Movie Log: Different, or Maybe Not

Two items on the Netflix calendar.  They're different, but perhaps I can identify a common thread.

One: the legendary production of King Lear with James Earl Jones, given at Joe Papp's New York Shakespeare-in-the-Park in 1973.   It's a delight, although you have to get used to the fact that the actors are declaiming the way they need to for an outdoor audience on a summer evening. Not an easy job: I've joined the Shakespeare-in-the-Park audience exactly once in my life--this in 1996--and I sat in the back row from which, for all their apparent declamation, I couldn't hear a thing.  But then, the play was Timon of Athens (only time I ever saw it) and perhaps it was just as well that I did not hear a thing.

Lear is different on that score: this was actually our third Lear within a year and I haven't any idea how many I might have seen over a lifetime (actually not that many, but more than three).  We are at the point where (unless silenced) we can chime in with our own interpretation of favorite lines--never fun for anybody, I suspect, except the utterer.  We're also at the point where any performance is going to live in the shadow of previous performances, perhaps for good, more often for ill.   Is Raúl Juliá really okay for Edmund the Bastard?  Well, yes, actually, though it took a few minutes' getting used to.  But that guy who played Edmund's father, Duke of Gloucester--he of the old-pro résumé, should be dependable for anything. Grant that he had to shout, but can't he do anything but shout?

And Jones himself?  I quite liked him.  By our time he comes so close to self-caricature, you wonder if he can ever actually get out from behind the glaze.  But you got the sense that he'd given thought to every line, that he had a purpose and was determined to get it across.  Mrs. B did spot one problem--he seemed to get younger as the evening went on, or perhaps better, to forget how old he was (in life, 42; in character "fourscore and upward").  It was almost as if he was telling himself: hey, it's working, I'm bringing this off!  No matter, well worth the time and the attention.

Second item: Street of Shame, an account by the extraordinary Kenji Mizoguchi of intertwined lives in a Tokyo brothel.  It's filmed with all of Mizoguchi's legendary patient compassion.    You can't call it "realistic" exactly: I double-dare anybody to watch 87 straight  minutes of what life is really like in a brothel (though perhaps Boardwalk Empire comes close).  But it is unblinking in its own way. And you think--wait a minute, this is 1956. Say again, 1956?   Tokyo?  A compassionate film about the lives of sex workers?  Who exactly was watching?  Would anybody have done (did anybody do) anything in America even remotely close?

I've already conceded that there isn't much of a common thread here, although I suppose you can add both to your "unblinking compassion" file.  And here is one more: in both cases, I found my selves thinking about the film itself but also about the context--context(s) which seem so far away.  New York in the 70s: not a happy place, but there is something joyous about seeing Juliá and Jones and several other minority theater folks on on display in such a desirable venue.   I'd been telling myself it was some kind of a breakthrough, but now: a glance at the old cast list shows me that both Jones and Juliá had performed in the Park before.  Still in both cases, that in both cases, the content seems so long ago and so far away. From 1973, or 1956.  Long ago and far away: how did that happen?

They Could Have Saved Us All Two Hours ...

Last night for the first time I saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and I can only wish I had waited longer.  How this steam in' heap of bloated confusion ever made it to the top of anybody's movie list, except perhaps as a Guantanamo torture film.

For starters, nothing about the setup makes any sense.  This guy has been in the Senate for 25 years and nobody back in Tinytown remembers how he got his start?   Not the editor?  Not even the old marshal?  And who made that lunkhead marshal to begin with?  And why did they let him stay in the job? And wouldn't somebody have wanted to clean up the debris of the incinerated old house?

But I guess my real problem is the prating busybody bullyboy John Wayne who reminds me of so many of the guys who used to make my life so miserable when I was a kid.    I guess I'm glad that he did (so it seems) indigent and alone. But if he was such a law and  order guy, why didn't he just take out Lee Marvin in the same reel and save the whole town its heartache?   Surely "looking like the Joker in a bad Batman remake"ought to be a capital offense even in the most raucous frontier town.

