by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was American Hustle, and it turned out to be one of the biggest cinematic disappointments
of my lifetime — I don’t think I’ve been so unimpressed by a major studio movie
since The Interpreter, and for
the same reason: it took a potentially rich, deep and fascinating story (very loosely based on the so-called “Abscam” scandal of
the 1970’s, in which the FBI entrapped some corrupt politicians in New Jersey —
“corrupt politicians in New Jersey”? Isn’t that redundant? Not all corrupt politicians are from New Jersey, but
sometimes it seems as if all New Jersey politicians are corrupt, even those who
make their bones as corruption-fighters, like current Governor Chris Christie —
and caught them on tape taking bribes from an actor posing as an Arab sheik
offering them money to smooth the approval processes for the casinos he
supposedly wanted to build on the Jersey shore) and dropped the ball on almost
all counts. American Hustle has
two bravura star turns — from Christian Bale as the central character, con man
Irving Rosenfeld, who’s caught by the FBI and given the chance to skate on the
charges against him in exchange for his services pulling off Abscam; and
Jennifer Lawrence as his estranged wife Rosalyn, a (stereo)typical Jewish nag
but also, in this quirky script by David O. Russell (who also directed) and
Eric Warren Singer, the one character who actually shows some degree of honesty
and integrity. Watching them in this movie, it’s hard to believe these are the
same people who played Batman (three times!) and Katniss Everdeen (twice, so
far), respectively! Otherwise it’s a really dreary movie, reducing a story full
of interesting resonances to a lot of dreary shots of two, three or four people
talking in a room. Through much of the movie I had trouble staying awake, and
even when that wasn’t a problem
it did occur to me that the whole story as Russell and Singer presented it was
so claustrophobic it would have worked better as a stage play than a film.
The
gimmick is that Irving is dating a hot young British number named Edith (Amy
Adams, who’s being hyped a lot lately as the next great female star but, to my mind, was totally
out-acted here by Jennifer Lawrence), whom he met at a party and bonded with
over their shared admiration for Duke Ellington (they’re shown listening to the
version of “Jeep’s Blues” from the 1956 Ellington at Newport album, and one rather overly imaginative imdb.com
“trivia” commentator suggested that this album fitted the film’s theme of
deception in that it was largely recorded in a studio and doctored to sound
live — not Ellington’s idea, as the poster thought, but that of his record producer,
George Avakian; in fact, Ellington was so appalled at the deception he walked
out of one of the re-recording sessions and refused to work with Avakian
again). American Hustle begins
with a prologue in which Irving (various voice-over narrations appear from him
and some of the other principals) explains that he started his career in crime
as the henchman of his father, a glazier — like Jackie Coogan in Charlie
Chaplin’s The Kid, he makes
business for his old man by throwing rocks through windows so his dad can be
paid to fix them — and ended up inheriting his father’s glass business, adding
a string of dry cleaners, and using both of those as fronts for various forms
of white-collar crime. When he meets Edith, Irving is a bit anxious that she
won’t accept him if she knows he’s a crook — only (in the first of many
surprise twists that power the script) she not only accepts him but joins him
as his partner in crime. Things work well for them for about half an hour until
they’re busted by the FBI, only agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) — who,
like Irving, does fake things to his hair to change his appearance into
something presumably cooler (Irving sticks a patch of fake hair to his scalp
and combs his real hair over to conceal that he’s balding, and Richie has a set
of baby-sized curls so he can curl his hair in a supposedly hip fashion) —
offers Irving a free pass if he’ll help set up four cons for the FBI.
Eventually, after a lot of boring
exposition and even more boring sexual byplay between the four principals —
Richie falls in lust at first sight for Edith and she’s willing to reciprocate,
but only once they’re totally honest with each other — something of a dramatic
design emerges: the FBI fixates on Camden, New Jersey Mayor Carmine Polito
(Jeremy Renner from The Hurt Locker
— remember The Hurt Locker? O.K.,
no one else does either) and sets up a sting operation by which he’ll hopefully
be caught taking a bribe from Paco Hernandez (Michael Peña), an out-of-work
Mexican actor who’s been hired to play an Arab sheik from Abu Dhabi who
supposedly wants to open a casino on the Camden coast. Carmine (based on
real-life Camden mayor and Abscam victim Angelo Errichetti, who’s dead now but
whose surviving friends visited the set and found Renner’s impersonation so
perfect it was almost eerie) naturally leaps at the chance to win a major new
economic development for his city and create thousands of new jobs — and,
equally naturally, leaps at the chance to make a few bucks for himself in the
process. The sting spreads to members of Congress (including a sitting U.S.
Senator, never named in the film but in real life it was Harrison “Pete”
Williams, D-NJ and then chair of the Senate Banking Committee) when Richie adds
a new wrinkle: he wants to bribe them to speed through a bill making the sheik
an American citizen. Richie also gets excited when a Florida mobster named
Victor Tellegio (an uncredited but appropriately cast Robert De Niro) gets
involved in the operation and, in return for his own cut, promises to use his
connections to make sure everything goes smoothly and the casino isn’t beset by
any labor problems either while it’s being built or after it opens.
Acting like
bagging a few corrupt politicians is no big deal — they’re portrayed as almost
literally a dime a dozen — but landing a Mafioso and former associate of Meyer Lansky would be a real
coup, Richie is led down the
garden path of what turns out [spoiler alert!] to be yet another Irving Rosenfeld scam, aimed at
extracting $2 million from the government. At the end Irving is caught but
allowed to go free once he gives the Feds back their $2 million, he gets to
stay with Edith — who’s really an American named Sydney Prosser — and his wife
ends up with the lieutenant in Tellegio’s operation (who looks awfully tall,
gangly and nerdy to be a movie Mafioso) who’d been cruising her from the moment they met. (This movie has a
total irreverence towards monogamy that’s either liberating or infuriating,
depending on your point of view.) There are good things to say about American
Hustle, including some genuinely artful
things about the script (notably the sequence in which Rosalyn blurts out to
her Mafia boyfriend and his contacts that she’s overheard the conversations
between Irving and Richie in which Richie has “outed” himself as a government
agent — though she thinks he’s from the IRS!), a nice speech at the end in
which Irving has some qualms of conscience about what he’s done (and in which
Russell and Singer, for the first and last time in the movie, actually acknowledge
some moral ambiguity and admit that if the phony sheik’s investment had been
real, Camden and its residents would
have benefited economically), and a refreshing avoidance by cinematographer
Linus Sandgren of the past-is-brown clichés: he’s not afraid to make the movie
look colorful.
American Hustle is
also quite creative in its use of music from the period; though Danny Elfman is
credited with an original score, most of what we hear is actual pop from the
early 1970’s (with one “ringer,” Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” heard in a disco
scene and actually livelier than almost everything else on the soundtrack —
it’s nice to be reminded not only that at one point disco was actually seen as
a new and liberating form of music, before it hardened into boring cliché, but
at its best it was considerably more artful than the “dance music” of today —
and Summer’s musical directors, Giorgio Moroder and the late Pete Bellotte,
knew enough to keep all the rhythmic noisemaking down to a minimum so Summer’s
extraordinary voice would be front and center, as it deserved), artfully used
to convey emotion. A particularly good scene is the one in which Rosalyn
Rosenfeld is doing housework (working around the shell of a microwave oven
Irving received as a gift from Carmine, and Rosalyn promptly blew up by putting
a metal-wrapped TV dinner — it’s interesting to be reminded not only of a time
when the Internet and cell phones didn’t exist but a microwave oven was
considered a new and incredibly exotic bit of high technology!) and listening
to (and singing along with) Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die,” and the
contrast between the James Bond world of high adventure for which the song was
written and Rosalyn’s limited horizons as a New Jersey housewife is thrilling.
It’s also nice to see Christian Bale’s physical transformation for the role
(one wonders if Robert De Niro, the past master of remodeling one’s body to fit
a part, gave him any pointers), including gaining over 40 pounds, doing a real
comb-over and slouching so much he ended up with two herniated discs. (At least
no one was going to mistake this schlub for Batman!) But the good points of American Hustle are few and far between, and don’t make up for all
the boring talk and even more boring sexual intrigue in between them. According
to imdb.com, American Hustle tied
with Gangs of New York (2002) and
True Grit (the 2010 remake) for
the second-greatest number of Academy Award nominations, ten, without winning
any awards (two other movies, The Turning Point and The Color Purple, each received 11 without winning any), though
watching American Hustle the real
mystery is not that it didn’t win any Oscars but that a dreary, dull movie like
this got so many nominations!
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
The Trials of Muhammad Ali (Kartemquin Films/PBS, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched a presentation of the film The Trials of Muhammad Ali on PBS’s Independent Lens series — though this wasn’t a PBS production or pick-up but a film that actually did have a theatrical release, albeit minor and spotty like most documentaries. It wasn’t so much a biodoc about Ali’s entire career as a focus on his early life, beginning when he won the gold medal in boxing at the 1960 Olympics in Rome and a group of 11 middle-aged whites in his home town — Louisville, Kentucky, which until the advent of Ali was best known for a quite different type of sporting event, the Kentucky Derby — formed a syndicate to manage him, run his career and help him evade the 91 percent top income-tax rate of the Eisenhower administration by arranging it so that all Ali’s income went to the partnership, and they in turn paid it (less their expenses and commissions) to Ali. I’m calling him “Muhammad Ali” throughout even though he was born Cassius Marcellus Clay (named, intriguingly, after the son of Henry Clay; the original Cassius Clay was an abolitionist — much to the embarrassment of his dad, who was one of many politicians in the first half of the 19th century who wanted to “compromise” on slavery — and was also Mary Todd’s boyfriend before they broke up and she married Abraham Lincoln) and the very act of changing his name became a flash point in the controversies that surrounded him in the mid-1960’s even though, as the film’s narration pointed out (I’m assuming it was both written and delivered by the film’s director, Bill Siegel, though no writer or narrator is credited), no one looked particularly askance at John Wayne or Rock Hudson for having changed their names (from Marion Michael Morrison and Roy Fitzgerald, respectively). The film’s story follows Ali’s first career, from the Olympic victory in 1960 to his refusal to be inducted in the U.S. Army in 1967 and the legal battle that ensued, during which he was stripped of the heavyweight championship he had duly won in 1964 (at age 22, two years before he had predicted he would win it) and kept by defeating all comers, and had a five-year prison sentence hanging over his head until the U.S. Supreme Court at first voted 5-3 to uphold his conviction before Justice John Marshall Harlan (described by Simple Justice author Richard Kluger as “a constructive conservative” who, unlike the crazy Right-wingers who dominate the Court today, cared about precedent and the principle of stare decisis) not only changed his mind on the case but wrote a far-reaching opinion that would essentially have thrown the door wide open to millions of draftees who sought to stay out of the military by citing religious grounds. The rest of the Court backtracked and seized on a technicality in the case (the original trial judge had prejudiced Ali’s case by questioning the “sincerity” of his religious beliefs against war) to invalidate Ali’s conviction without setting a precedent for other conscientious objectors, and the final vote was unanimous in Ali’s favor.
