by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I must say that during his lifetime the name “Jean-Michel Basquiat” meant absolutely nothing to me. I first heard of him as a protégé of Andy Warhol in reading the Warhol biographies published by Victor Bockris and Bob Colacello after Warhol’s death in 1987, and these books vaguely hinted that Basquiat was a straight African-American street painter whom Warhol picked up (metaphorically, at least) and sponsored but who died of a heroin overdose around the same time Warhol died of a more prosaic cause (accidentally killed by his doctors during routine gall bladder surgery). The portrait I had of Basquiat from those sources was as a barely civilized primitive who regularly beat up his girlfriends (we get nothing about that in this documentary, though at least two women who dated him are included in the interviewees) and who painted in a bold, primitive, aggressively ugly style drawn from his past as a graffiti artist.
I’d seen photos of him — a diminutive brown-skinned apparition in rather scrawny dreadlocks, which is what he looked like in the last few years of his life — and I’d seen a few pictures of his paintings but he hadn’t really registered on my consciousness even though Julian Schnabel, an older painter who was both a friend of Basquiat and a competitor, had made a dramatized biopic about him in 1996 with Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat and (who else?) David Bowie as Warhol. (I haven’t seen that, but Schnabel’s second film, his adaptation of Reinaldo Arenas’ memoir Before Night Falls, was so terrible — beset by a self-consciously “arty” approach that wrecked a story that should have made a profound and powerful movie — I’m not in any hurry to, either.) So I came to this documentary by Tamra Davis, awkwardly called Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (the title, as we learn about two-thirds of the way through the film, came from an article about Basquiat published during his lifetime), pretty unaware of the subject but willing to watch and listen with an open mind. I was astounded that given the brevity of his career — Basquiat was born in 1960 to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother (giving him the same sort of mixed-race ancestry as two other short-lived African-American artistic geniuses, Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix, though they were part-Native American while Basquiat was part Latino), he started painting in 1980 when he moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan (portrayed in the film as a wrenching physical and psychological journey on the same level as relocating from Kansas to Oz — which struck Charles as silly given the scant geographical difference between them and the fact that they are at least nominally part of the same city) and, with an artistic partner, started leaving often ironic graffiti under the signature “SAMO©” (the copyright symbol was part of the name).
A year later a gallery owner gave him space in her building and started buying canvases and paint for him so he could make regular (and commercially salable) artworks instead of painting on walls (though he still frequently painted on old windows, doors and other “found” objects others had discarded), and he began to build a reputation as part of an anything-goes Bohemian art world that, before Rudolph Giuliani’s crackdown, could still either find relatively cheap spaces to live in Manhattan or simply take over abandoned buildings and “squat,” and which seemed to derive a lot of its inspiration from the sheer squalor into which New York City had descended. Much of Davis’s film consists of historic footage of the Manhattan of Basquiat’s time, including the legendary descent of Times Square into a haven for sex-related businesses (porn theatres — before the rise of the VCR put most of them out of businesses because one’s own home is a far more congenial setting for the kind of gratification one gets from watching porn than a theatre — as Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee Wee Herman, can testify from grim experience — and live sex shows of varying degrees of envelope-pushing hotness).
The scene at the time was one in which distinctions between media blurred to near-insignificance: the point was that you were an ARTIST, and whether you expressed that with paint on canvas (or on public walls), with musical instruments (and if you didn’t know how to play the instrument you were so energetically wielding, that was actually considered a plus) or with cameras and film (still or movie) was immaterial, In fact, the film mentions that Basquiat was actually part of a five-piece band called Gray, of such amateurishness that he posed as a clarinet player but actually emitted nothing but random noise on the instrument. (This made it ironic that I watched this film at a time when my most recent music acquisition was the Mosaic Records boxed set of Artie Shaw, who regarded the clarinet as almost a sacred trust, an instrument not only to be learned but practically worshiped — and whose attitude not only towards music but art in general, as a skill to be honed after long years of practicing long before one dared to show oneself to a paying public, was absolutely the opposite of that of Basquiat and the other artists in his circle.) Indeed, the fact that he reached artistic maturity (or as close as he ever got to it in the limited time he had on earth) in a milieu that regarded the differences between media as irrelevant may have shaped what to my mind is the most interesting aspect of Basquiat’s art: its incorporation of text at a level where (like the graffiti that spawned it) it’s not clear whether the artist’s “real” message is in the images, the words or some ironic juxtaposition of the two we’re supposed to figure out for ourselves based on the work.
The film begins with a rare live recording of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker playing “Salt Peanuts,” heard under archive footage of Basquiat actually painting, and at first I assumed it was simply a rather cheap attempt to equate Basquiat with Parker -— both African-American groundbreaking artistic geniuses who lived dissolute lifestyles, used heroin and died young from it — though as the film unwound it turned out that bebop was Basquiat’s favorite form of music and he frequently had records of it playing while he worked (and when he wasn’t painting to jazz — a Duke Ellington record is also heard in the background of one of the scenes of Basquiat at work, and unlike the Parker side it was clearly on the original soundtrack of the videotape — he was painting to other forms of music, including a record of Ravel’s “Bolero” that he played over and over, making the piece even more repetitive than Ravel intended and driving one of his gallery-owner sponsors crazy), and a number of his works not only used jazz images (like the shapes of jazz instruments like trumpet and sax) but jazz-derived text as well: one painting intended as a tribute to Parker consisted of a crude reproduction of the original label for his Savoy recording of “Billie’s Bounce” as well as, in Basquiat’s familiar all-caps graffiti scrawl, the full discographical information on that record.
At the same time, Basquiat’s affect in the archival interviews shown in the film — including one Tamra Davis shot of him around 1984 (the dates are unclear) in which she and a woman friend named Kimberly took turns asking him interview-type questions even though they were all friends (“this is going to be a high-quality movie, huh?” Basquiat asked at the beginning of the tape) — reminded me much more of Jimi Hendrix (another mixed-race mostly African-American artist who did drugs and died young) than Parker; though he wasn’t as out of it in the interviews as Hendrix seemed to be (Hendrix seemed to be incapable of answering any question without sounding like the abstract lyrics to one of his more openly “psychedelic” songs), his answers are elliptical and mysterious, in ways that might reflect either a deliberate attempt to create a mystique around himself, the influence of drugs or both. The film delves into the rising-and-falling-star aspect of Basquiat’s fame, from the rave reviews his initial shows got in the Village Voice and other, smaller community papers in New York to the arrogant dismissal of New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, who in the clip used here said flat-out that Basquiat was plucked from obscurity and given showcase exhibitions in major galleries only because politically liberal people in the art world wanted a token person of color whom they could elevate and say, “See? We’re not just a bunch of privileged white people here.”
After watching this film I’m still not sold on the greatness of Basquiat as an artist; the work is imaginative conceptually but also so repetitively in-your-face that after a while all the confrontation just gets dull. What’s more, he never really learned to draw all that well — his work with a paint brush doesn’t look all that different from his work with a spray can — which makes me wonder how he attracted the attention and support of Warhol, who was proud of his considerable talents as a draftsman and whose beef with the art world’s orthodoxy when he was coming up in the early 1960’s was that they had devalued drawing talent, and the people who possessed it, in favor of abstract works that were much less of a technical challenge to create. Basquiat had the bad luck to hook on to Warhol and do a joint show with him in the mid-1980’s, at a time when the art world was sick of Warhol and he was considered an old-hat artist who was just repeating himself — and the joint Basquiat-Warhol exhibit he was hoping would cement his fame and reputation just got slammed, not only by the critics but by the audience as well (nothing from the show sold). The failure of the Warhol exhibit and the death of Warhol two years later, in 1987, seem to have been the events that totally unhinged Basquiat and led him to go back on heroin after he’d laboriously sobered up in Hawai’i and Los Angeles, leading him to die of an overdose in New York City in 1988.
Since then the price of Basquiat’s paintings has risen from the five-figure sums he was getting during his lifetime to over $1 million, and Basquiat himself has become the perfect art-world commodity: he died young, which gives him the same legendary quality as Raphaël, Van Gogh and Pollock; but at the same time he was so prolific he left 1,000 paintings and 1,000 drawings, so there’s enough work in circulation to maintain a market for some time to come (another parallel with Hendrix, who left so many recordings — he seems to have run a tape recorder every time he practiced — “new” Hendrix records are still being released now, 40 years after his death). As an artist I think I’d place him in the same category as Douanier Rousseau: an unskilled primitive, but a sufficiently imaginative unskilled primitive that his work remains interesting and stimulating — even though its relentless in-your-faceness really puts me off. There’s one fascinating anecdote in the film in which Basquiat and a friend are trying to get home from a prestigious gallery opening at which they’ve been fêted by the art world and the celebriati, and they’re on the streets of New York City trying to hail a cab — and at least five drivers of empty cabs drive right past them.
We get the point even before Basquiat’s companion makes it explicit — away from the glitz and glamour of his opening Basquiat was just another scrawny-looking casually-dressed dreadlocked African-American on the streets of New York — but later in the film it becomes clear that Basquiat was one of those Black people who blamed every negative social encounter with a white person on racism. Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child tries to make its central character’s story a metaphor for creative brilliance and how those who possess it have a hard time fitting into society — it even begins with a poem by Langston Hughes on the same theme called “The Genius Child,” suggesting that Basquiat’s short life and posthumous prestige prove Hughes’ argument that the genius child has to die before he’ll finally be accepted — but all too much of it seems like the art world’s equivalent of a VH-1 Behind the Music sex-drugs-and-rock-’n’-roll story; Basquiat’s short life and premature death is both a tragedy and a cliché.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Two Sharp Knives (CBS-TV “Studio One,” 1949)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I ran another episode of the CBS-TV series Studio One, a much better show than There Was a Crooked Man: Two Sharp Knives, a 1949 adaptation of a 1934 short story by Dashiell Hammett (for some reason, the blacklist prevented him from doing new work for films or TV — not that given his long-term alcoholism he’d have been in much shape to do new work even if he’d been allowed to — but it did not prevent the networks from paying him for rights to his old stories and characters), though the publication of the story I read in the Hammett anthology Nightmare Town must have been from a later edition since some of the dates were moved up to the 1940’s.