None of this, I admit, has anything much to do with the larger political message, supposed to give the film its heft and dignity. So just remember children: your nation is run by apron-wearing pantywaists who are the helpless pawns of gun-toting thugs.  

Remembering and "I Remember"

Mr. and Mrs. Buce enjoyed a Netflix screening last night of Fellini's Amarcord -- "I Remember" in the dialect of Rimini, Fellini's childhood home (so they say: I never heard the word anyplace else).   I must say I enjoyed it a lot more than I did on my first exposure perhaps 30 years ago--enjoyed it more, largely because I got it better.  At least in those days, I was not one of those who enjoyed carefree summers in Italy (cf. Dave Thomson, infra.): I had never set foot in the place.  Since then I've had the good fortune to spend a fair amount of time in Italy, not always carefree and not always summer, but absorbing and instructive for all that.  I've read  fair amount about the place and even picked up a smattering of a smattering of the language.  But whatever--the point is I think I have a somewhat better sense now of what he was up to.

I suppose there is no dispute with the notion that Amarcord holds a  place in the movie canon--and canonical or  not, it has a 91-91 at Rotten Tomatoes.  But I think it is harder to say just why it is so well loved.  The negative reviews are intense.  My first thought is that is that they just don't get it.  Then again, I'm not sure the positive reviews always get it, either: the movie just  be more subtle and complex than either its friends or its enemies understand.

So: the standard pitch is that Amarcord is a nostalgia trip, a gauzy and self-gratifying recollection of the director's adolescence just before World War II (the auteur would have turned 18 in 1938).  Most people find this a virtue and they are not entirely wrong: it is a nostalgia trip, and a good nostalgia trip is hard not to like.

A few dissenters   agree that it's a nostalgia trip but count that as more of a defect than a virtue. A few see it as just a bunch of fascist ruffians (or worse, cadet ruffians, ruffian wannabees), and what's so pretty about that? Some--Thomson--fault it for ducking all the hard questions, i.e., how did we (Italians) get into this mess and more  important, how do we get out?

I suppose Thomson is right on the big-picture aspect: there is essentially nothing here by way of larger context.  But as to the picture itself: I wonder if the picture is perhaps both a gauzy nostalgia trip and an unpleasant fascist cartoon?    Wouldn't it be fair to say that most of our nostalgia trips are, in some sense, cartoons--buffed down and buttered up for easier digestion?  One step to maturity is the recognition of how distorted and, okay, comical those visions may have been--while recognizing that they were, after all, our visions, and that we can no more disown them than we can disown a big toe.  My guess is that Fellini understands perfectly well the absurdity of the four kids, ahem, consoling themselves in unison in the parked car, like some sort of hands-on (heh!) barbershop quartet.  He understands the absurdity, but he knows that it is he who was there, he part of it all.  On the same theme, I think he understands just how pathetically overblown his little corner of society behaved--and yet knew that it was his little corner of society which he could not disown.   Put it in harsher terms: you can see why Hitler had such contempt for his Italian allies, and you can believe that with a lot like this, it's really no wonder that there was a Mussolini.    Fellini may not show us a way in or a way out, but he knows that it his past and that he cannot--and doesn't even want to--leave it behind.

Hannah and her Detractors

We took a flutter last night on 'Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt, remembering the kerfuffle over Arendt's New Yorker reportage on the trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolph Eichmann.   I think the best thing you could say about it is "inoffensive," maybe "workmanlike."  Barbara Sukowa held one's attention in the title role and Janet McTeer as Mary McCarthy was as annoying as McCarthy probably was in real life (that's a compliment).  But if you remember the Arendt/Eichmann episode, you wouldn't have learned anything new, and if you don't, the film probably won't inspire you to dig any deeper.

