TRASH In 1968, Pretty Poison, which plays the Castro Theatre this Thursday in a new 35mm print, arrived a bit early. The next year Easy Rider would suddenly make young American directors seem like “the future” of an industry then hobbling on the same now-arthritic legs that had supported its Golden Age decades earlier. By 1970 and for several years afterward small, idiosyncratic, independent (both within and outside studio funding) films would flourish, in number and frequent quality if not commercially.
But 1968 was the year of Belle de Jour, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary’s Baby, Petulia, two Ingmar Bergmans, and three Jean-Luc Godards — all “foreign films” in fact or stance. Stage or TV-trained not-quite-newbies like Arthur Penn or Mike Nichols aside, the perception was that U.S. cinema needed new voices yet unfound.
Certainly 20th Century Fox had no great expectations from Poison, which seemed eminently disposable: A small-town thriller with medium-watt stars, a first-time director (Noel Black had only done Skaterdater, a prize-winning ’65 short about suburban boarders), and a TV scenarist (Lorenzo Semple Jr., just off the Batman series). Expecting to dump it into drive-ins and second run houses, they opened in one New York City theater without a press screening, then were taken aback when Pauline Kael and Newsweek sought it out and praised it to the skies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJovJY-1f8c
We first meet Dennis Pitt (Anthony Perkins) being released from a lockup institution of some sort, his probation officer advising him to stay in touch and keep his “fantasies” in check. Relocating to a sleepy mill town for drone work at a chemical plant, Dennis quickly abandons both those principles. He’s convinced he’s under surveillance, because he’s onto a conspiracy to poison the water supply. Or is that absurd intrigue just a ruse to beguile the high school honor student he’s ogled on the football field in her miniskirt?
Sue Ann Stepenek (Tuesday Weld) is the golden all-American ingénue in Blondie’s “Sunday Girl:” “cold as ice cream but still as sweet.” She responds to Dennis’ crazy overtures with Girl Scout enthusiasm; looking for adventure, she’s willing to play along with his secret-agent delusions. It takes us a while to realize what’s really happening — that Dennis is not the bigger freak here. When we meet Sue Ann’s hectoring single mother (Beverly Garland), we begin to glean she might be using the older man to get out of her own domestic lockup. Later it occurs that she is Mother Version 2.0, with twice the chrome and venom. Weld doesn’t channel deception as most actors might — her Sue Ann doesn’t let us see the act’s seams any more than Dennis does. The depth of her performance is only revealed in a full-circle tag scene at that unlikely hub for criminal genius, the hot dog stand.
Weld was supposed to be our great actress of the 1970s, but that didn’t happen. Was the teen-pinup image impossible for audiences to overcome? Was she too “difficult”? Was she just not that interested? A few roles like this one make her career seem tragically under-realized. Director Black’s, not so much — the two movies he made (1970’s Cover Me Babe, 1971’s Jennifer On My Mind) on Poison‘s promise were nadirs of New Hollywood flailing that sentenced him to TV work and B genre flicks. But for a moment, Pretty Poison made it seem like anything was possible for them both.
FILM It’s not easy being a repertory cinema these days, even when you’re the coolest (or only, or both) one in town. Hoping that this town is big enough for more than just one, at least for a few days, the Roxie this weekend is hosting a kind of cult cinema smackdown between itself and two more of the nation’s finest such emporiums. Under the blanket title “Cinemadness!,” the three-day marathon of rarities, oddities, and unbilled surprises challenges you to look away, or stay away — either way, your sanity will surely be shakier come Monday.
Cinefamily kicks things off, road-tripping up from L.A.’s Silent Movie House. More than just film programmers, the collective also contrives relevant ring tones (intrigue your fellow Muni riders with the “Death Wish II-O-Rama”!), multimedia shows, curated archival wonders online, and live events like the “Jean Harlow Pajama Party.”
The party may be in your pants as well as onscreen Friday, March 23, as Cinefamily brings “100 Most Outrageous Fucks,” a clip compilation of the most tasteless, ridiculous, over-acted, and anatomically unlikely sex scenes yet found by people with an inordinate interest in such things. Expect mainstream Hollywood, exploitation cinema, and le porn to be fully representing.
This will be followed by a real obscurity. Dirkie a.k.a. Lost in the Desert was a 1970 endeavor by the late South African writer-director-producer-actor Jamie Uys, who would later have a fluke international smash with 1980’s The Gods Must Be Crazy. (And end his career 16 years later with barely-noticed The Gods Must Be Crazy V.) The Apartheid-era racial attitudes that drew criticism to some of his other works are absent from Dirkie, a film nonetheless distinguished as one of the most traumatizing and sadistic “family movies” ever made.
The titular eight-year-old (Uys’ own offspring Wynand) is sent for his “weak chest” to the country. Unfortunately a plane crash strands Dirkie and terrier Lolly (played by “Lady Frolic of Belvedale,” whose performance is indeed splendid) alone in the Kalahari Desert. As Dad (Uys) frantically oversees search efforts from Johannesburg, our wee asthmatic hero is attacked by a viciously persistent hyena; scorpion-stung; blinded by snake venom; fed Lolly’s cooked remains (or so he thinks); etc. Preceding by one year Nicolas Roeg’s better-known Walkabout, Dirkie is an equally spectacular survival adventure saga that’s less arty but even less suitable for young viewers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTCJWVLfAYo
The Alamo Drafthouse — jewel of Austin, that oasis of civilization in Texas — takes up Roxie residence Saturday, March 24, with two of 1987’s finest sci-fi-horror-action black comedies. A sleeper hit then that’s underappreciated now, The Hidden has pre-Twin Peaks Kyle MacLachlan as a mysterious “FBI agent” (OK, he’s from outer space) tracking an interplanetary homicidal maniac who quite enjoys Earth — especially its loud crap pop music, Ferraris, and automatic weapons. This mayhem-spreading tourist fears no physical peril because it can always abandon one human (or canine) host body for another. Typical of the script’s over-the-top glee is a stretch when said thingie “possesses” a stripper, taking rather more pleasure in her bodacious form than any slimy, tentacled whatsit ought to.
It’s followed by Street Trash, to date the only feature film directed by J. Michael Munro (still a busy cameraman), who incredibly was just 20 when he made it. This last word in low-budget Escape From New York-Road Warrior knockoffs finds a depressed city’s ginormous Skid Row population winnowed by (among other things) cheap Mad Dog-type wine with a flesh-melting-acid bouquet. Incredibly crass (typical banter: “You fuckworm!”), gross (see: severed-penis-as-Frisbee set piece) and energetic, it’s the guiltiest, most pleasurable of guilty pleasures.
The Roxie wrestles its own back Sunday, March 25 with three big attractions. First up is George Kuchar: Comedy of the Underground, an ultra-rare 1982 documentary about San Francisco’s beloved, recently deceased DIY auteur that was unavailable for preview. Then there’s Robert Altman’s 1984 Secret Honor, with Philip Baker Hall as the craziest faux Richard Nixon on record.
That is nothing, however, compared to the brain-warping experience that is Elvis Found Alive. An alleged two-hour-plus interview with the King himself (shot in silhouette), whom filmmaker Joel Gilbert located with stunning ease thanks to poorly-redacted paperwork obtained via Freedom of Information Act, this … documentary? re-enactment? mock-doc fantasia? … bares many a shocking revelation.
To wit: secret FBI agent Presley faked his own death because the Weathermen, Black Panthers, and Mafia had joined forces to assassinate him. Believe me, that is just the tip of the ice cube in this video cocktail. It all makes more sense if you know Gilbert is himself a professional impersonator of Bob Dylan (whom Elvis confides “dumped that awful Joan Baez when she tried to push him into leftist politics”) and has also made such direct-to-your fallout-shelter opuses as Paul Is Really Dead and Atomic Jihad. Does “Elvis” have an opinion about President Obama? Ohhh yeah, and that “socialist thug” best not mess with Memphis. America forever! *
TRASH History does not record whether the evening of January 23, 1974 struck anyone immediately as a momentous occasion. Probably not: perhaps distracted by Watergate, porn chic, rising gas prices, the Exorcist phenomenon, and passage (one day earlier) of Roe vs. Wade, any television viewers straying over from CBS’s Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour to ABC at 8:30 p.m. could hardly have fully understood the significance of what they were about to experience.
Today, we can only wonder at the supreme cool of an era in which a summit of titans — William Shatner, Andy Griffith, Robert “Mr. Brady Bunch” Reed, and Marjoe Gortner, the latter recently profiled in these pages — might be shrugged off as another night’s disposable entertainment. Or another week’s, this being an “ABC Movie of the Week” in the variously taboo-breaking, trashtastic, and forgettable lineage of gay drama That Certain Summer (1972), Karen Black-a-thon Trilogy of Terror (1975), and self-explanatory Gidget Gets Married (1972). Perhaps those who stuck it out, stunned into a dislocative state by the unexpected impact of primetime existential bleakness, chose to forget the experience and go on living their lives as best they could. (It can surely be no coincidence that, in a general sense, everything’s gone to hell since.)
You, of course, can approach forewarned at the Vortex Room when Pray for the Wildcats finishes off a bill celebrating the still alarmingly active Shatner’s 81st birthday. What, pray tell, is Wildcats? It is seriously sick shit directed by Robert Michael Lewis and written by Jack Turley, two nondescript network hacks hitherto and henceforth never so guilty by association. Their Mount Rushmore of broadcast comfort-food stars — the wild card being Gortner, a self-exposed evangelical con man just starting to turn his notoriety into an acting career — play business types on a guys-only holiday in Baja.
Except Gortner ain’t the weird one here, despite his contrasting youth and Godspell ‘fro. Instead, that’s erstwhile Mayberry sheriff Griffith, making the “old country boy” folksiness curdle on his tongue as Sam Farragut, a tractor tycoon who basically blackmails the other three into going on the trip lest their advertising agency lose his million-dollar account. They reluctantly leave their spouses (notably a bitchy Angie Dickinson) behind to pretend they’re having fun with this weaselly, wealthy hick.
Trouble is, Farragut turns out to be a full-on psychopath whose notion of kicks fast grows unpleasant. This proves particularly unfortunate for a hippie couple whose supple young flesh attracts Uncle Andy’s leering attention. But it leaves no one unscarred — as if we didn’t already get the cynical point from prior caustic references to “the rat race” and the American dream, Wildcats ends with one character saying “I want a divorce,” another announcing her recent abortion (topical!), and a third sighing an all-purpose “God help ya.”
This midnight walk on the daaaark side will be preceded by a program of Shatner rarities, including his very special 1972 guest appearance on Mission: Impossible, as an evil playboy in an episode titled “Cocaine.”
“DEEP SHAT”
Thurs/22, William Shatner rarities, 9 p.m.; Pray for the Wildcats, midnight, $7
FILM What with the internet, the paparazzi, Rupert Murdoch’s CIA-level spy techniques, and the general displacement of actual news by “celebrity news,” it’s pretty hard these days for a star of any sort to keep their debauchery private. Not like the good old days, when Hollywood carefully stage-managed publicity and only those who’d become a real liability risked having their peccadilloes exposed.
Such rare windfalls aside, the public were mostly restricted to watching beautiful people behave badly onscreen — a pastime that took a big blow once the censorious Production Code was instituted in 1934. Elliot Lavine’s latest Roxie retrospective of movies from that golden-shower period of post-silents, pre-Nannywood licentiousness — this time entitled “Hollywood Before the Code: Nasty-Ass Films for a Nasty-Ass World!” — provides plentiful early talkie titillation. Now that the bodies involved are long buried, we also know a few tales of their stars’ off-screen misadventures, too.
The week-long series of double bills sports its share of familiar titles, notably Howard Hawks’ terrific original Scarface (1934); Edgar G. Ulmer’s Karloff vs. Lugosi smackdown The Black Cat (1934); and the first, probably best version of H.G. Welles’ prescient biotech fable Island of Lost Souls (1932). There are women in prison (1931’s Ladies of the Big House), women in Faulkner (1933’s The Story of Temple Drake, a watered-down adaptation of W.F.’s then-notorious Sanctuary), women in everything else (1932’s Three On a Match, whose Depression-era Valley of the Dolls-esque trio includes a very young Bette Davis), and just plain Joan Blondell (1933’s Blondie Johnson).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzxnEDEY2Hs
It’s a few choice dames in lesser-remembered pictures that provide the biggest “nasty-ass” discoveries this go-round, however. March 4 offers a shocking double dose of pure white femininity finding themselves in, ahem, “Yellow Peril” — miscegenation being something Hollywood could only begin to embrace a few decades later. Frank Capra’s atypically erotic The Bitter Tea of General Yen, with Barbara Stanwyck alllllmost surrendering the white flag to a “charismatic Chinese warlord” (Swede Nils Asther, eyes narrowed), has become a minor classic since flopping in 1933.