What’s most interesting about this movie is the indication it gives of the ferment of the time and the ferment of Ali’s brain, and how they interacted to lead him to the Nation of Islam — which he ran across via a street preacher and Muhammad Speaks salesperson who’s interviewed in the film — where there were at least three choices open to him. He could have behaved like previous white-friendly Black heavyweights like Joe Louis and Floyd Patterson (whom Ali fought in Patterson’s comeback attempt, and sources in this film suggest that Ali was so incensed by what Patterson had said about him he deliberately held back and stretched out a fight he could have won easily and quickly just to punish him more) and stayed out of any of the political and social conflicts of the day. He could have endorsed the mixed-race civil rights movement of which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the principal public face (and there’s an interesting clip of Ali and King making a joint appearance and King saying that despite their religious differences, he supports Ali and admires what he’s doing to resist the Viet Nam war). Instead he embraced the Nation of Islam, which already was legendary — notorious, in some circles (the film includes clips from a 1959 CBS documentary about them, narrated by Mike Wallace, called The Hate That Hate Produced — which incidentally contains the earliest known footage of Louis Farrakhan, then known as Louis X) — for extreme Black separatism and the reverse-racist denunciation of all whites as “blue-eyed devils” (which David Frost tries to confront Ali about in a clip from his talk show included here). In some ways Ali was a throwback to the very first Black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, who like Ali didn’t give a fuck what the white world thought of him, but unlike Ali was simply a good-time guy who spent his earnings on flashy clothes, big cars and hot women (Black and white). Ali seems to have been a man of great native intelligence at a time when there were precious few avenues for a Black person — especially one without the education or the patience for college — to advance either financially or intellectually, and I suspect a good deal of the appeal of the Nation of Islam for Ali was simply that they treated him seriously as a full human being instead of just a physical commodity to be turned into a profit. Ali in the movie comes off as something of an opportunist, originally willing to join the U.S. military as a reservist and continue his career while avoiding combat (precisely what Joe Louis had done during World War II) until his wife talked him out of it and said that would be a betrayal of their shared Nation of Islam ideals.
Ali also comes off as bitter, callous and cruel in the wake of the killing of Malcolm X (who had helped bring him into the upper echelons of the movement and had been his teacher, but whom he abandoned when Malcolm split from Elijah Muhammad and the Nation and started seeking a more orthodox form of Sunni Islam); a clip shown here, at a time when the Nation was being blamed for Malcolm’s killing and the Nation was saying the “white power structure” did it, shows Ali saying that anyone who went up against Elijah Muhammad and tried to hijack the movement deserved to die. The film is a surprisingly rich documentary given how well known is the story it tells, and it’s a sophisticated enough work that it ponders the irony that a man who made his living with his fists could draw back and say that he could not in good conscience fight to kill in a war. When Ali was asked that very question at the time he said, “That’s different. You don’t go out to kill in boxing,” though the clips shown in this film are a bit more convoluted as he tries to explain the difference between his “aggressive” attitude towards his prizefight opponents and the outright murder of fellow human beings involved in war. Of course the film also shows his famous line, “The Viet Cong never called me ‘nigger.’” Indeed, in a modern interview with Louis Farrakhan (and that the filmmakers got him seems pretty amazing in itself!), Farrakhan recalls Ali’s response to being presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the U.S. government’s highest award for a civilian) — by George W. Bush, of all people — which was, “Still a nigger.” The film quickly shows how Ali was stripped of his title and kept from boxing for over three years by U.S. fight authorities and one state boxing commission after another, all of whom refused to let him fight in their states (it mentions a preposterous plan to stage a bout between Ali and basketball star Wilt Chamberlain in mid-air — on an airliner equipped with a boxing ring and seats for 200 spectators — to avoid being under the jurisdiction of any state, which never came off), and how he survived in the meantime (mostly by lecturing — at which he was pretty awful at first when he was simply spouting Nation of Islam platitudes, but later when he started talking from the heart about the war, his opposition to it and what Islam meant to him, he became a powerful, though predictably controversial, lecturer — but also by starring in a musical called Big Time Buck White, a film clip of which was shown here and depicts Ali singing in a thin, strained voice an anthem of African-American racial pride that really needed Paul Robeson in his prime to pull off) until a city boxing commission in Atlanta gave him a license to return to the ring in 1970 for a bout against white fighter Jerry Quarry, following which came his exoneration by the Supreme Court and the ups and downs of Ali’s subsequent boxing career — totally ignored here even though Ali 2.0 was almost as interesting both as a fighter and as a celebrity as Ali 1.0!
The film also notes the irony that when the Nation of Islam was split by factionalism again in the 1990’s in the wake of Elijah Muhammad’s death — between his son Wallace, who wanted to drop the movement’s anti-white racism and move it (as Malcolm had wanted to do) more towards what the rest of the Muslim world defines as Islam; and Louis Farrakhan, who reorganized his own branch of the Nation and ran it much the way Elijah had — this time Ali went with Wallace Muhammad and stayed in the more moderate, more traditional branch of the Nation. There’s also a wry comment towards the end that in U.S. mainstream discourse in the 1950’s and 1960’s the Nation of Islam was considered this very dangerous racial force, while traditional Islam was regarded relatively benignly; these days, especially after the 9/11 attacks linked “Islam” and “terrorism” in many Americans’ minds, the Nation of Islam is regarded as a quirky but relatively benign home-grown American force, while traditional Islam is widely considered an existential enemy of the U.S. While it would have been stronger if it had covered more of Ali’s life than just the 1960’s and today (it touches on his subsequent marital and family history and his diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease — which has frequently been blamed on the punishment he allegedly suffered in all those years as a fighter, though it’s my understanding that whatever the long-term damage prizefighting does to the bodies of people who do it, Parkinson’s isn’t one of the risks), The Trials of Muhammad Ali is nonetheless a quite interesting film whose premise is the maturation of a personality — one interviewee even says that it took the Viet Nam war and the threat to his liberty it occasioned to get Ali to grow up, grow out of the need to be protected by eleven white Louisvilleans and become a man. And though there’s precious little of the movie actually showing Ali fighting, there is an amazing clip from the bout in which he won his title for the first time, against Sonny Liston (the man who’d taken down Patterson and essentially the prototype for Mike Tyson: the street thug who was taught just enough boxing skills to hold himself in the ring and ultimately win on sheer power). Ali has gone down in boxing history as a fighter who generally avoided direct confrontation, running away from or rope-a-doping his opponents until he wore them out and could finish them off — yet in the clips from that first Liston fight shown here Ali easily penetrates Liston’s defenses (such as they were) and hammers home a series of combination punches as if Ali meant not only to beat Liston but to do so on the powerful punching that was Liston’s home turf.
Last night Charles and I watched a presentation of the film The Trials of Muhammad Ali on PBS’s Independent Lens series — though this wasn’t a PBS production or pick-up but a film that actually did have a theatrical release, albeit minor and spotty like most documentaries. It wasn’t so much a biodoc about Ali’s entire career as a focus on his early life, beginning when he won the gold medal in boxing at the 1960 Olympics in Rome and a group of 11 middle-aged whites in his home town — Louisville, Kentucky, which until the advent of Ali was best known for a quite different type of sporting event, the Kentucky Derby — formed a syndicate to manage him, run his career and help him evade the 91 percent top income-tax rate of the Eisenhower administration by arranging it so that all Ali’s income went to the partnership, and they in turn paid it (less their expenses and commissions) to Ali. I’m calling him “Muhammad Ali” throughout even though he was born Cassius Marcellus Clay (named, intriguingly, after the son of Henry Clay; the original Cassius Clay was an abolitionist — much to the embarrassment of his dad, who was one of many politicians in the first half of the 19th century who wanted to “compromise” on slavery — and was also Mary Todd’s boyfriend before they broke up and she married Abraham Lincoln) and the very act of changing his name became a flash point in the controversies that surrounded him in the mid-1960’s even though, as the film’s narration pointed out (I’m assuming it was both written and delivered by the film’s director, Bill Siegel, though no writer or narrator is credited), no one looked particularly askance at John Wayne or Rock Hudson for having changed their names (from Marion Michael Morrison and Roy Fitzgerald, respectively). The film’s story follows Ali’s first career, from the Olympic victory in 1960 to his refusal to be inducted in the U.S. Army in 1967 and the legal battle that ensued, during which he was stripped of the heavyweight championship he had duly won in 1964 (at age 22, two years before he had predicted he would win it) and kept by defeating all comers, and had a five-year prison sentence hanging over his head until the U.S. Supreme Court at first voted 5-3 to uphold his conviction before Justice John Marshall Harlan (described by Simple Justice author Richard Kluger as “a constructive conservative” who, unlike the crazy Right-wingers who dominate the Court today, cared about precedent and the principle of stare decisis) not only changed his mind on the case but wrote a far-reaching opinion that would essentially have thrown the door wide open to millions of draftees who sought to stay out of the military by citing religious grounds. The rest of the Court backtracked and seized on a technicality in the case (the original trial judge had prejudiced Ali’s case by questioning the “sincerity” of his religious beliefs against war) to invalidate Ali’s conviction without setting a precedent for other conscientious objectors, and the final vote was unanimous in Ali’s favor.
What’s most interesting about this movie is the indication it gives of the ferment of the time and the ferment of Ali’s brain, and how they interacted to lead him to the Nation of Islam — which he ran across via a street preacher and Muhammad Speaks salesperson who’s interviewed in the film — where there were at least three choices open to him. He could have behaved like previous white-friendly Black heavyweights like Joe Louis and Floyd Patterson (whom Ali fought in Patterson’s comeback attempt, and sources in this film suggest that Ali was so incensed by what Patterson had said about him he deliberately held back and stretched out a fight he could have won easily and quickly just to punish him more) and stayed out of any of the political and social conflicts of the day. He could have endorsed the mixed-race civil rights movement of which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the principal public face (and there’s an interesting clip of Ali and King making a joint appearance and King saying that despite their religious differences, he supports Ali and admires what he’s doing to resist the Viet Nam war). Instead he embraced the Nation of Islam, which already was legendary — notorious, in some circles (the film includes clips from a 1959 CBS documentary about them, narrated by Mike Wallace, called The Hate That Hate Produced — which incidentally contains the earliest known footage of Louis Farrakhan, then known as Louis X) — for extreme Black separatism and the reverse-racist denunciation of all whites as “blue-eyed devils” (which David Frost tries to confront Ali about in a clip from his talk show included here). In some ways Ali was a throwback to the very first Black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, who like Ali didn’t give a fuck what the white world thought of him, but unlike Ali was simply a good-time guy who spent his earnings on flashy clothes, big cars and hot women (Black and white). Ali seems to have been a man of great native intelligence at a time when there were precious few avenues for a Black person — especially one without the education or the patience for college — to advance either financially or intellectually, and I suspect a good deal of the appeal of the Nation of Islam for Ali was simply that they treated him seriously as a full human being instead of just a physical commodity to be turned into a profit. Ali in the movie comes off as something of an opportunist, originally willing to join the U.S. military as a reservist and continue his career while avoiding combat (precisely what Joe Louis had done during World War II) until his wife talked him out of it and said that would be a betrayal of their shared Nation of Islam ideals.