I do remember the episode and I remember feeling that Arendt had it pretty much right from the get-go.  As Arendt argues (I think), too often, evil is not outlandish, unworldly.  It's just stuff that people do--evil stuff, but still stuff.  FWIW,  you can say pretty much the same about good; cf. Marcel Ophul's pendant account of French resistance to the Nazis,  memorialized in The Sorrow and the Pity, where heroism is no more saintly than Eichmann's crimes are devilish. I suspect that Arendt came away winners in the long run (one reason the episode is forgettable); indeed I always thought that some of the outrage against her had a perfunctory air as if some of her critics found it politic to attack her even though they didn't have their heart in it.

But the movie did set me reflecting a bit on Arendt's career as a whole.  The book I take to be her iconic showpiece --The Origins of Totalitarianism--pops up on any number of lists of "great books" for the 20th Century. But does anybody read it any more?  Can anybody serve up a sufficient 50-word summary?  Or has it receded to the status of period piece, like Jack Paar or the Kaiser-Frazier auto brand?  Okay, grant that most, perhaps all, works of political/social theory begin as period pieces.  But some quintessential period pieces--Machiavelli might be the best example--have a way of transcending their period, to establish some lasting value.  Can the same be said for OT?

As to the rest of Arendt's work, there's a lot of it I can't evaluate because I haven't read it.  I do remember the character sketches or occasional pieces brought together in Men in Dark Times and I once again savor a curious truth: sometimes a writer's best work is his (her) more modest or less pretentious stuff: as a long-form journalist, she was actually quite good.

I also remember The Human Condition, not least as  orderly and systematic  in the way OT seemed to me not to be.  This may or may nor be a compliment--orderly Dickens is not Dickens at his best.  But her distinction between "work" and "action" (i;.e., "politics") does stick in the mind.   I do take some wry amusement for her Aristotelian contempt for mere "labor," the chores that you need to accomplish to get yourself through the day.  As a person who once cooked for a living, I am still a little startled to see her classify cookery as mere labor.    It cannot achieve dignity, she argues, it leaves nothing that endures.

Well.  Maybe last night's dinner is not something I wish to contemplate this morning.  But she seems utterly to have failed to grasp that while cooking may not endure, still cookery does.  The skill, the practice, the cuisine: no nation can call itself great if it lacks a great cuisine.  So if they invite for dinner at Hannah's--go for the conversation,  but stop for a burger on the way.

Kapringen

Entertainment planing tip: two Somali pirate movies in one month is quite enough. Back around the beginning of November we watched Tom Hanks do his stuff in Captain Phillips; last night we took in (I shouldn't say "endured") Tobias Lindholm's Danish Kapringen, A Hijacking, which tells (of course) tells the story in a much different way. It was exhausting, but time well spent. I wouldn't say that it's a better movie in the sense of "things that move," movable parts, all that stuff: in Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass directed about the best overall action film I've ever seen--really. But I'd say that Lindholm's is perhaps a better "movie" in the sense of storytelling and high drama. The focus here--you probably know this--is on the negotiations for the hostage release. We never even see the boarding.  Rotten Tomatoes reports that critics loved it all the way to 95 %; interestingly, audiences were more lukewarm, weighing in at only 77 percent.  My guess is that they might have been confused; they may have gone to A Hijacking expecting Tom Hanks and he was nowhere to be seen.

There's a superb general summary/review here (of all places) which I won't try to duplicate, but I do want to follow up one one issue--specifically, the treatment of the corporate boss back in the boardroom. At least one leading right-wing crazy site has said it is a subtle and insidious piece of leftist anti-corporate propaganda--made more mischievous, I suppose, by the absence of Navy Seals. But that is precisely what it is not. The leading grey-suit negotiator makes at least one horrifically wrong decision and some other questionable judgments.  But in this respect he is not all that different from his counterpart on the boat. He still comes across as a serious guy who understands that running his company does not cancel his responsibilities to his crewmen, both as employees but also as human beings.

I suppose you might sort this out as "Hollywood" versus "independent," but I'm more inclined to go with "US" v "Danish." I've had a bit of exposure to Danes: in my caricature I find them as highly entrepreneurial, serious about business but with some sense of themselves as parts of a functioning society. I don't mean to suggest they have better DNA than the rest of us: I'm more incline to ascribe it to us v them as in "small country" v "the world." You get a sense of "we're all in this together," coupled with a knack for cooperation (now that is the mystery ingredient) as they gear up to face the world.

