Pop Culture, High and Low, Past and Present. One Day at a Time.
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Sunday, April 20, 2008
DVD: Blast of Silence (1961)
Remembering ...
You’d heard of this movie before, in whispered tones. Church voices. Blast of Silence. A gritty, low-down noir shot guerilla-style on the streets of New York. Back in the early days of scrounging together bucks to make films on the cheap. You’d never seen it. Figured you never would. But you catch a break when lips slip that it’s getting the Criterion treatment. Five star all the way.
You jump on it as soon as you have the chance. Grass don’t grow under your feet.
You watch it, this movie written and directed by Allen Baron. He even stars in it, playing Frankie Bono, a Cleveland hit man who trains in to New York over Christmas to take care of a guy. But Frankie runs into some people from his past, a girl. He starts thinking about his life. You don’t want to do that. Not with that life.
You know the movie’s not perfect. The plot gets a little convenient, and if he can’t see the ending coming you figure Baby Boy Frankie Bono may not be the sharpest cannon in the shed.
But you’re not watching this one for the story. No. You’re watching it for the mood. The feeling. The energy that Baron finds on the streets of your hometown and channels into every frame. In Harlem. In Greenwich Village, beatniks pounding their drums and their libidos ‘til everything’s raw.
Remembering ...
You read Lawrence Block’s A Diet of Treacle not too long ago, from the same time and set on those same streets. The movie takes you right there. In style, in attitude, you’re watching one of those old Gold Medal paperbacks come to life. Or as close as you’re gonna get.
Most of all, you’re grooving on that voiceover. Written by blacklisted writer Waldo Salt under a phony name. Delivered by blacklisted actor Lionel Stander under no name at all. Putting you in Frankie Bono’s head. Making you feel Frankie’s palms sweat. Or not sweat. You know the meteorology of Frankie’s hands is important. You can’t get enough of that voiceover, think that Dave Kehr had it dead to rights when he called it “second person accusative.” You start doing that voiceover all the time. You can’t stop. You understand why friends of yours lapse into it on the streets of Philadelphia after a showing at NoirCon. You wish you were there to do it, too.
You even dig the extra features on the DVD. Baron’s still around, still kicking, still feisty. You like the guy, Martin Scorsese crossed with George C. Scott from The Hustler. He had a nice career for himself in TV. He takes you back to the locations, thirty, then almost fifty years later. Shows you the ways the neighborhoods change. And the ways they don’t.
You don’t see the best extra, though. A short graphic novel adaptation of the movie by Sean Phillips, one of the genius bad-asses behind Criminal with Ed Brubaker. That’s because you punked out, rented the DVD when you knew you should have bought it. You’ll pony up now, though. You want to come back to it.
Remembering ...
You watched Murder by Contracta few months back, another hit man movie. Picked by another genius bad-ass, James Ellroy. Vince Edwards wandering L.A., starting to feel bad about killing. You remember Ellroy talking up Contract as the first movie to give you the assassin as existential hero. Yeah, maybe. But you think Silence is the first one to get it right.
It’s one of the latest releases from the Fox Film Noir Collection. It’s directed by Otto Preminger, who made Laura. It’s got shadowy photography and a plot that’s twisted in every sense.
But trust me on this. Daisy Kenyon is not noir, no matter what the box says. Daisy Kenyon is melodrama. Pure melodrama. Uncut melodrama. Schedule I grade melodrama.
And as such, I couldn’t get enough of it.
Joan Crawford – who else? – plays Daisy, a Manhattan graphic artist who insists on paying her own way even though she’s also the mistress of high-powered attorney Dana Andrews. She’s on the verge of ending their relationship when she meets a veteran (Henry Fonda) shattered by the death of his wife and his experiences in Europe. Daisy awakens something in him, and soon she’s forced to choose between her two suitors.
Sound straightforward? Take my word for it, it ain’t. Nothing is straightforward with Otto Preminger. There’s always a welter of perversions and neuroses beneath the polished sheen of his movies.
Dana Andrews, a Preminger favorite, is at his best here playing a blithe charmer whom Rosemarie described as “Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer combined.” Competition for Daisy’s affections and a pro bono lawsuit he takes only to demonstrate what a swell guy he is reveal the hollowness of his life to him. They also expose the deep fissures in his marriage; his high-strung wife (Ruth Warrick) is taking out her frustrations with her husband on their younger daughter, in a subplot that still startles.
Fonda gives an atypical performance as a man whose demons have stripped away his internal censor. His unflinching honesty in word and emotion teeters between charming and unsettling, with the balance tipping toward the latter once Andrews comes back into the picture.
If Fonda is stretching here, Joan Crawford is playing Joan Crawford. Again, I have no problem with that. 42 at the time of Daisy Kenyon’s release, Joan is at least 12 years too old for the role; the noir cinematography by Leon Shamroy isn’t used to establish mood, but to hide the leading lady’s age. Watching Joan at this stage in her career isn’t about seeing her disappear into a character. It’s about bearing witness to a woman trying to stop the hands of time with every weapon in her arsenal. Always a mesmerizing spectacle.
For every aspect of Daisy Kenyon that’s dated, like the divorce proceedings that take up much of the third act, there’s another that remains bracingly fresh and adult. Throw in some well-produced extras that feature several members of the Film Noir Foundation and you can’t go wrong. Noir or not, Daisy Kenyon is a movie that gets under your skin.
Oh my God! The Adult Video News Awards are being televised on Showtime? This means they read my letters!
Wow. Always a bad sign when the women escorting the winners offstage are better dressed than the winners themselves.