It begins on a train — shown, given the limitations of live television, by a stock clip of a train which dissolves to a train interior but with blank spaces on the back wall where the windows are supposed to be (since there was no way in 1949 they could do the process-screen effect of scenery passing by one took for granted in the movies) showing a dapper-looking mystery man named Lester Furman, with a 10-year-old girl in tow. They’re on their way to the town of Deerwood, Pennsylvania to look for the man’s ex-wife — the girl’s mother — only as soon as he gets off the train he’s arrested on the basis of a wanted poster which claims he killed a man in Philadelphia named Paul Frank Dunlap, and before the night is over he’s found hanged in his cell. The coroner’s official verdict is suicide but he later tells the police chief, Scott Anderson (Stanley Ridges), that he only said that to cover for him in his political feud with district attorney Ted Carroll (Robert Emhardt), who’s trying to get Anderson fired and is using the death of a prisoner Anderson was responsible for as a political point against the chief.
What really killed Furman was a blow to the back of his head from a blunt object, committed while the police officer that was supposed to be guarding him was asleep at his desk. The ex-wife, Ethel (Wynne Gibson, who had got a star buildup from RKO in the early 1930’s but never quite made it even though she certainly could act: here she delivers a strong, though occasionally overacted, performance), turns up and identifies the body but notes that the picture on the wanted poster was an old one, taken just before she married Furman a decade earlier, touched up to make him look 10 years older — confirming Anderson’s suspicions about the poster after he called the police in Philadelphia and found they had no record of the mysterious Paul Frank Dunlap actually having been murdered. It turns out the whole thing is a criminal scheme in which Ethel is involved, along with her boyfriend Bill and two other persons, an old crook and a hard-bitten blonde woman, and the purpose is to get their hands on Lester Furman’s $500,000 estate — and what makes this story unusual and provides the Hammett-esque twist at the end is that the mysterious “Bill” is actually Anderson’s deputy, Wally Stott, who was sent undercover to infiltrate a numbers racket in Detroit, met and started dating Ethel, and ultimately worked out this scheme with the members of the gang he was supposedly working undercover to bust to knock off her estranged but still legally married husband, make it look like suicide, marry her himself and split the fortune four ways.
The other gang members plot to ambush Anderson in their hotel room — they think he and Wally will be the only cops there — but Anderson figures it out, realizing that the only person who could have murdered Furman without arousing (physically and mentally) the sleeping deputy was someone who had a perfectly normal reason to be in the jail, and who had access to a key that would allow him to let himself into Furman’s cell. The Hammett story was adapted by Carl Bixby and directed by Frank Schaffner — who, as Franklin J. Schaffner, would later helm such important high-quality feature films as The Best Man and Patton — and though he was hamstrung by the limitations of live TV (where, quite frankly, you were lucky if you got a picture at all; they generally used three cameras but quite often one camera went out in the middle of a telecast and the director had to improvise frantically to keep the show on the air with the remaining two) he tried to get the noir atmosphere important to filming Hammett; at one point, he shot Ethel Furman through the vertical rails of her hotel bed — an obvious visual quote from the famous scene at the end of The Maltese Falcon where the bars of the elevator gate are pulled closed in front of Mary Astor and symbolize the prison bars that will soon enclose her murderess character — and though the actors were not identified with their roles in the credits, this was nonetheless a generally well-acted TV episode, intelligently adapted by Bixby even though he made some curious changes to Hammett’s original.
In the story, which is told first-person by Anderson, Ethel Furman is a patsy rather than part of the plot — Wally is just courting her for her husband’s money but she’s genuinely in love with him and doesn’t realize that — and there is no daughter (in the story they had one, but she died in infancy, precipitating the breakup of the Furmans’ marriage), whereas Bixby quite powerfully uses the daughter to arouse guilt feelings in Ethel and lead her to confess to Anderson and name her co-conspirators. There aren’t any co-conspirators in the story; the plot is Wally’s own and he’s implementing it without help. There’s a hard-bitten blonde woman in the story but she’s just Ethel Furman’s traveling companion, not a part of the murder plot; and the faked wanted poster ostensibly comes from a private detective agency (whose head sees it and pronounces it a fake but quite a good one, done on their authentic letterhead) rather than the police department, but for the most part the story and the TV version track pretty closely, and in at least one respect the show improves on the story by making more of the political rivalry between the police chief and the D.A. — not surprising since Studio One had already done a TV version of Hammett’s novel The Glass Key, which focused on two equally corrupt factions (though one was posing as “reformers”) fighting over control of a major city. Two Sharp Knives was an unusually well-done live TV show based on an obscure story by a major author, even though Bixby’s script omitted the philosophical tag that gave the piece its title: a (supposed) old proverb, “To a sharp knife comes a tough steak.”
Last night Charles and I ran another episode of the CBS-TV series Studio One, a much better show than There Was a Crooked Man: Two Sharp Knives, a 1949 adaptation of a 1934 short story by Dashiell Hammett (for some reason, the blacklist prevented him from doing new work for films or TV — not that given his long-term alcoholism he’d have been in much shape to do new work even if he’d been allowed to — but it did not prevent the networks from paying him for rights to his old stories and characters), though the publication of the story I read in the Hammett anthology Nightmare Town must have been from a later edition since some of the dates were moved up to the 1940’s.
It begins on a train — shown, given the limitations of live television, by a stock clip of a train which dissolves to a train interior but with blank spaces on the back wall where the windows are supposed to be (since there was no way in 1949 they could do the process-screen effect of scenery passing by one took for granted in the movies) showing a dapper-looking mystery man named Lester Furman, with a 10-year-old girl in tow. They’re on their way to the town of Deerwood, Pennsylvania to look for the man’s ex-wife — the girl’s mother — only as soon as he gets off the train he’s arrested on the basis of a wanted poster which claims he killed a man in Philadelphia named Paul Frank Dunlap, and before the night is over he’s found hanged in his cell. The coroner’s official verdict is suicide but he later tells the police chief, Scott Anderson (Stanley Ridges), that he only said that to cover for him in his political feud with district attorney Ted Carroll (Robert Emhardt), who’s trying to get Anderson fired and is using the death of a prisoner Anderson was responsible for as a political point against the chief.
What really killed Furman was a blow to the back of his head from a blunt object, committed while the police officer that was supposed to be guarding him was asleep at his desk. The ex-wife, Ethel (Wynne Gibson, who had got a star buildup from RKO in the early 1930’s but never quite made it even though she certainly could act: here she delivers a strong, though occasionally overacted, performance), turns up and identifies the body but notes that the picture on the wanted poster was an old one, taken just before she married Furman a decade earlier, touched up to make him look 10 years older — confirming Anderson’s suspicions about the poster after he called the police in Philadelphia and found they had no record of the mysterious Paul Frank Dunlap actually having been murdered. It turns out the whole thing is a criminal scheme in which Ethel is involved, along with her boyfriend Bill and two other persons, an old crook and a hard-bitten blonde woman, and the purpose is to get their hands on Lester Furman’s $500,000 estate — and what makes this story unusual and provides the Hammett-esque twist at the end is that the mysterious “Bill” is actually Anderson’s deputy, Wally Stott, who was sent undercover to infiltrate a numbers racket in Detroit, met and started dating Ethel, and ultimately worked out this scheme with the members of the gang he was supposedly working undercover to bust to knock off her estranged but still legally married husband, make it look like suicide, marry her himself and split the fortune four ways.
The other gang members plot to ambush Anderson in their hotel room — they think he and Wally will be the only cops there — but Anderson figures it out, realizing that the only person who could have murdered Furman without arousing (physically and mentally) the sleeping deputy was someone who had a perfectly normal reason to be in the jail, and who had access to a key that would allow him to let himself into Furman’s cell. The Hammett story was adapted by Carl Bixby and directed by Frank Schaffner — who, as Franklin J. Schaffner, would later helm such important high-quality feature films as The Best Man and Patton — and though he was hamstrung by the limitations of live TV (where, quite frankly, you were lucky if you got a picture at all; they generally used three cameras but quite often one camera went out in the middle of a telecast and the director had to improvise frantically to keep the show on the air with the remaining two) he tried to get the noir atmosphere important to filming Hammett; at one point, he shot Ethel Furman through the vertical rails of her hotel bed — an obvious visual quote from the famous scene at the end of The Maltese Falcon where the bars of the elevator gate are pulled closed in front of Mary Astor and symbolize the prison bars that will soon enclose her murderess character — and though the actors were not identified with their roles in the credits, this was nonetheless a generally well-acted TV episode, intelligently adapted by Bixby even though he made some curious changes to Hammett’s original.
In the story, which is told first-person by Anderson, Ethel Furman is a patsy rather than part of the plot — Wally is just courting her for her husband’s money but she’s genuinely in love with him and doesn’t realize that — and there is no daughter (in the story they had one, but she died in infancy, precipitating the breakup of the Furmans’ marriage), whereas Bixby quite powerfully uses the daughter to arouse guilt feelings in Ethel and lead her to confess to Anderson and name her co-conspirators. There aren’t any co-conspirators in the story; the plot is Wally’s own and he’s implementing it without help. There’s a hard-bitten blonde woman in the story but she’s just Ethel Furman’s traveling companion, not a part of the murder plot; and the faked wanted poster ostensibly comes from a private detective agency (whose head sees it and pronounces it a fake but quite a good one, done on their authentic letterhead) rather than the police department, but for the most part the story and the TV version track pretty closely, and in at least one respect the show improves on the story by making more of the political rivalry between the police chief and the D.A. — not surprising since Studio One had already done a TV version of Hammett’s novel The Glass Key, which focused on two equally corrupt factions (though one was posing as “reformers”) fighting over control of a major city. Two Sharp Knives was an unusually well-done live TV show based on an obscure story by a major author, even though Bixby’s script omitted the philosophical tag that gave the piece its title: a (supposed) old proverb, “To a sharp knife comes a tough steak.”