So I'm tempted to full back on my own favorite bit of historical reconstruction: that it goes back to Viking longboats, collaborative enterprises where, in the words of the immortal Milo Minderbinder, everybody gets a share. Of course these were the same guys who used to kidnap their neighbors and sell them as slaves to chop cotton in Iran.

Girls Just Wanna Have Billing

Would it be "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer?"  Or does it go all the way back to Baby Snooks, interpreting the fears and hopes of little Robespierre?   Whatever; at any rate I'm pausing for a moment to savor the principle, not quite universal, that a successful drama has to have at least one all-seeing, all-knowing young female who, well, sees and knows stuff that nobody else in the cast seems to glom onto. 

Surely not the original but no doubt the modern avatar is Lisa ("I probably won't even get into Vassar") Simpson who can talk as an equal with Thomas Jefferson and Bleeding Gums Murphy.  But she's not a patch on Meadow Soprano who can talk as an equal with the biggest badass in New Jersey.  And she probably doesn't have nearly as much fun as Eliza Thornberry, the pigtailed scuba diver whose best friend is a chimpanzee in a tank top.

And so far as I can tell, the tradition isn't nearly over.  We still have Don Draper's daughter Sally who seems to be learning more about the ad business than anyone would really want to know.  And Dana Brody, for whom more may be in store as "Homeland" reaches its finale (not everyone loves her, though).

This is just a lazy evening's work.  Surely there must be more?

Ch'tis

Mr. and Mrs. Buce idled away a good-natured couple of hours the other night watching Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis.  It's an amiable piece of fluff, of interest (at least to an outsider) primarily because apparently it is France's biggest-grossing movie ever.  As such, it tells you--by which I mean, "me"--some interesting stuff that you might not otherwise guess about French culture.

The plot is straightforward--enough so that you can't imagine why nobody ever thought of it before.  Harassed postal manager dreams and schemes to get a transfer south to the Mediterranean.  Through his own incompetence, he winds up instead getting sent to Berques (pop. 3,800), way up at the tippy top of France, just under the Belgian border.  The north, oh dear the north: he'll hate it, this will never work.   The ch'tis, the sticks, though whether this is supposed to be a vulgar Anglicism or Berques patois, I am not sure.  Anyway, welcome to the sticks.

You can pretty much construct the rest of the plot from there and you'll be right and no harm done.  Think Northern Exposure with smelly cheese and rubber faces: the French do seem to like rubber faces.  I suppose that part of the point is that it gives its French audience a reassuring sense of nationhood while introducing them to a chunk of the country they never even suspected existed.  Yes, it does seem that nobody in France ever set foot in Berques unless they were born there, except perhaps for one old guy about whom the less said the better.  In terms of general framework, then, it is a lot like France's previous all-time top seller, La Grande Vadrouille--also a road film with a lot of good-natured merrymaking.

What is perhaps most eye-opening for l'étranger ignorant is that both the co-stars (one also the auteur) are also étrangers--at least in the sense that they both have visibly foreign roots.  In particular, Algerian: the auteur, Dany Boon, is identified at Wiki as the son of an Algerian Kabyle--i.e., Berber--father.  It says here that Boon's mother is Picard-French, i.e., the ch'tis--and that he has built a lot of his career on Picard-ethnic humor (his co-star, Kad Merad, is identified as having been born in Algeria to an Algerian father and a French mother).

The whole package seems almost absurdly transportable.  Evidently there is already an Italian version: Benvenuti al Sud.    Wiki mentions plans for an American version, although I don't see any sign of it.  Wouldn't take much imagination to cook up another 180 or so more.   Especially worth watching, I suspect, would be the Korean.

