by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Poppy,
W. C. Fields’ next-to-last movie for Paramount, made in 1936 when age,
alcoholism and injury (he was apparently in back pain through much of the shoot
and virtually all the long shots featured a double — Robert Lewis Taylor’s 1949
biography of Fields said it was his stand-in, Bill Oberlin, but imdb.com lists
John Sinclair as his double) were all catching up to him and making it harder
for him to work. Indeed, even though he was still popular, he was getting so
difficult to work with that Paramount dropped him after one more movie (his
overbearing performance in The Big Broadcast of 1938) and Universal picked him up. One odd thing about
Fields’ films is that, though still shot on a budget and with relatively short
running times (Poppy runs just 71
minutes), his Paramount films have excellent production values — far better
than the Universals, which are screamingly funny (especially the last two, The
Bank Dick and Never Give a Sucker
an Even Break — a title cribbed from the
final line of Poppy) but
wretchedly photographed with nary a hint of atmosphere. (Universal was capable
of great atmospherics but seemed to reserve them for their horror films and,
starting in the mid-1940’s, their noirs.)
Poppy began life as a
Broadway musical in 1923 that for the first time gave W. C. Fields the chance
to play an actual character instead of just doing comic sketches and juggling
routines in a revue. He’s “Professor” Eustace McGargle (a classic Fields
moniker), a traveling carnie who worms his way into small-town festivals and is
devoted to his young daughter Poppy (Rochelle Hudson), whom he’s raised as a
single parent and cared for as best he can given the economically marginal
existence they’ve been sharing. In the film’s opening scene — it’s set in 1883
and set designers Hans Drier and Bernard Herzbrun create a beautiful pastoral
atmosphere on extensive and elaborate “exteriors” built inside Paramount’s
soundstages, while director A. Edward Sutherland and cinematographer William C.
Mellor (a considerably more prestigious cameraman than usually shot a Fields
movie) give the show a rich, dappled visual look that suffuses the film in a
nostalgic, autumnal glow — Eustace and Poppy are on a roadside and she’s
lamenting the fact that she’s hungry. “We’re like Robin Hood,” he tells her.
“We steal from the rich and give to the poor?” “Which poor?” she asks. “Us
poor,” he replies. He gets his chance when they stumble into a small town where
a carnival is taking place; he starts working as a barker even though the town’s
mayor (Granville Bates) — the event is being sponsored directly by the city —
has no idea who he is. McGargle fakes an injury and demands a settlement of
$10,000 and a carnival booth; he gets the booth and $10 (though he doesn’t seem
to get the money because in the next scene he and Poppy are shown mooching two
hot dogs from a carnival vendor and, when the man demands immediate payment,
giving him back what’s left of them; “What am I going to do with these?” the
vendor asks, and Fields answers, “First you insult me, then you ask for my
advice on salesmanship!”), and even before he arrives at the carnival he’s made
$20 by selling a bartender a talking dog (McGargle is a ventriloquist), then
having the dog say that because he’s so insulted at being sold for so little,
“I’ll never say another word again!” (“He probably means it, too,” Fields
mutters in his own voice in an aside as he leaves.)
Poppy is so disjointed a movie (Fields almost never made a
movie that wasn’t disjointed)
that it’s only halfway through the film that we get to the main story: it seems
that the largest house in the town is occupied by the Contessa de Puizzi
(Catherine Doucet), who’s really an ex-showgirl named Maggie Tubbs who either
genuinely got married briefly to a European count or just faked having done so
(the script writers Waldemar Young and Virginia Van Upp — also more prestigious
names than we usually see on the credits of a Fields film — never quite
explained which). When McGargle is introduced to her he says, “Ah, the Countess
de Pussy, eh?” — a line whose cheeky audacity is amazing, especially in a
“post-Code” film — and there’s a great scene on her croquet lawn in which
McGargle pretends to be the world’s greatest croquet player but hasn’t a clue
about the game. (The funniest bit is his line, “Who left all these wires all
over the lawn?”) But she’s not the rightful owner; it really belongs to
Elizabeth Putnam, who ran away from town to join a circus two decades earlier,
and this gives McGargle an idea: he’ll fake a marriage certificate between
himself and Elizabeth Putnam, claim that Putnam is dead but Poppy is her
daughter and therefore the rightful heir. Only the local attorney, Whiffen (the
marvelous light comedian Lynne Overman, who got stuck in character roles while
two of his friends from his days on Broadway, James Cagney and Spencer Tracy,
became major stars), catches him at it and demands to be included in the deal —
then double-crosses him. In exchange for de Puizzi’s agreement to marry him
(though why he would want to marry
her is a mystery), he exposes the McGargles as frauds — only Sarah Tucker (the
great Maude Eburne from Ladies They Talk About), the only local who’s sympathetic to the McGargles,
discovers a locket among Poppy’s possessions that proves she is Elizabeth Putnam’s daughter after all, so Poppy gets
her fortune, the stability of small-town life she’s yearned for after all those
years on the road with her dad (who tearfully admits he’s not her dad at all;
he took her in when she was 3 after her mom died), and the rather dubious
affections of Mayor Farnsworth’s son Bill (Richard Cromwell, who’s tall, gawky
and comes off as Paramount’s attempt to clone their own Robert Montgomery).
Fields had filmed Poppy a decade
earlier as a Paramount silent called Sally of the Sawdust, with D. W. Griffith (of all people!) as his
director, Griffith’s wife Carol Dempster as the female lead (she’s considerably
better than the film historians would have us believe) and Alfred Lunt (again,
of all people!) as the local boy she falls for — and Lunt in the role was so
wretchedly miscast he’s just as gawky and awkward as Cromwell. The silent
version was actually longer and contained an elaborate chase scene at the end,
though Poppy has one marvelous
moment in which Fields (actually Sinclair — the doubling is especially obvious,
and though we hear Fields’ voice the camera is so far away it’s clear either
post-dubbed the lines or pre-recorded them “wild”) leaps onto a high-wheel
bicycle in an attempt to escape after having been exposed. I suspect Dorothy
Donnelly’s original script for the stage version was longer than either movie
and explained the plot points better, and I also wish they had kept at least
some of the original songs; instead all we get in the way of music is an
opening choral number by Frederick Hollander (Marlene Dietrich’s favorite
songwriter) and Sam Coslow extolling Poppy’s charms, and her big feature at the
carnival, “A Rendezvous with a Dream,” credited to Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin
but strongly reminiscent of the barbershop-quartet classic “On Moonlight Bay.”
Fields is marvelous (even with all the doubling, which is pretty obvious every
time the character has to take a pratfall); Rochelle Hudson is winsome (though
I suspect her voice was doubled and Mary Brian, the juvenile heroine from
Fields’ immediately previous film The Man on the Flying Trapeze, probably would have played it better), and the film
filled with juicy supporting roles played by fine character actors like Overman
and Jerry Bergen (as a gardener whom Fields repeatedly cheats out of money
using the same stratagems Bud Abbott later pulled on Lou Costello in film after
film after film). Fields made funnier films in his career both before and after
this one, but Poppy is a lovely
nostalgic pastoral that’s warm, amusing and a welcome entry in the Fields canon
— even though one suspects Donnelly’s original musical had a potentially better
film in it than either of the
ones that got made.
Friday, March 18, 2016
Thursday, March 17, 2016
The People vs. Larry Flynt (Columbia, Filmhaus, Illusion Entertainment, 1996)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The People vs. Larry Flynt, which I was somewhat startled to realize was made 20 years ago in 1996 — something that becomes apparent in the where-are-they-now titles in the closing credit roll. The credits list Jerry Falwell as still alive and preaching (he died in 2007, though the name “Jerry Falwell” recently surfaced in public discourse again when his son, Jerry Falwell, Jr., endorsed Donald Trump for President) and say that the assault on Flynt in Lawrenceville, Georgia in 1978 that left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair ever since was unsolved (serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin confessed to the shooting of Flynt and was eventually executed for eight unrelated murders in Missouri in 2013 — though Flynt, an opponent of capital punishment, had called on Missouri to spare his life; Franklin was also an avowed white supremacist who said his motivation for shooting Flynt was an interracial photo spread in Hustler). I had thought the movie, based on its title, focused mainly on his legal battles in various courtrooms across the country, and especially the famous libel suit Falwell filed against him over a parody ad in Hustler for Campari (the Italian liqueur manufacturer had done a series of ads called “My First Time,” which looked like they were going to be about the first time various celebrities had had sex and was really about the first time they had drunk Campari; Flynt and his staff came up with a parody ad showing Falwell saying that his first sexual experience had been with his mother in an outhouse).
It actually begins in Kentucky in 1952, where Flynt was born and where he (Cody Block) and his two-years-younger brother Jimmy (Ryan Post) sell moonshine to people driving through. (They explain that they make the stuff from potatoes, which would make it bootleg vodka instead of bootleg whiskey.) When they catch their dad (John Ryan) drinking too much of the merchandise, Larry throws the jug containing it at him. The film then flashes forward to 1972, when Larry and Jimmy Flynt are running a strip club in Cincinnati called The Hustler Club — the film makes it seem like they’re just scraping by but according to Flynt’s Wikipedia page the Flynt brothers actually had a number of clubs in various Midwestern cities and were doing quite well with the business — and Larry decides to put out a newsletter to help promote the club. Only he wants it done on “that shiny paper” (“slick,” his printer tells him it’s called), and he wants it full of nude photos of women despite the printer’s warning that that might get both of them prosecuted for obscenity. When he starts getting inquiries from people who want to subscribe to his magazine, he decides to launch it as a full-out publication with national distribution, and his rationale is that Playboy is already successful but people who don’t want to wade through all the ponderous articles to get to the hot pics, and who don’t make anywhere near enough to live the “Playboy Philosophy” lifestyle, would flock to a more out-front competitor. (Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s there were jokes about people who said, “I read Playboy just for the articles,” and Realist editor-publisher Paul Krassner once said the Playboy Philosophy was “more rationalization per square tit than any other magazine.”) Hustler becomes an immediate hit and, of course, attracts unwelcome attention from the authorities — especially when he started running explicit photos of women’s vaginas in November 1974 and in August 1975 ran a series of photos that were claimed to be Jackie Kennedy Onassis in the nude.
In 1976 he was arrested at his office in Cincinnati and charged with obscenity by local prosecutor Simon Leis (James Carville) as part of an anti-porn crusade funded by corrupt savings-and-loan owner Charles Keating (James Cromwell). (Ironically, the judge who sentences him to 25 years in prison after he’s convicted — though it’s later reversed on appeal — is played in the film by the real Larry Flynt.) In 1977 he goes through a brief conversion as a born-again Christian, recruited to the faith by President Carter’s sister Ruth Carter Stapleton (Donna Hanover) — though his wife Althea (Courtney Love — more on her later) suspects he’s just pretending to convert so he can get in Mrs. Stapleton’s pants. He’s busted again in Georgia in 1978 and his attorney, Alan Isaacman (a young Edward Norton in one of his earliest roles — the character is actually a composite of several attorneys that represented Flynt over the years), arranges a plea bargain — only we don’t find out what it is because Flynt obscenely rejects it and insists on going to trial. He’s shot after leaving the courthouse during one of the trial sessions, and like Lionel Barrymore, Bela Lugosi, Edith Piaf and quite a few people nowadays, he starts taking medications to control his pain and soon becomes addicted. He’s helped in his destructive spiral by his wife, Althea Jane Leasure Flynt (played by Kurt Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, who according to imdb.com showed up to interview for the movie under the influence of drugs; director Milos Forman offered her the role but only if she stayed clean and sober during the shoot — which she did, and later she credited him with having enabled her to get out of the self-destructive loop she’d been on and restart her career as both musician and actress, though through many of the scenes showing both her and Flynt as addicts it does look like she’s playing herself!).