No such luck for The Cheat (1931), a remake of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 shocker that was part of Paramount’s brief, failed attempt to make stage sensation Tallulah Bankhead a movie star. Her gambling-addicted socialite gets branded (literally) in lieu of repayment not by the original’s Far East businessman (dashing Sessue Hayakawa) but by a mere rich Caucasian perv with Sinophile pretensions (Irving Pichel). The big courtroom climax is a notable howler.
Bankhead remained a Broadway star and a popular “personality,” her throaty voice hinting at a semi-private life that included a great deal of bourbon, a fondness for unexpected nudity, and sexual appetites all along the Kinsey scale. After two decades off screen she arguably found her camp métier as a berserk Bible-clutching hag terrorizing Stefanie Powers in 1965’s Die! Die! My Darling.
Much less of a survivor was poor Clara Bow, who was beloved when she played the wild thing yet unduly punished when it turned out that role had relevance in real life. The quintessential flapper and “It Girl” (“it” meaning sex appeal) was never much of an actress, but an incandescent, live-wire screen presence.
Call Her Savage (1932) is a pre-Code jaw-dropper that was supposedly her personal favorite. Running an A-to-Z gamut of emotions (and hairstyles), her Texas heiress heroine Nasa “Dynamite” Springer is “never two minutes the same” — a nice way of saying she’s nuts. In 88 minutes she rides a horse like it’s something else, plays with her mastiff likewise, is near-raped by an estranged husband, turns streetwalker, causes a brawl in Greenwich Village café catering to “wild poets and anarchists,” gets in two catfights, hits the bottle, and finds peace upon discovering she’s a part Indian “half-breed,” which apparently explains all.
Emotionally unstable, due in part to a pretty horrific upbringing, Bow must have related. At the time she was enduring myriad problems, notably some embarrassing public revelations spilled by a blackmailing secretary. Savage would be her next-to-last film, after which she retired into a deep and troubled seclusion.
Heading thataway as well was Juanita Hansen, a silent star who’d gone down in flames a decade earlier thanks to a “Queen of Thrills” image that unfortunately she enacted a little too enthusiastically in real life. She quit cocaine, got hooked on morphine, quit that, and became an anti-drug crusader — but nothing re-ignited her career. Certainly not lone comeback vehicle Sensation Hunters, a 1933 Poverty Row exploiter in which she was fifth-billed as “Trixie Snell,” manager-slash-madam to a troupe of “Hot-Cha Girls” who kinda dance, kinda sing, but mostly roll customers at Panama City’s “Bull Ring Club.” It was a sad exit. Puffy and peroxided, Hansen is all too convincing as a woman with too many hard miles on her to go anywhere but further downhill.
Waaaay uptown — glittering Broadway via glossy Paramount — 1934’s Murder at the Vanities offered the last hurrah for pre-Code naughtiness. And what a hurrah: chorus girls in pasties and less (at one point they simply clutch boobs as if on a latter-day Vanity Fair cover); production numbers like “The Rape of the Rhapsody” (the “rape” being Duke Ellington’s “colored” jazz musicians and dancers invading a classical orchestra with something called “Ebony Rhapsody” — until a white gangster jokingly machine-guns them all down); plus sexual humor so blunt that Jack Oakie ends the film telling a giggly blonde “Come on, let’s do it,” meaning exactly what you think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCoj855Vdo8
On the side of the angels — definitely for losers here — there are numerous horrible songs (excepting standard “Cocktails for Two”), gag-inducingly sweet romantic leads, and kitschy-great ideas like having stage impresario Earl Carroll’s patented “Most Beautiful Girls in the World” pose en masse as tropical waves and cosmetics products. Representing Satan and evening gown-wearing pot smokers everywhere is villainous Gertrude Michael, who infamously sings torch song “Sweet Marijuana.” Michael was an elegant stage and radio star whose own recreational taste leaned more toward cocktails for one. Indeed, she was fictionalized as the hard-drinking love object in one-time lover Paul Cain’s 1932 novel Fast One, an early classic of hard boiled American pulp.
Saving the sleaziest for last, the series will truly flabber your gast with its closer. Normally prim MGM found itself reviled in early 1932 with the fleeting release of Tod Browning’s Freaks (playing the Roxie March 3), a much-misunderstood, now celebrated fable starring actual circus sideshow performers. It was considered so grotesque and unsettling that Freaks was banned in many areas — Britain didn’t see it until 1963.
Yet there’s no evidence of any similar backlash to the infinitely scuzzier Kongo, unleashed by Metro a few months later. A remake of Browning’s 1928 Lon Chaney vehicle West of Zanzibar, it stars Walter Huston as wheelchair-bound “Deadlegs” Flint. He’s used cheap magic tricks to appoint himself fearsome white-man “god” amongst spear-carrying tribesmen in a “dunghill” African outpost, all part of an elaborate, insidious plan to wreak vengeance on the rival who stole his wife and health long ago.
What this revenge eventually encompasses reads like a list of nearly everything the Production Code would soon bar from the screen: depicted or suggested drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, rape, sadism, and a convent-bred ingénue (Virginia Bruce) recalling “hot hairy hands pawing and mauling” her unwilling virginal body. Not to mention human sacrifice and a unique substance abuse “cure” using leeches.
One can almost hear the censuring voice of Will Hays, the Code’s original enforcer, when one character tells Deadlegs “The swamp’s wholesome compared to you!” It would arguably be 40 years before MGM distributed another movie so flagrantly perverse — and even then the studio was so ashamed they put it (Paul Bartel’s 1972 Private Parts) out under a fake subsidiary’s auspices.
HOLLYWOOD BEFORE THE CODE: NASTY-ASS FILMS FOR A NASTY-ASS WORLD!
FILM Agnieszka Holland is that kind of filmmaker who can become a well known, respectable veteran without anyone being quite sure what those decades have added up to. Her mentor was Andrzej Wadja, the last half-century’s leading Polish director (among those who never left). He helped shape a penchant for heavy historical drama and a sometimes clunky style not far from his own.
Since the late 1970s the result has been numerous great or at least weighty themes tackled head-on, with variable success. Following some well-received works at home, she commenced her international career with 1985’s Angry Harvest, about the amorous relationship between a Polish man and the Austrian, a Jewish woman, he hides during Nazi occupation. Very seldom inhabiting the present in her films, she’s approached classic children’s lit (1993’s The Secret Garden) and Henry James (1997’s Washington Square) with the same slightly ham-fisted competence.
She’s bolstered the notion of artistic genius being irascible via Ed Harris going Pollock on the ivories in 2006’s Copying Beethoven, and of Rimbaud and Verlaine shocking the bourgeoisie in 1995’s Total Eclipse. To Kill a Priest (1988) and The Third Miracle (1999) dealt with the uneasy relationship between faith, politics, and the Catholic Church in Poland. Less conspicuously, Holland has worked for hire on TV movies (one about murderer Gary Gilmore, another about murder victim Gwen Araujo) and series episodes (The Wire, Treme) that must rate among her least personal projects — as well as her finest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LV4JJPZCwI
Her one indispensable feature is 1990’s Europa, Europa, an ideal vehicle for her favored mix of the grotesque, sober, and factual — following a Jewish boy who passed as Aryan German, to the point of joining the Hitler Youth. The new In Darkness is her best since then, and it can’t be chance that this too dramatizes a notably bizarre case of real-life peril and survival under the Nazis.
Its protagonist is Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), an ordinary family man in Lvov (Poland then, Ukraine now) who’s not above exploiting the disarray of occupation and war to make ends meet. A sewer inspector, he uses his knowledge of underground tunnels to hide Jews who can pay enough when even the fenced-off ghetto is no longer safe. It’s late in the war; all avenues of flight are closed. The dozen or so citizens Socha secretes in the city’s bowels — freezing amidst vermin and waste — run a gamut despite shared panic. They include a professor, a junkie, a philanderer and mistress, and children. Extreme adversity doesn’t ennoble them — even in this dank entrapment there occur betrayals, fights, a bastard pregnancy. It is typical of Holland that when copulation and masturbation occur, the acts are at once furtively shameful and barnyard-frank.
Though both sides risk all, the “Polacks” openly disdain the “Yids,” and vice versa. In any other circumstance they’d happily snub one another. Only the flat brutality of the Nazis, gloating and laughing as they kill, can impose a thin allegiance. Yet as grueling months go by under constant threat of capture, something more than sheer dependency develops. Reluctantly, Socha finds himself unable to abandon “his” Jews even when they can no longer pay, and discovery would cost his life as well as theirs.
Holland will never be a cinematic poet. Her blunt, sometimes graceless approach to any story can leach its emotional subtleties as well as (more usefully) potential forced bathos and uplift. In Darkness has a few sequences poorly shaped enough to seem pointless. It takes us longer than it should to sort out all the major characters, and the sense of time passing is murky at best.
But for such a long, oppressive, and literally dark film, this one passes quickly, maintaining tension as well as a palpable physical discomfort that doubtlessly suggests just a fraction what the refugees actually suffered. On rare instances when Socha or others venture outdoors, sunlight feels as harsh and exposing as bleach.
In Darkness isn’t quite a great movie, but it’s a powerful experience. At the end it’s impossible to be unmoved, not least because the director’s resistance toward Spielbergian exaltation insists on the banal and everyday, even in human triumph.
FILM The demise of Ken Russell late last year at age 84 blew a few cobwebs off appreciation of his career, which had ever been beloved by cult-minded buffs but forgotten by most everyone else for some years. He hadn’t had a theatrical feature for two decades, and in his last years had been reduced to glorified home movies with titles like Revenge of the Elephant Man (2004) and The Fall of the Louse of Usher (2002). But for a while he was an inescapable, flamboyant, exasperating, and utterly unique presence in film, with even his detractors (who were legion) admitting his work could never be confused with anyone else’s.
In 1971 he was at his zenith as the scandal and big noise (frequently self blown) of British cinema, having had a great international success with 1969’s D.H. Lawrence adaptation Women in Love, which won a previously little-known Glenda Jackson her first Oscar, and a qualified one the next year with The Music Lovers, one of the increasingly outrageous classical-composer biopics he’d commenced making on the BBC and continued through 1975’s Lisztomania. (Which, featuring as it did Roger Daltry as pop star Franz Liszt having lovers dance like Rockettes on his giant phallus in one fantasy scene, and Wagner reincarnated as a Nazi Frankenstein in another, presumably exhausted that genre’s desecration possibilities even for Russell.) At the time, it seemed that 1971 was the year that killed off Old Hollywood and shat on its corpse. Movies like Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Roman Polanski’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, John Boorman’s Deliverance, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge, Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, Alan J. Pakula’s Klute, and Dusan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism all pushed the envelope in terms of sex, violence, and nihilism.
Even in such company, Russell’s The Devils — which closes “The Second Coming of the Vortex Room,” the venue’s February series of religion-themed films — was an outstandingly bad trip, an assaultive experience as tainting and unwelcome to most as that phone-receiver tongue licking Heather Langenkamp’s ear in the original Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). The words “hallucinogenic,” “appalling,” and “tasteless” would be applied to nearly all Russell’s films, but never with such genuine revulsion as this one. Today, The Devils can be seen as perhaps his greatest, most cohesive work — being about hysteria, religious and sexual, it justified his trademark surreal excesses as no subject ever would again.
Based on an Aldous Huxley novel about actual historical events, it takes place in a 17th century France beset by plague, persecution, church corruption, and court decadence. Scheming to end walled city Loudon’s independence, Cardinal Richelieu seizes on an accusation made by an unstable abbess that the leading local priest had seduced her entire convent via black magic. After considerable torture, said priest, Urbain Grandier, was burned at the stake, despite recanted testimonies and widespread belief that only “crime” was being in ambitious Richelieu’s way.
Russell depicts Grandier (played by his go-to bulldog Oliver Reed, practicing more restraint than usual) as a lusty breaker of celibacy vows, but also as a man of true conviction compared to the hypocritical displays of faith, morality, and community-mindedness around him. Mother Superior Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave as you’ve definitely never seen her before) is a hunchback lost in fantasy and spite, having like many of her wards not chosen this vocation, but instead been abandoned to it — back then, well-born females whose family didn’t have enough dowry money to marry them off were forcibly “married” to Jesus instead.