Yiddish Update

I did not learn my Yiddish at my mother's knee (she was Swedish), but I thought I had picked up the basics in my college years, and hanging around the bankruptcy court.  Evidently not.  The quiz show Says You reeducates me on a couple of points.

On, plotz.  I had thought it meant "fail," as in "the business plotzed."  Evidently a more careful definition is "explode;" so, failure with an oak leaf cluster.

And the other, bubkas, as in what the creditors get.  I thought it meant "nothing," and it seems I am sort of right, but I miss an important nuance.  I'm told it means insultingly nothing, in the sense of "how dare you?"  We once had a difficult client who did not pay his bill; he did, however, send us a nice flowering plant.   Perhaps I can file it under bubkas.

Perhaps both these textured meanings offer a small window into the texture and fluency of so extraordinary a language.  Which recalls to mind a story from my 19th summer--my time as a shabbas goy in Bethlehem, New Hampshire.  The  kid behind the cash register at the drug store said "...well, the thing about Yiddish is that it developed without a court tradition."   Which prompted two new insights: one, it's a concept I never thought of before; and two, this kid has a much better education than I do.

BTW we idled away a couple of pleasant hours last night with Joseph Dornan's Laughing in the Darkness--nominally a biopic of the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem but as the more insightful critics appear to have understood, a superb exploration of how a culture is created, finds it place, and is then swept away--all more or less within the career of a single writer.  Superb social insight and a fit companion to Ken Burns' Dust Bowl, which we had watched just before.

"Look at Me!" The Trope that Chooses Not to Speak its Name

My friend David  identifies a cinematic trope that seems to have eluded formal identification.  We resort to ostensive definition.  Three examples:

--Max Bialystock (aka Zero Mostel)  the producer in The Producers, surveying his hopes, dreams, lusts, aspirations and concluding "Look at me!  I'm wearing a cardboard belt!"

--Lefty Ruggiero (aka Al Pacino) in Donnie Brasco making his mob nut by smashing parking meters with a sledgehammer.

--Satan (aka Peter Cook) in (the original) Bedazzled annoying perfect strangers by scratching LP records and tearing the last page out of Agatha Christie novels.

And the common thread would be?  Well, there's black humor, of course, but there is plenty of that everywhere.  The more precise point has something to do with the dignity of big dreams and honest labor, and the stark reality that the  most exalted employment boils down to a lot of grunge.  Broadway producer?  Mr. Mafia toughguy?  Satan himself?  Don't you guys have minions?  Or minions with minions?  Hah, no: in the end you have to deal with all the crap on your own. 

There must be a name for this stuff somewhere (for lack of a better, we could call it the "Look at me!" maneuver).   And a dissertation, or a wall full of dissertations.  If not, I suppose there will be soon (although not by me).

Footnote:  David points to another common thread: these are three of my favorite movies.

Video Extra:  I haven't been able to track down footage of any of my three examples. The following is not quite on point but it might be the best "dignity of work" story since Mark Twain (in Life on the Mississippi) told how Mr. Bixby took the riverboat over the sandbar.

Makers and Takers Again

I didn't pick up on it right away, but while we were watching The Apartment the other night, I could swear I heard something that must count as a cultural marker.  That is: assuming memory serves, I heard somebody refer to some other folks as "takers."

The 47 percent, you say? Ah no, that's just it; not the 47 percent.  The point was that the "takers" here were the rich folks, the ones with the royal jelly on their fingertips, who took (sic) what they wanted and didn't have to pay.  As Marx might say, the unearned increment.

When, do you suppose, did "takers" pass through the singularity, reverse polarities, and acquire the meaning that Mitt Romney and his pals give it today?

Hodejegerne

Watched the Norwegian Headhunters last night.  It's a cheerfully macabre shoot-em-up, good fun if you like that sort of thing but I kept thinking it was a cinetized version of the one that begins "there once was a lady from Norway/who hung by her heels from the doorway...."