Sunday, September 12, 2010
There Was a Crooked Man (CBS-TV “Studio One,” 1950)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I had a late night and I squeezed in a movie — actually a 1950 Studio One TV episode called “There Was a Crooked Man,” an evocative title that was easily the best thing about this surprisingly dull piece. The title was also used for a 1970 Western feature directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, starring Kirk Douglas and Henry Fonda, which I haven’t seen but which Leonard Maltin describes as a “bawdy, entertaining Western-comedy-prison film with Douglas as cocky inmate at territorial prison c. 1883 who matches wits with progressive warden Fonda towards one goal: escape.” That plot has nothing to do with the story of this “There Was a Crooked Man,” first aired on June 19, 1950 (episode 41 of the series’ second season — today no show outside of news programs ever gets near 41 episodes in a single season!), is an adaptation by Charles Monroe of a story by Kelly Roos about the residents of a New York City boarding house — which seems a bit retro that late, especially since at least two of the women living there are married and their husbands return from overseas during the course of the story — and it’s a dull domestic comedy with a dull murder mystery grafted on (this was in the Mill Creek Entertainment 50-film Dark Crimes DVD box but barely qualified) in which the victim is Otis Block (Robert Emhardt), a resident in a wheelchair (he lives on the second floor and, since the building has no elevator, has to be carried down when meals are served and then carried back up), and the killer — as we figure out about an act before the characters do — is Professor Simons (Richard Purdy), who’s “outed” as the likely killer when we see him fooling around with his beard in a way that reveals that it’s fake.
The leads are Haila Troy (Virginia Gilmore) and her recently returned servicemember husband, Jeff Troy (Robert Sterling, top-billed), and there’s an interesting red herring in the vicious little meanie Paul Collins (Charles Korvin), whom we learn is an S.O.B. when he kicks the boarding-house cat just for the sick fun of it (more than once!). The motive has something to do with what would now be called an “affinity scam” the professor and some alumni of Columbia University were running on fellow alumni, hitting them up for handouts in the name of their old college ties — though it was hard for me to figure out what was supposed to have been illegal about that and why someone would kill rather than risk having that exposed. It was such a dull TV episode the period Westinghouse commercials featuring Betty Furness actually seemed like a relief from the boredom of the show, and early on I spotted an intriguing error: the phony professor is supposed to have got a drawing on his back, having sat outside and leaned against the building where a boy had drawn a face — only the drawing on the professor’s coat faces the same way as the drawing on the wall (it should be a mirror image).
Charles and I had a late night and I squeezed in a movie — actually a 1950 Studio One TV episode called “There Was a Crooked Man,” an evocative title that was easily the best thing about this surprisingly dull piece. The title was also used for a 1970 Western feature directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, starring Kirk Douglas and Henry Fonda, which I haven’t seen but which Leonard Maltin describes as a “bawdy, entertaining Western-comedy-prison film with Douglas as cocky inmate at territorial prison c. 1883 who matches wits with progressive warden Fonda towards one goal: escape.” That plot has nothing to do with the story of this “There Was a Crooked Man,” first aired on June 19, 1950 (episode 41 of the series’ second season — today no show outside of news programs ever gets near 41 episodes in a single season!), is an adaptation by Charles Monroe of a story by Kelly Roos about the residents of a New York City boarding house — which seems a bit retro that late, especially since at least two of the women living there are married and their husbands return from overseas during the course of the story — and it’s a dull domestic comedy with a dull murder mystery grafted on (this was in the Mill Creek Entertainment 50-film Dark Crimes DVD box but barely qualified) in which the victim is Otis Block (Robert Emhardt), a resident in a wheelchair (he lives on the second floor and, since the building has no elevator, has to be carried down when meals are served and then carried back up), and the killer — as we figure out about an act before the characters do — is Professor Simons (Richard Purdy), who’s “outed” as the likely killer when we see him fooling around with his beard in a way that reveals that it’s fake.
The leads are Haila Troy (Virginia Gilmore) and her recently returned servicemember husband, Jeff Troy (Robert Sterling, top-billed), and there’s an interesting red herring in the vicious little meanie Paul Collins (Charles Korvin), whom we learn is an S.O.B. when he kicks the boarding-house cat just for the sick fun of it (more than once!). The motive has something to do with what would now be called an “affinity scam” the professor and some alumni of Columbia University were running on fellow alumni, hitting them up for handouts in the name of their old college ties — though it was hard for me to figure out what was supposed to have been illegal about that and why someone would kill rather than risk having that exposed. It was such a dull TV episode the period Westinghouse commercials featuring Betty Furness actually seemed like a relief from the boredom of the show, and early on I spotted an intriguing error: the phony professor is supposed to have got a drawing on his back, having sat outside and leaned against the building where a boy had drawn a face — only the drawing on the professor’s coat faces the same way as the drawing on the wall (it should be a mirror image).
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Charlie Chan in Rio (20th Century-Fox, 1941)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008, 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles the last film on the Murder on a Honeymoon/Trouble in Paradise tape: Charlie Chan in Rio, a 1941 series entry from 20th Century-Fox (a year before they abandoned the series and sold the rights to star Sidney Toler, who in turn sold them to Monogram Pictures two years later) that, though the official credits stated was written by Samuel G. Engel and Lester Ziffren and merely “based on the character ‘Charlie Chan’ created by Earl Derr Biggers,” was actually a fairly exact remake of the second Fox Chan film, The Black Camel, which in turn was based on one of Biggers’ actual Chan novels. The locale was changed (the original took place in Chan’s stomping grounds of Honolulu), Biggers’ elaborate shipboard prologue was jettisoned (as it had been in the script for the 1931 film, credited to Hugh Stange, Barry Conners and Philip Klein and with some uncredited continuity contributions by Dudley Nichols, of all people), the first murder victim was demoted from movie star Shelah Fane to nightclub entertainer Lola Dean (Jacqueline Dalya) and the phony mystic, called “Tarneverro” in Biggers’ novel (and played superbly by Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film), was rechristened “Marana” and played by Victor Jory (which made the payoff that he was really the brother-in-law of the murder victim in the backstory more believable even though Jory was hardly the charismatic screen presence Lugosi was!). Indeed, all the character names except Chan’s were changed.
Though Charlie Chan in Rio was definitely a “B” movie (only 62 minutes long, 10 minutes shorter than the 1931 Black Camel), it still had the production polish of a major-studio film. Director Harry Lachman — a quirky and underrated filmmaker almost totally forgotten today even though he established cinematographer Rudolf Maté’s American career in Hollywood by using him on the visually spectacular Dante’s Inferno — and cinematographer Joseph P. MacDonald gave the film an atmospheric look rivaling that of Hamilton MacFadden’s direction in the original (ironically MacFadden was involved in this version as well — as an actor, playing the nerdy character of Bill Kellogg, boyfriend of one of the key suspects), though this film had a conventional background music score that was far less evocative than the marvelous use of Hawai’ian source music MacFadden had concocted for the original (at a time when most filmmakers believed background music in general was an outdated holdover from silent films that would fall into disuse in the sound era).
In this version Marana concocted a mixture of caffeine and a special herb he used to spike cigarettes, so when he gave his clients coffee and one of his special smokes they went into what the script described as a “semi-comatose state” and spilled their deepest, darkest secrets at his command — and the ultimate revelation of the murderer (Marana’s sister Barbara, using the name “Helen Ashby” [Kay Linaker], who was out for revenge against Lola Dean for having killed her husband when he refused to divorce Barbara and marry Lola) was dependent on Marana, her confederate, doing a reading of her in front of everybody but giving her a normal cigarette instead of one of his spiked ones, and having her fake a trance in which she denied all knowledge of the murder. (Charles said he’d seen this film as a kid and somehow that plot twist had stuck in his consciousness for 30 years!) The fact that the Chan series had held up for over a decade and could still produce a film this good (not great, mind you — with the possible exceptions of The Black Camel and Charlie Chan at the Opera, it would be hard to describe any of the Chan films as “great” — and those two only stand out because of the presence of major horror stars, Lugosi and Karloff respectively, as well as MacFadden’s atmospheric direction and highly creative scoring of the former) was pretty remarkable. — 2/16/03
•••••
I ran Charles the next-to-last film in the sequence of Charlie Chan movies from 20th Century-Fox, Charlie Chan in Rio, directed (as was its immediate predecessor, Dead Men Tell) by Harry Lachman, this time from a script by Samuel G. Engel and Lester Ziffren. Lachman’s direction was far less atmospheric than it had been in Dead Men Tell, alas, even though the story was considerably stronger since it was a remake of the 1931 Chan film The Black Camel, based on one of Earl Derr Biggers’ actual Chan novels instead of a studio concoction (though its origins in a Biggers novel aren’t credited and the only acknowledgment to Biggers is for creating the character of Charlie Chan). It also offers the only direct comparison available between Warner Oland and Sidney Toler as Chan in the same story, though at least part of the comparison suffers because of the overall formula the series had worked out between 1931 (when The Black Camel, the second Oland Chan and the only one of the first five to survive, was made) and 1941— particularly the comic-relief schtick involving one of Chan’s older sons. At least Victor Sen Yung is considerably less annoying here than he was in Dead Men Tell (where you really had to give Charlie Chan credit for keeping himself from killing his obnoxious kid).
