-as-hell introduction, with the camera tilting up adoringly), or the way tough guys should behave, they’re not getting it, they’re not getting what Scorsese pulls on all of us here, they’re not even remembering the ending. It’s Joe Pesci as Tommy’s dark “funny like a clown” humor proving to be deadly – once poor, timid Spider decides to stick up for himself, he’s done for. It’s your wife flushing the cocaine down the toilet because that is the only sensible thing to do and then yelling at her because that’s the only source of income you’ve got. It’s Henry Hill saying this as the movie’s nearing the end:
“If you’re part of a crew, nobody ever tells you that they’re going to kill you, doesn’t happen that way. There weren’t any arguments or curses like in the movies. See, your murderers come with smiles, they come as your friends, the people who’ve cared for you all of your life. And they always seem to come at a time that you’re at your weakest and most in need of their help.”
And Scorsese said as much in Richard Schickel’s “Conversations with Scorsese:” “Everyone paid for the privilege eventually. The danger of the picture is that young people could look at it and think, Hey, what a great life. But you’ve got to see the last hour of the picture when things start going wrong in a big way.” But – Jesus – the goddamn excitement of the movie, even when everything is falling apart, it’s still so breathtaking to watch. And at times, so darkly funny you have to catch yourself. And once you start watching, you can’t turn it off. You’re not skipping to better songs on the album. Every song is great and the structure is so perfect- You’re hooked.
GoodFellas is a gangster picture, of course, but it’s a rock ‘n’ roll movie if I ever saw one. At times it’s, in an oblique way, one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll movies ever made, which may sound hyperbolic because, yes, there are actual, direct rock ‘n’ roll movies that are great (and Martin Scorsese had made a few of them – The Last Waltz, No Direction Home, Shine a Light, George Harrison: Living in the Material World…) There’s also Jailhouse Rock, A Hard Day’s Night, Purple Rain… There’s The Girl Can’t Help It. There’s Performance, Easy Rider (where creepy Phil Spector memorably shows up), Head, Tommy, Quadrophenia, This Is Spinal Tap … the list goes on and on, I am missing many here … But GoodFellas makes me feel like I’m not just inside the lifestyle of a rock star, but inside the songs, the sex, drugs, romance, violence and downfall. The paranoia. The combined power of cast and crew pulls me into its thrall. But as flashy as the characters are in the movie, as they live a rock star life, it’s the creators who are the real rock stars: Scorsese, co-screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker. These artists are swaggering with style, but never style over substance. They, in fact, transmutate style into substance – the sensory/sensual overload is a weapon. And it is meant to be. The characters in GoodFellas are sensualists, some are also sociopaths, but they do indeed have soul – dark as it is, paradoxical as it is.
Pauline Kael, whom I admire, was mixed on the movie and said this, “Is it a great movie? I don’t think so.” (She’s wrong! It’s more than a great movie, it’s a landmark) However, she goes on to say, “But it’s a triumphant piece of filmmaking – journalism presented with the brio of drama. Every frame is active and vivid, and you can feel the director’s passionate delight in making these pictures move.” Passion. Yes. And this passion is so important here. Her piece is called “Tumescence as Style” – I think this is meant as an insult – tumescence – but I love how swollen and engorged the picture is, so alive and scary, ready for sex or on the verge of limp death – shambling towards doom. That is what we return to. And it is through that passionate, sensual style – the excitement of the soundtrack, the colors, the groundbreaking camera moves and “The life” that are such a huge part of it. I was thrilled to see it turn up again in two other Scorsese masterpieces, Casino (epic sibling to GoodFellas), and The Wolf of Wall Street (the scrappy, silk-suited bastard brother to GoodFellas). Watching Scorsese’s virtuosity – the zooms, the dolly/zooms, the freeze-frames, the variable speed shots, THAT tracking shot set to the Spector-produced “Then He Kissed Me.” Scorsese is creating his own Spector-like wall of sound (and image) in GoodFellas, or Brian Wilson producing the album “Pet Sounds” or “Good Vibrations” – the ingenuity of it all, the obsessive attention to detail. But – those sounds and those images in your brain – it’s gorgeous, but it’s got to be hard, too, carrying all that around on your own.
And as I said: It’s not for show, it lends feeling and weight and emotion to the proceedings: It’s like an injection of a drug and cruises, quickly, through your bloodstream. It’s a thrill.
As I write this, I think of Lorraine Bracco’s Karen – and, to my mind, we, the viewer, are Karen – and Henry – we are seduced by the bright lights, the power, the violent power of it all. There’s some part of us that wants to partake, our blood rushes, our heart pumps. Scorsese knows this, after all why do people live lives like this? He sees this as seductive, as dangerous as scary. Scorsese described how he saw these men in his introduction to Nicholas Pileggi’s 25th-anniversary edition of Wiseguy:
“I wanted to stay as close to the facts as we could. There was a natural rise and fall narrative there, but that wasn’t what made it special. It was the places, the restaurants and bars, the food they ate; the clothes, the sense of style; the gestures, the body language, the way of being with one another; the ease with which they committed murder. On the one hand, an immersion in detail that was sensual and documentary at the same time; on the other hand, a forward propulsion that moved with their energy and exhilaration, and then with their paranoia and stone-cold fear.”
Stone cold fear. It all goes bad. But Scorsese sees that you’re attracted to it – until you can take only so much. That’s the thing – we, again, like Karen, start to think… how far would we go with this? She was taken in by the excitement and romance – that date set up with the historic tracking shot into the Copacabana tuned to “Then He Kissed Me” – walking through the service door, through the kitchen, Henry knowing everyone (“Every time, you two! Every time!”) – the table floating in, especially for him, like he’s royalty. Or as Scorsese said, his “Valhalla.” The “Court of kings.”
Karen feels like a princess. It’s so romantic and no one can deny it – even when she asks what he does for a living and he answers “Construction.” We laugh knowing, yeah… that’s not all together true. The song swoons: “All the stars were shining bright and then he kissed me…” Well, that is perfect. Too perfect of course. Move forward in time to Sunday, May 11th, 1980, 6:55 am, the bravura sequence which serves almost as a short film all its own but fits seamlessly within the movie – Harry Nilsson’s fantastic, nervous breakdown of a love song, “Jump into the Fire” starts the ball rolling, excitedly amping up the harrowing, sometimes hilarious proceedings. (All of the songs, from “Monkey Man” to “Mannish Boy” to “Magic Bus” to “Memo From Turner” to “What is Life” have a stream-of-consciousness, mood-altering power, overlapping to underscore, comment and echo Henry’s mind) Henry is seeing helicopters, picking up guns, grabbing and snorting cocaine, meeting his mistress, instructing the babysitter, making sure his brother stirs the sauce, etc. and so on… music is all over the place, but there’s something about Nilsson scream/singing: “We can make each other happy!” almost like a threat. As if screaming is the only way he’ll be able to shout out all the dysfunction to delusionally convince himself these two will ever be happy again. Of course, they won’t be.
Karen’s a romantic to some degree, likely a girl staying up at night as a young woman listening to records, dreaming of love, but also not taking shit from a guy who jilts her (as she does so beautifully when Henry dodges her: “You’ve got some nerve standing me up. Who do you think you are? Frankie Valli or some kind of big shot?!”). In the Scorsese world, she’d be listening to Phil Spector produced songs (which are already dysfunctional and dangerous and yet swooningly romantic – songs written and produced by a psychopath) but there’s a sensuality and danger in those songs there that Scorsese well understands (think of the opening to Mean Streets with “Be My Baby,” a song Brian Wilson said was “like having your mind revamped.”) And then there’s, Scorsese, who, perhaps, like Henry, watched the wise guys from his fire escape ladder, saw the Cadillacs, the shiny sharkskin suits with his own score playing in his head. You feel all of this swirling together – the characters, the creator, the music – and Karen is key to understanding the attraction. The songs and dates and sexy temperaments and crossing the street to pistol whip an asshole, things that we know are red flags, they pull Karen in (“I know there are women, like my best friends, who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.”) And they pull the viewer in too.
But it’s not all fireworks and bravado – it’s something much more totemic, and essential, rhythmic, choral – something in our very life blood. We want to feel alive, on fire, and GoodFellas makes us, at the very least, live vicariously through these cock-of-the-walk men who live life on their own primal terms, just as we would like to. Take for instance, the Billy Batts/Tommy get your shine-box scene. Do you know how many women relate to this moment? The condescension of Batts towards Tommy? How he’s telling him to know his place and then making him feel hysterical for becoming so pissed off about it? (Forget any idea that women can’t understand this picture…) Tommy’s reaction before the murder – we get it, we even relate to it. Of course, until we can no longer and watch the destruction. Like any great dramatic rock band story, there’s a downfall.
The Band breaks up…
Scorsese meticulously maps out each betrayal, he choreographs them: each of them as dazzling a set-piece as the adrenaline-pumping “Side A” tracks he presented us with – the pink Cadillac with two dead bodies laid to rest as Derek and Dominoes’ lush piano coda from “Layla” begins, moving to the bodies in the garbage truck, the cranes jib down and push into a meat-freezing truck, all the way to the frozen body of Carbone. This is a song that makes you want to cry, Clapton and Duane Allman working together here – Allman’s sweet slide guitar and Jim Gordon on piano (I will add here that Gordon also played drums on two other GoodFellas’ tracks – let me know if there are others – Nilsson’s “Jump into the Fire,” and Harrison’s “What is Life” – and in real life, suffered from schizophrenia and murdered his mother. He, like Spector, is currently in prison. Also, reportedly, by some insiders including Rita Coolidge, he stole that piano coda from Coolidge, his ex-girlfriend. The dark resonance to this beautiful song has so many layers it’s kind of mind boggling). And so here we are, looking at all of these sleazeballs dead and feeling it. I mean, really feeling it, beyond who they are because do we really feel for them? I don’t know – it feels more as some kind of sad statement about life. Of what we stupidly reach for. Of our mistakes. Another beautiful moment is when Scorsese shoots a close up of Robert De Niro (cued to the opening chords of Cream’s “The Sunshine of Your Love”) at 32 frames per second so the camera can linger just oh-so-long in the glint of his eye – so he can bronze the moment Jimmy the Gent decides he doesn’t need living partners – or liabilities. He might as well keep the Lufthansa bounty all to himself. Another – Billy Batts is murdered to Donovan’s elegiac, epic “Atlantis,” an unexpected, genius decision that felt so surprising and yet so perfect the first time I saw it, I could never think of the song the same way again. It’s a sad song about a disappearing continent, a disappearing culture. Pesci kills a made man thinking he’s invisible. “Hail Atlantis!”
Scorsese also takes us down with Karen and Henry, we experience (in one of the most suspenseful scenes in the film) Karen almost getting killed with great ease by Jimmy as he offers her “…some beautiful Dior dresses…” for free – if only she would go into a dimly lit warehouse where ominous silhouettes await her. She comes out of this encounter, trembling and joining Henry in the driveway in a perfect symmetrical callback to the moment where Henry, like a focused, fast-walking knight in shining armor met her in the driveway after swiftly beating her offending neighbor to a pulp. This is the end, my friend, and Scorsese makes sure to rhyme with the opening thrills: Henry was getting hundreds of dollars when he was a kid, parking Caddies for the mob and now, when he goes to Paulie he is worth just that: a few hundred dollars. That is all he will harvest.
Oaths of loyalty are overturned, once more, in symmetry – Henry came out of jail, and into that fellowship, with a few words of advice from Jimmy “Never rat on your friends” and now, in the final act, he will.
Loyalty, family, identity and homeland will be foregone. Fingers will be pointed, like muzzles. Each of them, an assassination in court – each of them underlined by the camera pushing in – killing what is left of the life and the lights and the glory. And then Scorsese caps it all off with a POV shot of Tommy – gun straight at us, firing.
You’ve been hooked, lifted and dropped to the ground. And it is then that we figure it out: these songs, this album, like most of the best music, is about heartbreak. “You can jump into the fire, but you’ll never be free.”