Wilder Gets it Right

Chez Buce enjoyed a screening of the 1944 Double Indemnity last night and here's the big news that you already knew: Wilder really is one of the all-time great storytellers. I really never have seen the point of Fred McMurray nor even Barbara Stanwyck, but it doesn't matter: the pace and the detail and he atmosphere are all so right that it still remains the gold standard of noir.

I had always thought of this as a James M. Cain film after the guy who wrote the book; I had failed grasp how much of the dialog--the ratatattat almsot Groucho-ish one-liners that just holler the name of Raymond Chandler, who co-wrote the script. I see from David Thomson's account that Cain got it: per Thomson, Cain said "it's the only picture I ever saw made from my books that had things in it I wish I had thought of."

Curious fact name on important respect in which this film is like the other great Wilder masterpiece, Some Like it Hot. For an answer, go here.

Fun fact: I know that Edward G. Robinson was a vociferous Democrat and if memory serves, McMurray was a devoted Republican. Wonder if they spent their final moments together trash-talking the Roosevelt fourth term.

John Le Carré and the Aesthetics of Humiliation

Mr.and Mrs. B. have been imbibing BBC version of John Le Carré's, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. That would be the 1979 mini-series with Alec Guinness, not the current movie (that comes later). And I'm struck by the general air of grunge, of seediness that haunts the whole enterprise. Some it surely is intentional, deriving from the novel itself. Some is, I suspect, a tad more accidental. The almost comical amateurishness of the sets, for example,  like the stuff they used to market as self-parody in the old Bullwinkle cartoons (and the telephones have cords, bleah). But I suspect part of it just derives from the larger atmosphere. Though this is 1979, we're still at the end of the long and debilitating case of the grippe that swept over England when it woke up to the fact that was broke, without an empire, and generally an also-ran in the competition for national greatness.  And it brings you up short to reflect that we're actually functioning after the Beatles, the Swinging Sixties, the Carnaby Street revolution: crushingly, almost none of these characters seems to grasp the fact that his entire career has been a total waste of time.

Humiliation enough right there, had you known what was happening to  you--and George Smiley, at least, for one does appear to know.  He also know that he's being shamelessly cuckolded by one of his nearest and dearest.  To watch it, to enjoy it all, you pretty much have to share his own bleak sense of his own disgrace.  This theme of humiliation, not bye the bye, is also the theme of  my true favorite post-war British flic: Sunday, Bloody Sunday, where we see Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch both having their nose rubbed in the fact that they're not the lover they wanted to be.   


1979: way past the pull  date for the post-War malaise.  Meanwhile, the clattering you here at stage right would be that rough beast herelf, her hour come round at last.

Lubitsch and Wilder bring you the Revolutionary as Dweeb

Il Teatro Buce enjoyed a screening last night of Ernst Lubitsch's classic Ninotchka with Greta Garbo.  It's good fun, perhaps not least because the dialogue has Billy Wilder's thumbprints all over it.  It does tend to drag after the first half or so and I suspect it wouldn't have its status as a semi-classic were it not so closely woven into the legend of Garbo herself.

But what impressed me most was not its Garbohood buts place in the narrative of the Soviet Union and our perception thereof.  This is 1939: of course we had long since demonized the Soviets for their violence and corruption.  No surprise there; but the movie offers us much more--not just violence and brutality but also meanness, cowardice and bureaucratic time-serving.  Especially in the early scenes we focus not on Garbo herself (she isn't there yet) but on three petty strivers who remind you of nothing so much as the Marx brothers cross-bred with the three little bats out of Pogo--figures of contempt or ridicule, not remotely of fear except insofar as we fear for them.

I've commented with admiration before on Victor Serge's  great Case of Comrade Tulayev, in which he demolishes any possible illusions about the intentions of the Soviet elite.  When I first came to political awareness in the 50s, there were still people who tended to mist over at the thought of Soviet crimes and malefactions.  I've often wished they could have studied Serge.  Silly me; all they needed to do was to go to the movies.

For extra credit, what were the names of the three bats in Pogo?  Go here.