Ali also comes off as bitter, callous and cruel in the wake of the killing of Malcolm X (who had helped bring him into the upper echelons of the movement and had been his teacher, but whom he abandoned when Malcolm split from Elijah Muhammad and the Nation and started seeking a more orthodox form of Sunni Islam); a clip shown here, at a time when the Nation was being blamed for Malcolm’s killing and the Nation was saying the “white power structure” did it, shows Ali saying that anyone who went up against Elijah Muhammad and tried to hijack the movement deserved to die. The film is a surprisingly rich documentary given how well known is the story it tells, and it’s a sophisticated enough work that it ponders the irony that a man who made his living with his fists could draw back and say that he could not in good conscience fight to kill in a war. When Ali was asked that very question at the time he said, “That’s different. You don’t go out to kill in boxing,” though the clips shown in this film are a bit more convoluted as he tries to explain the difference between his “aggressive” attitude towards his prizefight opponents and the outright murder of fellow human beings involved in war. Of course the film also shows his famous line, “The Viet Cong never called me ‘nigger.’” Indeed, in a modern interview with Louis Farrakhan (and that the filmmakers got him seems pretty amazing in itself!), Farrakhan recalls Ali’s response to being presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the U.S. government’s highest award for a civilian) — by George W. Bush, of all people — which was, “Still a nigger.” The film quickly shows how Ali was stripped of his title and kept from boxing for over three years by U.S. fight authorities and one state boxing commission after another, all of whom refused to let him fight in their states (it mentions a preposterous plan to stage a bout between Ali and basketball star Wilt Chamberlain in mid-air — on an airliner equipped with a boxing ring and seats for 200 spectators — to avoid being under the jurisdiction of any state, which never came off), and how he survived in the meantime (mostly by lecturing — at which he was pretty awful at first when he was simply spouting Nation of Islam platitudes, but later when he started talking from the heart about the war, his opposition to it and what Islam meant to him, he became a powerful, though predictably controversial, lecturer — but also by starring in a musical called Big Time Buck White, a film clip of which was shown here and depicts Ali singing in a thin, strained voice an anthem of African-American racial pride that really needed Paul Robeson in his prime to pull off) until a city boxing commission in Atlanta gave him a license to return to the ring in 1970 for a bout against white fighter Jerry Quarry, following which came his exoneration by the Supreme Court and the ups and downs of Ali’s subsequent boxing career — totally ignored here even though Ali 2.0 was almost as interesting both as a fighter and as a celebrity as Ali 1.0!
The film also notes the irony that when the Nation of Islam was split by factionalism again in the 1990’s in the wake of Elijah Muhammad’s death — between his son Wallace, who wanted to drop the movement’s anti-white racism and move it (as Malcolm had wanted to do) more towards what the rest of the Muslim world defines as Islam; and Louis Farrakhan, who reorganized his own branch of the Nation and ran it much the way Elijah had — this time Ali went with Wallace Muhammad and stayed in the more moderate, more traditional branch of the Nation. There’s also a wry comment towards the end that in U.S. mainstream discourse in the 1950’s and 1960’s the Nation of Islam was considered this very dangerous racial force, while traditional Islam was regarded relatively benignly; these days, especially after the 9/11 attacks linked “Islam” and “terrorism” in many Americans’ minds, the Nation of Islam is regarded as a quirky but relatively benign home-grown American force, while traditional Islam is widely considered an existential enemy of the U.S. While it would have been stronger if it had covered more of Ali’s life than just the 1960’s and today (it touches on his subsequent marital and family history and his diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease — which has frequently been blamed on the punishment he allegedly suffered in all those years as a fighter, though it’s my understanding that whatever the long-term damage prizefighting does to the bodies of people who do it, Parkinson’s isn’t one of the risks), The Trials of Muhammad Ali is nonetheless a quite interesting film whose premise is the maturation of a personality — one interviewee even says that it took the Viet Nam war and the threat to his liberty it occasioned to get Ali to grow up, grow out of the need to be protected by eleven white Louisvilleans and become a man. And though there’s precious little of the movie actually showing Ali fighting, there is an amazing clip from the bout in which he won his title for the first time, against Sonny Liston (the man who’d taken down Patterson and essentially the prototype for Mike Tyson: the street thug who was taught just enough boxing skills to hold himself in the ring and ultimately win on sheer power). Ali has gone down in boxing history as a fighter who generally avoided direct confrontation, running away from or rope-a-doping his opponents until he wore them out and could finish them off — yet in the clips from that first Liston fight shown here Ali easily penetrates Liston’s defenses (such as they were) and hammers home a series of combination punches as if Ali meant not only to beat Liston but to do so on the powerful punching that was Liston’s home turf.
Saturday, April 12, 2014
Finian's Rainbow (Warner Bros./Seven Arts, 1968)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Finian’s Rainbow, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts’ lumbering epic musical from 1968 based on a surprisingly radical Broadway stage musical concocted by E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, Harold Arlen’s long-time lyricist, with two collaborators — Don Saidy co-wrote the book and Burton Lane composed the songs — which premiered in 1947. The story is a bizarre ragbag of clichés and attempts to advance the conventions of the form, and it centers around the adventures of an old Irishman, Finian McLonergan (Fred Astaire in his last musical, unless you count the first two That’s Entertainment! compilations), who steals a crock of gold from Og the leprechaun (Tommy Steele) intending to take it from Ireland to Rainbow Valley, Kentucky (the official synopsis locates it in a fictional state called “Missitucky” but the dialogue establishes it as the closest inhabited area near Fort Knox) and bury it in the ground, on the idea that if the United States government could become the richest in the world by digging up gold and burying it again, the same principle would work for him. He arrives in Rainbow Valley in the middle of a clash between the local tobacco sharecroppers, who’ve established a cooperative and are working to buy up the land they farm, and the local white establishment led by Senator Billboard Rawkins (Keenan Wynn, in a marvelous comic-villain performance), who’s trying to seize the whole valley for some purpose that isn’t specified in the script by Harburg and Saidy (the two original writers got to do the screenplay as well) but is quite clearly corrupt. Rawkins and his cronies, the local sheriff (Dolph Sweet) and his chief of staff Buzz Collins (Ronald Colby), are fending off the attempts of the federal government to take over Rainbow Valley for a large TVA-style dam project to provide electricity to the area — and in the scene in which Rawkins and Collins shed crocodile tears over all the starlings and other birds who’ll be killed by the dam project we’re wrenched back to a time when it was the Left that supported big energy projects and didn’t give a damn about their effects on the environment.
The film was Finian’s Rainbow, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts’ lumbering epic musical from 1968 based on a surprisingly radical Broadway stage musical concocted by E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, Harold Arlen’s long-time lyricist, with two collaborators — Don Saidy co-wrote the book and Burton Lane composed the songs — which premiered in 1947. The story is a bizarre ragbag of clichés and attempts to advance the conventions of the form, and it centers around the adventures of an old Irishman, Finian McLonergan (Fred Astaire in his last musical, unless you count the first two That’s Entertainment! compilations), who steals a crock of gold from Og the leprechaun (Tommy Steele) intending to take it from Ireland to Rainbow Valley, Kentucky (the official synopsis locates it in a fictional state called “Missitucky” but the dialogue establishes it as the closest inhabited area near Fort Knox) and bury it in the ground, on the idea that if the United States government could become the richest in the world by digging up gold and burying it again, the same principle would work for him. He arrives in Rainbow Valley in the middle of a clash between the local tobacco sharecroppers, who’ve established a cooperative and are working to buy up the land they farm, and the local white establishment led by Senator Billboard Rawkins (Keenan Wynn, in a marvelous comic-villain performance), who’s trying to seize the whole valley for some purpose that isn’t specified in the script by Harburg and Saidy (the two original writers got to do the screenplay as well) but is quite clearly corrupt. Rawkins and his cronies, the local sheriff (Dolph Sweet) and his chief of staff Buzz Collins (Ronald Colby), are fending off the attempts of the federal government to take over Rainbow Valley for a large TVA-style dam project to provide electricity to the area — and in the scene in which Rawkins and Collins shed crocodile tears over all the starlings and other birds who’ll be killed by the dam project we’re wrenched back to a time when it was the Left that supported big energy projects and didn’t give a damn about their effects on the environment.
Anyway, Finian McLonergan (ya remember Finian McLonergan?) arrives in Rainbow Valley with his daughter Sharon
(Petula Clark) in tow, and she immediately falls in love with the town
troublemaker, Woody Mahoney (Don Francks) — Harburg and Saidy supposedly based
this wanderlust-ridden character on Woody Guthrie but Harburg and Lane supplied
him with typical Broadway show ballads that don’t sound at all like Guthrie’s
music — while Og the leprechaun shows up to recover his gold. It’s explained
that as a leprechaun, he’s immortal and can use the power of the magic gold to
grant as many wishes as he pleases, but if a mortal tries to use the gold it’ll
only grant three wishes and then
the gold will turn to worthless dross. There’s also a subplot in which Woody
and a Black scientist named Howard (Al Freeman, Jr.) are trying to invent
something called “mintolated tobacco,” a cross-breed of the tobacco and menthol
plants that will create menthol cigarettes without having to blend the two —
only their first efforts won’t catch fire (in fact, they put fires out, which suggests they already have a marketable
product and should produce that),
and their next try burns but doesn’t generate smoke (and in an obvious
concession to the youth audiences of 1968 the efforts of Francks and Freeman to
smoke it are shot to look like they’re smoking marijuana). In the middle of all
this Sharon McLonergan gets so upset with Senator Rawkins’ racism that she uses
the power of the gold to turn him Black — and he joins up with the remaining
three members of a Black gospel quartette for a song called “The Begat,” which
is filmed with the singers approaching Rainbow Valley in a convertible for a
gig singing at the wedding of Sharon McLonergan and Woody Mahoney. Eventually
the movie ends when the wedding is disrupted by the Senator and his cronies,
and the baddies trap Sharon and Woody in the church where it was supposed to
take place and set it afire (gee, a Fury-style attempted lynching — that’s a great way to end a musical!), only
Og, who’s turned mortal by his separation from the gold and his falling in love
first with Sharon and then with Susan the Silent (Barbara Hancock), a truly
preposterous character who’s mute but supposedly talks in “dance language.”
(When she did her first “dance language” number I joked to Charles, “She’s
actually saying she should have been 30 years younger so she could have been in
Fred Astaire’s great movies
instead of Ginger Rogers!”)
The power of the magic gold gives Susan the Silent
a speaking voice at last (though, judging from Barbara Hancock’s flat singing
in the big finale, Og neglected to wish her a singing voice as well) and changes the Senator back into a
white man, though presumably with the more enlightened racial attitudes that
were wished into him in an earlier scene, and of course Our Lovebirds are
rescued and ultimately married in the burned-out husk of the church, while
Finian bids a teary farewell to both of them in a poignant scene that’s the
best thing in the movie — not because it’s any great shakes in itself, but it
makes a beautiful and moving farewell to Astaire’s career in musicals. Finian’s
Rainbow had a lot of old-line people behind
the camera — the musical director was old Warners hand Ray Heindorf and the
choreographer was Astaire’s lifelong friend Hermes Pan (the last name was
actually shortened from Pangiatopulos) — but the director was Francis Ford
Coppola, making his third film. He’d started with an American-International horror
cheapie called Dementia 13 which
had won him a contract at Warners, where he made a coming-of-age cheapie called
You’re a Big Boy Now that was a
smash hit in 1967 (at least partly due to the presence of the band the Lovin’
Spoonful, who not only did the soundtrack music but appeared in the film). As a
reward for the success of You’re a Big Boy Now, Coppola was handed the assignment to direct Finian’s
Rainbow, which after sitting in development
hell for two decades (quite likely, as an imdb.com “Trivia” poster claimed,
because Hollywood executives were skittish about its anti-racist satire)
finally got green-lighted as a movie in the wake of the enormous blockbuster
success of The Sound of Music in
1966. Just about every production chief at every major studio got the idea that
the way to lure audiences into movie theatres was through big, splashy,
epic-length filmizations of musicals, mostly ones that had been stage hits —
and just about every big musical shot in the wake of The Sound of
Music (including the direct follow-up, Star!, which reunited the key creative personnel from The
Sound of Music — director Robert Wise,
writer William Fairchild and star Julie Andrews) bombed big-time, including
this one.