I don’t know any of these people. I don’t watch porn or listen to Howard Stern. But it’s an award show, so I have to watch.
After 25 years they’re still doing jokes about “having hard days”? Bruce Vilanch is just phoning it in.
Every woman who teeters onstage hikes the bodice of her dress up, as if afraid it’s going to fall off. What are they worried about? They’re porn stars.
Ron Jeremy – hey, I do know one of these people! – just said he’s reading off cue cards. All the money in this business and they can’t afford teleprompters?
Every award has three presenters, and some categories have fifteen nominees. The adult film industry is like pee-wee soccer. Everybody gets recognition.
As always, lots of competition in Best High End All-Sex Release. In another year, any of these titles could win.
Guy in the front row! Button your shirt! Oh, sorry. Buckle your shirt.
Sweet Jesus, there’s a production number.
It’s set in the year 2011. It’s about abuses of the Patriot Act. I’m not kidding. And I’m so happy I’m watching this.
Oh, Lord, now the lead dancer is being arrested by FBI agents wearing flak jackets and gimp hoods who are taking her into custody using hula hoops.
I’ve got to admit, this number isn’t completely terrible. I’m glad they finally stopped hiring Debbie Allen.
Look at all the bored tongue kissing in the audience. Is that how you place a drink order?
Jenna Jameson is presenting an award named after her. She’s up there having a mini-meltdown, rambling about her crazy year and generally overstaying her welcome. She’s the Mickey Rooney of the AVN Awards.
So Jenna’s not retiring, but she said she’ll never spread her legs in this industry again. Clearly, there’s some nuance here that is lost on me.
This is the last year of the film category? Only video from now on. Jack Horner must be spinning in his grave.
No. Another production number. It features a drag queen and all the starlets groping one another. It’s like my senior prom is happening all over again.
Female Performer of the Year is the final category, the equivalent of Best Picture. The winner looks like she just came from a My Chemical Romance video shoot.
This must be the only awards show in television history to end with a 2257 notice. To read more about it, pick up Christa Faust’s Money Shot.
DVD: Houdini, The Movie Star
Let’s class it up a little around here, shall we? Via BoingBoing, here’s the preview for Kino Video’s upcoming 3-disc collection of Harry Houdini films. Gotta love that robot.
The Eliot Spitzer scandal offers ample fodder for commentary. I could contemplate the hypocrisy of a square-jawed reformer being felled by the most sordid personal behavior. Or consider the irony of a former hard-charging prosecutor becoming ensnared in the kind of elaborate investigation he once spearheaded. Or ask why Spitzer felt the need to import a call girl to our nation’s capital. You’d think Washington, D.C. would have plenty to choose from with its mix of money, power, and men separated from their wives. Or do New Yorkers view their prostitutes the way they do their pizza and bagels?
But none of those approaches interests me.
Instead, I will use the love guv’s woes as an excuse to voice one of this site’s long-standing complaints: there is still no special edition DVD of the 1995 sex thriller Jade that includes the extended ending aired on cable television. Joe Eszterhas wrote a prescient script about the governor of a major state frequenting hookers. That fictional governor, to quote a recent affidavit, could also be “difficult” and would ask his escorts “to do things that, like, you might not think were safe.” It’s uncanny. And proof that now more than ever, America needs Jade.
These movies have nothing in common aside from my seeing them over the same weekend and liking them both. I met multiple deadlines this past week, so perhaps the rosy glow of accomplishment is influencing my opinion. But I doubt it.
All due respect to Brad Bird and the Brothers Coen, but I’d call Paprika a genuine contender for both Best Animated Film and Best Picture of 2007. Throw in Best Adapted Screenplay, too, because it amazes me how well the movie hangs together.
An experimental therapeutic device that allows the wearer to interact with other people’s dreams is stolen. It’s up to a repressed scientist and her lively alter ego to prevent the boundaries between reality and fantasy from breaking down completely.
Paprika looks extraordinary. The dream imagery has a potent logic to it; the recurring “Parade of All Things Under the Sun,” as writer/director Satoshi Kon calls it, still haunts me. But the movie isn’t just about arresting visuals. It’s a dense story that takes on duality, the subconscious, and filmmaking. The last scene is note-perfect. When it ended, I felt – there’s no other word for it – uplifted. And that doesn’t happen often.
Here’s what’s known about the 1971 robbery that inspired The Bank Job. Thieves tunneled into a London branch of Lloyd’s and raided the safe deposit boxes. They coordinated their efforts using walkie-talkies, and those conversations were picked up by a ham radio enthusiast. Breathless coverage of the caper ended abruptly after several days, leading to speculation that the British government had issued a gag order – and that those boxes must have contained something special indeed.
From those facts and a mix of other historical tidbits, writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais cook up an entertaining stew. The ingredients include salacious royals, dubious “activists,” bent cops, a porn baron, and MI5. Or is it 6? It’s an old-school heist movie. Nothing slick here, just hard work and a lot of luck. Jason Statham, a Chez K favorite – news that there will be a Transporter 3 was greeted with song and feasting – has his best role to date. Well worth seeing.
After seeing two movies a day for a week, I needed a booster shot. Might as well go with the concentrated form. Born To Kill, directed by Robert Wise, scripted by Eve Greene and Richard Macaulay from James Gunn’s novel Deadlier Than The Male, delivers everything you could want from a film noir, pitched at delirium levels.
Femme fatale? Check, in the form of personal fave Claire Trevor decked out in a procession of impressive hats.