As the title suggests, the story is moved from Honolulu to Rio de Janeiro — probably not only a nod to the Good Neighbor Policy and the suggestion from Franklin Roosevelt’s administration that the studios make good-neighborly pictures set in Latin America but also an excuse for 20th Century-Fox to recycle some of the elaborate sets they were building for the Carmen Miranda musicals (a playback of Miranda singing “I-I-I-I-I I Like You Very Much” even appears as a record supposedly made by cabaret performer Lola Dean, played by Jacqueline Dalya and assuming the plot function of Shelah Fane in The Black Camel as the much-hated woman whose murder early on sparks the plot) — and the character names are changed. Also, there’s a weird bit of how-the-mighty-have-fallen in that Hamilton MacFadden, who directed the 1931 Black Camel, is demoted to actor this time, playing Bill Kellogg, one of the young men who are competing with each other for Lola Dean’s dubious affections (though it’s clear on screen he’s at least a decade older than his rivals).
With only 61 minutes of running time to work with (as opposed to the 71 minutes Barry Conners and Philip Klein had on The Black Camel), Engel and Ziffren pulled one of the usual tricks of “B” mystery writers, short-changing us on motive and letting us in on whodunit while whydunit remained pretty much a muddle. Lachman had proved on Dead Men Tell that he could be a superbly atmospheric director even within the Chan formula and a “B” budget, but this time around he didn’t seem to be trying, playing much of the action in long shots and essentially phoning it in. (I couldn’t help but think that MacFadden probably recalled the days when he was directing this story and thought, “I could be doing it better than he is!”)
The opportunity for direct Oland vs. Toler comparison goes about the way you’d expect it to — pretty much the way the comparison between Bela Lugosi and Carlos Villarias in the English- and Spanish-language versions of the 1930 Universal Dracula, or between Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade in the 1931 Maltese Falcon and Humphrey Bogart in the 1941 version also go: between a perfectly competent professional actor who delivers a perfectly competent professional performance and an actor who seems born to the role, so perfectly fusing the character’s personality with his own that he seems to be playing himself. I still can’t help but wish 20th Century-Fox would have got Philip Ahn to play Chan after Oland’s death, not only because he was really Chinese (the Asian-American activists who complained about the Chan films in the 1970’s had a better case against them for not casting a genuinely Asian actor than for stereotyping — Chan may be a stereotype but at least he’s a positive stereotype, and the value clashes between Chan and his Americanized sons, who were played by Chinese actors, are well-wrought conflicts between the immigrant and the second generation not that different from the ones Oland had played, in a different ethnic context, with Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer) but because he could have come a lot closer than Toler to matching Oland’s success in dramatizing Chan as the product of a very different culture with a very different attitude towards life, love, death and time.
Charlie Chan in Rio is nowhere nearly as strongly cast as its predecessor; it’s nice to see Mary Beth Hughes as Joan Reynolds (whose husband Ken, played by Richard Derr, is one of the men on Lola Dean’s string) in full bitch cry (why she didn’t get to play more femmes fatales after her incandescent performance in Anthony Mann’s 1945 Republic “B” The Great Flamarion is a mystery to me) and Cobina Wright holds her own in their confrontations, but Victor Jory as the phony psychic — here called “Marana” — is perfectly competent but a far cry from Bela Lugosi, and I couldn’t help but wish Fox had got Lugosi to remake the role; Jory merely comes off as a sinister, pompous faker while Lugosi (playing a character posing as a psychic to nail the woman he was convinced had murdered his brother) gave a far richer performance with a much greater range of emotion. (Here as in the two Chandu the Magician movies, it’s surprising but also enlightening to see Lugosi play a part with far more emotional subtlety and definition than another actor in the same role.) Like most of the later Fox Chans, Charlie Chan in Rio benefits from the major-studio infrastructure (you don’t have to worry about the sets falling down on the hapless actors any moment as you do watching a Monogram movie!) and is a perfectly reasonable mystery, but it’s hardly a match for its predecessor from a decade earlier in the Chan series. — 9/11/10
I ran Charles the last film on the Murder on a Honeymoon/Trouble in Paradise tape: Charlie Chan in Rio, a 1941 series entry from 20th Century-Fox (a year before they abandoned the series and sold the rights to star Sidney Toler, who in turn sold them to Monogram Pictures two years later) that, though the official credits stated was written by Samuel G. Engel and Lester Ziffren and merely “based on the character ‘Charlie Chan’ created by Earl Derr Biggers,” was actually a fairly exact remake of the second Fox Chan film, The Black Camel, which in turn was based on one of Biggers’ actual Chan novels. The locale was changed (the original took place in Chan’s stomping grounds of Honolulu), Biggers’ elaborate shipboard prologue was jettisoned (as it had been in the script for the 1931 film, credited to Hugh Stange, Barry Conners and Philip Klein and with some uncredited continuity contributions by Dudley Nichols, of all people), the first murder victim was demoted from movie star Shelah Fane to nightclub entertainer Lola Dean (Jacqueline Dalya) and the phony mystic, called “Tarneverro” in Biggers’ novel (and played superbly by Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film), was rechristened “Marana” and played by Victor Jory (which made the payoff that he was really the brother-in-law of the murder victim in the backstory more believable even though Jory was hardly the charismatic screen presence Lugosi was!). Indeed, all the character names except Chan’s were changed.
Though Charlie Chan in Rio was definitely a “B” movie (only 62 minutes long, 10 minutes shorter than the 1931 Black Camel), it still had the production polish of a major-studio film. Director Harry Lachman — a quirky and underrated filmmaker almost totally forgotten today even though he established cinematographer Rudolf Maté’s American career in Hollywood by using him on the visually spectacular Dante’s Inferno — and cinematographer Joseph P. MacDonald gave the film an atmospheric look rivaling that of Hamilton MacFadden’s direction in the original (ironically MacFadden was involved in this version as well — as an actor, playing the nerdy character of Bill Kellogg, boyfriend of one of the key suspects), though this film had a conventional background music score that was far less evocative than the marvelous use of Hawai’ian source music MacFadden had concocted for the original (at a time when most filmmakers believed background music in general was an outdated holdover from silent films that would fall into disuse in the sound era).
In this version Marana concocted a mixture of caffeine and a special herb he used to spike cigarettes, so when he gave his clients coffee and one of his special smokes they went into what the script described as a “semi-comatose state” and spilled their deepest, darkest secrets at his command — and the ultimate revelation of the murderer (Marana’s sister Barbara, using the name “Helen Ashby” [Kay Linaker], who was out for revenge against Lola Dean for having killed her husband when he refused to divorce Barbara and marry Lola) was dependent on Marana, her confederate, doing a reading of her in front of everybody but giving her a normal cigarette instead of one of his spiked ones, and having her fake a trance in which she denied all knowledge of the murder. (Charles said he’d seen this film as a kid and somehow that plot twist had stuck in his consciousness for 30 years!) The fact that the Chan series had held up for over a decade and could still produce a film this good (not great, mind you — with the possible exceptions of The Black Camel and Charlie Chan at the Opera, it would be hard to describe any of the Chan films as “great” — and those two only stand out because of the presence of major horror stars, Lugosi and Karloff respectively, as well as MacFadden’s atmospheric direction and highly creative scoring of the former) was pretty remarkable. — 2/16/03
•••••
I ran Charles the next-to-last film in the sequence of Charlie Chan movies from 20th Century-Fox, Charlie Chan in Rio, directed (as was its immediate predecessor, Dead Men Tell) by Harry Lachman, this time from a script by Samuel G. Engel and Lester Ziffren. Lachman’s direction was far less atmospheric than it had been in Dead Men Tell, alas, even though the story was considerably stronger since it was a remake of the 1931 Chan film The Black Camel, based on one of Earl Derr Biggers’ actual Chan novels instead of a studio concoction (though its origins in a Biggers novel aren’t credited and the only acknowledgment to Biggers is for creating the character of Charlie Chan). It also offers the only direct comparison available between Warner Oland and Sidney Toler as Chan in the same story, though at least part of the comparison suffers because of the overall formula the series had worked out between 1931 (when The Black Camel, the second Oland Chan and the only one of the first five to survive, was made) and 1941— particularly the comic-relief schtick involving one of Chan’s older sons. At least Victor Sen Yung is considerably less annoying here than he was in Dead Men Tell (where you really had to give Charlie Chan credit for keeping himself from killing his obnoxious kid).
As the title suggests, the story is moved from Honolulu to Rio de Janeiro — probably not only a nod to the Good Neighbor Policy and the suggestion from Franklin Roosevelt’s administration that the studios make good-neighborly pictures set in Latin America but also an excuse for 20th Century-Fox to recycle some of the elaborate sets they were building for the Carmen Miranda musicals (a playback of Miranda singing “I-I-I-I-I I Like You Very Much” even appears as a record supposedly made by cabaret performer Lola Dean, played by Jacqueline Dalya and assuming the plot function of Shelah Fane in The Black Camel as the much-hated woman whose murder early on sparks the plot) — and the character names are changed. Also, there’s a weird bit of how-the-mighty-have-fallen in that Hamilton MacFadden, who directed the 1931 Black Camel, is demoted to actor this time, playing Bill Kellogg, one of the young men who are competing with each other for Lola Dean’s dubious affections (though it’s clear on screen he’s at least a decade older than his rivals).
With only 61 minutes of running time to work with (as opposed to the 71 minutes Barry Conners and Philip Klein had on The Black Camel), Engel and Ziffren pulled one of the usual tricks of “B” mystery writers, short-changing us on motive and letting us in on whodunit while whydunit remained pretty much a muddle. Lachman had proved on Dead Men Tell that he could be a superbly atmospheric director even within the Chan formula and a “B” budget, but this time around he didn’t seem to be trying, playing much of the action in long shots and essentially phoning it in. (I couldn’t help but think that MacFadden probably recalled the days when he was directing this story and thought, “I could be doing it better than he is!”)