The drugs render Flynt both manic (after the events in the movie Flynt later publicly “came out” as bipolar) and virtually incoherent, turning his court appearances into bizarre, contemptuous rants — in one scene (and apparently this really happened) he comes into court wearing nothing below the waist but a diaper fashioned from an American flag — though the scenes of Flynt in court in the Falwell case conflate his two appearances in that case, one of which was a pre-trial deposition in which Flynt scared his lawyers by an incoherent presentation that made it seem like he was actually alleging that Falwell’s first sexual experience had been with his mom (of course, it was crucial to his case to establish that he’d published that as a parody and had not intended anyone to take it seriously as an allegation of incest between Falwell and his mom!) and one was his actual trial testimony, in which he was coherent, lucid and said what he needed to say to win the case. In the end, Flynt is acquitted of libel but found to have “inflicted emotional distress” on Falwell, and he insists on taking the case to the U.S. Supreme Court — which he does, eventually winning a unanimous verdict (the idea that any highly charged, publicly controversial case could be decided by the Supreme Court unanimously these days seems pretty unbelievable in and of itself) that awarding a judgment against someone for “inflicting emotional distress” on a public figure through something they published about him is a violation of the First Amendment. (I was especially impressed with the actor who played Justice Antonin Scalia, Rand Hopkins, and after the movie I joked that the Republicans could hire him to impersonate Scalia on the bench, say, “Oh, he didn’t die — that was just a rumor,” and use that as an excuse not to hold confirmation hearings on Obama’s appointee to replace him, Merrick Garland — “We don’t have to fill the vacancy because there isn’t one — Justice Scalia is still alive!”)
The People vs. Larry Flynt is as quirky in its credits as its story — the director, Milos Forman, is best known for his Academy Award winners One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, and while going from a biopic of Mozart to a biopic of Larry Flynt may seem like a major step down, both were figures who often cheekily defied the powers that be of their times and both were highly sexual (Carter Harman’s history of classical music wrote that when Mozart was on tour he often wrote his wife Constanze telling her how much he missed her, “and the content of the letters made clear the way in which he missed her most”). The screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, had previously written Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood, and though Larry Flynt was a commercial success instead of a commercial failure, they bring the same sensibility, the same love of the uniquely American oddball, to this film. Though much of The People vs. Larry Flynt is trying — the long sequences of Larry and Althea at home in their mutually destructive relationship that ends with her drowning herself in their huge, ornate bathtub (production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein deserves credit for making the Flynt home as monumentally tasteless as usual for people from their background who suddenly come into money) are like watching the proverbial slow-motion train wreck — but the film is stunningly directed and beautifully acted. (Woody Harrelson in particular is as right for this part as he was wrong for Haymitch Abernathy in The Hunger Games and its sequelae.)
Charles noted that The People vs. Larry Flynt is not just a good movie, it’s an interesting history of how social attitudes towards explicit sex in the media changed over the decades from what they were when Hustler started to what they were when the film was made — even though since then porn has been democratized by the Internet, to the point where Flynt himself has said that someday the Internet will put Hustler out of business (and he’s claimed to have diversified so much that 90 percent of his company’s revenue today is non-porn). There are also artful touches like having Flynt speak an (uncredited) quote from Lenny Bruce in his rally for “Americans United for Free Speech” (a Flynt front group to support his case) that “if you believe anything you can do with your body is wrong, then blame God, because the fault lies with the manufacturer”; having Flynt refuse to swear on a Bible to tell the truth in court because he now regards himself as an atheist and won’t take an oath on a book he doesn’t believe in (he’s instead allow to “affirm” that he’ll tell the truth, an exception to the oath requirement originally made for Quakers, who aren’t allowed to take secular oaths); casting Woody Harrelson’s real-life brother Brett as Flynt’s brother Jimmy; and dramatizing the $1 million offer Flynt made as a reward for finding the real killers of John F. Kennedy. (According to an imdb.com “trivia” poster, the Harrelsons’ father has been a prime suspect in the assassination by some conspiracy theorists.) Kudos also to cinematographer Philippe Rousselot for shooting the film colorfully instead of forcing it into the abominable past-is-brown look that seems to have become the movie world’s default visual style for everything. At times The People vs. Larry Flynt is a bit of a trial, but for the most part it’s a superb entertainment that balances social comment and sleaze better than Flynt’s publications ever did!
The film was The People vs. Larry Flynt, which I was somewhat startled to realize was made 20 years ago in 1996 — something that becomes apparent in the where-are-they-now titles in the closing credit roll. The credits list Jerry Falwell as still alive and preaching (he died in 2007, though the name “Jerry Falwell” recently surfaced in public discourse again when his son, Jerry Falwell, Jr., endorsed Donald Trump for President) and say that the assault on Flynt in Lawrenceville, Georgia in 1978 that left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair ever since was unsolved (serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin confessed to the shooting of Flynt and was eventually executed for eight unrelated murders in Missouri in 2013 — though Flynt, an opponent of capital punishment, had called on Missouri to spare his life; Franklin was also an avowed white supremacist who said his motivation for shooting Flynt was an interracial photo spread in Hustler). I had thought the movie, based on its title, focused mainly on his legal battles in various courtrooms across the country, and especially the famous libel suit Falwell filed against him over a parody ad in Hustler for Campari (the Italian liqueur manufacturer had done a series of ads called “My First Time,” which looked like they were going to be about the first time various celebrities had had sex and was really about the first time they had drunk Campari; Flynt and his staff came up with a parody ad showing Falwell saying that his first sexual experience had been with his mother in an outhouse).
It actually begins in Kentucky in 1952, where Flynt was born and where he (Cody Block) and his two-years-younger brother Jimmy (Ryan Post) sell moonshine to people driving through. (They explain that they make the stuff from potatoes, which would make it bootleg vodka instead of bootleg whiskey.) When they catch their dad (John Ryan) drinking too much of the merchandise, Larry throws the jug containing it at him. The film then flashes forward to 1972, when Larry and Jimmy Flynt are running a strip club in Cincinnati called The Hustler Club — the film makes it seem like they’re just scraping by but according to Flynt’s Wikipedia page the Flynt brothers actually had a number of clubs in various Midwestern cities and were doing quite well with the business — and Larry decides to put out a newsletter to help promote the club. Only he wants it done on “that shiny paper” (“slick,” his printer tells him it’s called), and he wants it full of nude photos of women despite the printer’s warning that that might get both of them prosecuted for obscenity. When he starts getting inquiries from people who want to subscribe to his magazine, he decides to launch it as a full-out publication with national distribution, and his rationale is that Playboy is already successful but people who don’t want to wade through all the ponderous articles to get to the hot pics, and who don’t make anywhere near enough to live the “Playboy Philosophy” lifestyle, would flock to a more out-front competitor. (Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s there were jokes about people who said, “I read Playboy just for the articles,” and Realist editor-publisher Paul Krassner once said the Playboy Philosophy was “more rationalization per square tit than any other magazine.”) Hustler becomes an immediate hit and, of course, attracts unwelcome attention from the authorities — especially when he started running explicit photos of women’s vaginas in November 1974 and in August 1975 ran a series of photos that were claimed to be Jackie Kennedy Onassis in the nude.
In 1976 he was arrested at his office in Cincinnati and charged with obscenity by local prosecutor Simon Leis (James Carville) as part of an anti-porn crusade funded by corrupt savings-and-loan owner Charles Keating (James Cromwell). (Ironically, the judge who sentences him to 25 years in prison after he’s convicted — though it’s later reversed on appeal — is played in the film by the real Larry Flynt.) In 1977 he goes through a brief conversion as a born-again Christian, recruited to the faith by President Carter’s sister Ruth Carter Stapleton (Donna Hanover) — though his wife Althea (Courtney Love — more on her later) suspects he’s just pretending to convert so he can get in Mrs. Stapleton’s pants. He’s busted again in Georgia in 1978 and his attorney, Alan Isaacman (a young Edward Norton in one of his earliest roles — the character is actually a composite of several attorneys that represented Flynt over the years), arranges a plea bargain — only we don’t find out what it is because Flynt obscenely rejects it and insists on going to trial. He’s shot after leaving the courthouse during one of the trial sessions, and like Lionel Barrymore, Bela Lugosi, Edith Piaf and quite a few people nowadays, he starts taking medications to control his pain and soon becomes addicted. He’s helped in his destructive spiral by his wife, Althea Jane Leasure Flynt (played by Kurt Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, who according to imdb.com showed up to interview for the movie under the influence of drugs; director Milos Forman offered her the role but only if she stayed clean and sober during the shoot — which she did, and later she credited him with having enabled her to get out of the self-destructive loop she’d been on and restart her career as both musician and actress, though through many of the scenes showing both her and Flynt as addicts it does look like she’s playing herself!).
The drugs render Flynt both manic (after the events in the movie Flynt later publicly “came out” as bipolar) and virtually incoherent, turning his court appearances into bizarre, contemptuous rants — in one scene (and apparently this really happened) he comes into court wearing nothing below the waist but a diaper fashioned from an American flag — though the scenes of Flynt in court in the Falwell case conflate his two appearances in that case, one of which was a pre-trial deposition in which Flynt scared his lawyers by an incoherent presentation that made it seem like he was actually alleging that Falwell’s first sexual experience had been with his mom (of course, it was crucial to his case to establish that he’d published that as a parody and had not intended anyone to take it seriously as an allegation of incest between Falwell and his mom!) and one was his actual trial testimony, in which he was coherent, lucid and said what he needed to say to win the case. In the end, Flynt is acquitted of libel but found to have “inflicted emotional distress” on Falwell, and he insists on taking the case to the U.S. Supreme Court — which he does, eventually winning a unanimous verdict (the idea that any highly charged, publicly controversial case could be decided by the Supreme Court unanimously these days seems pretty unbelievable in and of itself) that awarding a judgment against someone for “inflicting emotional distress” on a public figure through something they published about him is a violation of the First Amendment. (I was especially impressed with the actor who played Justice Antonin Scalia, Rand Hopkins, and after the movie I joked that the Republicans could hire him to impersonate Scalia on the bench, say, “Oh, he didn’t die — that was just a rumor,” and use that as an excuse not to hold confirmation hearings on Obama’s appointee to replace him, Merrick Garland — “We don’t have to fill the vacancy because there isn’t one — Justice Scalia is still alive!”)