"You want to forget us. But you can't do it because I'm not the only one. There's thousands just like me, and there's more hitting the road every day... " In Ed Brubaker's newest Criminal I write about William Wellman's depression-era pre-code, the tough and sensitive and beautiful, Wild Boys of the Road. Pick it up or order it, this Wed, April 24.
Here's my New Beverly piece John Cassavetes' romantic, poignant, emotionally volatile and movie-drenched, "Minnie and Moskowitz -- one of my favorite Seymour Cassel pictures. May the great man Rest in Peace.
“I wish my life was a non-stop Hollywood movie show. A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes. Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain and celluloid heroes never really die.” – The Kinks, “Celluloid Heroes”
Movies set you up. That’s what movie lover Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands) emphatically states to her older friend and co-worker, Florence (Elsie Ames), after the two women spend an evening out watching Casablanca. They drink wine in Florence’s dark little apartment and they talk; they talk like real women. It’s a disarmingly frank discussion between a much older woman with a younger woman about sex, men, doing what they can to please men (who seem to want everything from them, their heart, their soul, as Minnie states, only to learn men really don’t want it when they finally get it), loneliness and… movies. And yet, that “set up,” that fantasy, hangs over Minnie and Moskowitz in a complicated manner that neither damns the siren call of cinema nor negates their delusional pull. Perhaps we need movies. Perhaps we need them to realize we don’t need to believe in them? Perhaps to realize they’re often lovely, but often a lot of lovey bullshit? That’s how beautifully complex writer director John Cassavetes makes Minnie and Moskowitz – it’s just not that simple. Nothing in the Cassavetes universe is that simple.
As Minnie says: “You know, I think that movies are a conspiracy. I mean it…. They are actually a conspiracy because they set you up, Florence. They set you up from the time you were a little kid. They set you up to believe in everything. They set you up to believe in ideals and strength and good guys and romance and of course, love. Love, Florence… So, you believe it. You go out. You start looking. Doesn’t happen and you keep looking…. There’s no Charles Boyer in my life, Florence. I never even met a Charles Boyer. I never met Clark Gable, I never met Humphrey Bogart. I never met any of them… They don’t exist, Florence. That’s the truth. But the movies set you up. They set you up and no matter how bright you are, you believe it. ”
Minnie’s monologue is a potent clarification within a movie full of movies, a movie in which characters go to the movies, talk about movies, even drive past movie marquees. And that the film, set in Hollywood, was a studio picture, a supposed “youth movie” (if Lew Wasserman had his way) and also, according to Cassavetes’ biographers, a movie inspired by the director’s own courtship with his real life wife Gena Rowlands. It’s both a valentine and a warning tale. Don’t believe all that movie mush but don’t deny your feelings either. Don’t harden. Don’t get cynical. Don’t shove it all away. Love is the thing, but how we get there is a frustrating almost violent struggle. It is not gorgeous, suave and smooth, like Charles Boyer; it’s embarrassing, volatile and weird, like Seymour Cassel.
The picture works as a subversion of the romantic movie and the screwball comedy in that the “opposites attract” story is layered with pain, alienation and often at times, violence. The beautiful, blonde museum worker, Minnie, in opposition to the scruffy, long-haired, unpredictable Seymour Moskowitz – a man whom she states straight to him, is not her romantic ideal – could not be any more different. But Seymour is not going to take no for an answer. And that’s where the movie builds and spirals and literally screams into another realm – where the adorable troublemaker woman, Katharine Hepburn of Bringing Up Baby, will win Cary Grant by following him, nearly stalking him and perpetually putting him in peril, becomes the obnoxious almost unlikable man Seymour, who causes fights and arguments at every turn. A man we’re not sure about. Should Minnie even succumb to this guy? Is this healthy? I believe Cassavetes would say yes. After all it’s a version of him (and that marriage lasted until his death). But as a movie, we’re not so sure how this will end up, making it extra poignant and multidimensional. We’re happy they will feel happy, but… will it last?
Well, who knows? And considering Rowlands’ Minnie has been contending with so many messed-up, oppressive and abusive suitors at least Seymour sticks up for her, clumsily, when the moments arise (and they arise a few times, sometimes, his own fault). When she returns home after her night with Florence, a man is in her apartment. That man turns out to be her married boyfriend Jim (played by Cassavetes), whom she thinks she loves. What does he do? He hits her and knocks her on the ground. Why? Because he’s jealous (he justifies his behavior with the “I love you so much I just get jealous” routine.) Of course he’ll go back to his wife (after his wife attempts suicide) and Minnie’s left both depressed and disgusted. Then, in a standout scene, there’s another man (in a complicated scenario, he’s an accidental date) who berates her after she says she’s not interested in him over lunch. In a funny, sad and acerbic moment with a magnificent Val Avery as the never-in-a-million-years potential partner, Minnie listens to all he can give her (he’s very aggressive and nervous about this) only to get hollered at upon rejection: “Blondes. What is it with you blondes? You all have some Swedish suicide impulse? Huh? I took a blonde to lunch once, next think you know she wanted me to kick her… Bleached blonde, 90 dollar a week worker. I just wanted to take you out! Give you an education! Show you there’s a little love and understanding left in the world!”
And that’s where Seymour steps in to save the day. You know, like in the movies. Sort of. He really starts driving poor Minnie insane, even when he takes her to Pink’s (there are so many wonderful Los Angeles details in this movie). Seymour has just freshly arrived in L.A. from New York where his dating life wasn’t exactly aces either. But we learn that he does have at least one thing in common with Minnie – he loves movies too. The picture begins with Seymour watching The Maltese Falcon and also having a conversation with a fellow loner, in this case a stranger in a diner played by the brilliantly bizarre Timothy Carey (who adored working with Cassavetes). Carey is the unforgettably named Morgan Morgan and in a magnificently manic, sweaty scene, talks and yells about a lot of things: Aging, the kind of women he likes, his wife’s death… and again, movies. Seymour asks: “You like movies? I just saw a movie called The Maltese Falcon. You ever see that?”
Morgan Morgan: “Uh-uh. I don’t care anything… I don’t know anything about cinema. I don’t like it. Bunch of lonely people, looking up. Forget about it.
Seymour: You don’t like Bogart?
Morgan Morgan: I only like one: Wallace Beery
See, even Morgan Morgan likes one movie star.
By allowing all of these scenes to unfold with remarkable but very real people, movies and real life intertwine in Minnie and Moskowitz showing both the naturalism and uniqueness of everyday individuals. Real people may not be movie idols, but they’re often interesting and different. And scary. Seymour’s love for Minnie verges on the frightening. He violently threatens, fights, yells and punches things in her bathroom (reminding me of the rage-filled, frustrated love outburst in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love only, Adam Sandler’s Barry Egan explodes with violence from repression whereas Seymour is constantly at full volume). Seymour exclaims: “That’s what happens when you love someone! You punch doors! You make a fool of yourself!"
But there’s a lot of tenderness here too. And, in one scene, while watching Casablanca together. Seymour tells her that she looks like Lauren Bacall from the side. She smiles and leans her head on his shoulder. Movies. When they take a night swim, they return to her apartment and she begins singing the song she sang earlier in the film with loneliness towards Jim: “I love You Truly.” But this time Seymour sings along. It’s a lovely moment and it’s another movie moment. The song is indeed evergreen, many singers have sung it, but I thought of Ward Bond and Frank Faylen lovingly serenading James Stewart and Donna Reed on their wedding night in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Cassavetes loved Capra.
From Ray Carney’s “Cassavetes on Cassavetes”: “I loved Frank Capra when I was a kid. I saw Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and I believed in it. I believed in the people in our country and our society. I believed that the rich were not that bad and that the poor had a gripe, but that people could come together and that made America a better place for me to live in and be proud of. And every Capra film I’ve ever seen showed the gentleness of people. There were corrupt people within that framework, sure. The poor people were always oppressed, but they were oppressed with such dignity and loveliness that they were really stronger than the rich; the rich had to be educated. I grew up with that idea. I grew up on guys that were bigger than life. Greenstreet, Bogart, Cagney, Wallace Beery. Those were my favorite guys. I’d think, God, what a wonderful life they had – to have an opportunity to stand up there in front of people, in front of a camera, to express yourself and be paid for it, and say things and have it mean something to the audience.”
Movies a conspiracy? Is it a wonderful life? Like Capra, John, Gena, Minnie, Moskowitz, Florence and Morgan Morgan, it’s never that easy to answer.
I dig into Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money -- a strangely under-discussed Scorsese featuring a wonderfully weird Tom Cruise before he was doing wonderfully weird and Paul Newman in all of his wizened movie star glory. This is like a samurai movie with pool cues for swords... it's also something of a vampire story ... I love it.
“Back in the 40s this town was crawling with dollies like you. Good looking cokeheads trying their damndest to act tough as hell. I got news for you: they did it better back then. This town doesn’t change. The just push the names around.”
“Jeez, Charles, he doesn’t look so hot to me.” So says Lily Tomlin’s new agey Margo when she first spies Art Carney’s retired private investigator, Ira Wells. She’s scoping him out at a place many young people think guys his age are about to set one foot in – a cemetery. A seemingly anonymous old looking guy in a rumpled suit paying his respects to a dead person and the dead person’s loved ones, Ira walks past crypts on one of those sunny, deceptively cheery Los Angeles days that would feel strangely depressing even if he wasn’t in a cemetery. It feels a little impersonal too, all out in the open with those rows of crypts, and especially as Margo is sizing him up for hire. The camera follows Ira and you can hear a plane passing overhead. It’s an interesting way to introduce Tomlin’s character as she’s introduced to Ira – just her voice and her first impression observation – and then her sleazy-slick pal Charlie (Bill Macy) reassuring her: “Let me tell you kiddo, Ira Wells used to be one of the greats.”
Used to be. We’re still not so sure even after we’ve been introduced to Ira in the opening scene of Robert Benton’s 1977 picture, The Late Show. When we first see Ira, he’s sitting in his little room – not in an apartment we don’t think at first – but what looks like a room in a boarding house. An old movie plays on his TV. This is a lived-in space and it’s nice that the movie takes the time to show us his surroundings: there’s books stacked around and taped up photos of the old days, socks hanging to dry, a messy bed. We’ve noticed from the start that he’s working on a memoir, the title reads: “Naked Girls and Machine Guns: Memoirs of a Real Private Detective.” Well, that’s quite something. Who is this guy? If we had no idea what this movie was about before watching, we’d wonder how much of that title is an exaggeration. Or, is he writing a detective novel? But, right away, we think, this man – this man in this humble, rather touching room – thinks of his life as something to remember (as he certainly should. As anyone should.) And he also thinks that his life is something others should remember, hence, a memoir, or writing based on himself. And he’d like to grab people right away with the pulpy title: “Naked Girls and Machine Guns” (kind of ridiculous and “immature,” as Margo might say, but, hey, it grabbed me too). Obviously, Ira sees glamour in his old, sexy dangerous days, and maybe at this point of the movie, he’s content to drown himself in times past. The present? Watch another old movie and go to the race track.
As he sits in this somewhat sad, sagging room, we see some glamour in a framed photo of a beautiful young woman. An ex-wife? An old sweetheart? Probably not, as the woman is actress Martha Vickers, so memorable in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep. A noir-soaked nod on part of the filmmakers, a fan photo for Ira and, at first glance, a possible old flame of Ira’s. An old flame is not likely but … you never know. Ira may have had an even more exciting past than we will ever know. This is a room of memories. Not cool or flashy or dingy in a hardboiled, black & white, neon-sign-flashing-in-the-window kind of way, but the room of an old man. The room of someone’s grandfather. But. We suspect that this guy doesn’t have any grandkids. Or any kids for that matter. Or, any grandkids or kids that he’s ever kept in contact with, anyway.
His peaceful night of old movies and writing is interrupted when his old partner, Harry (Howard Duff – Duff played Dashiell Hammett’s private eye Sam Spade on the radio, and appeared in Brute Force, The Naked City, Private Hell 36 and While the City Sleeps – he was also married to Ida Lupino for a time) pays him a bloody visit. And then promptly dies in his room. He’s been shot. Ira is both pissed off and heartbroken. Now we see the tough guy Ira once was and still is: “God damn you, Harry! Letting someone walk up and drill you like that. Point blank. Nobody can palm a .45. Jesus Christ. You never had the brains god gave a common dog!” And then we see how heartfelt Ira is too: “Sorry you’re going off, pal. You were real good company.”