The opportunity for direct Oland vs. Toler comparison goes about the way you’d expect it to — pretty much the way the comparison between Bela Lugosi and Carlos Villarias in the English- and Spanish-language versions of the 1930 Universal Dracula, or between Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade in the 1931 Maltese Falcon and Humphrey Bogart in the 1941 version also go: between a perfectly competent professional actor who delivers a perfectly competent professional performance and an actor who seems born to the role, so perfectly fusing the character’s personality with his own that he seems to be playing himself. I still can’t help but wish 20th Century-Fox would have got Philip Ahn to play Chan after Oland’s death, not only because he was really Chinese (the Asian-American activists who complained about the Chan films in the 1970’s had a better case against them for not casting a genuinely Asian actor than for stereotyping — Chan may be a stereotype but at least he’s a positive stereotype, and the value clashes between Chan and his Americanized sons, who were played by Chinese actors, are well-wrought conflicts between the immigrant and the second generation not that different from the ones Oland had played, in a different ethnic context, with Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer) but because he could have come a lot closer than Toler to matching Oland’s success in dramatizing Chan as the product of a very different culture with a very different attitude towards life, love, death and time.
Charlie Chan in Rio is nowhere nearly as strongly cast as its predecessor; it’s nice to see Mary Beth Hughes as Joan Reynolds (whose husband Ken, played by Richard Derr, is one of the men on Lola Dean’s string) in full bitch cry (why she didn’t get to play more femmes fatales after her incandescent performance in Anthony Mann’s 1945 Republic “B” The Great Flamarion is a mystery to me) and Cobina Wright holds her own in their confrontations, but Victor Jory as the phony psychic — here called “Marana” — is perfectly competent but a far cry from Bela Lugosi, and I couldn’t help but wish Fox had got Lugosi to remake the role; Jory merely comes off as a sinister, pompous faker while Lugosi (playing a character posing as a psychic to nail the woman he was convinced had murdered his brother) gave a far richer performance with a much greater range of emotion. (Here as in the two Chandu the Magician movies, it’s surprising but also enlightening to see Lugosi play a part with far more emotional subtlety and definition than another actor in the same role.) Like most of the later Fox Chans, Charlie Chan in Rio benefits from the major-studio infrastructure (you don’t have to worry about the sets falling down on the hapless actors any moment as you do watching a Monogram movie!) and is a perfectly reasonable mystery, but it’s hardly a match for its predecessor from a decade earlier in the Chan series. — 9/11/10
Friday, September 10, 2010
200 American (Third Day Productions, 2003)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I was looking for something “different” for our evening movie and found it in 200 American, an enigmatically titled Gay-themed independent film from 2003 produced, directed and written by Richard LeMay. Charles had brought in a copy of this and I looked at a bit of it just to see what it was, then decided to make it our film for the evening and looked it up on imdb.com, where it was described as a Gay romantic comedy. What it actually was was a quirky half-comedy, half-melodrama in which the central character is Conrad (Matt Walton), the openly Gay head of an advertising agency (and it’s a sign of the times that no one makes a big deal about this — he’s known around the office as a Gay man but it doesn’t seem to be affecting his career one way or the other) who’s known as a control freak both on and off the job. His control-freak tendencies have led to a breakup between him and his partner Martin (John-Dylan Howard) and when the movie opens he’s been single for three months, hasn’t had sex at all in that time and has decided to hire a male prostitute — whom he picks out from what appears to be a photo catalogue and calls directly on the phone. (This seemed awfully retro for a movie made and set in 2003: by now such dates are almost always made on the Internet.)
The hustler he hired duly shows up — he’s stopped at the door of his building but Conrad tells the doorman it’s O.K. to admit him — and introduces himself as Tyler (Sean Matic); he has an accent Conrad immediately recognizes as Australian (“Most people think I’m British,” he tells Conrad); and he won’t kiss Conrad but will do anything else with him as long as the money changes hands first. The film’s title comes from Tyler’s rates: 200 U.S. dollars (given that this is taking place in New York City one wonders what other sort of currency Tyler would expect to be paid in, though maybe we’re supposed to believe he gets a lot of tourists in from other countries) for a single sexual encounter and $1,000 for an entire evening. Conrad and Tyler go at it — director LeMay politely averts his cameras so his (mostly) straight actors don’t have to enact the actual homo down ’n’ dirty on screen — and Conrad is sufficiently satisfied that he offers Tyler the surcharge for a full night, only Tyler says he needs notice for that and he’s already booked himself with other clients. Conrad makes another date with Tyler for one week later and this time does reserve him for the entire evening — only to be disappointed when Tyler gets out of bed before Conrad does and is already ready to leave by the time Conrad wakes up.
Nonetheless their Gay-for-pay relationship continues and Conrad tells the story to his friend Louis (Mark Ford), a stereotypical Black dreadlocked gossip queen who can’t believe Conrad is actually paying for something others — especially others with Conrad’s physical and financial assets — can get for free. Conrad explains that by paying for sex directly he remains in control of the situation. LeMay’s debt to the film Pretty Woman — which one of the characters actually mentions in the dialogue — is pretty obvious; at first 200 American seems to be going all-out to be a Gay version of Pretty Woman, with Conrad as Richard Gere’s character and Tyler (whose real name, it turns out, is Ian — Tyler is simply his nom de hustle) as Julia Roberts’ — only things take several turns from the Pretty Woman formula (which itself was merely an updated and slightly raunchier version of Cinderella!) when it turns out that Ian is also an aspiring photographer.
Conrad offers to put him on a $2000 per week retainer and get him an assignment as an assistant to famous photographer Ted Foster (Spencer Aste). Conrad’s art director, Michael (Anthony Ames, whom I thought was the most attractive man in the film and the one I’d most like to date), protests that he can’t impose an assistant on a photographer with a major reputation “just because you happen to be sleeping with him,” especially since Ted already has an assistant, Tony (Justin Durishin), whose job seems to be holding the reflector during outdoor photo shoots so the light from the sun bounces off it and onto the models’ faces. Conrad’s deal with Ian includes complete and total access to Ian’s body whenever and wherever he wants it — including one tryst he orders Ian to have in an empty room at the ad agency during a work day. The plot lurches into quite a few more complications than LeMay can handle or keep track of as a writer; it turns out that Ian was lured to the U.S. by a lover named Douglas (whom we never see), only no sooner did he arrive than Douglas dumped him, and he hooked up with a woman named Sarah, who agreed to a pro forma marriage with him so he could stay in the U.S. but wanted $10,000 for the deal — which is why Ian started hustling: it was the only way he could think of to raise the money in time.
There’s an interesting scene during a break on a photo shoot in which Emily (Lucy Smith), the middle-aged but still reasonably attractive woman who owns the company Conrad’s agency is doing the photo shoots for, tells Conrad’s go-fer Heather (Constance Reardon) how hot she thinks Ian is and whether he would be available — but LeMay drops this plot twist almost as soon as he introduces it, a pity since the potential complications of a male hustler with a (mostly) Gay clientele who’s engaged to a woman but is really a closeted Gay man being approached by a female as a potential client would have been interesting — a lot more interesting than some of the plot devices LeMay actually did concoct. Among these are two weirdly misfired attempts at comedy — Tony takes Heather to an S/M dungeon called “Spank,” negotiates a mysterious transaction with the club’s (Black) owner, tricks Heather into being locked in a cage and then leaves her there (it turns out, in an even more retro plot gimmick than Conrad picking up his hustler by phone instead of online, that Tony is actually kidnapping women and selling them into white slavery in Saudi Arabia — and Heather escapes this fate only because the police were tailing Tony and arrested him and rescued her in the nick of time); and later Conrad goes to visit his ex, Martin, and catches him entertaining someone else; they end up in the building’s elevator and it gets stuck, leaving them trapped for three hours in a little box with two Black women who quite naturally resent having to listen to these two white Queers arguing at fortissimo volume — and a quite nice scene in which Conrad, invited to visit his parents, is forced to bring Martin along because his parents liked Martin and wouldn’t want to hear that they’d broken up. (At the end of the visit, with Conrad blurting out the secret, Conrad’s dad takes Martin aside and says that just because he’s just broken up with Conrad doesn’t mean that Martin can’t still be their friend.)
The rest of the movie features Michael and Ian slowly falling in love with each other; Ian worried about how Michael will react when he finds out Ian has been hustling; a party at which Louis (ya remember Louis?) blurts out Ian’s secret; and an old-line 1930’s Hollywood-style ending in which there’s a temporary misunderstanding before Michael and Ian finally pair up, and Conrad and Martin reconcile (though LeMay neglected to make Conrad’s “comeuppance” believable and we’re not convinced that Conrad is going to give up his control-freak tendencies just to keep his relationship together). I couldn’t help but compare 200 American to another film I saw recently that was a similar low-budget production (also shot on video instead of film) and also dealing with a Gay theme, Get a Life, and though it’s nice that Richard LeMay was able to concoct a Gay story in which none of the principals are involved in the casual-sex scene (even Conrad picks up a hustler at least in part because for a man like him it beats hanging out in bathrooms, bookstores and bathhouses looking for quickie tricks), 200 American is a much less entertaining film than Get a Life.
Part of the problem is endemic to any movie that tries for both humor and drama — done well (the way Chaplin did at his best) the humor and pathos reinforce each other; done poorly they just wrench us back and forth from one sort of story to another and create an uncertain tone which makes the film less entertaining than it otherwise would have been. Had LeMay abandoned the loony gags and worked out more believable ways to eliminate Tony as a character, get Ian the job as Ted Foster’s assistant and set up the reconciliation between Conrad and Martin (which is obviously what he thought should happen from the get-go even though it’s his single major deviation from the Pretty Woman template with which he started his script), he’d have had a stronger film. Had he been a bit clearer on Conrad’s preference in bed — some of the early dialogue hints that Conrad’s a bottom, and had LeMay stuck with that he could have drawn some interesting ironies between Conrad taking the active role in his business and the passive role in bed — and more ambiguous about Ian’s true sexual orientation, he would have given himself more to work with and had a much richer, deeper and more satisfying movie.