The People vs. Larry Flynt is as quirky in its credits as its story — the director, Milos Forman, is best known for his Academy Award winners One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, and while going from a biopic of Mozart to a biopic of Larry Flynt may seem like a major step down, both were figures who often cheekily defied the powers that be of their times and both were highly sexual (Carter Harman’s history of classical music wrote that when Mozart was on tour he often wrote his wife Constanze telling her how much he missed her, “and the content of the letters made clear the way in which he missed her most”). The screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, had previously written Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood, and though Larry Flynt was a commercial success instead of a commercial failure, they bring the same sensibility, the same love of the uniquely American oddball, to this film. Though much of The People vs. Larry Flynt is trying — the long sequences of Larry and Althea at home in their mutually destructive relationship that ends with her drowning herself in their huge, ornate bathtub (production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein deserves credit for making the Flynt home as monumentally tasteless as usual for people from their background who suddenly come into money) are like watching the proverbial slow-motion train wreck — but the film is stunningly directed and beautifully acted. (Woody Harrelson in particular is as right for this part as he was wrong for Haymitch Abernathy in The Hunger Games and its sequelae.)
Charles noted that The People vs. Larry Flynt is not just a good movie, it’s an interesting history of how social attitudes towards explicit sex in the media changed over the decades from what they were when Hustler started to what they were when the film was made — even though since then porn has been democratized by the Internet, to the point where Flynt himself has said that someday the Internet will put Hustler out of business (and he’s claimed to have diversified so much that 90 percent of his company’s revenue today is non-porn). There are also artful touches like having Flynt speak an (uncredited) quote from Lenny Bruce in his rally for “Americans United for Free Speech” (a Flynt front group to support his case) that “if you believe anything you can do with your body is wrong, then blame God, because the fault lies with the manufacturer”; having Flynt refuse to swear on a Bible to tell the truth in court because he now regards himself as an atheist and won’t take an oath on a book he doesn’t believe in (he’s instead allow to “affirm” that he’ll tell the truth, an exception to the oath requirement originally made for Quakers, who aren’t allowed to take secular oaths); casting Woody Harrelson’s real-life brother Brett as Flynt’s brother Jimmy; and dramatizing the $1 million offer Flynt made as a reward for finding the real killers of John F. Kennedy. (According to an imdb.com “trivia” poster, the Harrelsons’ father has been a prime suspect in the assassination by some conspiracy theorists.) Kudos also to cinematographer Philippe Rousselot for shooting the film colorfully instead of forcing it into the abominable past-is-brown look that seems to have become the movie world’s default visual style for everything. At times The People vs. Larry Flynt is a bit of a trial, but for the most part it’s a superb entertainment that balances social comment and sleaze better than Flynt’s publications ever did!
Monday, March 14, 2016
Monkey Business (Paramount, 1931)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles a movie, the 1931 Marx Brothers feature Monkey Business, their third film and the first one expressly written for the screen instead of being based on a show the Marxes already had done on stage. It was also the first film they made in Hollywood (their previous two, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, had been filmed at Paramount’s New York studio at Astoria, Queens) and the first that didn’t include Margaret Dumont in the cast. (She stayed out of the next one, Horse Feathers, as well, but returned for the fifth and final Marx Brothers Paramount movie, Duck Soup.) It was made during the so-called “pre-Code” era of relatively loose enforcement of the movies’ Production Code (1930-34), though the DVD we were watching (part of the Marx Brothers’ Silver Screen Collection of all five Marx Brothers Paramount films from Universal Home Video) contained Production Code Certificate 2720 R, indicating that their source was a reissue print from the “post-Code” era of strict enforcement, in which no studio-owned theatre (and that included virtually all the major houses) or independent theatre that wanted access to major-studio product could play a movie without a certificate. We’ve been making our way through Universal Home Video’s collections of the Marx Brothers, Mae West and W. C. Fields as a sort of weird tribute to the UHF TV station from my youth, Channel 36 from San Jose, which through some quirk of reception came in beautifully at our home in Marin County — looking better than some of the local broadcast stations — and I got my first chance to see a lot of great old movies on that channel in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
Monkey Business is probably the closest the Marx Brothers came to a totally plotless movie; oh, it has a story of sorts — the Marxes (back when there were still four of the five biological Marx brothers in the act — Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo — and in fact they were still billed as the Four Marx Brothers) play stowaways on an ocean liner that’s crossing from Europe to New York. As the film opens, we get a stock shot of a liner in mid-ocean and then first mate Gibson (Tom Kennedy, who played a lot of dumb character roles in 1930’s movies but seems to have been inspired by working with truly great comedians the way Hugh Herbert was in W. C. Fields’ Million Dollar Legs) reports to the ship’s captain (Ben Taggart — his last name is listed as “Corcoran” in the imdb.com cast list but I don’t recall him being referred to by name in the actual movie) that there are four stowaways in the below deck. “How do you know there are four of them?” the captain asks. “They’re singing ‘Sweet Adeline’!” replies Gibson, referencing the 1903 song that was almost automatically in the repertoire of every barber-shop quartet. The Marxes are indeed the stowaways, hiding below deck in barrels marked “Kippered Herring,” and the captain sends a crew to search the hold and find them. “Don’t bother with those barrels,” Groucho says — and the people looking for them think that’s an order from the captain. The Marxes are unveiled — almost literally — when the captain gives an order to have the barrels hoisted out of the cargo hold because they’re in the way of the search for the stowaways, and the barrels rise without their bottoms and reveal the Marxes inside. (Apparently there’s controversy over whether Harpo is merely miming to “Sweet Adeline” when the Marxes are shown singing it or whether he actually sang — my bet is on him just miming in accord with his fabled silence on screen.)
The rest of the film is mostly a long series of chase scenes involving the Marxes and the people on the liner trying to catch them, with a soupçon of plot involving nice gangster Joe Helton (Rockcliffe Fellowes) — we know he’s a nice gangster because he’s trying to get out of the rackets and is traveling home from Europe with his daughter Mary (Ruth Hall), who’s just graduated from finishing school there — and bad gangster “Alky” Briggs (Harry Woods), who’s trying to knock off Helton and/or kidnap his daughter so Briggs can take over Helton’s bootlegging business. Briggs hires Groucho and Zeppo as his bodyguards, Helton hires Harpo and Chico as his, but the plot, such as it is, is simply a series of brief burps in between the wild comedy scenes, including the one in the Briggs’ stateroom in which Groucho is romancing Briggs’ wife Lucille (Thelma Todd, a brilliant comedienne and frequent foil for Laurel and Hardy in their movies at Hal Roach Studios, which lent her to Paramount for this film) and Briggs comes in on them; one in which Harpo hides out from the pursuers by crashing a Punch and Judy puppet show and impersonating one of the puppets, then when he’s caught slides down on a miniature scooter that Charles said could be considered an early version of a skateboard; Harpo standing in front of a restroom door that looks like it says “Men” until a man who tries to use it is booted out, and then he steps aside and we see it really said “Women” (it’s a gag the Marxes stole from Buster Keaton but it’s still hilarious); Harpo catching a pet frog, keeping it in his hat, and assaulting a man in the ship’s barbershop who says he has “a frog in my throat”; and perhaps the most famous scene in the film, in which each of the four Marx Brothers tries to get off the ship when it docks by impersonating Paramount’s great male sex star, Maurice Chevalier, whose passport Zeppo has stolen.
Zeppo, Chico and Groucho do the Chevalier impersonation and are easily caught, but Harpo comes in and his Chevalier impersonation sounds just like the real one — since he’s got a phonograph strapped to his back on which he’s playing Chevalier’s record of “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me.” In some ways Monkey Business is a pencil sketch for an even greater Marx Bros. movie, A Night at the Opera, since not only are the Brothers playing stowaways but there’s a great scene in which a returning diva, Madame Swempski (credited on imdb.com to Cecil Cunningham — was that a girl named Cecil or did the Marxes really cross-gender cast?), gives a press conference on the boat, only it’s taken over by Groucho, posing as a reporter and asking the most insulting questions he can think of: “Is it true you’re getting a divorce as soon as your husband recovers his eyesight? Is it true you wash your hair in clam broth? Is it true you used to dance in a flea circus?” When she protests, “I don’t like this innuendo,” Groucho fires back, “That’s what I always say: love flies out the door when money comes innuendo!” Once the Marxes get off the boat (by posing as a sick passenger and the three health care workers attending to him) the scene shifts to Joe Helton’s big coming-out party for his daughter — the film’s costume designer seemed confused about whether this was supposed to be a costume party or not, since some of the guests are dressed as cowboys and/or Indians while others are in normal wear — only she’s kidnapped by Briggs’ gang and taken to an old barn, a rather sordid and tacky-looking setting for the end of a film that until then has looked pretty stylish (that big Art Deco ocean liner is a triumph of the set designer’s art!).
There are still some nice gags, including yet another gag spoofing the pretensions of art singing — Groucho announces, “I wish to announce that a buffet supper will be served in the next room in five minutes. In order to get you in that room quickly, Mrs. Schmalhausen (Maxine Castle) will sing a soprano solo in this room” — as well as the obligatory piano and harp interludes from Chico and Harpo, respectively (though instead of a solo Harpo takes over from another harp player as Mrs. Schmalhausen’s accompanist and makes his distaste for her singing of “O Sole Mio” incredibly obvious) — and though Monkey Business peters out with a rather lame punch line (the three Marx Brothers who matter — Zeppo has rescued Ruth Hall from his kidnappers and is busy canoodling with her — are attacking a haystack with rakes and Groucho explains, “I’m searching for a needle in a haystack”), most of it is a laff-riot, the Marxes at full power unencumbered by much in the way of romance, music or plot. Monkey Business was directed by Norman Z. McLeod from a script credited to S. J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone and Arthur Sheekman, with imdb.com crediting J. Carver Pusey (a cartoonist who was hired as a gag man for Harpo) and Al Shean (the Marxes’ uncle and a vaudeville and Broadway star in his own right as half of the team of Gallagher and Shean), and Marx Brothers biographer Allen Eyles suggested that Perelman’s influence on the Marxes manifested itself in making Groucho more infantile than usual (when “Alky” Briggs is threatening to kill him for flirting with his wife, Groucho bats his eyes, raises the pitch of his voice to sound like a teenage girl, and says, “Do you think a girl thinks less of a boy if he lets himself be kissed?”) and Harpo more savage and demonic.
I ran Charles a movie, the 1931 Marx Brothers feature Monkey Business, their third film and the first one expressly written for the screen instead of being based on a show the Marxes already had done on stage. It was also the first film they made in Hollywood (their previous two, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, had been filmed at Paramount’s New York studio at Astoria, Queens) and the first that didn’t include Margaret Dumont in the cast. (She stayed out of the next one, Horse Feathers, as well, but returned for the fifth and final Marx Brothers Paramount movie, Duck Soup.) It was made during the so-called “pre-Code” era of relatively loose enforcement of the movies’ Production Code (1930-34), though the DVD we were watching (part of the Marx Brothers’ Silver Screen Collection of all five Marx Brothers Paramount films from Universal Home Video) contained Production Code Certificate 2720 R, indicating that their source was a reissue print from the “post-Code” era of strict enforcement, in which no studio-owned theatre (and that included virtually all the major houses) or independent theatre that wanted access to major-studio product could play a movie without a certificate. We’ve been making our way through Universal Home Video’s collections of the Marx Brothers, Mae West and W. C. Fields as a sort of weird tribute to the UHF TV station from my youth, Channel 36 from San Jose, which through some quirk of reception came in beautifully at our home in Marin County — looking better than some of the local broadcast stations — and I got my first chance to see a lot of great old movies on that channel in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
Monkey Business is probably the closest the Marx Brothers came to a totally plotless movie; oh, it has a story of sorts — the Marxes (back when there were still four of the five biological Marx brothers in the act — Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo — and in fact they were still billed as the Four Marx Brothers) play stowaways on an ocean liner that’s crossing from Europe to New York. As the film opens, we get a stock shot of a liner in mid-ocean and then first mate Gibson (Tom Kennedy, who played a lot of dumb character roles in 1930’s movies but seems to have been inspired by working with truly great comedians the way Hugh Herbert was in W. C. Fields’ Million Dollar Legs) reports to the ship’s captain (Ben Taggart — his last name is listed as “Corcoran” in the imdb.com cast list but I don’t recall him being referred to by name in the actual movie) that there are four stowaways in the below deck. “How do you know there are four of them?” the captain asks. “They’re singing ‘Sweet Adeline’!” replies Gibson, referencing the 1903 song that was almost automatically in the repertoire of every barber-shop quartet. The Marxes are indeed the stowaways, hiding below deck in barrels marked “Kippered Herring,” and the captain sends a crew to search the hold and find them. “Don’t bother with those barrels,” Groucho says — and the people looking for them think that’s an order from the captain. The Marxes are unveiled — almost literally — when the captain gives an order to have the barrels hoisted out of the cargo hold because they’re in the way of the search for the stowaways, and the barrels rise without their bottoms and reveal the Marxes inside. (Apparently there’s controversy over whether Harpo is merely miming to “Sweet Adeline” when the Marxes are shown singing it or whether he actually sang — my bet is on him just miming in accord with his fabled silence on screen.)