Ira starts tearing up.
Harry is the dead man Ira is seeing off at the cemetery, so it makes sense he’s so grumpy from the intrusion of Margo and Charlie. Let the man mourn his friend and partner for chrissakes. And worse, the case seems two-bit to him. You see, Margo wants to hire Ira to find … her cat. (We can’t help but think of Carney’s recent starring role in Paul Mazursky’s Harry and Tonto, though Ira does not give a toss about Margo’s cat). Margo owes a guy 500 bucks and, to settle the score, the guy has stolen her cat – he’s threatening to kill the animal if she doesn’t pay him. “So pay him!” Ira barks at her. Angry at Charlie he walks away muttering about how younger people should respect their elders. He’s sick of this shit, and he’s got other things to do. Like get on the bus. Go to the races. Sleep. Something. But soon enough, Ira knows there’s more going on here if Charlie is involved. In a terrific exchange, while Ira and Charlie are seated for a shoe shine (Charlie, wearing his flashy brown leather jacket, polyester shirt, orange pants and yellow socks, is reading The Hollywood Reporter – there’s ragged reminders of supposedly glitzy Hollywood all over this picture), Ira asks him what the hell is going on here with this “dolly” and the cat. Ira breaks it down: “Somebody puts the freeze on Harry Regan. Next thing I know you show up at Harry’s funeral with some dolly and a song and a dance about a stolen cat and all that hot comedy. What’s it all got to do with Harry?”
Well, something has got to do with Harry in this mess with the cat and “all that hot comedy,” and so Ira is on the case, discussing details with Margo in an amusing scene in her apartment, a space very different than Ira’s living quarters. Cat pictures, lots of plants, tapestries, bright colors, rock posters, there’s a meditation recording playing (she wisely turns it off), Ira shifts uncomfortably in his chair, while listening to her brief life story (wanted to be an actress, gave it up because she couldn’t play the Hollywood game, is now designing clothes, used to deliver items for some guy – probably hot – and split the money with the cat kidnapper. Only, one time she didn’t – here’s where Harry gets involved…). A woman of the 1970s, one who openly talks about her period and her therapist and astrological signs, Margo is a woman who’s seemingly trying anything in Hollywood, not just out of desperation, but out of, what she says, to “go with the flow.” I thought of the scene in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (Altman produced The Late Show) when Elliott Gould’s Marlowe tells bumbling Harry (David Arkin) what his scantily clad neighbors do for a living – they dip candles and sell them in a shop on Hollywood Blvd. Harry exclaims: “I remember when people just had jobs.”
Tomlin makes Margo lovable and smart – not just kooky and stereotypical hippy dippy – and a little mysterious too. For how much younger she is, and all of her more youthful of-the-time speak, does she have any friends, really? Other than the singer she manages? And are they even friends? Surely, she has a whole other life, but as presented here, it seems Charlie is her only friend. You start to understand that Margo, like Ira, is actually lonely. And that Los Angeles can be an alienating town whether you were a once aspiring actress, or you’re a retired private eye. You feel like people don’t care about you anymore. You’re don’t have that “it” factor. You feel disposable. It’s this observation of the fringes of Los Angeles, the “real” people (who may have had extraordinary lives if you bother to ask them about it), that makes The Late Show so intriguing and moving. It’s showing the sleazier side of the city; one in which people are still hanging on – some, by their fingernails. But they’re not all down-and-out, not yet, though one day they might be.
As the complicated mystery unfolds, Ira and Margo grow closer, and his crankiness softens. He seems amused by her, even likes her. And, in one scene at a bar, she tells him that she confessed to her shrink that she thinks he’s cute. He’s not sure what to make of that but the old guy must be flattered. She is thrilled after a high-speed chase in her van and she delights at the idea of them partnering up – a P.I. team. You feel for Margo as she suggests Ira move in to the apartment next door because, well, not only is she thinking of her new venture past designing clothes and managing talent, but she’d like to have this guy closer to her. She likes his company. He tells her he’s a loner. But the movie never turns this into a typical May-December romance – their attraction works as friends, as potential partners, as two different generations who have found something within each other that works, even if they drive each other crazy. And the movie never makes fun of them either. Margo may be a little zany, even annoying at times, but she’s got a heart, she’s got substance. And Ira may be cantankerous, walking around with his bum leg and aching gut, but he’s not always cranky, he’s witty, he finds joy in some things. And he’s got a good soul. Also – he’s still a good shot. In a remarkable scene, Ira aims fire at a car, but before he shoots, he pulls out his hearing aid. Somehow this is not funny, it’s just badass.
Benton (who earlier had co-written Bonnie and Clyde) wrote and directed this picture, his second directorial effort after Bad Company, and before his next picture, the Oscar-laden Kramer vs. Kramer. The Late Show, mostly acclaimed upon release, but underseen, is one of his best, if not his very best (I also like his later work with Paul Newman, Nobody’s Fool and Twilight). This is a gentle character study about the seamier side of Los Angeles that’s also violent, funny and melancholic – not super striking cinematically-speaking, certainly not showy, but deeply felt and nuanced. And the actors are all splendid here including Eugene Roche as fence Ronnie Birdwell, John Considine as the creepy/stupid gold chain-wearing henchman, Lamar, Ruth Nelson as Ira’s sweet landlady Mrs. Schmidt, and a terrific Macy who is both fantastically oily and entirely human.
Carney, famous for his comedic (though touching) role as Ed Norton on the television show The Honeymooners was enjoying a resurgence in the 70s on the big screen (he hadn’t been in many motion pictures before), winning an Oscar for Harry and Tonto and co-starring in Martin Brest’s Going in Style (among other pictures). His performance here is beautiful. He’s rough and gruff and no-nonsense, spitting out hard-boiled dialogue naturally (he’s never forced, he never plays cute, he never fills his character with easy bathos), but he’s also poignant and real. There’s an inner life going on with this guy, one of regrets, surely, one of sorrows, but also one of past excitement. He doesn’t just play this simply as an aging tough guy gumshoe, as Mr. Cool, and that makes his performance even cooler. There’s a wonderful moment where Ira is trudging down the street, dragging his laundry along in a sack (he doesn’t have a car) and Charlie and Margo drive by, asking him where he’s headed. He’s snaps back, “I’m on my way to the Brown Derby to meet Louis B. Mayer! Where does it look like I’m headed?” The humbleness of the laundry, and the idea that he both doesand does not give a f*** about what it looks like, his quick-witted delivery – it’s both charming and moving.
And the ending of the picture is charming and moving, circling back to the beginning of Ira and Margo and where they met – at a cemetery. Another friend is buried, and the two walk along to the bus stop. They sit on a bench that’s advertising the Hollywood Wax Museum: “Mingle with the Stars,” it proclaims. There’s nothing much star-studded going on as they sit on the bench, on a typical smog-choked Los Angeles street, wondering what to do next. But it appears hopeful. Maybe they’ll even partner up. After all, he’s still great at his job – age is experience, in spite of Hollywood’s endless quest for new stars, for youth – and he’s got a connection with Margo. And they’re in Los Angeles, a town, that Ira thinks, even as he grows older, never really changes: “The just push the names around.”
I forgot to mention ... my piece on Michael Curtiz's Angels with Dirty Faces in the Feb. 13 edition of Criminal. Artwork by the great Sean Phillips.
“The character I played in the picture, Rocky Sullivan, was in part modeled on a fella I used to see when I was a kid. He was a hophead and a pimp, with four girls in his string. He worked out of a Hungarian rathskeller on First Avenue between Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth streets—a tall dude with an expensive straw hat and an electric-blue suit. All day long he would stand on that corner, hitch up his trousers, twist his neck and move his necktie, lift his shoulders, snap his fingers, then bring his hands together in a soft smack. His invariable greeting was “Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya say?” -- James Cagney from “Cagney By Cagney”
“You'll slap me? You slap me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize.” – Rocky Sullivan
“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.
When this over-age punk emerges into the light of the city streets, seemingly to do something else (perhaps look for a straight job?) he’s beckoned by one of his criminal friends – wormy Al (Norman Lloyd) – who convinces poor Nick to join in on a payroll robbery. Nick’s worried – he tries to discuss his bad dream, he was running, running, and he’s seeing it as some kind of portent of doom (he’s not so dumb after all). Al brushes it off and talks of his dream – wealth and sunny Florida. They go on that heist and the movie wastes no time in showing it all go to hell very quickly – like so many two-bit crimes do. Nick winds up killing a payroll guard. Shit. He didn’t intend for that. He didn’t want to kill someone today. He’s probably never really wanted to kill anyone, not even his mother (later on in the picture she doesn’t give a damn if he dies or rots). But he’s gotta run. He’s got the case of money (freedom! Yeah, sure) and so he runs and runs. It’s like his dream never really ended. He runs all the way to a public pool, a curious but ingenious place for a quick hide-out, shoving his money in a locker next to the guys with wet towels and swim trunks, Nick looking out of place but tough enough for people to just get out of his way. He’s jittery and worried about his locker and you feel for him, no matter what, something the movie and Garfield hold on to as rough as he gets. You can’t help it.
This guy was born under a bad sign and you know he’s never been treated right. There’s a vulnerability here that’s not forced by Garfield, it’s just there, so much so that even as he changes into trunks and jumps into the water, you feel for him. It’s so normal, but not. And water— it should be cleansing, so refreshing but it isn’t. However, it is there that he meets another worried, sad soul – Shelley Winters’ Peg Dobbs. She’s shy and charmed by this handsome creature offering her such attention in the pool (as usual Shelley has some weird fate with water – see A Place in the Sun, The Night of the Hunter, Lolita and The Poseidon Adventure), and soon she’s bringing him home to family. Poor Peg. She thinks this is a proper pick-up and she landed herself a sexy bad boy (with depth) John Garfield. Even her sweet, welcoming family – Papa Dodd (Wallace Ford) and Mama (Selena Royle) along with kid brother Tommy (Bobby Hyatt) – seem a bit excited that she’s brought over this good-looking stranger, even if he’s sweaty and nervous and a little feral. They even go out for a spell, presumably so she can be alone with him. When they return, the entire family is held hostage.
It’s an intriguing set up – Nick running and holing up with this terrified family (a la The Desperate Hours before that movie was made, and this one is the grittier, better version) – and enclosing himself in further— a trapped rat. The romance, of sorts, between Garfield and Winters just feels tragic and awful – there’s nothing sexy or come hither about it. But as he’s pacing and planning his next move, he grows closer to the family, he does anyway, they really don’t – a nice family, something he’s never experienced. Watching him interact with the brood is fascinating. He threatens, sure, but he also wants to have family time, even setting up a turkey dinner for everyone to eat. The patriarch does not want to. He just won’t. And then Nick gets angry, forceful, hurt, actually. Eat the turkey! (I always think, Jesus Christ people, just eat the goddamn turkey).
So, it’s constant stress and worry and where he is going to go? Run off with Peg? Really? And why does it become increasingly important that this family accept him? Or in any way love him? Well, clearly he desperately needs love – but he has to reject it because, really? By the end of the picture, that’s what he’s screaming about to Peg in a beautifully acted (and shot) sequence as he shoves her down the stairs with him. Love. He’s yelling that she never loved him. Never. With the family turning on him, there’s no love anywhere in this world: “Nobody loves anyone. You, your old man, your family, the cops, my old lady, Al Molin! Garbage. Garbage!”
It’s a powerful scene that kicks you in the gut. You really believe John Garfield. You believe every move he makes here, in fact, and every line on his face says something. Ingeniously shot by James Wong Howe with some powerful deep focus close-ups, particularly of Garfield’s face, you get a visceral sense of dread – you want to wipe the sweat dripping from Garfield’s brow, and his eyes are so expressive and troubled that even when he twists into hoodlum mode, slapping Ford around or scaring Winters, you know it’s not out of mere power (though he wields it over them) but out of absolute panic. And watching this film now, and knowing what happened to its lead and its makers – damn. The experience is extra tragic. Victims to one of cinema's darkest, most shameful moments, the scabrous House of Un-American Activities Committee, Berry was blacklisted, two of the screenwriters, Hugo Butler and an uncredited Dalton Trumbo were blacklisted already, Lloyd was blacklisted for a time (he came back, thankfully, and is still with us) as was Royle. And of course, John Garfield. A serious actor and movie star (he trained in the Group Theater), a progressive man (and patriotic, he helped create The Hollywood Canteen) was called to name names and unlike many other actors, writers and directors, Garfield, both a once young street tough and a man of principle, refused to rat. Hero.