If Ian had been drawn as Bisexual, and had it been a woman (whom he would have been expecting to marry) instead of a man who had brought him to New York and then dumped him — and had he started hustling purely as a Gay-for-pay rent boy and only gradually discovered that he actually liked sex with men — his character would have been more powerfully ambiguous and LeMay could have got in some notions that challenged the essentialist “we’re born that way” version of sexual orientation and reflected the way people actually lived (much like the makers of Brokeback Mountain did — as disappointed as I was in much of that film and as overrated as I still think it was, it got that right: the characters’ sexualities were not crammed into nice neat little boxes labeled ‘straight” and “Gay” but had more of the ambiguity and confusion of the way people actually live and the attractions they sometime feel no matter how they define themselves on the straight-to-Queer continuum). But I suspect LeMay, whose business model was no doubt predicated on making a profit by selling DVD’s to Gay male buyers, probably didn’t want to do something that would rock his audience’s expectations in that fashion.
It also doesn’t help that 200 American isn’t that well acted; LeMay was criticized for using mostly heterosexual men to play his Gay characters, and while that’s bothered me in the past (when I read in the Los Angeles Times that Robin Williams was being considered for a Harvey Milk biopic, I wrote a letter to the editor that said, “Hiring a straight man to play Harvey Milk makes about as much sense as hiring a white man to play Martin Luther King” — and when the Milk movie finally got made with card-carrying het Sean Penn, I avoided it until its DVD release largely because of my upset that they hadn’t cast an openly Gay actor — though Penn’s performance, while not reflecting everything that could have been done with the part, at least was good enough that for two hours I suspended disbelief and accepted him as a Gay man) it bothered me this time less than LeMay’s defense, which was that he wanted “strong, realistic acting” and didn’t think he could get that from openly Gay actors. (His argument seemed to be that the genuinely talented Gay actors are all closeted and scared to death of being “outed” from the reasonable fear that it will destroy their chances at mainstream stardom.)
Well, he didn’t get “strong, realistic acting” from the actors he did hire, who seemed to be O.K. with the limited amount of physical affection LeMay obliged them to show (just a few quick kisses and body strokes) but whose delivery of dialogue, while hardly at the porn-star level of incompetence, didn’t have the kind of tough, intense conviction I would have expected from professional actors either. I wouldn’t be going on at this length about a film that left me as cold as 200 American did except that it’s a film I wanted to be able to like, yet another bad movie that with more care and imagination in the scripting stage and a stronger cast could have been quite good even on the limited budget LeMay had available.
I was looking for something “different” for our evening movie and found it in 200 American, an enigmatically titled Gay-themed independent film from 2003 produced, directed and written by Richard LeMay. Charles had brought in a copy of this and I looked at a bit of it just to see what it was, then decided to make it our film for the evening and looked it up on imdb.com, where it was described as a Gay romantic comedy. What it actually was was a quirky half-comedy, half-melodrama in which the central character is Conrad (Matt Walton), the openly Gay head of an advertising agency (and it’s a sign of the times that no one makes a big deal about this — he’s known around the office as a Gay man but it doesn’t seem to be affecting his career one way or the other) who’s known as a control freak both on and off the job. His control-freak tendencies have led to a breakup between him and his partner Martin (John-Dylan Howard) and when the movie opens he’s been single for three months, hasn’t had sex at all in that time and has decided to hire a male prostitute — whom he picks out from what appears to be a photo catalogue and calls directly on the phone. (This seemed awfully retro for a movie made and set in 2003: by now such dates are almost always made on the Internet.)
The hustler he hired duly shows up — he’s stopped at the door of his building but Conrad tells the doorman it’s O.K. to admit him — and introduces himself as Tyler (Sean Matic); he has an accent Conrad immediately recognizes as Australian (“Most people think I’m British,” he tells Conrad); and he won’t kiss Conrad but will do anything else with him as long as the money changes hands first. The film’s title comes from Tyler’s rates: 200 U.S. dollars (given that this is taking place in New York City one wonders what other sort of currency Tyler would expect to be paid in, though maybe we’re supposed to believe he gets a lot of tourists in from other countries) for a single sexual encounter and $1,000 for an entire evening. Conrad and Tyler go at it — director LeMay politely averts his cameras so his (mostly) straight actors don’t have to enact the actual homo down ’n’ dirty on screen — and Conrad is sufficiently satisfied that he offers Tyler the surcharge for a full night, only Tyler says he needs notice for that and he’s already booked himself with other clients. Conrad makes another date with Tyler for one week later and this time does reserve him for the entire evening — only to be disappointed when Tyler gets out of bed before Conrad does and is already ready to leave by the time Conrad wakes up.
Nonetheless their Gay-for-pay relationship continues and Conrad tells the story to his friend Louis (Mark Ford), a stereotypical Black dreadlocked gossip queen who can’t believe Conrad is actually paying for something others — especially others with Conrad’s physical and financial assets — can get for free. Conrad explains that by paying for sex directly he remains in control of the situation. LeMay’s debt to the film Pretty Woman — which one of the characters actually mentions in the dialogue — is pretty obvious; at first 200 American seems to be going all-out to be a Gay version of Pretty Woman, with Conrad as Richard Gere’s character and Tyler (whose real name, it turns out, is Ian — Tyler is simply his nom de hustle) as Julia Roberts’ — only things take several turns from the Pretty Woman formula (which itself was merely an updated and slightly raunchier version of Cinderella!) when it turns out that Ian is also an aspiring photographer.
Conrad offers to put him on a $2000 per week retainer and get him an assignment as an assistant to famous photographer Ted Foster (Spencer Aste). Conrad’s art director, Michael (Anthony Ames, whom I thought was the most attractive man in the film and the one I’d most like to date), protests that he can’t impose an assistant on a photographer with a major reputation “just because you happen to be sleeping with him,” especially since Ted already has an assistant, Tony (Justin Durishin), whose job seems to be holding the reflector during outdoor photo shoots so the light from the sun bounces off it and onto the models’ faces. Conrad’s deal with Ian includes complete and total access to Ian’s body whenever and wherever he wants it — including one tryst he orders Ian to have in an empty room at the ad agency during a work day. The plot lurches into quite a few more complications than LeMay can handle or keep track of as a writer; it turns out that Ian was lured to the U.S. by a lover named Douglas (whom we never see), only no sooner did he arrive than Douglas dumped him, and he hooked up with a woman named Sarah, who agreed to a pro forma marriage with him so he could stay in the U.S. but wanted $10,000 for the deal — which is why Ian started hustling: it was the only way he could think of to raise the money in time.
There’s an interesting scene during a break on a photo shoot in which Emily (Lucy Smith), the middle-aged but still reasonably attractive woman who owns the company Conrad’s agency is doing the photo shoots for, tells Conrad’s go-fer Heather (Constance Reardon) how hot she thinks Ian is and whether he would be available — but LeMay drops this plot twist almost as soon as he introduces it, a pity since the potential complications of a male hustler with a (mostly) Gay clientele who’s engaged to a woman but is really a closeted Gay man being approached by a female as a potential client would have been interesting — a lot more interesting than some of the plot devices LeMay actually did concoct. Among these are two weirdly misfired attempts at comedy — Tony takes Heather to an S/M dungeon called “Spank,” negotiates a mysterious transaction with the club’s (Black) owner, tricks Heather into being locked in a cage and then leaves her there (it turns out, in an even more retro plot gimmick than Conrad picking up his hustler by phone instead of online, that Tony is actually kidnapping women and selling them into white slavery in Saudi Arabia — and Heather escapes this fate only because the police were tailing Tony and arrested him and rescued her in the nick of time); and later Conrad goes to visit his ex, Martin, and catches him entertaining someone else; they end up in the building’s elevator and it gets stuck, leaving them trapped for three hours in a little box with two Black women who quite naturally resent having to listen to these two white Queers arguing at fortissimo volume — and a quite nice scene in which Conrad, invited to visit his parents, is forced to bring Martin along because his parents liked Martin and wouldn’t want to hear that they’d broken up. (At the end of the visit, with Conrad blurting out the secret, Conrad’s dad takes Martin aside and says that just because he’s just broken up with Conrad doesn’t mean that Martin can’t still be their friend.)
The rest of the movie features Michael and Ian slowly falling in love with each other; Ian worried about how Michael will react when he finds out Ian has been hustling; a party at which Louis (ya remember Louis?) blurts out Ian’s secret; and an old-line 1930’s Hollywood-style ending in which there’s a temporary misunderstanding before Michael and Ian finally pair up, and Conrad and Martin reconcile (though LeMay neglected to make Conrad’s “comeuppance” believable and we’re not convinced that Conrad is going to give up his control-freak tendencies just to keep his relationship together). I couldn’t help but compare 200 American to another film I saw recently that was a similar low-budget production (also shot on video instead of film) and also dealing with a Gay theme, Get a Life, and though it’s nice that Richard LeMay was able to concoct a Gay story in which none of the principals are involved in the casual-sex scene (even Conrad picks up a hustler at least in part because for a man like him it beats hanging out in bathrooms, bookstores and bathhouses looking for quickie tricks), 200 American is a much less entertaining film than Get a Life.
Part of the problem is endemic to any movie that tries for both humor and drama — done well (the way Chaplin did at his best) the humor and pathos reinforce each other; done poorly they just wrench us back and forth from one sort of story to another and create an uncertain tone which makes the film less entertaining than it otherwise would have been. Had LeMay abandoned the loony gags and worked out more believable ways to eliminate Tony as a character, get Ian the job as Ted Foster’s assistant and set up the reconciliation between Conrad and Martin (which is obviously what he thought should happen from the get-go even though it’s his single major deviation from the Pretty Woman template with which he started his script), he’d have had a stronger film. Had he been a bit clearer on Conrad’s preference in bed — some of the early dialogue hints that Conrad’s a bottom, and had LeMay stuck with that he could have drawn some interesting ironies between Conrad taking the active role in his business and the passive role in bed — and more ambiguous about Ian’s true sexual orientation, he would have given himself more to work with and had a much richer, deeper and more satisfying movie.