The rest of the film is mostly a long series of chase scenes involving the Marxes and the people on the liner trying to catch them, with a soupçon of plot involving nice gangster Joe Helton (Rockcliffe Fellowes) — we know he’s a nice gangster because he’s trying to get out of the rackets and is traveling home from Europe with his daughter Mary (Ruth Hall), who’s just graduated from finishing school there — and bad gangster “Alky” Briggs (Harry Woods), who’s trying to knock off Helton and/or kidnap his daughter so Briggs can take over Helton’s bootlegging business. Briggs hires Groucho and Zeppo as his bodyguards, Helton hires Harpo and Chico as his, but the plot, such as it is, is simply a series of brief burps in between the wild comedy scenes, including the one in the Briggs’ stateroom in which Groucho is romancing Briggs’ wife Lucille (Thelma Todd, a brilliant comedienne and frequent foil for Laurel and Hardy in their movies at Hal Roach Studios, which lent her to Paramount for this film) and Briggs comes in on them; one in which Harpo hides out from the pursuers by crashing a Punch and Judy puppet show and impersonating one of the puppets, then when he’s caught slides down on a miniature scooter that Charles said could be considered an early version of a skateboard; Harpo standing in front of a restroom door that looks like it says “Men” until a man who tries to use it is booted out, and then he steps aside and we see it really said “Women” (it’s a gag the Marxes stole from Buster Keaton but it’s still hilarious); Harpo catching a pet frog, keeping it in his hat, and assaulting a man in the ship’s barbershop who says he has “a frog in my throat”; and perhaps the most famous scene in the film, in which each of the four Marx Brothers tries to get off the ship when it docks by impersonating Paramount’s great male sex star, Maurice Chevalier, whose passport Zeppo has stolen.
Zeppo, Chico and Groucho do the Chevalier impersonation and are easily caught, but Harpo comes in and his Chevalier impersonation sounds just like the real one — since he’s got a phonograph strapped to his back on which he’s playing Chevalier’s record of “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me.” In some ways Monkey Business is a pencil sketch for an even greater Marx Bros. movie, A Night at the Opera, since not only are the Brothers playing stowaways but there’s a great scene in which a returning diva, Madame Swempski (credited on imdb.com to Cecil Cunningham — was that a girl named Cecil or did the Marxes really cross-gender cast?), gives a press conference on the boat, only it’s taken over by Groucho, posing as a reporter and asking the most insulting questions he can think of: “Is it true you’re getting a divorce as soon as your husband recovers his eyesight? Is it true you wash your hair in clam broth? Is it true you used to dance in a flea circus?” When she protests, “I don’t like this innuendo,” Groucho fires back, “That’s what I always say: love flies out the door when money comes innuendo!” Once the Marxes get off the boat (by posing as a sick passenger and the three health care workers attending to him) the scene shifts to Joe Helton’s big coming-out party for his daughter — the film’s costume designer seemed confused about whether this was supposed to be a costume party or not, since some of the guests are dressed as cowboys and/or Indians while others are in normal wear — only she’s kidnapped by Briggs’ gang and taken to an old barn, a rather sordid and tacky-looking setting for the end of a film that until then has looked pretty stylish (that big Art Deco ocean liner is a triumph of the set designer’s art!).
There are still some nice gags, including yet another gag spoofing the pretensions of art singing — Groucho announces, “I wish to announce that a buffet supper will be served in the next room in five minutes. In order to get you in that room quickly, Mrs. Schmalhausen (Maxine Castle) will sing a soprano solo in this room” — as well as the obligatory piano and harp interludes from Chico and Harpo, respectively (though instead of a solo Harpo takes over from another harp player as Mrs. Schmalhausen’s accompanist and makes his distaste for her singing of “O Sole Mio” incredibly obvious) — and though Monkey Business peters out with a rather lame punch line (the three Marx Brothers who matter — Zeppo has rescued Ruth Hall from his kidnappers and is busy canoodling with her — are attacking a haystack with rakes and Groucho explains, “I’m searching for a needle in a haystack”), most of it is a laff-riot, the Marxes at full power unencumbered by much in the way of romance, music or plot. Monkey Business was directed by Norman Z. McLeod from a script credited to S. J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone and Arthur Sheekman, with imdb.com crediting J. Carver Pusey (a cartoonist who was hired as a gag man for Harpo) and Al Shean (the Marxes’ uncle and a vaudeville and Broadway star in his own right as half of the team of Gallagher and Shean), and Marx Brothers biographer Allen Eyles suggested that Perelman’s influence on the Marxes manifested itself in making Groucho more infantile than usual (when “Alky” Briggs is threatening to kill him for flirting with his wife, Groucho bats his eyes, raises the pitch of his voice to sound like a teenage girl, and says, “Do you think a girl thinks less of a boy if he lets himself be kissed?”) and Harpo more savage and demonic.
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Gravity (Warner Bros., Esperanto Filmoj, Heyday Films, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was Gravity, a highly acclaimed 2013 space-travel movie (Charles argued that it couldn’t really be called science fiction because all the technology depicted in it exists now) directed by Alfonso Cuarón and co-written by him and his brother Jonás. It was part of the backlog of interesting-sounding recent films Charles and I have been accumulating on DVD but haven’t had a chance to watch because he has so few evenings off work and modern movies tend to be unreasonably long — though this one was an exception. When I looked it up on imdb.com before screening it to get the running time I found it was only 91 minutes — and of that the closing credit roll was seven minutes, so there were only 84 minutes of actual movie. This was a good thing, too, because the premise of the film was so simple and basic that was exactly the right length for it: enough time to sustain suspense and include action, not enough time to get the feeling the filmmakers were “milking it.” The film stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts on the space shuttle Explorer who are doing a routine outside maintenance job on the shuttle’s exterior when catastrophe strikes: a rogue Russian space probe hits one of Russia’s own satellites, sending lethal clouds of debris through space that, without an atmosphere to slow them down, knock astronauts Ryan Stone (Bullock — and the gender ambiguity of the first name might suggest her character was originally written for a man, but the Cuarón hermanos intended her to be played by a woman from the get-go; indeed, they originally wanted her to be Latina and played by Angelina Jolie, but the studio, Warner Bros., nixed that because Jolie’s salary would be too high and no one would believe a Latina astronaut anyway) and Matt Kowalski (Clooney) off their perch on the spacecraft and send them floating into space. Kowalski grabs a tether rope and, against Stone’s wishes, ties the two of them together, and after the 10 minutes of exposition in which we learn that, the entire film is taken up with the struggle of the two astronauts to stay alive and get to a nearby re-entry vehicle, either a Russian Soyuz on the International Space Station or a Chinese Shenzou on China’s own space station — which in this movie are all lined up in a neat little row.
Our “feature” last night was Gravity, a highly acclaimed 2013 space-travel movie (Charles argued that it couldn’t really be called science fiction because all the technology depicted in it exists now) directed by Alfonso Cuarón and co-written by him and his brother Jonás. It was part of the backlog of interesting-sounding recent films Charles and I have been accumulating on DVD but haven’t had a chance to watch because he has so few evenings off work and modern movies tend to be unreasonably long — though this one was an exception. When I looked it up on imdb.com before screening it to get the running time I found it was only 91 minutes — and of that the closing credit roll was seven minutes, so there were only 84 minutes of actual movie. This was a good thing, too, because the premise of the film was so simple and basic that was exactly the right length for it: enough time to sustain suspense and include action, not enough time to get the feeling the filmmakers were “milking it.” The film stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts on the space shuttle Explorer who are doing a routine outside maintenance job on the shuttle’s exterior when catastrophe strikes: a rogue Russian space probe hits one of Russia’s own satellites, sending lethal clouds of debris through space that, without an atmosphere to slow them down, knock astronauts Ryan Stone (Bullock — and the gender ambiguity of the first name might suggest her character was originally written for a man, but the Cuarón hermanos intended her to be played by a woman from the get-go; indeed, they originally wanted her to be Latina and played by Angelina Jolie, but the studio, Warner Bros., nixed that because Jolie’s salary would be too high and no one would believe a Latina astronaut anyway) and Matt Kowalski (Clooney) off their perch on the spacecraft and send them floating into space. Kowalski grabs a tether rope and, against Stone’s wishes, ties the two of them together, and after the 10 minutes of exposition in which we learn that, the entire film is taken up with the struggle of the two astronauts to stay alive and get to a nearby re-entry vehicle, either a Russian Soyuz on the International Space Station or a Chinese Shenzou on China’s own space station — which in this movie are all lined up in a neat little row.
This is good because it means the
astronauts can relatively easily get from one to the other; alas, it’s bad
because so can the debris. The debris destroys the shuttle and kills everyone
on it (meaning that when the ground control voice at Houston — played by Ed
Harris, who had a similar role in Apollo 13 as well as playing an astronaut himself in The
Right Stuff — advised Stone and Kowalski to
return to the shuttle, it was a good thing for them that they disobeyed), and
also slams into the face of a third astronaut who was outside the spacecraft,
Shariff (we never see his face — he’s just a floating body in a spacesuit and,
briefly, the voice of actor Phaldut Sharma) — the shot of his face with a huge
gouge out of it is by far the most frightening, or at least gruesome, moment in
this film. Midway through the film [spoiler alert!] Kowalski loses control and goes floating into space;
Stone offers to go after him but he takes the stiff-upper-lip attitude of a
classic movie hero, telling her it’s going to take all the resources (fuel,
oxygen, etc.) to save herself. She finds that one of the re-entry vehicles on
the International Space Station is missing — obviously the Russian astronauts
used it to get back to earth themselves — and the other’s parachute has already
popped open, rendering it useless for re-entry, but she can fly it to the Chinese station and hopefully
commandeer their re-entry
vehicle, which is the same design as the Russian Soyuz. (Stone tells Kowalski before he dies that she’s
trained on simulations of the Russian spacecraft, but she crashed the simulator
every time she flew it. “That’s what simulators are for,” he laconically
replies.) There’s an odd scene in the second half of the film where Kowalski is
seen as a living character again, but it turns out to be just an hallucination
of Stone’s — and according to imdb.com George Clooney wrote his brief
“resurrection” scene himself.