Doomed passion? Double check, because Claire hooks up with trouble personified: certified bad-ass Lawrence Tierney. He’s a post-crackup quick-tempered killer who insinuates his way into Claire’s clan by romancing her wealthy kid sister. But Tierney and Trevor are the ones made for each other, because they’re both schemers, dreamers, and batshit crazy to boot. Murder is their lovemaking!, as the poster should have said. Lousy Hays Office.
Plot twists? Fire it up and hang on.
Juicy character roles are another staple of noir, and again Born To Kill comes up aces. Walter Slezak as a genially corrupt private eye. Elisha Cook, Jr. as Tierney’s pal, always concerned about what’s “feasible.” Esther Howard as the bibulous old woman who can’t leave well enough alone.
Great scenes abound from the opening, a sharply observed look at the culture of soon-to-be divorcees’ rooming houses in Reno. A dazzling POV shot when Tierney’s first victim is discovered shows how much Wise drew from his experience with horror legend Val Lewton. And a confrontation between Cook and Howard in the blasted hellscape of sand dunes outside San Francisco is not to be missed.
Wise’s reputation has suffered over the years. Plenty of critics will never forgive him for his role as the perceived hatchet man on Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. Others just hate The Sound of Music. I say to hell with them. Wise knew how to tell stories, and he told them like an editor.
Born To Kill is mainly Tierney’s show. It was his one chance at a (sort of) conventional leading man role. Eddie Muller, in a terrific commentary track, provides the full sweep of the man’s career. He recounts the first time they met, at a screening of this movie, a saga involving profanity, headbutts, and unauthorized uses of promotional merchandise. It seems that Tierney – why don’t I let Eddie tell it?
“the first film that truly captures the beneath-the-gutter atmosphere and acne-scarred, unwashed villains of the middle period, ‘hard’ Leonard crime novels ... This one is sure to be offensive to some, but if the dark end of the alley is your meat, by all means, walk right in.”
The dark end of the alley was not my meat in 1986. At the time I was into stuff like SpaceCamp, which, coincidentally, starred 52 Pick-Up’s Kelly Preston.
Leonard co-wrote the script – to 52 Pick-Up, not SpaceCamp, although maybe he did some uncredited work – and the movie was directed by John Frankenheimer. But the surest sign you’re going to get the vulgar goods comes right at the beginning with the Cannon Films logo.
Roy Scheider is Leonard’s steely protagonist, an ex-military man who has built a successful engineering firm. He’s happily married to Ann-Margret, but is seeing Preston on the side. Little does he know that her interest in him has been orchestrated by a trio of seedy types bent on blackmail. Scheider convinces them he can only come up with a little more than fifty grand, then methodically pits the three of them against each other.
There’s some breathtakingly sordid stuff in Pick-Up, filmed in great lurid L.A. locations. Gotta love Scheider’s interrogation of Vanity in a “modeling studio.”
The movie’s best feature is its bad guys, rightfully described by Pelecanos as “unhinged.” John Glover portrays the ringleader, shooting porn films anywhere and everywhere; in that he’s ahead of his time, kind of a proto Joe Francis. His scene with Ann-Margret’s character late in the action is the very height of lowdown. Glover never lets up. He is magnetically loathsome, or loathsomely magnetic, in every frame. (Glover is an acclaimed stage actor who won a Tony award for his performance as twins in Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, which he then recreated on film. But what do I remember him for? Playing a deranged billionaire, equal parts Ted Turner and Donald Trump, in the underrated Gremlins 2: The New Batch. And now this. It almost makes me feel bad.)
Pick-Up is not exactly a good movie. It’s an enjoyably unpretentious one. It’s mean and it plays dirty. It’s trashy and it knows it. And sometimes that’s exactly what you’re in the mood for.
Movies: Three Hand Grenades, Two Mortar Shells, and a Suitcase Full of C-4
Slate provides some holiday cheer by serving up a list of alternative Christmas movies. Two of my yuletide staples are here (Die Hard and The Ice Harvest) along with some other inspired choices (The Thin Man, the haunting 2046 and All That Heaven Allows, a beautiful and deeply moving film that may send you into the egg nog headfirst.) I suppose tossing Bad Santa on there would have been too obvious.
But there’s no mention of the contemporary master of the Christmas movie: Shane Black. Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, all of ‘em set at the holidays, all of ‘em packed with a sleigh’s worth of firepower. Just what’s needed at the end of those long shopping days.
And where’s the Christmas movie that provides Chez K with its sole holiday tradition? Every year since its release, we screen it. In fact, I think we’re about due to fire it up.
Ever read a book and think the target audience consists of ... you? McDonald’s debut – named one of the year’s ten best crime novels by Eddie Muller in the San Francisco Chronicle – is about the intersection of pulp fiction, Hollywood and politics. Naturally, I ate it up.
Hec Lassiter is the last of the Black Mask boys, still cranking out two-fisted fiction in 1957. He’s being profiled by young poet Bud Fiske for True magazine when a real-adventure comes their way: they wind up in possession of the stolen head of Mexican general Pancho Villa, which is being sought by Yale University’s Skull & Bones Society for use in its secret ceremonies. Hec and Bud square off against intelligence agencies, ancient revolutionaries and homicidal frat boys. McDonald weaves plenty of real-life figures into the tale. Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, John Ford, Ernest Hemingway, Senator Prescott Bush. Even the senator’s grandson makes an appearance.
The plot moves at a hell-for-leather pace and is basically an excuse to mourn the passing of an era of American manhood and pay tribute to old-fashioned storytelling. Personally, I’ll never see Touch of Evil the same way again.