If Ian had been drawn as Bisexual, and had it been a woman (whom he would have been expecting to marry) instead of a man who had brought him to New York and then dumped him — and had he started hustling purely as a Gay-for-pay rent boy and only gradually discovered that he actually liked sex with men — his character would have been more powerfully ambiguous and LeMay could have got in some notions that challenged the essentialist “we’re born that way” version of sexual orientation and reflected the way people actually lived (much like the makers of Brokeback Mountain did — as disappointed as I was in much of that film and as overrated as I still think it was, it got that right: the characters’ sexualities were not crammed into nice neat little boxes labeled ‘straight” and “Gay” but had more of the ambiguity and confusion of the way people actually live and the attractions they sometime feel no matter how they define themselves on the straight-to-Queer continuum). But I suspect LeMay, whose business model was no doubt predicated on making a profit by selling DVD’s to Gay male buyers, probably didn’t want to do something that would rock his audience’s expectations in that fashion.
It also doesn’t help that 200 American isn’t that well acted; LeMay was criticized for using mostly heterosexual men to play his Gay characters, and while that’s bothered me in the past (when I read in the Los Angeles Times that Robin Williams was being considered for a Harvey Milk biopic, I wrote a letter to the editor that said, “Hiring a straight man to play Harvey Milk makes about as much sense as hiring a white man to play Martin Luther King” — and when the Milk movie finally got made with card-carrying het Sean Penn, I avoided it until its DVD release largely because of my upset that they hadn’t cast an openly Gay actor — though Penn’s performance, while not reflecting everything that could have been done with the part, at least was good enough that for two hours I suspended disbelief and accepted him as a Gay man) it bothered me this time less than LeMay’s defense, which was that he wanted “strong, realistic acting” and didn’t think he could get that from openly Gay actors. (His argument seemed to be that the genuinely talented Gay actors are all closeted and scared to death of being “outed” from the reasonable fear that it will destroy their chances at mainstream stardom.)
Well, he didn’t get “strong, realistic acting” from the actors he did hire, who seemed to be O.K. with the limited amount of physical affection LeMay obliged them to show (just a few quick kisses and body strokes) but whose delivery of dialogue, while hardly at the porn-star level of incompetence, didn’t have the kind of tough, intense conviction I would have expected from professional actors either. I wouldn’t be going on at this length about a film that left me as cold as 200 American did except that it’s a film I wanted to be able to like, yet another bad movie that with more care and imagination in the scripting stage and a stronger cast could have been quite good even on the limited budget LeMay had available.
Dead Men Tell (20th Century-Fox, 1941)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Afterwards I ran Charles the next film in sequence in the volume five boxed set of Charlie Chan movies from 20th Century-Fox, Dead Men Tell — a spookier title for a spookier movie than the norm for this series, and one in which Chan (Sidney Toler) sometimes seems to be a bystander in his own vehicle. It was released on the same date (March 28, 1941) as the Universal “B” Horror Island, and it has the same plot premise: an entrepreneur has booked a ship and has announced that they’re selling tickets to a cruise to a deserted island that supposedly was a hideout for pirates in the old days and has $6 million worth of buried treasure — only this time the ship is a sailing vessel instead of a motorized fishing boat, and the thrills come from the mysterious murders of two of the people aboard, Miss Patience Nodbury (Ethel Griffies) and Bill Lydig (an almost unrecognizable George Reeves — anyone expecting Superman to team up with Chan to solve the mystery would be sorely disappointed).
Chan gets into the action when his Number Two Son Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung) stows away aboard the ship — which, unlike the one in Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise, never leaves the dock — and the main thing I remembered from having seen the movie before is a preposterous dock set in which at least two of the doorways open straight onto a multi-story drop to the water (needless to say, Jimmy Chan takes no fewer than four headers into the briny over the course of the movie). The best aspect of this film is the direction by Henry Lachman, a Fox workhorse who seemed relegated to the “B”’s except for one genuinely good “A” he made in 1935 just before the 20th Century-Fox merger: Dante’s Inferno, which starred Spencer Tracy as a proletarian who rises to gambling entrepreneur and also marked the official screen debut of Rita Hayworth (though it was in production for so long two other movies she’d shot later, including Charlie Chan in Egypt, got released first). Aided by the chiaroscuro cinematography of Charles G. Clarke (a more prestigious name than one usually sees on a “B”), Lachman gives us oddly cropped screen-filling closeups shot in a surprisingly Wellesian manner, and his offbeat angles and lighting propel us into the action even though there’s not much action to be propelled into.
It’s one of those mysteries with a dizzying series of red herrings and a denouement that makes absolutely no sense — one gets the impression writer John Larkin just wrote all the names of his characters on slips of paper, posted them onto a billboard, threw a dart at them and whichever name the dart hit was the one he made the murderer. Lachman also directed the next Charlie Chan film, Charlie Chan in Rio, which I had already commented on and I recall as a much better film than this, probably because it came from an actual Earl Derr Biggers Chan story, The Black Camel, instead of a concoction from the 20th Century-Fox writers’ building — even though there was a how-the-mighty-have-fallen aspect to it in that Hamilton MacFadden, who had directed the superb original version of The Black Camel in 1931 (with Warner Oland as Chan, his second film in the role and the only one of his first five which survives) and also directed the 1934 musical Stand Up and Cheer which made Shirley Temple a star, was reduced to acting in Charlie Chan in Rio in a character role.
Afterwards I ran Charles the next film in sequence in the volume five boxed set of Charlie Chan movies from 20th Century-Fox, Dead Men Tell — a spookier title for a spookier movie than the norm for this series, and one in which Chan (Sidney Toler) sometimes seems to be a bystander in his own vehicle. It was released on the same date (March 28, 1941) as the Universal “B” Horror Island, and it has the same plot premise: an entrepreneur has booked a ship and has announced that they’re selling tickets to a cruise to a deserted island that supposedly was a hideout for pirates in the old days and has $6 million worth of buried treasure — only this time the ship is a sailing vessel instead of a motorized fishing boat, and the thrills come from the mysterious murders of two of the people aboard, Miss Patience Nodbury (Ethel Griffies) and Bill Lydig (an almost unrecognizable George Reeves — anyone expecting Superman to team up with Chan to solve the mystery would be sorely disappointed).
Chan gets into the action when his Number Two Son Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung) stows away aboard the ship — which, unlike the one in Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise, never leaves the dock — and the main thing I remembered from having seen the movie before is a preposterous dock set in which at least two of the doorways open straight onto a multi-story drop to the water (needless to say, Jimmy Chan takes no fewer than four headers into the briny over the course of the movie). The best aspect of this film is the direction by Henry Lachman, a Fox workhorse who seemed relegated to the “B”’s except for one genuinely good “A” he made in 1935 just before the 20th Century-Fox merger: Dante’s Inferno, which starred Spencer Tracy as a proletarian who rises to gambling entrepreneur and also marked the official screen debut of Rita Hayworth (though it was in production for so long two other movies she’d shot later, including Charlie Chan in Egypt, got released first). Aided by the chiaroscuro cinematography of Charles G. Clarke (a more prestigious name than one usually sees on a “B”), Lachman gives us oddly cropped screen-filling closeups shot in a surprisingly Wellesian manner, and his offbeat angles and lighting propel us into the action even though there’s not much action to be propelled into.
It’s one of those mysteries with a dizzying series of red herrings and a denouement that makes absolutely no sense — one gets the impression writer John Larkin just wrote all the names of his characters on slips of paper, posted them onto a billboard, threw a dart at them and whichever name the dart hit was the one he made the murderer. Lachman also directed the next Charlie Chan film, Charlie Chan in Rio, which I had already commented on and I recall as a much better film than this, probably because it came from an actual Earl Derr Biggers Chan story, The Black Camel, instead of a concoction from the 20th Century-Fox writers’ building — even though there was a how-the-mighty-have-fallen aspect to it in that Hamilton MacFadden, who had directed the superb original version of The Black Camel in 1931 (with Warner Oland as Chan, his second film in the role and the only one of his first five which survives) and also directed the 1934 musical Stand Up and Cheer which made Shirley Temple a star, was reduced to acting in Charlie Chan in Rio in a character role.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Date Night (21 League/20th Century-Fox, 2010)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was Date Night, a recent (released April 9, 2010) comedy starring Steve Carell and Tina Fey as Phil and Claire Foster, a long-time married couple with two kids who like to wake their parents up by jumping on them in bed — which is about the most exciting thing that happens to the adult Fosters all day. (It made both Charles and I feel old to see the movie open with the Ramones’ song “Blitzkrieg Bop” used as the background for a deliberately boring scene showing the utter staidness and predictability of the Fosters’ lifestyle.) One night a week they hire a babysitter so they can go on a “date night,” just the two of them presumably reproducing the excitement they felt when they were first courting each other before they settled into dull domesticity — only even that’s become a boring routine of their own, always going to the same local restaurant (they live in New Jersey and even their town’s distance from New York becomes a joke in the film — Phil’s a tax preparer and Claire’s a realtor — or is that a Realtor? — and when he says they live only 20 minutes from New York City she corrects him and says it’s an hour; he says, “When you show people houses you say it’s only 20 minutes from the city,” and she says, “I’m lying. It’s really an hour”) and ordering the same thing (salmon and potato skins — the first time we see them do this he complains that the dish is mushier than usual).