The Devils is a fevered nightmare, unrelentingly grotesque and claustrophobic. (Russell had the inspiration of hiring Derek Jarman as his production designer — not yet a director himself, the latter devised studio bound, abstract monochrome sets more vividly oppressive than any actual historic sites could have been.) It had to be heavily cut even before getting slapped with an X rating in the U.S., excised sequences like a mad convent orgy dubbed “The Rape of Christ” assumed lost until their re-discovery a decade ago. In England the film was banned from several districts. Nearly everywhere, critical response was bilious — reviewers felt violated, polluted, disgusted. The L.A. Times called it “a degenerate and despicable work of art,” others “pornographic” and “Satanic” outright.
Those gag reflexes were understandable. The Devils is flawed, mostly in its crudely satirical aspects. And its scalding majority impact is achieved in a hyperbolic manner that makes it very hard to separate the depiction of blasphemy from the embodiment of it. Yowling “I want to shock people into awareness. I don’t believe there’s any virtue in understatement!” to Time magazine that year, Russell cared little about clarifying that distinction.
A visual statement as singularly alarming as any canvas by Bosch or Bacon, its disturbance further heightened by avant-garde composer Peter Maxwell Davies’ striking score, The Devils would doubtless be more highly regarded today had it been one isolated case of delirium in an otherwise relatively sane director’s oeuvre. But the baroque excesses Russell flaunted under any circumstance, no matter how apt, made it seem just more of his reliable too muchness. The neglect his work has fallen into benefits this most serious of his features, as it allows The Devils to be seen clearly as a caterwaul of horror — not at supernatural possession but at the infinite human cruelty power and sanctimony can allow.
FILM Opposition to apartheid didn’t really pick up steam as a popular cause in the U.S. until the early 1980s. Which makes it all the more remarkable that New York City-based documentarian Lionel Rogosin made Come Back, Africa about a quarter-century earlier — though less surprisingly, the film itself was barely seen here at the time. Now finally playing American theaters outside his home town in a restored print, it’s a time capsule whose background is as intriguing as the history it captures onscreen.
The horrors of World War II and some subsequent global travel had stirred a profound awareness of social injustices in Rogosin, who began planning a feature about South Africa while still working at his father’s textile business. He had very little filmmaking experience, however, so he took $30,000 of his earnings and as “practice” made On the Bowery (1956), a semi staged portrait of Manhattan’s skid row area that won considerable praise, if also some shocked and appalled responses from Eisenhower-era keepers of America’s wholesome, prosperous self-image. (It was, as 1959’s Come Back, Africa would also be, much more widely appreciated in Europe.)
Armed with the confidence bestowed by that successful effort and several international awards, Bogosin traveled to South Africa — not for the first time, but now with the earnest intent of making his expose. In the mid- to late ’50s, however, that was hardly a simple task. He and wife Elinor Hart had to do everything clandestinely, from making contacts in the activist underground to recruiting actors and crew. (The latter eventually had to be brought in mostly from Europe and Israel.) To get permits he fed the government authorities a series of lines: first he pretended to be making an airline travelogue to encourage tourism; then a music documentary to show local blacks “were basically a happy people;” then another doc, about the Boer War. Amazingly, despite the myriad likelihoods of being informed on, he shot the entire film without being shut down or deported. It remained, however, a stressful and dangerous endeavor for all concerned.
Like On the Bowery, Come Back, Africa qualified as a documentary by the looser standards of the time (Rogosin preferred the term “poetic realism”), but mixed a loose, acted narrative with completely nonfiction elements. Like the prior film, it also followed the luckless wanderings of an agreeable protagonist played by a first-time actor actually found on the street — here Zacharia Mgabi, a 30-ish bearded worker “discovered” on a bus queue.
His character, Zachariah, is caught in one catch-22 of apartheid life: he can’t get a job without the appropriate permits, and can’t get the permits without a job. First he tries finding employment in the misery of a mining encampment, then travels to Johannesburg — where it’s illegal for him to be without further permits — where he’s bounced from one position to another. Working as “house boy” to a middle-class white couple, he’s fired when the racist, shrewish wife (a memorable performance by Myrtle Berman) catches him sneaking a drink from her own secret booze stash. An auto-shop stint is lost due to a friend’s incessant goofing off, while service as porter in a hotel is terminated when a hysterical white lady guest cries “Rape!” simply because he surprises her in a hallway.
Meanwhile Zachariah’s wife arrives from their native KwaZulu, and they tentatively set up house in a Sophiatown shack. (Come Back, Africa is of particular interest for its scenes there — within a few years the government had forcibly emptied this poor black township, having made its population mix of races illegal, and the area was razed to become an unrecognizable whites only suburb.) But even this small foothold on stability is doomed. Just as alcoholism dragged On the Bowery‘s hero back into a downward spiral at the end (both on- and offscreen), so Zachariah and his family are helpless to save themselves from the violence, police harassment, and self-destruction apartheid breeds and maintains itself with.
All show and almost no “tell,” Come Back, Africa pauses around the two-thirds point to let several men pass around a bottle, discussing the nature of and solutions to their oppression. They’re happily interrupted by the incongruity of a young woman in an elegant cocktail dress — no less than a then-unknown Miriam Makeba, who sings a couple of songs in her inimitable voice. When the film was finished, Rogosin bribed officials to get her out of the country, bankrolling his contracted “discovery’s” launch at the Venice Festival, and in the U.S. and England. But to his great disappointment, she was quickly taken under Harry Belafonte’s wing, dismissing her first benefactor as “not very nice” and “an amateur.” Thus a legend was born, with Rogosin pretty much cut out of the resume.
Come Back, Africa, too, would disappoint its maker in some respects. With a furious South African government swiftly condemning this portrait as “distorted,” his original plans for a trilogy became impossible. The film won a number of prizes — although unlike On the Bowery, it was pointedly not nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar — and would eventually be widely seen on European television. But it has still never been broadcast in the U.S., and despite Rogosin’s efforts — he went so far as to open NYC’s still-extant Bleeker Street Cinemas in 1960 to show it and other important new works — it collided with a thud against the overwhelming indifference of middle-class white audiences. They were barely starting to confront such thorny racial issues in their own backyard, much less in far-flung nations. Not shown in South Africa until the late 1980s, Come Back nonetheless proved a great influence on development of the whole continent’s indigenous cinematic voices.
A liberal shit-kicker to the end, Rogosin made other documentaries, was integral to the New American Cinema movement (alongside Jonas Mekas, Robert Downey Sr., Shirley Clark, and other experimental luminaries), founded distribution company Impact Films, and moved to England for a spell before dying in Los Angeles at the century’s turn. It’s a pity he didn’t live to see his two first features restored and rediscovered — though interviews late in life suggest he never let limited exposure dampen his activist zeal one whit.
FILM Today, seeing high-profile evangelical Christians reveal themselves to be charlatans or hypocrites is old news. Even the spectacle of homophobic mega church prig Ted Haggard, outed as a fan of male hustlers and crystal meth, resurfacing on Celebrity Wife Swap induced a few shudders but no real surprise. The plunge from public sanctimoniousness to scandal and newly angled self-promotion is by now too familiar to shock.
A few decades ago, however, the face of American evangelism was inclusive, straight-arrow centrist Billy Graham. Elmer Gantry-like tent revival shows seemed a thing of the past, or at least one whose few remaining practitioners traveled well off the mainstream radar. So there was considerable exoticism to Marjoe, a 1972 documentary that plays the Vortex Room next Thursday as part of a religion-themed February schedule.
Its subject was a 28-year-old Pentecostal preacher — titular name a combination of "Mary" and "Joseph" — who’d been "The World’s Youngest Evangelist," pushed onto the stage of a lucrative salvation circuit from the age of four. By his own estimation, his parents-managers-slave drivers made $3 million or so off his precocious act as God’s littlest huckster, none of which he ever saw. Some years after running away as a teen, he’d gotten his secular head together, but reluctantly re-entered the revival biz — working it half the year in order to fund the other six months as a California flower child.
As ample archival footage shows in Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan’s portrait, Marjoe Gortner was indeed the real thing, at least in terms of having a natural gift for mimicry, rhythmic "testifying," crowd control, and snake-charming dollars from wallets. But he’d never been a believer, and in adulthood was uncomfortable providing religious experiences to people who innocently assumed he shared in them. His restless showman’s energy needed to be channeled in another direction — rock or movie stardom, perhaps — so Marjoe the Movie was intended to chronicle, expose, and bury one career while hopefully launching a new one.
It worked, to an extent. Marjoe got a lot of attention, winning the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. The New York Times called its subject "Evangelism’s answer to Mick Jagger" (whom Gortner admitted stealing moves from). With the youth-oriented Jesus Movement then at its peak, some church leaders were not happy at an instance of Christian hoaxdom getting such wide exposure. Though what’s striking about the film now is not just how charismatic (in the non-divine sense) its protagonist remains, but how sincere he is: Marjoe doesn’t judge, condescend to, or snark at his nightly congregations, whose members he can make faint dead in holy rapture with a laying-on of hands. He knows they’re having an authentic experience, but also that "I don’t have any ‘power.’ Hundreds of people were healed at my crusades, but I know damn well it was nothing I was doing. Sometimes I feel like I should do repentance to the audience." So Marjoe was the record of his quitting.
It was just the start, however, of a wider public’s acquaintance with Marjoe Gortner. He made one album on a major label called Bad, But Not Evil. (Are the Black Lips aware of this?) Hunky in a slightly goofy way, he soon started guesting — usually as some kind of seductive wacko — in TV series like Kojak, The A-Team, and Fantasy Island.
He became a familiar face on the big screen, too, peaking early in commercial terms with a memorable role as a psychotic supermarket employee and National Guardsman who spends all of 1974 disaster epic Earthquake trying to force himself on a ‘fro-haired Victoria Principal. He definitely had ability and magnetism, but also the ill luck to appear in some of next decade-plus’ worst movies: joining William Shatner and Robert Reed as suburban nice guys on vacation with unexpectedly warped neighbor Andy Griffith (!) in Pray for the Wildcats (1974); imperiled by giant rats in The Food of the Gods (1976); in Viva Knievel! (1977), ’nuff said; Star Wars rip-off Starcrash (1978); horror idiocy Mausoleum (1983); women-in-prison jewel Hellhole (1985); and Rambo-meets-T&A travesty Jungle Warriors (1984) — replacing Dennis Hopper in that one after the latter was found wandering naked and senseless on location. Arguably only Linda Blair made more enjoyably awful movies in a particularly rich period for them.
Gortner had produced a 1979 version of the stage play When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? as a serious vehicle for himself — in which he was duly impressive, albeit as yet another psychotic — but that flopped. Around the same time he also started filming an autobiographical drama, only to reportedly abscond with the film cans when that never-finished project’s money ran out. By 1990 (and American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt), a respectable acting career was clearly not going to happen, and the one he had held little remaining appeal. Gortner spent the next couple decades producing charity sports events. He’s since retired, and shows no sign of any further desire for the public eye. He presumably prefers not being remembered at all to being remembered as a novelty.
Marjoe‘s co-feature is an obscurity I’d love to see an exposé documentary about: San Francisco-set The Second Coming of Suzanne (1974), a muddled parable about a megalomaniacal hippie film director (Jared Martin) obsessed with the titular chick (future Clint Eastwood consort Sondra Locke) he casts and, naturally, crucifies as star of his unfathomable film-within-the-film.
Suzanne itself is one of the most flabbergastingly pretentious movies ever made, the first and last screen opus of writer-director Michael Barry, son to second-tier Hollywood and Broadway leading man Gene Barry. Featuring a pre-fame Richard Dreyfuss and a pre-Decline of Western Civilization Penelope Spheeris in support roles, it’s such a timepiece — for better and far worse than you can begin to imagine. It should be required viewing for people who worship 70s cinema, as illustration of how easily all that era’s best intentions could go to hell in a hand basket. To wit, "Second Coming" kicks off this week with an inimitable pair: Soul Hustler, a.k.a. The Day the Lord Got Busted (1973), and 1972’s J.C., in which Jesus joins an LSD-crazed biker gang.