Seen today, Finian’s Rainbow comes off as an agreeable enough entertainment but one that goes so
wrong in so many key respects it forfeits its chance to be a truly great film.
It doesn’t help that Coppola chose to shoot most of it in genuine outdoors
location; a story that already pushes the limits of believability even by
fantasy standards (it’s one of those annoying plots where nearly anything can happen — and does) ends up clashing with the
naturalistic settings in which it’s being filmed. It needed a director like
Vincente Minnelli who would have stylized it (as he did with another Astaire
fantasy, Yolanda and the Thief,
another box-office flop but a considerably better film than Finian’s
Rainbow!); as it is, the one “exterior”
scene that was shot inside a soundstage, Susan the Silent’s Oklahoma-ish fantasy ballet, seems both more believable and
more entertaining than all the scenes shot in the genuine outdoors. I remember
seeing the “Begat” sequence as part of a San Francisco Film Festival tribute to
Coppola and wondering, “Why are they singing it in a moving car?” (And the
payoff of the scene — the car breaks down and is being towed when the song
finishes — adds an anachronism; though all the other cars in the movie are
accurate for the late 1940’s, when the story supposedly takes place, the tow
truck is a modern one from the 1960’s.) The casting also doesn’t help; Astaire
is marvelous except for the silly brogue he’s obliged to affect to denote
“Irishicity,” and Petula Clark — who was already under contract to Warner Bros.
Records in the U.S. and was put in this film to establish herself as a film
attraction in America — also gets saddled with a fake brogue, though aside from
that she sings marvelously. The opening “Look to the Rainbow” (better heard on
the soundtrack album than in the film itself, where it’s heard faintly at first
and then faded in) is magnificently phrased and shows what an eloquent singer
Clark could be of standard musical songs. In her native U.K. and continental
Europe she was a superstar acknowledged for a wide range of material, which she
recorded in three languages: like Caterina Valente before her and ABBA
afterwards, the instrumental tracks of her records were made first and then she
added her vocals in three different languages (English, French and German) for
various markets.[1] In the U.S.,
though, all she was known for was pop-rock novelty hits like “Downtown” and “I
Know a Place.” But for all her eloquence as a singer she’s only a moderately
talented actress, and after just one more Hollywood film (a 1969 musical remake
of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, with her
in Greer Garson’s role and Peter O’Toole in Robert Donat’s) she high-tailed it
back to England and resumed her career where she was appreciated.
The rest of
the cast is O.K. but not great; Tommy Steele has probably the finest singing
voice in the film (Astaire’s had deteriorated and, as noted above, he was
saddled with that horrible brogue; ironically, Steele was the one of the three
principals playing Irish who sang in his normal voice — and he was the most
convincing as an Irishman) but he so totally plays up the schtick one might as well be watching the leprechaun on the
Lucky Charms commercial. Don Francks has an acceptable but not great
Broadway-style tenor — and it doesn’t help that in what’s by far the most
famous song from this show, “That Old Devil Moon,” he’s got competition from
Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan (and Sinatra’s 1950’s version, with one of
those ballsy Nelson Riddle arrangements that powered him to some of the most
intense and visceral singing of his career, is unlikely to be bettered by anybody), or that in Francks’ duets with Petula Clark sound
designers M. A. Merrick and Dan Wallin are deliberately boosting his voice and
mixing hers down so she won’t overpower him. Overall, Finian’s
Rainbow is entertaining but nowhere near as
great a movie its creators were hoping for or thinking they were making; it’s about half an hour to 45
minutes too long for its own good, the production numbers lumber along so
unenergetically they actually slow the movie down instead of perking it up
(according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, Coppola fired Hermes Pan in
mid-shoot thinking he was too old-fashioned and replaced him with Claude
Thompson, but on the basis of the evidence that didn’t help much) and one
wishes for the energy this movie could have had if it had been filmed right
after the stage show’s original run instead of 21 years later, when Hollywood
had largely forgotten what it had once known about how to make great musicals.
[1] — ABBA’s mix of languages was Swedish (for their home
market), German (for continental Europe) and English (for the U.S. and U.K.).
Monday, April 7, 2014
49th Annual American Country Music Awards (Dick Clark Productions/CBS, 4/6/14)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Academy of Country Music award show was billed as the 49th annual one, and it was held in that well-known hotbed of country music … Las Vegas, alternating like a ping-pong ball between two venues, the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay. (Can’t the government of Myanmar, née Burma, repatriate the name “Mandalay” already?) I had wondered about that when I saw the CBS promos for this show, but it turned out this is a West Coast country show, not to be confused with the Country Music Awards that are based where you’d expect them to be: Nashville, Tennessee. It’s also a production of Dick Clark Productions (the man is dead but his production company lives on — though given how embarrassingly Clark the person was resuscitated for his New Year’s Eve shows the last three years he was, to borrow Benny Green’s phrase about Bunk Johnson, “alive, at least in the biological sense,” it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that Clark’s head was being kept artificially animated in a super-secret lab in the basement of his building in preparation for the future technology that will permit his staff scientists to re-attach it to a young live body), which means it has an element of audience participation. People with cell phones with text capabilities were permitted to vote for the award winners among the five nominees in two categories, Entertainer of the Year and Best New Artist. At least you were permitted to vote if you lived on the East Coast, since as usual the West Coast showing was three hours later — the East Coast media moguls never let us forget that we suck hind tit out here — and the voting had long since closed by the time we got to see it. (There was probably a Web site through which we could have voted in advance, though.) The producers made a mistake of opening their show with the best act, The Band Perry, which consists of lead singer Kimberly Perry and her brothers, Reid and Neil, playing guitars and singing backup, plus a couple of other musicians on bass and drums. I first saw The Band Perry on an Academy of Country Music special in May 2013, hosted by Tim McGraw (who showed up for one song last night with his wife, Faith Hill, making a surprise appearance on stage — perhaps to scotch the tabloid reports that she’s divorcing him because she caught him hosting Bisexual orgies at their home), and I was utterly blown away by the sheer power, emotion, soul and command of Kimberly Perry’s voice (the other Perrys are as irrelevant to their appeal as the other Jacksons were). The Band Perry kicked off the evening with a new song called “Chainsaw,” one of the angry anti-love anthems Kimberly likes to sing about boyfriends she’s dumping (she’s really the successor to 1990’s angry-young-woman artists like Alanis Morrissette and Meredith Brooks), and the visceral power of their music and particularly of Kimberly’s searing vocal was bound to make the rest of the evening an anticlimax.
There were a few attempts at what have come to be called “Grammy moments,” odd pairings of singers with each other whether they have anything to say to each other musically or not — like Lady Antebellum with Stevie Nicks, who long since lost most of whatever voice she had (as I’ve noted before, she and Bonnie Tyler are the principal victims of the myth that Black soul singers had “untrained” voices — the great Black soul singers’ voices were trained by the choir directors in the African-American churches where they started out, but Nicks and Tyler didn’t realize that and thought all you had to do to sing soul was stand in front of a band and scream). One of the songs they did last night was “Rhiannon” from the mega-hit Fleetwood Mac album Rumours — which in 1977 was powered to hit status largely via the visceral thrill of Nicks’ high notes. By the Fleetwood Mac reunion of 1997 she’d lost those amazing notes and had to rewrite the song to duck them — and last night the high notes were there, all right, but only because Lady Antebellum’s female singer, Hillary Scott, was there to sing them. Aside from that, the evening was entertaining enough — the sight of all those hunky guys in tight jeans was reason enough for an old queen like me to watch this show whether I liked the music or not — and I do like the music, even though a lot of it starts to sound the same after a while. Brad Paisley’s song “Laughing All the Way to the Riverbank” starts out with so exact a quote of the instrumental “hook” to the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” at first I thought he was going to cover the Stones’ song. I also found it grimly amusing that there seemed to be as many love songs to trucks as there were to people — the Song of the Year award even went to something called “I Drive Your Truck” by someone named Lee Brice! The only African-American on stage was Darius Rucker, ex-Hootie and the Blowfish (who had their 15 minutes with the 1995 album Cracked Rear View and were one of those bands that were neither as good as their hype suggested nor as bad as the critics reacting to the hype had it), doing a hit he had with Lady Antebellum (who seem to be everybody’s default backup band) called “Wagon Wheel,” a song co-written by Bob Dylan (and frankly, despite all the nasty cracks that have been made about Dylan’s voice lo these many years, I’d rather have heard him sing it!). It reminded me of the story I’ve heard that when Charley Pride became the first African-American country star in the 1960’s, there was still so much racism among the country-music audience that it wasn’t until Pride’s fourth album that his record label, RCA Victor, dared put his photo on the album cover. I’ve noted before that much of what passes for “country music” today really sounds more like what in the 1970’s we used to call “Southern rock” — the music of the Allman Brothers and especially Lynyrd Skynyrd — than like the music of Jimmie Rodgers (I), Hank Williams or Johnny Cash, and virtually everything played at the Academy of Country Music awards was of that type.
Oddly, the “Entertainer of the Year” award — one of the two that was voted on by viewers — went not to one of the young hunks in tight jeans (or one of the young babes in loose-fitting blouses and, you guessed it, tight jeans) but to 61-year-old George Strait, who’d just been featured in a 77th-birthday tribute to Merle Haggard in which he and Miranda Lambert (whom I like, even though she’s married to the show’s co-host, hulking, bear-like Blake Shelton, and I couldn’t help but joke, “Beauty and the Beast”) did “I’m a Hunted Fugitive” and “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down” (the latter a song familiar to me from Elvis Costello’s cover). One would have thought a tribute to Haggard would have included what is by far his most famous song, “Okie from Muskogee” (the song the late Phil Ochs heard and of which he said that finally the American Right had a songwriter equal to himself, Bob Dylan and the other folk heroes on the American Left), but aside from the fact that Haggard’s politics aren’t now what they were then (in the early 2000’s he startled his longtime fans with a safer-sex song and then a song attacking the Bush II administration for having lied us into a war in Iraq — one could imagine some of his long-time fans thinking, “Et tu, Merle?”), “Okie” is probably too much of a flash point for a show like this; even Toby Keith, famous for his angry-white-guy anthems supporting the Bush administration and the “war on terror,” did something safely non-political (“Get In, Sit Down, Shut Up and Hold On” — another motor-vehicle song!), though he showed a depth of emotional commitment beyond most of the almost interchangeable male hunks that dominated this program. Though the guest list was overwhelmingly male (Kacey Musgraves won Album of the Year but was not invited to perform; the only really major female voices showcased were Kimberly Perry and Miranda Lambert), Charles was impressed at how important women are in country music and how they aren’t shunted off to subsidiary roles they way they’ve traditionally been in jazz and (especially) rock — and I pointed out that country’s first supergroup, the Carter Family, was two women and one man, all of whom played instruments as well as singing.