TV: Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project (2007)
The best observation in this HBO documentary about the insult comic comes from Penn Jillette:
“(Rickles) had this quality of ... pleasing the audience was the most important thing in the world. Not in his life, in the world. But he would not compromise in any way to please them. A very complicated, very important idea. In a certain sense, the definition of art.”
The documentary is a must-see for fans of old-school showbiz. John Landis, who directed, met Rickles while working as a production assistant on Kelly’s Heroes. But there’s no mention of their other collaboration: 1992’s Innocent Blood, in which a sexy French vampire preys on Pittsburgh gangsters. Rickles plays a Mob lawyer-turned-bloodsucker. Also in the cast are Anthony LaPaglia, future Oscar nominees Angela Bassett and Chazz Palminteri, and half of The Sopranos. It’s great, trashy fun.
TV: This Week’s Reason Why I Don’t Watch CNN
I went back and forth about posting this photograph. It’s outside my bailiwick, the image isn’t the best, and it’s in questionable taste to harp on a typo in the midst of sad news. But I mentioned it over at Bill Crider’s blog, and now I feel it’s my duty.
Here’s Wolf Blitzer reporting on Wednesday’s shooting incident ... in Obama, Nebraska.
It’s a fast-moving story, they’re under pressure, I get it. But I still can’t believe this went on the air. Is the network using an election season macro? Any word beginning with ‘O’ auto-completes as Obama unless it’s changed to Oprah or Orange?
Update: The photo is now also up at Leavenworth Street, a blog devoted to Nebraska state politics.
Video: Farewell, Something Weird
PopMatters (via GreenCine Daily) brings word of the impending demise of Something Weird Video. I’ve watched a lot of the company’s titles over the years and while the movies themselves may have been disappointing, the presentation never was. Keeping these oddities in the public eye is valuable work, and Something Weird did it well.
I wrote about two of SWV’s burlesque films with Bettie Page here, and their Barry Mahon double bill here.
Onward into Warner’s Film Noir Classic Collection Volume 4 we go. Tension is the sleeper of the set so far. Richard Basehart stars as a mild-mannered pharmacist utterly devoted to wife Audrey Totter. Trouble is, Audrey’s not devoted to him. While he’s mixing pills on the graveyard shift, she’s swanning around town with her lover. Basehart wants to off the beau, but realizes he doesn’t have it in him. However, if he creates another identity for himself ...
Tension’s structure has dated somewhat; the proceedings are introduced and narrated by Barry Sullivan as a homicide detective with the great unlikely moniker of Collier Bonnabel. But the storyline about what people are capable of when they let slip their everyday lives is as sharp as ever. The cast makes the most of it, especially the magnificent Audrey Totter. She’s always a lot of fun to watch.
Where Danger Lives is a dud, but an oddly compelling one. Doctor Robert Mitchum saves a woman’s life after a suicide attempt, then promptly falls in love with her. (Don’t they cover these situations in medical school?) There’s a murder, and the couple goes on the run – even though initially, no one is chasing them. The first half of the movie is a series of miscues and mixed signals, while the second half grows increasingly surreal as Mitchum begins feeling the effects of a concussion.
The troubled woman is played by Faith Domergue, one of Howard Hughes’s “discoveries.” Faith, alas, isn’t a very good actress. But as the extent of her character’s mental illness is revealed, the weaknesses in her performance become ... well, not strengths, exactly, but interesting shadings in a psychological portrait. Let’s leave it at that.
Movies: Enjoy The Show
Yesterday we saw Michael Clayton, the terrific directorial debut of one of my favorite screenwriters Tony Gilroy. Great to see a smart, grown-up movie in a packed house. Still, the experience prompted a few rants.
Rant #1. Every preview we saw – and there were a lot of them – was for a movie about death. Dead kids, dead spouses, dead lovers, dead friends. Two in a row was depressing. Three was kind of funny. Four had people turning around to look at the guy who couldn’t stop laughing. For the record, attending a movie that addresses adult concerns does not mean that the audience is simply marking time until the sweet embrace of the grave.
Rant #2. The people who sat on the other side of Rosemarie brought an entire picnic with them. Thermoses full of liquid, large plastic sacks of bite-sized chocolate bars to be individually unwrapped. I’ve made my peace with the fact that people are incapable of sitting still for two hours without feeding themselves, and that many of these people are cheap.
But then the guy right next to Rosemarie ate an apple.
Anyone who eats an apple in a movie theater is a jackass. Apples are the loudest of the natural snacks, and they spray juice into the dark.
And don’t bother giving me the speech about how you’re hypoglycemic. Not everyone who claims to have blood sugar woes can be so afflicted. Statistically it’s not possible. You know the last society so fixated on humors of the body? Ancient Rome. And we all know what happened there.
Lastly, if you do insist on eating an apple during a movie, at least have the decency to take the core with you when you leave.
Here’s one for the Bill Crider video collection. A movie that probably had too much influence on me finally gets the DVD it deserves.
Alligator was a huge favorite of mine when I was a kid. A perfect blend of genuine shocks and tongue-in-cheek laughs, it somehow made the idea of a giant mutated reptile living in the sewers under Chicago plausible.
At some point I noticed that this movie and another cable TV staple, Piranha, were written by John Sayles. And that Sayles was also responsible for more ... grown-up fare. But he applied the same attention to detail, no matter what kind of movie he was making. From Sayles, I learned that craft counted regardless of genre.