Gravity is quite a good movie if you can accept that it’s hardly ground-breaking
science fiction; Alfonso Cuarón acknowledged a debt to the 1969 sci-fi rescue
film Marooned — though that one
was 132 minutes, had a much larger supporting cast (it cut back and forth
between the trapped astronauts, the pilot of the crew that was supposed to
rescue them, and Mission Control) and simply wasn’t as taut or action-filled as
Gravity. Also, as Cuarón noted,
the makers of Marooned didn’t
have access to computer-generated imagery (CGI); apparently 80 percent of Gravity was filmed with CGI, compared with 60 percent of
James Cameron’s Avatar, and the
entire movie was made with the actors in front of a green screen. Charles and I
couldn’t help but parallel it to The Martian, also a person-lost-in-space movie (more accurately,
a person-lost-in-an-uninhabitable-environment-on-another-planet movie), but
even though The Martian (unlike
Gravity) was too long for its own good and
it was hamstrung by Matt Damon’s severe limitations as an actor, it was also a
richer work with more interesting dramatic conflicts than just a central figure being literally whirled around in space by forces beyond her control
and trying desperately to survive. One also wonders, while watching Gravity, why there’s so much noise in the film when, as the
initial titles helpfully explain, sound doesn’t carry in space — they require
atmosphere — though the explanation on imdb.com is that when spacesuit-clad
astronauts bump into space hardware, as they do quite a lot in this film, the
suits vibrate and that’s what the
astronauts are hearing. There are even a couple of scenes in which we hear
Sandra Bullock breathe heavily inside her spacesuit just as Keir Dullea did in
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (still far and away the best science-fiction film ever made, and
perhaps the best film ever made, period) — where the abrupt cut-ins between the
interior of Dullea’s space pod, where there was sound, and the exterior, where
there wasn’t, was far more chilling than anything Cuarón came up with in this
film.
What los hermanos Cuarón
sought to do in Gravity was make
an outer-space thriller which would keep us on the edge of our seats wondering
what was going to happen next and keep the plight of Sandra Bullock’s character
— no matter that in a spacesuit one person looks pretty much like another and
it’s only through the close-ups shot through the spacesuits’ visors that we
could tell Sandra Bullock and George Clooney apart — front and center, and
given the tendency of modern filmmakers to detach from their characters and
expect us to observe them like lab rats, I won’t fault Alfonso Cuarón and his
brother for making a movie in which the entire issue is will Ryan Stone survive
and how much improvising she will have to do in order to get back to Earth
safely. In a sense Gravity is Jon
Krakauer’s Into the Wild and the
film Sean Penn made from it transported to outer space — as, to an even greater
extent, was The Martian — though
Krakauer’s protagonist was an individual on his own, untethered to the demands
and judgments (good or bad) of his Mission Controllers back home; and the
psychological and philosophical hints dropped in Into the Wild about what made the central character “run” are
barely there in The Martian and
utterly absent in Gravity. Still,
Alfonso Cuarón was out to make a thrilling film that would keep us on the edge
of our seats wondering if the heroine would survive (while having enough in
common with a normal mainstream Hollywood blockbuster we were pretty clear in
our own minds that she would
survive — indeed, one of the film’s most haunting shots is the one at the end,
in which she emerges from the Chinese re-entry capsule and swims from the site
of her splashdown to a beach — and neither she nor we have the foggiest notion where on Earth she is), and he did that brilliantly.
Saturday, March 12, 2016
Spotlight (Anonymous Content, First Look Media, Participant Media, Rocklin \ Faust, 2015)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Spotlight, the winner of the Academy Award as Best Picture of 2015 (though it won only one other award, Best Original Screenplay for Tom McCarthy — who also directed — and Josh Singer), and one which I quite enjoyed even though I was acutely conscious of its limits — and Charles, who had been underwhelmed when I brought home the DVD/Blu-Ray combo pack (someday I’ll have to figure out how to connect my Blu-Ray player so I can watch Blu-Rays with sound!), fiddled with his smartphone through much of the first half of the movie until I called him out and said, “I didn’t think it would bore you that much!” As just about all the world knows, Spotlight is about the investigative reporting team from the Boston Globe that spent two years (2000 to 2002) tracing the extent of pedophilia within the Roman Catholic priesthood and the role of the church’s hierarchy in covering it up. The title is a pun — “Spotlight” is the name of the Globe’s investigative team, which was set up separately from the rest of the paper and had the freedom to pursue big stories even if it would take months to create something publishable from the mass of raw data and the struggles to get sources to speak to them, and as the name of the film it also means the spotlight the paper’s investigations shone on the burgeoning scandal. Tom McCarthy, who before this film was mostly an actor, cited a wide variety of films as influences on the project, including Frost/Nixon, Broadcast News, Network, The Killing Fields, The Insider, Citizen Kane, Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, The Verdict and Good Night, and Good Luck, but the obvious big influence on this movie (and one McCarthy copped to) is All the President’s Men.
Both All the President’s Men and Spotlight are about intrepid reporters chasing down a conspiracy involving a hugely powerful institution — the White House in All the President’s Men and the Roman Catholic church in Spotlight — and dealing with pressures from high places to curb their investigation. Both films deal with the chancy relationships between reporters and their sources, many of whom are unwilling to talk at all, including the elaborate subterfuges deep-background sources often demand for their cooperation (though there aren’t any secret meetings in parking lots in Spotlight there’s a chilling scene in which a reporter asks a church attorney to confirm whether any of the priests on a list of possible pedophiles they’ve compiled from church records are indeed molesters, and he takes the pen the reporter has offered him and circles all the names on both pages of the list, indicating that all the priests on those lists are pedophiles), and both also show how boring the work of a journalist can be, especially sifting through records looking for tell-tale bits of information that might give away a secret. One obvious difference is that in All the President’s Men there were only two reporters, and they were played by “A”-list stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman at the height of their careers; in Spotlight there were six, and they’re played by, if not “B”-listers, then certainly “A-minus”-listers: Michael Keaton as Walter “Robby” Robinson, head of the Spotlight team; Mark Ruffalo top-billed as Mike Rezendes (he’s from the Azores and the name is Portuguese — one imdb.com commentator noted he was the first person nominated for Best Actor for playing a Portuguese since Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous in 1937); Rachel McAdams as Sacha Pfeiffer; Brian d’Arcy James (definitely the hunk in this cast!) as Matt Carroll and two others who kind of get lost in the shuffle. The ensemble casting works effectively and dramatizes how journalism, especially at this level, is inherently collaborative.
The other major issue in Spotlight is the tension between the long-term journalists at the paper, many of whom are Boston-born and –bred, and Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), the new editor the Globe’s corporate owners have just brought in from Miami to take over the paper — and, since the events of this film take place between 2000 and 2002, when the long shadow of the Internet (or, as I like to call it in these contexts, the “Interblob,” since like the Blob in the 1958 horror “B” of that name it seems to be sucking up everything in its path like a giant amoeba) was just starting to cast itself over the print medium and the reporters are worried one of the things Baron is there to do is lay a lot of them off in order to shrink the paper’s staff to match its declining profits. (There’s a reference in the dialogue to the Globe losing classified ad revenue to the Net — one of the first bad effects the Internet had on newspapers and journalism as a whole.) I’ve read enough stories in the Columbia Journalism Review and elsewhere to know about this and to share those writers’ anxieties that the rise of blogs and piece-rate Web sites are drying up the available funding for long-term journalistic investigations like the one against the Catholic priesthood depicted in this film; so many people are writing news stories and analyses without being paid, or being paid very little, and so many people at traditional newspapers are being told to write quick, short stories that will generate page counts for the paper’s Web site instead of long investigations like Spotlight’s that won’t generate publishable stories for months or even years. There’s even a family connection — literally — between All the President’s Men and Spotlight; one of the Globe staff members depicted is Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery), son of the legendary Washington Post super-editor Ben Bradlee, played by Jason Robards, Jr. in All the President’s Men. Spotlight not only feels like a 1970’s movie plot-wise, it’s directed like a 1970’s movie, with relatively long takes, an understated editing style and cinematography that features a wide palette of natural colors instead of making everything look brown and dirty green. There are a few nighttime interiors in the past-is-brown style, but mostly cinematographer Masanobu Takayangi shoots the people and backgrounds in realistic colors — the Boston Red Sox baseball game two of the reporters go to is a feast of green grass and colorful people in the stands — when I saw the Japanese name credited as cinematographer in the closing credits, I joked, “It takes a Japanese cameraman to make sure the world isn’t all brown!” Spotlight also benefits from an understated but effective musical score by Howard Shore — who wisely doesn’t bathe this movie in the mock-heroic style of his best-known credits, the Lord of the Rings movies — and an overall sense of sincerity and trust in the material that seems more characteristic of 1970’s filmmaking than 2010’s
Spotlight is an excellent film by one set of criteria — it’s vividly acted (most of the cast members went out of their way to meet Ronald Pthe real-life people they were playing and copy their mannerisms and even their accents; some imdb.com “trivia” items on the film noted how hard Michael Keaton worked on the accent, since the real Walter “Robby” Robinson didn’t speak with a discernible Boston accent until he got excited and those nasal “Baah-stun” tones came out, and so Keaton had to decide scene-by-scene when he should speak normally and when he should do the accent), impeccably and straightforwardly directed (McCarthy definitely trusted his story basically to tell itself without any dazzling visual atmospherics or editing tricks), and with a well-constructed script that threw enough obstacles at the reporting team (including the 9/11 terror attacks, which occur just as the investigative reporters are nailing down interviews with the victims they’ve been able to identify, many of whom are understandably skittish and have had to experience a lot of persuasion to get them to cooperate, and which had a local connection to Boston since the two planes that hit the World Trade Center had been hijacked from Boston’s Logan Airport; after 9/11 editor Baron orders all his reporters to do terror-related stories and sends Rezendes to Florida to do interviews with people at the flight school where some of the 9/11 attackers learned to fly, and he has to rush back in a hurry when a key set of documents the Globe needs to establish the culpability of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the cover-up is about to become public for the first time and he needs to get them before any competing newspaper does) to keep the film dramatically interesting without giving the viewer the sense that the writers are “larding it on.” It’s also worth noting that Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law — depicted with more nuance than most of the characters in the film since his history is as someone who courageously resisted racism in the South in the 1960’s and yet he got personally involved in covering for the pedophile priests — is played by Len Cariou, Angela Lansbury’s co-star in the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, and two other cast members particularly shine in small parts: Mitchell Cyril Creighton as Joe Crowley, a former victim who grew up to be a Gay man and insists that he would have been Gay even if he hadn’t been molested by a priest but sounds like he’s trying to convince himself of that at least as much as he is the reporters; and Richard O’Rourke as Father Ronald Paquin, who in the film’s most chilling scene tells one of the Spotlight reporters that he “messed around” with kids but made it clear he saw nothing wrong in doing so. For one brief moment we feel like we’re going to get a clue as to what made the abusive priests “run” — a topic on which this script is otherwise silent, though in some of the criminal cases against them pedophile priests have preposterously used the “he came on to me!” defense — only the door is slammed, literally and figuratively, in the reporter’s face by Paquin’s sister Jane (Nancy E. Carroll).