Work was then harder to come by and at the young age of 39, this great actor died of coronary thrombosis. Many speculate an already present heart condition was worsened by the stress caused by the House's inquisition, and that is probably true. Here was one of cinema’s greatest actors who looked fantastic on screen, pure charisma and craft and a precursor to Clift, Dean and Brando. His career with intense, funny, heartfelt, oftentimes roughly romantic and edgy performances in movies such as Gentlemen's Agreement, They Made Me a Criminal, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Body and Soul, Force of Evil, The Breaking Point, Nobody Lives Forever, Humoresque and so many more, was cut short because of the HUAC abomination. He Ran All the Way was his last movie. Watching the final shots of the picture – Garfield’s Nick staggering and slumping into that gutter – Jesus Christ, what a bad dream poor Nick had. Why didn’t anyone listen? Simple answer: no love. Well, we love you Nick. And we love John Garfield. And we’ll never forget him. He didn’t rat and he didn’t run.
10, no, 12 movies... Before January is over -- because past January 2019 seems too far away from 2018 and it's not officially 2019 until February (to me anyway) or to when I remember to stop writing 2018 on everything -- my favorite movies of 2018 so far (not necessarily in order). I haven't seen everything, so more could, or will be added...
Roma (Alfonso Cuarón)
You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay)
The Sisters Brothers (Jacques Audiard)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen)
Talking with Elliott Gould is a unique, enriching experience. He philosophizes, he riffs, he free-associates in an erudite, non-linear way that recalls jazz. Jazz – which is how he describes the movie we’re talking about Robert Altman’s masterpiece, The Long Goodbye, in which he unforgettably stars at Philip Marlowe. I met with Gould recently in Los Angeles to discuss Altman’s seminal picture, and the conversation moved to multiple subjects – Altman, Bergman, Chandler, Bogart, identity, freedom, how you can’t double cross a cat … so many things. It’s never not fascinating talking to Gould…
Kim Morgan: I’ll start with the genesis of the project … Can you discuss the journey of this version of The Long Goodbye?
Elliott Gould: I went to visit my friend David Picker who was running United Artists, I went looking for a job or looking to see if I could produce something with someone who seemed to get me. And David Picker gave me Leigh Brackett’s script. And, at the time, I didn’t know if there was a formal attachment with Peter Bogdanovich. I read the script – and I thought it was somewhat old-fashioned … the word pastiche doesn’t come from here, but, still, I was always interested in the genre. I was told that Peter couldn’t see me in it. He saw, in his mind, Robert Mitchum or Lee Marvin. And I said to David Picker, “I can’t argue with them, they’re like my Uncles. But we’ve seen them, and you haven’t seen me.” And then out of the blue I got a call from Robert Altman to whom United Artists had given the material. Altman called me from Ireland where he was finishing Images with Susannah York. And Altman said, “What do you think?” And I said, “I always wanted to play this guy.” And Altman said to me, “You are this guy.” And that was it.
KM: What made Altman decide to get involved …
EG: Well, we didn’t do McCabe & Mrs. Miller (You know I couldn’t do it at that point) and still McCabe & Mrs. Miller didn’t suffer, although I understand that wasn’t so easy for Bob to work with Warren [Beatty]. Bob had said to me, at that time, “You’re making the mistake of your life.” And I said, “Well it’s not my life yet and you can’t take away that I was your first choice for this and someday I will look at this and say, wow what a masterpiece and you wanted me to play it.” Meanwhile Warren and Julie were great. But, Bob and I had done so well with MASH and I guess it was just such a blessing because I was not only out of work, I had gone too far… being that I was producing. But I didn’t understand limitations with the business. I didn’t understand realty with the business. But Bob was certainly perfect for me and we really did great. I thought we might have done perhaps a Raymond Chandler every three years. Just to do the whole thing…
KM: It was already an iconic character but you made it iconic in your own interpretation … but it doesn’t sound like you had any trepidation with this character…
EG: No! Bob gave me so much freedom…. When we [with Steven Soderbergh] were all shooting Ocean’s Eleven, and it was 1:20 in the morning and we were set to do the scene where George Clooney tells everyone what it’s going to be, and I had a little scene with Matt Damon and all of us – the whole group was there – and just as we’re ready to shoot at 1:20 in the morning, Steven Soderbergh walked up to me and said “the ink on the face…”
KM: Yes…
EG: You’ve heard this and you know this. “Was the ink on the face an improvisation?” I’m ready to do my scene with Matt Damon, hit my marks and play my part, and I thought, what are you talking to me about? I have to wake up to respond to your question. And then we said, at the same time, “The Long Goodbye” – I said, “Yes, the ink on the face was an improvisation … was that behavior acceptable to you?” And Stephen said “Yes, but it was so unexpected.” I [told him] that exhibited the kind of confidence and trust that Bob had in me… Here’s this fascist cop who was questioning the character of Marlowe in this little room which was being observed from a two-way mirror, right? I thought in terms of the irreverence of the character and the core, the substance of somebody who will not deviate when it comes to pure nature and justice and what we need to believe in… And the cops saying, “What are you doing?” And I’m saying “I have a big game.” (You know in football they put like charcoal under their eyes to take the glare away) … and just being totally irreverent to the authority that is [pauses]… trying to build a wall on our Southern Border. It’s the same thing…
KM: Yeah …
EG: Yeah, it’s the same thing. Yeah. And then I went even further and put it on my face and started to do Al Jolson … I said, “So once I committed to putting ink on my face… If I had stopped and hadn’t continued and followed through and done it, it would have taken us about twenty-five minutes to clean me up and as you know, movies are about time management in relation to resources. Everything to me is about nature. Everything is about nature. And it exhibited Bob Altman’s confidence in me. I could weep, you know. And his trust in me.
KM: That he let you really improvise.
EG: More than that… because I know when we did MASH, he said to me, a couple of times, and I don’t like the way it sounds but it’s true, “I can’t keep my eyes off of you …I don’t know what you’re going to do.” And I said, “Then don’t look at me. I’m always in character. My presence here once you have a camera and you’re working, I’m always in character so don’t kill what I’m doing until you see it in consort with everyone else. Then, if it doesn’t work, you tell me and I’ll change immediately.” And the next day, Bob came up to me and said, “You’re right.” Bob always had a problem with authority. So, did I… With The Long Goodbye, I felt it was, the first picture for me. The first picture for me…
KM: Really?
EG: Well, I remember each up to The Long Goodbye…
KM: Yes, we talked about all of the movies leading up to this and how important they were to you …
[Gould discussed all of the pictures leading up to The Long Goodbye, what he learned, and the experiences associated with them, from his first picture, William Dieterle’s The Confession, also called Quick, Let’s Get Married, to William Friedkin’s The Night They Raided Minsky’s to Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a movie in which Gould said it was where he discovered his relationship “with the camera and that the camera is my first friend. It doesn’t lie to me, it doesn’t tell me do, or don’t, it just reports. It’s objective. Everything was subjective to me. That was a breakthrough for me. That was a great opportunity for me.” To, of course, MASHwith Altman, and how he was first offered Tom Skerritt’s part but said to Altman, “I could do it. I have a very musical ear, I could do it. But this guy Trapper John, if you haven’t cast it. I got what that character is. Even if it’s a certain color, a certain energy.” And then Altman gave him the part. He did Move and I Love My Wife. He did Richard Rush’s Getting Straight. And then he starred in and produced Little Murders, directed by Alan Arkin, based on the Jules Feiffer play… And then Ingmar Bergman’s The Touch – “I can’t say no to Ingmar Bergman, I want to know if I can act” – which was a meaningful experience for him – to work with Bergman and to talk to Bergman about many things – “In recent times I had seen an article which quoted Ingmar Bergman as saying I was difficult to work with. And that wasn’t true, nor is it true. But Ingmar is no longer living. Fortunately, there was an interview with Dick Cavett when The Touch was going to be released, and I couldn’t attend it, which was a disappointment to us… but Ingmar said on the Cavett show, which is on YouTube, that the day I showed up it was evident to him and his whole family, the crew, that I was a team player.” We led up to his ill-fated project A Glimpse of Tiger. So much interesting stuff – I will try to work on a second part of this interview to dig in deeper regarding all of those movies before and beyond The Long Goodbye…]
EG: The Long Goodbye was like a movie, movie, this was like in relation to movies I had seen growing up. And what with Altman giving me the kind of freedom he gave me, and for to have played a classic character out of time and place, it was like, in a way, a first movie for me…The Long Goodbye was the perfect vehicle for me to live in… I had come back from working with Ingmar Bergman [on The Touch], to do another picture, which was an error. There’s no shouldas… Once I could see that mostly people were in it for mostly what they could get out of it – and I don’t have necessarily a false value – but a great deal of what I could bring to it. You know, become a part of something. And so, that picture didn’t get made. But I started it and I didn’t finish it and I had to pay for it… and it was thought that I was nuts. And I must have been a little nuts in terms of not fulfilling my commitment to a picture…
KM: Oh, this was the project…
EG: It was called A Glimpse of Tiger and it emanated into What’s Up, Doc? which had nothing to do with what I was talking about [A Glimpse of Tiger]. My picture was like The Little Prince in urban American now, and the prince was this young girl, played by Kim Darby. They let me cast Kim Darby and they fought me all the way with Kim Darby and we couldn’t find anyone. And I remember meetings that I had … but that’s a different story… So, then I’m not working. I can’t work and they, being the establishment, without me being examined, they collect an insurance policy based on me being nuts. And I wasn’t. But in terms of understanding what I was doing and what I was trying to do, I didn’t quite know boundaries and limits. I thought I had earned the right to create. I thought I had earned the right to be in charge. We already made Little Murders I could do almost anything and… I had a very fertile potential to produce. I know chemistry in terms of nature and what worked together and there’s nothing more important and therefore, I just need writers… so I had no work. And then David Picker gave it to Robert Altman and here we are…
KM: I read that Altman had people read “Raymond Chandler Speaking”… which brings me to the beginning of the picture with your cat, a famous scene, which I love, and is an extension of Chandler because Chandler loved cats. I read that Altman said the cat is key because you can’t lie to a cat.
EG: Well, sure that was Altman! Altman said to me before we started to shoot, he told me the first sequence with the cat and the food. He said, “That’s the theme of the picture.” And that’s all Altman. It’s all Altman…
KM: And then the line throughout the movie is “It’s OK with me…” which was you …
EG: Altman gave me that freedom. It’s always the way I am. That was the first day. What that reflected to me was, I don’t necessarily know what anything means, I don’t know what’s going on and here we are after having awakened and trying to replace my cat’s food with something concocted. And again, this scene is not in it – the first day of shooting, we went to the CBS Radford Studio because we wanted an office building where a lot of different, like if you’ve got dentists, or a lot of different private eyes, or even Sam Spade at one point – and when I’m there and I say “It’s OK with me” … meaning, like I don’t understand what you’re doing or what any of this means, just don’t tread on me. And think what you think, do what you want to do, but I’ll just go my own way.
KM: It’s such a wonderful refrain throughout the movie…
EG: I had a little house in the beach… and Altman hired a skywriter to fly over my house and write, “It’s OK with me, too…”
KM: Really?!
EG: Yes, isn’t that sweet?
KM: Yes, that’s incredible. Do you also believe that by the end of the film that it’s not OK for Philip Marlowe?
EG: No, it wasn’t. He killed him [Terry Lennox]. No, it’s not OK.