Next to that awesome opening song by The Band Perry, the piece that stood out the most (at least for me) was newcomer Eric Church’s plaintive “My Home, Too.” There was also a quite good song by Hunter Hayes, “Invisible,” which I genuinely liked even though it seemed a bit too precious, too calculated a plea for acceptance of people who are “different” — Charles and I had heard it before on the Grammy Awards, where in the context of a show so relentlessly Queer-positive they even married same-sex couples on the air it certainly sounded like a coming-out song even though I have no idea whether Hunter Hayes is really Gay or just an androgynous one-man boy band (the industry seems to be positioning him to be the next Justin Bieber once the current one completes his self-immolation) with a high voice, a choirboy face and an ambiguous song pleading for acceptance of people who are “different” without getting too dangerously specific as to just what sort of “difference” he’s talking about. Indeed, on this awards show “Invisible” was presented as a song to help a relatively noncontroversial cause, child hunger (though, come to think of it, child hunger isn’t really that noncontroversial — not with idiots in public office like Paul Ryan saying that if children are hungry it’s the fault of their irresponsible parents). Apparently Hayes’ organization has hooked up with ConAgra Foods (which gives me chills right there) to raise money to feed hungry children by donating a portion of the purchase price of any food package of a ConAgra product containing a special push-pin stuck to its side to a fund to provide meals, and also iTunes is donating a portion of any money spent on a download of “Invisible” to the cause (though the announcement was ambiguous enough that the donations may have stopped by now) — the sort of corporate “greenwashing” campaign that usually gives me the chills.
Last night’s Academy of Country Music award show was billed as the 49th annual one, and it was held in that well-known hotbed of country music … Las Vegas, alternating like a ping-pong ball between two venues, the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay. (Can’t the government of Myanmar, née Burma, repatriate the name “Mandalay” already?) I had wondered about that when I saw the CBS promos for this show, but it turned out this is a West Coast country show, not to be confused with the Country Music Awards that are based where you’d expect them to be: Nashville, Tennessee. It’s also a production of Dick Clark Productions (the man is dead but his production company lives on — though given how embarrassingly Clark the person was resuscitated for his New Year’s Eve shows the last three years he was, to borrow Benny Green’s phrase about Bunk Johnson, “alive, at least in the biological sense,” it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that Clark’s head was being kept artificially animated in a super-secret lab in the basement of his building in preparation for the future technology that will permit his staff scientists to re-attach it to a young live body), which means it has an element of audience participation. People with cell phones with text capabilities were permitted to vote for the award winners among the five nominees in two categories, Entertainer of the Year and Best New Artist. At least you were permitted to vote if you lived on the East Coast, since as usual the West Coast showing was three hours later — the East Coast media moguls never let us forget that we suck hind tit out here — and the voting had long since closed by the time we got to see it. (There was probably a Web site through which we could have voted in advance, though.) The producers made a mistake of opening their show with the best act, The Band Perry, which consists of lead singer Kimberly Perry and her brothers, Reid and Neil, playing guitars and singing backup, plus a couple of other musicians on bass and drums. I first saw The Band Perry on an Academy of Country Music special in May 2013, hosted by Tim McGraw (who showed up for one song last night with his wife, Faith Hill, making a surprise appearance on stage — perhaps to scotch the tabloid reports that she’s divorcing him because she caught him hosting Bisexual orgies at their home), and I was utterly blown away by the sheer power, emotion, soul and command of Kimberly Perry’s voice (the other Perrys are as irrelevant to their appeal as the other Jacksons were). The Band Perry kicked off the evening with a new song called “Chainsaw,” one of the angry anti-love anthems Kimberly likes to sing about boyfriends she’s dumping (she’s really the successor to 1990’s angry-young-woman artists like Alanis Morrissette and Meredith Brooks), and the visceral power of their music and particularly of Kimberly’s searing vocal was bound to make the rest of the evening an anticlimax.
There were a few attempts at what have come to be called “Grammy moments,” odd pairings of singers with each other whether they have anything to say to each other musically or not — like Lady Antebellum with Stevie Nicks, who long since lost most of whatever voice she had (as I’ve noted before, she and Bonnie Tyler are the principal victims of the myth that Black soul singers had “untrained” voices — the great Black soul singers’ voices were trained by the choir directors in the African-American churches where they started out, but Nicks and Tyler didn’t realize that and thought all you had to do to sing soul was stand in front of a band and scream). One of the songs they did last night was “Rhiannon” from the mega-hit Fleetwood Mac album Rumours — which in 1977 was powered to hit status largely via the visceral thrill of Nicks’ high notes. By the Fleetwood Mac reunion of 1997 she’d lost those amazing notes and had to rewrite the song to duck them — and last night the high notes were there, all right, but only because Lady Antebellum’s female singer, Hillary Scott, was there to sing them. Aside from that, the evening was entertaining enough — the sight of all those hunky guys in tight jeans was reason enough for an old queen like me to watch this show whether I liked the music or not — and I do like the music, even though a lot of it starts to sound the same after a while. Brad Paisley’s song “Laughing All the Way to the Riverbank” starts out with so exact a quote of the instrumental “hook” to the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” at first I thought he was going to cover the Stones’ song. I also found it grimly amusing that there seemed to be as many love songs to trucks as there were to people — the Song of the Year award even went to something called “I Drive Your Truck” by someone named Lee Brice! The only African-American on stage was Darius Rucker, ex-Hootie and the Blowfish (who had their 15 minutes with the 1995 album Cracked Rear View and were one of those bands that were neither as good as their hype suggested nor as bad as the critics reacting to the hype had it), doing a hit he had with Lady Antebellum (who seem to be everybody’s default backup band) called “Wagon Wheel,” a song co-written by Bob Dylan (and frankly, despite all the nasty cracks that have been made about Dylan’s voice lo these many years, I’d rather have heard him sing it!). It reminded me of the story I’ve heard that when Charley Pride became the first African-American country star in the 1960’s, there was still so much racism among the country-music audience that it wasn’t until Pride’s fourth album that his record label, RCA Victor, dared put his photo on the album cover. I’ve noted before that much of what passes for “country music” today really sounds more like what in the 1970’s we used to call “Southern rock” — the music of the Allman Brothers and especially Lynyrd Skynyrd — than like the music of Jimmie Rodgers (I), Hank Williams or Johnny Cash, and virtually everything played at the Academy of Country Music awards was of that type.
Oddly, the “Entertainer of the Year” award — one of the two that was voted on by viewers — went not to one of the young hunks in tight jeans (or one of the young babes in loose-fitting blouses and, you guessed it, tight jeans) but to 61-year-old George Strait, who’d just been featured in a 77th-birthday tribute to Merle Haggard in which he and Miranda Lambert (whom I like, even though she’s married to the show’s co-host, hulking, bear-like Blake Shelton, and I couldn’t help but joke, “Beauty and the Beast”) did “I’m a Hunted Fugitive” and “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down” (the latter a song familiar to me from Elvis Costello’s cover). One would have thought a tribute to Haggard would have included what is by far his most famous song, “Okie from Muskogee” (the song the late Phil Ochs heard and of which he said that finally the American Right had a songwriter equal to himself, Bob Dylan and the other folk heroes on the American Left), but aside from the fact that Haggard’s politics aren’t now what they were then (in the early 2000’s he startled his longtime fans with a safer-sex song and then a song attacking the Bush II administration for having lied us into a war in Iraq — one could imagine some of his long-time fans thinking, “Et tu, Merle?”), “Okie” is probably too much of a flash point for a show like this; even Toby Keith, famous for his angry-white-guy anthems supporting the Bush administration and the “war on terror,” did something safely non-political (“Get In, Sit Down, Shut Up and Hold On” — another motor-vehicle song!), though he showed a depth of emotional commitment beyond most of the almost interchangeable male hunks that dominated this program. Though the guest list was overwhelmingly male (Kacey Musgraves won Album of the Year but was not invited to perform; the only really major female voices showcased were Kimberly Perry and Miranda Lambert), Charles was impressed at how important women are in country music and how they aren’t shunted off to subsidiary roles they way they’ve traditionally been in jazz and (especially) rock — and I pointed out that country’s first supergroup, the Carter Family, was two women and one man, all of whom played instruments as well as singing.
Next to that awesome opening song by The Band Perry, the piece that stood out the most (at least for me) was newcomer Eric Church’s plaintive “My Home, Too.” There was also a quite good song by Hunter Hayes, “Invisible,” which I genuinely liked even though it seemed a bit too precious, too calculated a plea for acceptance of people who are “different” — Charles and I had heard it before on the Grammy Awards, where in the context of a show so relentlessly Queer-positive they even married same-sex couples on the air it certainly sounded like a coming-out song even though I have no idea whether Hunter Hayes is really Gay or just an androgynous one-man boy band (the industry seems to be positioning him to be the next Justin Bieber once the current one completes his self-immolation) with a high voice, a choirboy face and an ambiguous song pleading for acceptance of people who are “different” without getting too dangerously specific as to just what sort of “difference” he’s talking about. Indeed, on this awards show “Invisible” was presented as a song to help a relatively noncontroversial cause, child hunger (though, come to think of it, child hunger isn’t really that noncontroversial — not with idiots in public office like Paul Ryan saying that if children are hungry it’s the fault of their irresponsible parents). Apparently Hayes’ organization has hooked up with ConAgra Foods (which gives me chills right there) to raise money to feed hungry children by donating a portion of the purchase price of any food package of a ConAgra product containing a special push-pin stuck to its side to a fund to provide meals, and also iTunes is donating a portion of any money spent on a download of “Invisible” to the cause (though the announcement was ambiguous enough that the donations may have stopped by now) — the sort of corporate “greenwashing” campaign that usually gives me the chills.
Sunday, April 6, 2014
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Lionsgate, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I finally ran Charles the second episode of the four-film cycle being made from Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, The Hunger Games. As probably everyone this side of Timbuktu probably knows by now, The Hunger Games takes place in a post-apocalyptic U.S. in which most of the country has been ruined by war but a redoubt called “Panem” has established itself in what used to be the northeast. Panem — the name comes from the old slogan of the Roman empire, Panem et circenses, which means “bread and circuses” and refers to what the Roman ruling class thought they needed to give the masses to keep them, if not exactly happy, at least content with their lives and uninclined to rebel. Like most modern-day dystopias — including George Orwell’s 1984, which seems more than any other book to have set the basic template for novels set in a highly stratified future in which a tiny ruling class has everything and everyone else is barely surviving — there isn’t much panem to go around in Panem but there are quite a few circenses, particularly the annual Hunger Games, in which two Tributes (Panem’s ruling elite gets not only its basic strategy but considerable direct inspiration from the Roman empire — indeed, writer Collins named virtually all the members of Panem’s 1 percent after real-life ancient Romans), one male and one female, from each of Panem’s 12 proletarian districts, are selected at random (though volunteers are accepted) to participate in a fight to the death inside a high-tech arena. The Tributes are under threat not only from each other but also from whatever lethal conditions, ranging from hostile weather to genetically modified monsters, the Gamemaker, the designer of the whole shebang, can throw at them. In the first Hunger Games novel, our heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) from the coal-mining District 12, ekes out a precarious experience as a hunter, armed with a bow and arrow, shooting black-market game and thereby helping out her widowed mother (her dad died in a coal-mining accident and mom is a traditional healer offering what passes for medical care in the District). She ends up in the Hunger Games when she volunteers to take the place of her younger sister Prim (short for Primrose) (Willow Shields), whose name is drawn in the Reaping (the drawing for contestants in each district), and her co-Tribute from District 12 is Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson). The Hunger Games are set up so that only one of the 24 contestants actually survives, but in the first episode Katniss and Peeta manage to be declared co-winners after they grab a bunch of poisonous berries and Peeta announces that they’re so desperately and totally in love with each other that either they both get declared winners or they will eat the berries, both will die, and the Capitol (used to refer both to the central city of Panem and the elites who live there) will be denied their annual victor with whom to intimidate the people into continued submission.