The film does give some insights into just how big the task the Spotlight crew faced — not only in going up against the Roman Catholic hierarchy but also the heavy-duty network of Boston 1-percenters, many of them Catholic themselves, who felt it was their duty to use their influence to protect the church no matter what (a prologue set in 1976, in a Boston police station as a priest has just been arrested but it’s made clear he’s only going to get a slap on the wrist and a referral to a church-run “therapy” clinic, followed by reassignment to a different parish where he’ll have a fresh crop of victims to prey on, is supposed to show us how long this has been going on and how little has been done about it) — but it’s clear McCarthy and Singer weren’t interested in the conflicts within the church or how they justified it, or why it particularly happened in the Roman Catholic church. One therapist we hear as a voice on the phone as the Spotlight people are phone-interviewing him, but whom we never actually see, nor is either the character, Richard Sipe, or the actor playing him, Richard Jenkins, listed on the credits; he claims that the Catholic church’s celibacy requirement for the priesthood had something to do with it and the priests who actually act out sexually with minors themselves had their emotional growth stunted at about 12. But that’s all McCarthy and Singer give us in answer to our obvious question, “Why on earth did they do it?” Spotlight is an excellent movie as far as it goes, but one gets the impression that they could have gone even farther (though maybe the film I imagine they should have made would have been so long they couldn’t have released it theatrically and would have had to put it out as a mini-series on a premium cable channel or a streaming service — in which form I, of course, would never have been able to see it!), and it’s certainly not a ground-breaking movie in any way, shape or form. It deserved its Academy Award for Best Picture (at least I think it did, since the only other nominee I’ve seen is The Martian) — it certainly wasn’t the sort of miscarriage in Academy history as happened when How Green Was My Valley beat out Citizen Kane, or The Hurt Locker beat Avatar — and it was quality entertainment, but there are certainly broader horizons the art of cinema can aspire to than this!
The film was Spotlight, the winner of the Academy Award as Best Picture of 2015 (though it won only one other award, Best Original Screenplay for Tom McCarthy — who also directed — and Josh Singer), and one which I quite enjoyed even though I was acutely conscious of its limits — and Charles, who had been underwhelmed when I brought home the DVD/Blu-Ray combo pack (someday I’ll have to figure out how to connect my Blu-Ray player so I can watch Blu-Rays with sound!), fiddled with his smartphone through much of the first half of the movie until I called him out and said, “I didn’t think it would bore you that much!” As just about all the world knows, Spotlight is about the investigative reporting team from the Boston Globe that spent two years (2000 to 2002) tracing the extent of pedophilia within the Roman Catholic priesthood and the role of the church’s hierarchy in covering it up. The title is a pun — “Spotlight” is the name of the Globe’s investigative team, which was set up separately from the rest of the paper and had the freedom to pursue big stories even if it would take months to create something publishable from the mass of raw data and the struggles to get sources to speak to them, and as the name of the film it also means the spotlight the paper’s investigations shone on the burgeoning scandal. Tom McCarthy, who before this film was mostly an actor, cited a wide variety of films as influences on the project, including Frost/Nixon, Broadcast News, Network, The Killing Fields, The Insider, Citizen Kane, Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, The Verdict and Good Night, and Good Luck, but the obvious big influence on this movie (and one McCarthy copped to) is All the President’s Men.
Both All the President’s Men and Spotlight are about intrepid reporters chasing down a conspiracy involving a hugely powerful institution — the White House in All the President’s Men and the Roman Catholic church in Spotlight — and dealing with pressures from high places to curb their investigation. Both films deal with the chancy relationships between reporters and their sources, many of whom are unwilling to talk at all, including the elaborate subterfuges deep-background sources often demand for their cooperation (though there aren’t any secret meetings in parking lots in Spotlight there’s a chilling scene in which a reporter asks a church attorney to confirm whether any of the priests on a list of possible pedophiles they’ve compiled from church records are indeed molesters, and he takes the pen the reporter has offered him and circles all the names on both pages of the list, indicating that all the priests on those lists are pedophiles), and both also show how boring the work of a journalist can be, especially sifting through records looking for tell-tale bits of information that might give away a secret. One obvious difference is that in All the President’s Men there were only two reporters, and they were played by “A”-list stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman at the height of their careers; in Spotlight there were six, and they’re played by, if not “B”-listers, then certainly “A-minus”-listers: Michael Keaton as Walter “Robby” Robinson, head of the Spotlight team; Mark Ruffalo top-billed as Mike Rezendes (he’s from the Azores and the name is Portuguese — one imdb.com commentator noted he was the first person nominated for Best Actor for playing a Portuguese since Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous in 1937); Rachel McAdams as Sacha Pfeiffer; Brian d’Arcy James (definitely the hunk in this cast!) as Matt Carroll and two others who kind of get lost in the shuffle. The ensemble casting works effectively and dramatizes how journalism, especially at this level, is inherently collaborative.
The other major issue in Spotlight is the tension between the long-term journalists at the paper, many of whom are Boston-born and –bred, and Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), the new editor the Globe’s corporate owners have just brought in from Miami to take over the paper — and, since the events of this film take place between 2000 and 2002, when the long shadow of the Internet (or, as I like to call it in these contexts, the “Interblob,” since like the Blob in the 1958 horror “B” of that name it seems to be sucking up everything in its path like a giant amoeba) was just starting to cast itself over the print medium and the reporters are worried one of the things Baron is there to do is lay a lot of them off in order to shrink the paper’s staff to match its declining profits. (There’s a reference in the dialogue to the Globe losing classified ad revenue to the Net — one of the first bad effects the Internet had on newspapers and journalism as a whole.) I’ve read enough stories in the Columbia Journalism Review and elsewhere to know about this and to share those writers’ anxieties that the rise of blogs and piece-rate Web sites are drying up the available funding for long-term journalistic investigations like the one against the Catholic priesthood depicted in this film; so many people are writing news stories and analyses without being paid, or being paid very little, and so many people at traditional newspapers are being told to write quick, short stories that will generate page counts for the paper’s Web site instead of long investigations like Spotlight’s that won’t generate publishable stories for months or even years. There’s even a family connection — literally — between All the President’s Men and Spotlight; one of the Globe staff members depicted is Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery), son of the legendary Washington Post super-editor Ben Bradlee, played by Jason Robards, Jr. in All the President’s Men. Spotlight not only feels like a 1970’s movie plot-wise, it’s directed like a 1970’s movie, with relatively long takes, an understated editing style and cinematography that features a wide palette of natural colors instead of making everything look brown and dirty green. There are a few nighttime interiors in the past-is-brown style, but mostly cinematographer Masanobu Takayangi shoots the people and backgrounds in realistic colors — the Boston Red Sox baseball game two of the reporters go to is a feast of green grass and colorful people in the stands — when I saw the Japanese name credited as cinematographer in the closing credits, I joked, “It takes a Japanese cameraman to make sure the world isn’t all brown!” Spotlight also benefits from an understated but effective musical score by Howard Shore — who wisely doesn’t bathe this movie in the mock-heroic style of his best-known credits, the Lord of the Rings movies — and an overall sense of sincerity and trust in the material that seems more characteristic of 1970’s filmmaking than 2010’s
Spotlight is an excellent film by one set of criteria — it’s vividly acted (most of the cast members went out of their way to meet Ronald Pthe real-life people they were playing and copy their mannerisms and even their accents; some imdb.com “trivia” items on the film noted how hard Michael Keaton worked on the accent, since the real Walter “Robby” Robinson didn’t speak with a discernible Boston accent until he got excited and those nasal “Baah-stun” tones came out, and so Keaton had to decide scene-by-scene when he should speak normally and when he should do the accent), impeccably and straightforwardly directed (McCarthy definitely trusted his story basically to tell itself without any dazzling visual atmospherics or editing tricks), and with a well-constructed script that threw enough obstacles at the reporting team (including the 9/11 terror attacks, which occur just as the investigative reporters are nailing down interviews with the victims they’ve been able to identify, many of whom are understandably skittish and have had to experience a lot of persuasion to get them to cooperate, and which had a local connection to Boston since the two planes that hit the World Trade Center had been hijacked from Boston’s Logan Airport; after 9/11 editor Baron orders all his reporters to do terror-related stories and sends Rezendes to Florida to do interviews with people at the flight school where some of the 9/11 attackers learned to fly, and he has to rush back in a hurry when a key set of documents the Globe needs to establish the culpability of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the cover-up is about to become public for the first time and he needs to get them before any competing newspaper does) to keep the film dramatically interesting without giving the viewer the sense that the writers are “larding it on.” It’s also worth noting that Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law — depicted with more nuance than most of the characters in the film since his history is as someone who courageously resisted racism in the South in the 1960’s and yet he got personally involved in covering for the pedophile priests — is played by Len Cariou, Angela Lansbury’s co-star in the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, and two other cast members particularly shine in small parts: Mitchell Cyril Creighton as Joe Crowley, a former victim who grew up to be a Gay man and insists that he would have been Gay even if he hadn’t been molested by a priest but sounds like he’s trying to convince himself of that at least as much as he is the reporters; and Richard O’Rourke as Father Ronald Paquin, who in the film’s most chilling scene tells one of the Spotlight reporters that he “messed around” with kids but made it clear he saw nothing wrong in doing so. For one brief moment we feel like we’re going to get a clue as to what made the abusive priests “run” — a topic on which this script is otherwise silent, though in some of the criminal cases against them pedophile priests have preposterously used the “he came on to me!” defense — only the door is slammed, literally and figuratively, in the reporter’s face by Paquin’s sister Jane (Nancy E. Carroll).
The film does give some insights into just how big the task the Spotlight crew faced — not only in going up against the Roman Catholic hierarchy but also the heavy-duty network of Boston 1-percenters, many of them Catholic themselves, who felt it was their duty to use their influence to protect the church no matter what (a prologue set in 1976, in a Boston police station as a priest has just been arrested but it’s made clear he’s only going to get a slap on the wrist and a referral to a church-run “therapy” clinic, followed by reassignment to a different parish where he’ll have a fresh crop of victims to prey on, is supposed to show us how long this has been going on and how little has been done about it) — but it’s clear McCarthy and Singer weren’t interested in the conflicts within the church or how they justified it, or why it particularly happened in the Roman Catholic church. One therapist we hear as a voice on the phone as the Spotlight people are phone-interviewing him, but whom we never actually see, nor is either the character, Richard Sipe, or the actor playing him, Richard Jenkins, listed on the credits; he claims that the Catholic church’s celibacy requirement for the priesthood had something to do with it and the priests who actually act out sexually with minors themselves had their emotional growth stunted at about 12. But that’s all McCarthy and Singer give us in answer to our obvious question, “Why on earth did they do it?” Spotlight is an excellent movie as far as it goes, but one gets the impression that they could have gone even farther (though maybe the film I imagine they should have made would have been so long they couldn’t have released it theatrically and would have had to put it out as a mini-series on a premium cable channel or a streaming service — in which form I, of course, would never have been able to see it!), and it’s certainly not a ground-breaking movie in any way, shape or form. It deserved its Academy Award for Best Picture (at least I think it did, since the only other nominee I’ve seen is The Martian) — it certainly wasn’t the sort of miscarriage in Academy history as happened when How Green Was My Valley beat out Citizen Kane, or The Hurt Locker beat Avatar — and it was quality entertainment, but there are certainly broader horizons the art of cinema can aspire to than this!