KM: The setting is that present – the early 1970s Los Angeles, which is so much different than now, in Los Angeles, but… in some ways, not entirely different…
EG: No, it’s not different than now. That’s the title for the sequel that I’m still interested in making – It’s Always Now [an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s story, The Curtain]. The Chandler Estate gave me the rights to (I no longer have them) The Curtain… this [Chandler’s story] was pre-The Big Sleep and pre-The Long Goodbye. The character’s name [is different] and they said I could be Philip Marlowe… The character is much older but he still has the same spirit and the same mind and the same focus… I did a little work with Bob on it, I’ve got a first draft screenplay from Alan Rudolph… It’s a very interesting project, and you can see where The Big Sleep came from…
KM: Working with Sterling Hayden – he’s so raw and touching.
EG: You know the history was that Bob cast Dan Blocker and then Dan Blocker died and it was almost the end of the picture. And then I thought about John Huston, but then Bob cast Sterling Hayden. And I asked to meet Sterling Hayden, I just wanted to sit alone with him. And in a dark room in the house that Bob had been living in…
KM: The house in Malibu…
EG: Yes, which was the Wade House [in the movie]. I was in a room like this, and he had recently come back from Ireland where he had some work with R.D. Laing… and so I knew that Sterling knew that I knew that Sterling knew that I understood him… So, at one point when we were in Pasadena working at the sanitarium where we find Sterling Hayden in that cottage that he’s in with Henry Gibson (you know, that specific cottage was where W.C. Fields lived the last part of his life…) And when Altman would be stressed… Sterling would say to me, I don’t know how he phrased it exactly, but, “Is the old man giving you a hard time?” something like that… And I said, “A little bit.” It didn’t have to do with the work but it probably had to do with my response to what Bob needed, and I’m always looking for something. And Sterling said, “Just vamp.” [And] what does vamp mean? It means, to hold time, meaning, when you vamp with music you hold time.
KM: Sterling Hayden and you … your chemistry together is beautiful.
EG: And the kind of man that he was! That scene where we’re sitting down and [having the drink] … Bob had designed it so that the camera is circling the two of us. And we couldn’t even know whether it would be able to be edited, but I didn’t have any doubt, and I don’t think that Bob has doubt, and so we did that with the aquavit.
KM: And part of it was improvised?
EG: I knew there were certain pieces of information that had to be in that scene so I could help with that [improvising], otherwise it was just about getting to know and see this relationship between these two different generations of men, and that was pretty amazing…
KM: I know you loved Hayden – was Hayden during the whole shoot, working with Altman – was he fine all during the production?
EG: Yes. [Gould nods a decided yes]. He hit me in the ear. When he comes home the night before he goes to sleep and I’m there, the “Marlboro Man,” he hit me on the ear – it really hurt. He really gave me a whop on the ear. Oh my god. It’s there in the picture too. I almost saw stars. Sterling was fabulous. Just fabulous…
KM: His frustration, his anger is so palpable, his drunkenness so real, it’s just such a powerful performance…
EG: Oh yeah, I sometimes think about establishing or seeing what it would take to establish a new category, several new categories at the Academy for performances that were not only overlooked, but not recognized, and his would be one.
KM: I like the little touches of old Hollywood in the film kind of living there on the periphery…
EG: Of course! Bob does that in the beginning and the end. And then, the end, “Hooray for Hollywood…”
KM: The security guard who does the impressions, he is so lovable.
EG: Oh, I know. He’s so charming! I wouldn’t have used the car… that was my car… the 1948 Lincoln Continental Convertible. I had won a bet once, and I don’t gamble anymore, as much as I love to win, I hate losing more and there’s nothing I need that I can win… I won the money to buy that car. And Bob used it. I didn’t even charge them for it. But I wouldn’t have used that car. I thought it was sort of obvious, I must say. It was called the Last American Classic. And John Wayne had one earlier. It was green. I gave it to Harrah’s Museum and they re-painted it and it’s there in the museum right next to the car that James Dean used in Rebel Without a Cause… It all connects. You know, it all connects…
KM: The casting is so wonderful and unexpected throughout – two of the main actors had never acted before…
EG: Yes. Jim Bouton. And Nina van Pallandt. She was a singer…
KM: And then, Henry Gibson – this was his first time working with Altman and he was so perfect…
EG: Henry Gibson. Yes, he was great. He was really scary in it. A really scary character.
KM: And Mark Rydell is also so scary in it…
EG: Oh, he was fabulous in the movie…
KM: As you obviously know, Rydell, a director… and he directed you…
EG: Yes, in Harry and Walter Go to New York…
KM: And I read that Rydell and Larry Tucker – who wrote with Paul Mazursky as you also know – that Tucker and Rydell re-wrote the Marty Augustine character …
EG: Larry Tucker and Paul Mazursky – they wrote I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. And then they did some other pictures. They did Alex in Wonderland. They were pleading with me to do Alex in Wonderland but I wanted to do Little Murders. And again, not to be sorry… I have no regrets…
KM: And Little Murders is such a great movie! I love that movie.
EG: Me too. I know. Oh, I know. But… I would have met Fellini…
KM: I’m curious about how the movie, the way it was shot, the camera movement, all of that, and how all of the actors flowed together as you were working…
EG: I read Luis Bunuel’s autobiography and there’s a story in it about when someone asked him to do a movie. And he asked, “How much do you have for the movie?” And at the time they said $75,000 and he thought, and then said, “I’ll do your movie for what you have for it, but you’ve got to stay away, I don’t want anyone else there thinking. No one else can be involved. It’s just us.” Do you know what I mean?
KM: And so, was Altman like that on the set – and with you?
EG: He said to me, when he called me in Munich another time, to take over what we thought Steve McQueen was going to do in California Split, he said, “I know if I give you a nickel, you’ll stretch it more than anyone else would consider.” And, well yeah. We want to work, we want to continue to work, but we have to be free…
KM: Did you have the most freedom with Robert Altman? It sounds like you did, of all of your directors you worked with, that he gave you that freedom…
EG: Well, I took it. I took it… Altman needed so much freedom to do what he did. I breathed it in. I took it… On The Long Goodbye, he told me I scared him. In terms of being free, and in terms of adapting to where we were at. Because even with the drowning scene and having waited for the high tide, Altman said to me, “Do you think we can do the two days work in one night?” Being that the first part was Sterling [when, in the movie, he’s walked out to the water], and the next was me running down, and the next part was waiting for the high tide, and then me going in there and coming out – and I nearly drowned. I literally nearly drowned… I had been playing basketball all day, and then I ran down to the beach several times… I thought, “You can’t go down, Elliott, there’s no one here to bring you back up.” And I was able to bring myself up and be able to go to her [Nina van Pallandt] and she was acting right there. She did great, she was perfect. And then we had to do it again, and I was really scared. And so, I could act a little more. I didn’t realize this was the mother ocean. And, I was aware that I was out of control, and if I went down, I was really close to drowning, because there was no one there with me… And I said, we could do it. Because I might have had shots with the sun coming up – in the scene where I talk about Ronald Reagan and throw the bottle of liquor – and I can see that people are lying – the police are playing parts, and she’s lying. And also, something interesting, if you want to look at it and analyze it, that Altman gave me all of that room, you know, all of that room. And … we did [the scene] three times… and we could have done it [again], but Altman came to me and said, “I’m tired. We can’t do it.” And I was all ready to do the two nights together. But it worked. But I would have loved to have seen sunrise in it. I would have loved to have seen the light change. Using light in relation to our mind.
KM: The movie is referenced in other films, you see the influence – like The Big Lebowski and you feel it in Inherent Vice… you see how much people return to the picture…
EG: It’s an American jazz piece… Sometimes I’ll study a generation later [in life]. Like I started to study High Sierra, and [John] Huston wrote that… Yeah. Ida Lupino. And I remember seeing it at the time. Now that I understand myself, and I could see through it. Bogart was fucking perfect… You talk about things that hold up. I mean, I watched Casablanca [again], not to be sentimental. I don’t want to deny it – if it touches me, it touches me. It means I’m still living.
KM: But no one’s ever been able to do you – you are so one-of-a-kind, I don’t think anyone could really emulate your performance, there’s no one like you.
EG: I would rather not ever go there… I should really go out and find all of the books on tape that I did [reading] Chandler, I think I did all of them – but I don’t want to go there. I find a personal identity in that. But it’s very hard to do. Because you have this character. This guy. I mean, he’s, it’s, a unique character. There’s no ego there…
KM: No, and it’s not a stereotypical type of masculinity either…
EG: Well, whatever masculinity is…
KM: And how Marlowe talks to himself, your interior monologue that you’re vocalizing…
EG: Always! Don’t we all have that?
KM: There’s such alchemy with this picture. Did you know you were making something so masterful, so magical while you were doing it?
EG: No, no you can’t… And sometimes we hope for things, and we don’t necessarily know what we hope for. We hope to do well enough to validate continuing to work. I’m sure that there have been some pictures as far as seeing some magic, or seeing something fuse; seeing different ideas fuse… But the idea… it’s Altman. It’s Altman. It’s Altman’s chemistry. And of course, me, being in the right place at the right time … It’s so close to me. It’s so close. It really is. I mean, again, Bogart was sublime. Dick Powell – he’s interesting, I look at some of his work, he’s a very fine actor and director and smart business man. And then you had several people, and even afterwards, like Robert Mitchum, and I love Mitchum… But, no, no, I’m glad Bob and I made the one. And… it breathes.
There’s got to be a morning after If we can hold on through the night We have a chance to find the sunshine Let’s keep on looking for the light
It’s New Year’s Eve on the SS Poseidon. And New Year’s Eve is often horrible. I’m sorry, I’m sure there are many who love New Year’s Eve and that is a wonderful thing, but good god it can be depressing. And especially at a party – crammed in a room (or on a boat) with people you’re supposed to be having a good time with. But there’s also something a bit mysterious about how woeful it can be. It’s not like you really want the same year to continue, not even if it was a great one, we all need a refresh of course, so that is the hope – a fresh start, a new beginning and, in some more dramatic circumstances, light out of the darkness. As Maureen McGovern sings, “There’s got to be a morning after…”
And that can happen for people. People who have permanently good attitudes, loads of self-motivation, or good luck. But with time and wisdom (and cynicism), you often know the next day, the New Year, really makes no damn difference from the day before. Unless you make it so (for yourself – for your community, or for the world, that’s something else). So here come the reflections about your life, which can fill you with melancholy or anxiety. And here come the resolutions. But will you empower yourself to even start them? Will you not, as Gene Hackman’s The Poseidon Adventure preacher testifies, “pray to God to solve your problems!” But instead, “Pray to that part of God within you! Have the guts to fight for yourself!” Maybe.
Or maybe you need an enormous push – a holler from a malevolent God, or a mischievous Devil (your choice), or, you need to take an absurdist journey through the looking glass. Or maybe you just need to freak yourself out. That all sounds so dramatic – it doesn’t need to be that dramatic, not in real life, and so this is why cinema is so glorious. You can, in the Ronald Neame-directed, Irwin Allen-produced, John Williams-scored, The Poseidon Adventure, live through all of these other people’s lives – their and hopes and their dreams and their freak-outs on New Year’s Eve. And enjoy the hell out of it. You can forgo a party or watching the ball drop or falling asleep early on the couch and experience the surreal hellscape of this aging luxury liner. There they go, sliding sideways across a dance floor, screaming. Here they are, terrified, hanging upside down from a table in a 1970’s party pantsuit. They’re not taking down the Christmas tree this year, they are, instead, climbing up it.
The passengers of the Poseidon, including four past Oscar winners, are facing the fight of their lives in an otherworldly realm of water, fire, explosions, and shimmering holiday tinsel. It’s ridiculous, it’s bizarre, it’s weirdly beautiful, it’s silly, it’s exciting, it’s, at times, incredibly human. You want a memorable New Year’s Eve? Or at least a pleasant kind of drunkenness? Watch Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine yell at each other about the right thing to do stuck in a capsized ship and watch Borgnine usually (always?) be wrong about it. No wonder, even beyond the whole disaster he’s found himself in, he’s often in a rotten mood.