The new DVD was a chance to watch Alligator for the first time in ages. Not only does the movie hold up, it’s better than I remembered. I appreciate the casting a lot more now. Comedian Jack Carter as the obsequious mayor, Henry Silva as a great white hunter brought in to get the gator. Robin Riker, playing the Midwest’s most fetching herpetologist, looks enough like Lindsay Lohan to give the proceedings some contemporary resonance. And Robert Forster is the man as the troubled cop who first realizes what lurks below.
The disc features an interview with Sayles, who explains how he folded a sociological critique into a monster movie (not a horror film), as well as a commentary track with Forster and director Lewis Teague that makes it plain everyone involved with this movie knew exactly what they were doing.
Miscellaneous: Overhead Conversation of the Day
Concerned Citizen #1: The government, they tell you they’re sending all that money to Iraq, but you know these guys are just lining their pockets with it.
Concerned Citizen #2: Yeah! They’re getting rich. Like Hal Burton. Dick Cheney’s buddy. Burton’s getting it all!
Volume 4 of Warner Brothers’ Film Noir Classic Collection has been out for weeks, but I’m only getting into it now. It’s not my fault, y’unnerstand. I ordered it as soon as it streeted from an online retailer and somehow wound up with a boxed set of Star Trek movies. The turnaround cut into my valuable noir-watching time.
Which killed me, because the collection includes a movie I’ve wanted to see for years. Decoy has become a fabled cult item because it features what may be the most macabre plot in noir history. A woman romances a prison doctor so he’ll revive her death row boyfriend after his execution – just long enough for loverboy to reveal where he’s hidden four hundred grand in stolen loot. The movie’s production history only adds to its mystique. Producer/director Jack Bernhard met actress Jean Gillie in England, married her, and made Decoy to introduce her to American audiences. They divorced before the film was released, and Gillie died of pneumonia soon after at age 33.
Her legacy burns anew with Decoy’s appearance on DVD. She’s remarkable playing the most fatale of femmes. TV legend Sheldon Leonard is terrific as a homicide dick who believes the worst about everyone. The rest of the cast? Not so good. And the soundtrack is overbearing. But that wild premise holds your interest, and the movie is bookended by spellbinding opening and closing sequences. To quote Rosemarie: “Anybody who wants to direct needs to study that intro.”
The writer of Decoy, Nedrick Young (who would go on to pen The Defiant Ones and Inherit the Wind), appears as an actor in the other half of this disc’s double bill. Crime Wave is the kind of rock-solid, unpretentious movie director André de Toth was known for. Reformed ex-con Gene Nelson gets sucked back into the life when a trio of prison acquaintances (a young Charles Bronson among them) busts out of San Quentin and expects his help. Hard-nosed cop Sterling Hayden watches his every move. Half the cast of this movie – Hayden, Ted de Corsia, Timothy Carey – would later turn up in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing.
I’d already seen Crime Wave, but I watched it again so I could enjoy the commentary track featuring novelist James Ellroy and the czar of noir himself, Eddie Muller. Ellroy literally pants over authentic early ‘50s Los Angeles locations and notes all the ways this movie informed his novel L.A. Confidential. (He based Bud White, played by Russell Crowe in the movie, partly on Hayden’s character, and points out a dive bar that’s the inspiration for the Nite Owl.) He also says that after rewatching Chinatown, he’s decided that it doesn’t hold up, and that Crime Wave is the better film.
I don’t think he’s kidding.
Miscellaneous: Observation
The new gig prompted me to take the plunge and buy a laptop. Renovations around Chez K have reached the noisy stage, so I’ve started taking it to coffee shops so I can work. Meaning I have, at last, become one of those people I have always despised. Such is life.
Movies: Run Swinger Run/Sex Club International (1967)
Oh, like you wouldn’t rent movies with those titles. I didn’t come here to be judged.
Actually, I don’t know why I rented them. Sexploitation movies bore me to tears. I prefer thrillers with a generous dollop of sleaze, not titillation with a half-assed plot grafted on. That’s what we get a double dose of here, courtesy of director Barry Mahon.
Sex Club International is the marginally better of the two. The club president can’t complete the simplest task without disrobing and looks just enough like Ann Coulter to give the enterprise some contemporary resonance. The movie is narrated by a regional man of mystery named, I kid you not, Lucky Bang Bang, who reads his lines off cue cards scattered on the floor.
But the good people at Something Weird Video know how to load up a disc with extras. There are several Mahon shorts as well as a collection of trailers for other classics of his oeuvre like Crazy, Wild and Crazy and Good Time With a Bad Girl. Sadly, there is no coming attraction for 1968’s immortal The Diary of Knockers McCalla.
Mahon eventually made the natural transition into children’s films. The disc includes the preview for his micro-budgeted production The Wonderful Land of Oz. Since watching it, I have not been able to sleep. It is that horrifying. I can’t find it online, but these photos will give you a taste of the horror that awaits you.
The best extra is a slideshow of adult film magazine covers accompanied by radio spots from the era. One ad trumpets a movie featuring footage of the birth of a baby. That’s soon trumped by one showing the birth of twins. All for educational purposes only, of course. It makes for quite a time capsule.
Amazing fact: Barry Mahon was the inspiration for Steve McQueen’s character in The Great Escape. Ed Wood gets a biopic and Barry doesn’t? Act I: War Hero! Act two is buck naked and bucking conventions. And in act three Barry gains redemption by reaching out to America’s youth. I’m telling you, this thing writes itself.
DVD: Payback, Straight Up: The Director’s Cut (1999/2007)
If there’s a collecting gene, I don’t have it. I can barely bring myself to buy DVDs of movies I enjoy. So imagine my surprise when I picked up one I didn’t like – at least the first time around.