<P>arts@sfbg.com <P> <P><B>FILM</B> French actor Valérie Donzelli made her first feature as writer-director with 2009’s <I>The Queen of Apples</I>, which trawled the film festival circuit for a couple of years — eventually getting its title tweaked to <I>The Queen of Hearts</I> — before making its unheralded U.S. debut at the 2010 Mill Valley Film Festival. It got a minor theatrical release in France and none at all here. <P>All this goes to show that, contrary to all optimistic wisdom, not every film will find its audience. Not even when it is, in fact, the kind of movie that tends to win audience awards. <I>Queen</I> was endlessly energetic, quirky, and endearing, in the manner of 1960s independent films whose youthful makers needed to prove they could do every trick and break every rule in the book. It was charming despite being almost too cute for words, and a mite too pleased with itself. The slender story aimed for little more than charm: Donzelli played a hapless young Parisian flinging herself from one comically doomed love to another before winding up with Mr. Right, played (as were all the Mr. Wrongs) by Jérémie Elkaïm, who in 2000 was the unstable gay teen in Sébastien Lifshitz’s memorable <I>Come Undone</I>. <I>Queen</I> may have been uneven, but it was frequently so funny that hardly mattered. <P>Obviously somebody noticed, however, since Donzelli is now back with a second feature she co-stars in, and co-wrote with, Elkaïm. (Evidently other people like this team as well — in the interim they got cast opposite one another in Élise Gerard’s 2010 <I>Belleville-Tokyo</I>.) It’s even playing at a theater near you, at least for the next five minutes. <P>Though more ambitious as (largely) a serious drama, <I>Declaration of War</I> reprises the same flaws as its predecessor, being over-stuffed with stylistic digressions, a little too eager to please at times. But once again it’s a very likable piece of work that largely works on its own terms. <P>While <I>Queen </I>was primarily content to poke fun at the great French tradition of slender twentysomethings moping lovesick about Paris, <I>War </I>declares itself on something inherently humorless: a child’s grave illness. Juliette (Donzelli) meets Romeo (Elkaïm) — yep, that’s a bit much — at a punk club, where his pogoing catches her eye. After a very 1960s montage of love al fresco (although they do not run through any flower fields), out pops the no less auspiciously named Adam, and all is well apart from some higher-than normal new-parent exhaustion issues related to the baby crying just about every waking moment. <P>Eventually, however, Adam’s tendency to barf, cough, and tilt his head leftward while showing no interest in learning to walk raises suspicions confirmed by Dr. Prat (Béatrice De Staël, who was also a standout as the heroine’s neurotic flatmate in <I>Queen</I>): little Adam has a brain tumor, and there’s a long uncertain road ahead that puts infinite strain on the young couple’s individual emotions, collective resources and future together. <P>Even in this much more sober story context, Donzetti can’t resist cramming in every stylistic whim that comes to mind, from superimpositions to interior voices and multiple anonymous narrators, not excluding a bursting into song. The cost of her chasing after such spontaneity is that sometimes a gamble falls flat, calling attention to itself without adding anything, like the soundtrack choice of some overly gimmicky electronica when Juliette freaks out during her child’s CAT Scan. Eclecticism isn’t always an ideal tactic, especially when a subject like this one demands a certain groundedness. <P>But many of her tactics work, finding humor in surprising places and refreshing some familiar devices of domestic tragedy. Donzetti has a very sure touch with actors; she and the ingratiating Elkaïm work so well together that we don’t mind their characters remain in some ways underdeveloped. (In fact this seems somewhat intentional — Juliette and Romeo plunge into serious commitment before they’re fully formed adults, and the script doesn’t spare them the odd outburst that’s childishly unflattering.) Much less melodramatic than its title would suggest, <I>Declaration of War </I>is uneven but full of life and ideas — there’s room for Donzetti to refine her directorial instincts, but one hopes they stay a little messy. <B>DECLARATION OF WAR </B>opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.
FILM Like the Olympics, albeit on a less rigid schedule, the perceived hotspot for evolving cinematic art tends to migrate every few years. Recently we’ve seen the likes of Romania and South Korea thrust into that rarefied limelight, just as decades earlier it had been Italy, France, Japan, or Sweden. Their moment usually occurs when a new generation of filmmakers with shared stylistic and/or political concerns impact as a collective force, reinvigorating the national cinema while making a splash on the international festival and art house circuits.
Iran has had a particularly long vogue, one that officially commenced with Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home? in 1987 and has only ebbed slightly in the quarter-century since. Contextualized by knowledge of the difficulties their makers have experienced enduring censorship and even imprisonment under the Islamic Republic’s strictures on free expression, it’s hard not to admire the rigor and range of their work — even if by the same token, expressing ambivalence toward it becomes a political and intellectual faux pas seldom allowed in polite circles. Partly to circumvent the censors, Iranian directors (excluding those making seldom-exported lighter entertainments intended solely for domestic audiences) have leaned heavily toward neo-realist poverty dramas, obtuse minimalist poetics, and stories about those typically least-objectionable protagonists, children. Only a philistine would say that many of these movies might reasonably strike a viewer as aridly uninvolving, tedious, or too precious. But there, I just said it.
Therefore it’s especially rewarding — even more so when fellow award magnets like 2011’s The Tree of Life and Melancholia are so aesthetically elaborate yet amorphous in narrative shape — to have an Iranian film like A Separation, which is both clear and complex in ways most directly connected to audience engagement. The country’s first movie to win Berlin’s Golden Bear (as well as all its acting awards), this domestic drama reflecting a larger socio-political backdrop is subtly well-crafted on all levels, but most of all demonstrates the unbeatable virtue of having an intricately balanced, reality-grounded screenplay — director Asghar Farhadi’s own — as bedrock.
A sort of confrontational impartiality is introduced immediately, as our protagonists Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) face the camera — or rather the court magistrate — to plead their separate cases in her filing for divorce, which he opposes. We gradually learn that their 14-year wedlock isn’t really irreparable, the feelings between them not entirely hostile. The roadblock is that Simin has finally gotten permission to move abroad, a chance she thinks she must seize for the sake of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But Nader doesn’t want to leave the country — for one thing, his senile father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi) can hardly be uprooted — and is not about to let his only child go without him.
Unconvinced of the necessity of Simin’s argument, the judge refuses to grant a divorce, after which she moves into her mother’s house. While seeing both parents (and being the only party aware that both of them are basically waiting for the other to “come to their senses” and reconcile), Termeh stays at home with dad, who is quickly overwhelmed by having to care for grandpa. To pick up the slack he hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), who desperately needs the income as her husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini) is unemployed. Yet she’s afraid to tell the latter about this job, and fears that it might violate their strict religious observances prove well-founded when what was billed as a simple housekeeping job instead proves much more suited to a nurse inured toward patient nudity and bodily fluids. Worse, her apparent abandonment of duty provokes an argument with Nader that drags all concerned into another, potentially much more serious court battle.
Farhadi worked in theater before moving into films a decade ago. His close attention to character and performance (developed over several weeks’ pre production rehearsal) has the acuity sported by contemporary playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan and Theresa Rebeck, fitted to a distinctly cinematic urgency of pace and image. None of the protagonists would likely consider themselves highly political. Yet the class differences and overlapping pressures experienced by both the white- and blue-collar couples here reveal a great deal about how a fissuring system is failing ordinary citizens, whether governmentally, economically, or ideologically.
There are moments that risk pushing plot mechanizations too far, and the use of both families’ children (esp. the director’s daughter, who looks of voting age while playing an 11-year-old) as silent, accusatory watchers of adult folly borders on cliché. But A Separation pulls off something very intricate with deceptive simplicity, offering a sort of integrated Rashomon (1950) in which every participant’s viewpoint as the wronged party is right — yet in conflict with every other. The escalating tensions that result pull you toward a resolution that might bang or whimper, but even there Farhadi springs the kind of high-wire trick that might seem pretentious or a cop-out in any film less exacting in its juggling act.
FILM The most famous and honored Hollywood directors have always been easily identifiable by style, genre, emotional tenor, or all the above. There’s Hitchcock with his wryly misanthropic suspense, and John Ford’s outdoor archetypes of masculinity. Even Steven Spielberg, who’s made just about every kind of narrative, has a telltale penchant for sweep and sentimentality running through everything from Jaws (1975) to The Adventures of Tintin (2011).
But the director probably responsible for more popularly embraced classics than any other during the industry’s golden age remains less familiar by name than many inferior talents, and his was the classic case of a lifetime achievement Oscar offered as thinly veiled apology for being ignored by the Academy over a long, conspicuous career haul. Howard Hawks could be said to bring all this upon himself: while far from modest, he was never much interested in self-promotion, or publicity in general. Nor did his films provide the obvious auteur identification points of a recognizable visual style, or consistent interest in particular genres or story elements.
They’re immaculately crafted, with some thematic similarities one can poke an analytic stick at after extended scrutiny. Yet as much as Hawks fought for creative freedom, often exasperating studio executives with his stubborn independence, he had few pretensions (or tolerance) toward art, pretty much measuring his movies’ value by their box-office performance. As has been noted elsewhere, that wasn’t because he was a bottom-line-focused hack, but because for decades his personal taste really did seem precisely in synch with the majority public’s.
The Pacific Film Archive’s “Howard Hawks: The Measure of Man” offers plenty of opportunity to weigh that discriminating yet popular appeal via a retrospective that’s thorough if not quite exhaustive. It reaches from his earliest extant feature (1926 comedy Fig Leaves) to his penultimate (’67 John Wayne horse opera El Dorado).
Between, there’s an almost staggering array of gems, more than any one life’s work should encompass: the seminal gangster flick (1932’s Scarface); deathless screwball classics Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), and Ball of Fire (1941); war epics (1930’s The Dawn Patrol, 1941’s Sergeant York); Western totems Red River (1948) and Rio Bravo (1959); setting the standard for cinematic sexual cool via the invention of Bogart and Bacall (1944’s To Have and Have Not, 1945’s The Big Sleep). Hawks wasn’t particularly attracted to musicals or sci-fi. Yet he made one of the all-time most enduring titles in each category, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and The Thingfrom Another World (1951, with “official” directing credit going to Christian Nyby).
Hawks came from Gentile gentry, which lent him an air of entitlement he didn’t mind using to intimidate the largely Jewish, working-class backgrounded studio chiefs he infuriated by running way over budget and schedule. The motion picture business was an odd, borderline-disreputable choice for his like just post-World War I. Yet its wooliness (not to mention the never-ending wellspring of pretty girls) struck his fancy, and he worked in numerous capacities before getting to direct a first feature in 1923.
Later he’d dismiss his silent-era films as apprenticeship, though the few that survive have their points — 1928’s A Girl in Every Port introduces an ongoing motif of jokily tough-loving male camaraderie and finds a quintessential Hawksian woman in coltish flapper legend Louise Brooks, while the same year’s hunk of “Arab sheik” exotica Fazil has some unusually vivid (for Hawks) depictions of sexual desire.
With sound, however, Hawks was immediately in his element: snappy patter and hardboiled realism (or something like) were more to his liking than the pictorial emotionalism of the silent screen, even if as a director he remained close-lipped toward cast and crew to a “sphinx-like” degree. (The many superficially contradictory comments about his on-set demeanor gleaned from collaborators in Todd McCarthy’s definitive biography Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood reveal a technique that liberated some and frustrated others.)
Scarface, which prompted his first of many censorship battles, came out as the gangster vogue was considered kaput. Yet it was a sensation, and remains the only such film from that era still shockingly violent, sexual, and modern. It’s arguable that the Hawksian template wasn’t fully formed until 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings. Its loose, episodic script suited his essential disinterest in narrative (which would become a problem in the 1960s), allowing all the greater focus on a tight group of wisecracking, poker-faced men in daily peril (as mail-delivering pilots in the remotest tropics), while Jean Arthur’s dogged pursuit of a seemingly disinterested Cary Grant posited women as an infrequently worthy adversary-companion on rare occasions invited into the boys’ club. (In the screwball comedies, however, berserk woman often simply torments man into submission.)
Allergic to mush stuff, Hawks liked slim, sporty, husky-voiced women — ones an ever-decreasing fraction of his age as time passed, both on and off screen. (Though Gentlemen made her, he professed zero understanding of bodacious Marilyn Monroe’s appeal.) Yet as with his three marriages, he seldom stuck with one for long, almost never casting leading ladies twice while working recurrently with Grant, Wayne, Gary Cooper, and numerous behind-the-camera personnel.
After a long, nearly unbroken string of hits, his touch began slipping in the mid-1950s; like many old-school Hollywood greats, he seemed quite out of synch with the times a decade later. By then Hollywood was probably relieved to be rid of a filmmaker who’d always used his success as leverage in getting maximum paydays (though as a compulsive gambler he was forever in debt), as well as against studio interference. He avoided long-term contracts whenever possible, acting like an independent agent long before seismic industry changes essentially dismantled the contract system for everyone. His politics were conservative, but seldom flexed — he had little use for politicking unless it helped him get more freedom (and money).
Hawks could be arrogant personally, yet was nothing if not unpretentious about his art, at one late point insisting “I never made a ‘statement.’ Our job is to make entertainment.” An unproduced screenplay from his twilight years describes central characters in terms one imagines he’d readily apply to himself: “Tough, resourceful, cheerfully ruthless but always within limits, deeply loyal to a friend but never sentimental, equally needing women, adventure, and a spice of danger to make life worth living.”