Rio Bravo and Confused Mythology

Chez Buce enjoyed a screening of Howard Hawks' (John Wayne's) Rio Bravo the other night, probably more as a classroom exercise than an entertainment. We didn't know each other back when the film came out in 1959 but we now stipulate that neither one of us would have attended the premier except as a condition of probation. Still, we were curious to know what kind of film would rate a score of 100 percent at Rotten Tomatoes.

I guess the best thing you can say is that we did get through all 140 minutes of it, and it does have its points: John Wayne as a flawed and vulnerable hero with a bunch of flawed and vulnerable sidekicks (Dean Martin as a reformed drunk--now, there's a stretch). Oh, and Angie Dickinson almost dominating a cast otherwise nearly all male. The pace is interesting, too: that Hawks fellow does know how to reel out a narrative.

I assume it was an eye-opener for dedicated Wayne fans to see their hero as thoughtful, easy-going, prone to misjudgment, but able at last to work as the focal point on a team. Teamwork: yes, that's the ticket. Which is why I find so puzzling what seems to be the received narrative of the place of Rio Bravo in film history:

Rio Bravo (1959) was an answer to the pessimism of High Noon, which have been seen as an allegory for the McCarthy era. Behind the script was the blacklisted writer Carl Foreman, who went into self-imposed exile to England. Hawks objected the film because he didn't think "a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help..."

Huh? Excuse me, but doesn't this have it exactly backwards? Isn't the conservative tradition that of the besieged loner, underappreciated and almost overmatched as he achieves the goal of protecting the freedoms on an indifferent multitude? And isn't it the liberal mythology that We're All In This Together--the drunk, the untested kid, the geezer even (geeze louise) the girl? Couldit be that Rio Bravo is the film in which Hawks/Wayne, outs himself as a Unitarian?

Side Note: As I say, neither Mrs. Buce nor I would have counted ourselves as a Wayne fan in youth. It does seem that each of us is ready to make one exception. Hers: The Quiet Man, where Wayne and Victor McLaglen beat each other senseless and (of course) wind up as fast friends. Mine: True Grit, where Wayne wears and eyepatch and shouts "fill your hand, you sonofabitch!" Not sure we are up for two more evenings of Wayne, though; at least for now, Rio Bravo is enough.

A Not-as-much Fun as You Might Expect Adventure

Exhausted from our bout with Elsa Morante, the Mr. and Mrs. Buce reading club needed a lightener. We chose Dashiell Hammetet's Maltese Falcon. It was good fun, and instructive. It is easy to see how he is a pivotal figure in the history of detective fiction: discontinuous with Sherlock Holmees, a precursor to (but not as good as) Philip Marlowe. Considering the cachet he acquired via Lillian Hellman, Hammett is a surprisingly mediocre writer: good enough at the rat-a-tat declarative sentences, but given a bit sloppy in construction and given to flights of fancy that don't quite get airborne. Chandler really does look pretty good by comparison to Hammett, and Marlowe by comparison to Sam Spade. Recall Chandler's motto for Marlowe: "Down these mean streets a man must walk who is not himself mean." Spade falls more into the category of "Yea, though I walk through the valley and the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley."

But then we pushed a good thing a bit too far. We watched the movie version--rather, "versions": not alone the justly acclaimed John Huston (Humphrey Bogart) number from 1941, but also its two predecessors: another Maltese Falcon from 1931, and an imitator-- Satan Met a Lady from 1936.

This enterprise also was instructive in its way but since we were our own instructors, we felt like we were sitting through some long evenings at a mediocre community college film appreciation class (just for the record, Palookaville has a fine community college). Still, a few points. One, the pre-Hays-office 1931 version is indeed a bit sexier than the more famous Bogey model, but you would hardly notice. We do get to see Bebe Daniels' bare shoulders emerging out of Sam's bathtub, and we can tell by the clock that they must have been in bed together: neither of these touches make it to Bogey. On the other hand, in the 1941 version, somebody calls somebody a "gunsel" (three times, by my count)--a gun-toting hoodlum or alternatively a passive homosexual, an erastes (cf. link). For this we have a censorship program? Did the censor, the little goose, not know what a "gunsel" is? Or did he assume the audience would not? Or was he distracted by the more anodyne meaning?