Payback is based on The Hunter, the Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake) novel already immortalized on film as Point Blank. Screenwriter Brian Helgeland, making his directorial debut, set out to make a movie closer in tone to Stark’s book. Plots don’t come much sparer: thief Parker (here renamed Porter) is double-crossed and left for dead by his wife and his partner. He then begins killing his way up the Outfit’s ladder to get the money back. Not all of it, you understand. Just his share.
It was a troubled production. Helgeland’s cut was deemed too dark, and he was replaced by another director. A voice-over was added, a new third act (complete with new characters) was grafted on. And the seams showed. I didn’t care for the movie, which played like a violent cartoon. Recently, Helgeland got a chance to recreate his version. The resulting DVD serves as an object lesson in the power of editing. From the same material, he’s crafted a substantially different film.
It may not be meaner, but it’s certainly leaner. The ending is simpler. Kris Kristofferson is no longer in the movie. His character is now only a voice, provided by Sally Kellerman. Much of the over-the-top quality of the ’99 film has been stripped away, which helps Gregg Henry’s performance as Porter’s duplicitous partner. The entire earlier version seemed to play at his manic frequency; with the film’s metabolism slowed down, he registers not as a caricature but as the kind of loudmouth hothead who drifts into a life of crime. I’m also happy to report that the scene in which dominatrix Lucy Liu kicks the crap out of Henry while wearing leather chaps is untouched. (Honestly, that’s the only thing I remembered from eight years ago.)
I’m still not completely sold on the new cut. It may be a question of casting. Not that there’s anything wrong with Mel Gibson; he’s always an inventive actor. But he’s also a star, and somehow that seems wrong for a professional who doesn’t want to call undue attention to himself. Parker’s more the character actor type.
The DVD includes a half-hour documentary detailing the movie’s history, in which all parties speak their piece. The best extra is an interview with Westlake, who says his favorite cinematic Parker isn’t Gibson or even Point Blank’s Lee Marvin, but Robert Duvall in the unsung The Outfit. “What Lee Marvin did was a wonderful destroyed Lee Marvin,” Westlake says. “What Robert Duvall did was a wonderful terse, taciturn Parker.” I’m partial to the movie myself. As Westlake says, it was made without a lot of fooling around – just the way Parker pulls a heist.
I’ll admit this right off the bat: The Larry Sanders Show is my all-time favorite TV series. I’ll stack it up against any comedy or drama. It helps that Larry is a perfect blend of both, an achingly funny series about a troika of characters so rich and well-defined they’d be at home in a Eugene O’Neill play. Insecure talk show host Larry (Garry Shandling), his loyal producer Artie (Rip Torn), and his talent-challenged sidekick Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor, giving full voice to the show’s most inspired creation).
Sanders is primarily remembered for the groundbreaking way it used real-life figures to comment on America’s growing obsession with show business, and those scenes draw blood to this day. Plenty of actors did the best work of their careers playing themselves. Like Illeana Douglas, worrying that boyfriend Larry will dump her if she tanks on his show. Jim Carrey’s turn on the final episode, his showmanship curdling into malignant narcissism as soon as the cameras are off, is nothing short of spellbinding. The later shows featuring Jon Stewart as Larry’s heir apparent make for particularly fascinating viewing now that Stewart has not only become this generation’s answer to Johnny Carson but has reinvented the role so completely.
For me, the show’s other true subject is work. You’re always aware of the enormous amount of effort that goes into making a standard-issue talk show that struggles in the ratings.
Aside: I always loved the episodes where something on the show would go so wrong that Artie would announce, “Tonight will be a ‘Best of Larry.’” It got to the point where I became disappointed that Jay and Dave never aired unscheduled reruns. Apparently I should have been watching The View, which had the decency to put the dysfunction front and center.
As the collection’s name implies, the episodes are cherry-picked from the show’s six seasons. Some personal favorites are missing. Artie’s drunken night in the office isn’t here, and neither is Larry’s celebrity roast. But other classics are, such as “Hank’s Sex Tape,” featuring one of the great lines of television history: “Sex is not a crime. It’s a loving act between two or more consenting adults.”
The episodes, though, are mere gravy for the special features. They’re so exhaustive that they essentially constitute a lost season of Larry, focused as they are on the divide between performer and performance, or what Garry Shandling calls “the curtain.” Shandling was intimately involved with assembling this collection; he even handwrites the introductions to his visits with the show’s guest stars. He boxes with Alec Baldwin and has breakfast with one-time paramour Sharon Stone, who played Larry’s love interest in one of the show’s strongest episodes. Their encounter quickly breaks through the playful artifice to plumb emotions with Cassavetes intensity. Shandling also reconnects with people who worked behind the scenes on the show. Protégé Judd Apatow cops to stealing Shandling’s creative method. In light of Apatow’s extraordinary success, that may be the show’s most lasting legacy.
I try to keep blanket statements to a minimum, but I already went big with the “all-time favorite” comment, so what the hell. This DVD package is the cultural high point of 2007 so far.
A New York childhood taught me that the light of the end of the tunnel is usually an oncoming train, often an express at that. Still, I see such a light, and I am hopeful. In the meantime, some tidbits.
The best movie I’ve seen in years debuts on DVD this Tuesday. Jean-Pierre Melville’s WWII resistance drama Army of Shadows receives the full Criterion treatment. Here’s what I said about it last August. Do yourself a favor and watch it as soon as you can.