And from the start, he’s sour – even as none of the sliding-across-the-dance-floor or hanging-upside-down has happened yet (the only one aware of danger is Leslie Nielsen, the ship’s captain, and his immediate crew). But Borgnine’s cop, Detective Lieutenant Mike Rogo, is, from the first scene, dealing with his sick wife, Linda (Stella Stevens), who is also upset. She’s often cranky and snips at him (“To love, dummy” she says later during a toast), but he clearly loves her. She’s a former prostitute (it’s discussed a few times after this moment – she’s worried someone on board recognized her – so much for new beginnings) and he’s bickering with her about suppositories (he doesn’t know where you put them – she does). He’s also annoyed with the doctor for taking so long, but, a portent of doom – three quarters of the passengers aboard the Poseidon are sick. New Year’s Eve is already starting off terribly.
On a more positive note, there’s sweet Belle Rosen (Shelley Winters) and her husband, Manny (Jack Albertson), a loving, retired couple who are traveling to Israel, thrilled that they’ll finally meet their grandson. Belle notices the older bachelor James Martin (Red Buttons), speed-walking on deck, an activity that looks wobbly and weird – it seems like he’s both running away from something or towards a goal he may never reach (it’s hard not to think of Buttons’ marathon dancer in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – and Jane Fonda’s Gloria dragging his dead body on her back across the dance floor). Belle thinks the health-conscious haberdasher is lonely. “That’s why he runs. So he won’t notice,” she says. God, what a bummer, Shelley, and on New Year’s Eve of all times. But she’s right.
Then there’s the rogue preacher, Reverend Frank Scott (Gene Hackman, who was in two great, very different pictures than this one –Cisco Pike and Prime Cut – the same year Poseidon was released), whose gotten in trouble with his church for, I suppose, being so rebellious, and is being sent to Africa. He thinks that’s just fine as he’s the best kind of reverend, he says: “Angry, rebellious, critical, a renegade. Stripped of most of my so-called clerical powers. But l’m still in business.” (He sounds like Royal Tenenbaum at that moment) We don’t know how to feel about him, he seems a little unstable, and he is going to become the hero of this movie, which is fantastic – a refreshing change of pace. He’s certainly not typical, he’s not square-jawed boring, this is going to be interesting…
He is full of New Year’s Eve assuredness and an almost creepy, all-powerful positivity towards the future. His punishment is, in fact, to him, “Freedom! Real freedom. Freedom to dump all the rules and all the trappings. And freedom to discover God in my own way!” He’ll discover something like God soon enough.
Later on, he’ll preach to a group of passengers – including a young woman (with a resourceful gown, we’ll learn that night) that he’ll bond with, Susan Shelby (Pamela Sue Martin), who is traveling with her ship-curious younger brother, Robin (Eric Shea), and the sensitive singer Nonnie Parry (Carol Lynley), who will form a connection – traumatized – with James Martin. The Reverend is sermonizing that God wants “winners, not quitters.” And he will, indeed, bring up, quite forcefully, New Year’s resolutions:
“So, what resolution should we make for the New Year? Resolve to let God know that you have the guts to do it alone! Resolve to fight for yourselves and for others and for those you love. That part of God within you will be fighting with you. All the way.”
He really seems to vibing something here, like perhaps a major catastrophe (or maybe he was really upset by the state of the world, hated Richard Nixon) and that is surely the point, but some of this preaching seems like it would creep out half of the ship. But Hackman is so good, so angry/charming, that he makes this guy’s weirdness riveting. I’d go see him preach if I were on that boat. I’d sit there all entranced and scared like Red Buttons in his natty scarf hoping his multiple doses of vitamins keep him virile enough to find a girlfriend or a wife or survive a 90-foot tidal wave. New Year’s Eve is awful anyway. Why not?
Once we get to the New Year’s Eve celebration, we’ve now met a likable waiter named Acres (Roddy McDowall), who is digging the young people and their music, and Arthur O’Connell as an older Chaplain who seems a bit disturbed by Hackman’s iconoclastic Reverend. Everyone’s celebrating in the grand, holiday-decorated ball room where the Captain doesn’t sit at his table for long – he and the greedy Linarcos (Fred Sadoff) must leave as there is an emergency (the undersea earthquake and all) – and Reverend Scott will take over as Captain. At the table anyway. But then he already seems like he has taken over. And then… the boat, described by the purser as “a hotel with a bow and a stern stuck on,” will capsize. Spectacularly so.
It’s an incredible, strangely beautiful, artfully composed sequence. The passengers, adorned in bright gowns and suits with frills and funny hats, fall to one side, tumbling over chairs and tables and musical equipment. They keep rolling along with the boat as its turned over by the tidal wave – the floor becoming the ceiling. They slide on a surface strewn with colorful New Year’s Eve confetti, trying to grab on to anything, desperately attempting to hang on to loved ones. The tables now have screaming topsy-turvy passengers clinging to them as they hang in the air. It’s insane, wonderfully surreal – Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole by way of Hieronymus Bosch mixed with a Max Ernst collage. The Day of the Locust’s Tod Hackett could paint it in his mind – and go crazy for sure – or maybe Shelley Winters would save him.
And from then on, the movie does not stop. These passengers, who really become only the handful of survivors/movie stars (all mentioned above) – the ones who climbed up that Christmas tree (save for Roddy McDowall who was already at the top, and then poor Arthur O’Connell stays down with all those who sided with the by-the-book purser instead of the rebel Reverend), will work through an unearthly quagmire within this upside-down abyss. They are moving up, from the top of the ship to the bottom (insane), to the outer hull, and they climb and crawl and swim through various stages of hell. Belle, who is constantly worried that her weight will impede her, will perform her heroic, sacrificial swim (she was once the underwater swimming champ of New York) and it’s quite moving. People argue – Rogo and the Reverend, Rogo and Linda, some are braver than others, some nearly lose their minds, and some of them die. And they’re all being led by a Reverend who is so challenged by God that, in his last act, he screams to the big man upstairs: “How many more sacrifices? How much more blood? How many more lives?! Belle wasn’t enough! Acres wasn’t! Now this girl! You want another life? Then take me!”
The Reverend, who has not wasted any time praying, something he seems not to believe in (for good reason in this case, he’s got to keep himself and everyone moving, what good would praying do?) is fueled with an anger at a blood-thirsty God that feels damn righteous at this point. If God set up this entire catastrophe as a test – why? Why did brave Shelley Winters have to die a watery death again (remember A Place in the Sun, The Night of the Hunter, the rain storm in Lolita)? Yes, I am blurring Shelley Winters with Belle, and with everything else she’s played (am I forgetting another cinematic water death?), but this is what The Poseidon Adventure does to me. Why take out any of these people?
And more about God – God is all over this picture, and yet, it really feels like God isn’t around much, not any sort of benevolent God. This God is furious. This God does not give a good goddamn while they’re twisting through this upside-down underworld of a ship. (Maybe a kinder God helped with the Christmas tree?) Or, to go further, there is no God – how could one not feel that while being so tested and enraged by a higher being? There is a Devil, likely. And maybe nature is God. (Maybe Gene Hackman’s Reverend is really getting to me…)
Well, wait a second… perhaps there is something more powerful up there to believe – a divine intervention. Near the closing of the movie, when they reach the end of the line, their only chance out of this netherworld, Rogo hollers out, “My God, there is somebody up there. The preacher was right! The beautiful son of a bitch was right!” (That would be a terrific bible verse – someone should work on that) Rogo once angrily accused the Reverend of thinking that he, himself, was God. Now Rogo may think that “beautiful son of a bitch” was some kind of Christ figure.
But does everyone believe now? I don’t know. Certainly not all of the viewers. The movie’s power is from how punishing and surreal it is – not entirely spiritually, even if religious allegory is all over the picture and surely meaningful to some – there’s something more potent about it being a crazy, screaming spectacle intertwined with all of this God business – it moves into another realm, one of wonderful epic absurdity. It spins through your brain like those Alice in Wonderland passengers rolling through the ball room in loud clothing with confetti and pianos flying everywhere. It manages to be both mind-numbing and invigorating, inane and inspiring. Is that possible? Sure it is. Life can be like that. And the movie is strangely satisfying. What you might need as the year comes to a close. What you might need on a day before the morning after.
“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 Lillian 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 – who will order them, what will they cost, which material will be chosen, colors, colors are so very important, who will design them, will it benefit the patients, will it help Gloria Grahame’s marriage, will it ruin her marriage, will those drapes ruin everyone, will people die – are the dramatis impetus of the entire movie. It sounds absurd – drapes – and at times it very much wonderfully is, but it’s an absurdity rooted in a reality in which something as supposedly inconsequential as window dressing pulls out heightened emotions in various people – people at vulnerable stages in their lives. Focusing on those damn drapes, something to prettify a room, to obscure outsider view, to showcase taste, it is also a focus that could create anxiety and depression. It also works to detract a person from their actual problems. I’m fine! It’s the drapes!
What’s powerful about The Cobweb is that the coverings always unmask rather than obscure – which speaks to the filmmaker as well – color, patterns, furnishings, design were important to Minnelli, who shoots these details with such intensity you can practically feel the hues vibrating from the scene (Some Came Running, The Bandwagon, Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, Two Weeks in Another Town, are some examples – his Vincent Van Gough biopic, Lust for Life, was reportedly his favorite picture, not a surprise for a few reasons, some being Van Gough’s bold colors, thick strokes and then, his madness). In The Cobweb, swatches of vivid drapery fabric sitting on a table between two characters, indeed just the word “swatch,” has never felt so lacerating and intense. Whenever Gloria Grahame holds a swatch in her hand or tosses it on the bed, I get nervous. It’s not crazy to think this material would attract Minnelli. As Mark Griffin wrote in “A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life and Films of Vincente Minnelli”:
“For a decor-obsessed director like Minnelli, being handed a story in which interior furnishings play a pivotal role must have seemed like a gift from the cinematic gods.” ‘The Cobweb was a psychological story that appealed to me greatly,’ Vincente said. ‘The thing that attracted me was that it wasn’t about the inmates, although the inmates happen to be strange. It was about the doctors and the foul-ups in their lives… It was so rich in possibilities that I volunteered to direct.’”
And he fulfilled all of those possibilities directing this movie (in Cinemascope, gorgeous Eastman Color, cinematography by George J. Folsey, a 12-tone score by Leonard Rosenman), with a cast that’s so star-heavy, you expect an Irwin Allen earthquake to shake up such icons. Nope, all Minnelli needed were drapes: Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Charles Boyer, Gloria Grahame, Lillian Gish, Oscar Levant, Adele Jergens, Fay Wray, newcomer John Kerr (Minnelli originally wanted James Dean for the role) and Susan Strasberg inhabit this tony asylum – the real one and the elegant homes and beatnik apartments – housed by the clinic workers and their wives. It’s fitting then, that the movie opens with the young, troubled artist, Stevie (Kerr) running down a road, only to be picked up by a doctor’s wife, Karen (Grahame), the neglected, kittenish and often angry stunner married to Widmark’s Dr. Stewart McIver. Their discussion? Color: Stevie says: “Red and green… Derain died last fall in a hospital. You wouldn’t know who he was … He died in a hospital in a white bed, in a white room – doctors in white standing around – the last thing he said was ‘Some red, show me some red. Before dying I want to see some red and some green.’”
We get to the drapes before Karen even drops off Stevie – their ride to the clinic intercuts with Stewart discussing the new drapes with the dour, by-the-book clinic administrator, Victoria Inch (Gish), who is cheap, and sees no reason to be the least bit extravagant about curtains. Karen later notices the swatches and without telling her husband orders up the new drapes herself – and much more colorful and expensive drapes, to the later horror of Victoria. Karen’s action becomes a bigger problem when Stewart agrees with his patients and the clinic’s beautiful, slightly bohemian crafts director Meg Faverson (Bacall). Stewart and Meg are for the patients designing the drapes – chiefly Stevie. They think this is great therapy, something that will make the patients feel happier and satisfied and useful. But oh my god… the drapes. So much drama in the drapes. More time spent with Meg makes Stewart start falling for her, and less time with Karen makes Karen start unraveling even faster. The carousing medical director Douglas Devanal (Boyer) coming on to her after she strategizes with him and opens up about her marriage, doesn’t help. And it just goes on and on in circles – arguing about the drapes – until Karen becomes furiously proactive and drives to the clinic, hanging those drapes up herself. We should be proud of Karen at that moment, even if it’s destructive. My god, someone did something about the drapes!