The 1936 comic version has its moments, but on the whole, it is pretty mediocre--they say it is material like this that prompted Bette Davis to skip out to London (and into litigation). The trouble is that nobody, and in particular not Warren William as the detective can seem to figure out exactly what is funny and why. Indeed, this may be the trouble with all three versionds--Spade himself, a hole in the center. Starting with Hammett, we never see inside his mind. So none of the three leading men--I include Bogart--can figure out exactly how to play him.

Still, the exercise was an ample demonstration as to why the 1941 version is so highly regarded: it is just so much better than the other two in almost every way. Certainly the bad guys: Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook, Jr. They own their parts. In a note on Greenstreet, the critic David Thomson says you can imagine that he is still out there somewhere, still tracking the elusive bird.

I'd said that Bogey couldn't quite figure out how to play Spade. I'll stand by that, but with a qualification: the romance between Bogey and Mary Astor. Watch it in the right frame of mind and this is one of the hottest scenes in film, as these two scoundrels try to get the better of each other. Thomson (again) says it is film noire crossbred with screwball comedy. Really, how can you beat a combination like that.

Twist Endings and Children

Filmjabber has a cute list up of twist endings in movies. I admit I haven't seen most of these, but those I have seen (Pyscho!) certainly qualify. But the list seems to have been assembled by children maybe by oldsters who have lost their long-term memory. Where is Captain's Paradise, for example? Or Kind Hearts and Coronets? I should think you would want to count Some Like it Hot, also; and the (original?) Producers. Or maybe these are just "zinger" endings; maybe comedy is a different item.

Roger Remembers Gene

Roger Ebert's tribute to Gene Siskel is a model of grace and generosity. We all knew they didn't like each other, but Ebert explains how much they did like each other--how much they responded to each other and triggered each other's responses.

Ebert is too generous, however, to thrust one important detail into the mix: Siskel was a snob. You could hear it in his voice, even if not see it in his face. He knew that he was the Yalie, the student, the man fit to keep company with an auteur. Ebert, in Siskel's eyes, was the hick from Hicksville who did not deserve a place on the same stage with him. Ebert for his part may have felt the same way, but he was self-contained. It's if he wasn't going to trouble himself with looking down his nose at Siskel; there was too much interesting work to be done.

Of course this kind of tension was hardly a drawback: you could tune in every week for the same reason you might watch the Indianaopolis "500"--to wait for the pileup and the flames. Which in the case of S&E of course never came and thank heavens for that--the show wouldn't have been nearly as much fun after therapy.

Frank Wilson also flags to a fascinating followup from a Chicagoan who was a close observer of the whole drama. Seems overdone to me: I never thought Siskel was quite that awful. But the writer knows he turf a whole lot better than I do, and he's probably worth a thought.

Update: In the first posting, I got the names mixed up--so, "Gene Remembers Roger." Now, that would be a story worth reading.

In the Category of Movie Lists

This has to be the biggest yawn ever (link).

Won't somebody ever vote for the original Dudley Moore and Peter Cook version of Bedazzled?

Update: Oh hey, I'd forgotten, I have my own top ten list here. And it shares one entry with Stanley Fish. And it does include Bedazzled.

If There is a Bunny in the Movie ...

My friend Ignoto articulates a sentiment that I have long entertained but never so well expressed. The topic is movies,specifically weird, nasty, creepy ones. Ignoto says:

I can watch fairly gnarly stuff, but I don't like it one bit when kids get hurt and I have an extremely low tolerance for movies about people screwing up their own lives. I have been known to say JUST TELL YOUR WIFE NOW AND GET IT OVER WITH BEFORE THE PSYCHO BITCH YOU SLEPT WITH COMES AFTER YOUR KIDS' PET BUNNY IN THE THIRD REEL.

My sentiments exactly.

Reference, for the lucky few who didn't get it: link.