Arrested Development, season two? Every bit the equal of season one.
Thanks to MLB Extra Innings, I have now seen commercials for every mid-level casino and regional brand of cold cuts in the continental United States.
A lovely old brick apartment building around the corner from Chez K is being slowly demolished. I took some pictures of what remains. They’re posted on my Flickr page.
Time to revive the storied tradition – OK, I did this once before – of briefly describing the DVDs gathering dust next to the TV because I’m too busy to watch them.
Arrested Development, Season 1, Disc 2. Whenever I caught an episode, I’d think, “This show is really funny.” I am now working my way through the entire series in sequence. One of the better decisions I’ve made lately.
A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints. It’s a way for me to jump on the Shia LaBoeuf bandwagon, because I haven’t had a chance to catch Disturbia yet. The movie also stars Chazz Palminteri and Robert Downey, Jr., and it don’t get better than them. But mainly I’m interested because Saints is set in “the tough neighborhood of Astoria, Queens. ” I came up in the adjacent ‘hood of Woodside, where I have to say the streets didn’t seem that mean. Then again, I spent most of my time indoors.
Hollywood Burlesque/Peek-A-Boo. Watching burlesque movies, like this double bill from Something Weird Video, for the comedy is like reading Playboy for the articles. Which I also do, thank you very much. There’s something about those interminable baggy-pants sketches that fascinates me, especially on those rare occasions when you see a veteran performer who’s still able to liven up a bit.
One of the burlesque shorts on the disc featured a dancer doing a striptease to an up-tempo rendition of “Danny Boy,” which is wrong on many, many levels. By the time it was over I was weeping, aroused, and angry, which for an Irishman is a normal state of affairs. Back to work.
Get Carter isn’t just one of the great gangster movies. It topped at least one critics’ poll of the best British films of all time. A year after Carter’s release, star Michael Caine, writer/director Mike Hodges, and producer Michael Klinger reunited for Pulp. Which, to my knowledge, has never topped a critics’ list of any kind. A bare-bones DVD skulked onto the market last week. And while Pulp suffers in comparison to Carter – name a movie that wouldn’t – it’s still worth watching.
Caine plays an author of paperback thrillers, churning out titles like The Organ-Grinder under an array of pseudonyms (Guy Strange, Dan Wild). He agrees to ghostwrite the autobiography of a faded Hollywood star with alleged Mafia connections and soon finds himself neck-deep in the kind of plot he usually dictates into a tape recorder.
Hodges tries to pull off something difficult here, telling a noir tale while sending up the genre’s conventions. It doesn’t completely work, but there are enough smart moments to keep the action interesting. This is the Michael Caine that Craig Ferguson lovingly satirizes, in full ‘70s glory with wavy hair and thick-framed glasses. And while Mickey Rooney may not be believable as an Italian, he shines as the Cagneyesque actor driven by an aging male’s vanity and a celebrity’s narcissism.
One member of the Carter team not brought back is composer Roy Budd. ‘Carter Takes The Train’ is one of the indisputably great main themes, so much so that it was reprised in the 2000 Sylvester Stallone Carter remake, where it was easily the movie’s best feature. Budd had a nice career doing jazz-inflected scores for Euro thrillers of the ‘70s, many starring Caine (The Black Windmill, The Destructors). I’ve been listening to them a lot lately. Good stuff.
TV: Entourage
Naturally, I love this HBO show. It’s about a kid from Queens named Vince whose effortless talent makes him the center of his universe. Frankly, I deserve royalties.
I was willing to let Turtle’s fetishistic obsession with the Yankees go. There are a handful of Bronx Brombers fans in the Mets’ home borough. But I draw the line at this week’s episode, which featured a gratuitous anti-Mets joke. Vince Chase made a movie called Queens Boulevard, for Christ’s sake. There’s got to be at least one Amazins fan in his posse. If Jeremy Piven weren’t still bringing it as Ari Gold, I’d stop watching in protest. For one week.
L.A.’s noir fest continues, and I continue not to be there for it. The L.A. Times looks at the festival’s bicoastal theme. Eddie Muller makes a key distinction, saying of the New York films:
“the characters want to escape the big city, the teeming metropolis. In L.A., you get to the Promised Land and you realize there’s no escape.”
GreenCine features a terrific multi-part video from January’s Noir City festival in San Francisco with Muller interviewing actress Marsha Hunt, star of Kid Glove Killer and Raw Deal.
The Rap Sheet recently conducted a poll to determine TV’s best cops and gumshoes. The results are in. Yours truly split his ticket, voting for Joe Friday and Jim Rockford.
DVD: Le Petit Lieutenant (U.S. 2006)
Last year I went to New York just as this award-winning French film ended its run there. Naturally, that’s when it played briefly in Seattle. I had to wait for its DVD release to catch up with it.
Lieutenant is the kind of police procedural that has been largely ceded to television. At times it plays like a cinema vérité hybrid of The Wire and Prime Suspect, as a rookie Paris detective adjusts to his duties with help from an alcoholic female superior returning to command. The movie takes its sweet time getting started; half an hour in, I confess to feeling a bit bored. But the plot takes hold once the rookie begins investigating the murder of a homeless man, leading to an ending that long-form TV couldn’t pull off. It’s a slow building film, but one worth watching.
The movie reminded me of Bertrand Tavernier’s L.627. The epic black comedy following a Paris drug squad is the M*A*S*H of cop movies, and as far as I know it’s unavailable on DVD. Who do I talk to about that?
Barreling toward a deadline means no new blog fodder for the weekend. Instead, here’s a heads up about an old favorite.