We observe the patients, the so-called mad ones, and we see them lose it a few times, chiefly Strasberg’s agoraphobic Sue, and of course Stevie – once the new drapes are put up, he runs again, suspected dead. There’s also the acerbic Levant taking hydrotherapy baths and uttering darkly amusing, disturbing observations (some based on his own psychiatric problems – the movie was adapted by John Paxton from the 1954 novel by William Gibson). But the non-patients are the ones going crazy in The Cobweb and madness seems inescapable – nothing can seemingly contain it – certainly not those goddamn drapes. Grahame (who gives the picture’s best performance – pouty, insolent and vulnerable) talking in a phone booth to a grim Victoria during a symphony is so unusually dynamic, you can truly feel how “sultry” the air is, as Karen explains in the overheated booth. And they’re talking about … well, what do you think they’re talking about? The small, stuffy phone booth is an apt place to be arguing about drapes – these are characters contained in their marriages, their rigidity, their guilt, their losses, their need for expression, and all feel, to varying degrees, on the verge of exploding, of running, whether out of something or back into their own torment.
There’s hints of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” here (“It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw-not beautiful ones like buttercups but old foul, bad yellow things.”) though Minnelli’s characters are stuck in an unstable rest cure in their own minds, with drapes and bright flowers and Gloria Grahame’s red lipstick, which at times looks almost running from the corner of her mouth – she always seems just a little mussed, not matter how beautifully dressed. Mussed seems appropriate as Minnelli cracks his characters over the head with the drapes and he never let’s go of those swatches for a second. Stewart says, “Before we know it, we’ll have so many drapes around here we’ll wrap the clinic up in them.” He’s almost right. By the end, someone will be wrapped in those drapes. Literally. For comfort. For calm. Watching Karen wrap Stevie up in the dreaded drapes like a blanket – oh, god – it’s not so calm. And, yet, the drapes have served some kind of utilitarian purpose. Which, seems at this point, well, insane.
“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.
It’s a world in which an independent, intelligent female disco DJ – all health and sweet sexiness – a single woman who should be free enough to walk to work or to dance with unabashed joy, finds herself terrorized by an obsessed stalker who torments her with upsetting, escalating obscene phone calls. He also watches her. And follows her. In fact, he works with her – she just doesn’t know it. Kind-hearted woman that she is, she’s nice to him.
But she, Norah (an impressive, lovely Juliet Prowse) is a brave heroine, and one based on the very real feelings women have when being stalked. She doesn’t want her world enclosed by a psycho. She doesn’t want to be constantly scared. She doesn’t want to check her back every time she leaves her apartment. She’s scared but it pisses her off that she’s scared. Because now she will have to check herself – that’s the world the movie also walks us through – Norah’s loss of freedom as this crazy life rages outside and around her, bodies dancing, hair swinging, to the music she plays. She can’t live her life trapped like this anymore.
So then there’s the police – who wants to drag the police into all of this? As a woman she senses this will become a whole other drama, or useless. But she must involve them, and so the police detective who comes to help her, Lt. Dave Madden (Jan Murray), does not arrive in the form of the upright, steadfast F.B.I. agent Glenn Ford in the much tonier obscene phone call thriller from a few years before this one – Blake Edwards’ darkly beautiful Experiment in Terror. No, the detective who comes to her aid is one who listens to disgusting cases on tape, of men saying sick-o things to female victims, and within earshot of his ten-year-old daughter (when his child sees Norah she asks her father if she’s a “hooker”). He also has books like “Sadism and Masochism: Vol. 1” and magazines like “Teenage Nudists” splayed out on his desk in full view of his little one. Research. Indeed it is research, but this guy really really loves his research. His own Police Captain is even creeped out by him and says: “Dave, you’ve gone over the line. You’ve joined them.” You’ve joined them.
But, as Dave protests, his daughter has to know there are perverts out there in the world and he’s not going to shield her from it, even if apparently, he becomes one himself. After all, his wife was raped, murdered and mutilated by a psychopath. Oh. Yeah, that part. As you can imagine, Norah is a little disturbed by all of this. But, hey, this is all she’s got right now. Her lesbian boss (played by a fantastically acerbic Elaine Stritch) makes a pass at her, and in a wonderfully shaded scene, nice Norah keeps saying, “If I’m wrong, I apologize.” She doesn’t want to offend this woman but she also wants her the hell out of her apartment. Well, her boss leaves, and is then murdered by her stalker. OK. Now what? And what the hell can she say to a police detective after he tells her that kind of backstory?
What the hell do you say or make of anyone or anything in this movie? It’s a potently bizarre little cookie, but it’s not entirely foreign in terms of our primacy and darker curiosities. If we’re truly honest about how much as viewers we are drawn towards darkness and depravity – in terms of watching it – and the mixed emotions of exploitation – Who Killed Teddy Bear? plays less like a trashy curio and more like the compelling character study that it is. I don’t really think there’s anything trashy about this movie at all, in spite of its reputation. Of course we are a little disturbed, and at times, thrilled and strangely delighted, maybe even nervous by the odd characters – chiefly, the stalker’s little teenage sister. She has been brain damaged after seeing him sleep with… their mother? A family member? (I’m still not certain) and falling down the stairs. There are incest vibes are all over these two, and yet, he’s always trying to protect his sister, unlike the weird-ass police detective who think his daughter should actually hear obscene phone calls as she’s going to sleep. But it’s not necessarily the lurid content of the picture that’s interesting in and of itself – it’s not there for cheap thrills or laughs – it’s the curious mixture of dual pathologies viewed with a tonally discomforting poignancy. That tonal discomfort and power is in large part due to the picture’s real star – the obscene caller, Lawrence, played by a brilliant Sal Mineo.
It’s one of Mineo’s greatest performances and shamefully not seen or discussed enough. Mineo’s large-eyed vulnerability so powerful in Rebel Without a Cause, Crime in the Streets and Dino, is heightened and morphed into a grown-up man here – primal and strong and damaged and, yet, disarmingly helpless. He’s sick in the head but something made him that way. That the picture is fixated on him sexually was a bold move for Mineo. Mineo said:
“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.”
Those jokey shorts didn’t exactly help his career, in spite of some fine notices for his performance, which seems unfair watching it now. The lingering on his body, and instead of Prowse’s (which is how it would normally go), is fascinating, and it happens in ways that manage to not feel exploitative, but more artful, more leeringly thoughtful, if that makes any sense. In this movie, it does. (Even Norah tells him he’s got a nice body) We’ve turned our eyes on the stalker – we stare at him. There’s the tightness of his clothes, an extended, bare-chested work-out scene where he seems to be powering through perversion (or stoking the fires), there’s a pool scene in which his suit is much more revealing than Prowse’s, and a dance in which Mineo’s shirt shows off his midriff – these scenes are all here to take in, but we truly think about what we’re looking at, because, how perverse are we?
The movie turns the gaze back, makes us wonder what that weird police detective wonders (probably not Sal Mineo), and removes the idea of watching this movie to get an eyeful of Prowse. And, looking at how gorgeous Sal Mineo is – we ask, why must he be so sexually screwed up? Why can’t he just enjoy himself? Even Norah wonders this.
There’s a lot of wondering going on with Who Killed Teddy Bear? There is nothing like this picture – the closest I can compare it to is the pictures of Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey or the novels of Hubert Selby, Jr. – there’s a downtown pulp and a gritty art to it – but it’s really in its own universe. The black and white cinematography by Joseph C. Brun (with Taxi Driver’s Michael Chapman as assistant camera) is gorgeous and experimental. I’m not sure why some find this picture junky – you can imagine Edie Sedgwick slinking into the frame and sizing up young Sal.
And Mineo takes this performance so much further. As I’ve written before about this picture, you might be thinking about beefcake, but it veers into a beefcake where violence and sex messes up a traumatized character’s mind, who happens to look like someone Lou Reed would sing about (someone like Little Joe). And then you’re thinking about Mineo, the actor, the characters he’s played before, and characters he is perhaps running away from as his career was changing. Take a look at your “switchblade kid” now. And, really, take a look. Everyone else in this movie does.
The New Beverly has re-opened this December. The first movie they played? Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a favorite, and one I was pleased to write about for the theater. Here's my piece. Welcome back, New Beverly! Christmas came early.
"Every studio but one rejected it…The studio head said, ‘Well, I’ll buy it if they don’t go to South America.’ I said, ‘But they went there!’ He said, ‘I don’t give a shit. All I know is John Wayne don’t run away.’” – William Goldman
Butch: You know, when I was a kid, I always thought I was gonna grow up to be a hero.
Sundance: Well, it’s too late now.
Butch: What’d you say something like that for? You didn’t have to say something like that.
Newman and Redford. Butch and Sundance. We know those faces. Those beautiful, almost ridiculously handsome, rugged, wrinkly-eyed smiling, goddamn charming faces. And those eyes – those twinkly and soulful eyes – these guys were made for the cinema beyond their physical beauty – they said so much with their eyes and in such different ways, and with a power that is, like the western anti-heroes they are portraying, instantly mythic.
In fact, it’s Newman, Redford and William Goldman that made the men – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – truly mythic – the real-life pair, not a household name before the picture, could have been forgotten by the mainstream world had the movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, never been made. But no one will forget them now. And there’s something ultimately touching about that. These two guys living and dying as the last outlaws during the remnants of the Old West, men who were up against the modernization of the world (while taking advantage of it – until they couldn’t outrun it), are emblazoned in our minds because of technology – the movies. And not just the movie made about them, but the big screen mythology of the western outlaw that was occurring in their own time – Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery came out in 1903 – five years before Butch and Sundance ended their lives in Bolivia. I wonder if they saw it? I can only imagine the possible glee (or anger – and screenwriter William Goldman thought of this too) on their faces. Even with the few photographs of the real life Butch and Sundance, I picture them sitting in the theater as Newman and Redford, smiling and elbowing each other, or angrily objecting (young Sundance, in fact, then Harry Longbaugh, as cited in Thom Hatch’s wonderful, The Last Outlaws: The Lives and Legends of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, wrote to a newspaper to set the record straight about his undeserving status as “one of the most dangerous outlaw in the West: “I read a very sensational and partly untrue article, which places me before the public not even second to the notorious Jesse James…”). There they are, in my mind, taking in the same kind of crime they had committed, listening to the audience oohing and awing in rapture.
Think of it: Butch and Sundance, looking at that in-your-face medium close-up of Justus D. Barnes as he shoots his pistol point-blank. And the amazement in the audience! To think that one day Butch and Sundance would also be on that big screen – they likely never anticipated that. They too, would get their close-ups. And people would flock to see them. So, yes, I imagine their eyes, whether Butch and Sundance or Newman and Redford (now I am blending the two images – see how mythology melds in your mind?) pondered the thought.
And those eyes are lit up.
Director George Roy Hill opens the film with newsreel footage resembling Porter’s train robbing revolution, elegiac music playing along. This isn’t just a happy story, we are already warned: this won’t end well.
Similar to my imaginings of Butch and Sundance watching themselves on screen, the superb title sequence was originally conceived as a scene in the movie. As discussed in Art of the Title, Butch and Sundance and Etta all view this in a theater in Bolivia – and are upset by it. Considered too downbeat within the flow of the film, Goldman moved the silent film idea at the start of the picture, setting the viewer instantly within the myth – an excellent decision. It’s a wonderful, unforgettable opening, a touching meta-moment – we watch a movie within a movie about the end of our protagonists and their Hole in the Wall gang followed with the print-the-legend: “Most of What Follows Is True.”