Friday, March 11, 2016
Man in the Vault (Batjac Productions/RKO, 1956)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles a movie he’d recently downloaded, Man in the Vault, along with a couple of shorts, a 1952 NBC-TV show called The Magic Clown whose sponsor, the Bonomo candy company (they were a subsidiary of something called Gold Medal Candy and they made mostly Turkish taffy and peanut brittle), integrated their product pitches so smoothly into the program it would have been virtually impossible to edit them out again (it was obviously a kids’ show, the sort that Mad magazine and Laugh-In so viciously parodied) and In the Suburbs, a 20-minute 1950’s production that was actually an infomercial for Redbook magazine, obviously pitched to Redbook’s prospective advertisers, that established Redbook as “the magazine of young adults,” back when “young adults” didn’t mean what it does now (teenagers) but people in their 20’s and early 30’s who had just bought their first house (in the suburbs, of course!) and were starting to have kids. Man in the Vault was part of the detritus of RKO Radio Pictures in its later years, a 1956 crime “B” co-produced with John Wayne’s Batjac Productions (and it ended up with a modern-day Paramount logo in front of it because Wayne’s heirs sold the Batjac catalog to Paramount after Wayne’s death), though Wayne did not take an executive producer credit (today a star of his magnitude insists on some sort of producer credit for any project he or she even breathes on!) and it really has nothing to do with the sort of filmmaking Wayne was famous for.
About Wayne’s only creative input into the film was picking the director, Andrew V. McLaglen, son of actor (and frequent Wayne co-star) Victor McLaglen and the person who has the interesting distinction of directing more episodes of the Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel TV series than anyone else. Man in the Vault was written by Burt Kennedy (who’d later become a director himself, specializing in Westerns) from a novel by Frank Gruber — this was at a time when the people who had formerly written for pulp magazines were placing similar novel-length stories with cheap paperback publishers like Crown and offering them as “paperback originals” — and it’s the sort of movie you think you’ve seen before even if you haven’t. It’s basically the old chestnut of the innocent, naïve young man embroiled in a web of crime; the innocent young man is Tommy Dancer (William Campbell), who works as a locksmith at Grover’s Lock and Key on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. This was at a time when location filming was becoming easier and film crews could shoot on actual city streets instead of painstakingly built re-creations on the studio backlot. According to imdb.com, there was a real Grover’s Lock and Key there and the filmmakers used the real storefront instead of building one as a set — though this doesn’t explain why, to play a lock-shop owner with an Anglo name, they hired David Leonard and let him do the stereotyped Jewish accent. Anyway, Our Hero (sort of) is playing at a bowling alley (it’s La Cienaga, owned by Art Linkletter, and towards the end of the film there’s a big shot of the outside sign with Linkletter’s name prominently displayed) when he’s accosted by a crook named Willis Trent (Berry Kroeger, who in the official credits lost the first “e” in his last name), who wants to hire him to open a footlocker. Tommy takes the job — and when he shows up at Trent’s house he gets introduced to the full-tilt criminal underworld, including Trent’s girlfriend (Nancy Duke) — that’s how she’s identified on the cast list — as well as Betty Turner (Karen Sharpe) and Flo Randall (Anita Ekberg, four years before she became an international sensation in La Dolce Vita — imagine, everyone in this film just one degree of separation from Fellini!).
Trent’s real ambition in all this is to get Tommy to sneak into a bank and make two keys for a safety-deposit box so Trent can steal its contents from its rightful owner, Paul De Camp (James Seay) — though we’re told in the dialogue that De Camp aced Trent out of the illegal gambling business in L.A. and therefore we’re not supposed to have sympathy for either of them. While all this is going on Tommy starts dating Betty even though she’s ordinarily a gold-digger who gets presents from her rich admirers, including a Cadillac and a fur stole (back when furs were considered a status symbol instead of a symbol of animal abuse); they go on innocent outings like a drive to the grounds of the Hollywood Bowl and they’re sufficiently drawn to each other that Trent and his “enforcer” Louie (Mike Mazurki, clearly recognizable even though quite a bit more bloated than he was in his greatest performance, as Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet 12 years earlier, when both he and RKO were seeing better days) finally get the reluctant Tommy to participate in the scheme by threatening to beat up Betty’s face if he doesn’t. The plan is Tommy will rent a safe deposit box of his own in that bank and that will give him access to the vault where the boxes are kept, so he can insert blank keys in the target box and later make duplicates — and there are some nice suspense scenes over whether Tommy will be able to do this without either the woman bank official in charge of the room where the boxes are kept, a security guard or another customer catching him — only Tommy is persuaded by yet another crook in his current circle of “friends” to steal the contents of De Camp’s box, which is $200,000 in cash, instead of turning it over to Trent for a measly $5,000 reward. Trent and Louie respond by taking Betty hostage and once again threatening either to burn her face or kill her outright if Tommy doesn’t give them the money, and there’s an exciting final shoot-out in the bowling alley in which the baddies try to flush Tommy out by rolling bowling balls down the alleys in hopes of crushing him and forcing him to come out of his hiding place so they can shoot him.
The alley is still using pin spotters who set up the pins between bowls by hand — I’m sure automatic pin spotters existed by 1956 but at the end the fact that the pins are still being set by hand is an important plot point — and as the pin spotter Batjac hired Pedro Gonzalez Gonzales. He’d had his 15 minutes of fame on Groucho Marx’s quiz show You Bet Your Life in 1953 — where Groucho had predictably found his double last name irresistibly amusing — and at one point he even tells Tommy he’s on his way to appear on TV — “You bet your life!” he says, whereupon Tommy asks him what’s the name of the show he’s going to be on and Pedro answers, “You Bet Your Life!” The big problems with Man in the Vault (which I had expected to be the old chestnut of someone getting locked in a bank vault instead of the old innocent-guy-involved-in-crime chestnut) are the director, the leading actor and the overall familiarity of the story. McLaglen was a great Western director — he’s one of only three (along with John Sturges and Don Siegel) who worked with both Wayne and Clint Eastwood — but he’s utterly wrong for the claustrophobic world of urban crime; the film is oddly slow-paced (despite running only 72 minutes) and scenes that would have benefited from noir atmospherics don’t get them. And William Campbell, who looks like RKO was trying to create their own Tony Curtis, simply doesn’t have the acting chops to make us believe he’s really torn between a normal life and a criminal one — the young John Garfield would have been ideal but Hollywood wasn’t exactly awash in “Garfield types” in 1956 (the young actors who could have pulled it off were instead copying Brando or Dean). Nor do the women help; Karen Sharpe is such a bland screen presence we don’t for a moment believe in her as a gold-digging femme fatale and so it’s no surprise when she turns out to be good at the end. Man in the Vault would never have been a great movie, but it certainly had the potential to be better than it is!
I ran Charles a movie he’d recently downloaded, Man in the Vault, along with a couple of shorts, a 1952 NBC-TV show called The Magic Clown whose sponsor, the Bonomo candy company (they were a subsidiary of something called Gold Medal Candy and they made mostly Turkish taffy and peanut brittle), integrated their product pitches so smoothly into the program it would have been virtually impossible to edit them out again (it was obviously a kids’ show, the sort that Mad magazine and Laugh-In so viciously parodied) and In the Suburbs, a 20-minute 1950’s production that was actually an infomercial for Redbook magazine, obviously pitched to Redbook’s prospective advertisers, that established Redbook as “the magazine of young adults,” back when “young adults” didn’t mean what it does now (teenagers) but people in their 20’s and early 30’s who had just bought their first house (in the suburbs, of course!) and were starting to have kids. Man in the Vault was part of the detritus of RKO Radio Pictures in its later years, a 1956 crime “B” co-produced with John Wayne’s Batjac Productions (and it ended up with a modern-day Paramount logo in front of it because Wayne’s heirs sold the Batjac catalog to Paramount after Wayne’s death), though Wayne did not take an executive producer credit (today a star of his magnitude insists on some sort of producer credit for any project he or she even breathes on!) and it really has nothing to do with the sort of filmmaking Wayne was famous for.
About Wayne’s only creative input into the film was picking the director, Andrew V. McLaglen, son of actor (and frequent Wayne co-star) Victor McLaglen and the person who has the interesting distinction of directing more episodes of the Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel TV series than anyone else. Man in the Vault was written by Burt Kennedy (who’d later become a director himself, specializing in Westerns) from a novel by Frank Gruber — this was at a time when the people who had formerly written for pulp magazines were placing similar novel-length stories with cheap paperback publishers like Crown and offering them as “paperback originals” — and it’s the sort of movie you think you’ve seen before even if you haven’t. It’s basically the old chestnut of the innocent, naïve young man embroiled in a web of crime; the innocent young man is Tommy Dancer (William Campbell), who works as a locksmith at Grover’s Lock and Key on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. This was at a time when location filming was becoming easier and film crews could shoot on actual city streets instead of painstakingly built re-creations on the studio backlot. According to imdb.com, there was a real Grover’s Lock and Key there and the filmmakers used the real storefront instead of building one as a set — though this doesn’t explain why, to play a lock-shop owner with an Anglo name, they hired David Leonard and let him do the stereotyped Jewish accent. Anyway, Our Hero (sort of) is playing at a bowling alley (it’s La Cienaga, owned by Art Linkletter, and towards the end of the film there’s a big shot of the outside sign with Linkletter’s name prominently displayed) when he’s accosted by a crook named Willis Trent (Berry Kroeger, who in the official credits lost the first “e” in his last name), who wants to hire him to open a footlocker. Tommy takes the job — and when he shows up at Trent’s house he gets introduced to the full-tilt criminal underworld, including Trent’s girlfriend (Nancy Duke) — that’s how she’s identified on the cast list — as well as Betty Turner (Karen Sharpe) and Flo Randall (Anita Ekberg, four years before she became an international sensation in La Dolce Vita — imagine, everyone in this film just one degree of separation from Fellini!).
Trent’s real ambition in all this is to get Tommy to sneak into a bank and make two keys for a safety-deposit box so Trent can steal its contents from its rightful owner, Paul De Camp (James Seay) — though we’re told in the dialogue that De Camp aced Trent out of the illegal gambling business in L.A. and therefore we’re not supposed to have sympathy for either of them. While all this is going on Tommy starts dating Betty even though she’s ordinarily a gold-digger who gets presents from her rich admirers, including a Cadillac and a fur stole (back when furs were considered a status symbol instead of a symbol of animal abuse); they go on innocent outings like a drive to the grounds of the Hollywood Bowl and they’re sufficiently drawn to each other that Trent and his “enforcer” Louie (Mike Mazurki, clearly recognizable even though quite a bit more bloated than he was in his greatest performance, as Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet 12 years earlier, when both he and RKO were seeing better days) finally get the reluctant Tommy to participate in the scheme by threatening to beat up Betty’s face if he doesn’t. The plan is Tommy will rent a safe deposit box of his own in that bank and that will give him access to the vault where the boxes are kept, so he can insert blank keys in the target box and later make duplicates — and there are some nice suspense scenes over whether Tommy will be able to do this without either the woman bank official in charge of the room where the boxes are kept, a security guard or another customer catching him — only Tommy is persuaded by yet another crook in his current circle of “friends” to steal the contents of De Camp’s box, which is $200,000 in cash, instead of turning it over to Trent for a measly $5,000 reward. Trent and Louie respond by taking Betty hostage and once again threatening either to burn her face or kill her outright if Tommy doesn’t give them the money, and there’s an exciting final shoot-out in the bowling alley in which the baddies try to flush Tommy out by rolling bowling balls down the alleys in hopes of crushing him and forcing him to come out of his hiding place so they can shoot him.