The best crime drama of 2006, not to mention one of the finest films of the year, comes to DVD on Tuesday. I speak of Argentina’s El Aura, or in English, The Aura. (Pretty good, huh? Never took Spanish. That’s just from watching soccer on Univision.)
Fabien Bielinsky’s haunting movie is about an epileptic taxidermist who accidentally gets the opportunity to live out his dream of pulling the perfect heist. To quote myself when I raved about it last November, “think of it as Richard Stark meets Oliver Sacks.”
Bielinsky died far too young last year, having made only this film and the marvelous con man caper Nine Queens. Both deserve your attention. I’m happy to do what I can to get El Aura’s cult following off the ground.
You’d think four Michael Shayne movies in a row would be enough. But knowing that the third film in the series was already available on DVD meant that I had to track it down. My Shayne bender wasn’t over yet. Speaking of which, who played Shayne Bender? Wasn’t it Hugh O’Brian? No, wait, Hugh O’Brian was Brannigan. (Have you watched the Lookwell pilot I sent you to? These are the jokes, folks.)
Alas, Dressed to Kill is easily the least of the five Shayne films I’ve seen so far. The gumshoe’s all set to marry his girl (played by series regular Mary Beth Hughes) when he stumbles onto a gruesome double murder tied to a long-ago theatrical production. The plot, from the Richard Burke novel The Dead Take No Bows, is so thick that Lloyd Nolan gets little chance to demonstrate his charm. His few good lines and the presence of veteran actors William Demarest and Henry Daniell are all that recommend this one. And with that, I stop talking about Mike Shayne. Until Volume 2 of the collection comes out.
Miscellaneous: Links, All Queens N.Y. Edition
A last-minute deal keeps Major League Baseball’s out-of-market games on cable – and the Mets sweep the opening 3-game series against the defending world champion Cardinals in St. Louis, outscoring them 20-2. It’s going to be a good summer.
Spider-Man 3is set to receive “the first-ever star-studded gala premiere in Queens” in the movie theater blocks from my childhood home. I knew Peter Parker growing up. A loner, kept to himself mostly.
I watched all four movies in Fox’s new two-disc set in four days, popping them one after another like Raisinettes (or your candy of choice), so obviously I liked them. I don’t want my newfound affection for these films to lead me to overstate their quality or importance. But it’s worth pointing out that actor Lloyd Nolan had worn Mike Shayne’s fedora three times before Humphrey Bogart appeared as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. The 1940s was the decade of the hardboiled gumshoe, and Nolan’s Shayne was one of the first.
The movies are all solidly crafted entertainments, as you might expect from the B-movie unit at Fox responsible for the Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto series. They use the name of Brett Halliday’s character but little else; the cinematic Shayne is your basic wisecracking big-city P.I., although what big city changes from film to film. In fact, there’s no continuity between the movies other than a stable of actors who recur in different roles. (For a sense of Halliday’s Shayne, check out Thrilling Detective or Flagler Street. And many thanks to Steve Lewis at the Mystery*File blog for clearing up questions about source material and for backing me on some other points.)
As is often the case, the debut title in the series is the best. Michael Shayne, Private Detective (1940) is the only film based on a Halliday novel, 1939’s Dividend on Death. A wealthy client hires the shamus to baby-sit his daughter, a degenerate gambler running with a shady crowd. An early scene in which Shayne hustles the men sent to repo his office furniture not only demonstrates a refreshing honesty about the realities of a private eye’s life, but establishes Nolan’s sly take on the character.
The follow-up film Sleepers West (1941) prefigures the classic noir The Narrow Margin as Shayne escorts a witness (Mary Beth Hughes) to trial on a train while fending off those who want to silence her. The next Shayne outing, Dressed to Kill, isn’t in the collection but is available on an older DVD. Here’s hoping a restored version is in Volume 2.
Blue, White and Perfect (1941) may be my favorite of the bunch. Shayne’s fiancée (Hughes again) pressures him to leave the detective racket, so he hires on at an aviation plant only to wind up tangling with Axis spies. The movie boasts a nice turn by TV’s Superman George Reeves as the mysterious Juan Arturo O’Hara. With a moniker like that, you know he’s up to something.
1942’s silly The Man Who Wouldn’t Die strands Shayne in a haunted house caper, but Nolan’s insouciance and the presence of Shayne regulars Marjorie Weaver and Helene Reynolds keeps the action snappy.
Fox errs in the placement of the movies, pairing the first and last titles on one disc. But crisp digital transfers and useful extras more than make up for the oversight. A feature on Shayne’s long history includes comments from Otto Penzler, Stuart Kaminsky and Mary Dresser, the widow of Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser). There’s a gallery of covers by Robert McGinnis as well as an informative interview with the artist. My favorite line is when McGinnis says that the women in his paintings are “ladies at a higher level, yet still appealing and provocative.”
What registers most strongly in these films is Lloyd Nolan’s wonderful performance. He’s given only stage Irishness and a bit of business with a keychain to define Shayne, yet he inhabits the role completely. Concocting disguises that fool no one like a proto-Fletch, tossing off sharp lines, engaging in deft physical comedy while still coming across as a man who can handle himself, Nolan essentially creates the modern P.I. template out of whole cloth.
Rosemarie planned on watching only the first film with me, but was so taken by Nolan’s work that she stuck around for all four. As the last movie ended she said, “I finally realized who Lloyd reminds me of: Bugs Bunny.” Fast on his feet, forever in trouble but always coming out on top ... yeah, I can see it.