Their against-the-rules victory has made both of them, especially Katniss, potential inspiration for rebellions from the Districts — exactly the sort of thing the Hunger Games were set up to discourage — and so as Catching Fire begins, President Snow (Donald Sutherland) — presumably the only Capitol resident who doesn’t have a Roman name — and the new Gamemaker, Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom it’s odd seeing in this role now that he’s dead — when Hoffman died the biggest shock for me was reading the list of credits in his obituary and realizing how many of my favorite movies of the last 10 years had had him in them), plots a way to nip any rebellious feelings in the bud. It happens to be the 75th anniversary of the Hunger Games, which gives the Capitol the right to make drastic rules changes (not that that stops them any other time — like every other authoritarian ruling class in history, the overlords of Panem recognize no restrictions whatsoever on their power and will do whatever it takes to stop any dissent from becoming dangerous), and the drastic rules change Plutarch hits on is to make up the cast of the current Hunger Games from the surviving winners of previous years. This means that Katniss and Peeta will be hurled into the arena again (though the script by Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt doesn’t do quite as good a job of dramatizing how that hooks Katniss’s PTSD as Suzanne Collins did in the novel) and will once again have to fight for their lives, this time against older but considerably more battle-ready opponents than they had last time. The idea is either Katniss and Peeta will be killed and the District residents who idolize them will get disillusioned, or Katniss will knock off the other District’s Tributes and they’ll hate her for killing off their heroes. There’s a quite stunning surprise ending that sets up the next episode of the story — though, following the contemptible practice started by the producers of the Harry Potter films and continued by the makers of the Twilight movies (as well as The Hobbit, which after the success of the Lord of the Rings triptych got stretched out from one film to three, count ’em, three), the last book in the series, Mockingjay, is going to be stretched out into two films.
Anyone coming to Catching Fire from having read all three books is going to get a quite different impression of it from someone coming to the film only from having seen the first Hunger Games movie, but as it stands it’s a rich, well-staged movie that mostly does justice to the material even though the screenwriters (at least partly due to the limitations of the film medium) have a harder time pulling off the marvelous double act Suzanne Collins did in the books, creating something that worked as a novel of ideas and an action thriller simultaneously. Much of Catching Fire — particularly the scenes of the actual Hunger Games themselves — looks like a Republic serial with a bigger budget (and with the contestants encased by force fields and natural barriers so they can’t just jump their way out of danger the way their predecessors at Republic could), and the ending is open-ended but, unlike the even more daringly open-ended (but also genuinely moving) ending of the second Twilight film, New Moon, exists not to bring this story to a satisfying conclusion but to set up the next episode. New director Francis Lawrence stages the film effectively (especially the action) and the acting is generally credible, though the young men — particularly the two in Katniss’s life, Peeta and her hunter boyfriend from back home, Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth, brother of Chris “Thor” Hemsworth) — look too much alike (the only reliable way to tell them apart is Gale’s hair is darker and slightly longer), and frankly I thought Sam Claflik, as the vainglorious District One Tribute Finnick Odair, was hotter than either Josh Hutcherson or Liam Hemsworth. Catching Fire is the sort of movie that’s difficult to assess except as part of its cycle, but as part of its cycle it mostly does justice to the material and tells an exciting story, even though it would be incomprehensible if you hadn’t either read the first Hunger Games novel or seen the first film.
Last night I finally ran Charles the second episode of the four-film cycle being made from Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, The Hunger Games. As probably everyone this side of Timbuktu probably knows by now, The Hunger Games takes place in a post-apocalyptic U.S. in which most of the country has been ruined by war but a redoubt called “Panem” has established itself in what used to be the northeast. Panem — the name comes from the old slogan of the Roman empire, Panem et circenses, which means “bread and circuses” and refers to what the Roman ruling class thought they needed to give the masses to keep them, if not exactly happy, at least content with their lives and uninclined to rebel. Like most modern-day dystopias — including George Orwell’s 1984, which seems more than any other book to have set the basic template for novels set in a highly stratified future in which a tiny ruling class has everything and everyone else is barely surviving — there isn’t much panem to go around in Panem but there are quite a few circenses, particularly the annual Hunger Games, in which two Tributes (Panem’s ruling elite gets not only its basic strategy but considerable direct inspiration from the Roman empire — indeed, writer Collins named virtually all the members of Panem’s 1 percent after real-life ancient Romans), one male and one female, from each of Panem’s 12 proletarian districts, are selected at random (though volunteers are accepted) to participate in a fight to the death inside a high-tech arena. The Tributes are under threat not only from each other but also from whatever lethal conditions, ranging from hostile weather to genetically modified monsters, the Gamemaker, the designer of the whole shebang, can throw at them. In the first Hunger Games novel, our heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) from the coal-mining District 12, ekes out a precarious experience as a hunter, armed with a bow and arrow, shooting black-market game and thereby helping out her widowed mother (her dad died in a coal-mining accident and mom is a traditional healer offering what passes for medical care in the District). She ends up in the Hunger Games when she volunteers to take the place of her younger sister Prim (short for Primrose) (Willow Shields), whose name is drawn in the Reaping (the drawing for contestants in each district), and her co-Tribute from District 12 is Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson). The Hunger Games are set up so that only one of the 24 contestants actually survives, but in the first episode Katniss and Peeta manage to be declared co-winners after they grab a bunch of poisonous berries and Peeta announces that they’re so desperately and totally in love with each other that either they both get declared winners or they will eat the berries, both will die, and the Capitol (used to refer both to the central city of Panem and the elites who live there) will be denied their annual victor with whom to intimidate the people into continued submission.
Their against-the-rules victory has made both of them, especially Katniss, potential inspiration for rebellions from the Districts — exactly the sort of thing the Hunger Games were set up to discourage — and so as Catching Fire begins, President Snow (Donald Sutherland) — presumably the only Capitol resident who doesn’t have a Roman name — and the new Gamemaker, Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom it’s odd seeing in this role now that he’s dead — when Hoffman died the biggest shock for me was reading the list of credits in his obituary and realizing how many of my favorite movies of the last 10 years had had him in them), plots a way to nip any rebellious feelings in the bud. It happens to be the 75th anniversary of the Hunger Games, which gives the Capitol the right to make drastic rules changes (not that that stops them any other time — like every other authoritarian ruling class in history, the overlords of Panem recognize no restrictions whatsoever on their power and will do whatever it takes to stop any dissent from becoming dangerous), and the drastic rules change Plutarch hits on is to make up the cast of the current Hunger Games from the surviving winners of previous years. This means that Katniss and Peeta will be hurled into the arena again (though the script by Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt doesn’t do quite as good a job of dramatizing how that hooks Katniss’s PTSD as Suzanne Collins did in the novel) and will once again have to fight for their lives, this time against older but considerably more battle-ready opponents than they had last time. The idea is either Katniss and Peeta will be killed and the District residents who idolize them will get disillusioned, or Katniss will knock off the other District’s Tributes and they’ll hate her for killing off their heroes. There’s a quite stunning surprise ending that sets up the next episode of the story — though, following the contemptible practice started by the producers of the Harry Potter films and continued by the makers of the Twilight movies (as well as The Hobbit, which after the success of the Lord of the Rings triptych got stretched out from one film to three, count ’em, three), the last book in the series, Mockingjay, is going to be stretched out into two films.
Anyone coming to Catching Fire from having read all three books is going to get a quite different impression of it from someone coming to the film only from having seen the first Hunger Games movie, but as it stands it’s a rich, well-staged movie that mostly does justice to the material even though the screenwriters (at least partly due to the limitations of the film medium) have a harder time pulling off the marvelous double act Suzanne Collins did in the books, creating something that worked as a novel of ideas and an action thriller simultaneously. Much of Catching Fire — particularly the scenes of the actual Hunger Games themselves — looks like a Republic serial with a bigger budget (and with the contestants encased by force fields and natural barriers so they can’t just jump their way out of danger the way their predecessors at Republic could), and the ending is open-ended but, unlike the even more daringly open-ended (but also genuinely moving) ending of the second Twilight film, New Moon, exists not to bring this story to a satisfying conclusion but to set up the next episode. New director Francis Lawrence stages the film effectively (especially the action) and the acting is generally credible, though the young men — particularly the two in Katniss’s life, Peeta and her hunter boyfriend from back home, Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth, brother of Chris “Thor” Hemsworth) — look too much alike (the only reliable way to tell them apart is Gale’s hair is darker and slightly longer), and frankly I thought Sam Claflik, as the vainglorious District One Tribute Finnick Odair, was hotter than either Josh Hutcherson or Liam Hemsworth. Catching Fire is the sort of movie that’s difficult to assess except as part of its cycle, but as part of its cycle it mostly does justice to the material and tells an exciting story, even though it would be incomprehensible if you hadn’t either read the first Hunger Games novel or seen the first film.
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
The Good Mistress (Lighthouse Pictures/Lifetime, 2014)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a Lifetime movie from my backlog of these productions: The Good Mistress, which I’d recorded back during its “world premiere” on February 14. The Good Mistress has a whopping misnomer of a title — one might expect a story about a woman who falls in love with a man, not knowing he’s married, and sees him for a while until she finds out he has a wife, whereupon she does the beautiful and noble thing and arranges a reconciliation between them. The woman who falls in love (or at least lust) with a man who’s married, but she doesn’t know that, appears in this plot line, but she’s not really a mistress (they only have sex once, though at least director Terry Ingram gives us a lovely soft-core porn scene between them, shot in deliciously atmospheric half-light — for a while Lifetime cut way back on the soft-core porn but now they’re bringing it back, which is a good thing). The woman is Sandy (Annie Heise), a recovering alcoholic whose drinking and partying hyped into overdrive following the death of her parents in a car accident until, driving while several sheets to the wind from her latest drinking session, she hit a young boy riding a bicycle and crippled him for life. For this she got five years’ probation and court-ordered rehab — her probation officer is a nerdy guy named Howard and both he and her landlord turn up in her life at the most awkward moments — and after she completes the rehab she moves to a small town called Sweet Meadow or something like that, where her girlhood friend Karen (Kendra Anderson) has arranged for her to work as a paralegal for the local law firm. During one of her lunch breaks she runs into a tall, lanky, dark-haired and not bad-looking but not drop-dead gorgeous either man named David Waterford (Antonio Cupo), who gives her a phone number and the name “Sam” and invites her to a dinner date.
The date is at a bar on the outskirts of town called Kenny’s — “Sam” told her it was a barbecue restaurant but there’s no indication it serves anything but alcoholic potables — where she’s hit on by a self-proclaimed “barfly” who says it’s his birthday and he wants to buy her a drink in honor of that. “It was your ‘birthday’ last month!” says the bartender — who turns out to be Kenny, the place’s owner and proprietor — and Sandy sees “Sam” arrive for their date and demands to leave immediately. Eventually they have their one-night’s tumble and Sandy thinks she’s in heaven — until “Sam” turns up at the lawyer’s office where both Sandy and Karen work, and Karen introduces him: “This is David, my husband.” It gets even weirder than that; as part of her job, Sandy has to visit the family of a young woman who disappeared two months earlier and whose body has just been found (in a preposterously obvious-looking amateur grave one wouldn’t think it would have taken the authorities two months to notice); the woman’s mother has kept a photo of her daughter and a card given her by her boyfriend reading, “A perfect rose for a perfect lady.” Sandy instantly recognizes the handwriting as David’s and concludes that David was the young woman’s mysterious boyfriend and he killed her — though she can’t tell either Karen or the police because David invited her to Kenny’s bar to set her up: all he has to do is report to the authorities that she was at the bar, itself a violation of her probation, and he can get her sent to prison any time. What’s more, David is running for county supervisor and the town sheriff, Grady Williams (Jeremy Guilbaut), is a close friend and strong political supporter of his, so the authorities are going to laugh at anyone who accuses him of murder.