For the second “date night” we see in the film, and the one that the story centers around, he insists on going to New York City and eating at the trendy (and ultra-high-priced; when she sees the menu she says, “If I’m going to order crab at these prices it better sing, dance and introduce the Little Mermaid”) seafood restaurant Claw — only the snippy stereotype-queen maitre d’ refuses to give them a table without a reservation. So when a couple called the Tripplehorns (an in-joke reference to the actress Jeanne Tripplehorn, whom I remember only as Kevin Costner’s sort-of love interest in Waterworld) get called for their reservations but don’t show, Phil hits on the idea of taking their reservation and getting seated. All goes well — they have a fabulous meal even though they probably had to take out a second mortgage on their home to pay for it — until two tall, rather hunky mystery men accost them and escort them outside. At first they think they’re just being thrown out of the restaurant for poaching someone else’s reservation, but soon it develops that these are Collins (Common) and Armstrong (Jimmi Simpson), strong-arm men for gangster Joe Miletto (Ray Liotta, who acted with the real Jeanne Tripplehorn in the 2009 film Crazy on the Outside). They’re after a flash drive the Tripplehorns stole from Liotta that has some deep, dark secret information on it, and they’re armed and ready to kill the Fosters if they don’t come across with the drive.
From then on — 26 minutes into a 93-minute film (not counting the extended credits sequence on the DVD, which features supposed “bloopers” from the original shoot — though I suspect some, if not all of them, were deliberately staged malapropisms made to look like spontaneous mistakes) — it’s basically a chase in which the innocent young couple realize pretty quickly that they can’t go to the police with their predicament because when they try — and blurt out some of their story to a female officer, Detective Arroyo (Taraji P. Henson) — they see Collins and Armstrong in the police station and realize the thugs that are after them are police officers. The film is perched uneasily between thriller and comedy, and some of the attempts at humor fall flat because it’s hard to laugh at two people who are in mortal danger from two implacable assassins who are also corrupt cops, but there are some brilliant gags — as when, in an attempt to flee the thugs in Central Park, the Fosters get into a motorboat and try to get away by water, only to find that the thing can’t go more than five miles an hour, so they end up fleeing by land and holding the boat over them as a shield à la the oil drums at the end of The Killer Shrews.
There’s also a great sequence in which the Fosters, having hooked up with a mercenary secret agent, Holbrooke Grant (Mark Wahlberg, shown shirtless through all his appearances), with state-of-the-art computer equipment and killer pecs, end up stealing his car and getting it inextricably fastened to a Yellow Cab driven by an African-American who seems to be channeling Eddie Murphy. The gag of two cars hooked together and unable to separate is at least as old as the Hal Roach Studios (the film I thought of was Kelly the Second, where the gag brought the film’s comic leads, Patsy Kelly and Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, together) and probably even older than that, but it’s the most screamingly funny gag in the film! Eventually the Fosters have to pose as an androgynous strip team to get into a private club called the Peppermint Hippo (a reference to South Park and apparently also a take-off on a real establishment, the Spearmint Rhino) because what’s so ridiculously important on that flash drive has turned out to be the supposedly squeaky-clean district attorney, Frank Crenshaw (William Fichtner), who seems either writer Josh Klausner’s take-off on Elliott Spitzer or a fugitive from a Carl Hiaasen novel, since he’s about as polymorphously perverse as Klausner and director Shawn Levy could make him and still keep their PG-13 rating; and as for the Tripplehorns, they turn out to be a low-life criminal couple named Taste (a surprisingly plump and seedy-looking James Franco) and Whippit (Mila Kunis — her alias comes not from the breed of dog but from the practice of sniffing the gases from a nearly used-up aerosol can of whipped cream), and it’s not their real name either: Taste just happened to use “Tripplehorn” as an alias because he had a mad crush on Jeanne Tripplehorn.
Eventually all ends more or less well — the good cops bust the bad cops and the corrupt D.A. and the Fosters go back to their suburban existence, albeit the last scene is a long-shot of them apparently having sex with each other in broad daylight on their front lawn, indicating that their horrible “date night” has shaken loose some of their inhibitions and rekindled their relationship. Date Night is a film that could have been screamingly funny instead of moderately amusing, and it’s derivative as all get-out (I noticed similarities to The Out-of-Towners and Charles ditto to Who’s That Girl?, which itself was reworked from Bringing Up Baby and What’s Up, Doc?), but it’s a nice little movie that (aside from a couple of scenes of Steve Carell retching) mostly avoids the offensive attempts to find humor in involuntary bodily functions that mar so many so-called “comedies” made today. Still, it’s amazing that a major-studio (20th Century-Fox) production with big stars noted for humor can’t even approach the laughs-per-minute quotient of a low-budget indie like Kabluey!
Our “feature” last night was Date Night, a recent (released April 9, 2010) comedy starring Steve Carell and Tina Fey as Phil and Claire Foster, a long-time married couple with two kids who like to wake their parents up by jumping on them in bed — which is about the most exciting thing that happens to the adult Fosters all day. (It made both Charles and I feel old to see the movie open with the Ramones’ song “Blitzkrieg Bop” used as the background for a deliberately boring scene showing the utter staidness and predictability of the Fosters’ lifestyle.) One night a week they hire a babysitter so they can go on a “date night,” just the two of them presumably reproducing the excitement they felt when they were first courting each other before they settled into dull domesticity — only even that’s become a boring routine of their own, always going to the same local restaurant (they live in New Jersey and even their town’s distance from New York becomes a joke in the film — Phil’s a tax preparer and Claire’s a realtor — or is that a Realtor? — and when he says they live only 20 minutes from New York City she corrects him and says it’s an hour; he says, “When you show people houses you say it’s only 20 minutes from the city,” and she says, “I’m lying. It’s really an hour”) and ordering the same thing (salmon and potato skins — the first time we see them do this he complains that the dish is mushier than usual).
For the second “date night” we see in the film, and the one that the story centers around, he insists on going to New York City and eating at the trendy (and ultra-high-priced; when she sees the menu she says, “If I’m going to order crab at these prices it better sing, dance and introduce the Little Mermaid”) seafood restaurant Claw — only the snippy stereotype-queen maitre d’ refuses to give them a table without a reservation. So when a couple called the Tripplehorns (an in-joke reference to the actress Jeanne Tripplehorn, whom I remember only as Kevin Costner’s sort-of love interest in Waterworld) get called for their reservations but don’t show, Phil hits on the idea of taking their reservation and getting seated. All goes well — they have a fabulous meal even though they probably had to take out a second mortgage on their home to pay for it — until two tall, rather hunky mystery men accost them and escort them outside. At first they think they’re just being thrown out of the restaurant for poaching someone else’s reservation, but soon it develops that these are Collins (Common) and Armstrong (Jimmi Simpson), strong-arm men for gangster Joe Miletto (Ray Liotta, who acted with the real Jeanne Tripplehorn in the 2009 film Crazy on the Outside). They’re after a flash drive the Tripplehorns stole from Liotta that has some deep, dark secret information on it, and they’re armed and ready to kill the Fosters if they don’t come across with the drive.
From then on — 26 minutes into a 93-minute film (not counting the extended credits sequence on the DVD, which features supposed “bloopers” from the original shoot — though I suspect some, if not all of them, were deliberately staged malapropisms made to look like spontaneous mistakes) — it’s basically a chase in which the innocent young couple realize pretty quickly that they can’t go to the police with their predicament because when they try — and blurt out some of their story to a female officer, Detective Arroyo (Taraji P. Henson) — they see Collins and Armstrong in the police station and realize the thugs that are after them are police officers. The film is perched uneasily between thriller and comedy, and some of the attempts at humor fall flat because it’s hard to laugh at two people who are in mortal danger from two implacable assassins who are also corrupt cops, but there are some brilliant gags — as when, in an attempt to flee the thugs in Central Park, the Fosters get into a motorboat and try to get away by water, only to find that the thing can’t go more than five miles an hour, so they end up fleeing by land and holding the boat over them as a shield à la the oil drums at the end of The Killer Shrews.
There’s also a great sequence in which the Fosters, having hooked up with a mercenary secret agent, Holbrooke Grant (Mark Wahlberg, shown shirtless through all his appearances), with state-of-the-art computer equipment and killer pecs, end up stealing his car and getting it inextricably fastened to a Yellow Cab driven by an African-American who seems to be channeling Eddie Murphy. The gag of two cars hooked together and unable to separate is at least as old as the Hal Roach Studios (the film I thought of was Kelly the Second, where the gag brought the film’s comic leads, Patsy Kelly and Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, together) and probably even older than that, but it’s the most screamingly funny gag in the film! Eventually the Fosters have to pose as an androgynous strip team to get into a private club called the Peppermint Hippo (a reference to South Park and apparently also a take-off on a real establishment, the Spearmint Rhino) because what’s so ridiculously important on that flash drive has turned out to be the supposedly squeaky-clean district attorney, Frank Crenshaw (William Fichtner), who seems either writer Josh Klausner’s take-off on Elliott Spitzer or a fugitive from a Carl Hiaasen novel, since he’s about as polymorphously perverse as Klausner and director Shawn Levy could make him and still keep their PG-13 rating; and as for the Tripplehorns, they turn out to be a low-life criminal couple named Taste (a surprisingly plump and seedy-looking James Franco) and Whippit (Mila Kunis — her alias comes not from the breed of dog but from the practice of sniffing the gases from a nearly used-up aerosol can of whipped cream), and it’s not their real name either: Taste just happened to use “Tripplehorn” as an alias because he had a mad crush on Jeanne Tripplehorn.
Eventually all ends more or less well — the good cops bust the bad cops and the corrupt D.A. and the Fosters go back to their suburban existence, albeit the last scene is a long-shot of them apparently having sex with each other in broad daylight on their front lawn, indicating that their horrible “date night” has shaken loose some of their inhibitions and rekindled their relationship. Date Night is a film that could have been screamingly funny instead of moderately amusing, and it’s derivative as all get-out (I noticed similarities to The Out-of-Towners and Charles ditto to Who’s That Girl?, which itself was reworked from Bringing Up Baby and What’s Up, Doc?), but it’s a nice little movie that (aside from a couple of scenes of Steve Carell retching) mostly avoids the offensive attempts to find humor in involuntary bodily functions that mar so many so-called “comedies” made today. Still, it’s amazing that a major-studio (20th Century-Fox) production with big stars noted for humor can’t even approach the laughs-per-minute quotient of a low-budget indie like Kabluey!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)