The alley is still using pin spotters who set up the pins between bowls by hand — I’m sure automatic pin spotters existed by 1956 but at the end the fact that the pins are still being set by hand is an important plot point — and as the pin spotter Batjac hired Pedro Gonzalez Gonzales. He’d had his 15 minutes of fame on Groucho Marx’s quiz show You Bet Your Life in 1953 — where Groucho had predictably found his double last name irresistibly amusing — and at one point he even tells Tommy he’s on his way to appear on TV — “You bet your life!” he says, whereupon Tommy asks him what’s the name of the show he’s going to be on and Pedro answers, “You Bet Your Life!” The big problems with Man in the Vault (which I had expected to be the old chestnut of someone getting locked in a bank vault instead of the old innocent-guy-involved-in-crime chestnut) are the director, the leading actor and the overall familiarity of the story. McLaglen was a great Western director — he’s one of only three (along with John Sturges and Don Siegel) who worked with both Wayne and Clint Eastwood — but he’s utterly wrong for the claustrophobic world of urban crime; the film is oddly slow-paced (despite running only 72 minutes) and scenes that would have benefited from noir atmospherics don’t get them. And William Campbell, who looks like RKO was trying to create their own Tony Curtis, simply doesn’t have the acting chops to make us believe he’s really torn between a normal life and a criminal one — the young John Garfield would have been ideal but Hollywood wasn’t exactly awash in “Garfield types” in 1956 (the young actors who could have pulled it off were instead copying Brando or Dean). Nor do the women help; Karen Sharpe is such a bland screen presence we don’t for a moment believe in her as a gold-digging femme fatale and so it’s no surprise when she turns out to be good at the end. Man in the Vault would never have been a great movie, but it certainly had the potential to be better than it is!
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case (British Broadcasting Corporation, Danish Documentary Production, Roskilde, PBS, 2011, TV release 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was a PBS P.O.V. (it stands for “Point of View”) episode I recorded in September 2015 (back when I could still record TV shows for later viewing before my cable system went “all-digital” and my DVD and VHS recorders ceased to work with the new signals) called Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case. The film started life as a 2011 documentary, a cross-production between the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Danish Documentary Production — the imdb.com entry also lists something called “Roskilde,” a Danish city that regularly hosts a rock festival that gets A-list bands from all over the world (Nirvana gave a scorching live performance there in 1992) but I didn’t know there was also a production company named after it (or does “Roskilde” merely mean where the offices and facilities of Danish Documentary Production are located?). Its subject is Ai Weiwei, the internationally famous Chinese artist best known for designing the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics, but notorious in his own country for photographs of nude people, many of them with political content (including one famous one in which 100 people posed nude for him, all wearing nothing except pictures of Mao Zedong — or, as we knew him when he was still alive and in power, Mao Tse-Tung — over their “naughty bits”), that had already put him on the authorities’ watch list well before he won the major commission for the Beijing Olympics. Ai Weiwei was allowed to start a blog on Sina Weibo, the main Internet platform in China (remember that China keeps its Internet as closely guarded and censored as it does all other media; their pattern of blocking access to foreign Web sites and automatically denying Chinese people access to sites with provocative words in their names like “democracy,” “freedom” and “human rights” has earned Chinese Internet censorship the name “Great Firewall of China”) in 2005 but it was taken down in 2009 because he used it to criticize the government, especially for its slow response to the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province. In August 2009 he was beaten by police in Chengdu as he was trying to testify for Tan Zuoren, who’d worked with him investigating the government’s responsibility for the deaths in the Sichuan earthquake, and as a result he had to have emergency brain surgery in Munich, Germany. In November 2010 Ai was placed under house arrest by the Chinese police for having allegedly built a studio in Shanghai without permission; he was released after one day but barred from ever leaving China again.
Last night’s “feature” was a PBS P.O.V. (it stands for “Point of View”) episode I recorded in September 2015 (back when I could still record TV shows for later viewing before my cable system went “all-digital” and my DVD and VHS recorders ceased to work with the new signals) called Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case. The film started life as a 2011 documentary, a cross-production between the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Danish Documentary Production — the imdb.com entry also lists something called “Roskilde,” a Danish city that regularly hosts a rock festival that gets A-list bands from all over the world (Nirvana gave a scorching live performance there in 1992) but I didn’t know there was also a production company named after it (or does “Roskilde” merely mean where the offices and facilities of Danish Documentary Production are located?). Its subject is Ai Weiwei, the internationally famous Chinese artist best known for designing the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics, but notorious in his own country for photographs of nude people, many of them with political content (including one famous one in which 100 people posed nude for him, all wearing nothing except pictures of Mao Zedong — or, as we knew him when he was still alive and in power, Mao Tse-Tung — over their “naughty bits”), that had already put him on the authorities’ watch list well before he won the major commission for the Beijing Olympics. Ai Weiwei was allowed to start a blog on Sina Weibo, the main Internet platform in China (remember that China keeps its Internet as closely guarded and censored as it does all other media; their pattern of blocking access to foreign Web sites and automatically denying Chinese people access to sites with provocative words in their names like “democracy,” “freedom” and “human rights” has earned Chinese Internet censorship the name “Great Firewall of China”) in 2005 but it was taken down in 2009 because he used it to criticize the government, especially for its slow response to the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province. In August 2009 he was beaten by police in Chengdu as he was trying to testify for Tan Zuoren, who’d worked with him investigating the government’s responsibility for the deaths in the Sichuan earthquake, and as a result he had to have emergency brain surgery in Munich, Germany. In November 2010 Ai was placed under house arrest by the Chinese police for having allegedly built a studio in Shanghai without permission; he was released after one day but barred from ever leaving China again.
On April 3, 2011 Ai was arrested at Beijing airport while
he was on his way to Hong Kong; the authorities sent 50 police officers to
search his studio and detained eight of his staff members and Ai’s wife, Lu
Qing. Six days later Ai’s accountant and driver both disappeared. Ai Weiwei was
kept in a small, isolated cell until June 21, when he was told that he was
being granted “bail” on condition that he confess to income tax evasion — the
confession included not only him but also the international corporation,
Beijing Fake Cultural Development, that handles his business affairs (and of
which his family says Ai is “neither the chief executive nor the legal
representative of the design company, which is registered in his wife’s name”) —
but he was kept under house arrest for another year, forbidden to post online
or give media interviews, and told that he could appeal the judgment against
him but only if he agreed to put up 2/3 of the amount of taxes he allegedly
evaded, $1.33 million. (The total judgment was about $2.4 million.) The film,
directed by Andreas Johnsen, picks up the story when Ai is released from prison
and returns home to his wife and his two-year-old son Ai Lao (remember that
Chinese, like most Asians, write their names with the family name first and the
given name last; among Caucasians, only Hungarians do that). Ai explains that
he’s changed the route of his morning constitutional walks so he can observe
the 18 cameras the authorities have around his property so they can keep him
under surveillance, and when foreigners try to meet with him he has to explain
to them that if he gives any
comments for publication abroad, he risks being sent back to jail. He also
explains that he is still under investigation by the authorities for
distributing pornography — Ai notes to the filmmakers that the Chinese
government equates nudity with porn (a debatable case because none of Ai’s
nudes are doing anything even remotely sexual, nor are they “flashing” any sex
organs) — and the spontaneous campaigns that started all over the world to
raise money to cover the money Ai would have to put up to appeal the tax charge
against him.
Ai’s major artistic response is to create an installation
illustrating the cell he was imprisoned in, done to its exact dimensions and featuring
a sculpture of him lying in the cell’s bed, which has to be cut up into six
pieces, each shipped out of the country separately to different locations
before they are taken to Venice, Italy for the Venice Biennale, the hugely
important exhibit of provocative new art that takes place every other year
(hence its title). Ai refers to the trial against him as “the fake case” —
punning on the name of the company and the lack of any factual basis for the
charges against him — not that the Chinese government needs any. What comes
through most strongly in this documentary is not only the oppressiveness of
totalitarian rule but its maddening arbitrariness; a long-established
dictatorship like China has long since mastered the art of leading out the
lines, making its creative people think they’re enjoying a rare moment of
freedom (a “thaw,” as it was called in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev), and
then suddenly, arbitrarily and for no discernible reason reeling them back in,
arresting them, making their lives hell and even after their release forbidding
them to leave the country. There’s a dark but also humorous moment at the end
when Ai realizes that on his way out of prison he forgot to ask for the return
of his passport — and the official he’s talking to decides that they’ve decided
not to give it back to him. He pleads with them to give him back his passport,
even if they stamp it not valid for travel outside China, but they insist
they’re not doing so. (It was not until July 2015, four years after this film
was made, that Ai Weiwei once again was given a passport and the freedom to
travel outside China.) In another scene, Ai notes that ironically his apartment
is in a building right next to the American Embassy — and Johnsen films the
roof of the U.S. Embassy from Ai’s living room and it looks like it might just be possible for an actor (or his stunt double)
playing James Bond to leap the distance, land on the roof and demand asylum and
leave the country, but not a
middle-aged man in mediocre health that had been worsened by previous police
attacks on him. Meanwhile, the Chinese government censored Ai’s works from two
big art shows in 2014.
The film is haunting in its depiction of the permanence
of the Chinese tyranny — particularly when Ai’s wife recalls going through her
own period of persecution and arrest during Mao’s crackdown in 1957 (when he
ordered what was called a “Hundred Flowers Movement” — “let a hundred flowers
bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend” — only to end it and put the
country in reverse when he decided too many dissident schools of thought were
contending and the regime’s control of Chinese politics would be threatened if
it continued) — even though the film ends with a scene showing Ai in a car,
defiantly insisting that he’s going to remain in China because he won’t be able
to do anything to change the regime if he leaves the country, and the
soundtrack gives us Nina Simone’s recording of the Anthony Newley-Leslie
Bricusse song “Feelin’ Good” (fading it out just after Hal Mooney’s awful
orchestral arrangement comes in and wrecks the song and her eloquent
performance of it). Though the PBS version was cut down from the 86 minutes of
the theatrical release to just 54 minutes, plus a three-minute interview with
filmmaker Johnsen, what remains is a heart-rending portrait not only of an
individual’s courageous resistance to totalitarianism but what the
totalitarians do to him — though, ironically, much of the dialogue consists of
Chinese obscenities that are wiped through not only on the soundtrack but the
subtitles as well (this film blessedly uses subtitles instead of voiceovers to
translate the Mandarin Chinese into English), a reminder that the Western world
has its own arbitrary and maddening censorship even though the consequences of
breaking our rules are hardly
anywhere nearly as horrendous as those of getting on the wrong side of a
government like China’s, which as I’ve argued in these pages before combines
the worst of both worlds: the totalitarian dictatorship and ideological control
of Mao’s Communist era and the use of that repressive state apparatus to ensure
that the Chinese people remain slaves to international capitalism and work long
hours for shit wages to produce the Western world’s playthings — including the
Apple Macintosh computer on which I am writing this.
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