TRASH The term “Hollywood” has become a many-splendored pejorative, applicable to anything trite, vulgar, politically liberal, morally lax, and so on and so forth. Yet as much as they might like to think they’re so-not That, what red-corpuscled Americans with an electrical socket in their dwelling — or simply senses to absorb stray bits of popular culture when they venture outside — aren’t influenced by if not downright addicted to some facets of the entertainment industry?
It takes enormous effort to approach purity in this regard: a combination of home-schooling, mainstream-society-shunning, self-sustaining, off-grid living that pretty much requires the clock be turned back to pioneer days, before oughty-mobiles and other fancy products of modernity. Certain radical polygamist sects of recent notoriety might be the closest anyone in the Lower 48 gets these days to unhooking more than one stubborn individual or three off the infinitely tentacled monster of pop media.
Of course those people are weirdos whom mainstream Mormons prefer not to be associated with, especially when they’re running for President. To be a regular LDS Church member means having a looser, somewhat disapproving yet tolerant attitude toward Hollywood products. It means, for instance, deeming MTV too racy for basic cable. (Think of the children!) It means wanting your cake, but eating it with less decadent icing. However, many a chef chafes at a consumer scraping the offending spices, toppings, and toplessnesses from his or her labored-over creations just because said consumer is on some special diet. From the consumer’s POV, of course, the issue is different: they paid for the item; why shouldn’t they doctor it as stomach and conscience decrees?
That debate, acted out in the heart of Mormonlandia, is at the crux of Andrew James and Joshua Ligari’s documentary Cleanflix. Its eventually very twisty tale starts out with the simple arrival of a supply to meet a demand — in this case, “cleaned up” versions of Hollywood movies offered for rental or purchase in a handful of Utah stores starting around the turn of the millennium.
Handily removing “sex, nudity, profanity, and gory violence” — pretty much in precisely that descending order of importance — from commercial movies for home viewing, Ray Lines’ original CleanFlicks identified a community need and filled it. This success did not pass unnoticed. In fact even as CleanFlicks sold its stores and moved into online distribution, competitors were multiplying like plygs (children of polygamous families), each one howling as the next invaded their territory.
There are many things you can’t do, or at least are strongly discouraged from doing, in the Mormon-dominated state of Utah. But practicing cutthroat capitalism is not one of them — quite the opposite. Money corrupts just like power, however, and Cleanflix veers in unexpected directions as one of its principal characters, a seemingly affable and earnest man of faith, turns out to be a purported fornicating stoner pornmonger whose only spirituality was spelled with a $. The heat gets such that he has to flee the state, briefly landing in Gomorrah itself, Hollywood.
Even as it stumbles upon such lurid human interest, Cleanflix keeps an eye on the bigger picture, notably the question: who has the right to alter a copyrighted work? Some “clean” video shops clung to the notion that since they purchased and tweaked each and every DVD themselves, they were free to do what they wanted with them. Besides, don’t the big studios often create censored versions of their own films for airplane screenings and such?
The industry begged to differ, eventually winning court victories that shut down most (if not all) of the independent “content filtering” businesses. We hear from directors like Steven Soderbergh and Neil LaBute (the latter an ex Mormon), who bristle at the hubris behind “changing something that doesn’t belong to you,” saying that it’s naive at best to think in taking a few bricks out of an artistic house you won’t cause the whole structure to collapse. Then of course there’s the worry that such tampering “cultivates a tolerance for censorship” and uses legitimizes “a shamefulness toward sexuality,” no matter what the artist’s original intention might have been.
Ye olden American hypocrisy in matters of sex vs. violence — so opposite the attitudes flaunted by our socialistic European brethren — is glimpsed in “cleansed” movies like 1996’s Fargo that many patrons find permissible with all its extreme bloodletting intact (remember that wood chipper?), but one mention of the word “penis” tastefully excised. The mind reels at some successfully censored cinema noted here, like 1999’s The Matrix with all its umpteen non-graphic killings removed, or even sacrosanct Schindler’s List (1993) minus any concentration camp details unsuitable for the entire family.
Some movies, however, resist all taming. Ray Lines admits there was no point trying to scrub up 1990’s seemingly harmless Pretty Woman (whose Cinderella is a streetwalker). As for 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, well … “We didn’t do that one on principle,” a CleanFlicks editor says. Just as the monkey at the typewriter will sooner or later write Hamlet, so in the infinite diversity of human experience, once in a great while homophobia is going to be good news for homosexuals.
CLEANFLIX
Sun/15-Tues/17, 7 and 9 p.m. (also Sun/15, 2 p.m.)
There have been a number of documentaries lately reflecting a fascination with Detroit as a ruined giant, our very own (barely) living Pompeii. Local residents have made films lamenting the extreme poverty and the bungled public-corporate policies that largely created it. Non-locals, particularly those state-funded Europeans, have made others whimsically extolling the environ’s pockets of reversion to agrarian culture — seeing utopian futurism there rather than a grimly comic last resort. Or they’ve exploited its accidental status as the world’s largest open-air gallery for the aesthetics of extreme urban decay.
James R. Petix’s It Came From Detroit is like none of the above. In fact the movie it most resembles in some ways is Doug Pray’s 1996 Hype!, which documented the still-fresh boom and bust of grunge — a phenom you may have thought about recently given the, er, hype attendant around Nevermind‘s 20th anniversary. About a decade after Seattle flew the flannel flag high, Detroit too had a musical moment that conquered the nation … or at least was supposed to.
Motor City’s answer to grunge — as framed by a media finally certain it had found the ever-elusive "next Seattle" — was garage, a term that had already gained some new traction from the 1980s Paisley Underground and related ’60s revivalist movements. Sporting chops barely above the Shaggs level when they started out, turbulent trio the Gories’ willfully primitive abandon triggered something, igniting a DIY scene that would eventually encompass such stellar acts as the Wildbunch, the Hentchmen, the Go, Detroit Cobras, the Dirtbombs, Electric Six, and more.
The scene was primed to explode, and when the White Stripes became Cover Boy and Girl on music mags ’round the world, their improbable success seemed sure to spread. A publicity frenzy peaked in 2003, when the Stripes vs. Von Bondies "feud" reached maximum impact via Jack White’s fist on Jason Stollsteimer’s face. But the rough-edged, rootsy focus of Detroit’s disparate new music stalled short of making further commercial inroads; while their sounds ranged from punk blues to goth bluegrass and beyond, nearly all the bands had the kind of live dynamic that can only be muted in the recording studio.
The label-signing frenzy fast over, for most it was back to the drag queen bars, bowling alleys, and coffee shops that had served as Gories venues early on, back to the lowly dayjobs (when found) and sleeping in cars when even rock bottom rent is too much. But the myriad interviewees in It Came don’t seem particularly disillusioned. As more than one points out, when you’re from Detroit you keep your expectations low and make music for love, because nobody’s gonna become a star. Almost nobody, that is.
FILM The grudging, occasionally outright hostile tone some critics, culture vultures, and fan types have taken toward In the Land of Blood and Honey points toward a fundamental problem most of them have, though few admit it: the belief that Angelina Jolie is just too damn famous, too much a figure of public speculation and private fantasy, to be taken seriously — let alone to make a movie about rape and genocide during the War in the Balkans.
That bleak historical chapter occurred about the same time that Jolie was a Beverly Hills goth teen into knife play, too many recreational drugs, and her brother (eww), with a fledgling professional resume consisting of modeling gigs, music videos, and an inglorious starring role in 1993’s Cyborg 2. Since then she has grown up a lot, and in ways that count (adopting children as well as bearing them, actually working at her “humanitarian causes” rather than using them as photo ops), is sort of a model world citizen as far as ginormous movie stars go. She also paired off with another such example, Brad Pitt — World’s Sexiest Woman, meet World’s Sexiest Man, cue celestial chorus — and while it may be a coincidence, shortly after that event he started consistently behaving onscreen like a real actor and less like an International Male model.
Jolie, too, can act, but since becoming a big star (circa 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), it’s been disappointing how seldom she’s been called upon to do so — as opposed to bringing the near-cartoonish va-voom and ass-whup in movies like 2003’s Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, 2005’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, 2008’s Wanted, and 2010’s Salt. Truth be told, when she has gotten a serious part in a serious film such as 2008’s Changeling or 2007’s A Mighty Heart, the stubborn glare of celebrity hobbles our ability to let her disappear into the role. It’s not fair, but there ya go. Those are highly competent, versatile performances that nonetheless might be more effective if delivered by someone whose first name alone seems to call for an exclamation point.
This is all beside the point when it comes to In the Land of Blood and Honey, or ought to be. But the fact is, her narrative debut as writer and director (she’s also credited with a little-seen 2007 documentary, A Place in Time) would probably be getting reviews in the respectable-to-rave range if created by anyone else. It’s certainly gotten some of those, but you’d be hard-pressed not to glimpse a certain “Who does she think she is?” resentment behind others who see the film as heavy-handed do-gooderism from a chick who should leave cinematic commentary about profoundly tragic historical events to people who are less … er, sexy.
Not that Blood and Honey doesn’t have its genuine faults. There’s contrivance in the way that young Muslim painter Ajla (Zana Marjanovic) and Serb cop Danijel (Goran Kostic) have a first date just as the war reaches 1992 Sarajevo — we never do find out how they met or how well they already know each other — then intersect again when she’s a POW and he’s an officer in the Serbian Army. This allows him to save her from the regular rapes other women prisoners suffer at the hands of guards, and eventually to set her up as his protected mistress, a breach of code that is unwelcome news to the ears of his powerful father General Nobosjsa (Rade Serbedzija), a fanatical “ethnic cleanser.” This premise is typical movie exceptionalism, even if it’s still a good step above the usual device of casting a Western character-star as our guide in unpleasant foreign affairs (see: Christian Bale in Zhang Yimou’s new Rape of Nanking drama The Flowers of War). The queasy but passionate love under impossible circumstances between Danijel and Ajla is compelling, but never as powerful as several instances of madness and cruelty that befall subsidiary characters, like the brutalization of a young woman who volunteers her sewing services, or an infant’s thoughtless fate simply for crying. The shocking senselessness of war atrocities depicted in scenes like these have some of the gut-punch impact of similar bits in Schindler’s List (1993). Keeping herself off camera (unlike many an actor turned director), Jolie also keeps stylistic flourishes likewise; Blood and Honey isn’t impersonal, but eschews any vestige of auteurist “personality.” (Comparisons may be odious, but it’s worth noting the seriousness Jolie achieves this way is the diametrical opposite of the superficial showiness displayed by Madonna’s directorial calisthenics to date.) It’s immaculately crafted, though, and the assurance with which the director tempers her own screenplay’s potential for excess suggests a refined intelligence beyond what can be condescendingly explained away by having the funds and ability to hire first-rate collaborators.
While not a great movie, Blood and Honey is a very good one; an honorable achievement, not just a vehicle for honorable intentions. Of course the point is nothing more complicated than “War is hell,” but how often do movies actually punch that across, as opposed to pouting a bit while making war look exciting?
Don’t hate her movie because she’s beautiful, rich, freaky, not Jennifer Aniston, or anything else related to the larger-than-lifeness of being Angelina Jolie. If someone else made In the Land of Blood and Honey, there would be little question about admiring its stark effectiveness. Of course, if someone else had made it, you probably wouldn’t be interested in seeing it, or even able to — the one positive her celebrity brings to bear here.
IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY opens Fri/5 in San Francisco.
FILM A lamentation frequently heard is that men don’t know how to express their feelings. At least not the theoretically less "manly" ones of vulnerability, self-doubt, weepiness, affection, "do these board shorts make me look fat?," etc. Every once in a while, however, there comes an entertainment that makes you think: better to keep those feelings unexpressed, bud.
"Entertainment" is a term pretty loosely applied to I Melt With You, which careens drunkenly between the obnoxious, embarrassing, and unintentionally hilarious before really jumping off a cliff of unearned, fatal self importance. Seldom has a potential camp classic induced such strong desire to plug in the slapping machine and subject all its principal participants to some aversion therapy.
Amusingly programmed for year-end release well after its heavily hooted Sundance Film Festival premiere — did Magnolia really think it might figure in top ten lists or award races? — its largest potential audience might be snark-seeking Occupy-sympathetic feminists who could treat it as their very own Showgirls (1995). Apart, of course, from ex-golden boys in the upper income percentiles who have "everything" and feel an existential nothing. They will likely be the only folks to grok I Melt as intended, as a mirror held up to My Pain, My Self. The rest of us will be experiencing quite a different sort of pain, in a different location.