And then… that beautiful shot of Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy, shot in sepia. The rack focus from the reflection of a bank in a window to Newman’s face – staring out at it – his eyes casing the place. Hill, cinematographer Conrad Hall and Goldman were clearly thinking of John Ford’s decree: “The main thing about directing is: photograph the people’s eyes”
There’s a lot of watching in this movie as Butch and Sundance are either casing or keeping an eye or being watched by others. The camera watches, their girlfriend watches, the viewer watches, the law watches, the super posse watches, they even have to watch themselves in a certain respect. And it seems the more everyone watches, the more everyone loves them – even if they hate them. It’s not superficial or a bunch of mush either, it’s not just physical attraction – it’s the chemical makeup of these two guys and what they project. In a Tracey and Hepburn way, in a Mirna Loy, William Powell way, in a Laurel and Hardy way… And as everyone watches, people see what they want to see, as Goldman’s screenplay introducing Butch puts so succinctly, so lyrically:
“He is Butch Cassidy and hard to pin down. Thirty-five and bright, he has brown hair, but most people, if asked to describe him, would remember him blond. He speaks well and quick and has been all his life a leader of men; but if you ask him, he would be damned if he could tell you why.”
Butch approaches the guard at closing time and asks what’s happened to the old bank. Butch says, rather disarmingly, that it was “beautiful.” The Guard tells him that people kept robbing it. “That’s a small price to play for beauty,” Butch opines. And from that gorgeous line comes the gorgeous intro of … Sundance. Another close-up, another shot fixed on the eyes – this is almost two minutes of Robert Redford playing poker, and we just keep looking at him, and for so long that it feels cinematically daring. Who is this guy? Well, we all know now, but at the time, we are looking at a true star-is-born moment. The Sundance Kid will never be forgotten because of this image and because this is Redford as what we know and think of as ROBERT REDFORD (the all caps ROBERT REDFORD). There’s so much mythmaking in this moment that it feels beyond cinema. There’s a reason he’s called a star.
Hill insisted on this majestically lit Conrad Hall close-up and to hold this shot at length because he wanted the audience to know that we are staying with this guy through the entire movie. This isn’t just some actor playing poker, some guy who will get shot in the first five minutes, this is one of the two who we will be following, rooting for, and falling in love with alongside that well-established star, Paul Newman. To think that anyone needed convincing of Robert Redford seems almost absurd now, but then he wasn’t a huge star. And so, again, to watch the mustachioed 32-year-old stoically playing poker, hat brim low, eyes piercing the darkness, and thinking of all that Redford will become (not to mention the Sundance institute) underscores how important a film entrance like this was. Redford, whom Hill fought for as Sundance (producer Richard Zanuck couldn’t see it – until he watched the dailies and realized how very wrong he was), won out on casting, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The picture moves from sepia to full color, and we drink in Hall’s stunning compositions (shot in Zion National Park, Utah) as the men ride their horses, completely in tune with nature. Watching Butch and Sundance slowly ride through a stream is such a simple thing of beauty, so exquisitely and meticulously shot by Hall, that we’re simultaneously at peace and in awe. Hall’s framing carefully keeps them in balance and not dwarfed by the landscape, even as its majesty is all around them – this is where they belong, this is where they seem content. Amy Taubin, when discussing Redford in a brilliant essay, described a scene later in the picture when the two are on the run:
“We see a close-up of Sundance as he surveys the terrain below, and from his point of view we see a sweeping moving-camera shot of vast stretches of plains and hills, dappled by the sun. Sundance is on the lookout for their pursuers, but his gaze is also smitten by the beauty of the landscape. No actor other than Redford could have turned, however briefly, a bittersweet comedy about two charming bank robbers into a tragedy of disenfranchisement.”
I love her description there – “a tragedy of disenfranchisement” – she’s so right. As Butch and Sundance ride to their way to their Hole in the Wall gang hideout, we are already lamenting any kind of loss they may feel away from those beautiful surroundings. As the two men talk, we immediately see that Butch, the leader, is the gabbier one, goofy, full of big ideas – not silly necessarily, there is some gravitas to him – he just doesn’t take life too seriously. Or he doesn’t let on that he does. Why? It could all go away in a flash. Death could be around the corner and he’s seen death, though Butch is not one to kill a man, (he, in fact, only killed one man in his life). Sundance is the quieter, deadlier, more serious one, he’s a thinker, but not without a dry wit of his own – and he’s a wonderful straight man to Butch. They ride and talk:
Sundance: What’s your idea this time?
Butch: Bolivia.
Sundance: What’s Bolivia?
Butch: Bolivia. That’s a country, stupid! In Central or South America, one or the other.
Sundance: Why don’t we just go to Mexico instead?
Butch: ‘Cause all they got in Mexico is sweat and there’s too much of that here. Look, if we’d been in business during the California Gold Rush, where would we have gone? California – right?
Sundance: Right.
Butch: So, when I say Bolivia, you just think California. You wouldn’t believe what they’re finding in the ground down there. They’re just fallin’ into it. Silver mines, gold mines, tin mines, payrolls so heavy we’d strain ourselves stealin’ ’em.
Sundance: You just keep thinkin’, Butch. That’s what you’re good at.
Butch: Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.
Butch says such proclamations without mere braggadocio – there is a touching blend of intelligence and insecurity, and, if I see it, I can make it happen, kind of attitude. And then of course when you know what happens in Bolivia, the enthusiasm is tempered with our own sadness. Because for such a buoyant movie full of life and fun, brimming with its counterculture heart and its New Wave approach to the Western (Hill is not doing John Ford, he’s not doing Sergio Leone, nor should he, he works with his own strengths, his own deconstructive/reassembling of the myth approach), and there’s a melancholic sense of loss to it all. The juxtaposition of their banter and behavior, modern at heart, and the characters’ collision with the machinery of modernity (they are already being phased out) makes me think of a much less Hollywood movie, a much more iconoclastic, rock and roll movie, Easy Rider (out the same year – 1969) – as Peter Fonda’s Wyatt, a.k.a. Captain America and Dennis Hopper as Billy, are trying to find any kind of freedom in the beautiful open America, only to feel it closing in on them. “We blew it,” Captain American says. And when Butch nears his end, he waxes sarcastic: “Oh, good. For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble.”
There’s a girl (a woman), and I would say, of course there’s a girl, but this is not the typical movie girlfriend. Sundance’s partner, beautiful, bright schoolteacher Etta Place (a luminous but nobody’s-fool Katharine Ross) lives, in a most unconventional relationship, with both Sundance and Butch. She sleeps with Sundance, but that doesn’t stop her from enjoying a romantic bike ride with Butch (set to B.J. Thomas singing Burt Bacharach’s earworm “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” one of three musical interludes that should be corny, and for some, it is, but it comes off charming – I loved it as a kid when I saw it on TV and I still love it as an adult). That famous bike ride (the bike represents the future) with Butch clowning and flirting and cuddling up to Etta is perhaps the most joyfully romantic moment in the picture – and it’s not even with her actual boyfriend, Sundance (though we don’t know what’s been happening beyond what we see on screen, which is both incredibly sexy and romantic, Noel Coward and Ernst Lubitsch would approve). Etta wonders how it would have turned out had she met Butch before Sundance – would they have become involved? “Well we are involved, Etta,” Butch says, “Don’t you know that? I mean, you are riding on my bicycle. In some Arabian countries, that’s the same as being married.”
This Jules and Jim situation was somewhat modern in movies in 1969 and was certainly modern, indeed radical, back in the day, as Etta Place really did live with both Sundance and Butch, and likely aided in at least one of their robberies. Looking at a picture of the real-life Etta and Sundance, he suited up nicely, looking slick, and she, so very pretty, wearing a beautiful dress and a watch pendant Sundance gave her, with a soulful look in her eye, you wish there was an entirely separate movie just about this fascinating woman (And there is! There are two TV movies about Etta, one with Ross, I’ve just learned of, that look to extend the mythology – Etta and Pancho Villa? Not sure if they are any good but I now need to check these out – digging to see if there are others…) Ross plays Etta with a warmth and intelligence and some mystery, and you want to know more about her. She’s a lover, but she’s also game, and she’s smart – she sees the end coming and gets the hell out of there. The real Etta took off as well – never heard from again – I wonder how long she lived? What was her life like? How much she missed those guys. Oh, she must have missed those guys.
And we’re gonna miss those guys. For as light as the picture plays – that touching sepia toned montage of Butch, Sundance and Etta’s high time in New York City, the music, the smirking banter – we know that this almost unseen force, the super posse, which takes up a good final third of the picture, is weighing down on them.
Shot at a distance, the posse is like a machine, emblematic of the future… and the future is the one thing Butch and Sundance cannot shoot their way out of. The amusing refrain “who are those guys?” is funny but also haunting as, really … “who are those guys?” That’s a question many of us could ask when we’re trying to untangle exactly who is at the bottom of it when our lives are suddenly upturned and things are beyond our control.
The great Goldman surely thought of all of this as he spent years researching Butch and Sundance (real names, Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Alonzo Longbaugh – already fantastic names) as this would go on to become one of the most influential works of screenwriting – a gold standard for not just the buddy film genre, but for screenwriting in general. Numerous filmmakers have been influenced by it including, not surprisingly, Shane Black, who said, “I studied William Goldman’s writing style, especially the scripts for Marathon Man and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I found both of those to be really riveting, entertaining in their own right, as if you were reading a condensed novel good for one sitting.”
It does read like a condensed novel – and you can understand why Goldman went lyrical with these men – their lives were not just mythic, but incredibly real – they came from hard working, religious backgrounds where the American dream is always out of reach. Both Butch and Sundance watched their parents work themselves to the bone, never getting ahead, and, after attempting backbreaking work themselves, decided – this is not for me. What is the point of this? Working without joy, working without profit? Why do this?
Much like the audience the film would amass, these two antiheroes were turning on, tuning in and dropping out
Goldman’s brilliance and dedication shine sin the way he subtly added layers of their biography and truth to the story without subverting the flow of the narrative, and you get glimpses of their past in pointed remarks or even double-meaning jokes. At one point Butch says to Etta, “I swear, Etta, I don’t know. I’ve been working like a dog all my life, and I can’t get a penny ahead.” And Etta answers: “Sundance says it’s because you’re a soft touch and always taking expensive vacations, buying drinks for everyone, and you’re a rotten gambler.” Butch quips: “That might have something to do with it.” In Sundance’s poker playing introduction he’s asked the secret of his success: His answer “prayer.” The answer is both ironic and earnest – coming from a religious background, prayer, even if rejected, likely never left him.
By the picture’s end, we know they’re gonna die (we know it earlier, in fact, as the film’s opening newsreel footage reads “The Hole in the Wall Gang, led by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, are all dead now …”), though we’ve been so charmed throughout the picture, and the chemistry between Newman and Redford that we may have forgotten. In a beautiful circular fashion, the movie opens with the legend – the film footage in sepia- and closes with the legend, the sepia freeze framing Butch and Sundance as they choose their fate in a spectacular kamikaze fashion. By allowing the soundtrack of the gunshots to continue over the frozen image of our heroes, Goldman and Roy Hill acknowledge the historical that these guys died (exactly how is up for question – they may have fulfilled a murder/suicide pact), but grants them immortality.
We want them to live – but we know their fate. And as an audience member, I think of the worried Etta stating to Sundance earlier in the picture, “They said you were dead.” And of tough, laconic Sundance, brushing past her with, “Don’t make a big thing out of it.” Quickly, the man changes his mind, and in his most moving, romantic moment, he shows his vulnerability and says, “No. Make a big thing out of it.”
We did. We do. And we will keep on making a big thing out of it.
I’ve returned to the world of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips with their fantastic "Criminal" -- running monthly, starting January 2019. My essay for this issue is on Joel and Ethan Coen's Blood Simple -- look for it!
Blood Simple is a lonely movie. The movie sweats, cries and bleeds loneliness. The road the two lovers, Ray (John Getz) and Abby (Frances McDormand) drive down at night, opening the film, is lonely. Never mind that they are together and about to consummate their union in a hotel room – it’s a lonely road – as remote as Hank Williams’ “Lost Highway,” as friendless as Tom Neal hitching a ride in Edgar G. Ulmer’s down and dirty Detour ...
“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.
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.”
“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.
*My piece originally published in Ed Brubaker's Kill or Be Killed
“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.”
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?IsNicky 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.
A bit from my piece in the newest Kill Or Be Killed:
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.
“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 TheMisfits 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.
“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!
“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.
“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.
"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.
“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.