Eventually Sandy becomes convinced that David not only killed the girl but is about to murder his wife as well as Sandy herself — her car crashed when someone cut her brake lines — and though the police have a suspect in the girl’s disappearance (the “barfly” from Kenny’s is found in the bar’s parking lot, having apparently committed suicide by running a hose from his exhaust pipe and filling the car with carbon monoxide), Sandy is convinced David killed him, too, faked it to look like suicide and dropped a false clue (a memory card from a digital camera filled with photos of the murdered girl) to frame the “barfly.” All the principals converge on the Waterfords’ isolated mountain cabin, and the big switcheroo occurs: the killer isn’t David but his wife Karen. Reflecting the same indomitable will towards pushing her weakling husband’s political career that Barbara Stanwyck showed towards Kirk Douglas in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (a film I suspect writers Ron Oliver and James Shavick have seen), Karen says to Sandy that she’s devoted a lot of energy to “cleaning up his messes,” including knocking off any other women he’s involved with and using his connections with the local sheriff to cover it up. Eventually the sheriff finally figures it all out — he sees a reflection of Karen’s face on one of the photos of the girl from the memory card that was supposed to implicate the “barfly” — and arrives at the cabin to shoot down Karen just when Karen is about to stab Sandy to death. The Good Mistress is pretty preposterous, and like a lot of Lifetime movies the opening is pretty dull as it sets up the exposition, but once the first of the two big reveals kicks in the movie becomes a pretty good thriller, effectively directed by Ingram with a flair for atmosphere and suspense far beyond what we usually get from Lifetime directors. It’s also decently acted — at least to the extent that anybody could make these far-fetched (to say the least!) situations believable — and yet more evidence that the producers, directors and writers of Lifetime movies have so internalized Christine Conradt’s formulae that even ones she had nothing to do with end up playing pretty much like the ones she did write.
I ran a Lifetime movie from my backlog of these productions: The Good Mistress, which I’d recorded back during its “world premiere” on February 14. The Good Mistress has a whopping misnomer of a title — one might expect a story about a woman who falls in love with a man, not knowing he’s married, and sees him for a while until she finds out he has a wife, whereupon she does the beautiful and noble thing and arranges a reconciliation between them. The woman who falls in love (or at least lust) with a man who’s married, but she doesn’t know that, appears in this plot line, but she’s not really a mistress (they only have sex once, though at least director Terry Ingram gives us a lovely soft-core porn scene between them, shot in deliciously atmospheric half-light — for a while Lifetime cut way back on the soft-core porn but now they’re bringing it back, which is a good thing). The woman is Sandy (Annie Heise), a recovering alcoholic whose drinking and partying hyped into overdrive following the death of her parents in a car accident until, driving while several sheets to the wind from her latest drinking session, she hit a young boy riding a bicycle and crippled him for life. For this she got five years’ probation and court-ordered rehab — her probation officer is a nerdy guy named Howard and both he and her landlord turn up in her life at the most awkward moments — and after she completes the rehab she moves to a small town called Sweet Meadow or something like that, where her girlhood friend Karen (Kendra Anderson) has arranged for her to work as a paralegal for the local law firm. During one of her lunch breaks she runs into a tall, lanky, dark-haired and not bad-looking but not drop-dead gorgeous either man named David Waterford (Antonio Cupo), who gives her a phone number and the name “Sam” and invites her to a dinner date.
The date is at a bar on the outskirts of town called Kenny’s — “Sam” told her it was a barbecue restaurant but there’s no indication it serves anything but alcoholic potables — where she’s hit on by a self-proclaimed “barfly” who says it’s his birthday and he wants to buy her a drink in honor of that. “It was your ‘birthday’ last month!” says the bartender — who turns out to be Kenny, the place’s owner and proprietor — and Sandy sees “Sam” arrive for their date and demands to leave immediately. Eventually they have their one-night’s tumble and Sandy thinks she’s in heaven — until “Sam” turns up at the lawyer’s office where both Sandy and Karen work, and Karen introduces him: “This is David, my husband.” It gets even weirder than that; as part of her job, Sandy has to visit the family of a young woman who disappeared two months earlier and whose body has just been found (in a preposterously obvious-looking amateur grave one wouldn’t think it would have taken the authorities two months to notice); the woman’s mother has kept a photo of her daughter and a card given her by her boyfriend reading, “A perfect rose for a perfect lady.” Sandy instantly recognizes the handwriting as David’s and concludes that David was the young woman’s mysterious boyfriend and he killed her — though she can’t tell either Karen or the police because David invited her to Kenny’s bar to set her up: all he has to do is report to the authorities that she was at the bar, itself a violation of her probation, and he can get her sent to prison any time. What’s more, David is running for county supervisor and the town sheriff, Grady Williams (Jeremy Guilbaut), is a close friend and strong political supporter of his, so the authorities are going to laugh at anyone who accuses him of murder.
Eventually Sandy becomes convinced that David not only killed the girl but is about to murder his wife as well as Sandy herself — her car crashed when someone cut her brake lines — and though the police have a suspect in the girl’s disappearance (the “barfly” from Kenny’s is found in the bar’s parking lot, having apparently committed suicide by running a hose from his exhaust pipe and filling the car with carbon monoxide), Sandy is convinced David killed him, too, faked it to look like suicide and dropped a false clue (a memory card from a digital camera filled with photos of the murdered girl) to frame the “barfly.” All the principals converge on the Waterfords’ isolated mountain cabin, and the big switcheroo occurs: the killer isn’t David but his wife Karen. Reflecting the same indomitable will towards pushing her weakling husband’s political career that Barbara Stanwyck showed towards Kirk Douglas in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (a film I suspect writers Ron Oliver and James Shavick have seen), Karen says to Sandy that she’s devoted a lot of energy to “cleaning up his messes,” including knocking off any other women he’s involved with and using his connections with the local sheriff to cover it up. Eventually the sheriff finally figures it all out — he sees a reflection of Karen’s face on one of the photos of the girl from the memory card that was supposed to implicate the “barfly” — and arrives at the cabin to shoot down Karen just when Karen is about to stab Sandy to death. The Good Mistress is pretty preposterous, and like a lot of Lifetime movies the opening is pretty dull as it sets up the exposition, but once the first of the two big reveals kicks in the movie becomes a pretty good thriller, effectively directed by Ingram with a flair for atmosphere and suspense far beyond what we usually get from Lifetime directors. It’s also decently acted — at least to the extent that anybody could make these far-fetched (to say the least!) situations believable — and yet more evidence that the producers, directors and writers of Lifetime movies have so internalized Christine Conradt’s formulae that even ones she had nothing to do with end up playing pretty much like the ones she did write.
Monday, March 31, 2014
The First Auto (Warner Bros./Vitaphone, 1927)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I put on TCM last night and Charles and I watched their “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of a film that technically wasn’t a silent: The First Auto, made by Warner Brothers (back when they were still spelling out “Brothers” instead of abbreviating it “Bros.” — take that, Clive Hirschhorn!) in 1927 and outfitted with a Vitaphone soundtrack conducted by Herman Heller (he gets a credit) that included not only a typical silent-film accompaniment (complete with easily recognizable, at least to 1927 audiences, songs about early motoring, like “In My Merry Oldsmobile” and “Get Out and Get Under,” as well as other tunes familiar to moviegoers of the period, including “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” “In the Good Old Summertime,” the “Skaters’ Waltz” — one of those melodies you’re likely to recognize even if you have no idea what it’s called — and “How Dry I Am”) but also some sound effects and even bits of human voices. The voices were almost all “wild,” recorded separately from the picture and dubbed in more or less where they belonged, but there wasn’t an attempt this early actually to have people talking to each other on screen (that would happen later in 1927, with The Jazz Singer). The First Auto was the headline attraction on the sixth Vitaphone bill, which played in a handful of theatres in the big cities — including the Colony Theatre in New York, where Vitaphone had premiered in 1926 with the John Barrymore Don Juan and a program of musical shorts that all used sound more creatively than these features did — indeed, as Alexander Walker noted in his book The Shattered Silents, many big-city audiences regarded these “canned” musical scores as a decided comedown from the live orchestral accompaniments they were used to when a major film was shown in a first-run house. (Allan Dwan, who directed the 1922 Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., recalled going from city to city and rehearsing the orchestra the day before the film opened to make sure they played the specially composed music in synch with the film and supplied all the required sound effects on cue.)
The First Auto is an odd little movie whose poignant depiction of technological change rings true today — adding to the irony that a film about the traumas people go through adjusting to a new technology was itself released in a process that was going to put a lot of people in the movie business (and in the movie audience as well) through a similar set of traumas as they adjusted to the technological change. It’s a film that remains moving even as the sheer rate of technological changes to which people have to adjust has sped up frantically — when Steve Jobs of Apple died one commentator noted that innovations in the computer products business happen so rapidly that within two years of Jobs’ death there would no longer be a market for any product with which he had been personally involved — whereas The First Auto takes place over a period of about a decade, opening in 1895 (we get the cue from an opening title that says the film is set “before anybody heard of Bryan”) in Maple City, Indiana. Unlike most movies of the classic era, especially ones set in small towns, the script for The First Auto (story by Darryl Francis Zanuck — a credit which startled Charles, who hadn’t realized what the “F.” stood for before — and script by Zanuck’s frequent collaborator in the early days, Anthony Coldewey) is quite specific in its geography. The principal character is Hank Armstrong (Russell Simpson), who owns the biggest and most prestigious livery stable in Maple City in 1895 and is also its leading breeder of thoroughbreds; his current star horse, “Sloe Eyes,” wins every race it enters (and is the fourth generation of her family Hank has owned). The races are trotting races, in which the jockeys ride sulkies (essentially miniature crosses between carriages and chariots, made to be as light as possible and made of metal frames to which two wheels and a seat are attached) and the horses are forbidden to gallop (if the horse breaks out of a fast trot it and its rider are disqualified) — one remembers Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, in which as part of his indictment of modern decadence in the song “Ya Got Trouble” con man Prof. Howard Hill says that current horse racing is “not a wholesome trotting race, no, but a race where they set down right on the horse!” Worse changes are in store for Hank Armstrong when inventor Elmer Hays (E. H. Calvert) comes to Maple City and, at a dinner presented by the town’s mayor, he gives a speech about the upcoming new invention, the automobile, which his factory is manufacturing at the rate of three autos a day. (As part of his presentation he shows some magic-lantern slides — the 1895 equivalent of a PowerPoint — and the last one, showing the front of his factory with his workers and their products, is shown upside down and encounters some unwelcome diversion when a cat walks across the screen.)