Richard (Thomas Jane) is a once-promising novelist whose printed output stalled short of the sophomore slump, and who’s now reduced to teaching actual sophomores. Jonathan (Rob Lowe) has blown his marriage, child custody, and Hippocratic Oath playing Dr. Feelgood to prescription-addicted socialites. Ron (Jeremy Piven) is a symptom of high-flying Wall Street corruption whose lush life is about to collapse under a hailstorm of federal fraud investigation. Tim (Christian McKay) is depressed — hey, somebody has to be fourth-billed and most expendable plot-wise.
They’re gathering at shared age 44 — the horror — for their annual week long bacchanal at an impressive cliffside Monterey manse. They do the conversational equivalent of extended ball-scratching, as well as a whole lotta booze, coke, weed, and miscellaneous pills provided by walking pharmacy Jon. Eventually they invite over some local youth, baiting the dudes with old-fart slurrings of "You don’t know anything!", slo-mo moshing, and sad sex-having with the chicks (including actual porn star Sasha Grey — membership really does have its privileges!)
The sole woman here who’s roughly their age is, naturally, way off the sexual radar. That would be Carla Gugino, stuck with possibly the year’s most thankless female part as a local cop who notices these asshole interlopers and, rather than keeping a nose-pinching distance, becomes increasingly concerned that something bad is about to happen to them.
Of course she’s right. Because it turns out these big swinging dicks made a pact when they were 18 that if adult life didn’t turn out to be as exciting and limitless and whatnot as it seemed then, they’d … well, make like Ian Curtis or Sid Vicious or any other punk-rock flameout they trivialize with their self-pitying, worshipful sense of personal identification. (The soundtrack is packed with punk and New Wave oldies meant to affirm that our protagonists remain rebels — but then, every mid-80s frat boy thought liking the Clash made them cool, too.)
Faced with the unbearable triteness of their being, these quixotically arrogant self-loathers implode in terms just as meaningful as you’d expect from four reasonably privileged grown white men whose primary source of angst is the fact that life didn’t turn out to be as easy or fun as imagined in their freshman dorm.
Credit is due to director Mark Pellington (1999’s Arlington Road) and first-time (possibly last-time) scenarist Glenn Porter for their resolute belief that such crybaby bathos merits tragic grandeur. They take the term "epic fail" seriously, making I Melt the Götterdämmerung of male menopause movies. Seldom has a vanity project (right down to producer Jane’s incessant showcasing of furry abs) backfired so badly, so personally on everyone involved. Because every scorching revelation here falls into the category of stereotypical rich-people’s-problems most Hollywood success stories are smart enough to bare only on their analyst’s couch.
Said therapist is well-paid to at least pretend empathy. That Pellington and co. actually expect us to pay cash money for the privilege of watching them bellow like the arrow-felled Last Buffalo is about as ridiculously far as the Peter Pan syndrome can possibly stretch.
I MELT WITH YOU opens Fri/23 in Bay Area theaters.
TRASH If you were around in the waning days of drive-ins and urban grindhouses, the heydays of video stores and 1980s late-night cable, or were a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fan, the name Greydon Clark might ring a faint bell — maybe even a warning bell.
For 25 years Clark was a prolific independent director, writer, producer, and even bit-part actor in the realm of low-budget exploitation movies designed for quick playoff in second-run theaters, graveyard-shift broadcast slots, and on rental shelves. Most were retreads of well-worn genre trends, a couple outright imitations of recent hits; they rarely hit the radar of mainstream critics, let alone awards-giving bodies — not even the Golden Raspberries. Though his last two features were futuristic adventures, Clark himself was relegated to cinema’s past by the turn of the millennium, having “aged out” in a business where an obsession with youth trickles down even to the least prestigious off-camera creative roles.
Now just short of 70, Clark is still around, selling memorabilia on his website, appearing at fan conventions, and the like. This Friday he’ll be at the Roxie for a Midnites for Maniacs tribute triple-bill featuring rare 35mm screenings of features long out of circulation.
First up is 1978’s Hi-Riders, a hybridization of then-current Smokey and the Bandit (1977) knockoffs and the earlier biker-flick vogue that’s one of his most enjoyable films. Frequent Clark collaborator Darby Hinton and busy stunt performer (through 1997’s Titanic) Diane Peterson are the nominal stars of a raucous action cheapie that pits muscle-car aficionados against each other, then against trigger-happy yokels ordered to kill by a vengeful fat cat who proclaims “Animals like that should be exterminated!” Acting pitched at a 10 on the hysteria scale, skinny dipping, and good crashes involving an actual bitchin’ Camaro ensue.
This is followed by Joysticks (1983), a prior Midnites for Maniacs midnight selection that remains a giddy high-lowlight in the short-lived 80s subgenre of movies about videogaming. How can it miss, with Porky’s-style gags, a hero named McDorfus, secondary “punk” villain King Vidiot (played by Napoleon Dynamite’s future Uncle Rico), and a theme song Tipper Gore might have taken exception to (“Jerk it left, jerk it right, shoot it hard, shoot it straight, video to the maaaaaax!!!”)?
Last and quite possibly least is 1982’s Wacko, one of several Airplane!-like slasher spoofs at the time. Its genial flailing about in search of laughs ropes in several of Clark’s favorite falling stars (Joe Don Baker, Stella Stevens, George Kennedy) and one future celebrity (pre-“Dice Man” Andrew Clay, as Fonz-y high school stud Tony Schlongini). If you were 10 years old (or 15 and stoned) in 1982, this was probably the funniest thing ever. So regress already.
But this selection offers just the tip of the native Michigander’s celluloid iceberg. Driving west on a whim in the 1960s, Clark managed to score work as both an actor and scenarist with Z-budget multihyphenate role model Al Adamson, including the incredible Satan’s Sadists (1969) and incredibler Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971).
Those experiences empowered him to direct, co-write, and act in 1973’s The Bad Bunch (Kiss The Establishment Goodbye was one of several alternative titles), a drama of Vietnam War-era racial tensions that was shot in Watts for less than $15,000. It was clumsily crafted and crudely melodramatic, but serious-minded enough — despite gratuitous boobs and opening song “Honky Mutha Nigga Lover” — to set him on a more determinedly commercial, costs recouping path from then on.
Thus 1976’s Black Shampoo, an outrageous blaxploitation cash-in on Warren Beatty’s heterosexual hairdresser lothario hit, followed quickly by the unforgettably named (if otherwise forgettable) Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977), tentacled-alien-Frisbee-creature horror Without Warning (1980, with a very young David Caruso as one victim), and so forth. They inevitably featured once-hot, now economically-priced Hollywood names of a certain age (Clu Gulager, Jack Palance, Yvonne De Carlo etc.), attractive youngers mostly never to be heard from again, and Clark regulars like actress spouse Jacqueline Cole. (The fact that so many of his actors and crew came back for more suggests that he’s a pleasant guy to work for.)
Some of these movies actually require the MST3K treatment they got (i.e. 1985 Joe Don vs. Mafia shoot ’em up Final Justice) to be watchable. Some, like 1990 psychological thriller Out of Sight, Out of Her Mind or 1980 sci-fi fantasy The Return (a rare upgrade to then-current B-level stars in Cybill Shepard and Jan-Michael Vincent), didn’t get it and aren’t.
But others are inspirationally silly, with enough hints to make it clear that their creator was in on the joke. Probably the most widely seen of his films is acknowledged camp classic The Forbidden Dance, one of two lambada movies released on the same day in 1990. It stars former Miss USA and future Mulholland Drive (2001) enigma Laura Harring as an Amazonian tribal princess who comes to Beverly Hills (accompanied by “witch doctor” Sid Haig) to attract attention to rainforest destruction via the healing power of public ass-grinding. All this and an ozone depletion message make it Clark’s Inconvenient Truth, just as The Bad Bunch was his Crash.
Less socially conscious but equally nuts are Uninvited (1988), in which a yacht full of the expected veteran actors and hot young ‘uns are terrorized by a mutant lab-experiment cat puppet; and Russian Holiday (1992), a daft espionage thriller with Susan Blakely as a tourist haplessly playing Nancy Drew amidst Moscow neck-snappings.
Then there’s 1989’s Skinheads: The Second Coming of Hate. Its hilarious racist, sexist, swastika-emblazoned goon squad makes the mistake of pursuing clean-cut “good” kids into the wilderness lair of survivalist Chuck Connors, who fought in World War II and knows just what to do with a buncha neo-Nazi scum. It’s pretty much the Reefer Madness of Reagan-era fascist punk gang movies (1982’s Class of 1984, 1984’s Savage Streets, etc.) — a category that surely calls for its own Midnites for Maniacs tribute.
FILM Longtime San Francisco resident George Kuchar’s death this September was a reminder of how many had been influenced by his loveably eccentric movies, from famous early fans like Andy Warhol and John Waters to the hundreds of students who passed through his San Francisco Art Institute courses over the decades. Among the latter, for a long time his most famous protégé — at least locally — was Curt McDowell, who started out as a teacher’s pet, moved on to heavy petting with teacher, and remained close to Kuchar as both friend and collaborator until his own AIDS-related demise in 1987.
George Kuchar’s half-century-plus output was always joyfully accessible “avant-garde” cinema, its mixture of the personal and the purple drawing on the conventions of those Hollywood melodramas he and brother Mike (who’s taking over George’s teaching responsibilities at SFAI) grew up watching in the 1950s Bronx. His films’ popularity was perhaps most hindered by the simple fact that he only felt moved to direct something in the more marketable feature length form once — 1973’s The Devil’s Cleavage.
McDowell’s films, often heavily influenced by George Kuchar’s (even when the latter wasn’t operating as scenarist and actor on them), also had a wide streak of camp parody, a Warholian mini-constellation of “stars,” a vivid aesthetic, and impulse toward autobiography. They were much more aggressively sexual, and ambitious — during his much-too-short career he made no less than four features, two of which were porn in the graphic-content if not commercial sense. The hour-long Peed in the Wind (1972), the same year’s Lunch, and 1985’s very-long-in-the-making Sparkle’s Tavern are basically forgotten now, the last not screened in the Bay Area for at least a decade, the others possibly unseen since the 1970s.
Thundercrack! (1975) — an even more daft shot at “adult” cinema than the experimental-minded Lunch — is better known, having had at least the beginnings of a midnight movie cult following. But with all its baroque, still-singular The Old Dark House (1932) meets Tennessee Williams charms (there is surely no other porn flick remotely like it), why isn’t it now as well known as, say, Pink Flamingos (1972) or Eraserhead (1977)? Part of that doubtless has to do with the disarray McDowell’s body of work has been in, access-wise, for nearly 25 years now. Some of his films are distributed by (but seldom rented from) Canyon Cinema. Others are in storage, or presumed lost. Nothing is available on DVD, and any videotapes have long gone out of print. Whether this is due to strife, disorganization, or financial limitations among the guardians of his trust remains as murky as it was in the 1990s, when the last, brief issue of Thundercrack! and some shorts on VHS occurred.
Thus, it’s sadly rare to get a McDowell program even here in SF, where his memory should flourish rather than be slowly slipping from public awareness. Just such an occasion arrives this week at the Roxie — co-founded by his longtime creative and domestic partner, Robert Evans — as two shows spread over three days reprise some (relatively) familiar as well as barely-seen material.
The main attraction, as well as the scarcest, is 1980’s 55-minute Taboo (The Single and the LP), which will be shown on projected VHS due to a typical bad-luck hurdle: its original materials, plus those for other films, were sent to New York’s Museum of Modern Art years ago, only to go missing in transit.
While McDowell often echoed George Kuchar’s use of narrative more as an erratic reference point than a rule to follow, Taboo has an unusually abstract relation to story even by his standards, at least those of his longer works. Purportedly crafted over four years — his output slowed considerably after Evans had replaced the incredibly prolific Kuchar as boyfriend — it has buxom, blonde-bewigged sis Melinda McDowell, recently departed Thundercrack! mad diva Marion Eaton, and a glowering Kuchar as three parts of a tempestuous two-couple marital equation variously simmering with unmet desire and boiling over with orgiastic excess.
But it’s the fourth player who dominates the filmmaker’s attention. One of his numerous onscreen Joe Dallesandros, but evidently a source of particular longtime obsession, Fahed (a.k.a. David) Martha hailed from a Palestinian family that owned the grocery store next to the Roxie; his petite yet muscle-bound Sal Mineo-like appeal piqued McDowell, who didn’t mind the frequent presence of an equally young girlfriend. (In fact, he freely admitted “really getting turned on by straight men.”) Throughout Taboo‘s mix of the poetical and camp, the black and white camera salivates over this nearly-naked Adonis’ body and cocky attitude; in turn, he displays an exhibitionist zeal he probably didn’t know he had in him. A producer here and close friend, former Castro Theatre programmer and current San Francisco Silent Film Festival artistic director Anita Monga says McDowell “just saw the deep sexual beauty in everyone,” turning them on with the sheer voracity of his admiring gaze.
In one of the shorts the Roxie is showing in a separate program, 1972’s Confessions, McDowell interviews friends and lovers, asking them to describe his best and worst qualities. Perhaps straddling both, one confides “You’ve always had this energy, it’s like an explosion. I think when people see your films they have to understand, like, sex. It seems like you need so much more sex than other people.” A satyr-like omnivorous seduction and insatiability still sweats off many of his films as if through pores, most notoriously 1985’s Loads (a Dionysian compilation of guys he’d lured up to masturbate and service in his Mission studio).
McDowell was a happily self-corrupted transplant from the Heartland (with typical alliterative flair, Kuchar called him “curt, cute, controversial, and not celibate … poet of the plebeian and perverse”); he enjoyed shocking the staid society left behind — 1970’s A Visit to Indiana is his amusingly sulky chronicle of a most reluctant trip home.
Also on the Roxie bill are such examples of pure, impish silliness as 1972’s Siamese Twin Pin Heads, a short perhaps dated by a “look ma, we’re naked!” glee that looked a lot more rebellious back then. But 1973’s Boggy Depot is a homemade musical anticipating Thundercrack!‘s puppet theater-Gothic look. Its variously scheming and schemed-against protagonists trill their ridiculous operetta-style lyrics to found orchestral tracks. This is one McDowell film in which people keep their pants on, but these 17 sublime minutes are orgasmically pleasurable nonetheless.
FILM There’s a new movie built around a performer’s brilliant evocation of a Golden Age Hollywood star’s charisma, ebullience, and vulnerability. And it’s not My Week With Marilyn — it’s The Artist, the forthcoming French “silent” feature in which Jean Dujardin (of the OSS 117 spy spoofs) miraculously channels the Brylcreem’d charm of pre-sound swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (with a bit of John Gilbert thrown in). It’s a wonderful performance, but a) who’s ever heard of Dujardin outside France, and b) Oscar is seldom impressed by mere comedy.
Statuette-clutching odds are higher for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of another famous dead celebrity is “well-rounded” in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. (Never mind that Dujardin does all these things too, albeit in a pastiche homage rather than a drippily conventional, sentimental biopic.)
Her Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and “magical” Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? (Actually, Theresa Russell came closer despite a much looser physical-vocal resemblance 26 years ago in Insignificance, but then that movie eschewed historical literalism for a fantasia wherein Love Goddess, Einstein, and Joes DiMaggio and McCarthy meet one night.) Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), Brokeback Mountain (2005), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle.
Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller.
This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over.
Meanwhile, a roll call of wasted A-list British acting talent includes Dame Judi Dench, Dougray Scott, Dominic Cooper, and Toby Jones, wringing their hands in the background. Branagh is good and Williams works admirably hard, but it’s his Sir Larry who unintentionally nails the pandering movie’s relationship to real life when he snipes that coaxing Monroe to act is “like teaching Urdu to a badger.”
MY WEEK WITH MARILYN opens Wed/23 in Bay Area theaters.
FILM While he’s always kept a fairly low profile doing it, probably no director who calls the Bay Area home has balanced our penchant for documentary work and independence with a successful commercial (meaning Hollywood) career as gracefully, or as long, as John Korty. Now 75, the Marin resident is in the midst of a major retrospective — incredibly, his first — at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, which runs through December 4.
You’ve already missed his first feature (whimsical 1966 indie The Crazy-Quilt), his latest (veteran rock ‘n’ roller portrait John Allair Digs In!), and one of the most popular broadcast documentaries ever: 1977’s Who Are The DeBolts (And Where Did They Get 19 Kids?), about a Piedmont, Calif. couple and their huge clan of mostly adopted children, many disabled war orphans. But there’s still plenty left that conveys the diversity of Korty’s output, even if it just scratches the surface of his nearly 50-year career — which began auspiciously enough with an Oscar nomination for 1964’s short anti-smoking satire Breaking the Habit.
That same year the native Hoosier moved with his Bolex to Stinson Beach. Filled with the era’s infinite youthful ambition, he made three features in fast succession, though despite all awards and admiring reviews, they took much longer actually getting released at a time when art house meant foreign films. The Crazy-Quilt mixed Chaplin-esque pathos with the antic and existential in its charting a dedicated cynic and a “girl who believed in everything” from meet-cute to shared grumpy old age. Likewise shot all over SF and Marin, 1967’s Funnyman had influential improv group the Committee member (and future sitcom staple) Peter Bonerz as a gifted comedian who’s a petulant boy-man offstage. Barely theatrically released in 1971, four years after its festival debut, its Rafael showing was probably its first local appearance in decades.
Korty had resisted Hollywood overtures since Crazy-Quilt, though he did work for Francis Ford Coppola’s then-fledgling American Zoetrope for a couple of years. In 1972, however, he commenced a prolific 26-year run of major-network TV movies, starting on a high note with odd utopian sci-fi fantasy The People (in which William Shatner restrains himself) and permanently-scarring teen cautionary tale Go Ask Alice.
Sometimes the material was a little schlocky (like 1991’s Suzanne Somers autobiographical dramatization Keeping Secrets, not to mention a little thing from 1984 called The Ewok Adventure), but more often his sights were set unusually high, with results sometimes among the very finest in the much disparaged telepic genre. Certainly considered such were two landmark films the Rafael shows for free over the next couple weeks: 1974’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, with Cicely Tyson as the ex-slave whose 100 years take her all the way to a 1960s civil rights march; and 1976’s Farewell to Manzanar, depicting America’s internment camps for Japanese-heritage citizens during World War II.
Once he’d crossed into broadcast, Korty had relatively few big-screen opportunities; the drippy 1978 Love Story sequel Oliver’s Story probably made him wish for even fewer. Getting a very rare revival at the Rafael is the more indie-sensibility ’76 Alex and the Gypsy, an offbeat if uneven comic romance between delightful Geneviève Bujold’s Roma woman and Jack Lemmon (basically playing Jack Lemmon) as her bail bondsman.
Korty’s longtime animation jones has rarely won much attention, despite its scattered presence in his filmography (like Funnyman‘s brief cartoon interludes). But it found full expression in 1983’s feature Twice Upon a Time, which closes the Rafael series. Regrettably underseen even by professed animation fanatics, a theatrical nonstarter, and DVD (let alone Blu-ray) holdout, it utilizes cut-out techniques Korty devised himself to follow “all purpose animal” Lorenzo, his sidekick Mum (who “speaks” in foley effects), and their fight to prevent evil Synonamess Botch from dropping “nightmare bombs” into the subconscious minds of sleepers worldwide. It’s a charming odyssey that recalls 1968’s Yellow Submarine in applying adult wit and design imagination to child-friendly ‘toonery.
As if all this weren’t rangy enough, a November 27 shorts program traverses ground from a 1961 documentary (The Language of Faces, chronicling a Quaker peace vigil at the Pentagon) to brief Sesame Street animations and 1974’s The Music School, a half-hour John Updike miniature from PBS’ American Short Stories series. *
TRASH The 1980s U.S. hardcore punk scene was one refreshing bastion of opposition in the Reagan era of militaristic, monetary, and quasi-“family values” conformism. But it was also increasingly a turn-off for folks who liked the music and the message but not the violence at shows.
Rather than leaving the rest of us to pogo in peace, inevitably a few shirtless yobbos would turn the mosh pit into an ever-widening demolition derby that typically devolved into punches. First girls left, then finally bands depressed by every gig turning into Fight Club. Sure, the perps wore mohawks, maybe even waxed pious about being straight-edge. But the sentiment applied: frat bratz, go home.
Still, it was a fairly harmless outlet (if also a factory) for all that excess testosterone. Boys will be boys, etc. Sooner or later they’d have to grow the fuck up. Right?
Well, wrong. Punk became punk-pop, embraced by the musical product divisions of multinational corporations everywhere, and while the chords didn’t change much, the lyrics stopped being angry about political-economic injustice — now they were about the kind of dubious injustice one might summarize as “I know I was a jerk but I’m a rebel and anyway who does that bitch think she is leaving me without a girlfriend WHAAAAAAAAAH.” The Adolescents were one thing; permanent adolescence is another. How (let alone why) do you grow up when label execs and fans want you to stay the guy who causes shoulder dislocations worldwide?
Illustrating one gun-to-head route toward responsible adulthood is Andrea Nevins’ The Other F Word, a fun if superficial new documentary in which the missing unmentionable is (gasp) fatherhood. Punks become dads! Like whoa! Break out the swear jar!
Much of this is cute. But the notion that getting older and more sedate is any more revelatory in a 45-year-old man from a 20-year-old band than it is for the rest of us seems questionable. Our principal guide is very likeable Pennywise leader Jim Lindberg, seen getting less and less happy with his road-to-family-time ratio, given an endless touring schedule and three daughters who miss daddy (and vice versa). Many lifers came to punk from broken homes; Art Alexakis from maybe-not-so-punk Everclear, who endured horrific childhood abuse, touchingly stresses “I’m raising my kids the way I wish I’d been raised.”
Some other interviewees here — I won’t name names — look like parental recipes for future therapy. A deeper documentary might have probed that, while asking wives and kids for their two cents. But F Word seldom gets past the surface “shock” appeal of heavily tattooed, aging bad boys changing nappies and joining the PTA. It’s still stuck in a testosterone zone most of its subjects have at least learned to compartmentalize. (Dennis Harvey)
THE OTHER F WORD opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters.
FILM Alexander Payne turned 50 this year, and surely ranks somewhere on the list of American directors (and scenarists) whose efforts are counted on as a reliable plus. Yet he’s only been at it for 15 years, making just five features — a decent number, until you realize it’s been seven years since the last one. By contrast, since 2004 Woody Allen has made eight features, a couple his best in some time. Still, not one of those is as good as Sideways.
Like all Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. It’s the kind of book whose story scale is ideal for a movie — nothing important need be cut — even if its very literary pleasures of tone, style, and voice might resist translation.
Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up, and her living will requires life support end should such a circumstance arise.
The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. (Also notable, for less poignant reasons, is Robert Forster as the wife’s obnoxious, bullying, blindsided father.)
Meanwhile, there is the inconvenient and pressing business of 25,000 inherited Kauai acres — a last great chunk of unsullied “paradise” — which most of the extended King clan want sold to a big developer for a cool half billion bucks. Matt’s reluctant status as primary trustee makes him appear like the very definition of haole greed, even if his family’s roots go back here 150 years.
Last, there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed “not enough” for had indeed been looking elsewhere and found it, in a casting surprise I’ll leave unspoiled.
The novel’s sly, self-deprecating wit is posited as Matt’s own. Reading it, Paul Rudd seemed a perfect choice. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy, like any middling h.s. athlete turned desk jockey; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Clooney has only fairly recently become as much an actor as a movie star. He’ll probably never have great range. But if this is his Oscar turn, we could all do a lot worse. (Such as Leonardo DiCaprio’s J. Edger Hoover, the showy-miscasting antithesis to nuanced understatement.)
Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are fine, not least Nick Krause as Sid, the boorish yet useful teenaged tool Woodley’s Alex insists on bringing along as an ally.
These are small quibbles, anyway. The Descendants is hardly The Tree of Life — yay — but its reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. There are moments here when Payne’s restraint itself is a thing of beauty, like a discreet late cut to some landscape shots where shameless tearduct-milking would normally go. The oil-and-water seriocomedy of a well-intentioned recent movies like 50/50 reveals how tricky this director’s customary feat really is, of making the serious and the comic blend together seamlessly.
FILM In 1990, cable was still a luxury many chose not to afford. The Big Three — it was now grudgingly being admitted that Fox might make it Four — weren’t doing anything all that different from what they had a decade or two or three before. Certainly the popular likes of Major Dad, Beverly Hills 90210, and America’s Funniest Home Videos weren’t exactly rocking the boat as thus far known to viewers and sponsors.
Then came Twin Peaks, which most ABC executives had thought a grievous mistake. Principal writer Mark Frost had the successful Hill Street Blues under his belt, but co-creator David Lynch’s four movies hadn’t remotely seemed to qualify him for America’s living rooms. The Elephant Man (1980) was a prestige project for which he was a hired hand, still his most “normal” film even if eccentric by most other standards; Dune (1984) was an expensive disaster fan-editors are still trying to salvage. Blue Velvet was the most perverse Americana joke imaginable in 1986, a screen year otherwise defined by Top Gun. As for Eraserhead (1977) — well, never mind.