Squire Stebbins (Douglas Gerrard), the richest man in Maple City, buys its first auto, and there’s a marvelous scene which reveals that both Zanuck and director Roy Del Ruth started out doing gags for Mack Sennett; Stebbins finally gets his car started, only it periodically emits explosions and even when it’s working right Stebbins is unable to control it and ultimately drives it off a cliff into a convenient lake — no one is hurt but the car is, as we’d say today, “totaled.” Nonetheless, progress takes its toll on Maple City in general and Armstrong’s livery business in particular — Armstrong takes it as a personal insult when a long-time customer and friend decides against buying a new horse and, at the urging of his family, decides to do something “modern” and purchase an auto instead. It gets even worse for Armstrong when his son Bob (Charles Emmett Mack) goes over to the other side; he moves to the nearby city of Detroit and takes a job with Henry Ford, helping to develop the famous 1903 racing car which, driven by Barney Oldfield (America’s first star racing driver, who was hired as a technical advisor for the film and ended up playing himself in it — and the car we see is an exact replica of the original), promoted cars in general and Ford’s products in particular nationwide. Meanwhile, Armstrong’s streak of horse-racing wins has come to an abrupt end when “Sloe Eyes” dies in childbirth (which is our one clue that she’s a she) giving birth to another mare, “Bright Eyes,” but since horse racing is fading in popularity and the racetrack in Maple City is now hosting, you guessed it, auto races, there’s little or nothing Armstrong can do with Bright Eyes (aside from waiting three decades for Shirley Temple’s producers to appropriate her name — joke). The First Auto is listed on imdb.com as a “comedy,” but it’s as much a drama as a comedy and it gets considerably darker and more serious as it progresses and Hank Armstrong loses his business, has the ignominy of having all his possessions (including Bright Eyes) sold at auction (and just to twist the knife in, the buyer of Bright Eyes turns her into a beast of burden and beats her unmercifully, leading Armstrong to attack him and the horse to escape and flee back to what’s left of Armstrong’s stable), and ultimately sets his own livery stable and barn on fire.
Then one of his few remaining friends in town tells him of an exhibition auto race scheduled for Maple City, and the two of them decide that if they sabotage one of the cars by pouring sulfur in its gas tank (incidentally in 1895 the cars were depicted as running on kerosene but by the 1904 scenes the fuel is being referred to as “gas,” meaning the gasoline almost all cars have run on ever since), it will explode in the middle of the race and no one in Maple City will ever want to buy an auto again. Only — wouldn’t ya know it? — the car he sabotages is the one his own son was planning to drive in the race, having come down from Detroit to Maple City to race, pick up where he left off with his girlfriend Rose Robbins (the mayor’s daughter, who while Bob was out of town went on a date with another guy but then walked out on him when he put the moves on her, and an ironic title says that she was the first girl to walk home from a car ride when the man driving her got “fresh”) and see if he can reconcile with his dad. Realizing that he’s sabotaged his son’s car, Hank races to the track in a carriage drawn by Bright Eyes but doesn’t get there in time to keep Bob’s engine from catching fire (Hank sadly tells Bright Eyes, “Even you let me down!”), though Bob is able to get out of the car before it blows up and there’s a final scene that establishes he’ll recover, he and Rose will pair off, and the film ends with a montage depicting the changing car models from 1904 to 1927 followed by a title, “End of the Trail … ,” and a horse silhouetted against the sunset. The First Auto is a fascinating movie, managing to balance its comic and dramatic aspects better than a lot of far more prestigious productions that have tried the same mix, and certainly its theme of the emotional impact of technological change on the people who have to live it is as current as the latest announcement from Silicon Valley. There’s also a macabre irony in that Charles Emmett Mack was killed in, you guessed it, a car accident just as he was heading for the location where the big race was to be filmed (though imdb.com doesn’t specify how Warner Brothers handled the death of a leading actor and what scenes had to be doubled or faked to complete the film), essentially making him the Paul Walker of the 1920’s.
I put on TCM last night and Charles and I watched their “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of a film that technically wasn’t a silent: The First Auto, made by Warner Brothers (back when they were still spelling out “Brothers” instead of abbreviating it “Bros.” — take that, Clive Hirschhorn!) in 1927 and outfitted with a Vitaphone soundtrack conducted by Herman Heller (he gets a credit) that included not only a typical silent-film accompaniment (complete with easily recognizable, at least to 1927 audiences, songs about early motoring, like “In My Merry Oldsmobile” and “Get Out and Get Under,” as well as other tunes familiar to moviegoers of the period, including “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” “In the Good Old Summertime,” the “Skaters’ Waltz” — one of those melodies you’re likely to recognize even if you have no idea what it’s called — and “How Dry I Am”) but also some sound effects and even bits of human voices. The voices were almost all “wild,” recorded separately from the picture and dubbed in more or less where they belonged, but there wasn’t an attempt this early actually to have people talking to each other on screen (that would happen later in 1927, with The Jazz Singer). The First Auto was the headline attraction on the sixth Vitaphone bill, which played in a handful of theatres in the big cities — including the Colony Theatre in New York, where Vitaphone had premiered in 1926 with the John Barrymore Don Juan and a program of musical shorts that all used sound more creatively than these features did — indeed, as Alexander Walker noted in his book The Shattered Silents, many big-city audiences regarded these “canned” musical scores as a decided comedown from the live orchestral accompaniments they were used to when a major film was shown in a first-run house. (Allan Dwan, who directed the 1922 Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., recalled going from city to city and rehearsing the orchestra the day before the film opened to make sure they played the specially composed music in synch with the film and supplied all the required sound effects on cue.)
The First Auto is an odd little movie whose poignant depiction of technological change rings true today — adding to the irony that a film about the traumas people go through adjusting to a new technology was itself released in a process that was going to put a lot of people in the movie business (and in the movie audience as well) through a similar set of traumas as they adjusted to the technological change. It’s a film that remains moving even as the sheer rate of technological changes to which people have to adjust has sped up frantically — when Steve Jobs of Apple died one commentator noted that innovations in the computer products business happen so rapidly that within two years of Jobs’ death there would no longer be a market for any product with which he had been personally involved — whereas The First Auto takes place over a period of about a decade, opening in 1895 (we get the cue from an opening title that says the film is set “before anybody heard of Bryan”) in Maple City, Indiana. Unlike most movies of the classic era, especially ones set in small towns, the script for The First Auto (story by Darryl Francis Zanuck — a credit which startled Charles, who hadn’t realized what the “F.” stood for before — and script by Zanuck’s frequent collaborator in the early days, Anthony Coldewey) is quite specific in its geography. The principal character is Hank Armstrong (Russell Simpson), who owns the biggest and most prestigious livery stable in Maple City in 1895 and is also its leading breeder of thoroughbreds; his current star horse, “Sloe Eyes,” wins every race it enters (and is the fourth generation of her family Hank has owned). The races are trotting races, in which the jockeys ride sulkies (essentially miniature crosses between carriages and chariots, made to be as light as possible and made of metal frames to which two wheels and a seat are attached) and the horses are forbidden to gallop (if the horse breaks out of a fast trot it and its rider are disqualified) — one remembers Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, in which as part of his indictment of modern decadence in the song “Ya Got Trouble” con man Prof. Howard Hill says that current horse racing is “not a wholesome trotting race, no, but a race where they set down right on the horse!” Worse changes are in store for Hank Armstrong when inventor Elmer Hays (E. H. Calvert) comes to Maple City and, at a dinner presented by the town’s mayor, he gives a speech about the upcoming new invention, the automobile, which his factory is manufacturing at the rate of three autos a day. (As part of his presentation he shows some magic-lantern slides — the 1895 equivalent of a PowerPoint — and the last one, showing the front of his factory with his workers and their products, is shown upside down and encounters some unwelcome diversion when a cat walks across the screen.)
Squire Stebbins (Douglas Gerrard), the richest man in Maple City, buys its first auto, and there’s a marvelous scene which reveals that both Zanuck and director Roy Del Ruth started out doing gags for Mack Sennett; Stebbins finally gets his car started, only it periodically emits explosions and even when it’s working right Stebbins is unable to control it and ultimately drives it off a cliff into a convenient lake — no one is hurt but the car is, as we’d say today, “totaled.” Nonetheless, progress takes its toll on Maple City in general and Armstrong’s livery business in particular — Armstrong takes it as a personal insult when a long-time customer and friend decides against buying a new horse and, at the urging of his family, decides to do something “modern” and purchase an auto instead. It gets even worse for Armstrong when his son Bob (Charles Emmett Mack) goes over to the other side; he moves to the nearby city of Detroit and takes a job with Henry Ford, helping to develop the famous 1903 racing car which, driven by Barney Oldfield (America’s first star racing driver, who was hired as a technical advisor for the film and ended up playing himself in it — and the car we see is an exact replica of the original), promoted cars in general and Ford’s products in particular nationwide. Meanwhile, Armstrong’s streak of horse-racing wins has come to an abrupt end when “Sloe Eyes” dies in childbirth (which is our one clue that she’s a she) giving birth to another mare, “Bright Eyes,” but since horse racing is fading in popularity and the racetrack in Maple City is now hosting, you guessed it, auto races, there’s little or nothing Armstrong can do with Bright Eyes (aside from waiting three decades for Shirley Temple’s producers to appropriate her name — joke). The First Auto is listed on imdb.com as a “comedy,” but it’s as much a drama as a comedy and it gets considerably darker and more serious as it progresses and Hank Armstrong loses his business, has the ignominy of having all his possessions (including Bright Eyes) sold at auction (and just to twist the knife in, the buyer of Bright Eyes turns her into a beast of burden and beats her unmercifully, leading Armstrong to attack him and the horse to escape and flee back to what’s left of Armstrong’s stable), and ultimately sets his own livery stable and barn on fire.
Then one of his few remaining friends in town tells him of an exhibition auto race scheduled for Maple City, and the two of them decide that if they sabotage one of the cars by pouring sulfur in its gas tank (incidentally in 1895 the cars were depicted as running on kerosene but by the 1904 scenes the fuel is being referred to as “gas,” meaning the gasoline almost all cars have run on ever since), it will explode in the middle of the race and no one in Maple City will ever want to buy an auto again. Only — wouldn’t ya know it? — the car he sabotages is the one his own son was planning to drive in the race, having come down from Detroit to Maple City to race, pick up where he left off with his girlfriend Rose Robbins (the mayor’s daughter, who while Bob was out of town went on a date with another guy but then walked out on him when he put the moves on her, and an ironic title says that she was the first girl to walk home from a car ride when the man driving her got “fresh”) and see if he can reconcile with his dad. Realizing that he’s sabotaged his son’s car, Hank races to the track in a carriage drawn by Bright Eyes but doesn’t get there in time to keep Bob’s engine from catching fire (Hank sadly tells Bright Eyes, “Even you let me down!”), though Bob is able to get out of the car before it blows up and there’s a final scene that establishes he’ll recover, he and Rose will pair off, and the film ends with a montage depicting the changing car models from 1904 to 1927 followed by a title, “End of the Trail … ,” and a horse silhouetted against the sunset. The First Auto is a fascinating movie, managing to balance its comic and dramatic aspects better than a lot of far more prestigious productions that have tried the same mix, and certainly its theme of the emotional impact of technological change on the people who have to live it is as current as the latest announcement from Silicon Valley. There’s also a macabre irony in that Charles Emmett Mack was killed in, you guessed it, a car accident just as he was heading for the location where the big race was to be filmed (though imdb.com doesn’t specify how Warner Brothers handled the death of a leading actor and what scenes had to be doubled or faked to complete the film), essentially making him the Paul Walker of the 1920’s.
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