Debuting in April of 1990, Twin Peaks took Velvet‘s surreal juxtaposition of Eisenhower-era small town idyllicism with hair-raising behavioral excesses, then stretched it semi-mockingly over the broad, flat ensemble canvas of Peyton Place — a trashily soap-operatic bestseller and TV series whose movie incarnation Frost-Lynch screened for inspiration. The notion of innocence defiled almost beyond comprehension was crystallized in their startling image of a homecoming queen beatifically dead, plastic-wrapped, washed onto the riverbank of her picturesque Washington state burg.
“Who killed Laura Palmer?” briefly gripped the nation, just as “Who shot J.R.?” had 10 years earlier. Two decades ago everything tasted better when drizzled with the special chocolate sauce of “postmodernism,” and Twin Peaks was the most ironic cherry pie vehicle for that addictive popular culture had yet baked up. It was so cool you could hardly believe it was actually being watched.
Then it wasn’t, making for one of the medium’s brightest, fastest flameouts. But naturally its cult has endured, despite so many home-viewing releases since compromised by laziness and rights issues, not to mention the colossal buzz kill of 1992’s first/last big-screen spin-off. Its actors have aged, and in numerous cases not prospered. But Twin Peaks itself is like Dorian Gray, forever ageless, seductively not-quite-right.
You can indulge your undying love at the Roxie, when a more-or-less “20th Anniversary Tribute” offers close to six consecutive hours of Peaks-iana. Co presented by short-range nostalgists Midnites for Maniacs, the evening commences with Otto Preminger’s noir-ish 1944 Laura, another story about an obsessed-over dead babe that was an apparent influence on the much later series.
Things begin in earnest with the 90-minute Peaks pilot, directed by Lynch himself. Swaying to the drugged prom dance themes of Angelo Badalamenti’s signature score, it introduced an incredible range not just of characters but of actors, both running the gamut from dewy to screwy.
Beyond those luscious youths (Lara Flynn Boyle, James Marshall, Sherilyn Fenn, etc.) who all seemed poised to become movie stars — particularly Sheryl Lee, whose Laura Palmer incited such mania that the Seattle “local girl” cast simply to be a corpse was brought back as a hastily conceived doppelganger — there were ex-actual movie stars (Piper Laurie, Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn), faded TV stars (Michael Ontkean, Peggy Lipton), David Lynch “stars” (Eraserhead himself, Jack Nance), miscellaneous oddjobs, and onetime “Elizabeth Taylor of China” Joan Chen. The latter never seemed quite to know what she was doing there, but then she wasn’t supposed to be — Isabella Rossellini had dropped out. Bemusedly observing all was Kyle MacLachlan’s apple-cheeked FBI Agent Dale Cooper, a Lynchian alter ego willing to plangently wade into swamps of teenage prostitution, cocaine deals, surreal dwarf fantasias, and so forth — as long as he could break for a cuppa diner joe and more of that fine pie.
Alternately queasy, campy, and swoony, Twin Peaks had it all. With its unending parade of lurid revelations, not excluding occult ones, the whole miraculous brew constantly threatened to sink into self-parody. Many thought it did so in the second season. ABC’s shuffleboard scheduling dealt further death blows to a fickle mainstream audience that had decided they weren’t sure if they cared who killed Laura Palmer anyway. (Lynch would have preferred the mystery remain unsolved.)
Still, the fanatics who remained made it seem viable to roll camera on 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (the Roxie program’s final feature) just after the show’s cancellation. No longer writing with Frost but Robert Engels, Lynch saw it as the first in a feature trilogy that would expand and complete the Peaks universe.
That was not to be. Booed at Cannes, Fire tanked everywhere but Japan. As with everything Lynch has ever done, it has defenders. The worse the project, the more vehement the defense, and as very possibly the worst of all, Fire is some folks’ notion of a cruelly maligned masterpiece. The director shot over five hours of material; should those umpteen deleted scenes ever surface, you can bet on a corrective-fan-edit frenzy.
In the meantime there’s still just the movie, as infuriating as the show was frequently great. It’s also (very) occasionally great, which itself is infuriating. The first section (starring Chris Isaac as Agent Non-Cooper in Upside-Down Pin Tweaks-ville) is the smug, dumb, garish self-parody the series never quite descended to. Eventually things come in to relative focus around Laura Palmer’s final week on Earth, building toward a surprisingly blunt religious fall-ascension, complete with literal angels.
The hellfire bits do have their moments, like scary Bob (Frank Silva) slithering into a bed, or driving two leashed girls at the end like panicked farm animals to slaughter. But the heightened gore and nudity seem pandering; fascinating Lee, 18 going on menopause, is made to totter around like a cokehead version of Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest (1949). There is dialogue as gee-whiz as Laura answering “Nowhere fast!” when asked “Where you going?” by Donna (Moira Kelly replacing Boyle, which doesn’t work); and as crass as demon-addled daddy Leland (Ray Wise) telling daughter “Let’s get your muffin!” en route to breakfast and the apocalypse. What is David Bowie doing here? As the New York Times review noted, such useless incongruities “would have made [just] as much sense inserted into a segment of Golden Girls.”
“20TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION FOR DAVID LYNCH’S TWIN PEAKS“
TRASH It seems hard enough to be a successful child actor without losing your head eventually, let alone one so identified with a particular role that no one is ever inclined to let you forget it. Yet The Bad Seed‘s Patty McCormack has survived intact the formative experience of playing arguably the most notorious child role ever — hundreds of times on stage and once in a 1956 film version that refuses to go away.
At least it was the most notorious until The Exorcist (1973) — but remember, demon-possessed Regan was a victim, not a perp. Seed‘s pigtailed Rhonda Penmark was a stone-cold sociopath, manipulating everyone around her and arranging the “accidental” deaths of those who couldn’t be manipulated.
In 1954, when William March’s novel was published to acclaim, this was a pretty shocking conceit; its theatrical adaptation the next year only fanned the flames. In a move very rare for Hollywood, all the principal Broadway players were retained for the film, a prestige project directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Most of them wound up Oscar-nominated, even if a Production Code rule requiring no crime be left unpunished forced the original ending to be softened (if you can call it that).
When she began playing Rhoda, McCormack was just nine, but already had prior Broadway, TV, and big-screen credits on her resume. She was, it seems, a stone-cold pro, though not an off-camera brat. However, she had enough of an edge not to fit into the uber-perky Sandra Dee mode of the era’s teenage ingénues; instead, she spent those years doing TV dramas, then “graduated” to a run of exploitation movies with ace titles, like 1968’s The Mini-Skirt Mob (“Hog straddling female animals on the prowl!”) and The Young Runaways (“They experiment with drugs … with sex … with each other!”).
Afterward she continued to work on television (including extended roles on both The Ropers and The Sopranos), on stage, and in occasional movies — notably being devoured by mutant cockroaches in 1975 cult horror Bug and recently playing First Lady Pat in 2008’s Frost/Nixon.
When McCormack appears this weekend at the Castro as the guest of honor for impresario Marc Huestis’ latest tribute extravaganza (not for the first time — that was in 1999), you can ask her about all these career highlights and more. But of course primary curiosity will be directed toward The Bad Seed, particularly since the film will be screened, and preceded by a drag “Miss Bad Seed” contest.
The actress has always been a good sport about this lingering fame from over half a century ago, but has reportedly refused any offers to reprise her signature role (or take the mother’s) in any Bad Seed sequel or remake. Yet she relaxed that rule, sorta kinda, to portray the person Rhoda might have grown into in a couple of direct-to-video cheapies released during the mid-1990s.
Mommy (1995) cast the veteran thespian as Mrs. Sterling, widowed by more than one wealthy husband (heh heh), now raising perfect little daughter Jessica Ann (Rachel Limieux) just the way she likes it, alone. When anyone attempts to interfere in that Mini-Me molding process — like a teacher who inconceivably gives a medal of academic merit to another student — Mommy gets very, very angry. Nonetheless, her sharklike smile always returns in time to greet the police interrogating her over the latest violent death she insists having nothing to do with.
Written and directed by Max Allan Collins, the Iowa-shot film is so bad it’s just … bad, amateurish and witless despite the fun McCormack is clearly having. Not to mention the weird appeal of her supporting cast: playwright and lead Exorcist priest Jason Miller looking pretty ill as a cop, velvet-voiced scream queen Brinke Stevens as Mommy’s suspicious sister, “First Lady of Star Trek” Majel Barrett as that unfortunate teacher, pulp maestro and definite non-actor Mickey Spillane as an attorney.
It made enough of a splash, however, to warrant Mommy 2: Mommy’s Day two years later. This sequel has marginally improved production values, better kills, and the line “I know, dear, you’re innocent. Like O.J.” Now a famous murder, Mommy has been released from prison with an experimental anti-psychotic implant in her brain — not that it stops her. Meanwhile Jessica Ann has taken up figure skating. There are no bonus points for guessing what kind of blade her pissy coach’s throat gets slit with.
These movies are for Bad Seed and Patty McCormack completists; drinking games can only help. However, the interview extras that have the star talking about various phases of her career are so entertaining you might hope for Mommy 3 so they can continue.
FILM Recent urban unrest in London and elsewhere induced the same shocked response England has rolled out some years now at signs of what’s been termed “Broken Britain” — as if it were a complete surprise that the poor won’t always be content to suffer in polite near-silence. Propriety and gentility may be shrinking in the U.K., but they still have a powerful grip on the nation’s sense of itself.
Similar tremors were felt five decades ago when things were at last waking up both economically and artistically after the long post-World War II slough. Back then, the “Angry Young Man” school excited international interest even as it triggered alarm and disdain from various native bastions of cultural conservatism. Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) discomfited many by depicting a young factory grunt who frequently wakes in a married woman’s bed, chases other available tail, lies as naturally as he breathes, calls neighborhood busybodies “bitches and whores,” and on one Friday night entertains himself by drinking till he falls down a pub staircase — deliberately. “What I’m out for is a good time. The rest is propaganda,” sneers beady-eyed Albert Finney in the 1960 movie version, airing his contempt for all things cozy, dull and complacent.
Today British movies (at least the ones that get exported) are still more or less divided as then, by a sort of class system. There’s the Masterpiece Theatre school of costumed romance and intrigue on one hand, the pint-mouthed rebel yellers practicing gritty realism on another. Except contemporary examples of the latter, from Fish Tank (2009) to Attack the Block now allow that Angry Young Men might be something else beyond the radar once tuned to cocky, white male antiheroes.
The “something else” is gay in Weekend, which was shot in some of the same Nottingham locations where Finney’s Arthur Seaton kicked against the pricks in Saturday Night. The landscape has changed — street level is now 14 floors down in a council flat building — but still nondescript, the boozy clubs still loud but with different bad music. It’s at one such that bearded, late-20s Russell (Tom Cullen) gets loaded, waking up next morning with a hangover next to no married lady but rather Glen (Chris New). You get the feeling Glen has been the guy a lot of Russells have woken up next to; he enjoys the upper-hand power of remembering more about last night than they do.
It would be unfair to reveal more of Weekend’s plot, what little there is. Suffice it to say these two lads get to know each other over less than 48 hours, during which it emerges that Russell isn’t really “out,” while Glen is with a vengeance — though the matter of who is more emotionally mature or well adjusted isn’t so simple.
Writer-director Andrew Haigh made one prior feature, a semi-interesting, perhaps semi-staged portrait of a male hustler called Greek Pete (2009). It didn’t really prepare one for Weekend, which is the kind of yakkety, bumps and-all romantic brief encounter movies (or any other media) so rarely render this fresh, natural, and un-stagy. Both protagonists are average in their way — even Glen’s cynical pretensions are pretty standard-issue, such that you might decide he’s full of shit if in more-kindly-disposed Russell’s position — but the somewhat improvised ways they talk and act aren’t banal or predictable, just credible. They fuck (the movie isn’t graphic, but it’s frank about stuff like wiping splooge off one’s stomach), do too much cocaine, argue, and face a paths-parting deadline imposed by the fact that Glen will shortly leave to study for two years in the U.S. This may not be true love, but even the frail possibility of that is enough to usefully unsettle them both.
Weekend makes its small but somehow stirring impact for a number of reasons, but not least because it’s British working-class anti-miserabilism — the Angry Young Man conventions so taken for granted that simply being working class no longer means anyone actually has to be angry. Despite a fag-baiting catcall or two, the problems these blokes face aren’t social (they’ve both got accepting straight friends, if not family) but internal. Two strangers connecting despite themselves is such an intricate thing it’s no wonder movies seldom get it this right. *
